Tornado III: Dust

The wreckage, the chunks, the torn pieces, the ripped pages floating in puddles. Rubble, sunken fires, ruins barely standing, like thin, tired legs. Soaked drawings, ink swimming away. I was expecting it all just like it all seemed to have been expecting me. It really isn’t worth describing. Anybody could guess what the aftermath of a tornado looks like. There’s something, though, that perhaps you, like me, couldn’t imagine. Something unbothered by gravity. It was in the air, in the water, around hair, inside my ears, on the books that had survived. And that was dust. So much dust. All of it. Nothing and no one could have warned me. I’m talking tons of minced matter. The tiniest lil bits of every single thing, no longer recognisable. And let me tell you, it takes a while for dust to settle. 

Through the dusty fog I was living in I’d sneeze and cry uncontrollably. I couldn’t see where I was, so I started to wander around with my arms stretched ahead, my hands trying to reach a hug, perhaps a door handle. I bumped into all sorts of things, like zombies do. Lost friends, rocks, coffee tables, retaining walls, spiky bushes, a doctor. The doctor said I had a bad case of dust allergy. I carried on dragging myself, trying to squint around. Time in semi blindness was piercingly slow, so slow, prickly slow. I can’t remember having slept or eaten for as long as the dusty smog lasted so I don’t really know how I made it through. I only remember that one day I started to vaguely recognise my surroundings. I seemed to be home, finally.

But home wasn’t looking like home. It was kind of empty and towers of boxes were piled up. I rubbed my itchy, crying eyes. Among the boxes, a pink one stood out through the smog. It had to be Hetty’s box. Hetty is the commercial name of my vacuum cleaner. That appliance, like me, has a few spins on her back. She’s sturdy and pink, with the shape of a head under a black hat. She’s also got two smiley eyes and a long nose, which happens to be the tube through which she sucks the dirt. I clumsily unpacked her and started to vacuum the air. The dusty fog was clearing up at last. I saw some movement at the top of a box tower. It was Momo, my cat! He must have been hiding inside a box while the tornado went on. You know cats. He jumped down from the very top and I finally reached my hug. He was looking cuter and more loving than before but he’d sneeze and cry, like me, as if he were also suffering from some allergy. I vacuumed our way to the vet. It turned out Momo had the same allergies I had: grass, olive trees, cats, dust… He wasn’t really tested for cats but I bet Momo is allergic to cats too. Well, now I really had to keep all that dust away from home, so I kept vacuuming even more hectically, sucking the hell out of every single thing and out of the empty space in between. 

Believe me if I say cleaning after a tornado is not an easy task. I bumped into an old friend who insisted on giving me a hand. We happened to be humming the same song. It was a sad one, a good one. I accepted his help, not because I thought I couldn’t do it myself, but because I just liked humming along with him. Hetty has wheels but he’d hold her for me while I vacuumed around so I didn't have to pull her from her nose. He’d also make sure her long cable didn’t get tangled. I still had to do the job, you know, but he made it easier. I think he knew what he was doing. All his T-shirts are stained with bleach. I suspect he’s a compulsive cleaner and you know compulsive cleaners like a good mess. 

For months I vacuumed and vacuumed frantically. Sometimes, little screws and hair pins were sucked from the floor. For some reason they would make this coin-falling-in-jar noise. I vacuumed my books, I vacuumed my pencil case, I vacuumed Momo’s bed and the lamp with the shape of Hello Kitty’s head. I vacuumed the space between myself and the mirror. God I was so thin. I vacuumed sofas and magazines, curtains, shoe soles and laces, clock hands. I vacuumed my way to the allergy doctor and my way to the supermarket. My way to the film club and my way to the rubbish container. I’d vacuum my chalkboard whenever I couldn’t think of what to vacuum anymore. I would smoke a cigarette and vacuum the smoke as I exhaled. Several feathers came out but I also vacuumed the duster once, just to rejoice in satisfaction. I was truly succeeding in keeping it all clear. Stroke by stroke, I was regaining my sharp sight, erasing all traces of the tornado so home could be a safe place for Moms and me, free of dust. 

Then it happened. It happened one morning, before putting Hetty to work. I suddenly thought to myself, ‘The vacuum bag must be pretty full by now, it’s time to take Hetty’s hat off and change it.’ I kneeled down, pulled Hetty’s ears, lifted her hat and… 

Pow!

A mushroom cloud, a dense grey explosion, a rising tongue of fine allergenic matter made its way up to my nose, my eyes, my mouth. The whole of my face, covered by a radioactive slap. My lashes, white. My brows, white. My long hair dry-shampooed from roots to ends by dust. All that dust, all that bloody dust that I had so carefully picked up and put away, all spat up my respiratory tract. My eyes were closed and I counted till three. Not with numbers, but with f*cks. F*ck. F*ck. F*ck. 

And I sneeeeeeeeeezed, just began to sneeze, coughing, sneezing nonstop, crying with itch and coughing my life out. Man. What the hell had just happened?

I was a ghost, a sneezing, crying apparition. And I had had enough. I turned to Momo and he ran in a coughing panic. I turned to my old friend. 

‘Holy shit. You alright?’ he said. 

‘Pointless!!’ I bursted. ‘All my hard -choo work, pointless. Achoo. All the suffering I tried to a- achoo- void, coming back to me, cough, cough, cough, exponentially multiplied.’ The interruptions were deducting drama from my rant, but I think the itchy crying was balancing it out. ‘Why this punishment aft, aft aftchoo after having survived a fu a fu a choo cking tornado?’ I pointed at the ceiling in anger. ‘Hadn’t I cough cough suffered en, en, en… enough? Why this now? Cough Why this? Cough, cough Why? Cough Why? Cough, cough, cough Why?...’ 

I entered a rhetorical loop of laments. The dusty fog was denser than ever. I was blind again. It was just my crying, my sneezing, my coughing, my desperate need for an explanation. An explanation that could at least ease the pain of living in a world where tornadoes can just come and wipe your home and leave it all ruined and full of dust and on top of that one can be allergic to dust and even cats can be allergic to dust, and you push through and put the energy you haven’t got anymore into clean it all up with an anthropomorphised vacuum cleaner and then you clean it and you’re thoughtful enough to change the bag and all the minced crap you put away suddenly goes back straight into your face in half a second and you’re back to zero and about to have an anaphylactic shock and who knows perhaps die unfairly, just like that, just like that, just like that. Without any reason. An explanation that would at least, no matter how cruel, no matter how complex, make it make sense. An explanation that would bloody hand me back some dignity, some agency from fate. The agency that only knowledge, only reason can give. The bloody cause of the effect, so I could at least know what to do or not do to avoid ending up in anaphylactic shock again! If I happened to survive this one! F*cking hell! 

‘Tell me, mate. You, my old friend. For pity. Tell me why!’ And like a powdered courtesan in the XVIII century after having read too much Voltaire, I wobbled and fainted. 

A folk tune from pre-revolutionary Russia woke me up. ‘Shit, the Russians!’ I screamed. 

‘Hey, yo, chill.’ 

I was buried in my friend’s couch. He was playing an old version of Tetris at light speed and idly smoking a blunt, all at the same time. There wasn’t a single speck of dust around. His coffee table was shiny-clean and the whitest double-bagged cup of tea was on it. 

‘That’s for you,’ he said. 

‘Thanks, mate.’ 

I wasn’t sneezing or coughing or crying anymore, just feeling a bit like Goldilocks at the three bears’ cottage. I had a sip. It tasted so comforting… 

‘Where’s Moms? Where’s Hetty?’ 

‘They’re at your place. They’re both fine.’ He sounded so reassuring…

Half the joint in his mouth was a perfect tube of ash, miraculously holding. 

‘You’re going to drop that ash and stain this immaculate haven.’ 

‘Shit!’ Tetris was going badly. He’d misdropped a long bar and a tower of Zs quickly piled up at the centre of the screen. ‘Sorry, what’d you say?’ He shook the bud above the ashtray. Not a fleck of ash flew away. 

I had a look around. ‘How… how do you manage to keep your place this clean?’ 

‘It’s not that clean.’ 

‘No, seriously. How do you do it? You don’t even have a vacuum cleaner.’ 

‘I don’t need one.’ 

‘You don’t need one. You’re taking the piss right now.’ 

He arched his eyebrows and shook his head. ‘I’m not.’ 

I frowned. ‘But you’ve seen how much dust is out there and how much I’ve had to clean just to keep my place breathable and in here it’s like being in a soap bubble. Why is that?’ 

He had a puff while staring at me intensely. 

‘You’re definitely hiding something from me,’ I said. 

He laughed the funny way only weed-smokers do. ‘I just clean before it gets too messy.’ 

There was a long silence. ‘I need to know why.’ 

His smile faded away. ‘I know you do.’ 

‘Why all that happened to me, you know?’ 

‘I know.’. He kept scanning me from behind the smoke. His eyes were the blue of a window-cleaning liquid. 

‘You know I need to know why or you actually know why?’ 

‘Both.’ 

He took another long puff and, holding the air in, said, ‘When you fell asleep I had a look inside Hetty. There was no bag. All the dirt you vacuumed was just stored directly inside, with no filter to contain it. There was a lot of dust bottled up so when you opened her hat, it exploded.’ He said all that before exhaling. 

‘Wait. I always change the bag. It makes no sense!’ 

‘It does.’ He now released the smoke. ‘Whoever shipped your boxes from wherever it was must have thought you don’t ship a vacuum cleaner full of dirt and they removed the bag. It was actually a thoughtful gesture. Why would anyone want to receive dust sent from miles away?´

There was no bag…  That coin-falling-in-a-jar noise suddenly made sense. ‘Shit. Is that it?’ 

‘Yep.’

I didn't know if it was the weed combustion or the simple logic behind my friend’s explanation, but I was starting to feel stunned. ‘Hold on. But why all the dust? And why am I allergic to it? And why is Moms too? And why was all my stuff in boxes? And why is home now miles away from where it used to be? The tornado. Why did it come!?’ 

‘It was meant to. Warm air down, cool air up. A supercell thunderstorm above… I mean, they said it’d come. Didn't you watch the forecast?’ 

‘I don’t own a TV,’ I whispered, lost in space. 

‘It’s just the natural result of explosive storms, cold temperatures, erosion, excessive hygiene and wind.’ 

Another long silence. This one must have lasted a really long time because the joint was almost over when my gaze came back from some black hole. 

‘Just that?’ 

‘Just that, mate,’ he smiled. 

In a way I was relieved, but I felt deeply stupid as well. I couldn’t believe the causes of all the pain I had gone through were so simple and yet somehow unavoidable. ‘Excessive hygiene…’ I whispered to myself. 

My friend put out the joint, creating the minimal amount of ash in the ashtray. ‘You’re some sort of control freak. You want to know the cause of everything because you think that way you’ll be in control. You can vacuum the air if you want, and I’ll help you if that makes you feel safe, but even if there are causes for a tornado, you can’t avoid a tornado, girl. You’ve gone through a storm. That’d be the definition of hell for any control freak. You’re traumatised. You need to feel sheltered. But remember, you’ve survived out there. You’re very much capable of protecting yourself.’ 

For the first time in ages I teared up not because of my dust allergy. 

‘Yo, the tornado is over now and it’s more or less clean here, right?’ He grabbed the joystick. 

‘I’m a control freak…’ 

‘So what? There’s nothing wrong with it.’ He pressed the ‘new game’ button.

The Russian melody was going on again in the background but he started humming over it. ‘Come as you are. As you were…’ At that point I was completely lost in a distant galaxy of thoughts. So in this world a tiny wind swirl could trigger a tornado, a sand storm, an outcome completely different to the one that was predicted just seconds before. Tiny wind swirls can go unnoticed. But even if unnoticed, they are still the cause of the outcome, because there is a cause for everything in this world. ‘Take your time, hurry up…’ But even if we noticed the causes, it might be that there’s nothing we could do to prevent the effects. In this world there are tornados for a reason. And there’s dust for a reason. And for a reason dust makes me cry and itch and sneeze and cough and also for a reason I can’t fully get rid of it. And that’s how the world is. And if the world weren’t like this, perhaps I wouldn’t even be in it. ‘Choice is yours, don't be late…’  I take it. It’s fine. I take the world as it is. I joined in after the chorus. ‘Come doused in mud, soaked in bleach…’ 

‘Don’t you want to break away from fate?’ My friend handed me the joystick with a smirk. ‘From the unavoidable fate of losing to me at Tetris?’ 

‘I’m a drama queen, a traumatised control freak, some delusional relic from the Enlightenment and an idiot. Why do you put up with me?’ 

‘Cause we’re playing and it’s your turn and you don’t always want to know the reasons for some things.’