Lightning People

by Christopher Bollen

  “It brings up a good point,” said a woman sitting just behind Rose whom Joseph hadn’t noticed before. “Isn’t there talk that Ahmadinejad was a leader of the radicals who held those Americans hostage in 1979? If he had an underground connection with Bush Senior—”

  “Bullshit,” Tobias wheezed, glowering angrily at this unfamiliar visitor. “We’re getting off point here.”

  “That’s hardly off point,” the young man in the Princeton sweatshirt argued, emboldened by another voice in the wilderness. “If we’ve had secret deals with Iran in the past, and we have, then it could be said our sworn enemies could actually still be in the government’s corner. I’ve seen things on the Web, listings of dates and locations where members of the president’s cabinet have been in the same hotels in Madrid and Prague at precisely the same time as key foreign ministers in our Axis of Evil. That’s a mighty fine coincidence.”

  “Did you bring that information with you?”

  “No . . . I, uh, just read it online somewhere.”

  Tobias slammed his foot against the concrete floor and launched into his warning about the duplicity of coincidence. “I don’t give a fuck about coincidences unless they lead us to something real. The history of the world is draped in coincidence. That is what separates the brothers and sisters of prisonersofearth from the other mind jockeys trying to discredit the movement with unverified information. Do I have to spell it out for you? We must remain skeptical jurists. No, we must take every report and read it as if it were a lawsuit filed against us. This and only this is the way to escape the prison.”

  Joseph stopped listening. He was watching the newcomer behind Rose’s shoulder who had spoken once, clearing the graying blond hair from her face before retreating back into its shadows. Her features were small and fragile, with traces of makeup carefully applied to preserve the beauty that must have come to her naturally in youth. Not so unlike his mother, he thought, who had cut such a striking, fastidious figure in the hallways of the Catholic college where she taught—her own red lips and black eyes drawn with a surgeon’s precision amid her straight brown hair—that it took the deans far too long to suspect the fanatical lessons she was bestowing on her students. Joseph could see a fitted beige suit coat and, from behind Rose’s legs, two high heels that didn’t read of nights spent in a cramped tenement apartment memorizing heretical plots by disgraced history professors. The woman put her fingers to her eyelids as if they ached from an earlier strain. A small wine-stain birthmark peeked from under the collar of her shirt when she stretched her neck. She had the polish of money and social obligations. When she opened her eyes, Joseph tried to smile at her, lifting his eyebrows in empathy, but by then Tobias had stormed from his seat and everyone was getting up to leave. Joseph grabbed his bag, tripping over the metal chairs in his path, and saw the woman tossing a quilted black purse over her left shoulder. He felt some urge to follow her, maybe even introduce himself or at least watch her slip into the crowds that ascended up Broadway in the rush for the subway. She looked too sane to be here and maybe also in some other part of the city her life was simple and complete. Her presence made the group seem redeemable and also, by comparison, less so.

  He scrambled around the side table to make a break for the door, pushing by one of the college students who gathered leftover coffee cups into a ziploc bag. At the end of the table, he found a slender white hand covered in freckles opening to meet him. Disappointingly, the hand belonged to Rose.

  “You were staring at me,” she said, as she grabbed Joseph’s fingers tightly and held on to his thumb. He didn’t know how to tell her that he was looking behind her. “I appreciate you supporting me like that. Tobias can be terribly cruel, and I wouldn’t come here at all if he weren’t also so terrifyingly correct. But you know what I mean. I’ve seen you here. A few times.”

  “Nice to meet you,” he said, forcing a smile while once again looking past her at the woman in the beige jacket who was now retreating into the hall.

  “He’s really good about the pharmaceutical companies, too bad we didn’t get to them. I told him he should write a book. He says they’d try to kill him if he ever published anything they could trace.”

  He sighed and looked down at her, the poor hopeless woman with yellow teeth and corkscrewed hair going in every direction but down. She wore a pilled wool pullover, which left her skin flushed. She smelled of the smoke that clings to bedsheets.

  “What brings you here?” she asked.

  “Curiosity.”

  She shook her head.

  “You don’t have to lie to me. Something must have spooked you. Do you have a relative in the military? Did you meet someone on the roof of your building one night who said they were just fixing the cable? No one comes to these things, unless they’ve touched something invisible.” She coughed and wiped her mouth. “Do you know what that feels like? To touch something invisible?”

  “I really have to run,” Joseph said with a faded smile. “My friend’s outside.”

  “It feels like teeth on the back of your neck.”

  He glanced again at the doorway, disappointed to find no trace of the woman lingering behind. He now understood the real danger of these meetings. Lonely people came to them.

  “So, what’s your name, if you don’t mind?” she asked coyly. He might have read her eagerness as flirtation in any other environment than this one. “Unlike Tobias, I don’t think strangers tell better secrets.”

  “My name?” he replied, stalling.

  “Yes. I’m Rose Cherami.”

  He paused as she waited expectantly.

  “William Asternathy,” Joseph said, realizing how much William would detest counting himself among the lost company of prisonersofearth. But it was the first name that came to his lips. The lights went dark in the basement conference room, and Joseph scrambled past her, escaping up the stairs to the street. He hailed a cab and gave his address, watching the blurred sidewalk as the car traveled south into the quiet sanctuary of the Village. He could be Joseph again now, the simpler version, an actor with nothing to hide.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  GOOGLE DELPHINE KOUSAVOS. An Internet examination of her life comes down to three entries. One cites her and Madi attending an alumni cocktail reception together two years ago at Columbia’s Schermerhorn Hall in the Class of 1997 “What Are You Lions Up To?” pages. Another leads to a picture of her with Joseph at the opening of an independent film festival in Tribeca. It’s not a bad photo either. She’s standing next to Joseph in a cream Balenciaga dress with beige leather heels that elongate her legs, and her skin is tan from an afternoon lying in the Central Park sun. She’s not really the focus of that photograph, Joseph is, stopping in front of the flurry of cameras in the lull of far more famous arrivals. Isolate Delphine Kousavos’s career hits, and she appears on Google once. She’s listed under the junior staff for the Bronx Reptile Department, a title from which she was promoted a year ago to “staff,” although it had yet to be acknowledged on the zoo’s “About Us” pages. Del often used the lab’s communal computer on her lunch breaks to type in the names of lost friends and previous coworkers to find some clue of where their lives had taken them. But she sincerely hoped that no one from her past bothered to hunt for her name in return. Forget Google, she finally decided. Who cares about immortality in Internet space? Del refused to waste her free hours searching for herself anymore.

  She usually spent her lunch hour out of the cafeteria, preferring the luxurious frostbitten rooms of the “Animals of the Antarctic” exhibition. She waited the hour in the shadows, opposite the penguins mating on plastic ice floes and a baby elephant seal resting his chin on a pile of fish carcasses. Before the exhibition opened, even before the cooling systems had been turned on high, she enjoyed watching the set designers reconstruct the cold barren arctic in silver paints and mesh netting. Assembled out of high-school art supplies, this brutal Ice Age gave her a moment of peace as if she had temporarily slipped beyond the reac
hes of the clock and its slow count to closing time.

  Del had never ridden the African Safari Train that threaded the entire geography of the zoo, but she knew enough about the institution to promise, after her first month there, that she would not remain bound by a working visa and a critically low paycheck for more than a year. “I know when I’m being taken for slave labor,” she had confided to a colleague from Louisiana who was the department’s authority on water moccasins. Her friend eventually quit after being bitten not by a snake but by an inner city youth caught spitting in the crocodile pond. That was seven years ago, and Del was still in the same exact place. She had not told her boss, Dr. Abrams, that her visa status had changed in recent days, and he had naturally not noticed the ring. Abrams did not notice how late she stayed at night in the department lab balming the cracked epidermis of a diseased corn snake named Welbutrin. In fact, all Abrams ever noticed besides her thighs and breasts was the disproportionate amount of time she spent mothering the rattlesnakes.

  “I hope those notes are for our files,” Abrams would say, creeping up behind her to try to catch a glimpse at her notebook. “Because I’m sure you’re aware we have a policy against independent studies. I don’t need to tell you that it’s not in the interests of the animals here to double as guinea pigs.”

  “No, you don’t,” she’d respond, snapping her notebook shut.

  “We’re a team in this department,” he’d lecture, grabbing his raincoat from the communal rack. “It doesn’t matter what college you went to. We all abide by the same rules. They’re maintained for the safety of the collection.”

  In her years at the zoo, Del had perfected the fine art of the sarcastic smile, which, if executed properly, punctuated every sentence with “asshole” just before the period. “Have a wonderful evening,” she said, smiling.

  In the late afternoon, Del returned from fake Antarctica, pressing send on a text message to Madi: “I need the number of that green card specialist ASAP. Losing my mind.” Madi swore she had the contact for the best immigration lawyer in town. As Del barreled through the darkened rooms of the reptile hall, she felt the vibration of a reply: “Sending now,” Madi wrote. “Want me to phone in a bomb threat?”

  Del hurried toward the staff door marked DANGER LIVE LAB in the carpeted black shadows of the exhibition hall. She avoided eye contact from visitors who often stopped anyone wearing a canvas jumpsuit to lodge a complaint about stroller accessibility or to demand detailed explanations on the feeding procedure of carnivores. Del used her hip to open the heavy metal door, and the bright fluorescent lights of the lab scrambled her vision. She pinched her eyes, and that was when she heard a scream rising from the inner offices.

  Not a soft scream, not a token gesture. A scream that meant what it sounded like.

  Del rushed down the hallway, broke through the lab’s set of swinging doors, and saw five of her coworkers slowly backing away from something on the other side of the center island. Her eyes then passed to Francine Choi, standing glued to the far wall with her left leg raised almost to her stomach. The scream came from Francine, and her mouth had kept the shape of that cry, with eyes open so wide her black irises were marooned in lakes of white. Something was keeping her frozen there. Del whistled at Kip, the playboy of the junior staff with his vertiginously stiff red pompadour. He turned his head and mouthed, “Get the shovel.”

  Del lifted the heavy, steel shovel from its wall hook and held it upright, gripping the handle, as she darted around the island. There Del saw what everyone was staring at, the beautiful four-year-old western diamondback, curled in a writhing figure eight on the linoleum floor, her head coiled back in the pre-striking rhythm less than a foot from Francine’s ankle.

  “I can get her with the hook,” Del said, about to drop the shovel, but Francine screamed again—almost angrily now, because she must have guessed that Del would rather save this animal, this particular specimen of any other in the entire collection, than lose her if there was any chance of recovery. The diamondback’s neck jutted backwards. That move was unmistakable. It’s the backfire just before the bullet leaves the barrel. Del could feel her own heart rip inside of her—fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, no, no, no—as the snake’s fangs arched out from the lower jaw, and the neck hurtled forward. Del swung, crashing the shovel’s weight down on the diamondback’s head. She had no choice.

  The blow shattered the skull, her mouth oozing puss and broken teeth across the linoleum. The shovel fell away from Del’s hands. Francine’s left sneaker returned to meet her right one on the floor.

  “Oh my god, Del. I’m so sorry,” Francine wailed as she tiptoed around the dead snake and fell against the chest of one of the older keepers. “I was just holding her. I wanted to feel the babies in the stomach, and she dropped.”

  The fact of the babies came to Del in a flash. Leto was seven months pregnant, not the prize of the department, but Del’s favorite and the subject of her many notebooks intended to be used one day to create the backbone of a book on rattlesnake mothers. She stared down at the snake’s bloated body on the floor and dropped to her knees in front of it, pushing away the tears that clotted her eyes.

  “It started striking. You had to do it.” Francine looked around at the other keepers for support. “That’s code. Well, she had to, didn’t she?”

  Del glared up at her.

  “Why were you holding her without a hook?” she yelled. “Why were you holding her at all?” But Del didn’t wait for those answers. Her fingers massaged the soft, limp stomach, still wet and glistening with the pattern of sand-blown diamonds, feeling for the pouch of eggs in the oviducts. Even with her fingers shaking, Del knew what she had to do. She would try to save them. She would try to rescue the embryos trapped in the uterus that, even if alive, would never find their own way out of their mother by themselves. Kip reached over the counter and handed her a scalpel, and she sliced Leto down the side, cut the damp distended belly open, and wedged her fingers inside.

  “They’re coming,” she said to Kip. “I can get them.”

  Ten babies were cut from Leto’s side in ten minutes. Ten frail slivers lying like ribbons on the linoleum floor. Nine dead fetuses to be burned in the zoo incinerator along with their mother, according to code. But one, at the breaking of its egg, bright as a yolk, slipped gradually from its sac and started breathing, a mere three inches of black cord. Del lifted the baby with her fingers into a small plexiglass terrarium that Kip held out in front of her. “Be careful,” she warned him. “This one has all the poison he needs already in his cheeks.”

  When Del stood up, wiping the snake’s amniotic fluid off her hands and staring at the baby coiled at the bottom of the clear container, the tears returned. She didn’t know if the tears were for killing Leto or for saving something counted as lost. She looked around for Francine, but the young zookeeper had disappeared, running for fresh air outside in the park. Kip stretched the department phone, tethered to its extra-long cord, over the counter and handed it to her. Suddenly she was speaking to Abrams, who was demanding a full account of the matter and belching in anger over the loss of a specimen.

  Abrams didn’t congratulate her. Instead he railed on about the canker of his dwindling staff, Francine Choi. Had she not followed regulations? Had she not heeded the signs, learned the drill, used a metal clamp instead of bare fingers to transport a viper? Didn’t she know a pregnant mother was particularly susceptible to distemper? Did she know what kind of politics were involved with killing an animal on zoo grounds? “It’s an embarrassment,” he moaned. Del considered ratting out the young keeper who had entered the department a month ago and had since failed in pretty much every way possible. But her allegiances were not with Abrams, not even in this moment of silent acknowledgement that passed over the telephone. She knew that Francine was an immigrant too, brought over from Korea on the promise of an American visa. Once they have you, they have you. And if you mess up, there’s the airplane home.

  “It didn�
��t go down like that,” Del replied, trying to sound impartial, even though Kip was already wrapping Leto in a plastic tarp with her nine dead infants. “It was an accident, and there was no way of saving her. I’ll talk to Francine about it.”

  He said he’d see her Monday early. He’d want to inspect the baby himself.

  When she hung up the phone, Kip grabbed her by the arms while he made the sound of an arena-sized roar.

  “You’re amazing, you know that?”

  “I killed an animal that belongs to the zoo,” she replied tiredly. “I’m not feeling too exhilarated right now.”

  “You know what’s funny? If this were any other department except maybe insects, we’d be on the news. If you shot a pregnant tiger, the public would care, and there’d be red tape for days.”

  “I cared. Leto was mine.”

  “You should have let her take Fran out,” Kip joked. “One good bite would have taught her a lesson.”

  “Shit, what time is it?” Del searched her pocket for her cell phone. “I have to change. I’ve got a date.”

  “I thought you already had a boyfriend,” Kip said, while fondling her hand. “You trying to make me jealous?”