Lightning Field

by Dana Spiotta

  “So watch this,” David said. He threw a bottle cap across the porch. It bounced once, then landed on the wood molding, where it stopped, perched.

  “Impressive,” Max said, and chucked a bottle cap in the same direction. It hit the porch floor, then skidded off to the side. No bounce.

  “Shit,” Max said. David took another bottle cap and threw it. It bounced perfectly, and followed the trajectory of the first, coming to a stop on the wood molding.

  “Shit, David.” Max picked up another and got ready to throw it.

  “Turn it sideways as you throw,” David said.

  “OK, now I see,” Max said. He bounced it. This time it got a bounce but missed the ledge. “OK, all right, now I’m almost there.”

  David threw. It did precisely what the first one did. Max threw. It was off but closer. David threw. Max. David. Mina sipped her beer. She watched them.

  “So, this is your afternoon writing distraction,” Max said, aiming. David laughed.

  “You figured it out. What about your work?”

  “I’ve got some crappy trailers I’ve been writing to make a few bucks. No time for anything else.”

  “What about that girl from Taylor’s?” David asked.

  “The barista,” Max said.

  “Yes, the barista,” David said. They both said it annoyingly, as if it were a strongly accented Spanish word.Bareeesta.Thebareeeesta.

  “Well, the barista is not likely to make a second showing,” Max said.

  David hucked one more bottle cap. He missed this time, actually.

  “Really, why is that?” David asked. Max grinned closed-mouthed.

  “Well, she got offended by something I did. Or didn’t do, I guess.”

  “What?” David asked, smiling, “What happened?”

  “Well, nothing. I just spent some time with her, and then I had to leave right after it was over because it was late. .”

  “Oh, no. Right after?” David asked.

  “Well, after I washed off in the bathroom. Yeah, pretty much right after. I could tell she was irritated. When she saw I was getting ready to go, she started to say, rather nastily, I might add, ‘Just go. OK, I have to get up. Please hurry.’ That kind of thing. I felt bad, but I was tired and I didn’t want to be there. It’s lousy, I know.”

  “The old dine and dash,” David said.

  “Fuck and flight,” Max said.

  “Suck and scram,” David said, now laughing.

  “Rut and run.”

  “Lick and leave.”

  “Poke and peel.”

  “Bang and banish.”

  “Bang and banish? Jesus, David, banish?” And Max started laughing. David laughed so hard his chest started to shake. Max now couldn’t stop. Mina watched them laughing and she decided she hated Max. Never again would he touch her, the bastard. Or watch her, really, or film her, for God’s sake. She got up and abruptly exited the porch, heading into the house. She heard the screen door slam behind her. She could hear them from the porch.

  “What’s with Mina?” from Max.

  “Oh, nothing. She’s acting sensitive. She knows we’re just joking. You know Mina.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Come on, Meenee,” David shouted. “Come back out. Come on.”

  “Come on, Mina,” Max said.

  “Oh, Mina Mina,” David said.

  “MinaMina,” Max echoed. They both said it like it was one name — Minamina. And then mimiced each other and giggled.

  “Minamina.”

  Bastards.

  “Hey, is she still not driving?” Max said, his voice low but still audible.

  “I guess not.”

  “I think I got it, look,” Max said, and then the sound of the bottle cap bouncing. Mina stayed in the house until Max left. Later she emerged and opened the door to David’s office. The blue-green glow met her.

  “What’s this, David?” Mina saw on David’s computer what looked remarkably like Max’s front stoop, in video grainy surveillance black-and-white. She looked at the address at the top of the monitor: www.espialvid.com.

  David was in the kitchen.

  “Oh, that’s a surveillance site. One of about ten thousand. This one shows movies made out of security tapes. Some even have narratives.” He came out of the kitchen with a beer. He looked at the screen. A woman with her face digitally altered so the features were blurred beyond recognition was entering and then leaving the house. It went on and on; sometimes she looked at the camera and sort of waved before she was let in. Mina, of course, recognized herself. She felt herself flush as she watched. She was not able to breathe for a moment.

  “What’s interesting here is that the usual thing about surveillance is the subject not knowing he or she is being filmed. We get that voyeur vulnerability thing. But this is a security camera that she knows is there. See, she waves at it sometimes. But she doesn’t know it has been edited and recorded and pieced together. So her knowing she is being filmed is subverted by her being made into a story of sorts. A narrative compiled without her knowing, by someone unseen. Apparently a person she knows well and trusts. But here she is on the Internet, and you sense she must not know because the face is blurred to protect her privacy. Or a better way of putting it is her face is blurred so it can be used to violate her privacy.”

  Mina stared at herself, unidentifiable in the poor resolution of the tape. She looked at David. He didn’t recognize her, he really didn’t.

  “Or maybe it’s all an affectation and she does know, and the digital altering is just to create a violating effect. She could bean actress, but these surveillance sites are supposed to be strictly for the unknowing subject. Other sites have knowing subjects. Kind of exhibition stuff. Not nearly as pornographic as this stuff. It’s mesmerizing, isn’t it.”

  Mina felt her life kaleidoscoping into something else, something she knew nothing about. She thought about all the videotapes Max took. The ones she knew about and the ones she didn’t.

  “Turn it off, David. It’s horrible. Turn it off.”

  She walked to the Gentleman’s Club to get drunk. Maybe Lorene was still there. She should not be surprised. She should have seen this coming. She walked fast, not feeling gravel or sidewalk.

  The thing was that it no longer mattered. It was over. But it disturbed her. All that mattered was his filming her, and she had just begun to understand this. Mina had just begun to locate her need to be filmed. Located it as a female affliction, even. She had always had the sneaking feeling that she was being filmed. She felt she was being watched at all times. It was sort of like believing God watched, except Mina didn’t believe in God. But she did believe someone was paying attention. That if you lined up the narrative of her life, the secret triumphs and humiliations, that it had a coherence, that she in some way made a kind of sense, that who she was now and what she did now were completely understandable, even sort of engaging, if viewed in the context of every possible minute that led up to it. Perhaps this was a sort of milky modern morality, that you were being paid attention to, or that you should put on a good show, one full of moving and sympathetic characters.

  Mina imagined this might be a particularly female perception.That women were in a way programmed to be animated by the attention of others. What Lorene said, the other day: we don’t exist if people don’t pay attention to us. Of course it wasn’t true, but it felt true. And this was irrational, but it explained why being filmed by Max was so deeply erotic. That it seemed to deeply reveal her inner self, the part of her that felt perpetually animated by the gaze of others. She had felt something irrational and pathetic, and this made it legitimate and real. She was being watched, she wasn’t crazy or deluded after all. And it wasn’t about vanity, damn it, it was about having the feeling that your life was being attended, about having your life signify something, some true thing. And that’s why it gratified her— being filmed was familiar and comforting from the first moment. Even Max didn’t realize this. She pretended otherwise. Wh
y did Max want so badly to film her? Now, that’s the question. Because the gazer must certainly want something, too.

  Sex was never the problem. It was, in fact, the only possible real thing in her life. The way it took the rule of two and made a mess of it, destroying and exhausting. There was nothing that couldn’t be brought to sex or found in it, and it made all the conversation dumb. But this was not a world where sex was understood. In all her life she could not imagine, no matter what, not wanting sex, would always hope for its transformations, its undoing alchemies. It was finally her only answer to her family, the only thing the world had to match the loss of her family, the loss of innocence, the only compensation for having to grow up and grow old. The only thing not given in her family was sex, so it made a perverse kind of sense that families were born of sex. The cold reality of sex, the way it made you bodied and exposed to someone not you, my God, the revelingin the body, the hushed words that flew, the desperate feelings. And yes, even in the most rote situation of it, even in its awkward moments when you thought banally — too long, lower, almost — even, or especially, then, the ordinary things of bodies. Her wounds exposed, and then she is embraced, or embraces, and she looks at him (it could be any one of them) and they are human and male and flawed, so fragile, but so different, such a strangeness to behold. And this was the pleasure she knew, the secret heart of all people, to be loved like this, perpetually strange, the bravery in it, the complications.

  She sat at the bar at the Gentleman’s Club and waited for Lorene to close up. Mina thought maybe the thing to do was to have children. Maybe that’s the thing to make sex stick. If that could make the bodily need of difference and strangeness become the undying connection of the ultimate familiar thing — a body born of you — a family.

  “Can I get you something?” Ray asked.

  “Liquid Oblivion. With ice.”

  He started in with the club soda.

  “Ray, a real one. Whatever cheap pour.”

  He didn’t even look up and poured her a glass of caramel-brown liquid.

  “In movies in the forties, when you ordered a drink in a bar, the bartender would place a shot glass in front of you and then put the bottle next to it, letting the orderer pour the drink himself. It’s almost a testament to seriousness. A certainty that one will not be enough. Leave the bottle. Pretend I’m John Garfield. That’s right. Thank you.”

  Mina downed the drink, took the bottle and poured another.

  Lorene wore gray silk trousers and a cashmere sweater, also pearl gray. She watched Mina.

  “Sit down. It’s rude to make a lady drink alone.”

  Lorene sat next to her on a bar stool. Ray placed a glass in front of her and Mina poured her a drink.

  “I hadn’t noticed any ladies drinking,” she said. Mina smiled.

  “You’re cute, doll,” Mina said, nodding at the glass.

  Lorene drank it in one shot. They sat quietly for a while.

  “All right, you’re upset.”

  Mina nodded. “Your razor-accurate perception again in evidence. How do you do it, Lorene?”

  “So you’re angry at me?”

  “What about sex. I mean, you apparently never have it, don’t need it, do you?”

  “You are having enough sex for both of us.”

  “It’s the only thing I like. I like sex. I love sex.”

  “You know, it’s impossible to have sex with everyone. You have to limit it or it doesn’t mean anything. It’s a triage kind of thing — you have a limited capacity and have to be selective in where it is applied.”

  They sat quietly as the restaurant closed down around them. Mina looked at Lorene in the semidark. She put her hand on Lorene’s wrist. Lorene held her hand as they sat.

  Mina shook her head. Lorene drank another shot. So did Mina.

  “You don’t even know the half of it.”

  “Well, I know more than you think. It’s not all that difficult to figure out.”

  “It’s funny, Lorene, that men are called callous for wanting to sleep with different women.”

  “You’ve been thinking about that.”

  “Yes, I have. They are called inconstant and callow. Theyfear depth. But what is it that makes men long for different women, if not desire for a different soul, if not attention to the ways each woman is different from all the others. In truth, I love the longing of men, the dire way they want all women, and I’ve felt it myself. I could fall for anyone, find all their calamitous, ridden selves deathly appealing at the right moment.”

  “In the right light.”

  “It’s not necessarily something I want to be cured of— desire.”

  Lorene got up from her bar stool. She started to shut off the lights and pulled out her keys to lock up.

  “All right, then there’s no problem. So why are you sitting here in the dark?”

  Mina leaned back against the bar, regarding her crossed legs. Lorene leaned over the bar and replaced the bottle.

  “There are so many alternate fictions at work in my life right now.”

  “Lies, I believe, is the common name.”

  “Right, then, secrets, lies, fictions. Logistics. It’s all about the mess of explanations and not the mess of bodies and souls. Lorene, I’m going in for the big car wreck, I’m heading—”

  “Right. Well, and it would be the best thing to—”

  “Right, run away—”

  “Exit before it all collapses—”

  “But.”

  “Look, maybe that’s the intention all along. Maybe the desire is to mess it up until you have to leave, because that’s really what you want all along.” Lorene leaned toward her over the bar. “I decided the other day as I sat home, unable to leave the house, that I would go. So we’ll go, we’ll go together.”

  Mina shook off Lorene’s suggestion of a lift home. She wanted a late-night, dangerous walk, a two-in-the-morning solitary walk home. Or maybe she wanted to pretend she was John Garfield for a little while longer.

  David was asleep when she got there. She wanted to slip into bed next to him and rouse him slowly with kisses and caresses. But it would just be a fight about lateness and another round of edging toward explanations. Which was a shame, because she wouldn’t mind holding him close right then, she was still certain that would make things better. Because tomorrow she would be leaving.

  Her father had said to her once, I’m addicted to desire. That was before. Back when he had everything.

  She constantly eavesdropped on him, or was inadvertent witness to a thousand of his indiscretions. Did he think she had no ears, no eyes? But she lurked, from lap to lap sleepily after dinner, playing with reading glasses in breast pockets and teaspoons on lemon twists and napkin rings. She experimented with drops of wine on sugar cubes. If she stayed quiet, often he let her stay for hours, head resting on the shoulders of a dozen eager “uncles” and “aunts.” Many hands wanted to hold her, and she heard the murmur of adult voices as the sweetness of drifting in and out of wakefulness in candlelight surrounded her. It was always a special occasion, and he was not one to protect children. It was only later in her sulk of fourteen-year-old languor that explanations were offered. “Sara is my special friend, be nice to her,” he would say, and she would shrug, unsmiling. He handed her his wallet. “Go get yourself something.” She carried it with two hands in front of her. She wandered to a corner to look inside. Bills and bills. She bought so many things. She thought he’d ask, but he didn’t. He just putthe wallet in his pocket without even looking at the money left. Her mother bought in bulk and at thrift stores. She would say, Let’s go to the bargain matinee. Mina took to pulling bills from his wallet whenever she could. Early in the morning, she slid stocking-footed into his sleep room and pulled a twenty or a ten. He never said a word, never a word.

  It was an instant, really, a flash she looked at as the end of her childhood, or at least a precipice of her ending childhood from which she could see the terror and power of adulthood. D
espite her father’s explicit desire that she not associate with the “below the line” technical employees on the set, she found the makeup trailer the only hospitable hangout. She sat and watched them work, and out of boredom they would beckon her to the chair and start to play. One inspired afternoon, Jay, huge, bulk-muscled, and lavishly gay, cooed and applied artful pats of makeup to her young face. Emmy, who despite her dyed black crew-cut adored creating the most conventional beauty, fussed at her hair. And she loved it, being touched by more than one person at once, being touched at all — lately, it seemed people hesitated to touch her as much, especially her father, who nearly cringed when she leaned on his lap one night, so tired she’d forgotten her sulkiness and tried to settle in between his spread knees, perching on a thigh, head to chest, where she could survey the world from the smell of his soapy sweater. She felt a brittleness in his body, a reluctance, and she quickly untangled herself and went to lie in his trailer, wrapping a blanket as tightly around her body as possible. It was not so only with Michael, who would still wrestle and roughhouse as always, still throw an arm over her shoulder, still squeeze her head to his mouth and make smacking noises as he kissed. Even much later, when his episodes had apparently alreadybegun, she took his arm and clung to him, satisfied that people might think he was her boyfriend, and he must have known, because he held open doors and lit cigarettes for her and bought her a rose from a ragged woman on the street.

  Her father had no affection for her adolescence, and as the makeup and hair were played, she realized this was the most touching she had had all summer. She missed her mother so badly thinking of her own loneliness, she actually started to cry, only quickly stopping to prevent streaking her made-up face.

  “You have the most beautiful skin,” Jay said.

  “Such soft hair,” Emmy said.

  “Wait until you see this,” and she held still as he used small wet cold brushes that felt like a tiny tongue on her eyelid. It made her shudder. Jay smiled at her.

  “Edie Sedgwick or Audrey Hepburn?”