Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (11 page)

Where did Storm Doe come from and how did she get into City Hall? The evidence from the battery of security cameras that constantly swept City Hall showed a woman in a purple balaclava strolling through every checkpoint late at night, carrying the bassinet, without attracting a single flicker of attention, as if she had the power to make herself invisible, if not to the cameras, then at least to people in her immediate vicinity; but also, obviously, to the duty officers whose responsibility it was to monitor the security screens. The woman simply walked into the mayor’s office, deposited the baby, and departed. Our ancestors speculated a good deal about this female. Did she somehow catch the system napping or did she possess some sort of invisibility cloak? And if the cloak, would she not also have been invisible to the cameras? Normally down-to-earth people began to have serious dinner-table conversations about superpowers. But why would a woman with superpowers abandon her baby? And if she was the child’s mother, might Storm Doe possess some sort of magic qualities as well? Might she … because it was important not to shy away from unpleasant possibilities in the time of the war on terror … might she be dangerous? When an article appeared under the headline
Is Storm Baby a Human Time Bomb?
our ancestors realized that many of them had abandoned the laws of realism long ago and felt at home in the more glamorous dimensions of the fantastic. And as things turned out little Storm was indeed a visitor from the country of improbability. But at first everyone was more concerned with finding her a home.

Rosa Fast came from a prosperous Ukrainian-Jewish family based in Brighton Beach, and dressed smartly in Ralph Lauren power suits, “because his people were our neighbors,” she liked to say, “but not in Sheepshead Bay,” meaning that Ralph Lifshitz from the Bronx had ancestors in Belarus, adjacent to “her” Ukraine. Fast’s star rose as Mayor Flora Hill’s fell, and there was no love lost between her and the outgoing mayor. Mayor Hill’s term had been beset by allegations of financial improprieties, of money rerouted into secret slush funds, and two of her closest colleagues had been indicted, but the dirt had stopped short of the mayor’s office, though some of the stench had penetrated it. Rosa Fast’s successful election campaign, which hinged on her promise to clean up City Hall, had not endeared her to her predecessor, while Flora Hill’s suggestion, made after she left office, that her successor was a “closet atheist” had irritated Rosa Fast, who had, in fact, fallen far away from the faith of her ancestors, but felt that what she did in the closet of godlessness was her own business and nobody else’s. Divorced, presently unattached, fifty-three years old and childless, Fast confessed herself deeply touched by the plight of Baby Storm and made it her business to see the little girl safely into a new life, if possible out of the reach of the tabloid press. Storm was fast-tracked for adoption and successfully transferred to her new parents to make a new, anonymous beginning under a new name, or that was the idea, but within weeks the new parents approached reality-TV producers and pitched a show to be called
Storm Watch
which would follow the star baby as she grew. When Rosa Fast heard the news she exploded with rage and shouted at the adoption services that they had delivered an innocent child into the hands of exhibitionist pornographers who would probably take a dump on television if somebody sponsored them to do it.

“Get her away from those bravoes,” she cried, using the slang term for reality wannabes that had become common usage even though the television network from which the term originated had ceased broadcasting, because programming of mendacious artifice that presented itself as actuality had invaded so much of the cablesphere that the original purveyor of such programming had become redundant. Everyone had learned that it was worth giving up privacy for the merest possibility of fame, and the idea that only a private self was truly autonomous and free had been lost in the static of the airwaves. So Baby Storm was in danger of being bravoed and Mayor Fast was furious; but as it happened the very next day the wannabe reality-star adoptive father brought the baby back to the adoption services, saying, Take her back, she’s diseased, and literally ran out of the room, but not before everyone had seen the sore on his face, the putrescent, decaying area that looked as if a part of his cheek had died and begun to rot. Baby Storm was taken back to hospital for checks but given a clean bill of health. The next day, however, one of the nurses who had held her began to rot as well, patches of malodorous decaying flesh sprang up on both forearms, and as she was rushed weeping hysterically into the emergency room she confessed that she had been stealing prescription meds and fencing them to a dealer in Bushwick to make a little extra money on the side.

It was Mayor Rosa Fast who first understood what was happening, who brought the strangeness into the arena of what could be properly spoken about, of
news
. “This miracle baby can identify corruption,” she told her closest aides, “and the corrupt, once she has fingered them, literally begin to show the signs of their moral decay on their bodies.” The aides warned her that kind of talk, belonging as it did to the archaic old-Europe world of dybbuks and golems, probably didn’t sit too well in the mouth of a modern politician, but Rosa Fast was undeterred. “We came into office to clean this place up,” she declared, “and chance has given us the human broom with which we can sweep it clean.” She was the kind of atheist who could believe in miracles without conceding their divine provenance, and the next day the foundling, now in the care of the foster care agency, came back to the mayor’s office for a visit.

Baby Storm reentered City Hall like a tiny human minesweeper or drug-sniffing Alsatian. The mayor enfolded her in a big Brooklyn-Ukrainian hug, and whispered, “Let’s go to work, baby of truth.” What followed instantly became the stuff of legend, as in room after room, department after department, marks of corruption and decay appeared on the faces of the corrupt and decaying, the expenses cheats, the receivers of backhand payments in return for civic contracts, the accepters of Rolex watches and private airplane flights and Hermès bags stuffed with banknotes, and all the secret beneficiaries of bureaucratic power. The crooked began to confess before the miracle baby came within range, or fled the building to be hunted down by the law.

Mayor Fast herself was unblemished, which proved something. Her predecessor was on TV deriding the mayor’s “occult mumbo jumbo” and Rosa Fast issued a brief statement inviting Flora Hill to “come on down and meet this little sweetheart,” which invitation Hill did not take up. The entry of Baby Storm into the council chamber induced a panic among the individuals seated therein, and a desperate rush for the exits. Those who remained proved immune to the baby’s powers and were revealed as honest men and women. “I guess we finally know,” said Mayor Fast, “who’s who around these parts.”

Our ancestors were fortunate in such an hour to have a leader like Rosa Fast. “Any community that cannot agree on a description of itself, of how things go in the community, of
what is the case,
is a community in trouble. It is plain that events of a new kind, events of a type we would have described until very recently as fantastic and improbable, have begun, provably and objectively, to occur. We need to know what this means, and to face the changes that may be taking place with courage and intelligence.” The 311 phone lines, she declared, would for the time being be available to people wishing to report unusual occurrences of any kind. “Let’s get the facts,” she said, “and move forward from there.” As for Baby Storm, the mayor herself adopted her. “Not only is she my pride and joy, she’s also my secret weapon,” she told us. “Don’t try any BS on me or my baby girl here will get medieval on your face.”

There was one disadvantage to being the adoptive mother of the baby of truth, she told her fellow citizens on breakfast television. “If I tell the smallest little white lie in her presence, well! My whole face begins, just dreadfully, to itch.”

Two hundred and one days after the great storm, the British composer Hugo Casterbridge published an article in
The New York Times
that announced the formation of a new intellectual group whose purpose was to understand the radical shifts in the world conditions and to devise strategies for combating them. This group, widely derided in the days following the article’s publication as a bunch of semi-eminent though undeniably telegenic biologists, mad-professor climatologists, magic-realist novelists, idiot movie actors and renegade theologians, was responsible—in spite of all the jeering—for popularizing the term
strangenesses,
which caught on quickly, and stuck. Casterbridge had long been a divisive cultural figure on account of his firebrand hostility to American foreign policy, his fondness for certain Latin American dictators, and his aggressive hostility to all forms of religious belief. There was also a never-proven rumor concerning the end of his first marriage, a rumor as persistent and damaging as the notorious gerbil rumor which attached itself to a Hollywood leading man of the 1980s. As a struggling young cellist—with, at the time, a serious dependency on dangerous narcotics—Casterbridge had met and quickly married a beautiful fellow musician, a violinist with star potential, who, soon afterwards, also caught the eye of a certain industrial tycoon, who began to pursue her without regard for her marital status, and, according to the rumor, confronted Casterbridge in his own small Kennington Oval apartment with the blunt question “What would it take to make you disappear from her life?” Whereupon Casterbridge, heavily under the influence of opium or something worse, replied, “One million pounds,” and passed out. When he awoke his wife was gone without leaving a note, and he found, when he checked, that one million pounds had been deposited in his bank account.

His wife refused to have anything to do with him after that, divorced him quickly and went on to marry the industrial tycoon. He never took drugs again and his career blossomed, though he never remarried. “He sold his wife as if she was a Stradivarius, and lived off the cash,” people said of him behind his back. Casterbridge was a capable boxer with a famously short fuse, so nobody repeated the slander to his face.

The strangenesses are multiplying,
he wrote in his article,
though the world before they began was already a strange place, so often it’s difficult to know if an event falls into the category of the old, ordinary strangenesses or the new, extraordinary variety. Superstorms have devastated Fiji and Malaysia, and as I write giant fires are spreading across Australia and California. Perhaps this extreme weather is just the new normal, giving rise to the usual arguments between the proponents and opponents of climate change. Or perhaps this is evidence of something much worse. Our group takes what I’ll call a Post-Atheist stance. Our position is that god is a creation of human beings, who only exists because of the clap-hands-if-you-believe-in-fairies principle. If enough people were sensible enough not to clap hands, then this Tinker Bell god would die. However, unfortunately, billions of human beings are still prepared to defend their belief in some sort of god-fairy, and, as a result, god exists. What’s worse is that he is now running amok.

On the day that Adam and Eve invented god,
the article continued,
they at once lost control of him. That is the beginning of the secret history of the world. Man and Woman invented god, who at once eluded their grasp and became more powerful than his creators, and also more malevolent. Like the supercomputer in the film
Terminator:
“Skynet,” sky-god, same thing. Adam and Eve were filled with fear, because it was plain that for the rest of time god would come after them to punish them for the crime of having created him. They came into being simultaneously in a garden, Eve and Adam, fully grown and naked and enjoying you could say the first Big Bang, and they had no idea how they got there until a snake led them to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and when they ate its fruit they both simultaneously came up with the idea of a creator-god, a good-and-evil decider, a gardener-god who made the garden, otherwise where did the garden come from, and then planted them in it like rootless plants.

And lo, there, immediately, was god, and he was furious, “How did you come up with the idea of me,” he demanded, “who asked you to do that?” and he threw them out of the garden, into, of all places, Iraq. “No good deed goes unpunished,” said Eve to Adam, and that ought to be the motto of the entire human race.

The name “Casterbridge” was an invention. The great composer came from an immigrant family of Iberian Jews, and was a strikingly handsome man with a grand, sonorous voice and the bearing of a king. He also shared the most unusual physical characteristic of his kin: he had no earlobes. He was not a man to be trifled with, though his loyalties were as fierce as his enmities, and he was capable of profound loyalty and friendship. His smile was a thing of menacing, almost feral sweetness, a smile that could bite your head off. His politeness was terrifying. His two most endearing qualities were his Rottweiler obstinacy and his rhinoceros-thick hide. Once he had an idea between his teeth, nothing would induce him to yield it up, and the ridicule with which the new Post-Atheism was received did not deter him in the slightest. He was asked on late-night American TV if he was actually saying that the Supreme Being was fictional, and that this fictional divinity had now decided, for undisclosed reasons, to torment the human race. “Exactly,” he said with great firmness. “That’s exactly right. The triumph of the destructive irrational manifests itself in the form of an irrationally destructive god.” The talk-show host whistled between the famous gap in his central upper incisors. “Whew,” he said. “And here I was thinking the Brits were better educated than us.”

“Suppose,” said Hugo Casterbridge, “that one day god sent a storm, such a storm as could shake loose the moorings of the world, a storm which told us to take nothing for granted, not our power, not our civilization, not our laws, because if nature could rewrite its laws, break its bounds, change its nature, then our constructs, so puny in comparison, stood no chance. And this is the great test we face—our world, its ideas, its culture, its knowledge and laws, is under attack by the illusion we collectively created, the supernatural monster we ourselves unleashed. Plagues will be sent, like those sent to Egypt. But this time, there will be no request to
let my people go.
This god is not a liberator but a destroyer. He has no commandments. He’s over all that. He’s sick of us, the way he was in Noah’s time. He wants to make an example. He wants to do us in.”