Lightning People by Christopher Bollen Read Free Book Online Page A

worst part. I called all the hospitals and the ambulance companies. There’s no record of anyone being picked up in Coney Island and taken to the emergency room that afternoon. But I have that paper. They forgot to take that from me.”
    An elderly man who sat next to Rose placed a sympathetic hand on her knee, and all eyes drifted to over to Tobias X, leader and soothsaying blogger of prisonersofearth, to gauge his reaction. The verdict wasn’t good. He puffed a quick channel of air from a graying beard that hung like an awning over his lips. The beard, along with a loose T-shirt soaked with chest sweat, gave Tobias the hybrid appearance of an American hostage or the late Jerry Garcia—a prisoner of enemy insurgents or an icon of bohemian freedom. He crossed his legs and gathered his small belly between his folded arms. “ They, they, they . Who are they, Rose?”
    â€œTobias.” A young man in a sleeveless Princeton sweatshirt raised his arm to reveal a mound of ginger pit fuzz. “They could be the current administration. They could be the Israeli secret police. Wouldn’t be so credible for Israel to be supplying their enemies with—”
    â€œStop,” Tobias yelled. “I will not have this meeting turned over to nonsense tales as a cheap form of entertainment. That pollutes our message. We are here specifically to posit conceivable detours,
possible ways in which our own government and their media development arm is purposefully deceiving the citizens of this planet. We present truths against fiction. Not blank pieces of paper. That is how you escape the prison.”
    â€œBut all I have are my stories,” Rose cried, pushing away the calming hand. “You tell us not to trust the newspapers and the commentators. Well, what the hell is left but our own stories?”
    Still slightly drunk from the beers with William, Joseph sat quietly in the second row where the suspicious stares of regulars had less chance to settle on him. He had heard this debate erupt so many times at the meeting—whom to trust, where the information was coming from, what counted and what didn’t. Those questions could clog his brain for the rest of the afternoon. Joseph had been attending these clandestine meetings—always in underground rooms of community centers, locations changing but the bare cinderblock walls with bulletin boards covered in flyers for dog-grooming classes and substance-abuse hotlines predictably the same—for so many of the years he had lived in New York. It wasn’t because he believed every irrational intrigue that got touted around these anonymous circles. It was simply the value in the questions themselves—the notion that the world turned with more sinister complications and betrayals than it seemed to in the sober light of day. The conspiracies lulled him. He found a strange consolation in these meetings. Perhaps because they reminded him of home.
    Joseph’s mother had been a prophet of paranoia throughout his childhood. She had once been a Catholic and had raised him the same, but the religion that ruled their house was hardly monotheistic. Joseph’s mother prayed to conspiracies, making patron saints out of plots and cover-ups and, as a tenured professor of American history, the bizarre predictive pattern of dates. She had been a regular speaker at conspiracy seminars, and Joseph could still remember attending one of her speaking engagements when he was only six or seven, in a small side room in Cincinnati’s convention center off of Fountain Square. The concrete walls had been covered in maroon muslin that left the thirty dazed audience members holding weedy library books and tattered newspapers synthetically pale under the bright overhead
lights. A flower show had just decamped, and the room must have been used for last-minute floral arranging because bits of green foam, plastic fern branches, and wilted white carnations littered