Struck
By: Kyle Diemler

It’s raining. It’s the kind of rain that people squint and yell things in. I’m leaning against the painted walls of my apartment’s entryway. It’s like a cave, the entryway, a high arch cut into the building, stacked with stone steps and littered with people. I’m smoking, of course, or I would be inside. But Kate doesn’t want the couch to smell like smoke.

            I take a drag.

            There is nothing to notice because it is dark, except the shelves of apartments that line that entryway, and the parking lot that sits in front of it all. Two floors up, at the door to 1511 a man is waiting, he has already knocked. He glanced at me when he started up the steps. His head is shaved, he is very thin, he wears loose clothes, and his eyes are bright blue. I bet he likes cheap beer because it is cheap, and because it is beer. And I know he is going to buy some heroin once Livingstone opens his door.

            Another drag.

            There is a man sitting on the concrete steps above me. He talks to himself in Spanish, but not sharp and quick, instead softly, and collected, like a gentle ancient prayer. Kate told me that he is crazy, that he walks around the parking lot at night, speaking to himself in that tongue and looking at the sky as if he were waiting for something to fall.

            There is a car pulling into the lot, and its headlights make the raindrops silver, and it there must be rust in its undercarriage, because there is a rattling that rich men never hear. Yes, the car is worth less than a congressman’s suit. It’s a ’97 Sentra and it is owned by a tall man in a blue coat. I watch him trot across the parking lot, the thin skin of water snapping between his feet and the asphalt with each step. He is the quiet man, the only man who keeps to himself more than Kate and I do.

            He lives in 1508, and his face is very stern. He’s very clean… I bet he’s a Nazi. I bet he has swastika flags pinned on the walls of his closet. Proud but hidden. Nobody knows, but the beauty of not knowing is that you can imagine.

            Another drag, deeper. Livingstone let the thin man inside, and they are making a deal. There’s a loud thunderclap, I feel it in my chest, and I know we’re in the heart of it, halfway in, halfway out.

            There is a woman who lives above us, but she’s not outside. To look at her you can see that she did drugs for a while, and stress has worn her down. But beyond her faded, aged skin and clumping mascara she’s still blond, and pretty, and kind. Once, she was outside, and she told me that she needed to quit smoking. We both sat and smoked together, and I met her. I really met her. She liked to talk.

            “I’ve got to be a better example to my kids, y’know? I’ve got two, Jessica and Nate.”

            She reached into her pocket and pulled out a picture. It was in a plastic sleeve, but not in a wallet or purse, just alone in her pocket, wearing down its corners and developing creases.

            “See, that’s Jessie, she’s nine, and Nate will be five in May.”

            Jessie’s hair was so blond it was almost white, grinning wide for the camera, wearing a thrift store shirt. Nate was just a chubby little kid, but he had the face of whoever his father was, god only knows, and it was sad because you could tell even then he had one of those faces. No matter rich he got he would always look poor. You know what I mean. A white trash face. Sunken eyes and a head shaped in a way that was different, but it was hard to say how. Someday he would rot away in a smoke filled trailer, and work with his hands, and strike his wife, and touch his daughter…  

            “I need to start taking them to church,” she said. “I want something better for them than all this.”

            She punched the bricks of the arch softly.

            “You know any places?”

            I shook my head. I don’t go to church.

            It wasn’t long after that Kate leaned out our door, the voice of my brother-in-law somewhere at the other end of the phone in her hand. She waved me inside with her free hand, and I left the lady who lives above us on the steps to smoke alone.

            That was April, and I haven’t talked to her since. Once I saw her taking her trash to the dumpster, and I waited inside behind the blinds until she had gone back upstairs, just so that I wouldn’t have to nod to her on my way to the car.

            I don’t like talking to the people of Kate’s building. I don’t like seeing other people like me, strange and quiet and depressed, working their way through life but not up through it. I don’t like knowing that we’re all in debt. Whether it’s our money or health or time, something’s on loan. I don’t like any of it.

            What I do like is coming over and finding Kate wearing my dress shirt and nothing else.

            It’s June now. It’s a pretty heavy rainstorm for June. This is April weather, or maybe May weather. This is bullshit weather. I’m tired of smoking, and I’m tired of staring at the rain. I’m tired. I throw what is left of the cigarette down, crush it under my sole. It exhales its last few wisps of smoke and I listen to the ash grind against the concrete. God, that’s a nice sound.

            Then the guy from 1507 comes home, and the raindrops turn silver in the headlights again.

            He drives a BMW but it’s so damn old and in such bad shape that it’s lost all of its class. He’s a guy who works overtime a lot, coming and going with his work gear six days a week. He comes home with a dirty smock and protective glasses and black smudges all over his face, but I know he’s not a mechanic. His car needs too much work on too many simple things, things he’d fix himself if he knew how. No, he works in a factory, like a lot of guys in this complex, works the weekends and everything. His shirt tells me that he works for a company that my brother-in-law used to work for, building “time-delayed mortar caps” or some shit for the military.

            I wonder if he ever thinks about the men that drive those jeeps with the guns mounted on the back, kicking earthy roads up into dust clouds in the Middle East. I wonder if he thinks about those men he kills, distantly. I guess he’s doing more for his country than I am.

            He’s still in his car, gathering his work gear, checking the sky to see if the rain will let up, but it’s too dark to see the clouds tonight. If he hadn’t put that extra time in at the factory today he might have missed the storm, it wasn’t so bad an hour ago.

            I’m just leaning on the bricks of the arch now, not even smoking, just waiting to see what he does. Kate’s asleep, Saturday Night Live is a rerun, and I figure there’s not much better to do. But if he notices me he’ll probably think I’m just a creepy guy. He’ll probably get nervous as he walks up to the steps, seeing me standing here doing nothing but watching the rain.

            Finally he’s stepping out of his car. Finally he crosses the parking lot in a slow walk, as if it weren’t raining at all. Drops of water cling to the wet tendrils of his hair, dripping off with every step and joining the parade of rain that crosses the asphalt in diagonal streams. His shoulders are soaked, and the skin of his neck where the tails of a complex tattoo peek out glistens in the streetlights.

            He’s holding his keys in one hand, his safety glasses and smock in the other, and it bothers me that he doesn’t mind the rain. I’m done. I’m ready to go inside, but I’m just dying to feel that strangeness, that tension that two unacquainted people have when they pass one another. I don’t know why, but the glance that the thin man with the blue eyes gave me as he went up to 1511, and the sternness on the face of the man in the blue trench coat as he ignored me, told me so much about them.

            I like to know people without knowing them.

            And finally he looks at me, from out in the center of the parking lot he looks right at me, and everything slows down. The rain falls slower, his footsteps drag, and I thought for a moment that the feeling, that strangeness I had waited for, had come. But the slight tension keeps growing, and electricity fills the air. Then everything really slows down. The snapping skin of parading water on the asphalt flies away from his feet in sheets of flat, clear water and bursts into droplets only inches into the air. He blinks, and it takes hours.

            And then it happens.

            The electricity I had felt was not the tension between this man and I, it was the tension between the earth and the sky. And finally, the clouds burst with light, and a streak of brilliant whiteness appears between them and this man. In the slowest moment I have lived through I watch a fault line appear in the sky, a fissure of white in all of the blackness, as if a crack had formed in our universe and I could glimpse into the holiness of another.

            And the lightning doesn’t come down, it just appears, and it runs through his body without a sound in that slow, slow moment. His face tightens, his arms seize to his chest as if he were trying to keep his soul inside. His shirt tears along his back as the electricity cuts like a blade. The light travels down him, jumping bolts change direction in midair and coil around his body, and penetrate through his flesh as a white string of ghosts. And the entire bolt slips through him altogether, and the fleshy meats inside of his heels burst and bloom open from the inside like pink carnations as the light leaves him and kisses the ground.

            And for a split second I’m still standing there watching him stand, neck bent forward, facing the ground, arms pulled tight to his chest. And then the wake comes, and the air collapses into the empty space where the white cut in our world had once been. Thunder louder than gunshots rings out, a 21 gun salute for the man, the struck statue in the parking lot, and then the sound hits me, and everything goes silent.

            The punch of the thunderclap steals the air from my lungs, and I feel myself falling back onto the concrete steps, a pain in my chest that feels like it is collapsing. Sparks of tingling energy rush over me, and for a moment things go black. But I can hear again.

            I can hear two car alarms going off in a horrifying chorus, and it sounds like they are arguing with each other. I sit up on the step. I can hear the door open behind me, and Kate steps out in her pajama pants and her old high school volleyball shirt.

            “Did you hear that?” She says, her voice still heavy with sleep. “Was that lightning?”

            And the only thing I tell her is to stay put.

            The man is still standing in the center of the lot, and I stand up as fast as I can. Doors open among the shelves of apartments, and a man on the third floor balcony turns his alarm off with his keychain, sending out a tweet among the hissing of rain and the wailing of the other car. By now, Livingstone is on his balcony looking down, and the old man from 1510 shuts off his alarm too.

            I walk to the edge of the archway, but for some reason I don’t want to step out, I don’t want to move beyond the cover of the bricks. There is no logic in thinking that I will be struck too, lightning never strikes twice… but there is no logic in what I have just seen either. The dark figure of the standing man hasn’t moved, until finally his whole body finally begins to lean back. Like a struck tree I watch him fall onto the lot, turning slowly to the side as he drops, and I hear the sound of his skull crack against the asphalt.

            For moment I think about how painful that is, but I know that he doesn’t feel it. He’s dead. He must be.

            I take a deep breath and run out into the rain.

            His neck is still bent, his arms still pulled to his chest. His soles of his shoes have burst open, a red mess inside them. His right hand is bleeding, and it takes me a moment to see the tip of a car key sticking straight through it.  In his other hand the safety glasses are crushed. Where his shirt is torn open, from his shoulder to his lower spine, there is blackened, cracked skin, and leaking blood or something between each split. Inside, Kate calls an ambulance.

            I shake uncontrollably, and I ask him if he can hear me, just to check. There’s a ringing in my ears, a screech really, but I’m sure he hasn’t made a sound. My chest aches. My head hurts. And I sit in the rain beside him for a while, and other tenants gather around, unsure of what to do.

            And the ambulance comes, and goes just as quickly, and no one else knows what to do now. The man in the trench coat is the first to go back inside, and the man who speaks Spanish is finally silent. The woman who lives above us smokes on the steps for a while, making sure her children go back inside every time they peek out the front door. Kate pulls me inside too, leading me gently by the wrist, and it’s a rough night inside my head. I take Tylenol, and I sit and think for a while.

            We go to bed, eventually. The next day I think about life and death and time and all of the things that scientists won’t ever really figure out.

            The day after that I can only think about his life. Everything had led up to that, the timing, perfect. Each detail that delayed him, or sped him up, down to the very second, led to that precise moment.

            If not for the red light he caught on the way home, if not for the penny he had stooped to pick up at the gas station that morning, if not for the extra ten seconds he spent by the vending machine, trying to decide between Snickers and M&Ms… 

            But it’s more than that.

            If not for the extra time put in at work, if not for the child support he had to pay, if not for the woman he met at a party two Augusts ago, if not for his father encouraging him to get out more…

            But even grander still.

            If not for his parents meeting in college, his mother showing up late for that class because she had run back to her car for a book, if not for his grandfather’s last night with his grandmother before shipping off to war, if not for Hitler, for God, for higher taxes, freedom of speech, a pocketknife used for opening the mail just a little quicker…

            If not for me, standing in the archway, waiting for something intense…

            And I don’t know what the others in the building think. But I go to church for a while after. I give up, after three weeks, and I go back to routine. I light my cigarette outside, because Kate doesn’t want the couch to smell like smoke. I even smoke when it’s raining. I remember what happened, but I still stand there, watching the man in the trench coat come home, the young couple that moved into 1507 leaving for a party… It doesn’t matter. Because even faced with mortality, and all these grand thoughts of death and life, the things that would inspire a freer man to take to the world and make the most of it all before death, can’t always strike changes in those who are stuck in life.

            Another drag, deeper.