Innocents and Others

by Dana Spiotta

  Sarah stopped, and her eyes looked to the side and back. She leaned over and rubbed the head of the dog next to her, then she looked back to Meadow. Her tone was emotionless, matter-of-fact.

  “After we stopped shooting, we started to argue and then he pushed me. I don’t remember what the fight was about. But usually it was Jason saying I cheated on him or wanted to cheat. Jason was like that—a lot of men are that way. They want you to be wild in bed, to get really crazy, but then they get freaked out like they blame you. I remember he slapped me and pushed me down the stairs and I ran outside. I was very drunk and high, so even though it was snowing and cold, I ran outside to the back of the house in my t-shirt and panties. Bare feet. This is when Mrs. Jamison saw me. I was screaming about Jason. Saying I would kill him. Crystalynn woke up. I could hear her shrieking, but I was too angry to stop. The garage door was open. I threw some stuff at Jason’s car parked in the garage. I wanted to get him out there, but he was ignoring me. I never said anything about burning the house—that was Mrs. Jamison’s mind. I was standing in the open garage, shivering, thinking if it weren’t for Crystalynn, I would drive away from all this and start over. And then I calmed down, started to shake with cold. She stopped crying. I went back in the house. Jason was passed out on the couch. I went up to my bed, which is across the hall from Crystalynn’s room. I fell into a wasted sleep. And sometime after that I woke up, maybe because I smelled something burning.”

  “So you never set anything on fire, not even by accident. You didn’t leave anything burning?”

  “No.”

  “Why did you tell the police that you set the house on fire?”

  “I could’ve set the house on fire. I was a smoker, Jason was a smoker. We were so far gone, I could’ve passed out with a cigarette. I also burned food when I was like that. So it could’ve been.”

  “But not that night?”

  “No. I was questioned by the police for hours and hours. I was young and scared. And they told me that the rough sex videos would be used in the trial and in the papers. And that Mrs. Jamison saw me. I was confused. I felt like it was all my fault. So after many hours of this, I said I set the house on fire to get back at Jason.”

  “There is evidence, suppressed at the time, that the fire was started by an electrical short in an overloaded outlet. In any case, arson requires intention, not carelessness.”

  “Yes,” Sarah said, nodding. “I heard about that.”

  “But let’s get back to the night of the fire.”

  “Crystalynn died,” Sarah said, looking down.

  “Can you tell us what happened?”

  “Okay, I will tell you.” Sarah looked up at Meadow and took a deep breath. As she spoke, her voice sounded flat, but she spoke very slowly. “I woke up. I was still high, the room—the world—was real hazy. I remember how I just wanted to go back to sleep. For many years I wished I had just gone back to sleep. The smoke and the smell came at me, I could feel my chest tighten. My throat was burning—the house was so hot, I couldn’t breathe. I pulled myself out of bed. Jason was not in bed. He was still on the couch, and probably already dead at this point. I crawled to the hall. I could see the smoke coming up from downstairs and smoke over my head. I looked up at the door to Crystalynn’s room.”

  Carrie had a premonition, an odd feeling, from Sarah’s flat tone. She felt a wave of nausea.

  “I never told this part before. They were too busy on how the fire was set, and so I never really got to talking about it much. I crawled to the door of her room and pushed it open. I stood up in Crystalynn’s room, and there she was sleeping in her crib.”

  Carrie wanted to leave the room. But she didn’t. Meadow looked frozen, listening intently. Carrie took a gulp of air and waited for what was to come.

  Sarah’s eyes looked up and back as if she could see the baby. Then she looked directly at Meadow. “I saw she was sleeping. I looked down at her, and I knew that she would die if I didn’t pick her up and take her with me. It was a few seconds that I stood there. My eyes and nose were running, the smoke was getting worse and worse.” Sarah nodded. Then she stopped nodding. “But I didn’t pick her up and take her with me,” Sarah said. “I didn’t. Instead, I—”

  “Cut!” Meadow said, her voice hard. Then, “Stop talking. Please don’t say anything more.” Her voice lowered to a whisper. “Jesus.” She looked at Carrie. Carrie was clutching her stomach and crying.

  “I thought you wanted to hear what happened,” Sarah said.

  “No, I don’t want to hear any more. I’m sorry.”

  They packed up in silence. When they got into the car, Kyle drove as Meadow smoked and said nothing. After a few minutes, Meadow took the videotape out of the camera and held it in both hands. She put pressure on the plastic shell until it buckled and snapped. Carrie said nothing. Meadow turned to her left to face both Carrie in the backseat and Kyle in the driver’s seat.

  “As far as I am concerned, we never heard any of that. This movie is not happening. I am done with it,” she said. “I don’t want to hear about gently placed pillows, or the caress that snapped the tiny neck, or whatever the fuck.”

  “Should we talk to the lawyer?” Carrie said.

  “No. As far as we know, she is a mentally ill woman making things up. And we are going to leave her alone.”

  “I agree,” said Kyle. “We need to forget all about Sarah Mills. If she gets out for not committing arson, that’s fine.”

  “She won’t. She doesn’t even want to get out, according to the lawyer,” Meadow said wearily. “I was hoping—” Meadow sighed. “I don’t know what.”

  When they got to the train station, Carrie and Kyle got out of the car, and Meadow switched to the driver’s seat. Carrie leaned down to Meadow’s window.

  “Are you going to be okay?” Carrie asked.

  “Yes,” Meadow said. “I am just tired of confessions.”

  “You don’t have to drive back tonight. Why don’t you stay in the city?”

  “I’ll be fine. I want to get up there,” Meadow said. And Carrie watched her drive away.

  * * *

  Carrie remembered that it was three days before Meadow’s mother would call her and tell her about the accident.

  DAMASCENE

  I

  In the 2015 spring semester, Meadow taught her class in DIY film, which always overenrolled. She attracted the students who disdained commercial filmmaking; they wanted to be like Sadie Benning, making disturbing videos with discontinued Fisher-Price PixelVision cameras they bought on eBay, or editing narratives out of found surveillance tapes, or using stop-action animation techniques for ironic nonchildish subject matter. She liked her students. They were finishing two weeks on the “LA Rebellion” of African American filmmakers of the 1970s. The anti-Blaxploitation films. Today they would discuss one of her favorite films, Killer of Sheep by Charles Burnett, which she had screened earlier in the week.

  “Killer of Sheep was Burnett’s MFA thesis. Think about that. Burnett made it for ten thousand dollars. Black-and-white sixteen millimeter shot with a school camera and edited in the school editing room. He made it on weekends over five years, using a number of nonactors from his Watts neighborhood, and filming in locations he grew up in. He says he wanted ‘just the daily life of a person.’ A scripted, fiction film that also contains a lot of real life, including the famous extended scenes of children playing. It is a beautiful film. The poverty of the neighborhood is everywhere, but Burnett treats it as something worthy of deep looking, with long takes, striking compositions, and lush music.”

  Meadow paused. “Today for small amounts of money we can buy a digital camera and edit film on our laptops. Or we can shoot and edit films using our iPhones. And yet. We should be overwhelmed with amazing outsider films, indie films, handmade films. Where are they? If technology was the barrier, and that barrier is gone, why don
’t we have some nerd in Albany making a homemade great American film like Killer of Sheep? Or like John Cassavetes? Instead we get bright kids doing super cuts of TV shows or selfie/vanity films made for Vine and Instagram. Fast and shallow.”

  She didn’t mind that she sounded like a scoldy old person sometimes. The students looked up to her, listened to her. One of them, she was determined, was going to make something great.

  “But maybe there are brilliant homemade films being made. How would we see them, find them, with all the visual static vying for our attention? Between all the”—Meadow paused, looked very serious, very stern, waved her hand—“cat parkour videos taking up all the available channels.” The class giggled.

  Afterward, as she was collecting her things, a student came up to her and waited until she looked up.

  “Professor Mori, I saw your film Children of the Disappeared. I loved it.”

  “Oh. Good,” Meadow said. “It was made a long time ago.”

  “I read Carrie Wexler’s essay,” she said. “And your essay.” She made finger quotes when she said “essay” and smiled.

  Meadow knew they would get around to asking her about that. Meadow smiled and then zipped up her bag. Meadow liked this student; she always listened and made interesting comments.

  “Your essay was great—people were totally confused by it.” Then, “I didn’t realize you wrote fan fiction. And it is really cool that you did old fat Orson Welles, nobody does old fat Orson Welles. Plenty of people have done young slim Welles, but I don’t think anyone has done what you did.” The girl beamed. She appeared to be waiting. Meadow just nodded and waited back. “So, can I ask you something, Professor?”

  “Sure.”

  “Since you are so passionate about cinema, why would you quit making films? If you don’t mind my asking?”

  “I don’t mind your asking. I just haven’t wanted to make any more films. I used to—” Meadow stopped, looked at this young woman’s face. “But not anymore.” The student nodded. “I’m afraid I have to get to a meeting now.”

  “Oh, sure.” The student walked to the door and then turned to face Meadow. “You know what? I know you were joking, but there actually are cat parkour videos. It’s like a whole subgenre of cat videos.”

  Meadow laughed and shrugged. “Of course!” When the student left the room, Meadow said, “Fan fiction? Oh my god.”

  When she got home, Meadow opened her laptop and reread Carrie’s essay. Carrie had written that the accident had changed Meadow, which certainly was true. Of course Carrie knew more than that, and she had to leave that part out. But over the years Meadow saw the whole thing much more clearly. Your life changes, and it can seem like it bursts into the new life. A damascene moment, a conversion. But if she was honest, she saw it was a number of moments—­significant events, one building on the other. All of them converting her, spinning her toward her new life. It wasn’t a downward spiral, although it felt that way at the time; it was an inward spiral, a seashell spiral, a spira mirabilis, as if she were drawing the events to her, moving her closer to who she really was.

  The first event was the phone call from Nicole/Jelly/Amy. It came long after Inward Operator had been released, when she was deep into the filming of Children of the Disappeared. Meadow got a message on her voice mail. She referred to herself as Jelly, not Nicole or Amy. Meadow called her back. She had no idea what was coming—she truly expected that the woman had seen the film again and was calling to say she liked it.

  Jelly: I finally saw your film. The one you made about me.

  Meadow: You did.

  J: I didn’t want to see it before because I was scared of watching myself, my life.

  M: I can imagine.

  J: You cannot imagine. (A pause.) You have no idea. The fact is that some women do not get love. And I knew that, I didn’t need you to show me that. I didn’t need the world to laugh at me. I did not need you to humiliate me. There is enough pain. Only Jack had a right to judge me.

  M: I think you are wonderful, and I tried to show how interesting you are.

  J: Don’t condescend to me. I am not stupid, although I was naive to believe you. You had all the power, and you knew exactly what would happen.

  M: I believed in you, I thought that Jack—

  J: What?

  M: I really thought that Jack would love and forgive you. That he would understand you.

  J: You set me up to be humiliated. You knew how it would look. You filmed it.

  M: I didn’t know. I swear I didn’t know how it would go.

  J: You did this to me. You did this to me. It was a hard, mean thing.

  M: I am so sorry.

  J: You played me. And then when you saw what you had, you put the film out there. Not everything needs to be filmed. Not everything needs to be seen, to be public. What good did it do? What was it for?

  M: I don’t know. (A pause.) I don’t.

  J: I just wanted you to get the picture on costs. What you did and what it felt like for me.

  M: Okay. I’m sorry.

  J: Some people—you, for instance—are very lucky in this life.

  Meadow never told anyone about Jelly’s call, but it was impossible to forget what Jelly said. When Meadow later received a lot of criticism for Children of the Disappeared, she kept thinking back to Jelly’s reproach. Meadow needed to do something different, which led to the second event: the aborted Sarah Mills confession. And her weird lack of affect as she confessed. The experience shook Meadow completely, which led to the third event, the accident. The stupid, careless accident.

  After the three-hour drive from Bedford Hills, when she was just a few minutes from home, she realized she had no coffee or food for breakfast tomorrow. Meadow stopped at the Price Chopper to get groceries. She swiped her credit card and waited. She was tired, and she heard the girl say, “Thank you,” and hand her the receipt. It didn’t occur to her to say “thank you” back until she had already started to walk toward the door.

  “Excuse me,” she heard the girl shout. Meadow turned back and the girl was holding up her bag.

  “Oh, my groceries! Sorry. Thank you so much,” Meadow said brightly and took the plastic bag. Where was the car? She clicked her alarm button on her key to find it. It clicked and the lights blinked. Of course, there it was.

  Sarah’s hand had shaken a little, otherwise you would never know that she was fragile. It would be impossible to guess what she was talking about if you didn’t speak English. She was so cool, even after twenty years, could someone be so cool?

  Meadow turned on the car. She cranked up the heat. She turned on the radio, then she turned it off again. It was like that Brother’s Keeper documentary. Wasn’t there a scene where the old guy confesses on camera to killing his brother?

  People will tell you anything. “I would confess,” Meadow said out loud, and she was shocked at how her voice sounded in the car. She laughed. Maybe it is from watching so many confessions on TV and in the movies. Meadow’s hands held the wheel lightly at four and seven o’clock. Her neck was sore; she put one hand in her lap and moved the other one across the steering wheel so she could control the wheel with one hand. The setting sun was in her eyes. She was driving into the dusk, and even with sunglasses it was too bright.

  “I confess,” she said. “I am a terrible, selfish person who just tries to make myself look smart,” she said, doubtfully. “But really, I am just trying to make myself. Out of looking at other people. I have no real self, I think,” she said. Meadow still couldn’t see and reached to lower the visor. Just then she changed lanes, to get into the lane that was for her turn, the turn she had made a thousand times before. Meadow was already in her driveway when she made that turn, already walking to her bed, to the sleep that she needed so badly. She looked to her left, but she didn’t look. She heard a horn, and she saw her car rushing toward the side of a
nother car. She pressed the brakes, but her car did not stop, it swerved, and in the moment before contact, she knew this was a big accident, and she thought perhaps she would die.

  When she hit the side of the other car, the front of her car crumpled and ripped away. There was an explosion, and her hands were pinned down as the airbag hit her face. Then it was over, just the burning smell. The airbag deflated, but she felt something sticking to her chin. She pulled the latch of the door and pushed. It creaked loudly but the door opened and she stumbled out.

  “Are you okay?” a woman asked her. And Meadow nodded yes, but then she fell back against the car and the woman helped her to the curb.

  “My face,” Meadow said, and tried to touch her chin.

  “Don’t touch it. It looks burned from the airbag. And your knee, does that hurt? Don’t move. An ambulance is coming.”

  The EMS people put a blanket on her. They made her lie down. They put something on her face. It was starting to hurt. The burning smell was awful, plastic and acid. She felt suddenly that she would be sick.

  Only once she was in the ambulance did she think to ask.