And so it was that realists and romantics alike were disheartened to hear of the death of Bridget Snapdragon. As the story goes, she died as the hail-fog rainbows faded, but the story is well traveled, and she actually died a few minutes prior. No sooner had an ample crowd of her fellow unclothed parishioners gathered to assist and well-wish than it became apparent that the accelerated birth had greatly traumatized her body. Despite Bridget’s giggling, she was hemorrhaging uncontrollably and a grayness much deeper than the hail fog could be seen creeping over her. As Dave cradled her in his arms, Bridget had the vaguest inkling that she was dying, though she could not fathom what that implied. Against her feeble protests, the babe was removed from her breast, and all whispers fell silent, all eyes turned respectfully away, as the oblivious Dave Wildhack, his backside pincushioned with toothpicks, wept heavily for his wife. Bridget Snapdragon sighed and she coughed, then gestured her husband to draw near, moments before a lingering finger of tornadic updraft reached down and softly plucked her from her position, popping her umbilicus like a dandelion’s stem and lapping her forever away into the heavens, but not before she, with nary a hint of jest, had breathed into Dave’s ear an inexplicable vulgarism that would haunt him for decades.
“Cherry shit.”
32 YAWNS ARE FAMOUSLY contagious, spreading over the telephone, across species, between mother and fetus, and at the slightest suggestion. Indeed, there are those who caution against any discussion of yawns even in print, fearing it may inspire a reader to put the story down and placidly nod off to sleep.
This may be true, and so all siestas are hereby forgiven, but it is a risk that cannot be avoided in telling this tale, for in New Orleans, twenty-five years after the tornado, a cool breeze blew down the center of Bourbon Street and left a silent cheer of yawns in its wake. But these were yawns of neither fatigue nor boredom. This rush of yawns was of the awakening variety, the type of gigantic yawns known to seize skydivers before they jump out of airplanes, or that singers are known to experience just before stepping onstage, or that athletes are overcome with prior to competition. These were the yawns that would flout all convention, yawns so insistent upon the fullest expression of their potential enormity that even the most refined mademoiselle would find them impossible to suppress. These were the yawns of an expanding consciousness, the sort of yawns that feel like a spirit stretching into its own skin, expanding to its material perimeter. These were the yawns of an awakened rebellion.
Be that as it may, only one person on Bourbon Street—a street vendor hawking seashell pipes—noticed the passing of this breeze and the overwhelming yawn it elicited in himself. But even he had forgotten his vague observation within seconds, though not before the memory of a long-ago tornado glanced through his mind. Nobody, however, not even the street vendor, noticed the Day-Glo orange Frisbee that whizzed thirty feet over the heads of everyone, surfing the front of the breeze.
However heedless was humanity, the world was suddenly more crisp than before this breeze’s passing. Sharper, keener, and eager, twangs rang longer, sparkles glistened brighter, and breath deepened. But despite this elating of their world, people only yawned gigantically, shook their heads, and returned to their rat-a-tat-tat reveries of what happened and what to do.
But every wind has its way, and this wind would not be gone. Resuscitated long ago out of the stale air of a veteran’s jail cell, fanned into life from the spin of a tossed playing card, this was the very same breeze that had danced its doozy over Normal, Illinois, twenty-five years before. By all rights, it should have long ago dissipated back into the atmosphere whence it emerged, but this was a lawless wind, brazen and brash. After all the ruckus in Normal, it needed to catch its breath is all, and so it drifted around planet Earth for two decades, here blowing an umbrella inside out, there slamming a door shut, tangling hair and knocking hats off everywhere, and always soothing the sad with the goose bumps of its passing.
Eventually, however, tired of dodging the agenda of every little puff and fart that came wafting along, our breeze found a home for itself in the deserts of Arabia as a dust devil, a miniature whirlwind visible only when it tapped at the sand. There, it twirled the days away in the Rub’ al-Khali, the Empty Quarter, the world’s largest expanse of uninterrupted sand. The Rub’ al-Khali provided a marvelous canvas upon which to frolic, as our breeze spent its days carving intricate patterns in the desert floor. It especially enjoyed following the rare visitors, staying invisible, close enough to lap their shirts and tunics off, as was its way. But nature nurtures novelty, and so its latest amusement was to scare the life into them by spinning across the paths on which they were driving, sandblasting their vehicles and erasing all tracks. Life was truly a breeze.
And there wasn’t much to it, really. Its only substance was as an air current, a wave of energy undulating through the fabric of the atmosphere. The air itself, the dust, the sand, the debris, these are all just evidence of a breeze’s passing, and not to be confused with the breeze itself any more than blood, sweat, and tears are to be confused with the human spirit. The wind, all wind, is its own force, and by law of physics every breeze is eventually rendered motionless by the friction of the material world. But this breeze was different. This breeze was defeating the laws that long ago should have torn it asunder.
This breeze was dancing.
33 AS YOU MAY have heard, at 8:16 A.M. on August 6, 1945, a Boeing B-29 bomber named the Enola Gay shat a fifteen-kiloton atomic bomb named “Little Boy” on the civilian population of Hiroshima, Japan. Sixty-six thousand humans evaporated immediately, sixty-nine thousand were burned horribly, and later, there were tornadoes.
Eight years later, on June 4, 1953, a sixty-one-kiloton atomic device was detonated over the deserts of Nevada. The finale of Operation Upshot/Knothole, it was dubbed the CLIMAX event, the largest aboveground atomic bomb test to have ever been conducted. A few days later, on June 7, 8, and 9, three consecutive days of unusually deadly tornadoes killed more than five hundred people in the United States. Many blamed these tornadoes on the CLIMAX event, and their suspicions were not without reason. Strong surface fires, as in forest fires or atomic bomb explosions, are known to cause an intense convection of atmosphere, like air being drawn up a fireplace. Only in a nuclear firestorm this is hell’s own fireplace. Such massive convection can trigger tornadoes.
So, when in the course of human events it was deemed necessary to ignore the lowest common denominator of sense and resume the rattling of nuclear weapons, there came a day in the breezy life of our Arabian dust devil when the sun rose twice. The first sunrise was beautiful—patient, silent, and still—blushing faraway dunes in shades of sunrise too embarrassing to behold. The second daybreak, a thermonuclear detonation, was too immediate to remember anything that came before. Our dust devil simply became the daybreak, a ten-million-degree inferno, a transcendental thunder bearing the echoes of every shattered illusion, and eastward it raced.
Under irresistible imperative, the gale that was our breeze barreled across desert, jungle, swamp, and sea. Skimming the Tropic of Cancer across the Pacific, it sent rogue wave assaults against every western beach in the Hawaiian Islands. Making continental landfall in northern California, it startled every redwood it passed with the suddenness of its gust, and it could linger not even to tip the hat of an early morning trout fisherman. Somersaulting across the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, a pack of rowdy dust devils couldn’t help but get carried away with its runaway enthusiasm, and once it hit the Rocky Mountains, it left snow emergencies in its wake for days.
At one point, as it rustled through a broad expanse of trees in western Colorado, a group of college students who’d rented a cabin in the mountains and stayed up all night tripping on acid paused in their morning game of Frisbee and looked west of their clearing. They listened with widening eyes as the forest trembled toward them in ferocity and fury, and when the wind engulfed them they couldn’t help but cheer. Once it had passed, all were left yawning w
ith gladness and exhilaration, whooping even as they watched their Day-Glo orange Frisbee sail over the trees and forever away.
34 OUTSIDE OF NEW ORLEANS, it came to be called the Great White Spot. As far as anyone could ascertain, the Great White Spot was something similar to a hurricane, but it did not begin like most hurricanes, as just another South Atlantic tropical storm amped up on global warming. Rather, it simply appeared in the Gulf of Mexico two mornings after the thermonuclear explosion in the Rub’ al-Khali, though no one of any significance publicized this coincidence. Actually, with a diameter less than ten miles across, it seemed far too small to be a hurricane. Nonetheless, with wind speeds estimated above three hundred miles per hour—estimated only because three hundred miles per hour was the highest measurement the instruments could withstand without being destroyed—meteorologists immediately dubbed the phenomenon Hurricane James and loudly decreed that Hurricane James was the big one, a category 5 hurricane headed straight for the city of New Orleans.
With shallows sloping as low as ten feet below sea level and with the all-too-recent memory of its last hundred-year storm just a few years back, New Orleans had good reason to panic. Within hours, the National Guard—already rail-thin from the latest backdoor draft—scraped every last unactivated guardsman together to evacuate the entire city—forcibly, if necessary, for no politician was about to risk the political fallout from another Hurricane Katrina. Stock in insurance companies tanked immediately, pulling much of the market with them; gasoline prices spiked to new highs; and live coverage of panicked traffic jams across ten lanes of outbound traffic riveted the world’s attention for days. Major networks competed for the flashiest HURRICANE JAMES graphic while civil engineers boasted on about New Orleans’ brand-new, state-of-the-art levee system.
Meanwhile, experts from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration began pointing out with increasingly quaky voices that Hurricane James was no mere hurricane. Its sudden appearance and continued presence violated every known law of meteorological physics. Most fundamentally, Hurricane James was spinning clockwise. That was completely wrong. The Earth’s rotation was supposed to create a Coriolis effect by which cyclone winds are deflected into a counterclockwise rotation in the Northern Hemisphere, and vice versa in the Southern Hemisphere. This had been a comfortable constant, a neatly wrapped simplicity of knowledge now being flouted by this flaunty upstart. And since no meteorologist can concede defeat to their collective nemesis—namely, the naysaying notion that there’s no predicting the weather—in order to protect their venerable position as the oracles of partly cloudy, the only possible conclusion was that Hurricane James must not be a hurricane.
Fringe scientists began to suggest that it was perhaps properly described instead as a runaway tornadic singularity, F6 on the Fujita scale. Heretofore, an F6 tornado had only been a theoretical abstraction, nothing more than an etcetera category, inconceivable by definition, impossible to predict, and capable of immeasurable destruction. Others countered that it was actually a hypercane, a hypothetical class of phenomenally powerful hurricane that spirals beyond any of the usual forces that limit hurricane winds to less than two hundred miles an hour. But this, too, was unlikely, since even a hypercane ought to rotate counterclockwise, although others pointed out that perhaps it was precisely its clockwise rotation that was holding it in place against the rotation of the Earth. In any event, computer models predict hypercanes only over water that is at least 120 degrees, and even the 90-degree globally warmed Caribbean seawater was too cool to fuel this colossus. It would take a comet crashing into the ocean to create that kind of heat, and no one had noticed anything like that happen recently. One fringe wackjob did point out that a comet the size of a city crashed into the Yucatán sixty-five million years ago. The Great White Spot, so his argument went, was a reverberation of that tremendous event, a delayed response. No fucking way was most people’s immediate response to his theory.
From wherever it came and by whatever category it was contemplated, Hurricane James spawned a fresh litter of doomsday predictions to compete with those of the nuclear politicians and peak-oil prognosticators, and celebrities organized benefit concerts every which way. A thunderous “I told you so!” echoed from fundamentalist pulpits throughout the Bible Belt as the wild-eyed and rapturous wagged their fingers at the Sodom and Gomorrah of the Deep South, reading and rereading Jeremiah, chapter 25, verse 32: Behold, evil shall go forth from nation to nation, and a great whirlwind shall be raised up from the coasts of the Earth. Then they flipped back a couple pages and slapped their palms righteous upon Jeremiah, chapter 23, verse 19: See, the storm of the LORD will burst out in wrath, a whirlwind swirling down on the heads of the wicked! The modern world couldn’t help but shiver in its mass-mediated and scripture-thumping exhilaration, but in the end, all the hurrying and scurrying was for nothing.
It would have been obvious, really, if anyone had bothered to look anywhere other than their teevee screens. Throughout New Orleans, birds were chirping, squirrels were scampering, and life was basking in its subtropical delight. Only the humans spazzed out, stampeding off the delta like a herd of buffalo. For every other species, the only tragedy was the famine of litter scraps.
But gradually, as days turned into a week, and as a week turned into two, it began to dawn on the collective imagination that something truly unparalleled was here occurring. Hurricane James, or whatever it was, wasn’t moving. Its unblinking eye had taken up a stable position in the Gulf of Mexico a hundred miles off the delta coast, its epicenter never straying, there to stay for days, weeks, until at last the reincarnation of the child who first announced that the emperor was wearing no clothes finally called the situation for what it was: the Great White Spot.
The Great White Spot. Hurricane James was no hurricane, that much was certain. Hurricane James was a new, apparently enduring feature on the surface of planet Earth, a curiously clockwise vortex of atmosphere, pulsing slightly smaller with the winter, pulsing slightly larger with the summer, but never dissipating, never shifting its position, just spinning, whirling, and spawning awe around the world. Just as Jupiter had long flaunted its Great Red Spot (the only other known instance of a hypercane in the solar system), it now appeared that Earth had achieved a spot of its own. There was much wow and jubilation.
And even though its port—the third most important in the United States, where the breadbasket distributes its agricultural exports from the mighty Mississippi River system to all points beyond—was now impassable for commercial purposes, New Orleans was booming. With the Great White Spot hovering off the coast, half the evacuated population had decided to defy the warnings of an increasingly irrelevant government and return to their homes after six weeks, and they weren’t alone. Tens of thousands more had converged within months, and with the proximity of the Great White Spot selecting for an inherently incautious population, New Orleans became wilder than ever, a true city at the end of the world.
It should be noted, however, that no one who had been in New Orleans longer than an hour continued to refer to the hurricane as the Great White Spot. The Great White Spot only looked like the Great White Spot on the teevee screen, viewed via satellite. In New Orleans, there was nothing spotty about it. From the tops of the highest buildings in New Orleans, the Great White Spot was a distant column, silver and serene, and it could be seen shimmering off the horizon like Jacob’s ladder, bending the sky as the whole of heaven veered into its vortex. When viewed through telescopes on particularly clear days, the column appeared to sway, as if undulating a lazy hula hoop, and surpassing all wonder, that hula hoop occasionally became visible as a rainbow born of the tremendous fountain of sea spray. Of course, since this interfered with their hellfire incantations, biblical literalists ignored both Noah’s rainbow in Genesis 9 and the mighty angel’s rainbow halo in Revelation 10, preferring instead to bray their brimstone and interpret the rainbow as a flaming gay flag—further evidence that the wrath of the LORD was abou
t to swirl down on the heads of the New Orleans wicked.
In New Orleans, the Great White Spot came to be known solely as Laughing Jim. Nobody had the faintest idea exactly why they called it Laughing Jim (other than that maybe Jim was a diminutive of the James in Hurricane James, and that laughter came easily in the streets of New Orleans), but travelers and tourists nonetheless picked up on it immediately, gleefully referring to Laughing Jim as often as they could while visiting. Everyone discovered, however, that it held little resonance once they left. It was like trying to say “aloha” in Ohio. The word itself reflects the spirit of a place, and the spirit of aloha does not live in Ohio.
And the spirit of Laughing Jim did not reside anywhere outside of New Orleans. How could it? The rest of the world thought New Orleans was populated entirely by lunatics, laughing in the face of death. Who knew how long the Great White Spot, or what did they call it down there, Laughing Jim? Who knew how long Laughing Jim would remain stable? Didn’t they remember the horrors of Hurricane Katrina? It was an entirely reasonable suspicion, of course, but there were nevertheless many whose curiosity could not be deterred. Within the first year, tens of thousands had left their jobs and moved to New Orleans. Millions more had made the pilgrimage to see if there was much ado about something.
All were delighted to discover that there was.
35 THERE ARE POISON WINDS on this planet that are said to drain a body of its vitality faster than a toilet flushes in a tornado, imparting a sense of unreality and futility, a creeping meaninglessness, that terrible conceit of alienation where nothing really matters. But then there are other winds that seem to fill the lungs with the breath of heaven, that create a sensation of hyperreality, as if everything one does matters very much indeed.
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