Lightning People

by Christopher Bollen

  “Like I told you, he’s been sick.”

  “At one such meeting, he must have spoken with a woman named Aleksandra Andrews. Does that name mean anything to you?”

  Yes, he knew who she was.

  “She asked me about your friend. I’m afraid I gave her your name. She was so insistent about finding it out that I couldn’t but be suspicious. You see, my parents live in Langley, Virginia, near the CIA headquarters. I knew who she was. You don’t specialize in corporate conspiracies without remembering every name that gets thrown around. I looked up the suspects. I even printed their pictures out and tacked them on my kitchen walls. That helps me to remember, living with them, treating them as ordinary as furniture. That’s how I remember faces so well. Her husband, Ray, was a minor player in California deregulation a few years back. I’m not talking about skimming a few dollars. I’m talking about billions when you think about reformed energy policy that would undermine any governmental control.”

  “So?”

  “So, anyone could see it if they paid attention. He’s a dead ringer.”

  “A dead ringer? Who is?”

  “Your friend. He’s a dead ringer for her husband. I knew in my gut that was why she asked about him.”

  “Rose,” he sighed. “I’m not following.”

  She licked her teeth. The lovers of secrets have ravenous mouths when they’re about to reveal impossible facts. They want the moment to slow down perpetually until the announcement is forever a second from leaving their lips. She lifted her eyebrows in pronouncement.

  “Ray Andrews was found dead in his car a mile from their house on the Pacific Coast Highway. One shot to the left temple, a revolver in his hand.”

  “Suicide,” he deduced as if she needed the simplification.

  “Suicide was the eventual conclusion,” she said. “Self-administered gunshot wound. The going theory was that he was complicit in corporate fraud and couldn’t live with the humiliation when it got out. But that wasn’t always the working theory, and it didn’t sit well with most investigators on the case.”

  “You think the government took him out? Or the energy companies?” Now he understood why Joseph felt obligated to visit Aleksandra. She was a half-crazy recluse trying to come to terms with her husband’s death.

  “It wasn’t a suicide,” Rose bulked, chewing on her blistered lips. “It was murder. But most of the investigators didn’t think it was any sort of conspiracy, not the kind you’re talking about. The CIA got involved for a little while because of Ray’s deep connections in Washington. Covertly of course. I have . . . let’s say I have family connections. I have evidence.” Rose shook the manila envelope in her hand. “The detectives thought Ray Andrews’s death wasn’t a hit, either.” She stopped and let the hush build around them. William arced his neck to encourage her to continue. “They thought Aleksandra Andrews murdered her husband. She shot him in the driver’s seat to make it look like a suicide.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Ray was going to go public, which would have wiped out all of their money and put them in the center of a very unseemly scandal. It’s so simple really. Aleksandra Andrews got rid of her husband before he could talk.”

  “You’re saying she murdered him and made it look like a suicide?”

  “The investigation team could never prove it. You can’t go after a grieving widow who’d make it very uncomfortable in the press. So eventually they buried it. Do you hear what I’m telling you?” William did. Crystal clear. “It’s not a conspiracy,” Rose said. “It’s just a murder. Why else would that woman leave California so quickly and move all the way across the country where no one knows who she is? She did it. And she didn’t get caught.”

  A smile must have been the last reaction that Rose expected to greet her confession but that’s what she received. William tried to hide it in the palm of his hand.

  “Your friend is in trouble. That’s why I’m here. I wanted to warn him.”

  “Why?”

  The question spooked her. She rocked backward and covered her stomach with her arms. “Because I liked him. Because I don’t want anything bad to happen. What do you mean why?”

  Laughter. Hideous, delicious laughter. He knotted his tongue to hold it down. Joseph, stupid, blind, unlucky, asshole Joseph. “Poor Joseph,” he said. Rose nodded her head in agreement.

  She handed him the envelope.

  “Give this to him. It’s police reports and all the public records I could find on the investigation. Anyone can find this information if they dig hard enough. Just make sure he sees it. She’s not going to admit anything, but you need to warn him. That’s all I’m here for.”

  Rose left the conference room without saying good-bye. She disappeared down the hallway and into the elevator, where she returned to the street to blur into the anonymity of nine million isolated people, guilty or innocent, who could say? No one could tell by looking at them. That woman he had met briefly so long ago at the Carlyle had killed a man and made it look like a suicide, just as William had done to Quinn. William was no longer laughing as he stared down at the envelope in his hands. Guilty or innocent: those roads wove and braided before departing in opposite directions, and it began to seem like utter chance which route anyone ended up traveling down. He and Joseph had been like brothers once, and some last fragment of that friendship stopped William from throwing the envelope in the trash as he exited Touchpoint for the last time. Maybe he would save Joseph from the sickness that awaited him. Or maybe he would just sit by and watch a man who had been given everything find out for himself how easily it was to fall.

  CHAPTER THIRTY - EIGHT

  JOSEPH’S PARENTS MEET the day after John F. Kennedy died. They meet smoking cigarettes in Alms Park beyond a ridge that dips into an awning of trees carpeted in cigarette butts. When the trees are empty of summer, glimpses of the Ohio River sparkle through the branches. The day after the assassination the branches are only half empty. Christine drives downtown to handle her grief in a mourning mass at St. Peter in Chains Cathedral. Her daughter goes to smoke. She goes with her best friend Melinda Nordstrom, a short, lava-haired girl with skin the color of raw bacon from the bitter November winds. They lock arms as they navigate the hard mud and spiked branches, leading them to a stewing circle of teenagers, making efforts not to cry.

  It feels good to be out of the house. In the house, the television never turns off and the phone rings constantly, as news on top of news on top of news creeps its way from Dallas. Katherine is surprised they haven’t blown a fuse in the last twenty-four hours—as if the country’s newest demonstration of collective mourning is to turn on everything that has a power switch. On the street, people move so slowly it almost looks like they are walking backward, maybe just a few days into the past. The white sky threatens ice but remains blank, like even it is unprepared to release an official statement. That leaves the hands of teenagers, snug under armpits. That leaves teenagers rocking and smoking and glancing at each other distrustfully but still with some quiet knowledge that the world has changed and they are going to be left to make sense of it. They mostly look abandoned, refusing the goading reassurance of their parents, instead choosing to gather together free of supervision, and now lost without their parents’ unwanted consolations.

  “Give me a cigarette,” Katherine says, opening her hand, while Melinda digs through her straw purse for the goods. “And a light,” she mumbles between pursed lips.

  Katherine knows some of them, the regular smokers who skip out on afternoon classes from other Catholic single-sex schools, as well as a few expats from public high schools whose silent brooding has always been mistaken for toughness, simply because they don’t have religion raining down on them all day at school; spirituality must be replaced with knife fights or race riots or whatever goes on in those godless, dress-code-less halls. And there are others here too, an older crowd already out of high school, not bothering with college, returning to the scene of the
ir younger experiments as if unready to let go and become permanent old people. It is one of those who taps Katherine on the shoulder and, when she turns, strikes a match that nearly singes her eyebrows.

  His name is Trip Holbly, already a man at twenty, with curly blond-brown hair that takes on a pea-green varnish in direct sunlight. There is no sunlight this afternoon, so his blond-brown hair curls over his ears and pokes from between the chrome snaps of a denim shirt. A trim, blond mustache lifts as he smiles, revealing a hole right in the center of his upper bridge, where two incisors and a canine should be. He cuts a gorgeous figure. To her he is not so unlike one of the marble saints in the church her mother is attending. She nervously sucks the flame he offers through a filter, as she tries not to stare.

  “What happened to your teeth?” she asks, unable to resist looking at his face any longer. His eyes are the navy color of her school-uniform skirt. His cheeks are a patchwork of dark freckles over faded ones. Dirt is a prettier makeup than foundation and eyeliner, and that’s why men always have the advantage in beauty.

  Trip Holbly’s laugh only amplifies the hole in his teeth. He takes a step back and lurches forward, swaying on the heels of beat-up brown work boots.

  “Knocked them out,” he says. “Just yesterday. I was doing a job on a roof, and when I heard that news come over the radio, I slipped. Fell two flights and landed on a bed of wood beams. When I came to, my teeth were lying next to me. Our president gets killed, I almost followed after him. I spent the day in the hospital getting stitched up.”

  Katherine nervously rubs her neck, impressed by a man who could speak so casually about losing something as essential as his smile. Her own teeth are chattering, because something frightening is going on with her heart. She giggles and stops, hating the dumb, girlish noise she makes, especially as everyone else around her is staring mutely into the distance. Thank god for the cigarette, which she plugs in her mouth and takes a slow pull, feigning confidence, feigning cool, while her whole body shivers like a door caught in the wind that doesn’t want to close.

  “So that’s it, huh? They couldn’t sew them back in?”

  He smiles broadly, as if to emphasize the point. “That’s it. No more solid food for a while. But don’t worry. I’m not going to keep looking like I can only eat applesauce forever. They’re making a retainer for me, so I can snap them back in til you won’t be able to tell. I don’t know why, but it feels kind of fated. Like I’ll remember the day always.”

  Melinda nudges Katherine’s shoulder, pointing to a corner where a blanket gathers some of the girls from school, one of them sobbing so hard that she is collapsed in a stretch.

  “Come on, Kate,” Melinda says anxiously.

  Katherine can hear the stories weaving through the trees already, Walter Cronkite breaking into As the World Turns, Jackie with blood on her suit, the principal’s voice bursting in on the classroom through the PA speaker and the teacher turning as white as chalk—all the details of yesterday, which brings a fresh wave of tears to her eyes. But she doesn’t want to sit down and cry with the smokers of St. Ursula. She shakes her head at Melinda. “I’ll be there in a minute,” she says. She turns to Trip Holbly, who is peeling a callous on his thumb.

  “I’m sick of those girls,” she says. She has never had to act brave before and is impressed by the credibility of her own performance. “Do you want to take a walk? You can see all the way into Kentucky over the ridge.”

  Out of his long, gray jacket, Trip Holbly has large biceps and skinny legs. His forearms are covered in cobwebs of fine blond hair. And Katherine, leading him to her favorite view of the river, is already wondering what it must be like to kiss a man with missing teeth.

  JOSEPH’S MOTHER FALLS for Trip Holbly on the spot. She later blames the decision (that’s what she called it, a decision) on the vulnerability and confusion of that week in 1963. But to look at pictures of him then—tall and unpretentious, with fresh muscles hatching on his body, with an honest crooked smile that comes from not expecting too much—it’s obvious the attraction is physical. To be fair, though, she’s right. Katherine Guiteau’s generation never fully digested the sorrow of that weekend. It collects in their stomachs and bowels like sediment, flaring up whenever conversations turn to the events surrounding November 22. For Katherine that weekend also carries radically different associations, which haunt and later chisel away at her sense of balance. A bridge connects Kennedy’s death to the moment she fell in love, and it is with some degree of shame that she looks at photographs of the First Lady gritting her teeth through her lace veil or the eternal flame bobbing in Arlington and thinks of Trip, slipping his arm around her waist and pointing out boats in the brown slate water that rushes under interstate bridges. She keeps the copy of Life with the stills from the Zapruder film, examining the whirl of pinks and silvers locked in nuclear greens, politicians the shape of movie stars, as if the insanity in those images turns into flowers under her eyes. She studies them alone in her bedroom with the door locked. There is an exotic glamour to those pictures, to the center of the world the size of an open convertible. Because her own life has contracted to a single frame as well, the shape of a construction worker raised in the countryside who lives in a factory neighborhood ten-minute’s drive from her own. She knows to be ashamed of her thoughts, even as she searches newspapers for photographs of the funeral march, of Oswald’s murder outside the police station, or of Jackie waving graciously at Love Field. She hides those thoughts the way she keeps the copy of Life hidden under her mattress—the hot pornography of falling in love, the kind that blows her world to pieces, while everyone else stands around not entirely aware that what is happening will have unimaginable consequences.

  Trip picks her up from school in a red mud-splattered truck four days later, the passenger seat cleared of tools and his smile fixed. He opens his mouth wide so she can judge the dental patch-up job for herself. They drive to his apartment in silence.

  The three railroaded rooms on the second floor above a hardware store are badly carpeted in thin maroon scraps that fit together unevenly, occasionally revealing brown linoleum where the carpet cuts away at the foot of the oven or the refrigerator. The heat ticks from an organ of old metal pipes, and the windows are lit in white frost. A gritty bar of soap curls like dry leather in the kitchen sink. Katherine notices that it is caked in black resin. He must spend his evenings washing tar from his fingers. There are no pictures hanging in frames, although the walls are punctured like a star map from a previous tenant’s attempts at a home. A pencil sketch of a fighter jet hangs on the refrigerator door by a magnet. She wonders if it is an interest in warplanes or in drawing that brought him to trace it.

  He pours two glasses of water from the tap; one a chipped coffee mug that he keeps for himself and the other a crystal green glass with no visible set mate in the cupboard. He offers it to her with a surprising lack of embarrassment. In fact, it is Katherine who is suddenly embarrassed, aware that it is the trapping of her privileged background that instantly regards the crudeness of the cup, and too quickly she tries to correct her response. Trip smiles, now guessing the inadequacy of his apartment for a girl like the one in front of him. He follows her into his living room and apologizes for the mess.

  She pretends to appreciate the cracked plaster walls with their dust-covered molding, as if inspecting the room for domestic possibility. The place feels lonely, shadowed in slants of late autumn sun, dank with mildew and rotted wood. Crumbled brown leaves drift in the corners.

  “Is it your first apartment?”

  “I’ve only been here three months. It still feels new. Are you sure you’re okay here?”

  “Yes, I’m sure.”

  “I can drive you back.”

  He reaches his hand out to comfort her. She unzips her coat with its soft lamb’s wool lining and hooks the collar on his open fingers. The heater is failing for all of its effort, but sweat pours from Katherine’s neck and she has the sudden urge to dip he
r head out a window to let the cold wind rinse her face.

  This is the first time she’s been alone in the apartment of a man; an apartment, not a house with barely concealed parents in her Hyde Park neighborhood; and a man, not a boy from one of the local academies nervously pinching trophies and sports gear as if to confirm that one day, with enough patience, he will grow up to be one. She turns to examine Trip, standing still in the cold, bare light like an organism she can’t quite identify in biology books, and it takes all of her courage not to ask him to drive her home. Her stomach cramps and a rush of focus keeps her legs from buckling. Every event in her life before this one has felt controlled, by god or nuns or her own mother or even the government, which until now has always appeared to her as efficient and reliable as god himself. But Trip Holbly is a force outside of those safe lairs.

  He leads her to a clear plot of carpet in front of a black television set and unbuttons his flannel coat, flailing as he pulls the coat’s arms inside out. She sits on a bed pillow neatly disguised inside of a wool throw and tries to check her appearance in the television’s blank screen.

  “Do you want me to turn on the TV?” he asks.

  “No,” she says, turning away from its reflection. She has watched so much television over the last few days, and each time she turns a channel there is new information, new news, new plots overtaking the last ones that have not yet been resolved, new funerals, new deaths; she is terrified to find out what she has missed by spending a day in class. She wants to be terrified by something else, and she is, her heart racing, her fingers fluttering toward her teeth. She sips the tap water slowly, while Trip yanks his sweater over his head, leaving him in a white T-shirt with a gold chain swaying a small crucifix side to side. She thinks of these seconds as if they exist on television, the seconds before everything goes crazy, the possibility that something else might happen, a million things, although only one will. Katherine reaches to put the glass on a wood side table and it slides straight off before she can catch it, knocking against the heater pipes and smashing into pieces on the carpet.