The Typhoon Brings Lies

Four years now since I took up my post at the mountaintop weather station. My work is this: twice a day, I strap a radio transmitter to a rubber balloon and release it into the sky, sending word of the air above the mountain down to the town below. Come spring, the station will close. Satellites are more accurate than humans, and they do not draw a salary. As the last observer, I am playing out this station’s final act.

The day the closure notice came, the man who had been our director tried to comfort me. It’s the march of technology, he said. Nothing to be done. I was not particularly sad. But the lights of the town, seen from the summit, had begun to look like one enormous billboard, and that grated on me, faintly.

I first noticed something was wrong at the end of August.

Two typhoons were approaching at once. Two vortices met over the sea, drew each other in, and merged into one. The broadcast station down in town announced that a large typhoon would make landfall over the weekend. Evacuation advisories, notices of business closures, water and hardtack vanishing from the shelves of convenience stores. I, too, sent up my readings, following the manual.

But the instruments on the mountain were saying something else.

The barometer’s needle began to wander just where it should have bottomed out. The wind vane held steady at north, trembling in small, rapid shudders. The radiosonde data drifted, a little each time, from what the models predicted. The first time, I thought it was error. The second, coincidence. The third time, I thought: the drift is always in the same direction.

The typhoon was bending its nose — a nose that should have been aimed straight for the town — first slightly east, then south. As though it were avoiding something.

In the dead of night, alone, I switched off the station lights and stood on the deck. The moon showed through a tear in the clouds, and the ridgeline floated up silver. In the far sky, the colossal vortex born of two colliding typhoons was slowly tracing out its own outline. It should have been a terrible thing. And yet I could not look away. The wall of clouds swallowing the stars made it seem as though the world were being quietly rewritten, and it was horribly beautiful.

The rain reached the summit the following evening.

It was strange rain. The station’s new panels lost their color. The plastic housings of the instruments clouded white and softened. The paint on the sign put up four years ago peeled away and ran off with the rain. And yet the old wooden main building — the doors painted bengara red, the copper weathercock — was exactly as it had always been. The rain seemed to choose only the things humans had added afterward, and wash them away.

I stood in the rain and let myself be soaked through. No one opens an umbrella on a mountaintop. That was something like the station’s law.

The wind weakened a little past ten that night. In the sky after the clouds had gone, not one of the town’s lights was visible. A blackout? Or had the lights been put out? The satellite phone would not connect. The radio carried broken fragments of a voice through the static. Somewhere, someone was repeating over and over that it was all right. Whether it was true, there was no way to know from up on the mountain.

When I happened to look, the weathercock was pointing north. In meteorology, an impossible direction. But the needle, never wavering, pointed firm and true toward the place the new wind would come from.

By morning, my duty remained: to report to the town below. There were two sets of numbers I could report. One was the model’s prediction, which the town below still believed. The other was the world’s new weather map, which I had verified with my own eyes, last night, on this mountain.

I sat before the radio, my hand on the transceiver switch. The weathercock still pointed north. Outside the wooden doors, grass that no one had sown was beginning to rise in the morning sun.

If it were you, which would you tell?