by Liz Grzyb
Sharp nodded. “Oh, no doubt. But I was referring to the Army.”
“Oh.”
“We have a touch down,” Gorton said. “8.3 kilometres to the south-west.”
“How big?” Sharp asked.
“Can’t tell. The NWS has upgraded their advice to Tornado Warning.”
“It’s too far.”
“You can’t control it, can you?” Jocelyn asked. “It could appear anywhere, go anywhere. My God, you berate the military for being gung ho, but you’re just the same.”
Sharp looked at her but said nothing.
“It’s lifted off,” Gorton said, “and is dissipating rapidly.”
“Is that it?” Jocelyn asked. “Well, that was a bit of an anti-climax.”
Sharp suddenly turned around and faced into the slight breeze that had sprung up. Gorton grabbed his hat. Jocelyn felt her skirt flap around her. The sun disappeared behind the dark clouds that were now scudding from the west and the sudden coolness reminded Jocelyn that it was late autumn and not summer after all. Fat raindrops began to fall around them.
“There!”
Jocelyn looked and at first couldn’t see anything in the darkness of the lowering cloud and rain. But then she saw what looked like an inverted cone in the cloud base that Jocelyn realised was rotating. As she watched, the cone grew bigger, longer, and approached the ground, forming a huge funnel. The size of it stupefied her.
“Talk to me, Roger.”
“Distance of 3.1 kilometres from the Homeland Defence Guard property. Vorticity is peaking at . . . Jesus, Terry, you can see the damned thing better than the satellites can at the moment.”
“I know. I just like the sound of your voice. I find it calming.”
Gorton laughed and made to hit Sharp with his hat.
As they watched, the tornado touched the ground and seemed to grow even bigger. Jocelyn could see it picking up debris from the ground and dragging it in its vortex.
“That’s got to be close to an EF2, don’t you think?” Sharp asked.
“Close,” Gorton agreed. “Rotational velocity is between 150 and 180 kilometres an hour.
Somewhere Jocelyn thought she could hear a siren like an air-raid klaxon from an old war movie. Movement way off to the right caught her eye and she saw army vehicles beginning to evacuate out of the tornado’s path. They’ll never make it, she thought. But after a few moments, it was clear that the Army trained their personnel well, because by the time the tornado arrived, they were gone.
The tornado continued on, ripping up fences and farm buildings and flinging them high in the air where they swirled around like confetti caught in a gust. The sound was horrendous but for some reason, Jocelyn did not feel in danger. From their little hill they could see that the tornado was heading away from them toward the Homeland Defence Guard. If she weren’t watching it with her own eyes, she would never have believed it. Maybe Sharp was a butterfly whisperer?
“Is anyone evacuating from the stronghold?” Sharp asked.
“Not that I can see,” Jocelyn replied. “It’s just going to miss the main building.”
“I can see people fleeing,” Gorton said. “Driving off in cars.”
“The tornado wouldn’t, you know, set off the bomb?” Jocelyn asked.
“No,” Gorton answered.
As Jocelyn watched, the tornado veered and obscured the collection of buildings in dust. She waited with bated breath to see if the world ended in a bright flash, but eventually the tornado moved on, leaving in its wake a trail of destruction the likes of which she had never before seen. What had been perfectly good buildings hiding perfectly bad people, were now little more than matchsticks. Jocelyn let out a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding and suddenly felt a hundredweight of tension fall from her shoulders. He had done it. Sharp had diffused a potentially catastrophic situation by creating a storm to blow away the danger. She turned to congratulate him.
“Damn it,” Sharp spat and suddenly took off toward the tornado as though he was an Olympic hurdler.
“Where the hell is he going now?” Jocelyn asked.
Gorton shrugged but he looked concerned. He lifted a pair of tiny binoculars from nowhere. “Oh, crap,” he said a moment later.
“What? What is it?”
“The tornado has changed trajectory again and there’s a young woman with a child who has just taken refuge in a shed directly in its path.”
Jocelyn squinted, trying to see what was happening, but all those years studying at university had ruined her long sight forever. Gorton handed her the binoculars. She grabbed them eagerly and tried to find Sharp, catching him just as he entered the shed. Jocelyn zoomed out and saw that the tornado was less than 100 metres from the shed. “Come on, Terry. Come on.” The seconds ticked by and the tornado drew ever closer. Finally, Terry emerged, pushing the woman and carrying the young boy. They paused to glance at the tornado, shielding their eyes and mouths from the flying dirt, then turned and ran away from it. Jocelyn felt an overwhelming sense of relief, but it was short lived.
Unbelievably, the woman had stopped and was gesticulating wildly at the shed. Sharp put down the boy, pushed the woman again away from the tornado and then ran back to the shed.
“Oh, no,” Gorton said in despair as Sharp entered the shed again.
The tornado bore down on the shed and obliterated it. Pieces of tin and wood became part of the debris storm circling the vortex. Jocelyn stifled a cry of horror and through streaming tears scanned the sky, trying to find the body of Sharp being flung around like a rag-doll. But it was impossible to see anything through the dust and the dirt. She screamed Sharp’s name but it was lost on the wind.
Gorton took off toward the tornado and the remains of the shed.
“Roger, no!” Jocelyn grabbed him as he passed her and dragged him to a halt. “No, you’ll be killed too.”
Gorton was clearly torn between the need to help his boss and Jocelyn’s logic but in the end it was decided for him.
Almost as quickly as it came, the tornado suddenly dissipated, leaving nothing more than a gust blowing leaves.
Jocelyn felt numb. One moment Sharp was alive and annoying, and the next he was dead. She turned to Gorton and found herself crying into his shoulder.
The rest of the afternoon was a blur. A Sierra mobile command centre in the form of a hi-tech bus appeared and Jocelyn sat wrapped in a blanket in a cubicle in the rear trying to keep warm while it drove back to Chicago. But by the time the bus had reached Chicago’s outer suburbs, the words of her piece on Sharp were beginning to form in her head. The moment Gorton said goodbye to her at her apartment door, saying how tragic the whole affair had been and if she wanted to talk he would be available, she was diving for her notebook and drafting an article that she knew would be her best yet.
* * *
Passing of Hero Tycoon Marks Turning Point for Humanitarian Efforts
By Jocelyn Kuepper
Hartsburg, MO: The body of Terrance Sharp, CEO of the Sharp Industries Group of companies, including the humanitarian response organisation SRRA, was found this morning. The find brings to an end to an eight-day search following his disappearance in a tornado outside the fortified compound of the terrorist organisation the Missouri Homeland Defence Guard. The discovery of Sharp’s body in a potato field some eleven kilometres from the location he was last seen was a heartbreaking moment for the thousands of people who had held vigil for him across the country. Sharp, a noted philanthropist, was leading a private attempt to recover a stolen nuclear warhead when an out-of-season tornado effectively disarmed the terrorist group. In a cruel twist the tornado took his life while he attempted to save a mother and son caught out by the storm. Authorities claim that . . .
* * *
“Oh, I don’t know,” Gorton remarked, putting the newspaper down. “It makes you out to be some sort of hero.”
“And what’s wrong with that?” Sharp asked. “A man should have some sort of legacy for p
eople to remember him by when he’s gone.”
“Well, it’s worked. Kuepper avoided any mention of the weather modification systems as she’d promised and confirmed your demise to boot. The perfect eyewitness. I can’t believe it went exactly as you’d planned. I suppose congratulations on your successful death are in order.”
Sharp straightened his tie. “No sign that the NSA or CIA are suspicious?”
“No, nor any of the military. According to all reports, you are as good as dead. Again.”
“Excellent. How do I look?”
Gorton considered him. “Pretty good for a dead man, but exactly like a Thomas Sheldon should, I suppose. Although you need to work on the accent. Time to go.”
“Right-o then. Hey, I want you to offer Jocelyn a job at Sierra, Roger, as an apology for treating her so horridly in this whole affair.”
“Very good.”
* * ** * ** * *
Future Perfect
Matthew Chrulew
Streaks of white flight press up against my oiled eyes, magnified a tenfold and weighty with existence. Gustborn, northbound, near-homeless migrants. I toggle the binoculars and they loom even larger, imprint on my vision. Almost as if I could touch them, though of course, I can’t, and shouldn’t.
For two weeks we have been following their routes via landbound detours, tracking their travel from a primate’s-eye-view. The Latinate name and behavioural idiosyncrasies of this admittedly nondescript subspecies of goose are really only known to the scruffy unit of activist-scientists I’ve attached myself to. For years, like their colleagues for decades before them, they have set themselves to documenting these birds, their fragmented habitat, interrupted migrations and declining numbers from the shores of Siberia to Aegean isles to the Finnmark coast. Orange-beaked, grey-chested, white-tipped, somewhat clumsy and uncharismatic, they wheel behind curling cumulus and are lost to my sight.
Sprawled beside me, Gyorg grunts. “Get a count?” They are notoriously difficult to track and, untrained amateur though I am, the party seems glad of an extra pair of eyes.
“Five, I think.” He grunts again. I never know if I have offered useful confirmation.
The group pick themselves up from the muddy paddock and creakily return to the roadside. I delay a moment, scan the skies one last time, augmented at first with the binocs, then just with my black-framed prescription sunglasses. I have come to recognise them by fleeting wingtip or half-glimpsed underbelly. But there’s nothing more. The flock is gone, from here, maybe for the last time, and I guess I wonder, what does it matter now if we know where the last few are or they die on their own?
* * *
I drift in the back seat of Markus’s old Toyota ute as we take the highway north across these Scandinavian flats. Gyorg rolls a cigarette next to me but will wait until we stop to light up. This is not the least of their endearingly gruff concessions to my presence. In return I try to make myself as light a piece of unwanted baggage as possible. Unnoticeable in the ideal. Sometimes I forget that’s not quite what they want. Peter’s lined, yet childlike face turned back from the front passenger’s seat tells me I ought to be paying more attention. I shake myself awake.
“You’re going to have to repeat that, sorry.”
He is neither perturbed nor embarrassed. “I was asking about your work. Your exhibition, intervention, project, performance. Your provocation! Does it take shape yet? Any ideas? Are you inspired?” His lip twitches in anticipation of my response.
I don’t feel mocked, or even misunderstood. So far on our driving and camping he has been curious and perceptive, not territorial over radio stations but opinionated on whatever emerges, whether pop or classical, a reader of Ballard and Freud as evidenced by the dog-eared paperbacks he not-too-inconspicuously carries, and capable of finely-calibrated jibes that are both slightly flirty and blackly humourous. I squint a little.
“It’s hard to be too inspired by extinction,” I say.
He weighs my words and seems like he wants to rejoin, but just swallows, nods, and turns back to the incoming grey tunnel of road and sky.
* * *
My last project was a ritual of mourning for the elephant. I coordinated a number of simultaneous flash mobs, public performances and intimate ceremonies recreating its calls and ways and celebrating its life and death. A singalong in Selous National Park in Tanzania. A prayer circle in the Bronx Zoo. A contemplation session in the Met, standing before paintings by incarcerated Thai elephants, meditating on their disappearance, feeling the grief of their mahouts. I’d paid someone to manage the social media but ended up tripling her fee as we trended and viraled our way into feeds and eyeballs.
I myself had been at an ivory bonfire in Botswana, a terrible, ghoulish sight, throwing hurt shrieks onto the flames.
I still remember the first call from The New York Times: “Why are you mourning a creature that still exists?” I had mulled for weeks what to say when I got that inevitable query. Not, Not for long, or Look at this data.
I simply said, “The elephant will have been an amazing triumph of nature.”
Prior to that I had done a lot of mourning installations and interventions and, yes, provocations: the passenger pigeon’s Empty Skies; the robber frog’s Use Value; the cave spider’s Unknown Unknown; the deboosterist TED-talk Re-Extinct and the ecosystemic Being-Towards-Death. I led a processional of robed children down Wall Street, joined poetry readings on the Remembrance Day for Lost Species, spent a freezing night in Hobart Zoo as the thylacine in Endling Alone. I had washed and buried numerous specimens, performed last rites and sung and tolled. I had cried and keened, wailed and wept, made my body and soul a vehicle for Earth’s lamentations. My hair still hadn’t grown back in parts. I had crawled the disrupted migration route of the bison for 31 hours in a skin retrieved from the American Museum of Natural History before an encounter with a translocated wolf gave my exhaustion its relief. I had planned to fly similarly with storks but the hospital bills meant I had to sell my glider. It was on that bed, dehydrated and depressed, and resenting even the drip and its pathetic intrusions, that I felt the need to mourn not only what was gone, like the dodo, or even what was right on the cusp, like the northern white rhino, with that awful last male surrounded by armed guards in Kenya, but what was effectively guaranteed to pass away in my lifetime, despite any efforts at conservation or protection.
It could equally have been the giraffe or the orangutan or the Western Pacific grey whale or any number of less charismatic but no less worthy unloved others. But elephants remember and need to be remembered and help us to remember. Their despairing, commanding trumps demanded a pre-emptive memorial.
That was what fired up Twitter, what “captured attention”, what got reviewers thinkpiecing, what provoked a flurry of letters to editors and donations to causes and other, more despairing flourishes and flailings. It was the evocation of that future perfect disappearance that meant I was barely questioned when I proposed, to the grants board of the National Council for the Arts, to disappear into the Arctic along with these anonymous numbered geese.
* * *
“You know they’re fucking done for, right?” Peter corners me as we set up camp for the night. His neck blotches red and the hollows beneath his eyes are sunk and dark. I had thought his quizzing playful, thought I’d passed the test, but he’s clearly been chewing on something rough and raw these last fifty potholed miles.
“I know and I hate it.”
He spits. “There is basically no remotely possible outcome in which these birds recover from the destruction of their lifeways. No fucking chance to escape the homo sapiens homogenisation of the earth.” He strains as he pronounces the bitterly ironic home in both words. “And nothing we do is going to help. Our tracking, the latest uncanny Silicon Valley tech, all the data we might collect, isn’t going to help one iota. Making fucking art about it is certainly not going to do shit.”
Gyorg looks up from the tent peg he was hammering, and
intones “Peter . . . ” through his cigarette, but I wave him off. I had to learn how to cope with my own manias and depressions; the least I could do is not aggravate his.
“I know, art is—”
“What are we even doing here? Wasting resources charting the already functionally extinct? Even if fucking capital S itself came in here with its big kahunas full of gold and jizzed that funding all over the birds so they sparkled with glittery Scientific American spunk, all it would fucking mean is we get to watch their deaths in full visibility. Probably accelerate them while we’re at it.” He drops the filter he has been scrunching. “Maybe the cryptomaniacs are right, and our best hope is birds unknown, untagged, untracked, thriving outside our vision.”
“I know, Peter. It tears me up just like you.”
“Don’t worry, all our grief is useless too.” He laughs. “But look at us. We . . . we just can’t let go. We are basically palliative care workers. Avian psychopomps.”
There is nothing I can say, nothing I can do. I take the tobacco from his shaking, calloused hands to roll him a cigarette. “They don’t get a good death,” I say. “But they shouldn’t have to die alone.”
* * *
We intercept them again at the edge of the marshland between mountains and plains. The skies are clear and the obdurate cold of a spouse’s sharp glare. This is our last best chance to count who remains of the once large flock that takes this route north from the warmer south after winter to roost. Some have already passed overhead, are beating and gliding into the distance, a last trio comes not far behind. They are almost gone.
I gaze out over the receding birds, wavering at the cliff’s edge. I may have had to give up my hang glider with its arcane powers, but I read those manuals, took my lessons, practised those gut-pounding jumps and falls and arcs into soaring, for so long that I think I know flight, extreme body-artist that I am, think I could do it, go with them, sprout wings and leave my too-human self behind and drift off into the horizon.
