Stone Arabia (14 page)

The photograph fascinated me, but I wasn’t that compelled to this story, not yet. The people kept talking about the Amish, and a box on the screen now showed the empty podium where the sheriff would soon appear. While we waited, they cut to a reporter interviewing another non-Amish resident
of Montgomery County. Apparently, Amish are very nice …
MOKTADA AL-SADR… BUSH $180 MILLION, KERRY $79 MILLION IN 1ST QTR FUND-RAISING REPORTS
…they don’t trust our modern conveniences but …
OPRAH THANKS STAFF
…help neighbors …
WEEKLONG ALL-EXPENSE-PAID
…plain people who put God and community first …
GIBSON’S PASSION GETS BIG EASTER BO
…Amish are wary of strangers…
WORKERS FILE LAWSUIT AGAINST ELITE SPA
…children like to play games just like non-Amish children, whom they call “English” …
WHITE HOUSE RELEASES AUGUST 01 MEMO SAID TO WARN OF ATTACK “IN THE UNITED STATES” …G.E. BACKS 1ST QTR EARNINGS FORECAST AS GLOBAL ORDERS FOR APPLIANCES, SILICONE, AND SECURITY PRODUCTS REBOUND
…
Good afternoon
—

At last the sheriff was now speaking
LIVE
. And no one knows anything or says anything new. Just seeing Amish people filmed from the back or from afar as they got discussed on the cable news made me uncomfortable enough, but the full breaking point didn’t hit me until the next evening.

When I got home from work, the house felt very quiet. I turned on the news, and there they all were, seemingly unchanged from the night before. They continued because the story hadn’t played out yet. No body, no crime, not yet. But they really continued because they had something new, and this was the breaking point: they secured an interview with the mother of the girl. I knew (from all the experts I heard yesterday) that Amish people don’t go on TV. She was breaking
Ordnung
rules for humility and could be shunned or excommunicated. Inexplicably, while we waited for the
exclusive interview, the little box in the corner showed a barn raising from the film
Witness
. Next the entire screen switched to a detailed map of the abduction site with the photo of the missing Amish girl in a box and an 800 number for tips on the ticker.

Then the mother appeared in a dark blue bonnet and dark blue dress and cape. She stood next to the reporter, and the sheriff stood behind her. The reporter asked why she was going on TV, and after a long pause, she answered. She wanted to help find her daughter Annie. She is thirteen and five feet two inches tall and weighs one hundred pounds. She was wearing a gray dress with a white apron. The woman spoke with an odd German torque, a hard-up inflection at the ends of the words. She was not beautiful. She was not the picture of Amish beatitude. She trembled. She looked down, she appeared frightened. Her voice shook, and then she couldn’t speak any longer. She glanced up one last time and shook her head a tiny bit as she looked into the camera. Her eyes were the same as her daughter’s, I could see that, but rubbed and red at the edges. I tried to imagine what she saw, or what she imagined the world saw. How did she conceive of the world through the camera and beyond her village? The journalist interviewing her almost reached for the woman as she backed away, and the moment was odd and raw. Her desperate capitulation to the harsh calculus of the English world that had swallowed her child would be endlessly repeated. Her resistance to humility in the face of God’s will would play over and over. Then it was gone and it was back to the thousand volunteers scouring the bleached late-winter hillside. The suspicious neighbor. The humble ways of these
quiet people. Amish girls are seldom alone …
KERRY VETTING POSSIBLE VICE PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES
.

This one would not be let go for a while. They had that photograph of the girl (now etched in my brain forever). And they had that video of the mother. Over and over, but then it would fade to the next thing. Not fade, it really was all and then nothing. Unless a body turned up, or a missing girl. By tomorrow evening, it would all be gone.

I didn’t go to my computer. There would be time for that later on. I crept into the hottest tub of water I could stand. I lay down until the water covered me up to my neck. I leaned my head back against the porcelain. I cried until my eyes swelled and my face ached. I had been crying all along; as soon as the woman spoke, the tears started spilling down my face. My eyes were weary and swollen. The hot water felt good. I pressed a washcloth against my eyes.

Jay called. I didn’t pick up the phone. I knew how ridiculous it sounded whenever I tried to explain to anyone—Ada, Nik, Jay—what made me so sad. No one is going to comfort you for what you saw on the news.

Wait, stop. There were several very significant others, but this recitation doesn’t get it. It falsifies it somehow by rupturing it from the time between. It makes it cute. Or cynical.

Denise took off her glasses and pressed her palms to her eyes. No, things didn’t happen in isolation. Ordering by chronology is better than ordering events by category. Things happened in a context, didn’t they? Those breaking events happened to her, or affected her, because (maybe) of what surrounded them. It wasn’t all events, it was some events. And maybe the why wasn’t contained in the event itself but in her. How to get at that, then? Collage? Pastiche? A list? Rhetorical questions? Or tell a story?

She had to eat something. It was drafty. She pulled on one of Nik’s black sweaters. All his clothes were black. He didn’t have a lot, at least not in his bureau. He had a lot of canned food. Organic chili. He bought organic canned food? That lacked a certain amount of derring-do for a drinking-smoking-pill-popping rock and roller. She laughed, and that was how she felt: giddy, high, on the verge of tears or laughs. A crazy person.

She heated the food and then ate fast, standing up. She was in a rush. She longed to get back to the writing. She wanted only that: to keep going. She surrendered to her mania, her hypergraphic state, and she couldn’t make herself stop until she had finished.

Back to the calendar of linear events. The advantage of some agreed-upon measure to shape the past is hard to argue against. For instance, I remember what happened between April 1, April Fools’ Day, and April 15, tax day. Now I regret what happened that day, but there was, I think, a very specific context to what transpired. I was getting my papers together for my tax returns. In exchange for allowing me some flexibility, my wealthy boss paid me as an independent contractor, meaning I was responsible for my own self-employment taxes and had to keep track of all possible expenses. I was sitting cross-legged on the floor with receipts, bank statements, utility bills, mortgage statements, insurance bills, and credit card statements arranged in little stacks all around me. I sorted and I felt the soul-sucking weariness of counting money long spent. The phone rang.

“Good, you’re home. I’m a few minutes away, can I stop by?”

“Yeah, but I’m in the middle of sorting crap for my taxes.”

Nik couldn’t possibly be in the area by accident; I lived forty miles northeast of him, forty traffic-thick, developer-contrived nowhere sprawly miles. There was no reason to be there unless you lived there, unless you decided you wanted to go for a drive on a congested freeway to shop at Best Buy or Bed Bath &

Beyond instead of going to your nearby neighborhood shopping mall and shopping at Best Buy or Bed Bath & Beyond.

Nik walked with a slight limp across my paper-strewn living room. He opened the sliding glass door to the patio and lit a cigarette. He stared at the piles of papers on the floor. He took off his sunglasses and rubbed his eyes and his chin. I could see he hadn’t shaved in a while: his beard was not ever all that heavy, and he had to skip shaving for a couple of days for anything to really show.

I got up from my stack of receipts and went into the kitchen. The whole house was built on a one-level horizontal line facing southwest. The kitchen opened to the dining room, which was open to the living room in a sort of L shape. It was an old-fashioned California suburban setup, built for fair-weather, optimistic middle-class comfort. The modest square footage didn’t feel too small because the two bedrooms off the hall and the main living space all faced the patio and were accessible to it through sliding glass doors. The orientation to the sliding glass doors and the outside beyond the doors also made it feel as if there were no distinct spaces, so I could make coffee in the kitchen and still talk to Nik by the patio door. He reached in his coat and pulled out a thick manila envelope.

I knew what was coming, I had seen it before. I wasn’t in the mood for making it easy.

“How’s your foot?” I said.

“Much better, actually. Thank you.”

“Did you see Dr. Fillmore?”

“Yeah. You were right, it is a kind of arthritis. He gave me some medication.”

I nodded as I poured myself a cup of coffee before the maker had stopped brewing. The coffee dripped from the filter onto the exposed burner, sizzled, and instantly smelled burnt. This would be my third cup of afternoon coffee.

“Good,” I said. I had given Nik the $150 for the doctor. I knew he also had a $975 bill from the emergency room. He would ignore that.

“How’s work?” he said. I just stared at him.

“How is your work?” I said.

“Great—see for yourself,” he said, holding out the manila envelope to me.

“I mean your job, have you—”

“I missed almost two weeks. I still can’t work too much. I can’t stand for long.”

I sighed.

“But you know, Dave is very cool about it, he lets me sit most of the shift.”

I poured milk in my coffee and stirred it. I didn’t look at him.

“I’m broke myself right now,” I said, frowning and stirring. “I don’t really have it. I mean, I really don’t.”

“Of course,” he said, “I know that. I’m not asking you.”

He put out his cigarette. He smiled and opened the envelope he had been holding out to me and pulled out a CD case. “Guess what? What you have been waiting for, hoping for—a new Fakes bootleg. Very rare. I’ve had a lot of time to work, so I compiled it this week. The unreleased 2004 sessions, made exclusively for you.” He handed it to me.

“How much do you need?” I said, ignoring the CD.

He shrugged and waved his hand. “A thousand,” he said.

“The whole rent, Nik? You don’t have any of it?”

“That’s not the
whole
rent. My rent is twelve hundred.” He reached in his jacket pocket for another cigarette. “You don’t need to worry about it. I have things in motion,” he said.

“I thought you worked some shifts,” I said.

He exhaled. “I had to buy food and gas, too.” And cigarettes and scotch, I thought. At least I didn’t say that to him. I marched over to my desk. I pulled open a drawer. I riffled through the papers until I found a credit card offer that included some low-interest-rate checks attached to a piece of paper upon which many caveats, warnings, catches, and asterisks (which I supposed meant risks of a sidereal nature) were printed in the classic credit card tiny faint print. The first time you actually read the words printed on these things was to feel the last connection to your childhood die. I filled one out for a thousand dollars. I handed it to him. He folded the check and put it in his billfold.

“I’m grateful, but you don’t need to do it.”

“Nik, this is truly it. You gotta figure something out. I’m in over my head here. I’ll fucking never pay off what I owe.” This was a true statement.

He looked down, nodding.

“You have to do something, file for disability or
something.
”

“I’m not even on the books for more than minimum wage, so disability wouldn’t really help much.”

“Well, we have to figure out something soon.”

After he left, I put on Nik’s fake illicit record. He had made a gorgeous little cardboard digipak for the CD. It was deliberately sort of rough, so it would look like a bootleg. He had several fake “unauthorized” labels; this was a Mountebank
Industries release, which meant it was acoustic demos, not a live concert bootleg, which would be, if it were the Fakes and not the Demonics (and never Nik Worth solo because he never played live), on the Cold Slice label. Nik said he had to tolerate these little sub-rosa products—after all, the fans demanded more than the bands could officially release.

The record is some wounded lyrical pop called
Breakfast at Kingdom Come.
It is just him with the piano or the guitar. No overdubs. His voice, totally naked and wrapped around a simple melody, sounds both familiar and strange. His uncanny lyrics always step up to surreal but never fall in. Just odd enough to mean something unusual. That’s Nik—the songs sound off and unexpected, yet after a second listen, you are hooked and craving their delicate circles and little returns and secret crevices.

I left all my papers on the floor and went to bed. I couldn’t sleep; drinking so much coffee had been a terrible idea. I lay there, closed my eyes, and tried to force my way into something approaching a rest state. My ill-considered sleep strategy was to mentally add up what I had given Nik over the years. Mostly the last ten years. The extravagant gifts, like the Canon color copier. (I had just received a home equity line of credit that I used to pay off my car and my credit card debts. I used the extra money to buy Ada a professional digital camera and Nik a top-of-the-line personal color copier. Of course both of those objects are more or less obsolete today. The massive credit card debt reaccrued.) I gave him money for rent on countless occasions. I gave him money for medical expenses. I gave him money for car repairs (uh, Nik, your tires look a little dangerous). He used to pay it back, but eventually we didn’t
bother to keep track. After all, my boss did pay me well, fairly good-sized lump checks that were so easy to spend. I used to help out my mother, too. At least now I didn’t have to pay for things for her. Her low Social Security income and her age and her total lack of assets had made things much easier. I did have to spend hours calling agencies and filing paperwork for her, but I even managed to get her a home aide to shop for her and visit once a day through the state in-home services and Medi-Cal. And Ada’s father paid for many of Ada’s expenses. So why shouldn’t I help Nik? Why should I offer him money he doesn’t even ask for and then berate him? Why was I such a horrible and selfish person? How could I spend money on champagne for Ada when my brother needed money just for his life? What is wrong with me—did I always have to be so self-indulgent, so extravagant? But it wasn’t really just extravagances, I had a high mortgage (and still lived at least an hour from everything). Some of that debt was spent on my insurance, my gas, my basic cost of living. I also had to pay, for instance, income taxes, property taxes—I didn’t plan well and things always came up. I lived beyond my means, it was true, but that was not hard to do. If Nik needed money, what difference did it make if I spent another thousand or not? This kind of thinking explained how I had accumulated a tremendous amount of debt over the last eight years. My monthly payments were fast approaching an unsustainable level. Somehow the whole big monster just kept rolling forward. I wouldn’t be able to pay it off unless I sold my house and moved to Alabama or Bakersfield or some other place where I could afford to buy a house with the pittance I would have left after I paid my debts. Which I couldn’t do. Or I
could sell my house and pay off my debt and then rent a place. But I was reaching the point where I had depleted my equity so completely that it was possible I might not break even when I sold my house.