Lightning People

by Christopher Bollen

“Yep.”

  “So I’m competing with architecture? Oh, Christ, which is colder? I get it.”

  “I was thinking, which is more humane?”

  “Asshole.” She walked over to the window, staring out at the skyline of New Jersey and its watery reflection in the Hudson River. Her eyes moved over the lines of the buildings set against the black sky.

  “Remember when we were kids and we’d go to the beach on summer nights and dare each other to dive in?”

  “Yes,” Raj said, returning the cigarette to the desk. “We never did. We just watched the hookers walk a few feet in front of the men who came down from the hotels. Our beaches contained either shells or prostitutes, and the tourists collected both. That’s what I remember.”

  “We never did jump in, did we? What were we afraid of?”

  “Sharks. Riptides. Mom beating our asses for going out without permission.”

  A yellow light trailing in the river reminded Madi of the swollen lemons at a market stall in Lisbon, near the bleak Moorish ruins of Castelo de São Jorge. She and Rapha had climbed up to that castle on their only excursion out of the hotel room on their trip to Portugal six years ago. It had been November, and they both had come down with the flu on the plane ride—sickness being what they had been trying to escape by leaving New York in autumn. They had spent four days watching CNN with the trashcan and the remote between their bodies on the coverlet, each taking turns vomiting and changing channels. By the fifth day, they had gathered enough energy to ascend the hill above the city and stood silently under the low, gray clouds that shot out into the Atlantic. She remembered Rapha kindly for once, as he fought with the pharmacist in thick Portuguese to fill a prescription, his hairy, naked body quivering as he ran towels under cold water to place on her forehead. He had taken care of her, and, being the first to feel health return (a fact that later convinced her that she had contracted the flu from him), nursed her with lobster bisque and squeezed lemon juice. Madi’s only solid memory of that vacation, the only value she had found in a week of fever and chills and indifferent maids rubbing their cigarettes in the room’s ashtrays while vacuuming around her bed, was the rare, indescribable light that drained through the cloud cover over Castelo de São Jorge. It was as soft as the underside of lemon rinds, as frosted as chilled tap water.

  It was something to remember.

  She wondered if Rapha, six years later wherever he had gone, ever thought of that light.

  “Do you think either of us will have children?” she asked, turning to look at her brother.

  “Get back on the stool. We’ll do one more roll, and then I’ve had it.” He kicked an extension cord and turned on the light tower. “I’m hungry. And I’m not eating curry tonight. It’s bad to let you get your way too often.”

  “I’m serious.”

  He knew she was. Her voice had lost its sarcastic guard, and she had the look of someone who had woken up in the middle of the afternoon confused as to how much time had passed.

  “Why the hell would you want children?” he snapped.

  “We would do a better job than our parents did.”

  “That wouldn’t be difficult.” Raj grabbed her hand and led her back to the stool. He repositioned her chin with his thumb, pressing the divot in her chin.

  “We’re not monsters,” she said. “It could happen. You’re pretty loving when you want to be.”

  “Sit still and think about what you just said. You think about how people like us could get into a situation like that and be glad we’re the monsters we are.”

  “People like us,” she repeated somberly. “So you do think we’re monsters, that there’s something wrong with us. I guess we can fight over which parent caused us to turn out like we did. The bad Singhs. Never married. Too screwed up for love.”

  Her eyes were a different color than his, chestnut brown instead of blue. Her nose trumpeted at the end where his caught a bump midway down the bridge and slid straight to the tip.

  “Monsters don’t cut their losses like we did. Monsters, like the ones in the movies, keep coming back, meaner and more hateful, seeing nothing good in knowing when to quit. I’d say we’re not the monsters. Other people are.”

  “I suppose I should thank you for the honesty,” she said ungraciously.

  He smiled at her. “Don’t mention it.”

  They left the studio and walked east in silence. They passed the art gallery where Raj would soon show his work, but he didn’t point it out to his sister, afraid of another spree of compliments and overblown expectations. Maybe it was because Madi had moved to New York first or simply the fact that she made more money, but he could never shake the sense that she was the older one, not he. She encouraged instead of admired, defended instead of looked for reassurance.

  Madi shook her purse on the corner and said, “Since we have something to celebrate, I’m buying tonight.” He tried to object, and she rolled her eyes irritably before stepping into the street. Her hair caught the wind of passing taxis. “Can I at least tell Dad about your show?” she asked him. “It would make him happy.”

  He was five inches taller than she was, and yet they probably weighed the same. When they were kids—before puberty redirected their ambitions—they were both obsessed with the scale in the bathroom. They competed to see who weighed more, squeezing every muscle to force the scale to deliver a higher reading. Who took up more space in the world? Who was more massive and essential? That was the last time Raj could remember beating her at anything.

  As they crossed the street, she slowed her pace to remain next to him. The sweat from the studio lights chilled their skin even in the hot night air, and Madi wrapped her arm around his. Raj made a mental note to tell his gallerist not to let anyone named Madeline Singh buy a single piece of his artwork—not even anonymously. He suspected she might try such a tactic to give him the illusion of success, and she’d never understand the deep humiliation that would result in that kind of sisterly meddling.

  Still, when Madi’s palm grazed his wrist, he opened his fingers, and they walked two blocks together squeezing each other’s hand.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  JOSEPH SAT ON the edge of the hotel bed, while Aleksandra dug through a white dress box on the floor. Inside the box were letters and newspaper clippings. Pages of the script she had been working on drifted around her bare feet, a few pages crumpled into Ohio snowballs, others smoothed back out and clipped together with red ink slashed through lines. “They’re here somewhere,” she swore. “No wonder I can’t seem to get Ray’s story down in any order.” Defeated, she brought the entire box over to the bed and sat down next to him, searching though the papers until she found a stack of photographs.

  Joseph had not gotten a job in Brooklyn like he told his wife. In the late afternoon he took the subway to the Upper East Side, making certain to turn his cell phone off to avoid Del in case she called. He didn’t want to gild the lie of a fictitious last-minute commercial any more than he needed to. And, anyway, it was only a lie of three days—a break from tripping over each other, some needed distance from the sweltering Gramercy apartment and all the unbearable questions he knew were circling in her head. He’d return at night so late that Del would already be lost to sleep.

  Aleksandra pressed her knees together on the edge of the bed, the skin corrugated from kneeling on the carpet. Her pale eyes gently traced his features, and she held the photographs tightly against her chest. Now that she had found them, it was as if she were afraid of letting them go. Her arms were covered in faded freckles, and blue veins cabled along her wrists and fingers. She had used those fingers to wipe his damp hair across his forehead an hour ago when she opened the door. “Thank you for coming,” she had said, blushing awkwardly in the door frame as she brought her hand back down to her side, embarrassed by the intimacy of the gesture. “I thought you might decide not to in the rain.”

  The instant he saw Aleksandra standing at the door—her hair tied back in a loose bun,
the faint birthmark trailing down her neck, her small, precise lips opening in gratitude, even the gentleness of her fingers pushing the hair from his eyes—he knew why he didn’t have the heart to turn her down when she called. He could have said, I hardly know you, and all you’ve given me is an outrageous, paranoid story that even the police concluded was a suicide. I’m sorry but I have no time for you. Good-bye, Aleksandra. I wish you luck. But a person turning around and walking away could never measure the damage they left behind. And one day, he might ask for a similar concession—believe what I tell you, follow along, don’t doubt what is so easy to disbelieve, this is what happened. I swear it’s all true.

  “I was worried I’d lost these,” Aleksandra said, staring intently at the snapshots in her hands. “I’ve moved around so often, from one hotel to another, I can’t keep track of everything I had.”

  “How long have you been at the Carlyle?” he asked.

  “About a year,” she said, and then paused, as if to track some jumbled hotel-starred cartography in her mind. “But I moved around a lot at first. A few nights here and there, first in a number of gritty motels on the edge of Times Square and then in some drab, efficient business lodges in the Financial District. At first I always asked for the smallest room they had. I’d unplug the phone and cover the window with the bedspread. I wouldn’t even let the maid in. I just wanted to be alone. Some people want to be surrounded by others when they’re grieving. I didn’t. No one could reach me, and I couldn’t reach them. That was as close as I could find to being nowhere.”

  Joseph heard a phone ringing in the room next door. Inexplicably, they both waited in silence until the caller gave up. Aleksandra shifted on the mattress, and her hip nudged against him.

  “I’d think places like that would make you feel worse,” he said.

  “Worse, better. I wasn’t trying to get better. I was trying to think. I just stopped trying to pay attention to Aleksandra Andrews, the poor useless widow who had lost her world. I even stopped looking at myself in the mirror every morning. Isn’t it interesting how you stare at the same face every day for your entire life? I often think about how each person I pass on the street must have spent months of their lives when you add it up studying their face in the mirror, getting to know every bone, every line, specialists of such a small circle of skin. You keep looking at your face like it’s going to tell you something about yourself, reveal some fact about who you are that your brain hasn’t managed to figure out. I think when you live so long with another person, you don’t really know who you are anymore without them. It’s not just you minus them. It’s as if they’ve cancelled a whole other part out, a part you assumed was yours but wasn’t. I figured those dark, tiny hotel rooms two-thousand miles from Los Angeles were as good a place as any to avoid looking at myself.”

  She placed the photographs in Joseph’s hand, and any doubts as to why she had first asked him to come were erased. He flipped through the stack slowly, careful not to crease the paper. In one picture Aleksandra had her arms around her husband’s neck, both of them smiling with wind-burnt cheeks on a dark California beach. In another they stood blazed by the candles of a birthday cake in a dining room. In another, Ray wore a black suit at a banquet table surrounded by other businessmen. Joseph stared at the face of her husband, his light brown hair peppered with gray, his sagging chin dipping from a strong jawline, his thin, almost effeminate nose webbed in blood vessels. He was a handsome man slightly ravaged by the first fissures of old age, while his wife, younger and healthier in the gold softness of western light, skirted around him with her eyes on the camera, as if she understood the instant these shots were taken that each captured moment would later be memorized and missed.

  Joseph tried to remember his own father, a man whom he also looked so much like. Joseph had seen pictures of him in his twenties and early thirties, bounding through forests and rooms in dirty workman’s clothes wearing a blameless, easy grin. At thirty-three, Joseph had turned into the man arrested in those Guiteau family photographs. But his father had never passed through his thirties to allow age to invade his face. Joseph couldn’t picture what the years would have done to him. If his father had grown old, maybe Joseph could also have imagined how he himself would age, how his features would be recast into the hard, brittle circuitry of his forties and fifties. He couldn’t, and perhaps that was because he wasn’t sure he would live to see those years. There would only be Joseph Guiteau, suspended forever in his early thirties, brushing his teeth in a toothpaste commercial, the mile marker before the explosion just beyond.

  Joseph let out a sigh, which Aleksandra mistook for sympathy. She nodded her head and placed her hand on his shoulder, sliding her palm down his spine.

  “He’s much older than you are here, by twenty years I’d say. But he could have passed for you when he was young. He probably looks more like your father when these were taken.”

  “My father died of a heart attack at thirty-four,” he said quickly. “It runs in the family.” That was already more than he had ever told Del and it surprised him how easily this information left his mouth. Aleksandra rubbed his back in consolation. Her fingers softened to the tips of her nails, as if she were afraid to upset him with any more than the faintest point of contact. He and Aleksandra were mourning for different men but staring at the same picture. He dropped the stack of photos in her lap, and she returned them to the dress box.

  IN THE GRAY evening light of the bedroom, Aleksandra told him about survival tactics.

  She told him about knives hidden in mattresses or under pillows of hotel rooms. She told him that when she first moved to Los Angeles at twenty, she had slept next to a kitchen knife for the first two months, unaccustomed to the city and its nocturnal sounds. The knife had been for protection against break-ins, freak rapists, and whatever chance monsters crawled up into bedrooms of single young women in a town that wasn’t yet their own. She told him that when she fled to New York five years ago, she again slept with a knife by her side, but this time she knew precisely who might be coming for her.

  Aleksandra told him that, after Ray’s funeral, she returned to the house in Malibu and found their study turned upside down. Not ransacked, there hadn’t been a mess, no valuables stolen, but the papers had been rummaged through, the drawers of the desk searched, the books in the library shaken. Datebooks going back ten years had disappeared. The police couldn’t find any evidence of forced entry, presuming Aleksandra in her grief had invented the burglary. She left Los Angeles five days later. She told Joseph that, when she landed at JFK, she checked into an airport motel and in the middle of the night the phone rang. A man’s voice asked for Mrs. Andrews. She said wrong number, and then the voice asked for Aleksandra Andrews. She packed in fifteen minutes. She took a cab to the Pierre on Sixty-First Street, the very hotel that she and Ray always stayed in on their trips to New York. When she went to check in, the receptionist told her that two men had come by earlier that evening asking for her. The Pierre had appeared in a number of those missing datebooks. She left the hotel, walked west, and took the smallest room the Penn Station Hyatt offered under a fake name. She told Joseph that she paid in cash for an entire year. She used names that never appeared in any datebook or photo album. She called friends and family from pay phones, and once or twice, they told her that someone had phoned asking if they knew of her whereabouts. She said she didn’t know if the fact that these men couldn’t locate her only encouraged their suspicion that she knew something. That maybe her disappearance persuaded them to search harder. But by that point she had stopped going by Aleksandra Andrews. It was only a year ago that she began using her real name.

  “Do you still think they’re looking for you?” he asked. Aleksandra wiped her forehead to consider a reasonable answer to a question that had nothing reasonable about it.

  “I don’t know,” she finally replied. “But I can tell you that I’ve learned to pack in five minutes. I’ve rented this room for a year, but I could
be gone by a single wrong number in the middle of the night.”

  She looked at him with fear in her eyes. He wanted to tell her that he understood that fear, how impossible it was to swim out of it, that he kept a gun in a metal box under his own bed and that it also wasn’t for random break-ins. But Aleksandra stood up, shaking her arms to compose herself, and he felt it was time for him to leave.

  “I’ll come back tomorrow,” he said. “If you want me to.” She said yes, she’d like that. She pressed her fingers against the closet door and slid it open.

  “Before you leave I want to show you something,” she whispered. She said it lovingly, as if inviting him to glimpse a precious artifact. Inside the closet, he found suit coats spaced evenly on wood hangers with pant legs folded in between the soft silk linings. The suits were navy, charcoal, black, tattersall, houndstooth, and pinstripe, the lapels curled like flower petals. “These were Ray’s,” she said, touching their collars with her fingertips reverently. “I brought them with me, packed in one of his old suitcases.” She grabbed the shoulder of a blue double-breasted jacket, which slipped off its hanger and into her hand. “He wasn’t a vain man,” she said, shaking the wrinkles out with gentle strokes. “He was nearly colorblind when it came to most things. When I first met him, he wore cheap suits that looked like leftovers from a yard sale. I had to teach him what a real suit meant, how it shapes the body and makes a man look like a thing to watch.” She opened the jacket and waved it like a matador’s cape. “Try it on. See if it fits.”

  “I don’t feel right about wearing that,” he said nervously, stepping back from the closet, afraid he’d defile some vital memory she had managed to preserve. “It was his suit. I don’t want to try it on.”

  “He didn’t die in this jacket,” she said, smiling. “It isn’t haunted.”

  Joseph turned and let his arms fall slack, the limp position costumers preferred while dressing him for an acting job. It occurred to him that he had built a career wearing other men’s clothes. This time was no different. Aleksandra threaded his arms through the sleeves and guided the jacket onto his shoulders. Then she sat down on the bed and took him in.