Lightning People (20 page)

William slowly regained his composure. He tried to tuck his T-shirt into his pants, breathing evenly through his nose. He was all right. He wasn't going to lose consciousness. He could resolve whatever catastrophe he had caused with a simple apology in the morning. Nothing could ever get so broken that it couldn't be fixed. Then he turned and saw the face of a woman unspeakably familiar to him.

Her eyes were wet as they stared into his. He wiped his mouth with the back of his fist, and it took him half of a second to connect this comforting face with her name, and in that half second, which felt like a piece of eternity breaking off its rock face, the impulse of his body moved to embrace her as his brain caught up and stopped him from reaching out.

She stared at him, as he turned pale, the sweat shining on his blistered face and his lips dotted in white spit. He could hear a fire door opening in the outer hallway and the echoes of feet descending the first of twelve flights down. She said a word so softly it sounded less like an insult than a matter of classification.

“Animal,” Jennifer whispered, almost as if she had said
don't worry
or
I love you
or
you're safe
.

JOSEPH ROLLED OVER on the couch, opened his eyes and closed them, and opened them again when he felt the moisture of rain coming from the window. Candles pulsed in the fireplace. Del stood with her back to him in white underwear and the frayed tank top she usually wore to clean the apartment. The inside of his head felt jagged. His stomach lurched, and his fingers were numb on the coarse wool cushion. He shook his wrists to try to circulate the blood.

“No electricity,” Del said, sensing him stirring behind her. “I can turn the radio on if you want. Most of the island's out.”

“All of Manhattan?” His mouth was dry.

“Almost.” She propped her cigarette in an ashtray and stretched her arm out the window. “I think a storm is coming too.”

“What time is it?”

“A little after four. You passed out, and then the lights blew. If you think about it, William did us a favor by sending us home early. Otherwise we'd be stuck up there, nothing but us and miles of road flares.”

Joseph tried to picture William's party, a hundred people mashed together in a room that had suddenly gone black as if all of their enthusiasm couldn't save the city from a shut down.

“I hope William's okay,” he said.

“I doubt he's too concerned about us.”

“He was drunk.”

“You give him too much credit,” Del said without turning around to face him. “You're naive about William.”

Joseph expected the anger, weighed and redoubled in the hour that he slept. Del hadn't wanted to go to the party in the first place and didn't appreciate the outcome. No one liked to be the sacrificial victim of somebody else's drunken disorderly. On the cab ride home she leaned against the window, following the fast fragments of sidewalks in the late-night resolution that talking could too easily journey over into an argument. But still, as she stood staring into the blackness of Twenty-Second Street, he couldn't help feeling sorry for William. “You can't attack failing,” he said. “You can't ask people to fail more quietly. That's what failure is: loud.”

“Shhh. Do you hear that? Listen.” They both concentrated on their ears. Joseph heard crowds screaming far off, like echoes of a stadium from across a highway. “They're partying in Union Square,” she said. “The whole city's out getting wasted, dancing in the park to the disco of police lights. The radio says people are stuck in the subways and in god knows how many elevators. That's always frightened me. Being trapped somewhere way down while the world adjusts above your head. You don't realize how truly helpless you are until something massive happens. Helpless and unable to do a single thing about it.”

“Come here,” he said, reaching out to her. “Don't be scared.”

“I'm not scared,” she laughed. Joseph wondered whether she was laughing at the notion that the blackout scared her or that he might be able to protect her from it. “Actually, I kind of like it.” She pressed her index finger into one of the candles and let the wax harden around her nail. “Disasters have a cheap thrill, don't they, before the real costs set in. There's nervousness to them like nothing's going to be the same. Only it always is.”

Del climbed over him on the couch, her knees fumbling between his legs and her elbows pitting the cushions by his ears. She lowered her lips to his neck, and he pulled her waist against his own to prevent
her from kissing him because he still felt nauseous. She wrestled onto her side and placed her hand on his chest.

“You feel like an earthquake,” she said.

“That happens sometimes in the middle of the night. It'll stop.”

Her breath smelled of tobacco, and shadows roped her face until only her eyes and cheekbones held the shape of her skull. She leaned in for a kiss, gliding her tongue over his own, and for a few seconds he tried to force out the dizziness and concentrate on her mouth, the eraser gap between her front teeth, the rutted plain of her palate, the lips that lost muscle against his own. Del kissed without having to breathe, as if she packed away oxygen for the long duration the way a climber packs air tanks before footing a mountain. But her knees clamped over his thighs, and her hand slid under the elastic of his underwear. He could no longer fight off the sickness. He pushed her away with his arm and rolled over on the couch to catch his breath.

Del sat up, reaching for her rolling papers on the armrest. She pinched the tobacco along the groove in the paper and inhaled with deep purpose, as if setting up a chess move in her mind. He knew her sighs so well he could document her every mood by the intake of her breath. She lit her cigarette and held it out with her forearm resting on her knee.

“Can I ask you something?” she said. He tried to get a glimpse of her face to gauge her expression, but the cigarette focused her features to the work of smoking. “Have you told your mother that we're married?”

“I told you before. I don't talk to her.”

“But it is strange. It is. Strange you never talk to me about your family. Strange I've never even heard her voice.”

“It isn't strange.” He climbed onto the floor and sat hunched over his crossed legs so that the candles wouldn't shine on his face. The candlelight polished Del's skin the color of honey and elongated the shadows of her eyes until they mixed with the darkness of her hair. He should have expected this sort of fallout. Sex would have been one way of repairing the break, confrontation the obvious other. He searched his brain for words that would fix the damage that William had done. “I moved here fifteen years ago,” he said. “Fifteen years
now. So long ago I doubt anyone back there remembers me. You're my family. Can't we keep it at that?”

“It's just that I don't know anything about her. I know you two don't talk, but I have no idea why. If someone asked me the details of your family, all I could do is shrug. I've got nothing to say.
Nothing
,” she repeated worriedly. “Do you know how that makes me feel?”

“Please don't do this,” he begged.

“Don't do what?” She shook her head and took a hard drag on her cigarette to gather her resolve. “I'm your wife, remember? Last I checked I'm allowed to ask that kind of question. Jesus, is it so bad that you can't even tell
me
?”

Yes, it is so bad I cannot tell even you,
he thought.
It is so bad you're the only person I can't tell.
Through their first months of dating, Joseph was thankful to find a partner who didn't pry into every corner and question every silence, never demanding entry into the infinitesimal details of his life that he wasn't willing to supply. She didn't treat love like weigh stations on the highway, constantly measuring the load between distances for something out of check. But tonight William had managed to put a crack in that trust. He knew Del had suddenly understood the liability in not knowing her husband inside and out, that such ignorance showed an embarrassing lack of romantic detective work, that she had, in a sense, missed something necessary. And now Joseph couldn't find the words to set her at ease.

She stared down at him from the couch, waiting for him to reply, and he kept his mouth shut, letting the silence pool around them.

“I'm not asking for every single detail,” she said.

“Then what are you asking?” he replied, burying his eyes into his fists.

“I'm asking you not to go mute when I ask you a question. I stood there while your friend asked me about your family tonight, and I had nothing to say. I felt like an idiot. Like I don't even know you.”

“If you feel that way, then why did you marry me?” he said in defense, gazing straight at her. He regretted the sentence as soon as it left his mouth. Del's hands balled into fists, and her feet scrambled toward the floor.

“You think I only married you for the papers, is that it?” she
screamed, pushing herself from the couch with a fast momentum. “You think that's what all of this is, just an arrangement?” But Joseph was already jumping to salvage whatever he could, grabbing her wrists and pressing her down on the cushions to keep her from running into the bedroom and slamming the door. She didn't fight him. She fell easily, her eyes staring up at him like she was daring him to agree with her.

“The truth? You really want to hear it? My mom's
not there
,” he said. “Not anywhere. Do you hear what I'm saying? There is no Katherine Guiteau to talk to. There will be no flowers. No congratulations. No nothing. She's lost her mind.”

Del's face crumpled, and thin strands of saliva roped her teeth. She knocked her head back and squinted her eyes. Her feet kicked against the armrest, but when he removed his hands from her wrists she kept them frozen in place.

“I'm sorry,” she said curtly, the apology still tainted with bitterness. “Why didn't you ever tell me that? God, Joe, it's things like that, no matter how much they hurt, that I need to hear.”

“There are reasons I don't talk about my family,” he replied. Shame hit him even as he felt the returning peace of their lives together. Shame, because he had only told her enough to derail her questions. Not the full truth. Not the extent of the story. Here were the first small cracks, he thought, still so faint they might go unnoticed, but they were there, deepening and splintering in the air between them. He had seen in other married couples how silence turned in on itself, how it spoke of old provocations and broken pacts. For the second time since their wedding, a wave of doubt came over him. Maybe marrying her had been a mistake because he couldn't give her all the answers. And it was stupid of him to think those questions would never come.

He waited for Del to walk into the bedroom or to crawl over to him and rest her forehead against his shoulder. She did neither. They remained alone on their separate corners of the couch for several minutes, until pale traces of fireworks flashed across the windows. Roman candles were being set off on a rooftop a few blocks north. Some small incendiary pocket of joy would always rise up in this city
even in its darkest hours, disturbing the sense that anything serious had occurred.

“I'm sorry,” she finally said, reaching her palm toward him in reconciliation.

“Please, Del. Just let it go.”

 

AFTER DEL WENT to bed and turned against the wall, Joseph left the apartment and climbed up to the rooftop. The roof was sticky with tar and covered in brittle wet leaves from previous autumns. Cables snaked across the cement, and a plastic bag scraped back and forth, caught on a cord that tied down broken patio chairs. Two helicopters circled high over the island, darting their spotlights into the gulfs of the avenues. Their rotor blades ticked like locusts in the faint, hot wind. Joseph stabbed his heel on a spent nitrous-oxide cartridge. One section of the roof was littered with rusted metal shells, left by teenagers who must have shot whippets and watched the apartment towers cave around them as they laughed themselves unconscious. The fireworks were over. Besides the beams from the helicopters, the only light pouring through the city came from idling police cars and tiny bonfire flares marking lanes up and down the roads.

This is how the island must have appeared to early explorers, a quiet, peaceable drift of dirt cut off from the mainland, as if the first settlers had wanted to get away from where they had started but were not entirely committed to the destiny of the huge new continent beyond it. Broadway cut the island down the middle, once an animal trail, retread by Indians, bricked and then paved and then lined in store chains by European colonists. In the darkness, one city—alive, adrenaline-pumped, unrelenting to any force of weather or hour, colored by every shade of idiosyncrasy—drifted into shadow, and another city emerged, heaps of steel and concrete jutting upward, dreaming arrogantly of value in height, no matter now if those owners of penthouses and balconies were marooned in their own sky hubs. The spikes and domes and jerry-rigged rooftop terraces chopped across the skyline in sporadic waves, and, below them, dark scaffolding braided together, home to the infrastructure of a billion dead switches and outlets. The sound the city made was
of its residents screaming in the streets, as if celebrating their own sudden obsolescence.

What if it never came back on?
Joseph wondered as he stepped closer to the edge.
What if the power was unplugged permanently?
Within a week the city would be emptied, the richest refugees the world has ever known clambering across the bridges in despair, a mass exodus moving on and out like seeds blown across a country that had grown inhospitable to them. Within a week, seven days, this entire island—with all of its dreams and industries—would be deserted.