Authors: John Barnes
Mother of Storms (46 page)
They have forty-eight fairly dull hours, with the windows revealing nothing but immense torrents of water and day and night separated only by the difference between almost and completely dark. The booming and roar of the storm are constant, and every so often something sizable hits the side of the house, but other than that there’s not a lot to distract them outside.
Jesse teaches the kids to play Monopoly and is a little appalled at how easily they take to it; he wonders if Naomi would think of him as a bad influence on youth. Surely she was smart enough to stay up in Oaxaca? They can’t get anything on broadcast so there’s always the possibility that Oaxaca was hit harder than expected, or that the coast to the north is safe, but since no new information has come in, Jesse just continues to hope based on what the situation was before.
He’s been getting kind of a funny feeling out of watching Mary Ann play with the kids, too. He knows this thing with her is probably not permanent. It’s not a matter of her being older or that she has vastly more experience of various kinds—catching up has been a lot of the fun.
The real trouble is with Jesse. Like many Americans in their early twenties, he just hasn’t absorbed the concept of permanence yet, and thus he can be deeply attached and passionate, but not exactly ever in love. As long as he’s around people of his own age the difference doesn’t show up, but where Mary Ann Waterhouse—if she found the right person, and not until—could easily contemplate waking up with that person every day until one of them died of old age, and thus imaginatively can live far into the future (and imagine having a connection to the past that long), Jesse is still in the child’s eternal present. He can be very attached to someone and want to see them again, but the sorts of questions an adult in love asks—including the important one of whether or not it would be a good idea to stay in love—never come to Jesse.
But though he’s not old enough for love, he’s old enough to know he’s not old enough, and when he sees Mary Ann happy with kids, Mary Ann typing away at an old-fashioned keyboard while she works out a list of things to do … he realizes that
if
he were ready, he’d take her in a minute.
if
he were ready, he’d take her in a minute.
If
she’d have him—after all, she’s really the one with most of what there is to offer in the relationship, not just financially but in terms of wisdom, experience, and for that matter, sexual joy. This is a slightly painful realization.
she’d have him—after all, she’s really the one with most of what there is to offer in the relationship, not just financially but in terms of wisdom, experience, and for that matter, sexual joy. This is a slightly painful realization.
Late that evening, Jesse and Mary Ann are upstairs, naked in the tub together by candlelight, taking turns scrubbing each other, looking up into the skylight at the way the water rolls deep and fast across the glass overhead, occasionally illuminated by the candle flickers. Jesse guesses there’re probably a couple of inches up there, maintained entirely by the wind and water pushing more over the skylight constantly. From here it seems like the ocean bottom.
Her head rolls back against his arm, and Jesse notes with some pleasure that though the red hair is still the funny cartoonish shade, there’s a bit of straw blonde at the roots now; she’d have to get a crewcut to be back to her natural color, but she could.
Washing her back, he notices again how tiny she really is, that they picked her for being fine-boned and slim. Under his hands, as he rubs her with the foaming soap, he finds the surgically shortened ribs, the interior girdle, the added ligaments to hold up the enormous breasts, the healed slits where they went in to crank her bottom tight. He tries to figure out how he feels about all of the scars, marks, and bumps that make her so strange to his touch; it would be nice to say he likes it because it’s all part of her, but that’s not true—nor does he necessarily feel outrage at what was “done to her,” since after all she decided to have it done and was extremely well paid for it. Sometimes he thinks he likes to touch her scars and alterations because it makes her feel more like a doll to be used, but that’s not completely true either—he feels less like that with her body than he has with most women’s.
Probably he just likes to touch Mary Ann, and tends to touch the places where she’s most unusual.
In her turn, she washes him thoroughly and just a little roughly—he’s often told her he feels “scrubbed” after she’s done, and she’s just as often pointed out he seems to enjoy it. They have just finished toweling off and are stretching out on the bed, their hands beginning to stay more and more often at chests and crotches, little nipping kisses starting, when they both sit upright, startled by a sound—
It’s the spatter of heavy rain on the walls, and the whistle of wind, Jesse realizes, and in a hurricane what do you expect?
Then he gets it. “It’s slacking off out there,” he says, “probably already no worse than a bad thunderstorm. Maybe by morning we’ll be able to see out.”
She gives a little whoop and rolls over onto him, kissing him deeply; he feels his erection stiffen against her, an instant before she has it in her hand, stroking it quickly, making sure he is hard before she sits carefully onto it. As the thunder outside transforms into a mere wild stormy night, she rides him joyously, masturbating as she does it.
It’s like something out of XV porn, he realizes, just in time to know that that is what she wants to give him, not what she is but his fantasy of her, and the crashes of thunder and wind outside, the flickers of lightning over her body in the warmth of the candlelight, drive him on, bucking upward to meet her as she climaxes again and again, in a triumphant, joyful surge.
“Mind you,” she says, leaning forward and letting his still-sensitive limp penis slide out of her, “this is likely to happen anytime we survive something big. Just wanted you to know there’s an incentive to survive.”
Shortly after, she’s asleep under his arm, her back against him and his hand resting on her strangely hard, unyielding belly, fingers idly finding the seams in the internal girdle. They’ve blown out the candles, and now there is only the wind and the rain, both blowing down into gusts. He is tired, and comfortable, and he’s just had wildly satisfying sex, but he’s kept awake by one thought—that while he had just kept on doing what seemed appropriate, and not showing the fear he did have around the Herrera kids, it was Mary Ann who had the real measure of the situation.
Jesse tries to imagine his own death and fails; but he knows the woman he holds in his arms imagined hers, lived with it, and let him see none of her fear. She is, he thinks, not merely older or more fully formed as a person. She’s too big and too marvelous for him.
He decides to try to live up to her, and stays awake just a little longer wondering if he can. When sleep comes to him, it’s deep and full of dreams, but he remembers none of them. They wake in the mid-moming when they hear the Herreras shouting—they too had slept late, and thus had missed the first real dawn in days. It is still storming outside, but unmistakably there is daylight.
Compared to the first passage under Clem Two’s winds, Naomi finds this one a breeze. The power runs out about halfway through, but in this deep basement there is food, there are other people, there’s safe water to drink and even a toilet … and most of all, there’s very little fear. She is even able to use some of the time to catch up on sleep.
In the dark, people sing or play word games. Naomi’s Spanish isn’t particularly good, but this seems to lead to good-natured amusement, and whenever she does manage to participate successfully they give her a big round of applause. And singing together is fun.
By the time the wind seems to have settled down to gusts and the rain to a spatter, it’s night, and their host suggests they all spend the night inside before venturing out; there’s no sign of any life out there right now.
So they all curl up once more, huddled near each other for warmth and
comfort. It’s very quiet and pleasant, and Naomi resists sleep a little while just because she wants to consciously enjoy it.
comfort. It’s very quiet and pleasant, and Naomi resists sleep a little while just because she wants to consciously enjoy it.
She knows, too, in an abstract way, that if she were in her usual state of scrubbed cleanliness, she would find the smell down here dreadful, not so much from the mixture of shit and bleach in the imperfectly sealed toilet buckets as from the smell of many bodies that have missed some washings. But at the moment she smells just like everyone else, and somehow that’s so … well, it’s democratic.
Then she wonders if perhaps worrying about how people smell isn’t some sort of residual racism, and for a moment, curled there on a couple of old beach towels up against a bookcase, she is wide awake with worry—especially because she knows that the people around her are clean anyway, the evening shower is at least as much part of their lives as it is of hers—
And now she wonders if knowing about the fact that this is a culture with a cleanliness habit isn’t also suppressed racism.
Then she remembers she promised herself she wouldn’t think about things like this, just two days ago when she thought she was going to be torn to scraps of meat any moment. And here she is, back with people. Time to start living her new life, whatever that’s going to be. The happy thought sends her drifting off into warm sleep.
When she wakes people are beginning to move around, and there’s a long moment before they all realize what’s different; they can’t hear any rain or wind at all. She jumps up, intending to be among the first to help, and then realizes again. It’s going to be a while to get over these habits, she decides, but she’s going to.
Meanwhile, she will pull her fair share, but she won’t act like she’s got to be the most helpful person on the planet.
Besides, the big job right now is getting the outer door pried open, and that’s mostly big-muscle work. Fortunately there are several large grown men in the group, and once they figure out that it’s just something heavy lying on the slanting cellar doors, they know that some hard heaves are likely to get them free.
They end up using a spare basement timber as a battering ram, hoping to make whatever it is tip over. No one seems to be much worried—it isn’t urgent to get out of the shelter at this very moment, and anyway there will no doubt be a party of rescuers along soon enough.
When all the men are set on the little flight of steps up to the door, five of them holding the timber endwise to the door, they start to swing it in their arms, bringing it sharply into the steel door on every third swing:
“Uno, dos, tres!” boom!
and then there’s the rattle of gravel and other things sliding down the door over the next
“uno, dos
,
tres!”
“Uno, dos, tres!” boom!
and then there’s the rattle of gravel and other things sliding down the door over the next
“uno, dos
,
tres!”
As the eighth
boom!
echoes through the cellar, sinking dully into the
earthen walls, there is a blinding flash from the door, and the men stagger back, crying out and dropping the timber as they cover their eyes. There is a moment of terrible stillness as everyone wonders what could be out there; the fear of what they will see merges with tens of thousands of images of the nuked cities of the world, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Port au Prince, Cairo, Damascus, Washington, and for one dreadful moment the thought that somehow there has been a nuclear war—
boom!
echoes through the cellar, sinking dully into the
earthen walls, there is a blinding flash from the door, and the men stagger back, crying out and dropping the timber as they cover their eyes. There is a moment of terrible stillness as everyone wonders what could be out there; the fear of what they will see merges with tens of thousands of images of the nuked cities of the world, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Port au Prince, Cairo, Damascus, Washington, and for one dreadful moment the thought that somehow there has been a nuclear war—
“El sol
,” says an old woman next to Naomi, and then everyone, as if not quite understanding yet, says “
el sol,”
a mass whispering in the dim cellar—and then everyone laughs.
,” says an old woman next to Naomi, and then everyone, as if not quite understanding yet, says “
el sol,”
a mass whispering in the dim cellar—and then everyone laughs.
The bright sunlight outside dazzles eyes that have been in the dark for many hours. Looking away from the door to shield their eyes, the men swing the heavy timber again, twelve swings, four impacts—and with the fourth there is a groan and rumble like distant thunder, and something goes scraping and bouncing down the face of the door, and falls with a crash outside.
One of them puts his hands on the door and pushes, and it flies open.
Everyone groans as the brilliant glare pours in, and they cover their eyes, but the warmth and dryness pull them forward, still shielding their faces and looking down at the ground.
Naomi staggers forward with the rest, her forearm across her eyes, watching only the motion of her sneakers at her feet and following the crowd more by her sense of touch than anything else. The first step comes under her feet, and she steps up.
There is such a diversity of noise, after the tomb-silence of the shelter and the ear-battering storm roar, that it is not easy to sort out the sounds ahead of her.
But just as she gets to the top, she realizes people are crying out and it’s not a happy sound. She drops her arm, and sees the wreck in front of her.
It’s a little self-driving car, and if the bodies in the backseat are any indication, probably what happened was that the two children in it were trying to get home and didn’t know that with the access to the guidance grid cut, the car couldn’t steer itself. There’s a safety cutoff—the little localized radar/ultrasound system that lets the car find somewhere where traffic isn’t moving and stop there without running into anything—but sometimes things like that aren’t working anymore, especially if a car is usually driven on manual control, and then again maybe the car did bring the kids to a safe stop and then the wind got it and rolled it.
They weren’t belted in, and from the look of the roof and hood, the car was rolled a lot. It’s all mud and wind-sanded metal now; Naomi can’t see what color it was originally.
The kids look like bent dolls; nothing in the spinning, bouncing car pierced their bodies, but they were slammed around in it like mice in a shaken glass jar, and they are visibly bruised everywhere; clotted blood stains their shirts. Legs and arms are not so much bent as reshaped; the bone must have been broken up so much that the limbs hang as if made of rags.
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