An ambulance was dispatched and the EMTs who first arrived declared the victim dead at 4:16 p.m.There was no heartbeat, no pulse, no breath. They tried to get his heart started, but no luck. The dead man was delivered to the morgue in the basement, and forty minutes after the lightning struck, the technician on duty turned to see the victim’s chest rise and fall beneath the plastic sheet. He was rushed to intensive care. His fingers and toes were black with soot and he was sizzling, hot to the touch. His heartbeat was still sluggish, so they put him in a tub of ice, hoping to shock his system into starting up. It worked. The victim groaned, shivered, and lifted himself out of the tub, demanding his clothes and his boots. Mr. Jones left the hospital an hour later, having refused all services, walking away toward a bus stop.
Another man would have been brain-damaged, if he managed to come back at all. But Lazarus Jones got on the bus and went home. Some people figured it was the ice that had kept his organs intact; others said his return was a miracle. Or maybe it was a sham. Maybe he’d never even been dead at all but was like some of those magicians or yogis you heard about; maybe he had the ability to lower his heart rate and stop his breathing as he hovered in between worlds without a gulp or a gasp.
Forty minutes, that was how long he was gone. From here to there and back again. It had taken me longer to drive from Orlon out here to the country.
The first thing I noticed after I’d turned into the long dirt driveway was the hole in the ground. Not only was it still there, it was much larger than the newspaper had reported — maybe three feet wide. Several trees had been uprooted by the crumbling earth and had recently fallen. Those that were still standing next to the strike spot were odd; the fruit appeared white, like snowballs. I suppose to anyone without my loss of vision, they were a brilliant orangey red. I stopped the car, got out, and took a piece of fruit that had fallen onto the ground. I half expected it to be cold, but it was warm, fragrant. I tore it open and tasted it. I felt like a person without sight who suddenly touched the face of someone she’d been to bed with but had never actually seen. The total surprise of knowing something utterly and completely, the familiar taste of an orange. I ate every bit.
I wiped my hands on my new dress and got back into the car. I drove a little farther, then stopped when I could see the house. It was nothing special. An old farmhouse with a tin roof. The rain, when it came, surely sounded like shotgun pellets; hail, when it fell, surely hammered away. I sat in my car for forty minutes, the exact amount of time he’d been dead. I wanted to get a feel for how long it had been, if that was possible. Could forty minutes be an eternity? Could you walk into fear as one person and come back as someone else entirely? I thought about the morning when I woke up and my mother was gone. The ice on the window glass. The slant of the sunlight. My brother cleaning the kitchen, his back to me. Go back to bed, he’d said. It’s too early. And so I had. I’d dreamed of snow and ice until I heard my grandmother calling my name.
Now I was in a place where there were white oranges in a field. Where there were thin wisps of high clouds. I still felt the wish I had made so long ago. It had been there all along, settled in my chest, in the place where my heart should have been, just below my strike mark.
All I wanted was to be somebody else. Was that asking too much? Was that asking for everything? That’s why I was here. It was already happening, just by driving fifty miles. The person I’d been would have never approached a stranger’s front door and knocked, not once but three times. Once for ice. Twice for snow. Three for the tires on the road.
Everything smelled hot; dust rose up and burned my nose each time I breathed in. I was someplace where there had never been ice. Where a January day was the same as July. Like the roofer who’d cried, I needed to know the difference between what was real and what was a dream. I pinched myself to see if it hurt. By the time I let go there was a raised mark on my skin. I figured it was red. That was a good sign.
I was ready to get what I deserved.
II
In chaos theory, does it matter what color the butterfly is? Would something entirely different have happened next if I hadn’t been color-blind? Would Lazarus Jones have opened the door if the dress I’d worn was white, as I thought it was, rather than red, as it was in anyone else’s eyes?
This is what he told me he saw from the upstairs window that first time I went to see him: A woman in a red dress standing on the porch. Out of place, out of time, steadily knocking on the door. Somebody who seemed intent on getting inside. He usually kept the shades drawn when people came looking for him. He had chased Dr. Wyman off with a gun, true enough. He wasn’t interested in visitors. He didn’t even talk to his own field-workers. But the red dress caught his eye. That’s what he told me later. Maybe I reminded him of the fruit in his orchard on the day lightning struck. Something he hadn’t expected and couldn’t quite stop.
As for me, I was ready for anything. I thought I might explode, the way I had when I shoved my hand through the window. I told myself if he didn’t come out of the house in five minutes, I would leave. Maybe I was indeed getting exactly what I deserved: nothing. A few minutes more and I probably would have been grateful for the opportunity to turn and run, the way I always had before. But I hadn’t planned what I’d do next. Leave and do what? Drive off the Interstate into a canal? Jump from a cliff? Go home, lie down on the couch, look at the ceiling fan? All I knew is that I wanted to fly away. I wanted to be something brand-new. I felt like those human beings in fairy tales who suddenly find themselves in another creature’s skin, trapped in sealskin, horsehide, feathers.
Lazarus Jones came out to the porch. I looked down at the ground. If he saw the expression on my face, I’d scare him off. Had I looked into a mirror, I would have frightened myself. I was desperate, you know. I was mired in death and wishes, trapped in the wrong skin. I was the donkey, ugly and braying, the goose girl asking for mercy, the beggarman in need of a crust of bread. The straps of my dress were falling off my shoulders. I didn’t care. Dust was on my face and on my fingers. He’d had forty minutes of knowing everything; all I wanted was a little piece of what he’d learned on the other side. I didn’t want to dissect him or photograph him or measure the radioactivity under his skin. I just wanted to be in the presence of a man it was impossible to kill.
There were birds overhead and I saw their shadows float by on the porch floorboards. It hurt to breathe. I should have apologized for intruding, or told him that I’d come a far distance only to ask how afraid I should be of death. I should have told him that the worst thing in the world is a wish that comes true. But I remained silent, the way I had so many times before.
“Who told you to come here?” he said.
What was I supposed to say? Fate? A butterfly on the other side of the world? The donkeyskin I wore, so itchy, so ill-fitting? An eight-year-old girl who breathed out one wish and changed everything?
“Are you trying to interview me, or something?” he wanted to know. He came over and took my arm. Did he test for lies this way? Could he feel a betrayal as easily as he could stop clocks?