Lightning People (42 page)

He put his hands over her knuckles to convince her that he understood. A tattered, white string wove around a gold Cartier bracelet on her wrist, and her fingernails were a shade of dark ivy.

“And my sister?” he asked. “Did you go to her?”

“Away,” she gasped. “Away, away.”

“You went away?”

“Yes. As fast as I could. Away.” It took Raj a second of mounting anger—you see someone lying in the street and all you do is leave them there?—to realize that she was not saying
away
but
oui
in her French drawl
.
“I ran to her. I almost slipped on the cobblestones because they were so wet. I ran across the street and bent down.”

A chill went through him. He wanted to lift his knees to his chest to protect himself from the rest of her story, but he knew any visible flinch would silence her. He bit the inside of his lip and forced his eyes to stare evenly. She shook her pack of Parliaments and tapped one of the cigarettes upside down on the table.

“I bent down, and I reached to hold the back of her head but then I remembered that to touch someone like that is to do worse damage to them. To hold someone who needs it most is to hurt them beyond repair. I thought I saw her eyes move. Not the eyes but inside the eyes, the black part, moving. There was blood staining her mouth, not blood everywhere, but a red dark stain covering her lips. I leaned
my ear over her mouth to hear if she was breathing but nothing came. I looked up, and now there were other people gathering around us and one of them was trying to embrace me, to take me in his arms because he thought I was her friend. He asked if she had had a seizure. I pushed him away and bent down again. I saw that her hips were crooked, broken like a doll. Her eyes were staring up but not at me, fixed somewhere behind my shoulder. I remember I screamed, ‘Can you hear me. If you can hear me, hold on to me.' There were flowers everywhere in the glass.”

“Flowers?” His eyes were filled with tears. “What do you mean
flowers
?”

“Flowers all around her and broken glass. Pink tulips and yellow daffodils. Maybe she had been carrying them.” He could not imagine his sister carrying flowers during a business day, even on a lunch break, not Madi, not tulips and daffodils. But the vision of his sister bringing her own bouquet to the scene of her death caused a small whimper to escape his lips. Cecile quickly caught the grief she was causing and raced her hands over his cheeks. Her fingers were hot and soft, and soon his nose was buried in her collarbone, the thick bandages of her dress so tight he could feel the swell of her skin along its binding. He pushed her back. “I'm okay,” he said. “Please keep going.”

“The ambulance came and the police. I told them what I saw and took their card. I didn't remember the photo until I got home. I uploaded it on my computer and called the detective. He asked me to e-mail it to him. Did it help?”

“Yes,” he said, fighting the sudden need to leave the apartment. He held his nerves as if holding his breath, as if his entire spinal column were a pulley system like the rusted oak wheel that hung in her window and he had to squeeze to keep it from flying into motion. “Thank you,” he whispered. “Thank you for doing what you could for her.”

“Of course.” She leaned over his chair with her eyebrows pinched, waiting for another round of tears. Raj stood up to drive off the pity, her beauty now seeming ugly and artificial, getting in the way of his pain. All of that talk before about her family, all of that polite
conversation, disgusted him. Soon she'd be off to her party soaked in flashbulbs, and he'd be left alone in the darkness of his bed. He knocked the chair to the floor and began to race for the door. But Raj stopped four feet into the loft and turned, as she waited by the table hunched over the spot where his chair had been.

“Can I ask you for one more favor?” Cecile nodded willingly, placing her palm on her forehead in concern. “Can you send me the picture, the one you took?”

“Yes.” She hurried to the bookcase to reclaim her laptop. “I'll e-mail it to you. What is your address?”

He spelled it for her as she typed it into the address bar and watched as she dragged the file into the attachment box.

“Do you mind if I use the photo?” he asked. “It's yours, after all. You took it.”

“It's not mine,” she said as if trying to refute any ownership. “You do whatever you want with it.” Cecile shifted her attention from the screen to him as if to find some command center in his eyes that would consent to the request or override the hysterical part of him that was still shaking and clenching his teeth. She pressed send, closed the computer, and in two minutes Raj was outside on the Bowery, heading home, where the photograph was already blinking in his inbox.

OF COURSE, WILLIAM could guess the identity of the woman Joseph was meeting at the Carlyle. He had once been up there himself on an audition for her. Aleksandra Andrews, who had told him so succinctly that he wasn't the man she was looking for, the first punch in the stomach that indicated all future treatment in the months that had followed. Evidently she had found her lead in Joseph. And while his former friend swore that his visits had nothing to do with an acting job, William smiled through the lie while he escorted him up to the hotel for the second day in a row. He nodded gratuitously in the cab, promising not to tell Del that her husband was still having trouble walking straight and keeping down water. He even provided a laugh track to Joseph's unfunny joke about their agent, Janice, and her constant pedophilic playground hunt for younger actors to replace them. Then, pressing his hand on Joseph's knee, William asked to borrow two hundred dollars.

Del had come home drunk the night before. She stumbled through the living room without a word to him, even as William shot up from the couch and welcomed her. She collapsed in bed, managing to kick the door closed before she passed out. When he woke this
morning, she had already disappeared, but not before stacking all of his clothes and toiletries on the floor by his feet, in what could only be read as a hostile gesture.

After Joseph withdrew the money from an ATM and waved good-bye at the hotel entrance, William raced to the nearest deli to buy
The New York Times, The Daily News,
the
Post,
and
The Wall Street Journal
. In the window booth of a coffee shop on Lexington Avenue, he scanned the metro sections, looking for any report of an elderly man discovered hanging in his West Village bathroom, a victim of suicide or foul play. He found nothing on Brutus Quinn, no trace of him in the ordinary dispatches of homicides, muggings, drug arrests, and child neglect that swept around his cup of coffee. What had made Quinn's cottage such a sympathetic refuge from the city—no neighbors, no shared walls, no well-meaning intruders coming to knock on a door hidden behind the backyard oaks—meant that the terrible actuality of Quinn's body could also go uninterrupted, unnoticed, the sheet creaking under the shower pipe and 180 pounds of Quinn floating perpetually like an astronaut in deep space. William crumbled the newspapers in his fists. Nothing could be decided until Quinn was discovered. William's own life would remain on pause, his future dependent on every anxious look behind him and on the faith in the prying curiosity of residents in the building in front of Quinn's cottage that would lead them to his door. William tried to breathe as he placed two columns of change on the table for a tip and paid the bill at the counter. He pledged to go on with his day avoiding the West Village.

So how did William end up on West Twelfth Street, two hours later, sweatshirt hood unseasonably darkening his face as he walked down the opposite sidewalk? Curiosity had dug its fingers into his cranium. William crept down the block and lingered in the bright sunlight, pretending to inspect a Thai-takeout menu that he found wedged into an apartment buzz box. The blue stucco building that hid Quinn's cottage darkened and lightened in passing shadows. In the top window, a young woman was listening to the radio, dancing as she modeled a bra in her mirror. In the window below this one, yellow curtains fluttered in a crosscurrent breeze. The building's black
lacquered door was closed. A dog walker passed with his sniffing ward of Rottweilers and poodles. There wasn't the slightest indication of anything alarming, no murder in the backhouse causing the residents to lock their windows or create a flowery curbside memorial for the neighbor that they had hardly known for thirty years.

William considered crossing the street to peer through the glass panes in the door that held a view of the tunnel, but he resisted, inching his back along the brick of the apartment building across the street. He saw the blue Cressida sitting where he had parked it, two tickets tacked to the windshield and, across the passenger's side window, a Day-Glo green sticker that read: SANITATION: THIS VEHICLE VIOLATES N.Y.C. PARKING REGULATIONS. AS A RESULT, THIS STREET COULD NOT BE PROPERLY CLEANED. A young mother pushing a stroller eyed him as she darted by, and quickly William set off toward the direction of the river. He turned the corner onto Washington Street, stumbled down to Bethune Street, and collapsed in a ball inside the entryway of a veterinary clinic, covering his face with the hood of his sweatshirt. The normalcy of Twelfth Street was setting off a wildfire in his chest.

He walked to Christopher Street and, folding one of the twenties that Joseph had given him, bought a joint off of one of the black teenage vogue queens who he used to buy drugs from in his poorer, less-connected days in New York. He waited until he got to the Hudson River pier to light it. He puffed on the cheap potpourri of marijuana and tobacco, not potent enough to dissolve his senses but enough to release the muscles that cramped down his arms and legs. He leaned against the railing as sailboats buoyed in the water, and beyond them the green silhouette of the Statue of Liberty, and beyond that more glistening water and buildings and the blue sky skidded in clouds. He sucked agilely on the brown crumbling paper.

William didn't know how long he stood staring at the river, but his cell phone was vibrating in his pocket and two cops in black uniforms were mowing across the pier's lawn looking for somebody in particular. His joint had burnt past his fingers, and he flicked the butt in the water. He dug into his pocket and answered the phone.

“William, it's Janice,” his agent said curtly. “What are you doing right now?”

“Nothing,” he replied. It had been so long since he had heard Janice's wonderful, tyrannical voice on his phone that he grabbed on to the railing to keep himself grounded.

“I have a woman here who wants to talk to you,” she said. “She asked for you by name and says it's urgent. Do you want to come up?”

William ran at full speed to the West Side Highway, waving his arms frantically at oncoming cabs.

 

THE WOMAN WAITING to see William Asternathy wore a wrinkled cream trench coat over a white “I
New York” T-shirt forever popularized by a rock star assassinated in New York. She was not the type of casting agent William had expected to find standing in Janice Eccles's maniacally clean office with sunlight reflecting off every chrome surface. Certainly she wasn't the polished industry insider that he had practiced speaking to with jittery excitement on the cab ride up to Touchpoint. Her skin was covered in red freckles, and her curly brown hair sprouted disobediently in every direction, failing to conceal three bald patches on her scalp. Her shoes were more like slippers, the left moving in nervous circles over the carpet. As William entered the office, he gazed quizzically at Janice. She sat behind her desk and stared back at him with a glued-on grimace, as if the presence of this woman in front of her would soon be blamed on him.

“Janice, you wanted me to come for an audition,” William spoke, less as a question, for he was still holding out hope that this woman had nothing to do with his sudden, blessed deliverance into the Touchpoint fold.

“I never said an audition,” Janice corrected. William heard her thinly disguised anger. “Rose Cherami, this is William Asternathy, the man you wanted to see.”

Rose Cherami glared at him with the same confusion and disappointment that he had shown to her. For a second, they shared the kind of frank disgust for each other that overtook a blind date.

“There must be some mistake,” Rose blurted. “This isn't him.” A trip wire in William's mind instantly recalled those very words spoken by Aleksandra Andrews two months prior, and he grunted at the insult.

“I'm afraid this is William Asternathy,” Janice replied mercilessly. “I should know. I represent him. Or at least I used to before he began to waste my time with these little dramas.”

Now both William and Rose, in unison, began to lodge their separate complaints, but Janice's patience snapped. She rose from her chair.