Overview Effect

Tanya Žilinskas

I had met Minka once before, also at one of Aria and Hazel’s parties. Tim attended that previous get-together, a combination potluck and game of croquet held on a stretch of greenbelt along the man-made lake in our neighborhood. Because he was with me then, my conversation with Minka did not go beyond a brief introduction, though Tim later referred to her as intense, emphasizing the word in a way that seemed to also implicate me. Minka had worn an outrageous number of necklaces, layered over one another like inextricable snakes.

But Tim did not come to tonight’s party, and I wondered what our friends knew about the current state of our relationship. In Aria and Hazel’s walk-up apartment, there were only single attendees—no couples. Minka and I found each other in the elbow of the L-shaped sofa, cupping glasses of warm sangria, and that’s when she told me that her twin brother had been violently murdered by Franklin Salvary, who was now in prison awaiting the death penalty.

“My brother was unloading his car,” Minka said. “He was having a barbecue at his house, and so he went to the bulk store to pick up hot dogs, drinks, chips. His car was double-parked on the street in front of his building when it happened.”

“When he was killed,” I said.

“No, when Franklin first saw him. Franklin saw him that night, and he thought he would do it right then. He would shoot this man in the face. That’s what he said at his trial. My brother reminded him of his father, who had been terribly abusive.”

I didn’t know what to say to this. Another pair of guests had sat down next to us, and were clearly eavesdropping on our conversation. But this turn to violence was perhaps more than they wanted from a dinner party, and they stood up and found another spot.

“I found a picture of Franklin Salvary’s father,” Minka said. “He bore an incredible likeness to my brother, Mark.”

“I suppose it becomes impossible, if someone is delusional, to make these kinds of distinctions.”

“Oh, Franklin is not delusional,” said Minka. “It’s true he had a sad and violent childhood. But he’s completely lucid. He saw my brother that night, which was not the night he killed him. He came back a week later, and when my brother stepped outside to—I don’t know what my brother was doing outside, actually. Smoking a cigarette, maybe, or taking out the trash, or looking at the stars. Isn’t it funny that an unknown action should put both of them on this path?”

“But it seems like the killer—”

“Franklin,” she said.

“Franklin—had a plan all along, if he thought to come back. Did he say what his intention was?”

“He wanted to see my brother again. He had a different idea going in, that they might have a normal conversation, and it would be a kind of release from how he still suffered from his father’s memory. But he said they got into a fight. That Mark picked a fight with him.”

“But why?” I said. “Is that something your brother would do?”

“It wasn’t likely,” she said. “My brother was non-confrontational. He was practically a Buddhist. But what I haven’t told you is that I visit Franklin every week.”

I must have appeared shocked, because Minka gave me an understanding look.

“The doctors say it might be therapeutic for me,” Minka said.

“Is it?”

Minka shrugged. “But what about you?” she said. “How’s your husband?”

My husband and I were trying to work things out. Tim thought we should have a baby, not for the usual clichéd reasons of trying to fix the thing between us, but because he sensed in me a void that needed to be filled. I needed to take care of someone, he said. If I took care of someone else, then I would have to take care of myself.

I knew I needed a change, but I wasn’t sure about a baby. The closest thing I had to a baby was art; I was a writer. I was taking an Introduction to Creative Writing class at night at the local community college, and this was something our instructor told us: we should call ourselves writers now, because in the act of trying to write, or even just thinking about it, we were writers.

I was the wrong age for the class; much older than the young people and much younger than the old people. Still, I felt as though I were doing something for myself, something unexpected that may or may not be beneficial to my current state of mind, but at least was a change. This was the only certainty I had—that something needed to change.

I did not say all of this to Minka, only that I was a writer, which was the kind of aspirational statement my professor would approve of.

“What luck,” she said. “I’ve been looking for someone to come with me to the prison and write an account of what happened between Franklin and my brother. To bear witness to our shared history.”

I tried to tell Minka that I wasn’t a journalist, but it didn’t matter. Minka had a flat, unbudging manner that I interpreted as the result of great trauma, and so it was difficult to say no to her. The act of me transcribing what she and Franklin said was maybe enough.

Minka suggested we get some food from the buffet Aria and Hazel had set out. I was exhausted from our conversation. It was fun to consider murder in theory, but another thing to talk to someone who had been directly affected by it. As we scooped out some of Hazel’s pasta bake, Minka placed a hand on my arm. I don’t know if she physically pulled me to her or if I was drawn in by some invisible force, but her mouth was suddenly at my ear, so close I could feel the condensation of her words.

“Franklin put a fist through my brother’s entrails like they were spaghetti,” she whispered.

When I got home, Tim was watching a movie about sexy space aliens. I sat down on the couch without greeting him. He had majored in film studies and was serious about not talking during movies. I tried to watch with him, but it was an older film and the special effects were campy. It was one of those things people watched as a joke. I laughed when an alien in a silver miniskirt stumbled over a fake moon rock, flipping it over and revealing its hollow interior. I laughed so hard tears streamed down my face, and even once I stopped laughing, the tears continued to spill. Tim’s eyes were fixed on the screen as though he were watching something solemn.

I thought about the void Tim talked about. What he was trying to say was that I was depressed, and of course I was depressed. I was too young for a midlife crisis, and yet the thought of living another thirty-seven years was deadening.

Minka picked me up that Saturday in her VW hatchback. I was impressed to see that she drove a stick shift. It felt symbolic; it suggested Minka didn’t shirk from difficult things. I jotted down this detail in my notebook as Minka watched me approvingly out of the corner of her eye. She was wearing a sweater that was so hirsute her necklaces were barely visible. I closed my notebook and her eyes returned to the road.

I hadn’t told Tim what I was doing. It wasn’t the time for him to question what I was up to, or if this was the right way to go about things. I hadn’t even told him of Minka’s and my conversation at the dinner party, only that I had had a nice time and that there weren’t enough appetizers. Neither of us knew what the other was doing when we weren’t at home or at work. I don’t know if Tim even remembered I was taking a creative writing class. Our interactions had become fragile: even harmless information was a bruising thing. I thought if we could get through this period without too much damage, we might once again find ourselves a cohesive pair.

It was a forty-five-minute drive to Franklin’s facility. I must have passed that prison dozens of times when I drove from the Bay Area to Orange County to visit my family. The prison was located off a stretch of the 101 with only blonde hills of oat grass and constellations of cows. The hills were scorched in patches; evidence of a recent disaster. A pair of giant turbines rotated in indolent unison.

I realized, as we passed a sign noting we were five miles from the prison, that I didn’t know what Franklin looked like. Minka had only mentioned that Franklin’s father had resembled her murdered brother, who was also her twin. Through these extended genetics, I imagined Franklin bore a fuzzy likeness to Minka.

But when we sat down in the visitors’ area with him, he had a beige placidity that bore no resemblance to Minka’s lovely, hawk-like features. What was even stranger was how he looked at Minka: with a subservient, wanting expression.

To prepare for our meeting, I read an online article about how to interview a disturbed person. The article said to ask probing questions while not upsetting the subject. The article hadn’t provided sample questions, so when we sat down with Franklin, I asked him how he was and immediately recognized this as a problematic question. But Franklin only smiled, said he was just fine, and asked how I was doing.

“I’m okay,” I said.

“This is Opal,” Minka said.

“It’s nice to meet you,” said Franklin, though his eyes lingered on Minka. I already felt inadequate for my task. The article stated what to do if the interview subject threw a chair, but not how to follow up on pleasantries.

“Did I tell you they’re going to televise William Shatner’s space trip?” Franklin said to Minka.

“I was going to record it for you,” Minka said. “In case they don’t show it here.”

“You’re a doll,” Franklin said. I seemed to be invisible to them, even as I was jotting down the things they were saying in my notebook. I didn’t know what to make of their congenial tone.

“Imagine,” Franklin said. “Experiencing space.”

I tried to imagine Franklin putting his hand through someone’s entrails.

As Minka and I drove back, I attempted to dig into the things the amicable conversation at the prison had left out.

“We didn’t get to talk about your brother,” I said. “I don’t think I got anything substantial for your account.”

“We’ll be back next week,” said Minka.

“What’s with the space talk?”

“Oh, Frank’s fascinated by space travel,” she said. “You can understand. It’s escapism, when he’s locked up for god knows how long.”

“How long is he locked up for?”

“He’s been there a year,” Minka said.

“But wasn’t your brother murdered three years ago?”

“It took them a while,” she said. “To realize it was Frank. It’s not always immediate, figuring out who the right person is.”

“I see,” I said. I wanted to ask Minka something else, but she appeared to be deep in thought. She had lifted her hand off the clutch and was dreamily raking it through her dark hair. A single piece of hair floated down and disappeared into the furred expanse of her sweater.

“Frank has more than a casual interest in space,” Minka said. “He wants to be an astronaut. He says this like it’s something available to him. At his age. He’ll be fifty in a couple of years. It’s ridiculous, of course, but there’s a child-like charm to this desire. He has terrible eyesight. That alone would disqualify him.”

When I told Tim that I was going out with Minka again, that she and I had more future outings planned, he was unsurprised. He thought Minka and I had a lot in common. When I asked him to elaborate, he said we both behaved like shipwreck survivors. It was true I had engaged in risky behavior in the past, and that some of it involved large bodies of water. Those same impulses drew me to Minka even as I was repelled by her.

“I’d love to speak with Franklin’s father,” I told Minka as we drove to the prison. This was what my creative writing instructor said: I should focus on secondary characters so the reader could learn more about the main character.

“Oh, you can’t do that,” Minka said. “He’s an abominable person. He’s the reason Frank is the way he is. And he died last year.”

After we parked the car in the visitor lot and made our way to the bag check and sign-in, Minka told me to let her do the talking. The last time we visited, she had done all the talking, but I assumed she meant she would lead the conversation where it needed to go, so I could write the account she wanted. I still didn’t understand the intention or direction of the thing I was doing for her.

But once Franklin was led to our table, Minka brought up his ambition to become an astronaut.

“Frank is very serious with his regimen,” she said. “He’s training, even in here. Poor thing. Your eyesight alone.”

“The food here is good training,” Franklin said, and winked at me.

I cleared my throat. I wanted to ask Franklin about his father, and I hoped Minka would take the hint to shift the conversation.

“Opal needs some advice,” Minka said. “She’s having marital problems.”

This was true, though Minka and I had never discussed it. Nobody, including Tim and me, had ever stated it so plainly. There were two possibilities: that our troubles were already well-known to our circle of friends, or that, as Minka’s wardrobe indicated, she was one of those people who possessed a heightened intuition.

Franklin looked at me sympathetically. “My father told me once: you’ve got to hear the other person before you speak. By hear he meant listen. Really listen and hear what they’re telling you.”

“That’s—good advice,” I said. “I wanted to ask you about your father—”

But Minka found another reason to interrupt, and Franklin was only peripherally interested in anything I had to say. I looked around the room as they spoke to one another. The guards were leaning casually against the wall near the entrance. The prisoners were wearing khaki jumpsuits; nobody was wearing handcuffs. A man at the neighboring table in a khaki jumpsuit was eating a piece of cake with a metal fork in one hand and holding a woman’s hand in the other.

Franklin put his hand on my arm as we left. It was an odd echo of Minka’s gesture when we met at Hazel and Aria’s party. This time I jumped, because Franklin was supposed to be a murderer. But he was looking at me with a gutting expression, the kind of look people give you when you’ve just told them something tragic, and they feel sorry for you but are also glad your troubles aren’t theirs.

“You should be careful, Opal,” Franklin said. “Emotionally fragile people are easily taken advantage of.”

“If I were to judge Franklin based on our interactions,” I said as Minka and I drove home, “he doesn’t seem like he’s capable of murder. He’s so nice he’s boring.”

“You’d be wrong.” Minka had on a starchy lilac lipstick that seemed wrong for this decade, and she pressed her lips together in reprobation.

“We haven’t talked about your brother at all,” I said. Minka didn’t answer. I thought of the unworried guards and the utter lack of tension at the prison. Along the edge of one of the tilled fields was a patch of flowering ice plant, improbable in its location and exuberance.

“Minka,” I said carefully. “What kind of relationship do you have with Franklin?”

“Maybe you should listen more closely. Frank is capable of almost anything.”

“Minnie, do you remember the old drive-in?” Frank said.

Minka and I had spent the drive to Frank’s facility in silence. She said she was feeling unwell, but she was practically glowing with health. I sensed she was still displeased with me.

Minka did not respond to Frank’s question. Her attention was drawn to the yard outside the barred windows. There was some sort of commotion—raised voices and a group of jumpsuited men gathered around something, or someone, on the ground.

“What’s going on out there?” I murmured.

“Someone’s gotten shivved,” Minka said breathlessly. “I think I see blood.”

“There’s no blood,” Frank said. “People don’t shiv here.”

I glanced at Minka, but she was still looking out the window and flushed with excitement. Frank was right. There was no blood, and the group was now dispersing in an orderly fashion. The guards hadn’t even left their posts. I could see a deflated basketball on the ground.

My questions were better directed at Minka than Frank. I had noticed at check-in, for the first time, a sign referring to the prison as low security. I’m not sure how I had missed it all along, when I was supposed to be collecting details for my account. But I had known since my first visit with Frank that he had never put his hand through anyone’s entrails. What was Minka’s, or Minnie’s, reason for building such a violent history around this benign man? And why involve me?

“How lucky am I?” Frank said. “Two beautiful dolls visit me every week. You could be sisters.” He was looking at Minka indulgently, and I knew his indulgence was nearly love. Maybe it had even surpassed love.

The next week I went over to Hazel and Aria’s for lunch, and there Aria told me Minka was married to a man who was not Frank. They were going to have a baby, Hazel added.

“That can’t be right,” I said.

“I know,” Aria said. “She’s not even showing.”

This was all a joke, of course it was, and I was the butt of it. After I left their apartment and got in my car, I considered calling Minka, but then what? Instead, I drove to the low security prison and asked to see Frank. When we sat down, I told him he had no chance of becoming an astronaut.

“Zero,” I said, and I hit my palm against the Formica low-security prison table for emphasis. One of the guards shook his head at me. I was ready to have a real breakdown. Frank must have seen it in my expression, because he grasped the hand I had slammed down.

“Take it easy, Opal,” Frank said. “Do you know, when William Shatner went into space, he hated it? It filled him with overwhelming sadness.”

“It’s called the overview effect,” I said. “I read about it. That’s neither here nor there.”

“That’s how I feel. Locked in here, away from the world. From Minnie. Overwhelming sadness.”

“But it’s not like that at all. You’re locked up, but you’re still on the planet. You’re too cheerful to know what he was talking about.” I knew what William Shatner had experienced was not confinement; it was the insignificance found at the center of a void.

But Frank had a romantic look on his face. It was a version of Minka’s post-coital expression when she told me about Frank’s violent tendencies. Frank was envisioning himself as an astronaut, I was sure of it. “Locked up, like on one of those space pods,” he said.

“Now that Minka isn’t here, I need you to tell me. There’s no brother, is there? What Minka has been saying isn’t real, is it?”

“Well, we all have different versions,” Frank said amiably. “It’s a real he said, she said, she said. He said, she said—she said, she said?”

“Maybe this is a good time to talk about why you’re here.”

“Possession with intent to distribute,” he said. “That’s why I’m here.”

I didn’t know what I was doing there anymore.

“Are you in love with Minka? Do you know that she’s married and going to have a baby?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Frank said. “Once I get out, we’ll be together. I’d do anything for her.”

“Do you think she loves you?”

“I know she does.”

“Why?”

“She loves me because I’m dangerous.”

But Frank was not a dangerous man, and he knew it; the inflection in his voice when he said it held quotation marks. He was functioning as a figment of Minka’s imagination, a blank screen she projected her fantasies onto. Wasn’t that love then a fragile thing, too fragile to exist anywhere outside Minka’s fancy and Frank’s imprisonment?

Minka’s fervency over these things she said about Frank: that he was a murderer, that he wanted to be an astronaut. I wanted to care about anything as much as she cared about them. In a way, if they were all made up, they meant even more. Perhaps the act of me witnessing them had lent them a sort of truth.

When I got home, Tim was on the couch. He had gotten us takeout, and carryout boxes were spread across the coffee table. He was watching the news reports of the space shuttle.

“How many times can we watch the same fifteen seconds of nothing?” I asked.

“I didn’t see it yet,” Tim said. “I was working.”

“It’s not much,” I said. “Just a suborbital jaunt. It’s not like going into deep space. And it only made William Shatner sad.”

“I thought we could watch it together,” Tim said, and looked down at his lap.

I understood then that I hadn’t been listening to what he’d been telling me. Tim was also suspended above something familiar and remote, and it was making him sad. Perhaps he had considered the vastness of what else was out there, or had had enough distance to appreciate what was still within reach. But was it—were we—even worth salvaging?

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s watch it together. I just need to take out the trash first.”

I grabbed the half-empty bag from under the kitchen sink and took it outside. I stood in our driveway, the garbage bag in one hand, my car keys in the other. The car was closer than our trash cans; this was how easily decisions could be made. The streetlamp was out, and the stars scattered across the night sky, some of them in motion, or otherwise satellites, or spaceships. What I wanted—if I possessed the ability or direction for desire—was a mystery, even to me.

A pair of headlights approached. It was one of those generic white delivery vans, dingy and dented, with darkened windows and no front license plate. We were at the end of a cul-de-sac leading nowhere; cars didn’t just drive through.

The van stopped in front of our driveway. The driver rolled down the passenger-side window and I could see something glowing and orange inside the car, like the lit end of a cigarette. An arm reached out into the night. It was like a rope thrown my way, holding me in space, twirling me like spaghetti.