What’s the difference between lightning and magic? is a joke common among meteorologists.
Magic makes sense. Lightning does not, even to the experts. Lightning is random, unpredictable. It can be as small as a bean or as large as a house. Noisy or silent, ashy or clear. It can be any color — red or white, blue or smoky black — and it seems to have a mind of its own. Lightning floats down chimneys and enters closed windows, slipping right through the molecules that make up glass. Lightning has its own agenda, most experts say; it can easily cause damage despite all safety efforts. Hide, but it may find you. Plan, but your plan may easily become undone.
Lightning plays favorites, picking the one out of the many, singling certain people out of groups of hundreds, even thousands. Lightning plays pranks, and seems to enjoy them. Lightning reaches 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit, more than five times the heat of the sun. It can be a hundred miles long, as thin as a man’s pinkie. Its effects are puzzling and indiscriminate. There are trees that have been hit that show no effect and then, months later, suddenly wither. Doors are removed from their hinges; cars are set on fire, and afterward only the radio is found to be working, crooning a sad song. People safe in their houses, chatting on the phone, have had lightning come in through the wires, entering the earpiece to strike them deaf. In one case a dog that had been struck farted black sulfur for weeks. Hairpieces have been snatched off bald men’s heads, women have been stripped of their clothes, children have reported seeing flaming objects circling their rooms, only to be disbelieved until all the electricity goes out or the walls themselves catch fire.
Some people get up after a strike and finish their golf games, go about their business, have quite a story to tell. Others’ lives are forever ruined.
Is that magic? Does it make any sense? Most incidents of odd weather can be logically explained. Blood rains, once thought to be the wrath of the heavens, are actually made up of the mecondial fluids released by certain lepidoptera simultaneously emerging from their chrysalides. Black rains, those old wives’ tales, are in fact stones picked up in whirlwinds and released elsewhere. Frogs falling from the sky, same thing, no magic whatsoever; the poor creatures are simply swept up in one place by a windstorm, then deposited on the shores of another land. And what if these frogs open their mouths and pearls fall out? Even then logic prevails: the frogs have probably been air-lifted from the China Seas, home of pearls shining in a dozen different shades no one would never expect: red, scarlet, crimson. Pearls the color of a human heart.
At Orlon University, the team was working backward, trying to understand lightning by studying its effects on human physiology. Our group of survivors met in the cafeteria of the Science Center in the evenings. Summer school wasn’t yet in session; for now the campus was quiet. I didn’t believe in support groups; why should I go? Nothing could save me. All the same, my brother insisted the group was part of the study I had committed to. It was for the greater good, something I rarely considered. Ned called repeatedly to suggest that for once I finish something I’d started. He had a point, I suppose. But I had no desire to walk across the Orlon campus, however deserted it might be, with my hair falling out, still in need of a cane to steady my limp. I pronounced it imp, and it felt that way. An imp in my nervous system, pinching at this and that. Reminding me of who I was and who I’d never be.
I might have backed out at the last minute, unintentionally forgotten the time, the day, the location of the meeting,
but Ned sent me a report he knew would intrigue me. It was a folder titled The Naked Man. How could I resist?
The Naked Man had been a roofer — a dangerous occupation, I knew from reading my safety tips. He was working after hours on his mother-in-law’s house on the occasion of his strike. He was forty-four years old, six foot two, 240 pounds. He was balding and wore a beard. He’d had two beers at the time of the incident, but he certainly wasn’t drunk. He worked alone. He’d never won the lottery, never owned a dog, never made a promise he hadn’t kept. Until recently.
That evening he was singing Johnny’s Cash’s “Ring of Fire.” Later, he realized this particular song was on his mind because he was having an affair with a woman who worked at the Smithfield Mall. Johnny Cash’s wife had written “Ring of Fire” when they fell in love and were married to other people. There was desire in that song, big-time. That was probably why the roofer was fixing his mother-in-law’s roof on such a dismal night. Guilt and desire, a bad combination. Storms were predicted, but he figured he had time. He figured a good deed might make up for his failings.
He was mistaken.
Halfway through his work, he heard a hissing sound, and he found himself thinking of hell and whether or not he might end up there, if such a place existed. His fingers started to tingle. And then he saw what he thought was the moon falling from the sky. But the moon had a tail, and that was surely a bad sign. It was ball lightning; it fell on the roof and rolled down toward him. It looked like a comet headed straight for him, a blue-black thing that was as solid and real as a truck or a boot or a living, breathing man. The roofer thought he might be face-to-face with the devil himself, that fallen angel. He thought about everything he hadn’t yet done in his life. All of a sudden owning a dog seemed like the most important thing in the world.
The hissing got louder and the next thing the roofer knew, he was standing on the grass, completely naked except for his work boots. His clothes were a pile of ashes and his beard was gone. In the photographs in his file, the Naked Man is standing against a white screen; he looks like a baby, wide-eyed, just welcomed to the world. My brother knew I’d have to see him in person. I was a librarian, after all; I’d want to know how the story ended. Had he gotten his dog? Had he ended his affair? Had he found another line of work, one that wasn’t so close to the sky?
I spied the Naked Man as soon as I entered the cafeteria. He seemed to have lost weight since he’d been struck. He used a cane, as I did. Surely the imp was in his system, definite neurological damage, but he was the silent type. He stared straight ahead, and I had the notion that he’d been coerced into coming, the way I’d been. Someone had insisted it would be good for him, cathartic, as if anything could be.
Most people in the group were more than happy to talk about their effects — that’s what they called their symptoms. The Naked Man kept silent, but the others were studying themselves, as if each one was a singular chemical experiment gone awry. After what they’d been through, who could blame them really? They didn’t whine or complain; they were matter-of-fact. Most, like me, had headaches and nausea and disorientation. Some had effects that kept them from working, from sleeping, from thinking straight, from having sex. There were myths that lightning-strike victims became hypersexual, electrified, in a manner of speaking, but most often there was the opposite effect — impotence and depression. Some in the group shook with muscle spasms, and some stuttered; some looked perfectly normal, and maybe they were. There were plenty of memory glitches, lost thoughts, forgotten identities. One fellow couldn’t remember where he’d been born. A girl couldn’t recall her middle name. For most, the moments before their strikes were the clearest time of their lives. Just as they would have remembered the stars falling from the sky, the memory of that bright instant was something they couldn’t get rid of, no matter how hard they might try.
I noticed the man next to me, a boy really, in his early twenties. Tall, gawky, hazel eyes. Oddly enough, wearing gloves. When he caught me looking, he leaned over, close.
“Want to see?”
The clicking in my head was bad; I may have nodded. I suppose he took that as a yes and thought I wanted to find out what was under those gloves. As if I cared. The boy’s name was Renny, and he was a sophomore at Orlon about to attend summer classes, trying to make up for the semester he’d lost when he was hit. When he took off his gloves I could see that he had been wearing a ring on one hand when he’d been struck by lightning, a watch on the other. Both pieces of jewelry had left deep indentations in his skin, as though he’d been branded by the heated metal. He didn’t have to say his hands caused him great pain; that much was evident from the depth of the ridges, from the way he moved, so tentatively.
“Too bad the watch doesn’t tell time,” Renny joked. On with his gloves. He winced. “I was on a golf course. Did you know that five percent of strikes take place on golf courses?”
“Really?” These people couldn’t talk enough about their experiences.
“I was with all the guys in my fraternity, nearly fifty of us; it was a party, kind of a fund-raiser to fix up our house. We were having a great time and then kerblam . I was the only one who got hit. Went right through my head and out my foot. Direct hit. I still have a hole here somewhere.” He fingered the top of his head till he found it. “Got it.”
The entire interchange was getting much too personal. Next he’d want to know if I slept without a nightgown. If my lightning strike was in my dreams. If I panicked and locked the door at the first sign of rain.
Still, he was grinning at me. I supposed I had to give him something.
“I was in my living room. The flyswatter I was holding caught fire.”
That seemed to please him. Almost as though I was confiding in him.
“Wow. I’ll bet that was a surprise.”
He was so concerned and friendly, I decided to give him a bit more information.
“It was a plastic flyswatter, so it actually started to melt. I bought it at Acres’ Hardware Store. It was a splash event.” I hoped that sounded professional.
“Good thing you weren’t using a rolled-up newspaper. You probably would have ignited.”
I liked his habit of understatement. Now when he smiled, I might have smiled back at him.
There were eight of us there that night — old and young, male and female, with nothing to define us, nothing in common. Watching over us, guiding us, I suppose, were a nurse, a neurologist — clearly junior to Dr. Wyman — and a therapist. I was soon to learn that out of all the documented cases of lightning strikes in the state, two-thirds had occurred in Orlon County. Lucky us. We were in the center of all the bad weather in Florida. No wonder my brother was delighted to live here.
We were forced to go around in a circle, introducing ourselves — first names only, of course — with the opportunity to discuss how we were feeling. Now everyone clammed up. Physical ailments were one thing, but this was something else entirely. What has your strike done to your soul? Your sex life? Now that flames have shot through you, is your ego intact? Or is it busy clicking, shaking, shuddering?
No one spoke up. The Naked Man made himself busy adjusting his boots. A teenaged girl with beautiful curly hair and mismatched socks closed her eyes and hummed. Her face was scarred with what I later learned had been raindrops vaporizing on her skin during her strike, turning to steam and burning her perfect complexion.
We weren’t about to talk about our emotional state. No one wanted to get that personal. We eyed one another and laughed self-consciously.
“Next topic,” a chicken farmer named Marv called out; he was roundly applauded.
We moved on to what folks really wanted to talk about. Lightning gossip was extremely popular with this group. “Bigger than,” “worse than,” “did you ever hear of” kind of stories. I listened to the tale of a man who’d been killed by a strike, then carried forty feet and deposited in a haystack. Another of a woman who had every other plate in her china cabinet shatter when lightning came sweeping through her condominium. I learned that open fields were dangerous, that some lightning left rooms filled with smoke, that cows were often victims of a strike, and those who survived gave curdled, yellow milk. But the subject people were most interested in and the stories most often told were about folks who’d been killed and came back to life.
There was a theory, unproven, but accepted by many in the room: the theory of suspended animation. Because lightning was capable of shutting off the systemic and cerebral metabolisms of a victim, much like a short circuit, a person could be “gone” — be officially and medically dead — for an extreme amount of time, past what might seem logically salvageable, and then brought back. Why it was possible to resuscitate such people was unknown. All the same, it happened.
There was an old man near Jacksonville, for example, known as the Dragon, who had allegedly been killed twice by lightning, not that anyone had ever seen him in person. And even closer, a man they called Lazarus Jones, right here in Orlon County. He was definitely real, his existence documented at the morgue and the hospital. Seth Jones, that had been his name before he revived.
I felt something go through my body. A current. It was the mention of an individual who could face down death. All at once, I was interested in something.
That hadn’t happened to me for a very long time.
So, what could he do, this man who’d been dead? How big? How bad? I leaned in, the better to hear, dragged my chair closer to the inner circle. Well, for one thing, it was said Lazarus could make an egg on a tabletop spin in a circle. His presence caused electromagnetic disruptions; elevators went up instead of down, lightbulbs burned out, clocks stopped. He’d been five foot ten when struck, six foot afterward. The lightning had stretched him, rearranged whoever he’d been before, altering him almost beyond recognition. He now radiated so much heat, he could eat only cold food; anything raw became cooked as he swallowed. He’d been gone for forty minutes, no heartbeat, no pulse. Impossible, of course, and yet it was true, documented by the EMTs. When Lazarus arose, his eyes were so black it was impossible to tell whether his pupils were dilated. Not that he would let anyone test him. Not eyes nor heart nor lungs.
“How did he manage to come back to life?” I asked Renny. “Wouldn’t he be brain-damaged after all that time?”
“Not if the theory of suspended animation holds true.”
We were whispering, knee against knee. I could feel Renny had a tremor. If I wasn’t careful, I’d start feeling sorry for him.
“They’ve been trying to study this guy Jones, but he won’t talk to the folks at Orlon. I guess he’s super-paranoid. I heard he chased Dr. Wyman off his property with a gun.”
Wyman, the neurologist who’d wanted to know if I was crazy when I put my hand through the window.
“Maybe he’s got the right idea,” I ventured. “Wyman’s my doctor, too. Maybe we shouldn’t be such guinea pigs.”
“Oh, I don’t mind. At least they give us snacks. And not just carrots.”
Renny grinned, then got up and headed to the refreshment table. I saw that he, too, limped. The foot the lightning had gone through had shriveled and was misshapen and the leg seemed to have nerve damage. Hence the tremor, the wobbling when he walked. I looked away. I didn’t want to think about Renny lining up his putt on the green, out for a great day, nothing more.
I wanted things cold, the way they’d always been. And yet, I felt moved by these people in some way I didn’t understand. Perhaps it was because each one was ruined so uniquely, every undoing so against all probability. I turned and saw that the Naked Man was sitting with his head in his hands, eyes closed. He was sleeping. A woman next to me, struck while pruning her hedges, held a finger to her lips.
“Poor thing,” she whispered.
I noticed that the Naked Man wasn’t wearing a wedding band, that there was dog hair on his pant leg, short black hair, probably a Labrador retriever. Maybe he’d gotten what he’d wanted, or what he’d imagined he’d wanted. But he moaned in his sleep, and we all turned to him, startled by the sound. There it was, like a toad let out in a garden. Sorrow.
The Naked Man didn’t open his eyes until the group was breaking up. Then he told us this sleep disorder was happening to him more and more; he couldn’t stay awake. He would be having a conversation with someone, and the next thing he knew, he’d be fast asleep, snoring. He couldn’t tell the difference between his life and a dream. That was his problem. He’d talk to his girlfriend, Marie, about what they’d done the day before, and she’d look blank. Then he’d understand — it hadn’t been real. The canoe on the river, the car on the road, the storm or the clear sky he’d been so certain of, all of it disappeared as soon as he opened his eyes.
“I want to be awake,” the Naked Man said. “That’s all I’m asking for.”
We all looked away when he started to cry. I, for one, hoped he would remember this as a dream. A hazy room of stunned and silent people who were decent enough to give him his privacy. Before he knew it, he’d be out walking his dog and he wouldn’t even remember us, the strangers who wished the best for him, who wished he would indeed wake up.
We all had our photographs taken that night. It was part of the study. Quite necessary, we were told. One by one, we went into the examining room. We took off our clothes and stood in front of a white screen. As I stood there shivering, I recalled a fairy tale, “The Boy Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was.” It was a tale I’d disliked as a child about a boy who is so brave he can play cards with corpses and subdue ghouls without ever once flinching. When my brother read to me, I always insisted he skip right over to the next one. I didn’t like stories in which Death was a major character. Even for me, this tale seemed too illogical. Who on earth could look at death and be unafraid?
When my time came to be photographed I got into position and did as I was told. I turned left and then right. I kept my spine against the white paper. My photographs would go in my file, the same as everyone else’s. My expression would resemble the Naked Man’s — blinking in the cold brightness. Maybe that was what kept Lazarus Jones away. He who had no fear, who had wrestled with death and returned far stronger than he’d been before. He wanted his privacy; some people believed a man who told his secrets was a man who lost his strength, and maybe Lazarus Jones was such a man.
I got dressed slowly. I was the last to go. I had just started driving again, which was probably foolish. I wasn’t yet well. Sometimes I felt so nauseated I had to pull over to the side of the road to vomit. Once, I had found myself on the highway out of town and I wondered how I’d gotten there, and how I’d ever find my way back.
Coming home from the survivors’ meeting, I circled round my block twice before I recognized my own front yard. There it was: the worst lawn on the block, weedy and in need of watering. I pulled into the driveway, hurried inside, went into my bedroom. I took off my clothes and looked in the mirror. I’d closed my eyes when I’d been photographed, as though that could keep who I was and what I looked like from my own consciousness. Now I saw. There was a splotch above my heart, the spot where the lightning had made contact before it sputtered and fell to the floor. I touched that place; inside it was hard, as if a little stone had been implanted beneath the skin.
The windows were open and I could feel the weather outside filtering through the screens. For once, I had good luck.
Unlike the mythical Dragon people spoke of, Lazarus Jones was said to be only fifty miles outside of Orlon. I thought about how the Boy with No Fear had played cards with the dead, how he’d grinned and thrown an ace on the table, how he’d walked through graveyards without a single shiver, how he knew death from the inside out. I wanted a man like that, one it was impossible to kill, who wouldn’t flinch if you wished him dead, who’d already been there and back.
I had brought a suitcase of clothes with me to Flor
ida, woolen clothes, New Jersey clothes, mittens, scarves, and sweaters. I needed something new for this occasion. I hadn’t been shopping for years, not since my grandmother had first taken ill. My clothes were serviceable, suitable for someone ten years older than I. I didn’t even have a decent pair of shoes, only flip-flops and sneakers and a pair of snow boots I’d surely never need again. But looking for something to wear in Orlon wasn’t so easy. I had to drive to the Smithfield Mall, three exits away on the Interstate.
I’d left my cane at home, and just getting across the parking lot in ninety-eight-degree heat took most of my energy. Still I went on, avoiding the Kmart — which I quickly judged as too large and unmanageable. I found a small dress shop and went in. I let the salesgirls bring me outfits while I stayed in the dressing room. It was dark and cold and I think everyone in the shop pitied me. I let them think I was a cancer survivor; it was easier to accept than the truth: the living room, the fireball, the burning flyswatter, the way fate had singled me out.
One of the salesgirls happened to bring in an armful of potential outfits while I was undressed. She took one look at me and sat down on the stool in the corner.
“Sorry.” I was apologizing for my own body. I grabbed the first dress on the pile and pulled it on.
“Lightning strike,” the salesgirl said. She’d noticed the mark above my heart. “I know it when I see it. Good Lord, I’m living with it every day.”
“You?” I asked.
“Him,” she told me. “My boyfriend. And he’s just about driving me crazy with all of his goddamn effects.”
The salesgirl’s nametag said Marie. And then I knew who she was. The Naked Man’s true love. The one he’d been thinking about up on the roof. I knew too much about her beloved. It might have been embarrassing if I wasn’t so used to being in that position.
“The world is a cruel place,” Marie told me. “You think you’re getting what you want, and you wind up with a plate full of crap.” She nodded to my reflection. “That one looks real good,” she said of the dress I had on. “I’ll give you a ten percent discount for all you’ve been through.”
I turned to the mirror. It was simple, a white shift. Not bad. I thought about the Naked Man’s desires, what he’d wanted most at the moment when it seemed death was coming for him.
“Do you have a dog?” I asked Marie.
“A dog? Do you think I’m going to have something shed all over my house? Not likely.” She got back to the business at hand. She was like that, concentrated on what was right in front of her. I was starting to think the Naked Man had a secret life, one Marie knew nothing about. “I don’t think you’re going to look much better than this,” Marie told me as she considered my image in the mirror.
I figured she was right. I bought the dress, along with a pair of sandals, and wore them out of the store. I tore off the tags in the car and then I sat there recuperating from my efforts, air-conditioning turned on full blast. I had that tingling feeling in my fingers that the neurologists said was perfectly normal, given that I’d been hit by so much voltage.
I pulled myself together and got back on the Interstate. The only thing I knew for certain was that my tires were safe. Even if my brother seemed to be avoiding me lately, at least he’d spent a great deal of time looking through a con-sumer’s handbook before buying my new tires in New Jersey. I wasn’t about to skid, so I drove fast.
Everything looked the same on the road. There were white egrets picking at trash. The grass had turned brown in the heat. We were moving into summer, the season people in Orlon referred to as hell on earth. They laughed about it, though, and none of them seemed intent on moving anyplace cooler. I kept the air-conditioning on in the car, but I opened all the windows. Fresh air in these parts was like a blast from a furnace. My dress blew up and I couldn’t hear the clicking in my head so badly with all that wind.
One of my “effects” was that I had to pee all the time. Again, perfectly normal, I was assured. I stopped at a gas station where there were a couple of guys hanging out, drinking sodas, passing the time. They whistled at me. They did, and I really had to laugh. I waved at them. I figured I must have entered the land where there were no women if a pathetic specimen like me drew whistles. I didn’t look at myself in the restroom mirror. I just peed and got out of there.
I had looked up Seth Jones’s address in the phone book, then gotten myself a local map of Orlon County. All the same, my destination was farther out in the country than I’d thought. Florida was bigger than New Jersey, and people drove more. It didn’t seem to bother them one bit, just like the heat, like lightning, like the anole lizards you’d find skittering around your trash cans. When people told you a place was close by, it could be a hundred miles away. I just made up my mind to forget about the time. What had time ever done for me? When I finally got off the Interstate there were groves of fruit trees on either side of the road. The road got smaller, the groves got bigger. Lemons, oranges, and then the signpost for Jones’s property. This was where it had happened. In a few days it would be the one-year anniversary of his strike. I had found the article in an old issue of the Orlon Journal stacked down in the basement of the library, just a brief report in the Metro section. Several people on the Interstate who saw the flash said it appeared to be going straight, east to west, as though a rocket had been fired. A huge rainstorm followed, leaving an inch of rain in less than an hour. Someone driving past the Jones property saw a deep hole in the ground and steaming black smoke rising.
An ambulance was dispatched and the EMTs who first arrived declared the victim dead at 4:16 p.m.There was no heartbeat, no pulse, no breath. They tried to get his heart started, but no luck. The dead man was delivered to the morgue in the basement, and forty minutes after the lightning struck, the technician on duty turned to see the victim’s chest rise and fall beneath the plastic sheet. He was rushed to intensive care. His fingers and toes were black with soot and he was sizzling, hot to the touch. His heartbeat was still sluggish, so they put him in a tub of ice, hoping to shock his system into starting up. It worked. The victim groaned, shivered, and lifted himself out of the tub, demanding his clothes and his boots. Mr. Jones left the hospital an hour later, having refused all services, walking away toward a bus stop.
Another man would have been brain-damaged, if he managed to come back at all. But Lazarus Jones got on the bus and went home. Some people figured it was the ice that had kept his organs intact; others said his return was a miracle. Or maybe it was a sham. Maybe he’d never even been dead at all but was like some of those magicians or yogis you heard about; maybe he had the ability to lower his heart rate and stop his breathing as he hovered in between worlds without a gulp or a gasp.
Forty minutes, that was how long he was gone. From here to there and back again. It had taken me longer to drive from Orlon out here to the country.
The first thing I noticed after I’d turned into the long dirt driveway was the hole in the ground. Not only was it still there, it was much larger than the newspaper had reported — maybe three feet wide. Several trees had been uprooted by the crumbling earth and had recently fallen. Those that were still standing next to the strike spot were odd; the fruit appeared white, like snowballs. I suppose to anyone without my loss of vision, they were a brilliant orangey red. I stopped the car, got out, and took a piece of fruit that had fallen onto the ground. I half expected it to be cold, but it was warm, fragrant. I tore it open and tasted it. I felt like a person without sight who suddenly touched the face of someone she’d been to bed with but had never actually seen. The total surprise of knowing something utterly and completely, the familiar taste of an orange. I ate every bit.
I wiped my hands on my new dress and got back into the car. I drove a little farther, then stopped when I could see the house. It was nothing special. An old farmhouse with a tin roof. The rain, when it came, surely sounded like shotgun pellets; hail, when it fell, surely hammered away. I sat in my car for forty minutes, the exact amount of time he’d been dead. I wanted to get a feel for how long it had been, if that was possible. Could forty minutes be an eternity? Could you walk into fear as one person and come back as someone else entirely? I thought about the morning when I woke up and my mother was gone. The ice on the window glass. The slant of the sunlight. My brother cleaning the kitchen, his back to me. Go back to bed, he’d said. It’s too early. And so I had. I’d dreamed of snow and ice until I heard my grandmother calling my name.
Now I was in a place where there were white oranges in a field. Where there were thin wisps of high clouds. I still felt the wish I had made so long ago. It had been there all along, settled in my chest, in the place where my heart should have been, just below my strike mark.
All I wanted was to be somebody else. Was that asking too much? Was that asking for everything? That’s why I was here. It was already happening, just by driving fifty miles. The person I’d been would have never approached a stranger’s front door and knocked, not once but three times. Once for ice. Twice for snow. Three for the tires on the road.
Everything smelled hot; dust rose up and burned my nose each time I breathed in. I was someplace where there had never been ice. Where a January day was the same as July. Like the roofer who’d cried, I needed to know the difference between what was real and what was a dream. I pinched myself to see if it hurt. By the time I let go there was a raised mark on my skin. I figured it was red. That was a good sign.
I was ready to get what I deserved.
In chaos theory, does it matter what color the butterfly is? Would something entirely different have happened next if I hadn’t been color-blind? Would Lazarus Jones have opened the door if the dress I’d worn was white, as I thought it was, rather than red, as it was in anyone else’s eyes?
This is what he told me he saw from the upstairs window that first time I went to see him: A woman in a red dress standing on the porch. Out of place, out of time, steadily knocking on the door. Somebody who seemed intent on getting inside. He usually kept the shades drawn when people came looking for him. He had chased Dr. Wyman off with a gun, true enough. He wasn’t interested in visitors. He didn’t even talk to his own field-workers. But the red dress caught his eye. That’s what he told me later. Maybe I reminded him of the fruit in his orchard on the day lightning struck. Something he hadn’t expected and couldn’t quite stop.
As for me, I was ready for anything. I thought I might explode, the way I had when I shoved my hand through the window. I told myself if he didn’t come out of the house in five minutes, I would leave. Maybe I was indeed getting exactly what I deserved: nothing. A few minutes more and I probably would have been grateful for the opportunity to turn and run, the way I always had before. But I hadn’t planned what I’d do next. Leave and do what? Drive off the Interstate into a canal? Jump from a cliff? Go home, lie down on the couch, look at the ceiling fan? All I knew is that I wanted to fly away. I wanted to be something brand-new. I felt like those human beings in fairy tales who suddenly find themselves in another creature’s skin, trapped in sealskin, horsehide, feathers.
Lazarus Jones came out to the porch. I looked down at the ground. If he saw the expression on my face, I’d scare him off. Had I looked into a mirror, I would have frightened myself. I was desperate, you know. I was mired in death and wishes, trapped in the wrong skin. I was the donkey, ugly and braying, the goose girl asking for mercy, the beggarman in need of a crust of bread. The straps of my dress were falling off my shoulders. I didn’t care. Dust was on my face and on my fingers. He’d had forty minutes of knowing everything; all I wanted was a little piece of what he’d learned on the other side. I didn’t want to dissect him or photograph him or measure the radioactivity under his skin. I just wanted to be in the presence of a man it was impossible to kill.
There were birds overhead and I saw their shadows float by on the porch floorboards. It hurt to breathe. I should have apologized for intruding, or told him that I’d come a far distance only to ask how afraid I should be of death. I should have told him that the worst thing in the world is a wish that comes true. But I remained silent, the way I had so many times before.
“Who told you to come here?” he said.
What was I supposed to say? Fate? A butterfly on the other side of the world? The donkeyskin I wore, so itchy, so ill-fitting? An eight-year-old girl who breathed out one wish and changed everything?
“Are you trying to interview me, or something?” he wanted to know. He came over and took my arm. Did he test for lies this way? Could he feel a betrayal as easily as he could stop clocks?
His touch was so hot I almost fainted. But that might not have been about lightning.
“I’m just a librarian, not a reporter. From Orlon. I just wanted to see you for myself. They talked about you in my lightning group. They said you died and came back and now you’re not afraid of anything. So why would you care whether or not I was here? You’re not afraid, are you?”
Those were more words all strung together than I’d said in years. It was exhausting to talk. I felt as though I’d had to pull each word out of my throat, like stones I’d swallowed, with sharp edges.
Jones looked at me more carefully now that he understood I’d been struck. I wasn’t just anyone, some busybody who had no idea of what he’d been through. He let go of my arm.
“If they say that about me, they’re idiots. And if I wasn’t afraid of anything I’d be one, too.”
He was studying me, up and down. I felt too hot. I remembered I was in Florida. I remembered it would never snow here. I could be honest. To a point.
“My strike affected my left side,” I said. “Nerve damage. Some cardiac damage as well. And I can’t see the color red.”
He laughed out loud; for a moment, his whole face changed.
“Is that funny?” I asked.
He stopped laughing. Stared at me. “Maybe.”
“You’re not going to pull a gun on me like you did to Dr. Wyman?”
“It wasn’t loaded,” Lazarus told me. “He ran before finding that out.”
What no one had mentioned about Lazarus Jones was that he was beautiful. Younger than I was; twenty-five or thirty, I couldn’t tell. His eyes were dark, darker than mine. I wondered if whatever he’d learned in those forty minutes had turned him to ash. He wore a long-sleeved white shirt and old jeans, work boots. His hair was dark and he hadn’t had it cut in some time; it was longer than mine. When he stared there was something hot in his gaze, as though he could burn you alive if he wanted to. If you gave him a reason.
“Well, you’re here,” Lazarus said. “What do you want?”
This sounded like a trick question to me. If I answered incorrectly, perhaps I would turn into ash myself. Burned alive.
We stared at each other. Putting my hand through glass was nothing compared with this. I was in this moment, no other time. Now when I thought about New Jersey it was like remembering a mythological country.
You had to do the thing you were most afraid of, didn’t you? In every fairy tale the right way was the difficult path, the one that led over boulders, through brambles, across a field of fire. I took a step forward and looped my arms around Lazarus Jones’s neck so I could be near him. Every person had a secret, this was mine: I couldn’t begin anything that remotely resembled a life until I understood death.
Lazarus Jones smelled like sulfur. People with sense run away from fire, but not me.
“Now that you’ve done it once, are you afraid to do it again?”
In response, he pulled me closer, just for an instant. For that time I didn’t hear the clicking in my head, not one snap. I didn’t smell oranges or feel the gritty dust.
“That’s for me to know. I’m not sure you want to find out.”
He let go and started walking away. Then he stopped and turned around. I was still there. He hadn’t imagined me or gotten rid of me. Yet.
“You want to know what I’m afraid of?”
He cast a shadow along the yardspace between us. A dark shade. The sun was no longer blinding me. I could see right into his face. Maybe I nodded. I must have, because he spoke.
“It’s the living that scares me most of all,” Lazarus Jones said.
He went on then, inside his house. After he’d closed the door, I heard the lock click into place. I felt lost, standing there. Sweltering in the sun. It was so hot out no birds were in the sky. They were all perched in the shadows.
A group of men were sitting in the shade as well, taking a break from picking oranges. One of them approached me as I walked back to my car. He was young, high-school age, tall and rangy. He had a curious, friendly expression and his hair was buzzed off. He reminded me of Renny, but he was healthy and strong; his hands were rough, covered with blisters. I wondered if the blisters caused him great pain. If he rubbed them with Vaseline. If some girl who loved him put his fingers in her mouth, healed him with a kiss.
“Was that Jones you were talking to?” the boy asked me.
“For a minute,” I said.
“He never talks to any of us. He leaves what we’re owed out on the porch. Then the fruit distributor sends trucks out, and those guys have nothing to do with him, either. I never even saw him before today. You were up close. Was he all deformed, or something?”
Deformed, no. Merely beautiful. But I didn’t think it was my place to comment if Jones wanted to keep himself locked away.
“I couldn’t really tell.”
“That’s what we all figure. He got hit by lightning and he’s all scarred up.”
“I didn’t see anything.”
“Let us know if you find out. Maybe we’re all working for a fucking monster.” The boy laughed at that notion. “Maybe he’s a bloodsucking creature from beyond the grave.”
“He wasn’t,” I said. Just beautiful, filled with ashes, shutting the door in my face. Only that.
“But you couldn’t really tell,” the boy challenged me. “Could you?” The other guys were whistling for him, calling his name, so he headed back to them. “See ya,” he called as he ambled back into the shade.
I got into my car and took off, but I was rattled. I pulled onto the Interstate going the wrong way and didn’t realize my mistake until I’d driven north for three exits. Orlon was to the south. Finally, I turned around and pulled off at a rest stop. I used the toilet and bought a bottle of water. The cashier complimented me on my red dress and then I realized why Lazarus Jones had laughed at my color blindness. I understood why the men in the gas station where I’d stopped before had whistled. They thought they knew who I was because of my red dress. I felt hot and confused; where he’d grabbed my arm heat blisters had risen. Where he’d whispered to me, my ear was burning.
I went home, took off my dress, and hung it in the back of the closet. The next morning, when I went out to my car, I noticed that the odometer had stopped. I wondered if the malfunction had been brought on by proximity to Lazarus Jones. There was something wrong with me as well. Definitely caused by Lazarus. Wherever he had touched me I had little raised burn marks. I went to the Orlon University Health Center, to see the nurse who’d examined me for the lightning-strike study. He name was June Malone and she was a year or two younger than I.
“You’ve missed a couple of meetings,” she said.
“Have I?” Like I was ever going again. “These things actually hurt.” I showed her my arm.
June gave me an ointment for my skin, but she seemed suspicious. Maybe it looked as though I’d mutilated myself, held a hot match to my flesh.
“I’m sensitive,” I told her.
“So I see.”
“Seriously, the slightest thing affects me,” I assured her.
“We need to report this to the study. Any new effect can be meaningful.”
“Look, I’m not the type to be in a study. And don’t these studies benefit the clinicians and the scientists, not the patients?”
I did agree to revisit the cardiologist, a fellow named Craven, who was in charge of my case but never seemed to recognize me. Thankfully, though, he recognized my heart. I suppose that was the important thing. I’d had a new electrocardiogram and Craven studied the results. He asked if my heart was racing. I admitted it was. I was given a prescription for nitroglycerin and told that when my heart started hurting I should slip a tablet under my tongue. I might occasionally experience angina brought on by the neurological and cardiac shock of the strike. Very common. I limped out of there with my ointment and my nitro, a commonplace wreck.
I spied Renny as I was walking across the campus. It was the first week of summer school and he was taking Modern Architecture; that was his major. In all honesty I wanted to avoid him; I didn’t want a friend. But he spotted me and shouted out for me to wait, so I did.
“Trying to sneak away?” Renny was wearing khaki shorts, sneakers, an Orlon University T-shirt, and his heavy leather gloves.
“I was being treated for a disgusting little skin condition.” I showed him my arm. We sat down on a bench under a cabbage palm.
“Want to trade?” he said. When he saw the look on my face he added, “I’m kidding. Just a little levity. No guilt if my effects are worse than yours. We’re beyond that. Fellow survivors and all.”
I suppose as friends we suited each other in some strange way. He told me a little about his life — his parents were doctors in Miami, his younger sister was still in high school. The only thing he’d ever been interested in was building things; he’d been obsessed with architecture since the first time he played with blocks. Now with his hands afflicted, he worried that architecture might no longer be an option.
Renny was only twenty-one, but he seemed older once he got to talking. He gazed at the other students passing by. I saw what was in his eyes. The others had no idea of what he’d been through. They were moving through a world in which people didn’t limp or have holes in their heads. In their universe no one wore gloves when the temperature climbed toward a hundred degrees. No one woke in the middle of the night, in pain, alone. A stranger in his own life.
“Do you think every person has one defining secret?” Renny asked.
I laughed, nursing my own most current secret, Lazarus Jones. “Don’t you think we’re more complex than that? Don’t we all have endless secrets?”
“Little, bullshit ones. Sure. I don’t mean those. Who do you love? Who did you fuck? Everyone has them. I mean one defining secret. The essence of a person. If you figure that out, you figure out the riddle of that particular human being.”
“Is this your way of getting me to confide in you?”
“Maybe. Just give me one of your bullshit secrets. But be careful. That might make us friends.”
I was surprised. Though he was a stranger to me, I’d thought he had assumed we were friends. Renny, it turned out, wasn’t easy to fool. I suppose he was used to people shrugging him off. The sun was in his face, blurring his features. All in all, Renny wasn’t a bad-looking guy, but not a single girl walking by had glanced at him. The limp, the withered foot, the hole in his head, the gloves. That’s what they saw.
Would it hurt me to give him something? Just a tiny bit?
“I went to see Lazarus Jones.”
Renny stared at me, then threw his head back and laughed. He might have even chortled. “Now that is bullshit.”
“Seriously. I did.”
“Bullshit and crap. Times two.”
“Fine. Don’t believe me.”
“Yeah, well then, tell me. Did he really chase Wyman off with a gun?” 60
“Unloaded. He didn’t want to be their lab rat.”
“Wow. Sympathy for the devil. Maybe you really did meet him.”
“He’s not the devil. And I’m hardly sympathetic.” Now that was bullshit. “He owns an orange grove.” Enough of this. “Okay, so now give me one of your secrets.”
“There’s one,” Renny said mournfully.
I followed his gaze. Several young women were on their way to the dorms. Frankly, I couldn’t tell one from the other. They were all pretty and young.
“The one on the left.”
The blonde.
“Iris McGinnis. She was in my art history class in the spring. She doesn’t know I’m alive. I’m insanely crazy about her.”
“This isn’t your defining secret, is it?”
Instead of answering, Renny said, “Look at her. No one will ever be in love with me.”
“You’re not the only one in the world with a terrible love life. I’m right there with you.”
There was no need for him to know about the policeman in the parking lot or my friends’ boyfriends in high school or the fact that I liked the way the burns on my arms felt, what they reminded me of. Sitting there with Renny, I wondered if choosing the red dress had been an accident. Was there a part of my brain that could still sense red, just as it sensed desire?
When Renny went to class I walked to my car and headed for the library. I had decided to get the library records in order. It was the least I could do to make up for all my absences. I was taking Frances’s handwritten notations and entering them into the word processor. On each patron’s card Frances had painstakingly recorded every book he or she had checked out. There was one woman, for instance, who had withdrawn every book on architecture that we had, then had ordered more. I wondered if she’d be a possibility for Renny until I came to her birth date and discovered this particular patron was nearly eighty years old. No match, I supposed, for the beautiful Iris McGinnis.
It was a Thursday afternoon, and as I worked I couldn’t help but overhear the preschool reading group. Frances was reading Andersen’s “Everything in Its Right Place,” in which the pious heroine is nothing like the Goose Girl in the Grimms’ tale. There were no heads nailed to the wall in this story. No cases of mistaken identity that weren’t easily rectified. A few of the mothers eyed me. I suppose there might be toddlers who continued to have nightmares from my time in command of story hour. No wonder their mothers wanted me kept at a distance. If I spoke, anything at all might drop from my lips: blood, frogs, death wishes, desire.
I kept to my files. I was in the A’s all afternoon. Before long my brother’s name came up. I hadn’t seen him in weeks; now it was as though I had stumbled upon him, face-to-face. I was surprised Ned had ever been to this library, when the university facility was so superior. The science library in the north quad ranked alongside the University of Miami’s collection, the result of a major donation by an Orlon alum who had invented a plastic attachment for fail
ing kidneys. But my brother indeed had a library card here, and as it turned out, he had used it. I slipped his card into my backpack to look at later on.
When I went home, the wind had risen. A hot wind. I parked and got out. I had the sense of being lost that I often had here, as though I’d been transported to Florida by means I didn’t understand. I’d blinked and my life had disappeared. There was Giselle, sitting in the weeds, her tail flashing back and forth. My familiar. She followed me in the door, and when I sat down on the couch, she leapt up and stared at me. The wind came through the screens and made the ceiling fan spin, though it was turned off. I took out my brother’s library card and Giselle tapped at it with her paw. Knock, knock. Who’s there?
I couldn’t imagine my brother reading anything but scientific journals and texts. Yet he had withdrawn the complete Grimm’s fairy tales not once, but twice. He’d actually had to pay an overdue fine. What would he have done with such stories? Why on earth had he wanted them? I’d had to force him to read them to me when we were children. Please, this one. That one. Not one about Death. He’d always had some comment to make: Genetically impossible for men to turn into beasts. Ridiculous to imagine that a woman could sleep for a hundred years. Absurd to think the dead could speak in rhymes and the living could make wishes that came true. But the logic of fairy tales was that there was no logic: bad things happened to the innocent, children were set out in the woods by their parents, fear walked hand in hand with experience, a wish spoken aloud could make it so.
I fed the cat, then took a cold bath. The blisters were still on my skin. To me they looked like flecks of snow. I shivered in my tub of water and watched the light fade. I had gone to Lazarus Jones because I thought he could help me understand what had happened on that January day when I was a child. Her very last moments, that’s what I was interested in. Did a person’s life flash before her eyes, all she’d had and all she’d lost? Or was it the last few instants that mattered most of all? Did the immediate past last forever, a tape that kept playing somewhere in the universe? Was the last thing my mother saw a sheet of ice? Was she listening to the radio, singing along? I suppose what I really wanted to know was if she despised me for the wish I’d made, whether it was possible in any way, in any world, for her to ever forgive me.
I let the water in the bath drain, and after I dressed I went outside. It was still hot. Too hot to breathe. The wind rattled, knocked things about. The palm fronds smacked against one another. Giselle followed me out and went to sit beside the hedge, waiting for the moles that sometimes wandered onto our lawn. I wondered if this would ever feel like home. If anything ever would. I wondered if this book was my brother’s defining secret, or just a small part of who he truly was.
Far away, there was thunder, a common enough occurrence in Florida, something most people ignored. I thought of Ned surrounded by a whirlwind, like the nucleus of an atom, trapped within itself. I thought of him walking into the Orlon Public Library looking for answers, still trying to understand what we did wrong. I wanted to telephone my brother and say, Tell me the truth. Do you believe a wish can kill? Do you believe we could have changed something that night, stopped the ice from falling, stopped our mother from getting in her car? If we’d run along the road till she turned around, woken from sleep and called the police with a premonition, would she still be alive? Tell me, brother, could we have done anything differently, you and I?