A. Attanasio - In Other Worlds

"Wow!" Zee yelled. "Are you charged! You look like you're being electrocuted-very slowly." He shifted his dark, slim eyes toward the table Sheelagh was clearing, her pendulous breasts swaying with her effort-. "She's overloading you?"
"Today's an unusual day for me, buddy, but not that unusual. What'll you have?"
"Give me a Harp."
Carl took out a bottle of Harp lager from the ice cooler and poured it into a frosted mug. "The wiring's shot around the bar. I can't get this blender or even the damn lightbulbs to work right."
Zee reached over, and the blender purred under his touch. "It's the same way with women and me. The touch must be light yet assertive. I think you've got a lot of backed-up orgone in there." He stabbed Carl's midriff with a swizzle stick. "How about a run with me tomorrow? We'll follow the Westway down to the twin towers. I'll go easy on ya."
Carl agreed, and they chatted amiably about their usual subjects-slow running and fast women-while Carl tended to business. Later, as he was leaving, Zee leaned close and whispered: "No sense wearing that
expensive cologne if you're going to dress like that." He reached out to shake, thought better of it, saluted, and left.
The rest of the day was a bumbling of small accidents for Carl. The bar's electrical system gave-out entirely, and he had to mix drinks by hand and repeatedly go down to the basement cooler for ice. The tiny screws in his eyeglasses popped out; and he lost a lens down an open drain. Napkins clung tenaciously to his fingers, no matter how dry he kept them, and he spilled several drinks before he got used to the paper coasters coming away with his hand. Midway through the dinner shift, with the house jammed, the lights began dimming. When he left; the bar to check the fuse box, the light came up, only to fade again on his return. "This is weird," Carl at last acknowledged, running both hands through his startled hair. Sparks crackled between his fingers. "I'm going home." He went over to the pay phone to call a neighborhood friend to cover for him, but he couldn't get a dial tone. Moments later a customer used the same phone without difficulty.
Carl waited until Sheelagh came to the bar with drink orders, then signed her toward a vacant corner. "What's wrong with me tonight, Sheelagh?"
"Your glasses are missing a lens. Your clothes need ironing. And you really should comb your hair."
"No– I mean, look at this." He touched her arm, and a large spark volted between them.
"Hey! Cut that out. That hurts."
"I can't stop it. I've been electrocuting customers all day. Look." He passed his hand over a stack of napkins, and the paper rose like drowsy leaves and clung to his fingers.
"It's some kind of static electricity," Sheelagh explained.
"I'll say. What can I do about it?"
"Keep your hands to yourself."
Spark surges thudded through him whenever he reached for metal, and after another hour .of stiffening jolts, he sat on a stool at the far end of the bar and cradled his head in his hands.
"Is it that bad, darlin'?" A gentle hand touched his bald head, and another spark jumped.
Carl looked up into Caitlin's whiskey-bright eyes. A –feeling of bloated peacefulness buoyed him at the sight of her time-snarled face. "Hi, Caity. Everything's wrong for me tonight. And I don't even know why."
"Just your luck taking a rest. Don't mind it. Have a drink."
"Nah-but I'd better get back to work."
"Wait." She took his hand, and another knot of electricity unraveled sharply with her touch. "I have to tell you." The marmalade-light in her stare dangled above him, and he could see the whiskey burning in her. "If only I could tell you what I've been humbled to. She doesn't know." She glanced toward where Sheelagh was serving a table, her sinewy elegance shining in the dim light. "You're a special man, Carl. Luck splits through you like light through a crystal. I see that. I see it because I'm old, and pain and mistakes have taught me how to see. You're a beautiful man, Carl Schirmer." Her scowl softened, and she turned away and went back to the kitchen. A customer called from the bar, and Carl rose like a lark into a smoky sunrise.
Caitlin's kind words fueled Carl for the rest of his last day, but by closing time he was feeling wrong again. He felt tingly as a glowworm, and all the tiny hairs on his body were standing straight up. He left Caitlin and Sheelagh to shut down the Blue Apple and walked home. An icy zero was widening in his chest, and he thought for sure he was going to be sick. Nonetheless, the beauty he had felt that morning was still there. Above the city lights, a chain of stars twined against the
darkness, and the fabric of midnight shimmered like wet fur. Only the bizarre emptiness deepening inside him kept him from leaping with joy.
So self-absorbed was he with the bubble of vacancy expanding within him that he didn't notice the befuddled look on the face of the kid whose huge radio fuzzed out and in as Carl passed. Nor did he see the streetlights winking out above him and then flaring back brightly in his wake. The midnight traffic slowed to watch the neon lights in the stores along Twentythird Street warble to darkness in his presence. Not until he had stumbled up the blacked-out stairs of his own building and had fumbled to get his key in the lock by the light of the sparks leaping from his fingers did he notice that a thin ghostfire was burning coolly over his hands and arms. He left the door unlocked behind him, afraid that something awful was happening to him. His apartment lights, like all the lights in the building; were browned out. The filaments in the bulbs glowed dark red but cast no radiance. The TV worked bat gave no picture, only a prickly sound. He wheeled the TV to the door of the bathroom, and by its pulsing blue glow 'he had enough light to take a cold shower. The chilled water invigorated him, and when he looked down at his arms, he saw that the shimmering was gone, if it had been there at all. Relief widened in him, and he washed the one lens of his glasses and put them on to examine himself more closely.
The air was a vibration of luminance, and the wavering static of the TV seemed louder and more reverberant. He slid open the glass door to the shower, and his heart gulped panic. The TV was blacked out. The illumination and the sound were coming out of the air!
He jumped out of the shower stall and nearly collapsed. The bathroom was refulgent with frenzied
light; waterdrops hung in the air like chips of crystal. Through the glare in the mirror, through an anvil, of ripping-metal noise, he saw that his head was blazing with swirls of silvergreen flames. Dumbstruck, he watched the terror in his brilliantly oiled face as green fire fumed from his body in an incandescent rush.
A white-hot shriek cut through him, and his body went glassy, shot through with violet sparks and flurries of black light. Silence
froze the room to a cube of crackling light. And the last thing Carl Schirmer saw was the glass of his own horrified face shatter into impossible colors. '
Zee was the first to see Carl's apartment when he came by the next morning for their planned run. His knock went unanswered, but he heard the TV, so he tried the door. And it opened. The apartment smelled windshaken, bright as a mountaintop. Zee went over to the TV, which had been wheeled across the room to face the bathroom door and was blaring a morning soap. He turned it off.
"Oh sweet Jesus!" The words escaped him before he knew what he was seeing. Ile bathroom was a charred socket. The mirrors were purpled from exposure to an intense heat, burned imageless. Zee entered, and the tiles crushed to ash beneath his sneakers. He stood– numb in the scorched and shrunken room. The seat of the fire-glossed toilet had curled to the shape of a black butterfly, and the sink counter that had held toothbrush and shaving implements was reduced to twisted clinkers.
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