Shock and horror came later when she found herself in the yard standing at the edge of a burned area in the lawn, Grandfather still smoking at the ears and nose, his head a violent shade of vermilion, his hands clutching with the strength of a strangler his evening Tribune. Grandfather had flown up and over the back of the lawn chair, tossed like a toy, the vermilion glow fading to something darker, a grim tattoo coarse and ugly, zigzagging from scalp to the conductive center just above the navel—our genetic fault line.
I am not superstitious. Just the opposite. I have degrees in mathematics and physics from a better-than-average university; I have made my living for twenty-two years by analyzing failure rates for the aerospace industry. I, along with three colleagues, designed the multipurpose Unplanned Event Record, which is now used universally.
But there was a close call last summer, and it changed everything, made me attractive in ways you would not imagine. Now I am preoccupied with insulation. I have had all the tall trees that once surrounded my house cut down. No TV antenna festoons the roof. I wear thick-soled rubber boots, even to church. (The steeple of our church was demolished by lightning a year ago. A char of skeletal beams points skyward, aspiring hope mutilated in a single, heaven-sent stroke.)
This is the truth we live by: A thousand repetitions of an event give you every right to expect the one thousand and first. This is what lies behind the reassuring phrase “Laboratory-Tested.” You rely on it. Your warranties would not be worth the paper they are written on if not for such testing. This is why, despite your romantic longings for a less technically suffocating world, you do not believe in ghosts, mental telepathy, synchronicity, healing crystals, New Age music, or the zodiac. Go to two astrologers on the same day and you are likely to have a head-on collision with yourself on the expressway to confusion.
We have a fine new world. It works repeatedly, not in random fits and starts. We have what the ancients only dreamed of: reliability. Chicken guts, crystal balls, tea leaves, tarot cards, I Ching sticks, drugor starvation-induced hallucinations do not produce the reliable and specific data required by jumbo-jet pilots, brain surgeons, market analysts, or, for that matter, wheat farmers. Bypass hard knowledge at your own risk. The “right-brain” enthusiasts, the gurus of intuition, are simply lazy. They want the shortcut that bypasses the difficult road between cause and effect. But no one gets off this road. Superstition remains superstition and it can only lead to the dark side of the mind, where illumination is scant and quirky, and those who travel there soon find themselves lost in the eclipse of reason.
I am haunted by lightning, but I believe in reason. I won’t produce convincing evidence here. I am not trying to convince anyone. I am only trying to save my life, my sanity, though it is too late to save Eugenia.
Eugenia had come to fear me. If I reached across the breakfast table to touch her hand, she pulled back, goose bumps spreading up her arms. I would see her counting, though she tried to conceal it. I saw the slight up-and-down ratcheting of her eyes as they numbered the vertical peonies in each panel of wallpaper to distract herself from her fear. A good-bye kiss at the doorstep had become an ordeal for her. Our lips no longer met. We kissed the neutral air. In the bedroom—but I am not one to discuss the bedroom. Suffice it to say that when the forecast was bad, our nights were spent in the stomach-souring dread of distant thunder.
Eugenia had evolved rituals for such times that made the traditional Latin mass seem accessible and abrupt. She made the bed seven times, spraying, again and again, the underside of the blankets and sheets with an antistatic aerosol. She stood on a chair and unscrewed the light bulbs, thinking, foolishly, that by disconnecting them from their source she would safeguard the bedroom. For this same reason, she unplugged the radios, clocks, and television set. She kept crystals under her pillows. Sometimes they found their way into the bedclothes, where they scratched us. But she would not hear my complaints. A sudden breeze with the smell of rain or ozone in it sent her running. She claimed she could see the fine hair along my upper arms rise up as if from sinister sleep when ordinary unmenacing clouds drifted overhead.
She knew—to give her credit—that she was made up of positive and negative charges. We all are. The universe is. There is nothing else. This is the bottom fine, perhaps the only line. The play of human events—a phantasmagoria imposed on an electromagnetic field. You knew this, of course. There is nothing more to say about it.
When the electron-hungry clouds—anvils, hammerheads—began to track me down with the same inexorable logic that describes the fall of an apple, Eugenia believed the danger was a consequence of moral fault. She made the sign of the cross before receiving me.
“I am entitled to some affection!” I have cried out on occasion.
“I am giving it to you,” she’d remark. “This is it.” But she’d wear electrician’s gloves with rubber gauntlets that reached her elbows. Gum-soled shoes covered her feet. She coated herself from ankles to earlobes with a nonconductive oil used in the manufacture of electrolytic capacitors that smells vaguely of burning dogwood. I still keep a steel drum of this oil in the garage. The insulation, naturally, also involved the place of intimate connection. The bolt of passion, needless to say, was often neutralized by such rigorous precaution. I won’t say more.
I have been to famous clinics. They find my blood, bones, and tissues normal in every way. They find no pockets of ionization, no secret micro lightning rods wired into my femurs or tibiae. My hair has been studied for excesses of copper, zinc, and iron—elements that might seduce electrons out of the sleeping ground. I have been wired to ultrasensitive meters while spinning dynamos were passed over my body, but the indicators did not leap.
The doctors advised psychiatry. They ignored the evidence I offered. One hundred years of empirical proof: grandfather in the lawn chair, his grandfather struck down in a pasture, the several attempts on me. My cousin Priscilla was electrocuted by her telephone during a storm. My eldest brother, Paul, his pacemaker dazzled by a faulty microwave oven, causing his heart to wreck itself with fibrillations; my young brother, Warden, dead on the putting green. And of course there’s me: the scalp-tightening sensations whenever a storm gathers, and then the close call of last summer. Evidence. But evidence without theory is noise. I have no theory.
Desperate for a theory, I wrote to Dr. Helper. Helper is a psychologist who writes an advice column in our local paper. I signed my letter “Haunted.” “Dear Haunted,” he replied. “The abnormal fear of lightning is a well-documented phobia. Like the other common phobias—fear of the marketplace, fear of heights, fear of confinement—it can now be safely attributed to brain-chemistry deficits. Rest assured, you can be cured through appropriate medication. As for your ‘evidence’—your ‘close call’—please, in the future, do not go fishing in aluminum boats.”
I didn’t know the boat was aluminum. It was painted dark green and had a woody look to it. The seats were wood, the gunwales were wood, and the oars were wood. I saw wood, I believed wood. It was Ted Lardner’s boat. I had checked the weather forecasts and there were no thunderstorms within two hundred miles. I cannot spend my weekends reading technical journals in my rubber shed. I need recreation.
I should have realized the boat was not wood by its action in the water, but Ted had distracted me with the tradition of sky burials in Tibet. The bones of the dead are crushed and mixed with yak butter so that the scavenging birds will eat the remains and carry them, along with the spirit of the deceased, into the sky. Ted teaches comparative culture at the community college and is endlessly fascinating, but even so, I should have been more conscious of the boat.
I caught a fish, then Ted caught a fish. I caught another fish, a trash fish, and then Ted caught a water snake. I saw a terrapin leaving a wake. There were mergansers, fish hawks, and an occasional heron. It was lovely, we had a fine time, and Ted, who makes his own guitars, talked melodiously of how lightning-struck wood is soft and easily worked. It bends cooperatively with
applied heat and produces, in the finished product, an incomparable tone. He had his guitar with him, and when we began to believe the fishing would not improve, he strummed and sang. It was idyllic. Even so, I should have been more conscious of the boat.
“My guitar speaks,” Ted said. “This is a concert guitar, the back and sides made of struck rosewood, the top of struck cedar.”
But there were other voices speaking, and I heard them too late. “Looks like rain,” Ted said.
“What?” I gasped. I swiveled about, rocking the boat.
“Boom, boom,” Ted said, and strummed, and then I heard it too: thunder filtered through trees and hills.
I dropped my pole, heard the gong of metal on metal, and it was then I realized the boat was made of aluminum, not wood. “Jesus, Ted!” I cried out. I picked up the oars, clambered into the rowing seat, and headed the craft back to the dock, which looked to be at least two miles away. Even as I bent to my labor, wind wrinkled the lake.
The first angry white billow appeared at the crest of a hill, and as if announcing its arrival, a basso-profundo roar caromed through the small green valley that held the lake and a few small farms. Unaware of my fear, Ted strummed folk tunes from the 1960s while drawing peacefully on his pipe.
The last remaining god is weather, someone once said. Clouds are bundles of electrical charges. The earth yearns with free electrons for the upward leap. Overhead the great white muscle of stratocumulus gathered itself toward the lethal flex. The weightless tons drifted silently over us, staining the water dark green. I rowed hard. At last Ted noticed my terror. “Not to worry, old son,” he said blandly. “Lightning can’t strike twice in the same place, or haven’t you heard?” He held his lightning-struck guitar high and grinned. “We’re safe,” he said. “Guaranteed.”
“There was fire in your mouth,” Ted said later. “The water glowed so that you could see huge mackinaw trout eighty feet down. They looked like swimming angels.”
All I remember is the taste of sweet onions, the flavor of lightning. You must survive in order to remember it, however. My brother Warden was killed on a golf course. Jean, his wife, was coming up behind, working her way out of a sand trap. It knocked him sideways, off the green, his putter a black wand in his dead fist. Jean said, “I bent down to give him CPR and smelled onions, but he’d only had fruit for lunch.”
For some reason, I had my net in my hand as I rowed. The aluminum frame, I am told, turned into a hoop of fire. The oarlocks were welded to their seats. The oars splintered. The fish we caught were instantly cooked. Brass rivets melted and the boat opened. Ted swam, towing me behind. Though I cannot swim, I was extraordinarily calm. I give credit to the strike, which had momentarily reorganized my mental processes. I felt holy in the lake, on my back, Ted’s hand gripping my collar, the sky blue and clear again above me as we made our slow way to shore. I believed I was dead and that Charon was towing me across the River Styx.
This mood stayed with me for a long time. I remember it so vividly that sometimes I believe it isn’t a memory but an ongoing condition. “Your jacket filled up with light,” Ted said. “You were a one-man monster movie.” Ted is one of the lucky insulated ones. He can touch exposed house wiring and not feel the thrilling vibration of alternating current. “It was liquid light,” he said. “I thought I saw your bones. They were red and alive under your shirt. I saw your heart.”
My fillings had melted, burning my mouth. I developed a permanent cramp in the rictus muscles, forcing an engaging smile on my face I was powerless to remove. Behind my back, and sometimes to my face, I was called Smiling Jack. At work, my lead engineer, Phil Stratton, a good man, tried to put a stop to it, but the name stuck nonetheless. Nicknames, however, were the least of my worries. Without warning, I had become attractive.
In Kmart, car batteries inched toward me until they teetered on their shelves. Computerized cash registers at my approach gave out tiny electronic screams, losing track of their sums. The ignition of my car would suffer from confused timing, often leaving me stranded. My Timex flowed backwards. Eugenia’s hairpins, like a caravan of army ants, followed me out of the bathroom.
There is an explanation for everything. This is no idle assertion. It is the philosophy that made the modem world possible. Next to Newton in my den is a portrait of Einstein. The thoughtless believe the latter superseded the former. No. The latter, using the same methods, holding the same belief in reason, and guided by the same faith in the certainty of explanation, extended the former. If you lose your belief in explanation, you have lost your mind. Your mind is a representation of a five-century-old trend. What is preparing to replace it offstage, in the wings, grinning in the shadows? I tremble to think. So should you.
One day I will find an explanation for Eugenia’s tragic death. I could not attend her funeral because of my relentless smile. Her relatives might have understood, but in my grief I found it monstrous, a senseless affront. We are electrical. But shall I declare a conspiracy of electrons? Should I fix blame on the microcosmic field of positive and negative charges? Should I say my vulgar smile in the face of my loss was arranged by an evil jocularity of atoms?
She was insulated. Boots, gloves, electrolytic oil, emotional distance. Yet the bolt found her. There was no storm. I admit to anger. A man is entitled to some affection. Yet prolonged contact frightened her. She ran, stumbling in her boots, through the house, from imagined danger. I could not help myself: I thundered. I roared. A man is entitled to some affection. I did not feel attractive, though a mob of paper clips, straight pins, tacks, scraps of foil, swarming in the air like gnats when the bright afternoon is cooled by storm clouds, followed me as I roared in pursuit.
I found her in the laundry room, wedged between the dryer and washer. I felt calm, reasonable, prepared to discuss the issue in a rational way, but I knew I was also roaring at her. She looked up at me as if at a bad sky. “Eugenia,” I said, but the syllables came out as claps of thunder.
Something kicked her. It reached me as a spent corona, a blue glow that washed over me like a wave, and, like a wave, receded. It came from the 220-volt outlet, domestic lightning, wanting me, I believe, but passing through Eugenia en route. I tried to dial 911, but the phones were hot. Storm clouds arrived on the scene, warning me to keep silent, keep insulated, whispering my fate in small cyclones that bent my neighbor’s trees and carried spirals of dust into the darkening air.
I have faith that a scientific explanation for these events will soon occur to me.
Borrowed Hearts
Leon woke up smelling the past. The past smelled rank, a funky odor: sex, sweat, and broth, a foul soupy cafeteria smell, or worse. He needed to remember it, the time and place where the smell originated, but could not. It was important, crucial, but it was impossible. He felt like crying, and then he did cry. He choked back the sobs, but could not hold back the tears. He was wracked with pointless nostalgia and then by free-floating remorse. It made no sense.
He rolled toward Maisy, his wife, thinking she might be the source of the smell. She was sleeping on her back, snoring lightly with her mouth open. He leaned close to her face and inhaled her breath. He slid the blanket down and sniffed her body, beginning with her armpits and moving to her neck and breasts.
He sniffed her navel and pubic tuft. He sniffed her knees, and finally her feet. But he smelled nothing, not even her sweat. She woke up, muttering, “What are you doing, Leon? Stop that. Where are my blankets?” “Sorry,” he said.
“You have to see a doctor,” she said. “I mean it.”
“It’s not medical,” he said. “It can’t be just a medical thing.”
“It is medical. It is a medical thing.”
Maisy got out of bed and found her robe. She grappled with it, looking for the armholes. Leon still desired her, though her belly in recent years had gotten large. It fell like a roll of silver-white dough over the long horizontal scar from a decades-old hysterectomy. The fine geometry of her face was becoming obs
cured by thickened flesh. Her hair was thin and mostly gray and her eyes had lost the startling blue urgency they’d had when he first met her thirty years ago. Even though she was sixty-six, time’s relentless anvil had not been completely punishing. She still evoked the image of the woman he’d married—the dancer with the long-legged twirl, her lean back descending in a subtle arch to the abrupt hillocks of her firm rump, the wide, generous breasts, the smooth neck, and the classic planes and hollows of her lovely face.
The smell that woke him up was fading. It had not come from his wife, he knew that now. Alone in bed, he smelled himself, his pits, his wrists and hands. He was still limber enough to pull his pale white feet up to his nose, but he had no odors at all. The odors—fumes, really—that he had smelled hadn’t come from anything in his present surroundings. They had come to him from the past, like a memory, a memory without images. The odor lacked a name and conveyed the feeling that if he could only pin it down—soup, sweat, candle wax, glue, sulfurous tar, the gamy residue of sex—then something momentous would be revealed to him, something linked to a past event of pivotal importance. But it remained abstract, and by the time he got out of bed and brushed his teeth, it was reduced to a memory of a memory, insubstantial as a pointless dream. None of it made sense.
He joined his wife in the kitchen. She’d already finished making coffee and was reading the paper at the table. He poured himself a cup and sat down. He inhaled the steam rising from his cup but could not smell the good coffee aroma. He went to the pantry and found the can of coffee and removed the plastic lid. He inhaled deeply, his nose almost touching the rich, dark grounds, but he smelled nothing.
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