Lightning People

by Christopher Bollen

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY - ONE

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY - TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY - THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY - FOUR

  CHAPTERTWENTY - FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY - SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY - SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY - EIGHT

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY - NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY - ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY - TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY - THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY - FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY - FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY - SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY- SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY - EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY - NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY - ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY - TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY - THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY - FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY - FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY - SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY - SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY - EIGHT

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright Page

  This is for my father and my mother

  “The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”

  —David Foster Wallace

  PROLOGUE

  WE HAD LIGHTNING strikes all summer but no blackouts. Through May and June lightning came without rain, rising out of New Jersey like a laser concert and slicing east in white tracers through Manhattan. Storms were a huge attraction for those of us who moved here from the Midwest. We’d climb up to the rooftops as ritual to watch them roll in from the west, feeling momentarily connected to the cereal-grain prairies and humid river valleys that we had worked so desperately to escape. For a long time we did this without worry or risk. After all, in the years when we were still new to the city, rooftops served as our twenty-four-hour parks. They were our unpoliced drug lairs, our water-tower jungle gyms, our love nests for random hookups with enough of a romantic panorama not to feel ashamed when groping through underwear near a bed of moldering trash. Every building had one, junked with cables and rusted lawn furniture and billion-dollar views. For many years we were drunk and happy, loitering on these hot tar gardens, adding our slender bodies to the skyline. The storms, however, were different. They were a private matter, a religion best observed alone, and maybe only for the Midwesterners, because they were the ones who were killed.

  First it happened to a twenty-three-year-old from St. Louis on a rooftop on Broome Street, then to a twenty-seven-year-old from Indiana on a sixth-floor tenement on the Lower East Side. Another lightning death occurred a few weeks later, also to a Midwesterner. The victims were all young men and women who had moved to the city within the last few years, scrounging for jobs or fame. And they had all been struck by a single bolt that ripped the shoes off their feet and melted the coins in their pockets. Although the newspapers never bothered to draw more than a cursory connection, each victim was described as “happy” or “ambitious” or “starting to make a real home in New York.” “I don’t know why the weather would take her,” one grieving mother was quoted as saying. “You expect murders or burglaries. But you don’t think your daughter is going to be killed by lightning in the middle of Manhattan. It makes no sense.”

  Most people will tell you that such deaths don’t make sense. Lightning strikes contain all of the inexplicable characteristics of coincidence, no reason, just a dice roll—like a tornado rummaging through one house and leaving the next unbothered. Then there are tougher cynics like Del, who says that because crime is down, New York has to find creative ways to stay dangerous.

  But I know the real explanation for these deaths—there is one for those who are willing to listen. The answer lies in the landscape itself. The Manhattan skyline has changed since I moved here from Cincinnati at the age of eighteen. What no one seems willing to mention is that before the World Trade Center fell, lightning rarely struck any parts of Manhattan other than the towers themselves, as they were the highest conductors in the city. But they are gone, and now we have taken their place, little conductors in our tight jeans and unwashed T-shirts, easy targets in a city that was supposed to hide us.

  Tonight I poured whiskey into two glass tumblers and watched snow fall across the television screen. Outside, taxis sped south toward the bridges, and Del and I kissed on the bed as close as we could to the air-conditioning. Her tongue was dry and her neck heavy, our faces blue in the television light. After she smoked her last cigarette, we took our clothes off. We did not have sex. We were nervous, and Del was tired. “Get the lights, will you?” she said, as she reached over and set the alarm clock for 8 AM. I thought the final moments of our single lives might turn us into feral sex partners, but we stuck to our routine. Tomorrow morning we are getting married at City Hall.

  I wish I could say that I am marrying Delphine Kousavos, a beautiful Greek woman with long black hair and a bad smoking habit, only out of love—that we bumped into each other on Seventh Street near Tomkins Square Park eight months ago and, clinging to each other’s arms and sentences, are about to spend thirty dollars for a two-minute ceremony. That also isn’t the correct explanation of events. It’s just the easiest story to tell.

  Many of us came to New York to get away from the stories of our childhoods, hoping here they would no longer apply. For a long time I thought I could shake the predictions told to me about my family, the ones my mother raised me on in a darkened house in Cincinnati that took each death as evidence, each year as a clue. There is a pattern that runs through the generations, a conspiracy in the bloodstream that kills with perfect timing. For many years, I thought nothing from back there could find me. Those stories could be wrong. But they could also be devastatingly correct.

  If I am right, I won’t live to see our first anniversary.

  For a while I was very young here and didn’t need to give in to the paranoia. I remember a lot of first days in this city: how a morning could lead to a fist fight with a homeless woman, a request by a model scout on Broadway to come in to an agency for pictures, an offer of a part-time job cater-waiting for a group of Chinese diplomats, or a four-milligram Klonopin shared with a failed child actor hiding from Hollywood before riding bicycles around an empty loft in Tribeca until our minds became unglued at dawn. All of those first shiny details told us that we had gotten very far from where we started, and that there was good reason to expect more.

  We still go up to the rooftops. We still look at the storms dragging in from the west. At some point, we stopped thinking of our time here as an open story that would only end well. Lightning doesn’t strike the same place twice until it does. Behind every senseless tragedy there is a careful logic. At some point, the weather changed when no one was looking, and we were no longer so young in New York.

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  JOSEPH GUITEAU MARRIED a Grecian snake charmer.

 
Not from Greece immediately, not by a long shot. There was hardly an accent to her vowels. She was a woman with a penchant for 1970s American rock, two credit cards in her wallet, and an alumni library card issued from Columbia University. She didn’t carry her United States work permit with her, but she had it to show when necessary. It was never necessary. The Bronx Zoo (“world’s greatest animal park in the world’s wildest city”) made sure to keep the noses of their Bengal tigers, adult Congo gorillas, and white alpine owls clean as far as the INS went by staying up to date on their employee files. Delphine Kousavos, sanitizer of anaconda cages, nurse to the irritable copperhead, specialist of the western diamondback, loved Joseph Guiteau. She had real feelings for him. As a child on her tiny island of Amorgos, she’d never dreamed of marrying a star of shaving cream commercials in a foreign municipal building at the age of thirty-two. But Del understood the facts as they were dealt. She had lived with Joseph in their Gramercy apartment for five months. She handled beasts far more venomous than actors. She married him on the morning of June 14, 2007.

  Joseph was so nervous he couldn’t get the ring on her finger. Quiet seconds passed inside Marriage Chapel #2 as he shifted his weight on his left foot and then his right, jamming the ring against Del’s knuckle. The silver-haired Puerto Rican court official, who must have seen every combination of man and woman that ever existed swearing eternal love before her, swallowed hard and closed her eyes. “It’s not . . . ” Joseph stuttered, glancing up at Del and then back at her hand, his hairline breaking in green sweat beads under the ticking green fluorescents. Del suppressed a small laugh and fixed her eyes on the New York City emblem painted on the wall behind him. A pilgrim and an Indian stood side by side, staring blankly inside a ring of wheat; the two looked very much like a lonely immigrant couple taking their chances on matrimony just like everyone else.

  Del’s finger started to swell.

  “Let me,” she said quickly. Before Joseph could stop her, she grabbed the ring and slipped it cleanly over her knuckle. The judge clenched the edges of the podium and, in a mangled Spanish accent, pronounced them man and wife.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” Joseph said later, when they walked through the metal detectors and out into the downtown sidewalk frantic with bike messengers and secretaries in the noontime rush.

  “Done what?” Del replied. “I hope you don’t mean marry you.”

  “I mean the ring. You shouldn’t have had to put it on yourself.”

  “Did you notice the poor girl who came in after us was eight months pregnant and bawling her eyes out? I think it went beautifully. Considering.”

  Joseph reached for her hand and held it for a second as they crossed through the stalled traffic on Centre Street. Office lights glared faintly in the windows surrounding City Hall Park. The sidewalk was canopied in magnolia branches, hanging low from the weight of brown buds. Joseph unknotted his necktie, and Del pulled the white gardenia from her hair, loosening a braid that unraveled in a tangle down her back. She made only a perfunctory attempt at working out the knot. Her fingers were still shaking, and she saw that Joseph’s were too. Her heels on the cobblestones were as loud as their breaths, and neither of them spoke or looked at the other. She threw the gardenia into the park’s dry fountain well and scanned Broadway for a taxi that would take them the thirty blocks home. Del noticed that nearly every bench and tree in this part of town was decorated with a small chrome plaque, a few engraved with commemorations of the dead, others blank and shining in the sun, waiting to be filled with the names of future ghosts.

  “It’s going to be impossible to get a cab,” Joseph said, stepping out into the traffic with his arm raised. “We should have booked a car.”

  “Why don’t we take the subway? It’s only six stops, and we can pick up some wine at Nico’s—”

  Joseph cut her off with an aggravated sigh.

  “I’m not bringing you home on public transportation.”

  Now that they had gotten married, they were suddenly talking to each other like strangers. Del watched Joseph try and fail to flag down an off-duty cab. Right then, he looked less familiar to her than he had in all the months that they had been living together. His blue eyes seemed lodged in deeper sockets, and the sunlight located hidden strands of red in his dark blond hair, which matched the color of his lips. His face was tired and more angular than it had been that morning, but his body jerked restlessly in his pinstripe suit. She noticed his skinny ankles peeking from under his pant cuffs. She stopped herself from telling him that he was being ridiculous to care about how they were getting home—what about the convenience of a ceremony at City Hall did he not understand?—but she knew that his pride was at stake. First the ring and now the likely prospect of no ten-dollar fare to see them back. Del followed him into the street and slid her arms underneath his suit coat. She rubbed her lips lightly against his neck, until an erection grew in the pants she had hung in the bathroom that morning to smooth the wrinkles with the shower steam.

  “Come on, Joe. It doesn’t make any difference to me.” She turned in her blue crepe de chine dress to start off for the entrance to the 6 train, leaving Joseph no choice but to stumble after her. As Del reached into her purse for her pouch of nicotine and rolling papers, she smiled, indulging an old habit for generalizations that she had worked to control over the years. Americans, she thought, those consummate tourists even in their personal lives, always needed their photo ops and rented limos with streamers icing the hood to ensure that an event was marked by happiness. But as soon as this thought crowded her mind, she realized her own people were far worse when it came to weddings—perhaps the guiltiest on earth in celebrations of love.

  “Fine. We’ll do it your way,” Joseph grumbled as he searched his wallet for his MetroCard.

  “Believe me, you’re getting off easy. If we were married in Greece, you’d want an annulment after four days, and my family would still be parading around drunk, pelting you with rice every time you stood up to use the bathroom.”

  “Please don’t tell your parents I took you home like this,” Joseph pleaded, pausing at the steps leading down to the subway platform. The whole day was greasy with June light, and he pinched his eyes to acclimate them to the darkness underground.

  “Only you couldn’t get an annulment,” Del continued, lost in the imaginary picture of her relatives dressed in white linen to the backdrop of the Aegean Sea. “Because my grandfather is the only judge on the island. So at a certain point it would stop being rice thrown at you and start being stones.”

  “Christ,” he laughed uneasily. “Exactly what kind of family have I married into? Is there anything else you want to tell me?”

  Del shrugged, left her cigarette rolling for Gramercy Park, and passed through the teeth of the subway turnstile. Her muscles relaxed in the cool, dirty winds brought by a train coming through the uptown tunnel.

  IN THE COMPARATIVELY modest month of wedding preparations in the Kousavos-Guiteau household, Joseph had suggested early on that they rent out a bar on the Bowery to celebrate. They could invite a hundred friends, serve crustless triangle sandwiches smeared with anchovies as a hat tip to tradition, and encourage everyone to speed dance and drink gallons of champagne for maximum elation—“until we’re all just one pile of melted plastic by the end of the night,” he had said enthusiastically. “That’s how you make it official.” Joseph had tried to sell this plan to Del in part to ensure that their post-wedding lives wouldn’t be a descent into the particularly agoraphobic form of hibernation new couples tended to take on. But Joseph also suspected that there was a reason for receptions. They provided the necessary distraction from realizing that you had just entered a binding legal contract with one of its chief clauses stipulating eternal unity. Too much time alone with the eternal leaves even the most dedicated wanting to jump through the nearest window, eyes on any escape route.

  He remembered Del’s response. “No,” she had said flatly. “That sounds so exhaust
ing.”

  “Well, how do you suggest we mark the occasion?”

  Del hadn’t answered him. She had let the plan drop and for weeks had avoided the issue. Now, alone in the silence of their apartment two hours after the ceremony, Joseph felt justified in the wisdom of his instincts. He slowly took off his coat and hung it in the closet off the bedroom. He walked back into the living room and leaned against the windowsill to pull his shoes from his feet. He rubbed the indentations that the leather left on his ankles and looked out the window, where a crew of undernourished skateboarders sped under the fire escape. Del was locked in the bathroom, removing her dress and makeup, as she had been for the last forty minutes. He occasionally heard the click of a lighter followed by the smell of smoke to indicate that she was in no hurry to return to him. He sat on the sofa to stare at the afternoon light slanting across the floor and then stood up to find the bottle of wine that they had bought on their walk home. He unpeeled the foil but didn’t open it.

  Joseph didn’t know what he was supposed to do to fill the hours after the wedding. The nervousness of the morning continued to hang over them. As soon as they unlocked the front door, he felt like they were moving awkwardly around each other, touching only by accident as they passed down the hall. As a professional actor who earned his money by the amount of repeated airings of his commercials rather than by the hours it took to film them in the first place, Joseph was accustomed to filling up free time. Hell, it was an art form the way he could transform an unaccounted day into a nonstop rush of errands, phone calls, Internet searches, masturbation, and previously uncharted routes through side streets in the East Village to discover novelty bookshops and second-hand stores whose only purpose was to distract the armies of artists and drifters who made up much of the city’s rudderless population. Even before they had agreed to get married, Del took on the tone of a disgruntled wife a few weeks into their cohabitation. “What the fuck do you do all day?” she’d ask him with her arms crossed over her chest in judgment. He’d always provide the same answer: “I’ve been thinking.” Del seemed to regard “thinking” as an activity equivalent to playing the lottery—lots of irrational hope with no net results—but it was true that in the last year Joseph consumed whole hours lost in thought. He thought on a bench in Madison Square Park about his family, about the people who had lived and died before him in Ohio, about the coincidences that ran through his bloodline. Sometimes, to waste an hour, he even attended certain meetings filled with paranoid cases who thought out loud about government plots and impossible cover-ups. Those voices made his own thoughts seem less crazed, almost normal by comparison. Joseph never shared what he was thinking with Del. He guarded those secrets the same way that he protected his most personal possessions when Del first moved into the apartment: in small closed boxes as if to say, some items are just mine. Even though we live together, you aren’t allowed in.