Dana Spiotta - Lightning Field

Mina wakes up on the couch at her mother’s. She thinks she’ll call David. Tell him she’s coming back. Well, what else is thereto do? She gets up and drinks coffee alone. She decides to take a walk through the park. It’s early, but already the place is full of determined runners and people walking their dogs. She hasn’t been in Central Park since she visited Michael at Columbia. Mina walks all the way to 116th Street, and over to the Columbia campus. It feels so long ago, another lifetime that she was here, the most desperate time in her life, worse even than right now. She had made herself forget how awful it felt, how lost she was. And it seems as she crosses the campus that she is able to remember it all for the first time, with nothing internal fixing it up. She actually has to walk here, on these streets.

A toothless man half-heartedly holds out a cup to her. She hands him a dollar.

She never fails to give money to vagrants and street people. Homeless people, bums, crazy people, damaged people. She stops no matter what and gives them something. She knows why she does this, why she gives them money: not out of sympathy for their suffering, not even out of pity, but as a talisman against them.

In the midst of the very worst year, the year her parents finally divorced, the year her fascination with not eating had quietly saturated every part of her existence, in the year of her deepest self-loathing, Mina called her brother at school. She had to escape. Although it was in the middle of midterm exams, he immediately insisted she get on the next plane to see him. He did this, insisted, at a time when surely he was barely holding it together. He’d already had one serious episode, perhaps even been hospitalized for a stint. She didn’t know at the time. She was mostly thinking about her own troubles. She did not want him to see her because she was so ashamed of whatshe was, but he insisted, as he always did. When she arrived at his dorm in Johnson Hall, when she finally saw him, all her rules collapsed. He was there at the door, smiling and handsome. Somehow the strangers they had become to each other had retreated. He was old Michael again, or at least puttting on a good show of it. And it made her normal and OK, her old self, or at least a good show of it. They spent one great afternoon walking around the campus, not saying much, but feeling playful and happy. He took her to the large and unfinished cathedral only blocks from his dorm. “Cathedrals are nice places,” he said, with no irony and no smirking. It had never occurred to him to go inside before. They felt hushed and humbled at the entrance. The light filtered through huge stained-glass panels. Mina was glad for the light and glad simply for those words, stained glass, words that seemed as mysterious and pleasing as the colored light itself, describing glass built to be shone through, designed to make something beautiful— sunlight — even more perfect, which seemed both full of hubris and nearly brilliant to her, not ethereal but human and touching. This was even more the case when she examined the figures portrayed in the stained glass — skiers and soccer players.

Mina sits on a bench by the cathedral.

So what if it ended there? Couldn’t that be the way it went? But there was more, and Mina couldn’t stop thinking of it now. The relentlessness of memory — she wanted to remember slowly and accurately, not mess the order, so she could find her way to thinking about it.

He left school later that semester, just missing his graduation. There was an incident of some kind — why didn’t she know exactly? He tried to return the next year but went back into the hospital. To stay for a long time. He wanted to. Yes, that’s it,that’s what she was trying to remember. This part. He never asked her to visit. But he wouldn’t have to, would he? Finally, after six weeks she did go. He looked so awful, gray-skinned and with those burns under his bathrobe. He was blank and silent. He smoked cigarettes and stared through her. The place was painted that green-yellow hospital color. The vague urine scent in the room, overlaid with peroxide and ammonia. And did she grab Michael and kiss him and hold his hand? Did she visit him again and try to bring him around? Did she tell him it would be all right? Did she ever even once write him back? It was unbearable for her to see him like this, this wasn’t her brother. What the fuck are all these cigarette burns? Mina wanted to scream. Why do you suck your cigarette like that? But she said nothing. It was part of the distance she had with him, had to have. Because she really didn’t want to know. After that one time, she never visited him in the hospital, no matter how often he asked. She was busy. She’d see him when he got out. It was better for him. She would just upset him. She was so busy. She simply refused to see him this way. And somehow, after enough time, the estrangement became ordinary and everyday. Eventually it became something she didn’t think about, pushed back into a secret compartment of her life.

Her mother said it was all the same, anyway. Wouldn’t have made a difference. But Mina knows better: it would have made a difference right now, remembering this. It would have made a difference right now if she had just done just the smallest bit better. It would make a difference to her.

Mina thinks, Lorene, I wish you were here. If you were here now, I would tell you there are people who with the tiniest kindnesses can save your life, and if we understood that, just the extraordinary effect of the measliest attempts to comforteach other, even just that, we might lead very different lives.

And Lorene would say, Natch. Of course, doll.

Lisa isn’t sure exactly what has happened, she is trying to figure out how to think about it. It is certainly bad, though, isn’t it? Alex and Alisa are crying, and she is trying to comfort them. They both fight her when she pulls them into her arms. They cry to each other, not to her. They are, in fact, crying at her.

Michael had finally woken up after half an hour or so of sleeping. Lisa had been in the room the whole time, watching him and keeping the kids occupied with a board game on the floor. Michael woke up with a start, sitting upright on the couch. He looked dizzy for a moment, eyes quickly scanning the room. He jumped up from the couch and looked frantically behind him, and then finally at the three of them on the floor. Lisa smiled at him, cautiously, but already she felt a sick surge of anxiety, a physical thing, a wave through her spine and in her shoulders. He didn’t smile back, she remembers, but stared wildly at her, confused, wide-eyed.

“Where am I?” he said. Lisa stopped smiling, she felt parts of herself sinking, even falling. The strange sensation of adrenaline starting to edge in.

“Lorene’s house.” Still he stared at her, disoriented. He glanced from her to the room and back again.

“What?”

“The hills above Hollywood Boulevard. Lorene Baker’s house.”

He took a deep breath and nodded, closing his eyes.

“What’s wrong with you?” she said, but the question had more fear than concern in its tone, didn’t it? It sounded like anaccusation. She was no longer on the floor, but standing. Alisa and Alex were watching her and watching Michael. There was perhaps a second, a tiny pause, in which the four of them took in one another.

“I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to spook you, did I spook you, I’m so sorry,” Michael probably said. Something like that. And Lisa thinks she remembers this vaguely, but actually, she is almost certain that Michael started to cry.

“What is wrong with you?” she said again, and she heard herself sounding angry. Alisa grabbed her calf and started to cry.

“A lot. I’m so sorry,” Michael said, and his nose was running a little and he wiped it with the back of his hand and sniffed. The scars again.