As the TV played an endless parade of burning cities, of mobilizing armies, of hazmat suits and mass evacuations, he continued like this for three days, with little rest, until the power grid went down. The air on the sixth floor was stagnant and still. There were still dozens of pictures of her hanging on the wall. The Storms were unpredictable. Sometimes they lasted hours. Sometimes they lasted weeks. The only thing predictable about them was that they were guaranteed to come. There were holes in time, in space; there were dimensions that even the greatest of physicists had no knowledge. These were holes in which all of humankind was turned inside out; where the superego was suppressed and each person’s id came raging to the surface like an untamed beast. At first the Storms were mild, and the media attributed them to a slow decay of the societal fabric: mass murders in Houston, gang rapes in Chicago, a massive increase in divorces, drug and alcohol abuse. It was as if the whole world was simply following
