The Annual Migration of Clouds Page 8

  A few had stayed, and rarely spoke about those who had left, always with a kind of dreamy dismissiveness — assurances that it was better out there. We told ourselves: That cannot be. You can’t live except in a city. They can’t start over out there. Later, I thought: But you don’t need a clean slate, do you? That’s not why they left. They already knew that. Just a slate is enough. Remembering that for Europeans it was not enough that we barged in to infect, to occupy, but that we invaded with violence, the intent to possess the “new” continent in a way that the people already living there did not. Destroy, steal, poison, rename, kill, barricade, and deny. In every way like Cad, the colonizer that should not have lived in us, should never have left whatever creature foul or fair it belonged in, but came anyway to possess, not to cohabit. Well then, maybe this is our punishment for that. But how does a fungus know who to punish?

  I pass the places that pass on treasures: a glass smelter, plastic warehouse, places offering compressed waste pellets to burn in stoves and boilers, a charcoal burner with beautifully labelled tins of tooth powder. Here I hesitate: The letter didn’t say what to bring to Howse. Would I need to provide my own toiletries? Sheets? Towels? My God. I don’t even know what classes I’ll be taking. I was accepted into Environmental Science. What will that mean?

  If it was a real university, wouldn’t they tell me those things?

  I’ve hesitated too long, frozen in doubt; the lady inside lures me in, and insists I get an Original Mint tooth powder even though I don’t have any store tokens or barter on me. I put my name in her book and put the tin in my breast pocket. “I’ll send a runner to collect later in the week,” she says. “Look after your teeth! You only get one set.”

  “Yes’m.”

  Dazed, anxious, I wander back out. Workshops now more than storefronts, people repairing wheelchairs and crutches, building steamcarts, scooters, gliders (oh no: I’ve always wanted a glider, and it is too late to save up for one now), water filters. A heavy, savoury smell draws me to an open doorway, a blast of strangely organic heat. Not like the heat from a fire, but almost animal — like the breath of good compost. It smells like a bakery, overlaid with a piercingly sour scent. I pause on the threshold. Vampires, wasn’t it? You had to invite them in.

  “Hello?” someone calls, a high clear voice. A young woman comes out, wiping her hands on a rag; she is semi-familiar to me for some reason. Maybe a couple of years ahead of me in school. I don’t remember her name, but she cries, “Reid, isn’t it? How are you? Are you hungry?”

  “No! I just, um. The scent carries all the way down the block.”

  She beams. Her cheeks are gold-brown and flawless, but I see the marks of the nameless marching up her neck, green and blue. Hello, sister.

  She says, “New batch. Want to come try?”

  “New batch of what?”

  I follow her into the back of the workshop, the smell growing heavier and damper by the minute, and we emerge at last into a plastic-sheeted courtyard full of the spring’s thin sun. A couple of teenagers diligently decant something from large, dented tanks, while an older woman and a big man in a leather apron play chess on a chalked-up tabletop. It takes me a minute to realize it’s a still of some kind — or no, bigger than that. What’s the word?

  “A brewery,” the woman says helpfully. I wish I could remember her name, but the older man solves that for me by springing to his feet when we come in.

  “Jamie!”

  “Just giving a sample to Brains here,” she says, and I flush automatically: I don’t know how the news got off campus, but here we are.

  “It’s bad for brains,” he says severely, and looks down at the board. “See?”

  “It’s not because you drink,” his opponent says. “It’s because you’re terrible at chess.”

  We leave them bickering, and Jamie gets me a tumbler from one of the teenagers. Distillery, that’s the word I’m looking for. The drink in the cup is bright, bready, bubbly. I sip it cautiously.

  “That’s our best so far. We’ve been experimenting with beer for a couple of years and haven’t even got it to the same level as the ancient Egyptians. It’s the water, you know? We have to be so careful with it, it kind of . . . knocks the life out of things.”

  “It’s awesome.”

  “Thanks for saying so, but we can do better. Here, finish that.” She refills my empty cup from a smaller tank, nudging away a white-and-brown dog lapping from the puddle below it. “Hops! For God’s sake, don’t drink that. Anyway, this is our cider. My personal favourite.”

  The cider is not better, but different; sweeter, sharper. I sip and look around at the complicated plastic tubing, the salvaged tanks scoured and polished, dozens of neat ceramic and glass bottles, bags of what I assume are raw materials. I’m sweating from the heat of fermentation. There’s moonshine on campus, of course; you couldn’t stop people from brewing booze if you tried. If the world had ended in atomic war instead of weather, there would still be someone crawling out of the irradiated slag to start a still. But half the time the campus stuff blinds you or makes you puke your guts out, so they use it at the hospital to disinfect tools and the rest of us steer clear. This is probably much safer, and clearly less explosive.

  “You must be so excited,” she says, peering at me over her own cup. “I mean, the university. That’s so amazing. I sent in my application with Mrs. Cross too, but, well . . .”

  “Yeah. It’s all just . . . still so new, you know?”

  The old man gets up, cursing quietly at the chessboard, and comes over with a white ceramic jug prominently labelled SMITH. I have figured out the pattern by now though, the smaller the bottle the higher the octane, and he proposes an academic toast with the contents — some kind of ultradistilled cider that goes down like fire — and by the time I extricate myself, I am, I dimly realize, a little bit drunk for the first time in my life.

  Delight. You read about it, but you don’t know what it’s like until you do it. Like other things. You can try to tell people what having Cad is like but they will never feel anything inside them like we feel. They will feel alone, like you’re supposed to. Not occupied. Now, I feel doubly, triply occupied: hot, light-footed, everything with a pleasant aura around it in rainbowy spikes. If you drink beer and cider and (for lack of a better word) schnapps, what does the fungus drink? Funny to think it’s off the clock now.

  Well, this won’t help with the hunt, though it’s helping with my nerves, but that’s not going to last. Anxiety still hums under the heavy blanket of booze: Will Koda tell me what to do? What if I die before I ever get to Howse?

  And just as I think this I see something I have not seen before: a steeple, rising impossibly behind a derelict apartment building, just the tip of it peeking out, the cross scratched black against the sky. This must be investigated, of course, in case a god, the one whose name I regularly take in vain perhaps, remains there waiting for a single worshipper.

  The building itself is low, grungy cream-coloured brick scribbled over with graffiti; the entire back wall is missing, so that the overall structure is only three sides and a roof. I enter through the front door anyway, because it seems like something they would have wanted me to do. As I pull the door open a snipped chain slithers from the handles, disintegrates at my feet in a puff of rust. I walk through the small heap of dead iron and into the shell of the church, gracefully arched where the outside is sharply angled. These were the timbers that could not be destroyed by storms or fires and were too big to loot. If a god is in here, I cannot yet hear it; I stop, and theatrically cock a hand to my ear, and laugh. It would echo, probably, if that back wall was there. Now, it just flies outside like a sparrow.

  I pick a little unsteadily (whoops: those last two shots of concentrated apple) through the broken bricks and cement, the pews bolted to the floor. It’s a small church, not like the big one downtown. New, maybe, built to fill a
gap near the end when materials could still be had from overseas and people wanted a place to beg for salvation. Like you couldn’t do it in your house. Maybe you couldn’t.

  I don’t know anyone who prays now. No atheists in foxholes, they say, but maybe we are. Nadiya’s parents, I remember, had prayed. Five times a day, pointed to . . . where? I couldn’t remember the name of the city. But Nads herself had not, or she said she didn’t. Her parents were quiet about it. Didn’t push her. You have to believe, they said, not just go through the motions; so if you don’t believe, you should not, and we will not make you. But she must have prayed at the end. How could you feel such pain and not cry out for the god of your ancestors?

  My stomach gurgles warningly. Don’t think about that. I trip over a pew, catch myself in a graceless half-twist. Everything feels easy, as if weights had been attached to my limbs and now they are gone. And from my new position I see an impossible — literally, I think — gleam of light and colour above me. A stained glass window. How? I have never seen one up close. Never looked through one. Immediately I am consumed not by a desire but a need to do so, and there remains a wooden staircase with a strip of dark green carpet running up the centre, and anyway the booze is probably wearing off, and I untangle myself from the pew and set off at half a run.

  God wants me to look at this. God wants me to see those colours, weakly shining onto the opposite wall’s crumbling white stucco. Royal blue and dark roses and greens, a gold like sunset. We use the word gold to mean a certain colour even if we have never seen the actual metal in our entire lives. I want to see it.

  And just as I put a foot on the first step, I don’t want to anymore.

  Slowly, I back away: two paces, three, five. And the desire re-emerges with all the fire of those first moments. Something cold and sick snakes its way up from my gut. You, it’s you, isn’t it?

  I try again and again: eyes open, eyes closed. On all fours, making my way up the ancient carpet nearly halfway before my body simply marches me back down. The fear surprises me; I can tell myself a hundred times that it is not real, but my internal shouting is the lone voice of dissent when my glands, my muscles, my gut, my disease, tells me it is.

  So. That’s how it is, is it. The thing in me feels the fear, and it says: No, you cannot do that.

  Not, Don’t do that. Not, I’d prefer if you didn’t. But, No.

  At last, exhausted, I sit on the floor and stare up at the small slice of window I can see from this level. The staircase sways in the wind. But I know I could have made it up there. Anger: the infection still lets me feel that. If I had doubted that the Cad was worsening, that doubt is gone. Nothing changes. Nothing changes except for the worse.

  A god does not live here, or if there is one, it mocks me in silence; because it will not help me, and it will not end my pain and my fury. If you see something like this and you do nothing, then all you are doing is laughing, and with evil. The world isn’t fair, the world isn’t fair, they tell us that all the time. All the time. I think it was the first thing I learned to write.

  I am not angry at god. But people must have been, back then. Mustn’t they? To watch everything they loved and treasured and deemed beautiful and good fall apart around them; even if half or more of those things were caused directly by what they were doing, they must have wondered why a god had caused the others, and had not intervened, and had watched in silence. Here, a city of over a million where barely one in a hundred had survived the days of darkness. Cold, silent, dry. Dusty hands clasping over elephant bones in the zoo. And the first lesson they passed to their children: It isn’t fair.

  I wonder if it is fair under a dome. If they pray there.

  A god does not live here, I tell myself again and again. A god does not live here. It is not a god I am leaving behind. Looking down at my nails: You are not a god. You are the only thing I hate.

  10.

  I finish my Friday chores on Thursday, and before hauling myself to bed leave an enormous pile of finished yarn under a sheet. I suppose this is by way of a will — not that I have anything to leave, but we studied wills in school, one teacher even made us analyze a transcript of Shakespeare’s will, and it is something that you are supposed to have if you are a grownup. Even if all it says is “I have nothing.”

  I tried to get you a little ahead of the curve, is what the pile says. It is also, I suppose, a farewell note: as opposed to the real note I left, which says that I am headed to help Koda at the soapworks. I glance at the heap only once on Friday morning as I leave the house, silently, in my good boots.

  We didn’t have much weaponry in the house. Unable to ask around about weaponry, not wanting to reveal the time or day of the hunt, I’d had to scrounge from people under other pretexts: spears I’d had to make in the middle of the night from knives borrowed from the kitchen, the rabbit farmers. “I’ll bring it right back,” I said, once, twice, three times. I hoped it was true.

  Now, as I leave, I pause and listen. I have carefully strapped everything against myself so I can grab it easily, and so it does not jingle as I walk. All sharpened for hours, unblooded. I don’t want to spook our pig.

  They say a pig can smell like you wouldn’t believe. Better than a dog, better than a bear. Better than a wolf, even, which I heard they’re seeing up north. And pigs travel in packs too, like wolves; tusk instead of fang, swaggering, because no one can eat them now, not even a bear. Sometimes from Bio Sci you look down into the trees, see the big boars shivering the trunks with their bodies, like boats in the thick water, no wake at all from the sows and piglets. When all the plants are dead, we would ask in class, what do they eat? And our teachers never said. Later, we knew the answer was everything, anything. That’s why they palisaded the campus at several points, Larsen told us. Because in the old days, in the cold, the boars came up, quietly, on cloven and padded hooves, and killed and ate. Chickens. Rabbits. Dogs, cats. The recently buried. The slow, the drunk, the unwary, the unlucky.

  What was Nadiya’s cat named again? My God. It is impossible that I have forgotten. Sleek and dainty, something about stars, not Star though, not Sky, not Stella. Galaxy? Nebula? The kind of black that looked blue in certain lights. We joked that she was part-magpie (though she never killed a magpie, that we saw; she never left the tenth floor).

  Anyway. They said the world shifted suddenly — lurched, really — from big, slow-growing animals that ate a few things, like elephants and tigers, to smaller, faster ones that eat many things, like mice and sparrows; and I do not know which the wild pigs are, huge survivors or exceptions to some rule, but they do have an awful lot of piglets virtually year-round, so there is no time when you can really be safe. They are always defending babies. They are always defending carcasses. They are always angry to see you. And they are always a tremendous, tremendous amount of food. You get tired of plants. Protein always at a premium: an egg, once or twice a week. But this, this.

  I am early; the big waterclock in quad to which we sync our individual wind-up clocks says five forty. But I could not risk staying in the house long enough to have Mom watch me try to nonchalantly leave, bristling with metal and glass like a porcupine. I sit at a bench under the huge dead trees and breathe the fog into myself, pretending that as I exhale something goes with it: the burning acid in my empty stomach, fear, adrenaline, something. Inside I want only pure water. It doesn’t work.

  Just as Henryk said, the platform is gone — folded up again and put away for the next time it’s needed. I wonder if they washed, scraped, sanded the blood off. Or if they just left it, and the next time someone has to make a speech or something, they will have to stand on that redblack landscape.

  It would be cleaner in the domes, I think again, unable to stop myself from imagining it. Whatever they did would be sterile. Fast. Or maybe they don’t do this at all. Kill people. Maybe I will come back and say: We don’t have to do this.

  Henryk arrives next
, of course; I had known he would. Maybe just in the general way that acknowledges that we are the only two who have never gone on a pig hunt, that we will be the youngest, the lightest, the weakest, the most likely to fuck up and be fucked up, and (as a result of all those things) the most scared. He too came here to breathe the pure water, I think. Breathe out the fear.

  “I restrung my bow,” he says, by way of greeting. “But then I didn’t bring it. I was like: Well what the hell is an arrow going to do against an eight-hundred-pound pig?”

  “Did people use to hunt those things with arrows? Back Then?”

  “Maybe thrillseekers did. If they had crossbows. But honestly I mean, all that hair, right. All that fat. And then I don’t think it was for food, because practically everybody bought their food in stores.”

  “Imagine seeking out a thrill and not even eating it. Jesus.”

  “Yeah.”

  I shift uncomfortably on the cold plastic, the dew soaking into my pants. “Do you remember the name of Nadiya’s cat?”

  “Cassiopeia.”

  “That’s what it was. I was a mile off. That’s right: for the beautiful queen who knew she was beautiful.”

  He laughs, but it’s got kind of a nervous, cawing quality to it; I half-expect a crow to hop out of the mist to see who’s calling. We’ve both got that fist of embers under our ribs: fear burning a hole. I tell myself it’s excitement, it’s anticipation, but it doesn’t work. Can’t just rename a thing and expect it to change what it’s always been. Look at Cassiopeia, who acted like royalty when she was a flea-sick kitten.

  “Look what came in the mail yesterday.” Henryk pulls out an envelope of his own: pinkish paper flecked with black, laborious dark green writing. They’ve misspelled his name: HENRY, in widely spaced block letters. “From my uncle Dex. Dad’s brother?”

  “No kidding. The one that moved up north, right? Where the tar lakes are?”