Lightning People (6 page)

Joseph's mother thought years could predict what was to come. Joseph had left Cincinnati to get away from those voices predicting worst-case scenarios. But those frightening possibilities she had force-fed him too early started to accelerate in his mind until he couldn't outpace them, even in this city, hundreds of miles and years beyond her reach. That's when he started sitting in on these subterranean gatherings to listen to other men and women whose lives had been picked apart by questions that could only be answered by turning every fact upside down.

Joseph had never told Del how many hours he clocked listening to conspiracies. Del was not the sort of woman to take insanity with appreciation. She might have found the normalcy of these conspiracy theory regulars even more threatening: middle-aged men and women dressed in mismatched sweat suits with greasy hair, clinging to their notebooks and watching from their corners with squinted eyes as if badly in need of prescription glasses. A few college students—arrogant, supple faces with vehement nods that they had learned to perform in their undergraduate seminars—filled out the number. Joseph figured that a few decades ago this faction could have taken to the streets in a Vietnam protest but now existed mostly in the freefall of Internet space, typing their dissent and waiting to voice
their exposures in secret unrecorded meetings where full names were not allowed.

Tobias had begun as he always did. “We are a small group willing to ask questions,” he said. “There are some new faces here, and we must try to be welcoming. When so few in the American population are willing to ask questions and remember the answers supplied, we are thankful to gain participants. That said—”

“We don't want strangers sniffing around for trouble,” Tobias's ruddy-faced second-in-command interjected. He went by the code name Gorilla, and dense black hair covered his body where his denim overalls did not. “No tape recorders. No cameras. No last names.”

The group nodded with complying smiles.

“Asking questions can be dangerous,” Tobias continued. “Unfortunately, in this time where identifying real from unreal is so crucial and explosive, we are forced to keep ourselves far from direct sunlight. Personal privacy is a necessary safety measure for public examination.”

Rose had waited a good ten minutes to tell her Jimmy Carter story, during which Gorilla reported at length his six-year research into the morning of 9/11. He counted the exact number of Arabowned newsstands that had been inexplicably closed in the hours before the attack and compared it to the number of Jewish-owned stores in the Financial District that had also been shuttered (side note: three gay video stores in the West Village, forming a tight geometric triangle, had all mysteriously been closed that morning). Defeated by the outcome, which suggested that neither camp knew an attack was imminent, Gorilla explained that he was now accumulating new statistics on why certain flights from JFK to various South American capitals had been heavily booked in the weeks before the collapse. “One name. Chavez. And his Bohemian Grove of capitalist pseudo-socialist Latin leaders sitting on their own oil reserves, happy to see blowout in the Middle East. No one has bothered to look in that direction yet.”

Tobias scratched his chin despondently, sensing derision in his own derision camp. “That's an interesting perspective. But please do not stop thinking about an inside job. I'm convinced about the
smoke clouds in the lower part of the tower. I'm convinced about explosive devices. Does anyone have any new findings on the engineering studies coming out of MIT?”

The mantra of prisonersofearth was that the U.S. government had planned the attacks. The White House saw those two New York towers as a tuning fork that needed to be struck in order to bring the entire country in key—and, of course, that key was a hymn of patriotism disguised to start new wars. Joseph heard many skeptics joke behind Tobias's back that it was just like the bloated American ego to try to take credit for even its own national disasters. But Tobias wouldn't hear any of it. The problem with Rose's story, Joseph realized, was that it pulled focus away from 9/11, the massive expanding subject that had recharged the conspiracy community and shelved all tangled, over-farmed theories on Kennedy, Vietnam, and even the New World Order as tired riddles no longer worth dissection unless they pointed to that bright September morning. Tobias clearly did not want to get bogged down with Kissinger. But the Reagan-Iran nexus, in such little circulation and thus as rare as two-dollar bills, suddenly caused a wave of alert voices and craning necks among the prisonersofearth.

“It brings up a good point,” said a woman sitting just behind Rose whom Joseph hadn't noticed before. “Isn't there talk that Ahmadinejad was a leader of the radicals who held those Americans hostage in 1979? If he had an underground connection with Bush Senior—”

“Bullshit,” Tobias wheezed, glowering angrily at this unfamiliar visitor. “We're getting off point here.”

“That's hardly off point,” the young man in the Princeton sweatshirt argued, emboldened by another voice in the wilderness. “If we've had secret deals with Iran in the past, and we have, then it could be said our sworn enemies could actually still be in the government's corner. I've seen things on the Web, listings of dates and locations where members of the president's cabinet have been in the same hotels in Madrid and Prague at precisely the same time as key foreign ministers in our Axis of Evil. That's a mighty fine coincidence.”

“Did you bring that information with you?”

“No . . . I, uh, just read it online somewhere.”

Tobias slammed his foot against the concrete floor and launched into his warning about the duplicity of coincidence. “I don't give a fuck about coincidences unless they lead us to something real. The history of the world is draped in coincidence. That is what separates the brothers and sisters of prisonersofearth from the other mind jockeys trying to discredit the movement with unverified information. Do I have to spell it out for you? We must remain skeptical jurists. No, we must take every report and read it as if it were a lawsuit filed against us. This and only this is the way to escape the prison.”

Joseph stopped listening. He was watching the newcomer behind Rose's shoulder who had spoken once, clearing the graying blond hair from her face before retreating back into its shadows. Her features were small and fragile, with traces of makeup carefully applied to preserve the beauty that must have come to her naturally in youth. Not so unlike his mother, he thought, who had cut such a striking, fastidious figure in the hallways of the Catholic college where she taught—her own red lips and black eyes drawn with a surgeon's precision amid her straight brown hair—that it took the deans far too long to suspect the fanatical lessons she was bestowing on her students. Joseph could see a fitted beige suit coat and, from behind Rose's legs, two high heels that didn't read of nights spent in a cramped tenement apartment memorizing heretical plots by disgraced history professors. The woman put her fingers to her eyelids as if they ached from an earlier strain. A small wine-stain birthmark peeked from under the collar of her shirt when she stretched her neck. She had the polish of money and social obligations. When she opened her eyes, Joseph tried to smile at her, lifting his eyebrows in empathy, but by then Tobias had stormed from his seat and everyone was getting up to leave. Joseph grabbed his bag, tripping over the metal chairs in his path, and saw the woman tossing a quilted black purse over her left shoulder. He felt some urge to follow her, maybe even introduce himself or at least watch her slip into the crowds that ascended up Broadway in the rush for the subway. She looked too sane to be here and maybe also in some other part of the city her life was simple and complete. Her presence made the group seem redeemable and also, by comparison, less so.

He scrambled around the side table to make a break for the door, pushing by one of the college students who gathered leftover coffee cups into a ziploc bag. At the end of the table, he found a slender white hand covered in freckles opening to meet him. Disappointingly, the hand belonged to Rose.

“You were staring at me,” she said, as she grabbed Joseph's fingers tightly and held on to his thumb. He didn't know how to tell her that he was looking behind her. “I appreciate you supporting me like that. Tobias can be terribly cruel, and I wouldn't come here at all if he weren't also so terrifyingly correct. But you know what I mean. I've seen you here. A few times.”

“Nice to meet you,” he said, forcing a smile while once again looking past her at the woman in the beige jacket who was now retreating into the hall.

“He's really good about the pharmaceutical companies, too bad we didn't get to them. I told him he should write a book. He says they'd try to kill him if he ever published anything they could trace.”

He sighed and looked down at her, the poor hopeless woman with yellow teeth and corkscrewed hair going in every direction but down. She wore a pilled wool pullover, which left her skin flushed. She smelled of the smoke that clings to bedsheets.

“What brings you here?” she asked.

“Curiosity.”

She shook her head.

“You don't have to lie to me. Something must have spooked you. Do you have a relative in the military? Did you meet someone on the roof of your building one night who said they were just fixing the cable? No one comes to these things, unless they've touched something invisible.” She coughed and wiped her mouth. “Do you know what that feels like? To touch something invisible?”

“I really have to run,” Joseph said with a faded smile. “My friend's outside.”

“It feels like teeth on the back of your neck.”

He glanced again at the doorway, disappointed to find no trace of the woman lingering behind. He now understood the real danger of these meetings. Lonely people came to them.

“So, what's your name, if you don't mind?” she asked coyly. He might have read her eagerness as flirtation in any other environment than this one. “Unlike Tobias, I don't think strangers tell better secrets.”

“My name?” he replied, stalling.

“Yes. I'm Rose Cherami.”

He paused as she waited expectantly.

“William Asternathy,” Joseph said, realizing how much William would detest counting himself among the lost company of prisonersofearth. But it was the first name that came to his lips. The lights went dark in the basement conference room, and Joseph scrambled past her, escaping up the stairs to the street. He hailed a cab and gave his address, watching the blurred sidewalk as the car traveled south into the quiet sanctuary of the Village. He could be Joseph again now, the simpler version, an actor with nothing to hide.

GOOGLE DELPHINE KOUSAVOS. An Internet examination of her life comes down to three entries. One cites her and Madi attending an alumni cocktail reception together two years ago at Columbia's Schermerhorn Hall in the Class of 1997 “What Are You Lions Up To?” pages. Another leads to a picture of her with Joseph at the opening of an independent film festival in Tribeca. It's not a bad photo either. She's standing next to Joseph in a cream Balenciaga dress with beige leather heels that elongate her legs, and her skin is tan from an afternoon lying in the Central Park sun. She's not really the focus of that photograph, Joseph is, stopping in front of the flurry of cameras in the lull of far more famous arrivals. Isolate Delphine Kousavos's career hits, and she appears on Google once. She's listed under the junior staff for the Bronx Reptile Department, a title from which she was promoted a year ago to “staff,” although it had yet to be acknowledged on the zoo's “About Us” pages. Del often used the lab's communal computer on her lunch breaks to type in the names of lost friends and previous coworkers to find some clue of where their lives had taken them. But she sincerely hoped that no one from her past bothered to hunt for her name in return. Forget Google, she
finally decided. Who cares about immortality in Internet space? Del refused to waste her free hours searching for herself anymore.

She usually spent her lunch hour out of the cafeteria, preferring the luxurious frostbitten rooms of the “Animals of the Antarctic” exhibition. She waited the hour in the shadows, opposite the penguins mating on plastic ice floes and a baby elephant seal resting his chin on a pile of fish carcasses. Before the exhibition opened, even before the cooling systems had been turned on high, she enjoyed watching the set designers reconstruct the cold barren arctic in silver paints and mesh netting. Assembled out of high-school art supplies, this brutal Ice Age gave her a moment of peace as if she had temporarily slipped beyond the reaches of the clock and its slow count to closing time.

Del had never ridden the African Safari Train that threaded the entire geography of the zoo, but she knew enough about the institution to promise, after her first month there, that she would not remain bound by a working visa and a critically low paycheck for more than a year. “I know when I'm being taken for slave labor,” she had confided to a colleague from Louisiana who was the department's authority on water moccasins. Her friend eventually quit after being bitten not by a snake but by an inner city youth caught spitting in the crocodile pond. That was seven years ago, and Del was still in the same exact place. She had not told her boss, Dr. Abrams, that her visa status had changed in recent days, and he had naturally not noticed the ring. Abrams did not notice how late she stayed at night in the department lab balming the cracked epidermis of a diseased corn snake named Welbutrin. In fact, all Abrams ever noticed besides her thighs and breasts was the disproportionate amount of time she spent mothering the rattlesnakes.