On Electrocution

Nonfiction by Maddie Baxter

I can still feel the shock if I hear the sound.

That morning, I showered and put heat protectant in the ends of my hair, but I didn’t think to rub it on the palms of my hands. When I went to unlock the doors of my morning workplace, my knees sunk into the carpet and the fabric of my denim jeans did not burn. I plugged the lamp into the socket and it did not set on fire. No lampshades swiped into a molasses, heat brown, and I sang along to an Amy Winehouse song without any lighters nearby. There was no alcohol resting in the back of my throat, waiting, eagerly, to catch aflame.

The internet tells me that 411 people are electrocuted at work each year. Electrocuted.com is a website dedicated to lawyers who only work on protecting shock injury victims and families. They have an “About Me” section that features photographs and biographical profiles on the lawyers that call themselves “electrocution experts.” They even run a small blog. A window pops up asking me if I’d like to start a live chat with a representative. I begrudgingly say no. What would I ask them? What angle to raise my arm to reenact the shock? How long do burn marks take to appear? How likely is the acquisition of super powers?

As I click the red X button in the computer browser, someone beside me crumples a soda can like it was a receipt in their back pocket. The crunch is like ripping apart Velcro, and the sound begins to conduct a symphony in my nervous system. My skin peppers with sensation, a witch setting off spells under muscle. I feel like I do when ripping off a large callous. When the thick skin peels off easily, but once it inches closer to the thinner layers, around the toes or ankle, twinges of pain rise like heat. But you have to keep going. You have to rip it all off. You have to find out what’s underneath, the root of pain, the thermal core that radiates it through your body.

Let me back up and start from the start: Before I got electrocuted, I was watching A Clockwork Orange. I didn’t like it. I’m not writing this to start a debate, but now I only associate it with being electrocuted- which I suppose, in fairness, is relevant in the whole systematic-torture-Ludovico-technique theme, which we are all familiar with, I am incredibly sure. The film’s main character, Alex, is driving down a road, with a massive Beethoven score raging in the backseat. Like a bull behind the bars, my laptop (which is projecting the film) wails with a 3-toned DING DING DING, interrupting the scene to translate its need to be connected to a charger.

That’s when it happens,

Alex is saying, “I was cured all right,” I plug the charger into the wall socket. Then, in my hands, I suddenly gain the ability to wield fire, and a sphere of hot-blaze red orange light makes home in my palms. It only shows its face for a second, but leaves a trail in its wake, the heat of its birth nuzzling into the insides of my left and right wrist. The sound is like cotton balls stuffed into my ear drums and the wick of a lighter. It pops like Sunday morning frying pan grease. It’s nostalgic, and I see my Dad poking our living room fire. In some weird way, I want to press this memory into my pocket.

Alex is saying, “I was cured, all right!” into the camera screen. He is cured of madness and no longer wants to rape or kill. The government has peeled back his skin, layer by layer, and infused goodness into his eyes. Sizzling, in the movie’s final scene, we balance on an uncanny valley of old Alex and new Alex — those that change themselves and those that choose to be changed. Inside of Alex’s character there is a weaver’s wheel of morality, and we are trying to figure which strings are cut.

The pain of the shock is there, but I hold onto the battery of my power chord for a few seconds longer than I should. My left arm surges like an overflowing syringe. Somewhere in this, I fling the chord to the ground and laughter spills out of my mouth, frothy and unswallowable. For some reason, I can’t stop laughing. I am coughing up a generosity for life while feeling the spout of energy bubble and bubble in my veins over and over again.

My two friends across the couch from me stand wide eyed and open mouth, moths waiting to fly in and make their homes within teeth. Wary, yet with urgency, they ask me — “are you okay” — their fear interfused with deep curiosity. I cannot answer. There is no answer inside of me. All I feel is a resurgence, a pulse that is second to the one in my heart. There is still energy racing through me in this exact moment, and I fear if I open my mouth to answer them some of it will escape. I want to keep it all locked up, the joyous feeling of all this feeling, and see if it will kick start the generator resting in my brain.

There was fire shooting through my veins, that day. Asking around, my coworkers now, almost a year later, tell me they, too, enjoy getting electrocuted. They tack on the word “too” unsolicited, positive I enjoyed the experience. “I didn’t like it!” I jostle them in my dreams. “It was a key forced into the padlock of my body.” What would have happened if flames had traveled higher? What if the fireball had been twice as large? Last winter I had a dream of lining up hundreds of hundreds of computer chargers and plugging them all into the same socket at different angles, gathering forks of every skew and design, bobby pins from pin thin to lusciously thick, and poking them into the tiny outlet slits for a chance of a spark.

But then, in the embers, Stanley Kubrick is standing behind the screen and he’s trying to change my life. Someone is pressing a lighter to the skin of an orange and trying to find the circuitry underneath. I am running my index finger over the incinerated blue green wires and perfuming my wrists with smoke. Beethoven’s 9th symphony is playing in my right ear and I am feeling the vibrations in my left hand. Alex is saying “I was cured, all right,” and I am signing the forms for a demolition of the veins in my arm. The workmen are preparing to break ground and I have my microscope ready to watch all of the peeling.

I feel like, sometimes, there is a small city inside of me, and each day I am shown a new way of burning it all down.

Maddie Baxter is a 21 year old poet, copywriter, and student at Wake Forest University. She is a massive fan of public transportation, bathrooms, and airports.