Alice Hoffman - The Ice Queen

“I want to pick some,” I said.

We took one of the ladders and set it against a tree; I climbed up and tossed the oranges to Lazarus.

“Enough,” he said. “We’ll never eat them all.”

But I couldn’t stop. More and more. I’d been starving; not anymore.

It was a cool night, but these oranges kept in heat. Little globes of burning sunlight. We carried the basket together. For this one night, in love, in love. Everything meant some­thing to us. Black sky, black trees, red oranges, sweet smell of the earth, the heat when he whispered to me, the sound of our feet on the dirt paths, the sprinkler system switching on, water falling.

We took off our clothes in the orchard and went under the sprinklers. In the night air, under water, we could em­brace each other any way we wanted to. There was no one for miles around. No one else at all. I loved the way he felt, so real, so here, so now. I loved his muscles under his skin, the heat from his body, the way his kisses burned. I loved the way it hurt, the way it made me know I was alive, now and in the ever after, seeing red, wanting to go down on my hands and knees, not caring if there was another person in the uni­verse. No wonder people did this however and with whom­ever; with strangers, in parking lots, desperate, greedy; joined together, you can imagine you’re not alone, the only one. So different, because when you are in love, that’s the joke: you feel your aloneness so deeply it hurts. When I’m not with you .

“Stop thinking,” Lazarus said to me.

I was freezing, without clothes, soaked by all that cold water, the sprinklers, the starlight, the now, the now .

I kissed him and let the rest fall away. He sat on the ground, pulled me down. I was in his lap with him inside me, able to look right into his eyes, the way they were like ashes. I ran my hands down his back. I felt everything. There wasn’t another man, shadowgraph or not. It was just him. Skin, muscles, bones, heart, blood, red, heat.

I just let go. I gave up, gave in: I stopped fighting being alive.

It was the time I would remember, more than the fish, tub, ice, pond, fast, hard, slow, baby; it was this, drowning while I knew he was thinking about leaving. We were a human example of chaos theory, thrown together by cir­cumstance. We didn’t belong together, I knew that. But for one night we were perfect.

When we went back to the house I took a hot shower. I was shivering, even when I got dry and had dressed. I took a sweater from the bureau drawer in the bedroom, then went into the kitchen. Lazarus was wearing the clothes he’d had on before; he still had mud on him. He was sitting at the table. He looked at me when I came into the room. I could tell from his expression that there was always a price to pay. The ruin. The sorrow. The ever after .

“Without you I would have been completely alone,” he said.

I looked at his mouth, the bones of his face, his ashy eyes, his wide hands, and the way his veins roped through his arms. Blue and red. Alive. I looked hard. I wanted to re­member that he’d wanted me once. I put this moment into the ever after, the core of everything I’d ever known.

He had cut all of the oranges I’d picked in half. It looked as though there was blood on the table, but it was only juice. These were the oranges that had been bringing the most profit at market. People liked how rare they were, the splash of color in a fruit bowl, in their mouths. He’d been getting double the price, but not anymore.

The ones he’d cut in half were black in the center. All that sweet red fruit that tasted like a surprise, that was gone. The oranges were rotting from the inside out. I’d heard about such occurrences. A tree that had been hit would stand for months and no one would guess it was dying at its center until it fell to the ground. Effects took time; you looked away, you thought you were safe, then they happened. Be­fore you knew it, everything had changed.

The story is always about searching for the truth, no mat­ter what it might bring. Even when nothing was what it ap­peared to be, when everything was hidden, there was a center not even I could run from: who I truly was, what I felt, what I was deep inside.

Renny’s family had brought a lawsuit R against Orlon University. Ever careful and pru­dent, the university protected itself, like a crea­ture that could only think to sting. My brother’s research was gone. Someday someone else would collect similar information and would interview lightning victims, photograph them against a white wall, but that would be then. Not now. In the now that we lived in, everything went through the shredder and was turned to dust.

I had thought of a way to give my brother some of the life he wanted to live. Something that might please him, interest him, something to remember in the ever after . I asked Nina, and she agreed, so I phoned my brother at work. I hadn’t seen him or spoken to him since Nina had told me. My brother and I weren’t exactly used to the truth. So I dodged it a bit longer.

“Before they shred it, get the Dragon’s file,” I told Ned.

I had managed to gain a referral from Craven, my cardi­ologist, so that I could speak with the attending cardiologist in Jacksonville. When I asked about the Dragon, the cardi­ologist told me the old fellow came back stronger both times he’d been struck by lightning. He was an ox of a man who still walked ten miles a day.

“We ran tests on him. He said he was too old to give us more than one day to study him. Said it was a waste of time. According to the facts of his condition, he should have stayed dead. His heartbeat was less than ten beats a minute, slower than a bear in hibernation. He was eighty-seven years old when his second strike took place. He was knocked flat on his back and received so many volts it was immeasurable. Then he got up and had lunch. He refused all medical care, and as far as we know, he’s the healthiest old bastard in the state. Go figure.”

“You want me to steal his file?” my brother said now when I phoned him. “As in just take it?”

“Right now.”

Ned laughed; he seemed pleased at the idea of a small criminal act committed against the university.

“If I get caught, I’ll say you’re the mastermind.”

I was nervous about seeing Ned. I thought I’d say some­thing stupid. Wouldn’t that be just like me. I figured a pub­lic place might be best; with people around, I might behave myself. I might not cry.

I met him at the diner in town for breakfast and he handed over the file.

“The Dragon’s an anomaly. One of a kind. Even if he’d talked to us, he would have done nothing for our study. He’s what people doing research call an ‘anecdote’ — a great story, but meaningless in the greater scheme of research. Just a lucky old bastard. And since there’s no longer a study, it doesn’t really matter.”

“Let’s go see him,” I said.

Ned had ordered a single scrambled egg and toast. He hadn’t even eaten half.

“We’ll be back by tonight,” I assured him.

“We never had anyone go out there and examine him. We can’t even be sure he’s still alive. Plus . . .” He played with his food. “Plus, I’m not feeling so great.”

“I asked Nina and she said you could go.”

“You asked Nina? What am I, five years old? Do I need permission?”

Leave it to me to say the wrong thing. I signaled the wait­ress and ordered rice pudding and tea. When I turned back, my brother was cleaning his glasses on his shirt. I saw that the skin under his eyes was scaly with rosy patches.