Lightning People (48 page)

 

ON THE MORNING of August 19, Joseph turned thirty-four.

He wore Ray Andrews's three-button suit to greet the sunlight pouring through the hotel windows. He placed his hand on his heart to feel its metronome under thick Italian wool. Aleksandra coiled next to him on the bed, her own dress rumpled from sleep. She was already awake, rubbing the tiredness from her face and consulting her wristwatch on the nightstand.

He had no intention of sleeping over. The evening pulled down so fast he couldn't even remember closing his eyes. But he had a
distinct physical memory of Aleksandra's arms covering him through the night. He had wanted to be home for his birthday, to meet the anniversary straight on, to wake up in his own bed with Del at his side surrounded by the comfort of his own belongings.

He tried to lift himself up but his muscles collapsed under the weight of heavy lungs. He clamped his fingers over his eyes and gave in to the weakness, falling back against a mattress damp with his own sweat. He looked over at Aleksandra, her skin pale and grooved from the pillow, and his voice came out hoarse like it had grown stubble in the night.

“I have to get back,” he said. “I have to go home.”

Joseph wiped the sweat from his forehead and tried to breathe, but the walls of the bedroom seemed to close around him. His lungs weren't filling with enough air, as if Aleksandra, her face now inches from his own, were stealing the oxygen from the room. Rain drizzled on the windows. Even the honking traffic on Madison Avenue seemed acutely aware of wasted time. He leaned forward to swallow, and Aleksandra pressed her hand on his chest as if to help him inhale.

“Thank you for staying over,” she said softly, nervously, breaking up her words with pockets of air. “I know you didn't mean to. But it was a comfort to me.” She grabbed his hand and placed her fingers inside of it. “I never got to say good-bye to Ray. So it felt like tricking myself into having him here again. For one more night at least.”

“You're welcome,” he replied, not entirely honored by the sentiment. Aleksandra looked older in the morning light, like the hours of sleep had taken an exhausting toll. He couldn't shake the feeling that she might have stayed awake in the night just to watch him—to see some earlier version of her husband. Joseph pulled his hand away and stopped himself from telling her that this morning would be the last time he could visit her. In his mind he was already hailing a cab to Gramercy, climbing the five flights of stairs to his apartment, opening the door, and crawling into bed with Del. He was already back there, surrounded by the familiar objects that he had somehow managed to compile in sixteen years of living in New York.

“I want to show you something,” she said and climbed over the side of the bed to open the white dress box on the floor. She returned
with a small plastic bag in her hand, which held a simple gold ring. “When the police showed up at the door, they told me Ray was gone. Gone, like he had taken a plane somewhere, like they had lost sight of him on the highway. They wouldn't let me identify the body. They said he'd have to be identified by dental records since the gunshot destroyed his face. I begged the detectives to let me see him one more time. The dead aren't dead until you see them that way. Those officers were right: they're just gone. After the investigation ended and the detectives finally ruled it a suicide, they returned some of his effects. Brown shoes, his ring, a wallet with all of his credit cards still in their holders, the St. Christopher medal he wore around his neck. I spread them all out on the dining room table and examined each one to find a single drop of blood. They said there was blood everywhere, all over the front seat, blood and brain matter and splinters of bone.” Aleksandra placed the plastic bag down gently on the bed and bent over it. She looked up to invite Joseph to inspect it, but he didn't want to. She placed her fingertip softly on the edge of the band. “Do you see it?” she asked. He wasn't looking. “It's so small. Just a little speck. The tiniest drop. That's all I have left of Ray. The smallest trace of blood to prove he was more than gone.”

“I have to go,” he said urgently. “I have to be home.”

Aleksandra gazed up, half-hypnotized, and her face suddenly crumpled as if his words only made sense to her now.

“Stay for a few more minutes,” she said. “Don't go yet. There's a surprise for you.”

“No. I have to.” He waited. “Aleksandra.” He didn't look at her. He couldn't watch the imperfect good-bye pass between them like two people waving on opposite sides of a car window. But there was no more time to spend mourning for Aleksandra Andrews. There was no more time to mourn for anybody else. Why had he not found her endless grief so frightening all along? The way she studied the ring sent a chill up his back, and all of his memories of Aleksandra holding her husband's photographs, suit coats, and even the pages of her script seemed tainted with the same specks only visible to his wife. “I can't come back here for a while,” he said. “I have some things to deal with.”

“But you will come back?” she asked. Joseph kept his eyes on the floor to prevent looking at her face, but he could hear the anxiety crowd her voice. “Just promise me that you will.”

“Yes. I promise. But not for a while.” He waited to say one more thing—
Aleksandra, I can't be your husband anymore
—but she was already crawling across the bed and leaping onto the floor, where she rearranged her dress over her thighs.

“Just another minute,” she said. “It's a surprise.”

She hurried to close the curtains and darted out of the room. He could hear a cabinet open, the clink of metal, and an empty box dropped onto a table.

Joseph unbuttoned the suit, pulling himself from Ray Andrews's sleeves. He shed the wool pants, slipping them from his legs by yanking the cuffs. He stripped off the vest, flailing his arms free. He found his jeans on the floor and pulled them up to his waist. Quickly he grabbed the plastic bag that contained the ring and held it up against the sunlight. There was no blood on the metal, not a single drop.

Joseph saw the light beating into the shadows, orange flares carving the blackness. “Are you ready? Close your eyes,” she said as she neared the bedroom. He didn't close them. Aleksandra stood in the door frame carrying a birthday cake on a plate, thirty-four candles like a small bonfire over the white icing that swirled with blue roses. The flames lit her face. “Happy birthday,” she said, bringing the cake toward him. They were both breathing hard, in and out. Her face disappeared behind the runny candles beating long bobbing flames. She placed it under his chin, and he smelled the sweetness of burning sugar.

“Thank you for coming back,” she said.

RAJ STOOD IN the center of the gallery rubbing his hands. Now that he had made the artwork and hung it on the walls, he wasn't quite sure what to do with his hands. He tried shoving them into the pockets of his pants, ripping out the thread that had sewn them shut. He tried holding on to an empty plastic cup that cracked down the sides from his grip. He tried pressing them into the eager handshakes of collectors and fellow artists who offered compliments like “masterful,” “seriously moving,” or “what a beautiful testament to your sister.”

His gallerist, Mirabelle Petz, overdressed in a black vicuña gown, was busy distributing drinks and angry glances to the loud, drunk twenty-year-olds who had descended on the Thursday night opening. She looked over at him onerously, although he knew that it was part of her business to keep the young entertained and amazed. He returned her look with a frazzled smile. The truth was he was relieved that the greasy, pretty Lower East Side contingent had shown up in their dirty sneakers, ripped T-shirts, and proud, boisterous body odor, laughing and scratching what facial hair they could muster, turning spilled beer into slick black scuff marks on
the white polished floor. They broke the melancholy he worried might overtake his first gallery show, which could be accused of indulgently providing the memorial for Madi that he had once promised to hold for her in New York.

In the bright warehouse space, twenty photographs of his sister, each a foot high and framed in black, hung in a square on the far white wall. A few older couples stood in front of the portraits, pointing out details in her face as if they were tracing their fingers over road maps for the fastest route through difficult terrain. Raj studied the shots taken not even a month ago in his studio, each one a different version of his sister staring into the lens, self-consciously sucking in her cheeks, carefully plumping her upper lip, concentrating all of her efforts on her forehead to ease the wrinkles. Twenty Madis looked out at him, so alive and loving and still asking him to go to India with her and ridiculing their self-pitying parents and trying to make sense of the fact that neither one of them had managed a successful romance. Twenty unblinking, breathing visitations of a woman whom he had loved most and lost the fastest, blind to the terrible event to come, but now, for the month-long run of the exhibit, staring across the room at what lay only days ahead of her, cutting all of her hours into unfinished things. Raj turned his head 180 degrees to catch a view of the opposite wall. Blown up so huge that the colors were a pixilated patchwork of sunburst reds and concrete grays was the cell phone picture that Cecile Dozol had inadvertently captured of his sister dying in the street. The single photograph papered the entire wall, and to stand inches in front of it was to see only the pop abstraction of digital bleeps. The way to make out Madi's body in her red sari on the wet cement and the blue car speeding down the street was to see it from the distance that the twenty Madis did, from the viewpoint of the only woman who could not witness how her own life had ended. Below the giant cell-phone picture, a humming fluorescent sign spelled out KEEP GOING in white cursive. Raj had chosen that as the name of his show.

The first guests had slowly petered in like morbid curiosity seekers, none of them men or women Raj knew by face, and their frail coughs and whispered voices echoed through the gallery. The
uncertain hush felt like an affront to Madi's memory, as if the larger world had already lost interest in her death. Raj had resigned the work to obscurity in the first hour of the show, but soon the small pools of visitors collected into a current that spilled from the door until Raj couldn't walk three feet without jostling into someone. He smiled, nodded, and kneaded his hands nervously. Right now it wasn't the photographs that worried him. It was the large, glass bell jar placed in the center of room, the only piece of sculpture standing midway between the competing walls. Inside the bell jar, hundreds of houseflies scrambled over each other, their red eyes bloated like gas masks, their silver-green wings fluttering against the cylinder walls. They gleamed like freshly poured blacktop, and visitors stepped cautiously around it. Raj was uneasy about this macabre inclusion, causing him to rub his hands more furiously. He had improvised the insects in the transparent container to fill the air and unite all of the dead white space that floated around the photographs. It was a testament to his earlier attempts to reveal the living, breathing traces in cold architecture, but, of course, there was no denying the fact that the flies were instruments of death. At exactly 8 PM tonight, he would lift the glass top to infest Mirabelle's warehouse space with a dark pestilence swarming in every direction.

Mirabelle had nearly vomited at the proposal—not in
her
gallery. But a second later her hazel eyes lit up with entrepreneurial glee, imagining the placement they would get in the papers for such a feat. Then she checked herself to fall in league with art-world solemnity. Only now, standing on the sidelines of his own opening, did Raj worry that the sculpture, like a grisly circus spectacle, cheapened the portraits of his sister.

Raj combed his shaky fingers through his hair. He nodded appreciatively at the compliments given by guests, avoided questions about his sister and his family, and accepted business cards that were misplaced forever inside the pockets of his suit. Standing by himself at the reception desk, he wished Del had not decided to return home to change. She had refused his conviction that her T-shirt and jeans were appropriate attire for his first opening. His eyes skirted the crowd. He wondered what was keeping her. Del was the only person
who would understand what the work on the walls really meant to him.

They had woken late that morning in bed, his arms roped around her naked body. In that first moment of blunt surprise that she was lying next to him, Raj felt happier than he ever expected he could. The sunlight poured across the pocked plaster walls, motors wailed down the Westside Highway, and Del's back rose and sank with each sleeping breath.
People change
, he thought.
When they get older, they do. They get weaker because they understand the stakes.
He realized that morning that it was possible to reclaim someone counted as lost. When she finally woke, raising her arms in a stretch and smiling back at him on the other end of the pillow, he wasted no time in pledging his love. He told her he didn't care that she was married. He knew from the first day she told him that it had only been for a green card. He told her that she could remain with her husband until her citizenship was arranged—people did it all the time, stayed married and divorced when the papers were signed. He'd wait for her. Then he'd marry her himself if he could. Del wiped the tears from her eyes and stopped his frantic declarations with a palm against his chest.