This Is Only a Test (2 page)

I'm not sure it's even begun.

AFTER

I will spare you the destruction.

You can imagine, I'm sure, what a tree looks like
horizontal
, or a house
turned inside out
. You can imagine also what it means when people say “
leveled
.” What it means when they say “
vanished
.”

Stories of
legs in
the front yard, of
victims
wrapped in trees like
tangled kites
. Stories of how all that people have left
in the world
now fits neatly in a grocery cart.

Do not read this too closely. I am trying to spare you
the broken glass and the blood.

What I can't spare you is the strangeness of living in a tornado-torn town amid writers who, much like myself, have a tendency to turn everything poetic.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black[cloud]
.

In the [Emergency] Waiting Room

Our poet hands are softer than cream cheese, and though we hardly know how to swing an axe, this doesn't keep us from
trying. But eventually we grow tired, sore, and return to our more familiar tools—paper and pen—as we rebuild our town word by word.

But before all that—before the axes and the paper and the pen—my wife, dog, and I wake early to retrace the tornado's path. It's the morning after, and with each step, we try to make sense of our shifted landscape.

But the cars used to be here
, I think, running my eyes the length of the empty lot,
so why are they now there?

Along the route I pick up a newspaper and listen for the prosody in the reports.

Read the repetition: “
unrelenting
,” “
unprecedented
,” “
devastating
.”

And hear the cadence in the quotes: “
digging with their hands
,” “
sifted through the remains
,” “
First responders didn't attend to the dead . . .
”

Every headline displays the word
RAVAGED
or
RUBBLE
, and regardless of which story you read, you're told to turn to page 7A.

But not before making a choice:

SEE DEATH

or

SEE SURVIVORS

The morning after, we see a bit of both.

We join the city's pilgrimage, shuffling directionless down the center lane of 15th Avenue as the sun begins to rise. We are a tailgate without a football game, a processional without a funeral. Through it all, my dog pulls hard on her leash. She doesn't like the sound of
chainsaws or shouting or
silence, and she is overwhelmed with far too much to sniff—the bolt of cloth flung a
hundred yards from Hobby Lobby, the milk bottles still upright in the shell of a Krispy Kreme.

All of this seems like a dream, which is the closest we've come to dreaming in twenty-four hours. We hadn't slept well the previous night, mostly due to the students partying in the apartments behind our house. They'd blared their music louder than the warning sirens, allowing every sound to float down from their balconies, infiltrating our half sleep with shouts for Ping-Pong balls and Solo cups.

But we were kept awake also by the whispers we repeated beneath the sheets—“If we'd died,” my wife said, staring at the plus sign on her pregnancy test, “then no one would've known about you.”

So many lost so much that day, but we still kept our secret.

Directions:

To the best of your ability, please answer the following questions
.

1.) Which of the following is not currently found in my bathtub?

 a.) My wife

 b.) My dog

 c.) My unborn child

 d.) Tornado

2.) Which of the following activities are best performed while enduring a disaster in your bathtub?

 a.) Secret sharing

 b.) Secret keeping

 c.) Dog petting

 d.) Scrubbing the tub

 e.) All of the above

3.) Which of the following is the proper response in the immediate aftermath of a disaster?

 a.) Calling family

 b.) Calling friends

 c.) Waiting for the cell phone signal

 d.) Continuing to wait for the cell phone signal

 e.) Leashing your dog

 f.) Unleashing your dog

 g.) Introducing yourself to God

 h.) Introducing God to your wife and dog and unborn child

  i.) Living up to your part of the bargain

  j.) Exiting your house

 k.) Wondering how your plant didn't tip

  l.) Drinking a beer

m.) Drinking two beers

 n.) Drinking zero beers and remembering your part of the bargain

 o.) Drinking four beers and remembering your part of the bargain

 p.) Pouring your beer in the sink

 q.) In the grass

 r.) In the plant that didn't tip

 s.) Telling your wife the words that got stuck in your throat in that bathtub

 t.) Writing your wife a note—it'll last longer

 u.) Taking a photo—it'll last longer

 v.) Crumbling that note, that photo, and cracking that beer instead

w.) Unleashing yourself to God

 x.) All of the above

 y.) Some of the above

 z.) None

4.) True or False: You were just a little scared.

5.) Which of the following newspaper quotations has been fabricated?

 a.) “We saw it spinning across the street . . .”

 b.) “I was standing at the door and saw it coming.”

 c.) “. . . I looked out the window and saw it hovering over the lake . . .”

 d.) “I was just trying to get my grandkids something to eat.”

 e.) “It just sat there too. Like it was chilling.”

 f.) “I have a shell of a home; just four walls.”

 g.) “I pulled two dead bodies from a . . .”

 h.) “I found an elderly lady and a three-year-old . . .”

  i.) “People laid blankets over the bodies of neighbors . . .”

  j.) “First responders didn't attend to the dead.”

 k.) “It happened too fast to be scared.”

  l.) “This just can't be true.”

m.) None

6.) Which of the following tools most effectively removes debris?

 a.) Chainsaw

 b.) Axe

 c.) Bow saw

 d.) Poem

7.) Where is the silver lining?

8.) In what ways did your students respond to your attempts to contact them?

 a.) With kind assurances of his safety

 b.) With concern for your safety

 c.) By writing you a poem

 d.) By writing you an email

 e.) By asking you for her final grade

 f.) By thanking you for an “awesome” semester

 g.) By wishing you the best of luck in your new job

 h.) By wishing you no ill will (despite the B–)

  i.) By apologizing for the late paper—“The tornado ate it.”

  j.) By asking for extra credit

 k.) By asking “pretty please” for extra credit

  l.) By asking you for your story

m.) By asking you what she's supposed to do now

 n.) By asking you “Where is the silver lining?”

 o.) By asking you if he'll seriously never see you again

 p.) By telling you she'll Facebook you

 q.) By telling you that composition class taught him little of survival

 r.) By telling you that African American literature taught him little of survival

 s.) By writing “The nightmares won't quit coming, will they?”

  t.) By writing “TTYL”

 u.) By writing

 v.) By not writing

w.) With silence

 x.) All of the above

 y.) Some of the above

 z.) None

9.) In the space below, please draw a picture of anything but this.

Essay:

In the space below, please write whatever you must. You can understand, I'm sure, the necessity of writing, even in the dark. Of re-inhabiting a space you'd just as soon forget. I'm asking you not to forget. I'm asking you to remember. To recall the relief you felt in waking up the morning after. And the frustration you felt while mummy-wrapped in the sweat-soaked sheets. Please take a moment to remember the way your foot crunched the cockroach on your walk to the bathroom that night.

Consider the loss of life and all you didn't lose. All you had to lose. All you might've lost had the wind recalculated its route.

Consider infrastructure, pregnancy tests.

Reconsider question #4.

Please, I'm begging you; do not provide specific examples in the space provided below.

May 8, 2011

Dear Future Child,

I write to you today so that you might have some account of our first disaster endured as a family. You see, you were there, too, as the tornado swirled overhead.

This is the part of the story we don't tell people because you are not here yet—just some tiny embryo—and the world is too unstable. There are still far too many factors left unaccounted for, too many variables.

Only sometimes, I'm told, does
X
+
Y
=
BABY
.

This morning, while cruising the cereal aisle in the grocery store, your mother nearly gave our secret away. There she was, mulling over the mini-wheats, when confronted by a cereal stocker named Al.

“Happy Mother's Day,” he told her.

“Thank you.”

“
Are
you a mother?” Al inquired, and after a moment's hesitation—after weighing the unforeseen consequences of confiding in a stranger—your mother whispered, “No, but maybe one day.”

Al nodded, returning his attention to the toasted oats and filing away the only clue we've yet to offer of your existence.

Now, I admit, Future Child, I know as much of growing babies as Al does. However, in the past few days, I've become accustomed to a new vocabulary—“fallopian,” “ovum,” “folic acid”—a great flurry of words now left fluttering around our unscathed house.

This is your father's attempt at using his new vocabulary in a sentence:

HOW MANY PLACENTAS DOES IT TAKE TO SCREW IN A LIGHTBULB
?

And:

IS IT TIME TO CHANGE THE AMNIOTIC FLUID YET
?

I am a poor student, though at least I know the one word we are never to say:
miscarry
, which to me sounds suspiciously like a football snafu, some ill-fated effort in which the ball was not properly tucked in the crook of one's arm.

Let me try another sentence:

I HOPE THAT WE DON
'
T
MISCARRY
.

You're probably wondering, Future Child, what might lead one to
miscarry
. Is it dependent on the stress of the mother, the split of the cells, the tornado overhead?

All of these things, likely.

I wonder if you could feel our heat as we gathered tight around you. If you had an inkling of what we were learning for the very
first time—that your protection suddenly seemed far more important than ours.

And trust me, Bucko, in your current state as an unstable embryo, protecting you is no easy feat. Just imagine holding tight to a poppy seed while on a roller coaster. You are as precarious as the water droplet clinging to our rusted showerhead, as uncertain as the small-clawed squirrel teetering atop the wire outside our house. You are the siren, the silence, the funnel and the cloud. But this is just the start of who you are.

While huddled in our bathtub, I thought,
You are an I, or an almost I
, and was reminded of a poem I taught last spring to a class that hardly cared.

Of the many ways I think of you, I most enjoy imagining you as the almost I; not yet a “he” or a “she” but an “almost.” And maybe, if we are lucky, a “soon-to-be.” A “person-in-progress.” A bucko.
My
bucko. One whose future will be determined by weather and coin flip and fate.