'Keep your hands to yourself.'
Spark surges thudded through him whenever he reached for metal, and after another hour .of stiffening jolts, he sat on a stool at the far end of the bar and cradled his head in his hands.
'Is it that bad, darlin'?' A gentle hand touched his bald head, and another spark jumped.
Carl looked up into Caitlin's whiskey-bright eyes. A -feeling of bloated peacefulness buoyed him at the sight of her time-snarled face. 'Hi, Caity. Everything's wrong for me tonight. And I don't even know why.'
'Just your luck taking a rest. Don't mind it. Have a drink.'
'Nah-but I'd better get back to work.'
'Wait.' She took his hand, and another knot of electricity unraveled sharply with her touch. 'I have to tell you.' The marmalade-light in her stare dangled above him, and he could see the whiskey burning in her. 'If only I could tell you what I've been humbled to. She doesn't know.' She glanced toward where Sheelagh was serving a table, her sinewy elegance shining in the dim light. 'You're a special man, Carl. Luck splits through you like light through a crystal. I see that. I see it because I'm old, and pain and mistakes have taught me how to see. You're a beautiful man, Carl Schirmer.' Her scowl softened, and she turned away and went back to the kitchen. A customer called from the bar, and Carl rose like a lark into a smoky sunrise.
Caitlin's kind words fueled Carl for the rest of his last day, but by closing time he was feeling wrong again. He felt tingly as a glowworm, and all the tiny hairs on his body were standing straight up. He left Caitlin and Sheelagh to shut down the Blue Apple and walked home. An icy zero was widening in his chest, and he thought for sure he was going to be sick. Nonetheless, the beauty he had felt that morning was still there. Above the city lights, a chain of stars twined against the
darkness, and the fabric of midnight shimmered like wet fur. Only the bizarre emptiness deepening inside him kept him from leaping with joy.
So self-absorbed was he with the bubble of vacancy expanding within him that he didn't notice the befuddled look on the face of the kid whose huge radio fuzzed out and in as Carl passed. Nor did he see the streetlights winking out above him and then flaring back brightly in his wake. The midnight traffic slowed to watch the neon lights in the stores along Twentythird Street warble to darkness in his presence. Not until he had stumbled up the blacked-out stairs of his own building and had fumbled to get his key in the lock by the light of the sparks leaping from his fingers did he notice that a thin ghostfire was burning coolly over his hands and arms. He left the door unlocked behind him, afraid that something awful was happening to him. His apartment lights, like all the lights in the building; were browned out. The filaments in the bulbs glowed dark red but cast no radiance. The TV worked bat gave no picture, only a prickly sound. He wheeled the TV to the door of the bathroom, and by its pulsing blue glow 'he had enough light to take a cold shower. The chilled water invigorated him, and when he looked down at his arms, he saw that the shimmering was gone, if it had been there at all. Relief widened in him, and he washed the one lens of his glasses and put them on to examine himself more closely.
The air was a vibration of luminance, and the wavering static of the TV seemed louder and more reverberant. He slid open the glass door to the shower, and his heart gulped panic. The TV was blacked out. The illumination and the sound were coming out of the air!
He jumped out of the shower stall and nearly collapsed. The bathroom was refulgent with frenzied light; waterdrops hung in the air like chips of crystal. Through the glare in the mirror, through an anvil. of ripping-metal noise, he saw that his head was blazing with swirls of silvergreen flames.
Dumbstruck, he watched the terror in his brilliantly oiled face as green fire fumed from his body in an incandescent rush.
A white-hot shriek cut through him, and his body went glassy, shot through with violet sparks and flurries of black light. Silence froze the room to a cube of crackling light. And the last thing Carl Schirmer saw was the glass of his own horrified face shatter into impossible colors. '
Zee was the first to see Carl's apartment when he came by the next morning for their planned run. His knock went unanswered, but he heard the TV, so he tried the door. And it opened. The apartment smelled windshaken, bright as a mountaintop. Zee went over to the TV, which had been wheeled across the room to face the bathroom door and was blaring a morning soap. He turned it off.
'Oh sweet Jesus!' The words escaped him before he knew what he was seeing. Ile bathroom was a charred socket. The mirrors were purpled from exposure to an intense heat, burned imageless. Zee entered, and the tiles crushed to ash beneath his sneakers. He stood-numb in the scorched and shrunken room. The seat of the fire- glossed toilet had curled to the shape of a black butterfly, and the sink counter that had held toothbrush and shaving implements was reduced to twisted clinkers.
The police, later, would classify the fare as unclassifiable. No human remains were found, and Carl was recorded as a missing person.
Caitlin and Sheelagh came by late in the afternoon
to see the mess themselves, and they found Zee still there.
'What do you think happened?' Caitlin asked after she had surveyed a blasted room.
Zee was sittin on the couch in the living area where he could see to the bathroom, staring as though he had not heard h r. He tugged at his beard, twisting at the braid that had formed from his daylong tugging. 'Spontaneous human combustion,' he whispered without looking at her.
'What?' The old woman looked to her daughter, who just shook her tear-streaked face.
'No one knows why,' Zee answered in a trance, 'but it happens all the time-usually to old ladies who drink too much.'
Caitlin gave him a fierce, reproving look.
'I'm not joking,' he shot back. .'That's the statistic. Men burn up, too. And I guess that's what's happened to Carl.'
'You mean, he just caught fire?' Caitlin sat down beside him and peered into his face incredulously. 'How can that be?'
'I don't know. Nobody, knows. I read about it once. The best theory they have is that imbibed alcohol ignites some kind of chemical reaction in the body.'
