Orange World and Other Stories

by Karen Russell

  “What did it feel like, to fly?” strangers would ask my daughter for years afterward. What Suzie said to these people, I have always felt to be a fine distillation of her character: “I won’t remember that.” Sometimes her inquisitors corrected her, assuming they’d heard wrong: “You can’t?” Then she’d repeat herself without further explanation: “I won’t.”

  She was unconscious when I got to her, so she couldn’t know that I raced across the pasture to her side. When I set my palm to her cheek, she spasmed, her whole body jerking in the dust. I cried out with her. When people ask, “Who found you out there?” she knows to answer, “My father.” But she doesn’t remember that I gathered her into my arms and held her.

  It was my fault, of course, that the twister got loose. I remembered plenty. And I was helpless against an older memory that found me there, kneeling beside my daughter: the time I’d seen a fish dropped by a Swainson’s hawk, thrashing on its long fall through the sky and then clapping itself like one white palm against the rocks.

  Nothing shattered for me in those moments while I cradled Suzie and rushed for the house; quite the contrary, all the pieces of my life fused into a mirror, spun at last by this event into a glassy coherence, and I saw, I understood, that in fact I had always been the greatest danger to my family. I was the apex predator. Duly noted. I made the revision. Once the girls made it to adulthood, I thought, I could relax. Guiltily, I began to dream of the day when I’d be alone, my shadow roaming the land, unhindered by the fear of hurting anybody.

  One by one they blew off—first Estelle, then each of the girls in turn. Today my daughters are far away, rooted in new lives, and safe from me.

  * * *

  —

  After my injury, I more or less gave up driving into town. I couldn’t move fast enough to sidestep the staring people. Their cold glances turned me into Bambi on the ice, slipping and sliding all over. Who can price-shop for soup amid that kind of judgment? I bought about a month’s supply of milk and cereal, eggs and canned chili, hamburger meat, buy-one-get-one frozen pizzas. A head of lettuce and some freckly bananas as an afterthought, because the doctor had begged me to eat foods with minerals, rich in whatever.

  Wes Jeter netted me on my way out the door. His struggle to smile was almost comical—how upset he looked as he grabbed my free hand, pumped!

  “I assume you made out better than the cloud.”

  I grinned in his direction. “We both survived. I got her back into the shelter. Tell you what, Wes, it was a goddamn miracle. She’s there now, fattening up on the hoses. Wind speeds of fifty-five this morning.”

  “Well, you need to put it down, Robert.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Robert, you look…unwell.”

  “Unwell?” I laughed. People were mincing words for me now, making me a word puree. As if I didn’t have the teeth to bite into the apple.

  “I ran into Lemon Guyron a few weeks back. He told me what you bid—”

  To my surprise, his eyes began to water.

  “I don’t know what your endgame is here, but, friend—”

  “Wes,” I said, “I have not felt so alive in years.”

  * * *

  Here’s how the fury forms:

  Towering supercells can reach seventy thousand feet into the atmosphere. These are the storms that breed tornadoes in nature. Countervailing winds roll air into a moving tube. (The “corpus” of the storm, some call this. Though a storm, of course, is bodiless.) Sun-warmed air near the ground begins to rise, updrafts that push into the center of the horizontal vector, causing it to bulge. A spectral mountain develops in the sky, energy sheeting down either side. Condensation releases heat, driving the updrafts higher. Two vortices are born; the weak twin dies; the survivor becomes the heart of a new system, the mesocyclone. A funnel descends, tightens, inhales more of that warm surface air, and accelerates its rotation. When that swirling horn makes contact with the ground, it’s officially a tornado.

  What kills a tornado? Theories vary. Here’s what I’ve observed firsthand: Eventually, the cold outflow of the downdrafts knuckles around the warm inflow, snuffing the tension that fuels its rotation, that keeps the chaos bounded and mobile. As the rotation slows, the funnel disintegrates. Out like a lamb. A loose wisp, swallowed back into the parent storm.

  Black heaven spiraling like a celestial drill bit—this is what you likely know of tornadoes from the movies. What you may not know is that there have been several reported cases in which a hand-raised twister has gotten loose, jumped a fence, and ascended toward a passing supercell. Spiraling up, not down, and fusing to the placental, moisture-rich belly of the wild storm. The farmer’s funnel becomes part of a jaw-dropping wall of cloud.

  To attempt to engineer that kind of miracle by, say, failing to bar the doors of your shelter would be an unspeakably dangerous and selfish act; and whenever rumors circulated around the sale barn of a rogue breeder who’d done just that, I sputtered my reproof along with Lemon and the rest. But inside, I was lit by wonder: suppose you could do it once and be guaranteed no casualties, no catastrophes. Imagine watching the cloud you’d raised embraced by the cumulonimbus, bridging this earth’s surface and the heavens. What could be more gratifying to a tornado farmer than standing witness to such an ascension? Can you see it? I can, but I’ve had a lifetime to practice.

  * * *

  I can tolerate cities, the crowds and the sounds of cities, but city people often get deeply spooked when they visit our sandy prairie. They call it empty, which isn’t true at all, but an error of perception that must result from the absence of tall buildings, groaning subways, or any clustered trees to wall off sight lines. A vast presence comes swarming at you overland, waving and yellow, airy and blue. A radial horizon. I did fine in New York, where I spent three days when my middle girl got married. I didn’t spook. I didn’t complain about wading shin deep through trash bags in Times Square or the festival of elbows. You add stuff in, and I can manage; you take stuff out, and a city person is undone.

  On their less and less frequent stopovers, the girls all refer to it now—“the emptiness.” Anna spent two days here in November and complained the whole while. She could no longer hear the land exhaling all around her. That saddened me; I didn’t know a child I’d raised could turn so numb. Ask the crowded stars if they find this country empty. Ask the howling guest behind our house.

  I’m an inland man, but I’ve always loved the dial tone, the salty wash of sound that floods into your ear, like the ocean, I imagine, so round and unstoppable that it rinses your memory clean, too, until eventually you forget that you are listening to anything at all. Midnight is the best time to apply this treatment to your ear. You lift the phone, call no one. It works on me the way the TV did back when the house was full. In the fallow years, after giving up the storms, I needed noise piped into my skull.

  The phone is a yellow rotary, a perfectly functional piece of equipment that slyly became an antique on our wall. I hate the newer models, which look like plastic antlers. I don’t have that little window that tells you the name of the intruder, the caller ID—which was never a problem when no one called. But since I’d quit town, the phone had started ringing daily, then hourly, sometimes every ten minutes, the sound fireworking through the kitchen until the tape would finally kick on and transmit one of three shrilly familiar voices:

  “I just called Amy at the pharmacy, she says you’re not picking up your medicine…”

  “So you’re at it again. I cannot fucking believe this…”

  “I am not bluffing, Dad, I will board a plane tonight if you don’t answer…”

  “Dad, Daddy, pick up, we’re all worried…”

  I considered picking up and telling them they should have been worried a lot earlier, because as it turned out I’d been depressed for years, and only now was I coming out of it. But I knew
that I could, and should, conserve my energy. Save my breath, save my strength. Everything I had on reserve was for my cloud; nobody would suffer for want of my presence except for her.

  My daughters seem to hold me accountable for some miserable early life that is entirely their fiction, as adult women. “We were tornado farmers in Nebraska,” I’ve heard them say, “we had no childhood.” I’m not sure what the motivation is there. Maybe they’re ashamed at how little they actually did suffer, relative to Estelle and me and folks of our generation. Whatever their reasons, our girls have recast their carefree youth into some campfire tale to entertain their city friends, or to chastise me for events long past. I feel outside of every story that they tell about me. “But you were always outside,” the middle one, Megan, likes to snap. “Always up, up, and away. We had to scream to get your attention.”

  Against that last accusation, I won’t defend myself. But they forget that I had to scream over the storms, too, at the top of my lungs. And still, they never understood me, did they?

  Anna and Megan left five messages apiece. Suzie only called once, on a Tuesday, or a Wednesday or a Thursday or a Sunday—I’ll admit I’d lost track—but it was Suzie who finally baited me into answering. I won’t let her voice languish inside the machine. I picked up, thinking of the fish’s belly on the rocks. Before I could get the receiver to my ear, she was already laying into me:

  “Are you insane, Dad?”

  “I taught you better manners than that. Want to start with ‘hello’?”

  “Wes called. He says you’re driving without a windshield. And he tells us you bought a tornado, with what money I don’t know…”

  After a moment, I was almost relieved. Old Wes. What a meddlesome prick. He must have really done some detective work, to hunt up Suzie’s New York number. Farewell, Wes. One less person to worry about.

  “Wes loves you, Dad. He was worried about you.”

  I could hear her breathing through her mouth, which reminded me that it had been forty minutes since I’d checked my cloud’s precipitation levels.

  “I gotta go, girl.”

  “Wes loves you. He loves you. Do you not understand that?”

  For a swimmy second, I forgot which daughter I was talking to. It was Suzie, the angry one. Though lately, that was hardly a distinction.

  “Megan says you haven’t been making your insurance payments.”

  “How the hell would Megan know that?”

  A great pain fanned out behind my eyeballs, and I felt suddenly so very tired.

  “Nobody can get hurt this time. Nobody lives out this way. And not that it’s any of your business, but the windshield isn’t gone, it’s just a little broken.”

  “Can you see through it?”

  “I know the roads.”

  “What you’re doing is selfish, Dad.”

  “I don’t see how my storm affects anybody but me. But if you want to be upset, that’s your choice. This is America.”

  “America, Home of the Free. Why didn’t I think of that? Okay, I choose not to care whether you live or die.”

  Then we were both exhaling into the receiver. I listened to our breaths collide over the line, my daughter’s and mine.

  “Goodbye, honey.”

  “Your friend loves you, okay? That’s why he called.”

  My mind bloated on a single note for a full minute, a pure, consoling sound, before I realized that I’d hung up on her.

  I considered calling Wes, to chew his ass out, but the simpler solution, in the end, was to unplug the phone.

  * * *

  Most of the guys I came up with are gone. Who knew that an exit to that hall of mirrors existed? Once, when I was a boy, I ran away from my family. Down the boardwalk, under the pop-eyed red and yellow lights of the carnival, toward the quiet rectangle that waited at the blue edge of the night. I reached that place, and instantly regretted it. The Ferris wheel loomed behind me, a blind monster’s eye, and I could hear only the wind sharpening itself against my scalp. I ran too far, didn’t I? Out of sight, out of mind. One by one they died, my mother, my father, my brothers, my bosses, my rivals, my storms, my wife, and turned my world into an afterlife. You might discover yourself here one night, and you can tell me then if you find invisibility to be a blessing or a curse.

  You know, I have always hated that expression, “a blessing or a curse.” As if anything in life were so neatly divisible. Let’s try this: a freedom, or something worse.

  * * *

  The morning sky was clear and the mercury low, but I knew on waking that rain was coming; and within fifteen minutes the thunderheads rolled in. I switched on the portable to the sirens screaming—a tornado watch, the first of spring: “At ten twenty-eight a.m., National Weather Service Doppler radar detected a severe thunderstorm capable of producing a tornado near Gosper County, Nebraska…” And then the patter of a hundred fingers against the kitchen ceiling, when I’d expected the hiss of rainfall. I slid up the sash and looked down to what remained of the wind chimes, scattered about the porch like shell casings, and then over to the shelter, which seemed to convulse before my eyes, the locking bars spinning in their cylinders and the domed roof vibrating; It will hold, I thought, just as the steel walls buckled and my twister smashed out. Sucking surface air, she tore a black furrow through the pasture, and within seconds of hitting the atmosphere her pearly color began to mutate as she absorbed the stain of whatever tumbled through her—now she was woodsmoke, now pollen, now gravel, now red dirt.

  Crossing into the far meadow, the funnel bloomed and vaulted skyward, reaching into that vast electric field that rolls without boundaries over the West; and as she made contact she started to lift off the ground, howling up and up like a flying top, bumping at the base of the storm. The anvil was already a mile in diameter, easy. The whole purplish wound pushed northeast, self-cauterizing with lightning.

  I did a limping sprint to the truck, dropped my keys twice before getting them into the ignition, then watched the needle jump by ten-mile increments as I raced to catch her. A half mile from the shelter, she purled the barbed fencing that separated my farm from Yuri Henao’s and began to drill across his flowering gardens. Yuri is a middle-aged man who breeds gentle sun-showers in horseshoe-shaped convection pods, and the guilt I feel today about the devastation to his land was not audible to me then, nor was any real concern for his safety—all swallowed by the high whine of my joy.

  As forked light raked the eastern prairie, I tracked the spinning cloud—bouncing down the highway, defining her trajectory, she seemed predatory now, certain of her quarry. She reeled in the galvanic atmosphere, doubling in size while the portable prattled on: “The National Weather Service has issued a tornado watch for Gosper County. A thunderstorm capable of producing a tornado was located over the town of Elwood, moving south at fifty miles per hour. Residents are advised to take caution and begin necessary preparations—”

  Next came the infinite moment. Never in my lifetime had I witnessed anything like it.

  Two hundred yards ahead of me, the funnel shot across the road, picking up speed and color, turning darker and darker, and then simply levitating. I braked hard, and the truck fishtailed, settling sideways in the empty lane. My hands cramped on the wheel, and muscles I’d forgotten for decades stiffened as my eyes lifted with her: The gust front could snuff the connection. The downdraft—

  All at once, my mind was serene. Beyond the dusky whirl of my twister, the black mass of the supercell rose, forty thousand feet at least, erasing the horizon, and she went spiraling into its heart. Within seconds, they were one. Wherever the mesocyclone touched down next, nobody would guess that a part of it had been reared on Coriolis Farms; they’d mistake it for an Act of God.

  The anvil took on the aspect of a rotting orange, the bruised clouds pierced everywhere by citrus reds and golds. I wasn’t thinking t
hen that what I had just done was the equivalent of loading a bullet into a gun. I wasn’t thinking at all. My thoughts had merged with the sirens on the radio, as the reports escalated in urgency: The storm now spanned two miles. Winds one hundred forty, one hundred fifty, climbing still. And then the watch was over; the tornado had materialized.

  “Flying debris will be life-threatening to those caught out. Mobile homes could be lifted from their foundations, damaged or destroyed. Residents are strongly advised to seek secure shelter immediately—”

  I felt no fear, no remorse, my senses rippling out like the wind through the truck cab. My body was folded into the driver’s seat, but my mind was nowhere at all, floating along the spiderwebbed windshield and up the ladder of my cloud. It had become a tornado, a real tornado. At this distance, perhaps three hundred yards off, it looked like a landlocked tsunami, a gray wave rearing up and back, dancing foamily around the empty highway. Belatedly, I felt the prickle of conscience, but a spiral check showed only the bucking prairie and miles of hard rain. Thank God. It would die out, I thought, before it could break even one window. Or it would kill only me.

  To my right and left were tractor-access roads, quickly turning to mud. If I wanted to run, I’d have to make a U-turn. I cut the engine, pulled the keys from the ignition, settled in. Rodeo of two. I’d only ever wanted to know what my cloud could become.

  The vortex loomed before me—a colossal door careening on screaming hinges. Between blinks it seemed to redouble in power, rocketing overland, belted together by heat. I saw, quite clearly, my truck smashed against the maw of a concrete culvert, my body lying in the field beyond, pale as an armadillo. Waiting like a shed skin to be discovered, photographed by the coroner. Which was perfectly fine by me; I was nothing, or I was breath absorbed into the spinning wind. I would follow my cloud into the storm’s vacant core. I would want for nothing, feel nothing. I would be spun apart. This mind of mine, already guttering, clocked its last memory: my old man pumping air into a dark chamber beneath the moon.