Alice Hoffman: The Ice Queen

Some people get up after a strike and finish their golf games, go about their business, have quite a story to tell. Others’ lives are forever ruined.

Is that magic? Does it make any sense? Most incidents of odd weather can be logically explained. Blood rains, once thought to be the wrath of the heavens, are actually made up of the mecondial fluids released by certain lepidoptera simultaneously emerging from their chrysalides. Black rains, those old wives’ tales, are in fact stones picked up in whirlwinds and released elsewhere. Frogs falling from the sky, same thing, no magic whatsoever; the poor creatures are simply swept up in one place by a windstorm, then de­posited on the shores of another land. And what if these frogs open their mouths and pearls fall out? Even then logic prevails: the frogs have probably been air-lifted from the China Seas, home of pearls shining in a dozen different shades no one would never expect: red, scarlet, crimson. Pearls the color of a human heart.

At Orlon University, the team was working backward, trying to understand lightning by studying its effects on human physiology. Our group of survivors met in the cafe­teria of the Science Center in the evenings. Summer school wasn’t yet in session; for now the campus was quiet. I didn’t believe in support groups; why should I go? Nothing could save me. All the same, my brother insisted the group was part of the study I had committed to. It was for the greater good, something I rarely considered. Ned called repeatedly to suggest that for once I finish something I’d started. He had a point, I suppose. But I had no desire to walk across the Orlon campus, however deserted it might be, with my hair falling out, still in need of a cane to steady my limp. I pro­nounced it imp, and it felt that way. An imp in my nervous system, pinching at this and that. Reminding me of who I was and who I’d never be.

I might have backed out at the last minute, unintention­ally forgotten the time, the day, the location of the meeting,

but Ned sent me a report he knew would intrigue me. It was a folder titled The Naked Man. How could I resist?

The Naked Man had been a roofer — a dangerous occu­pation, I knew from reading my safety tips. He was working after hours on his mother-in-law’s house on the occasion of his strike. He was forty-four years old, six foot two, 240 pounds. He was balding and wore a beard. He’d had two beers at the time of the incident, but he certainly wasn’t drunk. He worked alone. He’d never won the lottery, never owned a dog, never made a promise he hadn’t kept. Until recently.

That evening he was singing Johnny’s Cash’s “Ring of Fire.” Later, he realized this particular song was on his mind because he was having an affair with a woman who worked at the Smithfield Mall. Johnny Cash’s wife had written “Ring of Fire” when they fell in love and were married to other people. There was desire in that song, big-time. That was probably why the roofer was fixing his mother-in-law’s roof on such a dismal night. Guilt and desire, a bad combi­nation. Storms were predicted, but he figured he had time. He figured a good deed might make up for his failings.

He was mistaken.

Halfway through his work, he heard a hissing sound, and he found himself thinking of hell and whether or not he might end up there, if such a place existed. His fingers started to tingle. And then he saw what he thought was the moon falling from the sky. But the moon had a tail, and that was surely a bad sign. It was ball lightning; it fell on the roof and rolled down toward him. It looked like a comet headed straight for him, a blue-black thing that was as solid and real as a truck or a boot or a living, breathing man. The roofer thought he might be face-to-face with the devil himself, that fallen angel. He thought about everything he hadn’t yet done in his life. All of a sudden owning a dog seemed like the most important thing in the world.

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.