Dana Spiotta - Stone Arabia

“I’m broke myself right now,” I said, frowning and stirring. “I don’t really have it. I mean, I really don’t.”

“Of course,” he said, “I know that. I’m not asking you.”

He put out his cigarette. He smiled and opened the envelope he had been holding out to me and pulled out a CD case. “Guess what? What you have been waiting for, hoping for — a new Fakes bootleg. Very rare. I’ve had a lot of time to work, so I compiled it this week. The unreleased 2004 sessions, made exclusively for you.” He handed it to me.

“How much do you need?” I said, ignoring the CD.

He shrugged and waved his hand. “A thousand,” he said.

“The whole rent, Nik? You don’t have any of it?”

“That’s not the whole rent. My rent is twelve hundred.” He reached in his jacket pocket for another cigarette. “You don’t need to worry about it. I have things in motion,” he said.

“I thought you worked some shifts,” I said.

He exhaled. “I had to buy food and gas, too.” And cigarettes and scotch, I thought. At least I didn’t say that to him. I marched over to my desk. I pulled open a drawer. I riffled through the papers until I found a credit card offer that included some low-interest-rate checks attached to a piece of paper upon which many caveats, warnings, catches, and asterisks (which I supposed meant risks of a sidereal nature) were printed in the classic credit card tiny faint print. The first time you actually read the words printed on these things was to feel the last connection to your childhood die. I filled one out for a thousand dollars. I handed it to him. He folded the check and put it in his billfold.

“I’m grateful, but you don’t need to do it.”

“Nik, this is truly it. You gotta figure something out. I’m in over my head here. I’ll fucking never pay off what I owe.” This was a true statement.

He looked down, nodding.

“You have to do something, file for disability or something. ”

“I’m not even on the books for more than minimum wage, so disability wouldn’t really help much.”

“Well, we have to figure out something soon.”

After he left, I put on Nik’s fake illicit record. He had made a gorgeous little cardboard digipak for the CD. It was deliberately sort of rough, so it would look like a bootleg. He had several fake “unauthorized” labels; this was a Mountebank Industries release, which meant it was acoustic demos, not a live concert bootleg, which would be, if it were the Fakes and not the Demonics (and never Nik Worth solo because he never played live), on the Cold Slice label. Nik said he had to tolerate these little sub-rosa products — after all, the fans demanded more than the bands could officially release.

The record is some wounded lyrical pop called Breakfast at Kingdom Come. It is just him with the piano or the guitar. No overdubs. His voice, totally naked and wrapped around a simple melody, sounds both familiar and strange. His uncanny lyrics always step up to surreal but never fall in. Just odd enough to mean something unusual. That’s Nik — the songs sound off and unexpected, yet after a second listen, you are hooked and craving their delicate circles and little returns and secret crevices.

I left all my papers on the floor and went to bed. I couldn’t sleep; drinking so much coffee had been a terrible idea. I lay there, closed my eyes, and tried to force my way into something approaching a rest state. My ill-considered sleep strategy was to mentally add up what I had given Nik over the years. Mostly the last ten years. The extravagant gifts, like the Canon color copier. (I had just received a home equity line of credit that I used to pay off my car and my credit card debts. I used the extra money to buy Ada a professional digital camera and Nik a top-of-the-line personal color copier. Of course both of those objects are more or less obsolete today. The massive credit card debt reaccrued.) I gave him money for rent on countless occasions. I gave him money for medical expenses. I gave him money for car repairs (uh, Nik, your tires look a little dangerous). He used to pay it back, but eventually we didn’t bother to keep track. After all, my boss did pay me well, fairly good-sized lump checks that were so easy to spend. I used to help out my mother, too. At least now I didn’t have to pay for things for her. Her low Social Security income and her age and her total lack of assets had made things much easier. I did have to spend hours calling agencies and filing paperwork for her, but I even managed to get her a home aide to shop for her and visit once a day through the state in-home services and Medi-Cal. And Ada’s father paid for many of Ada’s expenses. So why shouldn’t I help Nik? Why should I offer him money he doesn’t even ask for and then berate him? Why was I such a horrible and selfish person? How could I spend money on champagne for Ada when my brother needed money just for his life? What is wrong with me — did I always have to be so self-indulgent, so extravagant? But it wasn’t really just extravagances, I had a high mortgage (and still lived at least an hour from everything). Some of that debt was spent on my insurance, my gas, my basic cost of living. I also had to pay, for instance, income taxes, property taxes — I didn’t plan well and things always came up. I lived beyond my means, it was true, but that was not hard to do. If Nik needed money, what difference did it make if I spent another thousand or not? This kind of thinking explained how I had accumulated a tremendous amount of debt over the last eight years. My monthly payments were fast approaching an unsustainable level. Somehow the whole big monster just kept rolling forward. I wouldn’t be able to pay it off unless I sold my house and moved to Alabama or Bakersfield or some other place where I could afford to buy a house with the pittance I would have left after I paid my debts. Which I couldn’t do. Or I could sell my house and pay off my debt and then rent a place. But I was reaching the point where I had depleted my equity so completely that it was possible I might not break even when I sold my house.

I needed to get some sleep. Downward I plunged — just watch me, I won’t stop.

I could file for bankruptcy. The ruptured bank option. Chapter 7, I should do it. But I wasn’t behind yet, I managed it all somehow. I tried to comfort myself with options, tried to put these things into perspective. I redirected my thoughts, I focused on breathing in and out. To find my way to some rest. I gave up and took a blue oval tablet from a bottle containing a quick-acting nonbenzodiazepine hypnotic, a nonaddictive sleep aid. What we used to call sleeping pills but can’t anymore because it sounds too tragic.

Jay and I watched an early Peter Sellers movie. He had stopped with the James Mason movies just when I was trying to find a way to tell him how sick I was getting of watching the James Mason movies. Evidently James Mason made hundreds of movies, and they were not all Lolita. The idea of seeing each one of them might have worked as a stupid conceit in a novel, or as a bit of film-school-teacher shtick, but in realty, in praxis, such obsessions grow increasingly tedious. The experience does not increase in meaning by its devotion to thematic repetition, or mere accumulation. The stubborn concentration does not make your appreciation of James Mason deeper. Instead it increases one’s intolerance and irritation. You grow to hate all James Mason movies, even the good ones.

Jay must have sensed my growing ambivalence, and today he switched to Peter Sellers without making any mention of or reference to the change. We watched The Ladykillers, which Jay found uproariously funny. We ate sushi as we watched. We drank Sapporo beer and the combination made our mouths taste funny. Later, we avoided kissing.