Stone Arabia (13 page)

Not coincidentally, that crap feeling also reminds me of the feeling I would get after surfing the internet for three hours straight, tracing down information about, say, depression or ovarian cysts or halitosis, until I finally forgot what I wanted or what time it was. Until I finally turned off the computer and realized I had accomplished nothing but the slow suffocation of time.

It is the feeling that your life has just left the room.

There were four hyperpervious moments between the New Year’s Day incident and my final crisis with Nik. I list them from least intense to most intense.

The rubescent drunk woman with the newborn baby who gets apprehended at a dive bar on New Year’s Eve (insert description from my previous entry for January 1, 2004, but omit date).

I wasn’t sure at first what I caught in the crawl at the bottom of the screen. As the news host interviewed an expert about an entirely different subject, the words creeping underneath them said,
BREAKING …GARRET WAYNE, STAR OF
THE K.O.
AND LATER HOST OF
MAKE ME AN OFFER,
SHOT HIS WIFE AND SON BEFORE KILLING SELF
…

That was it. The people above kept talking about some flooding in the Midwest. Then the crawl changed:
SHIITE LEADER AYATOLLAH SISTANI REFUSED TO MEET WITH U.S. OFFICIALS TODAY …NASDAQ FINISHED UNDER 2000 IN HEAVY TRADING …

I clicked to another channel. There it was, home footage of Garret Wayne in his backyard. He is swimming in his pool with his sweet five-year-old son and his tall blond wife. They are smiling and waving. Garret is tan and glistening in the sun; his torso is etched and there is no sign of career dissipation in his abdominal muscles. I couldn’t help but think it—this family looks so good, so happy, so beautiful.

And I started crying, which felt ridiculous, because I didn’t know Garret Wayne, his blond wife, or his beautiful son. But it had been a long day, I was tired, and I couldn’t stop. The
people talking had no information, no explanation, but they kept on anyway. They talked about the pressures of stardom, or the pressures of losing stardom. But then they showed a picture of Garret Wayne as a teenage star. His hair was blow-dried and he looked very young. This was how I remembered him. I had a small, stupid crush on him when I was eleven. Before I decided I was cool and loved only David Bowie. Before I was cool, I was eleven and I loved Garret Wayne. I loved his girly looks and his slim, tapered waist. I loved his shy, almost secret smile. Before I loved the pale, druggy ennui of the rock boys, I loved the all-American Garret Wayne. So I cried.

They were showing Garret in the pool again. He waves, dives in, and surfaces with a toss of wet hair and a grin. He reaches for his son. His wife helps the boy jump into his father’s arms. Then they all smile and wave again. I realized this must be the only footage they have of the whole family. I realized they will be showing this over and over again. They cut to some people talking, but they kept playing the home movie in a little box in the corner of the screen. Above the crawl, which continued on to floods, wars, and stock prices. Then a commercial came.

I clicked over to another channel. My hyperemotional reaction began to disgust me. I had, in middle age, become a person whose deepest emotional moments happened vicariously. Which reminded me again of my preteen years. How then I also lived through others, how I was dominated by fantasy. My emotional life nothing except what I longed for. And I remembered my feelings, sexual, sure, but more accurately described as presexual. I would imagine just holding hands with Garret Wayne, just being his girlfriend, just going to his house
in Hollywood. The hand-holding was erotic and physical, but a lot of the fantasy was material: I imagined living in his big house and getting nice jewelry from him. Oh God. I was not particularly deep at eleven. I cried about what a deeply pathetic person I was. How can something so banal, so cliché, bother me so? Worn out from trying to resist it, I let myself sob: a fat, audible, nose-dripping sob.

I cried even more as I watched a stupid, hastily assembled montage of Garret on another channel. Here he is in
The K.O.,
the seventies TV series that made his name. He played the son of a renegade former law enforcement officer, a default private detective in a quasi-vigilante mode. He would hang around with his dad, played first by a squinty-eyed Scott Glenn and then later by an equally squinty Jan-Michael Vincent. They would drive along dusty highways in their Pontiac GTO convertible and escape the pursuit of a dark, unknown syndicate of government and organized crime operatives as they avenged average and grateful citizens across America, but usually somewhere out west with dusty roads. They would always move on at the end of the episode, because they had to, because they were being chased, but often leaving a perfectly good woman behind, often with a perfectly good daughter by her side, making meaningful eye contact with young Garret Wayne. It was a big show, but I really watched it only the first three years. In the fifth season, the nineteen-year-old Garret was on his own, his father killed by the syndicate and its unseen monolithic force of cowards. The show was canceled after the limping, played-out sixth season.

Of course I understood how we suffuse random external events with the spiritual weight of our own emotional lives as
a way to feel things without ever really understanding them. We feel for the wrong things and for the wrong people, and so we are never released. But that didn’t stop me; it just gave my overreactions a little niggle of self-loathing, a weary gnaw of guilt.

They were showing the clip of Garret in the backyard again. He was forty-nine years old, but he looked much younger. He looked much younger than I did, and I was—Jesus Christ—forty-seven years old. He’d had some amazing plastic surgery, the kind that didn’t show, the kind that made you look like the best possible version of your age. How shameful, how awful, to hear about a tragedy and relate it to my vanity and insecurity about aging. I was so full of self-reproach and disgust, I lost track of what was on and found myself watching commercials. I grabbed the remote; I pressed.

They were showing Garret in his backyard. He must be in Beverly Hills. His wife’s name was Elaine. She was thirty-four. They were separated. She reportedly had a problem with depression. He reportedly had a problem with prescription drugs. They were now talking about Gig Young, who shot himself and his wife in the seventies. But someone basically was saying this beats that because Gig Young didn’t also shoot his five-year-old son. But someone else was saying, not really, because Gig Young had won an Oscar, and Garret Wayne was pretty much a washed-up has-been TV actor—they didn’t actually say that, but they pretty much did.

He smiles at the camera, he smiles at his wife. She’s glistening in the sun, her legs are long and taper perfectly to her knees. She is shiny and he is shiny and he dives in. She helps the
laughing little boy jump off the edge into his father’s waiting arms. His waiting arms, outstretched. I have memorized the rhythm of this family moment. It was cliché and predictable and clearly fake. It was unbearably, meaninglessly sad. I cried. How could I not cry?

I turned off the TV and, instead of going to bed, I went to my computer. I checked my email. I checked Ada’s blog. It hadn’t been updated since earlier in the week. I sent her an email just to say hi. Then I did it, I typed Garret’s name into the search box. Thousands of hits came up. And I went in, clicking on one site after another, going back to the search list so I didn’t miss anything. I didn’t find much I didn’t already know. He had a website, so I looked at that, but it wouldn’t load because it had too many hits. I understood that I was only one of tens of thousands of people following these links, going to these websites, sitting exhausted in front of a computer. I ended up at a hastily assembled tribute site, watching clips of Garret from
The K.O.
Tons of comments, many posted that very hour. In fact, although the site was put up that day, it already had thousands of visitors. I was alone and yet right there among thousands of people. We were all together in our puerile, lurid nostalgia, yet we were sitting all alone. It was no comfort, really, it just made it worse. By the next week—at the latest—this would all be quiet and abandoned. A relic site.

I went to bed, exhausted and depressed.

For days, I would return to the Garret story. I checked the tribute site, but after a week it stopped getting new posts. The story dropped away, just an autopsy toxicology report of the various substances in the bodies’ bloodstreams. I didn’t
care about that, how the contents of your blood became public information. I just thought about, and could not stop thinking about, what Garret Wayne’s last day was like. Did he get up and think, This will be the last day of my life? Or did he fall into a sudden rage, a rage of such distortive, annihilating force that he couldn’t stop himself? Was the gun sitting in a drawer, just in case? I stared at the headshot photo of his actress wife that had become ubiquitous now. Did she know what was coming? If not, how was that possible? I stared into the artfully lit eyes of this pretty, ordinary girl and tried to see if her future was written in her face.

We all long to escape our own subjectivity. That’s what art can do, give us a glimpse of ourselves connected with every human, now and forever, our disconnected, lonely terms escaped for a moment. It offers the consolation of recognition, no small thing. But what the televised bombardment of violent events did to me was completely different. I didn’t overcome my subjectivity; rather, my person got stretched to include the whole world, stretched to a breaking point. I became pervious, bruised and annihilated. That’s what it feels like, this debilitating emotional engagement—annihilation, not affirmation.

I finally made myself fall into bed.

It happened as I was eating in front of the television news. I know this was asking for it, I know, but this is what people who live alone often do. I was tired and couldn’t bother with the paper. I didn’t even want the commitment of a movie. Mostly, then, I watched the news.

A breaking story was in progress. Everything was always in progress and yet still breaking. The cable news people were discussing a missing child. Since I had just tuned in, they worked hard to catch me up on what was now unfolding. This wasn’t some suburban child stolen from a backyard in California. This was a thirteen-year-old Amish girl from a community in upstate New York. A box in the corner of the screen showed a live shot of a quiet dusty road with some patched farm hills in the background. When they moved to a full screen of the live shot for a reporter’s update, I could barely make out a church steeple silhouetted against the distant mountains. The update was: no updates yet, but they never say that. They were interviewing random, non-Amish locals.

Nobody, it was clear, had a clue. Then they had an Amish expert on to talk. While she spoke, they showed stock footage of a buggy with a fluorescent orange safety triangle on it as
the professor explained what Old Order Amish believed. What technologies they resisted. Why they refused to be interviewed on camera. They also brought on a missing-children expert. They spent minutes repeating, in different ways, the total lack of clues. But what trumped all of this information about the lack of information and showed clearly the reason we were all so deeply concerned was what they did actually have: a photo of her, the missing girl. A single gorgeous photograph apparently from a feature in a glossy magazine where the photographer had taken striking close-up portraits of rural Americans, particularly Amish and Mennonites. Amish usually don’t let themselves be photographed (said the Amish expert—the headline read “Plain People” as he spoke). Amish believe photographs encourage vanity.

Yes, yes. I put a forkful of brown rice in my mouth. Clearly that was one of the many dangers in photographs; and yet here was this rather exceptional photo of this girl. It is an intimate shot, not awkward or posed at all. She is carrying a bucket and the weight of it has pulled her arms down and forward toward the camera. She wears a sheer white cotton bonnet. The ties are undone and hang like hair down the sides of her face. A few strands of blond hair escape the edge of the bonnet and soften her cheek. Her eyes are wide-set, pale and clear. But she has the tiniest hint of something hard to fix in her expression—a delicate wisp of mystery, as if her fragile lips might be about to smile. She didn’t look childish or even very pretty. She just attended the moment—the camera’s moment—in a way that looked intensely present. She seemed like a real person, not a “missing Amish girl,” as the caption under the photo proclaimed.

I tried to not read the crawl underneath:
ARNOLD PALMER BOWS OUT OF MASTERS …NBA HORNETS@HEAT 7:00 …ST. JOSEPH’S COLLAPSES AGAINST XAVIER
…But I kept catching things, and then I would follow to catch up as the letters slipped off to the left:
KE TYSON NOT TO RETURN TO THE RING:
“
TOO OLD, TOO TIRED
”
…

Live coverage of the Montgomery County sheriff’s press conference was coming up. Only the commercials released me from the odd back-and-forth between the ticker crawling beneath and the incongruent images above it. It offered, I suppose, a way to never leave anything out. Maybe it was supposed to make you feel you could continue watching this show and you would miss nothing. You don’t need to surf, we will surf for you. We could cover something deeply and endlessly, yet we would leave nothing else out. But instead it made you feel that you were always missing more and more. The endlessness of it, the abundance of it, the pace of it: it made me feel terribly anxious. Why is so much happening all the time? Why can’t I stop it and read it? Why aren’t you pretending only one thing matters at a time, why aren’t you helping me make order of all of this? They began those crawls on 9/11 for emergency information. Like many emergency measures, it had become permanent. And it scattered my attention in uncomfortable ways.