Ride the Lightning
(Printer friendly)by Mark LaFlamme
Boiling in the soup of electricity, I felt puny beneath its might. What I discovered is that to escape the pain, one has to transcend it.
My name is Barry Dees. Not so long ago, I was a hot shot reporter here on the western side, the good side, of Florida. My political column was the most popular in the south. I was invited to speak twice at the governor’s mansion and the big news stations courted me openly. I was more celebrity than newsman. I was satisfied.
And then it was over. The light of my career went out like someone had pulled a fuse. A kind of ironic simile, I guess.
If you’re the type who follows news through the Internet, you’ve probably heard of me. You may have seen my face in that damn video. I’m the guy who pissed into a three hundred dollar suit after five seconds in the teeth of a police taser.
I never cared about that, you know. My life changed forever in those five seconds but it had nothing to do with public humiliation or a ruined pair of slacks. Some have said it was the shame of it that drove me mad, but they know nothing. They don’t know what I saw when I rode the lightning into a universe that exists beyond our own. They don’t know that those 50,000 volts transported me to a world so beautiful, I’ve been trying to get back there since. I fell in love a million times while I was out there in that sizzling world. It breaks my heart to be back here in this bland landscape. This world seems hideous to me now.
For five seconds I rode the lightning into bliss. I stood at the very tip of our own horrific universe and stared into a perfect one. Then the voltage was withdrawn and the door to that magnificent palace was closed. You don’t know the heartbreak of that nor will you ever.
Electricity was born a few scant seconds after the universe itself. By our standards it is ageless, and yet we believe with the arrogance of our species that we understand it. We believe we have captured it and bent it to do our bidding. But the current flows far and flows fast. It flies through holes in the world that we can never see. Electrons fly through our dismal world and into an infinity of others.
The only way to know it is to ride along. To ride the lightning as I have done.
I heard once that the largest growth spurt of the newborn universe happened in a billionth of a billionth of a second. The mind of man cannot conceive of time that fleeting. The fastest of all things, light itself can travel no more than the distance of three hydrogen atoms in that span. A distance so tiny it borders on nothing at all. And yet the holes that I speak of are smaller still, and I flew through one of them on a thrumming train of electrons and into a place of infinite beauty.
I achieved the impossible but a hateful cop with a cheap weapon took it away. So you will forgive me if I become bellicose at the idea that I went mad with embarrassment because I soiled my pants before the video cameras.
Embarrassed! I don’t even think of it.
The cop’s name was Rielly and he dared me to ride the lightning. Called me in the middle of the workday and issued his challenge like a schoolyard bully. Rielly was a sergeant, one of those progressive cops with a masters degree in criminal justice. He was one of this new breed of cops who embrace any technology that will help them more effectively batter away the rights of the people they are hired to protect.
He was a big man, a former prison guard who spent two hours a day in the gym and wore his hair in a flattop. He was irritated by a column I had written about police abuse of tasers. My opinion, well researched, proposed that the average cop was too egotistical and too unintelligent to be trusted with such a crippling device.
He called me and said this: “If you want to write about police technology, sir, I think it’s important that you have a better understanding of what we have and how we use it.”
Naturally, I declined. I would not be cajoled into participating in this public display.
But Rielly is a grand manipulator, a politician beneath the badge. He had announced this challenge not only to me but to all of the news stations that I have competed with for a half dozen years. It was the equivalent of a big kid challenging a smaller one to a fistfight by tacking up invitations across the neighborhood. My reputation was at stake. The reporters from these other agencies had envied me for years, I am sure of it. And they would waste no time at all loudly reporting my cowardice should I decline.
So you see how I was a victim in this from the start. I was goaded into this wretched experiment through conspiracy.
I stepped into a classroom on the second floor of the police station and was greeted by a dozen smirking officers and a half dozen reporters with cameras and recorders. I was marched onto a thin mat and told to stand at the end of it while Rielly and his cruel device stood behind me. They attached alligator clips to the collar of my shirt and to my shoes. I was like a monkey in a zoo being tortured for public delight.
Rielly squeezed the trigger and my life here was over.
I speak of beautiful things yet I will not try to convince you it was experienced without accompanying agony. The electricity owns you. You feel it pulsing through your bones like a million shards of glass and it’s everywhere. Muscles tighten around limbs and become useless to you. You feel your jaw freeze and your hands hook into claws. Compassionless electricity just hums and hums and traps you in a dimension where there is only you and this pain so high and bright, you have never imagined a thing like it could exist.
From the start, I was somewhere far from the familiar landscape I have walked all my life. At first, all I knew was the pain. I was strapped to a lightning bolt and my God, did I want to get off. For that eternity of agony, there was electric throbbing and there was the terrified chatter of my thoughts. In those thoughts I was shrieking, because I had become absolutely powerless in a way I have not experienced before. The pain was so spectacular it was like being squeezed in the fist of a merciless god. Boiling in the soup of electricity, I felt puny beneath its might.
What I discovered is that to escape the pain, one has to transcend it.
When I think of it now, I remember simply opening an eye. It is not an eye that exists in the dumb black caverns of the skull, but one that hides in the fathoms of the spirit. By discovering that eye, I escaped red spasms of pain and found unimaginable joy. I found the strength to ride the lightning instead of letting it ride me.
Man’s loftiest conceptions of heaven are low ideas in comparison with the perfection that I found. Mortals are not meant to ascend to such great heights. Yet I had ascended and perhaps for that billionth of a billionth of a second, I was in a perfect state in a perfect place.
And then it was gone. The madman cop released me from the grip of electricity and I was back in this hateful world, bright and loud and brash. I was thrust back into a roomful of people who despised me and they had erupted into delirious laughter. My crotch was wet and the laughter was deafening. I fell to my knees and vomited onto the floor and the laughter grew more thunderous. But I tell you this with all the honesty at my command: it was not the pain or the shame that sickened me. It was the ugliness of this world and everything in it. It was all strange and terrible to me now and so I heaved the contents of my gut onto that thin mat and then I collapsed into the sour pool of it.
It’s all in the video and I’m certain you have drawn your own conclusions. But I don’t care about any of that! I don’t care about the fools who laughed! Without them, I never would have seen that beauty nor understood how I was to spend the rest of my days.
My colleagues applauded when I returned to the newsroom. They stood at their desks and clapped. Some of them whistled through their teeth, others flung diapers at me. They behaved as though it were a lighthearted tribute, but I knew better. My colleagues despised me as well. They envied my talents and delighted in what they perceived as a moment of disgrace.
I walked to my desk in a rain of cheers, falling diapers and banal comments like: “You really pissed them off over there, Dees. Way to soak it all in, Dees. You really get absorbed in your work, Dees.”
I went to my desk, dumped all that was mine into a box and left through a back door. Not because I was offended by all of this, mind you. I had made up my mind to leave the place long before I had walked back into it. How could I continue such mundane work when I had lain eyes upon a place clean of suffering and shame, a place that sparkled with the kind of bright bliss this dank and dirty universe will never know? It may have been a cosmic fluke that I rode the lightning to Nirvana but the perfect beings that exist there were aware of me when I came. They love me as I love them. They crave as I do.
Somewhere around four hundred people get struck by lightning every year. Most survive with blown out organs or limbs, memory loss, permanent disabilities. You never hear them speak of a heaven found in the lash of lightning.
Hundreds jolt themselves in household mishaps and hundreds more experience the discipline of the police taser every day. Have you ever seen a news story with a criminal announcing that he discovered beauty and joy while being chewed up by that electrical jaw? Have you ever heard of a line worker speak of otherworldly glee upon surviving a jolt at the top of a utility pole?
You have not. They speak of pain and of long convalescence. Those hundreds or thousands a year who fight losing battles with the electrical force did not ride their lightning to paradise, as I did. It makes me wonder.
Was I chosen?
I lived back then in a fine house in a community called Tall Pines just outside the city limits. It’s a neighborhood of middle class homes but the houses are not all jammed together like you see in some suburban communities. The homes are greedy about their space. There are big backyards and neat lawns and there is no rough element there. You can always determine the status of a neighborhood by the cars parked in the yards. There were no rust buckets or sagging pickup trucks in my community. The cars you’d find at Tall Pines were late model BMWs, a Lexus or two, a lot of the really nice SUVs that drive the environmentalists crazy.
My house stood on a patch of land surrounded by trees so that I could see the nearest neighbor only if I wanted to. Mine was among the nicest. The Rankin place up on the hill was larger, with a two-bay garage and an in-ground pool, but Peter and Laurie Rankin were trust fund kids. They lived there because wealth had been bestowed upon them, not because they possessed natural talent the way I did. They never had to scrape and claw their way from the stigma of the community college. They never had to overcome.
I went home the day it happened wrung out and tired. It was a drizzly afternoon. The house was dark and somehow forlorn. I loved my home but on that day, it seemed close and cloying, dirty and hateful. I plucked soggy mail from the box and flung it inside. A potted fern leaned sickly and menacing beyond the front door and I kicked it aside. I flung my clothes onto chairs and kicked my shoes off into oblivion. I marched my way to the shower with the temperament of an athlete who has performed poorly on the field. If you had seen me then, the natural suspicion would have been that I was embarrassed and frustrated by the events of the day. I have told you and will tell you again that this was not the case. What troubled me was that I had been raised up to a place of supreme beauty and now I was here, in this seamy place crawling with despair.
All of the things I had once adored suddenly appeared hideous to me. I could not stand the sight of my own space. The paintings I had hung on walls seemed pointless and loathsome. The furniture, nearly new and very expensive, looked like crouching beasts rising from the swamp of the nasty carpet. The baby grand piano, one of the first extravagances from the infancy of my career, was no longer a source of gleaming pride. It was an unlovely hunk of wood taken from ugly trees in filthy forests.
Everything stank after I rode the lightning, did I mention that? I smelled dust and mildew in my living room and rotting morsels of food in the kitchen. With the shower running, I sniffed the rust and grime of water as it ran through stinking pipes. Even my skin smelled foul and deadly, like the smell of a rodent that has crawled behind a wall and died.
I was toweling away that nasty shower water when the monster showed itself. It stared from the vanity mirror, a vision of such grand beastliness that I screamed aloud and backed into the tub. I tripped over its edge, clutched at the shower curtain and dragged it down with me as I crashed into reeking water still surging to the drain.
For many moments, I floundered there, stricken by what I had seen, unable to free myself of the slimy curtain that clung like seaweed. I kicked at the sides of the tub, bashing bone on porcelain, bloodying myself in places. I clawed at the shower curtain, ripping it from my face, spinning and twisting within the tub. I sat up quickly and bashed my brow against the spout, bringing more blood and blurring my vision. I tell you unabashedly that it was the highest form of horror I have ever experienced. I thrashed for three minutes and those three minutes might have completely undone a lesser man. I got to my feet, bruised and battered, and faced the mirror again.
The monster stared out and it was more hideous than before. The eyes were slits within a gray, meaty face. The nose was large and bulbous, with nostrils high and wide. The flesh upon the body hung in ghastly circles around the squat torso. Dark, viscous liquid dripped down from one thick brow and I could smell that terrible ooze.
I think you have reasoned by now that I was the monster in the mirror. But for me, it was a slow and awful dawning. I had never seen a thing so wretched as I now saw myself, and so the truth of it was slow to come. It was blood dripping from the eye that brought it home to me and that moment was a terrible one. When you recognize the ugliness of the world completely, everything within becomes ugly as well. In that moment of understanding, gazing upon the ogre that was me, I knew I would not survive any longer in this contaminated world. I was as miserable and vulnerable as an exotic fish cast into a gritty and grimy street. Electricity had afforded me a glimpse into that sweeter world and so it required no forethought at all. I plucked a pair of scissors from a grooming kit I keep on the toilet tank. They were long and cool and in the gleaming metal I spied my reflection staring back, long and narrow and still horrific.
I held the scissors firmly in a fist, like a sword fighter with an undersized weapon. I stepped closer to the sink and considered the outlet in the wall. On a household level, I knew very little of electricity. I knew one of the vertical slots there was neutral and that one was hot. I had no idea which was which. Every day for the past five years, I had plugged a blow dryer into that outlet, trusting that electricity would make the device work. There were perhaps a dozen other outlets like it throughout the house but I had no idea how they provided the magic that they did.
I stepped closer, dripping blood and shower water. I moved the scissors closer to the outlet, my hands shaking. One slot was smaller than the other. On a hunch, I eased the tip of the scissors toward that one, not knowing what to expect, hoping only for a fast return to that wondrous world I had been forced to leave. I eased the point into the slot, felt the scissors scrape the sides, and frowned because it appeared nothing was going to happen. I pressed in further still, out of curiosity more than anything else, and my hand exploded in front of me.
I don’t know quite how to describe it. There was a high pop, like two bricks slammed together. There was a flare of blue light that seemed to jump into my head. There was a bright burning in my hand and a bolt of pain that roared up my arm into the shoulder. It was a deeply buried pain, like a toothache. But the hand that burned was no longer in front of me and I had no sense of where my arm was at all. The hand had sailed out behind me as though it had been fired from a tiny canon. The force of it spun me around and now the pain in my shoulder wasn’t the result of shuddering voltage, but of muscles twisting around the joint. I fell against the side of the tub, slamming my ribs into the rim of it. There was pain in my elbow now as well, and the more raw agony of burned flesh at my palm.
The echo from the clap of electricity still roared in my head. My eyes retained memory of that blazing light in the form of jagged white stars in my vision. I was slumped against the tub with the wounded arm twisted and bent in unnatural ways. I was dimly aware that the scissors, hot now instead of cool, were still clutched in my burned hand. Blood dripped from my face, whether the result of new wounds or earlier ones, I couldn’t be sure. I could taste it on my lips and smell it. The smell was nauseating like everything else.
I sat there for several minutes, gasping, taking inventory of my injuries, reviewing the experience the best I could. What I’ve described sounds terrible and it was. But it was not without its insights and the tiniest of joys.
I had gone there again, if only for the smallest sliver of time. Looking back, I believe I sensed it at all only because the beauty out there is so magnificent, even a whiff of it will leave an impact upon the senses. Just a glimpse of it, a taste. And then only the trauma of the jolt.
My sight returned eventually. When it did, I realized that the lights had gone out, a fuse blown by the power surge. I looked over my hand and saw that the entire thumb, part of the index finger and two circular portions of the palm had been burned black. My wrist and shoulder throbbed. A dark bruise that looked like a four-leaf clover clutched the elbow like purple fingers.
There was a good amount of pain, I won’t lie to you about that. But there was also encouragement. A return to that heavenly place was possible, I could see that now. It was a matter of ingredients, of just the right amounts of volts and current.
Consider a view of any city block. Do you even notice all the lines that hang over the streets anymore? Do you see them snaking from pole-to-pole, building-to-building like the strands of a never-ending spider web? Are you aware of the network of wires running right now through the walls behind you?
The fixtures that comprise our laughable hold on electricity are everywhere and so ubiquitous we have become blind to them. We drive right by power stations with all their sinister coils and tubes and we don’t see them. Lines of electricity run through our lives the way blood runs through our bodies. It connects us to far flung friends and illuminates our lives, but we barely think of it until it isn’t there.
I was thinking about electricity and nothing else. I climbed to my feet thinking in amps and watts instead of words. I had ridden the lightning again and here I was. I looked myself over. I was naked, wet, bleeding, burned and bruised. It was impossible to determine whether I had pissed myself on this second electron ride.
Did it matter if I had or not? It certainly did not.
I didn’t expect much of a jolt out of a lamp that was shaped like a swan. But then, I think I’ve already mentioned that I knew little about electricity until I learned that it was the white hot path to heaven itself. I remember interviewing a lineman once for an insipid story about electrical dangers following a hurricane. A lot of hurricanes blow through Florida, you know, and yet every time we get hit, the newspapers and the TV stations will issue harsh warnings about steering clear of downed lines as though everybody out there had forgotten that electricity could kill you.
The man’s name was Rudy and he answered most of my questions with clichés.
"Its the volts that jolts,” he told me more than once. “And the amps that kill.”
Blue collar workers and their vernacular. This line worker went on to explain that a person can take up to 50,000 volts but a mere 100 milliamps will kill you. I never understood the distinction, frankly. Something about one being like the flow rate of water, the other more like pressure. It’s the current that will stop your heart, I think is how it boiled down.
I was thinking about that when I unscrewed the light bulb from the swan lamp that sat upon the piano. The swan was pink and the socket that held the bulb ran from a metal tube imbedded in the bird’s neck. I always thought it was a little bit obscene. It looked like the swan had been impaled before it was glazed and forced to sit here in my home as an ornament. You couldn’t see the disfigurement when the lamp shade was on, but I had flung the shade to the floor as I prepared to test the electrical output of this elegant sea bird.
The bulb socket was altogether unremarkable. I stared down into it and saw nothing that looked like it could provide a send off to paradise, let alone a heart stopping jolt. There was a small strip of copper down there, perhaps half the size of a pinky fingernail, that I assumed was where the connection was made. I picked up the lamp and flipped it over, searching for information on amps and volts and whatever else might be of importance. I found none of this. Was it important? Probably not.
I set the delicate bird back on the piano. I turned on the switch to invite the power. I took another look into that innocuous socket and jammed the thumb of my right hand into it.
The blast of electrical juice was powerful and it hit my hand like a hammer. It felt more stunning than the jolt provided by the wall socket in the bathroom. And yet my hand was not flung away this time. There was no explosion of light or the sharp crack like miniature lightning. There was simply an immediate and intense thrumming that overtook my hand and ran up my arm like a million tiny soldiers marching up the bones. The thumb pressed into the socket actively hurt and hurt quite a lot. In the arm and shoulder there was more manageable pain, though after a few seconds, those soldier feet began to feel more like tacks. I grimaced and bore it, feeling the fast rat-a-tat flow of electricity, examining the sensation, waiting for it to carry my mind or perhaps my soul to that other dimension where I could stand once more among the gods and goddesses.
There might have been a glimpse, something felt more than seen, but my arm gave out before I could pursue it. No longer in control of the muscles of my wrist and forearm, I fell forward and the thumb that kept me fastened to the electrical world slipped from the socket. The tingling rage within my arm was gone at once and the lamp overturned in front of me. The swan broke apart on the dark lake of the piano top. It broke at the neck and its head slid upon the rod that impaled it. One gleaming glass wing snapped off and shattered. A long gouge appeared along the baby grand.
I cared nothing of those things. My arm was still haunted by the ghost of the power that had surged through it but I was still here. Grief and frustration overcame me. My thoughts were scattered, as though electrons still bounced within my brain like pellets shaken in a bottle. Should I douse myself with water and try again? Would the fuse box in the basement provide what I needed? Was there any place in this house at all where electricity would come in the right form to carry me away?
Over the next two days, I tried all of those things and more. I tried standing with one foot in a pail of water while jamming a fork into a toaster. A fast jolt and the toaster was dead.
I pried apart the television set and grabbed wire after wire until I got what I was looking for. There was a pop, an acrid puff of smoke and just enough of a charge to singe my already mangled fingers. In the basement, I thrust a screw driver into the fuse box and was thrown across the cellar and into a concrete wall. When I had gone down there, it was daytime and sun streamed through the small rectangular windows. When I came to, it was night and the nails from three of my fingers were nowhere to be found.
Some sense of it emerged. The wall outlet and the fuse box produced a charge too powerful to ever be sustained. The lamps, toasters and other appliances were too stingy with the power they shared. I slept off the pain and disappointment and found that even my dreams were nasty things now. In them, I saw all the faces that filled my world and each was more vile than the last. The editors I worked for and the reporters who had shared my space. The politicians and cops, school teachers and businessmen I had written about. The girls I had tried to date. All of them abominable to me in this realm I could no longer tolerate.
Memory of the felicity and peace I had found in that other place did not dim with time. To the contrary. The more hours and days that passed, the more I missed them.
You hear stories of alcoholics in the agony of thirst who drink cologne or heating fuel if there is no liquor to be had. You hear of junkies who rob pharmacies in the full light of noon, knowing they will be apprehended, willing to chance it for one more suck on the pipe.
But the intoxication that comes from bottles or pipes cannot be compared to the euphoria I found in a world that only electricity knows of. And so I won’t defend myself from what some have deemed madness. I’ll only emphasize that if you had experienced what I had, you would have gone to any lengths to reclaim it as well.
It took all of my courage to walk into the lobby of the police department. I was known well there and at one time, was even liked. I had made enemies, though, and so I had to hope that the authority of my profession would get me what I needed.
It was Rielly who greeted me at the thick glass that separated the dregs of the lobby from the men and women of law on the other side.
The lobby was empty that day. It was a Saturday and hot. The small room smelled like chlorine and I suspected that a janitor had recently cleaned puke or blood from the tiled floor. Rielly appeared surprised to see me. He actually stopped midway to the window and stood staring, bemused.
“Dees,” he said through a circular vent at the center of the bullet proof glass. “Didn’t expect to see you in here. You get beat up?”
I had no idea what he meant and initially believed this was some form of cryptic cop insult. Then I recalled the gashes on my face from my adventures in showering. My lower lip was puffy and scabbed from my tumble in the basement. My right hand was wrapped in a bandage.
I forced myself to smile and it was difficult. The cop behind the glass appeared as more of an ogre than the rest of the reptilian people I had encountered on the drive over. Perhaps it was the familiarity of him.
Perhaps it was the authority. Whichever, it was a chore for me to keep my gaze upon him and to muster a smile.
“No,” I said. “Not beat up. The last couple days have just been kind of difficult.”
Rielly snorted. He actually snorted at me. “Difficult, huh? Looks like someone threw you a blanket party. Did you catch yourself on the news, Dees? Every station had you up there pissing in your britches. We asked them not to, but they went ahead and did it anyway.”
I reddened and could feel it, burning at my cheeks and temples as though a hot towel had been wrapped around my head.
“No. I didn’t see,” I said. And that was true. After the experiment with the television, it never worked again. “But my experience gave me a lot to think about, sergeant. And I’d like to explore it a little more.”
Rielly’s eyebrows went up. “You want to explore it? What the hell does that mean, Dees? The way I understand it, you don’t work for the newspaper anymore.”
“That’s true,” I said. “I don’t. I decided to go the freelance route. More control that way, you know. I can tackle the stories I want to tackle without all the editor interference. This could be a real good thing. For both of us, I mean.”
His brow went up a little higher.
“What I mean,” I continued, “is that I’d like to experiment more with the taser. I’ve come around. I think I see what a positive tool it can be. I got a taste of what it can do, now I’d like to study the device a little closer. Look it over, describe it in detail, that kind of thing. Maybe I could take one home and call you with questions. I think this could really help to educate the...”
His mouth actually contracted into an O. Just like you read in the trashy novels. Both eyebrows were up and he looked like he was blowing invisible smoke rings.
Then he started to laugh. It was an awful sound, like rats fighting in a sewer pipe. It surely was a mark of how unpleasant this world had become for me that I found the grating, rippling, grinding sound of his laughter almost too much to bear. I gritted my teeth and felt all of my muscles go taut. I looked at him and he was like some repugnant, vicious beast from a primitive world, a heartless, soulless abomination that would eat children in a single bite.
“Crazy,” Rielly muttered, when the gales of laughter subsided to a sprinkling of giggles. “You’ve gone goddamn crazy, Dees. Holy shit.”
“Sergeant, I just...”
But he held his hand up behind the glass. He was smiling brightly and now he reached for his hip, plucking free the bright yellow device just like the one that days ago had delivered me to the Shangri-La of the electric ether.
“You want one of these?” Rielly said, smirking. “That it, Dees? You want to take one home to play with, maybe fire into your dick and see if you can get it up?”
It was funny, really. I was gazing at that Day-glo weapon like the alcoholic I spoke of would gaze at a bottle of Rye dangled before him. Rielly waved it back and forth and my eyes followed with the dumb hypnosis of a dog watching a tennis match.
“Crazy,” he said again. But the petty drama no longer amused him. He holstered the weapon and leaned in toward the glass.
“We don’t like you,” he said. “We never did and now we don’t have to fake it. You’re out on your ass, Dees and we couldn’t be happier. Now, go on and get out my lobby. The only way you’re going to ride the lightning again is to do it the hard way.”
I started to say something but never got the first syllable out. Rielly looked ferocious and loathsome to me. I fancied I could smell him, a swampy aroma tinged with acid sweat. I shook my head, dropped my eyes and turned around. Walking across the lobby, I could feel the baleful gaze on my back.
I stopped. Just short of the doors that would lead me to the polluted world outside, a fire extinguisher hung on a wall. It was silver and it reflected the image of the empty lobby at a weird curvature. A black hose snaked from the top of it and was clamped to the side. I walked to it, lifted it up and out and held the heft of it in my hands. From the corner of an eye, I could see Rielly shifting behind the glass. I walked toward him. I was smiling now but he no longer was. He had straightened and stepped back a foot or two.
“What the hell are you doing? Go on and put that back where you found it. I’m not going to put up with...”
I had hoisted the extinguisher up over my right shoulder. The weight of it hurt the tips of my nail-less fingers but it was easy to ignore. I brought the heavy canister back as far as I could and then heaved it forth with all the force I could muster.
The sound of the base striking the thick glass was deep and sonorous. It was like a gong pounded in a cavern. Rielly flinched and stepped back quickly, bumping his hip on a desk. That startled him and he offered up a squeak. His eyes narrowed and he glared at me. He lifted the tiny microphone pinned to the shoulder of his uniform and spoke into it. I didn’t hear what he said. I brought the extinguisher forward one more time, slamming it into the circular vent at the center of the window. The glass was not so much as scratched, but the metal seal around the vent cracked in several places. The sound of it was delightful. It was followed by the flutter of fast feet behind an ominous gray door to my left. I ignored it. I repositioned the extinguisher and pounded it into the glass one more time like a battering ram.
There was an exclamation of metal and the door was flung open. Rielly was not the first cop out. It was a younger officer named Ortiz who rushed out with one hand at his utility belt.
“Put it down!” the officer bellowed, and it was as loud as my battering had been. “Put it down! Do it now!”
I turned to face him, holding the canister up with as much menace as I could manage. Ortiz held his position. Rielly came around beside him, keeping a distance. Both men had hands at their belts.
I faked a lunge at them. I saw Ortiz ripping open a flap at his belt with admirable speed. For a moment, I feared he had gone for his gun or perhaps a can of chemical spray that would blind me but do nothing to send me back to electric Eden. Then I saw a flash of yellow as the taser came up. A half second later, the weapon was leveled in my direction. I heard Rielly bark a command just as Ortiz squeezed the trigger.
“Joe, don’t use the...”
Too late. The barbs and their wire leashes sailed across the lobby, striking my chest and anchoring to my skin. At once, I felt familiar voltage pounding into my body. It crackled into the base of my spine first, just like the first time. It traveled up and into my chest. I felt it grab hold of every muscle and pull them taut. Electricity pounded like a trillion exclamation points within me.
The fire extinguisher crashed to the floor but I barely heard it. Both of my hands had drawn into ugly fists and I pulled them involuntarily to my chest. My head went back and my lips pulled tight against my teeth. I was not aware of the officers in front of me or anything else in the universe in which they resided.
I want to describe this to you carefully. I know now that the jolt I took that morning in the police lobby was not the same as the one I had experienced days earlier. The reason is simple. When I had volunteered to ride the lightning while I was still a reporter, they had used alligator clips to hook me up. The logic for this was twofold: it was easier and cleaner not to have to shoot a journalist with the sharp hooks employed when a taser is used in the field. And secondly, by hooking the clips to my shoe and collar, they guaranteed that the electricity would pass from one end of my body to the other. In bully police lingo, it’s known as going for the full ride.
This day, with the fire extinguisher still clattering on the tiled floor, I did not get the full ride. And yet I was there. It was less vivid than before. What I saw was fainter. What I felt was more muted, but even in diminished form, it was exquisite.
When I was a kid, I read a story about a great scientist who fell in love with a microscopic being he discovered in his laboratory. He could view her (somehow the tiny being was presented as a female in the story) only with a microscope but he was convinced that she was as aware of him as he was of her. They were in love and yet infinitely apart from one another. He was macroscopic, she could not be seen with the naked eye. They might have well existed in different galaxies, so far apart were there worlds.
And yet there was love.
Imagine standing in a dank and dark place and holding in your hands a great glass globe. Around you is aching cold and endless darkness. But within this globe, a sun blazes impossibly bright. It throws off heat but does not hurt your eyes to look upon it. The light fills your mind and your soul with the heat of love like no other you’ve known. An in that light – not behind or beside but within it – exists the population of them and you are in love at once. They are like shadows and yet you know them to be beautiful. You look upon them with a higher form of sight, one that was not born until you beheld them. You adore them and feel them adoring you, in equal parts. There is no language to tell of the beauty they embody. It is greater than all the love that has ever existed in our world.
Officer Ortiz had squeezed the trigger and then released it. That meant for me a five second ride on the lightning bolt. But those are seconds as you know them in this moronic universe. For me, I left the pain of electricity and spent what felt like considerable time examining this lovelier world and lamenting that I had not drawn closer. In that span of time, I interacted with them and they with me. The sadness I felt that I could not come closer and would soon depart was evident. They were sad, as well.
I described to you the awesome joy out there. So you can imagine my grief when the current left my body and I was sucked back to this foul police lobby within this low universe. I was a mere crumb sucked through a vacuum tube, so swiftly came my return.
And what a return it was. For five minutes, the two officers battered me on the lobby floor. Ortiz held me down with a knee in my back and got handcuffs around my wrist. Rielly was down on all fours, red-faced and screaming. I felt his spittle tapping against my face and smelled the noxious poison of his breath.
“... going to lock you up with the barbarians at the county, asshole. They’ll love you over there with your pissy pants and you can just...”
So I had lost control of my bladder again. Who cared? I tell you, I didn’t care at all about that. I wasn’t listening to the foul-mouthed cop and his taunts. I was thinking about the ancient and rigid nature of electricity and how it could best be harnessed for my needs. I was thinking about charges, both negative and positive, and of volts and amps. By the end of Rielly’s tirade (it went on for the entire ride to the county jail in Bartow), I couldn’t even comprehend the language he was speaking. My mind understood only, for the time, the language of lightning.
I spent two days in jail and most of that time was on suicide watch. They believed I sought to kill myself because I had jammed a tightly rolled foil candy wrapper into the wall socket in my cell. The jolt was meaningless but it caused the lights in the entire block to flicker. I heard other inmates, brutish men with thick arms and thick brows, hooting with excitement, the numbing routine of their day disrupted if only for seconds.
I blew another nail from my finger and the guards made me change from an orange jail jumpsuit to a blue one. The cell they moved me to had no outlet and the two nights I spent there were an agony of craving. But when it was time for me to make a fast appearance in court, they were eager for me to be gone. Criminal mischief was the charge. I was freed on my own recognizance and released into the world of free men and to the beautiful portals opening on my electric ambitions.
I tried flying a kite into a torrent of electrons while rain battered me and lightning cracked between fat black clouds. Ben Franklin may have used a single key to entice the currents but I used an entire ring, not with one key dangling but nine.
It was 3 a.m. and the storm seemed directly overhead. I stood in a baseball field a half mile from my home, soaked to the bone, screaming at the sky. I ran this way and that way, playing out string from a cardboard tube, coaxing the five dollar kite in the form of a penguin as high as it would soar.
But the storm brought ferocious wind as well as lightning and a gust of it tugged my string into a towering oak tree. There was a snap and the line in my hands went limp. The last I saw of the penguin kite, it was thrashing and flapping under a crack of lightning, taunting me and celebrating its liberation.
An hour before dawn, a sleek sports car slid on rain slicked roads and into a power pole. Firefighters set up road flares around the wreck and paramedics removed the driver from his mangled automobile. I drove slowly past the scene, not caring at all for the well-being of the young man who moaned from a gurney. My eyes were on the splintered power pole and the wires that had fallen from it.
The downed lines spit and sputtered in the street, dazzling sparks dancing like fireworks. Firemen in wet yellow coats kept their distance. They watched the arcing wires warily as if it were a coil of snakes that might turn ornery and attack.
I pulled to the side of the road, bouncing my car up over a curb and skidding through mud. I climbed out and left the door open behind me. I passed by rushing paramedics who hollered at me. I weaved through the obstacle course of road flares and made for those fallen wires, watching them, wanting to pick them up and take on the load they carried.
A fat fireman blocked my way.
“Whoa! Whoa! What the hell are you doing! Get back!”
Powerful fingers dug into my shoulder. The fat fireman spun me around and pushed me back toward my car. I wheeled to confront him but three others had come up behind him. My eyes cut to the street where the wires still hissed and sizzled, beckoning me.
“Don’t even think of it, buddy,” said an even fatter fireman who blocked my way.
I thought of fighting them but the idea passed. The electricity there in the street was chaotic and fitful. It would not have served my needs and so why battle for it?
You should see by now that I had my wits about me. What some have deemed madness was nothing more than the growing urgency with which I approached my plight. And urgency it was. I had come to believe that one more day in this dreadful prison universe and I would be doomed to die here and to be buried in the reeking dirt.
My car was a six year old Volvo and had things gone differently, I might have traded up for a newer one. Or possibly for something more prestigious and expensive, like a Lexus. It is important, I think, for a man of importance within his community to adorn himself in a way that befits that image.
The Volvo was parked at a slant in the driveway. My house was a fine one, I think I told you, but there was no garage. The Rankins up on the hill had a two-bay garage and it always irked me that those talent less prima donnas had a double where someone like myself had nothing at all.
It was a hot day and I stripped down to shorts. I stood under the hood of the car with Florida sun beating down and heat rising from the engine. The smell of the engine was revolting, all those man made parts and liquids sucked from deep within the foul earth.
It had occurred to me that electricity was ruled by universal constants but it was not the same everywhere you find it. The taser with which police had stung me twice delivered 50,000 volts. It was a good dosage, I had come to understand, but delivered through a means that was flawed. The crude inventions inspired by our primitive minds have not released what I know to be the awesome potential of electricity. Electricity should exist in a perfect state, but with the gross imperfections of our devices, you will find that electrons that are good in one place are bad in another.
I experimented with the car battery only as a matter of routine. I told you I know little of mechanical things and it’s true. But I knew that such a battery uses a chemical process to release electrons and I also knew that the voltage was puny. Surely they would not be enough to lift a man into heaven.
I started the car. Within the engine, parts began to whir. I came around the front again, bent to the engine and lay a shiny wrench across the negative and positive terminals.
There was crackling and heat. The palm of my hand felt afire. There was tingling in my arm but only as far as the elbow. The world around me never fell out of view. The steady purr of the engine faltered as power was transferred from its grinding parts to my body. I held on for a moment, bearing the pain in my hand as I searched for glimpse into the beloved world beyond.
But there was none. I set the wrench aside and blew on the palm of my hand. It had reddened and the fingers were numb but I could still use it without much trouble. I flexed it over and over, getting blood to flow back into the fingers and I bent further toward the guts of the engine.
The wires rising from the distributor cap looked like the tentacles of a rubber beast. Greasy and black, they trembled only slightly with the hum of the engine. But I knew that they housed streams of beautiful electrons searching for a faster way to the ground. I knew that 50,000 volts of them would fly into me if invited.
I reached for one of the wires, skeptical that anything would happen at all, and closed a fist around the grubby tube no thicker than a magic marker.
The jolt was immediate. Immediate and familiar. Electrons slammed into my spine, traveled up into my chest and began to hum like a billion hornets stinging all at once. My muscles went taut; fist tightened around the wire. My entire body seemed to jump up and down with the pulse of electricity. I heard it buzzing in my ears. I waited. I waited.
And then I was there, hovering once more over that sublime world. I saw it all and I heard them, too. Those perfect shadows within the perfect light of the perfect sun, they were calling for me from this place so close and yet so infernally far.
Come be with us. Come to stay. We love you, Barry Dees. Find a way to be with us. Find a way, Barry Dees. Find a way and be with us.
Oh, the indescribable peace of them. I felt their love, so much more powerful than the electricity that surged through me. I saw them, heard them, felt them through senses that did not exist in any other man. I felt closer to them than before. I felt I was becoming part of that world and maybe for good. But then the billion hornets that stung my bones were gone as if a great wind had swept them away. Beneath my fist, the engine had shuttered and died. There was popping and groaning and the engine was dead. The acrid smell of burning wafted up.
I cannot describe the soul crushing misery that found me and will not try. I know I cried out and that I shrieked at the loss I had suffered at the death of the voltage. I turned my head to the sky and screamed. I ripped that wire from the engine and glared at it as though it had betrayed me with sentient malice. I flung it away and looked once more upon the hideous landscape around me. Sinister, foul smelling trees stretching up into a noxious sky. Loathsome houses squatting like maleficent beasts with windows like eyes and doors like black mouths. Filthy gray pavement and sun browned grass. Wires hanging everywhere like narrow hammocks, ugly prisons for the magnificent electricity that was misused by the population of this gluttonous world.
Up on the hill, through the hideous leaves of trees, the Rankin house stood gleaming. Windows washed, flowers hanging from boxes, sun dancing off the chrome of newly waxed cars in the driveway. It stood like a urban castle up there on the hill where it had been set by design. People like the Rankins like to place themselves up high so that they can gaze down upon those like me, as though the height of ego was not enough.
People like the Rankins had the best of everything. What near-perfect form of electricity might exist there in the walls of that palace?
If you have read the news stories, as I suspect you have, you know that I went up there streaked with car grease and raving. You have heard accounts stating that I snarled like a beast and seemed to speak in a language unfamiliar to anyone. You have come to believe that I beat a man dead with a wrench and attacked a woman in front of her children.
It is true, all of it, though I deny that the attack was unprovoked. I went there looking for pure electricity they kept selfishly enslaved. Mr. Rankin greeted me at the door, sweaty in a jogging suit, smirking and smug at the sight of me.
He reached to push me away and I brought the wrench down upon his skull.
Inside, I found Mrs. Rankin in tiny white shorts and a tank top and I beat her before she could attack. I had come to understand that people like these hoarded electric gold like misers and would stop at nothing to keep an outsider from finding it.
I swung the wrench at her temple and blood spurted onto her pristine white clothes as if that blood had wanted to be there all along. She went down in a heap on the living room carpet and I hovered over her a moment, looking upon the disgusting perfection of her: the straight white teeth, the delicately sloped nose, the perfect mounds of her breasts. I touched her a little because I found her unimaginably loathsome. I would soon be free of such creatures and felt it necessary to remember what terrible things I was leaving behind.
That is all, you know. Don’t believe all that you read in the papers.
The children were small. There was a boy and a girl and they were screaming. The girl stood behind a chair, clawing ragged red lines into her face and shrieking. The boy grabbed at my elbow as I moved my hands over the lump that was his mother.
I turned to him, slapped him hard, decided to save him.
I carried the boy to the basement and you know this, too. He tried to thrash and bite but the blow had left him sluggish.
What you don’t understand is that I felt great compassion for the child and wanted to free him. I held him in one arm as I moved across the basement to the electrical box. I held his writhing form as I smashed a fuse from the box and stuffed the blunt end of the wrench into the dark hole. I held him even as the muscles of my arms became overwhelmed with the onslaught of electricity – this top shelf electricity the Rankins and people like them keep greedily in their homes.
I held the boy as long as I could and he shivered with the buzzing of voltage. I found Utopia again but the boy did not. He fell limp to the floor beside me just as I ascended. I saw Utopia and then nothing at all. There was a terrific explosion within my head and the sense that I was flying. I sailed out and away from them and eventually, gravity pulled me down.
I awoke strapped to a hospital bed in a jail infirmary. Angry men leaned from chairs at my right and at my left.
You know what happened from here. A father and son were dead, a mother was left blind and partially crippled. The story was lead news on all of the big stations and every paper in the country carried it. They called me a killer and a madman because those are the labels applied to men who have discovered things too great to be grasped by the inadequate minds of mortals.
It would have taken a year or more to get me into a courthouse and through a trial, but I spared them all of that. I fired every lawyer sent to me until I found one who agreed to help me dispose of the matter as quickly as it could be done. No begging for mercy, no offering of explanations. I did not tell my story, why should I? I pleaded guilty, awaited sentencing, smiled when my peers announced that I would be put to death.
They still have the electric chair down here, you know. They still call it Old Sparky.
I have been here in this dark cell for six months now dreaming of it. There are no wall sockets and the one light bulb, the only source of electricity within this cage, was covered with a special box to keep me from it. I have been without a glimpse of my family in the world of currents for a half year but I am patient. I know they long for me the way that I long for them. I know we will be together soon.
Old Sparky administers only 2,000 volts, you know. But as I have come to learn, it is more a matter of the delicate dance between volts and amps. It will be just right. When the electricity comes to carry me away, it will take me forever.
I get letters from people who feel sorry for me and it makes me laugh. I feel sorry for all of you. You will reside for all of your days in a terrible, barbaric world and then you will die and be gone. I will live on forever in a place of such high beauty, you could not even dream of it. I am going to a place where I am cherished. Though I am nearing perfection, I am not there yet. The initial jolt from Old Sparky may cause a loss of muscle control and of bodily functions. I may piss myself when the electrons surge into me and I may even crap a little.
I don’t care about that at all. Why should I, when such bliss is at hand?
I tell you I don’t care that I might piss myself in front of strangers. I never cared about that and I don’t understand why you make such an issue of it.