Dana Spiotta - Lightning Field

“You know what I pray for?” Mina said.

“It’s just different things that engage you, not that things engage you less.”

“I pray for the day I pick up the paper and they discover that the Internet is a big failure and everyone is wrong and nobody wants to use it anymore.”

“It’s not that you get more information shoved at you. It’sjust different. And you have to figure out what you want. You have to be more accurate in your desires.”

“They would say, ‘Oh, boy, remember the Internet? What a fad that was.’ And people who hated it would be congratulated. ‘Boy, you guys were smart not to bother with that, how did ya know?’ ”

“Infinitesimal things can have as much pull as massive things. Things are not privileged in the same way. Eccentricity is encouraged.”

“I hate the fucking Internet.”

“You can bet on that making no difference at all. You can bet everything on that.”

“Oh look, he’s moving. What — look, I think he just — did you see that, David?”

“That’s nothing. Let’s go to live-streaming accidents.”

“How can they be live? How do they know an accident will happen?”

“There are certain street corners, one in L.A., one in New York, and of course, the best one is in Athens, where accidents happen up to three or four times a day. These live cams just surveil those corners. See?”

“But there is no accident.”

“But it’s all an accident. This is guaranteed preaccident footage.”

“Have you ever actually seen a live accident on this site?”

“Actual live, at the actual occurrence, or replayed highlight, postlive?”

“Actual-live live.”

“Actually, no.”

The week before it was the “trashy” lingerie superstore on a famously dilapidated boulevard. Today it was Mitterrand’s Mistress, an exclusive European hosiery-only boutique. Mina bought cashmere tights, guaranteed to let you wear skirts through the most frigid days of winter. They were the most expensive hose in the store, even more than the hand-stitched lace-topped stay-up thigh-highs in sheerest Noir. She had to admit the Viennese 70 denier strumpfhose in Pearled Cracked Cement, part of the Urban Disaster collection, tempted her, as well as the Semi-Sheer Velvet Finish Tights in Bruise and Blood Ultra Ultra Red (although any red, and especially a brown-purple red, is particularly unflattering in any-denier sheer, and she decided to wait until they restocked the sold-out opaque version of the tights). But these couldn’t match the feel — the promise, really — of the Cashmere Pure-Luxury, woven with the tiniest bit of nylon and Lycra (to make the cashmere cling and not bunch, barely detectable, a soft breath, a whisper on skin). When she spotted the last pair in medium, in the sort of oatmeal cream that would make her feel October and Ivy League, coed and coquettish, or at least like a sort of wrapped Christmas treat, all warm and inviting to touch, she said yes, knowing, in a sinking way, it was obscene. She just wouldn’t think about it — not even attempt the usual relativism of what was three hundred dollars here or there: Two couples out for dinner? A plane ticket to Seattle and back? One month’s health insurance? An evening’s worth of cocaine? — and, actually, not thinking about certain things had become soeasy lately, so much a newfound capacity of her conscious will. And by Friday the Winter-Spring Collection, such as Luscious Lent in Satin-Finish Ash, and even Ramadan Rayon Rose, in a more modest 170 denier, would be in, for preview, to the most special and loyal customers. A group with whom Mina surely belonged.

She had large, full thighs. David moved Gwen on the bed, her body the anchor of their afternoons; he could move against it and it would both resist and respond to him. Braque. No, something softer, undulative and layered. Bellini-folded intricacies, a labyrinth of other flesh. It almost upset him, repulsed him, but it did not. So close to disgust it was bracingly erotic, a giving over to all things unlooked at, unexplored. Here was exuberance in flesh. His larger and older lover, Gwen. Long married and with a grown child, Gwen.

Desire transforms you. David believed this.

Leg crooked on his lower back, white, dimples, soap, the soap scent of her thighs. He felt male and small. Hardness overcome by sheer presence, and age, too. Gwen was forty-four. David was thirty. She wasn’t at all like the women he had desired his whole life. His whole life.

It wasn’t a transformation. It was a conversion.

They whispered affection for parts. I love your hair (curly, silky brown). I love your hands (oddly delicate fingers, unpolished nails). I love your lips (his were not quite full, but evenly balanced, a pout-threatening shapely upper lip). Why, Gwen, do we say I love this and I love that, but we never say I love Gwen, I love David? When do the parts equal the person? But he didn’t say this because she didn’t want talk, she wanted murmurs and sighs. He didn’t ask anything of her because what ifshe said no? What he feared was a question and an answer that might unhinge their desire. The alchemy of what they were, he wanted desperately to not decompose it, not unravel it, because it felt like random fortune, shakable by temperature and seasons and hormones. He said nothing, held his curiosity back. How odd that it seemed necessary to command such restraint in the execution of a passion. Strange, you fall into an affair because you long to give in to pleasure, to surrender, and then you have to fight yourself to limit the character of your desires. The resistance mixes with the desire, and it becomes something else, some other new thing. It becomes part of the pleasure.

“Mina?”

“Hi, Jack.”

“How are you, kiddo?”

“I’m a little late for work.”

“Okay.”

“How are you?”

“Great. Melissa and I are going to a sweat lodge retreat in Montana for a few weeks. I thought maybe you would want to come.”

“Jack, I have responsibilities. A job. I can’t just leave. Besides, I don’t want to go to a sweat lodge.”

“How are things with David?

“Fine. I’ll fill you in when I have more time. I’m very late.”

“Okay. Mina?”

“What?”

“Michael got released from the hospital. I mean he checked out.”

“He did?”

“Yeah. He might contact you. I tried to call him at the hospital, and they said it’s been a couple of weeks. He’ll try and contact you. If he does, maybe you could go see him. You know, he’s—”

“Yeah, I know. He hasn’t contacted me. I can’t worry about this now. My life is very chaotic. I can’t be worried about Michael.”

“What’s wrong? Is there something you want to talk about?”

“No, it’s just the usual sort of insanity. Look, I have to go. I’m sorry.”

“I understand. Well, if you hear something, let me know.”

“How can I do that if you’re on an Indian reservation? Would that be smoke signals?”

“I’ll have my mobile phone. I’ll be checking my voice mail.”

“I haven’t heard from him.”

Mina had not seen Michael in years. Michael’s first episode, leading to his first hospital stay, seemed to come out of nowhere, or to be completely inevitable, depending on how she chose to look at it. Her father had looked to her — you know Michael, tell me what happened. You were always so close. Mina and Michael. Mina had adored Michael.

Then, before all the hospitals, there was the warmth of unbroken companionship. A person so close you hardly needed to speak. The combustible energies and combat closeness of children growing up together, moved around, variously parented. Interior logics developed. Secret reference points. An unquestioned and uncontrived siege bonding.