Truly Like Lightning

by David Duchovny

  Janet fixed Maya in her glare. “Let me tell you something, ma’am…”

  “Maya, please. Maya Abbadessa. Italian father, Mexican mother.” Oh yeah, she was able to work the Mexican mom thing seamlessly into this conversation with an African American woman. Beneath the stark difference in wardrobe, this was a minority-to-minority deal here. That was the angle. “But call me Maya.”

  Janet stared at the white woman across from her. “Maya. Nobody gives a shit about these kids in the desert. You don’t give a shit either. Not even my heart bleeds for them—they’re sitting on a land inheritance. They’ll be fine. I care about the disadvantaged children of regular, hardworking San Bernardines. The kids of color whose parents aren’t sitting on a gold mine, who work two jobs, or work for an unlivable wage. The kids at the border.”

  Suddenly, Maya got sleepy, as she often did when a lecture began. She caught Belinda’s eye and mouthed, “Espresso, please, double.”

  “Kids at the border. I hear you,” Maya said, and smiled her “sad, empathetic” smile. Janet all but rolled her eyes in response. But this outrage with “the system” was exactly what Maya was hoping for, and she could use her judo—this was the opening, small but visible, for the gambit with which she had teased Malouf—this good woman’s Achilles, where her anger and integrity met. Janet Bergram might not be personally for sale, but she could still be manipulated by her own self-righteousness and ambition for the kids if she could be led to seeing herself as a possible savior.

  “You’re right, Janet, and maybe I don’t care as much as you do about the kids. That’s fair, that’s your job. But I have a job too, and my job is to make money, and when I make money, other people make money. It trickles down.”

  “Doesn’t trickle like it used to. If it ever did.”

  “I see you’re between a rock and a hard place. I mean, I’m just spitballing here,” she lied, her plan well incubated and ready to hatch, “but what if you do turn away from these kids and give me a little time and let me set up a kind of metric that would enable you to quantify, in a scientific way, whether those Powers kids are being damaged or not.”

  “I don’t think that’s possible.”

  “No, it’s not possible, but it may be feasible.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean … what do you say you don’t report these kids, give no recommendation yay or nay, or you simply close the case, officially anyway, and while your back is turned, and your attention is where it should be—on the kids of San Bernardino, like the pit bull kid, who really need it—we do a test, we take three of the kids—he’s got ten … we take three of the kids and we put them in public school in San Bernardino for a year, and at the end of the year, we compare their growth, the growth in their levels of academic achievement and their emotional well-being, with the kids that stayed at home, and if the kids at home did better or comparably, I lose—the Powerses keep it all, but you win, ’cause then you get to pressure the embarrassed school system to be better. Armed with the results, you shame those whose lack of attention and funding have hamstrung the local schools, and we demand more money for the kids of San Bernardino that you care so much about.”

  “That’s crazy,” Janet said.

  “Is it?”

  Maya let Janet take a few moments to imagine that playing out, as complicated and unlikely as it might seem, before laying out her true vision. “If the kids do better in San Bernardino, which is the way more likely scenario,” Maya continued, “Praetorian wins and establishes a presence there, and we funnel millions into the neighborhood, all boats rising on a rising tide, children in those boats. Either way, you bring eyes to a broken system, and money follows eyes.”

  Janet couldn’t hide her curiosity in this strange wager, at least at the possibility of its economic boon. She momentarily lost her habitual bored and borderline contemptuous look, her pride and her self-righteousness joining hands. If the kids did better in San Bernardino, Janet could see herself as a hero to her community who would bring in millions of dollars of business, some of that inevitably showered on public works and public education, the kids.

  But could she do it all under the radar? She knew she could close her slim file on the Powerses and they would drift down and disappear into the overloaded system. Through the haze of bullshit, she started to view the Cash-n-ator as a possible source of good.

  For her part, Maya had entered the part of the soul seduction where she would wait to let Janet fill the silent spaces and betray her own growing interest to herself; to let the woman now rev herself up. Janet started speaking louder, a dead giveaway. “The local schools need so much, so much. And the criteria by which you judge the growth over the year will be by necessity somewhat subjective, no?”

  “Yes,” Maya agreed, “but we would do what we could to make it as objective as possible. Maybe have them all take a standardized test before and after the year?”

  “Sure. That’s a start.”

  Maya had the hook in, she needed to jerk the line now and sink it into the soft flesh of Janet’s mouth. But Maya paused again. She wanted Janet’s to be the next voice. She wanted Janet to continue moving this idea forward, to run with it, she needed complicity, agency. They stared at each other for about thirty seconds.

  Janet caved again, and asked out loud, “So the three kids—they continue on in the San Bernardino school system and then onto college hopefully, but what happens to the kids that stayed home?”

  “When we win, they gotta move off too, the whole family, and back to civilization. For the good of the kids and to abide by the law of the land. ’Cause that’s what our little social experiment has taught us. Your gut and the law are satisfied either way. That’s the moral of the story.”

  Janet Bergram, a civil servant with a master’s degree in social work as well as a J.D., who would be paying off her student debt until she died on the $68K a year she made before taxes, looked out the window of a private plane, the world at her feet. She stared past the clouds and allowed herself to dream of doing so much good for the kids of her hometown, and for the kids of this strange Mormon enclave that she didn’t know existed until a couple weeks ago. She didn’t like this “Maya,” the somewhat Mexican across from her, but she didn’t dislike her; sure, she was ambitious and greedy, but she was also imaginative.

  Janet was pretty sure she was smarter than Maya, she could take her. Only a fool would pay as much as she did for her shoes. She knew what Manolo Blahniks were from Sex and the City. Janet had served her community for a long time, and had longed to do something big for them all, to enable them to make a leap. These were just three kids that didn’t even have a record or social security number. She knew very well they could be hidden easily in a school for a year and no one would have to know—not the local government, not her boss, not the board of ed. The end could easily justify the means.

  “You know, Janet—may I be frank?” Maya was smiling at her, almost goading her, letting the fish run with the line; she knew that some bureaucrats, in their heart of hearts, imagined a rebel hero when they looked in the mirror. “You talk about how you have no power, you talk about the inaction of government, you talk about the lack of imagination and the sluggish bureaucracy, what you would do if you had the power—and here you are being offered an end run around the bureaucracy, here you are being offered a chance to be a maverick, an innovator, a visionary advocate for the tens of thousands of kids in your district. I can’t believe you will hide behind some of those same bureaucratic barriers and pass up this chance of a lifetime.”

  “These three kids don’t have social security numbers. They barely exist.” Janet was speaking almost to herself, convincing herself of what Maya had convinced her. All that remained was to pull the fish up into the boat. But Maya was so good at this sport that she wanted to see this fish jump onto the boat of her own free will, walk over to the grill, and squirt lemon on herself.

  “That’s right,” Maya said. “Our test will be over
in about nine months and no one will have noticed. Three kids no one ever heard of came into town and spent a year at a local public school and then moved to another town and another school. Happens all the time.”

  Janet sighed. It did happen all the time.

  “If I drop the case, or close it, and walk away in any official capacity … You’d have to get the parents’ permission, of course, to enter into this agreement—an agreement the legality of which, or any binding nature, is going to be highly debatable. They would have to willingly enter into it, willingly let three kids move to San Bernardino and go to school there. And I don’t see that happening.”

  “Leave that to me.”

  “If you threaten or coerce them in any way using my name or the authority of my agency or the government of California…”

  “As I said, leave that to me. I won’t mention your name. All I need is for you to officially close the case and walk away at this point. See to the other kids. They need you. That was your instinct. I’m not asking for your help or involvement; I’m just asking that you don’t get in our way or call attention to the family or us. It fits into your mission.”

  “How so?” Janet asked.

  Maya spoke from memory: “The mission of Child and Family Services is accomplished in ‘collaboration with the family, a wide variety of public and private agencies and members of the community.’ That’s what Praetorian is—a private agency; that’s what I am—a member of the community. This is our collaboration.”

  Janet nodded. Yes, she could get in trouble, but wasn’t the upside worth it? The agency was woefully understaffed; in fact, 22 percent of the positions in her line of work were unfilled. The system wasn’t working. Maybe the system needed a jolt. She had no idea how Maya would get the Powerses to agree to it, but maybe that didn’t concern her anymore. She could just close the case for a year, turn her valuable but overtaxed attention to the more needy. Nobody knew or cared about a few Mormons in the desert.

  “Where are we going again?” Janet asked wearily.

  “Nowhere. Joyride. That’s San Bernardino down there,” Maya said.

  Janet looked down, and yes, she could make out some familiar landmarks, and that was San Bernardino Airport almost directly below them. Her city, full of so many sad stories, looked small and simple and untroubled down there; she could see the whole thing in its geometric simplicity. Her stomach felt sour. Janet had a moment of panic where she imagined that these folks wouldn’t return her to terra firma until she gave them what they wanted. Held hostage on a private plane.

  “You mean we’re just flying in circles? Jesus Christ.”

  Maya smiled and nodded. She was twenty-seven years old and doing big business on a private jet. Millions, maybe billions, of dollars were fluttering around the Cash-n-ator fuselage because of her. And kids might even benefit. She felt high on herself.

  Janet Bergram, who made $33 an hour, shook her head in disbelief at the waste—of time, of oil, of food, of energy, and the sheer gall of wasted movement, and underneath that, the potential power for good. She felt like she might throw up.

  She repeated to herself, “Flying in circles.”

  10.

  IT WAS THE SECOND TIME that Maya would visit the Powers family at their desert compound, but as far as she could tell, it was the first. She remembered nothing substantial of that peyote night a couple months ago. The roads were not familiar, and then there were no roads, and they had to switch to ATV trails, and then there were no trails even. She was beginning to think she had hallucinated the entire thing. Though the terrain had a sameness to it, it also shone with a hard beauty, and the park ranger, whom she had contacted to drive her through and past Joshua Tree, pointed out what he thought might be of interest, as if she had hired him as a guide. “Seven hundred fifty species of vascular plants found here.”

  She’d google vascular later, but “plants” was enough, she got what she needed to get. He didn’t seem to see she was not that interested. “Half of those are annual plants that bloom in the spring. So it’s like a different planet, depending on when you come. Used to be a sea here but there’s not a ton of water now obviously, so not a lot of energy to burn, and energy is time, so time is different here in the desert. Slow. Not man’s time. Rock time, sand time, lizard time, geologic time. Look at those saguaro over there.”

  “Oh, is that how you pronounce it?”

  “Yeah, sawaro. They can live two hundred years.” He pointed: “Those guys over there knew Abe Lincoln. Imagine that. Look like men doing different things with their arms. Stick ’em up! Scare the shit outta me outta the corner of my eye sometimes. Cacti are to trees what man is to exoskeletal insects. They, like us, are soft on the outside, hard on the inside, have their bones, their wood, their structural integrity on the inside. Ever seen a dead cactus? You’ll see the wood. You can use the wood to splint a broken limb. Natives did. The original Spanish speakers called the Joshua trees izote de desierto—the desert dagger. That’s the nomenclature I prefer. Don’t worry, there won’t be a test.” Maya nodded and forced a smile. He was making her drowsy. “Over yonder that way is where the Chump administration, the Bureau of Land Mismanagement, wants to let Eagle Crest Energy Company build a hydropower plant and drain local aquifers in this drought-riddled world.”

  “Oh, I’ve heard of Eagle Crest,” Maya said, without judgment.

  “The fuckin’ devil if you ask me. I gotta watch my BP when I think about that orange ass clown.” He took a few deep breaths and shook his hands free of the bad juju.

  “Anyway—you’ll see jackrabbits, horned lizards, kangaroo rats, tortoises, if you’re lucky.” Maya was gamely trying to smile his way; he was showing off, lecturing, like a proud cabbie in a favorite city. “Predators here are the coyote and Mojave rattlesnake, bobcat, golden eagle, you might wanna be careful of tarantulas, too.” The guide watched her face cloud over. “Not a spider fan? What about Spider-Man?”

  “I don’t like snakes,” she said, pulling her knees up under her chin involuntarily.

  “Snakes are misunderstood,” he said. “They really only mess when messed with.”

  “I’m working on it.”

  “They’re not for everybody. What are you doing out here, if you don’t mind my asking? Research? You from Hollywood? Netflix?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Netflix and chill.”

  “That’s what the kids say.”

  “The government?”

  “I’m really not at liberty to say.”

  “Ah, I get it. Top secret.” He nodded. “‘Not at liberty to say’—that is so cool.”

  He smiled and checked his GPS. “I’ve never been to this place you wanna go. Heard tell of it but never been. Thought it was an old wives’ tale. According to this gizmo, won’t be but about ten more minutes now. Tough going.”

  After about thirty minutes, a house finally became visible like a mirage up ahead, seeming to oscillate on the flat terrain. “Thar she blows. Look at her waving at us. You know why heat makes waves like that?”

  “Heat waves? No, I don’t.”

  “Has to do with refraction,” he said proudly, “when light passes between substances of different refractive indices—hot air and colder air—when it mixes, makes vibration and shakes the light, looks wavy.”

  “That’s cool.”

  “No,” he said, “it’s cool and hot. And it’s just another way the desert messes with your head. Seeing is not believing.”

  The sound of the ATV must’ve carried for miles unimpeded in the wilderness, because the whole family was waiting outside the house, looking more like palace guards than a welcoming committee.

  “They expecting you?” the park ranger asked. “’Cause they don’t look so friendly.”

  “More or less.”

  “Looks like less to me.”

  “If you wanna wait here, that’s cool. I don’t want them to feel ambushed anyway. I can walk the rest.” They were about two hundred yard
s away now.

  “Yeah, I think I will. Rattlers, bobcats, desert animals—I know them. Desert people? Not so much. That’s an animal I can’t read. They look odd to me, and honestly, I’ve heard tall tales that they’ve got the whole place booby-trapped like some horror movie. Ever see The Hills Have Eyes?”

  “No.”

  “Well, the sand probably has eyes, too. You tread carefully. I’ll be waiting right here. How long you gonna be?”

  “Could be five minutes, could be a while.”

  “Well, shit. Go do your thing. You’re paying for the day. I’m here if you need me. Just whistle.”

  “Thank you.” She got out of the ATV and walked toward the house.

  As she approached, the younger kids looked at her like she was an escaped zoo animal, and she searched out the one who had stuck her with an arrow. Though her memories from that night were disjointed and surreal, she retained an image of her redheaded attacker as clear as if he’d been minted on a commemorative coin. She went to him.

  “Hi, my name is Maya,” she said, bending down.

  “I’m Hyrum. And I’m sorry I stuck ya. I thought you were a coyote.”

  Maya laughed. “That’s harsh. Coyote ugly, huh?” she joked.

  “What?” Hyrum asked. She tousled his red-blond hair, which was so dirty, thick, and matted with sand that it felt like animal fur. He looked like what she remembered of Huck Finn drawings in books from her childhood.

  “Hyrum,” one of the women said, stepping to them and pulling the boy away from her. She couldn’t make out if she was protecting the boy from Maya or protecting Maya from the boy. The woman introduced herself without extending her hand. “I’m Yalulah. You met me the other night but you probably don’t remember.”

  “I’m sorry, I was in no shape…”

  “No, you weren’t. Don’t touch the children, please. They’ve had no vaccines and have no defense against bacteria and viruses you bring to them from out there.”

  “Oh,” Maya replied, mortified. “I hadn’t thought of that.”