Lightning People

by Christopher Bollen

  “What is this?” Abrams wheezed, as if calling her bluff before he even bothered to read it. “If you aren’t happy here, you could have come to me. This is very irresponsible so late in the summer. We’ve already done the fall budget. I’m afraid if it’s a raise you are looking for . . . ”

  “You’re right, I haven’t been happy,” she said as she took the seat across from him. “Not for some time. But that doesn’t matter now. I’m giving you my notice.”

  He eyed her with irritation, pulled the paper from under the glass weight, and then threw it back on the desk as if it were an exorbitant electricity bill.

  “You know what this means, don’t you?” The corners of his mouth pitched upward in satisfaction. “It means we can’t sponsor your work visa anymore. I don’t see how you will remain in this country, Del, if you decide to leave us. I didn’t realize you were thinking of moving back to Greece.”

  “I’m not,” she replied, matching smile for heartless smile. She could hardly contain the warmth spreading through her chest, tremendous warmth filling her like a helium balloon. She rolled her shoulders back to capture more of it. She almost felt sorry for poor Abrams, forced to patrol the endless halls of caged reptiles until he confused the employees with the animals locked inside. “I don’t need to be sponsored, Dr. Abrams. The visa hasn’t been valid for some months. Although I do appreciate your concern.”

  Abrams’s cheeks flushed. He busied his fingers with a pencil, dashing a gratuitous checkmark into the top right corner of the paper.

  “It’s still irresponsible,” he complained while straightening his neck. “So late in summer. After we’ve been your family for nearly ten years.”

  “I’m willing to stay on for the next two weeks, or at least until you find my replacement,” she replied, appreciating the dignity of the offer but also a little disappointed that the moment she had imagined for so long was now concluding without a bottle thrown or some hysterical chase through the exhibition hall.

  “You’re damned right you will,” he muttered coldly.

  She stood up to leave, already picturing a future free of cages, checklists, and tours, when Abrams shot up from his desk, sending his chair orbiting into the corner.

  “One thing,” he said. She should have known Abrams was not the sort of man to go down without trying to strike one last blow in return. “That Crotalus atrox, what’s it called, Apollo. I need it driven to the research lab at Columbia. It’s being donated to testing. You don’t mind doing the department a favor, do you?”

  ON THE DRIVE into Manhattan, Del continually glanced over at the carrier in the passenger seat, the ratted seatbelt buckled over its plastic basin. Inside Apollo nested in a corner, no doubt frightened by the vibration of the car motor and the sudden jerks of southbound traffic. Tears filled her eyes. She didn’t want to hand the infant—her infant—over to a research lab of needles and dissections. All of that effort to save him had resulted in a few months’ survival before being probed and tortured simply to study how badly he suffered and what could be learned from his pain. Which philosopher said that every day for animals was a holocaust? The way they’re worked until their knees break, their eyes sprayed with household cleaner, their fur stripped for glove liners, their bones ground up for soup stalk, their tits milked, and their babies eaten. What would animals say if they could speak: You beasts without hearts, for sharing the planet with us, fuck you forever.

  It occurred to her as she drove through the wasteland sprawl of dollar shops and bullet-scarred liquor stores that she could simply keep driving south: she could pass right by Columbia and keep accelerating until she brought Apollo home to Gramercy. There she could keep him alive in her tub, build a desert of sand and plastic branches, and feed him mice from the pet store until she organized some way to send him out west where he could be released in the wild. The fantasy carried such joyous momentum, she pressed her foot more firmly on the gas, excited to get home and begin frantic phone calls to rattlesnake preservation groups. For a few stoplights, Del almost believed she would do this. She would save Apollo, right the wrong, and sacrifice herself to prevent this beautiful creature from the hell of human treatment. What difference did one snake matter to the rest of the world, which shot and skinned rattlesnakes every day by the bucketload in the west? Of course, there was no crime in killing a snake. There was only a crime in saving one. One life mattered so little. That obvious, terrifying fact—perhaps the first fact a child learns to acclimate them to the realities of the world—drove through her with an overwhelming punch as she searched for a parking space on 114th Street. She shook her head to vanquish the fantasy, because, in reality, there was no way to save Apollo. She would be arrested, deported, and never allowed to return because she had cared for this single, insignificant entity as small and thin as a crack in the sidewalk.

  She parked the department’s Honda Civic next to the campus. More tears clouded her eyes now, because this campus had been the place that she had met Madi what seemed like ten lifetimes ago. Maybe the tears had been for Madi all along.

  Del grabbed the carrier and walked through the wrought-iron entrance gates on Broadway, holding Apollo gently in her arms. She waited for the memories to crash down around her, four years coming back into her mind with the swiftness of an old classmate tapping her on the shoulder. But so much had changed at Columbia since she had graduated. The crumbling brick buildings of her student years had undergone clumsy techno-club renovations, steel and glass promising a learning curve at a faster, sexier rate. Madi would have approved. She had probably doubled her alumni donations to expedite the process. Madi always loved torching the old to make way for the new. As Del climbed the steps of Low Library, which she once sledded down in winter wasted out of her mind on red wine, she was thankful for the transformations. The less to remind her of those years the better.

  She followed the brick path lined with curving box hedges around the library rotunda. Three shirtless young men in skimpy blue shorts jogged toward her. They must have been eighteen, but their hairless bodies, taut with stomach muscles ribbed like the smooth dorsal shells of beetles, made them seem much younger. Or maybe Del had finally reached the age that no longer found similarities in youth. She tried to remember Dash’s body or even her own from those years of college but came up with blank outlines, a pink nipple or a feather of red stomach hair, but no definitive teenage anatomy. Maybe that failure to remember was the brain’s consolation, a mental trip wire to protect itself from time.

  Del passed through the science building’s automatic doors, entered the chilly cargo elevator, and took the nine flights down, deep into the core of Manhattan. Navigating a maze of antiseptic white hallways that reached so far back into the building they must have overshot the campus above ground, she finally found the name Sarah T. Isely, PhD and the sign CAUTION: LIVE LAB. She rang the buzzer and pushed her shoulder into the door, careful not to shake the box.

  Del waited ten minutes in a white bowl chair after giving her name to the grad student at the reception desk. She opened the top of the carrier and looked in at Apollo, slithering against the darkness with his wet forked tongue drilling in the air, the first bead of a rattle starting to hatch on his tail. He’s just a snake, she said to herself, whose brain is merely a reception center of heat and impulses. If so, then why did she feel like she was betraying him?

  She scanned the office for some clue to the research conducted by Isely and her team, but the waiting room merely doubled as storage. Filing cabinets were jammed with outdated paperwork and crowned with plastic ferns. A buzzing sound signaled the opening of an interior door, and the same white-yarn-haired woman who had accompanied Abrams through the Reptile House appeared, smiling in a tan lab coat. She extended a hand, which Del shook, while her other hand dug for a ballpoint pen in her breast pocket.

  “Are you alright?” Sarah Isely asked, staring at her sympathetically. “You look like you’ve been crying.”

  “Oh, I haven’t,” D
el said, quickly wiping her nose with her wrist.

  “Abrams,” she concluded. “Most of the researchers think he’s a ruthless bureaucrat. I find that twat describes him more succinctly. At least that’s what I limit it to behind closed doors.”

  Del liked her. Of course she liked her. The woman was a senior professor of herpetology, a wizard of biology, some long lost vision Del once had of her future self, the walking talking paradigm of the idea that you could spend a day with Squamata Serpentes and leave looking like a normal human being at night. Normal in this case meant two silver earrings cast over drooping lobes, a fresh application of peach lipstick, a bun tied loosely over silver streaming eyebrows, and a habit of drawing her chin close to her neck when she spoke. Her skin smelled of hand sanitizer.

  “Where do I sign?” Sarah asked, eyeing the shipment. Del searched her pockets and pulled out the release documents, pointing to the appropriate line.

  “Do you mind if I ask you something? Are you going to dissect him?”

  The older woman smiled.

  “Ah, that’s always what it comes down to, isn’t it?” She rocked back on her heels and let go of the tightness of her chin, lifting it to the ceiling. “Don’t worry. This little one isn’t destined for the knife.”

  “Then what are you going to use him for?” Del asked, unable to relinquish Apollo until she understood the full scope of his imminent extinction.

  “We need his venom.” Sarah said matter-of-factly. “A lot of facilities have their venom shipped in from private suppliers, but there have been too many tainted samples, blood and puss and a whole saturation of I’m not sure what. I prefer the extractions performed on-site. Fresh and cold, less chance of outside spoilers. Sorry. I have a tendency to go on.”

  “No, I’m interested,” Del entreated. “You know, I studied here. Undergraduate. I was a biology major. I never got this far down in the building. Dr. Isely, I hope you don’t mind if I ask. Why do you want rattlesnake venom?”

  Sarah opened the box and peered in at Apollo, inspecting her latest venom-maker. Then she glanced back up at Del, whose eyes were still holding the question out for her.

  “Do you know anything about the Furcifer labordi chameleon?” Sarah asked.

  “Green little lizard. Lives in Madagascar. About the size of my hand.”

  “That’s right,” Sarah said, clearly impressed. “You know, then, that its entire life cycle is a little under one year from conception to death. It’s the shortest living tetrapod on earth. You figure out Furcifer’s genetic makeup, determine what molecules are responsible for shoving it out of existence so quickly, find those analogues in human cells, wipe them out, and you’ve got the recipe for the fountain of youth. Or at least you turn eighty-year-olds into the new middle-agers. Of course, then you get into the problems of delayed mortality, but with STD rates among the elderly spiking the way they are, I guess humans always manage to figure out new ways to kill themselves early.” Sarah clasped Del’s arm affectionately and then closed the carrier, lifting it to rest against her hip.

  “But what’s that have to do with rattlesnakes?” Del persisted.

  “It’s the same principle. What does venom do when it hits the bloodstream?”

  “Bleeding, nausea, dilated pupils, cramping, vomiting, heart attack . . . ” Del had repeated this list so many times, she was proud of how quickly it poured from her lips.

  “Those are outward symptoms. And they’re the same symptoms as heart failure, aren’t they? But I’m asking what the venom does inside. It drops blood pressure. It clots the blood and causes paralysis, allowing time for more toxic poisons to take effect. Now imagine what those isolated molecules could potentially do for congestive heart failure. Essentially, they could relax the heart muscle and allow blood to flow in and out of its passageways. Voila. Rattlesnakes, the answer to the biggest grim reaper in America.”

  “That’s brilliant,” Del said in astonishment. She had read some journal findings on this subject but had never been so close to an actual scientist working the case. Del’s self-appointed rattlesnake study seemed so limited, so superficial—a book on mothers? Crosshatching diamond patterns in a notebook?—while women like Sarah Isely were digging deeper, turning the holy terror of teeth into real scientific possibilities.

  “It’s all research for now,” Sarah said, smiling. “You stare at cells all day under a microscope, you start thinking that all of life’s problems can be discovered in a petri dish. But we’ve made some strides. We’ve already begun testing, but we have miles to go yet.” Sarah consulted her watch and drew a conclusive breath, indicating she had somewhere more pressing to be.

  “Thank you for your time,” Del said, folding up the release papers in her pocket and again offering her hand. “I’m glad you’ll put Apollo to good use.”

  “Apollo?”

  “His name,” she said, blushing. “That’s what I called him.”

  When Del returned to the zoo, she spent the afternoon wandering around the grounds. As the last visitors funneled out into the dusk, she sat on a bench and listened to the animals. Their cries in the darkness were slow and piercing, a birdcall answered by a chorus of primates. They weren’t crying from hunger or thirst, as those needs no longer concerned them. The cries rose from somewhere deep in their blood, and Del made no attempt to speculate on their causes or origins. For a few hours after closing time, she simply listened to the noises that saturated the park, drifting through the bars and cages in an acoustic collision of continents and ecosystems. By day, the institution exaggerated comforting connections between animals and humans. A mural outside the Monkey House depicted Darwin’s familiar evolutionary chain of progress from slumped ape to straight-backed Homo sapien, with one last slot empty where visitors stood for photographs, demonstrating in their nylon running jackets and baggy Levi’s that they were inheritors of an unfinished project that would surely, at some future date, even render them obsolete drafts. But at night, there were only these invisible, lone cries, spilling into each other like some mirror city where no human brain could outthink the real connections: desperation and survival, the noise of night no matter where anyone stood on that long chain of progress.

  On the way home, she checked her messages to see if Raj had called. He hadn’t. “Are you home yet?” she wrote in the electric halo of her phone. She rechecked her phone an hour later as she exited the subway. Raj still hadn’t responded.

  THE APARTMENT WAS dark when she returned. She found Joseph in bed, murmuring through a fit of sleep-talking delirium. “Tyson first, then Thomas,” he whispered against the pillow. She changed into a T-shirt, brushed her teeth, and sat on the edge of the bed to place her hand on his shoulder. His skin was wet with sweat and coarse from a chill. He woke when she lifted the blanket over him.

  “I tried to wait up for you,” he said.

  “Sleep,” she replied, leaning over to kiss him on the cheek. “You’re still sick.”

  “Don’t go yet,” he pleaded. “Stay and talk to me.”

  She began to tell him of her visit to Columbia, her transfer of Apollo, and the scientific discovery of rattlesnake venom to cure heart attacks, but Joseph’s eyelids had already closed. He looked like a child when he slept. When she cancelled out the nervous blue jabs of his eyes, the beams that lit his features with purpose, his face rounded and softened in innocence. He seemed too young to be married to her when he was asleep, too much like a Midwestern boy sleeping under a galaxy of fluorescent green stars that he once told her he affixed to his bedroom ceiling as a child. She gently patted his chest.

  “I’ll get you some water.”

  Del walked through the living room raked in streetlight and down the hallway. She couldn’t be sure whether the knocking had just started or she had only now come across it. The wood floorboards creaked under her bare feet, which brought more knocking on the front door. She froze. Her heart twisted as it always did late at night with anything involving a stranger. She leaned into the kitc
hen to consult the microwave clock. 12:17 AM. She thought it might be Raj, back today from Florida, but he never would have barged in uninvited. Raj would have called her first.

  She shook her hair to bring some life to it, pressed her hands quietly against the door, and failed to make out the dark silhouette on the other side of the eyehole. She paused, waiting, but the stranger continued to knock. She pulled her thin, white T-shirt over her thighs, unbolted the lock, and cautiously opened the door.

  William’s hands straddled the sides of the door frame. His lips opened. He was all mouth.

  CHAPTER THIRTY - TWO

  “ I’M SORRY IF I woke you.”

  William’s lips, chapped and chewed, struggled with the words and offered the kind of insincere smile that must creep across the face of a drug smuggler when placing a suitcase in front of a custom’s agent. He watched Del cover her breasts with her arm and her legs close together from the draft of the outer hallway.

  “You did,” she replied. “We were sleeping.”

  “Is Joseph here?” he asked, peering over her shoulder as if expecting to see him materialize out of the darkness.

  “Of course he’s here. He’s in bed. This isn’t a good time, William. Joe’s sick.”

  “Well,” he stammered. He pinched the back of his neck and then shook his hand through his tangled hair, greased into an accidental mohawk. “I was hoping, if it isn’t too much of a problem, if I could crash here for the night.”