Lightning People

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“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.”

WE HAD LIGHTNING strikes all summer but no blackouts. Through May and June lightning came without rain, rising out of New Jersey like a laser concert and slicing east in white tracers through Manhattan. Storms were a huge attraction for those of us who moved here from the Midwest. We'd climb up to the rooftops as ritual to watch them roll in from the west, feeling momentarily connected to the cereal-grain prairies and humid river valleys that we had worked so desperately to escape. For a long time we did this without worry or risk. After all, in the years when we were still new to the city, rooftops served as our twenty-four-hour parks. They were our unpoliced drug lairs, our water-tower jungle gyms, our love nests for random hookups with enough of a romantic panorama not to feel ashamed when groping through underwear near a bed of moldering trash. Every building had one, junked with cables and rusted lawn furniture and billion-dollar views. For many years we were drunk and happy, loitering on these hot tar gardens, adding our slender bodies to the skyline. The storms, however, were different. They were a private matter, a religion best observed alone, and maybe only for the Midwesterners, because they were the ones who were killed.

First it happened to a twenty-three-year-old from St. Louis on a rooftop on Broome Street, then to a twenty-seven-year-old from Indiana on a sixth-floor tenement on the Lower East Side. Another lightning death occurred a few weeks later, also to a Midwesterner. The victims were all young men and women who had moved to the city within the last few years, scrounging for jobs or fame. And they had all been struck by a single bolt that ripped the shoes off their feet and melted the coins in their pockets. Although the newspapers never bothered to draw more than a cursory connection, each victim was described as “happy” or “ambitious” or “starting to make a real home in New York.” “I don't know why the weather would take her,” one grieving mother was quoted as saying. “You expect murders or burglaries. But you don't think your daughter is going to be killed by lightning in the middle of Manhattan. It makes no sense.”

Most people will tell you that such deaths don't make sense. Lightning strikes contain all of the inexplicable characteristics of coincidence, no reason, just a dice roll—like a tornado rummaging through one house and leaving the next unbothered. Then there are tougher cynics like Del, who says that because crime is down, New York has to find creative ways to stay dangerous.

But I know the real explanation for these deaths—there is one for those who are willing to listen. The answer lies in the landscape itself. The Manhattan skyline has changed since I moved here from Cincinnati at the age of eighteen. What no one seems willing to mention is that before the World Trade Center fell, lightning rarely struck any parts of Manhattan other than the towers themselves, as they were the highest conductors in the city. But they are gone, and now we have taken their place, little conductors in our tight jeans and unwashed T-shirts, easy targets in a city that was supposed to hide us.

Tonight I poured whiskey into two glass tumblers and watched snow fall across the television screen. Outside, taxis sped south toward the bridges, and Del and I kissed on the bed as close as we could to the air-conditioning. Her tongue was dry and her neck heavy, our faces blue in the television light. After she smoked her last cigarette, we took our clothes off. We did not have sex. We were nervous, and Del was tired. “Get the lights, will you?” she said, as she reached over and
set the alarm clock for 8 AM. I thought the final moments of our single lives might turn us into feral sex partners, but we stuck to our routine. Tomorrow morning we are getting married at City Hall.

I wish I could say that I am marrying Delphine Kousavos, a beautiful Greek woman with long black hair and a bad smoking habit, only out of love—that we bumped into each other on Seventh Street near Tomkins Square Park eight months ago and, clinging to each other's arms and sentences, are about to spend thirty dollars for a two-minute ceremony. That also isn't the correct explanation of events. It's just the easiest story to tell.

Many of us came to New York to get away from the stories of our childhoods, hoping here they would no longer apply. For a long time I thought I could shake the predictions told to me about my family, the ones my mother raised me on in a darkened house in Cincinnati that took each death as evidence, each year as a clue. There is a pattern that runs through the generations, a conspiracy in the bloodstream that kills with perfect timing. For many years, I thought nothing from back there could find me. Those stories could be wrong. But they could also be devastatingly correct.

If I am right, I won't live to see our first anniversary.

For a while I was very young here and didn't need to give in to the paranoia. I remember a lot of first days in this city: how a morning could lead to a fist fight with a homeless woman, a request by a model scout on Broadway to come in to an agency for pictures, an offer of a part-time job cater-waiting for a group of Chinese diplomats, or a four-milligram Klonopin shared with a failed child actor hiding from Hollywood before riding bicycles around an empty loft in Tribeca until our minds became unglued at dawn. All of those first shiny details told us that we had gotten very far from where we started, and that there was good reason to expect more.

We still go up to the rooftops. We still look at the storms dragging in from the west. At some point, we stopped thinking of our time here as an open story that would only end well. Lightning doesn't strike the same place twice until it does. Behind every senseless tragedy there is a careful logic. At some point, the weather changed when no one was looking, and we were no longer so young in New York.

JOSEPH GUITEAU MARRIED a Grecian snake charmer.

Not from Greece immediately, not by a long shot. There was hardly an accent to her vowels. She was a woman with a penchant for 1970s American rock, two credit cards in her wallet, and an alumni library card issued from Columbia University. She didn't carry her United States work permit with her, but she had it to show when necessary. It was never necessary. The Bronx Zoo (“world's greatest animal park in the world's wildest city”) made sure to keep the noses of their Bengal tigers, adult Congo gorillas, and white alpine owls clean as far as the INS went by staying up to date on their employee files. Delphine Kousavos, sanitizer of anaconda cages, nurse to the irritable copperhead, specialist of the western diamondback, loved Joseph Guiteau. She had real feelings for him. As a child on her tiny island of Amorgos, she'd never dreamed of marrying a star of shaving cream commercials in a foreign municipal building at the age of thirty-two. But Del understood the facts as they were dealt. She had lived with Joseph in their Gramercy apartment for five months. She handled beasts far more venomous than actors. She married him on the morning of June 14, 2007.

Joseph was so nervous he couldn't get the ring on her finger. Quiet seconds passed inside Marriage Chapel #2 as he shifted his weight on his left foot and then his right, jamming the ring against Del's knuckle. The silver-haired Puerto Rican court official, who must have seen every combination of man and woman that ever existed swearing eternal love before her, swallowed hard and closed her eyes. “It's not . . . ” Joseph stuttered, glancing up at Del and then back at her hand, his hairline breaking in green sweat beads under the ticking green fluorescents. Del suppressed a small laugh and fixed her eyes on the New York City emblem painted on the wall behind him. A pilgrim and an Indian stood side by side, staring blankly inside a ring of wheat; the two looked very much like a lonely immigrant couple taking their chances on matrimony just like everyone else.

Del's finger started to swell.

“Let me,” she said quickly. Before Joseph could stop her, she grabbed the ring and slipped it cleanly over her knuckle. The judge clenched the edges of the podium and, in a mangled Spanish accent, pronounced them man and wife.

“You shouldn't have done that,” Joseph said later, when they walked through the metal detectors and out into the downtown sidewalk frantic with bike messengers and secretaries in the noontime rush.

“Done what?” Del replied. “I hope you don't mean marry you.”

“I mean the ring. You shouldn't have had to put it on yourself.”

“Did you notice the poor girl who came in after us was eight months pregnant and bawling her eyes out? I think it went beautifully. Considering.”

Joseph reached for her hand and held it for a second as they crossed through the stalled traffic on Centre Street. Office lights glared faintly in the windows surrounding City Hall Park. The sidewalk was canopied in magnolia branches, hanging low from the weight of brown buds. Joseph unknotted his necktie, and Del pulled the white gardenia from her hair, loosening a braid that unraveled in a tangle down her back. She made only a perfunctory attempt at working out the knot. Her fingers were still shaking, and she saw that Joseph's were too. Her heels on the cobblestones were as loud as their breaths, and neither of them spoke or looked at the other. She threw the gardenia into the
park's dry fountain well and scanned Broadway for a taxi that would take them the thirty blocks home. Del noticed that nearly every bench and tree in this part of town was decorated with a small chrome plaque, a few engraved with commemorations of the dead, others blank and shining in the sun, waiting to be filled with the names of future ghosts.