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no desire to walk across the Orlon campus, however deserted it might be, with my hair falling out, still in need of a cane to steady my limp. I pronounced it imp, and it felt that way. An imp in my nervous system, pinching at this and that. Reminding me of who I was and who I’d never be.
    I might have backed out at the last minute, unintentionally forgotten the time, the day, the location of the meeting, but Ned sent me a report he knew would intrigue me. It was a folder titled The Naked Man. How could I resist?
    The Naked Man had been a roofer — a dangerous occupation, I knew from reading my safety tips. He was working after hours on his mother-in-law’s house on the occasion of his strike. He was forty-four years old, six foot two, 240 pounds. He was balding and wore a beard. He’d had two beers at the time of the incident, but he certainly wasn’t drunk. He worked alone. He’d never won the lottery, never owned a dog, never made a promise he hadn’t kept. Until recently.
    That evening he was singing Johnny’s Cash’s “Ring of Fire.” Later, he realized this particular song was on his mind because he was having an affair with a woman who worked at the Smithfield Mall. Johnny Cash’s wife had written “Ring of Fire” when they fell in love and were married to other people. There was desire in that song, big-time. That was probably why the roofer was fixing his mother-in-law’s roof on such a dismal night. Guilt and desire, a bad combination. Storms were predicted, but he figured he had time. He figured a good deed might make up for his failings.
    He was mistaken.
    Halfway through his work, he heard a hissing sound, and he found himself thinking of hell and whether or not he might end up there, if such a place existed. His fingers started to tingle. And then he saw what he thought was the moon falling from the sky. But the moon had a tail, and that was surely a bad sign. It was ball lightning; it fell on the roof and rolled down toward him. It looked like a comet headed straight for him, a blue-black thing that was as solid and real as a truck or a boot or a living, breathing man. The roofer thought he might be face-to-face with the devil himself, that fallen angel. He thought about everything he hadn’t yet done in his life. All of a sudden owning a dog seemed like the most important thing in the world.
    The hissing got louder and the next thing the roofer knew, he was standing on the grass, completely naked except for his work boots. His clothes were a pile of ashes and his beard was gone. In the photographs in his file, the Naked Man is standing against a white screen; he looks like a baby, wide-eyed, just welcomed to the world. My brother knew I’d have to see him in person. I was a librarian, after all; I’d want to know how the story ended. Had he gotten his dog? Had he ended his affair? Had he found another line of work, one that wasn’t so close to the sky?
    I spied the Naked Man as soon as I entered the cafeteria. He seemed to have lost weight since he’d been struck. He used a cane, as I did. Surely the imp was in his system, definite neurological damage, but he was the silent type. He stared straight ahead, and I had the notion that he’d been coerced into coming, the way I’d been. Someone had insisted it would be good for him, cathartic, as if anything could be.
    Most people in the group were more than happy to talk about their effects — that’s what they called their symptoms. The Naked Man kept silent, but the others were studying themselves, as if each one was a singular chemical experiment gone awry. After what they’d been through, who could blame them really? They didn’t whine or complain; they were matter-of-fact. Most, like me, had headaches and nausea and disorientation. Some had effects that kept them from working, from sleeping, from thinking straight, from having sex. There were myths that lightning-strike victims became hypersexual, electrified, in a manner of speaking,