Lightning People (16 page)

The cacti that usually guarded the storefront in unwelcoming spikes were gone. The doors didn't budge when William tugged the handle. Caving his hands against the window, he peered into the deserted space. Sunlight spilled across the empty wood floor. He could see all the way to the back room where two sisters should be waiting with their lockbox of cash, but only the bare butcher's table remained.

“Not possible,” he wheezed.

The midget shopkeeper next door shook a spray bottle at him. “They gone. Left.”

“Have they moved? To another location?”

“They close. Gone. What you looking for? You want plants?”

“Clocks?” William replied, about to unzip his bag to show the items weighing on his back—maybe all flower shops in the West Thirties were black-market fronts, maybe all nurseries doubled as antique dealers. But William thought better of it, kicked the door, and stumbled toward Seventh Avenue. He tried to calculate how
much of the money he had saved. The amount did not seem near enough. His stomach lurched as he passed through his least favorite part of town, Herald Square crowded with Macy's shoppers who always looked enraged even as they swarmed the walkways with their bulky department store bags. The soles of his shoes stuck on the concrete in the afternoon heat, and he walked in a daze, only coming alert as he passed beautiful women stepping into idling town cars and young men with cheekbones fluted like architectural eaves and with no doubt dependable erections even after several shots of tequila. They reawakened him the same way someone lost in a daydream was snapped back into reality by sharp spoken words. William used to love New York because of all the forced interactions on the street, the sordid, disparate occupants of the city meeting each other without any defenses, stepping together through their afternoons. Now it seemed as if his eyes were only attuned to those rare inhabitants whose lives were ruled by luxuries he could no longer afford. That was the hell of his psychology lately—the editing down of the world to its most glamorous and irretrievable parts.

When he returned to the apartment, he opened his backpack and repositioned the objects on their shelves, briefly acknowledging their fragile beauty as if for the first time. He stood for a while staring into the silent living room, wondering where Jennifer was and why she hadn't called to tell him when the papers would be signed. He had not made communication either, for fear she would remember that he still took up space in her apartment and would make good on her threat to kick him out. The quiet of the room with its French sofas and slender end tables—all of Jennifer's new money attempts at a WASP pedigree—felt like chaos waiting to break. A joint would have killed the panic, but he resisted the urge to phone his dealer, a headphoned NYU student with a toolbox of small ziplock bags packed with the turbo-hydroponic pot he grew in the neon greenhouse of his closet.

In the evening, when indoor lamps collected their light in faint halos before night finally settled, he considered the one backup he had left. Friends. Friends with money. He still had that to depend on. He dialed Joseph's number.

“It hurts to wait around, so I've decided that I'm going to do it. I'm moving.” William mustered enough enthusiasm to make the statement sound optimistic. The result was that he sounded like he was reading the words. “I truly believe it's the most mature decision to make at this juncture.”

Joseph responded with a shrill whistle.

“Are you sure? I really don't think you've thought this through. I can't believe things won't get better.”

“They will get better. They will when I'm out of town. I don't have much of a choice. I'm getting to a point where I'm out of luck here. Out of options. I sit around all day in my ex-wife's apartment wanting things I no longer have any chance of getting.”

“Maybe you should go in and talk to Janice.”

“I have talked to Janice,” he said furiously. “You don't know how bad it's gotten.”

“Then try something else.”

“It's too late for that, Joe. I've only done one thing for the past ten years. And if I have to submit myself to a day job, I'd rather do it someplace else, where everyone I know can't watch me fail. It's too embarrassing. Oh, people would just love that, wouldn't they? Nothing would make people happier than finding me waiting on them at some shit restaurant.”

“Don't get paranoid. Just calm down. How about we meet for a drink? Hairy Bishop?”

William hadn't meant to say what was running on overdrive through his mind. He wanted to stick to the script of asking Joseph for a loan, but the curiosity got the better of him. “Be honest. Are you getting any work?”

“This isn't a competition,” Joseph replied coldly.

That sealed it. He breathed harshly into the receiver. “I know it's not. I'd be happy if you were getting work,” he lied. “You can be honest.”

“Well, a few commercials maybe. And then there's some kind of project in development. I don't know what will come of it. I'm still deciding.”

William's fingers contracted around the phone in a slow strangle,
and his top teeth dug into their lower orders. It hadn't occurred to him that Joseph's options were so vast that he could actually decide which roles to take.

“Congratulations,” he said. “I don't think I'll get that beer with you.”

“Why not?”

“I've got to plan a good-bye party. One last celebration in this awful apartment that I don't even own. But here's the catch. It's a charity event: Help William Asternathy Get to California. Sounds fun, right? It's a hundred dollars a head and if you can't find it in your heart to pay, then fuck you. Beer will be complimentary, of course.”

“You can't,” Joseph moaned in horror. His friend's innate snobbery always seemed to come alive in moments of William's desperation. “I won't let you. I thought you didn't want to make it clear to everyone how bad off you are. Christ, if you need some money . . . ”

But William couldn't ask now. He couldn't take money from another man who was succeeding precisely where he failed. It was one thing to live off of the cash supplies of rich friends who hadn't earned their wealth and quite another to accept a donation from someone who had beaten him at the game he had played with delusional intensity for the span of his adult life.

“I can take care of myself,” he said. “You just wait for the invitation. Then I'll be out of here, and the whole town will be yours.”

“You're not leaving. You're just upset. This is the only place where you can—” but William hung up before Joseph could finish. It was pure insanity to think that anything would change for him. Insanity was Manhattan at sunrise with barely enough cash to pay the fare home. Insanity was the sunrise beyond that one, and the next, and again one more without a single decision to break the pattern. William walked to the bedroom to go to sleep early. He felt a rush of comfort in realizing that he had at least made a choice.

ALEKSANDRA AND JOSEPH sat on the floor of her hotel room with the lights off, the curtains closed, and the chain engaged on the door. Even in this quiet refuge, she seemed on edge, pausing when she heard footsteps in the hall and periodically turning to stare at the traces of light that broke underneath the curtains. Joseph watched a housefly crawl across the thick carpet, a black zigzag along the knotted threads.

This was their second meeting, arranged again through Janice. Joseph had wanted to ask his agent exactly what Mrs. Andrews had to offer him. But involving Janice now seemed like a betrayal of Aleksandra's trust. When he left the hotel that first afternoon, she had said, “I will explain more the next time you come back. It's hard for me to talk about it. But please, promise to come.” There had been a weight to her eyes, sincere and yet filled with urgent worry, which had forced him to agree.

He waited five days expecting the call, but when it arrived and Janice gave him the time, his stomach dropped, his throat hardened, and he almost decided to cancel. Aleksandra Andrews had something horrible in her life, he could feel it. He knew very well what
the face of a person with a terrible secret looked like. It was the face of someone who does not seem invulnerable to the simple negotiations of a day. He had learned over the years to control that face whenever he encountered it in the mirror.

In the elevator up to her room, he had promised himself to make no promises to Aleksandra Andrews. Just to listen. There was no danger in hearing her out. He calmed himself, exhaling three long breaths outside the door to 706. When he entered, he found her sitting on the floor in the darkness, her knees drawn up to her breasts. The rims of her eyes were swollen, and when Aleksandra first looked up at him, a small tremor shot through her tiny frame, bunching her shoulders and arching her neck. The birthmark disappeared against the redness of her skin. She gave a nervous smile that did not entirely reassure him, but he sat down anyway across from her on the floor. Then she stood up and chained the door.

Joseph asked her straight out, “Why were you at that meeting?” Aleksandra had warned him that it was difficult for her to talk, but she began relating the kind of story that perhaps could only be told to a stranger. Her words weren't the product of memorized recitation. They often swam hurriedly as if trying to grasp the next fragment, then suddenly disintegrating as if she were weighing them for accuracy. She often stopped to bite her upper lip mid-sentence, and in those cracks of silences, it was as if her courage might disappear into them, might just dissolve, leaving Joseph to stare into the shadows her eyes made.

“Our dream came to an end in 2001, or my dream really,” she began. “Because Ray was having nightmares well before that. We were happy once and doing quite well. You see, we were living on electricity. We were getting rich off power. It never occurred to me there was anything wrong in that.”

She stretched the neck of her sweater and rested her fingers on her collarbone. A silver necklace managed to collect some of the scant sunlight and project it into a prism on the ceiling.

“But Ray started waking up in the middle of the night. He'd put his hand over my mouth so tightly I could hardly breathe. He'd say they were out in the bushes. They were coming up the stairs.
I'd ask what he meant, but he'd just start to cry. He said he knew terrible things and no one would let him live with all of these facts in his head. He looked so scared—I mean
scared
like he believed in monsters. Ray was a strong man. You'd never seen anyone so stoic in the twenty-five years we were together. But those nights a little boy woke up who suddenly realized how dark and malicious the world can be. I didn't recognize him. That's when reality hit me. Right there on our bed in Malibu with his hand clamped over my mouth. That's when I knew that Ray was part of it.”

She yanked her fingers from her neck and pet the carpet with slow strokes.

“Your husband was part of what? I don't understand.” He worried his confusion might stop her cold, but she nodded her head as if in agreement.

“When we first married, Ray was in politics. He wanted to become governor, his goal since Stanford. He served as a junior senate assistant lumped down with bills on the California Energy Commission. He hated the work, but like anything, over time, you start to become fascinated with what you're thrown into. Eventually Ray went over to the private sector. This was maybe fifteen years ago. He became a lobbyist for deregulation. He had so much conviction for doing right to the people of California, I don't think he realized at first what was going on. He believed in free market, he believed in the private sector and the drive of competition to provide the cheapest energy to the state. But somewhere, when I wasn't looking, Ray changed. I often think it's ironic that I only started seeing him in the right light when the blackouts hit the state. By then it was too late.”

“Blackouts,” Joseph repeated, and again she nodded.

“You remember Enron?” she asked him. He did. For a while, no one could turn on the television or listen to a radio in a cab without hearing about Enron's deregulation scandal, a cautionary tale of price fixing and forced shutoffs. It was a subject that had permeated the basement meetings of prisonersofearth for many months.

“So your husband worked for Enron,” he guessed.

Aleksandra bit her upper lip. She could have stopped her story here. She still had the opportunity to derail the narrative and let
Joseph leave the hotel room knowing only the faintest glimmers of the nightmare behind her lips. She struggled to swallow, fighting off the impulse to stop.

“He worked for bigger people than Enron,” she said in a tone that almost accused Joseph of naiveté. “The deregulation scandal goes so much deeper than a single pony company in Texas. It amazed me in those months when the Enron story was breaking how cleanly the whole incident was being wrapped up with the trial of a few executives. Ray knew just how far the web spun. You see, he had all of the implications in his head. Not just fraudulent business crooks. I mean the government. Ray had enough information on key politicians in the White House to bring the whole country down if it ever got out.”

She rubbed her wrists and gathered her knees against her chest, hugging them so tightly that her bare feet lifted an inch off the floor. It was as if Aleksandra were bundling her body up so that only her mouth and mind mattered. Joseph remembered as a child how his mother sat in her study chair, her entire body erased underneath a wool throw, with only her head and hands visible when she talked about her research on conspiracies and cover-ups. His mother had eventually given up the rest of the world, but her body went first. Even now Joseph could only recall her face and hands in precise detail, blue veins and blue eyes both pulsing.