Story junkie Stanhope Ellis discovers that storytellers are dying after telling him stories. As he struggles with whether he is Mister Death or a cosmic witness, nurse Gayathri Das helps him navigate the emotional minefield. But will she die, like the others?
Story junkie Stanhope Ellis discovers that storytellers are dying after telling him stories. As he struggles with whether he is Mister Death or a cosmic witness, nurse Gayathri Das helps him navigate the emotional minefield. But will she die, like the others?
Yes. Iâm sixteen feet up on the scissor lift. The haze is thick from fires in Utah, though it is October, and dawn. Even the snowy peaks of the Front Range, tipped with rose, are dull in the mirrored skyscrapers of Denver. The dark translucence unfastens my mind, which reminds me of Shiva, the destroyer, which reminds me of Eva. I stand, like some rookie, on a toolbox to reach a brush Iâd left on a ledge, but Iâm so into Eva and her quality and her absence that I forget Iâm on this box, forget Iâm not clipped in. I step back to take in the wall, and nothing is there. A power line catches me, but it snaps and spews blinding light across my thigh. The charge blows my hat off, and Iâm out before my smoking back hits the asphalt. I canât see, but smell and hear everything: my smoldering overalls, rasping shouts, Chuckâs burrito breath. The danceable absurdities pouring out of his phone. Dadâs pipe-smoke safety. Evaâs chiming laugh. Her rose bouquet.
Illumination. The transformations of sound to color, to klaxons of red, to matter-of-factness of death, form a pulsing release. Blue life peels and skitters red. No more Eva. No more breathing and touching and knowing. Fine. I donât want to breathe and touch and know. The merge, the unbeing, goes on, and I luxuriate in nothingness. Iâd never realized the triumph of not having to care. I will not care again. I ride uncaring into rose fragrance and song.
Whoa there, big fella. Smoke and roses loop me back to the beginning. Why? Chuck wants his partner back: Stan the Man, who slathers tall mirrors. And Eva wants me doing. She was a strong swimmer. Her long strokes in the pool are pulling me home. Vision returns, but something is wrong. It takes me a sweet eternity to figure it out: this is not eye vision. I watch a crumpled Stan far below, as if Iâm a puppeteer returning for this abandoned marionette. Where have I been? This guy has more story in him. Is he up for it?
Eye vision returns gradually, annoyingly. I want the other vision. I want Evaâs eyes. She wore glasses. Built dioramas. Died on an ordinary Wednesday. A sad man asleep at the wheel and two lives gone. Something to do with overwork. Her glasses, her telescopes, shattered.
---
Eva stands in the sea of rosebushes she crammed into our postage-stamp yard. Closes her eyes and breathes deep. âAll these ego-tripping trivia tests! I want to know what I donât know. Impossible, I guess. Itâs too big. Immeasurable.â
âHey, space telescopes are out there measuring the whole universe.â
She laughs and bends to her pruning. âThatâs what I need. A pocket Hubble. Maybe Hubble sunglasses. I always want to know whatâs beyondâwhatâs left to do, you know? The future calculation, not the rearview.â
Iâm on shovel duty. I should defend Beloved History, so I bounce a clod off her earnest ass. âI like the rearview. But I get it. The expansion, rather than the bang.â
Eva beams at me as if just realizing how useful her garden gnome can be. âWell, you canât have one without the other.â
A space telescope actually looks deep into the past. I realize that now. It sees the expansion and the bang. Our future calculations turn on what has ever been. Possibilities require absolutes.
---
No diamond for Eva. She wanted a star sapphire ring: gold rays embedded in deep blue. From Thailand. It wasnât expensive, and she didnât show it around. She said it helped her focus. It matched the sky and sun of our outdoor wedding in Estes Parkâa crystal Colorado day when Longâs Peak crowded the altar: Best Mountain.
She had insisted we live in Park Hill, near Denverâs City Park. So we found an old bungalow with room, barely, for roses. Walked to the park and museum every day. Some of the dioramas at the natural history museum date back a century or more. Most museums are replacing them with virtual-reality whiz-bang, but Denver preserves them: arctic wolves watching caribou, polar bears on ice, grizzlies on tundra, sandhill cranes in prairie grasses. Wolverines, pronghorns, geese. A Jabba-the-Hutt elephant seal. Eva took classes on sprucing up the old classics. Said she saw the future in them. I didnât get it.
Two years ago, my wife was a florist who longed to be a curator: one who selects, organizes, presents. But she was already doing thatâ choosing roses for fragrance, books for power, friends for gratitude. Every window or display or diorama she worked on seemed more hopeful afterward. More an expression of what should be.
After the glasses shattered, I kept dreaming that Eva was building a diorama of our lives together: weâre deep in the garden, between the pinwheels she had sown, huffing the sweetness like college kids bonging their brains out. Iâm all about her, but Eva is turned outward from two steps up a ladder, peering through her thick Hubble glasses at the twilight horizon. A raven watches from the blooms. A black dog runs into the yard behind us. Swallows dart overhead. The Eva piecing the diorama together is ten times our size. The crystal glasses she wears are shattered, but she is precise. Then I see through fractured glass what both Evas are watchingâa knowing something in the distance. A chestnut foal trying to stand.
---
We breathe from bloom to bloom. Eva pauses to deadhead. The air is smoky, but she takes comfort in Hindu mythology. âThe three aspects of Krishna are Brahma, the creator; Vishnu, the maintainer; and Shiva, the destroyer.â
âWhat a show-off.â
âI think Shiva is the spirit of our age.â
âYou still want to try for a kid?â
âYup.â
âYou want to bring new life into a world of destruction.â
She smiles tolerantly and disappears into the bushes. âShiva clears
the way for Brahma. Maybe a creative Brahma time is on the way.â
âShe says from her rose-colored world.â
She laughs, but stays hidden. âShiva is a big deal! He-she also creates.
Seeing the creation is key.â
It all seemed dicey to me, but Iâve read enough history to know
that things are always dicey. In the end, it didnât influence our decision. Nothing could have stopped us from trying for a child. We were full of creative impulseâuntil Shiva destroyed. Now every loss, every car accident, every smoky day during fire season reminds me of Shiva. I understand that creation comes out of destruction, can be part of destruction, but, you knowâitâs hard to spot. Sometimes Iâm too small to try.
---
Christmas is coming, but thereâs no comfort or joy. Itâs stupidly hot. The back of my head is still sore from the concussion. The docs look at me like Iâm a freak, but donât say much. Iâm sure I died on the asphalt that October dawn, but canât talk about it, and no one asks. Who needs that can of worms? Sometimes the secret keeps me going. Iâm afraid to give it away.
The current left a source wound in the thigh and a ground wound in the shoulder. Electrocution is like being microwaved: youâre cooked from the inside out. The flesh burns are tricky but treatable. The internal kabob is harder to deal withâorgan damage, mostly. My heart fibrillated, but they teased it back into rhythm the first day. Alkalizing my urine somehow helps the kidneys mend. I drink strange concoctions, to no effect that I can tellâjust endless trips to the small room.
Chuck and Kitty Duran bring a basket of holiday nonsense to my hospital room. I mime gratitude. After Eva died, these two had harassed me dailyâtromping across the porch with casseroles, coffee table books, and assorted football crapola. Big smiles and bad jokesâthen and now.
I have the attention span of a puppy. Try to read but cannot care. All the old interests are gone. History died with Eva. Even the Greeks lost their allure. The blot in the personal story made the species story reek. Iâd always been fascinated with origins, with causes and effects, but suddenly it all seemed pointless. Why had I bothered? Human history amounts to a litany of ambitious thugs clawing their way to the top and ruining everything for everybody. Once in a blue moon, a Buddha-like creature breaks through, and we have a little evolutionary burst. But the in-betweening kills the soul.
I have this idea that those who die early feel it coming. It shows up in their work and moods. Amy Winehouse, for instanceâthe casual references to death, the annoyance at being in the crosshairs, the waves of depression. Eva fought the foreshadowing blues by scanning for dogs. If youâre feeling thin, find a familiar mutt and allow yourself to be thoroughly greeted. Youâll know your place in the world. So weâd walk the neighborhood, looking for connection. Skitch, a big golden, always carried a tennis ball. Molly, a collie mix, stuck with her person, a retired schoolteacher. But if Molly saw Eva and me, sheâd run half a block to leap and sing. After the glasses shattered, my solo act was less popular. Mollyâs gallop devolved to a saunter as she scanned the street. At least she kept up the collie smile, as if apologizing. Skitch still showed me his ball but always saved it for Eva. Where is she? These mugs provided comfort, but the searching was contagious.
I never understood why Eva wouldnât keep a dog. It must have been the mortal knowingâa subconscious unwillingness to leave another relationship unfinished. A child would have been something else: an evolving expression of what we were together. Consolation for Shiva.
January. Anshu Das drops by my hospital room on a too-warm day, looking dapper in butter yellow with his salt-and-pepper beard and ready smile. He lives down the street, near the park, in a compact Edwardian place with a carriage house converted to a one-car garage. In the cool garage, he keeps two things pristine: a red Vespa, which he rides to work eight months of the year, and an AWD Union-Jack Mini Cooper. âI always want to know I can escape.â Eva and I would talk with him in his driveway. I usually bailed early, but Eva always stayed to sop up Anshuâs stories from the Gita and Hindu mythology.
Anshu owns Citizen Jewelers on Capitol Hill. Our first conversation, years ago, was about Evaâs sapphire, which he had scored for us. âA seed truth,â he said, turning to me. âPrecious.â He told us he admires the gold on the Capitol dome as he Vespas and Minis to work. We learned that his appreciation has a broader scope. He sees all that is precious. âBijouâ is how he describes his cottage, which is artfully framed within a manicured garden. Anshu lives in a world of setting, luster, chroma. You can see it in his walk, in the way he swings a cricket bat.
Today he looks thinner, radiant. He asks personal questions, but I canât say much. I tell him about the toolbox dive, then run out of things to say. He ascribes my escapade to dharma. âEvaâs universal answer,â I say as if I know enough about it to call anyoneâs bluff. He beams and says the word isnât entirely translatable, but he thinks it means something like âduty that sustains cosmic order, that makes all possible.â I canât dismiss this because his Bhagavad Gita had saved me two years ago. He had been so attentive after Eva died that I gave him her too-thick Gita. It was far more commentary than source, and I hadnât seen the point. But Anshu promptly returned with a simple version of the sacred text. Small. Not scary. Not so much swami âsplaining. So I finally read it, as Eva had always wanted. Tried to honor it, for her. Set thy heart upon thy work.
Anshu carries a worn cricket bagâthe keeper of relics. When I ask about it, he ignores me and points to the ragged horizon framed in the hospital window. âDo you see Mount Evans? Once I climbed a ridge up there and peeped over the top. I was face-to-face with a mountain goat! A magnificent old billy with big shoulders, one foot away. I froze. So did he. But I was ready to retreat. He was not. He just stared at me, saying, âGive way, or I will butt you all the way back to Kolkata.â I gave way. The strength in those black eyes!â
His eyes are black and shining. âIâve hiked about half the Continental Divide Trail. The highest part. I climbed the fourteeners until they were overrun with tourists. Then I climbed unnamed mountains, which have no registries to sign. I love to be a nameless man on a nameless mountain!â
âDo you always hike alone?â
He collapses into a chair. âSometimes my sister, Gayathri, comes up from San Diego.â
âWhatâs the next adventure?â
He kneels and organizes the cricket bag until I stop expecting a reply. He smiles up at me. âI have been thinking about moving to San Diego. Gayathri is a nurse at Blessings Hospital, and sometimes she has several days off at a time. Iâve had a glorious mountain life. If I am permitted, I will have a glorious ocean life. I might learn to sail. I can see Gaya and me skimming along the coast through sunlight and sea spray. I dreamt of it. Precious!â
He smiles into the middle distance. âGaya is precious; the most adaptable person I know. You can see her changing her mindâchanging the course of her whole lifeâas she receives new information. When she was nine, she fell from a banyan and broke her right arm, which was dominant. She would not rest until she could do everything left- handed. Even her penmanship became fluid. When her arm healed, she would not go back. Then she learned to write Hindi for our grandmother. Sheâs ...â
âProtean.â
âThat sounds impressive.â
I wave a weary arm. âProteus was a shape-shifter. He could tell the future but would rather escapeâchange into a lion or boarâthan spill prophecy. Finding and holding him was the trick.â
âThat sounds like Gaya.â
Anshu stands and stretches. I wish heâd leave so I can get after the Sandman, but he needs to talk. âDarwin said that itâs not the strongest or most intelligent who will survive, but those who can best manage change. Adaptation is a kind of superpower, I think.â
I only have energy for nodding. Anshu laughs childishly. âGayathri is every day, all the time, adapting. She is a protean ideal, my friend!â
Beaming like the sun, framed against Mount Evans and a spotless sky, Anshu looks through me. I want to give everything to those eyes. He waits patiently for me to form the words. âIâdied.â
The eyes give everything back. âYes. I know.â
âAnshu, what the fuck? Why am I here? Where am I going?â
My face throbs. Anshu represses a laugh. âThere is only one reliable
kind of prophecy, Stanhope: the self-fulfilling kind. Who do you think you are? Thatâs you. The world whispers, so listen. Imagine the dharma that approaches and prepare a welcome.â
His charity unclenches my heart. A nurse stops at the open door and stares. He glances at her sheepishly. Sheâs not amused. âAnshu Das?â
He laughs as he makes for the door. âThey have my cricket bat downstairs.â
âYou tried to bring a cricket bat into a hospital?â
âThat is a story for next time. The healing of Stanhope Ellis must
proceed apace!â
Iâm presented with an aluminum cane, with which I lurch through
bustling halls. I drift for days, dreaming of sea spray, keeping an eye out for Anshu. But he never returns. Instead, Chuck appears on a grey afternoon, looking eager in a pumpkin-orange Broncos cap with blue trim. He fumbles with the bed controls. Cranks me vertical. Wonders about the fried Stanhope Ellis. The replacement stiff is squirrelly, he says. Will his anchor, the straight man, the unclipped-in, toolbox-diving rook, rejoin the circus?
UpChuck has been a patient, skyward partner. Weâve worked hard, scrubbing hot, wobbling landscapes. For two years, the flexing, tweaking labor, the prospects, the jokey work talk kept me going. On big jobs, weâd plant our feet wide and wave long, water-fed poles in slo-mo, like raggedy-ass Kabuki warriors. I razzed Chuck relentlessly about his Broncos gear. âChuckles!â Iâd shout, poling sloppy lather. He would lean into whatever I called him, vamping and drenching my bib overalls. We lived for afternoon breezes off the foothills.
---
After the glasses shattered, I couldnât face the book and flower shop. It had been a comfort, but now it was the oppositeâa pit of memory so deep that I could only go there to die. I considered that. But I was chickenshit in the end. Once I started staying away, I couldnât stop. All the time Eva and I had logged there now repelled me. The teamwork was everything. I couldnât be worthy by myself. Good people wanted to lease the space, but my heart wasnât in it. I sold the building and stock for a song, as is, to the good people. Then I needed workânot distraction, but immersion. I stashed Evaâs sapphire in my bibs and took the window-washing job Chuck dangled. Bless Chuck for that. He pulled me up-up-up. Every day.
Evenings and weekends, Iâd walk the neighborhood, fix up the house, binge on Star Trek. Eva was a serious Trekker. Voyager was her favorite. She loved the idea of being distantly flung across the galaxy and working her way home. Always the future, even when pretzeled, and home. The thought of her back-trekking fueled long to-do lists. I remodeled compulsively, remembering every detail of her arm-waving plans. No additions, just upgrades of existing space. All the things she wanted. As if a new bathroom or granite countertop would tractor-beam Eva back to me. I finished the basement, replaced the floors, installed efficient windows. Set toilets, tiled walls, hung doors. But I couldnât face the rose garden. Refused to learn what Eva knew. Needed to leave that hole in my understanding so sheâd come back to fill it. I hired a kid to water, and the bushes grew wild until a few of Evaâs friends quietly trespassed, restoring order. But as all was completed, the property became more echo than substance. It was all for Eva. Too flanged out for me. Too empty.
Anshuâs father died just before Eva. Then, a few months later, his mom. So we haunted the park and museum, talking about death and life. I stopped myself from asking about reincarnation. It would have sounded hollow, as if I was grasping at strawsâwhich I was. But Anshu understood. He smiled and said beautiful things about the rhythm of time. It was pure poetry. I was so shell-shocked that I retained nothing of it, but Iâll never forget how it made me feel. It was as comforting as a rose bouquet.
---
Chuck waits expectantly at my bedside. Am I up for more up-up-up? I can feel Anshuâs idea of cosmic duty inflating into a life preserver. Meaning is everywhere implied in Evaâs rose dharma. Okay. I survived for a reason. Set thy heart upon thy work. What work? I donât know what, but I know where. The white peaks are majestic, but dulling, flattened by dark translucence. Iâve been lostâno, foundâin Anshuâs sailing dream. The song is there.
I tell my partner that I canât wait for Strike Three. âIâll try the coast.â He grabs my shoulders and slams my bullet head into his chest. This surprises us both, and we blink a lot. A week later, he brings a realtor by. A month later, he helps me pack.
Stan dies twice. First, when his wife Eva dies in a car accident, and second, when he falls 16 feet from a scissor lift and through a power line. Against his will, Stan survives both events. Waking up in a hospital after the fall, Stan wonders why he is still on Earth. After a visit from Ashnu, Stan's pleasantly quirky neighbor who shares tales from Hindu Mythology, Stan decides to find his reason for living on. He quits his job, sells his house full of Eva memories, and moves to sunny San Diego, where Ashnu's sister lives. The laugh-out-loud escapades and heart-dropping tragedies that follow are epic acid trips through despair and euphoria, delivering readers chicken noodle soup for the soul and a shot of something strong on the side.
Mortal Weather is a celebration of connection among strangers and a promise to help each other. There are people everywhere heroically experiencing events that feel too big for their lives, yet they live on because others help them through it. Stan's life feels like one unlucky circumstance after the next, only revived by the kind and curious folks who find themselves by his side. I am relieved I get to reach for this book when I feel like my world is ending. It is the proof that others have survived grief and despair, so I can, too.
I commend the writing talent of McCarthy and his editing team. Every word choice is intentional, a true testament to word-smithing and syntax. The novel will be a prized possession in every English Literature classroom. With a lullaby cadence and endlessly profound sentiments, you can tell Mortal Weather is by someone who studied the rules and made them their own. It is a case of writing perfection.Â
When I finished Mortal Weather, I turned to the front page to start again. I had to absorb and remember every word in Stan's story. I am thoroughly excited to share this novel with my friends and family when it launches. The best part? There are three more books in the series.