Nine Kinds of Naked (10 page)

At one point, as it rustled through a broad expanse of trees in western Colorado, a group of college students who'd rented a cabin in the mountains and stayed up all night tripping on acid paused in their morning game of Frisbee and looked west of their clearing. They listened with widening eyes as the forest trembled toward them in ferocity and fury, and when the wind engulfed them they couldn't help but cheer. Once it had passed, all were left yawning with gladness and exhilaration, whooping even as they watched their Day-Glo orange Frisbee sail over the trees and forever away.

 

34
O
UTSIDE OF
N
EW
O
RLEANS
, it came to be called the Great White Spot. As far as anyone could ascertain, the Great White Spot was something similar to a hurricane, but it did not begin like most hurricanes, as just another South Atlantic tropical storm amped up on global warming. Rather, it simply appeared in the Gulf of Mexico two mornings after the thermonuclear explosion in the Rub' al-Khali, though no one of any significance publicized this coincidence. Actually, with a diameter less than ten miles across, it seemed far too small to be a hurricane. Nonetheless, with wind speeds estimated above three hundred miles per hour—estimated only because three hundred miles per hour was the highest measurement the instruments could withstand without being destroyed—meteorologists
immediately dubbed the phenomenon Hurricane James and loudly decreed that Hurricane James was
the big one
, a category 5 hurricane headed straight for the city of New Orleans.

With shallows sloping as low as ten feet below sea level and with the all-too-recent memory of its last hundred-year storm just a few years back, New Orleans had good reason to panic. Within hours, the National Guard—already rail-thin from the latest backdoor draft—scraped every last unactivated guardsman together to evacuate the entire city—forcibly, if necessary, for no politician was about to risk the political fallout from another Hurricane Katrina. Stock in insurance companies tanked immediately, pulling much of the market with them; gasoline prices spiked to new highs; and live coverage of panicked traffic jams across ten lanes of outbound traffic riveted the world's attention for days. Major networks competed for the flashiest
HURRICANE JAMES
graphic while civil engineers boasted on about New Orleans' brand-new, state-of-the-art levee system.

Meanwhile, experts from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration began pointing out with increasingly quaky voices that Hurricane James was no mere hurricane. Its sudden appearance and continued presence violated every known law of meteorological physics. Most fundamentally, Hurricane James was spinning
clockwise.
That was completely wrong. The Earth's rotation was supposed to create a Coriolis effect by which cyclone winds are deflected into a counterclockwise rotation in the Northern Hemisphere, and vice versa in the Southern Hemisphere. This had been a comfortable constant, a neatly wrapped simplicity of knowledge now being
flouted by this flaunty upstart. And since no meteorologist can concede defeat to their collective nemesis—namely, the naysaying notion that there's no predicting the weather—in order to protect their venerable position as the oracles of partly cloudy, the only possible conclusion was that Hurricane James must not be a hurricane.

Fringe scientists began to suggest that it was perhaps properly described instead as a runaway tornadic singularity, F6 on the Fujita scale. Heretofore, an F6 tornado had only been a theoretical abstraction, nothing more than an etcetera category, inconceivable by definition, impossible to predict, and capable of immeasurable destruction. Others countered that it was actually a
hypercane
, a hypothetical class of phenomenally powerful hurricane that spirals beyond any of the usual forces that limit hurricane winds to less than two hundred miles an hour. But this, too, was unlikely, since even a hypercane ought to rotate counterclockwise, although others pointed out that perhaps it was precisely its clockwise rotation that was holding it in place against the rotation of the Earth. In any event, computer models predict hypercanes only over water that is at least 120 degrees, and even the 90-degree globally warmed Caribbean seawater was too cool to fuel this colossus. It would take a comet crashing into the ocean to create that kind of heat, and no one had noticed anything like that happen recently. One fringe wackjob did point out that a comet the size of a city crashed into the Yucatán sixty-five million years ago. The Great White Spot, so his argument went, was a reverberation of that tremendous event, a delayed response.
No fucking way
was most people's immediate response to his theory.

From wherever it came and by whatever category it was contemplated, Hurricane James spawned a fresh litter of doomsday predictions to compete with those of the nuclear politicians and peak-oil prognosticators, and celebrities organized benefit concerts every which way. A thunderous “I told you so!” echoed from fundamentalist pulpits throughout the Bible Belt as the wild-eyed and rapturous wagged their fingers at the Sodom and Gomorrah of the Deep South, reading and rereading Jeremiah, chapter 25, verse 32:
Behold, evil shall go forth from nation to nation, and a great whirlwind shall be raised up from the coasts of the Earth.
Then they flipped back a couple pages and slapped their palms righteous upon Jeremiah, chapter 23, verse 19:
See, the storm of the LORD will burst out in wrath, a whirlwind swirling down on the heads of the wicked!
The modern world couldn't help but shiver in its mass-mediated and scripture-thumping exhilaration, but in the end, all the hurrying and scurrying was for nothing.

It would have been obvious, really, if anyone had bothered to look anywhere other than their teevee screens. Throughout New Orleans, birds were chirping, squirrels were scampering, and life was basking in its subtropical delight. Only the humans spazzed out, stampeding off the delta like a herd of buffalo. For every other species, the only tragedy was the famine of litter scraps.

But gradually, as days turned into a week, and as a week turned into two, it began to dawn on the collective imagination that something truly unparalleled was here occurring. Hurricane James, or whatever it was, wasn't moving. Its unblinking eye had taken up a stable position in the Gulf of Mexico
a hundred miles off the delta coast, its epicenter never straying, there to stay for days, weeks, until at last the reincarnation of the child who first announced that the emperor was wearing no clothes finally called the situation for what it was: the Great White Spot.

The Great White Spot. Hurricane James was no hurricane, that much was certain. Hurricane James was a new, apparently enduring feature on the surface of planet Earth, a curiously clockwise vortex of atmosphere, pulsing slightly smaller with the winter, pulsing slightly larger with the summer, but never dissipating, never shifting its position, just spinning, whirling, and spawning awe around the world. Just as Jupiter had long flaunted its Great Red Spot (the only other known instance of a hypercane in the solar system), it now appeared that Earth had achieved a spot of its own. There was much wow and jubilation.

And even though its port—the third most important in the United States, where the breadbasket distributes its agricultural exports from the mighty Mississippi River system to all points beyond—was now impassable for commercial purposes, New Orleans was booming. With the Great White Spot hovering off the coast, half the evacuated population had decided to defy the warnings of an increasingly irrelevant government and return to their homes after six weeks, and they weren't alone. Tens of thousands more had converged within months, and with the proximity of the Great White Spot selecting for an inherently incautious population, New Orleans became wilder than ever, a true city at the end of the world.

It should be noted, however, that no one who had been in
New Orleans longer than an hour continued to refer to the hurricane as the Great White Spot. The Great White Spot only looked like the Great White Spot on the teevee screen, viewed via satellite. In New Orleans, there was nothing spotty about it. From the tops of the highest buildings in New Orleans, the Great White Spot was a distant column, silver and serene, and it could be seen shimmering off the horizon like Jacob's ladder, bending the sky as the whole of heaven veered into its vortex. When viewed through telescopes on particularly clear days, the column appeared to sway, as if undulating a lazy hula hoop, and surpassing all wonder, that hula hoop occasionally became visible as a rainbow born of the tremendous fountain of sea spray. Of course, since this interfered with their hellfire incantations, biblical literalists ignored both Noah's rainbow in Genesis 9 and the mighty angel's rainbow halo in Revelation 10, preferring instead to bray their brimstone and interpret the rainbow as a flaming gay flag—further evidence that the wrath of the LORD was about to swirl down on the heads of the New Orleans wicked.

In New Orleans, the Great White Spot came to be known solely as Laughing Jim. Nobody had the faintest idea exactly
why
they called it Laughing Jim (other than that maybe Jim was a diminutive of the James in Hurricane James, and that laughter came easily in the streets of New Orleans), but travelers and tourists nonetheless picked up on it immediately, gleefully referring to Laughing Jim as often as they could while visiting. Everyone discovered, however, that it held little resonance once they left. It was like trying to say “aloha”
in Ohio. The word itself reflects the spirit of a place, and the spirit of aloha does not live in Ohio.

And the spirit of Laughing Jim did not reside anywhere outside of New Orleans. How could it? The rest of the world thought New Orleans was populated entirely by lunatics, laughing in the face of death. Who knew how long the Great White Spot, or what did they call it down there, Laughing Jim? Who knew how long Laughing Jim would remain stable? Didn't they remember the horrors of Hurricane Katrina? It was an entirely reasonable suspicion, of course, but there were nevertheless many whose curiosity could not be deterred. Within the first year, tens of thousands had left their jobs and moved to New Orleans. Millions more had made the pilgrimage to see if there was much ado about something.

All were delighted to discover that there was.

 

35
T
HERE ARE POISON WINDS
on this planet that are said to drain a body of its vitality faster than a toilet flushes in a tornado, imparting a sense of unreality and futility, a creeping meaninglessness, that terrible conceit of alienation where nothing really matters. But then there are other winds that seem to fill the lungs with the breath of heaven, that create a sensation of hyperreality, as if everything one does matters very much indeed.

This latter sort of wind was the atmosphere that settled over New Orleans—a defiant exaltation dancing in the shadow of a miserable geopolitical landscape of terrorism, wars, earthquakes, hurricanes, floods, tsunamis, gross political corruption,
collapsing economies, thermonuclear explosions, and sundry other clichés of impending apocalypse. For there in these days of war and of woe, an improbable wind inspired all who gasped upon it to believe in their own magnificence.

The thermonuclear bomb test in the Rub' al-Khali, and the consequent emergence of the Great White Spot, these were just the latest in a series of international incidents, the details of which will not be here belabored. There was a big bang here, a big bang there, cockswagger posturing, brinksmanship and brutality, garish patriotism and moral righteousness all around, the same old con of war. Perhaps the geopolitically curious are here disappointed at the dearth of detail, but in the words of world-renounced political scientist Barefoot Barry, “The machinations of government distract us from the aspirations of humanity.”

Besides, nobody really cared about anything anymore. Apocalyptic apathy. That's what self-impressed experts were calling it, how they were accounting for the cultural exodus into New Orleans, and the French Quarter in particular. Ravaged by the collapsing economy, desolated by consumerism, exhausted by fear, beaten into indifference, people of all ages were, very simply, shrugging a big fuck-it. Barefoot Barry liked to describe the attitude as “the wisdom of whatever,” and the wisdom of whatever was seen nowhere as sharply as it was seen in the streets of the French Quarter. It was trendy around town to fly a white flag from your car's antenna, signifying one's total surrender into life and the relentless death it implied. Strangers were friendly, smiles were frequent, and life had a thrill of adventure to it. Such a rowdy nowadays might
have been an unremarkable state of affairs; that it was an experience rare in the lives of so many was a sad circumstance indeed. It was not so sad, however, that people could not see what they were starving for once they tasted it, and this is precisely what they saw in New Orleans under the spell of Laughing Jim.

At least, this is what Elizabeth Wildhack saw. Elizabeth Wildhack was the only child of Dave Wildhack and our dearly deceased Bridget Snapdragon. Originally, Elizabeth had fled Normal, Illinois, to attend Tulane, but she dropped out by the middle of the first semester. The way she saw things, college diplomas were working papers, and since she didn't aspire to be a worker, why should she strangle her alleged future with debt just to get working papers for a job she didn't really want but would by then need in order to pay off the debt? At the same time, she held no disdain for education, so she continued to take classes. She just didn't register or pay for them. What kind of a society places something as essential as the education of its young below the signature line of a promissory note, anyway? That's what the hell she wanted to know.

In an Econ 101 class she wasn't paying for, she learned that student loans weren't even widely available until 1978. Before 1978, it seemed, tuition rose at 2 percent
below
the inflation rate. Since 1978, tuition has risen at
twice
the inflation rate. According to her professor, because the federal government guarantees student loans, banks earn a return on their money no matter what. Essentially, all market controls on the cost of tuition were removed, and more and more students have graduated into more and more debt every year since.