Lightning People

by Christopher Bollen

  William stood so long staring at his reflection in the bathroom mirror that when he heard Quinn open the front door, he wasn’t sure if minutes or an hour had passed. The door hinges squealed out of tune, and house keys clattered on the desk. Then he heard William?—uncertain, distrustful, like the name of someone who wasn’t supposed to be there. William practiced an easy smile in the mirror before he fixed his hair, slicking it back with wet hands, and walked out into the living room.

  The pills were supposed to make all movement easier, but they only worked properly when situations were already easy, and instead William felt like he was walking too slowly, so he jerked his legs forward to overcompensate. Quinn, zipped in a red nylon windbreaker, spun around and stiffened at the sight of him. His hands darted into his windbreaker pockets, and his fingers pinched their inner linings.

  “Ah, Quinn, my man,” William said, stepping forward in the first movements of a hug, but he only got a foot before he noticed Quinn’s sleepless eyes and the deep wrinkles across his forehead. “Who’d you think it was?”

  “You’re back.” Flat as pavement.

  “Yeah,” he laughed. “I hope I’m not interrupting. You don’t have a young guy outside, do you?” The mention of a hustler should have sent Quinn into a spree of winks and complicit sexual innuendos, but he remained frozen, glaring at him. William wiped his mouth and continued laughing. He could laugh for days. He’d laugh until Quinn would start laughing along with him and then he‘d know he was safe.

  But Quinn didn’t so much as breathe, and William stopped laughing. He hadn’t spoken to anyone he knew in five days and had hardly eaten, preferring the numbness of weed to food and water. Suddenly William missed the quiet indecision of the motel room.

  “Guess I had to come back sometime.”

  “I guess,” Quinn snorted.

  “What’s wrong?” He turned his eyes to the attention of the mail fanned out on the counter.

  “You know what’s wrong.”

  “You saw the car outside.” William refused to look at him, slipping his finger across a Verizon bill on its third and final payment notice, hoping one last second for the leniency of a world that would work in his favor. Don’t admit anything. Play dumb. Don’t say a word.

  “Yeah, I saw it,” Quinn replied.

  “Then you know I’m back,” he sighed softly. “The Catskills were perfect. Did you know—”

  “Cut it out,” Quinn said roughly, groping his nylon pockets before yanking his hands free to point one in his direction. “You know what I mean.”

  “No. I don’t.”

  Quinn rummaged through the contents on his desk and pulled a newspaper from under a blanket of envelopes. Quinn turned the front page over and wiped it flat with his palm. Then he thrust it out in front of him, rattling the paper as if it would come alive and speak. It did. MEAN STREETS, ran the headline. In an instant, William read the aftermath of the freak accident in Tribeca and what price had been paid while he had kept driving away from the scene. He took a step back and grabbed the counter. He smiled, but the verdict was already swimming through his eyes. Dead. The woman had died right there on the street as she vanished in the rearview mirror. He had done that, or at least the car had. The victim hadn’t just suffered broken bones or been knocked unconscious like William had imagined for all of those days hiding in the motel room. She had been killed, her whole life wiped out as he continued to speed away. He looked up at Quinn, hoping for him to contradict the report, because he couldn’t accept what a split second of carelessness now made him. But Quinn’s face didn’t ease. He was not a murderer. Even with the fact spelled out right in front of him, William hated Quinn for suggesting that he was one. He filled his cheeks with air and blew.

  Quinn brought the paper closer, shoving it against his face. “See that car,” he yelled. “That blue shape in the picture. Do you see it? That’s my car. I can see the fucking bumper sticker, that little tab right there!” His finger jabbed the blur. “I noticed the paint job outside. You had it fixed. You hit her. You hit her, and you drove away in my car.”

  Now that Quinn had gotten his accusation out, he backed away sheepishly, clenching the paper over his belly like it was in danger of being ripped to shreds. William shook his head, vowels muscling their way through his teeth, and he reached his arm out, but his balance was failing. He held himself against the counter. His knees gripped the cheap wood paneling of the sink. His fingernails dug into the cold metal basin. He had killed that woman. In one second she had been alive, and in the next she was dead. The realization kept returning, like he’d shielded the information off and it found another way of penetrating. He had no way of dealing with that kind of news, and his whole body was struggling to adjust. If he didn’t submit to it, if he didn’t let it sink in, it still didn’t need to be true.

  “Don’t lie to me. I don’t know where the hell you’ve been for the last few days, but it wasn’t upstate with friends.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “You stupid son of a bitch,” Quinn hissed. In their years of friendship, William had never seen Quinn angry, and he almost didn’t recognize the tattered, swollen face now cracking in blood vessels. “How the hell could you just keep going? In my car.” Quinn mentioned his car again like that was the most gruesome detail in the entire situation.

  William let go of the counter. His shoulders jerked as he let out a cry that had been building in his stomach since he had watched the city drift out of view on the turnpike. He took a step toward his friend’s fat, rigid body, but Quinn lifted his arm to shield whatever he thought was coming for him, an embrace or a punch. William pushed past him and collapsed on the couch, snaking his fingers into the limp bundled fabric. For another second he clung to the lie, he even improvised a deer dazed by headlights on the highway, but Quinn was shaking his head right through it, staring pathetically down at him.

  “Don’t even try it.”

  William dropped his head. He could grab his bags, race out the door, run north toward Fourteenth Street, and keep running. But Quinn would still be there, holding the newspaper, holding keys to a car dented and repaired.

  “Okay,” William whimpered. “Fine. Yes.” Quinn moaned. He banged his fist on the top of the bureau, which sent a picture frame that was leaning against the wall to crash face down. Quinn carefully picked up the frame and then shook it at him—a photograph of his former self, young and blond, laughing with a muscular chest and a flat stomach on a beach in Fire Island, like that loss was William’s fault too.

  “It’s sick. You hear me? Sick.”

  “What do you think, that I meant to hit her?” William could scream as loud as he wanted in the cottage. There were no next door neighbors, no eavesdroppers frozen just behind the walls with satellites for ears like there were everywhere else in New York. The strain of William’s voice shouting his own defense strengthened him. “I didn’t know what was happening. All of a sudden I was driving away. I drove like I wasn’t even in the car. And then suddenly I was in the Holland Tunnel, and by the time I reached the other side it was too late to go back. You know I didn’t mean to. Quinn, it was an accident.”

  “It doesn’t matter what you meant. That poor woman was killed, and you didn’t bother to stop. Don’t you feel an ounce of anything?”

  William stared up, waiting for a sign of compassion to ease the corners of Quinn’s eyes and mouth. William pumped all of the pleading and vulnerability he could into his face, hoping to catch any splinter of love that Quinn had felt in the years William had visited him. He waited as a minute went by, his eyes begging and insisting, come on, find me in your heart, but the coarse geography of Quinn’s face refused to weaken. Quinn gazed down in disgust. That expression woke William up. Quinn wasn’t going to forgive him.

  “I didn’t know she was dead. I figured a few broken bones. I’m not a murderer. It was an accident. I didn’t even mean to drive away. How are you supposed to know what to do in a moment like that? How can yo
u blame someone for an instinct?”

  Quinn’s jaw worked at grinding up his words before he spit them out. “How long do think it’s going to be before the cops figure out what kind of make that car is? And how many blue Cressidas are registered in the city? And how many have a white bumper sticker, and how many of those just happen to have undergone a nice little patch-up job on the hood?” Quinn was shaking too. Suddenly William realized, with some degree of hope, that his friend also felt complicit, like his own innocence had been pulled out from under him. Quinn slumped down on the couch next to him, slapping away William’s arm for the comfort of his own hands. “You really did it. You really did,” he repeated. “I was hoping it was a mistake, that I was embarrassing myself by even accusing you, that you’d come back and tell me I was crazy.”

  “I’ll fix it,” he whispered. He tried for a second time to put his arm around Quinn, who was staring in a daze out the window. “Quinn,” he begged. “I’m sorry. Please. It’s still me. I’m like your son, and I’m in trouble. I’m asking you to help me.”

  Quinn took those words with a dismissive hiss, but he accepted the arm that collected around his shoulder, and in another second William’s mouth burrowed deep into his chest. He cried into the red windbreaker, releasing all of the guilt and fear that had wracked him for so many days in the motel room. He reached for Quinn’s hand, brought it to his lips, and kissed the hairy knuckles, hoping those hands would help share the burden of saving him.

  “You did a terrible thing.”

  “I know.”

  “But I’m going to help you. I told you I’d always be here for you and I won’t break that promise now.”

  “Thank you.” He pressed his face into Quinn’s neck, smelling the chemical flowers of laundry detergent mixed with expired cologne. Quinn would save him. He was older and stronger and lived with death every day. He would protect him. William’s eyes closed in relief. He could have fallen asleep in that tight embrace.

  “Here’s what we do,” Quinn said finally. “We go down to the station, find the detective, and explain. We don’t even need to mention the repair to the car right now. We just say you were scared. That’s enough, I think. I’ll be with you at every step.”

  William lifted his head in shock as he stared at the meaningful clench of Quinn’s pale lips waiting for it to ignite into an altogether different proposal.

  “What?”

  “That’s how we fix it. We walk right down there, and you turn yourself in. That way, they’ll go easier.”

  “No,” he choked. “No. I’m not doing that. They’ll put me in jail.”

  “William,” he whispered tenderly, the kissed knuckles still pressed in William’s hand. “You have to. It’s your responsibility. You have to accept what you did. It’s the only way you’ll be able to live with yourself.”

  Quinn stared so solemnly, he could easily be mistaken for a man who had weathered high moral roads all his life. He looked utterly unlike the reckless prankster that William had come to love, the man who told stories of harassing cops and throwing used condoms at patrol cars. His fat, bloodshot face with its brittle dent for cheekbones and its burdensome drape of jowls showed every year of living outrageously on his own appetites—his loud indecencies and the even louder declaration of his rights to perform them, which always fought against the order of the law. William couldn’t believe that same man was telling him to turn himself in when it wouldn’t change a single thing. The woman was dead. She wasn’t coming back, no matter how long William sat in jail. He realized he had misjudged Quinn, his entire nature, all along.

  “No fucking way,” he screamed, jumping off the sofa and trying to reach under Quinn’s legs to gather his bags. “You can’t ask me to do that.”

  Quinn pushed William back, and in a second he was off the sofa too, collecting his wallet and house keys from the desk.

  “It’s for your own good,” Quinn snapped. “I was wrong about you. I expected more.”

  “Where are you going?” William asked in panic.

  “Where do you think? Down to the station. I’m going to tell them whether you come along or not.”

  William could feel his own heart racing so hard his fingers bunched as if to collect the blood. So few seconds were left to bring Quinn back to his side. “What good will it do?” he screamed. “I told you it was an accident. Please, Quinn.”

  Quinn wasn’t listening. He tossed his keys into the pocket of his windbreaker and shouldered past William’s halting arms. He stood at the door, trying to release his hands from the jacket pockets and said one last thing without turning around.

  “You have to behave like you share this world. You should learn this. We aren’t all just decorations for you, William. It isn’t right to treat a person like that. Like roadkill. Like they aren’t even human.”

  Every muscle was firing down William’s spine as he whipped his arm around Quinn’s neck, and his body fell on top of him before he could open the door. At first William held him almost like he was hugging him, like they were both staring out of the door’s small portal window at the weaving branches that hid the black lace of a fire escape. William only meant to stop him, to bring him down to the ground and make him listen, force him to understand. But Quinn’s hands quickly jerked to wrestle William’s arm from his throat. His hands were caught inside the pockets of the red windbreaker so they only lifted up like two oven mitts performing a boxer’s pantomime. Then Quinn jabbed an elbow into William’s stomach, gutting his air, and tried to wiggle free. Quinn started to scream, no longer in argument but shrieking as if he were under attack. His elbow struck William again, and to stop the screaming, William squeezed his arm tighter around Quinn’s neck, until the cry dissipated into a gurgle that exploded from his nose and lips.

  William closed his eyes, pinning his forearm against Quinn’s throat as hard as he could, all of his panic concentrated on that arm. If William let go, if he softened his hold, Quinn would scream, and if William looked into those eyes he would find them so engulfed in hatred that no pleading would ever be able to stop that hatred from spreading. Two feet frantically kicked against the base of the door. William kept his eyes shut and breathed into Quinn’s ear, the one action his friend could no longer perform. He constricted every muscle in his body, tightened every vein. William squeezed so hard it was as if his own brain contracted into the smallest pinprick, with no room for thought, no room for guilt or even understanding of what he was doing, just squeezing until the tightness blotted out any other message in his head. He felt Quinn’s legs buckle, and they both dropped quietly to the ground.

  When all thought was the size of a pinprick there was no room for consequences. But now the pinprick grew and with it came the realization of where he was and what he was doing. William wrenched his arm away. Quinn stared absently at the tiny black gap under the refrigerator. His face was purple, and his mouth hung open. William slid back frantically on the wood and grabbed the first thing his fingers found, a T-shirt balled on the floor. It was Quinn’s tie-dye rainbow shirt, his errand-day favorite. William wound it over his own face, stuffing the fabric in his mouth, and screamed with every ounce of strength into the sweet, dank body odor of the wonderful man who lay in front of him, gone.

  SUICIDES TELL LIFE backward. They start with death—the how, with what weapon—and the entire biography becomes a scavenger hunt for what went wrong. It hurt to acknowledge how easily the facts of Quinn’s life would make sense of such an end. The cottage was a museum wholly devoted to lost glories and leftover vices. And so was Quinn’s own body, disintegrating like everyone else’s, only at a faster rate.

  He pulled Quinn’s heavy body into the bathroom and finally released his hands from the windbreaker’s twisted pockets. He took the house keys out, threw them in the sink, and tied the end of a bed sheet around Quinn’s neck. Then with all of his remaining strength, he lifted the body on one shoulder while lassoing the other end of the sheet around the steel shower pipe. Willia
m pulled until only a few inches hung between the nozzle and Quinn’s neck. He made a tight knot and then let the body drop. The pipe bent at the weight but held. Quinn’s black Converse sneakers, a ridiculous but touching testament to youth, swayed an inch above the basin of the tub.

  William grabbed a towel from the closet and began wiping the tub under Quinn’s feet, the sink, the medicine cabinet, the pill bottles. He scrubbed the bathroom floor, backing out on hands and knees until no trace of his prints remained.

  The living room glowed in the evening sunset, all orange and cobalt reflected across the glossy plaster walls. He grabbed his duffle bags, shoved the dirty towel into its pocket, and placed them by the door. He knew his fingerprints were all over the room—why wouldn’t they be, they were friends?—but he was afraid that any further cleaning would look suspicious. Who cleans before they kill themselves? Suicides tell life backwards because they beg for answers close at hand. The calm disorder of clothes and furniture strewn in the eccentric effects of poverty, with magnets and LGBA pamphlets announcing Quinn’s condition before an autopsy would, were proof enough. Who would look further for answers into a life so strangled in old age and disappointment?

  William picked up his bags and locked the door behind him, ducked across the garden, through the tunnel, and out onto West Twelfth Street, moving in the opposite direction of the car, which was still parked five feet from the entrance.

  He walked toward the Hudson River, drenched in sweat, pressing his palm through his hair to keep an appearance of sanity, as his lips trembled at the flash of Quinn hanging in his shower like the loneliest man on earth. The path along the river was full of baby strollers and spandexed bikers whirling by on ten-speeds. William leaned over the railing, pretending to watch the sun dissolve into New Jersey, and tossed the dirty towel wrapped around the set of car keys into the water. He tried to catch his breath and, shivering, waited only long enough to see it sink.