Dana Spiotta - Stone Arabia

Nik laughs and puts down the cards, then he pulls his guitar in close again.

ADA

But the question is why. Why did you go to such lengths? Can you tell me about why you started keeping the Chronicles?

Nik doesn’t say anything, seems to be tuning his guitar. He strums a little.

NIK

It was kind of fun, far away from everyone.

ADA

Is that a lyric from one of your songs? Could you play it?

He sings the song:

NIK

I’m riding static, I hope you hear me

hiding in attics, among old Christmas trees

these widow’s flowers, drier than dust

they haven’t crumbled, seems that they must

I’m working again, I’m going to break it

I’m playing again, if playing you call it

It happens again, every day

It was kind of fun, so far away …

… from everyone

I’m riding static, I hope you hear me

hiding in attics, among old Christmas trees

Can’t you hear me yet?

Can’t you hear me yet?

He has a coughing fit, stops playing, takes a drink of beer.

I know this will be hard to believe, but I just wrote that. ( Laughs. ) It is called “On the Occasion of Being Interviewed for My Niece’s Documentary.” It is what you call an occasional song.

ADA

Who are you addressing in the song? The world? Yourself? Your sister?

NIK

I’m just making stuff rhyme, and I haven’t a clue what it actually means. Interesting, of course, to hear what other people think. I mean, I guess.

ADA 209

Who is your audience?

NIK

Myself. Other than that, I don’t have one, I suppose. Some family and friends.

ADA

My mother.

NIK

For instance.

Nik laughs a big long laugh. Then in a mock theatrical voice:

But sisters don’t count. Sorry, Dee Dee. Sisters and mothers don’t count, you see. I have no audience.

He strums some more.

Don’t mistake me, I don’t mean Denise doesn’t count in any big sense. My sister doesn’t count as my audience because she feels like an extension of me. She’s, well, an alternative version of me.

He pauses, reaches offscreen. He takes a drag on his cigarette and exhales. He shrugs.

What were the Chronicles? Accumulations, like memory but better. A thing to look forward to every day.

ADA

But why make a fake life? Why not do it with real life and get a real audience for all your work?

NIK

It wasn’t fake, it was real. And I grew to like not having an audience. Imagine being freed from sense and only having to pursue pure sound. Imagine letting go of explanations, of misinterpretations, of commerce and receptions. Imagine doing whatever you want with everything that went before you. Imagine never having to give up Artaud or Chuck Berry or Alistair Crowley or the Beats or the I Ching or Lewis Carroll? Imagine total freedom.

ADA

But in your Chronicles you are accused of all of those things. You have your critics call you derivative, immature, and cliché.

NIK

Well, I wanted it to be realistic.

Ada laughs.

You see, you see ?

He laughs.

You come at me with your camera and your need for explanations and your wanting me to be consistent.

The film ends. “That’s all there is,” Ada said. Denise nodded.

Over the next few weeks Denise helped Ada dig through the Chronicles. Denise decided to cooperate fully with the filmmaker. She paid June’s rent, and then July’s, then August’s. She went back to the routine of her life, but many times, instead of going home after work, she would go to Nik’s place. She would listen to music or read the Chronicles. Sometimes she thought about her own stack of writing, but mostly she just sat there.

There was no sign of Nik.

After the filming was finished and Ada had returned to New York, Denise didn’t come by as often, but she left his apartment and the Chronicles as they were. She liked that there was a space away from her house and her life; she liked being in someone else’s world. His apartment felt quiet, disconnected, peaceful.

She visited her mother, who didn’t ask about Nik. She saw Jay. They watched movies, they had dinner. Her life felt different, but there were days when it felt exactly the same. The commute. She even went back to watching the news during her dinner.

No one talked about Abu Ghraib or Iraq anymore. All they talked about was Vietnam. They kept showing commercials about how John Kerry was a coward for going to Vietnam, and then they discussed the commercials. The whole election would be decided by Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. The battleground states. Only people in Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio would decide if Bush should still be president. Everyone else would just watch. Not only was I a lurker online, but I lived in a lurker state, California.

One night in early September, Denise turned on the TV to discover a breaking news story in progress. The words under the image said school hostage, and then the words deadly standoff zoomed up from the bottom of the screen. Denise could see the video feed was not an American one. It had that instant rough-grade foreign feel. A reporter spoke, and it was simultaneously translated by a British woman in voice-over. Behind the reporter a large cinder-block building was visible. Then the shot cut to scenes of the building while the American anchor spoke over the images. Denise heard “hundreds of people, reportedly, most of them children.” Men with guns were rushing back and forth across the screen. Men in orange jumpsuits carried stretchers into white trucks. People, including children, wandered around unclothed, dazed, damaged. Then the entire screen filled with a map of the former Soviet Union: Russia and all the countries it contained, or used to contain. They cut to a hostage expert sitting on a chair, talking to two reporters sitting next to him. Then a Chechnya expert, then a separatist rebels expert.

The usual news crawl seemed to be suspended; they instead flashed detached facts about Chechnya and Beslan, but it still had the discomforting and discordant effect of too much.

The hostage expert was still speaking. Denise could feel the growing excitement. Something terrible was going to happen. Guaranteed. Glimpses of child hostages next to armed men in balaclavas. They also showed the hard-line, reportedly corrupt Russian police who wouldn’t negotiate with a Chechnyan, ever. Villagers, parents, and random passersby — some holding military-grade rifles — also surrounded the building. It was a pending bloodbath, even Denise could see that. And the cable newspeople were besides themselves with how genuinely breaking the news really was. This was one of those rare events that would unfold, dramatically, in real time, right on camera. Denise didn’t want to watch it. She didn’t even use the remote: she walked up to the TV and pressed its off button. I won’t watch the same things over and over, I won’t wait for, hope for, something to happen. I won’t.

But even after the TV turned off, she thought about it. She tried, she really did, to resist her out-of-proportion involvement. She decided she must organize her garage. She went out and pulled all the boxes off the shelves. She made room for new things. She piled all of Jay’s gifts into a discreet corner. But something bothered her. It wasn’t just the newspeople waiting for the Russian police to storm the school. It wasn’t just the serious tone of voice that barely contained a kind of breathless thrill as it said “reportedly wearing suicide bomb belts” and “according to our sources, the rebels say they will kill fifty children for every rebel soldier killed” and “Errol, is it true they are using children as human shields ?” It wasn’t just that concealed giddiness she detected in them, but something else, something in her.