Lightning People

by Christopher Bollen

  “You think I only married you for the papers, is that it?” she screamed, pushing herself from the couch with a fast momentum. “You think that’s what all of this is, just an arrangement?” But Joseph was already jumping to salvage whatever he could, grabbing her wrists and pressing her down on the cushions to keep her from running into the bedroom and slamming the door. She didn’t fight him. She fell easily, her eyes staring up at him like she was daring him to agree with her.

  “The truth? You really want to hear it? My mom’s not there,” he said. “Not anywhere. Do you hear what I’m saying? There is no Katherine Guiteau to talk to. There will be no flowers. No congratulations. No nothing. She’s lost her mind.”

  Del’s face crumpled, and thin strands of saliva roped her teeth. She knocked her head back and squinted her eyes. Her feet kicked against the armrest, but when he removed his hands from her wrists she kept them frozen in place.

  “I’m sorry,” she said curtly, the apology still tainted with bitterness. “Why didn’t you ever tell me that? God, Joe, it’s things like that, no matter how much they hurt, that I need to hear.”

  “There are reasons I don’t talk about my family,” he replied. Shame hit him even as he felt the returning peace of their lives together. Shame, because he had only told her enough to derail her questions. Not the full truth. Not the extent of the story. Here were the first small cracks, he thought, still so faint they might go unnoticed, but they were there, deepening and splintering in the air between them. He had seen in other married couples how silence turned in on itself, how it spoke of old provocations and broken pacts. For the second time since their wedding, a wave of doubt came over him. Maybe marrying her had been a mistake because he couldn’t give her all the answers. And it was stupid of him to think those questions would never come.

  He waited for Del to walk into the bedroom or to crawl over to him and rest her forehead against his shoulder. She did neither. They remained alone on their separate corners of the couch for several minutes, until pale traces of fireworks flashed across the windows. Roman candles were being set off on a rooftop a few blocks north. Some small incendiary pocket of joy would always rise up in this city even in its darkest hours, disturbing the sense that anything serious had occurred.

  “I’m sorry,” she finally said, reaching her palm toward him in reconciliation.

  “Please, Del. Just let it go.”

  AFTER DEL WENT to bed and turned against the wall, Joseph left the apartment and climbed up to the rooftop. The roof was sticky with tar and covered in brittle wet leaves from previous autumns. Cables snaked across the cement, and a plastic bag scraped back and forth, caught on a cord that tied down broken patio chairs. Two helicopters circled high over the island, darting their spotlights into the gulfs of the avenues. Their rotor blades ticked like locusts in the faint, hot wind. Joseph stabbed his heel on a spent nitrous-oxide cartridge. One section of the roof was littered with rusted metal shells, left by teenagers who must have shot whippets and watched the apartment towers cave around them as they laughed themselves unconscious. The fireworks were over. Besides the beams from the helicopters, the only light pouring through the city came from idling police cars and tiny bonfire flares marking lanes up and down the roads.

  This is how the island must have appeared to early explorers, a quiet, peaceable drift of dirt cut off from the mainland, as if the first settlers had wanted to get away from where they had started but were not entirely committed to the destiny of the huge new continent beyond it. Broadway cut the island down the middle, once an animal trail, retread by Indians, bricked and then paved and then lined in store chains by European colonists. In the darkness, one city—alive, adrenaline-pumped, unrelenting to any force of weather or hour, colored by every shade of idiosyncrasy—drifted into shadow, and another city emerged, heaps of steel and concrete jutting upward, dreaming arrogantly of value in height, no matter now if those owners of penthouses and balconies were marooned in their own sky hubs. The spikes and domes and jerry-rigged rooftop terraces chopped across the skyline in sporadic waves, and, below them, dark scaffolding braided together, home to the infrastructure of a billion dead switches and outlets. The sound the city made was of its residents screaming in the streets, as if celebrating their own sudden obsolescence.

  What if it never came back on? Joseph wondered as he stepped closer to the edge. What if the power was unplugged permanently? Within a week the city would be emptied, the richest refugees the world has ever known clambering across the bridges in despair, a mass exodus moving on and out like seeds blown across a country that had grown inhospitable to them. Within a week, seven days, this entire island—with all of its dreams and industries—would be deserted.

  It occurred to Joseph as he stepped closer, just a foot from the ledge, that New Yorkers had a reputation for being hard-skinned survivalists but were perhaps the least equipped with survival instincts of any lot in human history. Del said earlier that disasters carried the sense that nothing would ever be the same, only they always were, but she had been wrong.

  In 2001, Joseph had been living in a small studio on East Third Street, the downstairs neighbor to an elderly Polish woman whose husband had died of renal failure three years prior. She had redirected her love onto a fat, blue-coated greyhound who, frightened by the alien booms and smoke of the Word Trade Center collapsing, disappeared into the alleys of the East Village on the morning of September 11. For weeks, Joseph could hear his neighbor calling in the street for her dog. When Joseph tried to comfort her on the front steps, she shook her head and cried in anguish, “I never put a name tag on her. Even if she’s found, they won’t be able to contact me.” He had lost sight of this neighbor, although he heard her nightly rounds across his ceiling until the day she died eight months later. The firefighters broke down her door and discovered every item in her slovenly one-bedroom was pinned with a tag that read, IF FOUND, PLEASE CALL EILEEN KOWALSKI AT (212) 969-8704. HAVE A WONDERFUL DAY. Pots, fedora hats, a set of her husband’s dumbbells, weathered photo albums, even unwrapped bars of soap carried their own emergency contact label. And on the body of his poor upstairs neighbor, they found the same tag dangling from her St. Anthony necklace. Joseph had not thought Eileen Kowalski’s manic attempt to hold on to whatever she had an unusual response in the months after September 2001. Everyone in New York had been holding on, desperately, emphatically, because they had never before learned the valuable lesson of letting go. Now it seemed as if everyone—even Joseph—waited for some new horror to wake them, until then living out the last of their dreams. No one bothered to wonder whether those old dreams still applied in the aftermath.

  Joseph swerved back from the ledge and gave a final look at the darkened sea of buildings. To the west, a band of low, black clouds gathered, silent and sharp with rain.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  WILLIAM SHIVERED IN his blue parka as he rang the buzzer, trying to wipe the rain from his face with his wet hands. He had walked all the way from the motel on Fifty-Eighth Street that he had checked into at 4 AM, the hospitality desk lit with candles and the bald, horse-faced proprietor, with his beleaguered cross-eyes, shaking his head to payment by credit card. “Machine not working. Nothing working. You got to pay in cash. And don’t complain about no light. That’s city problem.” William noticed two framed newspaper articles on the wall behind the desk proudly calling attention to the fact that the drummer for a popular ’90s rock band had chosen this particular motel to empty thirteen glassine envelopes of heroin into his veins and die in the bathtub; such was the establishment’s foothold in local folklore. William had handed over three hundred dollars to unlock a black pool table-sized room, which smelled of disinfectant.

  “You lucky we still use keys,” the clerk had sniggered. “These fancy hotel with their swipe cards, guess what, don’t work with no power.” William threw down the bag of clothes he had managed to collect from the bedroom while Jennifer had patrolled behind him in the dark, demanding he
“get the fuck out” before she called the police. He had frantically searched for the cash collected from the party and found only 400 dollars on the floor by the bureau, a mercilessly small portion of the funds, which had, at some point, been stolen by one of the guests during the blackout. William had been on his knees, cursing god and blindly grabbing at the carpet for money, while his ex-wife stood over him screaming about the apartment and her rightful ownership over it, cursing herself for her foolish generosity. William had passed out on the motel bedspread without bothering to take off his shoes and was almost thankful the lights were still not working when he woke up the next morning at noon. At least it saved him from having to see his own face. He caught his reflection in storefront windows on his route to the West Village. Purple blisters crusted his cheeks, and a green hangover swelled his eyes and lips.

  Rain broke as he crossed Twenty-Third Street, intensifying into thick squalls that pounded his shoulders and laked sidewalks a few blocks later. Just as he made the turn onto West Twelfth Street, he heard cheers from the residents camped inside their million-dollar brownstones. Light flooded windows, alarm systems competed for emergency attention, a neon bar sign twitched on.

  As if by miracle, the power returned.

  “My god, what happened to you?” Quinn groaned as he opened the door. He was dressed in a midnight-blue robe and a pair of black rubber boots. “Were you beaten up by a street gang? Get in here this instant.”

  William accepted Quinn’s soft nurturing hands, guided through the backyard of decaying oaks, into the cottage, and onto the batikcovered couch to the chorus of his old friend’s sympathy moans. In a minute, he had tea warming his fingers and a patchwork throw shelled around his neck. Quinn pulled off his sopping shoes, and William almost cried at the gentleness of the action. Someone, he thought, still cared for him enough to warm his feet.

  “Jennifer finally kicked me out.” William decided not to mention the particulars of the disaster, not so much to cheat Quinn from the real story as to leave it dead and buried behind him, taking instruction from the series of bolts and chains that clamored across the door after Jennifer had slammed it shut. “I have nowhere to go.”

  “That bitch kicked you out in the middle of a blackout?” Quinn whistled as if impressed. “It figures. Never underestimate the cruelty of someone you once slept next to. They’re all vultures once you show them your weak spots. That’s why I never take all my clothes off when I have sex. It’s too vulnerable. They know just where to gouge you. Relax. Close your eyes. Did she have to attack you? I can see her nail marks. We’ll need to treat them.”

  William let his friend apply salve to his blisters, thanking him repeatedly as he tried to come up with the most delicate way of asking if he could crash in the cottage for the next few days. The downpour was beating on the roof, and a metronomic leak from the skylight made a puddle on the floor. Quinn pushed a houseplant over with his foot to catch the drip.

  “Can you believe that blackout,” Quinn said, dipping a Q-tip into the ointment. “They blamed it on a transmission failure. Some overworked breakers. This city’s falling back into the slump it was in during the ’70s, without all of the crazy people that made living in a disaster area so much fun.”

  “I have nowhere to go,” William repeated.

  “You’re lucky I’m even here. I was about to take the car upstate. I thought this power outage might go on for days, and best just to get the hell out, you know? Let the condo brats jam the Con Edison phone boards until they figured a way out of the mess. Do you want me to get you a mirror?”

  “I can’t stand looking at my face right now.”

  “Don’t worry. It’s still a good one.”

  “She wouldn’t even let me pack all my stuff. She just ran around, yelling about how she deserved to be happy. Do you know what she said when I asked her what would make her happy? She said, ‘You gone.’ She said, ‘This is where we end it. It’s time someone else paid for your messes.’”

  Quinn swiveled back to inspect his nursing efforts, then with a slow smile, squinted his eyes.

  “Then let it be the end of Jennifer too,” he said, clasping William’s hands. “You can stay with me for a few days. Until you get on your feet and find your own place. I’ll give you the extra key. You always have me. Remember the ones who love you, William. Then nothing’s ever really lost.”

  Thunder shook the walls of the cottage, and harder rain slapped the roof. Rivulets of water ran across the ceiling’s chipped wood beams. It seemed miraculous that this structure had managed to survive nearly a century without caving in on itself, reduced to a pile of mold and debris. Quinn filled the room with opera music, as he went to work clearing a corner of magazines and photo albums to make space for William’s bags. It occurred to William that he had always visited Quinn like he was performing a favor, a young man calling on an older, sicker one with the patronizing devotion of charity work. But Quinn, with his hairy white knuckles appearing from the sleeves of his blue robe and his bloated knees, now stooping to gather ingredients out of his mini fridge for the preparation of two hot meals, was not some ailing charity case. He had learned to stomach so many crushing blows and laugh right in the face of it. The cottage remained standing as if by Quinn’s insistence and would only collapse after its loudest, last resident collapsed first. So this is how you make it, William thought, too tired to help his friend boil water. Ugly, merrily, not demanding too much. Quinn quickly brought his fist down on a cockroach that crawled across the counter. William turned away and shivered under the blanket, not wanting to see the remains.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  A FEW DAYS before the blackout, Del had retrieved her old Nikon camera from the bedroom closet and loaded a roll of film. She had intended to start taking pictures like her lawyer advised. In the morning, when the electricity had not yet come on, Del picked up the camera from the kitchen table. She drew it to her eye and focused the lens on her husband who stood quietly against the window. She began to wonder what kind of photographs would make their lives together look meaningful and intertwined. She didn’t press the button.

  “Did you get me?” he asked while freezing with closed lips and hardened eyes.

  “No.”

  A call came in on Joseph’s phone. She kept the camera over her eye and considered dressing for work to find another means of getting to the Bronx as the subways still weren’t running. She wanted to take the day off. After their argument the night before, perhaps she and Joseph needed a day alone to repair the break.

  “Okay. Yes, I’ll be there,” he said into the receiver. He snapped the phone shut and watched her for a minute, as she continued to play with the zoom without pressing the button.

  “Take it or don’t,” he said.

  “I’m waiting for the right light.”

  “Otherwise you’ll have to wait until tonight.”

  “Why?” Del brought the camera down to rest on her hip. He was just a shadow against the bright rain pouring across the windowpanes.

  “A commercial in Brooklyn,” he said. “I guess the actor they hired couldn’t fly in last night. It’s a three-day job, so I’ll be back late.”

  “Do you have to?” she asked. “I’d rather you stayed here with me.”

  “This isn’t volunteer work. I have to take it. You’re still angry at me, aren’t you?”

  “I’m not angry,” she said, lifting the camera and taking a shot blindly without bothering to check the focus. “I never was. I just wish—”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” she replied. “Go.”

  Del managed to flag an off-duty cab that was willing to take her all the way to the Bronx for a special blackout fare of seventy dollars, which she figured, as they sped through Harlem, was roughly equivalent to her day’s pay after taxes. She tried not to worry about Joseph. What right did she have to demand facts and dates anyway, like her own worst INS case worker coming alive inside of their home? “Just let it go,” she said a
gainst the window, repeating Joseph’s own words. Bleeding, nausea, heart attack, cramping, vomiting . . .

  The Bronx had not lost power. Abrams shook his head at her late arrival, as if the story of a Manhattan power failure was merely an elaborate excuse to hide ingrained irresponsibility. Del changed into her uniform and took the stairs to the nursery, notebook in hand, to check on Apollo. She found him lying in his tank and assessed his skin, the elaborate brocade of diamond marks that flared down his spine, the dorsal imprint that defined him as a member of his subspecies and which he would carry for his entire life. The top layer of skin would shed for a brighter palette underneath, but he would never lose that particular patterning like his own unique fingerprint. A gassed white mouse had been placed by another zookeeper in the cage. She tapped her fingernail against the glass, hoping he would be driven to eat. Then she opened the terrarium and reached her hand a few inches above him, watching carefully for a reaction. His small spade-shaped head slid under her palm with his tongue whipping into the air to take in the molecules of her scent. This act was dangerous, a clear violation of zoo procedure, but she knew the first indicators of a strike posture, and her muscles moved with his own.

  Apollo was as venomous as any viper. Even a decapitated rattlesnake could still bite after its neck had been severed, fangs entering a toe and injecting the poison stored in its glands, a final payback in death. The only safe snake was one stiff with rigor mortis. It occurred to her that Leto had not stiffened when she performed the C-section. Del imagined the mother biting into Francine’s shoe, the way a woman in labor bites down on a pillow, while she removed the embryos from the fetal membrane. But, of course, Del had been the one to crush Leto’s head and shatter her teeth on the floor.

  She began to draw Apollo’s diamond pattern in her notebook, crosshatching the scales underneath the humming fluorescent light. She had not heard the door to the nursery open and almost jumped as two hands pried the notebook from her grip and began flipping through its pages.