Lightning Field

by Dana Spiotta

“Jean Peters.”

  LEFT. Of course. It was leftfrom,notof.

  David cracked a beer open triumphantly. “Oh, I have to have lunch with my agent tomorrow.”

  “On Saturday?”

  David shrugged.

  “Well, I have to work tomorrow night at the club, so I guess I won’t see you.”

  David nodded. He took another sip of beer and watched the screen.

  “Jean Arthur. Not Jean Peters, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I love Gary Cooper,” David said.

  “Jean Arthur, David.”

  Mina took a long, hot bubble bath. She stared at the parts of her body that poked out from the bubbles. She extended aleg to wash seductively. A commercial, it reminded her of. Her leg looked great, all bubble-dripping against the tile. She tried to forget pencil tests. She wrapped a towel turban-style around her head. She emptied the tub. She stopped on the way to the bedroom at the door to David’s office. He was at his computer again. The room was completely dark except for the sickly green-blue aura of the screen.

  Mina stood watching David. David watched the screen, which contained a small screen within the screen that watched some other guy’s computer, unattended and unmoving. Free-streaming live-feed video. Sometimes you could watch him at his computer. Sometimes he left and you could just watch his computer.

  “I can watch him for minutes at a time,” David said.

  “I do other things. I eat my lunch, I talk on the phone,” Mina said.

  “He stares at his screen. Does nothing. Occasionally he works the keyboard, but mostly he watches,” David said, eyes fixed.

  “I walk around. I see people. I smell things. I take baths, David.”

  “I like to watch real life, a stranger’s life, in real time. There is unlimited space, so the most atomic details are available. The most micro moments get play. Everything is attended.”

  “You know what I pray for?” Mina said.

  “It’s just different things that engage you, not that things engage you less.”

  “I pray for the day I pick up the paper and they discover that the Internet is a big failure and everyone is wrong and nobody wants to use it anymore.”

  “It’s not that you get more information shoved at you. It’sjust different. And you have to figure out what you want. You have to be more accurate in your desires.”

  “They would say, ‘Oh, boy, remember the Internet? What a fad that was.’ And people who hated it would be congratulated. ‘Boy, you guys were smart not to bother with that, how did ya know?’ ”

  “Infinitesimal things can have as much pull as massive things. Things are not privileged in the same way. Eccentricity is encouraged.”

  “I hate the fucking Internet.”

  “You can bet on that making no difference at all. You can bet everything on that.”

  “Oh look, he’s moving. What — look, I think he just — did you see that, David?”

  “That’s nothing. Let’s go to live-streaming accidents.”

  “How can they be live? How do they know an accident will happen?”

  “There are certain street corners, one in L.A., one in New York, and of course, the best one is in Athens, where accidents happen up to three or four times a day. These live cams just surveil those corners. See?”

  “But there is no accident.”

  “But it’s all an accident. This is guaranteed preaccident footage.”

  “Have you ever actually seen a live accident on this site?”

  “Actual live, at the actual occurrence, or replayed highlight, postlive?”

  “Actual-live live.”

  “Actually, no.”

  Saturday His-and-Her Perversities

  The week before it was the “trashy” lingerie superstore on a famously dilapidated boulevard. Today it was Mitterrand’s Mistress, an exclusive European hosiery-only boutique. Mina bought cashmere tights, guaranteed to let you wear skirts through the most frigid days of winter. They were the most expensive hose in the store, even more than the hand-stitched lace-topped stay-up thigh-highs in sheerest Noir. She had to admit the Viennese 70 denier strumpfhose in Pearled Cracked Cement, part of the Urban Disaster collection, tempted her, as well as the Semi-Sheer Velvet Finish Tights in Bruise and Blood Ultra Ultra Red (although any red, and especially a brown-purple red, is particularly unflattering in any-denier sheer, and she decided to wait until they restocked the sold-out opaque version of the tights). But these couldn’t match the feel — the promise, really — of the Cashmere Pure-Luxury, woven with the tiniest bit of nylon and Lycra (to make the cashmere cling and not bunch, barely detectable, a soft breath, a whisper on skin). When she spotted the last pair in medium, in the sort of oatmeal cream that would make her feel October and Ivy League, coed and coquettish, or at least like a sort of wrapped Christmas treat, all warm and inviting to touch, she said yes, knowing, in a sinking way, it was obscene. She just wouldn’t think about it — not even attempt the usual relativism of what was three hundred dollars here or there: Two couples out for dinner? A plane ticket to Seattle and back? One month’s health insurance? An evening’s worth of cocaine? — and, actually, not thinking about certain things had become soeasy lately, so much a newfound capacity of her conscious will. And by Friday the Winter-Spring Collection, such as Luscious Lent in Satin-Finish Ash, and even Ramadan Rayon Rose, in a more modest 170 denier, would be in, for preview, to the most special and loyal customers. A group with whom Mina surely belonged.

  She had large, full thighs. David moved Gwen on the bed, her body the anchor of their afternoons; he could move against it and it would both resist and respond to him. Braque. No, something softer, undulative and layered. Bellini-folded intricacies, a labyrinth of other flesh. It almost upset him, repulsed him, but it did not. So close to disgust it was bracingly erotic, a giving over to all things unlooked at, unexplored. Here was exuberance in flesh. His larger and older lover, Gwen. Long married and with a grown child, Gwen.

  Desire transforms you. David believed this.

  Leg crooked on his lower back, white, dimples, soap, the soap scent of her thighs. He felt male and small. Hardness overcome by sheer presence, and age, too. Gwen was forty-four. David was thirty. She wasn’t at all like the women he had desired his whole life. His whole life.

  It wasn’t a transformation. It was a conversion.

  They whispered affection for parts. I love your hair (curly, silky brown). I love your hands (oddly delicate fingers, unpolished nails). I love your lips (his were not quite full, but evenly balanced, a pout-threatening shapely upper lip). Why, Gwen, do we say I love this and I love that, but we never say I love Gwen, I love David? When do the parts equal the person? But he didn’t say this because she didn’t want talk, she wanted murmurs and sighs. He didn’t ask anything of her because what ifshe said no? What he feared was a question and an answer that might unhinge their desire. The alchemy of what they were, he wanted desperately to not decompose it, not unravel it, because it felt like random fortune, shakable by temperature and seasons and hormones. He said nothing, held his curiosity back. How odd that it seemed necessary to command such restraint in the execution of a passion. Strange, you fall into an affair because you long to give in to pleasure, to surrender, and then you have to fight yourself to limit the character of your desires. The resistance mixes with the desire, and it becomes something else, some other new thing. It becomes part of the pleasure.

  “Mina?”

  “Hi, Jack.”

  “How are you, kiddo?”

  “I’m a little late for work.”

  “Okay.”

  “How are you?”

  “Great. Melissa and I are going to a sweat lodge retreat in Montana for a few weeks. I thought maybe you would want to come.”

  “Jack, I have responsibilities. A job. I can’t just leave. Besides, I don’t want to go to a sweat lodge.”

  “How are things with David?

  “Fine. I’ll fill you in when I have more time. I’m ver
y late.”

  “Okay. Mina?”

  “What?”

  “Michael got released from the hospital. I mean he checked out.”

  “He did?”

  “Yeah. He might contact you. I tried to call him at the hospital, and they said it’s been a couple of weeks. He’ll try and contact you. If he does, maybe you could go see him. You know, he’s—”

  “Yeah, I know. He hasn’t contacted me. I can’t worry about this now. My life is very chaotic. I can’t be worried about Michael.”

  “What’s wrong? Is there something you want to talk about?”

  “No, it’s just the usual sort of insanity. Look, I have to go. I’m sorry.”

  “I understand. Well, if you hear something, let me know.”

  “How can I do that if you’re on an Indian reservation? Would that be smoke signals?”

  “I’ll have my mobile phone. I’ll be checking my voice mail.”

  “I haven’t heard from him.”

  Mina had not seen Michael in years. Michael’s first episode, leading to his first hospital stay, seemed to come out of nowhere, or to be completely inevitable, depending on how she chose to look at it. Her father had looked to her — you know Michael, tell me what happened. You were always so close. Mina and Michael. Mina had adored Michael.

  Then, before all the hospitals, there was the warmth of unbroken companionship. A person so close you hardly needed to speak. The combustible energies and combat closeness of children growing up together, moved around, variously parented. Interior logics developed. Secret reference points. An unquestioned and uncontrived siege bonding.

  At seven and ten they spent most of their summertimes apart and with different parents. Michael on location with their father, Mina in L.A. with their mother. But during the schoolyear they were always together. Mina and Michael became a two-person investigative cadre. They experimented, they were on a reconnaissance mission between themselves and the world. She mostly remembered them always lighting things in the fireplace. They would load the kindling and the newspapers and then the Duraflame log and then the real logs in the slate-manteled Beverly Hills fireplace. They would beg to be the one who lit the paper in three or four spaced-out places. The flare-up as it ignited, and then the flare-down as it worked on the wood and the “durable” flame. She liked the initial burning flash, and they were bored with the quietly crackling logs, the stoic heat-giving red glow. If the paper and the twigs burned so brightly, why not do the whole fire with paper and twigs? She had a fantasy of throwing endless paper and twigs as the flames flared and hungrily consumed. The drama of it.

  “It doesn’t last, doesn’t give off heat, it makes too much ash,” their father would say. But Michael and Mina would sit as close to the fire as possible, until their faces were red from it, until they couldn’t stand it. And when their father wasn’t looking, they’d chuck in newspapers, rolled and tied in a knot, so the flames could unknot it, flaring and then waning and sending little flaming pieces up the flue. They would float upward and glow as if in slow motion. And it would look for a moment how they imagined real fires would look, burning houses and cities, when the sky would be filled with pretty glowing bits of slow-rising ash.

  Michael took to drawing, on construction paper, skylines and houses. First cityscapes in silhouette, a skyline seen only in movies and nightlife commercials. Mina would cut the edges out, leaving the varied points, the profile of a grand city with six Empire State Buildings, “skyscrapers,” jagged, manic-edgedbuildings built with such upward optimism and hubris they scraped the sky. They’d put it there behind the Duraflame, prop it up before the fire was lit. Then when it started to burn, they would narrate it. They’d become broadcasters. Even break down on the air—“My God, the flames are consuming the city. I’ve never seen anything like this, my God”—and then they would bawl and scream and cry, finally mimicking the imagined screams of a burning city, even the rats in the boiling sewers.

  Their father told them the great Chicago fire started when a cow knocked over a lamp. Mina wondered later why a cow was in the city. And how a fallen lamp could start a fire. Michael figured the smallest mistake could burn the whole world down. One careless moment. They discussed fire drills. Escape plans. Window jumps that could be survived. Mina said, “Well, our house won’t burn because it’s brick,” but he reminded her that whole steel-girdered buildings burn, and brick was even worse. All the fire got locked inside with the people.

  “What’s a pizza oven made out of, like the one at Mario’s?” Mina knew what he was getting at. She nodded sagely.

  “Our house is a brick oven.”

  Then there was the garage. The metal-plated heat toy in the garage. It melted rubber pellets into creatures. It was called Creature Features. Then they discovered Shrinky Dinks, which were plastic, maybe Plexiglas, ornaments that you colored with a special marker and then put in the toaster oven until they shrank and their colors were sealed in, emitting an odd, burning-plastic smell that her brother and she fell in love with. They watched them shrink through the oven window. The melting preset pellets soon inspired their own heat “experiments. a” They both seemed to realize simultaneously that anything plastic could melt, and that the fun of it, the mystery contained within the plastic, was watching how it would melt. Objects lost their form and revealed something elemental and basic. The truth of things was revealed in their destruction.

  Michael’s army men succumbed first. They arranged two in static combat on a piece of tinfoil, locked them in the toaster oven, and narrated the results.

  “Nuclear combat,” Mina said.

  “Napalm is covering the hillside,” her brother said. The army men would darken, then all at once seem animated and start to buckle and move until they did begin to melt, their guns and arms indistinguishable, drippy appendages, their legs molten with the enemies’ legs. They’d stop it midmelt and let them dry, melted together — half men, half mutant blobs.

  “They’re discovered like this, after the bomb.”

  “Like Pompeii,” she said. Their little Joe faces melted so their entire heads looked like mouths screaming. Soon they had whole postapocalyptic armies, mass graves of melted, screaming men. The kitchen smelled foreign and toxic. Soon anything plastic found its way to the oven, had to be melted. Transformed by heat, watched through the window of the toaster oven. Later it occurred to Mina they were amazingly unsupervised as children. Didn’t anyone notice they were melting the entire world, from poker chips to Barbie heads to swizzle sticks? Couldn’t people smell it?

  “You exaggerate,” she had said, years later, to Michael in one of his lucid moments. “One time, one afternoon, we melted an army guy in the toaster. I think the rest is just your pyro fantasies.”

  But no, she was lying. She remembered. There was fire,and there was heat. Later there were the days of secret cigarettes on the roof, the red coals the only thing visible as they sat. She wanted to say, You tried to teach me how to do smoke rings, but it was like whistling with two fingers — one of those things you seemed able to do from instinct that I could never learn. But she didn’t say that.

  The hospital. When she finally forced herself to visit Michael in the hospital, it was her first and last time. He chainsmoked, making an ugly sucking sound until the gesture seemed odd and foreign and creepy. She tried to ignore it, and then she saw under his robe maybe a hundred crescent-shaped, white puckered burns. Circles with the same diameters as cigarettes. Over and over on his skin. Over and over, not once, not a fire and heat experiment, not curiosity or a flirtation with danger — but a mechanical difference. Over and over like the strange sucking sound he made when he inhaled. Mina didn’t want to think about that, didn’t want to think of him like that. Wouldn’t.

  But it wasn’t really the hospital. The estrangement started long before. The hospital was just the final articulation of it. The first time she noticed how different he was, how he had really changed, was during Thanksgiving vacation his freshman year at
college.

  Michael had had a rough start at school. He hadn’t made any friends. He was on again and off again with Lorene. He hadn’t called Mina much at all. Mina missed him completely; his visit was about the only thing she looked forward to that fall. But the strange thing was the longing didn’t stop after his return, it was still there as a kind of quiet sadness that couldn’t be comforted, sadness about how distant he seemed, sadness about not being ten. He was glamorously lean muscled andsuddenly tall. He wore a trench coat and a torn black T-shirt. He carried a dog-eared book, some Latinate-titled philosophy thing, which he fingered at times. He pretended that nothing had changed, jumping her and wrestling, giving her looks at dinner, watching midnight TV and giggling. But he fell into longer, more obscure monologues. He was almost patronizing.

  “What do you want to do tonight?” she asked him.

  “One — light air. Two — light breeze,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Three — gentle breeze. Four — moderate breeze. Five— fresh breeze. Six—”

  “What are you talking about?” She looked up at him. He clutched his book and smiled, as though he was joking.

  “Six — strong breeze. Seven — moderate gale. Eight — fresh gale. Nine — strong gale. Just who is she, this Gale? I want to meet this minxish thing.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Ten — whole gale. Oh, yes, yes, yes.” He laughed and clutched his book. His fingernails were dirty.

  “If you don’t stop, Michael, I’m going to leave the room.”

  “Eleven — storm. Twelve through seventeen — hurricane.”

  “Will you just stop this?” Mina walked to the doorway and glared at him.

  “Wait, Mina, wait, the best part, over seventeen— devastation.” Michael smiled.

  “Why do you do that? I hate when you recite things. It has nothing to do with anything. What’s your problem?” Michael just stared at her, for a moment confused, then he laughed.

  “I don’t know, it’s funny.” Michael looked at her. “I’m sorry.”