Dana Spiotta - Lightning Field

“But that’s not it. That’s not what I’m afraid of.”

“What then?”

“I am so scared that I am the sort of person who can be undone by such a thing. I’m so scared my whole life is built onsomething so inevitably doomed and so, well, so silly. I have spent the first third of my life fending off mostly unwanted attention from strangers, and I would spend the last two thirds pining desperately for that attention when it is gone. Now, that really scares the shit out of me.”

Miraculously, Lorene wants to eat breakfast. Lorene wants to sit down and eat breakfast. I watch her eating pancakes with maple syrup. I watch her poke a fork into a sausage link. We discuss our plans to reach my mother’s by the end of the week. I’ve already lost interest in open spaces. I urge her to the car. Lorene’s eating a fucking sausage. Tentatively at first, then with gusto. Lorene’s lips are glassy with sausage grease.

“I’m tired of driving,” she says. “Can’t we have another cup of coffee.”

“No. I’ll drive.”

Lorene looks at me oddly.

“What. I said I’ll drive,” I say. She’s wiping syrup off her unmade-up face. She looks so young. “You’re kind of a mess this morning.”

She smiles at me, licking her lips — it’s breathtaking really.

“One more cup of coffee, doll, and then you can drive your heart out.” She winks. I nod. I look for the waitress. She’s talking to a young man furiously scribbling in a notebook. Helooks up at her, hunted and unhappy, his hand shielding the page.

“There are people in the world who furiously scribble in notebooks, and then there are—”

“And then there are the rest of us. Unconcerned and undire,” Lorene says, mouth full.

“Yeah, I guess. After Michael went to the hospital, he would send me things, documents, I guess.” This is the first time I have mentioned Michael on our trip.

“After you wouldn’t see him? What do you mean, documents?”

“Well, printouts from his computer, really. Not letters at all. Just fragments. Obsessive, odd, third-person diatribes. Which was really strange — obsessed but detached at the same time.”

“I never got anything like that.”

“Well, he spared you that. Only his family got the full force of his rants. And I did see him at the hospital. I did once.”

“I know you did, Mina. At least he wanted to see you.”

“I’m his sister, for God’s sake.”

I keep the cryptic notes in a drawer by my bed. With the postcards. Sometimes, I admit, I didn’t even read them. They never had a salutation. They seemed to be dispatches from the front.

Fuck ’em, that’s what they deserve. Damn sick of all these goddamn mediocrities. They don’t understand, they don’t want to understand. He frightened them, reminded them of what sellouts they are, rubbed their noses in the vapidity of their lives. They cannot deal with truths or truthsayers. He would be burned for this. He was certain they would kill him for these thoughts. They had designed it all very nicely, the benign smiles, the concernedlooks. The restricted visits from family. His sister. Perhaps they even got her. And then bringing the goddamn machine in here. They wanted him to write again. Type his brain into electronic bleeps that transmit through the computer into the universe. What happens, he wondered, as he typed, to the deleted words. The cursor blinking highlighted blips that seemingly flash into erased nonexistence at the press of the delete button. Why was this button twice as large as any of the letter buttons. What deleted bytes of memory stay in electronic limbo. We can discover the technology to recover data you deleted years ago. A search engine with a thousand spiders crawling everywhere. It’s all there, somehow. Like a brain, imprinted, retained, waiting for the recall. The right technology. He thought of abandoned hard drives. He thought of landfills full of abandoned outdated computers. He thought of motherboards and microchips. Of punk hackers in the future, constructing twisted, scavenged PC’s from the outdated abandoned stuff. Hybrid invasive technology.

They monitored his monitor. He created passwords. Data alarms and hidden doorways of information. But if they monitored his creating these security measures, how could he protect himself? They unleashed relentless, single-focused programs that worked all day and all night to defeat his codes. Or even if he disconnected from all networks, all on-line communiqués (which he did, because if information can come in, information can go out, his data sucked out into the World Wide Web, replicated, disseminated in a thousand ways, in seconds, without him knowing a thing), there was still the plug, which sent electrical waves to his computer. Suppose information could travel on those electronic pathways. He saw an endless stream of letters and words, periods and commas, dashes and hyphens, streaming through the walls, through outlets, into some mother monitoring computer.Then a printer spitting the reassembled bits out and into his file for everyone to scrutinize. No wonder they always said, Write, write. Stealing his secrets. Every time he deleted a word or a sentence or a paragraph, he would feel them vacuum through the cord, to the socket and the wall. He could hear a slight electronic whisper of usurped data. At night when he slept, or tried to sleep, he could hear the whir of words whispering through the wires in his walls. Everything he deleted lived on and on, every night whispering. It’s the open sockets, that’s why he can hear it. They think he’s odd for putting tape over the socket holes. He can’t stand all those electronic waves flowing into the room. Now they poured back into his computer.

One day he’ll find a document, a story, composed of nothing but all the deletions he ever made, every random mistype, every dead-ended thought, every mistaken step, every regretted turn. All of his forgotten failures, assembled together, there on the screen.

He would have to take care of their computer. He knew now. He would delete what he really wanted to keep, and only “save” his mistakes.

Ibidem, Ad Libitum, Idem.

I kept all his “letters.” For some unknown purpose.

At first it was a small heart-shaped bruise along the inside edge of forefinger and thumb. Mina noticed it as David sliced an apple, and then only in a certain light.

“How did you do that?” she asked. It was curious, the way she didn’t hesitate to ask, how injuries are public, how one never hesitates to ask, Hey, how’d you get that? — it seemed to Mina, at this moment, oddly intimate.

“This?” David said, shrugging and smiling. “I’m clumsy. I fell running and jammed my hand.”

Later she noticed on the far side of the bruised hand a thin red raised line. It was a cut, a red-pink-edged swell on his knuckle. She didn’t ask about the cut (but it’s more of a scratch, isn’t it) but spent a moment or two contemplating the physics of falls. She tried to determine the contact order, the single-bullet theory of bruises — one fall or two? Gravel or pavement? Thumb then knuckle, or the other way around, or both at once or what?

“Do we have to do this?” she said. She opened a bag of chips and a powdered cheese puff of air escaped. The smell alone made her thirsty.

“We always do this. This is what we do. This is the day we do this. Don’t act like Susan,” he said, invoking the stay-at-home, invisible, despised girlfriend of one of their regular guests. He slid day-old snow peas out of a cardboard carton. He opened the carton of congealed rice and upended it. It came out in a glutinous mass, carton shaped. He slapped at it with the back of a plastic serving spoon. Slipft, slipft, slipft. It molded down into lumpy crags.