Lightning People (30 page)

“Maybe they don't know that you're staying here.”

“Maybe,” she replied.

“I'm sorry I didn't visit the last few days. Someone I know died. A friend of my wife's was killed crossing the street.”

“That's terrible,” she said, lowering her head. “I forget that accidents still happen.” The thought seemed to send her into a memory of an easier time. “Really, I should thank them for sending that letter. For a while, I wondered if maybe I was going crazy. That maybe Ray had killed himself after all. There's been nothing worse these last few years than doubting what you know is true, even if no one else believes you.”

“I believe you,” he said. He watched those words smooth some of the anxiety from her face.

“It's very nice of you to come up here to check on me, but I'm not your responsibility.” She raised her arm to shield his view of her. Aleksandra's eyes and cheeks were wrinkled from every hour she hadn't slept, but she was trying to superimpose a sense of calm. “It sounds like you have a wife who needs you. There's no reason for you to get mixed up in my problems. I appreciate your coming up here like you have, Joseph. It meant something, but now it's best if we just say good-bye.” She waited with her arm raised for him to unbolt the door and walk out.

He stood in the center of the room, pressing the letter against his palm. Joseph realized why he felt so drawn to a woman who refused to let her husband go. He needed someone else who believed in impossible circumstances. Tobias from prisonersofearth had once broken out of his own manic paranoia to deliver one bit of haunting poetry: “Conspiracy theorists are midnight astronomers to a world
that only sees by day. They describe a constellation of stars that slide over the skies, which the rest of the population can't even imagine.” Who else did he have to tell his own secrets to? Who else who would listen to the unbelievability of those words? He knew if he waited any longer Aleksandra would be gone.

“I don't want you to go,” he said. He resisted kneeling down to put his arms around her shoulders. Instead he walked over to the windows, grabbed the curtains, and drew them closed. The darkness swept over the room and opened it up again, increasing it, making it safe and vast. “I need to tell you something. If you're willing to stay here. If you won't leave.”

He did not want to die with this story inside of him. The story itself was a wish not to die. All stories were, he supposed.

“Will you stay and listen?” He squatted down on the floor next to her. He opened his hands, white and smooth with no scars or calluses. White and smooth but trembling with the work of holding them open. “Please?” He waited for the answer. He had never come this close to telling anyone this secret, and if she said no, he might never be able to tell anyone again.

Aleksandra took a deep breath and dropped her arms on her lap.

“Yes,” she said slowly. “If that's what you need.”

And just like that, where air met the voice box and applied its simple chords, he told her the story of a family.

 

THE ONLY REMINDER that Joseph kept of his father was his teeth. They remained in a padded ring box that sat in a metal case under Joseph's bed—two incisors and a canine held together on a piece of wire along with a cheap plastic bridge. They split from his father's jaw in a fall from the roof right before he met Joseph's mother.

“Your father had blanks in his smile,” she used to tell Joseph. “They didn't care about dentistry where he came from. They were poor—straight out of god's country—and didn't think teeth would help feed the cows. At least he had blue eyes, which they couldn't figure out how to ruin.” These insults were an attempt to ingratiate Joseph to her side of the family, which in the end, was all she had. She didn't know that her son kept the evidence of his dental defect in his
bedroom, where he often closed his eyes as a child and envisioned his father high in the sky, staring down with missing teeth that would have otherwise kept him looking a handsome thirty-four forever.

Eventually, all other physical signs of his life were destroyed. Joseph's mother made a fire on the hill behind their house in Cincinnati, where, years before, his father burnt the leaves he raked from the sludge grass in autumn. She carried out her husband's suits and sweat socks, the blankets that covered their bed, his entire underwear drawer, photographs from their honeymoon in Acapulco, and even his toiletries and torn leather wallet. She lit the pile with the matches he once used and tossed the matchbook into the fire. The smoke rose behind the roof of the house, while she stood before the blaze in a flannel nightgown peaking under a black fur coat. The wind swept the ashes into the woods and beat the flames. That was how his mother began to sign off on the world. She burnt it up.

When she was fired from her post as a tenured professor of American history, she shut all the windows of the house and covered them with wool curtains. His mother lost the keys to the Cadillac parked in the garage, although she never looked for them. She should have known that shutting herself off from the world made her more prone to her memories. She never looked for those either, but they were always around her, never lost and never recovered. Countries survive the histories of their massacres by forgetting. Families are not so lucky, the personal always harder to retreat from than the political. Joseph possessed no physical evidence that any of the Guiteau tragedy took place other than three teeth in a padded ring box stored alongside a gun in a metal box under his bed. But that doesn't mean every detail in the Guiteau story didn't happen just the way he remembered it. And whether he was the product of some mutant genes or something worse or perhaps nothing at all, the Guiteau history was all he had left to tell. They all lived, every member of that family. Some part of them still did in the one they left behind.

For a long time Joseph believed he could escape these terrible predictions and ludicrous curses passed through a bloodline. Even the doctors admitted that inherited diseases were as much nurture as nature. Change the environment, break the pattern. He left Ohio at
eighteen. He stocked the refrigerator, said his good-byes, and bolted the front door behind him. He went where anyone looking to escape their trapped beginnings went—that loophole in American identity, that city of reinventions. In New York, Joseph thought he had really performed the ultimate vanishing trick. Until now.

Right before Del moved in, Joseph started having trouble with the stairs. After two flights, the air knocked out of him and a river of ice ran through his hands, turning to water at the elbows. At night, his chest raced like it was trying to reach the ceiling, and in the morning his feet swelled to the point that he struggled to fit them into his shoes. Instead of telling Del, Joseph told a doctor. The cardiologist found nothing wrong—they never did. He suggested his problems were induced by stress. “So many of these symptoms are self-willed, Joseph. Your heart is fine. You have nothing to worry about.”

But the evidence was there: His great-grandfather, grandfather, and father all lost and buried five hundred miles away in different Ohio cemeteries. All dead at age thirty-four.

If Joseph Guiteau lived through the year, he would be the oldest man in the history of his family. He might be the last person of his generation, and certainly of his chosen profession, to see the gift of growing old.

RAJ WANTED TO watch the casket lift into the cargo hold but couldn't see it from the windows of the airport lounge. He had to trust it was on the flight, buried somewhere in the container below his economy seat on the starboard side of the plane. When he and Madi were kids, the family owned a tan Oldsmobile Toronado, and the car's seating chart never once changed when they piled in for Saturday pizza night or a trip to the mall. His father drove. His mother sat in the front passenger seat, pressing her hand against the glove compartment whenever his father hit the breaks or made a sharp turn, as if to illustrate how little she trusted him with her life. Raj filled the seat behind her, and Madi always ruled the back left. Already their alliances had formed in that car, as if their love could move horizontally and vertically but never diagonally across the center console. He couldn't remember if the arrangement had been planned or if it had happened instinctually, that they just piled in and stuck that way for life.

He watched the flight attendants perform their safety demo in the aisles. No passenger believed opening a door or strapping a seat cushion to their chest would save them from a failing aircraft.
But most watched respectfully anyway, smiling as the stewardesses continued their emergency directions, and everyone was complicit in the charade. Raj put his earphones in to listen to the jazz on the airplane radio, but the music twittered like the cheap atmosphere of a gift shop. His mother had worked at a gift shop in the mall for a few months. That was after the divorce, when the stores staffed temporary employees during the holiday rush. She brought home embezzled angels, elves, and snowflakes, covering every inch of the living room in a New Hampshire Christmas decor. He hadn't seen real snow until he visited Madi in college, not more than a few flurries. Snow created blackened ice ridges along Broadway, covered in gnarled fragments of fresh graffiti. It was on his second visit to New York that he decided to stay for an entire month. He couldn't remember at what point his return ticket expired and the two-year lease had been signed. Madi had been insistent about his staying in the city. He had been living at home with their mother, wasting his days after four years at Gainesville. “You're going to become one of those men,” she had warned him, “the ones married to their mothers who have to sneak out on dates.” By then, his sister had already gone through what was known around the house as the Manhattan Butterfly Effect. Every Christmas when she came home, her hair was a different color; first she had a lip ring, then a predilection for black leather pants worn with obscenely high heels, and in the last year of college she kept arguing about Blur versus Oasis like the bands were warring nuclear states that must be resolved before the Singhs opened their presents. “I never know
who
I'm going to pick up,” Raj said once on Christmas Eve leaning against a duty-free marquee. “I thought you were that Elvisy looking man in the wheelchair before you came strutting down the gangplank.” “It's so easy for you,” Madi had replied, slapping his shoulder in lieu of a hug. She had on a thrift-store mink and lime-green eyeliner, both looking greasy and disheveled after the three-hour flight. “You love cameras. I love . . . everything.” He hadn't brought his camera down with him. It hadn't even occurred to him until now that a photograph of Madi to place on her casket might be the one thing he could have brought.

Raj woke as the pilot announced that they were ten minutes away
from landing. His mother would be waiting in temporary parking to take him back to the house where he'd sit on her chintz couch. The plane taxied to the gate, while a stewardess listed connecting flights to foreign capitals he had once visited years ago as a freelance photographer. He couldn't remember anything about Bogotá or Caracas except for what he had caught in his lens. He grabbed his carry-on, shuffled through first class, and began the slow pilgrimage through the terminal to baggage claim. He stiffened at the thought of his mother bending across the seat to unlock the passenger-side door, staring silently at him with a look in those contracted blue eyes that demanded answers. She would expect an explanation for why Madi had died, because he had been there, in that awful city, not a mile from the accident, not looking out for his little sister. What good was an older brother if he couldn't even protect her from traffic?

He descended the stairs, swerving out of the way of running husbands and shrieking grandmothers. A green outline of palm trees decorated the wall next to the escalators, but the neon reminder of the tropics was unnecessary. Already he could see real palms exploding in the hot Florida sun just beyond the automatic doors. A row of suited Cuban men stood holding car-service signs at the bottom of the stairs.

One man edged behind the drivers, chewing on a piece of black licorice. Raj hadn't seen him in his loose white linen pants and brown leather sandals exposing tan impatient toes. But as Raj searched for the baggage carousel, he suddenly saw his father walking slowly toward him. His turban scrolled neatly around his temples, and his wiry beard parted at the cleft in his upper lip, framing a puckered expression that didn't express joy or sorrow, fear or love, only a determination not unlike the Cuban chauffeurs to pick up a passenger on the flight from New York.

Raj froze, watching his father approach. This was the man he would become. This was his future walking toward him at the Miami International Airport. He hadn't seen his father in years. Time had not worn him down but swelled him up until he was a soft fleshy bear of a man, almost sexless, like a benign cartoon chef on an Indian soup can who didn't look capable of strict religious discipline or a
loud broken marriage. He didn't look capable of once setting eyes on his son, fresh from his first haircut, and opening his palm to strike that son across the face.

Actually, Raj was wrong. He was nothing like him, not outside or in. It wasn't his father's presence over the years that turned Raj into the man he was. It was his absence. And no one gets credit for what their absence makes.

“I have waited a long time for you,” the old man said somberly, standing a foot in front of him and extending a chubby hand blotted in black licorice. “Let's find your bags and bring you home.” Those words must have been rehearsed for patriarchal strength, because once they were out his father stumbled forward and fell into him.