Lightning People (11 page)

“I'm thirty-two.”

“Forty. No difference.” She smacked her palm on her desk. “Wait for my calls. Let me do my job. But think seriously about other options. Hell, get married to someone with a career and see where that takes you.”

“I already tried that.”

“Try it again.” She pulled the lid off a canister of egg-shaped candies and offered him one. “Think it over. I tell you straight because I like you. I can't help you if you sit here wasting my time waiting for lightning to strike. You want to kill me, don't you?”

“Yes.”

Janice smiled at this. She rose from her seat, trudged around her desk in a swaying Aztec-patterned skirt, and patted his shoulders, the first time in their professional relationship he could remember that more than their hands had touched.

“Life is long. For better or worse.”

“What about that audition today?” he asked. “Why did she ask for me if all she wanted was to kick me out?”

“She thought you were someone else. She was very particular. I wouldn't worry. She's not a director. Just a rich lady with a few important friends in the industry and some sort of first-time script. She called me up blind.”

“Who did she want?”

“Not you, William. That's all that matters.”

Janice opened the door for him, and he accepted the hallway. And with a hard slam, the real Janice Eccles transformed into her chrome nameplate.

Jealousy must be a survival instinct, because it spilled so naturally from his mind and caught every thought on fire, wiping out whole neighborhoods of sense and memory. Another actor, someone his own age, maybe even Joseph for all he knew. William walked four blocks pounding his fists through the midtown air. That motherfucker. He dodged bicycles and taxis, peeling around tourists frozen under street signs doing complicated logarithms with street numbers in their heads. He broke into a light run, blowing into shoulders through Times Square. Sweating, lungs wheezing like a furnace, William finally stopped ten blocks from the agency and hailed a cab. “That's it then,” he sputtered to himself in the backseat. “That's the sign I was waiting for. It's over. Fine.”

Inside his apartment filled with Jennifer's belongings, he tried to wrestle himself out of anger and got down to the business of getting drunk. Five bottles of vodka—“fresh soldiers,” his father had called them—lined the kitchen counter. He stood at the window drinking. By nine o'clock, he had killed the remainder of one soldier and started on the second.

He thought of Jennifer stepping out of the shower with her mustard robe branded with cursive initials, her wet hair wedged in a towel. She smelled of bee pollen, her skinny thighs shuffling between the scrolling terrycloth. He tried to remember what Quinn said, about a world of sex out in the city waiting for him, about New York being wild and sarcastic and young. He culled up the short list of women he had slept with since Jennifer had left, their sweaty
bodies hanging off his own, their legs open and their fingers tense, without being able to recite any of their names.

But Jennifer kept stepping out of the shower, her moist arms and neck holding her scent, her face so smooth it looked like she had never known a second of desperation.

He packed his pockets with keys, driver's license, and a silver money clip loaded with six twenty-dollar bills.

By eleven, William barreled out of a taxi and into a club called Kaos, met two friends in the second of the establishment's two crystal bars—Jesse and Ed, actors and drinking buddies. Their faces glowed with feverish consumption. Or maybe it was from the lights that rained down from above, skimming over the hundreds packed on the dance floor. Flashes of metallic wrists shaking in the air, calves muscling up and down as if taking long flights of stairs, the music so solid that it hung like a metal vest over his ribs. So much electricity to keep the club dark and loud, so much energy exerted by bartenders to fill drinks.

William felt young in his blood. It was midnight. He was alive and in loud company.

“Why do you look so happy? You get a job or what?” Ed asked, throwing his arm around William's neck. “Haven't seen you out since that night we were trapped in three feet of snow at Michael's. Nothing to do but drink. Michael's gone, you know.”

“He died?” William looked at Ed with horror.

“Practically. He works at a Home Depot in Hoboken. Poor man. Says he wanted to do some soul searching. I'm not so sure Home Depot carries that.”

“So where are we going next?” William asked, grinning with neon teeth. The deejay slurred the record into a new track.

“He's asking where's next,” Ed screamed. “Jesse, tell him this place is enough for the next hour. Isn't it?”

Jesse offered a joint, thinly rolled, burned down to a quarter inch. William suctioned it with a deep inhale before passing it on to blue fingernails.

The woman's name was Myra, and she came with friends from the damp forest of the dance floor. Nothing hurt, not even the shine
of a flashlight directly in his eyes from a bouncer who was looking for a man that did not match William's description. He rolled up his sleeves.

William felt young and four-dimensional. He was high, and his heart was supplying drumbeats. Myra waved her blue fingernails for him to join her on the dance floor. When she screamed, her words came out broken between pulses of light, and she told him she was Chilean and had been above the equator for five days. She told him it was winter in Chile, which did not account for her tan.

Two hours and twenty minutes later he left Kaos with Jesse and Myra and two of her girlfriends who spoke even less English (although they insisted on trying) but no Ed. They took a cab six blocks to another club called Bad Engine, where a drag queen chugged a bottle of Jameson on stage and the audience whistled. The drag queen stared down the crowd like she was waiting for an apocalyptic horse to gallop through the room as an excuse to pull out a machine gun and blow everyone away. Jesse waved them into the VIP room, and William drank two vodkas served by a former gay porn star who asked him about breaking into more legitimate films. He sniffed something chalky out of a folded piece of tin foil from Myra's purse and danced with her blond friend to a Stone Roses remix.

They took a cab to a bar in Chinatown, and Jesse rolled down the window, dry heaving along Seventh Avenue to the shrieks of a Pakistani driver with a cell phone clipped to his ear.

“Just get there,” Jesse said. “We have to get somewhere else, you know, before the air starts turning blue. Somewhere without windows. And please, everyone, place your watches in your pockets. Under no circumstances are you to tell me what time it is.”

William's heart was racing as he leaned against Myra, who grabbed his hand and guided it between her legs. His fingertips were numb, but he forced them under the elastic of her underwear, and she closed her thighs to keep his hand from traveling any farther or from withdrawing it entirely. All of the nerves down his spine were firing. He wanted to stand up or lie down or play a never-ending game of chess. He wanted to move to Chile with Myra. He had
seen pictures of Santiago in a magazine, the gorgeous dark eyes of teenagers in bright brandless sweatshirts under a mountain covered in smog.

They walked into a Chinese restaurant that held no customers but was filled with tuxedoed waiters holding trays, through a kitchen canopied with washed silver pots, and into a large back room with a bar and torn vinyl couches. Myra bought him a vodka with nine one-dollar coins, and they sat around a coffee table, the three women speaking quickly as if each thought was an urgent message that would cure the future if only it were articulated
right now
. Myra's teeth chattered even when he kissed her.

“I am in New York for only a short time,” she told him.

“Me too,” he replied. She bit into an Adderall and put half on his tongue.

At four thirty, they turned down an alley and entered an apartment building where a party was in its slow dissolve in a sixth-floor walk up. Even though there were only nine college students in the railroad living room, trying to build enough enthusiasm to finish a box of Michelob on the floor, the guy in a tank top at the door said he'd only let in guests without penises.

Myra's two friends went inside, and the remaining three, heads bent down from the lightening sky, walked seven blocks in silence through the Lower East Side to an after-hours club that required a secret knock and a piece of red paper flashed over the peephole.

“The bar is ‘free' with ‘suggested donation,'” Jesse said with fingering quotation marks. “So if the cops bust, they aren't technically selling.”

“Who runs this place?” William asked. He held on to Myra's waist.

“It's technically abandoned, so technically there is no ‘they' to arrest. A guilty building with innocent people inside. We all wound up here by accident.”

A black bedspread covered the single window. Porcelain lamps lined the perimeter of the room. Men who looked like members of a British punk band in their popular decline jumped around the makeshift card-table bar. Myra and William finished off what was left of the powder in her purse, and he briefly thought about putting
one of the lampshades on his head as a joke, but considering the morose crowd and the possibility that the lampshade cliché had perhaps not yet traveled below the equator, he tangled his legs with Myra's on top of a dresser by the bathroom. Kisses held currency in Chile. Kisses were what made the night slow down.

Ed suddenly appeared with a scratch on his cheek and sat down next to him.

“It's five thirty,” he informed them despairingly. “Want a beer?”

William felt too awake, and he wondered how deep into the next day this place stayed open, protecting them from the wrecking ball of sunlight on the other side of the door. Negotiating a pocket of cab receipts, ripped paper bracelets, and one-dollar bills seemed far more difficult than what Ed was rambling on about—wars and American casualties and the dissemination of nuclear bombs. William looked at the crowd, the young half-exhausted bodies squatting in semicircles on the floor. Night was New York's great conspiracy, he thought. Everyone had come here for money and success but in the end they also came to get lost, become anonymous, disappear into the traffic of nine million people. The night hid the embarrassment of what they were during the day.

“It can't go on,” Ed kept saying. “How much longer can we go on like this? How much longer can we pretend we're safe and nothing more will happen?”

“We can go on,” Myra said softly, not quite following the thread. “They don't know where we are.”

“Maybe it will just go on,” William offered in an attempt to join the conversation. “On and on. Maybe the idea that there are all of these terrorists dying to blow us up is just an effort to make us hate the enemy. I mean, do they really care that much?”

“Of course they hate us,” Ed hissed. “Jesus, why do most Americans have such a hard time believing that anyone can possibly not like them? They hate us and they hate us more every day. We have problems our parents never dreamed of.”

“No one in New York has parents,” William replied. “Or families for that matter. We're all pretty much immigrants taking shelter
here.” Myra and Ed stared at him blankly. “I mean, we don't even
know
our parents.”

“I know my parents,” Myra said.

“I call my father every Tuesday,” Ed admitted.

“But you don't know them. You've deserted. Gone AWOL. There are no more mom-and-pop businesses because there aren't any more children to take over the register. That's why this city never supports the military. We don't know what it means to serve. But I mean that in a good way. We're liberators, activists. We've made an army of . . . ” He was channeling Quinn.

“I live with my mother,” Myra said, pushing his legs off of her. “My brother's in the army.”

“William, you're fucked up. That's not it at all. Casting us as a bunch of infidels just gives the government more excuses to ignore what we're saying, while it's doing pretty fucking little to keep this island protected. I'm telling you, the worst will come. And when it does, I dare anyone to act surprised.”

“I was born under a dictatorship,” Myra said. “You are with your family or you have nothing.”

“You aren't following,” William stammered, wiping his nose anxiously with his wrist. “We're an army that refuses to fight, which is like fighting. We fight with our backs.” His mind was warped from the drugs, he regretted that last sentence, and he could no longer even remember his original point. He went to the bathroom and when he returned, stumbling over a Japanese girl in a transparent dress who found his loafers insulting enough to ash her cigarette on, Myra and Ed were nowhere to be found. They had left together. Or just left. It didn't matter. They had abandoned him.

William opened the metal door and walked into the morning light up Stanton Street and west on to Houston. He laughed at the fleeting impression he left on bakery glass windows and on the car windows parked along the curb. He didn't mind losing Myra. He didn't care about Ed or the spread of uranium plants or even bombs being delivered by UPS to uptown embassies. He felt all of his jealousies and regrets disappearing the way the sun burned up the smog over
the city he imagined living in. Not Santiago. Los Angeles. You can't keep stepping in place, he was learning. By the time he found an off duty cab willing to take him uptown for his last twenty, his feelings about Jennifer had faded. Burned out in a sudden flare like it was all another year with its own set of problems.

As the stock market opened, he was just a man going to bed.