Be Ready for the Lightning, page 7
“Okay, fair. But now I’m going to be self-conscious, constantly worrying whether I’m mumbling around you. Hey. Remember that mumbling lawyer? The first guy?”
Conrad nodded and looked away, and I quickly said, “And by the way, Mom called me. They want to know if you’re going to Al’s wedding with Annie and me.”
“I sent them an e-mail about that.”
“You have seen Mom try to use the computer, right?”
Conrad and I laughed, and Annie said, “Beer?”
We both raised our hands, but Marta shook her head. I worried for a split second that Conrad might have gotten her pregnant, before remembering she’d already had two beers. Annie slipped into the apartment to get our drinks.
By that time, Conrad had stopped D.J.-ing and was playing poker. I think Marta was a card dealer somewhere, and that was how they had met, but the details with Conrad were always foggy.
To call Conrad a professional might have been a stretch, though he should have been—he was good enough. The problem was he’d been kicked out of every legitimate league and tournament he entered for fighting, and so he spent most of his time playing at an after-hours club where the felt was marred with cigarette ash and a few brown droplets of long-dried blood and veritable buckets of beer and whisky. I’d met him there once or twice, and most of the men there had said hi to me as politely as their drug and alcohol intake allowed. There was plenty of money on the table—with luck on his side, he could make more than his monthly rent in a few nights. But the thought of Conrad there in the dark—still there, when I was out having brunch with Annie, eating huevos rancheros in the sunshine and proudly complaining about our new, adult jobs—made me want to drag him out of the club and kick him into the bright Vancouver morning. I wanted to shake him and shake him.
There had been a fight where someone ripped the metal handle off a draught tap and used it on Conrad. In the months that followed, he sometimes forgot when I was coming to visit, even if we’d talked about it on the phone. Or he would say he’d meet me and Annie at the bar but never show up. Maybe it was just because he was sleeping at strange times, playing cards all night. Or maybe I just noticed these little failings more because he looked so different now, his old face clouded over and the new one reminding me every time I looked at him of the life he was living. One eye had gone a bit lazy, and one eyebrow (on the same side) was interrupted by a blank slash of scar. His nose was still fine-boned, but it listed to one side now. He was still handsome, because he thought he was still handsome, and so women still fell for him—today’s example: Marta—but his face as he got older was showing his history. I hated to look at pictures of us all as teenagers, because Conrad hadn’t just been beautiful the way people are when they are young; he’d been almost too beautiful for a boy, and I’d been weirdly proud of him for it.
Once, after the draught tap fight, I showed up at his door with Thai takeout, and there was a split second where I thought he didn’t recognize me. It was like someone was pouring cold metal down my throat. And in my car on the way home, I cranked the radio up to a deafening volume, something I would normally never do, because it’s so bad for your hearing, but I didn’t want to hear even my thoughts. I wanted to keep the secret from myself of how traitorously sick I was getting of watching him tear himself apart. It felt like I’d been watching Conrad fall for my whole life.
But now there was Marta, and here he was, at my place. Maybe things were getting better. Maybe everything would be okay, after all.
I looked away from Conrad, just as Annie came back out, empty-handed, a grim expression on her face.
“Good news—” she said.
But before she could add anything, someone else came out, shaggy-haired and as tan as a ginger could get.
Conrad leapt up and hugged Ted, clapping him on the back and then hugging him again. Ted’s smile wavered, as he took in the changes in Conrad’s appearance since they last saw each other, six years earlier.
Annie explained to Marta who Ted was and went back in to get the beers she’d left in the kitchen, when Ted surprised her there. Conrad and Ted finished with their manly embraces, and Ted turned to me. My heart was hammering around in my chest, unmoored, banging into my lungs and ribs and stomach and bladder.
“Hey, kiddo,” he said. “Do I get a hug?”
Unlike Conrad’s, his looks hadn’t changed much from eighteen to twenty-four. Or maybe they had, and I didn’t really remember what he looked like when he left. After all, I remembered him as a man at seventeen, in the back of the Hearse at the cabin, and he certainly hadn’t been. Really Ted’s looks didn’t matter much one way or the other, to Ted or to me, or, I guessed, to any of the women from his cruise ships and ports of call and travels in America and Canada and everywhere else that women were and Ted had been. Ted was more than looks.
I’d accepted by then—with some less-than-gentle help from Annie—that Ted hadn’t been pining away for me while he was gone. I didn’t care much about who he’d been sleeping with for the past six years, though. I just cared that he’d come home. Falling for Ted was like being chloroformed—you got knocked out and woke up missing something, and then you spent however long it took to get it back.
I stood up and got into his arms and put my face in his neck. It was too much, and we both pulled back a little.
“Can I cut in?” said Annie, who was back and putting the beers on the little patio table. She hugged Ted briefly, giving me a look over his shoulder that I chose to ignore. “I guess this is what I get for leaving the door unlocked, eh?” she said, squeezing him briefly. “Anybody at all can get in.”
Then Ted shook Marta’s hand and said, “So this is our trade for Al? Good deal.”
After a few beers, Ted said he ought to be getting home; he was staying at his parents’ for a couple of weeks, while he found a place. He thanked Conrad for telling him where we all were.
I said, “You knew Ted was home? You knew Ted was coming here?”
Conrad, who had been whispering with Marta, frowned and said, “I forgot.”
—
Ted came back with a ’91 Dodge Shadow convertible, twenty decent songs and two good ones (the one about me never did make it onto a tape). He drank so much in his first couple of months back that even after he found an overpriced apartment, he spent more on booze than rent. It didn’t seem to matter much, since he was such a fun, affable drunk, with strangely flawless coordination and a virtually unchanged demeanour after half-a-dozen pints. Even his driving was fine, and though Annie and I at first protested his habit of driving under the influence, we soon forgot it. If that sounds terrible, all I can say is it seemed like such a terrible thing to do that I believed Ted wasn’t really doing it. Every once in awhile, Annie and I would gossip to each other about it, or Annie would pull Ted aside for one of the serious, scheduled talks that, as freshly minted adults, we liked so much.
“I know, I know,” Annie and I would say to each other, sitting on our couch with our bare feet up on the coffee table. We still shared an apartment, though I made decent money at the hearing clinic and Annie considerably more than decent money in her engineering job. I was still saving for my master’s. “I talked to him about it the other day.”
Conrad, for his part, said nothing about any of it, though he would scoop the keys out of Ted’s hand and take over the driving, if he was there. Conrad had been drinking on fewer and fewer occasions over the years, and by the time Ted returned, he was down to ordering a token pint and nursing it all night. He was keeping his wits about him in one small way, and not at all in the others.
EIGHT
“I am here as a messenger. This might be difficult to understand, especially because we have lost, in this world, the ability to listen. Everything has become about parties and money and fancy clothes and impressing our neighbours. But I have been given a gift; I have been able to listen and to hear like a child. And by hearing, by rising above the noises and the lies of the world, I’ve been given a quest. Today is the first day. I will help you learn to fly, to fly on through morning to the best place, the golden island. Paradise. Paradise.” He says this twice, clearly feeling it ought to be making more of an impression, as if he had expected applause or cheering. “On these magic shores, children at play are forever beaching their boats. We too have been there. We can still hear the sound of the surf, though we can land no more.” His face is shining, with both sweat from the stifling air of the bus and a restrained excitement. “All you have to do is become like a child; confess it all, all the bad things you’ve done, and I will send you on. You can go there. You can fly. You don’t have anything to be afraid of. The highest order of angels have sent me here.”
My eyes have mostly adjusted to the new dim light of the bus. The spray painting is imperfect despite our efforts and lets tiny bits of light through here and there, creating a random cross-hatching of white light on the legs and arms of the people pressing together inside. It’s hot, and my hair sticks to my temples and neck and somehow seems to get in my mouth, but I don’t pull it away. The spray paint smell is turning my stomach. There’s a haze in the air that stings to breathe and is making my eyes water, I wonder if people might start fainting, if it might be toxic. The chemical stink is so strong I think I feel it seeping into my blood, throbbing under my fingernails, in the fat vein under my tongue.
There’s a dark puddle under the moustache man’s body like a spilled bottle of nail polish.
“Everyone stand up. Move back. Move back up the steps.” The shooter points to the rear section of the bus, where two steps lead up to a few front-facing seats and a U-shape of seats at the very back. “Please do this now, or I will have to do something else, and I don’t want to do that. There is a part of you that understands all this, deep down. You just have lost the ability to access it. But it is there.”
The people on the bus, about thirty of us, are now strangely orderly. Their faces are tense or blank or crying, but no one is screaming. The teenage boy’s girlfriend has wet her pants, and the sharp smell of urine is loud against the silence.
“Stand away from the back door. Do not stand close to the back door. Stand above the first step.”
Everyone presses farther back, and people near the rear door scramble to move up, so that an expanding stain of empty space, of nobody, circles the first stair and door. The shooter does not lower his gun. Has not lowered it.
No one wants to be at the front of the crowd, which is very crowded indeed, some people half-sitting and half-standing in the seats and others pressing against them. I’m close, uncomfortably close, to the front, in the aisle between the front-facing seats, near the stairs. I want to be at the back, behind everyone else. I don’t care that that is selfish.
When everyone moves, the bald man who handed out the spray paint steps in front of me, as everybody else moves backwards. He doesn’t look at me, just moves me slightly with his hand on my shoulder and stands in front of me, and something like relief just skims my surface. I am entirely blocked, entirely hidden. A teenage boy in a T-shirt is beside the man on one side, crouching in a seat. We are all facing the shooter.
No more honking comes from outside. No sound at all. And then there is a brief metallic whine followed by a man’s voice, crackling through a speaker in the driver’s panel, difficult to hear.
“Hello in the bus,” says the voice. “Can you hear me? My name is Ajay Kohli. The New York City Police Department is out here. I want to know what you want and how I can work with you to resolve this situation without anyone else getting hurt.”
The driver’s body would be visible through the unpainted side window, past the barrier. I think of them standing out there, the police or the SWAT team or whoever comes to things like this, looking at his body, trying to peer in through the tiny gaps in the paint. They may as well be in outer space, these non-people, who barely exist, who do not exist, who are not here. This man, with his voice leaking through the bus speaker like something diluted.
The shooter’s face has gone slack. “No one say anything,” he says. It doesn’t sound like an order, his tone closer to that of a worried leader hiding his people from harm.
“Can you tell me your name? I want to talk to you and see how I can help. I have a phone here that I can pass to you, if you’ll open one of the windows. That way we can talk privately.”
“No,” says the shooter. “No one opens the window. No one moves. Everyone stays still.”
The voice comes again. “Is there anyone else hurt in there? Has anyone else been injured? They’ve got doctors out here. They can help anybody who’s hurt. Just let me know what’s happening and what you need.”
The shooter points at the teenage boy in the seat beside me, who turns to look at the people behind him. “Come here,” says the shooter. His voice is soft. “Come here,” he says again.
I’m inches from the boy, can see his nostrils going like the heaving flanks of an animal. He looks around, unable to catch anyone’s eye. I look away too.
“Come here,” says the shooter, a third time.
The teenager rises from the seat and steps forward, placing one foot on the stair. The crowd presses back, as one, to give him room, but he stops, shaking his head. His eyes close, and his full lips disappear, they are clamped so tightly together.
The man who put himself in front of me, the bald man in the K-Way jacket, puts out his arm with a sort of scooping motion and touches the boy’s chest. Then he walks forward, the length of the bus, until he is only a handspan from the end of the gun.
“I lived a long time among the fairies,” says the shooter. He doesn’t seem perturbed that someone other than the one he had indicated is standing in front of him. “They are angels, really. People don’t understand that they are the same. But I do. And if you believe and become like a child, they will help you fly. You’ll be able to fly forever. You just have to confess what you’ve done, how your heart has changed from a child’s heart.”
The man nods. “Yeah,” he says. “I understand. I’m ready.”
The shooter nods too. Apart from the gun and talk of fairies, the two men look and seem normal. The weapon lowers slightly.
“It’s time to confess,” says the shooter.
“I don’t know where to start.”
The shooter just looks at him, his face still.
The man begins to speak, softly. I’m near the front of the crowd, can make out most of what he is saying.
“I’ve lied at work. I’ve taken credit for things my assistant did. I slapped my daughter across the face, and there was a bruise. I got with a hooker once, and I choked her, pretty hard, I guess.” He says something else that I can’t hear. He looks at the blackened window, as if he can see out. “And I—”
He breaks off and lunges, drops his shoulder into the shooter’s chest and grabs for the gun.
It almost works. The bullet goes into his arm, and he falls back into the courtesy seats. He opens his mouth to shout, his face furious and flushed from the pain, but the second shot comes quickly, entering over one eyebrow, small and dark, throwing his head back. I can see its exit, bone chips and hair and blood and bits of his brain, meat, for a split second, before his body drops back, flat on the right hand bank of seats. He doesn’t make a sound or say anything like the moustache man did. He doesn’t move. The shots were so loud. The smell is hot and brown and suddenly everywhere, stronger even than the spray paint.
“What’s happening in there?” says the police negotiator’s voice. “I’m trying to explain that you don’t want to hurt anybody, but they’re getting really worried out here. Can you tell me what just happened?”
“No.” The shooter has returned to his previous position. He has his gun up and is staring at the crowd without seeming to see us. His free hand goes to his face, his fingers grabbing, pulling at the flesh of his cheeks, pinching his upper lip between his knuckles. His voice is quiet but rises slowly. “No no no. No no this is not the quest only in the head only and then to the island that was not, not it, not it.” He lets out a howl that hits me like a running cramp, the awfulness of it curving my body over. He clamps a hand over his own mouth, and his head jerks up. As if he is only just noticing the people in front of him, he says, “Come here come here come here,” wildly, without pointing to anyone. His mouth stretches wide, a little dribble of spit trickling out.
There is silence for a moment, and then a phone rings. All heads turn as one. The ringing goes on. The large man who had been on his phone earlier holds it up, the other hand still plastered to his head.
“I’m sorry,” he says, and the shooter says, “Bring it to me.”
The shooter takes the ringing phone, and the man it belongs to scuttles back, away from him. The shooter, who seems to have recovered from his fit, looks at it for a moment, as if he isn’t sure how it works, and then he taps the screen. He looks forward, at the crowd, with the gun raised in his other hand.
“Hello?” he says. And then, after a moment, he says, “Peter,” and “No. That’s kind of you, but no, no. That’s not—I can’t talk to you anymore now.” He pulls the phone away from his head, looks at it and taps it delicately again before putting it into his pocket.
“Those people,” he says. With his empty hand, he gestures at the window. “Sleeping in their silly beds.”
He puts his gun arm down for a moment and rubs it, his fingers working the long muscle of his forearm. There is a sharp, almost telepathic zinging in the bus. Do we rush him now? If we all tried, we could do it. Some people would get shot, but not everyone. You might not die if you get shot—you might be okay. Some people would get shot, but not everyone. Who goes first? You go first, not me. Someone else go first. Just go, it won’t be that bad, I promise. I’ll be right behind you. And the thought that has been boiling in the hot air of the bus since he first spoke. He’s only one man. He can’t shoot us all at once. There is a leaning, but nothing happens. No one moves. He raises the gun again.
