Dana Spiotta - Stone Arabia

He placed two of the shiny white liver-toxic NSAID pills I brought him in his mouth and washed them down with a swallow of bourbon.

“That will make you feel better.”

He paused, put a hand to his mouth as if he were holding down something vile, then swallowed and nodded.

Denise put down her pen and clasped her hands as she stretched her arms up toward the ceiling. She shook her head and yawned. Two p.m. She should call someone. She ought to make some phone calls. She went to Nik’s bathroom and washed her face. She considered using Nik’s toothbrush, which he had left, and instead just gargled with green Scope.

She called her mother and told her she wasn’t coming today, but not to worry, the home aide would be there soon. Denise also called her boss. She heard herself say “sick.” And that was it. No police, no Ada, not yet. She just wanted more time. She walked back to the desk covered with the papers she had been filling. She wasn’t ready to stop.

She picked up an open pack of cigarettes that sat waiting on the edge of the desk, right within reach. She picked up Nik’s Zippo and lit one up.

The tobacco smoke curled into the room. She reached for the bottle of Evan Williams and poured some bourbon into the glass on the desk. It was all rather pleasant, rather comforting to her. She hadn’t eaten or slept at all, and now she felt it instantly as she swallowed a long warming pull, puckery and sweet. The bourbon and the cigarette smoke together. She could almost smell her brother.

She plucked a new pencil from the jar of neatly sharpened pencils. The chair was padded and she could adjust it up. He had it all figured out, didn’t he? The little world inside the big world. The world within the world.

But here is what she did not do: She did not put on his clothes. She did not play his guitar. She did not brush her hair out of her eyes in his manner. She did not imagine she had become her brother. She did not indulge in some rigged transmogrification like in that weird Roman Polanski movie. She forgot the name of it. The Tenant . She did put out her cigarette after only a few drags. That was enough. Ridiculous. Denise laughed out into the room. She took another sharp sip of the bourbon.

She took The Ontology of Worth: Volume 1, out of her purse and put it in the CD player, easily reached from her present perch. She hit play. She heard his voice, and then she clicked it off.

She was going about this all wrong — sequential, linear, chronological. From day to day. There were other ways, other connections that were maybe deeper, other ways of ordering and contemplating and telling and showing.

Confession.

If I am honest. If I can be truly honest. Memory doesn’t reside in dates.

Memory resides in what you notice, what you feel, what catches in your mind. And the things I remember best about the last year are not conversations with Ada or dates with Jay or helping Nik. All of those things fuzz into one another. The things I do remember best are not my experiences at all. They are what I call the permeable moments: the events that breached the borders of my person. Let’s call them breaking events. I don’t mean breaking news. I mean breaking of boundaries. These are incidents that penetrated my mind, leaked the outside inside.

Okay. Ever since my mother got ill, or ever since I began to suspect things were not right with my brother, or ever since Ada moved away to New York, or just ever since, I can’t quite negotiate the border between myself and the world around me. I am not referring to mere empathy or generosity or expansiveness. For example: when, on New Year’s Day, I read on the website I visit on a daily basis about the woman arrested in the bar, I didn’t have the normal person’s indifference. I got caught up. I got obsessed. I ruminated, I investigated. I developed an unhealthy correlative feeling of suffering. I developed a nearly debilitating sympathy, sometimes for the least sympathetic among us.

Okay. I watch a tremendous amount of television, mostly cable news. Further, I spend hours on the internet. And I read the newspapers. There are many hyped and excessively covered news events. Most just mildly engaged me, but some really got to me and overwhelmed me. I didn’t have the proper defenses any longer.

SARS was maybe the inaugural incident. My outsize preoccupation and concern about SARS was fairly ordinary contemporary hysteria, nothing that standard narcissistic hypochondria and paranoia wouldn’t yield when mixed with the right amount of overblown media yelping. But things soon moved to a different level, a deeper, more personal level. And it wasn’t just the big things — little, barely covered things got to me. Like when I noticed this newspaper photo of a middle-aged, heavily built man. He was in an orange jumpsuit and those awful manacles they put on the wrists and ankles of prison inmates. His face showed no emotion, but if you looked closely, you could see the wet streaks on his cheeks where tears had streamed down. I became instantly tearful myself; as I read about him, my tears grew to sobs. After twenty-seven years of prison, he was being released because DNA evidence had finally exonerated him. His stoic expression belied by tears, his suffering, I felt it, but also the misery of a life lived every day of those twenty-seven years, the things he thought or did to console himself, the injustice he had to live with every day — how could I not be moved? But I couldn’t stop. I wept and wept. I cut out the picture. I read everything I could about the details of his case and his life. I was inconsolable. I never cried like that for anything that happened in my actual life. That is my problem. This is what I am getting at. My vivid memories of these seemingly random news events. And my fuzzy, fading memories of my actual life.

How can these invasive, overwhelming external events be called my memories? I do partly remember by news cycle. I’m quite serious. It happened after the anthrax scare but before Daniel Pearl was assassinated. (Not just important cultural touchstones either. As in It happened right around the time Laci Peterson disappeared. ) This is the thing, the shame: my memory is dominated by events external to my actual life. These events, for whatever reason, stick in my mind and become secondhand memories. Although I did not experience the events, watching them and reading about them and my reaction to them was a kind of an experience nevertheless. It sounds so meager when I describe it, because the feeling it finally recalls really is, no matter how intense, meager.

It reminded me of watching a certain kind of film. Not some deep and powerful film that moves you, like The Bicycle Thief or Brief Encounter. Not even a sentimental classic, like Carousel or It’s a Wonderful Life . I mean some Lifetime channel made-for-TV menopause drama that you stumble upon in the middle of the night. Some embarrassingly manipulative estradiol-targeted story with predictable yet random tragedies, with kids and infidelity and self-pity. Some horribly tawdry thing, but it gets you. It just gets you, it makes it all just pour out of you. And after it is over, you feel as though you have really been through it. But what, really, have you been through? It is an exhausting and lonely moment, the moment the crappy movie is over and you are left with the crappy hollow feeling. That’s what this feeling reminded me of. A small, meager experience that costs you way more than it ought to.

Not coincidentally, that crap feeling also reminds me of the feeling I would get after surfing the internet for three hours straight, tracing down information about, say, depression or ovarian cysts or halitosis, until I finally forgot what I wanted or what time it was. Until I finally turned off the computer and realized I had accomplished nothing but the slow suffocation of time.