The Jupiter Guru

I was jogging in the park at 1:21 on a clear January afternoon when a rare, positively charged lightning bolt reached out from a cloud, crossed five miles of cerulean sky, dodged thirty some-odd obstacles on its way, avoided the dozen or so nearby elms and struck me. The odds of being struck by a normal bolt of lightning—much less a bolt from the blue—are 1:700,000. Probabilistically speaking, I’d had a better chance of spontaneously bursting into flame.

Everyone tells me how lucky I was, but here’s the thing about luck: it’s as often a curse as a blessing. Take the Jupiter Guru. Struck by lightning six times, and never once won the lottery. And sure, he could kill spiders with arc-bolts fired from his finger tips, but his heart was an arhythmic wreck and he lived in fear of self-ignited electrical bursts. The rivets in a pair of jeans were enough to ruin his day. 

Who we are often comes down to a limited set of discrete events, each one shifting the paradigm of our being, with the sum total effect greater than the individual parts. Events so massive and seismic and all-encompassing that they define and transform all others. They become the lens through which we view and are viewed. At fourteen I fell madly in love with a boy who betrayed and broke my heart, poisoning thereafter all future relationships. At twenty my mother died. She was a beautiful person, my best friend, and left a void that cannot be filled with sex or work or any manner of denial or escapism. At thirty-one, the lightning took what sense of peace remained, and left nothing but the nauseating and desperate non-hope that somehow it could all be reversed.

Two thousand people are struck by lightning every year. Many are permanently injured in some way: burn scars, hearing and vision loss, and diminished use of limbs are all typical. Most feel pain the rest of their lives. Ten percent of those struck die then and there. They may be the truly lucky.

                               * * *

Regarding the issue of “luck,” the Jupiter Guru stands alone. He once said, “Lucky’s just a word we use to describe people or events that fall at the ends of a bell curve. A measure of how often we find ourselves at those extremes. Calling it good or bad depends upon our perspective. To the impartial observer, surviving a cataclysmic static electrical blast is lucky. But for the victim, surviving said blast only to face a lifetime of pain and infirmity, not so much.”

Myth has it a scant few are gifted in return. They say Barnum had a man who'd been struck three times and could withstand huge amounts of electricity. Twice a day he was placed into a makeshift electric chair and sat unharmed as current passed through his body. Witnesses claim he glowed a faint blue. During the Depression, another victim made a living as a diviner, sensing storms days before they arrived. And as recently as '07 there were stories of individuals whose latent talents—talents like intuition, heightened empathy, precognition—emerged after a strike.

The Jupiter Guru was first struck at thirteen on a soccer field after a championship game. His team had won, in large part thanks to his efforts in goal. "I was pacing in front of the net,” he told me, “reliving each save. And I remember thinking I had never felt so good. Then a bomb went off. And even though I know that's not the truth, I say it. Because that's the headache I had everyday for years after. A concussive blast following me through space and time."

Chronic headaches are a common complaint among strike survivors. The average bolt of lightning carries thirty kiloamperes of current and transfers fifteen coulombs of charge and five hundred megajoules of energy—enough power to light a hundred watt bulb for over five hours delivered in less than a second. Try to imagine how that kind of juice can fuck up the nerves in your head. I’m surprised more don’t try for the easy way out.

Not that that was my intention. I just wanted to get back to normal. For two hundred and fifty days since the strike, I’d endured seismical headaches which waxed more painful with the hours and were bearable thanks only to increasingly powerful doses of acetaminophen and codeine. I’d already survived one calamitous blast. If another could set things to rights, I figured, why not?

                               * * *

It was Ellis’ idea, of course. Or rather, he was the idea’s inspiration. Ellis Driscoll had been struck by lightning twice when I met him, and made no secret of the fact that he had every intention of getting struck again. We met at a meeting of the Lightning Strike Survivors’ Network.  His psychiatrist had ordered regular and mandatory LSSN attendance as a condition of his release from the hospital. Ellis hated it. 

At my first meeting, a man asked why. Why it had to happen to him. Why it had to happen at all. What it was supposed to mean. I said, "There are sixteen million lightning storms world wide every year. Lightning occurs somewhere on this planet forty to fifty times a second. There are more than seven billion people, spread out over every continent. Eventually, someone's going to get struck. There is no why. It doesn't mean anything. It's just dumb luck." Several Survivors began to cry.

The group was a poor imitation of AA. A collection of sombre victims—half bewailing their luck, half thanking their gods, all of them wounded and scarred—who came together to commiserate and cry and connect. We’d sit in a circle with bitter coffee and stale baked goods and recite our litanies of sorrow, the details alone changing from week to week, victim to victim. As if it made the least bit of difference.  

One night, one of the Survivors was telling her story again. She was mousy and gray, such a tiny target. Since the trauma—we were always encouraged to call it that—she'd suffered insomnia and joint pain. "It's the pain that's the problem," she said, "that's why I can't sleep." And the others nodded sympathy and understanding, and encouraged, she continued. "God doesn't give you trials you can't face, and I can beat this!" Then the polite applause, and she sputtered and laughed and hugged everyone nearby, until Ellis began to laugh too. And when the group leader asked what was so funny, he said, "Everything, man. The stories, the tears, the hugs. It's all so hysterical, man. I mean, none of you get it, do you? You're like little kids on Christmas asking why they deserve all these presents or something. This is the best thing that could have ever happened to us, man. We will never find anything like that again. That power, that rush. The realization upon waking: I am still here. We'll never take that for granted again, man." And he stood and walked out of the gymnasium.

For Ellis, the lightning represented not only the greatest thrill that the natural world had to offer, more adrenaline-flooding and enervating than base jumping or cave diving or car racing—all of which he’s tried—but also, and most importantly, his ticket to supernatural abilities. 

The first idea he came by on his own. Upon regaining consciousness after his first strike, he realized he’d never felt more alive. “It was like I was in touch with everything, man,” he told me. “The air, the grass, the ants in their hill, the blood running through me, everything. A real rush, man. The. Real. Rush.” The second idea he got from the Jupiter Guru.

The Guru’s fifth strike was called "The Unlikely," and it was the one that nearly broke him. The one that shut off the light in the tunnel. Forced at last to recognize "normal" existence as no longer possible, he retreated to his hermitage on the beach and withdrew from any kind of social life. In theory, it shouldn't have happened. A 1:6,000,000 chance. He was safe. Indoors, for Christ's sake. The lightning piggybacked in on a land line while he was talking on the phone, and the shock blew out his right ear. It's deaf to this day. The odds of a being dealt a royal flush are 1:650,000. The odds of dying in a plane crash are 1:2,067,000. The odds of winning a state lottery are 1:3,500,000. I think that, for Ellis, the long odds were what invested the experience with such significance. 

You can’t put the blame on the Jupiter Guru, though. Ellis came to his conclusions all on his own. The way he saw it, the Guru proved the decades-old comic book hypothesis that one possible by-product of cataclysmic trauma was the granting of superpowers. The Jupiter Guru was his hero, his guiding light, the living embodiment of the metaphysical potential of the human being.  

When I confessed that I didn’t know who he was, Ellis launched into an enthusiastic encomium. “The Jupiter Guru is the man, man; like, a frickin’ lightning master, man. The Guru is, like, the closest thing to an old Greek god walking around these days, man. I can’t believe you don’t know who he is. You have to meet him. You’re going to fucking flip out, man.” So he took me to see this modern day deity.

                               * * *

The Jupiter Guru was struck three times before he was thirty. His second came at the age of twenty-three. This time it was at a park, a family reunion. It began to rain after the fried chicken was exhausted and the kids had picked up the dropped game of kickball. The ringer for the kids' team, the Guru could hardly beg off and join the others rushing inside. It happened halfway between third base and home. After this, one would have thought he'd learned to avoid sports played in open fields, but it seems it’s always the third time’s the charm. Called "the Cliché," it happened on a golf course, hole number 6, five iron raised overhead. A flash, and then two weeks of his life lost to coma. When he woke up, everything had changed.

The Jupiter Guru lived in a cave at the north end of Table Rock Lake. It was set into a cliff face a hundred feet from the beach and hidden by a cluster of trees and brush. From the entrance, a thin corridor twisted around and back on itself for a few dozen paces then opened into a chamber furnished with wicker on tatami. A two seater, a rocker, a pair of end tables, some bookshelves, a coat rack. All wood. The only other adornments were the pantheon of tiny sculpted gods seemingly collected from among all the world's religions occupying every available niche on shelf or cave wall, and the multitude of unsocketed, naked light bulbs scattered among them, each radiating a few candlepowers drawn from some unseen source. Their orange, glim-like glow suffused the space and leant a cathedral's mood, quietly ascetic and meditative.

The first thing the Guru did, before introducing himself even, was attend to my discomfort. No stranger to neuralgia, he laid me down on his cot and administered a range of remedies devised all his own through trial, error, and long experience. The compress he applied to my forehead was a mix of herbs and aromas that dulled the intensity of the ache, and encouraged by that small but welcome success, I also accepted the jay he rolled and passed around, something I’d not tried since college, while he cradled my head in his lap and rubbed my temples, a gentle ebb and flow of energy passing between us.

We by-passed the usual inanities requisite for new acquaintances and spoke instead of firmamental explosions and their residual effects. I had never really talked about it before. Not at the LSSN. Not to family or friends. "At the moment of the strike," I told them, "I felt time suspended. I remember bare branches frozen in the act of blowing and a leaf hovering just above me. I could feel the individual cells of my body vibrate with the shock of it, desperate to be torn to pieces just so it would stop. It felt like it would last till judgment. And after that, it's just a black blank, a Nothing, until the hospital. Since then it's been thought-obliterating migraines and recurring night terrors every day. Each one a reminder. Being honest? I'm surprised I've lasted this long." Toward dawn, we went out to the beach to build a driftwood fire down by the water, and he put his arm around my shoulders until the sun broke over the treeline.

The lightning had left behind a dream. A nightmare, in truth. Not every night, but often enough that I came to know it well and anticipate its intrusion. I’m standing on a beach just before sunset with a thick, black cluster of pregnant thunderheads slowly growling towards me across the water. Lightning stabs the water at maybe three strikes per minute. The air is thick with the smell of ozone, and gusts whip around me, rippling my clothes. The nimbus is a two-fold monster—a gross pelagic leviathan lurking in the water and an empyrean colossus filling the western sky; two hemispheres of a malevolent black cerebrum connected by rapid, synaptic electrical flashes. Two men are there. One runs along the edge of the surf, hooting and pumping his fists into the air at each electric flash. One sits on the sand, silent, watching the black clouds’ slow approach. He speaks, still facing away, but his words are lost to the overlapping rumbles of the storm. He turns to face me just as the clouds reach us. Bright light floods my head, the dream ends, and I wake up shaking and covered in sweat.

                               * * *

I would visit and find him reading, or sketching the landscape of the lake and woods, or meditating cross-legged out on the sand. He spent at least two hours a day in zazen. "For balance," he said. The Jupiter Guru was very concerned with balance.

Sometimes we went for walks and stopped for ice cream. I'd offer to go into the shop alone and buy his sundae, but every time he refused. The shop was dim inside, and the blue arcs he thew off were clearly visible as he brushed by chairs, counter tops, patrons, wincing at each. When I asked him why he did it, he said the pain purchased the pleasure.

"Balance is everything," he said. "The whole of our existence depends upon the maintenance of a precarious balance of forces. Electrical positive and negative, magnetic north and south. Matter and energy, particles and waves, yin and yang, life and death. Without balance? Chaos and violence and meaningless suffering. Or else, all experience flattening out in a dull and boring gray. We need the struggle. This interplay of agonistic forces spices the world. It's a paradox, I know, but not the only one in the world." And he smiled.

The fourth time he was struck, The Jupiter Guru treated it as a non-event. "It had happened so often before, it seemed. I was thirty-one,” he said, “and it had only been two years since the last time. I picked myself up off the ground, slapped at the burning bits on my clothes, and continued my walk down the boulevard. What else was there to do?"

It wasn't so simple, though. Alack and alas. Every strike increased the dormant static charge in his body and, thusly, his sensitivity and reactivity to the world around him. After the third, things were uncomfortable. A handful more shocks than the usual person's. Annoying, but tolerable. After the fourth, the same could not be said. Electrical outlets became a real hazard, and the power company refused to remove the wires from his apartment. Shocks leapt off of park benches, sign posts, traffic signs and signals, passersby, manhole covers, the very ground at times.  

We went to his cave every weekend at least. It wasn’t just the Guru’s skill with pain relief. The absence of ambient city racket, the cleaner air, even his simple, calming presence all helped to ease and soothe my head. A temporary comfort, sure, but a godsend nonetheless. He would perform his ritual therapies, and I’d read him the news from papers and magazines. Afterwards, we’d smoke some grass and talk, or sometimes simply sit out on the beach and quietly watch the lake.

Ellis was only ever interested in talking about lightning. The last thing, of course, that the Jupiter Guru wanted. Over eight months, Ellis expounded upon a variety of foci concerning the topic: strike probability calculations, mortality rates, weather patterning, electrotelepathy, -kinesis, and -sensitivity. His favorite topic was the Guru's condition and its implications. "So much of the world runs on electricity, man. And it’s all got to come from somewhere, right? Oil and natural gas and dams and fission and all that dirty shit. Solar's okay, but even that needs a machine to convert it, store it, transmit it. This would be like, the ultimate in clean energy, man." By way of rebuttal, the Jupiter Guru picked up Ellis’ phone and blew out its circuitry. Ellis always neglected to include the harsher realities in his calculations. 

He forgot, for instance, that the Jupiter Guru was deaf in his right ear. That his left arm, his chest, and his neck were a twist of burn scars. That his heart had picked up a stutter exacerbated by even the mildest of physical exertions. And every now and then he'd go as far as to suggest the solution to all the Guru’s sufferings was to get struck one last time. Lucky Seven, he called it. 

Once it was once too often, and the Jupiter Guru yelled at him. "Luck's a meaningless fucking word, Ellis! And it’s got nothing to do with this! It's a numbers game. Unfixed. Ceaselessly variable. And the universe is fucking hardwired to ensure it stays balanced in the long run! You talk like this is a game or some stupid fucking comic book. Like this is something you could control. But it's a wild animal, a goddamn madman with a gun. You don't have any idea what it's like!" The bulbs lining the walls throbbed with his pulse. A dozen burst like popcorn, and the air began to stink of ozone. For a moment, the only sound was the Guru's heaving breath. "Fortune doesn't favor suitors, Ellis. Even if you find what you’re looking for, it won't turn out like you want." He turned and left the cave, taking the light with him.

                               * * *

I screwed up, in the end. Seduced, maybe, by Ellis' surety, I forgot the reality. Or maybe I just ignored it. But how could I help but be intrigued? How help but to entertain any possibility of relief? Of a return to normalcy. A way to change things. But grand as our vast aesthetic illusions are, they're ultimately pointless. The secret to Mona Lisa's smile won't unlock the laws of nature. The world—well, the world's an equation: math the only reality. We tell ourselves stories to give our efforts meaning, but statistics are the final truth. Over the course of a year, the odds of a lightning strike rise to 1:3,000 and no fable or myth can assuage the repercussions of that fact. Life, it turns out, is as terribly and efficiently scripted as B-movie horror. The parts are cast, the crew's been hired, but no one's orchestrating the mob and the special effects guy keeps throwing blood and explosions into the mix. The Jupiter Guru knew it, but it was something I couldn't accept.

Acting, I decided, was better than not. Inertia requires force to overcome. Add into the system the gnawing molars of time and anyone not actively attempting to thwart their own personal slide into chaos is marching right towards the grave. It wasn't enough.

"I want to balance the equation," I told the Guru. 

"Admirable," he said. "Did you have a particular one in mind, or will any equation do?"

"Bear with me a second. These headaches, they started when I was hit. By a positively charged bolt, right? But most lightning is negative, which means there's a better chance of being hit, so maybe all I have to do to get back to normal is get hit by another bolt. It sounds crazy, I know. Like Ellis. But I'm not looking for superpowers here."

He stared for a moment, then sighed. "Ninety-five percent of strikes are negatively charged which, hypothetically, might balance out a positive. But—" he said, forestalling the affirmative he knew I was about to shout, "but it's also much weaker. A bolt from the blue's ten times as powerful, so a single strike isn't likely to reverse anything."

"That's why it needs to be more than one." And I told him about my dream.

"You can't be serious."

"Think about it: a series of lightning strikes delivering a massive amount of negative electrical energy all at once, negating the massive amount of positive electrical energy that got my head all fucked up in the first place. I survived that much power before, why not again? Strike mortality’s only, what, ten percent?”

“For a single strike, not for a damned cluster. You’re not thinking rationally.”

“Nothing about trauma is rational.”

He shook his head and said, “Even if it would work, and even if you could survive something like that, which I doubt, you still can’t plan for it. Storms like that exist, sure, but they’re rare, and you’ve got no way of predicting when one’ll blow up.”

I knew what he said was true, but I didn’t want to accept it. I told him we didn’t need to know. We just needed to chase. Eventually, we were bound to catch lucky. Like he always said, no matter how long the odds, the number comes up. And when he sighed again and shook his head, I said, "I have to try. I have to do something."

The Jupiter Guru met my gaze and held it. “When the Oracle prophesied that King Laius of Thebes would have a son who would grow to murder his father and marry his mother," he said, "the king pinned the boy’s feet together so he couldn’t crawl then ordered a servant to take the boy into the wilderness and abandon him to be eaten by beasts. But the servant couldn’t bring himself to follow the king’s orders and left the boy for a Corinthian shepherd, who raised the babe to a man. One day Oedipus went to see the Oracle and discover his fortune, and when he learned that he was destined to murder his father and marry his mother, he was horrified and immediately set off, intent to never see the shepherd and his wife again. On the road, Oedipus encountered King Laius, got in a fight with him over who had the right of way, and when the old man attacked him, Oedipus killed him in self defense. Oedipus continued on his way, defeated the Sphinx on the road to Thebes, made a triumphant entrance into the city, and was rewarded the throne and the hand in marriage of Queen Jocasta, his mother.”

“Your point being?”

"Trying to change our fate usually ends up sealing it,” he said.

                               * * *

My first mistake: I began to chase storms, searching for that rare cell that produced enough atmospheric friction to set the land and sky alight with a forest of electricity. On the increasingly rare occasions I found myself back on the beach, the Jupiter Guru was terse and formal, tending to my head then quickly retreating inside himself. Ellis peppered me with questions about my conspicuous absences. I think he suspected what I was about, but his goals were not mine. He’d have been a distraction at best.

The Guru, of course, wanted nothing to do with it. He’d found acceptance after his sixth and most recent strike. The Kübler-Ross endgame. When I asked him about it, he said, “What does it finally matter where or when or how? The fact of the event itself is enough. The details, just window dressing. It came in its own time, as will any more in the future. Nothing to be done but wait.” But that was something I couldn’t do.

How much time we waste in pointless endeavors. We could fill entire lifetimes. For two months I chased every thunderstorm in five states even remotely large enough to create the conditions I believed necessary. Each storm was functionally identical to the others, so that the weeks blurred together into a single meta-storm of thunder and rain and cranial agony.

The last one, though—the one that sent me back to the beach—it was different. It was August and the season for storms was over, but a few cells still lingered on the plains, reproducing weaker versions of themselves as entropy wore them down. I’d driven four hours south, through Oklahoma and into Texas, and arrived too late. The storm was still active but had moved away from the road and civilization into a wide field where my tiny Civic couldn’t follow. I parked along the side of the highway and sat on the hood to watch. At first it looked no different from the others, exactly what I’d come to expect: dark clouds, bolts stabbing down, the thick curtain of rain clearly visible against the broad expanse of flat horizon. Slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, it began to transform. The wind picked up, and far away as I was I could still feel the force of its torque and shear. The clouds began to rotate, and a wide cylinder began to take shape and grow towards the ground. The thunder and lightning died away, casting the world into eerie silence. And then, as if scenting prey, the supercell shifted towards a farm. The barns and silos and farmhouse were like toys, far away as they were, and the storm treated them like a toddler would. The structures were obliterated in a spray of wood like bomb shrapnel. It tumbled tractors and combines and trucks across the land like weeds. Tiny specks of objects indiscernible at such a distance, though my mind couldn’t help but imagine livestock, were hurled in every conceivable direction. And when the storm moved on, there was nothing left but rubble.

And just like that, I was done.

                               * * *

My second mistake was to forget. I forgot that it is a cosmic law that we only find what we’re looking for when we stop searching. I also forgot the rules of the cave. I knew you couldn’t take metal into the Jupiter Guru’s cave—for obvious reasons—but when I returned, excited to see him after so long an absence, I walked in without stopping to divest myself of watch, phone, jewelry, belt. I ran right up to the Guru and hugged him. He must have realized my mistake because his eyes grew wide in the instant before I embraced him and he put out his arm and said, “Wait,” but too late. 

Lightning is basically an enormous static shock, the same kind of buildup you get from rubbing socked feet on carpet but on a massive scale. My hug closed the circuit the Jupiter Guru’s body was always trying to create and gave the accumulated electrons somewhere to go. There was a magnificent pop sound accompanying a cluster of blue flashes around us. It was comparatively nothing for me—like briefly brushing against an exposed wire, a short barrage of pinpricks at my hands, waist, leg, and ear—but much worse for him. He collapsed onto the ground, screaming this piercing, wounded animal scream. His light bulbs waxed rapidly incandescent, growing brighter and hotter until they exploded in rapid firecracker bursts, leaving us in utter blackness with his shriek echoing down the depths of the cave.

The day after the accident, we sat on the beach with our feet in the water watching the clouds move across the face of the sun. He asked, “Do you think everything happens for a reason?” The touch of fatalism in the question surprised me. “After every strike someone would say to me, ‘Everything happens for a reason.’ Do you think it might be true?” I told him no, and he nodded, and quietly said, “I don’t either.”

He said, “I used to tell myself that, even though the lightning itself may not have agency or purpose or meaning, being empty of those things meant I could fill it with whatever I wanted, whatever I could make into sense. It’s not true though. I think it’d be better if it were divinely intended; at least then there’d be someone to blame.”  

I could only agree with him.

                               * * *

In the end, like so many things, we stumbled upon the storm by accident. Ellis and I were on our way to the cave, but when we arrived at the lake, on the far side from the Jupiter Guru’s home, we found him sitting in lotus on the sand watching a great black thunderhead roll in, still a mile or so away but moving swiftly. Heedless of our presence, he sat and watched the lightning, both within the obsidian mass, illuminating the folds and crags of its body, and shooting down at the land.

People semi-versed in the physics of storms will tell you that lightning, in fact, does not come from clouds but instead shoots from the ground up into the cloud. This is half true. The visible channel, the streak, travels sky-ward with such speed that it’s indistinguishable to the human eye which way the electricity was traveling. But before that, the channel it follows is carved out by ions shed from the clouds and stealthily falling, falling towards the ground, branching out, and then blazing with energy in one holocaustal handful of microseconds when a feeler finally touches down and sends billions upon billions of electrons surging along preordained paths.

Ellis ran towards the water and began to cheer on the storm, and in a flash of déjà vu I realized when we were. I looked at the Jupiter Guru and saw it reflected in his eyes. “We need to go,” I said, but he shook his head. I kneeled beside him and said, “Are you sure about this?” 

He gave a sad smile, brushed his hand against my cheek, nodded and said, “But this isn’t the way.”  

                               * * *

After it was over, after the storm had passed, emergency crews arrived and took the bodies away and then took me to the hospital, too, even though I was fine, I told them, I was fine, and I made the identifications. They asked me why we were out there, and I told them, “I made a mistake.”

They say that lightning never strikes twice in the same place, but they’re wrong.  What we perceive as a single, pulsing bolt is actually a staccato series of four or five striking along the same channel mere microseconds apart, like morse code for “die.”

It started with a flash, a single streak connecting the cloud and the water, and then, rushing towards the beach, a forest of electricity shot out of the black mass overhead, bolts cascading one after another like a champagne supernova, surrounding us, strobe-like and blinding with the roar of gods in our ears, as bolt after bolt lanced down at the sand, the water, Ellis, the Jupiter Guru, but inconceivably, as if it were somehow repelled, never me.

Trauma shatters. It takes the foundational structures of our lives and breaks them into unrecognizably tiny pieces. Body, mind, spirit. And they can't ever be put back together again, not really. The glue shows through the cracks in the eggshell. When trauma victims say they're fine, what they really mean is they'll never be fine again. Not the way they were before. What they really mean is they're broken beyond any repair you can offer, but what's the point in that kind of honesty?

Image by Holiday Feartree, Twitter/Instagram: @holidayfeartree