Lightning People

by Christopher Bollen

  “I have decided . . . ” They both waited, but he couldn’t finish the sentence.

  “Decided? To urinate in your own sheets? Did you get my messages? I’ve been calling for two days. I finally got a hold of your agent so I could reach you wherever the hell you were on assignment and she said you never showed. ‘That’s not Raj,’ I said. She must have disagreed because she hung up.”

  “I was thinking about crowds,” he managed through a dehydrated tongue. “Whole packs of people all together until they spread out like a sea . . . ”

  “Ugh.”

  She actually said “ugh.” Madi was all for the romance of mental breakdowns, but not when it involved her own bloodline. She threw the cereal in the trash, ran a shower for her brother, and touched up her makeup in the reflection of picture glass, behind which a line of soldiers cut a human curtain across Red Square. By the time Raj had returned to the land of the living, or at least dressed the part, she promised never to mention the “birthday granola incident” again.

  Raj didn’t mention it either. But after that birthday, he stayed in more. He became less visible. He kept to his studio as much as he could, and the laugh lines around his mouth began to diminish. He dated Del from the comfortable reaches of his set of broken armchairs and let her go without a single romantic chase down the stairs. Now at thirty-five, he watched summer mornings fade into gray afternoons without once stepping foot outside of his apartment. In the past week, he had managed to go four days without leaving the building. When Del had shown up that evening, he had kissed her in part because he was ready to touch the world again.

  When they were together, Del asked more than once why he never took her picture. And in fact, in all the portfolios that lined his shelf, in the sealed canisters of film yet to be developed, and in the stacks of mustard Polaroid boxes, he did not possess a single photograph of Delphine Kousavos. He tried to explain, “I no longer take photographs of things I find beautiful. Not anymore.” She snorted sarcastically, piling her hair on the top of her head while posing to judge her beauty in the mirror. “You took one of Madi,” she replied. “I saw it hanging in her bedroom. Wait until she hears that you don’t find her beautiful.”

  “Please don’t use my sister against me.”

  “Sorry we aren’t all Le Corbusier conference rooms. You must be disappointed. Some of us have a little sun damage. A few of us even breathe.”

  He had shot Madi because he knew the geography of her face as intimately as the bend in the West Side Highway outside his window. Underneath the lip gloss and bronzing cream, Madi was still the sister who had slept in the bunk above his own as a child before they graduated to separate rooms. Their parents: a white, reed-thin mother and a chubby Indian father splashed in black body hair. From those polar opposites, the two had come, and as kids, each had prayed with religious fervor to grow in opposite genetic directions. But puberty failed prayers. Raj had taken his mother’s skinny frame along with her electric blue eyes, while Madi, refusing to give in to the inevitable, bandaging herself in tight stonewash jeans and compulsively tearing out her eyebrows with tweezers, had inherited the thicker bones and paternal proclivity to sprout dense black hair along her forearms. They were the two wobbling melting pots molded by a couple who should never have married and who crashed their progeny against each other whenever possible—a cheaper alternative to smashing their set of kitchen plates. A very pregnant Vicki Birch Singh had delighted in the exotic foreignness of her turbaned husband when she agreed to let him pick out the firstborn’s name by flipping pages at random in the Guru Granth Sahib to the first letter of the first word of the first hymn according to Sikh custom. R made its chance monumental trek to Rajveer. But three years later, the kiln had cooled in the Birch-Singh household. A more disillusioned mother, smoking two packs of Newports per day and secretly attending Bible meetings at Southern Crossroads Gateway House, stuck to her guns and Birch family tradition, naming the second baby Madeline. “Screw your Guru Granth,” she had wailed an hour before bringing their daughter into the world. “Let this kid have a real chance of fitting in. Now get her out of me, or I’ll drive to the hospital myself.”

  Raj and Madi had been raised in a pink aluminum-sided household of warring religions, Raj’s red–black hair descending inch by inch free of scissors or razors, wrapped and bunned in the stiff white folds of a miniature Sikh turban. His grade-school classmates nicknamed him “The Turbinator,” spraying him with invisible machine-gun fire in the stone corridors of PS33, offing the enemy Arab boy he denied being in class assignments on cultural heritage. When faced with twenty-one reports on the Irish potato famine, the Cuban exile experience, and the yuletide meaning of dreidel, the verdant Punjabi territory between the Indus and Yamuna Rivers, with its lush gardens and flowering crops, might as well have existed in Saudi Arabia under the anorexic belly of a camel. Meanwhile, Madi, heavier in body but lighter in psychological load, wore plastic jelly shoes and Bermuda shorts and permed her hair according to the statutes of Sassy and Seventeen. Taking him by the arm on the first day of each school year, with the sun lifting above the singed Ft. Lauderdale palms, she acted as his American ambassador, his crop top liberator to the bleached blondes, freckled noses, and unmanageable cowlicks of the late summer playground. Madi had tried—how much can an eleven-year-old do?—to calm international hostilities. But there were two kinds of headgear worn at PS33: those bought at the Hat Hut at Palatial Gardens Mall and his, worn at all times, indoor and outdoor, for devotion and purity, which hid hair that was longer than any brushed by grade-school girls.

  The day his mother finally kicked his father out for being a lazy, emotionally inadequate non–Jesus freak, she picked him up from school in her rusted Rabbit convertible and threw down ten dollars at the closest barbershop to get his hair cut “proper.”

  “Cut it off,” she told the barber, as tears welled in her eyes and her fingers fumbled over her cigarette lighter. “The shorter the better. Real normal.”

  “But, miss?” the barber had said nervously, dipping a comb in a vat of amniotic blue gel, as if afraid he were about to commit a divine transgression. “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m fucking sure. I’m his mother.” Then through an eruption of nicotine smoke and tears, she patted Raj’s shoulders as he felt the cold scissor tips on the back of his neck. “You want something fun, angel? You can have whatever cut you want.”

  “ WHY DIDN’T YOU tell me Del had gotten married?” he said in lieu of a hello into the phone. Madi made three ticking sounds with her tongue, the hold music of a brain searching for an appropriate answer.

  “Raj, I’m in a meeting. There’s something of a crisis here, so don’t be upset if I settle Bangalore before I tackle your broken heart.” He checked his watch and imagined his sister in her Tribeca office, shuffling through documents in her loud silk sari and pinstriped pants. “I realize your infrastructure is also a little volatile right now, but I’m on a conference call with stockholders.”

  “Did you think you could just keep it from me?”

  She moaned. “I’m hanging up. Let’s talk about this later.” He heard a door close and then an angry whisper drive through the receiver. “So what? Isn’t she allowed to? You’d think you were still dating her. Some advice. Leave your damn apartment. Go for a walk. Let the air in your place do without your lungs for a while. Wake up, Raj. I can get you on a plane to Delhi in twenty-four hours if you’d be willing to take some pictures for me. I know it’s not fine art but ... ”

  He returned the phone to its cradle and slicked his hair down on the sides with water from the kitchen tap. Madi had spent the first twenty-five years of life playing the all-American girl to hide the father she didn’t want to look like. In college, she dyed her hair blonde and pierced her ears with seven holes. Somewhere around twenty-five, she let her natural black grow against the yellow until her hair hung like a flag splitting factions evenly down the middle. By the time she started wearing saris over her bu
siness suits, she had been promoted to vice executive in a corporate firm built on outsourcing IT departments to regions in Karnataka. “When you start calling yourself Madhavi instead of Madeline, I’ll know you’ve really lost it,” he had warned her. “I’ve been talking a lot to Dad,” she had responded. “He thinks India would be good for you too.”

  Mrs. Vicki Birch had been fired for smoking on the grounds of the gas station, when missing cartons were found in the form of brandin-question butts sprinkled near the fuel pumps at dawn. “Poor Mom,” Madi had said in response to the news and then cancelled her round-trip ticket to Florida for Christmas. “She reacts to her own faults by comforting herself with bad habits. Let’s not be two more of them, Raj. She needs to get her own life together without burying herself in lost children.” Madi was the only person he knew who still believed that the world, so fresh out of unclaimed land, was up for anyone’s grabs. Mostly her own. She was the sibling of airports now.

  Raj turned the knob on the apartment door and walked across the West Side Highway to the park along the river. He sat in the grass for ten minutes as sailboats tipped against the blue sky and couples leaned over the railing to bring themselves closer to the spray of the chop. He thought of that vision on the day of his thirtieth birthday. For some reason it had always remained there on the other side of his eyelids—a field of people stretching in all directions until their various heads and shoulders dissolved into an indistinguishable blur. To remove one or to add another would make no difference. In that crowd was everything at all times, hunger and expectation and filth. He wasn’t certain whether that vision had come as a nightmare or a relief. Raj had purposely turned his lens on studies of modern architecture, allowing no trace of those who lived between the walls to infect his work. So why should it surprise him that Del had finally moved on with her life? Why did it hurt to hear that obvious conclusion? He grabbed two clumps of grass and twisted the blades. The world belonged to those who kept moving in it. Del had been the one to call off the relationship. But Raj had let her go.

  CHAPTER SIX

  OCCASIONALLY WILLIAM’S AGENT, Janice Eccles, actually managed to do her job. And when that minor miracle occurred, a mixture of fright and euphoria overtook him, similar, he assumed, to the feeling a hostage must experience when finally freed from an escalating standoff. Suddenly, he was a free agent, no longer a pawn in a waiting game between forces beyond his control.

  William slipped his arms through a white Oxford, applying a dab of cologne to his neck and leaving the top buttons open to reveal a nest of black chest hair. He hoisted a pair of jeans around his waist and laced a pair of battered loafers. William inspected himself in the mirror and was startled by his own reflection because he found he was smiling. He had been smiling ever since he had heard the message on his phone from Janice that someone with money and a script looking for a male lead had asked for William by name. Aleksandra Andrews at the Carlyle hotel, 12 PM sharp.

  William had stepped quietly out of his twenties with the composure of a married man, accepting of his age. For a little while, anyway. He could see the changes every time he looked in the mirror. His younger face, a puddle of dark eyes and fattened-calf cheeks and a jaw that was tinted blue from shaved whiskers, had solidified into a slightly pissed-off grimace that only a forced smile could expunge. There was also a droop to his eyelids as if his forehead had lost its war with a heavy, distressing thought. But what surprised him more was how his brain had failed to follow the same holding pattern. He expected mood swings and hopeless indirection in youth but believed age would nail down those beating wings into solid, tenable anchors. The truth was that he felt even more lost than ever—like he was easy prey to whatever chemicals and errant hormonal secretions decided to unleash their tempers on him on any given hour. Where was the certainty that comes with the years? Wasn’t that the consolation of age—some peace of mind, some getting of the joke?

  He did not get the joke. His marriage had failed, his career had cooled, and he had inherited from his younger self a love of the late nights and the substances that drew those nights out further. Lately, pleasure was like a tropical island glimpsed from a plane window, almost there, in proximity, but never quite under his feet.

  William entered the unfamiliar hush of the marble lobby at noon sharp, checking his watch to make sure he was on time, and was directed by the receptionist to suite 706. He used the mirror in the elevator to fix his hair and examine his clothes, the bland shirt and pants, tricks of the actor’s profession to look as generic as possible so a casting agent can easily drop any identity onto his shoulders—murderer or amnesia victim, gladiator or car salesmen, gentle father or hotdog vendor or gun-toting marine. He would nail this audition, whatever it was. He would go in and bag the role, reading any clip of bad dialogue like the words dripped from his veins. He stepped onto the seventh floor and followed the medallion carpet pattern to room 706. He pressed his ear to the wood to catch a fragment of a script being read by some hack competitor and, hearing nothing, knocked on the door.

  “Come in.”

  The suite was dark, the lights had been left off, and what little sunlight there was broke in horizontal slashes across the beige carpeting. For a moment, even though he had been asked to enter, William thought he might be in the wrong room. He opened the door wider to allow some of the hallway light to make sense of the room.

  “Shut it,” a woman’s voice ordered.

  She sat in a whicker chair in the frame of double doors that led to the bedroom. Her legs were crossed and her elbow rested on the back of the chair, allowing her hand to play with a strand of hair twisted around a finger.

  “Hello,” he said. “Touchpoint sent me. I’m here for the audition.”

  “You’re William Asternathy?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He tried to make the words sound like a kiss blown through the dark into her heart. You had to flirt with these casting agents, male or female, make them want to take you out to dinner if they could. He was better at it with women and felt his chances rise when he saw her head nod approvingly.

  “Do you want me to read?” he asked.

  “Come so I can see you,” she replied, loosening her index finger from her hair and pointing toward the window. William sucked air through his nose and walked until the sunlight blinded him. He squinted, trying not to wrinkle his skin, and watched her stand up and take a step forward. She had blond hair, soft and washed but not combed so it hung clumsily over her ears. She was older, early fifties maybe, with tight, small Connecticut features that would read as pretty in soft focus, but she was pale underneath her tan. A scarlet birthmark shot up her neck almost like an arrow. She wiped her mouth.

  “You’re not him,” she said.

  “I’m not who?”

  “You’re not William Asternathy.”

  “Really? Are you so sure about that?” he stammered, almost laughing.

  “You’re not right.”

  “Well, you don’t know that. Let me read.”

  “I said you aren’t right. You’re not the right man.”

  “Look,” he snapped. He backed up a step to get out of the sun and considered moving toward her, but his fingers were bunching in anger and he didn’t want to come across as threatening. “Let me read the script and then make your decision.”

  “Get out.” She retreated behind the chair as if she also guessed he might be threatening, and suddenly the phone lying on the floor near her feet took on a larger presence than a non-ringing phone should.

  He squeezed the air in his fists and walked toward the door.

  “You’re a fucking waste of time, you know that?” he screamed. “You bring me all the way here and you don’t even let me read. Who the hell do you think you are?” But as William turned to catch one last look at her, he found that she had already disappeared into the bedroom, taking the phone with her. The double doors slammed shut and the chair fell over on its side.

  “ CAN YOU BELIEVE that?” William li
fted his arm from his eyes and stared up at the consoling face of Brutus Quinn.

  “You should complain.”

  “What do you think I’m going to do as soon as I leave here? I can’t go on like this. I haven’t gotten one thing thrown at me in months. Haven’t got a single part in beyond a year. God, it’s been two years now. Who am I kidding? And then this woman, this bitch, all she says is, ‘you’re the wrong man.’ You should have seen me. I almost murdered her.”

  Quinn rolled his eyes and grabbed a towel from the dish rack to dry his hands. “Will, come on.”

  “No, I won’t come on. I’m broke. Why is it every time I say I’m broke to anyone, all they do is roll their eyes?”

  “It’s part of the business,” he said, wiping his hands roughly on a black, paisley rag. William rotated onto his stomach and picked up the tea that Quinn had placed in front of him. He had come for fatherly advice and now no longer wanted to hear it. “You can’t hate people for not falling in love with you,” Quinn said, throwing the towel over his shoulder. “You can’t blame the world for not dropping everything they’re holding just because you’re walking by.”

  “But I do,” William struggled to laugh. “I don’t care if that sounds narcissistic.”

  “Well, I still love you,” Quinn said sarcastically, but his face reddened from the truth of the sentiment.

  Brutus Quinn hibernated year-round in a piteously small stucco cottage tucked behind an apartment building in the West Village, a single square of white bricks fitted with a thatched Hansel-and-Gretel roof that was so well hidden in its back garden of ailing oak trees that co-op boards and residential developers must have entirely forgotten about the thirty-year inhabitant shelling out eight hundred dollars per month to keep his stronghold in a neighborhood that was once crowded with affectatious gay men just like him. “Where have all the freaks gone?” was the title of one poem that Quinn had written on the subject of white, fertile, hetero gentrification. The answer to that question was easy: they had died. Quinn had tested positive in 1987, but his white cells somehow never bore the diminishing returns of those blood results. He persevered, heavier and more near-sighted as the years went on but still surprisingly healthy, as he watched most of his closest friends pass away within a matter of five years. William often thought of that disease as a bomb going off, leaving Quinn to carry on in the shrapnel of his former life, which decorated the cottage in the form of old photographs and dusty bric-a-brac arranged chaotically like a garage sale. Quinn had been an actor himself, and then, when his muscles lost their lean efficiency and his gray hair began to fall from the roots, continued on as a set designer for under-attended avant-garde plays. Quinn and William had met in one such production that had all the popular momentum of a six-day run. But their friendship had lasted, mostly on William’s insistence by his dropping in at the cottage four or five times a month, lying on the couch covered in dirty Turkish batiks, and listening to Quinn’s stories of New York in the ’70s and ’80s, which always involved young boys in constant need of drug money, suicides from swallowing razor blades, ACT-UP rallies at political conventions, kleptomaniacal models, and heavy doses of anonymous sex in the Meatpacking District. He couldn’t walk with Quinn anymore through the West Village streets, because the old man hissed at baby strollers and whistled at deliverymen. But William loved the quiet sanctuary of the cottage, a fallen museum devoted to Quinn in the prime of his days.