Chasing the Whirlwind
Fiction - by Wendy Nikel
"What color is the breeze today?" I ask Imogene, rolling down the window of the old Chevy I'd 'borrowed' from my uncle's junkyard after the fight.
Imogene leans out her window and breathes deeply, as if that'll help her see the wind's hues. "Orange. Part desert dust, part anticipation, singed at the edges from the heat. I think today's going to be the day we find it, Thea."
The dust part is indisputable. We've driven for hours across the desert's chapped surface without encountering another soul. If it weren't for the salsa music crackling through the van's speakers, I might think the whole world had disintegrated into dust and rock. And in some ways, I think we'd be better for it.
About the other part—finding what we were looking for—I have bigger doubts. Imogene should be used to my skepticism, but as she hands me the now-warm cherry cola we'd bought at our last gas stop, she leans back against the upholstered headrest and tries again to convince me.
"Today's the day we'll find that windstorm," she says, her voice breathy and light, "just like Gran's old book said. And the windstorm will lead us to the portal, and in we'll go, and never look back."
I sigh but play along. What else am I going to do, out on this wide, empty road? "And what'll we find there, huh? In this utopian alternate dimension of yours?"
She shrugs a sunburned shoulder. "Peace."
"Sure. Peace." Even as my mind scoffs at the thought of such a place, without conflict or hate or selfishness or greed, something deeper inside me, long buried, longs for it, wishes more than anything else that there is really a place like that, a place we could get to, somehow. A place we could stay.
"You saw how well the healing spells worked. You can't deny it; there's something to that book."
"I guess." I shift in my seat, peeling my sweat-sticky legs from the leather. It had been almost miraculous how quickly my bruises had disappeared. I rub my thumb along my jawline, testing it for the sharp memory of pain, but the sting doesn't come, no matter how hard I press.
"So why don't you believe me about this?"
I glance at Imogene and catch a glimpse of my own hollow-cheeked face reflected in her dollar-store sunglasses.
"Seriously? Would I be driving you out here to the middle of nowhere if I didn't believe you?" I ask.
"Yes."
I bite back my retort. She's right. I would.
Because even though I don't actually believe Imogene can see the wind in technicolor vision or that her Gran's stories about some mystical windstorm that serves as a portal to another dimension are true, Imogene is my best friend, and at the root of it all—through our years of sharing hopes and dreams, secrets and hurt, shame and pain and weariness—we've come to realize we're both looking for the same thing.
The overly peppy song ends and a news segment begins, but the DJ's voice keeps cutting out, breaking the story into jagged, splintered words, the same tragic tales we've heard before, just with different names and places attached. Each faceless, anonymous fragments of a larger, global disaster, mourned for a day or a week and then forgotten amongst the wreckage of all the others.
"Turn that off," I tell Imogene, and she flicks the button with her big toe and hums to herself the refrain of the last song. It sounds different in her voice, somehow softer and stranger. I wonder if she knows how she's changed it, warped it in her mind to something new and better.
The road before us is pockmarked, but I don't want to slow down—we weren't nearly far enough from our troubles yet—so the van just rumbles over the potholes, sending our thermoses and pans and tent pegs and camping supplies rattling around in the back like dissonant wind chimes across the empty miles.
"Do we have any more jerky?" I finally ask, breaking the long silence. Dust has coated my mouth with the dry taste of sandpaper.
"Nothing left but a stick of gum."
Imogene unwraps it and holds it out to me. I chew it, mentally calculating how many of my paychecks from Tasty Taco we've blown through, how much farther we can go on the little that's left. My stomach growls, a hollow sound that's too real, too sharp, too physical to ignore. I push it aside, to that dark place in the back of my mind where I keep all the other things I'd rather not think about, where they grow like mold in the back of a fridge.
Another mile down the road, another hunger pang brings it to the surface again. Maybe it's time to call it quits, to head back to our awful jobs and volatile families and the hurt and pain of a broken world. To get back to reality, where we belong. We've had our fun, chasing Imogene's impossible dream, but eventually, one of us is going to have to admit that this is all that there is, that there's nothing more out there, no matter how far we drive. And goodness knows Imogene's not going to be the one to say it first.
Before I can say anything, Imogene reaches over and squeezes my arm, her black-and-blue sparkled fingernails digging into my skin. She draws in her breath and points to a set of tire tracks that's even less of a road than the one we're on.
"There! Do you see that rock formation? The one that looks like a horse's head? Turn there, through that canyon. The wind's brighter there. Thea, this is it. I know it. It's like a neon sign pointing the way." She bounces in the seat, looking every bit like the five-year-old she was when we first met. "I told you today was the going to be the day. I told you."
I don't see what she's talking about. I never do. But I steer the van down the dirt path and through the winding canyon anyway. It can't be worse there than where we already are, can it? Brilliant walls rock rise around us with layers of red and orange and white, engulfing us like the rippling waves of a deep river. As I drive, Imogene climbs over the center console and digs around in the back through the milk crates where we'd thrown all our stuff before pealing out of Uncle Jake's junkyard.
The stuff I'd grabbed seemed so silly now: Faded photos in faux silver frames. Ribbons from kindergarten field day. A folded-paper flower from the boy I'd sat beside in second grade, whose name I couldn't even remember now. All artifacts of simpler times, before I'd discovered that people who'd hurt you don't always look like Disney movie villains.
"What are you looking for?" I call over my shoulder.
"Just a minute." When Imogene scrambles back into her seat, she's holding the book she swiped from her parents' closet before we left—the one her mom wouldn't put on the bookshelf because she was sure it was "dangerous" but refused to throw away, either, because it'd belonged to her mother. The book had sat in the same dusty cardboard box for years, and just looking at it, I can smell the dust and old shoes and the black marker scent of the words "GRAN'S THINGS" from all the times we'd snuck into the closet to read it. Its cover shimmers in the sunlight streaming into the canyon.
Imogene opens to a page marked with a bit of soft leather and reads aloud. "There's a place in the desert where one can ride Elijah's whirlwind, where this world opens to the next..."
I drive for miles, her voice a melody in my ears, until I happen to glance at the gas gauge. At the next switchback, I roll the van to a stop, and Imogene stops reading mid-passage.
"What's wrong?" she asks, craning her neck to look out the windshield.
"Tank's half empty," I say, pointing. "If we go any further, we won't make it back."
"Back?" Imogene sets down the book and looks at me like I'm insane, like I'm the one who's been searching for a passage to an alternate dimension. "We can't go back."
I could, I think. I have before. It's not easy, and I don't want to, but that's life, isn't it? Doing what you have to because what else can you do?
"Look," I say gently, "I love your Gran's stories. I do. But there's nothing out here but desert and rock and, I don't know, maybe some snakes, if we're unlucky. I don't see any neon signs in the wind."
"But I do," she says adamantly. "Back home, the wind is gray and silver and white, like feathers. When music plays, it's streaked with wisps of color, and where there's fear or anger, it turns black. And back there, in the city, there's so much black. So much I can barely breathe. But here… Here, it's like a kaleidoscope of colors, all singing out and pointing the way. We can't stop now; we're so close. I just know it. I just know the whirlwind's here."
She looks so certain, I can't say no, even though I know that it's stupid. Reluctantly, I shift into drive, my hands gripping the wheel, driving further and further from safety. My pulse thuds in my ears in time with the tires' hum. Turn back, turn back, turn back.
"Just around this bend," Imogene whispers, her voice a prayer cutting through my doubts. Then suddenly, “We've made it. We're here.”
The canyon opens into a dust storm so thick it looks like a wall rising before us. I can't see a thing beyond the van's hood. I can't tell whether I'd be driving us off a cliff or into a ravine or straight into a solid rock barrier. My foot presses firmly on the brake.
“All we have to do is drive through," Imogene says.
"Drive through that? You can't be serious."
"Of course I'm serious. This is what we've come here for, isn't it?"
Is it? I stare out at the storm, then back at her, all confidence and sense of adventure gone. "I can't—"
"It'll be okay. It's the final test, the leap of faith, just like it says in the book."
What was once a dream—a fantasy story—has now become all too real, and I'm paralyzed with the sudden choice. She's asking me to choose the impossible over the logical. The ideal over the rational. The fairy tale over reality. She's asking me to believe... not just enough to humor her for a few hundred miles or to risk running out of gas, but enough to trust her with my life. How big a risk am I willing to take to find a better world?
Confidence shines from her eyes, and I know then that I have no choice. I have to believe her.
After all, this is Imogene. Imogene, who believed me when no one else did, who dropped everything to leave with me when I needed to get away, who knows all my secrets and keeps them… who's looking for the same thing I am. I reach over to grab her hand. "Together."
She nods. "Together."
With one hand holding hers and the other gripping the wheel, I take a breath and nudge the gas pedal, driving headfirst into the whirlwind's frantic swirl. We watch as all around us, the world disappears into brilliant shades of color. And just beyond, just out of sight, something begins to take shape, like the edges of a brand-new world.