Dana Spiotta - Stone Arabia

Then the mother appeared in a dark blue bonnet and dark blue dress and cape. She stood next to the reporter, and the sheriff stood behind her. The reporter asked why she was going on TV, and after a long pause, she answered. She wanted to help find her daughter Annie. She is thirteen and five feet two inches tall and weighs one hundred pounds. She was wearing a gray dress with a white apron. The woman spoke with an odd German torque, a hard-up inflection at the ends of the words. She was not beautiful. She was not the picture of Amish beatitude. She trembled. She looked down, she appeared frightened. Her voice shook, and then she couldn’t speak any longer. She glanced up one last time and shook her head a tiny bit as she looked into the camera. Her eyes were the same as her daughter’s, I could see that, but rubbed and red at the edges. I tried to imagine what she saw, or what she imagined the world saw. How did she conceive of the world through the camera and beyond her village? The journalist interviewing her almost reached for the woman as she backed away, and the moment was odd and raw. Her desperate capitulation to the harsh calculus of the English world that had swallowed her child would be endlessly repeated. Her resistance to humility in the face of God’s will would play over and over. Then it was gone and it was back to the thousand volunteers scouring the bleached late-winter hillside. The suspicious neighbor. The humble ways of these quiet people. Amish girls are seldom alone …KERRY VETTING POSSIBLE VICE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES.

This one would not be let go for a while. They had that photograph of the girl (now etched in my brain forever). And they had that video of the mother. Over and over, but then it would fade to the next thing. Not fade, it really was all and then nothing. Unless a body turned up, or a missing girl. By tomorrow evening, it would all be gone.

I didn’t go to my computer. There would be time for that later on. I crept into the hottest tub of water I could stand. I lay down until the water covered me up to my neck. I leaned my head back against the porcelain. I cried until my eyes swelled and my face ached. I had been crying all along; as soon as the woman spoke, the tears started spilling down my face. My eyes were weary and swollen. The hot water felt good. I pressed a washcloth against my eyes.

Jay called. I didn’t pick up the phone. I knew how ridiculous it sounded whenever I tried to explain to anyone — Ada, Nik, Jay — what made me so sad. No one is going to comfort you for what you saw on the news.

Wait, stop. There were several very significant others, but this recitation doesn’t get it. It falsifies it somehow by rupturing it from the time between. It makes it cute. Or cynical.

Denise took off her glasses and pressed her palms to her eyes. No, things didn’t happen in isolation. Ordering by chronology is better than ordering events by category. Things happened in a context, didn’t they? Those breaking events happened to her, or affected her, because (maybe) of what surrounded them. It wasn’t all events, it was some events. And maybe the why wasn’t contained in the event itself but in her. How to get at that, then? Collage? Pastiche? A list? Rhetorical questions? Or tell a story?

She had to eat something. It was drafty. She pulled on one of Nik’s black sweaters. All his clothes were black. He didn’t have a lot, at least not in his bureau. He had a lot of canned food. Organic chili. He bought organic canned food? That lacked a certain amount of derring-do for a drinking-smoking-pill-popping rock and roller. She laughed, and that was how she felt: giddy, high, on the verge of tears or laughs. A crazy person.

She heated the food and then ate fast, standing up. She was in a rush. She longed to get back to the writing. She wanted only that: to keep going. She surrendered to her mania, her hypergraphic state, and she couldn’t make herself stop until she had finished.

Back to the calendar of linear events. The advantage of some agreed-upon measure to shape the past is hard to argue against. For instance, I remember what happened between April 1, April Fools’ Day, and April 15, tax day. Now I regret what happened that day, but there was, I think, a very specific context to what transpired. I was getting my papers together for my tax returns. In exchange for allowing me some flexibility, my wealthy boss paid me as an independent contractor, meaning I was responsible for my own self-employment taxes and had to keep track of all possible expenses. I was sitting cross-legged on the floor with receipts, bank statements, utility bills, mortgage statements, insurance bills, and credit card statements arranged in little stacks all around me. I sorted and I felt the soul-sucking weariness of counting money long spent. The phone rang.

“Good, you’re home. I’m a few minutes away, can I stop by?”

“Yeah, but I’m in the middle of sorting crap for my taxes.”

Nik couldn’t possibly be in the area by accident; I lived forty miles northeast of him, forty traffic-thick, developer-contrived nowhere sprawly miles. There was no reason to be there unless you lived there, unless you decided you wanted to go for a drive on a congested freeway to shop at Best Buy or Bed Bath &

Beyond instead of going to your nearby neighborhood shopping mall and shopping at Best Buy or Bed Bath & Beyond.

Nik walked with a slight limp across my paper-strewn living room. He opened the sliding glass door to the patio and lit a cigarette. He stared at the piles of papers on the floor. He took off his sunglasses and rubbed his eyes and his chin. I could see he hadn’t shaved in a while: his beard was not ever all that heavy, and he had to skip shaving for a couple of days for anything to really show.

I got up from my stack of receipts and went into the kitchen. The whole house was built on a one-level horizontal line facing southwest. The kitchen opened to the dining room, which was open to the living room in a sort of L shape. It was an old-fashioned California suburban setup, built for fair-weather, optimistic middle-class comfort. The modest square footage didn’t feel too small because the two bedrooms off the hall and the main living space all faced the patio and were accessible to it through sliding glass doors. The orientation to the sliding glass doors and the outside beyond the doors also made it feel as if there were no distinct spaces, so I could make coffee in the kitchen and still talk to Nik by the patio door. He reached in his coat and pulled out a thick manila envelope.

I knew what was coming, I had seen it before. I wasn’t in the mood for making it easy.

“How’s your foot?” I said.

“Much better, actually. Thank you.”

“Did you see Dr. Fillmore?”

“Yeah. You were right, it is a kind of arthritis. He gave me some medication.”

I nodded as I poured myself a cup of coffee before the maker had stopped brewing. The coffee dripped from the filter onto the exposed burner, sizzled, and instantly smelled burnt. This would be my third cup of afternoon coffee.

“Good,” I said. I had given Nik the $150 for the doctor. I knew he also had a $975 bill from the emergency room. He would ignore that.

“How’s work?” he said. I just stared at him.

“How is your work?” I said.

“Great — see for yourself,” he said, holding out the manila envelope to me.

“I mean your job, have you—”

“I missed almost two weeks. I still can’t work too much. I can’t stand for long.”

I sighed.

“But you know, Dave is very cool about it, he lets me sit most of the shift.”

I poured milk in my coffee and stirred it. I didn’t look at him.