Atmospheric Variables

My college girlfriend, Julie, didn’t believe in “E.S.P,” much as I insisted this has nothing to do with spooky mojo hoodoo. Let me make this clear. I’m not a guy who can foretell the future. If I was blessed with that skill, I wouldn’t have bombed my driving test, the written part of the Learner’s license that asks 126 multiple choice questions like, "How many centimeters can you parallel park from the curb?" I haven’t had a psychic dream, though I’ve mastered the ability to wake at any specific time if I drink two glasses of water and concentrate before falling asleep.

In the newspaper the next morning, under an ad for Stainmaster carpet, I read, “Thousands of miles of canals crisscross South Florida. Every driver should keep a heavy flashlight or some other tool within easy reach to break out if their car happens to plunge underwater.” I don't know why Julie didn't swim through the open window if she had time to stuff her keys in her purse. I guess even a Navy SEAL team would have trouble scrambling out of a car in the dark. You don't know which way is up. If I had seen this coming, I would’ve locked her in the bathroom, the way people barricade themselves after reading a horoscope marinated in doom and gloom: “Lie low, play waiting game. Avoid large bodies of water.”

Maybe I could never get a job answering phones for psychic hotlines, but I’ve noticed a connection between my mental curses and a few catastrophes. The first public display of my capacity took place in Redwall Elementary School. I told Daniel Kedlic about the train, the one I wished would plow into him. Kedlic always had a runny nose, and for some unknown reason, scribbled cartoons of female anatomy on every available surface. His X-rated doodles, vast filled-in outlines of incoherence, corkscrewed down the bookshelves in watermelon-scented Mr. Sketch markers. He didn’t even have the sense to assume an alias, or tag, as graffiti artists call it. He scrawled the same violin-shaped ladies, over and over again, on the gum-caked grooves of our chairs.

Miss Feist, our second grade teacher, had arranged a game of Silent Ball indoors on account of the rain spoiling recess. We sat on our shaky desks, which seemed a privilege in itself, while a "ball" made of masking tape zinged between us. According to legend, this ball contained a pair of crumpled panties. Whose panties, I couldn’t guess. If someone uttered the slightest giggle or shriek during the game, they were disqualified. I had a knack for keeping quiet, despite the stinging speed of Kedlic’s major league throws.

Several girls had just struck out. Kedlic scooped up the ball and beamed it at my face. I felt the whoosh of air before it smacked me with a cartoonish thunk. Coppery flavors spurted into my mouth and a noise like dry leaves crackled. A tunnel rushed toward me with a speck of daylight in the distance. In art class, we drew perspective drawings like that with foot-long metal rulers. Afterwards, I saw the scummy undersides of desks, some penciled with naked ladies-in-progress. The room throbbed.

“He fainted,” somebody said.
“Give Evan some air,” said Miss Feist.

She told me to sit with my head lodged between my knees. I followed her instructions, staring at the tops of my canvas All Stars. The other kids mulled around, not saying much. I heard him say, “He’s only faking,” and I mentioned the train, or, rather, the sizable dent it would carve in his head. Miss Feist didn’t even make me apologize. She called my mom and sent me home with my Transformers lunchbox and a pop quiz on fractions (if I really had the gift of second sight, I would’ve predicted her springing that on me).

Afterwards, Kedlic made it his personal duty to remind me of my inferiority. He battered me with insults and staccato bursts of laughter. Flying objects, such as paper clips, rubber bands, and number two pencils, zinged the air wherever I walked. By high school, the twitchy kid had morphed into a laid-back stoner. Pot-smoking has a Ritalin-style effect for some kids. It calms them down. His cognitive functions, however, hadn’t seen much improvement since second grade. His eyes grew fogged and distant. He still doodled. I figured that we shared the same classes when a Rubenesque lady with bazooka-sized boobs popped up in the margins of my Psychology book.
I’d spot him in the band room, not that he played any instrument. He materialized there with paper-bagged bottles of beer at lunchtime. One of his buddies, Ian Craven, worked as a teacher’s aid and could sneak into the music department without notice. He dangled the keys on a chain with a Weather Channel thermometer, as if he needed to gauge the band room’s dew point temperature on a regular basis. They would ease into the empty corridor, with its thicket of glossy black music stands, and crank the antiquated stereo, a dust-encrusted Panasonic that only played tapes. Bass-heavy beats squirted out of the speakers, a stampeding legion of buckshot chords and aneurysm-inducing guitar squiggles. Just before 6th period began, they would lock up and take off. Sometimes they forgot to adjust the stereo, so Mr. Maltby, the band teacher, and his nose-picking brass section, would get blasted by a bumpy riff of dense, ominous static.

According to rumor, Ian Craven introduced Kedlic to drugs ingested in other ways besides smoking. Maybe this explains what happened over spring break, sophomore year. Strolling home from a party, Kedlic walked onto some train tracks, plopped a coin down on a steel rail, and waited for the southbound train to run over it. Kedlic picked an interesting spot to wait for the coin squashing--he stood smack in the middle of the northbound track. Onlookers said he was very much aware of the first train, but utterly oblivious to the second one.

In homeroom, I learned about it from Jessica Morris, who said the train struck Kedlic on the tails side, flipping him into the air. He landed with a fractured skull, broken ribs, and a collapsed lung. She hadn’t heard the crunching noises it must’ve made, just the tornado-style wail of the steam engine, looping inside her mind.
Instead of visiting Kedlic at South Miami hospital, I moped around, watching late-night TV. He despised me anyway, so what did it matter? I slumped in the den, clicking past cat food commercials and jittery slices of porn scrambled beyond recognition. Flipping back and forth, muting orgasms in mid-groan, I pondered my responsibilities. Was it true? If a hasty insult, muttered during a match of Silent Ball, had catapulted Kedlic into a locomotive, what else had I done? Could my foul words take the shape of disasters?

I thought about all the nastiness I had ejected on unsuspecting meter maids, wisecracking morning radio hosts, and computer-generated phone solicitors, not to mention my P.E. coach, meaty-faced Mr. Lawson. I thought about the taxi driver who honked and honked because I stopped to let a stray dog lope across the lane during a green light. I had conjured up deep horrors for Mr. Cabbie, who would not be wearing a seatbelt when they happened.
At first I tried inanimate objects. Driving home from school, I passed rows of designer mailboxes, including one shaped like a cow. It didn’t have a head, just udders drooping like a row of pink faucets. I unleashed my hatred on Bessie the mailbox with a swarm of images, denting it with invisible baseball bats, sandblasting the motley varnish and plucking off the obscene-looking udders. Weeks went by and Bessie didn’t suffer so much as a scratch. In fact, she looked shinier, as though dappled paint came in a can and someone had slapped on a new coat.

Next, I experimented on things with a pulse. I settled for the conga line of ants marching across the kitchen counter. They would munch their way into my Honey Nut Cheerios and I wouldn’t notice until they popped up like punctuation marks in my milk. Mom had baptized them in various flavors of Raid, which didn’t do any good. I wondered if they had developed an immunity to it, the way my cousin Brian had to keep switching acne medications. No surprise when I doused the hardy bugs with waves of ill will and they kept bustling in endless supplies.

Newspaper headlines never ran out of opportunities for my trial runs. President Bush vomits into the lap of the Japanese Prime Minister. Had I played any part in that? Castro collapses during an anti-U.S protest. A rapist fries in the electric chair and I shudder with guilt. What about the mother of five who drowned her babies in a bathtub one by one and chased down her terrified eldest son to finish the job? Her bleary photograph, eroded with shadows, had the generic blandness of a Costco shopping card. “I killed my children!” the caption shouted.

Despite the fact that they hailed from Texas, I couldn’t help drawing a correlation. Suppose they were the same brats in the movie theater, kicking my crumb-infested seat during the brilliant single-take opening to Touch of Evil? Suppose they were the same miserable urchins piled into a nearby booth at Joe’s Stone Crab, sobbing so hard they hiccupped as I wrestled my napkin into origami? I might’ve cussed at them under my breath, told them to drop dead, but didn’t mean it.

As a kid, I used hold staring contests with the bathroom mirror, row after row of multiple, unblinking pupils like intelligent stones. I could gaze into them and guess the black thoughts that lurked behind their shiny exterior, a ticker-tape of dirty words, ill wishes, and prejudices that nobody else could detect or care to know.

Once, on a road trip to New Orleans with my college buddies, we stopped overnight at El Rancho Motel. While they whooped it up in the Gatorade-green pool, I rustled in a dresser drawer and unearthed a copy of Gideon’s Bible so pristine, the cover squeaked when I cracked it open. I squinched my eyes shut and picked out this verse: “But above all, my brethren, do not swear, either by Heaven or by Earth or with any other oath; but let your Yes be Yes and your No, No, so that you may not fall under judgment.”

I doubted that it worked the other way, that someone would sneeze and I’d say, “Bless you,” and they’d live happily ever after, white picket fence, 2.2 children, and all. I could try to guess their personal version of bliss, dress it up with prize-winning lottery tickets or picnics in the south of France, though it’s tough figuring out the formula for contentment. I don’t know if I believe in it.

Consider how I met Julie. Sitting in my dorm, freshman year, plugged into National Public Radio’s jazz hour on my Walkman, counting the bouquet of mold stains on my ceiling, I heard a series of hesitant chords tinkling in the background. Irritated, I turned off the Walkman, but the wobbly music didn’t stop. I turned to my balcony and noticed an open window one floor down. Inside I spied a pair of hands playing a piano keyboard. The knuckly fingers bent extra hard, as though the effort was physically draining. There was something familiar about the girl’s beatniky sandals, which were all I could detect of her identity. If I stared long enough, she would turn around. Sure enough, the melody paused. The girl stood and stretched. She drifted toward the window and her eyes tilted up, catching the angled brightness, turning clear for a moment.

“I’m collecting audio evidence,” I said, regretting the words that came out thickened and stupid. I brandished my Walkman, which doubled as a tape-recorder.
The girl stared. “No kidding, dude. How long have you been there?”
“Not long. I thought it was the radio.”
She burst out laughing. “I’m Julie,” she said. And she was.

I had seen her around the music department but we had never exchanged words. I jumped in the elevator and followed the tune down an empty corridor uninterrupted by carpet to a musty-smelling storage closet overflowing with the wreckage of old textbooks and Trapper Keepers. A flowered mattress was wedged between the wall and the piano, probably to prevent the vibration from taking over the entire dorm, which it had already done. The girl didn’t adjust her furniture-stiff posture. She put most of her concentration on the piano, so our conversation shaped the lyrics to a spontaneous song.

I stretched out on the floor, watching her sandals push the pedals. When I got up to leave, Julie said, “Stay. I don’t want to sit here by myself.” She was supposed to be taking a break from music, on account of a horseback-riding tumble that had busted her left hand. I told her that Bach had been left-handed too.

Any idea what it’s like going through high-school without having kissed anyone, not even the skinny brace-faced girl with squirrel-colored hair who had a crush on you in band? Any idea what it’s like selling Homecoming tickets outside the gym, tearing off a never-ending roll of pre-printed stubs that say, “Admit one,” as if the dance was a roller coaster ride where only kids “this tall” could come aboard? Any idea what it’s like having to conjure an imaginary girlfriend, a non-English speaking exchange-student from Romania, to con family members who have begun to question your sexuality, and then, to have her mysteriously vanish back to her Eastern-bloc country, despite the extra place setting at Thanksgiving dinner?

Just watching Julie wind her streaky hair into a ponytail was a landmark moment—the same when she finally accepted my invitation to study World History together (she had a photographic memory) or when she made a midnight bowl of Coco Puffs and sipped the last drop of tinted milk. I couldn’t help wondering why she felt comfortable doing that in front of me. I liked the sight of her marching into my dorm, her banged-up mountain bike at her side like a faithful steed. She’d wrestle it up the stairs and lean it against my tire-stained wall. We’d sink into my lumpy futon and kiss until our tongues ached, until my sulky roommate Kevin, the computer science major, compared us to puppies.

I don’t know how long I expected this to last. Forever, maybe. We had both planned to graduate a year late. Julie’s hand injury impeded her piano lessons and I had switched majors too many times before settling for English lit, just because I had racked up credits writing term papers about Hamlet’s Oedipal complex. The morning before we left for summer break, I woke up shivering. The shutters banged open and the door trembled in the draft. I heard the metallic drilling noise of suitcases dragging on the sidewalk. From the window, I noticed a small, compact girl lugging a pair of overstuffed bags down the steps, a blonde who wasn’t really a blonde, as evidenced by her blackened roots. She glanced up and gawked at me for the longest time, unable to wave or speak. I recalled meeting her during freshman orientation, just another random soul I never really got to know, not that I consider it a tragedy.
Julie wrapped herself around me. I nudged her once, twice. She bent in several places like a folding chair and nodded back to dreamland. Her fringed eyelids were smoothly closed, her mouth softened in sleep. I traced the tanline on her shoulder blades, so dark it seemed painted, and wondered if the color would come off on my skin. Another suitcase rattled across the courtyard. Julie snoozed on, mumbling a little, probably shouting in a dream. Subconscious noises always seem louder than life.

“I’m freezing,” she whispered, surprising me. “It’s too noisy around here. I’m going back to my room to sleep for a while.” Julie crawled out of bed and pulled on a sweater, the fuzzy kind that shed like a cat. Mohair, I think it’s called. She stepped over a herd of empty beer cans and reached for her purse. “Hey, fuzz-face. See you tonight?” she said. “We’ll grab some dinner before my plane leaves.”

We hugged so hard, she lifted off the ground. Julie pushed me away. She smooched my cheek and ducked out the door. She took the stairs, as usual, partly for exercise, mostly on account of her claustrophobic fear of elevators. I watched her slow, easy stride, like walking through water, and wished she’d turn around. Her kiss-print burned my skin.

I spent the day filling out loans for fall and thinking about Julie, planning where I’d take her to eat. Growing up in Greenfield, Massachusetts, she didn’t know about moros y cristianos, garlicky black beans smothered with white rice; or the wet crunch of media-noche sandwiches slathered in ham. Most Americans haven't — unless they live in Miami. We’d stop at La Caretta, a chain restaurant on 8th street with plenty of nostalgia for pre-Castro Cuba and sugarcane sprouting on the front lawn.

When I returned to my dorm, a weird feeling came over me like the tingling before a cold sore. I stepped inside and found a note on the floor in Julie’s bubbly, little-girl handwriting: “Sorry. My plane left earlier than I expected. It was nice getting to know you. I’ll call/write soon.” I sat on the edge of my bed, pondering the implications. Okay, so writing wasn’t Julie’s thing. The note sounded like a yearbook sendoff. She signed it with her name, nothing more, on a ragged slip of paper. We might’ve found it funny in a flickering, black-and-white way. I scanned it over and over, half-expecting the words to float off the page. There was nothing left to do except pack.

That summer, I waited tables at Café TuTu Tango, played bass in a band called The Pills and prayed for a sign of life from Julie. If the phone rang late at night, I’d race to answer it. Usually it was a wrong number. I didn’t even have her address because she was supposedly moving into a new apartment. I typed letters on my Dad’s clunky old 486 PC with the broken keyboard, the monitor plastered with hot-pink Post-It notes for “policy number, maturity date, and premium” as cryptic reminders of his client’s insurance statistics. I sent postcards to Julie’s last name, Steinberg, and the 5-digit zip code. Julie had said her town was so small, friends had mailed her Christmas presents addressed with directions that read, “north of the bridge, across from the church” and the packages arrived intact. One time, someone sent her a felt-tip note scrawled on a deflated balloon. She had to blow it up and peel off the postage to decipher the message, which might’ve been from an ex-boyfriend. I don’t remember.

At first, I worried that something bad had happened. I pictured planes nose-diving, trains derailing, cars crumpled like accordions. After a while, I longed to make these uncertainties a reality. I concentrated hard, superimposing a bull’s eye on Julie’s pressure points like a marksman’s target. I thought about the aching joints in her hands, some kind of premature arthritis, and wondered if I had caused this through retro-karma, boomeranging my hate backward through time.

Unlike other predictions I could test through the TV news, I had no way of knowing what had happened to Julie. September rolled around and I returned to school. At the registration office, combating protruding limbs and sopping umbrellas, I learned that she hadn’t signed up for any classes. I closed my eyes and focused on images of water, a tsunami-sized wave undulating in her direction, wherever that was.

Weeks later, I noticed a smiling boy in a “Here to Help You” t-shirt standing in the breezeway, holding a poster board sign announcing, “Classes canceled.” Hurricane shutters materialized over the dorms. On the news, a series of balding weathermen dissected the storm, their chance to play hero. They spoke in the dry tones of documentary voice-overs, discussing wind speed and barometric pressure while a buzz-saw cartoon cut across a satellite picture of South Florida.

On campus, I witnessed a mass exodus: cars bricked into traffic, teams of hardhatted workers pounding plywood over the windows because the stores ran out of aluminum shutters. Earlier I had walked past an elementary school and noticed all the children had left. I caught sight of someone on the swings—a middle-aged man, pumping hard as if he hoped to get somewhere.

I found myself with nowhere to go, nothing to do. I slept a lot, losing track of time. I stopped answering the phone or the door. I slept during the day, vaguely aware of sunlight moving across the room. I’d wake and doze again. Once in a while I’d check the fridge. Certain foods came to me, like mashed potatoes or shrimp, but when I cracked the fridge nothing looked good.

All through Dade County, trees toppled and power poles snapped. Dozens of garbage cans floated in the water, collected by the storm and driven into a watery cul-de-sac. Last year, more than 1,000 car crashes took place involving water—like the dentist whose car crashed into a canal off Interstate 75; a mother of three who backed her car into a North Miami Beach canal; and a church deacon crumpled inside his submerged car in a Dade County canal. I read about five teens who disappeared in 1979, found in a van at the bottom of a canal near the Florida Turnpike. People thought the teens had run away, but they were underwater for more than 17 years.

I hadn’t wished this kind of catastrophe on Julie, but it became clear to me. As her car rounded a curve, a puddle appeared—what was left of the highway, which had washed away overnight in the flood. Her car plunged in and sunk. Even if I didn’t have psychic powers, I could imagine it, and the more believable it seemed.

I shouldn’t have said it. That part where I pictured her taking a long walk off a short pier. Except it wasn’t a pier. It was a murky canal two miles south of the Florida Interstate 75 exit. And she didn’t walk. She drove. Tire marks reveal how her Toyota hatchback skidded into the plastic barrier designed to keep trash from the water, turned back onto the road, then spun counterclockwise into the canal. She called 911 on her cell as puddles seeped into her upholstery. By the time rescuers got there, her car had sunk upside down. They found her with the seatbelt off, keys in her purse.

On TV, the weathermen huddled, waiting for the storm to “turn.” I hated that term and the way it made the hurricane sound like a living thing. In the morning, I knew there would be a mess, though not as bad as they expected. Just a lot of rain. Yards would look as if herds of deer had trampled them - pine straw flattened and bedraggled. Beach-goers would hunt for washed-up shells. Muzak would still play outside the 7-11 with nobody there to hear it. But it wouldn’t be my fault.