Nine Kinds of Naked (34 page)

In the meantime, Special Agent J. J. Speed was still trying to figure out how to follow the meandering signal on his homing device receiver. He hadn't walked two blocks before he came upon a small crowd of people gathered around a
telephone pole that appeared to have a broomstick speared clear through it. There was a great deal of conversation and debate, and even some experimental tugging at either end of the broomstick. Some were offering hypotheses, that it was an art project, that someone had drilled a hole through the telephone pole, that it was just an illusion and that the broomstick was really cut in half and either side of it was actually just screwed into the pole, and so forth.

Special Agent J. J. Speed looked at his Day-Glo orange Frisbee and knew none of these explanations were true. Suddenly possessed by a terror he hadn't known in a quarter century, he spat out his splintered toothpick and replaced it with a fresh one. Then he pulled his maniple out of his back pocket and draped it over the hairs standing at attention on the back of his neck. Stealing a nervous glance at the cerulean sky above, he hurried uneasily on his way.

 

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T ANY GIVEN
moment, there are 1,800 storms churning the heavens, continuously balancing the opposing forces of warm and cold air circulating throughout the atmosphere. It is a relatively simple physics: Acting as a fluid, air reacts to any change in temperature or density by stirring into motion. All wind, consequently, is ultimately caused by sunlight, specifically the uneven heating of the Earth's atmosphere as the planet rotates and revolves. Hot air rises, cool air falls, air moves from high pressure to low pressure, and airflow is created. Hence, as chaotic as they might appear, storms are actually an orderly manner of negotiating a compromise between extremes of temperature. And whenever there is considerable
disagreement over the proper temperature of the Earth's atmosphere, convection systems swirl into existence, their vortices efficiently managing the confrontation between adversarial airstreams. Such vortices are the most elegant manner of resolving the dispute, whirling hot air up and cool air down with all due peacemaking, though obviously this is a disputatious diplomacy, and it does not occur without considerable hollering and shoving by the opposing sides.

What all of this rigor means is that tornadoes are something much more conciliatory than the careening agents of chaos and destruction we might otherwise judge them to be. Rather, tornadoes are supreme forces of order, representing the balancing of opposing forces. And hurricanes, of course, those tremendous twister sisters to the tornado, hurricanes represent the most coherent and persistent structures in an otherwise lawless atmosphere. Here is order at its most raw, balance at its most brutal, and of course all such explanations and superlatives are surpassed by the Great White Spot.

After eighteen months of staring down the Great White Spot, the best and most educated guess was that global atmospherics had reached a tipping point into some heretofore unknown pattern, a chain reaction cascading into a new level of order. Perhaps the seawater got too warm, or the air too humid, or the ozone layer too thin, or one fart too many upset the balance of atmospheric methane, or any number of other variables that could have set the stage or triggered the Great White Spot. Essentially, though, the more than forty-five thousand storms that bellow and bluster across the planet every single day were apparently no longer sufficient to maintain the
relative equilibrium of the atmosphere. The argument, flimsy in its infancy, was that something more consistently powerful was required to maintain atmospheric homeostasis.

Indeed, climatologists had warned for years that global warming was creating increasingly powerful hurricanes, but nobody could have guessed that the heavens could have possibly conjured up something like this. There was just no place for it in the world as it had been described. Because knowledge is only based on prior experience, existing climate models did not even allow for its existence. This created a void of meaning, and because it is the nature of humanity to comfort itself with explanation, there were many who found solace in the claims of opportunistic religionists who asserted that the visitation of the Holy Spirit is experienced as a divine wind. Then, as if to demonstrate this irrefutable truth, they commenced speaking in tongues. Pentecostal tent revivals became common across North America, and there was much incoherent babbling.

Not the least among this babbling was the idea that the Great White Spot was a kamikaze typhoon. In the original sense of the term, long before it was adopted by the Japanese military for nationalist propaganda during World War II, kamikaze was the name given to a pair of typhoons that allegedly defeated two successive fleets of Kublai Khan's invaders in the thirteenth century. The literal translation is “divine wind,” as it was believed that divine intervention thwarted the Mongolian empire's invasion of Japan. The Great White Spot, then, at least among the flag-burning left, was a new kamikaze, a divine wind to defeat the American Empire.

As a consequence of all this loose talk, it took some time for disconcerted scientists to accept the very existence of such a brazen scofflaw as the Great White Spot. But there it was anyway, spinning clockwise like some horrific miracle, haunting the hubris of humanity and pushing all social structures beyond any illusion of stability. And whatever the etiology of the Great White Spot, the structures that govern humankind were not about to relinquish dominion over the planet. Despite the collapsing global economy, quantities of money unprecedented since the Manhattan Project were funneled into two arenas: rigorous research that could model this preposterous singularity and predict what was going to happen next, and gee-whiz, wingnut research that could devise a viable technique of diversion or dissipation.

Hurricane diversion technologies had been abandoned in the 1970s when scientists were forced to admit that cyclones were simply too large for any of their ideas to be practical. But practicality was no longer a concern in the face of a doomsday event like the Great White Spot, and the best idea thus far took advantage of global warming. Maverick meteorologists had long suggested towing icebergs into the vicinity of hurricanes to cool the seawater and thereby relax the confrontation between competing airstreams, but the quantity of iceberg required to chill the Gulf of Mexico prohibited this in practice. In recent years, however, with the accelerated calving of major ice shelves off the Antarctic coast due to global warming, there was more than enough ice on hand to lower the water temperature believed to be fueling the Great White Spot. Of course, given that the Great White Spot was already defying all
existing climate models, there wasn't much proof that this would work. But since the only other alternative on the table was to start speaking in tongues in hopes of appeasing the wrath of the Holy Spirit, scientists stroked their chins in scholarly contemplation of the iceberg theory.

The only obstacle was the magnificent cost of towing the icebergs, but in the latter tradition of the kamikaze, desperation defies the face of total defeat, and so all necessary resources were deployed to locate and tow hundreds of icebergs—thousands, if necessary—into the Gulf of Mexico. Operation Break the Wind, they called it, and this project had been going on for several months. Operation Break the Wind was funded by the sale of berg ice, absolutely pure water frozen since long before the Industrial Revolution, but this was not really the case. Yes, berg ice was sold across the continent, and it was indeed absolutely pure water frozen since long before the Industrial Revolution, but this was victory-garden public relations, a civil morale booster, and never contributed more than a fraction of the percentage of what Operation Break the Wind was costing taxpayers.

But the citizenry like to feel like they're making a difference against the unraveling contradictions of modern society, and so impotent solutions that provide the illusion of empowerment are marketed to keep people from walking away entirely. Since this was already a world that manufactured a plastic bottle every time someone got thirsty while neighbors berated one another into recycling their empties, it should come as no surprise that millions immediately began filling their freezers with the bags of premium-priced berg ice sold
outside of every grocery store and gas station. Many even purchased deep freezers to stockpile berg ice, though as Diana eventually demonstrated in an Aquaholics Anonymous pamphlet, more than half of the berg ice sold was actually counterfeit, nothing more than frozen tap water polluted with the standard industrial cocktail of pesticides, pharmaceuticals, heavy metals, and occasional raw sewage.

But nobody outside of New Orleans knew about any of this. The only thing that mattered was that Operation Break the Wind had achieved a scarcely measurable decrease in water temperature. This fact was trumpeted across every headline, but so far only one thing had happened: As everyone on the planet knew, in the eye of the Great White Spot, in the center of the three-mile-wide coliseum formed by the blinding white eyewall of cascading ice crystals, there had always been a Day-Glo orange Frisbee capturing the imagination of teevee viewers, perpetually hovering ten miles high like some discus of Olympus. Early this morning, however, the Day-Glo orange Frisbee was gone.

Though lacking any proof that would demonstrate a causal connection,
something
had nevertheless happened, and science crowed victorious, claiming desperate credit for cracking the dam. Storm watchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration toasted morning margaritas chilled with authentic berg ice, fractured shards of the last pure and unpolluted water on the planet melting into their cheap booze, and later that afternoon, funding for Operation Break the Wind doubled.

 

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ERE IS THE AIR
, the medium through which humanity breathed only halfheartedly in the twenty-first century—oblivious to its very existence, really—and certainly disinclined to discover that this invisible nothing could possibly influence their very consciousness. That the stagnant air in so many office buildings typically yields stagnant crops of curmudgeons, their moldy outlooks desperately gasping for a breath of belief, is as obvious as the grins in the eyes of wilderness backpackers. It is an unflattering observation of ignorance, but only a species as inattentive to their world as late humanity could fail to notice that the winds had been shifting for quite some time.

It wasn't just retreating glaciers and calving ice shelves. After all, who could be faulted for not making an expedition to Antarctica to investigate the ice caps? But seasons had been growing increasingly unpredictable for years. In New England, it was as likely to be a chill sixty-five-degree day in January as it was in June. Months before their time, sap was running in maple trees, apple trees were budding, and bears were kicking awake from their hibernation groggy and pissed. Earth changes had been happening all around everyone, winter was more likely to be muddy than white, ski seasons were shorter by the year, spring was skipped altogether, and heat waves traded punches with cold snaps all throughout the summer and autumn.

Indeed, the only region on the planet that was experiencing anything resembling a consistent weather pattern was the three-hundred-mile diameter around the Great White Spot,
within which New Orleans was the only major population center. There, it was a cool sixty-eight degrees every night, and in the heat of the day thermometers maxed out at eighty degrees. Gone were the dreadful sweltering sweats of summertime. Gone were the tremendous thunderstorms and flood warnings. If you could tolerate the proximity of Laughing Jim whirling and wrathing beyond the horizon, the air was clear and warm year-round.

On the morning the Day-Glo orange Frisbee came whizzing out of the center of the Great White Spot, however, the winds were shifting in more than their typically bizarre fashion. It took some time for experts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to figure out what was occurring, but by the next morning the alarm had been sounded. It appeared as if hundreds of miniature tornadoes—gustnadoes, they called them—were sweeping throughout the Great White Spot's circumference of influence. Though there were dozens of possibilities, interpretations, inferences, and extrapolations to be drawn from this bald fact, the single scenario the mass media seized upon was this:

The Great White Spot is breaking apart, and hell is about to bust loose.

 

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LL CAPS READS
30 percent slower than standard capitalized text. This is why newspaper headlines are broadcast in all caps. It grabs the eye of the reader for that much longer, increasing the chance of spanning their attention and selling the periodical. An unfortunate side effect is that
headlines often shape public perception more than the actual content of the article. Hence, when news outlets around the country broadcast their headlines the morning after the Day-Glo orange Frisbee came whizzing out of the center of the storm, the sentiment that overwhelmed any sober analysis was this:

HELL IS ABOUT TO BUST LOOSE!

 

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HESE WERE MINIATURE
tornadoes, the reporters would stress, not really tornadoes at all, but gustnadoes. More like waterspouts, or dust devils
(DEVILS ARE ABOUT TO BUST LOOSE!)
, and there hadn't even been any reports of significant damage. Popular panic would surface nonetheless, but not until tomorrow, and outside of New Orleans, anyway. Today, the morning Elizabeth Wildhack awoke from her m2 nightmare and surreptitiously followed Diablo and the crusader, today had scarcely begun.

As Diablo was standing dumbstruck by the sudden disappearance of Billy Pronto at the top of the flight of stairs, he was at least comforted by the mewing presence of Zippy, nuzzling against his legs. “Hey girl, where'd you come from?” he cooed at the cat, just as Elizabeth arrived at the foot of the stairs.