Lightning Field

by Dana Spiotta

  He opened his eyes and turned his face toward her.

  “Uh, no. I was going to tell you that my arm is falling asleep and it’s going to go numb if I don’t move it out from underwhere you are resting your head and shoulders. Not right away, mind you, but soon.” She laughed and lifted her head from his chest and looked at him.

  “See, I’ve got you laughing now.”

  “Yeah.”

  He closed his eyes again, back on the pillow.

  “It’s very good right now, but it’s not always so easy.”

  She closed her eyes to listen to him.

  “Right now, yes, is great. But I have so much trouble.”

  “What do they say is wrong?”

  “I am. . I find comfort in small, orderly, controllable things.”

  “Do they give it a name?”

  “There is an anxiety that overwhelms me, and concentration is the only—” Michael stopped and shook his head.

  “What do your doctors say it is?”

  “C’mon, Lorene. What do you want to hear — Neotraumatic Stress Disorder. Nonspecific Anxiety Dysthymia. Bilateral Well-Being Deficiency Disorder. Pseudoautistic Hypermimetic Compulsion. Disassociative Dystopia Anticipation Paranoia.” Michael looked at the wall and drummed his fingers. He nearly smiled as he spoke. “Malicious Malingering Syndrome.” He glanced at Lorene, then looked away.

  “Metallic, endless, vacant thoughts drained of everything but static—” Michael stopped abruptly and stared at his hand.

  Lorene opened her eyes and looked at the stacks of papers in the room.

  “But here, in this protected place, even with me here, in this place, you’re OK.”

  “It’s fleeting. I can already feel things edging in. And this is on a really good day.”

  “You don’t feel good?” she asked.

  “It will take me weeks to recover. I can’t do this with you.”

  “But we already did.”

  “We can’t do this again. You have to understand, Lorene.” He was no longer looking at her, but staring at his hand. His fingers drummed the wall. Lorene sat up, leaned against the wall. She wanted to edge into his sight.

  “You have no faith in me. I am strong, I can handle anything. I can take it.”

  He smiled, and then he looked away from the wall and looked at her directly. He shook his head.

  “You’re always looking for the grand sacrifice, the salvation, the thing to give yourself over to. But I’m not built for these things. It’s me. I’ve lost faith in the world as a place I can reliably inhabit. It takes so much energy — so many possible interpretations. No way to distinguish one from the other. A paralysis, an ambivalence ensues. You’re perfect. You have such overwhelming certainty and confidence. But me? I just can’t.”

  “Can I stay a bit longer?”

  “I like small, orderly things I can contain. That I can hold completely in my head, with an order and an end.”

  He was driving with one hand on the steering wheel and the other holding his coffee. She offered to hold his cup for him, but he waved her off. The kids lay low in the narrow backseat of the truck. Lisa hated it, it wasn’t safe for kids their age, but they had no choice. Mark kept spilling coffee on his thick fingers, and then when he took a sip of the hot liquid, some of it spilled on his shirt.

  “Goddamn too much to expect a peaceful cup of coffee on a Sunday morning.” He rolled down his window and tossed outthe rest of the coffee. Then he tossed the cup in the foot well on Lisa’s side, where she watched it roll out of sight and clink next to two other cups already under the seat.

  Lisa went over her shopping list.

  “You know I only got thirty hours last week.”

  She nodded and looked at him. He still had one hand on the steering wheel. The other hand put a cigarette in his mouth and snapped his lighter open, lighting it. He squinted at the dash, half from the noon-bright sun they now faced, and half from the smoke that curled out of his mouth. Lisa opened her window. Glanced at the cigarette and then in the backseat at the kids. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. She found most things Mark did were bad for the kids to see or hear or have any proximity to. He had learned this by now. She went back to her list, whittling it down to its bare minimum.

  “We can’t get much. We are already late on rent and the phone and the electric bill will come Monday,” he said.

  “I’ve got nine hours’ cleaning money coming.” He didn’t look at her.

  “Oh, well, that’s a relief. Let’s see, that’s what? A hundred and ten bucks? And then you gotta give Brenshaw some money to baby-sit, and that leaves about fifty bucks. No, Lisa.”

  “Mrs. Brenshaw doesn’t care if I pay her anything. I just do some shopping for her and go to the post office. I help her cook. That’s all.”

  Mark looked at her and then tossed his cigarette. He put a hand on her plump knee. She had gotten very heavy since the twins, and she’d taken to baggy sweatshirts and jeans. Her hair was pulled back, and she seldom wore lipstick or even earrings. Still, she was smooth-cheeked and young. He held her knee for a moment.

  “You need to ask your mother for some help.”

  Lisa stared out the window.

  “No. I can’t do that, Mark.”

  He pulled his hand off her knee and turned the steering wheel leftward, moving the truck into a parking space.

  “Don’t be this way. We don’t have enough money. We are falling way behind.”

  “Look, I’m not asking her for money. We already owe her money. I’ll pick up more cleaning hours. We’ll manage.”

  “No, Lisa, you already can’t even manage to keep our apartment clean. There are piles of laundry and there is never any food in the fridge. I’m sick of it. Just ask her for five hundred. It means nothing to her.” But it was no use. She was being a stubborn bitch. She was in a foul mood. When she was trying to get him up this morning, he grabbed her arm and told her to give him a break. He just pulled her a tiny bit too hard. He honestly hadn’t meant to, and now she would be quiet and angry all day. The kids were quiet in the back, somehow taking Lisa’s mood and multiplying it.

  Alex gripped his mother’s hand as they walked across the parking lot following Mark and Alisa. Alisa did not want to hold her father’s hand. She kept pulling back to her mother. He moved too fast across the parking lot. Alisa went limp, a passive resister, her little body made dead weight. When he pulled at her she became a rag doll on the ground. He cursed, shot Lisa a look, then picked Alisa up. She continued to play dead, her head lolling around and her arms limp. She would do this to him. In the living room at bedtime, he’d grab her fast and she’d fall backward, like she’d been dealt a blow. It was kind of disturbing, her dead falls, even from the tiny height of a five-year-old body. She was fearless in her resistance of him. He wouldcontinue to pull her, and she would drag on the ground, her legs catching on table legs and doorjambs, until he gave up and picked her up. Then she became suddenly animated, her whole body a writhing, squirming thing, wriggling against his grip. He would nearly drop her, she became so difficult to hold, and he gave up, the five-year-old body outsmarting his huge person.

  In the parking lot she did not squirm but continued to play dead. He thought people walking by would think she’d passed out, but at least she wasn’t squirming.

  Lisa watched the back of Mark and her tiny daughter’s head bobbing. Her little face was blank. She wished Alisa wouldn’t behave like this toward Mark, but kids were not diplomatic in that way. They were Richter scales of disturbances, tiny, finely calibrated indicators of subarticulated resentments. At the entrance to the Safeway, Mark turned to Lisa and handed her the body of Alisa. Alisa immediately revived and hugged her mother with arms and legs, an exaggerated affection. Alex clung tighter to not just Lisa’s hand but her whole forearm. Mark regarded them for a moment, the three of them like refugees in some news footage, huddled under the shellfire of the enemy. He, of course, was the enemy, or the whole world was. T
hings had become stuck this way. He wanted to appeal to Alex, at least, but instead he turned away from them and strode through the automatic doors, the AC feeling good and momentarily relieving his frustration. He waited by a shopping cart as Lisa walked in, child-upholstered, staggering a bit. She peeled Alisa from her neck and pushed her into the kiddie seat of the shopping cart. Alisa still tried to cling to her from her seat, but Lisa firmly placed her daughter’s hands on the cart handle. Mark had his arms folded, watching. Lisa lifted thetight-gripped Alex and placed him standing in the cart next to where his sister sat.

  “Are we ready or what?” Mark said, scowling at his watch. Lisa pushed the cart after him, pulling her list out. He led them, although he had nothing specific in mind. She had the list. She stopped behind him, filling the cart with paper towels and jars of peanut butter and tubes of toothpaste. She read labels intently. She studied them. She examined produce. Smelled it. Looked at expiration dates and asked the produce clerk the origins of things. She picked expensive organic chicken. Mark didn’t say anything. Time and money were no object to Lisa.

  Alex reached for a package of cookies, and Mark grabbed it out of his hands.

  “No extras today. We can’t afford it.” Alex looked at his mother.

  “Don’t look at her. I’m the walking wallet. Daddy pays, not Mommy.”

  Lisa pushed the cart forward. Mark shook his head. How did he get to be the one who always said no? She was the one who had too much pride to ask for help.

  After the checkout girl took Mark’s money, he let Lisa push the cart of packages to the truck. He leaned against the car smoking as she unloaded the bags into the back.

  “That’s nearly my whole check, Lisa. I have to have some money for gas. And I need some money to go out and blow off some steam tonight. My one night of the week. I have to drink cheap beer and stay home watching TV, is that it? I have to work at five in the morning and I can’t even buy a damn hamburger?”

  Lisa put the kids in the backseat. They were quiet andpliant, thankfully. He watched her. They were a whole thing, united against him. He stood apart, unregarded. She moved heavily in the front seat and waited for him. He stood in the parking lot; the hot asphalt and the relentless summer California sun made him squint and sweat. He finally got in. She looked at his thick fingers on the steering wheel. It wasn’t going anyplace. Things were stuck. They were stuck.

  “I’ll take care of the rent. I told you,” she said.

  Mark shook his head.

  “But I’m not asking her.”

  Lisa felt a tiny soft hand on her cheek from the backseat. Her son, Alex, stroked the side of her face that was turned to the car window. A gentle little-boy touch. She reached behind her for his hand.

  Spirit Gyms and Miracle Miles

  Mina was trying to walk fast from her meeting with Lorene, which naturally she had been late for. First Lorene, then Max, then Scott. She had made Lorene late for an afternoon session at her spirit gym, again, Mina’s fault, again. But Mina couldn’t help it. She had, in a mere matter of weeks, hopelessly complicated her life. Now it seemed out of her control, a momentum of disaster. And on a Sunday. She remembered, with odd nostalgia, the way Sundays used to be. David and Mina’s unassailable day at home. It had all started on a Sunday, though, hadn’t it? She had sat on the porch with them, David and Max. Anordinary Sunday afternoon. They sat, drinking beer and eating potato chips, sucking on the occasional hot-weather cigarette. She kept lighting one and then putting it out — it never tasted as good as she imagined, but she kept trying, thinking some subtle chemical change had occurred since the last attempted drag that would make the cigarette as satisfying as she hoped.

  If a person — Mina herself, for example — if she were a stranger, passing this porch and taking in this tableaux, here is what she would think: she would envy the handsome group of friends, leisure-wilted, good-looking, laughing and slightly drunk in the afternoon. And the average-looking girl, in the casual company of men and their jokes and their ease. The luck of the girl, with the attention of the two men, and their laughter. What must her life be like? And Mina would see her as if she were in a print ad or a TV commercial, laughing open-mouthed, throwing her head back, shooting pool in a sequined dress, leaning into a sail on a perfect blue sea, throwing an arm up in the swing of a convertible, waving — open-mouthed and impossibly carefree — at unseen friends, but always outnumbered and accompanied by men. Always backlit by their charmed and undivided attentions. What a lucky girl, what a life she has, she would imagine, watching herself. And she’s not even beautiful.

  David’s best friend, Max, sat on their porch steps, unshaven and sweaty, smoking and drinking at twice the pace of the other two. He kept holding the sweating beer bottle to his forehead and rolling it horizontally, occasionally pressing the wet glass to one of his cheeks. David’s cheeks looked cool and dry. He wore an Australian army cap with a brim that suited his face, made him cinematic and casually glamorous. Where Max had an apparent early-thirties thin-guy gut that pressedagainst his T-shirt when he sat hunched, David was sleek, and inoffensively so, no hard-earned ripples in his stomach, just a natural slim elegance that made Mina think, He really isn’t like me, is he? It was in a silent pause in the afternoon sun, as she compared Max and David, that it happened. Max looked at her, looked when David wasn’t looking, looked when she was looking. He stared at her, and she felt it. It was like that, nearly conscious, although it wasn’t, she just made it so when she recalled it, finding reasons and ironies and logic and psychologies. But there, with the heat and the sweating beer bottles and the porch, within exhale reach of David’s obscene elegance, Mina nearly fainted with desire for his best friend, Max, his sweat and his soft, decadent body, his chain-smoking, his sideways cynicism, and his dead-on gaze.

  She walked faster. Faster and faster. She didn’t even notice that above Gower as it crossed Sunset the slightly sloping Hollywood sign was visible through the afternoon haze. From Gower you could see a red-tile-and-adobe church with a tower and a cross atop the tower. And only from this particular vantage point of Gower and Sunset did the cross seem to punctuate the “Hollywood.” She didn’t notice this today, although it was just the sort of thing she liked to notice, some hyper-unsubtle Babylon irony, one that you could imagine a fifties soundtrack punctuating grandly with telltale-sudden-realization music. One that surely was in some film, at some time.

  Lorene watched water collect in pools on the white tile floor.

  “Keep breathing,” he said. The water moved from rivulets to tiny pools. Eventually, a puddle. It collected, swelling, and then married other nearby puddles. The room must have a drain.

  “Concentrate on your breathing only,” he said.

  She was naked, perched on a bench with her back to him. She felt his hands — large, soft — on her lower back.

  “Expand your diaphragm. Expel all your breath slowly.”

  Mina walked from Max’s apartment off Rossmore to Beverly Boulevard. There she turned right and walked to La Brea. She moved briskly, attaining a sort of rhythm she found relaxing, even liberating. She was damp from the shower, and the hot, flat heat of the afternoon streets slowly penetrated her skin, replacing outward dampness incrementally with her own perspiration. She wore no stockings, just bare legs under a cotton dress and flat shoes. She felt peasantish and pure, but with a sort of sexy Sicilian-widow world-weariness. She walked along La Brea down to Wilshire. She walked, quickly as she could, west on Wilshire toward the streamlined moderne facade of the former May Company Department Store dimly visible in the hazy distance. This was it, the Miracle Mile. The first shopping district built for car shoppers instead of pedestrians. She was in true enemy territory now. She walked defiantly on, window-shopping the cul-de-sacs of parking lots, strip mall-ettes, and monolithic gray-faced buildings set back, way back, from the street. There was, miraculously, still a sidewalk. She laughed at this, their lack of commitment. Total car culture shouldn’t have sidewalks, should it?<
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  Lorene’s Talk-n-Touch Advanced Well-Being Therapy sessions with Beryl were even rougher than basic touch therapy. She sat naked on a towel-covered bench in a steam-filled room. At some point she would have to speak, not incessant rantings, but speak out of some inner hypnotic state. Beryl would lightly touch pressure points on her back, his hands hovering over energy points. Where energy collected, tension would beexcised through speech. She felt dizzy. When she took deep breaths, she felt her breasts rise. She was steamy wet; her nipples felt hard and swollen. She looked down with a careful pride. Still perfect, beautiful breasts at thirty-two. Not her original breasts, of course, but from this angle the scars from her breast augmentation were invisible, she had a flawless, natural-looking C cup. They looked even larger, though, because she was so slender and the skin was so white. She thought, I want the whole world to see my breasts. She almost laughed at the absurdity of this, but it was halfway true. Here was the greatest cultural asset a girl could have (attained at no small expense) and no one had seen them in years.

  “You can begin speaking at any time, Lorene. Just speak without editing. Just let the words flow out of you.” Christ. She closed her eyes. His hands were on her lower back. They felt good. She wouldn’t mind showing Beryl her breasts. Forget Beryl, call the old man himself, St. John. He could put his hands on her breasts. If the warm, large healer hands moved from back to front, if they started to rub and pull at her nipples very gently — Lorene felt the dampness between her legs, the way it was so easy to distinguish from the steamy dampness over the rest of her body. It was a darker wetness, a deeper kind of heat. She moved slightly on the cotton towel on the bench and let her vaginal muscles contract stealthily. The discretion of female sexuality, its secret demureness, its endless interiority— in her case, particularly so. Yes, it was secret — solitary and contained at all times.