Dana Spiotta: Innocents and Others

Sarah stayed on her knees, her eyes closed, her hands pressing her eyelids.

The last time I heard you, I was in the garage screaming at Jason. I heard you crying, and I wished that you would stop. I did not go to you. I was yelling, and Jason was ignoring me. I wished that everything would stop. I was sobbing, and I was in pain from my fall. My leg was red, and my thigh throbbed. I was in my panties and a t-shirt. I was shaking from cold and from the combination of drugs. My jaw was grinding in my mouth, and more than cold and sore, I felt angry. I threw a shovel at Jason’s car. I threw his bike pump against his car.

The last time I saw you, I was in your room and you were asleep. The smoke was burning my throat. I could feel the heat from the floor below. I stood over your crib, and you looked asleep. You were not crying, and my eyes and nose were watering. I could not tell if you were alive or not. I did not check. And I did not pick you up and run out of the house with you. I did not. I thought of doing it, and in the second I stood over your crib, I decided no.

In the early years, when she first began this exercise, Sarah used to think this litany during this part: I decided no. So you wouldn’t be like me, like my mom, like all of us. A bust. Like I was. So you wouldn’t find out about this life, that money would always be short, and without money, everything was too hard. So you wouldn’t turn that perfect body into a thing to fight against. So men wouldn’t hurt you. So I wouldn’t hurt you. I didn’t think those words, baby. I felt it in my tired body, and the only words in my head were, “Leave her be.” But then Sarah began to strip back the reasons, the story of why she thought she did what she did. Because even if it were true, it only served the self that she wanted to discard. She must simply contemplate what she did.

The smoke was choking me, and I went to the window of your room and opened it. The air, the cold night air, made me want to breathe, so I pulled myself out the window. I left you in the smoky room, and I moved toward the air until I woke up on the grass with someone giving me oxygen and loading me in an ambulance. This is what I did, Crystalynn.

Sarah stopped there. She no longer needed to add this part either: It was the wrong thing; it was a terrible bad thing and I am so very sorry that I did not save you. This was not her confession. This was her life in her cell, alone.

Sarah stayed kneeling, stayed pressing her eyes closed. Every day she did this, went over her last hours with Crystalynn. Every day it would come back, and every day Sarah must remember it. This was important, Sarah made herself remember, and then she could let herself go. She was on her knees and she felt now something like forgiveness. Not by God, or Crystalynn, or anyone else in the world. She felt forgiven by her own insignificance. She saw herself from the outside, on her knees in the cell, and she was gloriously insignificant. So much so that she was just air. What she wanted, what she thought, what she knew, didn’t matter.

The repetition of the days did something to you. You knew the monotony, but you couldn’t fight it. You had to invent your own repetitions to meet it. A ritual. This early, barely awake kneeling was hers.

She looked deep into the black of her closed eyes. Stared into the dark. When your sense of vision has very little stimulation, it invents images. Sarah doesn’t know the name for this is the Prisoner’s Cinema. It is a trick of the mind, blindness turned into glorious sight. Isolation turned into hallucination. After enough time, she saw a series of lights. The false images are called phosphenes, which means “show of lights.” But all Sarah knew was that it gave her vibrant colors of great depth, and patterns like a mosaic, like a tiled church floor or sometimes like the spiral of a shell. These visions did not absolve her of her time, her duty, and her deeds. Instead these visions took her through the limits of who she was and what she had done, and for this she felt gratitude, and with this, at last, consolation.

I am indebted to Exploding the Phone by Phil Lapsley. “The Miranda Obsession” by Bryan Burrough and Miranda Grosevnor inspired elements of the proto-catfishing in this novel. I derived part of Meadow’s analysis of the scene from Barry Lyndon from Martin Scorsese’s take in A Personal Journey Through American Movies . I took a line that imaginary Orson says from an appearance Orson Welles made on The Merv Griffin Show the night Welles died. The idea of re-creating lost films came from Guy Madison. James Benning’s RR belongs on Meadow’s list of train films, but it was made too late to fit into the chronology of the book. His work also pointed me toward this book’s epigraph.

Thank you to Melanie Jackson and Don DeLillo for the support they have given this novel. Thank you to my editor, Nan Graham, for her intelligence and passion. Thank you to Roger Hallas, Laki Vazakas, James Rasin, Robert Polito, Tom Luddy, Sam Green, and Bennett Miller for so much help on aspects of the film content. Thank you to Jim Hosney for emailing me answers to my film questions and allowing me to name him in this novel as an homage. Thank you to Cody Carvel for reading and commenting on the phone phreaking sections. Thanks also to Kelley Rourke, Eric Bianchi, Christine Healy, Scott Healy, Sterling Youngman, Marie Lorenz, Sarah Harwell, Rachel Kushner, and Judith Clark for comments and conversations that helped my work here. I am grateful to Syracuse University and its Creative Writing Program for giving me the time and support to work. Thank you to Susan Moldow, Katherine Monaghan, and Daniel Loedel and everyone at Scribner for supporting this book. Thank you to my mother, Emy Frasca, for reading this novel and giving me such helpful comments. I cannot thank Jonathan Dee enough for his constant support of my writing.

© Jessica Marx

Dana Spiottais the author of Stone Arabia , a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Eat the Document , a finalist for the National Book Award; and Lightning Field . Spiotta received the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, and the Rome Prize for Literature. Her work has been published by the New Yorker , the New York Times Magazine, Vogue , and the New York Times Book Review . She teaches in the creative writing program at Syracuse University.

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