Lightning People (56 page)

As she reached her arm toward him, he told her that he didn't believe her.

“What do you believe then?” Aleksandra asked him.

I'm completely out of stories
, he thought.
It's over, and I have no more stories to tell.

WINTER IN AMORGOS was brutal. Harsh winds tore across the island, slapping every shutter, picking up outdoor furniture and tossing it miles out to sea, sliding through clothes to look for loose sails that pushed people battling for foothold toward cliff edges. When spring finally arrived, purple anemones and flowering sage burst from plant boxes, and the smells of mint and rosemary drifted down from the mountains. Goat bells clanged day and night, and on Sundays church bells rang more hurriedly as the thick-ankled women made a moaning procession toward mass.

Del moved around the house with slow, lumbering steps. She surveyed the blue sky over the silver Aegean from the kitchen window and helped her mother skin a rabbit for dinner. The Kousavos house was like all others on the island, a featureless whitewashed slab that burned the retinas to blindness. Her childhood bedroom was decorated in inscrutable paper triangles from where her father had clipped her teenage rock posters from its pale yellow walls. On her shelves were some of her old college biology books, creased and dog-eared from the last time she lived at home, twelve years ago now after the death of Dash Winslow. Del could still remember her flight last
September over the Atlantic. She had watched the dark bank of storm clouds recede and the eastern sun break over the ocean. She had trouble remembering so many things lately, particularly English words that she would reach for out of habit—
holster, espionage, ink-jet, electricity
—only to draw her hand back empty. Her doctor said that forgetfulness was normal in her condition and in a few months the fog would lift. She preferred it to remain indefinitely. When she had finally reached the island port, her parents had been waiting. They had not expected Joseph to accompany her and they had not found him running with her into their arms.

Del left her mother with the stew and hobbled out into the front yard. Although it was only April, she felt the first tick of summer in the air. Soon vacationers would invade the island, filling the pebble beaches and dotting the horizon with cruise ships as high as hotels. She had begun counting months last October and she willed a new habit out of counting them with her finger and thumb as a substitute for cigarettes. When her mother caught her behind the smokehouse sneaking a ravenous puff, she flew into a rage. “You cannot think only of yourself, Delphine,” she hollered in Greek. “There are others now.”

Del had no memory of the shot being fired because she hadn't heard it. She was half a block away carrying two plastic pharmacy bags. She didn't see a woman run from the building, although neighbors were later able to describe her. She found Joseph lying in a fetal position on the bed, his eyelids closed like a boy asleep in her absence, a bullet wound blooming from his heart.

She couldn't remember the gun on the floor, but the police said it had been there the whole time. Del had only spoken to Joseph's mother once—a ten-minute conversation by phone where she delivered the news of her son's death. The old woman on the other end of the line hadn't seemed to understand what she was telling her, so Del repeated it several times into the silence of the receiver. Finally a low, steady voice said that she would see to the arrangements. Del hadn't gone to Ohio for the funeral. She wasn't even certain there was a funeral. If there had been one—as it had been with Dash's parents—she wasn't invited. Del felt no need to say good-bye to her husband in that part of the world from which he had wanted so desperately to escape. Still,
it seemed fitting the body she kissed one last time in their apartment found its final resting place in Cincinnati. His future had always been buried there, among his own people, biding their time until his return.

She had been careful not to tell the case detectives that Joseph had predicted his death. They were too busy trying to determine whether his murder had been accidental or premeditated, a distinction lost on her as she sat gathered around the luggage bound for Greece. The neighbors had heard shouts and the sound of a brief struggle. Through William and Janice, the police traced the woman seen fleeing from the building to a room at the Carlyle hotel. They found all of her belongings, but Aleksandra Andrews never went back to claim them. It was as if she disappeared that night out of the horror of what happened, or perhaps she had simply been invented, an emissary from Joseph's nightmare to complete the task of killing him by heart failure at thirty-four.

Goats trailed along the hardened dirt road, and the goat herder whistled at her condition, beating his stick on the ground twice for good luck. Seawater drifted in the air, giving the sense that all objects could be pried loose and washed away in the slow salt winds. Del crossed the road and approached the cliff, where the view encompassed an entire stretch of coastline with its swerving coves and ragged crags jutting roughly into the sky. To walk quickly, Del carried her stomach in her arms. Was it a final betrayal of a widow to wish the father was Raj and not Joseph? In the days after she discovered she was pregnant, she counted months backward and forward as if a different answer could be cleaved from basic math. Del had not become impervious to the superstition of a bloodline. Joseph had fulfilled his own prediction, and she worried the baby growing inside her might also carry that bad inheritance into the channels of its life. Ultimately, there was no question that the child was Joseph's, and she was glad. At night it kicked against its walls and settled when she sang to it. It would arrive any day now, an infant with plenty of room to grow.

She could lose an entire afternoon to patterns. First Dash. Then Joseph. She could trace circles with her foot in the dirt, until one circle perfectly matched another. She could count up the coincidences
that had shaped her years and echoed each death, until they formed a perfect sequence. She could gaze directly at the sun until its outline scorched her eyes and everything she looked at carried that faint red impression. But she preferred to stare out at the stretch of sea, where somewhere, thousands of miles beyond the curve, New York must still exist, and so must the people living in it. She didn't miss it, not more than some jittery, lightning-fast memory of youth.

One day, maybe, she would tell her son about it. Although nothing was decided. On that point, she was convinced.

THIS BOOK WOULD never have been attempted had it not been for a hundred different people, but it surely would never have been completed without the support of a select few. I'd like to thank my agent Bill Clegg for his supreme trust and belief in the book through the wilderness of the middle to the end and back again (and again with expert understanding of characters even at their most irrational); for him, this novel would survive as a flurry of word files on a computer and nothing more. I'd like to thank Denise Oswald for braving lengths and seeing something possible in its lines. Without the support, creative endurance, and perfect ear of my editor Dan Smetanka, this story might have had bite but drawn no believable blood. The entire team at Counterpoint including Charlie Winton has been wonderful at giving a first-time author a first-rate chance. I'd also like to thank particular friends who doubled as tireless champions: Fabiola Beracasa, when introductions were due, Michael Martin for his diligent reading and honest responses, T. Cole Rachel for listening to me whine, Joseph Logan and Kelley Walker for turning their Orient Village home into an erstwhile writer's retreat, Danko & Ana Steiner, George Miscamble, Brian DeGraw for first
alerting me through his art to the strange phenomenon of post-9 /11 lightning-strike deaths, the Bronx Zoo for allowing me to tour its herpetology department and being undeserving of the fictional world I set therein,
Interview Magazine
and
V Magazine
for keeping me employed, Brooke Geehan, and Heather Bollen. I am grateful for the research provided when research was required by the
Economist, Assassination in America
by James McKinley (Harper & Row Publishers),
Rattlesnake: Portrait of a Predator
by Manny Rubio (Smithsonian Institution Press), and a fleet of conspiracy-theory websites that half-convinced me they might be on to something.

I'd also like to specially thank all of my friends in New York City, some still with us, others lost, who stayed up with me well past midnight on so many nights and made me believe I could one day wake up and put the words down on paper. This work is partly dedicated to them.

Copyright © 2011 Christopher Bollen. All rights reserved under

International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bollen, Christopher, 1975–
Lightning people : a novel / Christopher Bollen.
p. cm.

Summary: “Joseph Guiteau is a working actor who moved to New York to escape a tragic family history in the Midwest. Wandering through a city transformed by the attacks of September 2001, he frequents gatherings of conspiracy groups, trying to make sense of world events and his own personal history. Looming over his life is a secret that threatens to undermine his new marriage to Del, a snake expert at a city park, whose work visa is the only thread keeping her from deportation back to her native Greece. The new marriage influences the lives of those around them: William, a dark and troubled actor whose sanity is fading as quickly as his career, leading him to perform increasingly desperate acts; Madi, a young entrepreneur who will have to face the moral complications of a business made successful by the outsourcing of American jobs to India; and her brother Raj, Del‘s former lover, a promising photographer whose work details the empty rooms of an increasingly alienated city. Christopher Bollen‘s first novel captures the atmosphere of anxiety and loss that exists in Manhattan. It is a story of the city itself, and the interconnected lives of those attempting to navigate both Manhattan and their own mortality.”—Provided by publisher.

eISBN : 978-1-593-76463-0

1. Manhattan (New York, N.Y.)—Fiction. 2. September 11 Terrorist Attacks,
2001—Influence—Fiction. 3. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS3602.O6545L54 2011
813'.6—dc22
2011025049

Soft Skull Press
An imprint of COUNTERPOINT
1919 Fifth Street
Berkeley, CA 94710

Distributed by Publishers Group West