Lightning People

by Christopher Bollen

  “You were right before,” Del said in the shadows of her hair. “It’s none of your business.”

  “We’re here for you,” Joseph said with a strained voice. “Why are you acting like this?”

  “Well, I’m not acting much these days at all, am I?” William couldn’t stop himself now. He had already sped past the warning flags and he was headed straight for the detonation. What difference did it make? He was leaving town. He could be honest with Joseph, and who cared if it was the last time they would ever share a room together? He didn’t need to hold on to him anymore, and the pity that filled Joseph’s face as he looked up at him increased the magnitude of every old grudge and quiet offense swallowed down with backslaps and beers. The music in the outer room was vibrating the bedroom walls, and that potent seed of jealousy deep inside of him, which too many drinks nurtured, began to vibrate as if looking to erupt. William was mistaking his rage for self-dignity, some part of him knew this, but adrenaline was racing through his blood. He wanted to get the deceitful nature of their friendship out on the table, so at least they both knew where they stood. “I want to know what jobs you’re getting. Then you and your wife can leave.”

  “Let’s go,” Joseph said as he rose from the bed. For a second they stood facing each other, the cold spray of Joseph’s breath blowing on his skin. Their lips were a few inches from touching, their eyes so close that the vision of each other blurred from lack of distance. William bunched his fists, but he considered throwing a punch for too long to reclaim the spontaneous courage it required. “Call me tomorrow when you sober up,” Joseph said. “You should go back to your party.”

  “You know what the problem with you is? You lack character.” William nodded his head to rev the thought, to sail it right through Joseph’s dignified departure when he was just getting started on the duplicitous nature of friendship. “You’re so sweet and quiet and, just look at you, helpful. My god, is there even a man inside that body?” He tried to grab Joseph’s ear, but his friend’s head whipped back and in another minute he had gathered Del’s hand and they were walking toward the door. “I’m sorry to tell you that,” he screamed after them. “But you make it too difficult to like you. You don’t try, and that’s not fair to the rest of us.”

  William found himself yelling at a slammed door.

  In the emptiness of his bedroom, his head spun, and the first flutter of guilt was extinguishing the anger that had caused him to destroy all of the promise of the night. Already an apology was forming on his lips. His balance knocked sideways as he tried to run for the door and he fell backward into the dressing room, crashing through the hangers and into the empty arms of blouses and coats and whatever else Jennifer had decided not to wear into her new life. He pulled himself up, bringing half of her wardrobe down as he climbed the clothes, and sprinted out of his bedroom to catch up to them. He hurried through the hallway, preparing his first words for forgiveness, but when he reached the front door, Joseph and Del were already gone.

  AN HOUR LATER, after a failed attempt to reclaim his earlier triumph on the dance floor, William squatted against the cold tiles of the shower while Diggs shoveled coke up his nose. Sweat poured down his cheeks, and his eyelids were creating film dissolves. Someone started kicking the door, as if at any second, those feet would be replaced with fire axes.

  William staggered into the kitchen and filled a glass with water. He listened to a rant about American politics between two British guys he didn’t recognize while bringing the glass to his lips. William could feel hives swelling around his Adam’s apple and resisted the urge to scratch. A chill ran through him, and the glass dropped in the sink where it cracked against the faucet. He wobbled back into the party. It had grown smaller in the last half hour, subtracting into couples that leaned against the walls. He wanted to kick everyone out, but it was already late and the end would come soon. The music was blasting in and out like someone was toying with the knob. Jesse punched him in the shoulder and said good-bye.

  “Stay, just for a bit longer,” William pleaded with his eyes shut. He steadied himself against Jesse’s arm. “I don’t feel well. Something’s not right. Something hasn’t been right for a while.”

  “You’re wasted. It’s two thirty. Roll with it. We’re all assholes after a certain hour. The trick is to think about something else. Think of a story, the first thing that comes in your head.”

  William tried to erase the shame he felt for the fight with Joseph. Tomorrow he would call him and apologize. He would beg forgiveness, he would send Del flowers—not because there was no truth in what he had said, but because there was no reason to leave a bruised memory of himself behind. He focused his thoughts on the first image that came into his brain, a sunken family room with a television set blaring through the Illinois sunlight.

  “Okay. A story.”

  “That’s right. Tell me.” Jesse coaxed. “I’m listening. Don’t worry about anything else.”

  “Did I ever tell you when I was a kid, all I did one summer was watch HBO?” He could hear people pushing around him quietly and knew they must think him far too gone to bother with a good-bye. He didn’t care. “I’d sit in our dark basement on the warmest days while every other kid was outside, enjoying the weather, making guns out of the lawn sprinklers, and throwing rocks at the cheapest cars. I’d be ten inches from the TV screen shivering in central air and watching any movie that came on. Really, the shittiest teen flicks and romantic comedies. They’d eventually repeat, and I’d sit there, memorizing the dialogue of all the parts until I got them perfect, and then, when my parents called me up for dinner, I’d try to use those lines on them.” William didn’t open his eyes. He was afraid his vision would scramble. He wanted to be the man he was three hours earlier.

  “That’s it,” Jesse encouraged kindly, holding on to his shoulders. “How did your parents react?”

  “I didn’t really care what my parents were talking about. I’d put in a ‘I don’t think love is going to save you from getting out of this amusement park alive’ or ‘How can you watch every man walk out on you and not wonder if maybe you’re the problem?’ The weird thing was, my parents would just nod and go quiet for a minute over their plates, like they were really considering what I said, weighing it for some insight to their failed paving company or the neighbor’s escalating divorce battle. Once I told my mother, ‘If you don’t see that the whole town wants you dead and try to do something about it, tomorrow you’ll wake up next to a vampire who only wants to rip your heart out.’” Telling the story was helping him. It was keeping him from passing out. It was cutting through the clouded thoughts.

  “How did she take that?”

  “She began to cry.” Spit burst from his lips. He started laughing hard, involuntarily snorting, even though he didn’t find what he was saying to be the least bit funny. His knees buckled, and suddenly the pressure of the lights stopped beating against his eyelids. The music skidded to a silence. William opened his eyes, and the living room was black. A long collective “ahhh” passed through the mouths of the few guests that remained.

  “We blew a fuse,” Jesse said, lifting William’s chin. But already he could hear other voices saying “brownout,” then “no, look out the window. The whole city’s gone.”

  William took Jesse’s hand and kept going with the story. He wanted to get out an apology before he lost consciousness. Electrical failures would have to wait. Manhattan would have to remain in the dark until he uttered one proper apology—one honest appeal for forgiveness that would stand in for all of the others.

  “Okay, story time’s over,” Jesse replied with a nervous voice. “We have an emergency. Seriously, man, get it together. Where are the stairs?”

  Matches and lighters began to crack the blackness. Bodies fumbled over chairs to locate jackets and purses, and the windows were opened to let in sirens and screams coming from the street.

  “Sometimes I think about calling them and saying that none of what I said
was meant for them. It had nothing to do with their lives. They were headed to divorce court no matter what. I mean, my poor mother. Did she start thinking all of Breeze Falls, Illinois, really wanted her dead? Even her own husband?” His laughing returned in harder waves, exploding up his windpipe from his stomach and out through his nostrils, and he bent over, wheezing out laughter uncontrollably, gasping for air as his entire body shook with painful joy. He clenched his hands around his stomach like he might throw up. “Wait. It gets worse.”

  No one had seen her enter the apartment, and if they had, most would not have been able to identify her. They would have taken her for a late arrival stuck on the twelfth floor of a party in its death throes. She wore a silver charm bracelet that caught the match light and dirty canvas sneakers that tracked beer across the rug. She held the receipt from the cab that had dropped her off in front of the building. She did not need to grope through the dark. She knew the layout of the apartment. Her hand slid along an empty shelf of missing curios as she passed.

  William slowly regained his composure. He tried to tuck his T-shirt into his pants, breathing evenly through his nose. He was all right. He wasn’t going to lose consciousness. He could resolve whatever catastrophe he had caused with a simple apology in the morning. Nothing could ever get so broken that it couldn’t be fixed. Then he turned and saw the face of a woman unspeakably familiar to him.

  Her eyes were wet as they stared into his. He wiped his mouth with the back of his fist, and it took him half of a second to connect this comforting face with her name, and in that half second, which felt like a piece of eternity breaking off its rock face, the impulse of his body moved to embrace her as his brain caught up and stopped him from reaching out.

  She stared at him, as he turned pale, the sweat shining on his blistered face and his lips dotted in white spit. He could hear a fire door opening in the outer hallway and the echoes of feet descending the first of twelve flights down. She said a word so softly it sounded less like an insult than a matter of classification.

  “Animal,” Jennifer whispered, almost as if she had said don’t worry or I love you or you’re safe.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  JOSEPH ROLLED OVER on the couch, opened his eyes and closed them, and opened them again when he felt the moisture of rain coming from the window. Candles pulsed in the fireplace. Del stood with her back to him in white underwear and the frayed tank top she usually wore to clean the apartment. The inside of his head felt jagged. His stomach lurched, and his fingers were numb on the coarse wool cushion. He shook his wrists to try to circulate the blood.

  “No electricity,” Del said, sensing him stirring behind her. “I can turn the radio on if you want. Most of the island’s out.”

  “All of Manhattan?” His mouth was dry.

  “Almost.” She propped her cigarette in an ashtray and stretched her arm out the window. “I think a storm is coming too.”

  “What time is it?”

  “A little after four. You passed out, and then the lights blew. If you think about it, William did us a favor by sending us home early. Otherwise we’d be stuck up there, nothing but us and miles of road flares.”

  Joseph tried to picture William’s party, a hundred people mashed together in a room that had suddenly gone black as if all of their enthusiasm couldn’t save the city from a shut down.

  “I hope William’s okay,” he said.

  “I doubt he’s too concerned about us.”

  “He was drunk.”

  “You give him too much credit,” Del said without turning around to face him. “You’re naive about William.”

  Joseph expected the anger, weighed and redoubled in the hour that he slept. Del hadn’t wanted to go to the party in the first place and didn’t appreciate the outcome. No one liked to be the sacrificial victim of somebody else’s drunken disorderly. On the cab ride home she leaned against the window, following the fast fragments of sidewalks in the late-night resolution that talking could too easily journey over into an argument. But still, as she stood staring into the blackness of Twenty-Second Street, he couldn’t help feeling sorry for William. “You can’t attack failing,” he said. “You can’t ask people to fail more quietly. That’s what failure is: loud.”

  “Shhh. Do you hear that? Listen.” They both concentrated on their ears. Joseph heard crowds screaming far off, like echoes of a stadium from across a highway. “They’re partying in Union Square,” she said. “The whole city’s out getting wasted, dancing in the park to the disco of police lights. The radio says people are stuck in the subways and in god knows how many elevators. That’s always frightened me. Being trapped somewhere way down while the world adjusts above your head. You don’t realize how truly helpless you are until something massive happens. Helpless and unable to do a single thing about it.”

  “Come here,” he said, reaching out to her. “Don’t be scared.”

  “I’m not scared,” she laughed. Joseph wondered whether she was laughing at the notion that the blackout scared her or that he might be able to protect her from it. “Actually, I kind of like it.” She pressed her index finger into one of the candles and let the wax harden around her nail. “Disasters have a cheap thrill, don’t they, before the real costs set in. There’s nervousness to them like nothing’s going to be the same. Only it always is.”

  Del climbed over him on the couch, her knees fumbling between his legs and her elbows pitting the cushions by his ears. She lowered her lips to his neck, and he pulled her waist against his own to prevent her from kissing him because he still felt nauseous. She wrestled onto her side and placed her hand on his chest.

  “You feel like an earthquake,” she said.

  “That happens sometimes in the middle of the night. It’ll stop.”

  Her breath smelled of tobacco, and shadows roped her face until only her eyes and cheekbones held the shape of her skull. She leaned in for a kiss, gliding her tongue over his own, and for a few seconds he tried to force out the dizziness and concentrate on her mouth, the eraser gap between her front teeth, the rutted plain of her palate, the lips that lost muscle against his own. Del kissed without having to breathe, as if she packed away oxygen for the long duration the way a climber packs air tanks before footing a mountain. But her knees clamped over his thighs, and her hand slid under the elastic of his underwear. He could no longer fight off the sickness. He pushed her away with his arm and rolled over on the couch to catch his breath.

  Del sat up, reaching for her rolling papers on the armrest. She pinched the tobacco along the groove in the paper and inhaled with deep purpose, as if setting up a chess move in her mind. He knew her sighs so well he could document her every mood by the intake of her breath. She lit her cigarette and held it out with her forearm resting on her knee.

  “Can I ask you something?” she said. He tried to get a glimpse of her face to gauge her expression, but the cigarette focused her features to the work of smoking. “Have you told your mother that we’re married?”

  “I told you before. I don’t talk to her.”

  “But it is strange. It is. Strange you never talk to me about your family. Strange I’ve never even heard her voice.”

  “It isn’t strange.” He climbed onto the floor and sat hunched over his crossed legs so that the candles wouldn’t shine on his face. The candlelight polished Del’s skin the color of honey and elongated the shadows of her eyes until they mixed with the darkness of her hair. He should have expected this sort of fallout. Sex would have been one way of repairing the break, confrontation the obvious other. He searched his brain for words that would fix the damage that William had done. “I moved here fifteen years ago,” he said. “Fifteen years now. So long ago I doubt anyone back there remembers me. You’re my family. Can’t we keep it at that?”

  “It’s just that I don’t know anything about her. I know you two don’t talk, but I have no idea why. If someone asked me the details of your family, all I could do is shrug. I’ve got nothing to say. N
othing,” she repeated worriedly. “Do you know how that makes me feel?”

  “Please don’t do this,” he begged.

  “Don’t do what?” She shook her head and took a hard drag on her cigarette to gather her resolve. “I’m your wife, remember? Last I checked I’m allowed to ask that kind of question. Jesus, is it so bad that you can’t even tell me?”

  Yes, it is so bad I cannot tell even you, he thought. It is so bad you’re the only person I can’t tell. Through their first months of dating, Joseph was thankful to find a partner who didn’t pry into every corner and question every silence, never demanding entry into the infinitesimal details of his life that he wasn’t willing to supply. She didn’t treat love like weigh stations on the highway, constantly measuring the load between distances for something out of check. But tonight William had managed to put a crack in that trust. He knew Del had suddenly understood the liability in not knowing her husband inside and out, that such ignorance showed an embarrassing lack of romantic detective work, that she had, in a sense, missed something necessary. And now Joseph couldn’t find the words to set her at ease.

  She stared down at him from the couch, waiting for him to reply, and he kept his mouth shut, letting the silence pool around them.

  “I’m not asking for every single detail,” she said.

  “Then what are you asking?” he replied, burying his eyes into his fists.

  “I’m asking you not to go mute when I ask you a question. I stood there while your friend asked me about your family tonight, and I had nothing to say. I felt like an idiot. Like I don’t even know you.”

  “If you feel that way, then why did you marry me?” he said in defense, gazing straight at her. He regretted the sentence as soon as it left his mouth. Del’s hands balled into fists, and her feet scrambled toward the floor.