Lichtenberg Figures
Originally published in The Louisville Review, May 2014
It’s the Sunday after Jen got hit by lightning and the burst capillaries in her chest makes it look like the lightning still runs beneath her skin. We sit in the living room in front of the air conditioner. She can’t wear a shirt or a bra since her whole body feels tender. The doctor said the scars would fade in a few days, but for now they look like thin, pink tree roots winding through her veins. The air conditioner rattles until I weigh it down with the largest book I can find, Astrophysical Objectives of Optical Astrometry. The house now bathed in the white noise of cool air.
I feed Laurie and put her to bed. She can get loud when she runs around, and Jen has a constant, buzzing headache. She asks for a bedtime story but I say maybe tomorrow. Laurie hasn’t talked about the strike since the hospital. I kiss her on her forehead and watch her small fingers grip her stuffed rabbit as I turn out the lights. They said she might have trouble with nightmares but when I check on her a few minutes later she’s fast asleep, peaceful.
In the living room Jen stares straight ahead. There’s something stoic about the way she sits, with her back so straight. Like a dancer, maybe, though Jen has never danced. At our wedding we swayed in place as I felt gropingly for her hip through the armor of tulle her mother had insisted on– nothing that could be defined as dancing.
Jen’s breasts look swollen with the scars stretched over them. They hang oblong and taut. She holds a bag of frozen peas at her chest, the condensation dripping down her stomach, the couch dark and wet under her.
“Want a towel?” I ask, and her eyes stare like I’d slapped her.
“I’m ok.”
We sit and we watch TV game shows. People win prizes when they wrangle the most expensive groceries into their cart. Usually I’d be sketching and she’d be reading. But now we watch Frank and Patty from Illinois find the golden wrapped hams in the freezer section and it seems they have the whole thing in the bag.
“I’m going to bed, hun.” Jen stands.
“I’ll come, too.”
“I’m ok,” she says again, and tries to bend over to give me a kiss. Her breasts hang like painful pendulums and I stare at her skin, the woven scars. So close to the surface I can see their patterns, the way they curl from her shoulder down her arm, from her heart to her armpit. They’re scars thick as rope in some places, then thin as if traced by a razor–– her heat-dried skin tightens as she bends. I’m too distracted by it to meet her halfway. I wait a moment too long to react. She gives up on the kiss and straightens.
“Good night,” she says.
Frank and Patty don’t win. They blame the unwieldy ham.
When I turn the TV off the house is dark except for the reading lamp where Jen had been sitting. Jen’s the morning person, ironically, considering she studies stars for a living. I’m the househusband and the night owl. I paint at night in the kitchen with the refrigerator door open because I love the light it gives. Still lifes of our family, the clues to our day, laid out in degrees of shadow–– washed forks in the drying rack silhouetted against the kitchen window, books opened and forgotten on their spine, socks half balled from being stripped impatiently off 5-year-old feet. Tonight, though, they don’t feel like clues. The house feels abandoned.
I go to check on Laurie in her room.
Laurie was there when Jen was struck. Jen was walking to the car from Laurie’s cancelled pee wee soccer game. The air was heavy but it hadn’t started raining yet. The lightning stuck a nearby pole. Laurie was in the car taking off her shoes. The rubber tires kept her safe. Jen could have died, but she didn’t, just left with the marks. Made from the impact, the doctor said, not the electricity. The impact of the lightning, running through the pole, then the ground, then the collapsible goalie post she was carrying, through her fingers, arms, chest, rupturing capillaries as it surged. A domino effect of bursting vessels. The impact made her shoes fly off.
I took Laurie to see a therapist at the hospital while Jen was getting another MRI. The therapist asked Laurie to describe what she’d seen. “Mom looked like the mermaid on the front of a boat,” she said. Laurie stood up and glued her legs together, stuck her chest out, her head back, her spine arching over the invisible bow of a ship. “See?” she said. I didn’t see, but I told her I did.
We had Laurie later than I wanted–we were always too broke, or always too busy– and now there’s nothing I regret more than waiting until we turned forty. We get tired and are too far removed from our own childhoods. It’s hard to dredge it back, sometimes. But there are times Laurie seems much older than she is. She’s like her mom in those moments, quiet and strong and bright. And the way she sleeps–curled up on her side, arms around her knees–she does that like her mother, too.
The humidifier on Jen’s side of the bed makes the room feel smaller than it is. The doctor recommended we use it to keep the scar tissue hydrated and prevent it from becoming permanent. She’s naked and rather than her usual curled-up position she lies on top of the sheets, splayed like a starfish. I can see every imperfection, every scar slick in the blue light of the humidifier. The mole to the left of her bellybutton, the stretch marks running white down her lower stomach towards the thick thatch of hair between her legs, the dimples of cellulite rippling where her thighs meet the mattress. I remember watching my mother walk around the house when I was a kid with used coffee grounds held with saran wrap against her cellulite, praying the imperfections away as the brown juice dripped down her knees. Jen has never, would never– she has this dignity about her, even asleep.
I strip my pants off and lie next to her on my side, propping myself up with my elbow to take her in. The scars curl and wind in the wet blue light, her skin turned translucent, pallid. In the beginning they scared me. But now I want to run my hands down her shoulders and chest to see how the scars feel, if they’re raised, if they feel as electric as they look.
I love the way her chest moves. Her swollen body reminds me of her pregnant self. I miss feeling that close to her, when I would rest with my hand on her stomach, when she cut out caffeine so I cut out caffeine and we would fall asleep on the couch at nine. I miss– I miss the calm of that, the easy murmur of our lives.
In my dreams her scars are alive, they float through the steam. The pink curls brush my face, comforting, and are sweet in my mouth.
“Coffee,” she says when she wakes. If Jen has a need she makes it clear. It’s something I fell in love with early on. Flowers, she told me on our third date, not chocolate. She tells me if the dishwasher needs to be unloaded. She tells me what she wants for her birthday.
But it’s when Jen speaks about her work that her articulation really dazzles me. I envy her when she speaks about stars. She engineers the correct phrases, elaborates on equations, sites sources. She is good at giving driving directions, too, provided you need to know how to go from one nebula to the next.
The first time she tried to explain her work to me in detail we were 25 years old and on the roof of our first apartment. Not a roof deck but a roof, where we could sit on the black tar that rubbed off on our legs and our feet and stained the white tile floors when we came back through the kitchen window. We lived next door to a church, with bells that woke us up Sundays and drove us crazy. We went up there for her to wax poetic about astronomy and for me to sketch. And in the memory– the September sun hit the Boston skyline and painted hazy orange the stained glass of the church. Jen’s tar-stained legs glowed orange, too, and bruised with the shadows.
She borrowed my sketch pad and wrote X, F(X), F(F(X)), F(F(F(X))), F(F(F(F(X)))) with my charcoal pencil. See the way the clouds–, she swept her hand. The clouds were pulled cotton across the sky. They’re fractals, she said, tapping the equation. The letters and parentheses meant nothing to me, which she must have read in my eyebrows.
She explained fractals again, about a year ago. It was Laurie’s fourth birthday, after we put Laurie to bed. Jen took a sewing needle, rested the tip against the surface of a glass slide and tapped it repeatedly, firmly, until cracks began to form. Then she placed the glass under the my-first-microscope we’d given to Laurie, focused in. I replaced her eye with mine.
A fractal, Jen murmured, and then upped the magnification. The jumble of cracks and fissures, like a clear kaleidoscope, came back into focus. You keep zooming in, you’ll see the same pattern. She did, I did. That’s a fractal. Has applications in all parts of human anatomy–– DNA helixes, bronchial sacs–– and outside the human body. Mountains, snowflakes, tree bark. Earthquakes, ocean waves, and lightning, she described. The bolt itself, but also where it strikes. Where lightning strikes sand you find fulgerites, golden glass structures, fractals woven from 500 megajoules of energy.
Also clouds, she smiled, remember years ago when I tried to explain?
In the early morning half-light of our bedroom the humidifier’s basin has run dry and it sputters. She pulls the sheet up to her neck. “Coffee,” she repeats, “and can you make Laurie some eggs?”
I wade through memories in front of the stove. Fractals. They had some part in her breakthrough on exoplanets though I’m still not sure exactly how. It had to do with mapping the Basin of Attraction, the pattern of one planet’s orbit over millions of years. Somehow she applied the theory to exoplanets and won the Annie J. Cannon Award and the Newton Lacy Pierce Prize. I remember the term– Basin of Attraction– because it sounded so sexy when Jen said it from a podium.
“Coffee,” I say when she comes into the kitchen, and I set a cup down at the table. She’s wearing a giant black t-shirt and moves tenderly to keep the cotton from rubbing against her skin.
“Good morning, alligator,” she says to Laurie, a joke since Laurie can never seem to get right the see you later alligator, in a while crocodile ritual. This time Jen doesn’t try to bend down for a kiss. She sits in front of the mug, spine ramrod to avoid the wooden chair back, and takes a sip with her eyes closed. The curls of her lightning scar past the sleeve of her shirt, nearly down to her elbow–
“Jen,” I say, leaving the stove, bringing my hand to hover above her arm, “are these fractals? The scarring?” The air around her skin is hot. She’d told me that a bolt of lighting is a fractal, that fulgerites in the sand are, too. Where it strikes sand, where it strikes flesh.
“Yeah,” she says, “I think they are.”
I turn off the stove. The eggs are sticking. I forgot to use butter. I scrape the egg I can salvage out of the pan with a spatula, and when I turn again Laurie is arching her back, legs stuck together, head thrown.
“I want to be a mermaid when I grow up,” she’s telling Jen.
“That’s nice,” Jen says. She doesn’t know about the therapist, about Laurie’s reenactment of the lightning strike. “I wonder what kind of pension you’d get as a mermaid,” she smiles. She’s always liked telling grown-up jokes to kids.
“Laurie,” I say, “how did you sleep last night?”
“I don’t remember,” she says, “how did you sleep last night?”
“Just fine,” I say, “No bad dreams?”
“I’m gonna watch t.v.,” she says. She has these twig legs in pink striped pajama leggings and she runs out of the room on them. Her legs look about the width of my wrist, and I wonder how they even hold her up. I hear the electric ping of the ancient t.v. starting up in the living room.
“What was that all about?” Jen says.
“It’s nothing. How are you feeling?” She shifts in her chair.
“Fine,” she says, tugging at the t-shirt. “I hate wearing this.”
“You’re as beautiful as the night we met,” I say.
“Thanks,” she says, still pulling at the fabric, “I’m going to need a refill on the pain meds soon. Could you stop by the pharmacy later?”
We met in college. I went to MassArt and she went to MIT, introduced by my friend who was dating her roommate. The friend and the roommate have long since broken up. But right from the beginning Jen and I had this straightforward love, worn in and comfortable. Jen wore no makeup except Chapstick and kept her hair in a thick ponytail down her back. She was in the middle of her thesis project on free-floating planets, planets unbound by the gravity of their suns and roaming through galaxies alone.
We met when we were only twenty-one. We’ve had it easy, we really have. We work partly because we have so much history. She knows what I went through during my mother’s chemo, my mother’s death. And I understand what she’s moving towards and what she hopes to discover. She gets my past, I understand her future.
The night I met Jen, I remember asking her, If they could send you to a free-floating planet tomorrow, would you go? Jen stared at me, and I realized how pretentious it was even as I said it. But she didn’t laugh at me.
No, she answered.
Why?
Because life is one big science experiment, she said.
There’d be nothing left to do if it was all figured out.
We always had it all figured out, the two of us. Neither of us have ever had our heart broken. That’s a handicap, my mom told me after I’d proposed. My mom was an artist, too. A dancer. Never having your heart broken will make your art hollow. I was hurt when she said it, but turns out she was right. I mostly paint commissioned portraits now. Pieces for mantelpieces– girl with bow smiling, boy and girl with dog by a rosebush. There’s a market for these, a nostalgic niche market of rich people with too many mantles and too few images of themselves. A way for me to paint and pay the bills. Fractal art, the same on every level.
We always had it all figured out, the two of us, until we had Laurie.
The day passes mostly like the last but for Jen’s crying. A leaky faucet, a constant stream. It starts after breakfast, seemingly at random, and she stems the flow with paper towels. I want to sit and rub her back softly with the flat of my hand, something reassuring, but she can’t be touched. I persuade her to move to the couch where at least she can be comfortable. Laurie is in there sitting cross-legged in front of cartoons.
“I had a bad dream about a person with two eyes,” Laurie says as we walk into the room. She is sitting a foot or two in front of the entertainment unit, and her blond ringlets are whirled into a rat’s nest.
“That’s a normal number of eyes, baby,” Jen says. The tears are still running, individual tears that roll smoothly and drip off her chin. “The medicine,” she reminds me, “the prescription slip’s on the counter.” The sky is dimming outside and the television is lighting the room. The air conditioner is still running smoothly–– the house is an ice box. I find the prescription in the kitchen and open the refrigerator, looking for nothing in particular.
I turn and I watch my girls through the kitchen doorway. The frozen peas are lying forgotten on the couch cushions bathed in the fridge light, long yellow shadows, and the moving blue from the television screen. Jen is staring straight ahead, towards the kitchen, but not at me. Her jaw is working like it does when she’s staring at a spreadsheet.
Laurie is moving her hand in front of the television screen, twirling her fingers like she’s clearing out cobwebs. Twisting her wrists in this deliberate way, careful and smooth. The static, I realize. She’s sweeping her fingers against the static of the T.V., entranced.
I go back into the living room. Jen shakes her head, rubs her eyes, stands and looks at me. She looks lost. I drop the prescription on the couch and pull her towards me, the embrace a whisper, barely touching. I close my eyes and try to picture my wife in Laurie’s mermaid stance, the electricity bursting through her, but I can’t. I try for what feels like the thousandth time to imagine what it would have been like to lose her, what it will be like one day, but my mind blanks.
Laurie is sitting with her back to the T.V., now. She’s cradling one of her hands in the other like a doll. She stares up at us. I can feel the heat of Jen’s skin through her t-shirt. Her tears are soaking through my shirt to my shoulder. I just can’t imagine what it would have been like to lose her, what it will be like.
But Laurie can.