The Annual Migration of Clouds Read online

  And then I’m gone too, arms pumping, a straight shot up the stairs where Henryk’s muddy white jacket is a beacon guiding me home.

  We stagger back in silence. My thighs burn from the stairs and from the work of fighting my temporary paralysis; Henryk is wheezing. The stupid, skinny, ragged rabbit hangs from my fist. In the shadow of our home we stop and collapse against the wall. I want to scream.

  It’s never done that before. I had read about it, even half-believed it, but I had never truly experienced what Cad could do — that sickening grip inside, the instant fear, as if someone had thrust a bag over my head. Nothing I’ve felt in my life could have compared to it. No secret internal movements with their own agendas — cramps, hunger pangs, the clutch and release of my monthly blood. There are so many muscles in the body we cannot control. I know that. It should have been familiar. A little.

  But to have it confirmed: that yes, there are things the disease does not want you to do, and no, you will not be able to do them. And that it might do this again. That it will do it again. That it is getting worse: that this is a slide towards whatever it wants to do next. And not what I want to do. Stay safe, it says. I will make you safe. No matter what.

  And the dead dog —

  Henryk is staring at me, fearful. “Are you okay?”

  “Fine. Ran too fast. Stairs.”

  “Thanks for coming to get me.”

  “Yeah. No prob. Like I wouldn’t.”

  “Reid, listen though . . .” He casts around for a moment, trying to say something difficult. His gaze shoots down to the rabbit, to the ground, to my left shoulder, at last up to my eyes. “Your face . . .”

  “What?”

  “Go home,” he says. “Go home and look.”

  “I . . . okay. I’ll come bring you your share after I —”

  “It’s fine. Keep the whole thing. It’s for you and your mom.”

  “Henryk.”

  “I’ll talk to you later,” he blurts, and takes off, half running.

  8.

  Home is silent, half filled with sunset like weak tea. I trudge through the door, eel past the dividers without looking at them, begin to push open the door to my office. It moves in silence a few inches: just enough to see Mom, furtive, quickmoving, her hands busy in my small filing cabinet, opening the top drawer, shutting it, opening the second drawer, digging her hands into rags and underwear, shutting it.

  I clear my throat.

  Mom spins, too fast. “Hi, baby. What w— oh my God!”

  “Um. I went to the valley? We got a rabbit, but uh . . . Kind of slipped in the mud.”

  She’s not staring at my clothes, though. She’s staring at my face. Still holding the rabbit, the battered claws of its hind legs digging into my palm, I push past her, gently, and take the tiny hand mirror from the top drawer of my filing cabinet.

  Scratches from the branches, a deep gouge beneath my eye that I didn’t even feel. It’s clotted, mostly. Looks like a raspberry stuck to my face. But below that, a new profusion of Cad: vines, tendrils, dreamy bluegreens shifting at visible speed, as fast as the returning spring clouds. My cheeks look like laundry flapping on a line. Far away, through mist. It is a shout, a sign in block letters. Telling me what I already knew. What it told me in the valley, tangled in willows. It says, I did this for you. For your own good.

  Hatred, sudden and sharp, like a mouthful of bile. Not for my good. You and only you wanted to live, you son of a bitch. You didn’t care if Henryk lived or died. Worse: you wanted him to die if it meant you would survive.

  I want to ask Mom about it over a mug of tea. Sit on the lab bench like we always do, forearms on the black plastic. Has it happened to you? Did you feel something move inside you? Were you afraid? Resigned? Did it feel like the kick of a baby: the motion of a foreign thing inside your body reminding you that a thing without a name lives inside you? Reminding you that you aren’t alone?

  She’s shocked, worried. I wonder what it would be like to let her comfort me again. To try to be comforted. For a second I ache for it, like real hunger. How can I leave her? Who will comfort me when I am surrounded by strangers?

  “I’ll go take this apart.” In response she comes forward and palpates the carcass briskly, without distaste for the dusty pelt, the obvious bite-marks from the dogs.

  “Pretty scraggy.”

  “Yeah.”

  “If you get the hide off in one piece, though, they might be able to get one pair of mittens out of them for you. It’s lucky you’ve got such small hands, for all your height.”

  “I could’ve been a surgeon, back then.”

  “Baby, you would have been a wonderful surgeon. Even now . . .” She trails off. The university seems to loom between us, shouldering us aside. But no: I will not stay here and train under our doctors on the fastest ways to hurt people. Even if it was her dream. She could have told me.

  The main thing, I want to tell her, is that you wake up from dreams.

  I head back to the main lab and arrange a spot on the counter to skin and butcher the rabbit. A fiddly process, and I haven’t done it for a while. Green lines are marching up my wrists like caterpillars, and at almost the same speed. I ignore them as I sharpen my knife, wash my hands.

  Trying to concentrate, but my mind is running on a parallel track, harried and fluffed like a nesting bird: Did she check under my covers? Did she find my secret hiding spot? The cabinet was where I put all my childhood treasures — bits of petrified wood, a desiccated marten skull, a couple of magpie feathers — but the accepted agreement, never spoken, is that even though we have no secrets between us, and indeed she watched me bring in every item that was stored within it over the years, she would never open it to look, just as I never open her secret tins or boxes, stored on the lab shelves.

  If she thought the whole thing was a hoax, why would she go for the letter and the tracker?

  The knife slips; my hands jerk away from each other so sharply that the knife almost flies into the far wall. I steady my grip, heart pounding, and grimly continue. The blood helps after a few moments: slick at first, then sticky. Mom’s eyes on me, as palpable as a touch.

  “You should change your clothes. Have a bath.”

  “I cleaned my hands.”

  “The mud is flaking off.”

  “I’ll be careful.”

  Without its pelt, the rabbit, a buck, is pathetically skinny. A hard winter, not very cold but seemingly neverending. I feel more sorry for it than other things I’ve hunted. It survived and survived and survived as its friends and family perished, and finally, when the worst was clearly and provably over, when a mouthful of grass could be felt between the teeth at last, no spring came.

  Sorry, sorry, sorry. I hope you lived well. Sired kits. A little of you hops around still, I hope. The part of you that is unaware that it is from you.

  Its flesh is clean though, no worms or pockets of infection. Not like us. A rabbit, killing and butchering me, would toss me away in disgust and scrub its paws with bleach. Imagine that, one day: generation after generation of Cad infected people having kids, living safely, leaving the risks to the others, till down the line everyone had it and we would finally be docile and wise as the fungus wished us to be. Everyone else dead. Natural selection, bitches, as Larsen would say. Cut us open: tree after tree, marked in black and green.

  “You didn’t go alone, did you?”

  “No! No. God. Of course not. I went with Henryk. He didn’t want his half. Good thing too, I mean look at this guy.” I begin to part it out, making sure I keep everything away from the bowl of guts. Cut here, then here, then here, then here. Funny how it comes right back to you. Muscle memory.

  “You know,” she says, moving to the far end of the bench, “I hadn’t even met your father when I was your age. People were getting married later then too. In their twenties. When they
had gotten to know each other a little better.”

  “Mm.” Hindquarters set aside, take off the loins: gently, pushing it up with the thumbs. Favourite part. Poach those in oil tonight and spoil ourselves away from the Dining Hall. Tired of eating lentils and beans and field peas all the time; sometimes you just want meat.

  “My mother still thought that was too young, in fact. She married at thirty-three. She wanted me to be more independent first, find an office somewhere, live on my own for a while. I don’t want you to think your whole life relies on someone, she used to say. You need to learn how to be your own support.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And I wasn’t thinking about that while your father and I were going out. Of course. But I remembered it after he left and it was just you and me. Not that you weren’t doing your best, baby, but you know. You were only six. I kept worrying: What would happen to us? Would we be okay? What will she think of marriage, when she gets older? What will she think about men? Because, you know, we only know what we’ve been taught. And we can only be taught what we see.”

  Another proverb she thinks she came up with, but I’ve heard the oldsters say it before her. I guess it fits, anyway. She thinks life is endless repetition, and that there’s nothing wrong with it, and that’s accurate. The same patterns writ small and large, always recognizable, even at a glance. You copy what you see in your family, which copies what it sees in its neighbourhood, which copies what it sees in its city.

  “You know, Henny’s a . . . he’s a good boy. He’s always been a good friend. I’m not saying he’s a bad person . . .”

  At last I stop and look up, bloodied to the wrists, stuck in place lest I drip on the floor. We stare at each other. Her gaze is righteous, defiant. Rimmed darkly with blue, her eyes seem larger and younger than I’ve seen them for years. Oh boy, here it comes.

  “. . . But you know, baby, people grow apart. Sometimes the people you like when you’re young aren’t . . . aren’t the kind of people you’d necessarily be friends with when you’re older. Because they have different values. Different priorities.”

  “I guess so.”

  “So I just want you to be sure, really sure, that if you think this . . . this university place . . . is real, and it’s somewhere you want to go, that that’s not something that people are . . . influencing you to think. Because sometimes a tempting idea gets more tempting with peer pressure. Especially if you’re too . . . if you let yourself get too involved with someone. They can have a lot of influence on what you think. If you just stepped back and . . .”

  “Mom, can you . . . involved? Involved how? What do you mean ‘too involved’? I mean, can you just . . . help me out here, please, just say it if you think . . . Henryk and I are sleeping together or whatever. Because first of all we’re not, and secondly, I can think for myself.”

  “I’m not saying you’re not thinking for yourself! I’m just saying, sometimes people don’t realize why they’re thinking something, till they look at it by themselves and —”

  “And even if I was banging someone —”

  “Reid, I’d prefer if you used a less vulgar expression.”

  “What? All right, I don’t know. If I was in love with someone, if I was — is that still too vulgar? If I was involved with someone, why would you think I wouldn’t know my own mind? That’s not how it works, that’s not remotely what it means.”

  “You’ve never been in love, baby, it can be very intense, especially at your age — when you’re older, you’ll see what I mean —”

  “Just because you lost your mind with a man doesn’t mean it happens to everybody!”

  We both stop midway through whatever we were going to say next, as if I had slapped her. The tears are close to the surface again. Even an apology will not take that back. I look down at the lab bench: bloodied lumps on the black. Like the platform, in the cold fog of the morning. And in fact, do the marks on her face look darker now? Even now, while we’ve been talking? As if I did slap her and left these instead of reddened skin.

  Who’s talking to me? Her, or her sickness?

  Do you understand, I want to tell her, do you understand that I did not consent to this: to having Cad, to being born with it. That you forced that upon me. As your mother and father forced it upon you. Do you understand that I am angry? That my anger is the same as yours should have been? That I fear darkly that you want me to stay and it wants me to stay and I can’t tell the difference between

  (neurotransmitters. it doesn’t)

  (don’t)

  (it just means nerve it doesn’t mean brain it doesn’t mean)

  (stop it)

  (mind, it doesn’t mean you, what you are, where you live)

  I realize I’m panting, as if I’ve just run up the stairs. Flight after flight after flight after flight, no breaks. Not even sure what I’m mad about. Being accused of an untruth is one thing, but this is very mild. It is far worse that she thinks I don’t know myself. Or that she is trying to talk me into not knowing myself. That she thinks Henryk has his thumb on some invisible scale in my heart, and that she too thinks she has a thumb on the scale.

  But as soon as I think it, I feel sick, monstrous. Of course she does. And of course she should. She’s my mother, my only family. Brought me into the world. Raised me alone. With love that has never wavered. Now I throw it back into her face. What we owe each other may not be precisely equal or even equitable, but it is not this.

  With an effort, I slow my breath, and finish the rabbit, and wash my hands again, and pour the bloody water into our plants. “I’ll take the bones down to the kitchen, unless you want them.”

  “No, go ahead. I’ll deal with the meat.”

  “Thanks.”

  9.

  Two days remain till the pig hunt, forty-eight hours to build up a real good supply of adrenaline and have it gnaw away at my nerves; on the Wednesday morning I am temporarily recruited to help turn compost, which needs a lot of pitchforks and a lot of backs. Warm work, hard to fuck up. For a few hours I manage to bed down my screeching brain and I listen eagerly to the gossip and flirting. But the minute I stop moving, my brain gets back to work on the only thing it seems to want to do right now: thinking of things that will go wrong during the hunt, and gruesomely playing them inside my head on a loop.

  After lunch, I spin with Mom for a few hours, then wander back outside to look at our allotment. But this leaves me queasy and strangely disoriented, as if the ground is slowly revolving, and I cannot bear it for long. Maybe I am getting sick, I think as I walk. Maybe that rabbit was infected with something after all. Can’t always tell can you. Not everything signs its name on your face like Cad does. I do feel feverish, I feel not just heated from exertion but simmering from within, a heat generated from what feels like my marrow.

  From talking to people, it seems this is the time of year you might get a pig and not die. Now, when they’ve been hungry all winter, and might finally be getting weak. Watchful, yes, but slow and languid from the long starving. Better eats in the fall, absolutely, and Back Then I think people only did hunt in the fall, because they wanted to play fair, but we will not play fair, we cannot.

  But Hen and I were worse than a joke during our rabbit hunt. We were a danger to each other and anybody around us, we were lucky to get out of there in one piece. And that was just the valley dogs!

  I don’t know what I can bring to the pig hunt. It’s clear I can’t learn anything to help myself before then, but good equipment might give me enough of an edge. Maybe the new makers will have something.

  It is sunny, cold, a stiff breeze carrying a smell of snow rather than rain. I imagine the heat of my fever blowing off me like dust. Reaching Whyte, I take off my jacket and carry it flapping in one hand. Sometimes you can find things here that you can’t find in the campus stores. Maybe I will know it when I see it.

  Fat white c
louds over the valley, blustering and important, on their way to some committee or other. Places to be. Not like me, wandering; my life (not that you say it out loud), what is required of me, is not so dangerous, not so hard. Not like those early days of starting over, when a living had to be scratched out of the dying earth. Something a teacher once said, about how as society progresses you can tell it is doing so by the amount of leisure time people have — the amount of time you are not literally trying not to starve.

  With a little start I think of the story we were studying when that came up. What had it been called? Something very simple. The sweet and brainless Eloi, who did nothing but eat and dance and sing, and then the horrible Morlocks, who lived underground and ate flesh (could you call them cannibals if the species had diverged so much? I had written an essay about it, and failed, and to add insult to injury earned a See me after class for apparent pro-cannibal tendencies). What if it was like that in the domes? Had it been long enough? Probably not, three or four generations, and yet — Eloi alone had gone into them, sort of. Would they look at me and see a Morlock?

  I stop at some random storefront, not really hearing the patient ringing hammerblows from within. Was that what the universities were doing? Taking in a feral pet, taming it, hoping for . . . what? Civilization? A terrible idea, a terrible word. Civilization is a word from Back Then — a noun meaning something that had destroyed itself because that is what civilizations were meant to do, and a verb meaning “to ruin by extraction.” Rich places sending our trash to poor ones so they could pick through it for recyclables, like we do now. Always people have simply lived the way they thought they should based on what was around. They threw away plastic, understanding that it would never be needed again. And now we cannot make it, so we use what they left us. The Indigenous people here under centuries of colonizers, till we broke the world and they quietly, nearly overnight, packed up and left the cities together, to live better on the land that their invaders were too busy dying and fighting to lay claim to any longer.