Weather Report
Another person has died today, bit by a mosquito. The bugs come out at night, report newscasters, dusk to dawn a dangerous time. Stay indoors, warn our phones, which buzz with CDC updates. Wear long pants, sleeves. Don’t venture outside.
Others have died. A child. A grandparent. The local news uses a scrolling banner to announce the death toll.
We must wait, we are told, for the frost. We wait for things to die to see if we might live.
We stay indoors much of the fleeting summer. Winter lasts too long—more than half the year shrouded in darkness—so some folks, frantic and starved, go outside despite the warning. Being in nature, walking through New England forests, wading into waters, is worth the risk. They stare at the sun in desperation, trying, after so much darkness, to relearn what it means to be happy.
What must it be like, asks my mother back in California, to live where you cannot go outside? Where the sun does not shine, where the beach does not beckon? What does it mean to live where the land seems to not want you, not want humans at all?
But even as she speaks, her voice crackling across the phone, California is on fire. The state burns black at the heart, the blaze pulsing out a thousand miles in any direction. The flame can’t be contained, and it eats away entire cities, households reduced to ash and bones once the smoke settles. In news reports, it looks as though the state is bleeding. Schools close, highways come to clot. It is impossible to breathe outside, so people retreat indoors to wait.
***
If you must go outside, doctors and hospitals email patients, spray yourself with chemicals. Do not dawdle in the sun.
The approaching New England autumn is a visible protest, leaves self-immolating orange and gold before flaming scarlet, falling to the ground to rot, barren branches like upturned cages in the sky. Like the land, folks retreat into themselves, go dormant because trying to carry on is simply too much.
It is too cold to go outside for more than half the year, but it is also getting warmer. This climate change is new, the old timers say, Cape Codders with leathered skin and knuckles worn with the crevasses of eighty winters.
The experts on television echo this, standing in front of screens that show weather tantruming across maps of the world. Here, a hurricane, its great eye sweeping silent across the sea, ravaging the shore. There, a dust storm. A crop goes fallow because the rains will not come. Another rots from too much water.
We wait for frost to kill the mosquitos. This kills the ticks, too. Lyme does not come as quickly, but it is much more common. Posted signs line nature trails and lakesides. Each spring the warning map grows larger, the creatures smaller. The CDC warns ticks can be as small as a freckle, the seed of a strawberry. Lyme Island, folks call Martha’s Vineyard. Folks have caught it once, twice, carry ticks to the doctor in Ziploc bags. Still, the sun is worth the risk.
***
Over my head, planes douse forests with chemicals; over my mother’s, they flood flames. Sometimes we look up and planes advertise luxury condo rentals or health insurance or weight loss pills. California is burned and dead and smoking when my mother calls. A friend’s grandmother was lost in the fire. It is late where I am—now my mother has the sun—and we talk, each of us bound inside. We watch the weatherman on television say that things are not right.
When I wake, another alert: two more dead.
Everywhere, a thousand small riots: the earth shutters beneath California. Across the world, Japan feels the typhoon. A volcano erupts off the coast of Italy. A thousand miles away, ash rains from the sky. A landslide buries hundreds of homes under the earth. Snow brings thunder. Tornadoes snake across the land.
None of this is happening, says the president. All of this is happening, my phone buzzes with weather alerts. What is happening, my aging mothers asks.
A glacier slips silently into the sea.
***
There is no cure, the CDC says. The mosquito bite will not hurt, but the sickness will spread. First comes a headache and then the fever, pulsing like a wound. Nothing to do but wait.
Each day I pass the lake across from my house, the one where I used to kayak at sunset, leaning back in my solitary boat to soak up the warmth, imagining myself happy again, before sending the sun to my mother at the other edge of the world. I miss my mother and California, and I retreat to the water because ticks, folks say, cannot swim. I skim across the water like a bug and for once it seems as though nature does not mind me here.
I am reminded of California summers with my mother barefoot at the beach, sand flies and crabs scurrying over our toes. My mother is young and I am happy and on the news the weatherman smiles when he speaks of the rain and the animals in the zoo are not the last of anything.
***
Mosquitoes cluster near the water, doctors warn. They come out at dusk. Don’t venture out.
A polar bear starves. A missile strikes. A fracked mountain collapses.
My mother calls and my father has fallen. My one-year-old niece has cancer.
Now the weatherman uses a scrolling banner like the president. Here is what is happening, he says first. Look at what is happening, he warns next. What is happening, he pleads now.
I wait with my mother, each of us holding our breaths over the phone, staring out our windows at the earth outside, lately so full of sorrow.
All along the highways cluttered with cars, windows up despite the brief sunshine, trees burst into flame. Now New England looks as though it is bleeding. But winter will come soon enough, dulling everything into submission.
My mother peers into the darkness of the morning or evening we are speaking, into the burned California soil. She waits for anything to grow.
Out my window, I think for a moment I spy fireflies glinting across the lake. But it is only the reflection of a plane overhead and my television reflecting on the windows, banners scrolling disaster.
