Bullets of Rain Read Free Page A

heart-accelerating decongestants like MSM's from wake-up till sleeptime. A decade back he'd had his septum corrected, and polyps excised. A week following the minor surgery, a blood vessel high up in his skull decided to let go like a burst fire hydrant, liberating blood in fat, metronomic drops that obstinately refused to slow down, or dam up. This nasal apocalypse lost its comic value after about five minutes. What didn't drip out went down his throat in an unstoppable, inexorable, slow-motion torrent-now; that was funny, the thought that he could die from a nosebleed that didn't even hurt. All his blood would run out of his skull and he would die. Laugh riot. Just imagine the funeral for a guy who had croaked from a terminal runny nose.
        He was vaguely ill and in the first stages of woozy shock by the time Lorelle drove him to the Half Moon Bay lire station and they caught an ambulance ride into the city, where a triage nurse estimated he had swallowed more than a pint of his own blood. A patient physician named Dr. Bloch had tried packing his nostrils with eight feet of some nonabsorbent material that looked like pasta. No good. Then, in one of those moments straight out of a 1950s sci-fi film- it'd crazy, but it just might work! -Dr. Bloch fed a catheter into Art's nose and inflated it with a hypodermic full of water, which applied the needed pressure to the unreachable rupture. The whole event was so comedic that it sharpened Art's appreciation of the fact that he could die abruptly, by ridiculous means. Death by absurdity, without hidden meaning or footnote.
        Not so with Lorelle. Cancer wasn't as funny. He still said her name aloud, to himself, several times a day. Even now.
        Art's sinuses mended and he was 100 percent okay. His cholesterol was negligible. Heart, lungs, blood, all fine. He was thirty-eight and could conceivably live to ninety; he just had no idea how he was going to get that far or last that long, for reasons having nothing to do with aging or his physical state. He was a lit, average man, hiding out in a sanctuary of his own making, logging work with little joy, mourning the loss of a revised director's cut of his own life-the version in which Lorelle had lived.
        What he wanted now was a storm. A violent, freezing sky show, to inspire him. Thunder and fury. His stocks were good, and if catastrophe struck, his own garage was outfitted better than a bomb shelter. He wanted to bear witness while some black bitch of a hurricane cleaved around the battlements of his stormproof fortress, this product of his will. Then maybe he could return to the stoop labor of telling restaurant technology which way to swing.
        Three mornings running, now, the sky had come up dour crimson. Old sailor sayings were apparently claptrap.
        "Blitz! Beweg deinen Arch hier ruber! " he shouted on the return trek from Spilsbury's. The dog, having enjoyed a longer morning jaunt than usual, snapped to and obeyed. Art assumed his dog-voice: "You're a good boy, aren't you? Guter Hund. Du bit halt mein Beter! " Blitz loved the sound of the word good. He hung his tongue to the wind like a fluttering slice of ham, agreeing that he was, in fact, a good boy. Gulls winged about, buffeted mercilessly by gusts in their unending scavenge for refuse and dead things. Blitz wanted to jump high enough to snag them. Art saw the birds reflected in the dog's rich, coffee-colored eyes.
        A quick scan of the websites on his Favorites file yielded no new consumer temptations, merely an endless avalanche of pop-up windows, click-now hot links, and animated come-ons. The World Wide Web had boiled down to three basic constants-porn, advertising, and a smorgasbord of humans declaring themselves and their likes to a world they could not see, in a frantic attempt to leave a visual benchmark amid the digital waterfall of data; perhaps lend some humanity to all those invisible ones and zeros. He was aware he