screamed, “Nova weather! How the blazes did it—” But I couldn’t hear myself, and Leslie didn’t even know I was shouting.
Nova weather. How did it get here so fast? Coming over the pole, the nova shock wave would have to travel about four thousand miles—at least a five-hour trip.
No. The shock wave would travel in the stratosphere, where the speed of sound was higher, then propagate down. Three hours was plenty of time. Still, I thought, it should not have come as a rising wind. On the other side of the world, the exploding sun was tearing our atmosphere away and hurling it at the stars. The shock should have come as a single vast thunderclap.
For an instant the wind gentled, and I ran down the sidewalk pulling Leslie after me. We found another doorway as the wind picked up again. I thought I heard a siren coming to answer the alarm.
At the next break we splashed across Wilshire and reached the car. We sat there panting, waiting for the heater to warm up. My shoes felt squishy. The wet clothes stuck to my skin.
Leslie shouted, “How much longer?”
“I don’t know! We ought to have some time.”
“We’ll have to spend our picnic indoors!”
“Your place or mine? Yours,” I decided, and pulled away from the curb.
V
Wilshire Boulevard was flooded to the hubcaps in spots. The spurt of hail and sleet had become a steady, pounding rain. Fog lay flat and waist-deep ahead of us, broke swirling over our hood, churned in a wake behind us. Weird weather.
Nova weather. The shock wave of scalding superheated steam hadn’t happened. Instead, a mere hot wind roaring through the stratosphere, the turbulence eddying down to form strange storms at ground level.
We parked illegally on the upper parking level. My one glimpse of the lower level showed it to be flooded. I opened the trunk and lifted two heavy paper bags.
“We must have been crazy,” Leslie said, shaking her head. “We’ll never use all this.”
“Let’s take it up anyway.”
She laughed at me. “But why?”
“Just a whim. Will you help me carry it?”
We took double armfuls up to the fourteenth floor. That still left a couple of bags in the trunk. “Never mind them,” Leslie said. “We’ve got the rumaki and the bottles and the nuts. What more do we need?”
“The cheeses. The crackers. The foie gras.”
“Forget ’em.”
“No.”
“You’re out of your mind,” she explained to me, slowly so that I would understand. “You could be steamed dead on the way down! We might not have more than a few minutes left, and you want food for a week!
“I’d rather not say.”
“Go then!” She slammed the door with terrible force.
The elevator was an ordeal. I kept wondering if Leslie was right. The shrilling of the wind was muffled, here at the core of the building. Perhaps it was about to rip electrical cables somewhere, leave me stranded in a darkened box. But I made it down.
The upper level was knee-deep in water.
My second surprise was that it was lukewarm, like old bathwater, unpleasant to wade through. Steam curdled on the surface, then blew away on a wind that howled through the concrete echo chamber like the screaming of the damned.
Going up was another ordeal. If what I was thinking was wish fulfillment, if a roaring wind of live steam caught me now… I’d feel like such an idiot… But the doors opened, and the lights hadn’t even flickered.
Leslie wouldn’t let me in.
“Go away!” She shouted through the locked door. “Go eat your cheese and crackers somewhere else!”
“You got another date?”
That was a mistake. I got no answer at all.
I could almost see her viewpoint. The extra trip for the extra bags was no big thing to fight about; but why did it have to be? How long was our love affair going to last, anyway? An hour, with luck. Why back down on a perfectly good argument, to preserve so ephemeral a thing?
“I wasn’t going to bring this up,” I shouted, hoping she could hear me through the door. The wind must be three times as loud on the other side. “We may need food for a week! And a place to hide!”
Silence. I began to wonder if I could kick the door down. Would I be better off waiting in the hall? Eventually she’d have to—
The door opened. Leslie was pale. “That was cruel,” she said quietly.
“I can’t promise anything. I wanted to wait, but you forced it. I’ve been wondering if the sun really has exploded.”
“That’s cruel. I was just getting used to the idea.” She turned her face to the door jamb. Tired, she was tired. I’d kept her up too late…
“Listen to me. It was all wrong,” I said. “There should have been an aurora borealis to light up the night sky from pole to pole. A shock wave of particles exploding out of the sun, traveling at an inch short of the speed of light, would rip into the atmosphere like—why, we’d have seen blue fire over every building!
“Then, the storm came too slow,” I screamed, to be heard above the thunder. “A nova would rip away the sky over half the planet. The shock wave would move around the night side with a sound to break all the glass in the world, all at once! And crack concrete and marble—and, Leslie love, it just hasn’t happened. So I started wondering.”
She said it in a mumble. “Then what is it?”
“A flare. The worst—”
She shouted it at me like an accusation. “A flare! A solar flare! You think the sun could light up like that —”
“Easy, now—”
“—could turn the moon and planets into so many torches, then fade out as if nothing had happened! Oh, you idiot—”
“May I come in?”
She looked surprised. She stepped aside, and I bent and picked up the bags and walked in.
The glass doors rattled as if giants were trying to beat their way in. Rain had squeezed through cracks to make dark puddles on the rug.
I set the bags on the kitchen counter. I found bread in the refrigerator, dropped two slices in the toaster. While they were toasting I opened the foie gras.
“My telescope’s gone,” she said. Sure enough, it was. The tripod was all by itself on the balcony, on its side.
I untwisted the wire on a champagne bottle. The toast popped up, and Leslie found a knife and spread both slices with foie gras. I held the bottle near her ear, figuring to trip conditioned reflexes.
She did smile fleetinglyas the cork popped. She said, “We should set up our picnic grounds here. Behind the counter. Sooner or later the wind is going to break those doors and shower glass all over everything.”
That was a good thought. I slid around the partition, swept all the pillows off the floor and the couch and came back with them. We set up a nest for ourselves.
It was kind of cozy. The kitchen counter was three and a half feet high, just over our heads, and the kitchen alcove itself was just wide enough to swing our elbows comfortably. Now the floor was all pillows. Leslie poured the champagne into brandy snifters, all the way to the lip.
I searched for a toast, but there were just too many possibilities, all depressing. We drank without toasting.
