Dana Spiotta - Stone Arabia

When I went to bed, I was totally exhausted and not at all able to sleep. I turned the television back on. I clicked through to the late-night shows. People were making jokes about the young women in the photos, particularly the one smiling girl’s pointing and thumbs-up in front of the naked and hooded prisoners. She was everywhere.

I tried to imagine her growing up in West Virginia. Being a not very special girl and growing up in a trailer park. I could see the bad sex at an early age after drinking the bad beer. I could see the high school guidance counselor and the long drab future. Then the recruiter and a chance to leave. You either joined up or stayed home and got pregnant. I would have joined up, too, I think. But then what? I didn’t want to think any more about this girl, but I wanted to know, after the bad sex and the shit school and the recruiter, then what happened to her?

The story of these photos and this girl was banner news for the moment. But I knew she and the whole story would be put aside, even though it was an election year. The president had already denounced her, significant people had drawn the line, and the soldiers would be charged as the sick aberrations we all knew they were. But even if that were true — and it was difficult for anyone to believe that this wasn’t a typical part of a much bigger picture — it still didn’t mean what they wanted it to mean.

I flipped through the channels. I stopped at an in-progress episode of a police drama. My eyes were stinging from lack of sleep, but my mind jig-jagged, and I knew the best I could hope for was that this show would bore me into a stupor on the couch and I could click off the TV and fall asleep.

No matter what I watched, I couldn’t be distracted from the young soldier. I couldn’t figure her out. She eluded any explanations. Was she trying to fit in and be tough? Was she told that she had to do this or else? Was she just stupid, a damaged antisocial product of fetal alcohol syndrome or malnourishment in infanthood? I could only come up with a cliché sense of her that was too general to mean anything. It wasn’t just the smile on her face that unnerved, it was the repetition and the need to photograph and the easy indifference. The porn aesthetic that people slipped into and what it meant about the kind of lives they had lived. Waiting, talking about nothing, waiting. Corn slapped out of a can. Pimples and bruises on pale white skin. All the smells of close quarters and the inadequate solace of another cigarette. But still.

Then I read somewhere, on some blog or newspaper website, that this girl, this notorious United States Army soldier, longed to be a storm chaser. She dreamed of following cyclones and filming hurricanes when they make landfall. I was falling asleep, and I found some release in that phrase, make landfall, and I liked the sound and feel of those words, hurricane and cyclone, they made the world feel human-sized again, and I was nearly asleep at last—

And it hit me. I realized it, and the realization blew hurricanes and cyclones and horrible photographs and sleep right out of my mind. Of course: Nik’s health, Tommy’s death, visiting our mother. The hyperordered state of his apartment. And the last album in the twenty volumes of The Ontology of Worth being finished and released for his upcoming fiftieth birthday. I’ve got it all under control.

I sat up. I knew what he was planning to do, and I knew it absolutely.

How could I be so thick? How could I be so careless? I looked at my watch: 3:58. I couldn’t call him now. The next morning, after a few hours of sleep on the couch, I drank coffee and thought of what I should do. I looked at my email. I called Nik and told him I wanted to come over after work. He said he had a shift that night and I could come see him at the bar.

Nik didn’t hear me come in. He was sitting on a stool. He hunched over a paperback book he had pinned to the bartop with a splayed hand. He held a cigarette with the other hand. I stood and looked at him for a second, my big brother. His hair fell down in his eyes. He frowned a little and took a drag. He stamped out the cigarette in an ashtray, flipped the book cover-side up (Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game ), and made circle motions with his shoulders as he moved his head from side to side. At last he saw me.

“Hey!” I said. He waved me over.

“Hiya,” he said, and I leaned over the bar and gave him a kiss. I could smell cigarettes, of course, and a citrus oversmell that must have been his shampoo or hair gel. No bourbon this time. Neither he nor I would mention our last fight. Mostly because our fights consisted of me freaking out over something and him placating me until it blew over. It was just the way it went with us, the way it always was. He took out a bottle of the amber beer I usually have when I come in. I nodded. Every gesture of his seemed at least darkly meaningful if not downright cryptic.

“I’m glad to see you. It’s been dead and I’m falling asleep here.” He turned to the stereo and punched up a new song. It was some ultrafamiliar sixties rhythm and blues, but much more rhythm than blues. The kind of music that made you want to move against your will, as if it plugged in to some preconscious and involuntary need for beat and repetition. It did not mirror the moment for me.

“Can you turn that down? A little?”

Nik shrugged and turned it down.

“What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” I said, smiling. I looked in his eyes. He betrayed nothing. “How are you feeling? How’s your foot?”

“I’m okay, actually pretty good,” he said. Nik smiled. He had, considering our haphazard visits to the dentist as children and his lifetime devotion to smoking, these straight white teeth, and his smile still made him look almost boyish. I have decent teeth, but I have a narrow and strictly horizontal smile that makes my lips turn knife-blade thin and my eyelids pooch into little pillows of flesh. I often used to wonder what it would be like to go through life with a flashy Nik-type smile. “What?” he said.

“I was thinking something, I have this idea,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“Maybe you could … I think I need some help with my mortgage,” I said.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yes, I need to get a roommate,” I said.

“A roommate? Really? What about Thomas Kinkade?” Nik said, smirking now.

I shook my head. “Jay and I are not about to live together. No! I just met him, c’mon,” I said. I took a swig of beer. No way would he go for this, or make this easy, but I had to try it and see. “I was thinking you have had difficulty paying your rent. You could move in to my place. You could have the guest room, and you could turn the garage into your studio.” There, I had offered it. It was possible — I did have a guest room, which I used hardly ever.

Nik shook his head and smiled again, but this time it was one of his brow-furrowed wincing smiles with a sigh blown through it, clearly meaning are you bat-shit out of your mind? I looked around the room. Nobody else was in the bar. It was early. He waved a hand at me.

“What?” I said.

“Jesus, I don’t want to live with you, are you fucking kidding? You really are so funny. You don’t want to live with me either, trust me.” Which was totally true, I did not want him to smoke in my house or to be there when I got home. I did not want him to play music all the time and I didn’t want to find out how much he really drank. I hadn’t lived with Nik since I was seventeen. I had no idea what he was really like, his toothpaste and his coffee and his dirty laundry. But.

“Well, I could use the company and the help. So consider it. For my sake.” He patted me on the head like I was an imbecile. He held up another bottle of beer and waved it at me. I shook my head no. I sat and picked at the label of my nearly empty beer bottle. I couldn’t leave yet. He thought I was lonely, that that was what this was about, and I could tell he felt sorry for me even though he said nothing. He smiled at me, and it had his special reluctant sister-pity in it. He hadn’t guessed my motives, not yet.