Weather Woman

by Cai Emmons

  “We all forget things. Even younger people, like the medical students I teach, have lapses in memory. Think of how often computers freeze up. You’re fine, really, Dr. Fenwick. Would you like to see your brain scans?”

  Diane nods, not sure at all. She is unable to receive this good news that flies in the face of her recent experience. It does not feel like the whole story. It isn’t the whole story really, because she has not been honest. She is here for information about her own brain, yes, but she is also here about Bronwyn’s brain too—and there is certainly no way Dr. S can weigh in on Bronwyn’s brain without having seen it. And something else too—she is here to investigate something even beyond Bronwyn’s brain, something about the human brain in general. What she really wants to know is perhaps unanswerable: What is the possible reach of the human brain? What are its limits?

  Dr. S has turned on her computer and the monitor has come alive with bright blobs of primary color. Diane tries to recognize something of herself in those color blocks, tries to recall what she was thinking as she lay like a corpse in the circling scanner.

  Dr. S uses the laser pointer. “You see these areas here—this is where there is high activity, rapid glucose metabolism. You see how healthy it all looks? It is very much alive, very active.”

  Diane squints, trying to see what Dr. S sees, trying to make sense of the colors and match them with particular thoughts she was having that day.

  “What made you become interested in the brain?” Joe asks, ever curious, thinking perhaps about a character for his next book.

  “Oh my,” she says. “It’s always a wonder to me that everyone doesn’t want to explore the brain. It’s capable of so much. And yet we’re just beginning to understand it. You’re a writer, are you not? I imagine you have always been interested in stories and language.”

  “Oh, yes. Since I was very young.”

  “This is true for me also. I have been curious about the brain since I was a small child back in India. I had a friend who was a spelling champion. He knew how to spell so many words, words from many languages even, words whose meaning he did not know. I wanted, even back then, to see how his brain was working from the inside.”

  Diane floats, hearing them at some remove, thinking of Bronwyn, wishing she could get Bronwyn to come here and have her brain examined. What would Dr. S see?

  “And you, Dr. Fenwick, I imagine you, too, have always been focused on natural phenomena?”

  Diane stares at the colorful simulacrum of her brain and smiles weakly. She is not like Joe and Dr. S. She has worn and shed many skins since she was a child.

  42

  When Matt arrives at the apartment in Greenpoint, Buzz and Ramona, Buzz’s ex-girlfriend, are sitting next to each other on the low couch, flipping through take-out menus, a few empty beer bottles on the floor by their feet.

  “Señor! Señor!” Buzz says rising to embrace Matt and get him a beer. “My chaperone has arrived at last.”

  “He’s toasted,” Ramona says.

  “Like you’re not,” Buzz says.

  It’s the second act of something and Matt has missed Act I.

  “Pizza or sushi?” Ramona asks Matt. “Your call.”

  “Give him a break. Let him chill.”

  Matt has met Ramona a few times when she and Buzz were still together. She wasn’t exactly a bad-news girlfriend, but she wasn’t good news either. She’s one of those women who talks four inches from your face, and she’s always asking people what they’re thinking, especially men.

  Matt drops his bag and excuses himself to the bathroom, no bigger than a broom closet with only a toilet and sink. The door, bulged with humidity, won’t close. He doesn’t pee, just sits on the closed toilet with his head in his hands. Bronwyn must have seen what he saw, water filling the streets, storm drains overflowing, hillsides collapsing, houses being dismantled like brittle Lego creations. It all happened in the time it took them to fly east. He’s been calling and texting her since he landed, but she’s not responding. She must have seen—it’s all over the news, reporters gloating over the disaster as if it’s a Super Bowl upset. No one is mentioning the fires that preceded the rain and the sudden way they expired. Human memory is stupidly short. He wishes Ramona wasn’t here and that Buzz wasn’t drunk. He has to talk to someone, but there’s no way he’s discussing any of this with Ramona around. He rinses his face and goes back out.

  Ramona, tittering, turns to Matt. “Did you ever hear about the time I threw a head of iceberg lettuce at Buzz? He was busy being an asshole about something and I was furious so I just let it fly and it hit his cheek and he had a nasty bruise for, like, a week. I’ve got a picture of it somewhere.”

  Buzz dismisses her with a wave. “He doesn’t need a picture. I’m sure he can imagine it. So, Señor, how was L.A.?”

  Ramona stands and swishes off behind a Japanese screen that defines the bedroom. Buzz rolls his eyes. Matt understands his arrival has rescued Buzz—who is soon to be married—from relapse into a night with Ramona he might have regretted.

  A day and a half later, Matt and Buzz are halfway over the George Washington Bridge, locked in traffic and heading west. He’s told Buzz everything and Buzz has listened in his calm, equivocal way. Matt has even shown Buzz the footage from his phone. Still, Buzz has only smiled and shrugged and shaken his shiny bald head and told Matt to chill.

  But the fact is, Matt cannot relax, not after what he’s seen, first the fire receding, then those floods. He’s been trying to tell Buzz how his entire frame of reference has changed, his entire belief system, but Buzz remains unmoved. Look, Matt keeps saying. You’ve seen the footage, how would you explain that? Buzz shrugs, apparently happy to live with the cognitive dissonance. Matt cannot comprehend the lack of curiosity in his friend, the lack of a need to understand and explain things. How slow some people are to absorb what their senses tell them.

  Traffic has brought the car to a standstill. Matt stares out the window past the bridge’s steel girders down to the iron-gray Hudson River. The water is moving down there, he knows, but from up here it appears to be fixed in place. Even the transport vessel smack in the middle of the river appears stationary. About this particular view he knows better than to trust what he sees. He knows how the appearance of movement is always influenced by the position and movement of the observer. All his life he has been doing what everyone learns to do, balancing what his senses tell him with what he has learned about how the universe works. When he was a child he took great pleasure in holding his hand up to obliterate the moon entirely. Moon’s gone, he would say triumphantly, knowing full well it was an optical illusion. But none of his accrued understanding helps him now. There is only what his camera recorded, shaky and inconclusive but definitely startling, and his own internal sense that something mysterious has happened, wrought by Bronwyn.

  The traffic is finally moving again and Buzz’s Honda rumbles off the bridge into Fort Lee.

  “Hey look, man,” Matt says, “I can’t do this. I’m too preoccupied. Just drop me off here. I’ll get myself back.”

  “Oh shit, you’re bailing on me again?”

  “I gotta follow up on this thing.”

  “I hope you know what you’re doing. If you ask me, this woman sounds psychotic.”

  Matt shrugs. No, he absolutely does not know what he’s doing. That’s the whole point. He isn’t sure of a damn thing. Christ, by his late twenties he was supposed to have things figured out. All his friends are getting their lives together. Metcalf with his film stuff. Buzz has taken a job in a brokerage firm and in a few months he’ll be getting married. No more road trips for him. Matt thought that would be his fate soon too, but now life has started to seem like one long road trip, stops here and there, but none of them lasting very long.

  Buzz pulls to the curb amidst a hail of fractious honking. They part with a stiff, over-the-gearshift man hug, and Matt gets out into the blitzkrieg of Fort Lee, hoping he doesn’t think back to this moment regre
tfully someday. Right now there is no other choice he can make.

  43

  Why must she struggle so hard to learn how to act in the world? She longs for a simpler time when she found comfort so easily in studying the shapes of clouds before she learned to classify them. When she was a child she used to lie on her back on the strip of grass behind the back steps and stare up for hours, as if she was attending an old-fashioned drive-in movie. She watched the vapors assembling, becoming the shapes of things she wished for—unicorns, bicycles, ice cream cones—then disassembling. It was as if they were sending her secret messages that only lasted briefly, so she had to be always attentive, always aware. If she flicked her eyes away even briefly, she might miss the news. Sometimes the clouds moved lickety-split, becoming one thing then another and another in a matter of seconds (like being dragged too quickly down the aisle of a toy store), but other days—those long hot summer days when everything was still but for the drone of insects—they hardly seemed to move at all. They hung in the sky, motionless as sleeping cats, boring to some, but not to her.

  She used to need proof of everything like Diane, but now she knows certain things beyond the reach and necessity of proof. She can be a destructive force. She knows this. She feels this. She has to watch herself.

  She sleeps lightly, wakes in the grip of dread. In LA the rain has stopped, but water is still camped in places it shouldn’t be. So much is ruined, beyond reclamation. She calls Lanny and whispers into the phone.

  “Have you seen what happened in LA?”

  “Bronwyn, is that you?”

  “Have you seen? I think I did it.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “I didn’t mean to.”

  “I’ve been watching it—it’s impossible to miss. You stopped the fires, didn’t you?”

  “But I started the rain too. Light rain. Then something happened.”

  “Talk louder, I can hardly hear you. Is someone there?”

  “No one’s here. I’m losing my voice. I’ll call you back.”

  She lays the phone back in its cradle to experiment with her voice in the cabin’s silence. “Hello? Hello!” The sound, transported through her jawbone is a reedy whir, nothing like a normal human voice. Normal, the thought is laughable. How long it has been since she’s been acquainted with normal. Is she losing her ability to speak, one capability exchanged for another? She never asked for this. If only she could expunge this talent of hers, revert to who she once was. But how? She longs for the freedom and innocence of childhood.

  Lying still on the couch she has no idea what the date is, but her body, unbidden, does its work, informing her that fall is coalescing. The Earth’s axis tips and hedgehogs gorge on fruit before curling themselves into tight balls, deer rut aggressively, bats desperate for mates send out frequencies of love, wasps die off, the fur of the arctic fox whitens.

  Bronwyn pictures herself among these animals, fattening herself and finding a hole in a tree, curling herself into it, allowing her heartbeat to slow to the bare minimum. She would like to leave this life for a while, awaken in spring after a long reorganizing sleep.

  The radio plays jazz, the kind that slides over a person without making demands. A car drives up. She goes to the kitchen window and looks out. The car is old and black and covered with light splotches in the shape of large amoebas. Matt steps out. A surprise and not a surprise. Given the way they parted at LAX, she might have surmised he would come. There is so much unfinished business between them. She opens the front door. Coming across the lawn he sees her, and the light behind his face turns on. It takes her a moment to realize she’s happy he’s here. Someone who knows. At the bottom of the front steps he hesitates, his eagerness leashed, his smile timid.

  “I thought you were on your way to Montana,” she says, sotto voce, the best she can do.

  “I changed my mind. Again. My friend is ready to kill me.”

  She nods and steps inside and he follows. She switches off the radio and they go to the porch where she’s been living for the last couple of days. It is early afternoon, mild and hazy. An offshore breeze brings the ocean close, imbuing the air with salt and humidity. They sit on opposite ends of the couch. He is familiar and unfamiliar, like a brother returned from a long trip to a foreign land. He thrums with questions.

  “You’ve seen the news, right?”

  She nods.

  “What are you going to do?”

  She shrugs. “Hibernate.”

  “Lyndon Roos is all over me.”

  “Why? What does she want?”

  “I don’t know. To control shit, I guess. She wants you to go public.”

  “Ugh.”

  “Definitely.”

  “She believed in me. I appreciate that.”

  “Unlike me.”

  She smiles. “People should be skeptical. I would be if it weren’t me.”

  “It’s different now. I have tons of questions, but I am a ‘believer,’ if you want to call it that.”

  “Well, there’s no call to believe in anything now. It’s all over. I’m looking for an exorcism. Or something.”

  “Really? But you can’t just—I mean I saw what you did. It was—it was awesome and you—”

  “A woman died in those floods. Did you know that?”

  “You think that’s your fault? It’s not your fault.”

  “It could be. Something went wrong. I didn’t mean for it to rain like that—so hard and for so long. I don’t know for sure. And if I don’t know I—” She growls and rises and pushes outside where she catapults herself down in the grass.

  His hand moves lightly through her hair. A reassuring gesture like the petting of an animal. He lies above her, his knobby brown knee and taut calf within reach of her fingertips. Her nerves are lit, thousands of dormant capillaries flooded. The world telescopes down to the exhortations of skin and blood. She doesn’t move.

  On the next breath she lifts her hand and places it on his knee. His kneecap twitches. She cannot see his face, but his conspiratorial smile is already firmly etched in her mind. Can a moment like this last forever? How she wishes it could. After this there is so much predictable awkwardness, so much working out. But this moment, here, now, in the grass by the river, his hand in her hair, her hand on his knee, the mist of anticipation scenting the air between them, this is pure and as perfect as it gets.

  Her edges dissolve, she loses the boundaries of her own body as she imagines she’s him, replete with sinewy limbs and penis. Like migrating birds equipped with internal compasses, they slide their bodies across the prickly grass simultaneously, neither of them moving first, the messages between them coordinated, synchronous, parsed quickly without words or facial expressions.

  They face each other. He draws lines on her cheeks with his finger, circles her nose. She touches his hair, separating the locks, which are coiled and springy as sphagnum moss. This is the forgetfulness she sought, the oblivion, all thought transmuted into body sensations. He manipulates her lips into a smile that her muscles take over. He smiles back.

  Nothing they do here will hurt anyone. They disrobe each other slowly, silently, his shirt first, then hers. His chest is lightly flocked with dark hairs, hers with a constellation of tawny freckles. She wears no bra. He cups her small breasts and closes his eyes, sighs. Next their shorts, her underpants.

  They lie back down, exposed to the breeze, the sun. They entwine their legs and arms, singular in their focus, hushed, oblivious to the pokey spears of charred grass. Around them everything rustles and murmurs. Branches crack, wings flap the air, something splashes up from the river. They hear it all, they hear nothing, their senses at once sharpened and dulled. A heron lands in the shallows by the bank and folds in the broad scaffolding of its wings. It watches, missing nothing, judging nothing, but they sense only the slightest whisper of a breeze that could be anything.

  For three days they live in near solitude, often mute for long stretches. Even in the supermarket i
t is just the two of them. Even as they walk on a busy beach, a planet of two. They are apprentices of each other’s bodies, he exploring her bird-like shoulders, her pronounced clavicle, the blue veins of her inner arms. What abundant and colorful hair she has! She marvels at the heat of him and delights in the curiosity he showers on everything: The birds on the river, the variety and sheen of her shoes, the now-boxed instruments of her former weather station.

  He takes her kitchen by storm, a cyclone of energy, singing Italian arias in his high tenor as he makes pasta sauce. They eat by candlelight, both voracious, feeding each other, swooning over the garlicky sauce, the crusty baguette, the piquant salad greens. She laughs at her own appetite. She laughs at the way humidity has fertilized his hair so it springs from his head in all directions. What a gift he is—accepting, attentive, kind.

  She will not discuss her skill, but he doesn’t forget it for a second. This is a woman like no other woman. They spread a quilt in the grass and laze naked in the midday heat. He presses his thumb into her supra sternal notch.

  “It must be here,” he says.

  She smiles with her eyes.

  He touches her forehead, feeling for her third eye. “Or here?”

  A half-smile, but not an answer.

  His finger descends along the midline of her body, grazing her ribs, arriving at her belly with its pleated button. “Then here?”

  “Shh. I don’t know.”

  “You must have guesses.”

  “I can’t explain. Don’t make me.”

  So he hushes, but he doesn’t stop searching and speculating. The source is somewhere in this small pale body. Her heart? Her lungs? Her gray matter? Is it coming from one of those chakras people talk about? Is it qigong? He embraces her carefully, worried about hurting her, feeling beneath her skin the architecture of sternum and ribs and pelvic bone. He kisses her fingertips. He eschews thoughts of the future which scarcely seems to exist.

  He is a ventriloquist with her body parts, her feet are whiny ten-year-old boys, her knees leather-jacketed bikers, her hair a lounge singer with a smoky voice. He doesn’t care about making a fool of himself because every once in a while her smile cracks wide, joyous and beyond her control.