Lightning Field

by Dana Spiotta

  “All those stories are the same,” Lorene says. “Anyway, finding out everyone is weak and human happens sooner or later, anyway. It just seems a shame we can’t get any comfort out of knowing we are mostly all this way.”

  The old woman is definitely talking softly to herself. Maybe she is finally telling someone all the things she never said in her life. Her secrets, except now no one is left who cares. And it’s unbearably lonely to have a secret that never gets told. It doesn’t exhibit its secretness unless it is known. It is made to be violated. Or maybe not. Maybe the old woman’s just crazy.

  Mina could not stop thinking about Scott. She couldn’t shake the awfulness of how he had looked at her. She couldn’t shake the misery of Max’s videos either, or another fight with David because he guiltily returned from some secret meeting with whomever he met and returned from. She headed to the Gentleman’s Club, the night streets all cool desert and truly deserted.

  Sex was not what worried Mina. It was everything else.

  She for the first time felt a kind of queasiness about wanting-Max. She felt the hangover of Scott, and it gave her the doom-laden bends thinking of how things had developed with Max. Of what possible outcome there would be, because affairs didn’t just stay in one place. They didn’t progress necessarily, but they went places. The more static you try and make them, the faster they slip into strange, unforeseen places.

  At first it was how often. Once a week only. Between oneand four. This was not negotiable. Max, despite his gut and his smoking and his paper-strewn house, adhered to rather strict rule making. The more arbitrary, the more vehemently he clung to it. Mina had to meet him once a week, but on constantly changing days. Monday this week, Tuesday the next, Wednesday the next. No discernible patterns must evolve, he said. But then it became impossible. They took more chances, they saw each other more often, she just had to. But the more they saw each other, the more elaborate the paranoia and the more complicated the restrictions became. He freely engaged, enthusiastically engaged, in the particularly dangerous and impractical liaison with his best friend’s wife. And yet he displayed rigid logic and rationalism in his execution of the affair, as if these rules mitigated it somehow, made it tolerable. The way he made her take a shower before she left. She knew then she would become a lightning rod for a subrational guilt. An intolerable transgression that fueled an excessive passion. And a hypervigilance, seen only in the most haunted men, combat vets, murderers, executioners, sweaty embezzlers, and Max. How is it she came to feel sorry for him? How is it she found his paranoia erotic, and she never felt guilt, she just didn’t think about it? So it was not really as odd as it might have seemed, given these rules, when they actually stopped having sex. Or intercourse, rather. Max liked to videotape her before, get her undressing, ask her questions. They both found this erotic. Then yesterday it finally happened. He asked her to lie on the bed. He continued videotaping. He instructed, and she obeyed. You look sexy, he said. And she knew instantly where it was going, but she played dumb. Because sex was a sort of anagram for them, a way of merely organizing and reordering the same elements. First I do this and then you do that. Say thiswhile I do that. The next time, he goes first. There were just so many possible combinations and variations. So she absolutely knew that the camera would become the preeminent thing between them, the variable that multiplied the limited possibilities. Show me what you do by yourself, he said. He was still taping. She didn’t care. She put her hand under her panties. No, don’t close your eyes, he said. And she opened them. Open your legs, he said. He sat in the chair, fully dressed.

  “You like this?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Mina, I can’t see what you’re doing.”

  “I know. But I do it like this. With the panties on.”

  He smiled behind the camera.

  “OK, but today I want you to take off your panties.”

  “You come here and take them off,” she said.

  “No.”

  “Put down the camera and come here.”

  “No, now just do what I say.”

  Mina pulled her underwear down. She started to touch her pubic hair. She would be able to come quickly. She knew how easy it would be, she found a sideways angle on her clitoris, pushing her index finger fast against it. She looked at the reflection in the lens, her lover behind it. He moved toward the bed, still filming. He put his hand on her knee and pushed her thighs apart.

  “I can’t with them apart,” she said.

  “You can do it. Come on, I want to see better.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You can do it. You’ll like it. I want to see.”

  Mina came, and her legs shook, and the difficulty of it made it more intense.

  “Come here now. I want you to come here now.”

  Max kept taping.

  “It’s late. You should go.”

  “Please, Max.”

  “It’s late.”

  Later, at the restaurant he had called her. He told her he was watching her video. That he was very close to coming. And as the servers and customers crowded by her, she listened to him come. It was then she knew that it was going to be like this now, his way with her. She was, she had to admit, excited by it, this new place.

  www.missingchildren.com

  Lisa logged on to Mark’s computer while the twins slept in the next room. The blue light of the computer in a dark room made her hungry. She ate a chocolate bar and followed her anxiety to pixels and abstracted places. A warning was issued in a box: Any information you submit is insecure and could be observed by a third party in transit.

  No button worked unless she pressed the OK button. It didn’t give you the option of “yes,” but just a resigned “OK.” The other options were to “cancel” or “do not warn again,” which was like a permanent OK. She clicked on “OK,” agreed to the terms, to third-party observations. She appreciated the warning — now she was out there and in the open road. She first was shown tips to avoid abduction.

  Teach your children to be wary of strangers.

  Then she was shown the phone number for information: 1-800-MISSING. It was a ghoulish thing, this combination of technology and tragedy. She pressed on to the search for faces. This was the directory she had compiled in her mind every day. First the words came. Numbers and names. Dates of birth. Dates last seen. And a phrase categorizing the crimes:

  Endangered Missing

  Lost Injured Missing

  Family Abduction

  Endangered Runaway

  That was all. Whole stories and whole lives shorn of all but these categories. Abduction, endangered. Certainly. Missing. And then after the numbers and the facts came the faces, straining across some cyberspace, one appearing before another, some taking longer and partially appearing and then slowly coming into focus. The page now had faces next to numbers, some in black-and-white and some in color. They were four years old and smiling in a class photo, or black-and-white and at a distance. They were twelve and already more reserved, or seventeen and far away. They were nine and with those oversized adult teeth, and Lisa could not stop scrolling and examining all their faces, already familiar and not so distant from the twins, already lost forever to their families, and the faint hope of this place.

  Someone stirred in the room. She turned and her son was there, in his foot pajamas and his half-asleep face. His hand rubbed his eyes as he watched her, backlit by the screen of the computer with all the faces of the lost.

  “Alex, baby, why are you out of bed?” she asked, turning, blocking the screen from view.

  “I had a nightmare, Mom,” he said, his voice teetering on crying, the very vocalizing of the wordnightmarefrightening him into tears. She went to him and knelt beside him. Lisa picked her son up into her arms and held him. He sighed into her shoulder and she rocked him, just like when he was a tiny baby, she swayed in the familiar rhythm of babies and mothers, something that was slipping away as they grew older, something that ev
ery day soothed a little less as he got bigger. They were gradually losing their perfect rhythm of two, except for moments like these when the night scared him back into her arms. It worked, he relaxed and it was better, it was perfect and he could stop crying. Lisa put him on his bed by his sleeping sister, and she watched them both as they slept.

  In the other room the computer said “Good-bye” in a strangely chipper voice and disconnected. From lack of activity. She sat, but she was not still. She sat, vigilant and listening, deep into the night.

  “Ms. Delano?”

  “Yes. Who is this?”

  “This is your father’s friend, Bill.”

  “Oh, yes. Bill. Bill Collector. I remember you. What’s up?”

  “I need to get in touch with your father, Jack Delano.”

  “Well, that is touching, Bill. But I don’t know how to reach him.”

  “I’ll just keep calling, Ms. Delano.”

  Pause.

  “You will, won’t you. You really are a sweetheart, aren’t you? The sum of twenty-one centuries of human striving. The zenithof contemporary culture, the Enlightenment realized, the dreams of Thomas Jefferson fulfilled. Nietzsche’sÜbermensch.John Ford’s quiet man. Your mother must be very proud.”

  “Ms. Delano. Your father has no honor.”

  “You don’t know about my father, you hopeless little sleaze-ball. Clearly you know nothing about honor. What kind of man are you? A real man would rather beg on the streets than call strangers and harass them about debts their parents supposedly owe and threaten and you dare even use a word like honor. You have no shame, Bill.”

  Click.

  Ring. Ring. Ring.

  “Hello.”

  “You shouldn’t hang up on me, Ms. Delano. It’s very rude. Don’t make me take measures. . of a legal nature. Just tell me where your father can be reached.”

  “Look, Bill, I’m going to level with you, all right?”

  “Please.”

  “My father is dead, OK? He had a tragic beach accident. It’s really very painful. I’d rather not discuss it at this point. So you can put his card in the expired file. Just tear it up.”

  “Ms. Delano?”

  “Yo.”

  “I can’t do that, you know. You could right his debts, you know. We could work out a payment plan. You could do it for your father’s memory. Get rid of these calls forever by paying his debt.”

  “I don’t care, Bill. You can call me for the rest of your life. I can be your life’s obsession, if you like. Take my number home and put it under your pillow so you can call me early in the morning. I’ll give you my work numbers so you can call methere. I’ll give you my lovers’ numbers, both of them, so you know where to reach me in the afternoon. I’ll be your life’s work, if you like. Go ahead. I like the attention.”THE LAST VIDEO

  Audio: Muffled.

  MINA

  What are you doing?

  Image appears, just shadow.

  MAX (O.S.)

  I’m turning on the camera.

  MINA

  Oh.

  MAX (O.S.)

  Turn on the lamp by the night table.

  We hear a click and the room is low lit by the table lamp. Midshot of GIRL on the bed, the sheet pulled up around her breasts, smoking a cigarette. The bedroom is disordered, clothes strewn everywhere, books, ashtrays full of cigarettes, an open bottle of wine and half-finished glasses.

  MAX (O.S.)

  Why don’t you take the lamp shade off? I’m not getting enough light.

  She does this. She just casually bats the shade off. She looks at the camera, smoking. The naked lightbulb lights her from down up, casting backward shadows on her cheeks and brow.

  MAX (O.S.)

  You look like night of the living dead. Zombielike. But a sexy zombie.

  GIRL smiles at the camera.

  MAX (O.S.)

  It’s the naked bulb. The cigarette. Your slightly dirty smile. Tabloid, like those Hollywood Babylon police photos. Starlet found murdered in bed.

  MINA

  Black Dahlia. Fatty Arbuckle. Errol Flynn.

  MAX (O.S.)

  Bloodstained sheets and empty whisky bottles. She’s clutching the suicide note in her white fist.

  MINA

  Clara Bow. Lana Turner. Sal Mineo. Lupe Valez. Virginia Rappe.

  MAX (O.S.)

  Uremic poisoning. Yes, that’s the feel. That’s the general ambience.

  MINA

  But it’s just a no-name girl. A quiet, simple, everyday infidelity, your bad lighting and your messy apartment. You provided the sordid frame.

  MAX (O.S.)

  But it suits you. Squalor and dirty sheets and a solitary moment on camera. You look sexy.

  GIRL exhales and reaches over to extinguish her cigarette. The sheet falls from her breasts and she lets it bunch by her waist. She looks at the camera.

  MINA

  Max—

  MAX (O.S.)

  No talking. Just sit there.

  MINA

  Max, I think I’m not into where this is going. Seriously.

  MAX (O.S.)

  Shh. I don’t want talking. Just be quiet. This time quiet. Girl, in bed, no-name girl. This is postcoital. This is the tryst at its most signifyingmoment. There is the smell, slight but there too, of sex. The camera gets this somehow, too. Maybe removing the light shade is to compensate for not being able to have the smell on camera.

  MINA

  It’s a bit cliché, don’t you think? It’s not very interesting. Besides, there is no coital anymore, is there? Not post or pre. We are perpetually faux coital.

  MAX (O.S.)

  Don’t spoil things, Mina.

  MINA

  Spoil things? In case you haven’t noticed, I don’t like this video shit anymore.

  MAX (O.S.)

  Let’s not have an Edward Albee moment, shall we? And it’s not videotape. It’s digital, by the way.

  MINA

  Jesus. The thing is, I’m really bored. Really. Don’t look so surprised. Besides, I thought you found the truth so fucking fascinating.

  There is a long pause.

  MAX (O.S.)

  What’s fascinating to me right now is your silence and my filming it here on this bed withthe dirty-cliché sheets and the smell-evoking Hollywood-scandal lightbulb.

  GIRL shrugs and puts out her cigarette. She waves him off and gets up from the bed. She starts to get dressed.

  MAX (O.S.)

  What interests me is that dirty smile on your face. The utter lack of regret or even a vague sadness. No thought of your young husband waiting at home. No thought of climbing into bed with him when your long blond hairs are still mussed from my sheets. And not just anyone, no, but David, young kind trusting David, has not only had his wife sleep out, but she’s chosen his oldest and best friend to fuck. In one act his life is transformed into the tritest, most distasteful display. And he doesn’t even know it. Humiliations visited beyond his belief.

  GIRL purses her lips. She listens, but continues dressing.

  MAX (O.S.)

  And there you are, unembarrassed. Unashamed. You think, Well, it’s you too, Max. You are his best friend. But we know I’m a bastard. We know no sordid situation is too much for me. We know how I crave aberrance. It’s in my makeup, isn’t it? That’s why you want me. I would never have talked you out of it. I wouldsolicit it. That’s what you desire in me. You were so bored and frustrated with your own stupid life, you can only be turned on by humiliation and aberrance. His best friend. That’s why you like the dirty sheets and the naked lightbulb. That’s what you’re here for.

  GIRL is now dressed. She grabs her purse, glances at the camera. The camera pulls in to a CLOSER SHOT. She shakes her head.

  MAX (O.S.)

  Mina.

  GIRL shakes her head and turns away. She heads to the door.

  MAX (O.S.)

  You’re not leaving, are you?

  Another long pause. GIRL is putting on her earrin
gs.

  MAX (O.S.)

  Mina? Don’t leave, c’mon.

  MINA

  I am leaving now.

  The camera stays on GIRL. We hear MAX breathe off camera. She is about to leave and then she goes back, reaches over to the lamp, and clicks it off.

  TITLE: END

  * * *It was the three of them again — on the porch. Max sat at David’s feet, and Mina was thinking, I want to kill Max for having it over on David. It was a slow pulse, it was in how he inhaled his cigarette. It was how he ate his chips. It was the subtext of his conversation. I fucked your wife. It occurred to Mina, the lousy and far-reaching meanness of what Max and she did. She thought, Christ, he really must never know. No matter what happened. She swore if Max gave her one goddamned look, one “special” smile. . But no. He sat there, laughing and talking as usual. He had no heart. Or he hid it well.