Lightning People

by Christopher Bollen

  You left so quickly. I remember so much about you that I’m worried I’ll forget. I can remember your smell—greasy coins in laundered pant pockets—but I haven’t smelled it in so long I’m not sure I’d recognize it. We still keep your chair at the dinner table. It sits there between us while Mom continues on with her perfect-family trip by making every recipe she clips from her perfect-family magazines. It’s weird without you, like one of us is missing. I had a dream last night that power lines fell on the house, and Mom and I could only walk through the rooms trying not to touch anything metal—not the doorknobs or the drawer handles or even the telephone because the electricity would climb through the wires and electrocute us. We had to stay locked in here forever, looking like any other house on the street except one wrong touch and we’d be fried. At the end of the dream, I just couldn’t stand it anymore and I finally went to open the door. Mom pleaded, “Please, honey, don’t touch. Please, you can’t, Katherine.” The worst part of the dream was when I put my fingers on the knob for the first time in all the months that we had been trapped inside. Nothing happened. The door opened. Maybe that’s what it felt like when you left.

  JOSEPH WOKE TO the sunlight. It poured through the window grates and created a diamond pattern across his bed. He woke with a jolt like he was diving forward, and now his body fell back with the heaviness of a fever. He fought the quick convulsions of his stomach. His fingers shook as he pulled the sheet off his legs, and his feet shot over the mattress, numb when they met the floor. Soon Joseph was on his back shivering again. He heard water running in the bathroom and called for Del, but the answering footsteps were too heavy to belong to his wife. It was William who walked into the bedroom freshly shaven and dressed in one of Joseph’s polo shirts still creased from the folds of the laundry.

  Joseph wished, as he closed his eyes, for a full pardon from having to deal with William. His friend had never been especially adept at sticking to the background, and he knew too much precious energy would have to be spared to keep him at a distance. Why did William have to show up now? he thought. But when he opened his eyes, there William was, even with his washed, uncharacteristic cleanliness, looking rough and obstinate as furniture. The tight, wide smile and, above it, two brown eyes staring in a farsighted squint, barely hid the exhaustion swelling underneath. William was trying to appear easy and light, trying and failing—that was what amplified the uneasiness, hard and dark. He held a glass of water and jerked it forward, as if he could not establish the proper rhythm of a gentle offering.

  “Surprised to see me?” he asked, too light, too easy. Joseph reached for the glass.

  “Yeah, I am. What are you doing here?” He drank the water down, feeling the liquid mix with the acid in his gut. “Aren’t you supposed to be in California?”

  William shook his head, as if that provided enough of an answer, and slapped his palm over Joseph’s forehead in the task of amateur temperature reading.

  “You shouldn’t worry about me right now, you should worry about yourself. We need to get you to a doctor.”

  “Get me a bucket.”

  William returned with the trashcan from the bathroom, placing it under Joseph’s chin in time for him to puke up pulpy, yellow fluid in four convulsive heaves. When his stomach settled, Joseph turned over on his side and rested his cheek on the pillow. But then he pushed himself up to make another attempt at getting out of bed.

  “Maybe you should stay put,” William advised. “Del snuck out at dawn. But I’m here. I’ll nurse you back.” William’s eyes tried to engage Joseph in a show of concern, but Joseph couldn’t shake the sense that a threat lay under that promise of nursing duties. To be honest, he couldn’t imagine a worse fate for an ailing patient. Perhaps his reaction was simply the residue of the last time he had seen William, spitting drunken insults at his party. “Do you want me to run to the pharmacy to get you something? You can’t take these kinds of illnesses too lightly. Trying to burn yourself out is going to put you in the hospital.”

  “What are you doing here?” he repeated, sitting on the edge of the bed as he gritted his teeth in preparation for standing. “I thought you were gone.”

  “Not yet,” William laughed, bending down to cup Joseph’s chin. “I changed my plans. While you were asleep, Del invited me to stay on your couch for a few days. Is that all right with you?”

  Joseph refused to believe Del had offered that hospitality on her own free will. William walked over to the dresser to toy with the lid of Del’s cedar jewelry box. He picked up a silver locket and inspected it before chucking it back into the box. If William was trying to demonstrate his ease in their apartment, he was doing so at the risk of uninvited familiarity. Sometimes it was difficult not to take intimacy as a threat. Joseph searched for the proper response to get William out of their apartment while still preserving some semblance of kindness. The truth was, Joseph hated the fact that William had set up camp in their home. He had hoped for time alone with Del. Only in the last few nights had they begun speaking to each other with the same warmth they had shared before Madi’s death.

  “It’s just bad timing because of what’s happened,” he started to explain. “And now Del quit her job, and I’m really sick. Maybe you’d be happier in a hotel.”

  William crossed his arms and glared at him.

  “You know I figured you’d say something like that. Actually I thought you’d find a more eloquent way of putting it. Maybe ask Del to get rid of me while you were a few blocks away having lunch.”

  Joseph saw the hostility forming on William’s lips, and he waved his hands to clear the air.

  “That’s not it,” he said with a sigh, exhausted from the need to provide an explanation. “This place is just tiny, that’s all. Del and I already trip over each other when we’re here alone. I just thought you’d be more comfortable—”

  “I am comfortable,” William yelled. “I don’t take up much space. Look, I only need a few days, just to get everything sorted. Then I’ll be out of your hair, and you and Del can fuck and hold hands and try on each other’s clothes all you want to. Is this really how you treat a friend who’s taken so many bad bullets the last couple weeks?”

  “William, you’re always taking bad bullets,” he replied. He gathered his strength and began to ascend on shaky legs.

  He steadied his hand against the doorframe and stumbled into the living room. William followed behind, watching the skinny body shuffle in front of him with skin as pale as crane paper. Joseph headed down the hallway to the front door without another word, expecting his friend to be right behind him. But when he turned, he found William standing in the living room with his tongue digging into his cheek. William jerked his head back, his eyes searching for something underneath the bed. Joseph knew William was the kind of person who would take liberties to search through other people’s possessions, and it frightened him to think what William might find under that bed. He pictured the metal box wrapped in a towel that was shoved under there. That fact almost convinced Joseph to open the door and to wave him out. But he turned into the kitchen, rifled through a drawer, and reappeared with a set of keys hooked around his finger.

  “Here’s our spare,” he said. “I’m not walking too well. If you aren’t doing anything for the next hour, will you help me get somewhere?”

  William hesitated in the living room, as if he anticipated that the offer might suddenly be withdrawn.

  “You want to go to the doctor?” he guessed.

  “No, I’ve already been to doctors.” Joseph weighed whether a confession could be trusted on William. If he felt a single degree healthier, he wouldn’t have risked it, but already his muscles ached, his lungs burned with air, and he wanted to go back to bed and pull the covers over him. “I have to go to the Carlyle. Only you’ve got to promise you won’t tell Del.”

  William stepped forward and took the keys from Joseph’s finger.

  “I’d be happy to help,” he said, cracking his lips in the swee
test smile that his training as an actor provided. “Your secret’s safe with me.”

  It took an hour to get out of the apartment. William helped Joseph out of the shower, wrapping a towel around his hips, and held on to him as he stepped into a pair of pants and slid a sweater over his head. The sweater was too thick for the mercury of August but warm enough to control his shivering. “Come on,” William said encouragingly, as he steadied his friend by the waist and led him down the stairs to the sidewalk.

  “I can walk on my own.” Joseph pushed away William’s hands. He stopped for a minute to lean against a neighboring rail post. “I’m just dizzy.”

  “Of course you are,” William agreed, refusing orders and returning his hands to his friend’s waist to keep him moving. “You’ll be okay in a few days.”

  Joseph didn’t respond, he just nodded and continued down the sidewalk toward Park Avenue. They were walking so slowly, people stepped into the street to bypass them. William waved his arm on the corner and caught the first cab. He ushered Joseph into the back seat so gently, even racing around to the other side of the car so he didn’t have to climb across the seat, that Joseph was glad he hadn’t disappointed him by asking him to leave. They were still friends. Their love for each other still mattered.

  “Carlyle,” William yelled through the glass divider. “You want me to wait for you outside? I don’t mind.”

  “No, don’t wait,” Joseph whispered. “You have the keys.”

  “Why are you going to the Carlyle? Is it for an acting job?” William kept his tone light to prevent any trace of anger that could be detected in his voice.

  “No. I have to meet a friend up there.”

  “A woman?” William asked.

  “A friend,” Joseph repeated. “I don’t want Del to know because she doesn’t need to be bothered right now.” Joseph cleared his throat to change the subject. His eyes widened to punctuate the sincerity of his next words.

  “William, I want you to know that you can still ask me for help if you need it. I mean that. I realize things have been tough for you lately. If there’s anything I can do . . . ”

  William ignored the hand unclenching on the seat between them, opening like a vulnerable offering. He turned his head to look out the window as the cab accelerated through midtown.

  “Too late for that,” he replied.

  ON THE SEVENTH floor hallway of the Carlyle, the pain in his stomach was already receding, and his chest eased its tight grip. Health, some last warm jet of it, was returning to him now. He had kept tears from his eyes the entire cab ride up to the hotel, but now they were quickly spilling out. Aleksandra opened the door wearing a cream silk dress that amplified the birthmark on her neck. Her dry, washed hair waved down her cheeks, and she pierced her lips at the sight of him as if forming a contracted W—what, who, why.

  Joseph threw his arms around her. He pushed his chin across her collarbone, and a whine exploded from his mouth so sharp it might have cut through any part of him had it not found a way up his throat.

  “I told you once that the pain would come,” he said into the darkened room behind her, where a single floor lamp with a green shade burned, filling the air with a soft tortoise glow. “I told you it would happen. And now I’m afraid it has.”

  HE SAT ON THE SOFA. Aleksandra knelt on the floor in front of him, pulling off his shoes and pressing her thumbs into his arches. He threw his head back to follow the curling leaf molding on ceiling. “I could just be sick. It might have nothing to do with my heart. But what if it is my heart?”

  Aleksandra stared up at him, nodding her head like she agreed with each opposing claim.

  “It’s okay,” she whispered softly. “Do you want to go to a doctor?”

  “I’ve been to doctors. I’ve been all my life, and they don’t find anything. I’ve been to five this year.” Joseph’s body was shivering.

  “Are you cold?” she asked. He nodded his head. She rose from the floor and disappeared into the bedroom to return with one of her husband’s suit coats. He slid it around him and bundled the thick lapels at his throat. The smell of jasmine and mothballs and old newspapers drifted around them.

  “Sometimes,” Aleksandra said calmly, “I sit in on those meetings and listen to all of the conspiracies hatched over 9/11, all because two buildings can’t collapse in perfect verticality. Just like Kennedy and the time required to fire two consecutive bullets. That’s what all of those theories are based on—the impossibility of their occurrence. Like if you restaged them there’s no possible way they could happen like they did.” She cupped his hand, her voice strangely soothing like a mother telling a child a comforting story. “But one day it occurred to me that despite all of the slicing and dicing that conspiracists do just to demonstrate the details don’t add up, if you did repeat those events, they wouldn’t happen again as they did. But the conspiracists have it wrong. That only proves that they did happen just the way we’ve been told. I realized that their very impossibility is what makes them real. They aren’t exceptions to reality. No, they’re perfect examples of it. If you take any event and isolate it, blow it up huge so you can study its slightest grain, there’d be a million tiny impossibilities worming every which way across the landscape, all the unlikely variables, all of the unaccounted-for seconds, all of the chance collisions falling too perfectly into place. That’s what life is. Even you and I, sitting in this hotel room together right now. It’s impossible that we’re here together, and that’s why it’s real.” She stopped talking and placed her hand on his chest while she studied his face. “You want me to tell you that you’re crazy to think what happened to your family will happen to you. But I can’t.”

  Joseph reached his arm around her and rested his fingers against her shoulder.

  “Then what am I supposed to do?” he asked.

  Aleksandra smiled and wiped her nose slowly with her knuckle. “I think you should tell your wife,” she said. She didn’t look at him when she said this, perhaps understanding that such advice would render her less necessary to him. “You should tell her the truth.”

  “I can’t,” he replied, dropping his hand in his lap. He tried to hold the air in his lungs in an attempt to calm his nerves. “It would destroy what we have. It would ruin everything.”

  Aleksandra leaned back with a sigh and wove her fingers through her hair. The pale green light softened her skin.

  “You sound like Ray,” she said. “I don’t think he ever wanted to tell me. He thought I’d be disappointed in him. Like if home were kept free from the trouble he had gotten himself into, then there might still be a place to breathe.”

  Aleksandra shook her head as if to wrench herself from the memory of her house in California. She stood up and walked slowly across the carpet like she was carrying what remained of Ray’s memory in arms that crossed at her waist. Aleksandra’s back was to him, and she swayed from side to side as if a song had come unleashed in her head. The work of mourning never gets finished, Joseph thought. There is always more to be done. She crossed the room and stopped at the lamp, collecting the chain in her fingers.

  “It’s ugly, isn’t it?” she said before turning the light off. “All that humming gets to you. Most people can’t hear it. They can’t hear the current moving in the walls. That’s the reason I go to those conspiracy meetings. They can hear it too. I went back this morning to prisonersofearth.” In the darkness, the curtained windows lit up white like the underbelly of a fish. Aleksandra was a dark column in the center of the room. Her silhouette was black and smooth. The only sound was the constant whirr of the air-conditioning, breakers of an ocean heard from far away. Joseph could almost imagine that he was swimming underwater, moving through soft, cool currents even as he sat on the edge of the sofa. He seemed so far from that crowded apartment in Gramercy that awaited his return.

  “Why did you go back to the meeting?” he asked.

  “I guess I missed hearing the connections. I missed the adrenaline of those kin
ds of questions. It doesn’t matter if it’s about electricity or satellites beaming your every move into a microchip or even 9/11. I’m just glad not to be the only person who hears the current in the walls.” She looked over at him with two wet black eyes. “Your friend was there. Rose Cherami. She asked me about you. She still thinks your name is William.”

  “Does she?” he laughed.

  “I told her I found you. But I didn’t tell her your real name.”

  “Aleksandra,” he started and then let a second travel between them while he phrased his question carefully. It was a question that had as much to do with him as it did with her. Their stories were invading each other, overlapping, braiding together by a common thread, as if the death of Ray Andrews, so long dead, were relevant to both of their lives. “Do you ever think it might have been easier for you if Ray never told you the truth?”

  She walked noiselessly toward him across the carpet. In the darkness, she looked vague and watery like a gathering of particles, a million atoms coming in and out of focus, teeth and bones and soft palms, almost there but on the verge of vanishing. He could walk through her, swim into her, he could drift.

  “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe it would have been easier to believe that he just shot himself. It would have been harder at first, but it wouldn’t have destroyed me too.”

  “Then you see why I can’t tell Del. ”

  She leaned down and placed her knuckles against his cheek. The ice of her skin woke him. “Have you ever thought that in the great evolution of Homo sapiens, we’re still only inefficient early drafts? We’ve adapted to the planet, but we still haven’t developed the proper equipment to deal with loss.”

  The work of mourning is never finished. There’s always more to be done. Aleksandra curled her fingers around the collar of her husband’s coat, titled her chin, and kissed him on the lips. The kiss wasn’t sexual. There was no ransack of hands to lead it beyond what it was. It was an acknowledgment of the life left in each of them, the small fragment that wanted to go on.