Dana Spiotta - Lightning Field

“Shut up,” he whispered. He opened one vial and sniffed at the opening. He inserted a pinkie in the top and tasted the powder. He had seen this in cop shows a million times, he was well prepared.

“I think that’s your everyday cocaine,” and he made a stage-yawn gesture. He reached for the next vial and repeated the cop-show bit.

“That looks grayer and clumpier,” Mina whispered.

“Well, it’s not cocaine,” he whispered, and made a face indicating a bitter flavor. “I wonder what drug it could be? Maybe I should ask Daddy.”

“Put it away and let’s get out of here,” she whispered, looking at the doorway. “What difference does it make what it is?”

“One way to find out,” Michael said. Looking at him, she realized he was enjoying this discovery quite a lot. Then, in a gesture of huge import, something Mina would never forget, a point of difference that would be turned over and over and referred to for years to come, her brother looked straight at her, leaned back his head, put the vial to his mouth, and tapped the entire contents into the back of his throat. He swallowed hard a couple of times. Amazing, exceptional Michael. He had the giddy, exalted air of someone who had just proved something dramatic to himself, even if it wasn’t clear yet what that was, or maybe the giddiness came from not knowing the precise consequences and just waiting for the fallout. Mina thought again about the newly surfaced difference between them, beyond age or gender or geography, but a categorical difference, an absolute, italic difference.

“Are you, like, fucking nuts?” She felt tiny and frightened.

“Shh, it’s OK. Jut get me some water.”

A half hour later it was time for the family meal. They sat at the dining room table, the entire family and the friends who were included as family. Lately — actually, precisely —since her incident with Dennis, her father’s best friend, she regarded these friends as intrusive, creepy, envious types. Sort of Anne Baxter-ish groupie characters, admiring her family but deeply resenting it, too. Right next to her father sat Dennis, as if everything were the same — he had said to forget it ever happened, and, look, he had. And her father’s assistant, Sheila. Smiling at her. All these familiar people now had shadow selves to Mina, as she did herself. But these were only minor distractions compared with Michael. She didn’t take her eyes off him once as they began eating. Michael seemed unaffected. He ate and conversed and even quoted a whole monologue from a movie, flashing his dazzling golden-boy smile.

“Say, Mike, what are you studying out there?” Dennis asked him. Michael looked at him and took a sip of water.

“Michael is going to take a graduate philosophy course next semester,” Jack said.

“As a freshman?”

“He got to skip his required undergraduate philosophy survey.”

Mina pushed the food around on her plate, estranged from her own body, abstracting eating into a hideous, complicated thing. Her family invaded by pod people, or what was that movie? Where they all look familiar but they have really been stolen away? They all seemed to be having so much fun, Michael included. Mina felt as if she had taken the mystery vial of white powder, that she must be the one invaded by foreign entities.

Now Michael started to eat very slowly.

“Where do you think you’ll go to graduate school?” Sheila asked. Michael stared at his fork as if it had suddenly become an object of mysterious function.

“Are you going to go to film school?” Dennis said. They all looked at Michael, who was cautiously pressing the tines of the fork into a baby carrot. He glanced up at the adults looking expectantly at him. There was an awkward pause.

“There’s this place in New Mexico.”

“A film school?” Jack said skeptically.

Michael grasped his fork tightly and stared at his fist.

“It’s this valley. And this guy put these stainless-steel rods, four hundred of them, equidistant, precise, in a field out in this valley.” Michael gave up on the fork and started to smile but still didn’t look up. Jack sort of laughed uneasily.

“So the delineated space, this grid, is exactly a mile long and a kilometer wide. Four hundred rods out there to attract lightning. Just for its own sake. That’s the idea, anyway.” Michael stopped smiling. “And it’s there, right now, this very moment, these hundreds of precisely aligned, perfectly spaced lightning rods in a field in a valley about two hundred miles south of Albuquerque, New Mexico.” There was a pause as everyone nodded at Michael and then went back to eating. Jack asked if anyone wanted more wine, and conversation resumed in a different direction and Mina continued to watch Michael, waiting for him to say something to her or glance her way.

He wore a look of extreme concentration. He gamely grasped the fork once again, lifting it with a mechanical deliberateness, then closed his mouth on it, following with a labored and protracted swallow. Slowly the fork went down again to the plate, and then the long way back to his mouth. Eating hadbecome too conscious for him to accomplish, although he seemed determined to continue. She again tried to catch his eye. Later we will both laugh about this, right? He continued to eat even more slowly. He finally dropped the fork and stood up. He excused himself and left the room. Not a glance or a wink or an eye roll in her direction. No one seemed to give much notice to his abrupt exit. They accepted it as standard moody teenaged behavior. They shrugged and commented faintly about Michael “doing his own thing” and “letting him work it out.”

Mina heard the revving of his Alfa Romeo. Michael peeled out of the driveway, leaving her with the pod people, all alone.

Hours later, he woke her with a tap on the arm. She had fallen asleep still in her clothes, on top of the bedspread, lights on. Michael was sitting on her bed.

“Jesus, are you OK?” she said.

“No, I’m Michael,” he said, giggling.

“You’re, you’re like so fucking crazy, Michael.”

He looked a little wild-eyed but recovered; in fact, he glowed with an aloof, distracted sort of amusement.

“I thought you were like splayed across Sunset Boulevard.”

“Like, like, like yeah?” he said, giggling some more.

“What?” Mina asked, rubbing her eyes.

“Am I, like, crazy? No, I’m, like, OK, a nearly perfect facsimile of OK but not actually OK. But like OK.”

“Stop it.” “

Like stop it, or really stop it?”

“Fuck, Michael.”

“I’ve been thinking, Mina, that a person could speak only using the words like, yeah, yah, and perhaps as if and communicate purely by inflection and gesture. You know, like,” and he nodded and then he shrugged.

“Stop it.”

“It’s Zen language, minimal, pure, all reduced to context and intonation. Hyperbolic emphasis. All complications of meaning reduced to these porous words, as meaningful or as meaningless as you choose. Erasing language, pure inflection. Pure speech. So nonspecific it encompasses everything, sort of, like, profound, you know? We could call it “like” speaking.”

“Are you OK?”

“Like, yeah.” Michael raised the inflection on the last part of yeah as if to say, That is obvious. So obvious.

“I screwed up, Mina,” Ashlee said. She was twenty-two and astoundingly tan.

“What do you mean?” Mina flicked on the reservation computer.

“I mean I entered the wrong information for Mrs. Bradley last night.”

“Is that a real tan? Or is that one of those self-bronzers?”

“I entered someone else’s information, and it was supposed to be no fish, but we used a fish stock, and she’s allergic to—”