Lightning People (50 page)

He dropped the beer bottle. It clanged on the floor and rolled
against his feet. A thousand pixels built color and from color shapes and from shapes the scene of a hit-and-run on a Tribeca street corner, the very picture that Quinn had brandished on a page of the
New York Post
. There it was, blown as huge as a billboard, an advertisement of his own guilt, the woman he struck lying in the street and the blue car with its white bumper sticker speeding not fast enough into the distance. A thousand pixels were washing into his retinas making one clear picture that moved past the moment they constructed: William racing away in the car, turning a corner, foot on the gas, tunnel ahead, police waving his dented, bloodied grill underground until he had come out the other side with everywhere to run. He tried to swallow and checked to make sure no one was watching, connecting the dots just as his eyes were doing now. He turned to look at Del who had led him here to see this, then brought his eyes back on the wall. Nothing added up. His vision swarmed with yellow lights, and he fought to keep from falling to his knees.

He advanced on wobbly legs, one foot in front of the other, until the hit-and-run dissolved into shapes, shapes into colors, colors into a thousand pixels of meaningless raw blue cells and inside of them a man in the driver's seat checking his rear-view mirror to make sure that no one was watching him go. KEEP GOING read the neon sign in front of him. The light whined faintly with electricity.
Keep Going
. He had already done that.

He turned around and saw the face of the woman in twenty black frames, puffy eyes and puffed out lips, like a collection of discarded passport photos, serenely watching as the man behind the wheel now nearly collapsed on the gallery floor.
A setup.
The realization almost came as relief. William's thoughts reassembled in a scrambled dream logic.
They brought me here to catch me. This is a trap.
His eyes quickly scanned the room, scrolling for indications that this entire gallery had been constructed just for him. Yes, everyone looked too clean, too orchestrated in their matching clothes and forgettable smiles like background actors in an elaborate stage set. They were all part of it, each one playing a part, just waiting for the police to materialize out of the white walls or for William to fall on the floor with a confession. He tucked his hands into his armpits to keep them from lashing out.
But not a single person seemed interested in him. Only Madi Singh stared with cool indifference from twenty windows on the opposite wall.

What do you want from me?
William asked her with silent lips. He tried to find the answer in the dead woman's forty eyes, dark little orbs pinpricked with a camera flash. What could he do now but beg her for forgiveness?
I'm sorry
. He wanted to yell that through the room.
My life was ruined too. I'm sorry. Forgive me and leave me the fuck alone.

Forty black eyes aimed directly at his forehead.
Too late for that
, she seemed to reply, half-smiling, half-not. William's knees lurched as he tried to move them toward the door. He needed to get out, to run until he was out of Chelsea, off this island, gone from the entire state, the whole eastern seaboard far behind him, never to come back. He should have done that in the first place. That's when William started screaming at the top of his lungs.

Flies swept over him, a hundred maggots burying into his hair and skin. Flies sense rot hidden underneath the flesh, and they were sticking to his face and neck. He screamed through his teeth to keep the insects from slipping down his throat. He slapped his arms and stomach as the flies covered his fingers like chain mail. She had brought this on him. Right here, next to the photo of his crime, he could actually believe that. He imagined them pouring from her eyes, nose, ears, and mouth.

William wasn't the only person screaming in the gallery. But he was the only one who suddenly believed in divine retribution. He begged for help, “God, someone, please,” and no one in the gallery bothered to watch him as he fell.

 

WILLIAM SLAMMED HIS shoulder against the glass door and burst out onto the sidewalk. He ran blindly, knocking into a woman, and then twisted around as he fell into the street. He landed on his side, his hands scraping against the cement. He lay there for a minute against the concrete, still flinching from the flies as if expecting more to descend on him.

“Are you alright?” the woman asked. Her fingers gently touched his neck. He looked up with his hands guarding his face and found
worried, mascaraed eyes. William glanced around and noticed guests from the gallery assembling on the sidewalk, choking with disgust and laughing as they rubbed their arms and legs. His heart beat erratically under his sweaty shirt, but he slowly realized that the flies had not been a figment of his imagination. He lifted himself onto the curb, and the young woman stood over him with wisps of brown hair falling across her face.

William pinched the tears in his eyes. Her long red lips opened to expose twisted yellow teeth, which bit down decisively on a cigarette. She cupped a lighter, and the flame softened her skin. He felt the jerk of beauty, that familiar wrench to the gut when being in the presence of someone astonishingly beautiful. It was stabbing William even as his brain was still busy trying to make sense of the moment the world opened and flies shot out to swallow him. She wore a black leather jacket, and her bare legs traveled up to a tight, short skirt that, from his angle, barely covered her underwear.

“No, I'm not alright,” he managed, then burst into a laugh, hiccupping as he wheeled backward on the sidewalk. “I really wasn't. But I guess I am now.” His hands were raw from the concrete, and they stung when he pushed himself upright again.

“What's your name?” she asked. It took him a second to remember it.

“William,” he replied.

“William,” she repeated in the foreign elongation of vowels. She pulled her skirt farther down her thighs. “With pleasure. I'm Cecile. They were just flies, you know. Do you always lose your mind like that?”

“Lately,” he said as he studied her. He recognized her. She was a model, maybe, or an actress, or some other scarce visitation circled in a halo from the streetlight behind her. Anything was possible now. He would take anything as long as he was free from ever stepping foot in that gallery, from ever looking at Madi Singh in the face. “The bugs were all over me,” he said, rubbing his arms. “From that woman in there.”

“Ah, yes, Raj's sister,” she surmised with quiet reverence. “Are you a friend of his?”

“A friend of a friend,” he said. “It's too awful. I've got to get out of here. I can't go back in there again.”

“Yes, it's so sad,” she whispered, examining his face and finding something that she liked in it. Her eyes narrowed. She shook her head, as if simultaneously admonishing and celebrating her own impulsiveness, and reached her hand out to him. “Well, William, if you are a friend of Raj's, then why don't you come along with me. I have a car waiting. We go to a party at a friend's place. Just try not to fall over, okay?”

Before William could even comprehend his deliverance from the gutter outside the gallery into the arms of Cecile Dozol, he found himself in the backseat of a black Range Rover, being driven by a man who introduced himself as Cecile's bodyguard. As they pulled away, William spotted Del walking down the street with the olive-skinned man she had kissed in the gallery. He felt the jab of the envelope on his stomach as he relaxed into the leather seat. He didn't care anymore about Del or Joseph. He didn't want to remember anything, no more visitations, no more photographs or newspapers or a body hanging from a sheet yet to be discovered in a cottage ten blocks south. William had no more energy to devote to those crimes. He let them go as easily as he released the grip of his fingers. He turned his mind to Cecile Dozol, as he watched the lights of the city blur through the tinted windows. The dead were gone, at least for now. He felt the lightness of being driven, no longer at the wheel, carried off by strangers with smooth shock absorbers and beautiful, beckoning faces. The Range Rover drove east. Cecile's bodyguard watched him distrustfully in the rearview mirror, and Cecile smiled at every green light.

IMITATION WAS A Darwinist trick to ensure survival. Western diamondbacks were the snakes responsible for the most fatalities in North America, and their diamond coats and maraca rattles warned anyone who got close exactly what kind of bite to expect. But when Del returned to the Gramercy apartment the morning after Joseph's birthday, she wasn't thinking about rattlers. She was taking lessons from the non-venomous bull snake two cases down in the exhibition hall at the zoo. The bull snake capitalized on its superficial similarity to the diamondback, duplicating its dorsal patterning, mimicking the same strike posture, even manufacturing a hissing sound that impersonated the percussion of the rattle. Bull snakes were method actors, all color and no bite. Joseph was an actor. Imitation as survival.

She had not expected nearly three months into her marriage to fall back in love with Raj. But the world had changed since the morning of June 14, the ground had come unmoored, and the people she had loved most had been swallowed in its fissures. Abrams phoned her on her walk east to ask her why she had not reported to work for the last two days. Then he told her not to bother showing up for her last week of employment. “You've disappointed us,” he said sternly
before informing her that he had already found her replacement. The only thing keeping her in the country was a marriage almost three months old and a meeting scheduled for December 1 at Immigration and Naturalization Services.

As she steadied her key in the building door, she understood that imitation was her only possibility for remaining in New York. She had made her bed, so far from the country gilded on her passport and stamped across her face, and now she would have to continue making it, pretending love and happiness for total strangers, filling photo albums with pictures that told of youthful devotion, which did not have their basis in reality. Maybe Joseph would understand. He must see how far they had fallen out of each other's reach. He would understand, and they could continue on toward the day of that scheduled interview, two actors who loved each other but not enough to believe their parts.

She wanted to blame him. How much easier to walk in and accuse him of wrecking their marriage with some excuse about not being the man she thought he was. But Del couldn't pinpoint any moment that Joseph had proven to be anyone other than who he claimed: quiet and compliant, willing to let her live her life however she wanted, asking for so little that she had been left needing someone who asked her for so much.
What about my happiness?
she wanted to scream at him as she climbed the steps to the apartment, her fingers trembling over the railing. Her happiness—she suddenly realized how hollow that demand was, as if she could claim it as an inalienable right. What were her rights in this country? She had somehow been led to believe that happiness was promised here more than anywhere else.

She let herself in and tiptoed down the hallway. She found Joseph in bed, his skin still torched with a fever, his eyes glassy but staring up at her tenderly as she hooked her purse on the doorknob. She wished she had kept it in her hands. They were shaking uncontrollably. Would this be the last time? The last walk down the hallway, the last keys placed on the counter, the last view of the windows leaking their slanted Twenty-Second-Street light, the last glimmer of a husband who still did not know that another man stood in his place?

“I'm sorry I missed your birthday,” she said, sitting down on the edge of the bed. She placed her hand on his arm. Touching Joseph was a habit, and she quickly pulled her hand back. Joseph nodded his head as if he hadn't expected her to remember. He didn't ask where she had been or why she was wearing a red dress that indicated a life already being lived beyond the confines of this bed. She stared into the corner of the room, as he pressed his fingers on her knee to bring her eyes back to him. When she finally relented, she was startled by how forcefully he looked at her. The last blue eyes. The last time they searched for her in their bedroom.

“There are things I haven't told you,” he said, as he propped himself up against the wall. “I haven't been honest with you.”

We haven't been honest with each other
, she wanted to reply.

“There is something I kept from you because I didn't want to admit it. I was afraid what it would sound like. I didn't want to tell it to myself.”

Here it comes, she thought, the moment of confession. I lied, you lied, we married too fast and resented each other for that decision. She almost wished they could skip over the details and admit defeat without having to bare their worst selves.

“Are you ready to listen?” he asked.

She rolled a cigarette and lit it. It amazed her as the moment of ending approached how much love came pouring back in—almost enough to repair the break. Almost. Like the first days of warm weather arriving in late winter, the sun glassing the city and making everyone believe the worst weather was behind them, just before a new bank of storms chartered east and paved the streets in ice.

“Joe,” she sighed in resignation. “You can tell me anything.”

 

IN THE TIME-SAVING unions of City Hall, there was no clause for sickness and health. In fact, there were no promises offered at all, no end to loneliness, no eternal blessing to remain devoted as long as you both shall live, no richer or poorer, or even, amid the mind-absorbing bureaucracy of paperwork and money orders, a scant mention of love. So what exactly had Del and Joseph promised to be for each other that June morning almost three months ago? If it
had only been about a green card, why the blue silk dress and the pinstripe suit and the fight about riding the subway home and the ancient Greek recipe and the anxious twisting of rings? Was that simply to make the deception easier to swallow? They had promised each other so little. They had only said
I do
to the lawfulness of husband and wife
. I do. I don't now. I did once, maybe.