Lightning People (35 page)

Raj stared into the dead center of a palm tree whose dried fronds skirted the departure lane at MIA. His father placed a hand on his knee.

“Do you know I'm not even allowed to board a flight with my karpin,” he said incredulously. “They want me to check it in my luggage.”

Raj pulled his black leather jacket around his shoulders and waited until his row was called. He tried to remember random verses of the holy book, while flipping through magazines by the cash register. In three hours he would be home.

THE TRUTH WAS Del couldn't get back to normal even if she tried. Madi's death was like a laser, slicing right through the center of her life. Like a ringing phone in the middle of night, where a stranger's voice on the other end whispers
you're running out of time
.

In the evenings she spoke to Raj quietly on the phone from Florida, mostly listening to the silences filling the gaps between his sentences. He talked about the funeral (quick, without a single family conflict, his mom so dazed that she walked with her arm stretched out to keep her standing straight) and about the progress on Madi's case. Raj asked if he could see her when he returned, and she let more silence, a thousand miles of it, drift between them before she answered yes.

She climbed into bed with Joseph. He had come home late, breathing heavily from the short flight of stairs, his eyes blackened like two used ashtrays, nodding at her as she sat in the kitchen, and undressed for bed. He was still damp and feverish, fighting the residue of a late summer cold. He looked sick and yellow, but so did everyone, so did she, barely able to eat and smoking through a pouch of tobacco every two days. Only after Joseph fell asleep did she return to the
couch where she curled in a ball, scratching old nail polish off her toes. She felt close to that moment when the silence between them would finally lift and they could continue on together, but for now she preferred to remain locked in her own arms on the couch listening to the laughter and the screaming that made up the night.

She listened to young women who passed under the window on the street, girls going out, girls getting ready in dresses tighter and shorter each year, hair longer and blonder, going to the clubs, going to meet men, going to live the way they pictured living in New York should be—that fast live wire current circulating through the city, which was only felt by those who hadn't yet lived here long enough to be inured to its charge. Then she thought about Raj lying in bed at his father's house, an overgrown child returning to his care after so many years out of his reach. She imagined Madi fluttering through the window, the edges of her red silk sari licked by the wind and her black hair streaming in tendrils. Del knew the hallucination was of her own making, but she waited for this phantom Madi to say something to her, some answer that would make sense of the world erupting all around her without her best friend. The dream never got that far. Del woke to hear Joseph stumbling into the bathroom.

She dressed for work quickly and said good-bye to him while standing on the other side of the bathroom door. For once on the subway to the Bronx, she didn't run though the list of snakebite symptoms in her head.

If Madi's death was like a laser, its first target was the mud-brown building of the Reptile House. Death was capable of producing amazing life. Leto's death had produced little Apollo, the miraculous baby, an inch of cord with lidless eyes, moving on ripples of muscle, creeping through the white sand of his crib. If that death had brought life, perhaps Madi's death could do the same.

That morning, she slipped a sheet of department letterhead in the lab's electronic typewriter and typed her resignation letter to the Bronx Zoo Herpetology Department c/o Dr. Abrams. Whipping it from the machine, she carried the letter through the break room and knocked on Abrams's office door. He sat in front of an open book, a concave chest bolstered by twin elbows, and his eyes glanced up
distractedly. She closed the door, placed the letter on his desk, and anchored it under a crystal paperweight with a black winged beetle frozen in its core.

“What is this?” Abrams wheezed, as if calling her bluff before he even bothered to read it. “If you aren't happy here, you could have come to me. This is very irresponsible so late in the summer. We've already done the fall budget. I'm afraid if it's a raise you are looking for . . . ”

“You're right, I haven't been happy,” she said as she took the seat across from him. “Not for some time. But that doesn't matter now. I'm giving you my notice.”

He eyed her with irritation, pulled the paper from under the glass weight, and then threw it back on the desk as if it were an exorbitant electricity bill.

“You know what this means, don't you?” The corners of his mouth pitched upward in satisfaction. “It means we can't sponsor your work visa anymore. I don't see how you will remain in this country, Del, if you decide to leave us. I didn't realize you were thinking of moving back to Greece.”

“I'm not,” she replied, matching smile for heartless smile. She could hardly contain the warmth spreading through her chest, tremendous warmth filling her like a helium balloon. She rolled her shoulders back to capture more of it. She almost felt sorry for poor Abrams, forced to patrol the endless halls of caged reptiles until he confused the employees with the animals locked inside. “I don't need to be sponsored, Dr. Abrams. The visa hasn't been valid for some months. Although I do appreciate your concern.”

Abrams's cheeks flushed. He busied his fingers with a pencil, dashing a gratuitous checkmark into the top right corner of the paper.

“It's still irresponsible,” he complained while straightening his neck. “So late in summer. After we've been your family for nearly ten years.”

“I'm willing to stay on for the next two weeks, or at least until you find my replacement,” she replied, appreciating the dignity of the offer but also a little disappointed that the moment she had
imagined for so long was now concluding without a bottle thrown or some hysterical chase through the exhibition hall.

“You're damned right you will,” he muttered coldly.

She stood up to leave, already picturing a future free of cages, checklists, and tours, when Abrams shot up from his desk, sending his chair orbiting into the corner.

“One thing,” he said. She should have known Abrams was not the sort of man to go down without trying to strike one last blow in return. “That Crotalus atrox, what's it called, Apollo. I need it driven to the research lab at Columbia. It's being donated to testing. You don't mind doing the department a favor, do you?”

 

ON THE DRIVE into Manhattan, Del continually glanced over at the carrier in the passenger seat, the ratted seatbelt buckled over its plastic basin. Inside Apollo nested in a corner, no doubt frightened by the vibration of the car motor and the sudden jerks of southbound traffic. Tears filled her eyes. She didn't want to hand the infant—
her
infant—over to a research lab of needles and dissections. All of that effort to save him had resulted in a few months' survival before being probed and tortured simply to study how badly he suffered and what could be learned from his pain. Which philosopher said that every day for animals was a holocaust? The way they're worked until their knees break, their eyes sprayed with household cleaner, their fur stripped for glove liners, their bones ground up for soup stalk, their tits milked, and their babies eaten. What would animals say if they could speak:
You beasts without hearts, for sharing the planet with us, fuck you forever.

It occurred to her as she drove through the wasteland sprawl of dollar shops and bullet-scarred liquor stores that she could simply keep driving south: she could pass right by Columbia and keep accelerating until she brought Apollo home to Gramercy. There she could keep him alive in her tub, build a desert of sand and plastic branches, and feed him mice from the pet store until she organized some way to send him out west where he could be released in the wild. The fantasy carried such joyous momentum, she pressed her foot more firmly on the gas, excited to get home and begin frantic
phone calls to rattlesnake preservation groups. For a few stoplights, Del almost believed she would do this. She would save Apollo, right the wrong, and sacrifice herself to prevent this beautiful creature from the hell of human treatment. What difference did one snake matter to the rest of the world, which shot and skinned rattlesnakes every day by the bucketload in the west? Of course, there was no crime in killing a snake. There was only a crime in saving one. One life mattered so little. That obvious, terrifying fact—perhaps the first fact a child learns to acclimate them to the realities of the world—drove through her with an overwhelming punch as she searched for a parking space on 114
^th
Street. She shook her head to vanquish the fantasy, because, in reality, there was no way to save Apollo. She would be arrested, deported, and never allowed to return because she had cared for this single, insignificant entity as small and thin as a crack in the sidewalk.

She parked the department's Honda Civic next to the campus. More tears clouded her eyes now, because this campus had been the place that she had met Madi what seemed like ten lifetimes ago. Maybe the tears had been for Madi all along.

Del grabbed the carrier and walked through the wrought-iron entrance gates on Broadway, holding Apollo gently in her arms. She waited for the memories to crash down around her, four years coming back into her mind with the swiftness of an old classmate tapping her on the shoulder. But so much had changed at Columbia since she had graduated. The crumbling brick buildings of her student years had undergone clumsy techno-club renovations, steel and glass promising a learning curve at a faster, sexier rate. Madi would have approved. She had probably doubled her alumni donations to expedite the process. Madi always loved torching the old to make way for the new. As Del climbed the steps of Low Library, which she once sledded down in winter wasted out of her mind on red wine, she was thankful for the transformations. The less to remind her of those years the better.

She followed the brick path lined with curving box hedges around the library rotunda. Three shirtless young men in skimpy blue shorts jogged toward her. They must have been eighteen, but their hairless
bodies, taut with stomach muscles ribbed like the smooth dorsal shells of beetles, made them seem much younger. Or maybe Del had finally reached the age that no longer found similarities in youth. She tried to remember Dash's body or even her own from those years of college but came up with blank outlines, a pink nipple or a feather of red stomach hair, but no definitive teenage anatomy. Maybe that failure to remember was the brain's consolation, a mental trip wire to protect itself from time.

Del passed through the science building's automatic doors, entered the chilly cargo elevator, and took the nine flights down, deep into the core of Manhattan. Navigating a maze of antiseptic white hallways that reached so far back into the building they must have overshot the campus above ground, she finally found the name Sarah T. Isely, PhD and the sign CAUTION: LIVE LAB. She rang the buzzer and pushed her shoulder into the door, careful not to shake the box.

Del waited ten minutes in a white bowl chair after giving her name to the grad student at the reception desk. She opened the top of the carrier and looked in at Apollo, slithering against the darkness with his wet forked tongue drilling in the air, the first bead of a rattle starting to hatch on his tail.
He's just a snake
, she said to herself,
whose brain is merely a reception center of heat and impulses
. If so, then why did she feel like she was betraying him?

She scanned the office for some clue to the research conducted by Isely and her team, but the waiting room merely doubled as storage. Filing cabinets were jammed with outdated paperwork and crowned with plastic ferns. A buzzing sound signaled the opening of an interior door, and the same white-yarn-haired woman who had accompanied Abrams through the Reptile House appeared, smiling in a tan lab coat. She extended a hand, which Del shook, while her other hand dug for a ballpoint pen in her breast pocket.

“Are you alright?” Sarah Isely asked, staring at her sympathetically. “You look like you've been crying.”

“Oh, I haven't,” Del said, quickly wiping her nose with her wrist.

“Abrams,” she concluded. “Most of the researchers think he's a ruthless bureaucrat. I find that
twat
describes him more succinctly. At least that's what I limit it to behind closed doors.”

Del liked her. Of course she liked her. The woman was a senior professor of herpetology, a wizard of biology, some long lost vision Del once had of her future self, the walking talking paradigm of the idea that you could spend a day with Squamata Serpentes and leave looking like a normal human being at night. Normal in this case meant two silver earrings cast over drooping lobes, a fresh application of peach lipstick, a bun tied loosely over silver streaming eyebrows, and a habit of drawing her chin close to her neck when she spoke. Her skin smelled of hand sanitizer.

“Where do I sign?” Sarah asked, eyeing the shipment. Del searched her pockets and pulled out the release documents, pointing to the appropriate line.

“Do you mind if I ask you something? Are you going to dissect him?”

The older woman smiled.

“Ah, that's always what it comes down to, isn't it?” She rocked back on her heels and let go of the tightness of her chin, lifting it to the ceiling. “Don't worry. This little one isn't destined for the knife.”

“Then what are you going to use him for?” Del asked, unable to relinquish Apollo until she understood the full scope of his imminent extinction.