THE GAPS IN THE STORM

 (Published in Short Story Journal,” 2001)

                This is no simple winter storm, it’s a full-blown blizzard, heavy snow, gusts to 60 miles per hour.  The temperature is dropping dangerously.  We scrape frost from the window and watch patches of whiteness obscure the city for long moments, tiny ice crystals, thicker than fog, driven to lethal force by an Alberta clipper.  It’s death to be caught outside in such weather.

            When the winds subside briefly, bits of the city peer through, snapshots in white and gray, here the flat geometry of a building, there the dark and ravaged branches of a tree, occasionally the headlights of a car as it struggles along nearly impassable streets.  Then another blast sweeps across our vision, and everything is lost.

            Although we can’t leave the restaurant, we seem less trapped here than suspended in time.  The four of us have converged on the Kitchen, our custom on Saturday afternoons, to discuss ideas introduced to us in college and still important now that the classes are over.  The rest of the week we are a CPA, an assistant manager at a video store, an insurance salesman, and a security guard, all working hard at our jobs.  But on this day we think of ourselves, almost, as one, four aspects of a single entity.  Here we have no ambitions, no pressure to meet quotas or deadlines, no angry clients, no spousal obligations, no cellphones.  Here we gather to talk, to wonder, to dream.

            The snowstorm has been predicted for a week, but we came anyway, not expecting it to intensify to such ferocity so quickly.  We thought we had time—and now we do, for we must stay, the four of us, the waitress, and the cook, until the storm whips its fury northeastward and the plows can dig us out.  That may be hours, perhaps a day.

            “Beauty is but a flower,” one of us challenges, “which wrinkles will devour.”

            “Brightness falls from the air,” another answers and in unison with the first, “Queens have died young and fair.  Dust hath clos’d Helen’s eye.  I am sick, I must die.”

            We all chirp in, “Lord have mercy on us.”

            The waitress, whose name is Jodie, knows us well enough to expect poetry.  “I hate Shakespeare,” she says.

            “Not Shakespeare,” we say, “but same era.  Thomas Nashe.”

            “What's this one called?” she sighs.

            “Summer’s Last Will and Testament.”

            “Oh,” she says, and we all glance out the window.  “Can I get you anything, coffee, hot chocolate?”

            “A flagon of ale, wench,” one of us says, “and roast pigeon.”

            Had the speaker not been female Jodie might have been offended, or at least pretended to be.  “This ain’t no tavern, milady, and we’re out of pigeon.”

            “No pigeon?” we cry.  “Scandalous!”

            At this point our conversation could degenerate into ribaldry, it’s happened before, jesting with fake British accents in what we imagine to be a proper Elizabethan manner.  This is not inappropriate on our winter’s day.  We have only to look outside.  Any time or place could lurk behind that curtain of white.  We needn’t be limited to now: who’s to say during our next respite, when a gap appears in the crystal mist, that the concrete geometry won’t give way to stone spires, that the headlights won’t become lanterns, that the transportation won’t whinny and neigh?  Perhaps a weary traveler, coming in from the cold, will announce, “Babington has gone to the gallows.”  Perhaps we will raise our glasses and toast the Queen, or lament the plot that failed and the poor man who had to die for that failure.  Either way we will discuss it.

            “Babington was a dupe,” one of us will say.

            “In a nonexistent plot,” another agrees.  “There was never any real threat from the Catholics.  The whole thing was manufactured by the government, the secret letters, the conspirators, all of it.  They created a plot just so they could crush it and frighten anyone who might be planning to rebel.  Someone had to die, and Babington was just stupid enough to let them use his name.”

            “You question the Queen’s methods?” the traveler demands, drawing his dagger.  “Do you doubt her wisdom?  Traitors doubt.  Subjects of the Crown, we who uphold the true faith, do not.”

            We look down, not wishing for trouble.  “No, sir, you mistake our meaning.  We simply regret that the affair had to end like this.  Babington was so young.  Was he drawn and quartered?”

            “That is the penalty for treason,” he says, reluctantly sheathing his blade, “and rightly so.  Tell the owner of this establishment that he should take care what kind of people he serves—he would not wish to become embroiled in matters of state, as Babington has learned to his sorrow.”  He glares at the four of us with contempt.  “Myself, I will not eat in such company.”

            The traveler is so confident, so assured, in his moral indignation.  He sees no gray.  We admire the simplicity of his world, the certainty.  Our own lives are more complex and less sure.  He pulls a cowl over his head and lurches through the door, into the storm.  The snow closes around him.

            “Scandalous!” we repeat to Jodie.  In lieu of pigeons and ale, ribaldry and fake British accents, we order two burgers, a pork chop, a chicken sandwich, three coffees and a tea.  As she takes our tickets to the cook, we watch her and wonder how her life will be.  She’s two months pregnant, young, and alone.

            “She's just a baby herself,” we comment, and then we can’t think of anything else to say about that.  It’s sad, and joyous, too.

            The restaurant usually pipes in music, but today it’s not.  In that absence, when we’re not speaking, there’s an eerie stillness.  Inside we’re insulated from the cold, but also from sound.  Only occasionally will the wind’s shrill moaning penetrate the glass.  Then we’ll turn our heads to the storm and be amazed at nature’s ghostly display, images raging silently on a screen.  That scene is hypnotic, an undulating flow of blindness and half-light.  (We wonder: caught in this Arctic nightmare, will our traveler regret his haughty disdain?  Probably not.  He’ll urge his mount forward, the poor beast already coated with ice, his own clothes saturated and starting to stiffen.)

            We’re the only customers here, the only people, it could be argued, foolish enough to be out on a day like this.  Jodie’s come back, and she invites herself to join us while we’re waiting for our food.  We’re delighted with the new blood.  She sits down and lights a cigarette.  “Do you mind?” she says, and we say no, though we do.  Pregnant women shouldn't smoke.

            “Ever been on a cruise?” she asks, her eyes on the blizzard.  “I was, once, in high school.  Well, it wasn’t really a cruise.  We were on one of those tours, you know, where the teachers say they’re showing you culture and history, but really they’re just chaperones?  Who pretend they’ve seen it all before, even though this is their first trip overseas, too, and they’re almost peeing their pants they’re so excited?  When you couldn’t care less what they want you to see, you just wanna scope the European guys?”

            Yes, we tell her, we took one of those in college, although instead of a teacher, our tour guide was an Austrian student, a few years younger than us.  We confess: we were interested in culture and history.  We could scope here at home.

            “Anyway,” Jodie continues, “we were sailing from Holyhead, that’s in Wales, to Ireland.  You know, on a ferry?  I was seasick at first, but then I got used to it and went out on the deck to watch.  I’d never been on that much water before.”  She nods toward the window.  “It was cool.  The weather was bad, only it was rain, not snow.  The water was black and choppy, and the rain was gray, and it was just like this, rain coming over the bow in sheets so thick you couldn’t see nothing, then it’d let up and there’d be all that black water behind the gray.  You know?”

            She exhales a plume of smoke that curls leisurely toward the ceiling and dissipates.  “Well, my friends thought I was nuts standing there on the deck like that, and they took me into the cafeteria and made me drink hot cocoa till I warmed up.  Probably woulda caught my death if they hadn’t come, but it was just the most beautiful thing I ever saw.  It was just like this.”

            We can see her black water in the gaps of the storm.  An iceberg appears where the building once stood.  Can it be an iceberg?  We point it out to her.

            “There’s no icebergs in the Irish Sea,” she begins, but we’re off on another challenge, and she doesn’t get a chance to finish.

            “Was Captain Smith trying to set a record crossing the Atlantic?” one of us thinks aloud.  “Was that why the ship didn’t slow down at night?”

            It takes a moment for the rest of us to catch the reference.  Ah: “And why did he ignore the ice warnings?”

            “If the lookout is given binoculars, he sees the ’berg in plenty of time and it’s an uneventful crossing.  Maybe Smith gets his record and retires in glory.”

            “Murdoch should’ve just rammed it.”

            “What are you nuts talking about?” Jodie asks, exasperated.  Yes, she knows us, but even now she has trouble following our train of thought.

            “Murdoch was the First Officer.  If he rams the iceberg instead of trying to miss it, there’s some damage, but the ship stays afloat.  By swerving, he does the only thing that can sink it: pops rivets and knocks holes in its side for three hundred feet under the water line.”

            “Wasn’t that just human nature, though?” another of us counters.  “He couldn’t foresee what was going to happen.  Nobody would choose to let a ship carrying 2200 people collide with an iceberg.  He had to try.”

            “Here’s human nature for you: they locked the third-class passengers below until most of first- and second-class were loaded onto the lifeboats!”

            “Well, it’s a moot point anyway if the Californian answers their distress flares.  What was it, ten miles away?  Five?  Nobody had to die.”

            We turn to Jodie.  “Some of the survivors were still alive in the early 2000s.  Terrible what they must have gone through, yet they’re always so gracious in the interviews.”

            “Think of the horror of watching fifteen hundred deaths, of surviving when so many didn’t.  Maybe you’re steerage and everything you own is on board when the ship goes down.  Worse, maybe your husband or child is there.  Imagine how you’d feel.  The ship split in two.”

            “You’re in a lifeboat on the ocean, the water is twenty-eight degrees, and somewhere in the night people are screaming, wailing, crying, praying.  You can’t see them, only hear their voices, and it’s a heart-wrenching sound.  You’ve moved away from the ship to avoid getting caught in the whirlpool when it goes down.”

            “Only there isn’t a whirlpool, it just slips under the water smooth and quick.  Meanwhile hundreds are drowning and freezing.  They’re calling for you to save them.  Your lifeboat is only half full.”

            “And so the question becomes: do you go back, knowing you can’t possibly rescue them all, knowing too that in their panic they may capsize your boat and kill you?  Do you risk your life to save a few, or cover your ears until the screaming stops, and so survive?”

            The cook’s voice booms over the intercom.  “Jodie, please.”

            “Your orders are up,” she says and grinds her cigarette into the ashtray.  She’s not impressed with philosophical mind games.  “You guys are weird.  Did this really happen, or what?  ’Cause if it did, you can’t change it, so it don’t matter what anybody shoulda done.  All that’s left is what they did do.”  She stands up.  “I tell you what, though, I’m never gonna go on a cruise again.”

            She leaves and our eyes, as usual, drift to the window.  Is it an iceberg that looms through the gap, or just flat concrete geometry?  Certainly there is no black background, no calm seas on a cold April night.  It’s all white, white interrupted by gray, inundated by white.

            We wonder if there are people in that building across the street—people who see our light and think of us as nighthawks in a daytime maelstrom, Nighthawks, like the Edward Hopper painting.  Do they consider us lonely, pathetic souls with nothing better to do, drawn to brightness, converging here to give color to our lives?  Or are we merely survivors?  We may well ask the same about them.  Maybe we should throw each other a lifeline and see who reaches for whom.

            “What if the snow were clouds,” one of us says, changing the subject, “and we’re not looking out, but up?”

            “Then we’re in a rocket!”

            “Pretty soon those clouds are going to part for us for good and there really will be blackness.  Infinite blackness.”

            “Not infinite.  We’ll have the stars.”

            “Infinite blackness and infinite light, too.”

            That panorama explodes before us, distances so vast our minds can’t hold it.  We are weightless in the void.  Galaxies swirl into existence out of superheated gases left over from the Big Bang.  Stars wink, flare, fade or are born anew.  We’re seeing the past—not only the past, but somewhere out there, the Beginning.  What are we, measured against the wheel of heaven?  Religions teach us we’re at the center of this wheel, that we’re the hub around which everything spins, but we’re not at the center, not at all.

            We think of our Elizabethan traveler, moving away from us at the speed of silence, dropping his shoulder to the wind and once again glancing back at our faint, or only remembered, glow.  Navigators on ships, before the days of compasses, used to find their position by using the stars, dead reckoning.  Are we a point of light to this man, guiding him not toward but from?  We could still bring him home if he’d let us, if only he had the humility to turn around.  But no, Babington has been torn apart and can never be untorn.  The traveler must continue.  He knows his path.

            We do not yet know ours.

            “Where should we go?” we ask.  “We have unlimited worlds.”

            “But not unlimited time.  The nearest star is how many light years away?”

            “The speed of light is no barrier.  Thought is instantaneous.”

            We agree and find a planet of fantastic cities, culled from the memories of science fiction novels we’d enjoyed in college.  For convenience we create an atmosphere with the proper mix of oxygen and nitrogen and populate the cities with humanoids who speak English and know our Earth histories by heart.  We envision technologies we can’t envision, civilizations spanning solar systems and benevolent governments to rule over them.  We are the travelers here.  Perhaps we’ll enter a restaurant and talk of Watergate, or Teapot Dome, or Five Year Plans, and the locals will cock their heads in amusement.  “It was nothing,” they'll say, or, “Yeah, you really screwed that one up.”  Things are always viewed better from a distance.

            Our world is perfectly conceived.  We marvel at its luxuries and enlightenment: a free society without superstition or rituals or need.  We ache for what we could become in such a place, where ideals have replaced strategic plans.  This is a startling contrast to what we know.  If only we could live to see it.

            Jodie interrupts our speculation with food.  She distributes the burgers, the pork chop, the chicken sandwich.  “Look,” she says, “this stuff you talk about?  You guys are all married, right?” We nod: three wives and a husband among us, and two kids.  “Well, isn't that enough?”

            “Sometimes it’s too much,” we say, and sometimes too little, and seldom just right.  Always the past or the future calls us, never now.  That’s why we have Saturday afternoons in the Kitchen.  Because Monday will come.

            She shakes her head, shrugs.  “Anyway, I just checked the parking lot.  Our cars are drifted over.  I mean, you can’t even see them.  We’re not going anywhere.  There’s no blankets here, so we’ll have to sleep in the booths and use our coats.”  She rubs her stomach with both hands.  She’s not showing yet.  “Am I gonna have to listen to you idiots all night?”

            Jodie is eighteen or nineteen and unmarried, but if parenthood concerns her she doesn’t say so.  We ask her about it.

            “I just want to have my baby,” she says.  Then she indicates the phone by the entrance.  “‘Course, none of you was smart enough to bring your cells, so you probably need to make some calls.”

            One by one we do, to tell our spouses we’re okay.  The entrance door is all glass and frost has built up on its perimeter, leaving an irregular circle in the center.  The blizzard rages on outside, and in the gaps a world of stone passes by, a luxury liner speeds toward an iceberg, a starship sails the endless sky.  In the snow our traveler’s mount has stumbled and will not rise.  Zealous and inflexible, the man chose conviction over comfort.  At least he’s always moved in certainty: his belief in his Queen and his God has seen him through.  But not here.  Here the storm overwhelms him.  He drops to his knees, pats his dying horse.  Resting his face on the animal’s heaving side, he listens to its final furious breaths.  Then, resigned, he lies down with his trusting servant, its heat radiating away into the wind.  Perhaps this will seem right to him.  Does his faith ever waver, now, when there are no causes left?  We cannot know, for the curtain of white engulfs him, and he’s gone.

            The four of us have watched the blizzard from the shelter of the restaurant.  Our meals steam on the plates, our drinks are hot, our families are home and safe.  We have discussed and wondered and dreamed, imagining the wind to be some kind of metaphor for time.  Sometimes we see clearly, sometimes not at all.  Eventually, we know, the single entity that is us will have to split up, each following a different path.  That inevitability saddens us, but the disquiet we feel isn’t the fear of separation or failure, or even death, but of uncertainty.  And the wind isn’t just time, the wind is life, and it blows by quickly.

END