Lightning People by Christopher Bollen Read Free Book Online

out on him was this: “Did it ever occur to you that you shouldn’t have told Jennifer everything? Did you ever think that once you told her the worst she had no choice but to leave you over it?” Of course, Joseph did want to tell Del everything. But he knew there were some secrets so damaging they blew holes in even the toughest terrain. He had read a story a year ago about a suicide bomber with explosives taped to his chest under his coat. At the last minute, the bomber changed his mind and was taken into custody by the police, who naturally had asked him to remove his coat. The bomber refused. He knew that if they saw the explosives they would shoot him on the spot.
Once the coat was opened, there would be no difference between the bomb and the man. Joseph purposely stopped reading before he discovered what had happened. But he could already guess. The only safe secret was one that remained concealed. He raced through midtown, sidestepping tourists and trying to fix the slight lurch from four beers with William. He was late for a meeting that he was very careful never to tell Del about.
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    â€œ I SAVED A man once.” The woman identified herself in the chat rooms of prisonersofearth.com as Miss Trust. At the basement meeting, under the buzzing fluorescent bulbs, she went by the less cryptic name of Rose. “He was crazy. A real lunatic, only you can’t tell that by two arms waving in the water.” She cleared her throat, attempted eye contact with the fourteen bodies slumped in metal folding chairs forming a loose double circle in the center of the room, and continued. “It was out at Coney Island last summer. I ran into the ocean and pulled him out of the waves. He must have weighed two hundred pounds with the water filling his pockets. I got him onto the beach and that’s when I saw the donkey pin on his lapel and under it, a T-shirt that read A LEADER, FOR A CHANGE.” Rose laughed nervously and wound a ringlet of her brown hair around the tip of her nose. “He thought he was Jimmy Carter. No kidding. Looked like him too, you know, that tender face of an overripe apple. He kept swearing on and on about Kissinger and embassy hostages in Tehran. ‘Unfair,’ he kept saying. ‘Shame. They’ll know Henry made a backdoor deal with Iran not to release them. They’ll know I had no way out.’ He started quoting some 1979 reelection speech and said he finally lost faith that our children would have a better tomorrow, and, when belief in the future died, why continue? Then he dug into his pocket and offered me a piece of paper with circles and arrows running all over the place. Said it proved the whole thing, you follow one arrow and you get around to all of them. Israel selling arms to Iran to destabilize Iraq, America selling arms to Iran to support the contras, Iran promising a payout totaling twelve billion, Israel angry about being strong-armed at Camp David, but mostly, all them—Begin, Reagan, Bush, the clerics, and
Kissinger conspiring to knock him out of office because he didn’t get the greedier picture, because he just wanted fifty-two men to kiss their home soil again. By that time, a crowd on the beach had gathered around us, and an ambulance drove right onto the sand. Before the paramedics took him away, he grabbed me hard by the neck and said, ‘There are no children of tomorrow. I was wrong. They grow up to be just like those monsters we call men today. I lost the election by telling the truth everyone knew. They won by telling lies nobody believed.’”
    The audience shifted uncomfortably in their seats. A few worked their teeth on splintered fingernails.
    â€œI guess you could say I saved a president,” Rose said. “I brought that paper home, hung it with clothespins on my shower curtain, and put my blow dryer to it. In the end, all I got was a dry piece of paper with all of the words washed off. Here’s the