Stone Arabia

by Spiotta, Dana

  And I started crying, which felt ridiculous, because I didn’t know Garret Wayne, his blond wife, or his beautiful son. But it had been a long day, I was tired, and I couldn’t stop. The people talking had no information, no explanation, but they kept on anyway. They talked about the pressures of stardom, or the pressures of losing stardom. But then they showed a picture of Garret Wayne as a teenage star. His hair was blow-dried and he looked very young. This was how I remembered him. I had a small, stupid crush on him when I was eleven. Before I decided I was cool and loved only David Bowie. Before I was cool, I was eleven and I loved Garret Wayne. I loved his girly looks and his slim, tapered waist. I loved his shy, almost secret smile. Before I loved the pale, druggy ennui of the rock boys, I loved the all-American Garret Wayne. So I cried.

  They were showing Garret in the pool again. He waves, dives in, and surfaces with a toss of wet hair and a grin. He reaches for his son. His wife helps the boy jump into his father’s arms. Then they all smile and wave again. I realized this must be the only footage they have of the whole family. I realized they will be showing this over and over again. They cut to some people talking, but they kept playing the home movie in a little box in the corner of the screen. Above the crawl, which continued on to floods, wars, and stock prices. Then a commercial came.

  I clicked over to another channel. My hyperemotional reaction began to disgust me. I had, in middle age, become a person whose deepest emotional moments happened vicariously. Which reminded me again of my preteen years. How then I also lived through others, how I was dominated by fantasy. My emotional life nothing except what I longed for. And I remembered my feelings, sexual, sure, but more accurately described as presexual. I would imagine just holding hands with Garret Wayne, just being his girlfriend, just going to his house in Hollywood. The hand-holding was erotic and physical, but a lot of the fantasy was material: I imagined living in his big house and getting nice jewelry from him. Oh God. I was not particularly deep at eleven. I cried about what a deeply pathetic person I was. How can something so banal, so cliché, bother me so? Worn out from trying to resist it, I let myself sob: a fat, audible, nose-dripping sob.

  I cried even more as I watched a stupid, hastily assembled montage of Garret on another channel. Here he is in The K.O., the seventies TV series that made his name. He played the son of a renegade former law enforcement officer, a default private detective in a quasi-vigilante mode. He would hang around with his dad, played first by a squinty-eyed Scott Glenn and then later by an equally squinty Jan-Michael Vincent. They would drive along dusty highways in their Pontiac GTO convertible and escape the pursuit of a dark, unknown syndicate of government and organized crime operatives as they avenged average and grateful citizens across America, but usually somewhere out west with dusty roads. They would always move on at the end of the episode, because they had to, because they were being chased, but often leaving a perfectly good woman behind, often with a perfectly good daughter by her side, making meaningful eye contact with young Garret Wayne. It was a big show, but I really watched it only the first three years. In the fifth season, the nineteen-year-old Garret was on his own, his father killed by the syndicate and its unseen monolithic force of cowards. The show was canceled after the limping, played-out sixth season.

  Of course I understood how we suffuse random external events with the spiritual weight of our own emotional lives as a way to feel things without ever really understanding them. We feel for the wrong things and for the wrong people, and so we are never released. But that didn’t stop me; it just gave my overreactions a little niggle of self-loathing, a weary gnaw of guilt.

  They were showing the clip of Garret in the backyard again. He was forty-nine years old, but he looked much younger. He looked much younger than I did, and I was—Jesus Christ—forty-seven years old. He’d had some amazing plastic surgery, the kind that didn’t show, the kind that made you look like the best possible version of your age. How shameful, how awful, to hear about a tragedy and relate it to my vanity and insecurity about aging. I was so full of self-reproach and disgust, I lost track of what was on and found myself watching commercials. I grabbed the remote; I pressed.

  They were showing Garret in his backyard. He must be in Beverly Hills. His wife’s name was Elaine. She was thirty-four. They were separated. She reportedly had a problem with depression. He reportedly had a problem with prescription drugs. They were now talking about Gig Young, who shot himself and his wife in the seventies. But someone basically was saying this beats that because Gig Young didn’t also shoot his five-year-old son. But someone else was saying, not really, because Gig Young had won an Oscar, and Garret Wayne was pretty much a washed-up has-been TV actor—they didn’t actually say that, but they pretty much did.

  He smiles at the camera, he smiles at his wife. She’s glistening in the sun, her legs are long and taper perfectly to her knees. She is shiny and he is shiny and he dives in. She helps the laughing little boy jump off the edge into his father’s waiting arms. His waiting arms, outstretched. I have memorized the rhythm of this family moment. It was cliché and predictable and clearly fake. It was unbearably, meaninglessly sad. I cried. How could I not cry?

  I turned off the TV and, instead of going to bed, I went to my computer. I checked my email. I checked Ada’s blog. It hadn’t been updated since earlier in the week. I sent her an email just to say hi. Then I did it, I typed Garret’s name into the search box. Thousands of hits came up. And I went in, clicking on one site after another, going back to the search list so I didn’t miss anything. I didn’t find much I didn’t already know. He had a website, so I looked at that, but it wouldn’t load because it had too many hits. I understood that I was only one of tens of thousands of people following these links, going to these websites, sitting exhausted in front of a computer. I ended up at a hastily assembled tribute site, watching clips of Garret from The K.O. Tons of comments, many posted that very hour. In fact, although the site was put up that day, it already had thousands of visitors. I was alone and yet right there among thousands of people. We were all together in our puerile, lurid nostalgia, yet we were sitting all alone. It was no comfort, really, it just made it worse. By the next week—at the latest—this would all be quiet and abandoned. A relic site.

  I went to bed, exhausted and depressed.

  For days, I would return to the Garret story. I checked the tribute site, but after a week it stopped getting new posts. The story dropped away, just an autopsy toxicology report of the various substances in the bodies’ bloodstreams. I didn’t care about that, how the contents of your blood became public information. I just thought about, and could not stop thinking about, what Garret Wayne’s last day was like. Did he get up and think, This will be the last day of my life? Or did he fall into a sudden rage, a rage of such distortive, annihilating force that he couldn’t stop himself? Was the gun sitting in a drawer, just in case? I stared at the headshot photo of his actress wife that had become ubiquitous now. Did she know what was coming? If not, how was that possible? I stared into the artfully lit eyes of this pretty, ordinary girl and tried to see if her future was written in her face.

  We all long to escape our own subjectivity. That’s what art can do, give us a glimpse of ourselves connected with every human, now and forever, our disconnected, lonely terms escaped for a moment. It offers the consolation of recognition, no small thing. But what the televised bombardment of violent events did to me was completely different. I didn’t overcome my subjectivity; rather, my person got stretched to include the whole world, stretched to a breaking point. I became pervious, bruised and annihilated. That’s what it feels like, this debilitating emotional engagement—annihilation, not affirmation.

  I finally made myself fall into bed.

  BREAKING EVENT #3

  It happened as I was eating in front of the television news. I know this was asking for it, I know, but this is what people who live alone often do. I was tired and couldn’t bother with the paper. I didn’t even wa
nt the commitment of a movie. Mostly, then, I watched the news.

  A breaking story was in progress. Everything was always in progress and yet still breaking. The cable news people were discussing a missing child. Since I had just tuned in, they worked hard to catch me up on what was now unfolding. This wasn’t some suburban child stolen from a backyard in California. This was a thirteen-year-old Amish girl from a community in upstate New York. A box in the corner of the screen showed a live shot of a quiet dusty road with some patched farm hills in the background. When they moved to a full screen of the live shot for a reporter’s update, I could barely make out a church steeple silhouetted against the distant mountains. The update was: no updates yet, but they never say that. They were interviewing random, non-Amish locals.

  Nobody, it was clear, had a clue. Then they had an Amish expert on to talk. While she spoke, they showed stock footage of a buggy with a fluorescent orange safety triangle on it as the professor explained what Old Order Amish believed. What technologies they resisted. Why they refused to be interviewed on camera. They also brought on a missing-children expert. They spent minutes repeating, in different ways, the total lack of clues. But what trumped all of this information about the lack of information and showed clearly the reason we were all so deeply concerned was what they did actually have: a photo of her, the missing girl. A single gorgeous photograph apparently from a feature in a glossy magazine where the photographer had taken striking close-up portraits of rural Americans, particularly Amish and Mennonites. Amish usually don’t let themselves be photographed (said the Amish expert—the headline read “Plain People” as he spoke). Amish believe photographs encourage vanity.

  Yes, yes. I put a forkful of brown rice in my mouth. Clearly that was one of the many dangers in photographs; and yet here was this rather exceptional photo of this girl. It is an intimate shot, not awkward or posed at all. She is carrying a bucket and the weight of it has pulled her arms down and forward toward the camera. She wears a sheer white cotton bonnet. The ties are undone and hang like hair down the sides of her face. A few strands of blond hair escape the edge of the bonnet and soften her cheek. Her eyes are wide-set, pale and clear. But she has the tiniest hint of something hard to fix in her expression—a delicate wisp of mystery, as if her fragile lips might be about to smile. She didn’t look childish or even very pretty. She just attended the moment—the camera’s moment—in a way that looked intensely present. She seemed like a real person, not a “missing Amish girl,” as the caption under the photo proclaimed.

  I tried to not read the crawl underneath: ARNOLD PALMER BOWS OUT OF MASTERS …NBA HORNETS@HEAT 7:00 …ST. JOSEPH’S COLLAPSES AGAINST XAVIER …But I kept catching things, and then I would follow to catch up as the letters slipped off to the left: KE TYSON NOT TO RETURN TO THE RING: “TOO OLD, TOO TIRED” …

  Live coverage of the Montgomery County sheriff’s press conference was coming up. Only the commercials released me from the odd back-and-forth between the ticker crawling beneath and the incongruent images above it. It offered, I suppose, a way to never leave anything out. Maybe it was supposed to make you feel you could continue watching this show and you would miss nothing. You don’t need to surf, we will surf for you. We could cover something deeply and endlessly, yet we would leave nothing else out. But instead it made you feel that you were always missing more and more. The endlessness of it, the abundance of it, the pace of it: it made me feel terribly anxious. Why is so much happening all the time? Why can’t I stop it and read it? Why aren’t you pretending only one thing matters at a time, why aren’t you helping me make order of all of this? They began those crawls on 9/11 for emergency information. Like many emergency measures, it had become permanent. And it scattered my attention in uncomfortable ways.

  The photograph fascinated me, but I wasn’t that compelled to this story, not yet. The people kept talking about the Amish, and a box on the screen now showed the empty podium where the sheriff would soon appear. While we waited, they cut to a reporter interviewing another non-Amish resident of Montgomery County. Apparently, Amish are very nice …MOKTADA AL-SADR… BUSH $180 MILLION, KERRY $79 MILLION IN 1ST QTR FUND-RAISING REPORTS …they don’t trust our modern conveniences but …OPRAH THANKS STAFF …help neighbors …WEEKLONG ALL-EXPENSE-PAID …plain people who put God and community first …GIBSON’S PASSION GETS BIG EASTER BO …Amish are wary of strangers… WORKERS FILE LAWSUIT AGAINST ELITE SPA …children like to play games just like non-Amish children, whom they call “English” …WHITE HOUSE RELEASES AUGUST 01 MEMO SAID TO WARN OF ATTACK “IN THE UNITED STATES” …G.E. BACKS 1ST QTR EARNINGS FORECAST AS GLOBAL ORDERS FOR APPLIANCES, SILICONE, AND SECURITY PRODUCTS REBOUND …Good afternoon—

  At last the sheriff was now speaking LIVE. And no one knows anything or says anything new. Just seeing Amish people filmed from the back or from afar as they got discussed on the cable news made me uncomfortable enough, but the full breaking point didn’t hit me until the next evening.

  When I got home from work, the house felt very quiet. I turned on the news, and there they all were, seemingly unchanged from the night before. They continued because the story hadn’t played out yet. No body, no crime, not yet. But they really continued because they had something new, and this was the breaking point: they secured an interview with the mother of the girl. I knew (from all the experts I heard yesterday) that Amish people don’t go on TV. She was breaking Ordnung rules for humility and could be shunned or excommunicated. Inexplicably, while we waited for the exclusive interview, the little box in the corner showed a barn raising from the film Witness. Next the entire screen switched to a detailed map of the abduction site with the photo of the missing Amish girl in a box and an 800 number for tips on the ticker.

  Then the mother appeared in a dark blue bonnet and dark blue dress and cape. She stood next to the reporter, and the sheriff stood behind her. The reporter asked why she was going on TV, and after a long pause, she answered. She wanted to help find her daughter Annie. She is thirteen and five feet two inches tall and weighs one hundred pounds. She was wearing a gray dress with a white apron. The woman spoke with an odd German torque, a hard-up inflection at the ends of the words. She was not beautiful. She was not the picture of Amish beatitude. She trembled. She looked down, she appeared frightened. Her voice shook, and then she couldn’t speak any longer. She glanced up one last time and shook her head a tiny bit as she looked into the camera. Her eyes were the same as her daughter’s, I could see that, but rubbed and red at the edges. I tried to imagine what she saw, or what she imagined the world saw. How did she conceive of the world through the camera and beyond her village? The journalist interviewing her almost reached for the woman as she backed away, and the moment was odd and raw. Her desperate capitulation to the harsh calculus of the English world that had swallowed her child would be endlessly repeated. Her resistance to humility in the face of God’s will would play over and over. Then it was gone and it was back to the thousand volunteers scouring the bleached late-winter hillside. The suspicious neighbor. The humble ways of these quiet people. Amish girls are seldom alone …KERRY VETTING POSSIBLE VICE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES.

  This one would not be let go for a while. They had that photograph of the girl (now etched in my brain forever). And they had that video of the mother. Over and over, but then it would fade to the next thing. Not fade, it really was all and then nothing. Unless a body turned up, or a missing girl. By tomorrow evening, it would all be gone.

  I didn’t go to my computer. There would be time for that later on. I crept into the hottest tub of water I could stand. I lay down until the water covered me up to my neck. I leaned my head back against the porcelain. I cried until my eyes swelled and my face ached. I had been crying all along; as soon as the woman spoke, the tears started spilling down my face. My eyes were weary and swollen. The hot water felt good. I pressed a washcloth against my eyes.

  Jay called. I didn’t pick up the phone. I knew how ridiculous it sounded whenever I trie
d to explain to anyone—Ada, Nik, Jay—what made me so sad. No one is going to comfort you for what you saw on the news.

  BREAKING EVENT #4

  Wait, stop. There were several very significant others, but this recitation doesn’t get it. It falsifies it somehow by rupturing it from the time between. It makes it cute. Or cynical.

  Denise took off her glasses and pressed her palms to her eyes. No, things didn’t happen in isolation. Ordering by chronology is better than ordering events by category. Things happened in a context, didn’t they? Those breaking events happened to her, or affected her, because (maybe) of what surrounded them. It wasn’t all events, it was some events. And maybe the why wasn’t contained in the event itself but in her. How to get at that, then? Collage? Pastiche? A list? Rhetorical questions? Or tell a story?

  She had to eat something. It was drafty. She pulled on one of Nik’s black sweaters. All his clothes were black. He didn’t have a lot, at least not in his bureau. He had a lot of canned food. Organic chili. He bought organic canned food? That lacked a certain amount of derring-do for a drinking-smoking-pill-popping rock and roller. She laughed, and that was how she felt: giddy, high, on the verge of tears or laughs. A crazy person.

  She heated the food and then ate fast, standing up. She was in a rush. She longed to get back to the writing. She wanted only that: to keep going. She surrendered to her mania, her hypergraphic state, and she couldn’t make herself stop until she had finished.

  APRIL 2–14, 2004

  Back to the calendar of linear events. The advantage of some agreed-upon measure to shape the past is hard to argue against. For instance, I remember what happened between April 1, April Fools’ Day, and April 15, tax day. Now I regret what happened that day, but there was, I think, a very specific context to what transpired. I was getting my papers together for my tax returns. In exchange for allowing me some flexibility, my wealthy boss paid me as an independent contractor, meaning I was responsible for my own self-employment taxes and had to keep track of all possible expenses. I was sitting cross-legged on the floor with receipts, bank statements, utility bills, mortgage statements, insurance bills, and credit card statements arranged in little stacks all around me. I sorted and I felt the soul-sucking weariness of counting money long spent. The phone rang.