Dana Spiotta - Lightning Field

“The old dine and dash,” David said.

“Fuck and flight,” Max said.

“Suck and scram,” David said, now laughing.

“Rut and run.”

“Lick and leave.”

“Poke and peel.”

“Bang and banish.”

“Bang and banish? Jesus, David, banish?” And Max started laughing. David laughed so hard his chest started to shake. Max now couldn’t stop. Mina watched them laughing and she decided she hated Max. Never again would he touch her, the bastard. Or watch her, really, or film her, for God’s sake. She got up and abruptly exited the porch, heading into the house. She heard the screen door slam behind her. She could hear them from the porch.

“What’s with Mina?” from Max.

“Oh, nothing. She’s acting sensitive. She knows we’re just joking. You know Mina.”

“Yeah.”

“Come on, Meenee,” David shouted. “Come back out. Come on.”

“Come on, Mina,” Max said.

“Oh, Mina Mina,” David said.

“MinaMina,” Max echoed. They both said it like it was one name — Minamina. And then mimiced each other and giggled.

“Minamina.”

Bastards.

“Hey, is she still not driving?” Max said, his voice low but still audible.

“I guess not.”

“I think I got it, look,” Max said, and then the sound of the bottle cap bouncing. Mina stayed in the house until Max left. Later she emerged and opened the door to David’s office. The blue-green glow met her.

“What’s this, David?” Mina saw on David’s computer what looked remarkably like Max’s front stoop, in video grainy surveillance black-and-white. She looked at the address at the top of the monitor: www.espialvid.com.

David was in the kitchen.

“Oh, that’s a surveillance site. One of about ten thousand. This one shows movies made out of security tapes. Some even have narratives.” He came out of the kitchen with a beer. He looked at the screen. A woman with her face digitally altered so the features were blurred beyond recognition was entering and then leaving the house. It went on and on; sometimes she looked at the camera and sort of waved before she was let in. Mina, of course, recognized herself. She felt herself flush as she watched. She was not able to breathe for a moment.

“What’s interesting here is that the usual thing about surveillance is the subject not knowing he or she is being filmed. We get that voyeur vulnerability thing. But this is a security camera that she knows is there. See, she waves at it sometimes. But she doesn’t know it has been edited and recorded and pieced together. So her knowing she is being filmed is subverted by her being made into a story of sorts. A narrative compiled without her knowing, by someone unseen. Apparently a person she knows well and trusts. But here she is on the Internet, and you sense she must not know because the face is blurred to protect her privacy. Or a better way of putting it is her face is blurred so it can be used to violate her privacy.”

Mina stared at herself, unidentifiable in the poor resolution of the tape. She looked at David. He didn’t recognize her, he really didn’t.

“Or maybe it’s all an affectation and she does know, and the digital altering is just to create a violating effect. She could bean actress, but these surveillance sites are supposed to be strictly for the unknowing subject. Other sites have knowing subjects. Kind of exhibition stuff. Not nearly as pornographic as this stuff. It’s mesmerizing, isn’t it.”

Mina felt her life kaleidoscoping into something else, something she knew nothing about. She thought about all the videotapes Max took. The ones she knew about and the ones she didn’t.

“Turn it off, David. It’s horrible. Turn it off.”

She walked to the Gentleman’s Club to get drunk. Maybe Lorene was still there. She should not be surprised. She should have seen this coming. She walked fast, not feeling gravel or sidewalk.

The thing was that it no longer mattered. It was over. But it disturbed her. All that mattered was his filming her, and she had just begun to understand this. Mina had just begun to locate her need to be filmed. Located it as a female affliction, even. She had always had the sneaking feeling that she was being filmed. She felt she was being watched at all times. It was sort of like believing God watched, except Mina didn’t believe in God. But she did believe someone was paying attention. That if you lined up the narrative of her life, the secret triumphs and humiliations, that it had a coherence, that she in some way made a kind of sense, that who she was now and what she did now were completely understandable, even sort of engaging, if viewed in the context of every possible minute that led up to it. Perhaps this was a sort of milky modern morality, that you were being paid attention to, or that you should put on a good show, one full of moving and sympathetic characters.

Mina imagined this might be a particularly female perception.That women were in a way programmed to be animated by the attention of others. What Lorene said, the other day: we don’t exist if people don’t pay attention to us. Of course it wasn’t true, but it felt true. And this was irrational, but it explained why being filmed by Max was so deeply erotic. That it seemed to deeply reveal her inner self, the part of her that felt perpetually animated by the gaze of others. She had felt something irrational and pathetic, and this made it legitimate and real. She was being watched, she wasn’t crazy or deluded after all. And it wasn’t about vanity, damn it, it was about having the feeling that your life was being attended, about having your life signify something, some true thing. And that’s why it gratified her— being filmed was familiar and comforting from the first moment. Even Max didn’t realize this. She pretended otherwise. Why did Max want so badly to film her? Now, that’s the question. Because the gazer must certainly want something, too.

Sex was never the problem. It was, in fact, the only possible real thing in her life. The way it took the rule of two and made a mess of it, destroying and exhausting. There was nothing that couldn’t be brought to sex or found in it, and it made all the conversation dumb. But this was not a world where sex was understood. In all her life she could not imagine, no matter what, not wanting sex, would always hope for its transformations, its undoing alchemies. It was finally her only answer to her family, the only thing the world had to match the loss of her family, the loss of innocence, the only compensation for having to grow up and grow old. The only thing not given in her family was sex, so it made a perverse kind of sense that families were born of sex. The cold reality of sex, the way it made you bodied and exposed to someone not you, my God, the revelingin the body, the hushed words that flew, the desperate feelings. And yes, even in the most rote situation of it, even in its awkward moments when you thought banally — too long, lower, almost — even, or especially, then, the ordinary things of bodies. Her wounds exposed, and then she is embraced, or embraces, and she looks at him (it could be any one of them) and they are human and male and flawed, so fragile, but so different, such a strangeness to behold. And this was the pleasure she knew, the secret heart of all people, to be loved like this, perpetually strange, the bravery in it, the complications.

She sat at the bar at the Gentleman’s Club and waited for Lorene to close up. Mina thought maybe the thing to do was to have children. Maybe that’s the thing to make sex stick. If that could make the bodily need of difference and strangeness become the undying connection of the ultimate familiar thing — a body born of you — a family.

“Can I get you something?” Ray asked.