Dana Spiotta: Stone Arabia

She had an oddly blank feeling — she had a theoretical caring gap. She should be horrified, but she really wasn’t. She didn’t feel the story seeping into her. Why? Was it because she couldn’t see most of the children? That there weren’t innocent school photos of them from an earlier time, individual narratives of specific lives told in English with pictures from soccer games? Was it because the school itself looked more like a factory or prison than any school she had ever seen? Or that all of it, the whole thing, felt so deeply foreign? She was afraid that was it, that was what kept her at a remove. There was this secret, shameful feeling that it wasn’t quite as bad because it was so foreign. It wasn’t as horrifying.

She pushed all the boxes back on the shelves in a neat row and then began to wipe the dust from the empty shelves underneath.

Because, perhaps, they were used to it, in these chaotic foreign countries. They were used to violence and terror and collateral death. Child death. That wasn’t true, but it felt true, maybe, how when Americans watched foreign disasters it felt different than watching a school in Colorado, somehow. It was in their clothes, their head scarves, their voices, their full-stop y s and k s. Even their eyes looked foreign. It felt more like spectacle than she cared to admit.

She had seen the faces of the parents waiting outside. It wasn’t them, was it? The war-torn, world-outside-the-USA people weren’t inured to bloody children. It was her, watching at home.

When Denise was done, she went into the house. She made dinner. She took a bath and went to bed. She felt tired and quickly fell into a sleep.

When she woke at three a.m., she lay there but knew she wouldn’t be able to fall back. She was awake, dreadfully and fully awake. Awful to be awake and alone at this time. The only things were the computer or the TV. She sat up in bed and switched on the cable.

It had happened, the thing they were waiting for, and it was all over the news. Breaking News flashed and reflashed across the bottom, but Denise could not take her eyes from the images above it. The school was on fire. She could hear the quick, successive cracks of gunshots. There was a lot of smoke, but she could see people running in all directions. Children were climbing out of windows or being pulled out. Some were bloody, all were naked or nearly naked. Something exploded, and then there were sirens and the men were dumping kids on the grass and going back for more. She could hear crying and yelling. The shot cut to stretchers with small bodies covered completely by white sheets. The newspeople explained the images, but they needed no explanation. The parents were on camera, women with scarves tied on their heads, shrieking in Russian and sobbing. An older woman with a photo of her daughter talked into the camera. The reporter’s voice said, “This woman just learned of her daughter’s death.” Tears streamed down her face, and she held up the picture of her daughter as she bellowed words at the camera. Denise felt her chest catch, and the horror of the thing cascaded all over her. Finally it wasn’t, didn’t feel, at a distance from her. They were suffering, and the constant presence of suffering made it worse, not easier, didn’t it? It was a life that wore on you and weighed on you, and then it kept getting worse. She saw, in the weary, sobbing women, what she recognized as despair. The pain just gets worse.

The Beslan school broke her open, but what purpose did it serve? What was a person supposed to do with all of this feeling? Feeling nothing was subhuman, but feeling everything, like this, in a dark room in the middle of the night, by yourself, did no one any good. Certainly not Denise, who held her head and wept and watched two hours of breaking, beating news coverage. Of children and blood and chaos. Each possibility, not feeling or feeling, each response was inadequate. Everything was inadequate.

The worst part would come tomorrow, when they repeated these images over and over; or the day after, when the world out there would move to the next thing, the next terrifying and electrifying and stupefying thing. Are we supposed to forget? If not forget, then what?

She couldn’t do this anymore. It cost her too much.

A week later, Denise came home from work. She fell asleep easily but woke up well before dawn. She went online and booked a plane ticket to New York. She knew why she did this, and she knew it didn’t make sense. She packed a bag and drove herself to the airport in the early-morning dark. She would also visit her daughter. She boarded the plane and sat by the window. She put the tiny paper-covered pillow on the hard plastic between the window hole and the seat. She leaned in to the little scratchy rectangle, closed the window shade, and slept until she arrived in New York.

She didn’t have it entirely planned out. When the plane landed, she didn’t call Ada. She went to one of the rental car desks. She handed over a credit card. She headed out into the afternoon traffic and made her way to I-87 and drove north.

Denise didn’t listen to the radio. She put the last Ontology disc in the player, the one he gave her on his birthday. It consisted, as she now knew, not of the antimelodic sound experiments she’d expected. It had nine songs — actual songs — of sad, mostly acoustic music with low, searing vocals. It was, simply, beautiful. It was not dirgy or depressing; it was enigmatic and darkly funny. It was undeniably an end, but an interesting, fecund end that could have been explored for years. Or not.

Denise made it to Albany and stopped to get a sandwich. She drove west on I-90. She followed her map and got off in Canajoharie, a small Mohawk River town with an almost pastoral old-fashioned industrial decay: faded painted signs on brick walls, still-intact stone edifices next to boarded-up windows, and peeling, faintly elegant multipaned storefronts and warehouses. Denise drove slowly through the town, stopped at a gas station for directions, and then headed over a stone bridge past the half-abandoned Beech-Nut factory and into a smaller town, Palatine Bridge. She drove to the Palatine Motel on Route 5 and checked in. It was past eight, and the diner across the road was closed. Denise ate a candy bar and drank some milk. She looked at her map, and then she went to bed. As soon as she turned off the bedside lamp, she fell asleep.

She ate breakfast at the little diner and asked for directions. She drove her rental car up a county road that rose above the river town into the farm hills and woods north of it. The land around her grew empty of homes and businesses. There were high cornfields on either side of the road, but she could still see the hills rising up in the distance. She passed a farmhouse, and then she drove over the crest of a hill. Dead ahead of her she saw a stone church with a tall green wooden steeple. A tiny village was bracketed between the stone church and another church, a plain white clapboard building at the other end of the road. As she drove higher, the hills seemed to fall away from this little road; she could see the foothills of the Adirondacks and the Catskills, and as the sun rose higher in the sky, the whole place seemed to glow — an unusual, quiet, rough-stone glow, but a glow nonetheless. She turned onto the street, and there by the road was a village marker, STONE ARABIA.

Just past the village, she saw a hand-drawn sign that said QUILTS FOR SALE and HONEY FOR SALE. She turned down the long dirt driveway. Denise had asked at the diner about how to find Stone Arabia and the woman and her farm. She said she was looking for a babysitter. Some of the women worked as babysitters for the English. You just had to give them rides.

Denise recognized the house from the images on TV. It was a large white wood farmhouse, with two much larger barns adjacent to it. A man watched her get out of the car. She waved at him. He waved back but didn’t smile. She walked over to him, feeling decadent from the smell of exhaust and the weight of her expensive sunglasses. She took off the glasses. He was repairing a piece of farm equipment. He was sweating in black pants, white shirt, and suspenders. He took off his wide-brimmed hat and wiped his head, then put the hat back on. He had a beard and no mustache, as was their custom. Denise had read about all the Old Order rules as she ate breakfast that morning. She had printed a stack of pages from her computer. They believed a mustache was decorative and another opportunity for distracting vanity.