Lightning People

by Christopher Bollen

  It was a simple platinum band she wore on her right hand. Del remembered Madi buying it with some of the first money she had made working in the financial sector, when the idea of doing anything with her literature degree had finally been dismissed as the dream of an impressionable student who didn’t understand how little poetry suited real life. Raj grabbed Del’s wrist and slipped the ring onto her finger. It fit perfectly.

  “She was wearing it when she died,” Raj said, still staring at it. “They gave it back to me. We put it on her at the funeral but these goons come out just before they close the coffin to take all of the jewelry off. Anyway, I want you to have it. She would have liked that.”

  Raj held her fingers in his palm and gazed into her eyes, dripping blue icebergs, once so inhospitable but now begging for her to tell him what he wanted to hear.

  “I can’t leave him right now,” she said suddenly, terrified that if she didn’t say it right then she would never find the courage. “Joseph’s very sick. He needs me to take care of him.”

  “Is that how it is?”

  “Yeah. That’s it.”

  “Just right now or . . . ?”

  “I’m not leaving him.” She reached her hand up to touch his cheek, but he pulled his head back in defense, dropped her fingers, and turned around. “I’m sorry, Raj. I guess there wasn’t going to be a part two for us in the end. I thought there could be for a while, but we were both just fooling ourselves.”

  “No,” he said as he walked toward the oak dresser. “I wasn’t fooling myself. You were. You were fooling both of us.”

  “Maybe,” she replied. “I didn’t know what was going to happen. I’m sorry.” She struggled to lift the dress over her shoulders, fighting with the fabric until the lace skirt covered her head. In that second, when the room was blocked out by a curtain of fabric, she gave herself a moment to shut her eyes and let out a hard, silent cry that cramped every muscle in her face and left her jaw open in the volts of the loudest ache. Then she collected herself, snapping her mouth shut and pinching the water from her eyes, as she threw the dress on the floor. Raj stood by the dresser with his back to her, pretending to rifle through papers.

  “You can come back another time and go through her clothes,” he said with the coldness of a legal agreement. “Just take what you want and leave what you don’t. I’ll get people to move it all out this week. And take the peacock too or else it will go with the rest.”

  She picked up her purse from the dining-room chair. Clutching the strap, she walked quietly over to him, reaching out to touch his arm.

  “There’s so much I want to tell you,” she said, trying to hold back her tears. “It’s just not the right time for it. You have to believe me.”

  “There is never the right time for it. Is there, Del?” He didn’t look up but flinched as her fingers pressed against his skin. “I think you should go.”

  She didn’t take the peacock. She pressed the call button and when the doors split open she walked into the elevator and struggled to find any last words that would sum up everything she wanted to say. Only when the doors started to shut and she saw him rounding the corner, his neck craned sideways to watch her go, his skinny body casting a long shadow across the concrete floor, his eyes not angry or excited, only then did she find something to say. In the last inch of Madi’s apartment she said “good-bye.” Then the room and Raj disappeared into a crack, and the elevator brought her down.

  THAT NIGHT, SHE and Joseph lit candles and ate from takeout boxes on the living room floor. Thunder made only a purr that trembled the windows, but lightning struck deep, momentarily turning the room into flashes of white and green. Del had bought two bottles of wine on her way home from Madi’s apartment, and she ignored the Chinese food for the task of finishing one bottle all on her own. She hadn’t told him about her interaction with Raj, and it hardly seemed worthwhile to speak about it now. She took long sips from her glass, as Joseph mentioned the appointment at INS.

  “It’s still set for December 1,” he said. “That’s three months away.”

  “Yeah,” she replied from behind her glass.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, dropping his fork into the container and staring worriedly over at her. “Don’t you still want to go through with it?”

  She took another sip and changed the subject.

  “Did I ever tell you that rattlesnake venom is being tested to cure heart failure?” Del had been thinking about that irony all week, how the venom in her favorite animal was being studied to treat the disease that had wiped out Joseph’s family. That had been only one of the many ironies that left her smoking cigarettes while staring out the window at the same tenement building across the street as if she were trying to commit the view to memory. She told Joseph of the advances Dr. Isely had been making in her underground lab up at Columbia, milking snakes to locate the molecules that slowed the blood supply and relaxed the muscles in the heart. “Maybe it will be a reality in five or ten years. Who knows?” she said, as she poured more wine in her glass. “Maybe one day rattlesnakes will be the cure everyone’s been waiting for.”

  “Jesus,” he said, reaching across the floor to wrap his fingers around her ankle. “I hope it’s true. Do you know what that could mean?” She didn’t answer. “That could be your next job, Del. Why don’t you call up this woman and ask if you can be a part of it? There can’t be many people around with your specialties. They could probably use you.”

  She put her fingers on his hand and smiled faintly as she pulled her foot away. It meant something that Joseph suggested it, but she had already signed off on that dream.

  “No,” she replied. “That’s not going to happen.”

  She looked at him as she poured the last of the wine from the bottle. Outside, lightning flashed across the windows, bouncing off buildings, leeching through metal until its current dispersed deep below the sidewalk. Was it true that lightning couldn’t strike a person if they weren’t grounded, feet in midair, no part of them anchored to the earth? In midair, a person was safe. Lightning strikes weren’t random. They hunted for things with roots to correct an imbalance between the land and the sky. Lightning was an atmosphere looking to settle a score.

  She took a sip and smiled. How could she not smile now, not want to laugh out loud at the shit-spitting humor of the world? Up until a few weeks ago, Del had dreamed of a green card, and now a meeting at INS scheduled for December was the last option on her mind. It was amazing what life gave you, she thought. Almost as amazing as what it took.

  The truth was Del had already said good-bye that afternoon through the closing elevator doors of Madi’s apartment, and she meant to keep her word. She gulped the final remnants from her glass. It had been quite an experiment. She could remember watching 1999 turn into 2000 from a rooftop in Tribeca, feeling all of the promise of that new invisible century finally arriving. She had been looking north toward the glowing halo of Times Square, and Madi had grabbed her by the neck and said, “Stop staring at the place where some stupid ball dropped. It’s not there, it’s right here.” Madi had been right about the future, for a while anyway, but now it was time to say good-bye. She could feel things dying, the power leaking out of her, leaking out of buildings and store windows and the trees lining the sidewalks, out of the new glass high-rises along the piers of the Hudson River and out of the back doors of the yellow cabs racing down FDR. It was all ending—her version of it, her time with it, that future they once waited until midnight for—washing quietly away.

  She rose from the floor and carried the takeout boxes into the kitchen to dump them in the trash. After a few minutes, Joseph appeared in the doorframe. He leaned against the refrigerator, dropped his head, and calmly spoke.

  “I don’t want you to be unhappy,” he said. “What can I do?” She ran tap water over her chopsticks and then threw them in the garbage too. She would no longer need chopsticks. She would no longer need the plates in the cabinets or the pots hanging like rusted or
naments over the stove or the ceramic plant holders lined up on the sill.

  “I don’t want to stay here anymore,” she said.

  CHAPTER FORTY - SIX

  WILLIAM FOUND HIMSELF in the first days of September the happiest he had ever been in New York. He watched Cecile walk from the shower with a towel tied around her waist, beating her hip with the palm of her hand, picking up a plum that matched the color of her nipples, and tearing her teeth into its meaty flesh. Joy tidal-waved over him at the sight of this woman, right here, no mirages, the frank tap of her feet coming nearer, her hair wet and her thin body wired. They had remained in her Bowery apartment for almost a week, having sex and sleeping until their bodies gathered the strength to do it all over again. William was happy to let go of the city outside her windows. He listened to Cecile play a ballad on her guitar, memorized her favorite films and the arrangement of the dresses in her closet, and clapped as she danced in only a pair of heels with a flag draped over her shoulders. He felt himself falling under a heavy spell and didn’t resist.

  By the fourth day, Cecile picked through a basket of needles and thread and handed him a spare key to her apartment, another of so many spare sets he had collected over the summer. He took it greedily and kissed her for the gift. But William didn’t risk leaving her place for fear he would never find his way back.

  Occasionally he woke in the middle of the night, his fists swarming through her pillows from a nightmare that starred Quinn in a lumberjack shirt turning around in a small woodland cottage with car keys in his hands. The keys transformed into a flurry of flies, and William came awake on the soft down comforter to hear the traffic roaring on the Bowery. Cecile’s lips glided along his collarbone as she formed sleepy French phrases he didn’t understand, guiding him back into the safety of the bed.

  Se coucher. J’ai la photo tire demain. Translation: You are safe, don’t think of the hell you passed through to find me. The world, this city, my arms, they’re yours . . .

  Such was the paradise of Cecile’s loft with its old granary wheel forever bull’s-eyed in the top window that William only left one early morning to mail the manila envelope that Rose Cherami had given him. He addressed it without a note or a return address to Joseph at his Twenty-Second Street address, no longer caring what effect it had on its recipient or even if it arrived. William simply wanted all traces of the past out of his hands, free to return to the vortex of Cecile Dozol’s universe floating four flights above the street. Of course, her privilege was a clear attraction. William had even found the courage to call Janice and insist on arranging a meeting between her and Cecile if she’d consider letting him back into the agency. Her family name might open doors that otherwise shut in his face.

  William walked up the street, located the nearest mailbox, and threw the envelope away into it. He headed back to the apartment as a cool fall wind curled around his ears, and so complete was his surrender to this magnificent dream state that he was taken aback at the sight of two middle-aged men in cheap dove-gray suits standing at the door of the building. The men eyed him, turned their attention to the buzzers on the door, and then swerved their heads in simultaneous double take.

  “William Asternathy,” the bearded, coffee-toothed man said. “Are you William Asternathy?”

  “Yes,” he answered. “Why?”

  “I’m Detective Tasser. This is Detective Hazlett. We’re from homicide.”

  In that furious second, William evacuated his body in search of an outdated version of himself that he no longer recognized.

  “What is this about?” William asked, training his eyes on the shape of an urn that the detectives’ profiles made against the cold sunlight.

  “It’s about your friend, Brutus Quinn. You know him, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” he replied through a dry mouth. “Of course I know him. An old friend. Haven’t seen him for a while. Has something happened?” His teeth chattered, ready to break into a full nervous crescendo. He clenched his hands, which were shaking in the air over his chest.

  The two detectives shared worried glances.

  “Do you mind coming with us down to the precinct?” Tasser asked. “Our car is just over there. We need to ask you a few questions.”

  “It would be better if you came with us,” Hazlett confirmed. “It’s not something you want to do right here.”

  “Should I bring anything with me? You see, I’ve got an audition in forty-five minutes,” he lied. “Can this wait for another time? Perhaps tomorrow or next week?”

  The two plainclothes detectives shared more worried glances, communicating some cop shorthand for suspect apprehended, suspect showing signs of resistance.

  “You should cancel that audition,” Tasser said, bracing his fingers around William’s arm.

  THE DRIVE TOOK eight minutes, an entire lifespan. William counted the minutes on the dashboard clock from the backseat of the Cadillac. He crushed his hands between his knees, wondering why they hadn’t used cuffs. The interior smelled musty and sour, although scuffed paper mats from a recent trip to the car wash carpeted the floor. There was no metal netting separating him from the officers, no guns visible in their belts, no police cars trailing closely behind.

  But William had seen enough cop movies to predict what he could expect. He knew they would take him into a bare, windowless room and work him over, picking at him slowly, politely, before rifling through him with violent accusations to pry out a confession deep in his chest.

  William bent his head and forced himself not to look out of the tinted windows, as Houston Street sailed by in construction sites and mountain-high underwear ads. He stared at the green digits of the console clock, four minutes, five, six, seven, almost eight. The inside of this car was a network of windows and doors, but it was still the first of many cramped spaces he would have to share with law enforcement, a whole future of claustrophobically small enclosures. He was still simply a suspect, no confession, no lawyer, no Miranda rights. Cecile would be wondering why he hadn’t already returned. He had told her he was running out to buy condoms and flowers, such embarrassing, fantastic items, purchases that told the shop clerk he was a well-loved human being, a man who cared about the body and mind of someone else, a man who wouldn’t murder anyone. If he had gone to buy those items instead of mailing that envelope, would Tasser and Hazlett have let him out on the next corner?

  William could hardly remember killing Quinn. But he had, way back when, at a point as faint now as an echo. His heart was pounding, and he sat on his hands to prevent them from lashing out. If the detectives were from homicide, shouldn’t he already have asked if Quinn was dead? Wouldn’t an innocent person have immediately asked that question? William dove forward between the front seats, but he was too late. Tasser spun the wheel, and the unmarked Cadillac found a parking space in front of a gray stone building.

  Hazlett opened the back door, pulled him out by his arm, and tailed behind him, while Tasser led the way. They passed single file through the entrance, walked by the bulletproof glass humming with accident reports, and climbed a flight of stairs. Tasser punched open a swinging door on the second floor, guided him down a passage of filing cabinets and ringing cubicles and into a bare, white-walled room that held a brown Formica table and three metal chairs. It was exactly like the movies. Exactly like an episode of Law & Order that you turn off at the next commercial break. Exactly like a place that purposely existed outside of the real world, where it was just William and his soul and the detectives with their questions about what that soul was doing at the time some murders took place.

  “Have a seat,” Tasser ordered with a host’s gesticulation. Hazlett carried in files under his beefy armpit.

  “What is this about?” William asked as he sat across from them. “Quinn isn’t in some kind of trouble, is he? That man wouldn’t hurt a fly. He was like a father to me. Is like a father to me. Homicide? He couldn’t have killed anyone.”

  More anxious glances flew between the detect
ives. They declined the chairs in front of them, preferring to stand. Tasser closed his eyes. Here it comes. The first accusation, delivered in the cheap deceit of friendship, making an easy pathway for trust, just before the punches started, the shouting, the turning over of every detail. His thighs beat together, his feet tapped on the linoleum tiles, he took long breaths, he fidgeted, his body was rocketing out of control, and he kicked his chair back to unleash the energy stored in his legs.

  “We have some very bad news,” Tasser started, gazing at him intently with coffee-stained eyelids that matched his teeth. “Your friend Quinn was found yesterday morning in his backhouse apartment.”

  “Found?”

  “He was found hanging from his shower pipe.”

  William had intended to produce some effective tears, but when Tasser delivered the news, he immediately choked and tears streamed from his eyes. They had finally discovered his body. There were no more questions in the matter. The news that William had waited to hear for so long passed through him like an electric shock.

  “That can’t be. Not possible. Quinn couldn’t have been murdered.”

  Tasser squinted.

  “Why would you assume he was murdered?”

  Trap one.

  Six consonants hissed out of William’s mouth, failing to produce a word. He swallowed and tried again. “Because Quinn would never kill himself. I know that. He was a fucking survivor. He had been HIV positive for twenty years. The man wouldn’t let anything stop him. He loved life. He of all people had to fight to stay here with us, to keep himself going. Suicide. I’m telling you, he wouldn’t have done that.” Everything he was saying was so horribly accurate.

  “Mr. Asternathy,” Tasser said with a sigh, “we found him hanging in his shower from a cord. That would suggest a suicide.”

  Cord, trap two. He had used the navy sheet stripped from his bed.