STORMBOX

According to CBS News, clowns have been making random appearances in Greenville, South Carolina, emerging—in one case—from a wooded area behind an apartment complex to whisper and make “strange noises,” flash “green laser lights,” and attempt to lure children, using “large sums of money,” into the woods. Though I did not recognize the name of the apartment complex—Fleetwood Manor—I did recognize the name of the city, which, as it turns out, is where my mother and her siblings were raised, and where all of them, except for my mother, now live, including my favorite aunt, who become my favorite because she did things like let me eat chocolate mousse for breakfast and throw her long blond hair over her head like Cousin It from the Addams family and send me cassette tapes upon which she told me that she was sad to hear that I had not played with Teresa, a three-foot doll who lived in a back room closet of my grandparents’ house, and that my aunt knew that I had not played with the doll because Teresa had told her so, and that the doll was so lonely that sometimes, at night, when everyone else was asleep, she slipped outside, to talk to Phillip, a statue in the shape of a naked boy who was perpetually holding onto a tiny pecker from whose tip a bit of black hose extended—ostensibly for use as a fountain, though I’d never seen him employed in this manner. Because I knew that my favorite aunt would have heard about the clowns—it was, after all, international news—and because I hoped she might have some kind of inside scoop, I sent her a text that said, “What’s up with all the clowns?” A few seconds later, she replied, said she didn’t know, and that the whole thing might be made up. What wasn’t made up, however, was the hurricane my aunt was currently watching on a radar map at her best friend’s house on the Isle of Palms; it was headed straight for them. In an attempt—more or less—to be funny, I asked if her friend had a “hurricane closet,” a reference to the “storm closet” that my aunt and cousins would retreat to when my cousins were kids, whenever they received word of impending storms. No, my aunt said, her friend did not have a hurricane closet, and in fact I must have been mistaken, because when her children were younger there was no particular closet designated as such, though she did have something she referred to as a “storm box,” which contained a lantern and batteries and a weather radio; during storms my aunt would bring this storm box, along with blankets and pillows and candy and games, into a closet, where she and my cousins would wait for the thunder and the rain to pass them by. As someone who has enjoyed, from time to time, hiding in dark places, I always thought it would be fun to enter a closet during a storm and listen to the weather radio and play cards and eat M&M’s from one of those huge, “family-sized” bags and see the faces of my cousins lit by lantern light while thunder boomed overhead, but, as it turned out, I never visited my aunt’s house during a thunderstorm or a tornado or, for that matter, severe weather of any kind. Still, I like the idea of having a “storm box”—and although the kind my aunt assembles makes a certain degree of sense, I think I’d prefer to own one that, once opened, could actually create a storm: I imagine lifting the lid, retreating to a safe distance, pressing a button on a remote, and wiry tentacles of lightning shooting out crazily, into the atmosphere, where they would attach themselves to whatever clouds they could find, and tow them together, and then somehow produce the necessary instability and thus convection required to instigate a storm. Although I’m fairly certain no box like this currently exists, a Swiss company called Meteo Systems claims that their WeatherTec Emitter Systems can charge naturally occurring aerosol particles which are then “advected” into clouds by convective updraft, thus “influencing” ice particles and “enhancing” rainfall, a system that could be helpful—or so they claim—in arid conditions. Likewise, the Beijing Weather Modification Office, which employs over 37,000 people, claims to have the ability to produce rain by firing rockets loaded with chemicals into the sky, and “seeding clouds” to produce rain, as much as fifty-five tons of it per year. Of course, it is difficult to say for sure whether or not the rain that subsequently falls after a so-called “cloud seeding” is the result of nature or man, and as pleasant as it may be to imagine rain transforming scorched deserts into lush grasslands, there’s no way to predict what the potential consequences might be, so perhaps it is better not to interfere, and better, in the case of an approaching storm, to seek shelter with the comfort of a storm box, or to do as my family did when I was younger, and as I do now with my own and only son, which is to find a place outside—a covered porch works best—to stand and observe the unfolding drama, far enough away from the main event to convince yourself that there’s nothing to worry about, but close enough so that, as the rain mists your face, you feel the need for human contact, so you place an arm around your son’s chest, which is itself a kind of storm box, if you allow yourself to think about your son’s body and its capacity to act as a container of sorts and to imagine its internal workings as a kind of endless tumult, what with its ceaseless—at least until the day it ceases—flow of blood, the driving engine of which is of course the boy’s heart, whose rhythmic and steady beat—especially at times like these, when rain-lashed trees sway in wind, and lightning flashes brighten the night—you are grateful to feel against the palm of your hand, as it is no more fathomable than storms, or clowns, or favorite aunts, or artificial rain, or dolls that come alive at night, or the fact that you emerged from nowhere to see it all, and to nowhere you will someday—but perhaps not just yet—return.