Lightning Field

by Dana Spiotta

  “Speak,” he said. “Breathe and empty yourself.” How could she? She could say she was thinking of his hands on her breasts — or how she hadn’t been touched in that way in so long. (Was it truly years? Why was everything in her life suddenlymeasurable in years? Years seemed like months, months like weeks.) How long had it been? Since she saw Michael in the hospital. No, but that would be a nice fantasy to stick with, something she could almost make true by sheer will. Why not, if that’s better than the truth. More truthful than the truth. No, the last one was Dean, of course. His name gave her an inward wince. Lorene told herself there was nothing to be ashamed of — she should regret nothing. But Dean was as far from Michael as possible, as uncomplicated and unmindful as they come. But that was a fantasy, too. She hadn’t wanted Dean because he was the opposite of Michael. She had wanted Dean because he was great-looking and edgy and aloof and a bit nasty. It was her vanity. She found him very sexy.

  Mina took only forty-five minutes to finish the walk to the hotel on Wilshire. She was, of course, late to meet Scott. She had never gone from Max to Scott on the same day. She was pretty sure she wouldn’t like it, but she had to walk somewhere — she didn’t want to be home or at work. And she felt needed by Scott. Max hardly touched her anymore anyway. She wanted Scott’s devotion. He was there at the bar, waiting, obviously relieved to see her. It was touching, almost, his ordering a drink for her, clutching her hand, acting as if his good luck would be snatched from him at any moment, or if he might be arrested for desire or pleasure. It was endlessly appealing, but then she felt sorry for him, and removed and suddenly bored. Here’s the drink, now what to say? Drink it fast, get it in your head.

  Lorene had slept with Dean and then feigned indifference. Dean flirted with her friends and seemed to hardly notice. Then they would collide through all the rooms in Lorene’s apartment, having frenzied, intense movie sex. SometimesDean would leave before dawn. It went on for several months. But the sex wasn’t really good. It was department-store-lingerie,Cosmo-quiz tacky sex: it satisfied briefly and then bored her completely. And when she no longer wanted Dean, it wasn’t gradual. It went all at once, with no warning. She just felt irritation and a vague revulsion in his presence. He didn’t read that right, he thought it was part of their game. It worried her — that he didn’t realize things had come to an end. He pursued her anyway. He began to hang around her restaurants. She ignored him and was utterly unresponsive. He began to sleep with her waitresses. Lorene wondered if he spoke about her, about the sex they had had. She started to feel the price of things, of the way he was still in her life even if she didn’t want him to be. The low-grade menace of it — because surely by now he saw it was no game and he just lingered out of spite. She felt the weight of not being able to make ex-lovers disappear. It amazed her that Mina managed so well. Without all this bulimic self-reproach.

  The last time she saw Dean he had wandered into Dead Animals and Single Malts at around eleven o’clock. He was already obviously drunk. He stood by the bar and watched her, in his black expensive suit, his dumb overly fashionable shoes and vapid smile. She couldn’t bear men who wore fashionable shoes, unless, of course, they were gay men. He gave her heavy looks that irritated her completely — she almost felt bad for him. Almost. He had a drink and then grabbed her arm as she walked by. He pulled her over. That was it. She yanked her arm away.

  “Look, Dean, I’ve had it. I don’t want you touching me, or hanging out in my restaurants. I am not enjoying this and I want you to leave, now.”

  He smiled at her. “Lorene, Lorene, why are you such a little bitch?” When he spoke she realized he was more drunk than she had first guessed — there was an underslur to his speech, just the way thechofsuchin a slushy, ugly, sloppy sound ran through the barely detectableaand became thelioflittle. Sushalille.This gave her some alarm. She hated drunk people, they became so narrow-focused and insatiable.Relentless. But to her surprise he let go of her arm and asked the bartender for his check. He put a bill of large denomination on the table and waved at the bartender to keep the rest. Lorene supposed Dean thought this gesture indicated class of some kind. She watched him leave. Dean had good, snaky hips, a nice long, graceful body. But as soon as he spoke or even gestured, all that dumb-boy vanity poured out. She felt something hard and cold inside her that she hadn’t felt before. Dean was the last lover she’d had. It was such a shame. But she wasn’t built for it, the combustible, vaguely menacing qualities. She felt nauseous thinking about it.

  Mina straddled Scott’s lap with all her clothes on. She felt his wanting her. She wanted him to slowly pull her skirt up, for them to kiss and feel each other up like schoolkids, not taking off their clothes until the last minute. But he just kissed her the way he always did, sort of perfunctorily and already wanting to be on to the next part, moving to the bed and taking off all his clothes.

  “If you just want to wait until you’re ready, that’s fine. Just remember that until you speak, the healing cannot begin.” Beryl applied pressure to her back, a steady touch that seemed to melt the aching in her shoulders. Lorene found herself talking aloud.

  “I don’t know what to say,” she said. Beryl pressed her neck.

  “I feel fear in your body, Lorene. Some deep fear. Tell me about that. Tell me what you fear. Be specific, and just go on, don’t think too much.”

  Scott wanted to have dinner. He wanted to keep it going. She realized as she dressed that things had kept accruing for him. She had stayed in the same place all these months while he kept going deeper and deeper in. She felt a wind of panic. He said they had some things to discuss. She insisted no on dinner, she had to leave, was already late. She finally agreed to meet him the next afternoon. She agreed just to escape. She walked home, thinking tomorrow had to be the last time with Scott. She would have to tell him it was over.

  “When I was walking from my car to this building, I passed a group of four guys huddled by their car. I think they were about eighteen years old. I readied myself for their staring. I readied the glassy gaze I have used my entire life. I saw peripherally a glance in my direction, and then I looked at one of them, but he wasn’t looking at me. His gaze traveled right past me. He was completely indifferent to me. No look back. He gave me no look back. And I can’t believe it. I am only thirty-two, and I am invisible to this guy. And then suddenly I saw the rest of my life stretched out before me. In a flash. The slow, excruciating dismantling of me as an object of desire. I would no longer command desire. And I felt so upset by this future, I wanted to run home and hide under my covers and cry. I really don’t think I can bear it, you know, getting older.” Lorene started to sob a bit, and Beryl held her shoulders.

  “But that’s not it. That’s not what I’m afraid of.”

  “What then?”

  “I am so scared that I am the sort of person who can be undone by such a thing. I’m so scared my whole life is built onsomething so inevitably doomed and so, well, so silly. I have spent the first third of my life fending off mostly unwanted attention from strangers, and I would spend the last two thirds pining desperately for that attention when it is gone. Now, that really scares the shit out of me.”

  Third Road Stop: New Mexico

  Miraculously, Lorene wants to eat breakfast. Lorene wants to sit down and eat breakfast. I watch her eating pancakes with maple syrup. I watch her poke a fork into a sausage link. We discuss our plans to reach my mother’s by the end of the week. I’ve already lost interest in open spaces. I urge her to the car. Lorene’s eating a fucking sausage. Tentatively at first, then with gusto. Lorene’s lips are glassy with sausage grease.

  “I’m tired of driving,” she says. “Can’t we have another cup of coffee.”

  “No. I’ll drive.”

  Lorene looks at me oddly.

  “What. I said I’ll drive,” I say. She’s wiping syrup off her unmade-up face. She looks so young. “You’re kind of a mess this morning.”

  She smiles at me, licking her lips — i
t’s breathtaking really.

  “One more cup of coffee, doll, and then you can drive your heart out.” She winks. I nod. I look for the waitress. She’s talking to a young man furiously scribbling in a notebook. Helooks up at her, hunted and unhappy, his hand shielding the page.

  “There are people in the world who furiously scribble in notebooks, and then there are—”

  “And then there are the rest of us. Unconcerned and undire,” Lorene says, mouth full.

  “Yeah, I guess. After Michael went to the hospital, he would send me things, documents, I guess.” This is the first time I have mentioned Michael on our trip.

  “After you wouldn’t see him? What do you mean, documents?”

  “Well, printouts from his computer, really. Not letters at all. Just fragments. Obsessive, odd, third-person diatribes. Which was really strange — obsessed but detached at the same time.”

  “I never got anything like that.”

  “Well, he spared you that. Only his family got the full force of his rants. And I did see him at the hospital. I did once.”

  “I know you did, Mina. At least he wanted to see you.”

  “I’m his sister, for God’s sake.”

  I keep the cryptic notes in a drawer by my bed. With the postcards. Sometimes, I admit, I didn’t even read them. They never had a salutation. They seemed to be dispatches from the front.

  Fuck ’em, that’s what they deserve. Damn sick of all these goddamn mediocrities. They don’t understand, they don’t want to understand. He frightened them, reminded them of what sellouts they are, rubbed their noses in the vapidity of their lives. They cannot deal with truths or truthsayers. He would be burned for this. He was certain they would kill him for these thoughts. They had designed it all very nicely, the benign smiles, the concernedlooks. The restricted visits from family. His sister. Perhaps they even got her. And then bringing the goddamn machine in here. They wanted him to write again. Type his brain into electronic bleeps that transmit through the computer into the universe. What happens, he wondered, as he typed, to the deleted words. The cursor blinking highlighted blips that seemingly flash into erased nonexistence at the press of the delete button. Why was this button twice as large as any of the letter buttons. What deleted bytes of memory stay in electronic limbo. We can discover the technology to recover data you deleted years ago. A search engine with a thousand spiders crawling everywhere. It’s all there, somehow. Like a brain, imprinted, retained, waiting for the recall. The right technology. He thought of abandoned hard drives. He thought of landfills full of abandoned outdated computers. He thought of motherboards and microchips. Of punk hackers in the future, constructing twisted, scavenged PC’s from the outdated abandoned stuff. Hybrid invasive technology.

  They monitored his monitor. He created passwords. Data alarms and hidden doorways of information. But if they monitored his creating these security measures, how could he protect himself? They unleashed relentless, single-focused programs that worked all day and all night to defeat his codes. Or even if he disconnected from all networks, all on-line communiqués (which he did, because if information can come in, information can go out, his data sucked out into the World Wide Web, replicated, disseminated in a thousand ways, in seconds, without him knowing a thing), there was still the plug, which sent electrical waves to his computer. Suppose information could travel on those electronic pathways. He saw an endless stream of letters and words, periods and commas, dashes and hyphens, streaming through the walls, through outlets, into some mother monitoring computer.Then a printer spitting the reassembled bits out and into his file for everyone to scrutinize. No wonder they always said, Write, write. Stealing his secrets. Every time he deleted a word or a sentence or a paragraph, he would feel them vacuum through the cord, to the socket and the wall. He could hear a slight electronic whisper of usurped data. At night when he slept, or tried to sleep, he could hear the whir of words whispering through the wires in his walls. Everything he deleted lived on and on, every night whispering. It’s the open sockets, that’s why he can hear it. They think he’s odd for putting tape over the socket holes. He can’t stand all those electronic waves flowing into the room. Now they poured back into his computer.

  One day he’ll find a document, a story, composed of nothing but all the deletions he ever made, every random mistype, every dead-ended thought, every mistaken step, every regretted turn. All of his forgotten failures, assembled together, there on the screen.

  He would have to take care of their computer. He knew now. He would delete what he really wanted to keep, and only “save” his mistakes.

  Ibidem, Ad Libitum, Idem.

  I kept all his “letters.” For some unknown purpose.

  At first it was a small heart-shaped bruise along the inside edge of forefinger and thumb. Mina noticed it as David sliced an apple, and then only in a certain light.

  “How did you do that?” she asked. It was curious, the way she didn’t hesitate to ask, how injuries are public, how one never hesitates to ask, Hey, how’d you get that? — it seemed to Mina, at this moment, oddly intimate.

  “This?” David said, shrugging and smiling. “I’m clumsy. I fell running and jammed my hand.”

  Later she noticed on the far side of the bruised hand a thin red raised line. It was a cut, a red-pink-edged swell on his knuckle. She didn’t ask about the cut (but it’s more of a scratch, isn’t it) but spent a moment or two contemplating the physics of falls. She tried to determine the contact order, the single-bullet theory of bruises — one fall or two? Gravel or pavement? Thumb then knuckle, or the other way around, or both at once or what?

  “Do we have to do this?” she said. She opened a bag of chips and a powdered cheese puff of air escaped. The smell alone made her thirsty.

  “We always do this. This is what we do. This is the day we do this. Don’t act like Susan,” he said, invoking the stay-at-home, invisible, despised girlfriend of one of their regular guests. He slid day-old snow peas out of a cardboard carton. He opened the carton of congealed rice and upended it. It came out in a glutinous mass, carton shaped. He slapped at it with the back of a plastic serving spoon. Slipft, slipft, slipft. It molded down into lumpy crags.

  “Maybe I won’t play tonight,” Mina said. Dumplings, wet-looking and misshapen, thunked onto another plate. “What meat is in those, do you think? It looks gross,” she said.

  “You’ll play. You always play. Don’t do this every week. You always have fun, once you’re into it. I can’t always get you to get into it.”

  “I could just watch and not play,” Mina said.

  “It’s the same meat in there as last night when you ate two and loved it,” David said.

  “I’ll play but not for long,” she said. He was dumping ice into the ice bucket. Getting out his cocktail shaker. The chilled martini glasses. Cutting twists.

  “Gosh, you’re good at cutting twists,” she said. “Even with that scratch. I mean, the lemon might make the scratch sting.”

  “We could get pizza, I mean if this isn’t good. Max could bring pizza.”

  She left the kitchen and examined yesterday’s mail by the phone. There were two postcards. One was addressed to David:

  “Wanton, Wary and Weary”

  an episode ofEros and Others

  teleplay by Max Mitchell

  airing August 15 at 8pm on FOX

  This card she threw in the garbage after tearing it into six equal pieces. The other card she did not read but put into her jeans pocket. It was addressed to her and she could feel the origin of it. Martinis, she really wanted one of David’s ice-cold martinis out of his etched-glass vintage cocktail shaker. She watched him pour as people arrived. He handed one to her and it pleased her, to be offered something by her husband, and she didn’t mind at all when he sat next to her and she could admire his smile and good spirits sideways, as he addressed his friends. He was nice to watch like this, perfectly OK. After she felt the cold heat of the thick, chilled vodka, she decided
she would play. Poker, charades, Scrabble. Whatever game night entailed this week. Whatever sort of drunken ironic stupid excuse it took. Sometimes it was all just goofy calls in the poker ring, blind three-card stud with all ladies wild. Or baseball, at night, follow jacks, until they outdid one another with ridiculousness. Eventually, at some time during the evening — in the duration of the evening — you could slowly sense the serious shift in the game. Nearly undetectably, andsort of contagiously, people would start really trying to win, really wanting to win, and somebody would argue about somebody leaving, and somebody would tell someone they’re taking it too seriously, and then Mina would think if she didn’t live there, it certainly would be a nice time to leave. She would yawn, and start to clean up, and eventually go to bed, leaving them laughing and arguing. Tonight she couldn’t wait for Max to arrive, and then studiously avoided any conversation that might address or exclude him. He behaved the same as always. He looked sexy, unshaven but combed, and in good cheer. She left for her room at eleven and undressed for bed. The next day he would probably call her at work and tell her, “I wanted to follow you in there, wanted to get under your Sunday nightie, press at you through the cotton until you woke up, and I’d have to cover your mouth when you came so the others couldn’t hear us,” or something like that, and she would wonder whether she should believe him. But the point was just the phone call and talking about it, anyway. It would make the work night bearable.

  The other card, unfolded at last, read: I want to see you. I miss you. It’s suffocating on the road out in the world. PS I left the hospital and am heading east. All manner of dire request for your company on this expedition. Do not tarry. Do not pass go. Do not ignore me or you may not exist. Do not call or write. Just come here. Will be at Mom’s in New York by September.