Alice Hoffman Read online

  “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 de
cent 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 Florida, 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 consumer’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 st
rike. 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.