Almost Heaven

Inside the cloud the future storm was staging, its raging eye caged in its fist, its potential for destruction masquerading as soft lofty brume: just another summer's afternoon in heaven. This was weather: this is what the country was about. Everywhere we went--New England or New York, the North, the South, the Plains states or the West--we talked about the weather. Because weather was news. For two nights in a row now, all the networks had led the evening news with bulletins about the weather: a heatwave in the South, a drought in the Midwest, a twister down in Texas. This meant something, Holden knew. This meant something big. Something strange was going on. You can't stop feeling something strange is going on when people disappear entirely from the narrative, from news--when news starts coming at you faceless. That's what news about the weather is, it's faceless. It's the absence of man's fingerprint on history. It's the advent of a new age of news where the only things worth sending crews to are encounters of the katabatic kind. To hell with Bosnia. To hell with Kurds. To hell with Cuba when a cyclonic force is massing on the ocean off the coast of Florida and a robot in a satellite is on location, live. That is our news in the millennium. To hell with 60 Minutes and The New York Times. To hell with The Economist, Le Monde, the Beeb, Bernstein and Woodward. Honey, they are old and cold and it is hot out there. And you can catch a headline on the Weather Channel any time of day. "D'ja hear about that heat they's havin' in the South?" the taxi driver asks him at the airport. "What kinda heat?" "It's record breakin'. Scary." "What's so scary about heat?" "Murder rate goes up. People lose their cool. Me, I'm prayin' soon a blizzard will move in." In August, Holden emphasizes. It's a long shot, the driver shrugs. But stranger things has happen, he's been told. Meanwhile August in Virginia brews daily rain. Baking air moils upward in a mass so solid you can see it. Sometimes it sits, yellow, stinking on the James, on Ol' Jim River, like an invalid too sick to rise. Sometimes it creeps into the city, seeks its dissipation in the streets. It stares at us, the heat: it draws its bead on us and makes us plead for breeze. It smothers us in sheets. It drives us crazy. Every evening, from the creaking porches, from the screened-in vistas of the suburbs, from the fields of brown tobacco leaf and crackling corn in Surry and in Prince George Counties, we look skyward as the day fades, and we read the clouds. Without knowing we are learning how, we learn to forecast August thunderstorms by omens, from the signs. We learn to tell when it is coming--rain. Sometimes it's the birds who give the game away, taking to the trees. Sometimes it's a smell, the smell of copper when the sky goes green. Sometimes it's the rhumatiz, lightnin' in our bones. People who can read it best, the best storm prophets, are the ones who navigate through thunder on their runs to heaven and they had kept his airplane on the ground. Hour had ticked by. Then another. Two. The afternoon passed. The sky above the runways had turned dark, an amber welt had risen where the sun had slipped into the Potomac. Holden had been traveling by plane for more than fifty hours and he hadn't slept. Or at least he felt as if he hadn't slept. And anyway he had no memory of it. Sleep. Do we remember sleeping? Or do we just remember dreams. His only recent memory was of travel. Traveling from place to place where all the places seemed the same: He had gone from Sarajevo in an armored transport two, maybe it was now three, days ago. Since then he had been moving like a mechanized target through what seemed to be a single firing range along a midway of a carnival: series ofWiggins, Marianne is the author of 'Almost Heaven', published 1998 under ISBN 9780609000564 and ISBN 060900056X.