Alice Hoffman Read online

  I knew exactly what Peggy was up to. So take that! See there! You can do it, too! Up by your bootstraps! Work a little harder!

  All of Peggy’s cases were success stories. Perhaps I should have warned her: her luck was about to change. I was stubborn; I suppose I tried to fail, and yet I did improve slightly, at least on the surface. I never mentioned the lack of the color red, the buzzing under my skin, the clicking in my head. The one creature I couldn’t hide my most secret effects from was the cat. Sometimes Giselle would come to sit next to me and place her paw on my arm. Her paw would vibrate violently and after an instant, she’d remove it and stare at me. I thought she knew me then. The only creature in the universe that understood how I really felt. No wonder she disliked me. I hadn’t fooled her one bit.

  Frances York had promised to keep my job open for me at the library, that bookless, underused place. When she telephoned to tell me the news I said, Oh joy. She missed the sarcasm; she thought I meant it.

  But of course I will, dear. We stick together.

  I didn’t know if she meant librarians, or losers, or women who were alone, facing some sort of tragedy. I figured she’d had tragedies of her own, not that I wanted to hear about them. I wanted to tell her that at my last job I used to have meaningless sex with someone in the library parking lot on a regular basis. Someone I didn’t love and didn’t want to love me. That I did it even in the winter, when there was ice everywhere and our breath steamed up the car windows. I wanted to tell her that ever since my lightning strike I spent my nights vomiting and clicking, and that my eyes — the stand-ins for her failing vision — hurt so badly I’d probably never read another book again. I wanted to tell her I had managed to do away with nearly all of the people I loved most in the world, death by proximity and idle wishes, and I still couldn’t manage to get rid of myself. Instead, I said, Thank you, and promised I’d advise her about my condition; as soon as I felt up to it, I’d come back to the library.

  My life was empty and that was fine. It was what I was used to. Yet there was something expected of me, like it or not. I was to be a part of the lightning-strike study, persuaded by my brother to be among the dozens of patients tested by a team of biologists, neurologists, and meteorologists on the third floor of the Science Center over at the university. My brother seemed to feel guilty about what had happened to me, and yet he was avoiding me. Best not to see what disturbs you. Best to order it, examine it, and place it in a study. The way I saw it, chaos theory was at the root of Ned’s guilt. On those occasions when he phoned me, it was to discuss the probabilities of my lightning strike. If he hadn’t insisted, I wouldn’t have moved to Florida. If I hadn’t moved, I wouldn’t have been struck, and on and on. I didn’t want to hear any more and I certainly didn’t want to see Ned suffer. One of us doing that was enough.

  So I gave in.

  The experts tapped at me, charted my heartbeat, examined my skeleton. I saw a neurologist. A cardiologist. Then a psychologist. They gave me a battery of intelligence tests and told me it was fine if I didn’t remember the names of historical figures most fifth-graders could reel off. There were psychological tests as well; I expected as much. On those questions I answered that everything was false.

  I was informed that there were many different kinds of lightning strikes — splash, contact, step voltage, blunt trauma, and direct hit. Mine seemed to have been a splash — the flyswatter, it seemed, had come between me and the full force of what can be as much as 120 million volts. Ninety percent of lightning-strike victims survived, but 25 percent suffered major effects, some of which weren’t apparent for months or even years. My brother sent over several books, and the medical staff loaded me down with pamphlets. I think they were all trying not just to educate me but to let me know how lucky I was simply to be alive.

  By the end of the month, the neurologist in charge of my case, Dr. Wyman, said I was progressing nicely. I knew I wasn’t. Oh, I had moved on from a walker to a cane, from physical therapy every day to twice a week and finally to practicing my exercises alone. Peggy had gone on to her next patient, an elderly man who’d fallen down the stairs and broken every single bone in his legs. I was done as far as Peggy was concerned. Up and about and enjoying the Florida weather, I’m sure she was saying to the man with broken bones. Dr. Wyman was most likely discussing me with his colleagues. Such good progress! Even when I admitted the ocular problem, he insisted the fading of a single color was nothing to worry about. Perhaps to him it was nothing, but to me the loss of red was staggering; the emptiness I was left with made me weep. In my world, a cherry was no different from a stone. Oh, how I missed things that had never mattered to me before. An apple, a carnation, a bird I knew to be a cardinal, which to my eyes was as gray as a dove.

  There were no words for how wrong Wyman was in his assessment of my condition. In fact, I’d been deteriorating. The crying, the coldness inside, the fear every time I walked out the door. How could I tell the doctor what was wrong with me? I didn’t understand it myself. I couldn’t articulate the pain; it was the pain of nothingness. My fear was of the weather, the atmosphere, the very air. What good did safety tips do me now? Avoid water, metal objects, rooftops; stay off the telephone in a storm; don’t think glass can protect you; even if a storm is eight miles away, you’re still not safe from a strike.

  Avoid life, perhaps that was the answer. The number one safety tip. Stay away from it all.

  Without words, only action would do. To show my doctor what little progress I’d made, to show him what my world was made of, I put my hand through the window. It was a staggeringly stupid thing to do, but maybe Peggy had been right. Maybe I wanted help; maybe I was desperate for it. I was trapped behind glass, cold, empty, dead inside. Such was my condition, Doctor, if you really want to know: shattered.

  The Science Center was cool, crisp, temperature-controlled. It was a shock to have broiling hot air stream through the broken window into the deeply cold room. The doctor leapt back. Glass covered the floor, shimmering. In all honesty, I had stunned myself. It was as though the girl in my childhood story had suddenly lurched forward against her casing of blue ice.

  “Good Lord!” Wyman said. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  Blood, I suppose, was running down my arm. It looked like paste to me.

  “Are you crazy?” my doctor asked me.

  That didn’t seem a very professional question. And frankly, I thought it was up to Wyman to tell me. He was the diagnostician, after all; he was the one so certain I was improving.

  The maintenance crews were mowing the grass, and the humming of their work mixed with the click inside my head, so I stopped listening to the doctor. I was taken back to the hospital in an ambulance, even though all I needed was a few stitches. I had just wanted to get my point across. What was so wrong about that? There it was, every bit of who I was: blood, panic, sorrow. Did I have to spell it out for him?

  I was observed by internists and a psych team for forty-eight hours, during which time I made certain to be extremely pleasant. I could do that whenever I wanted to. I’d learned how in high school. The me you want me to be, the girl who knows how to listen. It didn’t take long before the nurses were confiding in me about their love lives, just as my friends had in high school. The dietitian took a special liking to me. Her mother was dying; she closed the door so she could cry in front of me. I didn’t tell her about my own history, my mother running to her car, my dear grandmother crying in her sleep.

  But all the time I was in the psych ward, I might as well have been made of ice. That first crying jag I’d had was surely an anomaly. In the ward, I looked in the distance for mountains, but there were only meshed windows, tall cabbage palms. The things I was most aware of were the things I was unable to see: geraniums in pots along the windowsill, gray and black checkers set out on drab boards, the mouths of the nurses as they spoke to me, lips so icy white they seemed frozen.

  When they released me — progress, again! — I too
k a cab home. I found Giselle pacing at the door, ravenous. This time Nina had forgotten her, so I fed the poor creature tuna fish from the can and a saucerful of milk. My diagnosis was panic disorder and depression, and I couldn’t agree more. Trauma-induced, they told me. Well, yes, that was true. Only the trauma hadn’t happened here in Florida, and it had nothing to do with lightning.

  When I let the cat out in the yard I could feel the change in the atmosphere. It was the oddest thing. It was as though I were a cloud instead of a human being. I knew it would start raining minutes before it did. I could feel the charged atoms in the air, and I was quick to call Giselle in before her coat got matted and wet. While I was getting into bed there was a lightning strike nearly five miles away. The strike split a pine tree in two and started a fire that burned several houses down to ash. It was summer lightning, the kind that appears without thunder, without a sign. But I didn’t need anyone to tell me about it.

  It was the one thing I could feel deep inside.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Light

  I

  That’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 we
re 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.