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.