Nine Kinds of Naked (9 page)

 

30
P
RIOR TO THE
invention of the lightning rod, church towers were struck by lightning with embarrassing frequency. As bell towers were frequently the tallest structures in the skyline, this should not be surprising to modern minds. To eighteenth-century churchgoers, however, who took Jesus at his word when he remarked, “I beheld Lucifer as lightning fall from heaven,” it implied that God the omnipotent was unable to protect his own houses of worship from Lucifer's lightning. Such majestic impotence fueled rumors that the church was in fact worshipping a false god, a demiurge whose half-assed contrivances were supremely susceptible to the prankish electricity of the true God's divine lightning.

As it turns out, popular opinion so embraced this Gnostic heresy that lightning strikes are today deemed “acts of God” in the legal sense. Tornadoes, too, are generally considered acts of God by insurers, necessitating the purchase of additional tornado insurance policies if one hopes to be financially protected from the wrath of God. Few outside of Kansas fret over tornadoes when purchasing insurance, and this was certainly the case in Normal, Illinois. Even State Mutual Insurance, one of the largest insurers in the nation and Dave's employer, did not have tornado insurance. Unfortunately, most of the campus of their national headquarters was leveled by the tornado. This irony was neither amusing nor inspiring to the board of directors, but State Mutual was ultimately rescued from insolvency by a disaster relief windfall from the federal government, and Dave's job, as always, was secure.

Aside from that, property damage was scattershot. While
few neighborhoods were left entirely untouched, the reasoning that determined whose house was destroyed and whose house was overlooked would remain forever hidden. Many residents emerged from their unspoiled homes only to find a gaping foundation and chimney next door or across the street where a neighbor's house used to be. In one instance, a homeowner was gladdened to discover that her meticulously landscaped yard was largely undamaged and, if anything, invigorated by the storm, the only disturbance being a plastic ficus tree that had been removed from the waiting room of a nearby dentist's office and slam-planted into the middle of her garden, flaunting its gaudy lifelessness.

In addition to the Dalmatian in the sycamore—whom no one ever claimed but who eventually found a home with the fire department as Toto, the town mascot—there was one additional oddity worthy of mention. The day after the tornado, it was discovered that every number nine key on every keyboard in the mayor's administrative offices was missing. As it turned out, this last detail was not due to the tornado, but to an April Fool's Day prank pulled by one of the mayor's staffers the Friday prior. He was promptly dismissed.

As far as casualties, there were hundreds of injuries, some of them severe, but by the time the dust had settled there were only three deaths, and only one of them confirmed. Aside from Billy Pronto, whose body was never found, Judge “Maximum Max” Maxwell was the first to perish. He had tornado insurance, as well as an external tornado shelter, and he was reportedly safe inside of it when he was suddenly seized with the absurd realization that he had neglected to lock the back
door to his house. Against the protests of his wife, he pushed her out of his way and ran outside.

His body was found two days later in a cornfield outside of town, still clutching the doorknob to his house.

 

30
T
O LIVE IS TO
test our luck against an undefeated hunter. We squirt into life at an unspecified time and place, and the bloodhounds are immediately set loose, gradually honing in on our scent. We catch a scratch here, we take a blow there, till eventually we're worn down and we fall, and the game is over.

Or, we remember why we're here and we become artful dodgers, ducking and lucking our way through their blood-lusting teeth with deliberate unpredictability. Bridget Snapdragon held to the second strategy and considered it a theory of poise as well: avoiding structure, abandoning habit, living for the day, and placing perfect faith in the Hidden Variable. Of course, the Hidden Variable—the subquantum event that spawns the fractal infinity of our universe—delights in perpetrating nonlocal nonsense, and so those who live on the edge sometimes find the edge sooner than they may have hoped.

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
Y
AWNS 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
A
S 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.