Be Ready for the Lightning, page 10
“Okay.”
It seems like a long time before anything happens, but maybe it’s only a few seconds. Then the floodlights go off. It seems even darker than it was before they came on.
“Okay, Peter. The lights are off, just like you asked. I listened to what you said. I know you’re a fair person, so maybe now that I listened, and I talked to the people out here and got the lights turned off, you could send some of the people in the bus outside. You said you want to help people, and that would be helping them, and it would be helping me too.”
“You don’t understand,” says the shooter. “I’m here to help. People are really unhappy now. There are a few bad people that make all the good people unhappy, and people grow up and get dark, and the unhappiness just spreads; the grownups are unhappy and hurt, and they hurt other people. Everyone is unhappy. I hear them. It’s all they talk about.”
“Is it hot in the bus, Peter? It’s hot out here. Do you need water? I can bring you some water, if you want.”
“I don’t need water. I need to finish my quest, and I need to help people. I’m the only one who knows the way.”
“Do you think it’s going to snow today, Peter?”
“What?”
“Sorry, maybe that was a silly question.”
“It was. It’s very hot. That was silly.”
“But I need to ask you an important question. Peter, is there anybody who is hurting you, who is making you do this? I can help you or anyone you’re worried about. I know you don’t want the people on the bus to get hurt. I know you just want to make people happy. I got them to turn off the lights, right? So if you tell me how to help you, I bet we can make it work. Nobody has to get hurt—not you, not those people.”
This is the wrong thing to say. The shooter drops the radio, which recoils back on its cord and smacks against the driver’s barrier. It hangs there. Everyone looks at it. The shooter looks at it. He looks up. He fires his gun twice into the ceiling of the bus and screams, and his screams have no words in them.
TWELVE
Annie and I sat on a beach, a white sand beach that seemed to radiate heat malevolently at us. Even though we sat on lounge chairs, it still felt like the surface of the sun.
We were in Mexico and Annie was getting divorced. Or rather, we were in Mexico because Annie was getting divorced, at the ripe old age of twenty-eight. She had even paid for my portion of the trip, saying she was glad to stick it to Howard one last time; she’d buy me two seats on the plane if I wanted, an offer that I’d declined. I’d made her wait a week before we went, so I could make sure I wasn’t leaving the clinic in a bind while I went away for seven days, six nights, which was half of my annual vacation time.
We were at an all-inclusive resort, a first for both of us, and we felt like fools, surrounded by bachelorette party blackouts and couples—newlyweds, cheaters, middle-aged-let’s-get-the-spark-back-ers—pawing each other in the reserved lounge chairs. Annie was taken aside by the resort manager after the first day and told she couldn’t tip the staff.
“I read an article that they need stuff like Tylenol and tampons and stuff. Maybe we could buy a bunch of that stuff and sneak it to the maid or something?” We had just returned to our room. While Annie spoke, she deconstructed the cheesy towel swan and wrapped it around her waist. “I feel like a colonialist dickhead. A brown colonizer. Okay, not that there weren’t plenty of brown colonizers. But still. God, this was a terrible idea, I’m sorry.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s Cuba, not Mexico. With the Tylenol and all that,” I said.
“Hey, do you remember any Spanish from university?”
“I can ask the time. And tell you my name. That’s about it. Oh, I can tell you I want an elephant.”
“Big load of help you are,” said Annie, and she grinned.
As I turned away, though, I saw, out of the corner of my eye, the smile fall from her face.
—
When Annie first moved to San Francisco five years earlier, we had done video chats, but she spent so much time leaning forward into the camera, hawkishly critiquing her own beautiful face in the thumbnail image, that eventually I said the video function was crashing on my crummy old laptop. So we stuck to audio chats, and I liked that better, Annie’s voice, which was a high, soft voice, coming out of the speakers, compressed but still sounding like her. I would lie flat on my bed to listen, even though it was not an optimal listening position. My own hearing was slightly above average but well within range. Annie told me about meeting an Israeli filmmaker who wanted to take her skydiving, and a banker who showed her photos of his beach house when she turned him down for a date.
“It’s amazing here,” she said. “As soon as you’re done school, you have to come visit. My place is tiny, but we can squish. We could road-trip to LA, I’m dying to go.”
I said I would, but when school was over, I accepted a position at the clinic and the prospect of a visit faded away.
I was the most junior audiologist, so I was mostly relegated to administering hearing test after hearing test, but I liked it. I ignored old men who looked down my shirt, as I leaned over to fit the headphones on their soft, overlarge ears, and every time they missed pressing the button to indicate they’d heard the test tone, I felt truly bad. But it was a clean, straightforward feeling, the badness, in a place where things were constant and measurable.
The years went by almost without my noticing. Annie and I switched to text chats, because we were both distracted and doing other things while we talked, and she started mentioning Howard, but because of all the filmmakers and bankers, and the choreographers and venture capitalists who had come before him, I didn’t pay that much attention at first. I stayed focused on my clients, on being as good as I could at my job.
The clients who came through my testing room were kind, for the most part. They’d been wearing aids for years and knew the path only went in one direction. Maybe they were putting on brave faces, but they often seemed less upset about losing their hearing than I was upset for them. I didn’t get upset in front of them—it wouldn’t have been fair—but sometimes I went and sat in the bathroom, when I had time in between appointments, and dropped my head down between my knees. It was loss after loss, no matter how stoically people took it.
The exception was the kids. The very small ones cried, and the older ones who didn’t were even more scared, because they understood more of what was happening.
“It’s okay,” I would lie, keeping my own voice calm and even for them. “It’s all going to be okay.”
—
A brittleness had started to emerge in Annie just a few weeks after she started typing Howard in our chats, about two years after she moved to San Francisco, and it was that, the brittleness, that I had noticed because the Howard had seemed unremarkable.
The wedding was supposed to have come quickly, but there were problems—problems for which Annie had a variety of terms, like “wrinkles” and “hiccups” and “glitches.” Finally, during one of our online conversations, she cleared up some of my confusion.
We’ll do it in October, just after my birthday. I’d say you should come, but there isn’t really going to be a ceremony or anything. We’re just going to the courthouse. Howard’s wife…his ex-wife, she’s almost his ex…she’s being a complete bitch, and he thinks it’ll be easier if we just keep it quiet.
This was the first mention of an ex-wife.
Well, do you want me to come? I typed. In the background, I had CSI on, and they were bent over a dead woman’s body, making quips.
She’s being a total cunt, V. I feel like running her over.
In the end, I didn’t go. I wanted to, but Annie said not to, and I got tired of asking if she really meant it. Her tensile strength, which had always been so high, suddenly seemed that of the finest of threads. I could tug only gently without unravelling her. It felt strange, to be absent, to drive to the grocery store the day Annie was getting married. I remembered Al’s wedding and the way Marie had looked at him, the poem from the ceremony, and I wanted to rescue Annie. But how, I wondered, do you rescue someone you love from getting what they want?
Are you sure about this? was the most I’d said.
After a long wait, Annie had said, Sometimes you have to hit on eighteen, you know? Because it might end up fucking perfect.
Card games made me think of Conrad crouched behind his computer, the way Annie and I were just then.
I think it’s good to be brave sometimes, Annie typed. If I don’t at least try, I’ll regret it for the rest of my life. I know I will.
And I let it go at that.
—
Now, in our Mexican hotel room, there was plenty of talk of the ex-wife, who had, in the end, become the un-ex-wife, the soon-to-be-current-again wife. Annie vented her spleen in creative epithets but without the glee her most creative insults had once contained.
“She’s worse than a syphilitic dogfight kingpin married to his own cousin who gives inaccurate sex-ed pamphlets to rural teenagers.”
She looked expectantly at me, and I volleyed back with “She’s worse than a Nazi. Who trips kids in ice-skating lessons. And parks across two spaces.”
“A bit weak,” said Annie. “But I appreciate the effort. It’s really Howard we should be roasting on the coals, but I can’t even handle thinking—” And then her merry face went immobile, blank.
I went to her and wrapped my arms around her. She’d always been beautiful and was prettier than ever; the time between her early and late twenties had sharpened and honed her, the slight baby fat of her cheeks melting away to leave huge, dark eyes, a defined chin and full mouth.
Though Annie’s marriage had been brief, she seemed overshadowed by it. Mostly she was herself, but when I looked at her in moments of rest, I saw an eerie blankness in her face. Annie, who had always had more than enough, whose energy burned her up from the inside and got her into trouble, was quiet now. There were bursts of speech where the old Annie emerged, but she seemed to find this difficult, tiring, to maintain. She slept with a nightguard now, because she was grinding her teeth.
“Can we just?” said Annie, and she crawled onto her bed, pulling me by the hand.
The two of us lay together, Annie with her head on me, me stroking her long hair, damp with sweat at the temples and hairline from lying out in the sun.
“You need more padding,” said Annie, smushing her cheek against my chest. “I need nurturing. Nurturing means tits.”
“I’ll be sure to go get some comforting Mexican breast implants, while you take a nap.”
“Thanks, I appreciate it.”
I wanted to put on the radio or television, any distraction, but I couldn’t reach that far without moving Annie’s surprisingly heavy head off. “What am I going to do, V?”
“Why don’t you come home?”
“San Fran is home now. Besides. I’m not going to slink back to Vancouver. Like he owns California. He thinks he does, the pompous fuck.”
“I wish everyone would come home,” I said, and Annie craned her head back. “You and Al. Ted came home. You could come back.”
“Oh, V,” she said. “You gotta let it go.” She settled back onto me. Her hot tears had soaked through my tank top and were cooling on my skin. “Al’s never coming home, that’s for sure. He’s got a sweet life in New York. Him and his perfect marriage. You should see their apartment. Anyway. I should take my own advice. Let it go, right?” Then she said, “I’ve never been very understanding, about Ted. I always thought you were being sort of dumb, you know.”
“I know.”
“I didn’t say it.”
“You didn’t. Much.”
“Anyway,” said Annie, and her voice went even smaller than it already was, impossibly small, and I hated the unseen Howard for that shrinking. “Anyway,” she repeated. “I get it now.”
—
The next day, Annie got up and seemed determined to be her old self.
“We’re going to a cenote,” she said. “I booked it—it’ll only be about fifteen bucks to get there and another five or so when we’re there. It’s a natural pool thing.”
“Right. I’ve been dying to get away from the big boring ocean to some smaller water anyway.”
“Come on. It’s fresh water. I think. Anyway, it’ll be nice.”
In the taxi, I considered the possibility that we might be murdered, two girls alone heading off into the middle of nowhere with our taxi driver, without any real anxiety, more worried about my awful accent for the few Spanish words I could manage. It wasn’t a really hot day, and it drizzled briefly before we arrived.
The cenote was pretty much a giant, beautiful hole in the ground filled with water. A man in a whitewashed wooden stand charged us eighty pesos each and then steered us toward a path with a rope fence on the water side. He loped past us to the pool below, where he cleared out a few large, stray leaves, and then he left. We were alone with the water, which was greenish-blue below sheer rocky cliffs that sloped down to the swimming area. The water was clear; in some areas, there was wide, pock-marked rock under the surface, but in other spots, I couldn’t see anything but darkness. A small cave opened above the waterline in one of the cliff faces.
Once we’d walked down, Annie took off her sandals and let her feet hang in the water. She was pulling off her shirt, when she gave a little squawk and pulled her feet out.
“They were tickling me,” she said.
Dozens of little black fish swirled in the shallows. I fluttered my hand through the water, and they scattered. We wiggled out of our shorts and shirts, bathing suits already on, towels folded on the rocks, and waded into the cenote. It was cool and felt thin and clean after days of buoyant ocean water.
“You can do cliff jumping here,” said Annie, after we were wetted down. She looked up at the rock face, which was some twenty feet high.
“Not on your life,” I said, laughing and turning away. But a moment later, Annie’s silence brought me back. “Are you serious?”
Annie looked down, and I thought she was suppressing a laugh at the notion of our jumping. But when she raised her head again, her face was flushed.
“I’m sorry I keep going on about this,” she said, before she even started. I just nodded, and Annie took a shaky breath and said, “It’s like I couldn’t face it, everything ending with Howard, so I just crammed it in a spare room somewhere.” She stopped and gestured toward herself. “You know, like a metaphorical room.”
“I assumed as much.”
“Ha, so very ha. Anyway, I figured I should start wading through it, right? Just get into the shit, so I can get out on the other side and maybe stand a chance of finding someone else, before my ovaries turn into raisins. But I’m trying now, and it’s like I can’t even get in there. Access denied. It’s like it’s in there, all raw and toxic, and I can’t even get at it anymore. It doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t anything. It’s all boarded up.”
“Oh, Annie.”
“For instance, this is where I should be crying. But I’m not. I don’t even care sometimes. I look at my hands, and it’s like they’re someone else’s.” She scowled at her hands like they were the source of it all. “This sounds stupid, I know.”
“Are you sure you’re an engineer? You should have your own talk show with this stuff.”
“Don’t joke,” said Annie, so quietly that I went cold.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I wish I could help you get back in.”
“Yeah, well. You’re even worse than me at this stuff. But I appreciate you listening.” Then she said, “Get up, we’re jumping.”
“Not going to happen.”
“Come on. Conrad would do it.”
“Of course Conrad would do it.” But I got up, moving in front of Annie, heading up the path. It didn’t look high at all from the water.
At the top of the ledge, there was a gap in the fencing and two short poles, painted yellow, on either side of the space, to indicate the jumping point.
“I guess this is where you can jump from without hitting the bottom or a rock or something.” Annie sounded less enthused now. “We don’t actually have to do this, if you don’t want to.”
Conrad would do it. I imagined what it would be like, to see stepping off the rockface as no different than stepping off a curb. To see hard fists in a dark after-hours club as nothing more interesting than a chat with co-workers. To not care about giving up beauty, not care about having it in the first place, about anything. I remembered Conrad picking me up after school, walking over the property line to where he wasn’t wanted, like it was nothing at all. As if the line didn’t exist.
I stepped off without a word, and for a fraction of a second, I expected to float. But instead there was a nauseating elevator-drop in my stomach, much longer than I expected. I was still falling, still falling. My inner ear detecting the change, shouting for my attention. Animal fear bloomed like a road flare in my guts, and then there was the hard slap of the water, forcing my legs apart, my arms up, pulling my bathing suit, my hair flaming above me.
“Holy!” said Annie from the top of the ledge, when I surfaced. “You could have warned me.”
She dithered at the ledge for several minutes before jumping off with a flood of expletives. Her jump seemed ages shorter than mine, and when she surfaced, she grinned and said, “Okay, that was terrifying.”
She came and sat by the water’s edge with me, as I slid one foot in, tentatively, and held it still, while the little fish approached and nibbled at me. It did tickle, sort of, or some other strange feeling that I didn’t have a word for. It wasn’t unpleasant, though the sight of the fish, which looked a little like leeches, was off-putting.
“If they chew my whole foot off, you’ll have to piggyback me to the resort,” I said. I looked over and smiled at Annie, who tried to smile back.
She was staring at the little lines on my thighs. She saw me see her looking, and she kissed her fingertip and pressed it to the marks without saying anything. We sat in silence. Bits of her dark eyebrows stuck up in minuscule spikes from the force of her jump into the water. She hadn’t quite managed the smile, and I knew the jump hadn’t worked the way it was supposed to. Maybe I shouldn’t have jumped first, or I should have asked Annie to hold my hand, so we could jump together. Maybe it didn’t matter.
