Wichita (9781609458904) by Thad Ziolkowsky Page A

Virgil.
    And the minute he got off the plane in New York he was pestering Virgil to acknowledge the astonishing and quite possibly unprecedented nature of what had occurred. Ask Lewis, Dad! Once in ten thousand lifetimes an event of this magnitude occurred! But what Abby saw as a worrisome but in the end legitimate instance of “spiritual drunkenness,” Virgil decided was a psychotic break triggered by the morning-glory trip, which Seth happily told him all about. Having lured him down to a clinic run by a colleague on the pretence of measuring his surely exceptional brainwave function, Virgil had Seth subjected to a battery of tests then kept there for observation for several days against Seth’s will and without informing Abby. The test results were inconclusive but Seth was so furious at the betrayal and traumatized by the clinic discipline that he refused to speak to or visit Virgil afterward, with the estrangement lasting right up until Seth decided he wanted to become an actor and the Van Sant auditions were announced.
    When he returned from New York, he spoke less and less about the morning-glory trip, less and less in general. When he did speak, it was to Abby alone. They spent a lot of time in her room, the door closed. And what he said frightened her: he wanted to finish the job; he wanted to die the rest of the way.
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    O n the cutting-board island in the kitchen, breakfast has been laid out on white platters—over-easy eggs, white membrane sealing in the yolks, crisp bacon, hashed brown potatoes, bagels. Not that anyone else would go to the bother, but Lewis can tell at a glance that it was made by Abby. She could so easily run a successful restaurant or catering business. But that would be too—what? Easy? Hard? Predictable, he decides. It would bore her.
    He fixes a plate, sits down at the table and opens the Mac. At the tap of a key, the screen fills with an image of a smiling Abby at the wheel of the Escalade driving through Great Plains country. The window is down, her arm is hanging over the side and a sheer white scarf trails. Below the image is text, which Lewis reads while eating.
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    Grateful Gaia Storm Tours
    You’re probably well aware of the basics: from late March to late August of each year, tornado-spawning supercells are created in the area known as “tornado alley.” According to conventional meteorological accounts, it’s all due to the collision of warm, moist air coming up from the Gulf of Mexico, with dry cold air blowing in from the Rockies. But what do these terms really mean? What is “air,” “warm,” “cold,” and, above all, “collision”? Is it merely a matter of agitated atoms, as per the dominant scientific view? Hardly.
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    The Broken Heart of Gaia
    Dissatisfied with enthusiastic but essentially (offensively?—B.) empty and wrongheaded scientistic-thinking characteristic of typical storm-chase outfits, you’re ready for an advanced, spiritually evolved experience of the skies, what we call Gaia Consciousness. This is not a quest for a photo-trophy of a funnel cloud or lightning strike. We do not have a “passion for severe weather,” and we are not interested in helping you “achieve your chasing goals.” This is a journey into the broken heart of Gaia, she who has been hubristically taken for granted, pumped with pollutants and plumped with antibiotics, scorned by agribusiness and the self-destructive actions of an out-of-control patriarchy, capitalism, petrol, the relentless desacralization of the world that has been in full swing since the Industrial Revolution a scant two hundred years ago but really began four millennia ago with what has been variously represented in human myths as the Fall. This is the grieving, violent energy that fills the skies of the Great Plains in the spring months and through the summer. If you are prepared to feel the full force of that energy,