Authors: Christopher Bollen
Lightning People (47 page)
So, by the local squint, Joseph grows up relatively normal. Except, of course, for his heart.
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AFTER SCHOOL, KATHERINE
takes him to appointments with area specialists. The doctors draw blood, run him through scanners, x-ray his ribs and lungs, strip him down to his electric-blue underwear and bring in colleagues to stare in awe at his sunken breast bone and pale left nipple. A few
expert cardiologists, aroused enough by the Guiteau family history to fly four hours from Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute in Los Angeles, talk to Katherine in pleading whispers, hoping to write treaties and present her son at regional medical conventions. One Xavier University documentarian even asks if she can periodically follow Joseph around with a camera until he turns thirty-four, recording the “paranoia and being choices” of an abbreviated human life span. Katherine dismisses all opportunities for early-death stardom. She wants to keep the paranoia close at hand.
takes him to appointments with area specialists. The doctors draw blood, run him through scanners, x-ray his ribs and lungs, strip him down to his electric-blue underwear and bring in colleagues to stare in awe at his sunken breast bone and pale left nipple. A few
expert cardiologists, aroused enough by the Guiteau family history to fly four hours from Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute in Los Angeles, talk to Katherine in pleading whispers, hoping to write treaties and present her son at regional medical conventions. One Xavier University documentarian even asks if she can periodically follow Joseph around with a camera until he turns thirty-four, recording the “paranoia and being choices” of an abbreviated human life span. Katherine dismisses all opportunities for early-death stardom. She wants to keep the paranoia close at hand.
Katherine Guiteau remains a college professor in and out of the classroom. She is an empiricist in the old sense, constructing her lectures on American history the same way that she draws up the death warrant on her own son's heart: by observation and recorded evidence. Facts do not shift in transport on their way to the vague ether of the theoretical. The eight Guiteau birth and death certificates that she collects tell all she needs to know on genetic predisposition. Eventually when the doctors fail to find any physical aberrations in Joseph's heart muscle, Katherine stops scheduling appointments. She takes Joseph on as her own assignment.
The greenhouse addition is the first room to be sacrificed of sun. The rest go later, window by window, year by year. For Katherine, pulling the blinds is a way of killing free time. Darkening the house assumes the same gathering tactic that other families utilize by building a fire or calling their children to dinner. Initially, Katherine doesn't remove her husband's artifacts from the house, packing only the most obstinate possessions like his cross-country skis and Holbly Builders job files into the far reaches of the basement. She leaves most of his things where they last fell. His bathroom door is shut in the upstairs hallway, the bulb in the ceiling socket unscrewed, but it still holds his clutter of loose change, nail clippers, and open cans of shaving cream. Trip's winter coats mix with theirs in the front closet. His shoes line up single file in their shared walk-in off the bedroom, and ties hang according to color from a bar on the other side of the door. Joseph takes his father's teeth from his medicine cabinet and hides them in a sock at the bottom of his underwear drawer. If Katherine notices, she doesn't say anything. She continues on, rifling through the mail, pulling out advertisements and election notices addressed to Trip Holbly and collecting them in a brown grocery bag permanently stationed by the front door. Joseph didn't really know his father. He was too young when Trip died in a swimming pool that had since been filled
with concrete and covered with teak lawn chairs that have never once been sat on. Katherine keeps those remnants of her husband around not so much as if he still lived but as if he just left. It is Trip's death that defines his character. It eats and sleeps in the house right alongside them. Katherine has the widow's habit of closing her eyes and rotating her wedding ring. She wears it for the remainder of her life.
with concrete and covered with teak lawn chairs that have never once been sat on. Katherine keeps those remnants of her husband around not so much as if he still lived but as if he just left. It is Trip's death that defines his character. It eats and sleeps in the house right alongside them. Katherine has the widow's habit of closing her eyes and rotating her wedding ring. She wears it for the remainder of her life.
TRIP HOLBLY (GUITEAU), 1944â1978, 34,
HEART FAILURE (BY DROWNING), CINCINNATI
HEART FAILURE (BY DROWNING), CINCINNATI
THOMAS GUITEAU, 1923â1959, 34,
HEART FAILURE (SEE BROTHER, VINCENT), CINCINNATI
HEART FAILURE (SEE BROTHER, VINCENT), CINCINNATI
TYSON GUITEAU, 1894â1928, 34,
HEART FAILURE, CINCINNATI
HEART FAILURE, CINCINNATI
JOHNSON GUITEAU, 1867â1901, 34,
HEART FAILURE, CINCINNATI
HEART FAILURE, CINCINNATI
JOSEPH THOMAS (HOLBLY) GUITEAU, 1973â2007?, 34?,
HEART FAILURE?, CINCINNATI?
HEART FAILURE?, CINCINNATI?
Not martyrs of coincidence, these names that Katherine prints across the dry-erase board in her study. Not saints or sufferers, these Guiteau males that she clatters out on her electric typewriter, pausing before adding the additional question marks on her son's entry. Each is a link, a ruler of time, a pixel in a pattern that crystallizes faultlessly through the years. The fact that Trip is not a Guiteau by birth does not negate the design. It only suggests to this tenured history professor that a larger law is in effect. Dates are her expertise, her religion, identifying a necessary plot point in the procession of events. Katherine grows her hair long until it touches her waist. She puts on her makeup every morning and irons the wrinkles from her blouses and skirts. For a long time she does not speak aloud about the chance pattern of those names and dates, but they weigh in her mind until she can't sleep, creeping down the long hallway from her bedroom to Joseph's to stare in at him in the dark.
The opening lines of her first and only book,
Chain Reaction: Premonitions by Historical Patterning
, read as follows: “To believe that history is a dice throw of coincidental actions that could have gone any which way is to accept chaos as the governing principle of life. Let's suspend chaos theory for
the sake of thinking logically. Reader, don't fall into the illusory trance that time is moving pawns without intent.”
Chain Reaction: Premonitions by Historical Patterning
, read as follows: “To believe that history is a dice throw of coincidental actions that could have gone any which way is to accept chaos as the governing principle of life. Let's suspend chaos theory for
the sake of thinking logically. Reader, don't fall into the illusory trance that time is moving pawns without intent.”
Two planes crash in a field. In the first case, all on board die. In the second, everyone survives. For most, the difference rests on the impossible variable of luck. For Katherine Guiteau, the results are rationalâthe movement of the wind, the speed of impact, the pilot's responses under duress, a fate that can be figured. Trip Holbly's death did not depend on a ripped aorta or the inability to breathe under water. She sees history doing what it does: fulfilling a promise no one else has the perspective to comprehend. No coincidences. No random chances.
It is hard to isolate the exact moments when Katherine Guiteau's belief in a strange, invisible hand guiding the universe starts to impact her university lectures. At some point her personal fear of all of the men in her family triggers a reevaluation of all historical events as a coded pattern. At some point she takes the world for a system, each death for a clue. The bookshelves of her study once held the wonders of histories and atlases, biographies on capitalists and convicts, minutemen, and Donner survivors. But slowly these chronicles are lost to new titles that come delivered in brown wrapping paper every few weeks by UPS:
Assassination Theory; Kennedy and the CIA: Who Knew?; Lincoln's Killers; Lee Harvey Oswald: From Moscow to Mafia; The Calibrations of Poker.
The outdated orange wallpaper of her study is tacked with stills of the Abraham Zapruder film, atomic greens and gun grays caught in pixilated freeze frame.
Assassination Theory; Kennedy and the CIA: Who Knew?; Lincoln's Killers; Lee Harvey Oswald: From Moscow to Mafia; The Calibrations of Poker.
The outdated orange wallpaper of her study is tacked with stills of the Abraham Zapruder film, atomic greens and gun grays caught in pixilated freeze frame.
“We came together because of this,” she tells Joseph one afternoon as he stares tentatively at the photographs. “Did I ever tell you that? You owe your life to what happened down there.” When Joseph tries to resist this birth rite, she stands behind him, swirling his blond hair through her fingers. “We know things that we don't even realize we do,” Katherine says quietly, almost as if the riddle is a soothing gesture, a mother's voice. “We're so used to looking at them day in and out, we forget that they have anything left to show us. But we see it. It's only frightening because it offers something that will change us.”
Chain Reaction
is published by a small university press in 1990. At the moment of what Katherine believes to be her greatest triumph, her validation of several years of rigorous intellectual labor, the deans cancel her first day of American History II. Arriving to her classroom, she finds not students but
campus security. They escort her back to her car in the parking lot without allowing her to collect her personal items.
is published by a small university press in 1990. At the moment of what Katherine believes to be her greatest triumph, her validation of several years of rigorous intellectual labor, the deans cancel her first day of American History II. Arriving to her classroom, she finds not students but
campus security. They escort her back to her car in the parking lot without allowing her to collect her personal items.
This final humiliation, this sentencing of an overactive mind chained to a history that no one wants to hear, proves her final break with the world. Two small but searing articles in the morning paper expose her heretical teaching practices as a perverse form of religious mania. Joseph's civics teacher, an ancient Jesuit priest who continually applies Vaseline to his lips, places the clipping on his desk and shakes his head. “I won't bring this up with the counselors,” he promises. Katherine Guiteau followed that signal cliché of historyâthose who forget it are doomed to repeat itâbut it doomed her for finding it there.
Katherine remains in her darkened bedroom with all of the lights off, the blinds pulled over the windows, the alarm clock by her bed unplugged, and leaves it only to gather her husband's possessions that have blended into their own over the years. She collects them slowly in her nightgown, ignoring Joseph as he follows her around the house asking her to stop. Coats, ties, winter boots, wallets, condoms, an assortment of arrowheads, the grocery bag of junk mail, and everything else in her immediate line of vision. She brings them out to the backyard, climbs the hill with her slippers muddy and her long fur slung over her shoulders and drops them into the pit where Joseph's father once burned fall leaves and summer nettles. She pours gasoline and lights a match, watching the smoke waft over the house and tunnel upwards into the January sky. Katherine Guiteau disappears. She strings thick wool over every upstairs window to keep the sunlight out. She doesn't even leave her bedroom when the wailing alarms of tornado warnings tell her to take shelter in the basement. Joseph sits on the edge of her bed and talks to a woman he can barely see. She reaches for his hand in the dark and holds it, her skin soft and warm and safe. She rubs the calluses on her son's palm and smiles. If he ever mentions the possibility of her venturing out of the house, maybe just a walk for fresh air, she wrestles her hand away and turns over on a pillow.
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FOR THE MOST
part Joseph avoids her bedroom. He lives like a teenage bachelor, playing host to his grandmother, Christine, who visits on weekends and pretends that her daughter's psychosis is a passing phase. School life at his all-boy's Catholic high school: Choir Boys with BMWs and Attention Deficit Disorder, or some other title of an after-school special that doesn't
explain the daily lull of punches and communal push-ups and acne-stained necks splitting out of white oxfords lassoed with St. John's regulatory poly blue tie. Joseph has a few friends, enough to fill a cafeteria table, enough to cheer him on at dress rehearsals playing Tom alongside a talcum-powdered girl shipped over from St. Ursula cast as his mother in
The Glass Menagerie
, or a Caiaphas tied with pillows around his waist in St. John's all-male review of
Jesus Christ Superstar
(a whorish freshman with long red hair wins hearts and, unfortunately for him, minds as Mary Magdalene). Joseph picks theater because it is the extracurricular that eats up the most hours after school. But he also chooses theater because it allows him the temporary escape hatch from being Joseph Guiteau. Off stage, Joseph has a quiet laugh that terminates his sentences as if he isn't fully committed to the words he speaks. He is tall, his cheeks are blotched rash red, and his scraggly blond hair is shaved on the sides and sprouts roughly into a rumple of bangs.
part Joseph avoids her bedroom. He lives like a teenage bachelor, playing host to his grandmother, Christine, who visits on weekends and pretends that her daughter's psychosis is a passing phase. School life at his all-boy's Catholic high school: Choir Boys with BMWs and Attention Deficit Disorder, or some other title of an after-school special that doesn't
explain the daily lull of punches and communal push-ups and acne-stained necks splitting out of white oxfords lassoed with St. John's regulatory poly blue tie. Joseph has a few friends, enough to fill a cafeteria table, enough to cheer him on at dress rehearsals playing Tom alongside a talcum-powdered girl shipped over from St. Ursula cast as his mother in
The Glass Menagerie
, or a Caiaphas tied with pillows around his waist in St. John's all-male review of
Jesus Christ Superstar
(a whorish freshman with long red hair wins hearts and, unfortunately for him, minds as Mary Magdalene). Joseph picks theater because it is the extracurricular that eats up the most hours after school. But he also chooses theater because it allows him the temporary escape hatch from being Joseph Guiteau. Off stage, Joseph has a quiet laugh that terminates his sentences as if he isn't fully committed to the words he speaks. He is tall, his cheeks are blotched rash red, and his scraggly blond hair is shaved on the sides and sprouts roughly into a rumple of bangs.
Joseph usually learns about raging weekend house parties that involve live, sexually curious girls on the Monday morning after the fact. For obvious reasons, friends rarely receive invites to slumber parties at his house, and like every other American high school, St. John's exists on a reciprocal trade economy, so he is rarely invited in kind. The few friends who do make their way through the doors on Arcadia Avenue never see his mother, largely because upstairs is off-limits to guests. He often tells friends that his mother has an incurable blood disease. He tells them that she is afraid of people. In both cases, he doesn't think it a total lie.
In the end, he leaves. He wants to get away from the house and its ghosts and all of the men chain-linked to the years written beside their names. He goes where no one knows the history of a death-prone family. He follows that great summer migration of losers and misanthropists on their flocking journey to coastal cities on the promise of bright-light anonymity. He leaves at eighteen, after his graduation pushes him across the stage in tasseled penny loafers and a blue cap and gown. He has already received his acceptance letter from NYU, arriving like a prize plane ticket from a nonsensical game show called College Admissions Roulette. His grandmother takes his picture by the hood of her car in the parking lot.
At least Christine Guiteau is there to care for her daughter. At least she understands.
“Don't go,” Katherine says in the blackness of her room. Only scant
flashes of light burn between the vertical blinds above her bed. She has begun reading books again, but she can never finish more than a few chapters before turning to another in the hope of starting out on a higher spirit. “Or do,” she reconsiders. “But don't go far. I'm sorry I wasn't the mother you deserved.”
flashes of light burn between the vertical blinds above her bed. She has begun reading books again, but she can never finish more than a few chapters before turning to another in the hope of starting out on a higher spirit. “Or do,” she reconsiders. “But don't go far. I'm sorry I wasn't the mother you deserved.”
He tells her that she has been. He tells her that he loves her. He tells her that he isn't going far. He lies to her as he holds her warm hand on the edge of her bed.
“You know, there's nothing wrong with you,” he finally says after a long silence, and they are left staring into the dark shapes of each other. “Even if you're right about me, that doesn't mean you can't go on.”
“I hope you don't believe that,” she replies. As Joseph stands up to go, she places her hand on his knee, so softly that, for a second, he merely mistakes it as a final sign of tenderness. “I have something for you,” she says. “It isn't anything really. It's these earrings that belonged to your great-grandmother. She gave them to me for my wedding. I know you can't use them. But maybe you can give them to someone when it's right.” She lifts herself off the mattress and digs through her jewelry box with amazing precision. It occurs to him that her eyes must have become supernaturally accustomed to see in the dark, and that maybe she had been able to look at him clearly all along. “It's important,” she says, pressing the two pearls into his palm. “Please take something. Something more than you've already got.”
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