Lightning People

by Christopher Bollen

  He stood as still as he could in the middle of the living room. He heard the shower run in the bathroom and Del’s voice humming along to a song stuck in her head. For a second, as his fingers began to undo the top button of his shirt, he wondered if it was fair to marry a woman whom he couldn’t let in completely. Jitters too late infected his mind: You, Joseph Guiteau, wearing a pinstripe suit, are only an actor playing the part of a happy groom. What right did he have marrying a woman whom he blocked and shielded from his worst secrets, who had only learned scattered pieces of his life edited and scoured of their grimmest details? He often went silent when Del threw her hands on her head in exasperation and said, “Doesn’t anyone in this city have a nine-to-five job anymore? Am I the only person who has to wake up in the morning?” Work had been her signal complaint since they met. He knew she hated her job at the zoo, stuck giving tours and cleaning snake cages to stay in the country on her visa. But as of today she wouldn’t have to worry about that anymore. She could be free now. Joseph loved her enough to give her that.

  “It’s just jitters,” he said out loud to drive them away. He inhaled deeply and walked to the bathroom door. “Del, you almost ready?”

  “A minute,” she yelled.

  He returned to the sofa, unbuttoning his shirt and wiping the sweat from his chest. A bleating car alarm in the street mixed with the muffled motor of a garbage truck, all the ordinary echoes of the city telling him that it was still a normal day, and soon the nerves would pass and he and Del could go on, living like they had, in their rented apartment five flights above the sidewalk behind the matted branches of the elm trees.

  It occurred to him to call someone with the news. Isn’t that what someone was supposed to do when they married, tell the ones they loved? Joseph reached for the cell phone in his pocket, unsure of whom to call. He hadn’t spoken to his only relative in nearly fifteen years. He was amazed that he still remembered the ten-digit number of the house in Cincinnati and was so taken with his immediate recall that he only regretted dialing when he heard the first ring. After three more rings a voice answered tiredly, distrustfully, like the vocal chords were out of practice.

  He had not heard that voice since he left Ohio, and he remembered it now, how it had deepened in pitch after his father’s death. He struggled to return the simple greeting, but his tongue shut down against his teeth. His mother was the last person who would celebrate the news of his wedding. She had already given up all belief in the value of such eternal commitments. That low Midwestern voice had been the one to tell him all through his childhood that there was only one thing he could count on with certainty: ending up like his father, and the father before him. Maybe she had changed, he thought, as he tried again to say hello. But he waited through the silence of the receiver.

  The bathroom door opened, and Del walked out with a towel knotted over her breasts. A wet rolled cigarette hung clumsily from her mouth. She smiled and then squinted her eyes when she noticed the phone at his ear.

  “Who are you calling?” she asked as she tapped her cigarette into the ashtray on the dresser.

  There was no reason to tell his mother the news. There was no reason after so many years to tell her anything. Maybe he just wanted to know that she was still there in the house in Cincinnati, with power lines connected to the utility poles along the street as if keeping the whole house moored to a world that his mother had long given up. Joseph closed the phone and dropped it on the coffee table.

  “No one,” he said with a smile. Del picked up the wine bottle and rammed the corkscrew into the bottle. Her hands were wet, and the handle slipped from her grip. He grabbed the bottle to open it for her, and she walked past him into the bedroom. She returned a minute later pushing a pair of faded gray jeans over her hips. A black bra hung over her shoulders, unfastened in the middle, and her breasts slapped her thin freckled arms as she fought the unwilling zipper.

  “Hey,” he said, “We’re married.” Del looked up at him with her eyebrows lifted, and in that moment Joseph no longer felt waylaid by the anxiety of the morning. Yes, they really were married. The day had happened. He just needed to say it out loud to someone. Del laughed and pointed to the stereo on the dresser.

  “Put on some music then,” she said. She patted his left cheek as she made her way toward the kitchen. “I’m sorry I didn’t agree to a party. I guess you’re just going to have to forgive me.”

  He was relieved to see her easy, ungraceful walk in the shadows of the hallway. Maybe love was the closest thing to feeling safe in the world. As safe as two people can be anymore.

  “You love me, right?” he yelled to her. He didn’t want to stop talking now that they had found their foothold in each other again. He knew it was stupid to ask that question on the day of their wedding, but the sound of his mother’s voice had brought too many doubts to circle in his mind. “You’re happy. About today, I mean.”

  As he put one of Del’s favorite records on the stereo—an erratic’70s rock ballad that reminded him of drilled cavities and reminded her always of molten romance—she stepped back into the hallway.

  “Of course I love you. More than anyone ever. Christ, what a fucking question.”

  BUT WAS THAT the absolute truth? The day had been filled with questions, but they only asked for answers in the present tense: I do. Not I will. Not I did. Del made moussaka for dinner from the recipe her mother had given her, a list of ingredients and baking directions typed on a piece of paper that proved its merit in its thick wax of ancient, corroded grease stains. They ate the meal at the table under candlelight, where Del made excuses to return to the kitchen to splash cold water on her face and take sips of whiskey from a glass on the counter. At the table she drank wine and reached her hand out to stroke Joseph’s arm with her knuckles. When there was nothing left of the moussaka in the pan, nothing left of the day but the last hour to midnight, she followed Joseph into the bedroom. They kissed on the bed as her fingers dug below the waist of his pants, tracking the scant hairs of his stomach until they flowered around his penis. Enough light from the street shone through the diamond grates of the window for Del to see Joseph clearly. His straight white teeth and the solid architecture of his face always managed to astound her. She appreciated how handsome, how disturbingly and un-menacingly Midwestern those features were, how they matched some old idea of what American men looked like when she had imagined them at night on her bed as a child. She pulled herself away with a final kiss and told him she needed a glass of water. The temperature was nearing a hundred degrees in their apartment tonight.

  She loved Joseph. More than anyone. But the unconditional “ever” might have been a bit of a romantic leap. In truth, there were other men that filled up the dark island in her head reserved for those names and faces she had once felt certain she had loved. Del had a habit of returning to that island, of sitting with those ghosts for concentrated minutes, desperate to resurrect details—accents, dinners, states of circumcision, arguments, intimate conversations that felt like walking over a cliff together—that made remembering them worth the price. What was the value of holding on to someone if she couldn’t hold them again later in her mind? As she walked quietly through the apartment on the night of her wedding, slightly drunk on the combination of whiskey and wine, she allowed herself to remember the first time love had inhabited human form to unbalance the contents of her heart.

  Dash Winslow had been as striking and ridiculous as his name implied. Dash had seduced Del at Columbia on the grass lawn next to Rodin’s Thinker simply by standing before her one afternoon, cutting a shadow over her Anatomy of the Human Brain reader. He had long red hair that descended into brown as it reached his elbows and a thick red beard that brought out disturbing green eyes, which made him look possessed by a marauding homicidal Viking. What he was possessed by, in their senior year at Columbia, was a family who had the audacity to name their second son Dashiell, owned a huge chunk of commercial real estate on Long Island, and bankrolled
an entire hall in the Islamic wing at the Met. Thus Dash’s ripped heavy-metal T-shirts and piled-on silver chains and even the yellow daisy that he tucked thoughtfully behind his ear could easily be written off as an attempt at low-grade rebellion while attending a middlebrow Ivy. But Dash really was possessed. His pupils held a dilation that could only be seen in others during the peaks of an intense acid trip. He brought Del back to his off-campus apartment and fucked her three times in two hours. He spread a bedsheet out on his balcony and, naked, they watched the sun cinder into New Jersey and the homeless build their tents in Riverside Park. They drank whiskey and smoked pot as they leaned against each other. That was the night she first fell in love with single malt scotch, a lasting indulgence, and also with him.

  Like someone who came from extreme privilege and unlike someone tied to the responsibilities it obligates, Dash carried a reckless confidence that she had never seen in a man her age. She was used to settling for the occasional half-hearted orgasm with one of the cerebral loners who didn’t have her work-study obligations, waking up at seven on weekend mornings to pack bags of fetal pigs in the biology freezer, which she favored to churning out collated color copies for the junior faculty. Dash claimed her as his girlfriend right away, picking her up most nights in front of her dorm on 114th Street, placing his gray wool fedora over her head, and taking her to underground clubs on the Lower East Side that he had frequented since he was thirteen. She couldn’t believe this side of New York had always existed without her ever tapping into it. Somehow, like most Columbia undergrads, Del had been left stranded inside the wrought iron of the Upper West Side, living on the cool sophistication of subway rides down to Soho for student-teacher cocktail parties in renovated lofts with Abstract Expressionist prints the color of urine on the bathroom walls.

  Dash was naked so often when they were together, the red curls covering his nipples and matching the flaming tuft above his hooked erect penis, a part of her felt detached when running into him on campus and seeing him dressed in camouflage pants with absurd yellow handkerchiefs tied around his wrists—like he was dressing for a world outside of the one they shared. Yes, she considered herself a feminist. Yes, she held a lit candle on the march down Amsterdam Avenue to take back the night and attended seminars on the brutality of fashion magazines and female genital mutilation in remote West African villages. But Dash could hand her a blade of grass that he picked on his way to meet her and she’d keep it preserved in the gold locket she wore around her neck. He played bass in a band called Splatter Pattern. She had briefly tried out as a backup singer, but, as Dash himself said, “You sing like you’re being electrocuted for a crime you didn’t commit.” Instead she sat behind the curtain at their shows smoking a dozen cigarettes and throwing death glances at the girls who assembled around the stage—models or junkies or wannabes of either camp who looked pretty and lost under the colored lights. Alas, she’d found her type: He was an artist. He bought Marcel Breuer metal chairs and twisted them into useless piles of junk.

  Del and the red Viking had fallen so hard for each other that the morning after they graduated—she magna cum laude in biology, he a “walking degree” until he finished a full summer semester of classes and a mandatory gym requirement—he asked her if she would consider living with him and having a baby. “Isn’t that what all this money I’ve got is for?” he asked, while kicking a combat boot toward the ceiling fan that circled slowly above his bed. “Let’s make a child because we have so much love it needs to spill into something else.” What he didn’t know—and what she did—was that her stomach was already carrying a dark secret. What she didn’t know—and what he did—was that he was about to embark on a two-month tour with his band. They were both twenty-one.

  Her parents were a furious chorus of answering-machine messages. She tried to stop drinking the scotch in his apartment for the baby she hadn’t yet told him about. She had moved her clothes into his closets and spent evenings camped out naked on his balcony when she received the news that Dash had been with his two bandmates in a blue Mustang at 12:30 AM on Summerlick Highway outside of Boston when they were hit head-on by a semi traveling at seventy miles per hour. The driver was alive but in serious condition. The man in the front seat had been beheaded by the truck’s grill. The passenger in the back had sustained such grave injuries that he bled to death as the police tried to cut him out of the Mustang’s chassis. Dash had not said anything to the officers as they worked to pry him out of the skeletal backseat, but one of them got the sense that he had, for a while anyway, been conscious. Del’s college roommate and best friend, Madeline Singh, held her hand for twenty-eight days. Madi held it when Del was not invited to the funeral by the Winslow family, held it as Del agonized about whether or not to have the baby, tried to hold it as they waited on the plastic bowl seats at the Planned Parenthood clinic, and used every inch of her hands to clasp on to Del at John F. Kennedy Airport before her flight back to Greece, to go home, to get away from New York, to be embraced by a family that had already framed her diploma over their living room clock, encased in glass to keep the sea salt from infecting the gears.

  Del spent a year on Amorgos before returning to New York. In those four seasons drifting in the quiet Aegean she gained pounds and invested her afternoons in her own studies, first in the heart muscles of the human anatomy and then, with a strange interest in toxins and circulatory structures, in herpetology, reptiles, the cold-bloods. The western diamondback drew her particular interest, fangs on one end, a rattle on the other, swerving through the deserts of America, reminding her of the country she missed. Madi kept a bed waiting for her return in an apartment on the edge of the East Village. By the time Del climbed out of a taxi on Avenue B with two pieces of luggage and a box of vinyl records—the only item she took from her dead boyfriend’s apartment before she slipped the key under the door—the pain of losing Dash Winslow had pretty much dissipated into the heartbreak of failed possibilities. Or rather, Del saw him for the distortion he had always been, a gorgeous kid who had been amplified in the head of another as the perfect, all-answering, money-backed future. He had finally been consigned to a blade of grass hidden in a locket at the bottom of her jewelry box.

  Eleven years later, she stood at the kitchen counter filling a glass with water from the faucet, and she could actually blame Dash’s death as the reason she had tumbled out of permanent citizenship in the United States by leaving that summer for Greece. If she had stayed, gone to graduate school or landed a job in biology research, she would have been granted one of those passes that the INS bestows on students who remain in the beneficent kingdoms of the educated working class. Instead, she had to apply all over again for visas, collecting letters from employers and friends on her merits every few years, paying cash for immigration lawyers who said “the chances are good, Ms. Kousavos. You work at one of the city’s top tourist attractions. Now when are you going to get that panda pregnant? My son loves pandas. Do you think you can swindle free weekend passes?”

  The last thing her father had said to her when she was home for Christmas three years ago was, “Don’t you do something drastic, young lady. Don’t go marrying some fool American for the papers, for the citizen card. You do a wedding here with your mother. We decorate the whole town for you.” She hadn’t phoned them yet to give them the news, and part of her wondered if she needed to tell them at all. Families far away are allotted such small windows into the lives of their children, wasn’t it best to let them imagine her world the way they wanted to, as if every day the Statue of Liberty drifted behind her shoulder and cops cleared her path at night until she was safely locked behind her door? It amazed her that she had survived fifteen years in the city, for much of that time staying out late enough to see dawn break through the yellow night sky, and still her parents cautioned her to be careful if she told them she was visiting a friend in Brooklyn. “Take a taxi,” her mother would plead. “We will send you the money if you cannot afford it.” (This from a wom
an who felt spending more than twenty dollars on a dress constituted financial delusion.)

  Her parents would not have approved of the scant fifth-floor apartment she and Joseph called home. The ceiling in the kitchen had turned a septic brown from water leaks, and scabs of paint dangled over the table, ready to drift like dandruff over their meals. The dark oak floorboards in the living room were severely warped, sprouting loose nail heads that left the soles of her feet in a constant callus. But the worst was the heat. Even when she moved into the apartment in the bitter January cold, carrying box after box up five flights and tracking snow across the wood until most of her belongings sat in puddles, the rooms hung to their fever. That winter the windowpanes shriveled until they no longer sealed out the wind. But a few feet from the frosted glass, Del and Joseph danced to her collection of old records, sweating in shorts and stretched-out T-shirts, as if they alone had fallen into a billboard advertisement for a tropical timeshare while the rest of the city was submerged in ice.