‘Johnny,’ he said, and then faltered. ‘What’s what’s
Roger had been on his way over with drinks, and now he paused, puzzled. Johnny was looking over Chuck’s shoulder, at the distant thunderheads. His eyes were vague and hazy.
He said: ‘You want to stay away from that place. There are no lightning rods.’
‘Johnny …’ Chuck looked at his father, frightened. ‘It’s like he’s having some kind of … fit, or something.’
‘Lightning,’ Johnny proclaimed in a carrying voice. People turned their heads to look at him. He spread his hands. ‘Flash fire. The insulation in the walls. The doors … jammed.
Burning people smell like hot pork.’
‘What’s he talking about?’ Chuck’s girl cried, and conversation trickled to a halt. Now everyone was looking at Johnny, as they balanced plates of food and glasses.
Roger stepped over. ‘John! Johnny I What’s wrong? Wake up!’ He snapped his fingers in front of Johnny’s vague eyes. Thunder muttered in the west, the voice of giants over gin rummy. perhaps. ‘What’s wrong?’
Johnny’s voice was clear and moderately loud, carrying to each of the fifty-some people who were there – businessmen and their wives, professors and their wives, Durham’s upper middle class. ‘Keep your son home tonight or he’s going to burn to death with the rest of them. There is going to be a fire, a terrible fire. Keep him away from Cathy’s. It’s going to be struck by lightning and it will burn flat before the first fire engine can arrive.
The insulation will burn. They will find charred bodies six and seven deep in the exits and there will be no way to identify them except by their dental work. It… it…, Patty Strachan screamed then, her hand going to her mouth, her plastic glass tumbling to the lawn, the ice cubes spilling out onto the grass and gleaming there like diamonds of improbable size. She stood swaying for a moment and then she fainted. going down in a pastel billow of party dress, and her mother ran forward, crying at Johnny as she passed:
‘What’s wrong with you? What in God’s name is wrong with you?’
Chuck stared at Johnny. His face was paper-white.
Johnny’s eyes began to clear. He looked around at the staring knots of people. ‘I’m sorry,’
he muttered.
Patty’s mother was on her knees, holding her daughter’s head in her arms and patting her cheeks lightly. The girl began to stir and moan.
‘Johnny?’ Chuck whispered, and then, without waiting for an answer, went to his girl.
It was very still on the Chatsworth back lawn. Everyone was looking at him. They were looking at him because it had happened again. They were looking at him the way the nurses had. And the reporters. They were crows strung out on a telephone line. They were holding their drinks and their plates of potato salad and looking at him as if he were a bug, a freak. They were looking at him as if he had suddenly opened his pants and exposed himself to them.
He wanted to run, he wanted to hide. He wanted to puke.
‘Johnny,’ Roger said, putting an arm around him. ‘Come on in the house. You need to get off your feet for…
Thunder rumbled, far off.
‘What’s Cathy’s?’ Johnny said harshly, resisting the pressure of Roger’s arm over his shoulders. ‘It isn’t someone’s house, because there were exit signs. What is it? Where is it?’
‘Can’t you get him out of here?’ Patty’s mother nearly screamed. ‘He’s upsetting her all over again!’
‘Come on, Johnny.’
‘But…’
‘Come on.’
He allowed himself to be led away toward the guest house. The sound of their shoes on the gravel drive was very loud. There seemed to be no other sound. They got as far as the pool, and then the whispering began behind them.
‘Where’s Cathy’s?’ Johnny asked again.
‘How come you don’t know?’ Roger asked. ‘You seemed to know everything else. You scared poor Patty Strachan into a faint.’
‘I can’t see it. It’s in the dead zone. What is it?’
‘Let’s get you upstairs first.’
‘I’m not sick!’
‘Under strain, then,’ Roger said. He spoke softly and soothingly, the way people speak to the hopelessly mad. The sound of his voice made Johnny afraid. And the headache started to come. He willed it back savagely. They went up the stairs to the guest house.