Dana Spiotta - Stone Arabia

He still brought me Thomas Kinkade Painter of Light ™gifts. This obsession wasn’t negotiable. They stacked up in my garage.

Also April 20

When Jay got up to use the bathroom, I checked my email. I knew from Ada’s blog posts that she was moving forward with her documentary about Nik. I had been enthused and then began ignoring and nearly discouraging it for some reason.

hey ma,

guess what? i’m thinking I would come out and film in the next month. I know that is sooner than i said, but I have some investors to get me started — i will explain when i see you. dad will get me a ticket with his miles. Of course i would stay with you if i could, but you are so far away from everything. i will stay at Mike’s house by Runyon Canyon — you know i want to film some of the movie there. I haven’t talked to nik about the details of this yet. Did you get a chance to mention it to him and see what he thinks? do you mind? I would need to interview you, too, is that okay?

I’m totally excited!

xoxoxoxo

a.

I clicked on MARK AS UNREAD and watched it become bold new mail again. I would answer it in the morning. I would have to talk to Nik. Nik didn’t use email. He had my old computer and printer, but he didn’t subscribe to the internet. He was stubborn this way. Last Christmas, Ada set up a MySpace page for Nik. One of Nik’s signature Fakes songs played as soon as the page opened, “Sugar Caves.” The details of the page were a continuation of the Chronicles fiction, or at least Ada’s approximation of it. Nik seemed touched, but he quickly pointed out the inaccuracies. (He was a stickler for precision in his fictions. No continuity issues, no sloppiness. He would later hand her a typed list of errata to add as a sidebar to the page.)

“You could, you know, extend your whole project onto the internet. You know, it would be perfect for that, it would make it totally multidimensional, update it. You could even put up MP3s of all the music, reach a new audience. I could help you, you know.”

Nik stared at her laptop. He read aloud, “‘Thirty-plus solo records, with the additional recordings of the two main bands plus the side bands.’” He chuckled.

“I think it looks great,” I said. But actually it was weird seeing Nik in the real world like this — the real world of the internet. I felt anxious about it, too exposed somehow.

Ada smiled and clicked on the next song, the Demonics’ “Somersault.”

“You would have to do a separate Demonics page, a Fakes page, a Nik Worth page, even pages for some of the side projects like the Pearl Poets and Lozenge. And then link them all together,” Nik said. Lozenge was Nik’s short-lived one-man electro-boogie band.

“Exactly!” Ada said. “I could do that if you want.”

Nik smiled at her. “Naw, not for me.”

“Why?”

“Don’t look so sad. It is just that I’m a paper-and-paste guy.”

“A glitter-and-glue guy,” I said.

“Yeah, that too.”

I wasn’t sure if Nik would want to have a documentary made about him. But who knows, maybe he would jump at it. He had made lots of films and videos over the years. (First with our mother’s Super 8 camera. Then a Betamovie camcorder I bought him for Christmas 1985. More recently a Sony MiniDV for his birthday.) He made music videos and a couple of clips where he interviewed himself. Ada could use all of that if she wanted. I didn’t even know if she knew all the stuff that Nik had made over the years. I didn’t even know it all.

Ada emailed me to tell me Nik had agreed to be interviewed. He agreed to open his archives to her. Whatever she wanted.

It was eighty-one degrees and the midday sun seared me through the thin skin of my clothing. Despite my dark glasses, the blinding shine made phantom sunspots appear whenever I blinked. I helped her into the passenger seat and the oppressively stale and baked air of my car.

“Give it a minute.” The car was on, the AC was on high, but it still only felt like the air pushed up to you and sat there, hot and thick. I knew that somewhere there were new cars that could do this air transition much better. But my mother didn’t seem to notice. She sat and looked straight ahead. I drove out of the driveway of her apartment complex and toward the highway. We were on our way to Ralphs supermarket. Leslie, the home aide assigned to my mother, went shopping for her. But sometimes I went, and I took her with me. It was something to do, an activity. Usually we went to Wal-Mart, other times we went to Ralphs.

I pushed the cart. I had a small list. It felt nice and cool as we went down the aisle, and we were in no rush. She picked out cookies. And then some Pop-Tarts.

“Ma, you know you can’t have too many sweets. You know, diabetes.” She looked at me and sighed. She put the Pop-Tarts back, shoving them on the wrong shelf.

When I was a kid, I used to do exactly the same thing when I went shopping with my mother. I would try to slip sweets into our basket. We had so much food in our cart that sometimes it would work, and she wouldn’t notice even at the checkout. She wouldn’t notice until she unpacked it at home. I liked going with her to the supermarket, I used to ride underneath the basket of the shopping cart, sitting with legs straight out in front of me on the little shelf just above the wheels. She would push it for maybe an aisle, and then the wheels would catch and the cart would resist her push. She would tell me to get off and walk, it was too heavy. I would wander off and lose track of her. I didn’t keep her in sight, because I had a system for finding her. I would walk along the end aisle and look up each lane until I found her. Once in a while I would get all the way to the end of the store and not see her. I would become slightly frantic, move quickly from aisle to aisle, and then get very frantic when I still couldn’t find her. I would run to a checkout girl and get my mother paged.

I was reminded of this childhood panic when I spent too long staring at a box of cereal. I was reading labels, trying to see what she could eat within her diabetes guidelines. I looked up and she was gone. I left the cart and went to the end of the aisle. I looked in each direction — I looked for her, in her powder-blue tracksuit and her short gray hair. I didn’t see her. I moved along, looking up each lane. Still I didn’t see her. I felt myself panicking. I knew that one of the symptoms of dementia is “wandering.” She could wander out into the street and disappear. It happened to old people all the time. They injure themselves, they get lost, they get hit by cars. I started to tear up as I hurried past all the lanes again. She wasn’t that bad yet, she wasn’t totally disoriented yet.

I saw her.

She was at the front of the store, on the other side of the checkout lines. She was standing with a police officer. I ran over, waving my arms at them. I saw that she had handcuffs on. My mother was in handcuffs.

“What is going on?” I said, still tearful, putting my arm around my mother. She looked at me, totally confused.

“Are you her daughter?” said the police officer, who I now saw was simply a security guard.

“Yes, I am. What is going on?”

“Your mother was shoplifting. When a clerk tried to stop her, she resisted him and shouted ethnic slurs,” he said.

“My mother doesn’t use ethnic slurs. And she doesn’t shoplift. She probably just forgot to pay. She’s old, you know?”

The guard undid the handcuffs. He claimed he just wanted to scare her a little. By handcuffing her in front of the entire store? She had put containers of yogurt in her pockets. And two candy bars up her sleeves. My mother had read the manager’s identification pin and called him a dumb wop. She had no explanation for any of this behavior. They didn’t press charges. I was told I could no longer bring my mother to the store. On the ride home, she muttered.