Lightning People

by Christopher Bollen

  In a few minutes, the teenager bolted from the cottage with his backpack straddled on his shoulders, walking fast, focused on turning the first corner. William said good-bye and lifted his hand, but the kid didn’t turn around, kicking the steel door open and leaving it to squeal as he disappeared into the tunnel. Quinn stepped out of the cottage in a pair of madras shorts with an orange towel wrapped around his neck. His fat, red belly hung over his buttoned waist.

  “Christ, Quinn. That guy was young. Too young.”

  “He’s legal, so please no guilt routine,” Quinn said with squinting eyes. “It was perfectly soft-core, if you really must know. I didn’t even take my clothes off. I’m sure I was the most innocuous valetudinarian he’s screwed around with all week.” It was Quinn’s habit to disguise his vices in a rich vocabulary.

  “But he’s a kid.”

  “He’s an escort who’s got to make money. At least that’s what his ad said.” Quinn tugged William’s sleeve in exasperation, leading him back inside. “Forgive me if I don’t want to air-condition all of the West Village. And stop giving me that look. When did you get so prudish about the necessities of sex?”

  “I just feel bad for the guy.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “You know what I mean,” William sighed. He was glad to see the tissues on the sofa had been cleared. William took off his jacket and hung it on the wooden coatrack in the corner. Quinn was perhaps the last human on earth who still owned a coatrack. But he was also the first human on earth William knew who was so open and nonchalant about his sexual indulgences. That kind of freedom impressed him. No secrets were concealed behind silent pauses or heated refutations. Quinn was that rare being who did not meet the world halfway with his head lowered. So liberated, so blameless, nothing he did could come back to haunt him.

  “What I meant,” William said, “is that it’s just bad to be used so young.”

  “Then we all might as well quit right now,” Quinn replied more seriously than William expected. “Because that’s the way it’s eventually going to run. For everyone. You want innocence, you’re not going to find it here. The only people who talk about the innocence of teenagers are the ones who have forgotten what it’s like to be a teenager. Personally, I find innocence overrated—creepy, really, because it shows a deplorable lack of curiosity in the world.”

  “I’m sure it wasn’t curiosity that brought him to place that ad.”

  Now it was Quinn’s turn to sigh, placing both hands on William’s shoulders. He gazed lovingly at him. His white whiskers bristled over his tiny upper lip like a flag tattered by rough weather. The wrinkles deepened under his eyes. “There are no perfect situations. You’re not going to be absolutely happy.” Quinn spoke in his most flagrant proverbial voice. “You never will. Enjoy what you can scrounge out of it. We’re all mistreated. We just have to appreciate the seconds that we aren’t. Now I’ve rented movies. You better not have plans.”

  Quinn went to work rewiring the back of his antique television set to plug in his equally antique VCR. William watched the old man bending down with crackling joints, excitedly shoving wires and cables here and there in preparation for a quiet evening of lewd comments and cheap food delivery. It was a joy for Quinn to have someone to share his evenings with—much more so than the hour with the escort in a silent, loveless transaction of one-way pleasure. William understood what his being here meant to his friend.

  “Quinn.” William’s voice broke, just as it broke a zillion times in his mind as he imagined this worst-of-all-that-had-ever-come-before deceit. “Would you care if I borrowed your car for a little while?”

  “The Cressida? I guess I don’t need it. Why? Where are you going?” He arched his head over the dusty television screen.

  “Upstate. I have some friends who invited me to their cabin. Thought I’d get out of town for a bit.”

  “The keys are in the desk drawer,” he replied, jamming cables haphazardly into the back of the set. “Just please be careful. I could only afford to insure myself, and I have all of those unfinished costumes in the trunk. So promise no accidents. Now which plug . . . I hate modern technology. They can’t make it easy. They want to frustrate you into believing it’s an actual science.”

  “It’s not modern technology if it’s twenty years old.” William tried not to think of driving the Cressida west tomorrow. It killed him to imagine the moment it dawned on Quinn that he had been cheated by his own adopted son, the one young man he had shown the most kindness to, the one he had not treated as a transaction but had selflessly taken in. “Let me do that,” William said. “You’re half blind, and you’ll never get it working. What movies are we watching anyway?”

  “Family fantasy adventures,” Quinn replied sarcastically, slitting his neck with a quick finger. “Horror. The pernicious destruction of goodly innocence. Maniacs with their chainsaws. The food menus are in the cabinet.”

  IT WAS NOON before William packed his suitcases into the Cressida’s trunk, shoved on top of period costumes draped in clear cellophane. William had hoped to return the costumes to the apartment after Quinn left, but his friend had unexpectedly asked a favor: “Drop me at the theater before you go. Forty-Third Street. It will give me a chance to make sure you can actually drive this thing.” The thing in question was a 1992 dinosaur, if dinosaurs had been shaped like bars of soap, painted electric blue and emblazoned with a sticker that had long faded white on the right bumper. The Cressida’s cramped interior was a cockpit of ripped pleather upholstery and cracked knobs. An alpine forest of deodorizers hung from the rearview mirror, and the air-conditioning vents made a hissing sound that produced no more than a faint breath. William tried to clean the windshield with the automatic wipers, but the twin blades smeared pigeon droppings and dirt across the glass. Quinn stuffed himself into the passenger seat, jacked forward some years ago and jammed permanently into place. They drove in silence through the afternoon traffic up Eighth Avenue. When Quinn pointed to a corner in Times Square, he leaned over and kissed William on the cheek. William did not return the favor, staring straight ahead.

  “See you in a couple days, gorgeous,” Quinn said, climbing out. “Remember to refill her before you’re back. Yet hold I off. Women are angels, wooing: Things won are done; joy’s soul lies in the doing.” Quinn waited expectantly for a reaction in the sliver of the unrolled window, and when he got none, howled, “Troilus and Cressida, you idiot. The make of this car. I have to teach you everything.”

  A light rain flecked the windshield, washing away some of the grime, as William took the first corner to steer back into the downtown traffic. It hurt not to say good-bye to Quinn, a final farewell to a beautiful, dying man. William kept his eyes not so much on the road but on the buildings and mile-high billboards and the crowded gridlock of bodies that flowed along the sidewalk. He wanted to see it, to talk to it all, one last time before he descended into the Holland Tunnel.

  He sped south into the West Thirties, glad to be free of deep midtown, into the diamond, plant, and garment districts that intersected in a chaotic game of rock, paper, scissors. He fell behind a U-Haul with its cargo hull open, rumbling Oriental rugs over the potholes. The rain slowed, and William slapped the console blindly to stop the wipers from scraping the glass.

  He entered Herald Square with its department store madness and crosswalks overrun with extended New Jersey families cushioned in layers of I NY bags. He nearly hit two female backpackers who stopped in the wake of the Cressida to scream German insults as horns herded them back to the curb. He raced down Ninth Avenue into Chelsea.

  The city had always scared the shit out of him. He never felt completely safe here, like he had been thrown around in a tornado and managed to grab on to whatever happened to be flying by. In all of his nights here, it was the feeling of dread that accompanied him the most. And what had come of it? William could have given bus tours on all the different apartments around New York where he had hung out, fought, stayed up speed-ta
lking until dawn, or had one-night clumsy affairs in. He could have gone on that way forever, finding someone new to try it with again, like it was still an experiment worth conducting, only the same results each time.

  New York was beautiful too. He could say that.

  He broke across Twenty-Third Street, sidling up to a taxi driver in the curb lane who sucked on a drumstick to light Jamaican jazz. Wine glasses and slicked hair glistened under bistro canopies, endless lunches, as the sun lit the windshield, brightening the grime into yolk stains.

  William gunned through the West Village, red bricks and black wrought iron, flowers withering against windows in the heat. He cut through a yellow light, taking the engine up to thirty to increase the sidewalk blur. Liquor store, Starbucks, too many magazine shops with too many magazines in their splattered windows, the faces of celebrities faded to the bland beige of porn stars, dogs to adopt, bikes for rent, shuttered nightclubs with ripped colored awnings, a children’s hair salon. He saw Houston Street ahead. Two cop cars blocked it with their lights flashing, forcing traffic to turn. He rolled down his window and heard the echo of a rally somewhere farther downtown. A few teenagers in army fatigues drifted along the sidewalk carrying banners about oil and Iraq. Another anti-war rally, another demonstration primed for the media—signs pointing up to the news cameras in helicopters instead of to each other in the street—just to prove that New York was superior, a more outstanding, outraged example of what already looked to him like an indulgent, wellorchestrated lie. Thank god he was leaving, because eventually—William was convinced of this point—more terrorists would come to finish the demolition job. They were probably already here, strapping explosives to rats to burrow deep into the cracks and sewers. Once William had said that if the whole world blew up, he would like to be in the center of Manhattan, riding the last skyscraper into the dust. No longer.

  He tried to turn down Seventh Avenue, which would have linked him directly to the Holland Tunnel, but it too was blocked, cordoned by blue sawhorses. He drove east, turning south and weaving through the tinier labyrinthine streets of Tribeca, as his wheels ground the debris of a recently dissolved parade route. A group of protestors on the corner yelled something about “gas is murder” to passing cars. One held the head of a George W. Bush piñata, already bashed by sticks and empty of its spilled candy. William maneuvered a middle finger out the window to add his opinion to the debate. He peeled the wrong way down an empty cobblestone street. Abandoned construction sites were wrapped in plastic sheets and tied down with yellow police tape. What gifts, he thought, more condos.

  William wasn’t complaining. He didn’t feel pathetic or even sad. His entire windshield glowed white like an overdeveloped photograph. He could barely see out of it. William tried to make amends with Joseph, to love Jennifer again, to laugh with Quinn, but they were already behind him. The sun warmed his hands on the steering wheel, and he squinted to make out the color of the traffic light already high up over the car’s hood. He couldn’t see, and his knee accidentally triggered the wipers, which whisked over the glass. William couldn’t see a damn thing. Like this city was trying to screw him one last time, he could almost believe that, blinding him the very moment he finally wanted to look at it clearly.

  He struggled to glance out the back window to check what street he had just passed, and he caught his reflection in the rearview mirror: a young man, not old at all, some would say handsome, minus a few bruises and scabs. Those would heal. If someone like Quinn, who carried his own death in his blood, could open his eyes every morning and shove that damaged body into the day, so could he. Instead of adjusting the rearview mirror, he watched his own smile creep across his face.

  Of all the moves that defined his recent history, William believed this one, right here, was done all on his own. He floored the gas, laughing into the blinding haze of glass.

  CHAPTER TWENTY - ONE

  MADI WOKE LATE, finding a text on her cell phone that had been sent from her boss, Marcus, at some point in the night. “Emergency meeting. The colonels are here from Bang. Not going to be pretty. Advise a straight face.”

  Bang. They had come to complain, the Indian men in immaculate gray suits with lavender handkerchiefs folded in their breast pockets. Marcus called them the “colonels” because they were the managers of the company’s remote support headquarters in Bangalore. She and Marcus were the brains of Eval-ution and they were the hands. The hands had come to attack the brain.

  Their suits fit perfectly, tailored in the British style, not the bulky loose-crotched American standard. They didn’t look like colonels. Small bellies bulged from their shirts, and their skin was smooth and hairless with the dew of aftershave. One thing Madi knew for certain: they didn’t trust her, didn’t like her, didn’t want her telling them how to conduct operations. While their business was made in the utility of phone calls, Madi tried as much as possible to keep her conversations with them to e-mail.

  She took the elevator to the twelfth floor, rushed through the sparse beige lobby, and entered the conference room. Three men—Narayanan, Hinduja, and Spohr—sat side by side across from Marcus with three glasses of water in front of them. The windows were open, and the room was insufferably hot. The colonels didn’t like air-conditioning, even in a late New York summer. They said central air made them sick, and, deferring to cultural bias, Marcus kept it turned off. Just open windows and tap water and Marcus with his sleeves bunched to his elbows.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she said, bowing her head as she took the chair next to her partner. The colonels stared at her, at her scarlet silk sari extending over a pair of tan trousers, with detectable disgust. She had to remind herself that the colonels worked for her and Marcus and not the other way around. “I trust we can see eye to eye and come to an agreement on the minor problems rearing their heads.”

  There were no minor problems. And there was no trust. Spohr raged for an hour through a litany of dilemmas hitting Bangalore, all of which she had known for some time, known them so intimately she could have supplied the details to back them up.

  Bangalore was on the brink of collapse; the city had ground to a halt, choking on its own successes. Spohr named erratic power supplies, the narrow roads studded with potholes, the inadequate water systems and faulty sewers that were blocked and seeping over. Bangalore, beautiful exotic Bangalore, with its lush toppling gardens and mild springtime climate, had experienced a population explosion unprecedented in the nation’s history. The rapid boom of the information-technology industry had created an urban hub out of dust, and now that industry was paralyzing the very city that had flowered it. The money that flowed into the streets jammed traffic, all the new-model SUVs, all the French boutiques and shipments of imported computers and young college graduates migrating in waves, demanding New York–style loft apartments. Yet foreign companies like Eval-ution were opening new service centers each week, expanding their prospects, overstaffing, bringing in more workers, making new billionaires who bought motorcycles and opened nightclubs and extended the congestion into the late-night hours. The infrastructure of the Karnataka town was breaking under the weight.

  Calmly, Madi nodded her head through Spohr’s list of antagonisms. Spohr did not need to school her on the growing pains of capitalism, and she resented how he dogged her replies—had dogged them in e-mails and phone messages and now flew for an entire day to dog her in person. She softly explained that they had expected oversaturation in the city center and that they needed to put pressure on the local government for support—a government, she noted, whose coffers had been filled by Eval-ution’s growth.

  But the three men balked at her response as if they’d said they were starving and Madi had merely described the menu of an expensive restaurant. “Easy for you to say,” Spohr stammered. “You aren’t being vilified in your own home.” They informed her that the government had already turned against them. The chief minister believed too much had been given to the elites of the city and was now act
ively taking measures to check the progress. Farmers in the rural sector had been struck by failed monsoons and had taken to killing themselves in the Bangalore streets while all around them Chanel boutiques and minimalist Western lounges popped up by the dozen. “It all looks too indulgent,” Spohr huffed miserably. “The local government has not appreciated the foreign market’s disinterest in the city’s politics and now its sitting back and watching us sink.”

  “Then they are idiots,” Madi said abruptly. She found three faces staring at her with their jaws locked and their eyes open in horror. Marcus braced his hand over her own as if to tell her to be quiet. “Well, it’s true,” she yelled. “The job growth in technology is unlimited. What India cannot return to is cheap labor.”

  Spohr wrenched his head back like he was on the worst roller coaster of his life.

  “You don’t know India, Ms. Singh,” he snapped. “You are an American woman who says what’s good and bad for us? You know nothing. We live in dust and you grow fat? Is that the idea? India needs to be given more than jobs answering phones. It needs the respect you bestow so easily on your workforce in America. We must to protect the people of Bangalore. You can dress however you want, in your sari—”

  “Mr. Spohr, there is no need for insults,” Marcus warned. “Ms. Singh is your employer as much as I am. These problems are affecting all of us.”

  “Here you are wrong,” he yelled. “You don’t live in Bangalore. Maybe you own it. But it is not your home.”

  “I am here to determine what this company needs to run efficiently,” Madi said in the softest voice her anger would allow. “And, since you asked, I do care what happens in India. Very, very much. My family is from India. I didn’t pick out this sari to flatter you this morning, Mr. Spohr. I have as much claim as anyone to it as a homeland—”

  “I will not work with her,” he shouted as his fist pounded against the table. “We come to tell you we need help, and all you ask us to do is expand. We cannot grow just because you sit in an office in New York and will it. Who told you that you were one of us, Ms. Singh? I’d like to know the name of this man.”