Strange Weather

by Joe Hill

  I came by to see her the next afternoon, and Larry answered the door in a baggy MEXICO! T-shirt and his boxers, his silver hair standing up on one side of his head. When I asked if I could help with Shelly, his face shriveled and his chin began to quake.

  “Hector took her away! He took her while I was asleep!”

  “Dad!” shouted a voice from somewhere behind him. “Dad, who are you talking to?”

  Larry ignored him and came down the step, into the light. “What must you thingg of me? I let Hector take her away. I signed all the papers. I did as I was tolt because I was tired and she was too much trouble. Do you believe she would’ve ever given me up?” And he took me in his arms and began to sob.

  “Dad!” Hector shouted again, coming to the door.

  There he was: the bodybuilder and navy boy, proud owner of a mint ’82 Trans Am straight out of Knight Rider, the son I only sometimes remembered that Shelly and Larry had. The kid who made a party trick of picking up a chair one-handed while his mother sat in it.

  He had put on a spare tire of fat, and the ink on his Sailor Jerry tattoo had begun to blur and fade. His fashion sense hadn’t matured in the years he’d been away and might best be described as Richard Simmons chic. He wore a bright red sweatband to hold his frizzy hair out of his eyes and a tank top with a pirate on it. He looked embarrassed.

  “Jesus, Dad. Come on. You’re gonna make the kid feel awful. It isn’t like you sent her to the pound. You can see her every day. We both can! It was best for her. You’re putting yourself inna early grave chasing after her. You think that’s what she’d want? Come on. C’mon now.” He put an enormous arm over his dad’s shoulder and gently peeled Larry off me. As he turned his father back into the house, he flashed a chagrined smile and said, “Come on in, bucko. I just made date cookies.” When he called me “bucko,” I shivered.

  Shelly had been admitted to a place called Belliver House. Hector had driven her there that morning, while his father was napping. It wasn’t the Four Seasons, but she’d get her pills on time and wouldn’t be digging in a Dairy Queen dumpster for edibles. Hector said his father had been crying ever since. He told me this after Larry Beukes had shuffled back to bed, where he’d spent almost the entire day. By then Hector and I were sitting in front of The People’s Court with tea and warm date cookies, their insides sweet and gluey, bits of walnut in them to give a little crunch.

  Hector leaned forward over his plate to speak to me in a confidential tone that was entirely unnecessary, since we were all alone. “I used to be kinda jealous of you, you know. The way my mom talked about you. The way you did everything right. Good grades. Never talking back. I’d call Ma from Tokyo to tell her I just ate sushi with a relative of the emperor, and she’d say, ‘Oh, great. By the way, bucko just invented a working nuclear reactor out of spare Legos and rubber bands.’” He shook his head, grinning beneath his Tom Selleck mustache. “She was right about you, though. You were every bit the stand-up kid she said you were. If not for you, I don’t know how my dad would’ve managed the last year and a half. And Ma . . . back before it all slipped away from her, you gave her a reason to get up every morning. You made her laugh. You made her a lot happier’n I ever did, I guess.”

  I was mortified. I didn’t know what to say. I fixed my gaze on the TV, and with my mouth half full I said, “Great cookies. Just like your mom used to make ’em.”

  He nodded wearily. “Yeah. I found the recipe in one of her notebooks. You know what she called ’em?”

  “Date cookies?”

  “Mike’s Favorite,” he said.

  13

  I WENT TO SEE HER now and then over the next couple years. Sometimes I went with Larry, sometimes with Hector, who’d moved to San Francisco to be closer to his parents. Later I drove myself.

  The first year or so, she was always glad to see me, even if she thought I was the TV repairman. But by the time I was a senior in high school, she no longer acknowledged me when I visited—or anyone else. She sat in front of the TV in the overcrowded common room, a sunlit space that smelled of urine and old people and dust, a place with dirty tile floors and fraying secondhand furniture. Her head lolled forward on her neck, the folds of her chin sunk into her chest. Sometimes she would whisper to herself, “Next channel, next, next, next.” She got very excited whenever someone changed the channel, would bob up and down in her seat for a couple moments before settling back into her melted slouch.

  Maybe a month before I left for MIT, I drove into San Francisco for a meeting with the home-brew computer hobbyists, and on the way back I got off the interstate two exits early and swung by Belliver to look in on Shelly. She wasn’t in her room, and the nurse at the desk couldn’t tell me where to find her if she wasn’t in front of the TV. I discovered her sitting in a wheelchair by some vending machines in a side hallway, down the corridor from her bedroom, unattended and forgotten.

  It had been a while since Shelly even seemed to notice me, let alone recognize me. But when I knelt next to her, something, some dim awareness, brightened in those green eyes of hers that had gone as soft and faded as sea glass.

  “Bucko,” she whispered. Her gaze shifted away and came back again. “Hate this. Wish. I could forget. How to breathe.” And then that faint, almost amused light flickered in her eyes. “Hey. What’d you do with that camera? Wouldn’t you like to take my picture? Something to remember your best girl by?”

  My whole back went as goose-bumpy and cold as if someone had dumped a bucket of ice water on me. I leapt away from her, then went around behind her and grabbed the handles of her chair and rolled her out into the hall, rumbled her briskly on to the lobby. I didn’t want to know what she meant. I didn’t want to think about it.

  I cornered the nurse behind the desk and made ugly noises at her. I said I wanted to know who had left my mother by a fucking vending machine and how long she’d been there and how much longer she would have been there if I hadn’t randomly stopped by. When I spoke of her as my mother, I had no sense that this was in any way a lie. And it felt good to be angry. It was a sorry second to being loved, but it was better than nothing.

  I yelled until the nurse was flushed and looked stricken and shamed. It satisfied me to see her dab at her eyes with a tissue, to see the way her hands shook when she picked up the phone to call her supervisor. And while I vented, Shelly sat in her wheelchair, head lolling on her chest, as forgotten and invisible as she’d been by the vending machines.

  How easily we forget.

  14

  THAT NIGHT A HOT WIND—it was like air blowing from an open furnace—tore through Cupertino, and thunder banged, but no rain fell. When I went out to my car in the morning, I found a dead bird on the hood. The gale had flung a sparrow into the windshield hard enough to snap its neck.

  15

  MY DAD ASKED IF I planned to visit Shelly before I left for Massachusetts.

  I said I thought I would.

  16

  THE SOLARID WAS IN A box in my bedroom closet, along with the photo album of Shelly’s thoughts and a manila envelope containing the Phoenician’s memories. What—did you think I threw any of that away? That I could’ve thrown any of it away?

  Once, a few weeks after I saw the last of the Phoenician, I got his not-a-camera down from the top shelf in my closet and brought it to the garage. Just touching it made me nervous. I remembered how when Frodo put on the Ring, he became visible to Sauron’s infected red eye, and I was afraid that merely by coming in contact with the Solarid I might somehow summon the Phoenician back. Hey, fatso. Remember me? Yeah? You do? Not for long.

  But in the end, after turning it over and over in my hands, I put it back in the closet. I never did anything with it. I didn’t take it apart. I couldn’t see how to. There were no seams, no places where the plastic parts joined together. It was, impossibly, all of one piece. Perhaps if I took a picture, I might’ve learned something more, but I didn’t dare. No, I shoved it back in the closet and then hid it behind a b
ox of wires and circuit boards. After a month or two, I was sometimes even able to go fifteen minutes without thinking about it.

  The weekend before I was set to depart for Boston—my dad and I were flying there together—I opened the closet and went looking for it. A part of me didn’t expect it to be there, had almost come to believe that the Phoenician was someone I’d dreamed up in a day of fever and emotional distress, years earlier. But the Solarid was there, just as I remembered it. Its blank blind glass eye stared down at me from the top shelf, a mechanical cyclops.

  I set it gently in the backseat of my Honda Civic, so I wouldn’t have to look at it while I drove to Belliver House. Just staring at it felt dangerous. Like it might suddenly, vengefully go off and wipe my mind, to punish me for letting it gather dust for four years.

  Shelly was in her bedroom, a compartment just a little larger than a prison cell. I knew that Hector and Larry had been by to see her a few hours before—they always dropped in on Saturday morning. I had timed my own visit to fall shortly after theirs, so they would have had a last chance to be with her.

  I found her in her wheelchair, turned to face the window. How I wish she’d had something beautiful to contemplate. A green park of oaks, a place with a fountain and benches and children. But her room looked out on a sun-baked parking lot and a pair of dumpsters.

  She had her Walkman in her lap, a pair of headphones on her head. Hector always put her headphones on when he left, so she could listen to the soundtrack of Stand by Me—the songs she and Larry had danced to when he was new in the country and she was just out of high school.

  The music was long over, though, and she was just sitting there, her head twitching on her neck and spit hanging off her chin, sitting in a diaper that needed changing. I could smell it. Oh, the dignity of the silver years.

  I slipped off her headphones and eased the chair around to face the bed. I sat on the mattress across from her, so our knees were almost touching.

  “Birthday,” Shelly said. She looked at me briefly, looked away. “Birthday. Whose birthday?”

  “Yours,” I said. “It’s your birthday, Shelly. Can I take your picture? Can I take some pictures of the birthday girl? And then—then we’ll blow out the candles. We’ll make a wish together and blow them all out.”

  Her gaze snapped back to me, and there was suddenly an almost avian interest in her eyes. “Picture? Oh. Okay. Bucko.”

  I took her picture. The flash flashed. And again.

  And again. And again.

  Pictures fell to the floor and developed: Shelly’s bent grandmother drawing a pan of date cookies from the oven, a cigarette poked in one corner of her mouth; a black-and-white TV set, children wearing Mickey Mouse ears; the name Beukes written in blurred black ink on a raised pink palm above a phone number; a fat baby with his fists raised in the air and jam smeared on his chin, Hector’s hair already a mess of fizzy curls.

  I shot a little more than thirty pictures, but the last three didn’t develop, which is how I knew I was done. They were gray, toxic blanks, the color of thunderheads.

  By the time I rose, I was crying, silently and furiously, a coppery taste in my mouth. Shelly slumped forward, her eyes open but seeing nothing. Her breathing was congested, hitching. Her lips were pursed—as if she were about to blow out the candles on her birthday cake.

  I kissed her forehead, breathing deep the fragrance of the room where she’d spent the last years of her life: dust, feces, rust, neglect. If I was wretched in that moment, it was not because I’d pointed the camera at her—but because I’d waited so long to do it.

  17

  HECTOR CALLED THE NEXT DAY to let me know she had passed away at two in the morning. I didn’t care what the cause of death was and didn’t ask, but he told me anyway.

  “Her lungs just quit,” he said. “Like her whole body suddenly forgot how to breathe.”

  18

  AFTER I HUNG UP THE phone, I sat in the kitchen listening to the clock on the oven tick-tick-tick. It was a very still morning, very hot. My dad was out, had the A.M. shift then.

  I went into my bedroom and got the Solarid. I wasn’t scared to pick it up now. I carried it outside and put it down in the driveway, behind the front driver’s-side tire of my Civic.

  When I backed over it, I heard it shatter with a plasticky crunch. I put the Civic into park and got out to have a look.

  When I saw it, though, in the driveway, my heart leapt like a bird caught in a gale, thrown helplessly into the hard wall of my ribs. The case had been smashed into big, glossy splinters. But there was no machinery within. No gears, no ribbons, no electronics of any kind. Instead it was filled with something that looked like tar, a thick gallon of black soup—a soup with an eye in it, a great yellow eye with a slit pupil at the center. A great blackberry-colored glob of Panama Thrill with an eyeball in it. As that tarry crap spread out in a puddle, I swear that single eye rolled to look at me. I wanted to scream. If I’d had enough air in my lungs, I would’ve.

  As I watched, though, the black liquid began to harden, rapidly turning silvery and pale. It stiffened at the edges, crinkling up, fossilizing. The shiny hardness spread inward, reaching that yellow eye at last and freezing it solid.

  When I picked it up, the whole black splash had become a blob of dull, lightweight steel, a little smaller than a manhole cover, and about as thin as a dinner plate. It smelled like lightning, like hail, like dead birds.

  I held it for only a moment. That was all I could stand. No sooner had I picked it up than my head began to fill with hiss and static and lunatic whispering. My skull became an AM tuner dialing in a distant station: not Radio Adulthood but Radio Madness. A voice that was ancient when Cyrus the Great crushed the Phoenician people under his heel whispered, Michael, O Michael, melt me down and build. Build one of your thinking machines. Build a com-puh-ter, Michael, and I will teach you everything you want to know. I will answer every question, Michael, I will solve every riddle I will make you rich I will make women want to fuck you I will—

  I flung it away with a kind of revulsion.

  The next time I picked it up, I used tongs to slide it into a garbage bag.

  Later that afternoon I drove to the ocean and threw the fucking thing in.

  19

  HA-HA. SURE I DID.

  20

  I DID USE TONGS TO handle it, and I did put it in a garbage bag. But I didn’t throw it into the ocean—I threw it into the back of my closet, where I had kept the Solarid for so many years.

  That fall my mother flew to America to meet my father and me in Cambridge and see me installed at MIT. I had not set eyes upon her for over a year and was surprised to discover that her mouse-colored hair had gone completely silver and that she had taken to wearing rimless bifocals. We had a meal together as a family at Mr. Bartley’s Gourmet Burgers on Mass Avenue, one of only a few meals I can recall us sharing together. My mother ordered shoestring onion rings and just picked at them.

  “What are you looking forward to the most?” my father asked me.

  My mom answered for me. “I imagine he’s glad not to have to hide it anymore.”

  “Hide what?” I asked.

  She pushed her shoestring onions away. “What he can do. Once you’re in a place that lets you be your fullest self . . . well, you never want to leave.”

  I have no memory of her ever saying she loved me, although she did give me a stiff hug around the neck at the airport and reminded me that contraception was my responsibility, not the responsibility of my future dates. She was killed in June of 1993 by members of the Lord’s Resistance Army, on a mountain road along the northwestern border of the Congo. She died with her French lover, the man with whom she had lived, it turned out, for most of a decade. Her death made the New York Times.

  My father absorbed the news in the same way he’d responded to the space shuttle Challenger disaster—gravely, but with no great sign of personal grief. I could not tell you if they ever loved each other or what l
ed them to make a baby together. That is a mystery greater than anything concerning Shelly Beukes and the Phoenician. I will say that as far as I know, my father had no woman in his life in all the years when they were apart, first when they were separated by Africa and later when they were divided by her death.

  And he read her books. Every one. He kept them on the shelf right below the photo albums.

  My father lived to see me graduate from MIT and return to the West Coast to pursue my master’s (and then my Ph.D.) at Caltech. He died the week before I turned twenty-two. A live subtransmission line let go on a wet and windy night and caught him across the back where he stood at the side of the repair van, collecting his toolbox. He was nailed with 138 kilovolts.

  I went into the twenty-first century alone, an angry orphan who resented it whenever people my age bitched about their parents (“My mom is pissed because I don’t want to study law,” “My dad fell asleep at my graduation”—blah, blah, blah). But then I also resented people who didn’t complain about their parents but spoke of them with affection (“My mom says she doesn’t care what I do as long as I’m happy,” “My dad still calls me Little Trooper”—blah, blah, blah).

  There is no system of measurement that can adequately quantify how much resentment I carried in my heart when I was young and lonely. My sense of personal grievance ate me like cancer, hollowed me out, left me gaunt and wasted. When I set off for MIT at eighteen, I weighed 330 pounds. Six years later I was a buck-seventy. It wasn’t exercise. It was fury. Resentment is a form of starvation. Resentment is the hunger strike of the soul.

  I spent most of a musty, stultifying April vacation clearing out the house in Cupertino, boxing up clothes and chipped dinner plates to bring to Goodwill, delivering books to the library. That spring the pollen was heavy, coating the windows with a bright yellow haze. Anyone who had come into the house would’ve found me with tears dripping off the end of my nose and assumed it was grief when really it was allergies. Packing up the house where I’d lived out my entire childhood was a surprisingly dispassionate business. With our generic furniture sets and our inoffensive striped wallpaper, we had left almost no mark on the place at all.