Tornado

The weather was pleasant, so the large window in the classroom was open. But as the class progressed, we could sense trouble out there. Clouds were passing through quickly and there was a kind of electric current in the air. If you live in the midwest you know this is a sign of trouble; the sky becomes the color of a day-old bruise.

My ESL students were from around the world, but they too knew trouble, as if we have a built-in survival instinct; they cast worried glances at the sky and the increasing wind outside the window. Mohammed and Maya had brought some kind of quarrel in at the beginning of class; they were snapping at each other and seemed to be on the edge of a fight. Mohammed was an older guy, from Saudi Arabia, with a wife and two daughters over at the student housing across the woods; Maya was a young Israeli woman, not backing down from any argument. At all costs I wanted them to refrain from a political argument about Israel's right to exist, or anything related to that, as these things got so volatile so quickly and there was really no solution. Instead they were snapping about some story we had been reading about a mixed-race marriage. The question concerned what kind of preparation a couple would have to do to make a mixed-race marriage successful. Some class members had already maintained that they weren't in the market for marriage anyway, so it didn't concern them. I told them, you can still answer the question, if you want to practice your English. I glanced nervously at the sky out the window; things were getting worse.

A guy named Nawaf arrived breathlessly, late for class. He was a young guy from Yemen; he'd been delayed in arriving due to some war activity at his airport, and then been placed in the wrong reading class, so he was just now arriving in our class where we would study intermediate reading. I knew he was fairly good at speakng and I guessed that he'd been held up by talking to much to some young woman in the hallway or somewhere as he loved people and was pretty good at just striking up conversations. He had curly hair and powerful, intense eyes, and I think Maya noticed him right away, as she was sitting near the door. He noticed her, too. I could tell it was the beginning of some kind of something, as from that moment on, they were very aware of each other's presence.

Soon after he arrived, though, some guy came by to tell us to move our entire class down to the auditorium on the first floor, because it was a tornado warning. A warning meant that one had been seen in the area, and I knew that we didn't mess around; if someone told us to find a safe place, we'd find a safe place. I told everyone this. There's a tornado in the area. Class is dismissed. Stay with me and we'll go to that auditorium down on the first floor. During a tornado you want to be downstairs, away from windows, with good solid walls around you.

Maya had again locked eyes with Nawaf, and they were now talking as we walked down to the first floor. There was another man, Diego, in the class; he was trying to catch up to them and be included in their conversation. I tried to keep track of everyone, but couldn't; some were already out of my sight. When we got to the auditorium there were other classes there, maybe about thirty or forty people altogether, and somebody had put on the overhead projector, which was playing a news reel but silently. Maya and Nawaf sat together in a back corner so they could keep on talking, and Diego joined them; I could tell this wasn't their choice but something they had to allow. Mohammed was explaining to me that he had to go home to his wife and children, as she was not permitted to talk to anyone outside the family, and she would not know what to do. He planned to walk straight across the woods, about half a mile, to get to his home.

Absolutely not, I told him. A tornado was spotted in the area, allegedly coming toward us, and the last thing you want to be walking out in the woods with huge trees out there, not to mention panicking animals. We just don't do it, and I'm sure your wife will figure out the best sthing to do with her kids and herself, to find safe shelter. He was not pleased with my answer. She is not allowed to ask for help, he said, or just go to a shelter where there are others, if he, her husband, is not around, he said. To him it was a matter of life and death for them, regardless of the danger of the woods.

The other problem concerned Erina, whose elderly parents were visiting from Japan for her older brother Taru's graduation. I was amused at the mention of Taru, who had been my student maybe six years ago, hadn't learned much English, but somehywheow got through and even graduated, or was about to graduate, by some kind of miracle or perhaps cheating which was always a possibility. In any case this elderly Japanese couple were visiting the U.S. for the first time and what should happen but a tornado come through.

And it was a whopper, from what we could tell. The wind raged outside the door and a huge tree fell right in front of the door. This mean that no emergency vehicles could get anywhere close so hopefully we wouldn't need one. Some guy who vaguely recognized addressed the auditorium and implored us to just stay calm, sit still, the auditorium itself was safe, with no windows and concrete walls on three sides. The pictures on the overhead showed a kind of weather radar which had a moving tornado literally passing right over our town. We could hear the wind raging outside and the sounds of other trees falling.

There was another problem in the form of a guy named Menk, paid by some mafia gang in Chicago to "deal with Maya" and get her "out of the picture." Menk is as close as it gets to a real bad guy in this story, although he had some redeeming features, and I didn't know about him at that time; he had simply found the auditorium, found Maya, and was disappointed that she had two men near her at the time. He had in fact had sinister motives starting with killing and rapidly coming down to kidnapping or some such thing, based on the fact that he too was taken in by her. It involved some shady business her father was involved in and, given the fact that the father was going to visit in the coming days, that's why it was urgent that she be "dealt with" in his bosses' words. He, though he was Russian, had never seen a tornado like this one. And, though he was not afraid to use weapons, he did not know if he could deal with two men, Nawaf and Diego, as opposed to just one, or perhaps Maya alone. Keep in mind, he looked distressed, but I didn't at that time know any of this, or know even who he was.

There were several classes, altogether maybe fifty people, in the auditorium, and another teacher, Adam, was taking a kind of provisional authority over them, telling them to stay put where they were safe, don't venture out, the tornado is upon us, that kind of thing. I was more than happy to just let my students know that Adam was right, listen to Adam. I tried to talk to Erina and a few other people who were curious about tornados in general. I felt the best thing was to sit still, let it pass, however bad it was, and then worry about getting home.

When I turned around, though, Mohammed was gone, and I was upset about it. Erina said he just waited until I wasn't looking, and left; at least he had told me that he was leaving. Huge trees were falling all over the woods and our biggest fear was that one would crush the building, but so far that hadn't happened; nothing stopping them from falling in the woods, though. The tornado was intense, but it was over in about twenty minutes. It was what they would call a derecho, a straight-line tornado, with eighty-mile-an-hour winds, damage to trees, power lines and houses all over town; it would change our town forever. The graduation plans were a shambles. Power was out through town and would stay out for weeks. Everyone's lives would be affected.

I got the sense that Maya and Nawaf would be an item from that time forward. Diego sensed that also and was sticking to Maya like glue knowing that if he let them be alone he would lose her altogether. He was possibly a distant cousin of hers, maybe related to the aunt at whose house she stayed, but his interest in her was brotherly; as an Argentine, he felt that she too, being at least part Argentine, should be watched over and protected. He was older than she was, and that was one reason she couldn't just tell him to back off and leave her alone.

Maya was off to Harvard soon; she had some kind of scholarship there and had to be there by a certain date. She was not a typical Israeli student; in fact, someone questioned whether she was even Jewish, if her father had lied about being Jewish in order to get out of Russia, and then, from Israel, had apparently come to the US himself. She was Jewish, she maintained, her mother being an Argentine Jew, but she would have no idea what to do about a Yemeni boyfriend.

Nawaf, for his part, was planning on moving to Michigan with his relatives, though again I wouldn't find this out until later. He was an intense kid, and also had relatives in town, and also, like Maya, had not even considered the consequences of falling in love with someone of another culture. One learns this the hard way. One loves who one's heart loves. I could practically watch him reconsider his choices, or, readjust his life to wanting this new, beautiful woman who he'd just met.

Menk, desperate to split up the three so he could get Maya alone or somewhere where he could enact his plan, started yelling at everyone to get up and leave. This was irrational and desperate, especially given the fact that the tornado was still just dying down and possibly not gone, so it was destructive and dangerous as well. Adam got quite upset that this guy who nobody knew would just yell at everyone and tell them to leave, and Adam yelled back; there was a shouting match. I signalled to my students not to go anywhere. It was a tornado, the last thing you want to do is stroll out the door for any reason.

But finally, we observed Ying, who snapped; she was one of my students as well. A young, pretty Taiwanese girl, she'd been coming unhinged recently and had started snapping at Erina, but at this moment, with Adam and Menk yelling at each other, and the picture of the tornado clouds on the weather radar moving and changing shape on the overhead screen, she started dancing at the front of the auditorium. She was silent and not trying to attract attention, but her dance was eerily reflective of the picture of the storm moving and she was clearly in a trance, like she was at one with the tornado and the picture of its cloud moving on the screen. Anyone who saw it, like me, was stunned and amazed at the way they fit together. Some, like Maya, Nawaf and Diego, possibly busy talking about other things, may not have even seen it. But it was truly incredible. I'd never seen anything like it.

I don't mean to make a drama about whether Nawaf and Maya actually got together, how, or when; in fact, there was no way even I could keep track of such things, outside of asking, and they might not tell the truth. Menk, with his dark intentions, was not going away, but she was safe from him as long as the boys were with her, and he finally left, I think, though Adam may have needed help to get him out of there. In any case I ran into both of them, Maya and Nawaf, sitting in the hallway of the building not far from my office, early in the morning, when I returned to gather up some of my things to leave town. My family was leaving town because we had small children and no generator and had no idea how long we would be without power. Maya and Nawaf, and the rest of my students, had no such luxury, with nowhere to go, but they told me they'd survived the night with no power and were doing fine. They were concerned about Mohammed, who they hadn't heard from, and also about Ying; they were well aware that Ying had gone over the edge mentally, and that was dangerous in a foreign country that had been struck by a tornado and had no services.

"And did you see all the trees fallen all over the place, all over town, on houses and cars, crushing everything?" Nawaf asked. In that sense, in awe of a derecho or powerful tornado, they had something in common. We all had lived through probably the most powerful storm ever in that town, in that area, and we were lucky. The grace of God, we agreed, they sitting in that hallway, out of sleep, and me, their teacher, just gathering a few things in order to clear out of town. Diego, they said, had a dog to tend to, who was panicking and causing trouble, and that was the only way they could get him to leave them alone; they smiled and laughed at that. The stories of Ying, Mohammed, and even Menk and Maya's father, I would find out later, all in good time, and it can only be described as unbelievable. Everyone whose car had been crushed, or dormer window, or was in the hospital when its power went out, had a story to tell, and we heard stories for months; some I'll tell. We all had to just take a break and let life return to normal a little.

the following is an experimental kindle vella chapter. let me know what you think!