At school they taught us to recognize a bell that signaled a tornado had touched down nearby. They taught us to sit in the hallway with our textbooks fanned over our heads like sun hats. Personally, debris falling on my head is the last thing I’m worried about in the event of a tornado. The thing I’m worried about in the event of a tornado is being picked up and carried off to somewhere I don’t know. I’m worried about flying in circles with the cows and grass and broken planks of wood, the tornado deciding, “My work here is done” and retracting back into the clouds and letting me crash-land in a field beside upside-down cows, no clue where I am or how to get home or how to get these cows upright again.
The reason I’m worried about this is because of the time our town got hit by a pair of twisters. They circled each other like tango partners, stepping and twisting through the edge of town where the high school was, peeling away paint, exposing pipework, and carrying away every unlocked bicycle. After they wandered off into farm country, the high school did a head count and found that three students were missing, including my older brother. Eventually one kid snitched and said they had used the tornado as cover to sneak out of school, to play hooky. Mom was redder than the tomatoes we found in our yard after the tornadoes went through farm country. She called my brother, and he insisted the tornado had picked him up and thrown him into a strange town and he had no idea how to get home. Mom said, “Look at a map, Peter.” He said, “This place isn’t on any map, Mom.” And that was it. He never came back.
Mom would call him periodically and he’d tell her about the strange town, about how no one there knew how to swim so they freaked out when it rained, or how the dogs barked in reverse, or how people greeted each other by saying “I’m sorry for your loss.” The other two students with him were his girlfriend and his best friend, so it seemed like he had a happy little situation going on, but I also suspect he must have been terrified. In the back of his mind, he must have wanted at least the option to come home, to walk through the front door covered in foreign dirt, drop his bag at the foyer, give mom a big hug and just hold her, letting the forgiveness pour out of them both, her saying “I’m so glad to see you” and him saying “I’m sorry for your loss.”
I had nightmares of tornadoes for a long time after that. I dreamt of the roof being torn off our house like the top of an envelope, and the screaming wind calling for me while I clung to the bed post. In the dreams, it’s no use. My mom runs in and tries to hold me down, she doesn’t want to lose another son to God knows where, but it’s no use. The tornado sucks me up and shakes me around in a dark, howling, rainy, dusty confusion, and spits me out into some unmapped place, probably not even the same place my brother’s in, and I have no choice but to plant roots and start a life there. And worse, I realize I’m now living on the real map, and the map which included my hometown but not this place was wrong. In fact, the hometown I thought I had never existed, and Mom is just a lost soul putzing around an abandoned plane of existence.
Then I wake up.
I go into the kitchen and see Mom putzing around and I just wonder.