Lightning People

by Christopher Bollen

  It feels as if everything in the universe is just barely holding together, as if those tiny glass pieces only assembled for a little while to form a cup and decided to break apart again on their own. That’s when Katherine starts to cry, not so much for the nation or for Kennedy or even that skinny runt Oswald, but for whatever is holding together in herself.

  Trip touches her chin, lifting it with the side of his finger and then takes aim and kisses her.

  His hands wrestle open the buttons of her Oxford shirt and start twisting the metal spoke of her bra. She grabs the bottom of his T-shirt, slipping it over his head and feeling the rubbery skin of his back. His fingers touch her left breast, and, with the other hand, he finishes the job of removing his shirt, tossing it to the side, and smiles down at her. She leans back onto the floor and gets a look at his body, the blond hair of his chest descending like a stream over his abdomen. She touches his shoulders, grooved with small scars, as his knees push her legs apart. He is shivering, his arms pocked in goose bumps, his chest puffing in and out. She is terrified if she lets another few seconds of stillness move between them, she’ll lose her nerve and stop. So she lifts her hips, pinches the elastic of her underwear beneath her skirt and pulls the white silk material down until it expands between her thighs. Trip swivels back on his knees, pushes the underwear the rest of the way to her ankles, and then, without bothering to unbuckle, snakes out of his pants. Soon his body rests on top of her. He holds his weight with a right arm anchored just above her head, and she can hear his teeth click back and forth as he fills her mouth with his tongue. His penis slips under the pleats of her skirt as she blends her fingers into the curls of his hair, the way hairdressers measure the length before cutting. Only one thing can happen next, and she doesn’t cry when it does. Why has it always been described to her as a loss?

  Joseph’s mother imagined losing her virginity to an artist in Paris or a university professor on a college excursion through Rome. She loses her virginity on the carpeted floor of a weekly rental in the neighborhood where her own cleaning lady goes home every night to cook dinner for her kids. That is as exotic as Cincinnati has to offer a seventeen-year-old, and, anyway, she is deeply, grossly, morosely in love.

  Katherine returns to Trip’s apartment three evenings each week, strips down to her underwear, and soaks up the filthy stench of poverty, all the nicks and grit staining the walls and dirtying the carpet squares. She washes her hands with the scab of soap in the kitchen sink and then descends upon Trip, whom she likes best when he doesn’t shower because he reeks of sweat and lumber, the wilderness of men who build garage additions and third bathrooms, skylights and gazebos, in her part of town. When she isn’t with him or about to see him, her body feels as if it wears one of those iron blankets nurses throw over you for dental X-rays. And the only way to shed it is Trip Holbly, who once dreamed of being a pilot although his vision was too poor, who smiles patiently as she quotes feminist theory or prosaic love sonnets, who incuriously never shares her one-way-ticket runaway fantasies to European capitals, and who takes her to dinner when she receives a full scholarship at the University of Cincinnati, which means that she isn’t going anywhere. Katherine Guiteau is staying put.

  IN THE FALL of 1964, a rash of tornadoes sweep through the Ohio Valley and rip open the barns in the surrounding countryside like soup cans. Downed power lines inside the city limits kill two and set a mansion on fire. On the last day of the inclement weather, when the noon sky makes a horrific sunrise of purple and black, Katherine Guiteau and Trip Holbly marry in St. Mary’s Church to the mood music of warning tornado sirens and steeple bells. Katherine, in a white satin dress buoyed with crinoline and lace, is escorted up the aisle by her maternal grandfather, Dominic Garfield. The couple hosts their wedding reception in the vaulted marble undercroft whose corridors are named after Katherine’s grandfather after all of her grandmother’s donations. Aurelia, a white ghost in a wheelchair, who gave her granddaughter a pair of freshwater-pearl earrings to wear, is steered through the Tyson Guiteau memorial tunnel. Katherine likes to think of her grandmother’s nodding head as a sign of approval, although when she makes her way over to kiss Aurelia on the cheek, her hands and shoulders are also bobbing up and down. “You must always keep those pearls with you,” Aurelia tells her, squaring her gulleted eyes on the bride’s earlobes. “Some things have to remain in this family, understand?”

  Katherine teaches freshman history at a small Catholic college on the east side of town, while her husband tars driveways into gleaming black pastures for grazing luxury cars. Their own two-floor Queen Anne has the deceptive look of affluence as well, due to Trip’s skimming of unused construction supplies from job sites. He is responsible for the greenhouse addition that bubbles from the back and that inadvertently kills birds, sometimes three or four a day, which fly into the polished glass and collect dead on the porch, a mortuary of cardinals and sparrows and brilliant, suicidal blue jays swept into mulch bags on Sunday morning. He also draws a large dirt oval in the backyard, outlining the swimming pool he begins to dig by himself in 1971. Katherine is obsessed with committing the progress of the pool to film, with two years worth of shots of her husband disappearing into a hole in the ground, hands on a shovel, his torso glowing and an orange Cincinnati Bengals T-shirt tied around his forehead to soak the sweat.

  Their son crawls into their photos in 1973. Joseph Thomas Guiteau Holbly arrives like an ambassador of peace, bringing all of them together, a fat Buddha baptized at St. Mary with a diaper rash and green socks with crocodile teeth stitched along the toes. He’s the solid wrinkled future, the aftermath of astonishing love. Even Aurelia, who takes forty minutes to descend from her attic bedroom to the front porch, hails the child as a blessing.

  “He’s so little,” Trip says, bending over his mother-in-law Christine, who is bathing her grandson in the tub. “How do they make it to adulthood? He’s as fragile as an egg.”

  “Trip,” she whispers so her daughter won’t overhear. Katherine is upstairs grading exams in her study, covering test sheets with bloodstains from the red Sharpie she uses to correct errors on wars and generals, battles and court justices. “You must watch her. She doesn’t spend enough time with him. She shouldn’t have gone back to teaching so soon. He needs to be with his mother every second, not with me. He’ll come out wrong not having her around all day.”

  “He’ll be fine, Mom,” he replies. He calls her Mom—that’s how close this family has gathered together around Joseph’s arrival. “He’s going to turn out perfectly,” he assures her. “I won’t let anything bad happen to him.”

  DOES IT HELP to tear the world down before you go? To show what little there was to love in it and what unhappiness you found therein? Does that make the leaving easier? Aleksandra bent over Joseph in her bed. Her cold hands smoothed his cheeks, as atoms of dust swam through the cleft of light that broke from the closed curtains. She asked him—without a trace of sarcasm—an indecent question while he lay dressed in an indecent three-piece suit: if he died, what would he miss most?

  “I’m not going to answer that,” he said, folding his hands resolutely on his chest. But the macabre game had already started to play in his head so he answered to humor her. “Travel. Going places I never got around to visiting.”

  “You’ll miss places you haven’t been? That’s a bit of a contradiction, isn’t it?” she said. “You’ll miss airports, vacuums of time. Is it possible for anyone to love an airport waiting lounge?”

  “No, I mean the getting there. I always wanted to see Istanbul. The flood of the Bosporus pouring around the boats. The clamor of markets.”

  Aleksandra shook her head. “Tourist traps smelling of goat shit and German BO. And that awful whine vibrating out of mosque speakers calling everyone to prayer. It’s a constant headache, that city.”

  “Okay, the Amazon. The Pyramids in Giza. The reefs cutting through the blue waters off Tulum.”

  “Malaria. Terrorist targets. Overf
ed tourists bubbling around just to startle the last tropical fish. Is that really the best you can do? You’ve lived for thirty-four years, Joseph. Give me something with teeth.”

  Her voice held out the challenge in the same manner that acting coaches used to implore him to deliver a line with more “gut,” and Joseph searched for a better impersonal answer. A personal answer would cost him too much.

  “Dreaming then,” he replied. “I’ll miss dreaming. Sleep.”

  She shook her head again. “Here lies Joseph Guiteau in the position he liked best.”

  “Alcohol. Getting slowly drunk as the sun dips. Feeling all worry spin away along with your balance.”

  “An evil drug with diminishing returns,” she sermonized, lying down next to him to stare up at the same patch of ceiling. “We all would have been stronger people with less of it. Are you really going to miss being reduced to nonsense?”

  “Sex.”

  “If it were ever really fulfilling, its greatest practitioners wouldn’t come off as starved.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Is that an answer or just commentary?”

  “Revolution, then,” he improvised, propping his head on his elbow. “Group dissatisfaction amassing in the street.”

  “Which one were you ever part of? They’re a nasty, nasty business.”

  “Movies. Books. Poetry. Bad poetry. Liking the things you know are junk. Consuming junk and smiling. Junk for junk’s sake.”

  “Commercials?” she suggested. “The ones you starred in? How about those? I’ll place them in the time capsule. You really want them remembered?”

  The chess game went on this way, each answer immediately and unequivocally devaluated like bad stock, as Joseph offered the smell of rosemary and the first cracks of dawn after a sleepless night, salted steaks, certain nineteenth-century paintings, Gandhi, wildlife documentaries, the ghost of the moon on summer days, even a grating Irish comedian known for vulgar pop shots about the female anatomy. To all of these vague, sacrosanct submissions, he received an instant critique of their non-meaning in the growing whirlpool of abysmal fluff. He went for high roads.

  “I guess I should say children. Children. But I didn’t get around to having any.”

  The answer produced a grunt. Aleksandra drove an instinctive arm against her belly and rotated on her side.

  “That’s the go-to answer. I’m afraid I can’t go to it either. Do you think you care more about the future of the planet if you’ve unleashed your chromosomes onto it? I wonder. Kids are a safe bet, though. Kindness is good. Loving others, it’s hard to dispute that.”

  “How about falling in love?”

  Aleksandra laughed. “More nostalgia, the worst, most malicious strain.” She stroked his cheek with her knuckles in consoling condescension, and her eyes hardened like she was dispensing some sage advice to the obstinately naive. “You’re trying to get back to those first times, chasing after the original high. And the older you get the more you find you’re just acting, and the part is a little less dignified and more unbearable each rehearsal. You’re an actor. You must know what it’s like not to believe your own lines.” Joseph was genuinely surprised by Aleksandra’s critique. Hadn’t it been love that kept her writing the pages of her script, trying to rescue her husband in words after he could no longer be rescued from life? She slipped her fingers under the lapel of the coat. Her fingertips softly followed the curve of his ribs through the wool vest.

  “I’m out of answers,” he said wearily. “You have such a delicate way of making it all sound so cheap. I didn’t realize you hated the world so much.”

  “Hate the world,” she repeated lovingly. She buried her face into his chest and then resurfaced. He could see the plumbing of blue veins traced around her eyes and the corrugated networks of wrinkles on either side of her mouth. They had not kissed again and had not spoken of it, but ever since that brief, inexplicable moment of affection passing between them, Aleksandra had become more solid and substantial. She was no longer the fragile woman who spoke in a quiet monotone as if always on the point of disappearance. Her hands continually rushed to keep hold of him as if to prove that he were still in the room with her, and he could imagine her as the woman she must have once been before her husband had been killed. The fear and paranoia that had clung to her in all of those weeks seemed distant like a bout of sickness. Maybe Aleksandra had just been lonely after all, trapped in a past that wouldn’t let her touch it, and she had accepted that loss as a permanent condition. Her need to touch him came like a sudden panic as if she wanted to ensure that she was no longer stuck in this hotel room, or this city, all alone. Joseph had not mentioned the letter she had received and neither had she. Maybe it was possible simply to forget. Maybe forgetting was the only rational way to deal with the past.

  Aleksandra blew a scant hair from her eyes and twisted on her side. “But really what is there?” she asked, stretching her neck until the wine-glass birthmark lengthened to a scarlet arrow. “What is so wonderful that makes forty more years of living worthwhile? You should just be happy with what you had. If we’ve achieved anything over animals, it should be a little comprehension that the triumph of existence isn’t simply surviving as long as you can. We’ll be forgotten, all of the beauty and difficulties will be wiped out of memory, and the struggle will all have proved . . . what? Food, sex, and vacations? Like our lives are postcards we send off to people who barely bother to read them when we die?” She shook her head and rolled over to let her jaw rest on his shoulder. He knew that she was tearing the world down for his benefit, and maybe Aleksandra was as aware as he was of how unconvincing she was at playing this part. Forgetting wasn’t an option. Aleksandra had already made it too clear that she was not the kind of person who could let go easily. Still, he pressed his hand over hers to thank her for trying.

  “Okay, my final answer is Ohio.” Before she could argue, Joseph heard the hesitant knock of the cleaning women at the door of the outer room, the slide of the card key in its sheath, and the whine of the supply cart as its wheels rolled over the carpet. Their job was to make the place look as uninhabited as possible, to clean up people’s messes until even the boarders returned to find a room that wasn’t their own. And that, of course, was a hotel room’s principle beauty. The Carlyle was limbo, beautiful, antiseptic nowhere, where life could go on not living itself out. It was the space-time equivalent of a hold button, and that’s why Joseph had learned to feel so ecstatically not at home here.

  “I’ll get rid of them,” Aleksandra said, crawling across the bed. There was one obvious answer that would have stopped the game with a single word. He could have added Del to the inventory, the one person whom he had rushed out of his life to marry and keep hold of when he could barely keep hold of himself, for a little while at any rate, for long enough to imagine that kicking violently would do any good. That’s what love is, he thought, kicking violently, getting off of the world that won’t let you go.

  “I want to change my answer,” he said, when Aleksandra returned.

  “Which one?”

  “All of them.”

  She stood over him, the lightness of her face collapsing into worry. Her eyes were as dark as footprints in day-old snow. She pressed her fingers against the shoulders of the wool suit—Ray Andrews’s three-piece suit with its gray vest buttoned across his abdomen, the jacket splayed open to reveal its purple silk lining, and his bare feet snaking out of the tailored cuffs. He had done that for Aleksandra, put on one of the suits that belonged to her husband so she could see it filled again. She said it brought her comfort, even if it were an ersatz Ray lying there with his mind on another wife. She climbed over him on the bed.

  “You do look like him a little bit,” she whispered. She squinted as she stared down at him, perhaps to trick herself into seeing Ray below her. “You breathe the same way, out of your mouth instead of your nose. I can remember it now.”

  There were two days to his birthday. Sex, malaria, chi
ldren, praying Muslims—that’s what the world was screaming with and none of it would be missed. He buttoned the jacket to fight a chill. Aleksandra smiled. There was still time for kindness. He would do that for her. He’d give her some comfort even if it wouldn’t last.

  ON A JUNE day in 1978, Trip is shingling the roof of a neighborhood bungalow, and the temperature is steaming past 103. There has been some fight among the workers, mostly Harley drivers with tattoos and ponytails and with kids living with ex-girlfriends’ relatives. There was a radio playing Bob Seger that one of the workers kicked off the roof. Trip tells everyone to take an hour off to cool down. He drives back to the house on his lunch break, parks his truck in the driveway, strips to his underwear in the upstairs bathroom, and removes his teeth. He dives into the pool.

  When the department secretary appears at the door of the classroom, Katherine has just scrawled “personal conflicts in the Bull Moose Party” across the blackboard for twenty delinquent summer students. The secretary’s face looks sallow behind the meshed rectangular glass, and she can’t get the words out. She waves for Katherine to follow her. Outside on the college lawn clicking with sprinklers, she manages “something’s happened.”

  Katherine learns it happened so quickly he probably didn’t feel it for more than a moment. But the coroner’s report finds water in his lungs as well as a ruptured artery, making it difficult to determine if he felt himself drowning, taking in water, while he struggled against the pain driving through his chest. The cause of death should be heart failure—or rather it should only be heart failure—but he died of drowning before his aorta could do him in. The next door neighbor, Mrs. Emily Gehlert, says that she never heard a struggle or a cry for help.

  The coroner says the heart would have burst anywhere—in a pool or in his sleep, lifting a hammer or lifting his son. The official report lists “aortic dissection,” a surge of blood released from the heart, opening a rip in the lining of the main artery. Death was excruciating but rapid, blood spilling into the open cavity as water fed into his mouth. The ICU doctors feel the need to press the point that the tear wasn’t caused by swimming, as if they are worried that Katherine might blame the death on her husband’s decision to swim alone in the backyard pool during a workday.