teasing his interest in her daughter to keep him happy and hopeful. Carl's loneliness was the only lack Caitlin could pretend to complete in return for all he had done for* them. Besides, Sheelagh was too self-willed for her mother's opinions to influence her even if the crone had really thought he was right for her. Carl spent little time pondering it that last day lie lived as a man, for he was kept busy with his own strangeness.
Lightbulbs blinked out around him faster than he could replace them. And as he worked the bar for the afternoon business lunches, the reverie he had experienced that morning spaced out and became moony and distracted.
'You look pretty harried, sucker,' a friendly, gravelly voice said as the blender he was trying to run for a banana daiquiri sputtered and stalled. He looked up into the swart-bearded face of Zeke Zhdarnov, his oldest friend. Zee was a freelance science writer and parttime instructor of chemistry at NYU. He was a thickset man with a penchant for glenurquhart plaid suits and meerschaum pipes. Carl and Zee had been friends since their adolescence in a boys' home in Newark, New Jersey. They had nothing in common.
At St. Timothy's Boys' Home, Zee had been a husky, athletic ruffian and Carl a chubby, spectacled math demon. A mutual love for comic books brought them together and defied their differences.
St. Tim's was a state house, and the place was haunted with dispirited, vicious youths-from criminal homes. Zee offered protection from the roughs, and Carl did his best to carry Zee's classwork. At eighteen, Zee graduated to the Marines and Nam.
Carl sought personal freedom by applying his math skills to finance at Rutgers University. A Manhattan brokerage drafted him straight out of the dorms. Meanwhile in Nam, Zee was learning all there was to know about the smallness of life. He paid for that education cheaply with the patella of his right knee, and he came back determined to invent a new life for himself. He studied science, wanting to understand something of the technology that had become his kennel. When that became too abstract, he went to work for a New Jersey drug company and married, wanting to find a feeling equal to the numbness that surrounded him. During his divorce, he had sought
out Carl, and the pain and rectification of that time had brought them together again, closer than they had ever been. Carl had done poorly at the brokerage, stultified by the anomie that had poisoned him from childhood but only oozed out-of him after he had found enough security to stop his mad scramble from St. Tim's and catch the scent of himself. He had smelled sour, and not until he had met Sheelagh and developed the Blue Apple did he begin to feel good about himself. That was a year ago when Zee had reappeared. Now Zee came by often with a crowd of students to fill the Blue Apple up, and Carl was always happy to see him. They shook hands, and a loud spark snapped between their palms.
'Wow!' Zee yelled. 'Are you charged! You look like you're being electrocuted-very slowly.' He shifted his dark, slim eyes toward the table Sheelagh was clearing, her pendulous breasts swaying with her effort-. 'She's overloading you?'
'Today's an unusual day for me, buddy, but not that unusual.
What'll you have?'
'Give me a Harp.'
Carl took out a bottle of Harp lager from the ice cooler and poured it into a frosted mug. 'The wiring's shot around the bar. I can't get this blender or even the damn lightbulbs to work right.'
Zee reached over, and the blender purred under his touch.
'It's the same way with women and me. The touch must be light yet assertive. I think you've got a lot of backed-up orgone in there.'
He stabbed Carl's midriff with a swizzle stick. 'How about a run with me tomorrow? We'll follow the Westway down to the twin towers. I'll go easy on ya.'
Carl agreed, and they chatted amiably about their usual subjects-slow running and fast women-while Carl tended to business. Later, as he was leaving, Zee leaned close and whispered: 'No sense wearing that
expensive cologne if you're going to dress like that.' He reached out to shake, thought better of it, saluted, and left.
The rest of the day was a bumbling of small accidents for Carl.
The bar's electrical system gave-out entirely, and he had to mix drinks by hand and repeatedly go down to the basement cooler for ice. The tiny screws in his eyeglasses popped out; and he lost a lens down an open drain. Napkins clung tenaciously to his fingers, no matter how dry he kept them, and he spilled several drinks before he got used to the paper coasters coming away with his hand.
Midway through the dinner shift, with the house jammed, the lights began dimming. When he left; the bar to check the fuse box, the light came up, only to fade again on his return. 'This is weird,' Carl at last acknowledged, running both hands through his startled hair.
Sparks crackled between his fingers. 'I'm going home.' He went over to the pay phone to call a neighborhood friend to cover for him, but he couldn't get a dial tone. Moments later a customer used the same phone without difficulty.
Carl waited until Sheelagh came to the bar with drink orders, then signed her toward a vacant corner. 'What's wrong with me tonight, Sheelagh?'
'Your glasses are missing a lens. Your clothes need ironing.
And you really should comb your hair.'
'No--I mean, look at this.' He touched her arm, and a large spark volted between them.
'Hey! Cut that out. That hurts.'
'I can't stop it. I've been electrocuting customers all day.
Look.' He passed his hand over a stack of napkins, and the paper rose like drowsy leaves and clung to his fingers.
'It's some kind of static electricity,' Sheelagh explained.
'I'll say. What can I do about it?'
