Dana Spiotta - Stone Arabia

I went to bed, exhausted and depressed.

For days, I would return to the Garret story. I checked the tribute site, but after a week it stopped getting new posts. The story dropped away, just an autopsy toxicology report of the various substances in the bodies’ bloodstreams. I didn’t care about that, how the contents of your blood became public information. I just thought about, and could not stop thinking about, what Garret Wayne’s last day was like. Did he get up and think, This will be the last day of my life? Or did he fall into a sudden rage, a rage of such distortive, annihilating force that he couldn’t stop himself? Was the gun sitting in a drawer, just in case? I stared at the headshot photo of his actress wife that had become ubiquitous now. Did she know what was coming? If not, how was that possible? I stared into the artfully lit eyes of this pretty, ordinary girl and tried to see if her future was written in her face.

We all long to escape our own subjectivity. That’s what art can do, give us a glimpse of ourselves connected with every human, now and forever, our disconnected, lonely terms escaped for a moment. It offers the consolation of recognition, no small thing. But what the televised bombardment of violent events did to me was completely different. I didn’t overcome my subjectivity; rather, my person got stretched to include the whole world, stretched to a breaking point. I became pervious, bruised and annihilated. That’s what it feels like, this debilitating emotional engagement — annihilation, not affirmation.

I finally made myself fall into bed.

It happened as I was eating in front of the television news. I know this was asking for it, I know, but this is what people who live alone often do. I was tired and couldn’t bother with the paper. I didn’t even want the commitment of a movie. Mostly, then, I watched the news.

A breaking story was in progress. Everything was always in progress and yet still breaking. The cable news people were discussing a missing child. Since I had just tuned in, they worked hard to catch me up on what was now unfolding. This wasn’t some suburban child stolen from a backyard in California. This was a thirteen-year-old Amish girl from a community in upstate New York. A box in the corner of the screen showed a live shot of a quiet dusty road with some patched farm hills in the background. When they moved to a full screen of the live shot for a reporter’s update, I could barely make out a church steeple silhouetted against the distant mountains. The update was: no updates yet, but they never say that. They were interviewing random, non-Amish locals.

Nobody, it was clear, had a clue. Then they had an Amish expert on to talk. While she spoke, they showed stock footage of a buggy with a fluorescent orange safety triangle on it as the professor explained what Old Order Amish believed. What technologies they resisted. Why they refused to be interviewed on camera. They also brought on a missing-children expert. They spent minutes repeating, in different ways, the total lack of clues. But what trumped all of this information about the lack of information and showed clearly the reason we were all so deeply concerned was what they did actually have: a photo of her, the missing girl. A single gorgeous photograph apparently from a feature in a glossy magazine where the photographer had taken striking close-up portraits of rural Americans, particularly Amish and Mennonites. Amish usually don’t let themselves be photographed (said the Amish expert — the headline read “Plain People” as he spoke). Amish believe photographs encourage vanity.

Yes, yes. I put a forkful of brown rice in my mouth. Clearly that was one of the many dangers in photographs; and yet here was this rather exceptional photo of this girl. It is an intimate shot, not awkward or posed at all. She is carrying a bucket and the weight of it has pulled her arms down and forward toward the camera. She wears a sheer white cotton bonnet. The ties are undone and hang like hair down the sides of her face. A few strands of blond hair escape the edge of the bonnet and soften her cheek. Her eyes are wide-set, pale and clear. But she has the tiniest hint of something hard to fix in her expression — a delicate wisp of mystery, as if her fragile lips might be about to smile. She didn’t look childish or even very pretty. She just attended the moment — the camera’s moment — in a way that looked intensely present. She seemed like a real person, not a “missing Amish girl,” as the caption under the photo proclaimed.

I tried to not read the crawl underneath: ARNOLD PALMER BOWS OUT OF MASTERS …NBA HORNETS@HEAT 7:00 …ST. JOSEPH’S COLLAPSES AGAINST XAVIER …But I kept catching things, and then I would follow to catch up as the letters slipped off to the left: KE TYSON NOT TO RETURN TO THE RING: “TOO OLD, TOO TIRED” …

Live coverage of the Montgomery County sheriff’s press conference was coming up. Only the commercials released me from the odd back-and-forth between the ticker crawling beneath and the incongruent images above it. It offered, I suppose, a way to never leave anything out. Maybe it was supposed to make you feel you could continue watching this show and you would miss nothing. You don’t need to surf, we will surf for you. We could cover something deeply and endlessly, yet we would leave nothing else out. But instead it made you feel that you were always missing more and more. The endlessness of it, the abundance of it, the pace of it: it made me feel terribly anxious. Why is so much happening all the time? Why can’t I stop it and read it? Why aren’t you pretending only one thing matters at a time, why aren’t you helping me make order of all of this? They began those crawls on 9/11 for emergency information. Like many emergency measures, it had become permanent. And it scattered my attention in uncomfortable ways.

The photograph fascinated me, but I wasn’t that compelled to this story, not yet. The people kept talking about the Amish, and a box on the screen now showed the empty podium where the sheriff would soon appear. While we waited, they cut to a reporter interviewing another non-Amish resident of Montgomery County. Apparently, Amish are very nice …MOKTADA AL-SADR… BUSH $180 MILLION, KERRY $79 MILLION IN 1ST QTR FUND-RAISING REPORTS …they don’t trust our modern conveniences but …OPRAH THANKS STAFF …help neighbors …WEEKLONG ALL-EXPENSE-PAID …plain people who put God and community first …GIBSON’S PASSION GETS BIG EASTER BO …Amish are wary of strangers… WORKERS FILE LAWSUIT AGAINST ELITE SPA …children like to play games just like non-Amish children, whom they call “English” …WHITE HOUSE RELEASES AUGUST 01 MEMO SAID TO WARN OF ATTACK “IN THE UNITED STATES” …G.E. BACKS 1ST QTR EARNINGS FORECAST AS GLOBAL ORDERS FOR APPLIANCES, SILICONE, AND SECURITY PRODUCTS REBOUND … Good afternoon —

At last the sheriff was now speaking LIVE. And no one knows anything or says anything new. Just seeing Amish people filmed from the back or from afar as they got discussed on the cable news made me uncomfortable enough, but the full breaking point didn’t hit me until the next evening.

When I got home from work, the house felt very quiet. I turned on the news, and there they all were, seemingly unchanged from the night before. They continued because the story hadn’t played out yet. No body, no crime, not yet. But they really continued because they had something new, and this was the breaking point: they secured an interview with the mother of the girl. I knew (from all the experts I heard yesterday) that Amish people don’t go on TV. She was breaking Ordnung rules for humility and could be shunned or excommunicated. Inexplicably, while we waited for the exclusive interview, the little box in the corner showed a barn raising from the film Witness . Next the entire screen switched to a detailed map of the abduction site with the photo of the missing Amish girl in a box and an 800 number for tips on the ticker.