Lightning People

by Christopher Bollen

  She stretched the neck of her sweater and rested her fingers on her collarbone. A silver necklace managed to collect some of the scant sunlight and project it into a prism on the ceiling.

  “But Ray started waking up in the middle of the night. He’d put his hand over my mouth so tightly I could hardly breathe. He’d say they were out in the bushes. They were coming up the stairs. I’d ask what he meant, but he’d just start to cry. He said he knew terrible things and no one would let him live with all of these facts in his head. He looked so scared—I mean scared like he believed in monsters. Ray was a strong man. You’d never seen anyone so stoic in the twenty-five years we were together. But those nights a little boy woke up who suddenly realized how dark and malicious the world can be. I didn’t recognize him. That’s when reality hit me. Right there on our bed in Malibu with his hand clamped over my mouth. That’s when I knew that Ray was part of it.”

  She yanked her fingers from her neck and pet the carpet with slow strokes.

  “Your husband was part of what? I don’t understand.” He worried his confusion might stop her cold, but she nodded her head as if in agreement.

  “When we first married, Ray was in politics. He wanted to become governor, his goal since Stanford. He served as a junior senate assistant lumped down with bills on the California Energy Commission. He hated the work, but like anything, over time, you start to become fascinated with what you’re thrown into. Eventually Ray went over to the private sector. This was maybe fifteen years ago. He became a lobbyist for deregulation. He had so much conviction for doing right to the people of California, I don’t think he realized at first what was going on. He believed in free market, he believed in the private sector and the drive of competition to provide the cheapest energy to the state. But somewhere, when I wasn’t looking, Ray changed. I often think it’s ironic that I only started seeing him in the right light when the blackouts hit the state. By then it was too late.”

  “Blackouts,” Joseph repeated, and again she nodded.

  “You remember Enron?” she asked him. He did. For a while, no one could turn on the television or listen to a radio in a cab without hearing about Enron’s deregulation scandal, a cautionary tale of price fixing and forced shutoffs. It was a subject that had permeated the basement meetings of prisonersofearth for many months.

  “So your husband worked for Enron,” he guessed.

  Aleksandra bit her upper lip. She could have stopped her story here. She still had the opportunity to derail the narrative and let Joseph leave the hotel room knowing only the faintest glimmers of the nightmare behind her lips. She struggled to swallow, fighting off the impulse to stop.

  “He worked for bigger people than Enron,” she said in a tone that almost accused Joseph of naiveté. “The deregulation scandal goes so much deeper than a single pony company in Texas. It amazed me in those months when the Enron story was breaking how cleanly the whole incident was being wrapped up with the trial of a few executives. Ray knew just how far the web spun. You see, he had all of the implications in his head. Not just fraudulent business crooks. I mean the government. Ray had enough information on key politicians in the White House to bring the whole country down if it ever got out.”

  She rubbed her wrists and gathered her knees against her chest, hugging them so tightly that her bare feet lifted an inch off the floor. It was as if Aleksandra were bundling her body up so that only her mouth and mind mattered. Joseph remembered as a child how his mother sat in her study chair, her entire body erased underneath a wool throw, with only her head and hands visible when she talked about her research on conspiracies and cover-ups. His mother had eventually given up the rest of the world, but her body went first. Even now Joseph could only recall her face and hands in precise detail, blue veins and blue eyes both pulsing.

  “Ray started to tell me things, always at night,” Aleksandra said. “I asked him to stop talking, but he couldn’t. I wonder if he thought telling me all of those secrets felt like he was getting rid of them. He said they’d come for him.”

  She stopped, and he waited for her to continue. She released her legs from her arms and began twisting a loose thread in the seam of her pants. She let the quiet settle around them for a few minutes. Joseph tried to imagine the beautiful, unguarded woman Aleksandra must have been before she had this story. His mother had once been beautiful as well. Everyone always claimed that their parents had been great beauties in youth. But there had been a time before his father died when her lean frame and long black hair carried a gravity that forced heads to turn toward her like a law of physics. Aleksandra must have possessed that same kind of magnet. Some of it still remained. In the conspiracy meeting she appeared strong and complete, her tightly closed mouth over a set of agitated teeth the only clue to a crack just under the surface. He wondered how much of that crack had already swallowed her. And how much farther it might open.

  “For a while I thought we’d be safe. But I was wrong. When the entire family of one of Ray’s chief associates died in their home one night from a carbon-dioxide leak, I finally started to believe him. When we heard the news, Ray pulled our luggage out and demanded we pack, put everything we could in the car, and drive north. That night I had to talk down a man who could run marathons, who ate dinner at the White House as the president’s guest, who once told me that as long as we were in California, an earthquake couldn’t break us apart. I refused to leave that night, creeping off with what cash and valuables we had like thieves of our own life.” Aleksandra exhaled and wiped her eyes with her knuckle. She bit her lip and swallowed. “I sat Ray down and told him he had to go to the papers, even if it meant prison. I assumed the safest route was full disclosure. Ray would be safe if he told everything he knew.”

  “What did the papers say?”

  “There were no papers.” Aleksandra stopped talking. Her head tilted to the side as if she were trying to make out a picture that had been hung the wrong way. Joseph instinctually tilted his head to match the line of her eyes.

  “Ray was found in the front seat of his Lexus in a parking lot off the Pacific Coast Highway on April 27, 2002. A bullet had been fired into the left temple with a pistol in his left hand. Never mind that he was right-handed. The coroner concluded suicide.” Her face was too shadowed to read, but stands of hair floated flame-white around her head. “Now you know why someone like me goes to conspiracy meetings in a city on the other side of the country. Because all I have are Ray’s secrets. I’ve given up going to the papers. They want proof, and I don’t have so much as a piece of paper. I’m just a raving wife trying to rationalize her husband’s suicide.”

  Joseph realized now what distinguished Aleksandra from the other members of the basement conspiracy meeting—and what had fascinated him about her that day. Her eyes held a fixed gaze that was not quite focused on the objects in front of her. “We were married for twenty-five years and lived in that house in Malibu for twelve of them. I sold everything a week after Ray’s funeral. I got out with a few suitcases. Do you know what it’s like to leave a place you’ve called home in a matter of days, unable to speak to friends you’ve known since childhood? Do you know what it’s like to have your world emptied? You can’t even let your memories digest. But I’m going to salvage something. You don’t live in Los Angeles for as long as I did and not know some pretty good contacts in the film industry. I don’t care if it sounds cheap. It’s the only medium people pay attention to anymore.”

  “So you want to make a movie?” Joseph asked. “About his death. Am I right?”

  “I’m not asking you to believe everything I’m telling you. I’m just asking that you play him.”

  “Because I look like him?”

  She lifted herself from the floor, holding onto her knees for support. Then she walked quietly to the window and opened the curtains. Taxis streamed up Madison Avenue in hurried yellow waves. In the sunlight, Joseph noticed a typewriter sitting on the rosewood desk in the corner with typed white papers sta
cked around its metal shell.

  “Not just because you look like him,” Aleksandra said, turning around and walking toward him with her bare feet soft and deliberate on the carpet. Her toes were hairless but the nails were chipped and the skin gray with dirt. “Because you were also in a conspiracy meeting in a city on the other side of the country. Because that means you might believe me. Do you think I sound crazy? If you do, you don’t need to come back.”

  As she came closer, he saw her face appearing from the shadows, tearless but strained with jaw muscles swollen from clenching. The slender birthmark on her neck swelled and dimmed as she breathed. Joseph had been in the presence of hundreds of attractive women in his career. His profession brought so many gorgeous specimens in close proximity that their looks began to read as dull and indistinguishable. He loved that Del was beautiful in an unstudied way, which could never be captured on film. But staring up at Aleksandra, Joseph felt a tick of that same attraction, maybe because she had long stopped caring about what she looked like. She gazed down at him, and he scooted backward on the floor to put some distance between them.

  “Are you frightened there’s still someone looking for you?” he asked. “Is that why you’re here in this hotel? You think maybe they haven’t blocked up all the leaks?”

  “Yes,” she said, nodding. “But I’m far worse frightened that I’ll never get to say what I know. That terrifies me far worse. That’s why I couldn’t stop telling you once I started. It’s been building inside of me for so long.” He could see that she was exhausted, but her shoulders relaxed as if they had lost their heaviness. “Do you know the etymology of the word conspiracy?” she asked him. He shook his head. “It comes from Latin. It means to breathe together. So you see, for a conspiracy to exist, there needs to be someone else to share it.”

  Joseph crawled forward onto his knees. He had been wrong earlier: there was a danger in listening. He should have learned that lesson in all of the years he had spent listening to his mother. Words stay lodged in the ear where they multiply like a virus.

  In the loud whirl of the midday traffic, he offered her the only thing he could. He reached out his hand. Aleksandra grabbed his fingers and told him there was more.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ENTER THE LIGHT. Every decent party needed a theme. This had always been William’s party-throwing ethos. He spent hours of his afternoon at a going-out-of-business lighting store on lower Broadway digging through bins and buying back stock of every imaginable light source ever to have been factoried out of Taiwan: strands of white Christmas bulbs, blinking yellow duck bulbs, chili pepper bulbs, grape-cluster bulbs, bulbs in the shape of Chinese take-out boxes, the Virgin Mary, jumping salmon, disco balls, and novelty incandescent bulbs with dickface written across their upsidedown foreheads. He also bought a cardboard klieg light and a fiberoptic bouquet that lit up like a sea anemone. He plugged power strips into the outlets of his apartment and wove a black spider web throughout the living room, hooking cords around shelf ledges, doorframes, sprinkler pipes, and sofa legs. That left only pressing the switch, and the entire apartment shone like one great ball of happy fire that would eat through sunglasses and radiate spleens. It was like standing inside the flame of the Statue of Liberty, waving good-bye to the confused, uninvited tourists galvanized around her feet.

  At seven, he opened the door to the beer delivery, directing the carts into the kitchen. At eight, he shaved, applied beeswax to his hair and cologne to his neck, and then proceeded in his underwear to empty the medicine cabinet of the prescription pill bottles, hiding them in a pair of boots in the bedroom closet. Even close friends become impenitent thieves in the presence of pill bottles. Jennifer had been prescribed the mostly mellow stuff, although William had already raided the single exception, her long-expired bottle of Ritalin. He now found only a few bitten-off crescent moons at the bottom of the bottle, slipped one remnant into his mouth, and gulped it down with a palm of sink water.

  First he dressed in a houndstooth jacket but decided against that bit of cocktail formality. This was his last party in New York. He might as well dress for spills. Anyway, even with the air-conditioning cranked on high, the lights were slowly roasting the rooms. Instead William wore a black T-shirt emblazoned on the front with the demon face of Klaus Kinski in Nosferatu. He loved this shirt. Like an uglier friend, it made his own features stand out by comparison.

  “I have a Jesse Lowman here for you,” the doorman announced over the phone.

  “Send him up. Say, Steve, I’m having a little party tonight, so you can let everyone pass and don’t make them sign the registry.”

  “That’s not policy.”

  “Come on. It’s a party. You can’t expect me to keep answering the phone every six seconds.”

  “Where’s Jennifer?” Steve always asked this question in the tone that sought approval from a higher rank. The doorman knew damn well she hadn’t lived there for months.

  “Don’t worry. She’s not invited. I’ll give you fifty bucks.”

  Steve paused. “What president is on the fifty?” he asked, retreating into the condescending demeanor of the building’s co-op board, which would never have allowed a character like William to set up a home on the twelfth floor if he hadn’t been the unfortunate appendage of a sensible young woman with an advantageous last name.

  “Eisenhower. Calvin Coolidge. For fuck’s sake, you’ll get your money.”

  Jesse had agreed to guard the door, collecting the one-hundred-dollar admittance fee for a small cut of the revenue. “Sorry I’m late,” Jesse said, dashing in like someone ready to do more rigorous labor than simply accepting cash in the hallway. He wore an army-green shirt buttoned up to the collar. His hair was parted down the center. Jesse’s left eye was tinted in a lusterless yellow bruise, and he reeked of weed. “Jesus, I can barely squint in here. If I’m going to have permanent retinal damage, maybe you could give me a little extra for the corrective surgery.”

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” William said, taking a minute to inspect the lights. “Like we’re in the middle of the sun.” William threw a beer over to him before retreating into the kitchen to dump ice into a plastic laundry basket that would serve as a cooler.

  “You’re going to trip the circuits,” Jesse, so out of character with this sudden practicality, warned. “And the electricity bill.”

  William’s throat summoned a laugh. At least the bills were in Jennifer’s name.

  BUT THE PARTY was beautiful, like dancing through an explosion. The strands of bulbs wrapping around the room forced everyone into the center, offering few corners for the less communicative and uptight to isolate themselves. There was Joan and Glenn and his first roommate in New York who was already slow dancing to very fast metal with a handsome Latino kid with a pink plastic comb stuck into his braids. William didn’t want to do any drugs. He told himself to hold off, but his old friend, Gibby, a blogger on parties and socialite itineraries for various fashion Web sites, hustled him into the bathroom and guided a pen cap of white powder to his nostril. The offer of free drugs was a New York party ritual bestowed to the host. In any other circumstance, Gibby wouldn’t have conceded so much as an empty baggie for William to rub his teeth numb with.

  “Things will get better,” Gibby said in the mirror, pinching the clefts of his tie.

  “I’m not doing this for sympathy,” William replied. He wiped his nose with his wrist. “I’m doing this for the money. I’m sure that’s something you can understand.”

  Truth was, things had already gotten better. The front door opened, and in came ten more arrivals, paying customers but also friends, dazed momentarily by the sunburst. They wore cocktail dresses and monogrammed T-shirts under sport coats, hair assembled in loose buns that exposed the dark roots of blonde dye jobs, black fingernails clutching cigarette packs, teeth glowing in the shine.

  William had e-mailed his Enter the Light invitation to almost forty addresses, but the exponential nature of party
invites continuously forwarded to constellations of less familiar hotmail and yahoo and mac suffixes assured that the apartment would reach its capacity by the end of the night. Even though a few purposeless strangers stood by the laundry basket of beer, William, already four vodkas into his celebration, was ecstatic to see so many friends from downtown who had come to the Upper West Side to wish him off. The turnout was impressive. There were the younger syndicate kids who carried their youth in place of any higher status—they were the quickest to fall down drunk or be dragged off into strange beds while their friends still searched for them in the crowd. There were also the older, semiaccomplished writers and editors and managers of esoteric bands who provided conversation to those who pretended to listen. And, as always, William spotted more than a dozen attractive, precisely dressed men and women whose only real profession was the legacy of their last names. These were the city’s most endemic partiers. They were all children or grandchildren of somebody. They were actors with no film credits. They were part-time deejays.

  One iPod was disconnected from the speakers for another, and now slow songs from the ’80s played. The names of the bands were utterly forgotten, but the lyrics were instantaneously memorable and sung loudly with clenched fists. The soundtrack brought everyone onto the living room’s makeshift dance floor, because these were the songs from their childhood, the ones that they had listened to on the radio in the backseats of cars as acne-scarred misfits, imagining what their lives would one day be like as adults. William felt certain that they had imagined something very close to this party. The alcohol and speed pumping through his bloodstream made the party feel necessary and profound—as if gathering together in close confines was the raw matter of existence, a human need since time began to fight off the darkness in the company of fellow survivors.