Lightning People by Christopher Bollen Read Free Book Online Page B

the carpet like the aftermath of a summer storm. Joseph sat quietly in one of the foldout chairs by the emergency exit. He remembered his mother taking the stage, walking confidently toward the microphone in a brick-red dress. The applause flooded the room, and his mother fought a smile as she introduced herself. “Facts can suggest almost anything,” she had begun. “But for those of us who make it our duty to study them carefully, they can tell us something very specific indeed. I am proposing that history does not simply illuminate where we have been. Logic does not come only in the backward glance. It can also shed light on where we are going. Definitive light. To misquote a fellow conspiracist, I say to you today, don’t follow the money. Follow the years.”
    Joseph’s mother thought years could predict what was to come. Joseph had left Cincinnati to get away from those voices predicting worst-case scenarios. But those frightening possibilities she had force-fed him too early started to accelerate in his mind until he couldn’t outpace them, even in this city, hundreds of miles and years beyond her reach. That’s when he started sitting in on these subterranean gatherings to listen to other men and women whose lives had been picked apart by questions that could only be answered by turning every fact upside down.
    Joseph had never told Del how many hours he clocked listening to conspiracies. Del was not the sort of woman to take insanity with appreciation. She might have found the normalcy of these conspiracy theory regulars even more threatening: middle-aged men and women dressed in mismatched sweat suits with greasy hair, clinging to their notebooks and watching from their corners with squinted eyes as if badly in need of prescription glasses. A few college students—arrogant, supple faces with vehement nods that they had learned to perform in their undergraduate seminars—filled out the number. Joseph figured that a few decades ago this faction could have taken to the streets in a Vietnam protest but now existed mostly in the freefall of Internet space, typing their dissent and waiting to voice
their exposures in secret unrecorded meetings where full names were not allowed.
    Tobias had begun as he always did. “We are a small group willing to ask questions,” he said. “There are some new faces here, and we must try to be welcoming. When so few in the American population are willing to ask questions and remember the answers supplied, we are thankful to gain participants. That said—”
    â€œWe don’t want strangers sniffing around for trouble,” Tobias’s ruddy-faced second-in-command interjected. He went by the code name Gorilla, and dense black hair covered his body where his denim overalls did not. “No tape recorders. No cameras. No last names.”
    The group nodded with complying smiles.
    â€œAsking questions can be dangerous,” Tobias continued. “Unfortunately, in this time where identifying real from unreal is so crucial and explosive, we are forced to keep ourselves far from direct sunlight. Personal privacy is a necessary safety measure for public examination.”
    Rose had waited a good ten minutes to tell her Jimmy Carter story, during which Gorilla reported at length his six-year research into the morning of 9/11. He counted the exact number of Arabowned newsstands that had been inexplicably closed in the hours before the attack and compared it to the number of Jewish-owned stores in the Financial District that had also been shuttered (side note: three gay video stores in the West Village, forming a tight geometric triangle, had all mysteriously been closed that morning). Defeated by the outcome, which suggested that neither camp knew an attack was imminent, Gorilla explained that he was now accumulating new statistics on why certain flights from JFK to various South American capitals had been heavily booked in the