Lightning People

by Christopher Bollen

  “Do you want some aspirin or a sleeping pill?” she asked him.

  “I’m a little better now.”

  “You don’t look it.”

  “Just sit here a minute,” he said, not wanting her to leave. He was afraid that if he let her go, he would lose her again, lose her to rooms, to other people, to wringing hands and phone calls far away. There were a million forces competing to come between them, and some already had. He realized what effort it took to preserve this simple gesture of Del holding his hand on the bed. “Talk to me,” he said.

  “Don’t you think you should sleep?”

  “Just for a minute.”

  “Okay,” she said, wiping her teeth with her tongue. She told him that she had finally come to a decision about her job. There was no point staying on any longer at the zoo, and she planned to give her resignation as soon as possible. “I should have done it a long time ago,” she said. “I’ll stay until they find someone to replace me.”

  “I’m glad,” he replied. “I always said you should.”

  “Just so you know, that means I’m officially just your wife.”

  “Officially?” he repeated.

  “I mean, on my visa. I’m the wife of a citizen.”

  “Now I know why you’re being so good to me,” he said, squeezing her fingers. He didn’t mention that she still wasn’t sleeping next to him in bed or that they had barely spoken in more than a week. He tried to smile. Then his eyes closed, and he fell asleep, bringing Del, as if by hand, into the current of his dreams.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  RAJ HAD NOT meant to become his father’s son so late in life. It had been Madi’s wish for a reunion and it had been her funeral that had delivered Raj to his portly, towel-headed father who quietly placed sandwiches and glasses of milk on the kitchen counter, as if leaving offerings to an invisible deity. Raj slept in his father’s cramped guest bedroom on a sofa foldout that dug its springs into his shoulder blades. After the funeral, he laid there for two days in his black suit, refusing to change, as two rounds of sunlight burned through the closed metal blinds. He hadn’t meant to stay at his father’s apartment. It was his mom he thought he was returning home to, but she had long since renovated his bedroom into an office for her monthly church newsletter (titled, in black authoritarian capitals, GET WITH WORSHIP!). That left the option of Madi’s old room—still decorated with posters of forgotten boy bands and pirouetting ballet slippers. It might seem odd that his mother had chosen to scrap Raj’s room, the child she was closest to, and keep Madi’s, the prodigal, intact. Maybe she had hoped the daughter who once slept there would one day return to her, stripping off the Indian wardrobe to embrace the cold, dusty prom dresses that still hung on pillowed silk hangers in the closet. The one other sleeping option at his mother’s house was the couch, where four half-feral cats arranged themselves like ailing fashion models, each named after a Beatle (the cats were all female and Ringo was missing a left eye). “If you stay with him, you must promise to visit each day,” she had demanded. “You must help me go through her room. I can’t just let it be.” Raj chose the silence of his father’s green-wallpapered Miami condo, where he could administer his own pain in his own slow doses. “You watch out he doesn’t hurt you,” his mother whispered, even though it was just the two of them in her kitchen. “He’s not civilized. That man still carries a knife!”

  The knife was the snaggle-pointed kirpan, and, along with a wood comb, a silver bracelet, and saggy cotton underwear, it hung somewhere in the bulk of his father’s body as a testament to his faith—as if to unwrap a slovenly businessman was to find one of god’s armored foot soldiers. His father hadn’t cried at the funeral. He stood behind Raj, staring in concentration, as if he were trying to tighten every internal organ simultaneously. Raj had waited for one word, one sigh, one cough, one break of the larynx, but the old man stayed silent.

  His words came later, at the ambrosial hour before dawn when his father sat on the floor of the living room.

  What Raj heard that first morning after the funeral, still dressed in his black suit on the bare foldout, were words of scripture chanted through the wall.

  “True here and now. O Nanak, forever and ever true. By thinking he cannot be reduced to thought, even by thinking hundreds and thousands of times. By remaining silent, inner silence is not obtained, even by remaining lovingly absorbed deep within . . . ”

  Raj let the chanting go on for several minutes before rolling off the mattress to pound his fist against the wall.

  Quietly then, but no less devout: “The hunger of the hungry is not appeased, even by piling up loads of worldly goods. Hundreds and thousands of clever tricks, but not even one of them will go along with you in the end . . .”

  After two days of prophetic psalms creeping through the wall into his ear, Raj had had enough. At least his mother mourned in the local vernacular. Wiping the crust from his eyelids—strange to return to his hometown to discover he’d grown allergic to the air—Raj pulled himself from bed and decided a cheap motel room, even with its drunk, horny vacationers, would be a more benevolent way to greet the morning. He opened the guest bedroom door, stumbled into the living room, and found his father sitting before a low table strung in velvet, head bent toward the pages of the Guru Granth Sahib.

  “Dad, please,” he wailed, hand judgmentally braced on his hip. “Do you know what hour it is?”

  The smile cracked through his father’s beard, and under blue tinted reading glasses his eyes gleamed.

  “Rajveer, I am only performing my duty.”

  “So I’ve heard. You’ve been at it for days. Can’t you at least go to the gurudwara and let the soulless get some sleep?”

  “You have been sleeping for days,” his father replied solemnly, as if the observation sprang from the text in front of him. “When will you wake up?”

  Raj shook his head and leaned against the doorframe, plotting packed bags and a room key at the motel a block from the beach. He knew what duty his father was performing, the Sikh sacrament of Saptahik Path, a less lunatic marathon variant of the Akhand Path, which involved reciting the entire Guru Granth Sahib from page 1 to page 1,430 in a concentrated amount of time—often performed after, say, the loss of a favorite daughter. Raj looked down at his father, at the curled conch-shelled turban, as the man read on: “In that pool, people have made their homes, but the water there is as hot as fire. In the swamp of emotional attachment, their feet cannot move. I have seen them drowning there.” Here was a lone believer so far from his Punjabi home, holding on to a custom in the last place that cared about celestial paradise when the sun licked the Atlantic waves and teens tied on their floss bikini tops. Raj knew that his father had stopped attending the only gurudwara within miles, electing instead to celebrate his own slightly irreverent version of the religion at home. He no longer, for example, read the scripture in the native Gurmukhi, preferring the tainted English translation in paperback form. What other Sikh concessions had he made? Oh, yeah, he married a Christian, his son chopped off his hair, and he drank Budweisers while eating his dinner over the kitchen sink at night. In other words, his father spoke Sikh with an American accent, and maybe the orthodox believers who attended the boxy, stucco gurudwara wouldn’t have let him through its sacred doors. Raj sat down on the floor.

  “I will not stop reading, son, until I finish. Two hours every morning. I do this to commemorate your sister.”

  “I’m listening,” he sighed. “Go ahead.”

  “If you insist on remaining while I read, you must cover that offensive head of yours.”

  Raj pulled a lace doily off a side table and placed it squarely on his head. He expected his father to slam the book shut or banish him back to the guest room—the doily, after all, had been a childish jab of rebellion—but the gesture seemed to pacify the old man, as he slid his finger under the words and read aloud.

  For the next week, it became their morning ritual, the first they had shared since the div
orce. The white doily remained affixed on Raj’s head until seven thirty each morning, even as the black suit was traded for a white T-shirt, yellow swim trunks, and black dress socks. Raj listened to the Guru’s hymns and praises and atrocities, passing in and out of attention as his father plodded away at the verses with his resolute tongue. There were words and names he did not recognize, passages that made little sense, others too conveniently contemporary (“To the addict, there is nothing like the drug; to the fish, there is nothing else like water”). But also, there were familiar verses that fluttered mental photo albums, bringing back the Turbinator in less tormented times.

  After the morning observance, he and his father walked along the beach. They didn’t speak or touch. They stared at the blondes on towels with their tops untied, and Raj jumped through the ocean waves and dove under small crests, while his father held his shirt, shoes, and socks at the tide line. They sat at a booth in the local diner, eating eggs, and his father ordered small cups of chocolate pudding for dessert. Raj wondered if this was another concession—he remembered a sacred pudding was served after scriptural readings at the gurudwara—but he never commented on it, not wanting to break the peaceful silence of their mornings together.

  The afternoon Raj showed up on his mother’s doorstep, she took one look at him head to toe, and spat, “This is the way you treat the woman who gave birth to you? I lose one child, and the other one can’t find it in his busy vacation schedule to visit me. My you look tan. Have you been at the beach? I’ve been on my knees crying, and you’ve been out getting sun.”

  He did not tell her about the pre-dawn recitations, but he did say that he and his father had taken time to be together. “Get to know each other again” was exactly how Raj phrased it. She walked into the kitchen to slam a few cabinet doors.

  “Honestly, Raj, I thought you had more sense. That man and his charms—pure brainwash.” Raj followed her across the candyspeckled linoleum, surprised that Vicki Birch still thought that the man she divorced twenty years ago still possessed any charm. “I suppose he’ll have you back in a turban by Friday.”

  “Do you want me to hate him?” he asked. “I think Madi would have liked the fact that I spent some time with our father.” His mother spun around, too incensed to busy her hand with another cabinet door.

  “Don’t you tell me what your sister would or would not have liked,” she screamed. “If she had the good sense not to get wrapped up in that India fixation, we wouldn’t be visiting her grave later this afternoon. Ohhh,” she moaned, liquid brimming her eyelids. “I’ve been lonely too. I lost a child as much as he did.”

  He sat with melted ice and lemonade in his mother’s backyard, while bees threaded the clump of Spanish daisies growing from under the house. Vicki Birch cried until dusk. Raj didn’t want to admit it, he couldn’t put his finger on why, but he found his father’s stoic silence more honest, more pure, in its mourning than his mother’s stomach-wrenching sobbing at any mention of a topic that might lead her back to the subject of her daughter.

  “She’s gone, Mom,” he finally said a week later. “She’s gone, and we’re alive. I want to think of Madi as I knew her. Not as she was in this house when we were kids, but just last year, last month, last week in New York.” His mother recoiled, grabbing a sponge and lobbing it into his stomach. Perhaps she heard the influence of the Guru Granth Sahib in her own son’s words—to look forward and not backward, to accept death as part of life. On page 1,429: “Says Nanak, nothing lasts forever; the world is like a dream. People become anxious when something unexpected happens. This is the way of the world.” He and his father had turned the page on 1,430 that very morning.

  “You make me sick,” she said, before burying her face in his chest.

  The Oldsmobile was idling at the curb to take him to the airport. His bags were in the trunk, and his father was sitting behind the wheel, pretending not to search for his ex-wife’s silhouette in the window.

  “You can call me whenever you want,” he said, hugging her.

  “I guess that’s all I have left. That’s all parents get, the sound of their children already drowned out in other places. Raj, promise me you’ll be careful up there. It’s not safe. And promise you’ll come down for Christmas. I’ll put your room back just the way it used to be. You’ll stay with me this time, and I won’t bother you.”

  On the way to the airport, his father finally broke the silence that had enwrapped them for the past week. As a baseball game drifted into extra innings on the radio, his father suddenly gunned the motor and spoke quickly to match the acceleration of the car.

  “Rajveer, there is still one thing we must discuss.”

  “What?”

  “The man who killed your sister. He has not been apprehended.”

  Raj continued to look forward, rattled by the sudden turn of his father’s attention to the specifics of Madi’s death. These were not the words of a sacred book.

  “It was a hit-and-run,” he replied. “An accident.”

  “I have called your police in New York many times. I have asked the detective if they have found the party responsible. But they throw me off. They don’t care what an old man in Florida thinks about their negligence. But we care. Your sister must have justice, Rajveer. The driver must be punished.”

  The Oldsmobile wove into the far left lane, where air gutted through the half-open windows. He could hear cicadas beating in the median grass.

  “I didn’t think you cared about such things,” Raj replied. “She’s gone. Let it be.”

  “We are Sikh and we do believe in avenging injustice. When one’s life and dignity are violated, the guilty must face her bodyguards.” This mention was as close as his father got to the subject of Indira Gandhi’s 1984 assassination by her two Sikh bodyguards, after she ordered the storming of the Golden Temple in Amritsar to suppress rebel activity. But Raj picked up on the reference immediately; he remembered how his father had advocated the shooting, had used forks and knives at the breakfast table to illustrate the atrocities of Indira’s army, and had cried against the anti-Sikh violence it fueled in the days after her death, when Raj was only a child watching the foreign carnage on the television set.

  “I’m not a bodyguard,” Raj said. “I’m her brother.”

  “I ask only that you encourage the police to continue their investigation. You must go and speak to them directly. That sin cannot be forgiven without a fight.”

  Raj stared into the dead center of a palm tree whose dried fronds skirted the departure lane at MIA. His father placed a hand on his knee.

  “Do you know I’m not even allowed to board a flight with my karpin,” he said incredulously. “They want me to check it in my luggage.”

  Raj pulled his black leather jacket around his shoulders and waited until his row was called. He tried to remember random verses of the holy book, while flipping through magazines by the cash register. In three hours he would be home.

  CHAPTER THIRTY - ONE

  THE TRUTH WAS Del couldn’t get back to normal even if she tried. Madi’s death was like a laser, slicing right through the center of her life. Like a ringing phone in the middle of night, where a stranger’s voice on the other end whispers you’re running out of time.

  In the evenings she spoke to Raj quietly on the phone from Florida, mostly listening to the silences filling the gaps between his sentences. He talked about the funeral (quick, without a single family conflict, his mom so dazed that she walked with her arm stretched out to keep her standing straight) and about the progress on Madi’s case. Raj asked if he could see her when he returned, and she let more silence, a thousand miles of it, drift between them before she answered yes.

  She climbed into bed with Joseph. He had come home late, breathing heavily from the short flight of stairs, his eyes blackened like two used ashtrays, nodding at her as she sat in the kitchen, and undressed for bed. He was still damp and feverish, fighting the residue of a late summer cold. He looked sick and yellow,
but so did everyone, so did she, barely able to eat and smoking through a pouch of tobacco every two days. Only after Joseph fell asleep did she return to the couch where she curled in a ball, scratching old nail polish off her toes. She felt close to that moment when the silence between them would finally lift and they could continue on together, but for now she preferred to remain locked in her own arms on the couch listening to the laughter and the screaming that made up the night.

  She listened to young women who passed under the window on the street, girls going out, girls getting ready in dresses tighter and shorter each year, hair longer and blonder, going to the clubs, going to meet men, going to live the way they pictured living in New York should be—that fast live wire current circulating through the city, which was only felt by those who hadn’t yet lived here long enough to be inured to its charge. Then she thought about Raj lying in bed at his father’s house, an overgrown child returning to his care after so many years out of his reach. She imagined Madi fluttering through the window, the edges of her red silk sari licked by the wind and her black hair streaming in tendrils. Del knew the hallucination was of her own making, but she waited for this phantom Madi to say something to her, some answer that would make sense of the world erupting all around her without her best friend. The dream never got that far. Del woke to hear Joseph stumbling into the bathroom.

  She dressed for work quickly and said good-bye to him while standing on the other side of the bathroom door. For once on the subway to the Bronx, she didn’t run though the list of snakebite symptoms in her head.

  If Madi’s death was like a laser, its first target was the mud-brown building of the Reptile House. Death was capable of producing amazing life. Leto’s death had produced little Apollo, the miraculous baby, an inch of cord with lidless eyes, moving on ripples of muscle, creeping through the white sand of his crib. If that death had brought life, perhaps Madi’s death could do the same.

  That morning, she slipped a sheet of department letterhead in the lab’s electronic typewriter and typed her resignation letter to the Bronx Zoo Herpetology Department c/o Dr. Abrams. Whipping it from the machine, she carried the letter through the break room and knocked on Abrams’s office door. He sat in front of an open book, a concave chest bolstered by twin elbows, and his eyes glanced up distractedly. She closed the door, placed the letter on his desk, and anchored it under a crystal paperweight with a black winged beetle frozen in its core.