It's one of my earliest memories. My feet dangled above the ground as I sat staring at the faded, yellow paint on the wall and inhaling that sickly hospital smell. I remember the inexplicable feeling of dread churning inside of me. It was the kind of feeling I could only place upon reflection years later. The memory is full of confusion. I knew something big was happening. We were leaving, and the car was full of packed bags. Daddy stood at the desk, checking us in. He wore a black and red striped polo and those tan, leather shoes he always wore. Next thing I remember, Daddy was leading me past the door frame into the hospital room.
I was crying because I knew we were leaving Mommy here. Why couldn't she come with us? I didn't want to leave her there alone. I didn't want to go away from her! I sat on the bed, and she held me and stroked my hair and told me how much she loved me. Her face was pale, her head bald, and there were tubes coming out of her nose.
I asked her, "Mommy, why can't you come with us? I want you to come with us!"
She smiled softly and said, "I want to come with you too. But Mommy needs these machines to breathe. It's not safe..."
I cried, burying my face into her body and clutching her gown with both hands, holding on with the intention of never letting go. I would do anything in my power to stay with her.
"I'll still be here when you get back," she said. I should have known she didn't believe it when her smile melted and tears flowed from her eyes. Both of her hands grasped mine, and she said, "Whatever you do, just know I love you. I love you so much, Noah. I want you to grow up big and strong and be the best person you can be. The most important thing you can do for me is live a wonderful, happy life, okay?"
It wasn't okay. I nodded through the sobs, hot tears rolling down my cheeks and snot filling my mouth. She said goodbye, and I screamed, "NO!" and Daddy carried me out kicking and screaming.
I couldn't understand why we had to leave her there.But, I remember staring desperately out the back window and seeing that pitch black cloud in the sky.
The next thing I can remember was Daddy and I in a dark room. He sat me down, wringing his hands. I asked him what was wrong. Then I asked him when we were going back for Mommy. He looked up at me, light glistening off the tears in his eyes. Seeing him choke up sobs made me cry too. What he said next was imprinted in my memory forever: "Noah. Mommy... mommy's gone."
Just like that, half of my world vanished.
They called it a tar shower. The thing that killed my mother. They thought it was just a hurricane at first. The evacuations were precautionary, but mother knew she wouldn't make it if the power went out. The world was shocked as news media broadcast footage from the affected area. It looked as if the entire city had been razed by some sort of explosive that deposited black soot everywhere. The buildings had been flattened, and only skeletons remained, reduced to their innermost structure and plumbing. Cars, street signs, mailboxes - everything left in open was completely evaporated under the thick layer of black. The world stood captivated by 24 hour coverage as the hazmat specialists announced their findings: the storm was worst case of acid rain in history - a mixture of oil residue, noxious material, and condensed greenhouse gases gathered in the clouds and poured down upon my mother and ate her alive. The thought of her screaming and thrashing as the tar poured in through the ceiling has always haunted me. My mother died terrified, suffering, and alone.
I never forgave my father for that.
He and I would have solemn, silent dinners, only communicating through the scraping of our utensils. Occasionally, he would try to start up a conversation. Ask how my day was. How school was going. Sometimes I obliged him with one word answers. He wanted me to become an ecologist. To find a way to end the tar showers for the good of the world. For my mom. To this, I responded with dead silence. I always finished my plate first, and, before I stood, he would look up at me with desperate eyes, hoping today would be the day we finally had a real conversation. The day I granted him absolution. Then I would stand, take my plate to the sink, and give him the same, "thanks for dinner, Dad" with a flat, hollow tone. No matter how many hours he spent in the kitchen, it would never be my mother making those meals.
The Black Deluge in California was only the first of many tar showers our angry mother Earth unleashed upon her rebellious children. Tar showers increased in frequency until they were a constant summer threat. They cropped up in routine storms and laid waste to whole towns. No shelter could shield from the wrath of the storms, the black acid eating through the sturdiest of buildings and burrowing deep into the ground. I always shuttered seeing the harrowing images on the news. The dyed bones of a little arm clutching a miraculously preserved doll, young storm chasers with death wishes attempting to live stream the destruction from inside the storms. All their videos ended the same: unbearable shrieking as the acid ate through their skin, bones, and phones.
Naturally, the fashionable thing was to become an ecologist, or anything related to the environment. But I wanted to stay as far away from the tar showers as possible. I refused to become an ecologist, but my mom's last words to me always rang in my ears. Whatever it took, I needed to survive. At the job fair, when all of my friends went to the ecology booths, I stopped by a business school. I moved across the country for college, and I never came back.
The years flowed on. I graduated and got married, and I got a job at a big oil company in the Gulf Coast. Rachel was so excited to move to Florida with our little girl. "We can go to the beach every day! It'll be great."
I tried to suppress the jolt of panic as I replied, "Yeah, you'll just have to be careful. Always check the forecast to make sure there are no storms."
"Ahh, Noah..." she said, reaching for my hand across the table, "We'll be careful. You know only 1 in 800,000 rain storms are tar showers."
I smiled then, even knowing that she worked for a conservative think tank. I thought she was right though. There was no use blaming the energy sector for tar showers when the leading ecologists' data was inconclusive at best. So, we moved to Florida. Tahlia was so fascinated by the sand and the shells. She frolicked in the teasing waves as I watched with my wife laying next to me in the sand. I remember grinning and thinking, This is it. I'm living a wonderful, happy life.
I worked on the rig a month on, a month off as a field engineer. My days there were spent in my office drawing up plans, printing blueprints, and bouncing strategies off coworkers. It was basically my job to prevent a second Deepwater Horizon. I failed.
One day, one of our ultra-deepwater pipes exploded. I watched my computer screen in horror as it, and all the pipes around it, flashed red. Later, the report said that a minor earthquake on the seafloor bent the pipe until it could no longer maintain pressure. Soon, through the madness and scrambling on the rig, I saw the black cloud of oil billowing to the surface of the water. As I stood there, one of our disaster analysts informed me that we had an estimated 10 days until the oil began to wash ashore. 10 days because an incoming tropical storm was going to accelerate the spread.
My hands shook as I tapped my phone to call Rachel.
"Hey baby," She answered cheery as ever.
"Rachel, you need to get out of Miami. There's been a..." I stopped, suddenly remembering protocol.
"What? What happened?"
"You have to get out of Miami. Cause... there's a tropical storm coming, and I'm afraid there's going to be a tar shower."
She sighed. "Noah, I know you're concerned, but we're going to be fine."
"You don't understand," I said panic rising with a fluttering urgency. Panic is a funny emotion. It's the emotion of the powerless. "The storm is going to pass through the Caribbean Islands and wrap around and hit Florida!"
"I can't fly out of town every time it rains, Noah! We're staying here, and we're going to bare the storm with everyone else."
There was nothing I could do. "Okay."
A brief moment of silence.
I added, "If they call for an evacuation, please just go. I love you."
"Love you too."
There was no evacuation. Some speculated that the oil spill might cause a tar shower, but the general public believed that they were completely unpredictable. So, the citizens of Florida hunkered down and waited for the tropical disturbance to pass. My thumb compulsively tapped refresh on my newsfeed until I saw the first report.
My heart plummeted as I read the words, "Tar shower wipes out Southern Florida", my chest tightened and breathing constricted. My stomach coiled as panic shot through my veins. I remember screaming. And falling. And nothing after that.
I'd had a heart attack. The doctors got it pumping again, but I still don't feel anything but the cold, dead, loneliness of loss. My wife and little girl are gone, and I can't even see their bodies. I can't stop thinking. Why? Why me? Why my family? Why did Rachel not listen to me? Why didn't I just tell her? Why did we even move down herethere in the first place? I keep having nightmares of Tahlia sitting next to my mother in that hospital room screaming for me to come save her. Those shrill, grating screams that can only come from pure agony. I twist and turn through the yellow halls, but I always arrive too late, and the black slush has already taken them away.
After I got out of the hospital, I went to Colorado. My dad moved there after I moved away. Back when they used to think that the tar showers only happened on the coasts. We quickly learned that there was no refuge from the merciless waters of Hell. He lives close to the mountains, on the edge of town in a little, beaten house with overgrown weeds. I give his door three sharp knocks. There is some shuffling and clanking inside, and soon the door opens. I gaze upon my father for the first time in years. His ample belly stretches his now faded black and red polo. Grey hair and stubble do little to cover the wrinkles in his yellowed skin. A spark of hope lights his eyes as he looks at me. It was the same look he'd given me at dinnertime for all those years. He gasps, "Noah? Is that you?"
"Yeah, Dad. It's me."
He invites me in. I try to ignore the bottles of alcohol strewn about. He gets a beer from the fridge and gives me one too, and we finally sit down at the kitchen table to talk.
"Noah," he starts, "your mother… I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. I’m so, so sorry." Dad falls silent, focusing on the label of his beer.
I stare across the table, realizing that even though I'd lost my mother, I'd pushed away my father. "I know, Dad. I'm sorry too..." There are no words I can say to make it better. Years of bitterness and estrangement won't go away with words. Tears well up in my eyes. "I... I lost my family." I start sobbing, hot tears rolling down my cheeks and smacking the table. "I lost my family to the damn tar showers."
My dad gets up and embraces me. He's sobbing too, sharing all the same pain, grief and loss. Years of bitterness and sadness are washed away by the mingling of tears and the sharing of suffering. We stay that way for a long time, father and son finally reconciled.
Then, he breaks away, saying with a heavy voice, "Well, you should go. There's a storm coming, and... I think it's going to be a bad one."
The tears burn a little as they dry on my face. I wipe them away. "I'm done running."
Dad looks at me and smiles, then he goes and sits down on the sofa. I open the door and feel the cool air that precedes the storm. The cloud of darkness comes racing over the mountains, blotting out the blue like a million strokes of black paint obscuring an already finished portrait. Lightning strikes overhead as the black cloud overtakes us, filling the air with the acrid stench of burning tar. I look to my dad. He puts his feet up and lays back, not even as much as glancing toward the window. Fat droplets of tar now splatter on the cement and grass. The wind picks up, and a few drops are blown onto my skin. They burn, just as I thought they would. I wipe a black dot from my arm with my shirt. It's left a deep red sore. And there are several holes in my shirt where the rain has touched. I see the sheet of heavy rain approaching - the black curtain that's ended the story for so many people is now about to end mine. I can't breathe for the acid in the air. I step back into the doorway, as if it matters. The first pools of black appear through the ceiling. Then they pour right through, a black deluge of destruction. The ceiling splits over my dad, and the acid washes away his skin. The muscles on his face peel and disintegrate as his bones are dyed a ghastly black. Now the tar pours on me. I scream as it burns my head and shoulders. I hold out my hands before me as the horrible, dark water eats my flesh to the blackened skeleton that dissolves into nothing. As the acid washes me, I go completely numb. My feet are gone, and I fall into the acid, the splash of the rain blinding me. It eats into my head and body from all ends until all I am is blackness.
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