Stone Arabia

by Spiotta, Dana

  “Well, he gave you an ending, didn’t he?”

  “I just think he left behind everything for a reason. So I want to go and explore his archives. I want to film the details of his collection of stuff. I want to record the handmade labels, the collages, the intricate systems of order and reference. It would be so great.”

  “I don’t think I like that idea. I don’t think you should go through his stuff.”

  “In case he comes back?”

  “He has only been gone two days, so I’m just not sure you should tear through his stuff.”

  “I thought you were so sure he was gone for good,” Ada said.

  Denise nodded halfheartedly. “Okay.”

  “What, honestly, would he want?”

  “It’s fine, film there. Just be careful with his things.” Ada nodded, and she sat next to her mother on the couch. “What?”

  “I need something more,” Ada said.

  “Yeah?”

  “I need to film more of you. Maybe you can go through the archives with me. Maybe—”

  “Not right now. No, I don’t think I want to do that.”

  “But Mom, you are all that is left.” Denise smiled at Ada. “Think about it.”

  “I will think about it, honey, but you must give me a little time. And absolutely no filming at the police station. That’s too much for me.”

  “Okay, okay.” Ada poured some wine for her mother and then held out her glass. “To Nik, wherever he is.”

  “To Nik, that selfish prick,” Denise said, and started laughing. She took a long sip. She put a hand in Ada’s hair and pushed it back from her face. Ada lifted the same section of her hair and tucked it behind her ear. “Do you have any of your film with you? Do you have the Nik interview you did?”

  “Oh yeah. Of course. I mean, I have it all with me all the time. I have DVDs in my purse, in my car, everywhere. I can show you the Nik interview if you want to see it.”

  “I think I would like that.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Ada’s camera follows Nik as he walks through his studio and his apartment. There are books to the rafters, shelves everywhere, a drum kit, guitars, recording equipment. Any wall space is covered with notes, photos, charts, drawings. There are no empty spaces, but it looks highly organized. It has the look of systems and purpose. Nik has an unlit cigarette dangling out of his mouth. The camera follows him as he goes outside, walks around the yard, and then they go through the outside entrance to his garage studio.

  NIK

  That’s it, where I have worked the past twenty-four years. Western Lights, the headquarters of Playpen Studios.

  ADA (offscreen):

  And Pause Collective, and Medium Effort …

  NIK

  Yes, the headquarters of so many record companies. It all happens here, kids.

  Nik sits down on a stool and pulls his well-worn Gibson dreadnought guitar onto his lap as he ducks under the strap. We can see rows of the thick black binders of the Chronicles behind him with different years on the spines. Some years get multiple binders.

  ADA

  You have lived here for how long?

  NIK

  I moved here in 1981, so close to twenty-four years.

  ADA

  Do you own it?

  He laughs and smiles down at his guitar as he strums a little.

  NIK

  No, I don’t own it. I’m not like your mom and everyone else in this country. I have no desire to take part in the great ownership society.

  ADA

  Do you consider yourself a political person?

  NIK

  Not really, I just don’t pay attention. I’m too much of a narcissist. I mean, I’ll vote against the president this year. I hate the president. But how much do you have to pay attention to realize George Bush is a thug?

  ADA

  The Chronicles are not just a casual hobby, are they? They are extremely elaborate, the work of a lifetime of effort. They appear to be considered down to the tiniest detail.

  NIK

  You want to know how detailed? Let’s put it this way. If the Chronicles are dug up two hundred years from now, the readers would find them entirely plausible. It would be hard to believe they are conjured from nothing. Particularly when I have all the music. I kept close track. I kept the internal logic and continuity. I have the accompanying scholarship. Verifications could be made.

  Nik looks at the volumes lining the shelves. He laughs.

  NIK

  It isn’t just these binders. And the various iterations of recordings. There are movies and videos. There are separate books by some of the characters, there are items of merchandise, there are tie-in promotional products, there are court documents, spin-off projects. I have the collected writings of some of my “reviewers” and so on. Have you ever seen these?

  He pulls out a deck of playing cards. Each one has a painting and then writing inked over the painting, sometimes wrapping around to the other side. He shuffles through them.

  You remember those Rock Dreams books from the seventies? You wouldn’t, would you? They were these very popular books. They had dreamy psychedelic paintings of rock stars. Some of the images seemed like lyric illustrations. Others had little stories or poems about the rock star. There were a couple volumes of these books—you were supposed to stare at the paintings while you were listening to the music, I think. They were rock-and-roll-fantasy paintings. Anyway, I thought they were kind of corny, but I also really liked these handmade playing cards I saw, I think maybe at this gallery, ages ago. They were made by Wallace Berman or someone like Wallace Berman. And each card had a poem with a painting or collage on the back. So I stole that idea and combined it with Rock Dreams. And I thought the Demonics would release them for their fans as listening decks. Anyway, I made decks for all six of the Demonics records. They are all painted and drawn by hand, no repros. And one edition. I don’t know if your mom has even seen these. I think I am the only one who has looked at them, but I have to admit, they are pretty cool. Ha. I am my own biggest fan.

  Nik laughs and puts down the cards, then he pulls his guitar in close again.

  ADA

  But the question is why. Why did you go to such lengths? Can you tell me about why you started keeping the Chronicles?

  Nik doesn’t say anything, seems to be tuning his guitar. He strums a little.

  NIK

  It was kind of fun, far away from everyone.

  ADA

  Is that a lyric from one of your songs? Could you play it?

  He sings the song:

  NIK

  I’m riding static, I hope you hear me

  hiding in attics, among old Christmas trees

  these widow’s flowers, drier than dust

  they haven’t crumbled, seems that they must

  I’m working again, I’m going to break it

  I’m playing again, if playing you call it

  It happens again, every day

  It was kind of fun, so far away …

  … from everyone

  I’m riding static, I hope you hear me

  hiding in attics, among old Christmas trees

  Can’t you hear me yet?

  Can’t you hear me yet?

  He has a coughing fit, stops playing, takes a drink of beer.

  I know this will be hard to believe, but I just wrote that. (Laughs.) It is called “On the Occasion of Being Interviewed for My Niece’s Documentary.” It is what you call an occasional song.

  ADA

  Who are you addressing in the song? The world? Yourself? Your sister?

  NIK

  I’m just making stuff rhyme, and I haven’t a clue what it actually means. Interesting, of course, to hear what other people think. I mean, I guess.

  ADA 209

  Who is your audience?

  NIK

  Myself. Other than that, I don’t have one, I suppose. Some family and friends.

  ADA

  My mother
.

  NIK

  For instance.

  Nik laughs a big long laugh. Then in a mock theatrical voice:

  But sisters don’t count. Sorry, Dee Dee. Sisters and mothers don’t count, you see. I have no audience.

  He strums some more.

  Don’t mistake me, I don’t mean Denise doesn’t count in any big sense. My sister doesn’t count as my audience because she feels like an extension of me. She’s, well, an alternative version of me.

  He pauses, reaches offscreen. He takes a drag on his cigarette and exhales. He shrugs.

  What were the Chronicles? Accumulations, like memory but better. A thing to look forward to every day.

  ADA

  But why make a fake life? Why not do it with real life and get a real audience for all your work?

  NIK

  It wasn’t fake, it was real. And I grew to like not having an audience. Imagine being freed from sense and only having to pursue pure sound. Imagine letting go of explanations, of misinterpretations, of commerce and receptions. Imagine doing whatever you want with everything that went before you. Imagine never having to give up Artaud or Chuck Berry or Alistair Crowley or the Beats or the I Ching or Lewis Carroll? Imagine total freedom.

  ADA

  But in your Chronicles you are accused of all of those things. You have your critics call you derivative, immature, and cliché.

  NIK

  Well, I wanted it to be realistic.

  Ada laughs.

  You see, you see?

  He laughs.

  You come at me with your camera and your need for explanations and your wanting me to be consistent.

  The film ends. “That’s all there is,” Ada said. Denise nodded.

  Over the next few weeks Denise helped Ada dig through the Chronicles. Denise decided to cooperate fully with the filmmaker. She paid June’s rent, and then July’s, then August’s. She went back to the routine of her life, but many times, instead of going home after work, she would go to Nik’s place. She would listen to music or read the Chronicles. Sometimes she thought about her own stack of writing, but mostly she just sat there.

  There was no sign of Nik.

  After the filming was finished and Ada had returned to New York, Denise didn’t come by as often, but she left his apartment and the Chronicles as they were. She liked that there was a space away from her house and her life; she liked being in someone else’s world. His apartment felt quiet, disconnected, peaceful.

  She visited her mother, who didn’t ask about Nik. She saw Jay. They watched movies, they had dinner. Her life felt different, but there were days when it felt exactly the same. The commute. She even went back to watching the news during her dinner.

  No one talked about Abu Ghraib or Iraq anymore. All they talked about was Vietnam. They kept showing commercials about how John Kerry was a coward for going to Vietnam, and then they discussed the commercials. The whole election would be decided by Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. The battleground states. Only people in Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio would decide if Bush should still be president. Everyone else would just watch. Not only was I a lurker online, but I lived in a lurker state, California.

  One night in early September, Denise turned on the TV to discover a breaking news story in progress. The words under the image said school hostage, and then the words deadly standoff zoomed up from the bottom of the screen. Denise could see the video feed was not an American one. It had that instant rough-grade foreign feel. A reporter spoke, and it was simultaneously translated by a British woman in voice-over. Behind the reporter a large cinder-block building was visible. Then the shot cut to scenes of the building while the American anchor spoke over the images. Denise heard “hundreds of people, reportedly, most of them children.” Men with guns were rushing back and forth across the screen. Men in orange jumpsuits carried stretchers into white trucks. People, including children, wandered around unclothed, dazed, damaged. Then the entire screen filled with a map of the former Soviet Union: Russia and all the countries it contained, or used to contain. They cut to a hostage expert sitting on a chair, talking to two reporters sitting next to him. Then a Chechnya expert, then a separatist rebels expert.

  The usual news crawl seemed to be suspended; they instead flashed detached facts about Chechnya and Beslan, but it still had the discomforting and discordant effect of too much.

  The hostage expert was still speaking. Denise could feel the growing excitement. Something terrible was going to happen. Guaranteed. Glimpses of child hostages next to armed men in balaclavas. They also showed the hard-line, reportedly corrupt Russian police who wouldn’t negotiate with a Chechnyan, ever. Villagers, parents, and random passersby—some holding military-grade rifles—also surrounded the building. It was a pending bloodbath, even Denise could see that. And the cable newspeople were besides themselves with how genuinely breaking the news really was. This was one of those rare events that would unfold, dramatically, in real time, right on camera. Denise didn’t want to watch it. She didn’t even use the remote: she walked up to the TV and pressed its off button. I won’t watch the same things over and over, I won’t wait for, hope for, something to happen. I won’t.

  But even after the TV turned off, she thought about it. She tried, she really did, to resist her out-of-proportion involvement. She decided she must organize her garage. She went out and pulled all the boxes off the shelves. She made room for new things. She piled all of Jay’s gifts into a discreet corner. But something bothered her. It wasn’t just the newspeople waiting for the Russian police to storm the school. It wasn’t just the serious tone of voice that barely contained a kind of breathless thrill as it said “reportedly wearing suicide bomb belts” and “according to our sources, the rebels say they will kill fifty children for every rebel soldier killed” and “Errol, is it true they are using children as human shields?” It wasn’t just that concealed giddiness she detected in them, but something else, something in her.

  She had an oddly blank feeling—she had a theoretical caring gap. She should be horrified, but she really wasn’t. She didn’t feel the story seeping into her. Why? Was it because she couldn’t see most of the children? That there weren’t innocent school photos of them from an earlier time, individual narratives of specific lives told in English with pictures from soccer games? Was it because the school itself looked more like a factory or prison than any school she had ever seen? Or that all of it, the whole thing, felt so deeply foreign? She was afraid that was it, that was what kept her at a remove. There was this secret, shameful feeling that it wasn’t quite as bad because it was so foreign. It wasn’t as horrifying.

  She pushed all the boxes back on the shelves in a neat row and then began to wipe the dust from the empty shelves underneath.

  Because, perhaps, they were used to it, in these chaotic foreign countries. They were used to violence and terror and collateral death. Child death. That wasn’t true, but it felt true, maybe, how when Americans watched foreign disasters it felt different than watching a school in Colorado, somehow. It was in their clothes, their head scarves, their voices, their full-stop ys and ks. Even their eyes looked foreign. It felt more like spectacle than she cared to admit.

  She had seen the faces of the parents waiting outside. It wasn’t them, was it? The war-torn, world-outside-the-USA people weren’t inured to bloody children. It was her, watching at home.

  When Denise was done, she went into the house. She made dinner. She took a bath and went to bed. She felt tired and quickly fell into a sleep.

  When she woke at three a.m., she lay there but knew she wouldn’t be able to fall back. She was awake, dreadfully and fully awake. Awful to be awake and alone at this time. The only things were the computer or the TV. She sat up in bed and switched on the cable.

  It had happened, the thing they were waiting for, and it was all over the news. Breaking News flashed and reflashed across the bottom, but Denise could not take her eyes from the images above it. The school was on fire. S
he could hear the quick, successive cracks of gunshots. There was a lot of smoke, but she could see people running in all directions. Children were climbing out of windows or being pulled out. Some were bloody, all were naked or nearly naked. Something exploded, and then there were sirens and the men were dumping kids on the grass and going back for more. She could hear crying and yelling. The shot cut to stretchers with small bodies covered completely by white sheets. The newspeople explained the images, but they needed no explanation. The parents were on camera, women with scarves tied on their heads, shrieking in Russian and sobbing. An older woman with a photo of her daughter talked into the camera. The reporter’s voice said, “This woman just learned of her daughter’s death.” Tears streamed down her face, and she held up the picture of her daughter as she bellowed words at the camera. Denise felt her chest catch, and the horror of the thing cascaded all over her. Finally it wasn’t, didn’t feel, at a distance from her. They were suffering, and the constant presence of suffering made it worse, not easier, didn’t it? It was a life that wore on you and weighed on you, and then it kept getting worse. She saw, in the weary, sobbing women, what she recognized as despair. The pain just gets worse.

  The Beslan school broke her open, but what purpose did it serve? What was a person supposed to do with all of this feeling? Feeling nothing was subhuman, but feeling everything, like this, in a dark room in the middle of the night, by yourself, did no one any good. Certainly not Denise, who held her head and wept and watched two hours of breaking, beating news coverage. Of children and blood and chaos. Each possibility, not feeling or feeling, each response was inadequate. Everything was inadequate.