Orange World and Other Stories

by Karen Russell

“I am aware,” I said to the seller’s fat-lipped manager.

  (Bobby, what did you expect would happen? One of my wife’s favorite questions, whenever things went sideways for us.)

  At the loading chute, I clutched the hauling papers, watching the young storm flatten, straighten. Lemon, bless him, had loaned me his trailer to get the bucking cloud home. Moisture found my tongue, settled there. This is what she tastes like, then. My storm. Mine to keep spinning, mine to make strong. Moisture dribbled onto my cheeks, amazingly of my own manufacture. Never when I’m called upon to cry can I wince out a tear. At Estelle’s funeral, to my girls’ disgust, I was a dry teat. Couldn’t plug my eyeballs into what I felt deep below.

  The pale funnel pulsed out and contracted, like a star exploring its cosmos. In the sunlight, against the dark walls of the chute, it became a ghostly gramophone needle, leaping and falling, lightly and blindly, searching for the groove.

  These days such mishaps are rare, but every rancher knows that anecdote about the fledgling twister that burst its trailer, escaped onto the highway. In the rearview I saw only the solid metal cylinder. But in my mind’s eye I beheld her, a cone of swiftly moving air.

  I drove south through successively finer meshes of rainfall. Nobody emerged from the house to scream, Robert, what have you done?

  * * *

  My first thought on waking was Did she live through the night?

  From the bedroom window, I have a clear view across the parched grass to the tornado shelter. Cottony mist enveloped the steel enclosure. Let’s admit it was a dumb-ass move, to buy a sluggish cull on credit, at an age when I cannot realistically expect to raise a cloud to tornadic stature, much less turn a profit. To buy a twister, at this most vulnerable stage in its development, without having set foot in my own shelter in half a decade. An impulse purchase is cinnamon gum, not an unvetted cloud.

  Twelve hours ago, I’d pulled up to the shelter to unload and found everything still functional. Incredibly, the silent fans had clicked on. The great air bladders that had been idle for years began swelling and falling again. I got the hoses fretworked to maintain the updraft, tubed in some ice crystals. Checked the vertical vorticity levels: all excellent. Warm winds and cold winds charged into the system—the collision of temperatures that keeps a baby spinning, breathing. The goal is to get that rotation to be self-sustaining. It’s an art, no doubt, to calibrate your inputs so that you fight off homeostasis, keeping a young storm in that growth state. A tornado farmer is always in pursuit of a paradox: consistent instability. As Estelle and our girls would tell you, if I have one talent, it’s for this: knowing what a developing storm needs to stay angry, to live on.

  * * *

  —

  “She’s alive!” I exited the house and breathed a sigh of relief. The chimes that ran from the porch beams to the silver dome of the shelter were hysterically singing, which meant that inside the steel walls, my baby was spinning. I couldn’t recall the last time I’d been so happy about anything. In my tone I heard the man I’d been when the girls were young and our farm was operational.

  My oldest daughter was four pounds at birth, and her appearance flooded the earth with an infinite number of horrors and perils, a demonic surge of catastrophic possibilities out of all proportion to the tiny mass in my arms. Love unlids Pandora’s box. Is that obvious? Before her, I honestly did not know it. What I felt for her was of a wholly different order than what I felt for Estelle. Never before had that heat collided with the icy possibilities of accident, of death. Not at these speeds, not with this intensity, and constantly. They were born at the same moment, twins: our baby daughter and the danger.

  Raising a tornado, you’re always dreaming of its dying day. That’s the breeder’s ultimate vision—to build a storm until it can unwind spectacularly, releasing all of its cultivated fury, vanishing before your eyes. Whereas with my daughters, I have to pretend they’ll live forever. The alternative is too terrible to contemplate. If there is a life after this one, I’ll be dead myself and still pretending. What the girls birthed in me was a fear worse than any feeling I had fought through as a single man.

  * * *

  —

  When I reached the shelter, the funnel was suspended between the floor and ceiling vents, looking more irritable than powerful. The anemometer reported no gain in speed, and the wind girdles showed a fairly consistent circumference. But that sound spiraling out, I’d forgotten how a roar like that can fill you up entirely. Hearing loss is part of aging, I suppose. But I hadn’t guessed you could go deaf even to a sound’s howling absence. To the absence of all pleasure in your life. Now it seemed absurd that I’d endured so many years without a storm to nurse. How had I survived the peace and quiet? My ears were swamped, until there was no longer any room for thought. I moved, and it was the sound moving me.

  Two transparent tunnels run from the shelter to the shining fence line between the birches. Cost a fortune to put them in, and then I got only a decade’s use out of them before Estelle delivered her ultimatum. It’s a joy to watch the young funnel exercise. I hit the lever that releases the doors, and the cloud burst into view, flying the length of the tunnels, blown up and back by the fans.

  Having enough pastureland to run your twisters is essential. That spaciousness, I have in abundance. Beautiful country, covered in wildflowers and yucca blooms when we get enough rain. From a plane you can see the erosion lines where the grasslands become the badlands. “So much land, Bobby,” Estelle used to say. “Why don’t you try growing something else?”

  There’s another tornado shelter that we never finished, on the other side of the house. There it sits, accusing me still, with the quiet eloquence of my father’s old jalopies rusting in the bunchgrass. (Robert, would you fix those things or sell them? Please? Estelle would plead. And I’d tell her, which I thought was a pretty good joke, I’m forming an artificial reef.) I used to insist the second shelter was at “an early stage of completion,” then it gradually became a “stalled construction”; it was a decade before I used the word “abandoned.” Now, thanks to my recent purchase, I was going to die penniless, all good intentions still waiting in the rain.

  For some reason, the sight of grass poking between the ruined planks of the foundation filled me with relief. Wind plucked at my shirt, tugging at the sleeves. In a cooperative spirit, I undid the buttons and shrugged it to the ground.

  Nobody would find me out here on my hands and knees, crawling around the periphery of the shelter to check its ventilation. Nobody would comment on my slack, hairy belly. Nobody would say a word for or against me, because nobody was watching at all.

  Around noon, the good feeling broke into articulation, and I could voice precisely what had been making me so happy. Because I’d finally done it, hadn’t I? I’d outlasted my life. The girls were grown; Estelle was gone. There was nobody left for me to hurt.

  Live long enough, and your life becomes your own to gamble with again.

  * * *

  By Friday of our third week, we were broaching a level of instability that would allow the funnel to double in strength. I was spending twelve, fourteen hours a day by her side, monitoring her growth and cooking the hot wind into her, holding my ear to the throbbing hull of the shelter. Her rising and descending wailing followed me home at night, and into my dreams. Something wonderful had happened to me, and my sleeping and waking lives were now identical, filled with singing storms.

  I had so many responsibilities at the shelter that I kept forgetting to take my medicine; one afternoon I woke up on my back, watching the real sky darkening above me. Flat, white clouds glided serenely overhead, so that for a moment I felt like I was at the bottom of a lake, staring up at a hundred floating docks.

  * * *

  —

  My old man returned from Germany at twenty-seven already scoliotic with his freight of nightmares and medals. When I was a ki
d, I hated him for spending so much time away from us. I’m not angry about this today. The same need lives in me, and I wonder at the mechanisms by which such things are inherited. Memories went darkly leafing through my dad, growths he couldn’t control. Of course he had to leave us to be with his storms. He had my ma, three midget sons wearing his face and always chanting his name, glomming on to his knees—there was no respite in the house. I imagine a tornado must have been the only ax that could level the entire Hürtgen Forest inside him—again and again, as often as necessary. When you’re so thickly sown with ghosts, it makes no sense to plug your ears against them. Those cries come from within. The solution my father hit on, and taught me young, was to raise storms loud enough to drown out all interior sound.

  I was always late for dinner. Eat without me, I’d beg my family. Outside every window, they could see our black storms feeding. Some nights we had to scream over their howling: HOW WAS SCHOOL, GIRLS? I’d grip the table with knuckles popping to avoid running right back into it. The howling was a magnet, pulling at my spine. The house was a cardboard box, and nowhere I could be for very long. Our house, I had to remind myself, because it was Estelle’s domain; I did my living outside. At night we left the windows open so that I could pretend I was amphibian, straddling the inner and the outer worlds. Dawn released me back into the lake of the sky. Springtime meant air filled to brimming with secret moisture, begging to be captured and spun into the dark wombs of my twisters. My daughters’ gnatlike little voices, I’m sorry to say, were no match for that howling.

  When I was a younger man, I liked naming the storms. Shiva, Smash-N-Grab, Jack B. Limber, Calypso the Queen. My daughters got quiet names, each one as sweet and forgettable as a sugar cube dropped into a teacup. Anna, Megan, Susan. You see how it goes for the Bambis and the Rainbows in this world; I wanted the girls, unlike my tornadoes, to travel anywhere they chose without causing a stir.

  * * *

  Six weeks after the auction, kneeling at the midpoint of the tunnels, I clocked my twister barreling overland at fifty-one miles per hour. My throat was on fire before I realized that I was screaming along with her.

  Then the bad moment came, when she blasted through the boundary and into the open air, swelling marvelously in diameter, uprooting the centenarian elm and rooster-tailing a wall of red dust. The force of her exit knocked me into a quivering heap in the dirt; I shook my head clear and stood to find the funnel moving straight for me, swallowing the distance between us like brush-fed fire.

  I regained consciousness on the far perimeter of the field, resting my head on a pillowy lump that seemed to be made of my own bruised skin. The cloud was sucking topsoil from every direction, turning a muddled brown as she spun off to the east and kicked my truck onto its side. I did not hear or see the windows shatter—without my glasses, the whole scene before me was one streaming tear.

  Had she picked a different day to escape, she’d have been dead already; but as it happened, atmospheric conditions at that moment were ideally suited to support her life. All morning, a thunderstorm had been brewing on the western horizon, moving over the dowdy spires of the grain silos. Major precipitation, cherry-sized hailstones, sporadic lightning. Warm surface winds had been pushing up from the Gulf, and the sky overhead was deep blue for miles; she was glutting on that warmth, pulling it into her whirling body. I found myself thinking, insanely, that my cloud must have realized this and planned her break accordingly.

  She was flying for the house. My hands muffed my ears, came away sticky and red. The sight didn’t bother me; it was only my blood, after all. I knew the next sight would be my house splitting apart. People report their entire lives flashing before their eyes on such occasions; I saw sticks, a stack of bills. Why didn’t I stand then, and run to save myself? But this part of me has always been the broken one. In boyhood, I remember feeling very charitably toward my fevers.

  Good luck is luck I don’t deserve, and yet this is simply what happened: the wind changed direction. At the precise instant when all seemed lost, my funnel spun one hundred eighty degrees, pivoting with an arbitrary mercy that I had to fight not to take personally as grace from on high. A rear-flank downdraft from the massing weather system might have turned her; I can offer no worthier explanation for what I saw. With the same howling serenity with which she had targeted my house, she flew back the way she had come, blowing in a clean line. The funnel seemed almost human in her retreat, retracing her steps through the gouged pasture and disappearing into the shelter, sucking the gates shut behind her.

  “Good girl.” I sighed. It felt as if a spear tip had lodged in my left side. I spit up a muddy pink phlegm and felt proud of my cloud, wondering if she’d broken my ribs.

  * * *

  —

  “I thought I was finished today, Estelle,” I spoke into the cave of the house. Sandy air settled on my gumline; I’d taken to leaving the windows and the doors open so that I could hear my storm chiming at all hours. “I thought I was finished, but look at how quickly a man can be resuscitated.”

  * * *

  “Unscathed, I wouldn’t say that,” the doctor said, frowning down at me with his expression of Ivy League constipation. “A cracked rib can easily lead to pneumonia, if you’re not careful about your breathing.”

  “Doc, if you’d seen how fast she was going, believe me, you’d know how lucky I am to be breathing at all.”

  The doctor removed his glasses, and his blue eyes were unshaded lamps. He was a new doctor, a young doctor. Very telegenic. Definitely looked the part of concerned physician. Color me fooled. Because when I told him I needed some relief, his whole face crumpled like a kite in a tree.

  “I’m going to suggest an excellent physical therapist. In the meantime, I’d make sure to keep taking all your current medications.”

  “I was sort of hoping for some painkillers, to be honest with you.” I coughed and winced. “Just a vial or two of tide-me-overs.”

  In the mirror, I watched my features twist to demo my agony. Old men are never taken seriously; we are no longer the authorities on anything, are we? Not even our pain. I resented having to perform it for a stranger, when there is nothing so genuine.

  The doctor’s mouth puckered further, the lips tugging into a little heart, and I wondered why his pen wasn’t moving.

  “Tide-me-overs. I see.” He placed the pen on the desk. “What exactly did you have in mind?”

  His shining eyes didn’t fool me now.

  “Do I look like a drug dealer, Doctor?”

  The doctor smiled at that. “Do I?”

  It got so quiet I could almost hear the gavel rapping inside him.

  “Can I be honest with you, Mr. Wurman? You look like a man who’s falling on hard times. And I promise you, this is not the cushion you want to land on.”

  * * *

  Driving home from the doctor’s with one hand splinting my ribs, I found myself wondering how Suzie was doing. I don’t have a favorite daughter, but Suzie is the one I worry about the most at night. During her senior year in high school, I rode her to Lincoln every Friday for her appointments with a great blur of healers, including Dr. Barbara, the “osteopath,” a word that made Estelle and me picture a feathery dinosaur. None of them helped, I guess because Suzie couldn’t tell us what had broken. Her spirit, or her heart, or possibly something even more delicate and too fast moving to name, like those polar clouds that transform while you watch them. The X-rays revealed only minor fractures. But I broke it, whatever it was—no mystery there. On that count, we were all in agreement. Two decades later, my guilt is alive and well. For a parent, there is no recovering from such knowledge.

  She was sucked into the heart of the storm, spun above the shelter, dropped almost a quarter mile away. The newspapers nicknamed her “Dorothy,” and TV cameras swarmed our farm. We felt misused by them. They made her eyeball fodder, filler between commercials. Flowers
and cards poured in for about a week, and then months of sidelong glances. To this day, on Suzie’s rare visits, folks will whistle at her as if she were up on a parade float—“Hey, Dorothy!”—blind or indifferent to her wincing.

  Afterward, Suzie was skittish around me. Whenever I tried to touch her, she gasped as if scalded. She couldn’t even get to anger, and I worried about that at night. Some natural progression had stalled out inside my daughter, and I knew what that felt like, one forlorn note repeating itself, your song in a rut.

  The deal we struck was this: Estelle wouldn’t leave me, but I had to do something else. No more howlers in the shelter. I begged her not to take the girls from me. She said she planned to do just that, unless I quit. I conceded, thinking I wouldn’t last a month. How could I live without that roaring? Nobody would disagree that raising storms is a poor choice of employment for a father of three children. The simple fact was that I didn’t know how to do anything else.

  “So learn,” my smart wife suggested.

  I got a job at a friend’s wind farm, cash-cropping zephyrs. It was hackwork, the semi-luminous. I hated the minutes of my life. I wanted to do what I always had done, better than it had ever been done. I wanted to put my head in an oven. But I kept my promise, and collected my checks, and raised the tame weather. And eventually, I retired.

  Suzie is thirty-seven now, a paralegal, and she says her day-to-day is very full. But our daughter, “miraculously uninjured,” never really recovered. She started dressing like she had something to hide, in black clothes that were slouchy and ugly, slack at the neck. Even the tailored shirts her mother bought her gave up hope on her hunched body, lost their shape. The skittishness became a permanent trait, sunk deep—though ultimately she did get to anger, a special rage that seems to ignite only in my presence.