stood up, not surprised or even disappointed at being stood up, but still affected—

still, despite myself, a little turned on, by the clerk’s hand having been down my skirt, by the contextualizing laughter itself, turned

on, also, by the book I’ve just bought, the cover of which is seductive matte black, a night

landscape with dunes, cactus—

a small and violent, generous book (from the text on the back: I’m pointing again, it’s a habit, I know), the kind I make an effort to find when someone trusted tips me off—

I am struck by the scene, its unlikeliness: the unexpected rain and the intensity of it (you really can’t go outside in this; the streets are empty), the unexpected encounter with my believed-to-be-dead clerk, even the near-instant change of tenor among my cohabitants in the bar, who went from silent to annoyed to convivial (with one exception: the bartender, scowling and swiping at her screen) five minutes into the deluge. Struck

by the scene, and just staring at the book and its title. I don’t know what it’s about, not really. I open it to page one of section one, “The Earth”:

“I’m dead, Makina said to herself when everything lurched.”

THE ACTUAL NEWS

What the actual news reports said, when the bartender turned on the television twenty minutes into the downpour, was that this was a tropical storm—Ezekiel—that had surprised the meteorologists by straying farther west than expected and now risked being upgraded to a hurricane, screwing with the nomenclature, it turns out, since in the U.S., tropical storms and hurricanes are named by different bodies, governmental and non (a fact the flustered meteorologist spent a minute of screen time on while sedans and SUVs floated down roiling street-rivers from left to right across the bar’s oversize TV).

I looked around. I look around: to my right, three lone drinkers, each pounding thumbs or fingers against a phone. To my left, a pair, youthful in dress and posture though I can’t see the agebetraying parts—faces, hands—so glued together are they in lips and tongues and, it turns out when I look harder, tears. They don’t seem to be fighting. One keeps grabbing the other’s chest, twisting t-shirt between fingers, which appears to make the other cry harder and also kiss harder. One is blond with a pink streak sprouting from the temple, the other wears a deep-black ponytail. I’m still staring at them, wanting to know what they know, when everything lurches.