Dana Spiotta - Lightning Field

“You like this?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“Mina, I can’t see what you’re doing.”

“I know. But I do it like this. With the panties on.”

He smiled behind the camera.

“OK, but today I want you to take off your panties.”

“You come here and take them off,” she said.

“No.”

“Put down the camera and come here.”

“No, now just do what I say.”

Mina pulled her underwear down. She started to touch her pubic hair. She would be able to come quickly. She knew how easy it would be, she found a sideways angle on her clitoris, pushing her index finger fast against it. She looked at the reflection in the lens, her lover behind it. He moved toward the bed, still filming. He put his hand on her knee and pushed her thighs apart.

“I can’t with them apart,” she said.

“You can do it. Come on, I want to see better.”

“I can’t.”

“You can do it. You’ll like it. I want to see.”

Mina came, and her legs shook, and the difficulty of it made it more intense.

“Come here now. I want you to come here now.”

Max kept taping.

“It’s late. You should go.”

“Please, Max.”

“It’s late.”

Later, at the restaurant he had called her. He told her he was watching her video. That he was very close to coming. And as the servers and customers crowded by her, she listened to him come. It was then she knew that it was going to be like this now, his way with her. She was, she had to admit, excited by it, this new place.

www.missingchildren.com

Lisa logged on to Mark’s computer while the twins slept in the next room. The blue light of the computer in a dark room made her hungry. She ate a chocolate bar and followed her anxiety to pixels and abstracted places. A warning was issued in a box: Any information you submit is insecure and could be observed by a third party in transit.

No button worked unless she pressed the OK button. It didn’t give you the option of “yes,” but just a resigned “OK.” The other options were to “cancel” or “do not warn again,” which was like a permanent OK. She clicked on “OK,” agreed to the terms, to third-party observations. She appreciated the warning — now she was out there and in the open road. She first was shown tips to avoid abduction.

Teach your children to be wary of strangers.

Then she was shown the phone number for information: 1-800-MISSING. It was a ghoulish thing, this combination of technology and tragedy. She pressed on to the search for faces. This was the directory she had compiled in her mind every day. First the words came. Numbers and names. Dates of birth. Dates last seen. And a phrase categorizing the crimes:

Endangered Missing

Lost Injured Missing

Family Abduction

Endangered Runaway

That was all. Whole stories and whole lives shorn of all but these categories. Abduction, endangered. Certainly. Missing. And then after the numbers and the facts came the faces, straining across some cyberspace, one appearing before another, some taking longer and partially appearing and then slowly coming into focus. The page now had faces next to numbers, some in black-and-white and some in color. They were four years old and smiling in a class photo, or black-and-white and at a distance. They were twelve and already more reserved, or seventeen and far away. They were nine and with those oversized adult teeth, and Lisa could not stop scrolling and examining all their faces, already familiar and not so distant from the twins, already lost forever to their families, and the faint hope of this place.

Someone stirred in the room. She turned and her son was there, in his foot pajamas and his half-asleep face. His hand rubbed his eyes as he watched her, backlit by the screen of the computer with all the faces of the lost.

“Alex, baby, why are you out of bed?” she asked, turning, blocking the screen from view.

“I had a nightmare, Mom,” he said, his voice teetering on crying, the very vocalizing of the word nightmare frightening him into tears. She went to him and knelt beside him. Lisa picked her son up into her arms and held him. He sighed into her shoulder and she rocked him, just like when he was a tiny baby, she swayed in the familiar rhythm of babies and mothers, something that was slipping away as they grew older, something that every day soothed a little less as he got bigger. They were gradually losing their perfect rhythm of two, except for moments like these when the night scared him back into her arms. It worked, he relaxed and it was better, it was perfect and he could stop crying. Lisa put him on his bed by his sleeping sister, and she watched them both as they slept.

In the other room the computer said “Good-bye” in a strangely chipper voice and disconnected. From lack of activity. She sat, but she was not still. She sat, vigilant and listening, deep into the night.

“Ms. Delano?”

“Yes. Who is this?”

“This is your father’s friend, Bill.”

“Oh, yes. Bill. Bill Collector. I remember you. What’s up?”

“I need to get in touch with your father, Jack Delano.”

“Well, that is touching, Bill. But I don’t know how to reach him.”

“I’ll just keep calling, Ms. Delano.”

Pause.

“You will, won’t you. You really are a sweetheart, aren’t you? The sum of twenty-one centuries of human striving. The zenithof contemporary culture, the Enlightenment realized, the dreams of Thomas Jefferson fulfilled. Nietzsche’s Übermensch. John Ford’s quiet man. Your mother must be very proud.”

“Ms. Delano. Your father has no honor.”

“You don’t know about my father, you hopeless little sleaze-ball. Clearly you know nothing about honor. What kind of man are you? A real man would rather beg on the streets than call strangers and harass them about debts their parents supposedly owe and threaten and you dare even use a word like honor. You have no shame, Bill.”

Click.

Ring. Ring. Ring.

“Hello.”

“You shouldn’t hang up on me, Ms. Delano. It’s very rude. Don’t make me take measures. . of a legal nature. Just tell me where your father can be reached.”

“Look, Bill, I’m going to level with you, all right?”

“Please.”

“My father is dead, OK? He had a tragic beach accident. It’s really very painful. I’d rather not discuss it at this point. So you can put his card in the expired file. Just tear it up.”

“Ms. Delano?”

“Yo.”

“I can’t do that, you know. You could right his debts, you know. We could work out a payment plan. You could do it for your father’s memory. Get rid of these calls forever by paying his debt.”

“I don’t care, Bill. You can call me for the rest of your life. I can be your life’s obsession, if you like. Take my number home and put it under your pillow so you can call me early in the morning. I’ll give you my work numbers so you can call methere. I’ll give you my lovers’ numbers, both of them, so you know where to reach me in the afternoon. I’ll be your life’s work, if you like. Go ahead. I like the attention.” THE LAST VIDEO

Audio: Muffled.

MINA

What are you doing?

Image appears, just shadow.

MAX (O.S.)

I’m turning on the camera.

MINA

Oh.

MAX (O.S.)

Turn on the lamp by the night table.

We hear a click and the room is low lit by the table lamp. Midshot of GIRL on the bed, the sheet pulled up around her breasts, smoking a cigarette. The bedroom is disordered, clothes strewn everywhere, books, ashtrays full of cigarettes, an open bottle of wine and half-finished glasses.