Neither Mercy Nor Malice

"Woman!" Father J. J. Speed thundered the conclusion of his sermon, unctuous oratory dripping off his tongue like quicksilver as he competed with the storm outside. "Woman is the fairest of all creatures." Father J. J. Speed was chasing his rant, hot on the trail of the Holy Spirit, and no burrs of hesitation would tangle his climax. "The tender curves of Mother Eve are irresistible, as beautiful as the Earth itself, yet as seductive as the forbidden fruit. Mothers and daughters, lead us not into temptation. Your modesty means the salvation of your fathers and your sons. Lead them not into the thicket of lust. Lead them not into the jungles of lechery. For as Jesus the Lord has spoken, 'Whosoever looketh upon a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.' Sisters, save your brothers from this mortal sin…"

Bridget furrowed her brow, disliking and dismissing Father J. J. Speed's logic. What the heck was he talking about, standing up there stumping for prudery? And at the dawn of spring, no less! She imagined herself shouting back at the pulpit: Adam and Eve were naked, you doofus! Modesty only emerged after the fall! Nature has no privates. The naked truth is this: Modesty is the devil’s handiwork. She grinned in smug satisfaction with herself.

"…And as we go forth into our lives this week," Father J. J. Speed concluded, pleased that even the storm outside had become suddenly still for his finale, "let us remember that the salvation of others," he bowed his head, "lies in our own modesty." After an extended dramatic moment he gestured with his open palms for the congregation to rise. "Let us pray."

The rustle of everyone standing was defeated by a resounding rumble of thunder bowling across the ceiling, followed by a rattling veil of hail sweeping across the roof. The oblivious Dave Wildhack paid no attention, silently rejoicing instead as a couple hundred female haunches burst once again into his view. Bridget Snapdragon imagined herself continuing to assert that the salvation of others lies in our immodesty, and demonstrating her point by streaking nine months pregnant through the church. As for Father J. J. Speed, he kept his head bowed, working a grin out of his face. It was a good sermon, and these left him with an oratorical high that temporarily relieved the burden of his own hypocrisy. Plus, it was cool that the storm’s thunder seemed to echo of the irrefutable truth of his words. Straightening his face and looking up at last, he began to lead the congregation in their monotonous recitation of the Apostle’s Creed. “I believe in God, the Father almighty, Creator of heaven and Earth."

It relieved nobody when what sounded like every toilet in the building simultaneously flushing gave way to a tremendous gurgle throughout the building’s plumbing system.

A split second after the completion of the first affirmation and before they could draw in a breath to continue, every open door in the church simultaneously slammed shut. This was a consequence of the exceptionally low barometric pressure that had been developing in the atmosphere around the church, and it gave everyone a considerable start. It relieved nobody when what sounded like every toilet in the building simultaneously flushing gave way to a tremendous gurgle throughout the building’s plumbing system. As everyone looked around at each other bewildered, the reverberating echoes of this commotion gave way to an abrupt stillness in the atmosphere. The only sounds were the creaking of the hanging lights, now circling more emphatically, immediately followed by a swell of murmurs and whispers, and also, thanks to the microphone mounted on Father J. J. Speed's cassock, an amplified "what in the hell?" He was as unsettled as everyone, and after a few more moments, he addressed the congregation deliberately, if irresolutely. "I think, folks, perhaps, um, we should, ah, proceed downstairs?"

Scarcely had he spoken these words than a noise like every bee on the planet swarming filled the collective aural cavity. People began to jostle one another nervously in the pews, and the noise quickly rumbled into what sounded like the roar of a gigantic waterfall bursting its dam at last, bellowing like a billion revolutionaries storming the Pentagon. Everyone froze, looking up, mouths uniformly agape. Everyone, that is, except for Bridget Snapdragon. She was lowering herself unobserved onto the pew, clutching her enormous belly. She called out to Dave, who didn’t hear her, but did happen to look her way by chance a few moments later. He leapt immediately to her side, and seconds later, the roof of the church was ripped from its flying buttresses.

As far as the cosmos is concerned, planet Earth is very literally in the middle of nowhere. As a result, there is nothing necessarily up about north. In other words, given the absence of any permanently stable point of reference in the infinite void of space, it is impossible to assert with any certainty that north is upside down, right side up, sideways, diagonal, or any other particular direction in the three-dimensional 360-degree infinity of space. It is only a convenience of a culture bred from colonialism that allows us to generally assume that north is up and south is down.

Be that as it may, if we can close our minds for a moment and assume there is something inherently right side up about north, it then becomes possible to pretend there is also a top and a bottom to our entire solar system, an assumption that itself permits the existence of the consistently meaningful rotational directions of clockwise and counterclockwise. Armed with this expansive delusion, it at last becomes possible to point out that, with the notable exception of Venus, every planet in our solar system rotates counterclockwise on its axis.

Now, this celestial pattern is no trivial fact. As a direct result of the so-called counterclockwise rotation of the Earth, 99 percent of the tornadoes on the so-called top of the Earth rotate counterclockwise when viewed from above. However, the F4 tornado that struck Normal, Illinois, that fateful April Fool's Day was of the 1 percent that rotate clockwise. What this means is anyone’s guess, but for years afterward Georgeann Judge would tell Dave Wildhack — by then no longer oblivious — that it was a Venusian tornado.

It was no apparition when the congregation witnessed Jesus Christ turn several holy cartwheels down the center aisle of the church before ascending into the windstorm above. As one does not ordinarily expect gymnastics from crucified prophets, the lack of a revelatory aura made it not the least bit less astounding. However miraculous that spectacle might have been, there was scarcely a moment to appreciate it before all hands were shielding first their eyes and then their heads entirely. A cone, extending a half mile up and occasionally revealing the midday sun at its far end, enveloped the entire terrified church far too much like the tunnel rumored to greet us at death. Brilliant flashes of lightning zigzagged between howling walls of bilious debris, and somewhere a civil defense siren began to whimper.

Bridget shielded neither her eyes nor her head, although Dave, his confusion having given way to his instinct of paternal responsibility, was doing his best to protect both himself and her. Bridget was inhaling, drawing in an infinitely deep breath like a child looking up from an asphalt faceplant. Her eyes were wide and her pupils dilated, gazing up, absorbing and reflecting the entire circumstance, and still she inhaled. Her rib cage expanded to its full capacity, her heart gorged itself on ionized oxygen, her incipient daughter caught a buzz off the superoxygenated blood pumping through the umbilical hookah, and still she inhaled. Her water broke, and still she inhaled. When the atmosphere finally found its way out of Bridget’s lungs, her wail pierced the roar of the tornado like a referee’s whistle in a soccer riot. It was such a blast of tribulation, in fact, that half the already panicked congregation instinctively turned to see what in the name of God was happening now.

What they saw was not Bridget Snapdragon in the throes of childbirth, for she was lying down obscured by the pews. Instead, half the congregation was greeted with the sudden sight of Georgeann Judge’s husky and entirely naked body. Georgeann noticed this herself at about the same instant as everyone else, but her reaction was one of incredulity rather than mortification. She needn’t have worried, for within seconds an identical fate was greeting everyone around her, seams splitting as easily as perforated tissue paper, wedgies ripping underwear clean off, buttons busting out, bracelets, watches, necklaces, everything except for the occasional sock was stripped like feathers from a chicken.

Father J. J. Speed’s cassock was the last article of clothing to join the congregation’s Sunday best in airborne frolic. Having seen everyone else’s clothing yanked so rudely off, he had time to lay a firm grasp on the inside of his smocky sleeves a moment after his chasuble soared off his shoulders and a moment before an unseen hand rent his cassock in two like an indignant Pharisee. He immediately found himself twirling one half of his furiously flapping vestments in each hand as they struggled to join the dancing apparel above. At about the same time as his boxers split off, Father J. J. Speed realized the futility and the foolishness of his tug of war with the heavens. Looking like a superhuman and sacrilegious Chippendale reject, he ceased his grapple and released the billowing fabric with a splendid flourish, sending it sailing into the melee above. The two halves of his cassock left all remnants of chastity with the nude dude below as they joined the spinning rave of raiment, gradually twisting and tangling into an orgy of torn panties and rumpled trousers before vaulting high into the wild blue yonder.

Nature knows neither mercy nor malice. From organism to ecosystem, every level of order has its own reasoning, all of which exists indifferent to the dreams and nightmares of other levels. As we are indifferent to any suffering inflicted upon unwelcome microorganisms as our own bodies struggle toward homeostasis, so is the good Earth indifferent to the catastrophes and disasters inflicted upon its inhabitants as it sneezes and coughs. Simply stated, a tornado is an absolutely neutral fact.

This truth was not apparent to the whimpering and sobbing parishioners now huddled naked in each other’s arms, hiding beneath the pews from a wrath they could never have imagined. That everyone had taken shelter under the bolted-down benches was fortunate, for this particular tornado was so malevolent in its indifference that it had managed to locate Father J. J. Speed’s sixty-six thousand remaining toothpicks and send them raining down on the parish like a volley of darts. The wind-whipped velocity permitted the toothpicks to puncture the surface of the pews, embedding themselves so comprehensively that every wooden surface in the church had become a virtual bed of nails.

Father J. J. Speed had taken solitary shelter under the altar, entirely naked but more concerned with shielding his chest from public view than his privates. The thing was, Father J. J. Speed had a barely noticeable attribute that he was nevertheless very self-conscious about. Directly between his nipples, a dessert bowl sized depression dipped concave. Not having revealed himself naked to many people over the course of his life, he had grown to imagine that this feature was an elephantine deformity, and made every effort to ensure that no one would discover his terrible secret.

So there he squatted, shivering and habitually wishing he had a toothpick on which to gnaw when thousands of them came spraying out of the sky like an Egyptian plague, pelting and piercing every surface of the church. Despite the apparent fulfillment of his wish, he did not reach for one, and it would be over two decades before he would ever reach for one again. In his mind, the era of the toothpick ended at that moment, and a new dawn had arisen. His lifetime supply of toothpicks was gone, and he was still alive. It was a rebirth of sorts. He could move on at last, and he reached for his open Bible to lay a praise-the-Lord and promising hand upon it. He saw that it was open to Ezekiel, chapter one, and his astonished eyes happened to fall upon verse four:

And I looked, and behold, a whirlwind came out of the north…"

~ Nine Kinds of Naked is Tony Vigorito's second novel. The major themes of the book revolve around the Jungian concept of synchronicity, chaos theory, and the Butterfly Effect. Tornadoes and hurricanes, representative of chaos, propel the storyline across its twelve centuries.

Vigorito wrote this book as an experiment in literary synchronicity, starting with the title and inventing the entire story day by day according to the synchronicities of his daily experience. What emerged was an exploration of the Butterfly Effect, as what initially appears to be a chaotic storyline eventually relents into a tightly-interconnected series of events linked across time, space, and meaning...

Diablo is serving a brief jail term in Normal, Illinois. One day, he happens to idly toss a playing card—the Joker—across his cell. From the scarce draft of the spinning card, a powerful tornado eventually forms that touches the lives of all the major characters, intersecting their lives in synchronistic fashion.

Billy, the guard who released Diablo from jail, gave a ride to Diablo, who was hitchhiking outside the jail. Caught in the same tornado, Billy is torn from the driver's seat and tossed into the sky. Five years later, just after quitting a job, Diablo almost runs Billy down with his car. Billy now calls himself Billy Pronto and insists that he can only speak in the present tense.

Special Agent J.J. Speed is a CIA agent and a former priest who changed his life after the tornado struck the Church in Normal, Illinois, at which he was conducting Mass. The tornado stripped him of his priestly vestments (along with the clothing of everyone else in the congregation) and sent them sailing into the sky. Twenty years later, stuck in a dead-end assignment in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, he happens across his priestly scarf—definitive as it was embroidered with his initials—being sold by a street vendor. He is shortly reassigned to New Orleans.

Elizabeth Wildhack is a dropout philosopher and a New Orleans stripper. She is the daughter of Bridget Snapdragon, who gave birth to her during the tornado that struck the Church in Normal, Illinois, just before her body disappeared into the sky. Elizabeth eventually meets Diablo, who has been selling seashell pipes on Bourbon Street for the last fifteen years, ever since he quit his job and Billy Pronto began haunting him.

A year prior to their meeting, and two days after a thermonuclear bomb test in the Rub al-Khali, an overnight hypercane formed in the Gulf of Mexico. New Orleans, still raw from Hurricane Katrina years back, flees its path, but the world is soon startled to discover that this anomalous hypercane is not moving, taking up an apparently stable position in the Gulf. This hypercane is the latest incarnation of the tornado initially spun from Diablo’s playing card, which had been a dust devil in the Rub al-Khali gradually dissipating into nothing before the thermonuclear explosion caused it to grow in strength.

Woven throughout the larger story is Clovis, runaway serf from the 9th century who stumbles upon the mythical Golden Bough, a scene which Bridget Snapdragon happened to paint on the kitchen wall while pregnant with Elizabeth. Possessed of the Golden Bough, Clovis is thereby granted solitary access to the underworld - the world beneath the illusions of time and meaning. Existing outside of time, he aspects the trickster, and amuses himself by orchestrating tremendous coincidences."
~ Wikipedia