Lightning People

by Christopher Bollen

  TRIP HOLBLY (GUITEAU), 1944–1978, 34,

  HEART FAILURE (BY DROWNING), CINCINNATI

  THOMAS GUITEAU, 1923–1959, 34,

  HEART FAILURE (SEE BROTHER, VINCENT), CINCINNATI

  TYSON GUITEAU, 1894–1928, 34,

  HEART FAILURE, CINCINNATI

  JOHNSON GUITEAU, 1867–1901, 34,

  HEART FAILURE, CINCINNATI

  JOSEPH THOMAS (HOLBLY) GUITEAU, 1973–2007?, 34?,

  HEART FAILURE?, CINCINNATI?

  Not martyrs of coincidence, these names that Katherine prints across the dry-erase board in her study. Not saints or sufferers, these Guiteau males that she clatters out on her electric typewriter, pausing before adding the additional question marks on her son’s entry. Each is a link, a ruler of time, a pixel in a pattern that crystallizes faultlessly through the years. The fact that Trip is not a Guiteau by birth does not negate the design. It only suggests to this tenured history professor that a larger law is in effect. Dates are her expertise, her religion, identifying a necessary plot point in the procession of events. Katherine grows her hair long until it touches her waist. She puts on her makeup every morning and irons the wrinkles from her blouses and skirts. For a long time she does not speak aloud about the chance pattern of those names and dates, but they weigh in her mind until she can’t sleep, creeping down the long hallway from her bedroom to Joseph’s to stare in at him in the dark.

  The opening lines of her first and only book, Chain Reaction: Premonitions by Historical Patterning, read as follows: “To believe that history is a dice throw of coincidental actions that could have gone any which way is to accept chaos as the governing principle of life. Let’s suspend chaos theory for the sake of thinking logically. Reader, don’t fall into the illusory trance that time is moving pawns without intent.”

  Two planes crash in a field. In the first case, all on board die. In the second, everyone survives. For most, the difference rests on the impossible variable of luck. For Katherine Guiteau, the results are rational—the movement of the wind, the speed of impact, the pilot’s responses under duress, a fate that can be figured. Trip Holbly’s death did not depend on a ripped aorta or the inability to breathe under water. She sees history doing what it does: fulfilling a promise no one else has the perspective to comprehend. No coincidences. No random chances.

  It is hard to isolate the exact moments when Katherine Guiteau’s belief in a strange, invisible hand guiding the universe starts to impact her university lectures. At some point her personal fear of all of the men in her family triggers a reevaluation of all historical events as a coded pattern. At some point she takes the world for a system, each death for a clue. The bookshelves of her study once held the wonders of histories and atlases, biographies on capitalists and convicts, minutemen, and Donner survivors. But slowly these chronicles are lost to new titles that come delivered in brown wrapping paper every few weeks by UPS: Assassination Theory; Kennedy and the CIA: Who Knew?; Lincoln’s Killers; Lee Harvey Oswald: From Moscow to Mafia; The Calibrations of Poker. The outdated orange wallpaper of her study is tacked with stills of the Abraham Zapruder film, atomic greens and gun grays caught in pixilated freeze frame.

  “We came together because of this,” she tells Joseph one afternoon as he stares tentatively at the photographs. “Did I ever tell you that? You owe your life to what happened down there.” When Joseph tries to resist this birth rite, she stands behind him, swirling his blond hair through her fingers. “We know things that we don’t even realize we do,” Katherine says quietly, almost as if the riddle is a soothing gesture, a mother’s voice. “We’re so used to looking at them day in and out, we forget that they have anything left to show us. But we see it. It’s only frightening because it offers something that will change us.”

  Chain Reaction is published by a small university press in 1990. At the moment of what Katherine believes to be her greatest triumph, her validation of several years of rigorous intellectual labor, the deans cancel her first day of American History II. Arriving to her classroom, she finds not students but campus security. They escort her back to her car in the parking lot without allowing her to collect her personal items.

  This final humiliation, this sentencing of an overactive mind chained to a history that no one wants to hear, proves her final break with the world. Two small but searing articles in the morning paper expose her heretical teaching practices as a perverse form of religious mania. Joseph’s civics teacher, an ancient Jesuit priest who continually applies Vaseline to his lips, places the clipping on his desk and shakes his head. “I won’t bring this up with the counselors,” he promises. Katherine Guiteau followed that signal cliché of history—those who forget it are doomed to repeat it—but it doomed her for finding it there.

  Katherine remains in her darkened bedroom with all of the lights off, the blinds pulled over the windows, the alarm clock by her bed unplugged, and leaves it only to gather her husband’s possessions that have blended into their own over the years. She collects them slowly in her nightgown, ignoring Joseph as he follows her around the house asking her to stop. Coats, ties, winter boots, wallets, condoms, an assortment of arrowheads, the grocery bag of junk mail, and everything else in her immediate line of vision. She brings them out to the backyard, climbs the hill with her slippers muddy and her long fur slung over her shoulders and drops them into the pit where Joseph’s father once burned fall leaves and summer nettles. She pours gasoline and lights a match, watching the smoke waft over the house and tunnel upwards into the January sky. Katherine Guiteau disappears. She strings thick wool over every upstairs window to keep the sunlight out. She doesn’t even leave her bedroom when the wailing alarms of tornado warnings tell her to take shelter in the basement. Joseph sits on the edge of her bed and talks to a woman he can barely see. She reaches for his hand in the dark and holds it, her skin soft and warm and safe. She rubs the calluses on her son’s palm and smiles. If he ever mentions the possibility of her venturing out of the house, maybe just a walk for fresh air, she wrestles her hand away and turns over on a pillow.

  FOR THE MOST part Joseph avoids her bedroom. He lives like a teenage bachelor, playing host to his grandmother, Christine, who visits on weekends and pretends that her daughter’s psychosis is a passing phase. School life at his all-boy’s Catholic high school: Choir Boys with BMWs and Attention Deficit Disorder, or some other title of an after-school special that doesn’t explain the daily lull of punches and communal push-ups and acne-stained necks splitting out of white oxfords lassoed with St. John’s regulatory poly blue tie. Joseph has a few friends, enough to fill a cafeteria table, enough to cheer him on at dress rehearsals playing Tom alongside a talcum-powdered girl shipped over from St. Ursula cast as his mother in The Glass Menagerie, or a Caiaphas tied with pillows around his waist in St. John’s all-male review of Jesus Christ Superstar (a whorish freshman with long red hair wins hearts and, unfortunately for him, minds as Mary Magdalene). Joseph picks theater because it is the extracurricular that eats up the most hours after school. But he also chooses theater because it allows him the temporary escape hatch from being Joseph Guiteau. Off stage, Joseph has a quiet laugh that terminates his sentences as if he isn’t fully committed to the words he speaks. He is tall, his cheeks are blotched rash red, and his scraggly blond hair is shaved on the sides and sprouts roughly into a rumple of bangs.

  Joseph usually learns about raging weekend house parties that involve live, sexually curious girls on the Monday morning after the fact. For obvious reasons, friends rarely receive invites to slumber parties at his house, and like every other American high school, St. John’s exists on a reciprocal trade economy, so he is rarely invited in kind. The few friends who do make their way through the doors on Arcadia Avenue never see his mother, largely because upstairs is off-limits to guests. He often tells friends that his mother has an incurable blood disease. He tells them that she is afraid of people. In both cases, he doesn’t think it a total lie.

  In the end
, he leaves. He wants to get away from the house and its ghosts and all of the men chain-linked to the years written beside their names. He goes where no one knows the history of a death-prone family. He follows that great summer migration of losers and misanthropists on their flocking journey to coastal cities on the promise of bright-light anonymity. He leaves at eighteen, after his graduation pushes him across the stage in tasseled penny loafers and a blue cap and gown. He has already received his acceptance letter from NYU, arriving like a prize plane ticket from a nonsensical game show called College Admissions Roulette. His grandmother takes his picture by the hood of her car in the parking lot.

  At least Christine Guiteau is there to care for her daughter. At least she understands.

  “Don’t go,” Katherine says in the blackness of her room. Only scant flashes of light burn between the vertical blinds above her bed. She has begun reading books again, but she can never finish more than a few chapters before turning to another in the hope of starting out on a higher spirit. “Or do,” she reconsiders. “But don’t go far. I’m sorry I wasn’t the mother you deserved.”

  He tells her that she has been. He tells her that he loves her. He tells her that he isn’t going far. He lies to her as he holds her warm hand on the edge of her bed.

  “You know, there’s nothing wrong with you,” he finally says after a long silence, and they are left staring into the dark shapes of each other. “Even if you’re right about me, that doesn’t mean you can’t go on.”

  “I hope you don’t believe that,” she replies. As Joseph stands up to go, she places her hand on his knee, so softly that, for a second, he merely mistakes it as a final sign of tenderness. “I have something for you,” she says. “It isn’t anything really. It’s these earrings that belonged to your great-grandmother. She gave them to me for my wedding. I know you can’t use them. But maybe you can give them to someone when it’s right.” She lifts herself off the mattress and digs through her jewelry box with amazing precision. It occurs to him that her eyes must have become supernaturally accustomed to see in the dark, and that maybe she had been able to look at him clearly all along. “It’s important,” she says, pressing the two pearls into his palm. “Please take something. Something more than you’ve already got.”

  Joseph leaves Cincinnati with pearls and his father’s teeth. The pearls fit in the holes between the teeth on the retainer. He gives the pearls to his first serious girlfriend in New York, who loses one to the lawns of Central Park and the other to the drain.

  The teeth remain in a box under his bed. They remain there next to a gun.

  ON THE MORNING of August 19, Joseph turned thirty-four.

  He wore Ray Andrews’s three-button suit to greet the sunlight pouring through the hotel windows. He placed his hand on his heart to feel its metronome under thick Italian wool. Aleksandra coiled next to him on the bed, her own dress rumpled from sleep. She was already awake, rubbing the tiredness from her face and consulting her wristwatch on the nightstand.

  He had no intention of sleeping over. The evening pulled down so fast he couldn’t even remember closing his eyes. But he had a distinct physical memory of Aleksandra’s arms covering him through the night. He had wanted to be home for his birthday, to meet the anniversary straight on, to wake up in his own bed with Del at his side surrounded by the comfort of his own belongings.

  He tried to lift himself up but his muscles collapsed under the weight of heavy lungs. He clamped his fingers over his eyes and gave in to the weakness, falling back against a mattress damp with his own sweat. He looked over at Aleksandra, her skin pale and grooved from the pillow, and his voice came out hoarse like it had grown stubble in the night.

  “I have to get back,” he said. “I have to go home.”

  Joseph wiped the sweat from his forehead and tried to breathe, but the walls of the bedroom seemed to close around him. His lungs weren’t filling with enough air, as if Aleksandra, her face now inches from his own, were stealing the oxygen from the room. Rain drizzled on the windows. Even the honking traffic on Madison Avenue seemed acutely aware of wasted time. He leaned forward to swallow, and Aleksandra pressed her hand on his chest as if to help him inhale.

  “Thank you for staying over,” she said softly, nervously, breaking up her words with pockets of air. “I know you didn’t mean to. But it was a comfort to me.” She grabbed his hand and placed her fingers inside of it. “I never got to say good-bye to Ray. So it felt like tricking myself into having him here again. For one more night at least.”

  “You’re welcome,” he replied, not entirely honored by the sentiment. Aleksandra looked older in the morning light, like the hours of sleep had taken an exhausting toll. He couldn’t shake the feeling that she might have stayed awake in the night just to watch him—to see some earlier version of her husband. Joseph pulled his hand away and stopped himself from telling her that this morning would be the last time he could visit her. In his mind he was already hailing a cab to Gramercy, climbing the five flights of stairs to his apartment, opening the door, and crawling into bed with Del. He was already back there, surrounded by the familiar objects that he had somehow managed to compile in sixteen years of living in New York.

  “I want to show you something,” she said and climbed over the side of the bed to open the white dress box on the floor. She returned with a small plastic bag in her hand, which held a simple gold ring. “When the police showed up at the door, they told me Ray was gone. Gone, like he had taken a plane somewhere, like they had lost sight of him on the highway. They wouldn’t let me identify the body. They said he’d have to be identified by dental records since the gunshot destroyed his face. I begged the detectives to let me see him one more time. The dead aren’t dead until you see them that way. Those officers were right: they’re just gone. After the investigation ended and the detectives finally ruled it a suicide, they returned some of his effects. Brown shoes, his ring, a wallet with all of his credit cards still in their holders, the St. Christopher medal he wore around his neck. I spread them all out on the dining room table and examined each one to find a single drop of blood. They said there was blood everywhere, all over the front seat, blood and brain matter and splinters of bone.” Aleksandra placed the plastic bag down gently on the bed and bent over it. She looked up to invite Joseph to inspect it, but he didn’t want to. She placed her fingertip softly on the edge of the band. “Do you see it?” she asked. He wasn’t looking. “It’s so small. Just a little speck. The tiniest drop. That’s all I have left of Ray. The smallest trace of blood to prove he was more than gone.”

  “I have to go,” he said urgently. “I have to be home.”

  Aleksandra gazed up, half-hypnotized, and her face suddenly crumpled as if his words only made sense to her now.

  “Stay for a few more minutes,” she said. “Don’t go yet. There’s a surprise for you.”

  “No. I have to.” He waited. “Aleksandra.” He didn’t look at her. He couldn’t watch the imperfect good-bye pass between them like two people waving on opposite sides of a car window. But there was no more time to spend mourning for Aleksandra Andrews. There was no more time to mourn for anybody else. Why had he not found her endless grief so frightening all along? The way she studied the ring sent a chill up his back, and all of his memories of Aleksandra holding her husband’s photographs, suit coats, and even the pages of her script seemed tainted with the same specks only visible to his wife. “I can’t come back here for a while,” he said. “I have some things to deal with.”

  “But you will come back?” she asked. Joseph kept his eyes on the floor to prevent looking at her face, but he could hear the anxiety crowd her voice. “Just promise me that you will.”

  “Yes. I promise. But not for a while.” He waited to say one more thing—Aleksandra, I can’t be your husband anymore—but she was already crawling across the bed and leaping onto the floor, where she rearranged her dress over her thighs.

  “Just another minute,” she said. “It�
��s a surprise.”

  She hurried to close the curtains and darted out of the room. He could hear a cabinet open, the clink of metal, and an empty box dropped onto a table.

  Joseph unbuttoned the suit, pulling himself from Ray Andrews’s sleeves. He shed the wool pants, slipping them from his legs by yanking the cuffs. He stripped off the vest, flailing his arms free. He found his jeans on the floor and pulled them up to his waist. Quickly he grabbed the plastic bag that contained the ring and held it up against the sunlight. There was no blood on the metal, not a single drop.

  Joseph saw the light beating into the shadows, orange flares carving the blackness. “Are you ready? Close your eyes,” she said as she neared the bedroom. He didn’t close them. Aleksandra stood in the door frame carrying a birthday cake on a plate, thirty-four candles like a small bonfire over the white icing that swirled with blue roses. The flames lit her face. “Happy birthday,” she said, bringing the cake toward him. They were both breathing hard, in and out. Her face disappeared behind the runny candles beating long bobbing flames. She placed it under his chin, and he smelled the sweetness of burning sugar.

  “Thank you for coming back,” she said.

  CHAPTER FORTY - ONE

  RAJ STOOD IN the center of the gallery rubbing his hands. Now that he had made the artwork and hung it on the walls, he wasn’t quite sure what to do with his hands. He tried shoving them into the pockets of his pants, ripping out the thread that had sewn them shut. He tried holding on to an empty plastic cup that cracked down the sides from his grip. He tried pressing them into the eager handshakes of collectors and fellow artists who offered compliments like “masterful,” “seriously moving,” or “what a beautiful testament to your sister.”