Lightning People

by Christopher Bollen

  His gallerist, Mirabelle Petz, overdressed in a black vicuña gown, was busy distributing drinks and angry glances to the loud, drunk twenty-year-olds who had descended on the Thursday night opening. She looked over at him onerously, although he knew that it was part of her business to keep the young entertained and amazed. He returned her look with a frazzled smile. The truth was he was relieved that the greasy, pretty Lower East Side contingent had shown up in their dirty sneakers, ripped T-shirts, and proud, boisterous body odor, laughing and scratching what facial hair they could muster, turning spilled beer into slick black scuff marks on the white polished floor. They broke the melancholy he worried might overtake his first gallery show, which could be accused of indulgently providing the memorial for Madi that he had once promised to hold for her in New York.

  In the bright warehouse space, twenty photographs of his sister, each a foot high and framed in black, hung in a square on the far white wall. A few older couples stood in front of the portraits, pointing out details in her face as if they were tracing their fingers over road maps for the fastest route through difficult terrain. Raj studied the shots taken not even a month ago in his studio, each one a different version of his sister staring into the lens, self-consciously sucking in her cheeks, carefully plumping her upper lip, concentrating all of her efforts on her forehead to ease the wrinkles. Twenty Madis looked out at him, so alive and loving and still asking him to go to India with her and ridiculing their self-pitying parents and trying to make sense of the fact that neither one of them had managed a successful romance. Twenty unblinking, breathing visitations of a woman whom he had loved most and lost the fastest, blind to the terrible event to come, but now, for the month-long run of the exhibit, staring across the room at what lay only days ahead of her, cutting all of her hours into unfinished things. Raj turned his head 180 degrees to catch a view of the opposite wall. Blown up so huge that the colors were a pixilated patchwork of sunburst reds and concrete grays was the cell phone picture that Cecile Dozol had inadvertently captured of his sister dying in the street. The single photograph papered the entire wall, and to stand inches in front of it was to see only the pop abstraction of digital bleeps. The way to make out Madi’s body in her red sari on the wet cement and the blue car speeding down the street was to see it from the distance that the twenty Madis did, from the viewpoint of the only woman who could not witness how her own life had ended. Below the giant cell-phone picture, a humming fluorescent sign spelled out KEEP GOING in white cursive. Raj had chosen that as the name of his show.

  The first guests had slowly petered in like morbid curiosity seekers, none of them men or women Raj knew by face, and their frail coughs and whispered voices echoed through the gallery. The uncertain hush felt like an affront to Madi’s memory, as if the larger world had already lost interest in her death. Raj had resigned the work to obscurity in the first hour of the show, but soon the small pools of visitors collected into a current that spilled from the door until Raj couldn’t walk three feet without jostling into someone. He smiled, nodded, and kneaded his hands nervously. Right now it wasn’t the photographs that worried him. It was the large, glass bell jar placed in the center of room, the only piece of sculpture standing midway between the competing walls. Inside the bell jar, hundreds of houseflies scrambled over each other, their red eyes bloated like gas masks, their silver-green wings fluttering against the cylinder walls. They gleamed like freshly poured blacktop, and visitors stepped cautiously around it. Raj was uneasy about this macabre inclusion, causing him to rub his hands more furiously. He had improvised the insects in the transparent container to fill the air and unite all of the dead white space that floated around the photographs. It was a testament to his earlier attempts to reveal the living, breathing traces in cold architecture, but, of course, there was no denying the fact that the flies were instruments of death. At exactly 8 PM tonight, he would lift the glass top to infest Mirabelle’s warehouse space with a dark pestilence swarming in every direction.

  Mirabelle had nearly vomited at the proposal—not in her gallery. But a second later her hazel eyes lit up with entrepreneurial glee, imagining the placement they would get in the papers for such a feat. Then she checked herself to fall in league with art-world solemnity. Only now, standing on the sidelines of his own opening, did Raj worry that the sculpture, like a grisly circus spectacle, cheapened the portraits of his sister.

  Raj combed his shaky fingers through his hair. He nodded appreciatively at the compliments given by guests, avoided questions about his sister and his family, and accepted business cards that were misplaced forever inside the pockets of his suit. Standing by himself at the reception desk, he wished Del had not decided to return home to change. She had refused his conviction that her T-shirt and jeans were appropriate attire for his first opening. His eyes skirted the crowd. He wondered what was keeping her. Del was the only person who would understand what the work on the walls really meant to him.

  They had woken late that morning in bed, his arms roped around her naked body. In that first moment of blunt surprise that she was lying next to him, Raj felt happier than he ever expected he could. The sunlight poured across the pocked plaster walls, motors wailed down the Westside Highway, and Del’s back rose and sank with each sleeping breath. People change, he thought. When they get older, they do. They get weaker because they understand the stakes. He realized that morning that it was possible to reclaim someone counted as lost. When she finally woke, raising her arms in a stretch and smiling back at him on the other end of the pillow, he wasted no time in pledging his love. He told her he didn’t care that she was married. He knew from the first day she told him that it had only been for a green card. He told her that she could remain with her husband until her citizenship was arranged—people did it all the time, stayed married and divorced when the papers were signed. He’d wait for her. Then he’d marry her himself if he could. Del wiped the tears from her eyes and stopped his frantic declarations with a palm against his chest.

  “Please, Raj,” she said quietly, as stunned as he was by the momentum of his words. He had never been this man before, loud and open and willing to accept all compromises, and he struggled to adjust, flailing his hands in fear that she would leave him again. He knew if she did he’d never be able to get her back.

  “Tell me you don’t love me,” he had dared her, sitting upright on the mattress. If she told him that, he’d believe it. She lifted her hand and covered his cheek.

  “You know that I do,” she said.

  They had remained in his studio all afternoon, a couple moving tightly on their own circuitry, and Raj swore he could feel an electric shock every time he touched her.

  He glanced eagerly as the gallery door opened, hoping to find Del in its frame. Instead two party photographers ran over to blind the latest arrival with a battery of flashbulbs. Everyone turned and waited to identify the recipient of so much attention, growing quiet for a second in the collective awe of a potential celebrity gracing their midst. The hurricane of hunched photographers ebbed, backed up, still shooting through film just in case they hadn’t arrested every possible angle. Cecile Dozol, her brown hair messily strewn in a ponytail, her short tight skirt barely reaching beyond a baggy motorcycle jacket, wrenched herself away from the cameras and raced up to Raj. She gathered his shoulders in her arms.

  “Congratulations,” she said in her exaggerated French accent. She unlocked her giant yellow teeth as she pointed to her cell phone picture blazing across the wall. “The first time I have ever done anything that was placed in a gallery. I’m honored that I could give you this.”

  “Thank you for everything,” he said sincerely. She cupped his hands and kissed him on the cheek. In a second, flashbulbs flooded their embrace, catching the necessary shot of unknown artist next to a societal somebody. Mirabelle Petz, face flushed, exalting the god of celebrity appearances, materialized by his side, feigned old acquaintance with Cecile, and soon the two orbited into the sea of pa
rtygoers all waiting anxiously for the flies to be released at the end of the night.

  Raj dropped his head in defeat, wondering if any of this mattered. It had taken him several speeches in his bathroom mirror as he got dressed to convince himself that he wasn’t selling out his love for his sister to the shocks and starts of a cold, inhospitable art world. Raj shook his head to drive off the despair. When he looked up he finally saw her, the only woman left who meant anything to him, standing with her hands on her hips, her lips disappearing and then cracking open in a smile.

  “It’s for Madi,” he said weakly, scared to open his arms for fear that she wouldn’t accept them. He stiffened his back even as his heart muscles weakened. Del reached her hand out, and he took it. She smiled at him in approval, and he knew that he had done something he could be proud of.

  “This is the best way to celebrate her,” Del said, the bright white overhead lights creating constellations in her eyes. “I want every single one of those pictures. Promise to make me a copy of all of them.”

  “I don’t want to think what Petz is trying to sell them for,” he replied. He had so much more to say to her, the throat that had finally opened that morning now choking eagerly to make up for lost time. But Del rocked anxiously back on her heels, as if a little splinter of uncertainty had already managed to wedge between them in the hours since they last saw each other. She smiled and asked him when he was releasing the flies.

  He looked at his watch. Five minutes to eight.

  “Soon,” he said. “You don’t think it’s disrespectful, do you?”

  “Come on,” she replied. “Madi hated these places. She’d love to have one last joke on all these sophisticates taking her pictures so seriously.”

  Del wrapped her hands around his waist and kissed him softly on his lips, enough to convince him that, at least for tonight, nothing else mattered. Not art or theatrics. Not an unsolved traffic accident that would never find peace in the arrest of the perpetrator. Not messages from his father demanding justice or even the fact that Del was still married and they would have to deal with those consequences tomorrow. For now she was here with him. And his pictures had succeeded in doing all that photographs can be asked to do: honor a split second that the world has already let go of.

  “I guess it’s time then,” he said, steadying himself for the finale, although Del was staring over his shoulder at a man in jeans and a black sport coat inspecting the blue pixels of the hit-and-run car.

  “What is William doing here?” she asked as the color leaked from her face.

  “Who is that?”

  “No one.” She tried to recover, swatting the annoyance away with her hand. “It’s not important.” Mirabelle interrupted, her fingers tapping her wristwatch.

  “Raj, go do it, and let’s close up shop,” she ordered in her heightened state of polite hysteria. “The best openings end when everyone’s still enjoying. I’m worried the flies are going to get stuck in the air-conditioning vents. It will be hell to clean up tomorrow. Do it before the Health Board comes and shuts us down. Or, at least, before I change my mind.”

  He walked over to the bell jar in the center of the gallery. The youngest, bravest guests were crowding around him, waiting with cringing mouths and twittering feet. The flies were the end of everything. They were the agents that quickened the decay, that impregnated the dying flesh with their own embryos, that spun through summer rooms like reminders that nothing would last, not even them, dying belly up on a windowsill in a few short hours. Raj grinned painfully in expectation, holding the expression of a man who liked the poetry of this act on paper but suddenly felt absurd when braced with lifting the container and letting the small pestilence invade the room. But he suppressed any last apprehensions. For him, it served as a ritual, not Sikh nor Christian nor Floridian Singh. Just for him and Madi. Art only makes sense if you believe in it.

  “Do it, man,” one skinny kid said through his T-shirt, which he had tented like as mask over his nose. Several women started running for the front door.

  Raj looked at the twenty portraits of his sister, each of their faces staring attentively out at him. Come on, brother, tell me what you’re thinking. I’m the only person who has the same blood that you do. I know you like the palm of my hand. Tell me, and no sugarcoating it either. Tell me what you really want from this world.

  He lifted the bell jar. The swarm cycloned the air, eating the white from everyone’s eyes, a thousand black molecules exploding in all directions.

  CHAPTER FORTY - TWO

  WILLIAM WAS ON his hands and knees in the living room. A hamster’s nest of newspaper drifted around him as he searched each metro section for the tiniest fragment of news on Quinn. There were so many lurid murders happening every day in New York, entire columns devoted to knife-wielding subway riders, raped and strangled college students last seen drinking at clubs, Craigslist male escorts found tied and butchered in outer-borough dumpsters. There were so many murders, it was possible that a single death would simply disappear into the collective pool. How could this city have ever seemed like a sanctuary to him when so many killers and victims cruised through its streets, each part of the equation looking for its missing component in an endless sequence of crimes? The city’s garbage was sent to Fresh Kills, the garbage people to Rikers Island. That’s where William would go if he ever got caught, locked up on an island created out of the waste of this one.

  William twisted on his knees as he read through the newspapers, spending hours that no subscriber could possibly afford to waste each day on every square inch of information. The lack of discovery only slowed the movement of the clock and invaded the room with an excruciating silence. Every time the phone in the apartment rang, William jumped in panic. The answering machine recorded voices of friends wishing Joseph a happy birthday.

  He picked up the manila envelope that Rose Cherami had given him. He hadn’t decided yet whether or not to give it to Joseph. Perhaps it would make the perfect birthday present, a perverse reminder that he was not immune to those tragedies that awaited their coverage in the next day’s newspaper. We are all potential fodder for those grisly dispatches, he thought. In the news one day and then out of mind forever as if to prove just how insignificant any life here was. It had occurred to William to take the file up to the Carlyle himself, demanding money from Aleksandra Andrews to keep the documents from Joseph. But even alone and desperate for an action on which to focus his energy, William didn’t want to get mixed in any more trouble. What he needed now was a solution. He needed to borrow money—a lot of it—from Joseph, and every hour he waited for him to return home, the brutal heat and quiet of the apartment increased his conviction that leaving New York was his only safe bet.

  When the lock finally turned and the door opened, he stood up expectantly with his hands clenching the envelope. Del stumbled down the hallway, her eyelids already dipping in the fatigue of finding him there. She mumbled as she shot past him into the bedroom, pulled a red dress from the hanger in her closet, and ignored his hello as she shut herself in the bathroom. She walked out a few minutes later, her wet, black hair gathered over her left shoulder and fresh makeup darkening her eyes and lightening her cheeks. She moved toward the sofa with her head bent to claim her purse.

  “Are you going to meet Joseph?” he asked her.

  “Why?” she snapped back at him as if answering an accusation.

  “Because it’s his birthday,” he said pensively. Del froze and looked up in surprise. Her lips grimaced, and, for a second, she hid her eyes in her hand.

  “Oh,” she sniveled. She took a moment to catch her balance and then placed the purse strap purposefully on her shoulder.

  “I thought maybe you would wait for him. I’m sure he’ll be back soon.”

  Another wounded expression pitted her face. She stopped at the hallway as if fighting whether or not to leave.

  “I’d like to see him too,” he hinted. He guessed that Del must be on her way to meet h
im. She must have arranged a party for Joseph and resolved not to invite him. Of course, she wouldn’t want him there. She didn’t want him here. But William already decided there was no more time left to wait on asking for a loan. He couldn’t handle another morning of newspapers to define the only actions of his day. And he couldn’t ask Del for the money, not for another two thousand dollars on the same excuse he used on her the first time.

  “Are you going to a party?” he asked to force a confession.

  “Yes,” she replied, more to herself than to him. “I mean, no. Not one for you, William. It’s none of your business where I’m going.”

  “But it’s his birthday,” he found himself repeating, almost whining out the words, as if he truly had Joseph’s interests at heart.

  Del leaned against the wall, shook her head to gather some last ounce of strength, and then turned. She hurried to the door and opened it. Her heels reverberated down the hallway steps.

  William sprinted into the bedroom closet and selected one of Joseph’s black sport coats. He threaded his arms through the sleeves, slipped the manila envelope under his armpit, and ran after her down the steps. What difference did it make now if he showed up unexpectedly? What could Del do but smile at his arrival?

  She was half a block ahead of him. Church bells counted to seven, and the sky was dissolving from orange to black, sending silver echoes on eastern balconies. Del headed west across Broadway, taking the looks of paunchy businessmen with her, men who were returning from work to their own wives but dreaming of mind-blowing sex in every apartment along the way.

  William followed her, keeping fifteen feet behind, a stalker’s distance, staying out of range in case she happened to look behind her. She walked quickly, surveying roadblocks way ahead of her and swerving in advance to maintain her hurried pace. She raced all the way through Chelsea. William didn’t have to pass under awnings or loop around bus stops. She was a distance runner envisioning a finish line. She never once bothered to look back. A soft wind was sliding through the city, snuffing out candles on outdoor bistro tables, blowing trash across the sidewalk, licking William’s ears and, with a slight tilt of his head, blow-drying his hairline of sweat. The half-deserted blocks in far West Chelsea were loud with echoes from where they had been, which emphasized the quiet of the street they moved down now, a woman and her fidgeting shadow. Blackened art galleries started mixing with closed car washes under the rusted canopy of the old Highline elevated train tracks.