The Ice Queen

I’d left my cane at home, and just getting across the parking lot in ninety-eight-degree heat took most of my energy. Still I went on, avoiding the Kmart — which I quickly judged as too large and unmanageable. I found a small dress shop and went in. I let the salesgirls bring me outfits while I stayed in the dressing room. It was dark and cold and I think everyone in the shop pitied me. I let them think I was a cancer survivor; it was easier to accept than the truth: the living room, the fireball, the burning flyswatter, the way fate had singled me out.

One of the salesgirls happened to bring in an armful of potential outfits while I was undressed. She took one look at me and sat down on the stool in the corner.

“Sorry.” I was apologizing for my own body. I grabbed the first dress on the pile and pulled it on.

“Lightning strike,” the salesgirl said. She’d noticed the mark above my heart. “I know it when I see it. Good Lord, I’m living with it every day.”

“You?” I asked.

“Him,” she told me. “My boyfriend. And he’s just about driving me crazy with all of his goddamn effects.”

The salesgirl’s nametag said Marie. And then I knew who she was. The Naked Man’s true love. The one he’d been thinking about up on the roof. I knew too much about her beloved. It might have been embarrassing if I wasn’t so used to being in that position.

“The world is a cruel place,” Marie told me. “You think you’re getting what you want, and you wind up with a plate full of crap.” She nodded to my reflection. “That one looks real good,” she said of the dress I had on. “I’ll give you a ten percent discount for all you’ve been through.”

I turned to the mirror. It was simple, a white shift. Not bad. I thought about the Naked Man’s desires, what he’d wanted most at the moment when it seemed death was coming for him.

“Do you have a dog?” I asked Marie.

“A dog? Do you think I’m going to have something shed all over my house? Not likely.” She got back to the business at hand. She was like that, concentrated on what was right in front of her. I was starting to think the Naked Man had a secret life, one Marie knew nothing about. “I don’t think you’re going to look much better than this,” Marie told me as she considered my image in the mirror.

I figured she was right. I bought the dress, along with a pair of sandals, and wore them out of the store. I tore off the tags in the car and then I sat there recuperating from my efforts, air-conditioning turned on full blast. I had that tingling feeling in my fingers that the neurologists said was perfectly normal, given that I’d been hit by so much voltage.

I pulled myself together and got back on the Interstate. The only thing I knew for certain was that my tires were safe. Even if my brother seemed to be avoiding me lately, at least he’d spent a great deal of time looking through a consumer’s handbook before buying my new tires in New Jersey. I wasn’t about to skid, so I drove fast.

Everything looked the same on the road. There were white egrets picking at trash. The grass had turned brown in the heat. We were moving into summer, the season people in Orlon referred to as hell on earth. They laughed about it, though, and none of them seemed intent on moving anyplace cooler. I kept the air-conditioning on in the car, but I opened all the windows. Fresh air in these parts was like a blast from a furnace. My dress blew up and I couldn’t hear the clicking in my head so badly with all that wind.

One of my “effects” was that I had to pee all the time. Again, perfectly normal, I was assured. I stopped at a gas station where there were a couple of guys hanging out, drinking sodas, passing the time. They whistled at me. They did, and I really had to laugh. I waved at them. I figured I must have entered the land where there were no women if a pathetic specimen like me drew whistles. I didn’t look at myself in the restroom mirror. I just peed and got out of there.

I had looked up Seth Jones’s address in the phone book, then gotten myself a local map of Orlon County. All the same, my destination was farther out in the country than I’d thought. Florida was bigger than New Jersey, and people drove more. It didn’t seem to bother them one bit, just like the heat, like lightning, like the anole lizards you’d find skittering around your trash cans. When people told you a place was close by, it could be a hundred miles away. I just made up my mind to forget about the time. What had time ever done for me? When I finally got off the Interstate there were groves of fruit trees on either side of the road. The road got smaller, the groves got bigger. Lemons, oranges, and then the signpost for Jones’s property. This was where it had happened. In a few days it would be the one-year anniversary of his strike. I had found the article in an old issue of the Orlon Journal stacked down in the basement of the library, just a brief report in the Metro section. Several people on the Interstate who saw the flash said it appeared to be going straight, east to west, as though a rocket had been fired. A huge rainstorm followed, leaving an inch of rain in less than an hour. Someone driving past the Jones property saw a deep hole in the ground and steaming black smoke rising.