Ursula herself had, I heard, 897 nails in her by the end. She was a red carpet stuck full of blades. I hope she died knowing her boy was going to live, that she had saved him. What she did to us—to the world, to the sky—is unforgivable, but I wouldn’t want any mother to die feeling she’d failed to protect her child. Justice and cruelty are not the same, and knowing that is the difference between being right in your head and being someone like Ursula Blake.
This was all five weeks ago, and as you know, in the time since, the sparkle dust has coated the entire troposphere. The last rain that was water, not nails, fell on the coast of Chile in mid-September. The only other precipitation since then has been radioactive ash. Our armed forces nuked Georgia, wiping out the firm that had developed Charlie Blake’s vision of crystal rain and annihilating most of the scientists who might’ve been able to reverse the process. ISIS fell for fake news claiming that the crystal rain was the work of Jewish scientists and launched rockets at Israel. In response Israel obliterated Syria with half a dozen warheads; they leveled Tehran while they were at it. Russia took advantage of the international chaos to storm the Ukraine. In Jakarta it rained nails the size of broadswords and killed nearly 3 million people in an hour, which was almost as bad as a nuke. The president’s latest move has been to offer tin umbrellas on his web store, $9.99 a pop, made in China. Admit it, the guy knows how to turn a buck.
It isn’t all a nightmare, although some days it seems close. A single colleague of Charlie Blake’s, a researcher named Ali-Rubiyat, was in London when Georgia was baked at 5 million degrees Fahrenheit. Although crystal generation was not his area of study, he had some crucial files on his laptop, and the scientists in Cambridge have cooked up a neutralizing agent that stops crystal growth and might make it rain normal again. It works half the time in the lab, but no one is sure what it will do in the wild.
I remember how Yolanda used to send me photographs of clouds and tell me what she saw when she looked at them. This one was an island paradise for the two of us, where we would live the rest of our days in hula skirts, feeding each other pineapple. That one was a big smoky gun that we would use to shoot the moon. Another was God’s own camera, taking a picture of us as we kissed. All I’ll ever see when I look at the clouds from here forward is weapons of mass destruction.
That’s how we got to now—all of us watching the Internet (what’s left of the Internet) to bear witness when the drones take off from Heathrow to disperse the neutralizing powder. If they can take off. There’s a 60-percent chance of nails in that part of the United Kingdom this evening.
I’ll be watching myself, on the couch with Marc DeSpot, who has taken up digs in Andropov’s old apartment and who often limps upstairs to see how I’m doing. We’ll be surrounded by half a dozen purring felines. Marc and I have kept ourselves busy rescuing neighborhood cats. Or, really, I rescue them and he pets them and gives them silly names, like Bill Due and Tom Morrow. His mobility isn’t what it used to be, although Marc has assured me he’ll be back to chasing tail soon enough.
Less than a quarter of the world has power or web access, but everyone who does will be tuned in tonight for the most watched public science experiment since the moon landing. I’m sure the comet cult will be watching next door, Elder Bent and his stepdaughters and Andropov, hoping the powder doesn’t work. They’ve got the end of the world penciled in for just a couple weeks from now. They’d hate to be wrong again.
Me, I’ve got my fingers crossed and a heart full of H-O-P-E, hope. The meteorologists predict that a big storm front will pass across the Rockies at the end of the week. If the Ali-Rubiyat formula works, it’ll be coming down cats and dogs. If it fails, it’ll be pins and needles instead.
If we do get real rain, I’ll run right out to dance in it. I’ll stomp in puddles like a little kid, all the rest of my days.
They say into every life a little rain must fall.
God, let it be so.
AFTERWORD
THESE STORIES WERE WRITTEN IN LONGHAND over the course of four years. I began the first of them, Snapshot—then titled Snapshot, 1988—in Portland, Oregon, in 2013, while I was on tour for NOS4A2. It came to fill two notebooks and the back of a placemat from one of those 1950s-themed diners. After the story was done, I put a rubber band around the notebooks and placemat, stuck the whole mess on a shelf, and more or less forgot it existed.
I completed my fourth novel, a very long book titled The Fireman, in the fall of 2014. I wrote The Fireman in longhand as well; it wound up occupying four and a half giant Leuchtturm1917 notebooks. That left half of a very large notebook untouched. I hate to see so much paper go to waste, so I used the remaining pages to write Aloft. At that point it occurred to me that I was working on a collection of short novels.
Most of my favorite stories as a reader come in at this length. Short novels are all killer, no filler. They offer the economy of the short story but the depth of characterization we associate with longer works. Little novels aren’t leisurely, meandering journeys. They’re drag races. You put the pedal to the floor and run your narrative right off the edge of the cliff. Live fast and leave a pretty corpse is a shitty objective for a human being but a pretty good plan for a story.
My favorite novel, True Grit, is just over two hundred pages long. Maybe the best novel published in this century, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, is six tightly constructed novellas, thematically laced together in an elegant cat’s cradle of story. Neil Gaiman’s most perfect novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, is not one sentence longer than it needs to be and came in at less than two hundred pages. Tales of horror and fantasy especially thrive at a length of about twenty-five thousand to seventy-five thousand words. Think of The Time Machine, War of the Worlds, Jekyll and Hyde, most of Richard Matheson’s brief, sinewy novels, and Susan Hill’s (no relation) brilliant Woman in Black. You want to be able to read such stories in just one or two sittings. You want them to feel like a hand on your throat.
And for me, after writing a couple seven-hundred-page novels back-to-back, it felt particularly important to get lean and mean, if possible. Nothing against long novels. I love discovering a big, fantastic world to explore, to get lost in. But if epic-length works are all you ever write, you risk becoming the bore at the dinner party. As the deejay Chris Carter says, don’t overstay your welcome or you’ll never be welcome to stay over.
I think Rain arose from a desire to spoof myself and my own sprawling end-of-the-world novel, The Fireman. I’m a big believer in making fun of yourself before anyone else can. I wrote it in the early part of 2016, as the presidential race was heating up, and initially the president in my story was a fatigued, besieged, but basically competent woman. Also the tale had a much happier ending. After the election . . . things changed.