Lightning People (40 page)

Joseph threw his arms around her. He pushed his chin across her collarbone, and a whine exploded from his mouth so sharp it might have cut through any part of him had it not found a way up his throat.

“I told you once that the pain would come,” he said into the darkened room behind her, where a single floor lamp with a green shade burned, filling the air with a soft tortoise glow. “I told you it would happen. And now I'm afraid it has.”

 

HE SAT ON THE SOFA. Aleksandra knelt on the floor in front of him, pulling off his shoes and pressing her thumbs into his arches. He threw his head back to follow the curling leaf molding on ceiling. “I could just be sick. It might have nothing to do with my heart. But what if it is my heart?”

Aleksandra stared up at him, nodding her head like she agreed with each opposing claim.

“It's okay,” she whispered softly. “Do you want to go to a doctor?”

“I've been to doctors. I've been all my life, and they don't find anything. I've been to five this year.” Joseph's body was shivering.

“Are you cold?” she asked. He nodded his head. She rose from the floor and disappeared into the bedroom to return with one of her husband's suit coats. He slid it around him and bundled the thick lapels at his throat. The smell of jasmine and mothballs and old newspapers drifted around them.

“Sometimes,” Aleksandra said calmly, “I sit in on those meetings and listen to all of the conspiracies hatched over 9/11, all because two buildings can't collapse in perfect verticality. Just like Kennedy and the time required to fire two consecutive bullets. That's what all of those theories are based on—the impossibility of their occurrence. Like if you restaged them there's no possible way they could happen like they did.” She cupped his hand, her voice strangely soothing like a mother telling a child a comforting story. “But one day it occurred to me that despite all of the slicing and dicing that conspiracists do just to demonstrate the details don't add up, if you did repeat those events, they
wouldn't
happen again as they did. But the conspiracists have it wrong. That only proves that they did happen just the way we've been told. I realized that their very impossibility is what makes them real. They aren't exceptions to reality. No, they're perfect examples of it. If you take any event and isolate it, blow it up huge so you can study its slightest grain, there'd be a million tiny impossibilities worming every which way across the landscape, all the unlikely variables, all of the unaccounted-for seconds, all of the chance collisions falling too perfectly into place. That's what life is. Even you and I, sitting in this hotel room together right now. It's impossible that we're here together, and that's why it's real.” She stopped talking and placed her hand on his chest while she studied his face. “You want me to tell you that you're crazy to think what happened to your family will happen to you. But I can't.”

Joseph reached his arm around her and rested his fingers against her shoulder.

“Then what am I supposed to do?” he asked.

Aleksandra smiled and wiped her nose slowly with her knuckle. “I think you should tell your wife,” she said. She didn't look at him when she said this, perhaps understanding that such advice would render her less necessary to him. “You should tell her the truth.”

“I can't,” he replied, dropping his hand in his lap. He tried to hold the air in his lungs in an attempt to calm his nerves. “It would destroy what we have. It would ruin everything.”

Aleksandra leaned back with a sigh and wove her fingers through her hair. The pale green light softened her skin.

“You sound like Ray,” she said. “I don't think he ever wanted to tell me. He thought I'd be disappointed in him. Like if home were kept free from the trouble he had gotten himself into, then there might still be a place to breathe.”

Aleksandra shook her head as if to wrench herself from the memory of her house in California. She stood up and walked slowly across the carpet like she was carrying what remained of Ray's memory in arms that crossed at her waist. Aleksandra's back was to him, and she swayed from side to side as if a song had come unleashed in her head.
The work of mourning never gets finished
, Joseph thought.
There is always more to be done
. She crossed the room and stopped at the lamp, collecting the chain in her fingers.

“It's ugly, isn't it?” she said before turning the light off. “All that humming gets to you. Most people can't hear it. They can't hear the current moving in the walls. That's the reason I go to those conspiracy meetings. They can hear it too. I went back this morning to prisonersofearth.” In the darkness, the curtained windows lit up white like the underbelly of a fish. Aleksandra was a dark column in the center of the room. Her silhouette was black and smooth. The only sound was the constant whirr of the air-conditioning, breakers of an ocean heard from far away. Joseph could almost imagine that he was swimming underwater, moving through soft, cool currents even as he sat on the edge of the sofa. He seemed so far from that crowded apartment in Gramercy that awaited his return.

“Why did you go back to the meeting?” he asked.

“I guess I missed hearing the connections. I missed the adrenaline of those kinds of questions. It doesn't matter if it's about electricity or satellites beaming your every move into a microchip or even 9/11. I'm just glad not to be the only person who hears the current in the walls.” She looked over at him with two wet black eyes. “Your friend was there. Rose Cherami. She asked me about you. She still thinks your name is William.”

“Does she?” he laughed.

“I told her I found you. But I didn't tell her your real name.”

“Aleksandra,” he started and then let a second travel between them while he phrased his question carefully. It was a question that
had as much to do with him as it did with her. Their stories were invading each other, overlapping, braiding together by a common thread, as if the death of Ray Andrews, so long dead, were relevant to both of their lives. “Do you ever think it might have been easier for you if Ray never told you the truth?”

She walked noiselessly toward him across the carpet. In the darkness, she looked vague and watery like a gathering of particles, a million atoms coming in and out of focus, teeth and bones and soft palms, almost there but on the verge of vanishing. He could walk through her, swim into her, he could drift.

“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe it would have been easier to believe that he just shot himself. It would have been harder at first, but it wouldn't have destroyed me too.”

“Then you see why I can't tell Del. ”

She leaned down and placed her knuckles against his cheek. The ice of her skin woke him. “Have you ever thought that in the great evolution of Homo sapiens, we're still only inefficient early drafts? We've adapted to the planet, but we still haven't developed the proper equipment to deal with loss.”

The work of mourning is never finished. There's always more to be done
. Aleksandra curled her fingers around the collar of her husband's coat, titled her chin, and kissed him on the lips. The kiss wasn't sexual. There was no ransack of hands to lead it beyond what it was. It was an acknowledgment of the life left in each of them, the small fragment that wanted to go on.

DEL USUALLY TRANSFERRED to the N train at Times Square after work. That was the train that took her back home. But she continued on the 9, trying to picture Raj in his most familiar position, lying in bed with a pillow shoved over his face. It would now be her duty to bring him back to life, to force him into a pair of shoes and walk him to a restaurant, ordering food that could be shared. There she would press him lightly on what had happened in Florida to shut him off so entirely that he hadn't even responded to her calls. That was as far as the reverie went. Or as far as Del allowed it to go, because the thought came to her that perhaps she had misconstrued their brief reunion, holding each other on his bare mattress, for something more. The side effect of her recent estrangement from Joseph was this: she missed Raj, the curly black hair and the clench of his teeth before his guard faded and someone more fragile and awkward appeared, a man who had been alone too long to remember the value of someone else's hands. With Madi gone, who else would lead him back into the world?

Twenty-Eighth Street whizzed by and now Twenty-Third Street. Del bolted out of the car and bound up the stairs to Seventh Avenue.
Here again was the long walk west toward Raj's highway studio. She had already made this pilgrimage two times in as many months, and how different her pace had been on both occasions—the first time reticent and the second crazed with grief. She wondered how many more times she would walk in the opposite direction of home before the date of the INS interview on December 1. “How do you spend your evenings, Mrs. Guiteau?” she imagined the agent asking her. At that appointment, she would have Joseph beside her, nodding through the sanctity of a marriage being factchecked by professional love readers, and the thought stopped her in her tracks, right on Twenty-Third Street, as tourists with their wheeling suitcases funneled around her into the grungy cavern of the Chelsea Hotel. She should turn around and head back to him. She had left Joseph with a fever in bed, too sick to respond when she checked on him that morning before work. But she envisioned other bodies in the apartment where she had last seen them: William on the couch, sleeping on his stomach with his torn, checkered boxers barely covering his hairy ass, the contents of his bags spilled out on the rug, and her bottle of scotch open on the coffee table. She couldn't return to the apartment, not when it was still daylight with too many hours left to consume with the physically sick and the psychologically deranged. But most importantly, the compulsion to check her phone and smile through the mystery of no news from Raj was too disabling to make it through another night.

She kept heading west, faster now as she broke into a light jog, then running across Eighth Avenue against a DON'T WALK light, dodging an uptown bus that whistled with its brakes. Her lungs were burning from a lifetime addiction to nicotine, but the pump of her heart revitalized her. She zigzagged, she bolted, she galloped the bike lane, hurrying like she was late for her own court verdict. She was already at Tenth Avenue, already rounding the corner on a Citibank that was once an art gallery that was once a pizzeria that was once a savings and loan, and soon his street was in her sight. There was the car wash with its prismatic suds pouring into the sewer and, on the other side, the glass prism of a photo agency with its invisible furniture and alien-thin inhabitants. She ran straight
toward Twenty-Fourth Street, crisscrossing between cars, clipping bumpers, flashing her palm to halt oncoming traffic. Her breathing had become loud and shallow, but she didn't slow down, flying across the sidewalk as she culled the last of her strength, bit down on the hot afternoon wind, and sprinted past the frosted glass of art galleries as empty as white vaults. She saw the rusted green dumpster,
his
dumpster, the one that had always guarded his front door and reeked of vomit, and finally, crossing the littered pizza boxes of a finishing line, let herself go slack.

She grabbed the dumpster handle for support and bent over, collecting all of the air she could, which blew out faster than she could swallow. She tried to wipe the sweat from her forehead, suddenly alert to how she must look. She searched for a car window to gauge her reflection. But even before Del could run her fingers under her eyes to mop up the smeared eyeliner, the metal door of Raj's building opened and there he was: Raj in laced loafers, peering past her into the street for a cab. He was not rolling around in dirty sheets cursing the sunlight. He was wearing a crisp, gray shirt buttoned at the wrists, its tails tucked into the waist of a pair of belted khakis. His hair was long and parted down with gel.

“Del?” he said with a startled exclamation, blown back a few inches on his heels. “What are you doing here?”

She pitched herself up, wiping the residue of the dumpster handle on her thigh.

“Raj,” she breathed. “I was coming. To see you.”

“Were you running to see me?”

“No. I mean, yes, I was running. But . . . ” She took a step back as his hand shot forward to steady her.

In a flash, her humiliation turned to resentment, and she stiffened up, hands on hips, her head tilted in the conviction that the most accurate way to read someone was sidelong.

“What are
you
doing here?” she asked.

“I live here.”

“I mean outside,” she charged. Raj's cheeks went flush, and that was all she needed, the biological evidence of guilt, blood vessels more honest than any clumsy rejoinder, because now he knew that
she knew and vice versa. He hadn't called, not because he was too doubled-over in grief but because he was actively avoiding her. A sane Raj had gotten those text messages late in the night. She wasn't sure at what moment her pulse passed over from exertion to pain, but her heart had taken on a thicker beat, worms eating at the aorta, timed perfectly to tinge her words. “So you're back. And looking well.”

“I got in a few days ago,” he managed. “I've had to deal with some family obligations. I wanted to get that all done before I called you.”

“I thought you got in yesterday.”

“No,” he said uncertainly. “The day before.”

“I see.” Imagining him still in Ft. Lauderdale when he had, in fact, been eight avenues away felt like a betrayal to the bond they had formed in his studio only a week ago. She shook her head at her own stupidity, shook it because what was becoming clear to her was already clear to him—he hadn't wanted to see her. “Well, I just wanted to make sure you were okay. I was worried. That's why I ran. I know we were both pretty bad off before you went down for the funeral.”