Liz Jensen - The Rapture

Hurricanes can threaten one place and hit another, veering off randomly, says a meteorologist. This is particularly the case with super-sizers. The current projection of the computer models is that Hurricane Stella will not hit Rio, but head out to the ocean where it will eventually dissipate. But no one wants to take chances: with a backward glance at the unhealed wounds of New Orleans and Dallas, a mass exodus has begun, bringing with it a new set of crises and panic-induced emergencies. There are three-mile-long tailbacks on the exit roads, and the trains are bursting. A whole lot of people are going to get wiped out. Along with their chicken coops and their crap fencing and their screaming munchkins and their pet dog Fuckface.

Nightmares of a certain variety can do me in. I have not yet worked out how to avoid succumbing to them. As the TV horror blooms like a pornographic flower, I close my eyes and inhale, and I am back in the stench of my own private hell: a sewerish, earthy, petrol stink, the blinding, almost transcendental torture of my neck and chest, the odd blankness of my lower half, the choking smoke, the seemingly endless wait for help as I drift in and out of consciousness. Alex’s groaning.

I held on to his elbow, the only part of him I could reach. At least it felt like an elbow. Rain was falling — big thundery drops, warmish, strangely greasy. It seemed we were outside. I felt soil, or silage, or compost, or mud. We’d been on a minor road. And were they nettles, stinging my arm? Or a new, excruciating form of torture, designed to make your brain float out of your head and hover somewhere above you like an alternative moon in a sky filled not with light, but with the eiderdown of irradiation that is the twenty-first-century urban night? My atheism forgotten, I mouthed the default prayer of the desperate, like a beached fish gasping its last. Mild concussion tumbled the phrases in a linguistic tombola. As we forgive those, hallowed be Thy name, Our Father, Thy kingdom come, our daily bread, our trespasses, as it is in Heaven, deliver us.

Any port in a storm.

Enough. ‘I am grateful it was T9 and not CI. I am grateful I am alive not dead, and I am grateful that for my mother it’s vice versa, and that Dad doesn’t know who the hell I am when I come to visit him. I am grateful, I am grateful, I am grateful, cuando te tengo a ti vida, cuanto te quiera ,’ I mumble, moronically, as I leave the room and perform my elaborate bathroom routine, and then return, refocused, to see satellite pictures showing a huge whorl of white vapour, whose central vortex, like a celestial plughole, is the hurricane’s blind eye. A series of graphics explains the mechanics of super-sizers: the warming seas, the greater bulk of moisture and the flux of air above, the drama such combinations can trigger, the fact that with global warming, they will soon become ‘part of the landscape’.

Part of the landscape.

I try out the odd expression on my tongue as I windmill my arms and watch people I don’t know as they panic, improvise, weep, wave, and drown.

When my mind is in turmoil, my stomach needs fuel. Like many poor cooks, the scrambling of eggs is something I have learned to master in order to survive. I smash four into some melting butter, and start stirring. What I lack in culinary skills I make up for in coffee-making expertise: thanks to the benign influence of my first psychoanalysts, I have developed an anally precise morning-beverage preparation ritual, which involves the grinding of Colombian beans, the careful charging of my small but perfect percolator, filched from my father’s flat when he retreated permanently to his private netherworld, and the frothing of hot milk with a special battery-powered gizmo that bears a passing resemblance to a dildo. Ten minutes later, breakfast prepared and consumed, I feel if not a whole woman again (that I’ll never be), then three-quarters of one, which is as good as it gets for me on the rehabilitation front. I drive to work. On the radio, there’s more news of Stella. At last, she is veering out to sea.

Through the open door of the recreation room at Oxsmith, you can hear the rapid clatter of a ping-pong game and the thud of MTV on the big screen that’s surrounded by a group of kids. Along the south-east wall, a lone boy, prostrate, is chanting tonelessly on one of the scuffed prayer-mats while a Tourette’s kid shifts from one foot to the other muttering expletives. I wheel my way past a hugely fat girl swaying to the music, her belly spilling over the top of her jeans, her face as smooth and empty as moulded plastic. She has wound T-shirts around her head to form a giant multicoloured turban. Watching her fixedly, a boy who a month ago removed his own eyeballs and had to have them surgically replaced, is gearing up to masturbate. Business as usual.

I find Bethany Krall watching CNN on the small television in an annexe off the main room, where two male nurses are talking desultorily and punching at their mobiles. She has made herself comfortable. Perched on a chair with her legs tucked underneath, she’s chewing gum furiously, as if there’s some kind of speed mastication record she’s hoping to beat in the course of her day, which is somehow related to the unfolding nightmare on the screen. I can see immediately that she’s riding high.

‘It’s back to the worst-case scenario,’ says a woman on the TV. ‘Hurricane Stella’s changed course again, and she’s now definitely heading for Rio. She’ll hit any time in the next hour.’

‘Yo, Wheels.’ Bethany grins as she spots me, then fists the air like a triumphant athlete. But with a third coffee inside me, I am back on track, and I refuse to let the latest news shake me. The only sane approach to what’s happened is to take it as given that Bethany’s prediction of the hurricane is a guess based on something she has gleaned, via the internet, from some obscure weather station. Or simply coincidence. What did Frazer Melville say? Case dismissed . My job, as a professional, is to manage Bethany’s conviction that it isn’t a random fluke. And even reverse it. The alternative — the Joy McConey model — doesn’t bear thinking about. The trouble is, when you deal on a daily basis with people’s fantasies not coming true, there’s no handbook on how to behave when they actually do. I’ll have to run on whatever instincts I have left.

‘Yes, you were spot-on, Bethany,’ I say.

‘Well, duh ,’ she says through her gum. Her face is still pale, but the cheeks carry a faint, waxy flush, reminding me of those Madonna statues that cry tears of blood on demand in mystically devout pockets of the world. ‘Well, Wheels? Aren’t you going to say anything?’

‘I am,’ I say non-committally. ‘But I don’t imagine it’s what you’d most like to hear.’

‘You’re going to say it was just a random coincidence, right? Well, Joy was just like that at first. Back in the days when she was a zero too. So if that’s what you want to believe, you go right ahead.’ I nod slowly but say nothing. ‘They always give people blankets,’ she comments, jerking her head at the screen, and rolling her grey-green gum around on her tongue and teeth. ‘Why’s that? It’s not like it’s cold.’

‘Shock makes your body temperature drop,’ I respond automatically, trying to hide my irritation at the laconic, I-told-you-so way she’s watching the drama unfold. She can’t seem to imagine what this means for individual lives. For her, they’re like tiny pixillated screen-beings. Little Sims whose lives you can meddle with and overturn at will. ‘Especially if you’re wet. It’s comforting.’

It’s more than two years ago that I held Alex’s elbow and thought that cold flesh needn’t always be a bad sign. That if I just kept hold of it, kept squeezing it so he’d know I was there, passing on my warmth, everything would somehow be all right. I thought, too, about his family. Now everything would be out in the open. There’d be no avoiding it, no denying it, no more pretending. Sickness mingled with relief, and the hovering suspicion that I would probably panic later, if I could muster the energy. They would give me a tranquilliser of some kind, I hoped. Perhaps they already had. At that point, it didn’t cross my mind that I was badly injured. The fact that I couldn’t feel anything seemed like a blessing, a sign that I was intact, that I hadn’t lost anything. Yes: I’d been given some kind of tranquilliser. How good of them, how thoughtful, professional and well-organised. I could close my eyes and sleep.