The Annual Migration of Clouds Read online

  The Annual Migration of Clouds

  Premee Mohamed

  Contents

  Dedication

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  13.

  14.

  15.

  16.

  17.

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Dedication

  For Vanitha

  1.

  You don’t name it; you don’t give it a name, either. They must have names they use for each other. I don’t know what mine calls itself and if it told me, I would try to forget, I swear I would. It would not be like the secret names of dogs, which as a child I desperately wished to learn.

  But the name on this envelope is mine, undeniably, printed crisp and black across the pristine paper trembling in my deathgrip. Printed, by a machine. Inside, the letter and the lump. Just like in the stories.

  As if it is trying to read the words, the unnamed one visible beneath my thumbnail writhes in perfect traceries, tiny trees of green and blue. Graceful as branches in winter. The only pretty thing it makes, and even so I sometimes stain my nails with saskatoon skins so the patterns cannot be seen.

  Which doesn’t work. It ensures you can see it. Always.

  “Reid!”

  I turn; my friend Henryk is running up the black slate steps, breathless, hair over his face. As he skids to a halt, he brings the smells of the thaw — mud, snow mould, standing water. “Hey! What’s that? Listen, they caught —”

  “They?”

  “They, you know. The Flags and all them. They caught that guy that was messing with kids last year!”

  Messing with. He cannot, neither of us can, say the words. “Did they really catch him?”

  “Oh yeah, they got him tied up in the quad.”

  “Hen, you fucking . . .” I close my eyes for a moment. “I mean, did they catch the right guy?”

  “Oh that. I don’t know. I suppose they must have.” He pauses, and adds weakly, in the face of my silence, “They tied him up. I saw.”

  I look at my hands again, the whole landscape in miniature. White paper, black ink, green trees under my nails. The thing stilled for the moment: eavesdropping, too intent to squirm. “They gonna hang him?”

  “Probably.”

  “Gross.” I pause, because the answer doesn’t matter, but I still have to ask. “Is he . . . does he have . . .”

  “Cad? No.”

  “Fuck.”

  Henryk’s eyes are large, loyal, a dirty no-colour, like sky. He says what he knows I cannot: “But sometimes I wish you could give it to people, you know? Some people. Who deserve it.”

  I know he doesn’t mean me when he says you. That forestalls any hurt feelings.

  At any rate we both know you can’t. Cad doesn’t move sideways. It appears spontaneously: and then implacably, silently, it moves down through genes and time like water seeking its lowest level. A heritable symbiont, they used to call it. Once and only once, I cried out to Henryk, But it’s not, it’s a fucking parasite, and the pain that shot through me was impossible to describe. As I imagined being struck by lightning would feel. Sight gone, sound gone, a roaring whiteness, transfixed throat to heels as if on a pole of molten metal hurled by a god. I never said it again.

  This thing is of me, does not belong to me. Is its own thing. Speaks its own tongue. A semi-sapient fungus scribbling across my skin and the skin of my ancestors in crayon colours, turquoise, viridian, cerulean, pine. I imagine it listening now, keenly, sipping my happiness. Hatred twists my face before I can force it back down.

  “Are you okay?” Henryk says, as if we had not just said aloud that the worst punishment for a child molester should be the transmission of my own disease. “Is it . . . do you think it’s . . . ”

  “Getting worse? I don’t think so.”

  “But you would know.”

  “Yeah. It makes sure you know.” I don’t want to think about it anymore. Quick, change the subject. Easy enough, given the morning’s coup. “Look what I got.”

  “Holy shit. Holy shit. Is that — it can’t!”

  His shock is gratifying. I didn’t think I’d get to tell him first, but I wanted to tell someone. I’m glad it was him, I realize. Everything he feels just pours from him like sunshine through a window, he cannot help it, he has no shadows in him.

  “How is this even possible?!” He throws an arm awkwardly around my shoulder, startling me nearly off the step. “Reid! Oh my God. You got in! Look at you! You got in! Do you know what the odds are against that? Do you know —”

  “Actually, they put it in the letter. See?” I unfold the crackling thing, Dear Ms. Reid Graham, We have received your application to Howse University and are extremely pleased to confirm your acceptance, and hand it to him. His fingers are black with dirt, but the paper seems to disregard it; nothing transfers.

  Henryk’s face is as red as mine feels. Blushing, squirming, they used to say “an embarrassment of riches,” and only now, when no one is rich, do we know how it feels. I try to compare it to anything in my life, one single thing, and nothing happens; my memory is empty of such a sensation. My heart is going so fast I can hear it in my throat.

  “The paper,” he whispers.

  “It’s so weird.”

  “It’s so weird.”

  The material is your first clue that we are out of our league. The only new paper we’ve ever seen has been grey, gritty, stiff, recycled a hundred times. From the accounts in books, themselves printed on ancient paper that still seems impossibly new, I know it can be made out of trees. But you don’t dare make anything out of a tree now; they are too young and too few, and therefore too precious, to kill for something as frivolous as paper.

  And this is not. It says (brightly, in tones of wonder) that it’s spider silk generated by GMO bacteria, processed, purified. The entire sentence is an impossibility. This stuff, this pristine, even glowing white surface, is proof positive of a better world somewhere — carried a thousand klicks through who knows what, and still as clean as fresh snow.

  And the best part: “Come here for a sec.” We scuttle off the steps and plunge into the market, weaving through booths, stoves, banners, tents, blankets, shelves, till we find a low-ceilinged niche at the back. No windows of course, we’re below ground level, but everyone has lamps going, and this will be more impressive in real dark. “Try to rip it.”

  “What? No. Absolutely not. It’s your acceptance letter.”

  “Trust me.”

  “Trust you,” he echoes. “Remember when you told me that that wasp nest on the corner of St. Joseph’s was a —”

  “That was years ago. Are you ever going to forgive me for that?”

  “No. I’m gonna hate you for a thousand lifetimes.”

  We crowd into the corner, blocking the light with our bodies, and I tug on a corner of the letter as hard as I can.

  It rips, but reluctantly — like gristle. Light flowers at the paper’s edges for a split second, and then slowly, reproachfully, it knits itself back together, threads reaching for each other, grasping across the abyss. On my fingertips, it feels like the footsteps of ants. The light shines through my hands to paint tiny landscapes, red sky of skin and blood, black trees where the glow canno
t go.

  “Hooooooooly shit. It makes its own light!”

  “Thou hast said ’t, Caiaphas,” I whisper back. “I got it just before sunrise, and it was just . . . I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it.”

  Act casual: lean on the wall. We try to get our bearings, stretch our minds till they can wrap around this, and still they cannot; I can’t believe I had become so smallminded. Even the ink is a miracle, black and sharp. We write on our uneven grey paper in root dyes. Ours is a very low-contrast sort of world, requiring close study and getting fuzzier by the day. Little kids complain about the painful clarity of their scavenged schoolbooks: The writing’s too bright, they say. It hurts my eyes. This, from nothing more than old paper, which does not carry its own light.

  “How does it all work? Does the university send someone to come get you? I thought they never left the domes.”

  “I don’t think they do. Otherwise they’d be out recruiting, wouldn’t they? They sent a little tracker — sort of a, like a, well . . . ”

  “Can I see?”

  I place it in his dirty palm: a nondescript silver sphere the size of a hazelnut, hung on a light cord of strange material. At its equator a tiny blue light pulses, obeying some instinct or directive that we cannot perceive. “You activate it when you’re past the Zone marker, and then they come get you.”

  He hands it back, impressed. “So they can stay secret or whatever.”

  “I guess.” Secret or whatever: I know what he means though. A secret not like our private strawberry patch, but like the hidden schools of wizardry in old books. Mystery, power, esoteric knowledge, and all the riches that must attend these things. Science tangible but no different from magic now, because we cannot replicate it, which we were taught is the point of science: research, which is to say, you can find it again.

  Instead the acceptance says: What do you believe in? And the tracker says: Believe in me.

  It says one more thing, which is We, in turn, believe in you. Because they are trusting me to get to the Zone on my own, and in a little under two weeks. Non-negotiable. Some people would say it is a demand. To me, it speaks of confidence in my abilities, in their choice.

  My hands are shaking. Henryk laughs at this, not mocking but glad, awed, hanging absently on the sleeve of my jacket like he used to do when we were little. We stare out at the market as it gets going: stalls rolling up, tents coming down. Ordinary morning. Laughing. Kids zipping around like sparrows.

  It’s all so preposterous; when I opened the envelope this morning, I guffawed, absolutely reflexively and all alone, like a cough. In my disbelief I thought it was best that no one else know. It’s a joke, it’s a prank, a fairytale. That you should be Cinderella, nineteen years old, sweeping and dancing and singing to the birds in the crumbling remnants of a city and a planet brought to its knees, infected with the strangest disease ever seen, and one day a being made of light comes and waves a wand over your head: Go to the ball. Here is your gown.

  “Your mom must have freaked out.”

  My heart crawls into my throat and stays there. “I didn’t tell her yet.”

  “Oh my God! Seriously? I’ll walk you up.” He pauses before we get going, and adds, “It sucks that . . .”

  I know. I know. In his silence, which might strike an outside listener as embarrassed or unsure, I hear what he means to say: What mars today is that the person who would have been proudest of this is not here. We are bereft of the beloved dead.

  2.

  We live in the Biological Sciences Centre; a strange affair, as I know from my reading, but what were people supposed to do? No one seemed to have accurately imagined, let alone zoned neighbourhoods for, a human existence in which no one in the world could survive unless it were close to a river in a sturdy building. And the university still had those when Grandma’s generation was forced to find refuge, and so here we are today. It’s not a disaster if you still have a roof, Mom always says. It’s not a tragedy. Not if the wolf gets to the last piggy’s house and finds he can’t blow it down.

  Long ago pillaged and sacked, our castle of brown brick and cream trim still stands, snooty, even snotty, above the ruins of newer buildings; ugly (really; over a hundred years old, and wonkily coyote-shaped on the map) but proud of its ugliness, filled with hundreds of offices and labs that slowly became occupied as the world shook itself apart. Home sweet home. Mom and I are on the eleventh floor (Zoology), Henryk on the eighth (Genetics).

  Grubby stairwells, concrete and brick, everything smeared with the passing touch of thousands of people, redolent of unwashed bodies and the outside dust that gets into everything. But redolent also of things that refuse to fade, of books, chemicals, specimens, ink, age. Dignity, maybe.

  The persistence of the smell suggests that we are participating in, rather than merely witnessing the aftermath of, some proud and even noble long-unbroken chain of knowledge and study; but the truth is, of course, that the chain did break. And not once but again and again and again; and not just in the transmission of knowledge from the learned to the unlearned but also parent to child, elder to youth, country to country, every way you could think of. We live in the scattered links that remain.

  Some of us try to piece them back together, of course. Impossible to resist at least trying. But the powers of the old world are required to reassemble it in full. Easier, though infuriating when you are surrounded by essentially intact existing links, to make a new one. Otherwise you end up as nothing more than an alchemist, screeching about theories based on texts even the ancients didn’t write with a completely straight face. The wheel was practically the only thing that did not have to be reinvented.

  Briefly, as usual, Henryk and I pause to catch our breath on the sixth-floor landing. The staircases are mostly left clear, concrete polished too smooth by too many feet to be really safe. Someone tumbles down a flight about once a week as it is without something to trip over. People brush absently against our backs in passing.

  In silent agreement we squeeze into the window to study our valley. Unlovely in the early spring, crusted with a thin rime of muddy snow, the river still choked with ice, a single slate-dark thread of water at its centre. Sleeping tangle of grey saplings, dead shrubs of sepia or amber or faded dogwood red. Brown sparrows and dust-coloured pigeons. The only real colour is magpies, repeated shouts of iridescence, irritatingly clean in their black and white suits. Like photographs of actors or spies. How do they stay so clean in this crap, I always wonder.

  Staring down at the trail of destruction from last month’s storm, raw soil and even bedrock exposed by landslides, I can almost hear Henryk thinking, Do you remember when we — Yes, the dust storm when we were five years old, just when the grownups had thought those were all over, a relic of the past. Everyone rushed inside, not pausing to snatch up drying clothes or smoking fish; and Mrs. Chermak from the third floor, who had been sick for weeks and didn’t look strong enough to pick up a fart, scooped us both under her arms and sprinted a hundred yards flat out, charging through the propped-open door ahead of a walloping cloud of dark grit.

  A week later, when we had exhausted every drop of potable liquid (and several inadvisable nonpotable ones: a dozen of our neighbours were dead already of imbibing from unlabelled bottles and specimen jars), a scouting party went out for water. And Hen and I, and Tash and Arvin and Nadiya and McConaughey, formed our own investigative cabal and sneaked out as well. Not far, I said, so that we could run back. Arvin terrified, tears tracking down his dusty face, holding the door open, and Nads on lookout. But lookout for what? The air was still, opaque, a hot cloth stretched over the face, heavily unmoving. We pulled up our shirts, uncaring of exposed bellies, to protect our noses and mouths, and tiptoed into the dark orange light.

  How had it hung like that, the darkened dust. Why wouldn’t it fall? We stretched out our hands and stared as static tugged the filth to our skin, leaving a trail in
the thick air the way it seemed you could do with clouds (so creamy, so solid) but the grownups assured us you could not. Stomachs churning with fear in the unnatural stillness. Like standing at the bottom of a grave, firelit, studded with the tiny corpses of sparrows.

  I pulled free of Hen’s grip on my jacket, scooped from a drift, cried out, the sound muffled in cloth like a chirp. The cupped handful of dust weightless to the skin. Like placing one’s palm into nothing more than a puff of warm air.

  It wasn’t till it settled, covering the entire valley in a foot of black fluff, that we realized what it was: our precious topsoil for miles around, blown away, destroyed. We were so stunned we could not even have wept if we’d had the water to spare. And in the years to come . . . no, don’t think about it.

  Now I think: I could never do that today.

  Or: I would never be permitted to do that today.

  “Come on.” I tug Henryk away from the window, and we keep climbing.

  The door to the office and lab I share with my mother is propped open, labelled with our names under a half dozen crossed-out ones. Liquid noises inside, a faint lullaby hum.

  “I’m going to go back to the shop,” Henryk whispers. “See a crocodile, however, not until later.”

  “Indeed. Alligators are frequently observed.”

  He whisks down the stairs, turning at the final corner to wave again and make sure I wave back. The old crocodile/alligator thing never gets old. Best when there’s someone older there to yell at us that we’re doing it wrong, so we can do it even more wrong later.

  I knock on the door, a perfunctory tap. “Mom?”

  “Hi, baby. Just having a bath.” I edge around the room dividers and clotheslines and find her in our living room, a metal bowl balanced in the lab sink over a lamp. My heart’s going so hard it’s like I can feel it crashing against the envelope in my jacket, a small kicking animal trapped there, scratching me. I try to think of when I’ve been so excited before and can’t.