Lightning People (55 page)

Raj understood that if he fell now there would be no woman with a spare set of keys to march down the hallway and entreat him back into the world. He'd have to tread very carefully from here out. Mirabelle Petz had called a week prior with a bleak report. The art wasn't selling. It had merited a glowing paragraph review in
The New York Times
and a few prospects from European curators who were hoping he might reenact the interactive fly performance, preferably without the accompanying portraits. Collectors didn't want dead bodies piling up in their living rooms. It didn't take much convincing to persuade Mirabelle not to add his name to the stable of artists on her website.

He had become a relatively solvent man from his sister's inheritance. He had the money now to do anything, go anywhere. He could board planes and pit stop around continents like he had once done mercilessly as a freelance photographer. He considered his options as he paced the studio floor and climbed across his mattress, burying his head in a pillow. One morning, lying in bed with the newspaper, he found an article on the national elections in India one year away. Manmohan Singh would be up for reelection as prime minister, and grassroot politicos of every caste were vying to win the hot seat of the biggest democracy on earth. A band of rebel Maoists was threatening to chop the hands off of anyone who voted and machine-gun through the flamboyant fabrics that covered the poll booths. The morning he had turned thirty, Raj had hallucinated heaving, restless crowds. He had chosen to photograph bare modernist rooms but the crowds
waited in the very country Madi had loved. He cut the article out and tacked it to his wall. One year from now, maybe he would go. He would take pictures of the voters in all seven territories gathering to cast their straws on the future of their warring, religion-whipped, atomic republic. He would do so without interfering, a mere foreigner capturing the country where his father had been born through the lens of his camera. Maybe he would even travel to Punjab and surprise his father with a call.
You'll never guess where I am
.

The afternoon sun folded in arcs across his walls. Night revived them in trailing headlights. Morning faded the walls white. He stared out of his window at the Hudson River, which licked the sides of ferries and sailboats. He mixed sour milk with the last of his granola and spooned it into his mouth as he sat on his stool, rocking in semicircles with his bare feet. He thought of Del but not as often. He remembered the last moment of seeing her in the elevator, and part of him wished he had fallen to that superior cliché of romance by saying, “I hope you find what you're looking for.” Of course, that wasn't really the truth. He hoped she'd realize the value of what she left behind. He wondered if she had finally been granted her green card and if that had satisfied her into fondness for the man she had married. Or had she already moved out on him? He considered sending one of Madi's portraits over as a present, but no one needed to be reminded of the ghosts that haunted them. The twenty portraits were stacked in his studio, covered in brown packaging paper.

The light bouncing off the river aggravated his eyes. He placed the bowl on his desk and walked to the window to pull the chain on the blinds.

Raj knew he should put on his shoes and leave his apartment. He should will a habit out of the sun and the restless pedestrians and the fluting breeze drifting off the Hudson River chop. He should bring his camera out with him to begin a new series of photographs. But his muscles froze at the very idea of opening his front door. It would all be there waiting for him, a crowd outside his very window, as it always had been.

Sweeping the shredded quilt over his shoulders, Raj climbed into the darkness of his bed.

JOSEPH AND DEL created two mountains in their living room. One small pile—books and sweaters, photographs and record albums—was devoted to items to take. The more impressive range, consisting of furniture, the stereo, lamps, and thick winter jackets, climbed toward the ceiling as a chaotic whirlpool of possessions they would not need in Greece. Joseph worked diligently at stripping and disassembling the Gramercy apartment, his skin drenched in sweat from the fever that still clung to him. He had not been able to shake that last symptom of his late summer sickness, but even in delirium, he taped up boxes and cleared shelves. He wanted to prove to Del that his body had been delivered back to health. He wanted her to believe him strong enough to make the trip. She watched from the sidelines, folding clothes neatly into her luggage. Even though they were leaving, there was meaning to the boxes they filled for Amorgos, his stuff and hers mixing in the messy mergers she had once envisioned for them inside these walls. She had already phoned Frank Warren, Esq., to let him know that they no longer needed his services.

His fever intensified at night, warping his dreams into hallucinations of his mother, so he tried not to sleep. He stared out the
window from the bed, the single square in the apartment not given over to packing. Any doubt Joseph had about going with her only rose in the middle of the night. The darkness covered the city and then the city ate through that darkness with a radiation visible from outer space. That was the vision of New York Joseph stored in his head like a postcard. What happened here? The answer was everything, and he'd miss that vast proposition. But he pressed his wet body against Del, and the sacrifice became small in comparison.

The evening before they were scheduled to fly out of JFK, a storm ripped across the island. Rain swelled the streets and flooded the storm drains. Water splattered on the wood floor from the open windows. Red siren lights bled through the gray air as ambulances sped toward emergencies. Del brought up the last batch of mail from the downstairs box. Only one piece was addressed to Joseph, a large manila envelope scrawled in sloppy print. He opened it against the windowsill, and his eyes scanned the name of Aleksandra Andrews on a series of police files. Joseph flipped through the stapled pages, testimony briefs, evidence inventories, and photocopies of typed procedurals, all indicating that Aleksandra had been the prime suspect in the murder of her husband. “She wore rubber dish gloves, which later could not be recovered. Consequently she passed a forensic paraffin test on both hands. Fresh mud on boots suggests recent activity. Refuses lie detector. See defense sequester.” Joseph slapped the papers against his chest and studied the envelope but found no return address, only the fact that it had been mailed in New York. So she had killed him all along, he thought. The memory of him lying in bed next to her dressed in Ray Andrews's suit sent a chill racing through his arms.

Joseph shoved the papers into the envelope, and he couldn't help feeling thankful to the anonymous sender. If he held any last doubt about leaving, this final discovery steadied his resolve. Maybe Aleksandra had mailed it to him as her way of saying good-bye, just as she had mailed that ridiculous letter to herself to convince him once to stay. In either case, he had spent too much time in this city mixing with the wounded and the deranged, too much time dressed as other men. Tomorrow he would be on a new island.

Del eyed him nervously from the pile of clothes in the middle of the room.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said, as he tossed the envelope on the bed. “Another thing to get rid of.” He ran to her and wrapped his arms around her waist. He whispered against her ear. “I can't wait to leave and live around absolute strangers.”

She pulled him softly back with her hands. He knew that Del was still trying to come to peace with him, as if he had cleared all but one last hurdle that prevented her from dissolving into him.

“I have to confess something to you,” she said, staring up. “I never actually told my parents that we got married.”

“So they don't know I'm coming.”

“Not yet,” she said. “I tried to tell them but I didn't know how. I'm their only daughter, you see. They wouldn't have forgiven me if I'd gotten married without them there to witness it.”

Joseph laughed and nodded his head. They could forgive each other for their families. “It's fine. We don't have to tell them. We can do it again.”

Del burrowed through the remaining clothes yet to be packed and yanked out a yellow rain slicker, which she drew around her shoulders.

“Last shopping trip,” she told him. “I'm going to the pharmacy to buy a few things.”

He tried to grab her wrist but she was too fast, darting for her keys on the dresser.

“Can't you just wait until we get there?”

“Joe, I don't think you realize how small Amorgos is. They barely stock enough soap for the two thousand Greeks who live there. You have to smuggle the quality American stuff in. Perfume, tobacco, toothpaste.”

She waved a hand and stumbled down the hallway. Joseph walked into the bedroom and pulled the metal box from under the mattress. He placed it on top of the envelope on the bed. Two last items to get rid of. Two pieces of a puzzle that no longer completed his picture or any other. He opened the box and removed his father's teeth. Then he
turned to the window, lifting the glass and gathering the diamond security grate at its hinges. He climbed out on the fire escape. Drops of rain spiked on the rusted bars. As he scaled the slippery metal steps, clouds of brick dust erupted from the scaffolding.

The rain slowed as he ascended to the roof but he was already drenched. Joseph took off his shirt and tugged his jeans to keep them from sticking to his legs. His feet were black from tar, and he jumped up and down as he waited, bouncing on his tiptoes. He could hear the rumbling, the shake in the sky like a jet passing low through the cloud cover. Up here it was possible to feel the ache of the storm, the physical desire to make contact with the city. The weather had come in from the Midwestern plains. Yesterday it had ripped through the Ohio Valley and had followed its sidewinding meteorological path through the flats of Pennsylvania, mowing down trees and upending trailers, before making its way into Manhattan—the last shelf of land before the ocean.

He saw the first strike, a narrow white tracer that forked like a tree root and evaporated. He jammed his fists straight up, taking to the airwaves. He was young and getting older, and the blood was pulling through his capillaries. When a second bolt of lightning spliced a rooftop farther south, shooting off sparks of singed iron, he screamed.
That was more like it. Make some noise
. He had been in bed so long, he never wanted to lie down again. He had wasted too much time waiting for the worst, pushing his body toward its own extinction. The lightning bolted in twos and threes, trying desperately to touch something that could take it. Every building was like a willing wire, every spire and antenna. The whole city was a conductor.

Soon he wouldn't be here anymore, he'd be gone, way east or west, farther away than he had ever been in his life, a tropical island he couldn't locate on a globe. He'd go with her because Del was the future, and a future was a place he could now imagine. Maybe he'd even take her name. He'd drop Guiteau like unwanted cargo into the Atlantic along the way. Joseph tried to stretch his body as long as his muscles could go.

The storm was running out to sea. The lightning tore through the clouds, whitening the city like an X-ray. The storm was losing
its chance to correct the imbalance, to strike and settle an aching debt. The wind slipped through his armpits and over his stomach. He pulled the teeth one by one from their metal bridge and, in one quick toss, threw them as far as he could over the skyline, until they disappeared into the night. Towers blinked red to warn planes. Red signs flickered in the streets. Red glazed the puddles on the rooftop. Manhattan waited and continued to wait.

He would not think about the past anymore. That was his only promise. There was an old Cincinnati joke that went as follows: If the world blew up, Ohio would find out about it two years later. Deeming the news too distressing, they'd quickly change the channel. In that admission of willful ignorance, Joseph thought, there was a certain hopefulness, a protest against oblivion. It was enough.

Joseph climbed down the fire escape and crawled through the window. He was eager to see Del's island, where she had warned him only eight people spoke about eight words of English. That would do for him. Last night, she had drawn Amorgos across his back with her fingertips. “And here's the beach, and there's the goat hill, and that's the church with its ugly goat bells. And here's where my parents live.” She had told him what the weather in Amorgos was like. Almost like New York, she said, in its seasons. But softer and lighter and yet much more extreme.

He could only listen to her. She would perform all translations for him now.

He put his foot down on the floor and brought his other leg over the sill. His jeans and hair were dripping with rain, and he left his T-shirt in a ball on the fire escape. The charge in the air had come with him into the apartment. He wiped the water from his eyes. In the dim light of the bedroom, he noticed papers strewn across the white mattress, ripped from the staple that bound them together. The envelope lay on the floor. The metal box was open and empty.

He saw her standing in the corner of the bedroom. Her wet body twitched like she was surrounded by hidden enemies, and her eyes rushed around his face as if she were searching for a point of entry.

“What are you doing here?” he yelled, trying to take a step back.

“What do you mean?” she pleaded. “I came because I need help. You're the only one who believes me.”

She pressed her palm against the bedroom door and shut it. The bolt snapped into its lock.

He heard each drip of rain outside the window, each siren, each breath.