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.