Lightning Hits the Fans, Part 1

Whoa boy.

There’s gotta be a difference between having fans and having friends, even online; has to be some sort of happy medium between social networking and introducing oneself to one’s would-be stalkers. 

It has now been… Well, let’s see here… [inaudible mumble] 2006, give or take a couple months…. Carry the one… It has now been roundabout one year and five months since I began blogging.  And during that time, yes, it’s true, I’ve run across some truly kind and extraordinarily interesting people. Moreover, I’ve witnessed some other folks who have begun talking with each other, then met in the world of flesh-and-blood, and then everyone lived happily ever after.  That sort of thing.  You know what I’m talking about.

But I’m out with Greg on Halloween and it happens again. Just sitting there, minding my own business, wondering what in the hell getting shit-faced drunk has to do with dressing up like a pirate in preparation for All Saints’ Day, when it happens. 

“Excuse me, ma’am?”  I turn to see a little dark dude, bowing or kowtowing or something, I’m not sure.  He won’t make eye contact.  In his hand, he holds a napkin and a pen.  Another one just like him stands in the background.  “Would you, um, could I please have your autograph?”

Ah, yes. An autograph. Of course.  Such a burden it is, to be so famous.  And what would drive this pair to request that I sign my name upon a bar napkin from this elite establishment?  What have I done in my life to inspire such submission as I see before me?  Is it my illustrious legal career? My nifty costume? My good genes? 

“You’re Adri, from the Sanitarium, right?”

Greg goes slack, jaw dropping. He just stares in amazement, not quite comprehending.  But he still agrees to snap the photo when my admirers gain confidence.

The conclusion of an old blog page and the inauguration of a new one wipes the slate clean in that Spring Cleaning kind of way where you forget about the dark corners you haven’t wanted to look into for so long. All that crap about fairy tales and latent mental conditions and a screwed up childhood, to boot?

Throw it out. Cut to commercial. It’s gone.  It’s in past tense.

And now, for my cold open here at the new place, I toss off a short quiet one.  “Electrical Storm” is nothing but a muser.  Hardly the stuff of the three-ring big top circus that I’ve emceed before. 

It’s a short one, and it’s a quiet one, and hardly three dozen people even bother reading it, but it gets me immediate emails.  Specifically and for our purposes, it garners an email from one “Wyatt,”  who informs me that he’s a longtime lurker drawn in by my death and cutting references.  Wyatt’s kept a low profile up until now, though.  Up until I write about lightning.

Wyatt, it seems, has some experience in this area.  Wyatt boasts of having been actually struck by the stuff itself.  So right away, with this short quiet blog entry at the new digs, well, now I’m talking Wyatt’s language.

The language of lightning.

Then Saturday, we exchange a couple emails.  Wyatt and me, I mean.  He tells me about his short stint as a conduit for a half million volts of electricity.  He tells me about a woman – “this one woman in an organization I’m in” – who’s served as such a conduit not one time, no, not just once, but on two separate occasions, years apart.

I take the bait, hook, line, and sinker.  “What are the chances of two people in the same organization getting struck by lightning?  What kind of club are we talking about here?”

This Wyatt the Email Dude, he tosses me out little bits of info, a piece at a time.  Making no sudden moves, he reels me in.  Quietly reading my blog for so many months now, he thinks he’s got it figured out, what makes me tick.  It’s after dark on Saturday night – a night with more hours than any other night of the year – when he casually suggests I meet him and an acquaintance at the West Gray Café.

Yep.  The West Gray Café.  Wyatt has indeed been reading my stuff.

I agree to meet him, of course.  I mean, c’mon.  It’s just too good. Potentially, anyway.

Plus, worse comes to worse, you know… I’m generally armed.

My friend, Greg, however, disagrees with my assessment of the situation.  He insists on accompanying me.  I point out that his presence was not part of the arrangement I reached with Wyatt the Email Dude.  These lightning-struck folks, you can’t make any fast or unforeseen moves around them.  They’ll scamper off like electrified squirrels, straight up the nearest telephone pole.  Who knows what’ll happen.

Greg persists until I finally agree to bring him along, on the condition that he let me drive. 

The last time Greg let me drive, I introduced him to the grand time that is hurtling down dark country roads sans headlights in the middle of the night.

Greg’s primal fear of my driving soon overcomes his concern for my well-being at the West Gray Café.  He hands me the keys to his motorcycle.  Well, I suppose it can still be considered his, although recently, I’ve put one hell of a lot more miles on it than he has.

Victorious as usual, I make my way over to the West Gray Café.  I make my way over to meet Wyatt the Electrified Email Dude and his acquaintance.  Nice vague word, that.  “Acquaintance.”

They’re not hard to pick out of the small evening crowd at West Gray.  Wyatt and the Acquaintance, that is.  If you had an aerial photo of a crowd and were asked to pick out the guy who’d been struck by lightning, ten to one you’d zero right in on Wyatt.  Unless you thought it was a trick question, that Wyatt was placed in the photo to throw you off.  You know, as too obvious?

Wyatt is wearing rubber. He sits in a wheelchair.  He looks as though he is perhaps going scuba diving after grabbing a bit of dinner, but it isn’t a scuba suit and he isn’t going scuba diving. It is a suit made out of rubber, Adri. His long white, unkempt beard juts out of the rubber hood at strange angles and his gargantuan green galoshes hardly fit under the small wooden table at all. On the table before him sits a jar that, to these untrained eyes at least, appears to be something fleshy floating in formaldehyde. 

Ah, the internet. It does bring folks together, doesn’t it?

What’s telling, though, is that Wyatt is hardly sore thumb material at the West Gray Café.  Truth be told, he’d probably fit in better at the Last Concert Café, but that’s several miles further up the road.

A faint scent of ozone surrounds him at all times.

Accompanying Wyatt is what appears to be a wadded up piece of discarded newspaper dressed in a tweed suit coat.  If you look closely, you’ll almost make out a dark pair of eyes.  And then, of course, there are the obvious tufts of nose hair, confirming that yes, this is indeed an Acquaintance.  The Acquaintance, even…

“Good Lord!”  Wyatt shouts, observing me through bottle bottom glasses.  “You are that person, aren’t you?  I’ve had my doubts all these many months.”  He motions me towards a chair.  “Frankly, I was never really sure.  Not even this afternoon.”

Wyatt is eating a bread roll covered in strawberry jam.  His suit makes much less noise than one might imagine.  The lack of noise, however, does not make the overall scene any less strange.  Acquaintance stares into the distance blankly.  I don’t sense any acknowledgement of my presence. 

I don’t sense any breathing or other signs of life, either, for that matter.

And I pinch myself, just a little bit, to double-check that I’m not watching Twelve Monkeys or Brazil on television.

I’m not watching Twelve Monkeys or Brazil on television.

“Adrianna, I invited you here so I could introduce both myself and my friend, Norman.”  Wyatt motions to Norman.  Norman, apparently the old weak silent type, remains aloof and slightly corpsy. 

After we’ve stared at Norman for a suitably pointless amount of time, Wyatt continues, simultaneously knifing more jam on his roll.  “Adri, Norman and I are Thanatonauts.”  He takes a bite of roll.  “Um, Flatliners, if you will.  We are members of a group of individuals who assist each other in bringing themselves unto death under controlled conditions in order to explore it.  Death.  We help each other go there and have a look around and then come back to report on it.”

Whoa boy.

End of Part 1…