This Is Only a Test Read Free Page B

place in the world for an almost I?
    Trust me, Bucko, when a tree falls it makes a terrible sound.
    Swear to me you didn’t hear it.

To the Good People of Joplin
    May 23, 2011
    To the Good People of Joplin:
    This will get worse before it gets better. I know this because of what I’ve observed from my own firsthand experiences in Tuscaloosa, a city much like yours which was ravaged a month prior to your own ravaging. Likely you watched us from afar, which is what we do now, our cities forever wedded by our season of misfortune.
    Allow me to share with you a difficult truth:
    In the coming hours and days your death count is likely to rise. Cell phone reception will return—which, on the surface, seems like a good thing, though this increased communication will mostly only bring bad news. People will begin to learn who was lost and how, and as their stories are sifted from the rubble,it will soon become clear that everybody knows somebody now gone. You will begin hearing stories, though unlike the phone calls not all of them will end badly. Like the one where the bathtub blows away but the family remains safely inside; and the one where the dog survives two weeks on broken legs before reuniting with his people.
    In short, take comfort where you can.
    As the dust settles, people will begin endowing the storm with a conscience. They will talk about how the tornado leveled one house but left another, how it
made that choice
. You will begin fitting nature’s lunacy into some strange logic, bring God into the equation and speak of “master plans” not yet revealed to his flock. This is a good technique, and one that we have found to be quite useful here in Tuscaloosa. The fitting together of disjoint pieces offers the same distraction as any good puzzle—an outlet to busy oneself when the mind is in need of rest.
    I should warn you, though, that you’ll soon be inundated by a storm of another sort.
    Everyone will want to help you, and even those of you who were spared the worst of it will receive a knock on your door, someone pleading with you to take a bottle of water.
    Listen to me: just take it. This is a small gift from a person who feels as helpless as you do. Better still if you can muster a stoic smile, though you’ll surely be forgiven if you can’t.
    Good people of Joplin, I can’t promise you much, but I can promise you this: one month from today, you will not be healed, but you will be healing.
    The scrap will be piled alongside the roads, and eventually even the choir of sirens will dissipate. One day soon, cars will once again outnumber ambulances, and in a few weeks’ time, you’ll seea child fling a Frisbee and forget that anything more treacherous ever circled in the wind.
    This morning, as my cereal turned soggy, I watched the on-site meteorologist from the Weather Channel choke up on the air. He was describing your world turned inside out, your people stumbling, when he momentarily misplaced his own stoic smile and admitted that Joplin looked “very reminiscent of what we saw last month in [pause] Tuscaloosa.”
    His pause said what his words couldn’t, reminding me of one final piece of advice that I’ll bestow upon you now.
    You will find, I think, that the inexplicable nature of nature is another hard-earned side effect of your troubles. And more to the point, that seeking answers in the aftermath is a Sisyphean task not worth your effort.
    For a month now, I have been trying to write my way out of disaster.
    It is still here.

Fifty Ways of Looking
at Tornadoes
    1.
    For nine months now, I have been trying to write my way out of disaster. I thought it would be easier than this. Yet no matter how many times I report on that April afternoon in Tuscaloosa—when my wife, dog, and I hid in our bathtub—still, the storm will not leave us.
    2.
    Once I made them by hand. You can make one, too. Pour a teaspoon of salt into a cylindrical glass and