Lightning People

by Christopher Bollen

  William’s heart was racing as he leaned against Myra, who grabbed his hand and guided it between her legs. His fingertips were numb, but he forced them under the elastic of her underwear, and she closed her thighs to keep his hand from traveling any farther or from withdrawing it entirely. All of the nerves down his spine were firing. He wanted to stand up or lie down or play a never-ending game of chess. He wanted to move to Chile with Myra. He had seen pictures of Santiago in a magazine, the gorgeous dark eyes of teenagers in bright brandless sweatshirts under a mountain covered in smog.

  They walked into a Chinese restaurant that held no customers but was filled with tuxedoed waiters holding trays, through a kitchen canopied with washed silver pots, and into a large back room with a bar and torn vinyl couches. Myra bought him a vodka with nine one-dollar coins, and they sat around a coffee table, the three women speaking quickly as if each thought was an urgent message that would cure the future if only it were articulated right now. Myra’s teeth chattered even when he kissed her.

  “I am in New York for only a short time,” she told him.

  “Me too,” he replied. She bit into an Adderall and put half on his tongue.

  At four thirty, they turned down an alley and entered an apartment building where a party was in its slow dissolve in a sixth-floor walk up. Even though there were only nine college students in the railroad living room, trying to build enough enthusiasm to finish a box of Michelob on the floor, the guy in a tank top at the door said he’d only let in guests without penises.

  Myra’s two friends went inside, and the remaining three, heads bent down from the lightening sky, walked seven blocks in silence through the Lower East Side to an after-hours club that required a secret knock and a piece of red paper flashed over the peephole.

  “The bar is ‘free’ with ‘suggested donation,’” Jesse said with fingering quotation marks. “So if the cops bust, they aren’t technically selling.”

  “Who runs this place?” William asked. He held on to Myra’s waist.

  “It’s technically abandoned, so technically there is no ‘they’ to arrest. A guilty building with innocent people inside. We all wound up here by accident.”

  A black bedspread covered the single window. Porcelain lamps lined the perimeter of the room. Men who looked like members of a British punk band in their popular decline jumped around the makeshift card-table bar. Myra and William finished off what was left of the powder in her purse, and he briefly thought about putting one of the lampshades on his head as a joke, but considering the morose crowd and the possibility that the lampshade cliché had perhaps not yet traveled below the equator, he tangled his legs with Myra’s on top of a dresser by the bathroom. Kisses held currency in Chile. Kisses were what made the night slow down.

  Ed suddenly appeared with a scratch on his cheek and sat down next to him.

  “It’s five thirty,” he informed them despairingly. “Want a beer?”

  William felt too awake, and he wondered how deep into the next day this place stayed open, protecting them from the wrecking ball of sunlight on the other side of the door. Negotiating a pocket of cab receipts, ripped paper bracelets, and one-dollar bills seemed far more difficult than what Ed was rambling on about—wars and American casualties and the dissemination of nuclear bombs. William looked at the crowd, the young half-exhausted bodies squatting in semicircles on the floor. Night was New York’s great conspiracy, he thought. Everyone had come here for money and success but in the end they also came to get lost, become anonymous, disappear into the traffic of nine million people. The night hid the embarrassment of what they were during the day.

  “It can’t go on,” Ed kept saying. “How much longer can we go on like this? How much longer can we pretend we’re safe and nothing more will happen?”

  “We can go on,” Myra said softly, not quite following the thread. “They don’t know where we are.”

  “Maybe it will just go on,” William offered in an attempt to join the conversation. “On and on. Maybe the idea that there are all of these terrorists dying to blow us up is just an effort to make us hate the enemy. I mean, do they really care that much?”

  “Of course they hate us,” Ed hissed. “Jesus, why do most Americans have such a hard time believing that anyone can possibly not like them? They hate us and they hate us more every day. We have problems our parents never dreamed of.”

  “No one in New York has parents,” William replied. “Or families for that matter. We’re all pretty much immigrants taking shelter here.” Myra and Ed stared at him blankly. “I mean, we don’t even know our parents.”

  “I know my parents,” Myra said.

  “I call my father every Tuesday,” Ed admitted.

  “But you don’t know them. You’ve deserted. Gone AWOL. There are no more mom-and-pop businesses because there aren’t any more children to take over the register. That’s why this city never supports the military. We don’t know what it means to serve. But I mean that in a good way. We’re liberators, activists. We’ve made an army of . . . ” He was channeling Quinn.

  “I live with my mother,” Myra said, pushing his legs off of her. “My brother’s in the army.”

  “William, you’re fucked up. That’s not it at all. Casting us as a bunch of infidels just gives the government more excuses to ignore what we’re saying, while it’s doing pretty fucking little to keep this island protected. I’m telling you, the worst will come. And when it does, I dare anyone to act surprised.”

  “I was born under a dictatorship,” Myra said. “You are with your family or you have nothing.”

  “You aren’t following,” William stammered, wiping his nose anxiously with his wrist. “We’re an army that refuses to fight, which is like fighting. We fight with our backs.” His mind was warped from the drugs, he regretted that last sentence, and he could no longer even remember his original point. He went to the bathroom and when he returned, stumbling over a Japanese girl in a transparent dress who found his loafers insulting enough to ash her cigarette on, Myra and Ed were nowhere to be found. They had left together. Or just left. It didn’t matter. They had abandoned him.

  William opened the metal door and walked into the morning light up Stanton Street and west on to Houston. He laughed at the fleeting impression he left on bakery glass windows and on the car windows parked along the curb. He didn’t mind losing Myra. He didn’t care about Ed or the spread of uranium plants or even bombs being delivered by UPS to uptown embassies. He felt all of his jealousies and regrets disappearing the way the sun burned up the smog over the city he imagined living in. Not Santiago. Los Angeles. You can’t keep stepping in place, he was learning. By the time he found an off duty cab willing to take him uptown for his last twenty, his feelings about Jennifer had faded. Burned out in a sudden flare like it was all another year with its own set of problems.

  As the stock market opened, he was just a man going to bed.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  SOMEWHERE IN THE filing cabinets and hard drives of the INS department, there must be classified interrogation reports on how closely immigrants married to U.S. citizens approximated a legitimate union. Did they hold hands during their INS interview or exchange well-timed adoring glances, talk of pregnancies like impending vacations, wince when the subject turned to the first time they met each other’s parents? If the INS really wanted to judge the authenticity of love, they could do no better than to catch a couple trying to sleep during a summer heat wave. That’s what Del figured when she rolled onto her side and kicked the sheet off her body, while Joseph reached his arm over her waist and flattened his hand against her stomach.

  Tonight in their bedroom, the heat was merciless. The few drops of rain that clanged on the air conditioner outside the window had threatened a cooling reprieve but even those drops had gone dry. She and Joseph had both taken showers, bringing the cold water with them to bed, and after an hour of tossing, had sex to waste excess energy. But still the sleep didn’t come. Del felt th
e sweat build in the crevices of her armpits and tick along her thighs. Just moving out of Joseph’s reaches would have helped, but she liked the tight grip on her body and the way she could hear every inflection of his voice travel up her spine.

  Joseph always fell asleep first. He could switch off in the middle of the loudest argument echoing through their windows from the street, but he was also the kind of sleeper plagued with constant nightmares. Sometimes in the night she’d wake to find him caught in the inner logic of a dream, sitting up or reaching over to grab her hand, mumbling, “It’s gone now. It won’t wait any longer. I can’t keep it off,” or “a trick, they plotted for it to look like an accident, but the numbers are off.” She’d calm him by pushing him down on the mattress and saying, “I’ve got it. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it now.” He never remembered those incidents in the morning and laughed when she recited his dream messages back to him. Tonight, though, Joseph tapped his fingers on her stomach and wiped the sweat of his mouth against her shoulder. She felt the small divot of his lip, always badly shaved, which she often suctioned as the last of a kiss. He whispered, “Did you call the lawyer?”

  “I’m going to,” she replied. “Madi says he’s the best. All of her Indian friends used him. They got their green cards within a year and could finally quit their jobs or file for divorce.”

  “Don’t divorce me,” he said. “You should wait until I make more money.”

  She slapped his arm and then held on to his knuckles.

  “I’m sorry you have to deal with this. The whole process is revolting. It’s like the love gestapo. You go in for an interview and are forced to answer all these personal questions just to prove we’re legitimate.”

  He clenched her stomach. “How much more legitimate can we be?”

  “I’m not worried,” she said defensively. But she was worried. What kept her awake wasn’t just the summer heat but the mistake of visiting Raj in his studio two days earlier. It had initially seemed like a way of closing the door on the past for good, but instead it induced a resurgence of old memories and hesitations. The quakes of love are different. She had said that to herself when she left Raj that evening, and she said it to herself now as she wrapped her fingers around Joseph’s hand. The room once shook violently for Raj, and it now shook for Joseph. Why did she feel any need to compare them?

  She slid deeper against Joseph’s chest and felt his muscles rise and fall with his breathing. She felt the tick of his heart against the fragile cage of his ribs. She could hardly understand that version of herself who had fought so hard to stay with Raj against all of his aloofness. How can you compare a person who barely fulfilled the fundamental requirements of a relationship against someone who let you in so easily? She had trusted Joseph enough early on that she wasn’t afraid to tell him about the heartbreak of losing Dash. They had sat on the roof of this very building bundled in thick winter coats under the freezing February moonlight, while she stabbed cigarette after cigarette to pulp on the tarred brick. She told him how the car crash that killed him hit her so forcefully she could still feel the impact travel through her body eleven years later. Joseph’s eyes flinched as he grabbed her by the wrists, almost too tightly for reassurance, and said, “the pain will never go away. You shouldn’t blame yourself for not being able to get beyond it.” Raj would have taken that confession as proof that he couldn’t compete with her past and let the quiet fall between them.

  Joseph ran his fingers up her body, and she turned over to face him. His eyes were closed, but even in the darkness she could see them moving under his lids.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m sorry that we have to go down there and prove we’re a couple. I’m sorry we have to prove that for anyone but ourselves.” She meant it. The idea of government agents tracking through their personal lives did not sound appealing no matter how you rationalized it. But she knew that Joseph could be trusted to concede to the agreement, play up the devoted husband, and even memorize the items she routinely bought at the drug store if an INS agent asked such a question for proof of domestic partnership.

  “I’ll do whatever you need,” he whispered. “You don’t have to ask.”

  “I know you will,” she said. “At the end of the day it just comes down to luck. We’ll be alright. We are alright.”

  He didn’t respond, and she took his silence for sleep. She lifted his hand from her stomach and checked the clock on the nightstand. Her mind habitually calculated the difference in time zones whenever she looked at the hour hand. She climbed quietly out of bed and tiptoed into the living room, grabbing her cell phone from her purse before dialing sixteen digits to ring her east into a kitchen filled with morning.

  “Mitera,” she said to her mother’s voice. “Kalinishta. Kalimera.”

  MADI TAPPED HER platinum ring against the porcelain handle. Two cups of tea sat on a teak tray between two former college roommates. Two cups of tea and fifteen years, in the span of which, it occurred to Del, they had traded lives.

  Del had made a point before coming over to Madi’s apartment not to mention freshman year of college. There was nothing worse than a friendship that can never let go of its genesis. She loved seeing Madi, and the promise they had made in their dorm room to one day serve as each other’s maids of honor would have held if Del had planned that kind of wedding. But lately she was disturbed by the fact that the silences between them were filled mostly with memories of dorm room antics that were only rehashed in each other’s presence. The first week of classes, half the staff at Columbia had gone on strike—not the professors preaching deconstruction and Marxist revisionism but the building custodians and the women in hairnets who drew up the multicultural dinner menus and the secretaries who fielded calls for the dean. The strikers had created a human, sign-waving barricade around the Morningside Heights campus, and classes were rerouted into conference rooms at the nearby sister school of Barnard. Del had refused to attend in support of the workers, and Madi delayed her first week of course requirements in the conviction that she had applied to Columbia College, the co-ed Ivy, not Barnard, the vaguely lesbian all-women’s version separated by Broadway and its own wrought-iron gates. It took two weeks for Columbia to settle with the strikers, and in that time, two strangers, cooped up together in a dorm room barely big enough to fit a bunk bed and a wood desk, forged a friendship that would lead to four years of marathon drinking, hangover breakfasts, bisexual rumors, bad dye jobs, positive acid trips, and the unwanted name-splitting nickname around campus as “Mad Fiend.”

  In those early days, Madi had been the romantic, the one to lose her heart to the New England stoners passing bubble machines coated in latex as senior art projects. Del had been slower on the draw, the less likely of the duo to be dragged from a poetry reading to a bed on Riverside Drive, the less likely to remove her bra in front of two hash-smoking NYU students and toss it out of the window where it hung for months in the branches. It was, as it usually went, the literature and not the biology major more prone to oral sex with teaching assistants and remarks such as “When you let a little twerp eat you out in the archive room of Avery Library, you at least expect some leniency on the metaphor of flowers in Virginia Woolf.” But over the course of that first year, their styles began to merge. Madi took on some of Del’s darker European accents and Del some of her roommate’s glossy Florida highlights. “They put us together because we both sound like foreigners,” Madi had said that first day. “Thing is, you are and I’m not.”

  Watching Madi sip her tea in a linen caftan and clasp Del’s ankle affectionately, she had trouble finding any trace of those old fingerprints on her friend. Madi had widened, gaining weight in her face and hips, and, although she still had long slender legs that looked primed for a bikini, the dark tanner applied to her cheeks and neck made her appear as Indian as her outfit. If anyone happened to walk in today on Mad Fiend, they would assume Madi to be the foreigner. Del once joked that she looked like she had just been spit out o
f immigration and was surprised by the smile that leaked across her face.

  Madi’s apartment also possessed the same sense of reinvented identity, partitioned with elaborate embroidered screens, ginger tapestries, and a gold peacock holding up the coffee table glass by its head. She had bought the apartment two years ago. Walked into an abandoned sweatshop in Chinatown and bargained the price down to two million. The place smelled of old fabrics, fresh paint, the rotten fish of Chinatown stalls, and too much sandalwood incense.

  “You know what’s been really bothering me lately?” Del confessed. “There was a time when we all seemed on the same level. And suddenly you and everyone else shot forward, and I’m still where I was, where I’ve always been. How did that happen?”

  “Raj says I think about money too much.” Madi laughed and shook away the complaint. “Of course I think about money too much. That’s what I do for a living. He says it like it’s a revelation, like he only just realized I work in finance and maybe I don’t even know what I do all day. But I tell you, what stopped all those kids we knew who refused to go to Wall Street because they were afraid to sell out and instead just sat there, fucked out of their heads and shaking about paying rent each month, was the inability to see what good you can do by playing the game. I tell Raj, you think I’m not helping the poor in India. Go take a look at what’s being built there. Watch how the economy is developing. See the opportunity. Who do you think did that, artists and Peace Corp volunteers? Not a chance. It was those of us staying up at 3 AM in our cubicles so we could conference-call Bangalore. That’s who.”

  “No one’s accusing you.”

  “I know.” Madi tried to lighten her tone with a laugh. “I just wonder when I’ll stop buying dinners for people who sit there, order whatever they want, and go to great lengths to tell me how they refuse to fold to the corporate mammon and never even pretend to reach for their wallets when the check arrives. One day you have to wake up and see this city as more than a playground for bad decisions and never-ending hangovers. Well, don’t you?” Del tried to come to her own defense, raising an index finger over the tray. But Madi anticipated her reaction, smiling as she grabbed Del’s hand to smother the critique. “I’m not talking about you. You work hard, and I respect that. But don’t you ever find it odd that you and I pull down nine-to-fives and all the men around us snap photographs of blank walls or audition for the opportunity to act like an irrelevant page in a bad Elizabethan romance? I’m beginning to believe that art is the black hole of ambition. If you want to know where the most useless, self-indulgent complainers are, try going to an art opening.”