Jason’s patients, for the most part, were people with cancer. His practice, for the most part, consisted of watching them die. “Doctors tend to think we control destiny,” he said. “We don’t.” But as much as he wanted to remember that simple fact, he couldn’t stop trying. He was a “hospitalist,” which meant that he kept tabs on every field. “Medicine evolves,” he said, and it was his job to keep track of its adaptations, to communicate one specialist’s innovations to another. “I am flamboyantly smart,” he said, knowing he sounded arrogant, smiling because he was arrogant enough not to care. “I am built to memorize things with no apparent pattern, and to discover the pattern.”
He was small man, trim and compact. After chasing storms for fifteen hours and sleeping for four, he’d be up at seven, his jeans crisp and his plaid shirt tucked in and unwrinkled. He smiled and frowned like anyone else, but his dark brown eyes were always earnest and intent. As a religion, the Judaism of his youth dissatisfied him; neither chaotic like a storm nor black-and-white like an X ray. Its 613 commandments seemed to him like so many quick fixes. “Religion” struck him as a means for imposing patterns, not revealing them.
Jason had a black belt in tae kwon do, and he’d begun studying a fighting system devised by the Israeli military called krav maga, Hebrew for “explosive force.” In college, he’d been a stand-up comedian. His routines worked, he said, because he knew how long to let the crowd laugh. As a doctor, he had an eerie sense of prognostication. He seemed to be able to just look at a patient and read the number of days. Valuable information; his colleagues called him Dr. Death, and meant it as a compliment. Everything Jason had ever done had taught him the same paradoxical lesson: Timing is everything; you can’t control anything.
When he was in medical school, Jason would keep an eye on the TV weather and hop into his car to go speeding out onto the plains east of Denver whenever he heard about a tornado, which was like trying to catch a thief in the act after reading about the robbery in the paper. So he studied: weather maps and meteorology books, the coolness of raindrops, the different sounds made by wind, the underbellies of clouds. One night, he convinced his fiancée, Irma, to drive out into the aftermath of a storm with him. He suspected it was growing instead of dying, turning into a supercell, which is a weather system so vast—“a tower of water as tall as Everest”—that it seems to defy physics, to break any rule people could imagine. Jason guided his car into its heart, “core-punching.” Out onto I-70, which had been turned into a black ribbon by the rain, driving from the time he saw the late news—on which he’d watched footage of the tornadoes he’d missed and the crowds that had gathered around their touchdowns—on into midnight and past. And that’s when he saw it. Or rather, heard it. Humming, in the dark; roaring, beneath the drum of rain. Lightning flashed. “And there it was, lit up by four strikes, in front and behind,” Jason recalled. “My own private tornado.”
A bell alarm squawked in the minivan, a quick series of beeps followed by a long, high tone, rising from the dashboard. “Thunderstorm warning,” Jason said, and turned up the weather radio: The National. Weather Service in Hastings. Has issued a. Severe thunderstorm. Warning. Until seven-thirtyP.M.
We pulled over at an intersection and got out of the car to have a better look at the conditions. Ahead of us clouds had built to a tower, spreading out at the top like an anvil. On one side of the road, wheat lay down as if dead. On the other, a field of tall green grass rippled like a brushfire in wind so strong we had to shout. An oil well bobbed in the distance. The earlier, homogenous white sky was now a menacing palette of hues: To the south it was yellow; to the north, dark gray; it was brown on the horizon; and a nearby hill was silver-green. From the west, a still-bright sun hanging low in the sky made the dark cloud tower glow. We were nearing the “magic hour”: 6:00 P.M., when, after absorbing eleven hours of sunlight, the ground gives off the most heat of the day. The heat ascends into the cooler, “virgin air” above, spinning as it rises, creating fuel for storms. If we were going to see anything that day, it would be soon. But would we know it if we saw it?
“Okay, Stormchasing 101.” Back in the van, Jason picked up a pen and a notebook and started into a routine that was somewhere between a meteorology lecture and a high-speed game of Pictionary. He drew lines, circles, crosshatches, and arrows, pointing in every direction at once, at each other, off the page. He scribbled vocabulary and definitions in the margins: dew point, convection, dry line, convergence. Sketches and letters becoming indistinguishable, indecipherable, as they piled on the page. The most commanding picture looked like an elephant with wings about to blow the earth away. Another could have been Moby Dick with a harpoon pricking his hide. The whale-cloud on the page looked as mad as the cloud-tower above us, both ready to swallow us down.
“A lot of words people use about storms imply maliciousness,” Jason said, defensively. “But that’s not how storms are. They’re no more malicious than a jaguar chasing an antelope. Really, they’re no different from us. They’re made of the same stuff. The molecules that make us started by being born within the stars. We’re nothing more than recycled entrails of dead stars. A water molecule that’s making up one of my brain cells could have been a water molecule in a stream during the Jurassic period, and before that it traveled through space to end up mysteriously right here in front of our boring little sun. That’s cool shit. The fact that it all came together and formed what we call life, that’s even cooler shit.
“Storms are very much like what I think God would be: plodding along. Existing on all the various parameters that exist around it. How could a storm be malicious? Good and bad are human-assigned values. They don’t exist. In that way, storms are very much like religion. They’re not here for good or bad. They just exist. No altar is going to make the storm less or more powerful. No amount of prayer is going to make the storm more real. No amount of energy on my behalf is going to make a storm form one place over another. And whether or not I’m paying attention to the weather, it’s going to take place despite of me. That’s one of the things that makes weather magnificent. You can try and predict it all you want. If you have all the math down and it still doesn’t end up the way you thought it was going to end up, that’s neat. That’s what people dig. People dig a good mystery.
“A lot of my patients, those whom I help guide to death, they ask me about my spirituality. If they ask me to pray with them, I’ll pray in any religion they have. But I think the world is as the storms are. It is. There’s not even an agenda. There’s just a tremendous amount of force.”
Some doctors, he knew, thought of his prayers as placebos; other, more devout colleagues wished that he wouldn’t sully the devotion of true believers with his atheistic imitations. As far as Jason was concerned, both types of physicians would benefit from more time studying the clouds. “What my patients are asking me to do is give them spiritual strength,” he said. “I don’t see that as dishonest. I can’t predict what’s meaningful for them. A patient’s spiritual life is one area where I don’t sense patterns.” He paused. The minivan shook in the wind. “Storms give me the same solace. Sometimes I just get lost.”
We weren’t sure if that was good or bad, if the storm was the cure or the symptom, but Jason put the notebook down and shifted the van into gear. “We’re done with the lesson,” he said, pulling back onto the road, heading on a straight line for the storm clouds we’d been chasing all day. “Now you’ll see things.”
And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out…
GOSPEL OF MATTHEW 18:9
Gospel
BY RANDALL KENAN
SHE kept peeking through the blinds to see if they were still there, as if the situation could have changed in a mere five minutes. Every time she would see the vans with their gigantic white mushroom antennas sprouting up toward Heaven. CNN. NBC. MSNBC. FOX. BBC. CBS. BET. Piney View Lane had been clogged and coagulated with people and cars. The Orange Grove police had erected barricades and had taped off
her yard with that yellow police tape Velmajean remembered from television police shows. But seeing the brethren—some full-time security, some volunteers from the church—made Velmajean breathe more easily. The sight of them reminded her that the Reverend was in charge. And he was going to make sure everything would be all right. Any minute now he would be arriving for the press conference at which they would announce Velmajean’s next miracle.
On one of her compulsive peeking trips she was happy to see the Reverend’s sleek black SUV pull up, a miracle in and of itself the way the crowd parted before it like the Red Sea for the children of Israel. It was one of those bright autumn days in North Carolina when the leaves swirl about like roan pixies. At first the sea of reporters engulfed the arriving dignitary, but thanks to the brethren a path was made, the tape was lifted, and an entourage from the church made its way to the house. Before he could knock, Velmajean opened the door.
“Oh, Reverend, I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you.”
The Reverend Jamie “Spike” Horowitz took off his shades, paused in his patented way, and opened his arms to the sixty-two-year-old widow. He flashed his cover-boy smile, which always made Velmajean more than a little giddy and wrong-feeling inside. It was the sort of smile that could cause her to write bad checks. “Sister Velma, how’s our little miracle worker?”
As they embraced, and the Reverend whispered calming, dulcet-tone words into her ear, in filed five men: two lawyers and three equally suit-clad bodyguards. The Reverend himself was in his usual jeans and signature form-fitting sweater. He was easily the largest man in the room; his muscles visibly undulated underneath each time he moved. “Sister, the Lord’s got big—big—things in store for you. Hallelujah!” He slapped his hands together with a loud slap, as if he were about to close some great deal. “Hallelujah!” That was one of the Reverend’s favorite words. He used it the way gang members used the F word. He looked into her eyes, expectant perhaps for confirmation or outburst or questions or doubt. But Velmajean simply smiled. She wanted to get this ordeal over with. General Hospital was coming on in ninety minutes.
The Reverend Spike ordered everyone to get down on their knees. The men encircled Velmajean Swearington Hoyt, placing their hands on her shoulders and back; the minister laid his hand on her forehead.
He said: “Father God. Please bless this endeavor into which we—your children—are about to embark…”
“Praise God,” said one of the bodyguards.
“…and please guide my tongue…”
“Guide him, Lord.”
“…for the further glorification of your Kingdom. We ask a special prayer for your chosen vessel, our sweet sister Velma here, Lord. Hallelujah. That her heart remain pure…”
“Pure.”
“…and that you continue to use her as your sign upon this earth.”
“Amen.”
With that the men helped Velmajean to her feet.
“Do I look all right, Reverend? I mean, will this look okay on TV?” She wore a sky blue dress of conservative cut from the collection of one of her favorite designers that she’d bought at Hecht’s department store a year ago. One of the women from the church had come by and touched up her silver coiffure.
Again the Reverend Spike looked at her as if she were the kumquat of his eye, the center of his universe. “You look positively radiant, sister.”
With that, led by the Reverend, followed immediately by Velmajean, and then the five men, the group marched down the path from the split-level brick-and-beige house, built in 1976 and paid for in full by the death of Velmajean’s husband, Parker Hoyt, in 1996, down to the horde and the lights in the middle of that Thursday afternoon, to the microphones feeding up to satellites informing televisions and radios and computers around the globe; where the Reverend Spike Horowitz, the former Internet millionaire turned Christian entrepreneur, announced that on the coming Sunday at a special service to be held at the newly completed Atomic Church of God and Worship Center (“congregation 20,000”), Mrs. Velmajean Swearington Hoyt, of Orange Grove Township, would be doing the Lord’s work “by performing her thirteenth recorded miracle live on an international broadcast sure to reach two billion people, to convince them of the Almighty’s presence in the world and in their lives.”
Just as the Reverend had instructed, Velmajean stood and smiled for no more than two and a half minutes for the flickering barrage of lights, never uttering a word, whereupon two of the bodyguards escorted her back into her well-guarded four-bedroom home while the Reverend and his lawyers fielded questions for another twenty-seven minutes.
Velmajean considered watching the show on TV but reckoned it would be on—in an edited version—in heavy rotation well into the night.
As she took off her dress, looking forward to relaxing, to trying to put all this hoopla out of her thinking, she realized with a start that she had recognized a face in the crowd. That strange, beautiful man she had seen that day in the parking lot, the day she brought the little girl back from “the other side.”
That day had been a Thursday too, and she had gotten to the supermarket early. She was feeling particularly proud of herself, for with the judicious and meticulous use of coupons she had purchased $201.29 worth of food for $79.82 ($25.25 would be in rebates).
As she labored to put the groceries into her six-year-old Oldsmobile—once upon a time bag boys offered to help, but those days were long gone—a young man walked up. “Please,” he said. “Allow me.”
“Thank you, young fellow.” She was pleased and flattered. He was black—an African, blue-black—and basketball-player tall. He was smartly dressed in a black suit, over which he wore a long black coat that almost touched the ground—odd on a pretty spring day. And he wore shades. His head was clean as an eight ball and just as dark. For some reason he reminded her of the Secret Service agents who surround the president, and for that reason, or so she told herself, she felt safe around him.
When he was done he closed the trunk. The grocery cart was gone.
“Where—”
“You are blessed among women, Velmajean Swearington.”
At first, so perplexed by the disappearance of the cart, she had not registered what he had said. She looked at her African chieftain in his expensive suit. “Yes, young man, I know. Have we met?”
“No,” he said. “I mean you are truly blessed.”
With that he reached out and took her hand. The feeling was warm at first, then noticeably hot, her hand tingled, her face flushed. She could not move, only stare at the stranger. To this day she could not swear on exactly what it was she felt, only that it felt better than sex, sweeter than love, stronger than the will to live. Or maybe it was just the spring air and his warm hand and smiling face.
Just as quickly the man let go and stepped back. He spoke only a few words after that, before he walked off into the highway to melt into the traffic as if he were some human sports car.
He said: “His wonders to behold.”
Looking back on it, Velmajean marveled at how easily she had brushed the entire incident aside. Laughed it off. Thought nothing of it. Straightaway. “Good Lord,” she had told herself, “there are some crazy folk walking around here.” As for the touch: He sure was warm-blooded.
Perhaps, again in hindsight, she might have thought on it more had not, no more than twenty minutes later, she turned onto Kensington Road: a beige Suburban SUV rolled over. An ancient Dodge Dart on its side, the wheels still spinning. A man, distraught, standing, pacing. A man and a woman on their knees. Lying prostrate and motionless before them a child, bloody and twisted.
Velmajean rushed from her car and toward the people as if by instinct. “Oh no. Oh no.”
Both the woman and the man were crying and clutching each other, a portrait of kneeling sorrow; pitiful, tear-soaked visages, bodies quivering with sobs.
The standing, hippie-looking man, his long hair flaring out in all directions, was possessed by a wild look of despair. “I di
dn’t see your turn signal, man. I didn’t—Oh, God. I didn’t—”
Velmajean had been ordered to take rudimentary first aid and emergency skills classes as part of her job as office manager at Deco Furniture long before she retired. She asked if an ambulance had been called. If the girl had been moved. No one answered her.
She knew to check for vital signs: the eyes, the breath, the pulse. At first things seemed dire. There was a lot of blood. She could not see where the blood was coming from. But as she touched the girl, by and by the little one began to stir. First her leg, and then a piercing cough. With flutters the girl’s eyes opened, and she lifted her head, at first tentatively, and then with the full strength of youth. “Daddy?” She began to cry.
“Oh, my God!” The woman grabbed the girl up into her arms. The man literally yelled.
“She must have just been knocked out. But don’t move her,” Velmajean said.
“No,” the man finally said, as he too rushed to his daughter. “She was dead. She was dead.”
“You must have been mistaken. See. She’s right as rain.”
Down on her knees next to the father, both smothering their daughter in hugs and sobs, the mother finally raised her head and said, “You don’t understand. My husband’s a dermatologist. She was dead.”
Still and all Velmajean drove off that day convinced that things were never as bad as they looked.
Velmajean Swearington Hoyt had belonged to the St. Thomas Baptist Church of Orange Grove Township all her life. In her youth the church, just outside Durham, had been thriving, the center of a small crossroads community not even listed on most maps. The minister, the Reverend T. T. Bryant, had been a theology professor at Wake Forest Seminary and had as much charisma and warmth as he had theological knowledge and wisdom. Folk always said his sermons were like an angel’s home cooking. Velmajean had been baptized in that church, she had been married in that church, and both her parents, and finally her husband, had been funeralized in that church.
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