The towers of downtown Knoxville were invisible from more than a mile or two away; driving upriver along Neyland toward the UT campus and downtown was like an act of creation, with buildings gradually materializing out of the murk, though they never seemed to make it all the way to crisp, sharp-edged solidity. Walking was like swimming through Jell-O.
Every patch of ground that wasn’t watered was cracking open from the heat and the drought. Cornstalks were withering in the fields; the pastures at the UT cattle farm, across the river from Sequoyah Hills, had gone from emerald green to desert brown. The Holsteins that normally dotted the hillside pasture seemed to have given up on the grass altogether, huddling miserably in the shallows on the inside of the river’s big bend.
A flock of Canada geese had given up migrating to take up permanent residence in a small, grass-ringed pond beside the UT Hospital’s parking garage; I passed them every day on my way to the Body Farm. The flock, which had doubtless congratulated itself on its wisdom and good fortune in laying claim to such a choice pond, had gradually taken on a look of despair and betrayal as the pond shriveled, shrinking to a puddle, then a mud flat, and finally a circular patch of red-clay desert-a mocking reversal of the oasis it had once been. I stopped one day on the shoulder of the road and got out to take a closer look. The cracked earth-saucer-size slabs of curling clay, divided by dark, deep fissures between-looked like a nightmarish, 3-D version of a flayed giraffe skin. Peering down into the fissures, I flashed back to a childhood fear that had haunted me one hot, dry summer half a century before: What if the devil managed to escape from hell and break free through the cracks in the ground? What if he emerged just as I happened by, my tender young soul ripe for the picking? Suddenly it hit me: It wasn’t just a childish fear. Garland Hamilton was roaming free on the face of the earth this hellish summer. I shivered in spite of the heat and fled to seek refuge and distraction amid the corpses at the research facility.
But even there, even after death, the bodies seemed to be suffering from the heat. Dark, greasy stains- volatile fatty acids leaching out of tissue as it liquefied-pooled around the bodies, just as the sweat pooled and soaked my shirt. One body, which Miranda and I had laid in the sun at the edge of the clearing just two days before, had actually burst like a balloon, the gases in its abdomen building up so fast that the skin could no longer contain the pressure. What had been a man’s belly was now a gaping crater, fringed by ragged entrails. I stared. In all these years of research experiments, I’d never seen a body pop. Scientifically, it was fascinating; emotionally, it was disturbing, one more omen hinting that we were gripped by a torrid plague of biblical proportions. I took a few photographs to document the event-without them I wasn’t sure anyone would believe my description-and then fled for the shaded, air-conditioned corridors beneath Neyland Stadium.
I had been wishing for a serious rain, to clear the air and cool the blasted earth. By midafternoon, thunder was vibrating the stadium’s grimy windows and mammoth girders. But by evening, when I drove home, the air was still steamy and the ground was still parched, and I decided it was just heat lightning toying with my hopes.
I was wrong. By the time I microwaved a can of soup for dinner, the branches of the big oaks in the front yard were whipping around like palm trees in a hurricane. The sky turned purple, then black, in a matter of minutes. A flash of lightning lit the world, followed by the tearing crack of thunder, and sheets of rain-torrential, horizontal rain-lashed the west-facing windows of my house.
Often I liked to sit out on my screened-in back porch during thunderstorms; in this case, though, when I stepped out the door, a soaking mist-rain shredded but not stopped by the wire mesh-drenched me from face to foot and sent me scurrying inside for protection and dry clothes.
One of my favorite features of the house was the bank of windows lining the west wall of the living room. Most summer evenings the living room stayed bright enough to read in until after eight. Tonight, seven o’clock was dark as midnight-blackness punctuated by blinding flashes of lightning, which lit the room like a flash gun, searing a negative afterimage onto my retinas. Reflexively, ever since childhood, I’d been in the habit of counting the seconds between the lightning’s flash and the thunder’s boom: “one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi…” If I got to “five Mississippi” before the thunder rolled over me, I knew the lightning was a mile away. Within minutes after this evening’s storm broke, I found myself lucky to get through “one Mississippi”; sometimes I didn’t make it even through the “one.”
Then came a flash so bright, accompanied by a boom so loud, that I was sure the house itself had been hit dead on. When my vision returned, I saw a brief shower of sparks from a utility pole out by the street, and I knew that part of the boom was the sound of the electrical transformer on the pole exploding. I glanced at the face of my DVD player for confirmation and saw that the numerals had gone dark. I figured it might be a while before the power came back on, so I felt my way to the kitchen, opened the drawer beside the refrigerator, and fished around until I felt the box of wooden matches. I could have gone to the bedroom and retrieved the flashlight from the nightstand instead, but the idea of the flashlight beam, harsh and impersonal, made me choose the matches. They were the old-fashioned strike-anywhere kind-the kind you can strike on a stone fireplace, or a zipper, or even with your thumbnail if you’re daring and dexterous. I’d always preferred them to the kind you have to strike on the box-I liked getting to choose where to strike them, maybe, or liked the look of the red match heads tipped with white-but it was getting harder and harder to find this sort these days. The grocery store had stopped carrying them; the only place I knew where to buy them anymore was Parker Brothers, an old-style hardware store run by old-fashioned guys-guys like me, I supposed. Funny, I thought, people think nothing of careening through freeway traffic at ninety miles an hour, weaving in and out with a foot of clearance between their bumper and the next car’s. But God forbid we should do something as risky as strike a wooden match on a fireplace brick.
I felt my way into the living room, where an oil lamp-its glass chimney and base grimy to the touch-occupied a dusty spot on the mantel. Lifting the chimney free of the metal clips that held it in place, I set it on the mantel beside the base, then slid open the matchbox and removed one of the square wooden matches. I pressed the tip lightly against the surface of a brick above the mantel, then dragged the match upward. As it scratched across the rough surface, it gave off a small shower of sparks, then bloomed into a dazzling flower of yellow and blue. Once the flame shrank to a small teardrop of yellow, I touched it to the lamp’s wick, which took the flame and amplified it.
I tucked the box of matches into my pocket and buttoned the flap closed, then wiggled the lamp’s chimney back into position and lifted the lamp from the mantel by the narrow glass neck. Holding it aloft before me, like the Statue of Liberty-the Statue of Electrical Outage, actually, or the Statue of Paranoia-I made my way back to the kitchen and set the lamp on the table. The kitchen had always felt safer, somehow, or more comforting than any other room in the house, but tonight even the kitchen seemed perilous.
Leaves clawed and slapped at the windows like hands-like Garland Hamilton’s hands, slapping me in the face, again and again. Another flash split the darkness, and for a blinding moment I thought I saw a man silhouetted against the lashing rain and shuddering hedge. Then the night went black again, and the afterimage on my retina reversed to a negative: The dark figure looming against the brilliant background lingered as a ghostly shape in white on a field of black, the edges fringed by the bleached-bone fingers of tree branches. When the afterimage faded and my eyes returned to normal, all I could see was my own image reflected in the kitchen window, the oil lamp beneath and to one side of me, casting ominous shadows in the hollows of my eye sockets. I did not look like someone I’d want to meet in a dark alley.
I sat down at the table, close to the lamp, and tilted and angled my head to dispel the shadows around my eyes. Finally satisfied that the sinister expression was gone, I turned my gaze to the lamp itself. Its cotton wick nestled just below a slit in a small metal dome; a small hexagonal knob extended from the dome on a spindly shaft, and by twisting the knob I could roll the wick up or down with gears that were hidden within the dome. Twisting the wick slowly down, I watched it gradually disappear, like sand edging downward into the neck of an hourglass as time begins to run out. As the wick’s edge threatened to vanish through the small metal sleeve between the reservoir of oil and the glass chimney, the flame shrank to a pale blue flicker along the charred edge of woven cotton. I twisted the knob in the other direction, and the wick slowly rose, the flame blooming bright yellow again, its edge as sharp and solid as the edge of a full moon.
I lifted the oil lamp by its narrow neck, where the metal collar and wick mechanism screwed onto the glass base. Halfway up the base, at its widest part, oil sloshed within the clear container. The wick-a flat ribbon of woven white cotton-undulated within the liquid, like a tapeworm preserved in alcohol. The lamp’s neck felt small and vulnerable in my grasp, and I forced myself to ease the tension in my grip, lest it snap in my hand, sending the glass base and its flammable contents crashing onto the kitchen’s tile floor. I made my way through the house by
