Lightning People (18 page)

William confessed this belief to Ed, who sat cross-legged on top of the walnut credenza taking great care in smoking a tiny brown tick of a joint.

“I think I kissed my babysitter to this song.” He went back to coaxing whatever weed remained with his lungs. “But I guess you can be sentimental since you're leaving. When
are
you leaving?” Ed caught a glass that nearly toppled off the ledge when a girl in a red shift dress, perhaps the first casualty of the free alcohol, knocked into them.

“Very soon. Definitely before summer's over. You'll visit, right?”

“L.A. is a cultural wasteland, a desert of opinion. You go there, you get thirsty for back here. I think it's best to let it be the mirage it is.” Ed waited for a response, and, getting nothing, changed subjects. “Where's that old dude? That creepy gay guy you're always throwing on everyone?”

“Quinn? He's not creepy.”

“Will, the last time we were forced to interact, he spent the entire evening trying to convince me to let him put his hands in my underwear for sixty seconds, because, if I'm not turned on, what difference does it make? And if I am, we both win.”

“I didn't invite him. He doesn't have the money and he doesn't know I'm going. You know, Ed, some people might actually be a little upset about my leaving.”

“Everyone here looks pretty exhilarated.”

Even Ed's cynicism couldn't spoil the night. For the past hour, William had entered a revolving door of arms gathering around him one after another, lips kissing his cheeks and whispering luck into his ear. Even a few ex-girlfriends from before his marriage had shown up, older and skinnier than they had been in their twenties, each dragging a new boyfriend in tow, and each one—Arden, Byrdie, terrible Carolyn with a neck brace of another self-invented injury—all shelling out money to say good-bye. Joseph had been wrong about the party. Friends could find it in their hearts to donate a small contribution to his cause, because they knew how difficult it was to
leave the city. They understood that you could do everything wrong and still go out in victory for just having tried.

The music changed again to harder, more vengeful rock, and William heard a lamp crash on the floor. He was too high on happiness to care about the damage inflicted on the apartment. His friend Diggs, mutantly tall with bleached-white hair tied back in a rubber band, poured a shot of tequila, and William pounded it down in a single swallow. William refused a tiny glass bowl of pot that was being passed around because he already felt like he was floating across the room, where a guitar solo stretched out endlessly like its strummer was flying off a cliff and leading him to follow along.
Good-bye New York, good-bye and thank you, thank you dearly for every moment ...

 

AN HOUR LATER, William found himself trapped in one of those black hole conversations only attempted in the proximity to free alcohol. Ed braced his arm around a redhead with skin the glossy, airbrushed sheen of magazine paper. She let out a series of unprovoked laughs and, despite this symptom, affirmed on three separate occasions that she was getting her master's in media studies at NYU. That should have been a warning siren instead of a point of pride.

“You people don't realize what is going to happen with technology,” she said, her palms waving to indicate a massive invisible explosion of technology rising up around them. “We think our parents are prehistoric because they can't figure out how to turn on a laptop. But the
real
reality is that fifty years from now we are going to look back at this time as utterly medieval. This isn't the first of days. It's the last of the old ones. We're on the edge of tomorrow, but we're on the wrong side.” She was the kind of person whose entire impression of the future was based solely on the most recent inventions.

Ed kissed her on the cheek before dismissing her theory outright.

“You're talking about simulated realities, right? I don't think actual experience is ever going to disappear. Yeah, maybe one day our children's children will remember the comforting bygone smell of their grandparents nuking up processed chicken in their kitchen microwaves . . . ”

“The nostalgic odor of fresh plastic . . . ” William offered.

“Yeah, the old-fashioned feel of silicone implants. But come off it. We're never going to live full-time inside of a microchip. The way I see it, experience will always win out because there's always a real chance of dying. No one does anything if there isn't that slight tinge of risk.”

William glanced around his party for a sign of Joseph. He still hadn't seen his friend come through the door. He sipped his drink, only faintly listening to the conversation.

“You're wrong,” the redhead whined in growing grad-student distemper, irate that her own private seminar had been hijacked for a free exchange of ideas. “Real experience will be swapped for virtual. There will be no need to fly all over the earth, to witness any event first hand, to even touch the cheek of the person you love. All living will be done in virtual zones, where we will exist as avatars and then, finally, all of our desires and dreams will be fulfilled. That's what really separates the past from the future. It will be the fulfillment of all human wishes, all the time, as fast as a click of the button. And honestly, Ed, the beauty of this inevitability is that it supplies the answer to all of these land wars in the Middle East or the fallen condition of the environment. The only way we can keep living on this planet is if we stop ransacking it and make a new world that exists in the ether, one in which we never have to move a muscle to experience. You might not believe me now, but look me up when you get there. I'll be the avatar with ten breasts and the head of Helen of Troy.”

“I'm not going home with you,” Ed huffed, before making good on his threat by removing his arm from her shoulder. “Don't you see that's the problem with kids growing up right now? They don't understand the concept of boredom or frustration or wanting what you can't have. Everything has gotten too easy. William, remember when you'd rip out a page of a porn magazine at a store and sneak it back to your bedroom and you'd concentrate on a single picture, maybe the size of a postage stamp, and from that you'd spend whole weeks imagining everything about those bodies, just from one little photograph the size of your fingernail? That's what got me to leave Montpelier, my boredom and desperation. And no kid today is going
to have any chance of being happy because they no longer need to go out and find what they want in the world. They don't have to imagine anything. How can you be excited by all of those nude bodies being thrown at you on the Internet twenty-four hours a day? William, back me up here?”

He nodded distractedly and let the conversation continue without him as it dissolved into the mind-numbing questions of whether or not we were already living in a simulated reality, and if so, why on faux-earth would the programmer controlling this universe pack it with so many boring phone calls and soulless day jobs. William was sure Ed would go home with the grad student no matter what she said, and he left them midway through their techno-existential trip. He had too much to say on the topic of boredom and desperation. Instead, William concentrated on walking without staggering. He kept his head raised. He danced as stupidly as he could in the center of the living room with a blonde he had once met at an audition, and no one laughed at his slow, clomping feet or writhing arms. All evaluations were in his favor tonight. He was the reason for all of the light. The future didn't frighten him. It was the past that had put a hole in his heart.

 

AT ONE IN the morning, the party had reached its maximum capacity, and the effects of William's drinking were starting to pay dividends. He couldn't fix the blur in his vision. His T-shirt was soaked in sweat, and his skin almost hurt from the heat. He licked his lips and tasted the iron of his skin.

“The bathroom line is too long,” Jesse said, breaking from a circle of young women who were dancing to the latest pop song. Their dresses cut out down their backs, and their spines beaded like strands of pearls. They were wasting all of their excess energy before they drifted off to Amagansett or the Catskills or Shelter Island to wait out the rest of the months until autumn brought the first chill to the city. A bearded skater in a gas-attendant's jumpsuit strung the duck bulbs around his body, and he fell over as his legs got lassoed in the cord. “That guy's so wasted, he's going to start a fire.”

“Aren't you supposed to be guarding the door?”

Jesse slapped a large roll of bills inside a handshake that William couldn't bother to count. He put the money in his pocket, satisfied with the bulge.

“It's already too crowded, and the beer's gone. I think you've made enough.”

William looked past Jesse and noticed Del worming her way through a huddle of smokers by the door. She wore an emerald green dress that made her skin look pale, and a smudge of eyeliner muddied her cheek. He waved to her. She lifted a bottle of champagne wrapped in silver foil.

“Thanks for coming,” he said.

“It's a million degrees in here.”

She offered him the bottle, and he popped the cork. It sailed beyond his vision, and he gathered the exploding foam in his lips.

“Where's Joseph? You guys are a little late.”

Del hadn't heard him, distracted by Jesse who was eagerly reaching out his hand, half handshake, half frantic wave. The heat from the lights was destroying everyone's sense of self-restraint.

“This is Joseph's wife. Del, Jesse,” he said.

“Oh,” his friend sighed, realizing his chances with her were already hopeless. “I don't think you paid.”

Del went for the purse hanging at her hip, but William stopped her.

“Don't worry about it.”

Jesse tried to whisper something into Del's ear, but he overshot his balance. Her hands caught him by the shoulders before he fell into her. William grabbed her arm and led her into the hallway where it was quieter.

“Charming guy, your friend.”

“Never mind him,” he said. He tried to kiss her cheek, but she pulled away, leaving him to swerve back awkwardly, going through the unnecessary act of pretending that he had tripped. He noticed how her eyeliner amplified her deep brown eyes. Wolf eyes with specks of yellow like fall leaves. He knew, standing there with her in the corridor, that she was the kind of woman who looked down on him. As they stood in silence, he could sense that she was
judging him, picking out his slobbering speech and sweaty face, restyling, critiquing, but it didn't matter tonight. He felt like a huge open field upon which all had been planted and had so many seeds already growing inside of him. He didn't want or need this woman to like him.

“So where's Joseph?”

“He's in the bedroom,” she said, nodding down the hall. “He's helping one of your stoned-beyond-cognition friends find the second bathroom.”

William took a gulp of champagne. “Can you tell him to tone down the miracles tonight? It is my party after all. How do you live with someone like that, Del? Isn't it hard to sleep at night in the light of that halo? It would give me a headache.”

“Maybe you should stop drinking,” she replied, squinting her eyes at him.

He took another long guzzle. The anger he had felt for Del was suddenly spreading over onto Joseph, both of them trying to ruin his own good-bye party by arriving late and then judging him for the effects of the happiness that had occurred in their absence. He wished they hadn't bothered to come.

“Why is that?” he asked her. “Because you think I'm drunk?”

“Because the police are here.”

He turned to catch sight of two officers in squat mailbox leg stances standing at the front door. Silver nametags, black leather holsters, plastic zip-tie handcuffs hooked around belt loops. The music instantly lowered, the conversations turned into nervous whispers, which only called attention to their panicked tone, and a bullet, William could swear, passed into his pancreas. But just as he was prepared to pull the plug and apologize to his neighbors, he spotted Ed heading straight toward the door like the cardinal of sanity ascending a pulpit. William could always count on Ed for calming words that satisfied cops. In a minute, both parties were nodding their heads in concession, as if they were agreeing on the accidental nature of a roadside collision. Still, William felt too wasted to go near the door until the police were safely escorted out of the building. He didn't have Ed's talent for talking down authorities.

“Let's go find your husband,” he said, steering Del down the hallway toward the bedroom. As they approached the door, Joseph opened it. The two men stood for a second, as if trying to recognize each other, before Joseph reached his arm out and gathered William's neck in his hand. “Congratulations,” he said so sincerely that William instantly suspected its authenticity.

William pulled his friend into the bedroom, sweeping him along in the arm that held the champagne. He wanted a break from the noise and the sweltering lights and the dangers of law enforcement. He dug into his pocket to release the stash of rolled-up twenties, waving the money momentarily in front of Joseph's face to show him how wrong he had been, and then tossed it on Jennifer's vanity table. William's eyes ascended from the table to the oval mirror framed in gold. He caught his own reflection and froze at what he saw. A razor rash of puss-white bumps rose around his chin. The sweat on his face made his skin sallow, patchworked with red lashes across his cheeks. The pupils of his eyes were so constricted that he worried they would disappear entirely into the quicksand of brown. Dried blood caked the edge of his left nostril, although he didn't remember a nosebleed. He began to pick off the blood and, embarrassed, forced his fingers up to his hair to straighten the part.