Truly Like Lightning

by David Duchovny

  Mary was still spiraling. She could juggle chain saws, but not all this shit spinning in her head right now. “But there’s got to be something for me to do. I can’t sit on my ass waiting for an ax to fall.”

  Out the door now, Janet turned to face her yet again. She had to get out of here. She had to get out there to gauge how fast the story was growing, what shape it was taking. She had to get on top of the narrative, shape it if she could; each minute mattered. She pointed back into the house.

  “Just keep loving that kid in there. Keep your family together. Pray. That’s what you can do. That’s your job. Those are your instructions.” All her learning, all the books, all the years, and that was the sum of her expert advice: love and prayer. The blind leading the blind. Jesus Christ, forgive me, she thought.

  “Okay.”

  “And pray for that child in the hospital.”

  During the rest of that long, jumpy day, Mary got the word to Bronson via the park rangers in Joshua Tree, but someone had to stay with the kids, so Yalulah came to Rancho Cucamonga. Hyrum was taken to the hospital to get checked out. He was perfectly fine aside from a couple facial abrasions, a black eye, and some scrapes on his knuckles and knees. Then he was taken down to the police station, where he was interviewed and gave a statement that was identical to the one he gave Janet Bergram. It was chilling to Mary; that little boy had ice in his veins. It was a clear case of self-defense. Hyrum told the cops that he swung at the other boy, a sixteen-year-old named Hermano Ruiz, but that he seemed to hit his head hard on the concrete. The cops had been to the scene and they saw the bloody wheel stop, and had a pretty good idea of how the fight must have gone down. The stories of the other kids, Hermano’s posse, were all over the map—five different kids and they saw five different fights every time they were asked to recount it.

  Only Hyrum’s account was unchanging. So the cops thought he was either a mad genius psychotic child or telling the truth. Trouble was, this wasn’t just a black eye and a bloody lip; Hermano was in bad shape. Word was that doctors were saying that he might never walk again, might not talk again, a lot of rumors, but he might never be the same. With all that pain and heartache, a pound of flesh would be taken from someone, and no one was 100 percent innocent.

  Pearl and Deuce came home to be with their brother. Yalulah sat with Hyrum, and Hyrum told her the same story, no detail ever changed. Yalulah sat with Mary that night, after the kids had gone to bed, and tried to figure out what the hell happened and how they were gonna get back to square one. Mary didn’t tell Yalulah that she didn’t want to go back to Agadda da Vida anymore.

  She did tell her that Deuce had interest from Harvard, and Pearl had interest from Juilliard. They weren’t going to go back, and Mary told Yalulah she supported that. Yalulah approved as well.

  “How did he fall through the cracks?” Yalulah wondered, stepping up to but not over the line of blaming Mary for what had happened with Hyrum.

  “He didn’t fall through the cracks. He’s always been wild. He got into a fight, and an accident happened—let’s try not to overreact here. It’s no one’s fault. An accident.” If she kept talking like that, eventually, she hoped, she’d believe it. Fake it till you make it, she remembered from AA.

  “Just a schoolyard fight?” Yalulah repeated.

  “Yup. Boys will be boys.”

  Mary asked Yalulah how Bronson had taken the news, and she said he had laughed when he heard scrawny little Hyrum had kicked some big kid’s ass. Mary tried to warn her that the world had changed a lot in this area in the past twenty years and that people now felt entitled to answers for why bad things happened; they wanted someone to blame. That the family had to be careful of how they talked about what had happened. The way they talked about what happened, Mary said, was almost more important than what had happened.

  “They want someone to blame for the world being a fucked-up place?” Yalulah asked.

  “I think they do,” replied Mary.

  “Jesus, we left this fucked-up place years ago. We know! We are on their side.”

  “Yeah, I know, but we look like the enemy.” Mary was doing her best to impart what Janet had told her.

  “But an eleven-year-old?” Yalulah asked.

  “Probably not,” Mary said. “Hyrum did tell me he forgot to tell Janet Bergram that he thinks someone was filming the whole thing on his phone and if we can find that it’ll show he’s telling the truth.”

  “Well, you should tell her that. That sounds promising.”

  “I’m afraid to see it. Hopefully, it won’t come to that.”

  “Maybe we should go see the kid’s mom tomorrow, though. Apologize. When she sees we are sincere, that will change things.” Mary smiled; that was a good idea, an old-fashioned, human idea, but she didn’t have the heart to face it herself. She didn’t trust herself with the intensity of a confrontation no matter how well intentioned. Yalulah was better in a crisis, less emotional. She should go.

  “I can’t. Can you? You’re his mother, too.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll go,” Yalulah said. “I’ll go with Hyrum. That little shit is gonna tell that poor kid and his mom he’s sorry and he’s gonna promise to do everything he can to make it right.”

  On her way to gather Hyrum, there was a knock at the door. Yalulah opened it to three police officers who said they had to bring Hyrum in for questioning again and he’d be released to his parents in a few hours if he wasn’t a flight risk.

  “Why again?” she asked.

  “Not sure, ma’am,” the lead cop said.

  “They have new information?”

  “I don’t know, ma’am.”

  “Flight risk?” Mary laughed at the cops. “He can’t even drive a car. He’s gonna ride his fucking bike to South America?”

  Yalulah couldn’t believe it either, asking, “Where the hell is an eleven-year-old gonna go?”

  “Good, then.” The cop ignored her attitude. “This should be over in a few hours. Unless the judge finds he should be remanded to juvenile hall, which is unlikely.”

  “Then what?”

  “There should be an adjudication hearing within thirty days.”

  “Adjudication?”

  “Yes, like a trial, but for children. Decided not by a jury, but a judge. You should get a lawyer, ma’am.”

  Mary stepped up to the cop at the door, getting in his face, and said, “We don’t need a lawyer. He’s innocent.”

  “Even the innocent need a lawyer, ma’am. You’ll want to get out of my face now.”

  “And if he’s found guilty?” Yalulah asked politely, gently pulling Mary away from the cop.

  “That’s a ways off, ma’am. One step at a time, maybe?”

  “But if he’s found guilty?” Yalulah repeated.

  The cop shrugged. “I honestly don’t know, ma’am. I’ve never taken a child this young in before.”

  “How guilty can an eleven-year-old boy be?” Mary asked, thinking of that stupid porn on Hyrum’s phone, and the notebook drawings, hoping to God she’d found all that rune shit and thrown it away.

  “Who’s the mother here?” the cop asked, displaying some exasperation at the ’round and ’round.

  “Both of us,” Yalulah answered. The cop raised his eyebrows and turned and smirked over his shoulder at the other two cops.

  “We’re dykes,” Mary said contemptuously. “Mormon edition. Big fat Mormon dykes … that turn you on, you gross motherfucker?” Mary was not good with cops; she’d been hassled and harassed frequently by them as a young homeless person on Venice Beach, and she’d never lost that flinch at blue, that reactive distrust.

  “Right,” the officer said, getting the picture. Mary could see some sweat beading on his upper lip, and that gave her confidence. “I see. Well, those are questions for another man, ma’am, a lawyer, like I said, a priest maybe.”

  “A priest?” Mary nearly spat. “Like a fucking Catholic priest? Fuckin’ cop.” Yalulah had to re
strain her again. The cop’s hand went to a canister of mace on his belt, and he left it there as a warning. The two men behind him bristled.

  “Yeah, a priest,” he said, “and yeah, all the priests I’ve ever met were Catholic.”

  “Oh, a cop and a comic,” Mary sniped.

  “Shut the fuck up, Mary,” Yalulah pleaded.

  “No, just a cop. But I’m also a son, and I also have a son. Look, lady, I’m just a cop, I’m not here to judge. That’ll come later. Now we will need to take the boy. Is he home?”

  Without waiting for an answer, the cops pushed past both women into the room. “We’d like to take a look around, if you don’t mind.”

  33.

  “IT’S A DEFINITE BLUMHOUSE TAKE, that’s the template—take a hoary horror concept from the past, tweak it politically to the left of the original IP, shoot it for a price, five to ten mil, make all the villains old, white, privileged males and all the heroes women of color, or just women anyway. My heroine, Dr. Hyde, think Viola Davis or Gal Gadot or Phoebe Waller-Bridge—have you seen Fleabag? So dope. So Jekyll is a brilliant scientist. She already had to fight her way through a scientific establishment that’s predominantly and prejudicially male. ‘Women don’t have those types of brains,’ some old white guy with an English accent says. Plus she’s a lesbian, or bi, or maybe even trans, or on the way to trans—I haven’t figured that out because trans-formation is the woke allegorical theme of the movie that will make robo-critics tell you it’s okay to enjoy the cheap scares and blood and guts.”

  Maya was sitting in the Ivy by the Shore restaurant, picking at a salad that was twice the size of her head, and listening to a twenty-two-year-old named Sammy Greenbaum pitch a reboot of the Hammer film she had targeted as promising, Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde. Malouf, sole owner of the Hammer library, had made her take the lunch meeting. Sammy had directed a short film about the relationship between a homeless man and his dog called Friend’s Best Man, his USC senior project, that got into Sundance last year and “made a splash,” and more important, he was the son of one of Malouf’s billionaire polo-playing buddies who was on the Praetorian board.

  Sammy was thirsty, on his fourth Diet Coke of the lunch; he was vaping and spitballing hard. “So in the original, Dr. Jekyll is a man of course, of course we change that—that’s toxic patriarchal shit—and so our Dr. Ms. Jekyll, she takes the potion, which could be hormones, would be hormones in this day and age, for the trans thing, you know, getting ready to transish, he/she kills prostitutes, which doesn’t make any sense, except that she’s thinking the police will think it’s Jack the Ripper, aha—but I don’t even set our movie in London or the past, I set it in present-day San Francisco, the main suspect will be named Jack Ripperwell, you like that? But we shoot in Vancouver for the exchange rate, west coast for west coast not a problem, anyway—in our movie—she needs to kill men, not women. That’s a no-brainer. And, here’s the genius part—she targets sexual assaulters. She’s a doctor, twist, she’s a research scientist who also has a thriving private practice made mostly of gay men—maybe even set it at the height of the AIDS crisis in the late ’80s, maybe she stumbles on her potion trying to cure AIDS—shit, that’s good! Twist. But the killer isn’t gay, not Silence of the Lambs gay—can you imagine trying to make that movie now, NFW. Do you mind if I voice memo?”

  “Not at all.”

  Sammy spoke into his phone: “San Fran ’88, period? AIDS, GMHC, patient zero, cure?”

  Maya’s own phone started vibrating; she hoped to God it was some kind of emergency that would save her from the rest of the wild pitch, but out of courtesy, she let it ring.

  “So,” Sammy continued, “the good doctor, she’s got friends in high places, politics and shit, she’s well connected, they get her a list of sex criminal names in her area, real dark Masonic Temple–type stuff—4chan, 8chan, Charlie Chan—Q Anon to the max—the Wieners, Weinsteins, and Epsteins, but they can’t all be Steins, can’t all be Jews, okay, that would be fucked up, was that Keith Raniere a Jew? Raniere a Jewish name? The Nxivm dude? Anyway, he’s Canadian I think, isn’t he? Which is even better, Vancouver is where that went down? I gotta check. Twist. A Canadian villain offends no one. Justin Trudeau gonna mean-tweet me? That’s so fuckin’ woke I love it. Anyway, one can be a Catholic priest, perfect, one’s like an R. Kelly, cover all the bad-guy bases—and she creates a list of these predatory men and goes to fucking town, maybe castrates them before she kills them and feeds them their own genitals, goes medieval poetic justice on their asses, right? And her signature is to leave behind this blue smoke from like a smoke bomb, like her Bat Signal—blue for boy? But blue is the new pink. Get that? She’s appropriating a traditionally male color like a boss. There’s a new sheriff in town, a new pope. Yeah, it’s visual as fuck. That’s how I write—with images. My palette is lit as fuck. They don’t call it moving words, they call it moving pictures. Poetic justice! So she’s like Dexter in a way, too. Maybe even finds some DNA link between a genetic mutation in these rapers and her AIDS cure, so killing them ends up saving others—no, that’s not quite right, but maybe something in there, in the ballpark of there.”

  Sammy kind of amused Maya, in the way she could be partially entertained by those videos of animals doing human things, like a squirrel on a skateboard or a pigeon in a little suit. He no doubt misread her slight smile.

  “Who’s Dexter?” she asked.

  “Showtime show from when I was a kid—a serial killer who killed serial killers.”

  “Ah. Clever. Wait, did you say she feeds them their own genitals?”

  “I did, indeed.”

  “Rad. Raw or cooked?”

  “Oh. I don’t know. I’m gonna say probably raw ’cause I don’t want to imply that a woman cooks, you know? That’s fucked up.”

  “Do they know they’re eating their genitals when they eat them?” Maya became aware that a table near them had begun to listen to their conversation.

  “That’s a good question. I don’t know yet. You ask really good questions.”

  “Probably depends if, you know, she serves it in a stew or just, like, puts the cock out there like a sausage.” Sammy was momentarily stunned by the word cock, charmed and disarmed.

  “Uh, I’m thinking stew. Just riffing, but, yeah, stew. But like tartar, raw, like I said.”

  “Fair enough. Totally. Cool. Well, that sounds like quite the ride. Excuse me one second.”

  She pulled her phone out of her purse and saw that it was Janet Bergram trying to reach her and that she had three voice mails from her already. The urgency was unsettling, as she hadn’t heard from Janet in over a month.

  “Sammy,” she said, “I just need to make a quick call and make sure this isn’t an emergency. You’re great. The pitch is great. So many levels. Best one I’ve heard so far.”

  “No problem, and call me Sam,” Sammy said, and snapped his fingers at the waiter like an entitled young white man for his fifth Diet Coke. Maya got up, dialed Janet, and walked to the bar for some privacy.

  “Hi, Janet, Maya Abbadessa.”

  “There you are. Did I catch you at a bad time?”

  “Yes, the worst, and thank you.” She laughed.

  “I’ve been trying you for a couple hours.”

  “I see that, what’s up?”

  “There was an incident.”

  Janet gave her the rundown on the Hyrum situation. Maya silently, hand over mic, ordered herself a tequila shot from the bartender. This was horrible news. The whole Praetorian/Powers test was fucked now, obviously, but beyond that, this was a very sad tragedy—a kid was badly hurt, she heard “decerebrate posturing” and “anoxic brain injury”” and “intracranial pressure,” and that doctors were concerned about “brain herniation” and “unresponsive wakefulness syndrome.” She got dizzy, and almost upchucked thirty-five dollars’ worth of lobster Cobb. Hyrum’s future was in serious jeopardy. She downed the tequila; she wanted another, but thought better of it. She felt like s
hit. She knew from watching a million Hammer films that the explorers were not supposed to get involved with the natives, that the scientist shouldn’t play God, that she shouldn’t have fucked with Bronson and fucked up this fucked-up family. She’d have to get right to the office to tell Malouf, and probably get fired.

  “Thank you, Janet, for telling me. And I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize to me. Oh, and the last thing, the reason I called.”

  “Yes?”

  “Hyrum told me he thinks one of the other kids was filming the whole thing on a phone and that that would show that he’s telling the truth about the incident. That it was self-defense, not a hate crime, et cetera. Now, I’ve got my ways of trying to locate the phone, but I’m Black, and there’s limits to how much these Mexican families trust me.”

  “Well, I’m white, my Spanish sucks, and they don’t know me from Adam, so I don’t see how I’d do any better…”

  “No, they don’t know you, but you have resources I don’t, someone from your business could flash serious money around; I bet you could buy that phone, find the video, for ten grand, less, they’re just kids, poor kids, poor families, remember, you could get all the phones in the neighborhood for a hundred K—might be worth it?”

  So Janet Bergram was a player, too. Even the righteous ones had to figure the evil angles and do the dark math. Everybody had dirty, bloody, callused hands. Maya didn’t know if this revelation made her profoundly sad or profoundly justified. She dug at a shred of lobster lodged above her incisor. The bartender, who looked like a fifteen-year-old with huge biceps, shook his head disapprovingly at her and whispered, “No cell phones at the bar.”

  “Fuck you, you infant,” Maya replied, then smiling, added, “You wanna be in a horror movie?”