As they worked, Flannery couldn’t ignore the change in Brandon: in place of his usual goofy warmth was the cold precision of a machine. He was doing what he could to hold it together.
“It’s normal, you know.” She said it as they took a coffee break, waiting for the machine to spit sugared chemicals into their Styrofoam cups. “A lot of HD patients are in denial at first. It can take them a while to break through that. She’ll be back.”
Brandon picked up his cup of steaming coffee and walked back to the lab without responding.
Later, Flannery noticed Brandon using a dropper to lightly coat the starting wire in a solution from a petri dish labeled I.C.E.9. When she asked what it was, he pushed the petri dish toward her.
“Take a look.”
She adjusted the microscope eyepiece until the blurry grayness sharpened into a handful of rod-shaped cells with messy flagellum sprouting from the poles. “Just what I’ve always wanted,” she said dryly.
It was Pseudomonas syringae, he told her, a bacteria plant pathologists had been studying for years; it showed up all over the world on trees, grasses, and domestic and wild animals. As it turned out, P. syringae caused water-based life-forms to freeze in above-freezing weather. “Gives me a wider range of temperatures to work with in the chamber.”
It made evolutionary sense that something had developed this kind of ability, thought Flannery. Freeze damaged a plant, breaking open membranes, making it easier for the bacteria to feast on the nutrients inside.
Brandon had asked her to photograph his snow crystal project because Flan owed him for helping her get set up at the Climate Institute and because he still thought of her as a snow specialist. An Iceman. At Marsh, she and Brandon had both taken a class from a visiting atmosphere specialist who first introduced them to the hidden world overhead.
Flannery had always planned to return to the States and go on the job market as an ice specialist, like Brandon had, after the yearlong EOP in Nigeria was over. Then, Kunle told her how, growing up, full-moon nights were an opportunity to venture through the bush to nearby compounds and chase girls. He also told her a proverb from his village: when the moon is bright, even the lame wish to get up and dance. Falling in love with him was a lot like a full moon: everything suddenly looked different.
At the time, Kunle was still working on his PhD because it took so long to finish school in Nigeria. After decades of harsh dictatorships, even the best Nigerian universities no longer had adequate funding or laboratories for educating PhD candidates in much more than the abstractions of book science, and even the professors they had always seemed to be on strike. To make money for room and board, Kunle worked as a campus okada driver, wearing a bright orange vest and oversized helmet, ferrying students from the front gate to dorms and academic buildings on the back of a motorbike for thirty naira. Sometimes, Flannery showed up at the end of his shift; he’d free himself from the orange vest and they’d buzz outside the campus and into Adamanta for a beer before it was time for him to return the okada.
On the nights Kunle studied for exams at the building they called the Faculty, reading by the light of a rechargeable lantern, Flannery brought him suya grilled by vendors on the side of the road. They would sit on a concrete bench in the breezeway, devouring the thinly sliced peppered meat from its newspaper wrapping.
“I’m surprised an oyinbo can take the spice.”
“I’m from Texas. We have a thing called salsa.”
They talked about their childhood. How when she didn’t know the words in school choir, she’d mouth watermelon, watermelon, watermelon. How, as a boy, he had to hide in the yam fields to find a quiet spot to read.
Because they worked together on the EOP project, Flannery and Kunle kept their growing intimacy a secret at first. When Kunle stayed overnight at her place, he woke at dawn so he could sneak out before the campus roads filled with people.
Still lying in bed beneath the mosquito net, half awake, she watched him bathe in the tub across the room. Coated in suds, he scrubbed his body, hair lathered white like an old man’s before he dipped the plastic bowl into the bucket and poured water over himself in little sips. Toweling dry, he would turn to her, naked, and ask, “What do you like least about me?” He placed one leg and then the other up on the side of the tub, rubbing Vaseline into his feet and the crevices between each toe until the skin glistened. Before leaving, he would turn his head to the small mirror, making sure there were no stray straight hairs caught on his shirt. Nothing to give them away.
Another time, they sat, hands grazing, on a wooden bench inhaling the smell of toner, trying to be discreet in the chaotic midst of the student center’s dozen running photocopy machines, when he turned to her and said, “Everything has changed.”
So instead of going on the job market in the States, Flannery found a low-paying position at a small, underfunded research outpost run by a middle-aged, burned-out British scientist, who immediately began grooming Flannery to take over the project. She was no longer an Iceman. She was now a woman of the desert.
Adamanta was in many ways the perfect place for this kind of research. Despite the dangers of sectarian violence (which were significant, the city being located on the fault line between Christian south and Muslim north), they were surrounded by Sahel, the thin zone of transition between the Sahara Desert and the tropics. Desertification was causing the Sahara to move south, overtaking the Sahel. Plants died, and the soil was sucked of its nutrients before blowing away with the wind. This, in turn, meant less evaporation and more reflected sunlight from the land, further weakening the monsoon, causing even less rainfall. When African droughts first became severe in the 1960s, most Western scientists dismissed the cause as overgrazing by the natives. Africans weren’t taking care of their land, they said. With climate change now a global problem, nobody dared say that anymore.
Flannery and her colleagues measured the speed of this process. How fast were the tropics becoming Sahel? How fast was Sahel becoming dirt? Could the process be reversed or was it already too late? Her boss, always in khakis and a stained T-shirt, would crouch over topographical maps and say, “It’s not like we have the resources to change anything, but at least we can bear witness.”
Kunle eventually finished his PhD and began working part-time in her lab and as a lecturer at a small, local university. It was around this time that, through her boss, they first met Mrs. Tonukari, the Welsh woman and forty-year veteran of Nigeria who became Flannery’s only model of a Western woman who’d actually built a life here and stuck it out over the long haul.
When Mrs. T came calling, it was without warning and often at the crack of dawn, revving the engine of her ancient Peugeot in the driveway or rapping loudly on the front door. Flannery would ride back with her, sometimes still wearing pajamas, sitting in the passenger seat and holding on her lap the woman’s shopping basket full of red bananas, white bread, potatoes.
“If you don’t do it first thing in the morning, around here it doesn’t get done,” Mrs. T liked to say.
Once their car was stopped at a ramshackle roadblock. The young men wearing threadbare T-shirts and sunglasses went on and on about how some bullshit sticker on her car was expired. “Pay up,” they said, “or we won’t let you through. Pay up or we’ll tow your car to police headquarters.”
“Oh my,” said Mrs. Tonukari. “Oh no.”
They spent half an hour in the wilting heat while Mrs. T halfheartedly tried to talk the dubious security detail out of the fine, halfheartedly searched for naira in her purse, which contained multitudes of crap. Flannery looked straight ahead at the road strewn with orange peels and empty plastic sachets labeled “Pure Water.” Anyone could see the men weren’t police, and they had no plausible equipment to tow a vehicle. Bargain it down, Flannery kept thinking, and let’s get the hell out of here. But Mrs. T was the forty-year veteran of the country, and so they dealt with the situation her way: using flailing, panicky white fear.
Her house
on the university campus—Mrs. T’s husband had been a professor of engineering until his retirement—had the look of an old farmhouse, out back a clothesline and an overgrown garden, inside lots of books and knickknacks, candles in empty wine bottles, a wooden staircase leading to the bedrooms. She would make Flannery tea while telling stories and pulling books from her shelves, splaying them open to point to things. Books were not easy to come by in Nigeria any longer, and Mrs. T refused to loan any of hers out. Too many of them had walked off over the years, she said.
She told Flannery about when Nigeria was the center of the West African publishing world, when Magazine Road in Ibadan was lined with presses and everything was “more lively.” Flannery remembered thinking how it always felt she’d arrived too early or too late to the party in this world. But Mrs. T’s nostalgia wasn’t based on illusions, and Flannery saw it on the faces of Kunle and other Nigerians, too: so much promised, so much squandered.
Mrs. T had a number of Nigerian friends, but she latched onto Flannery because she was lonely for someone to talk to about her life before coming to Adamanta. She claimed that, to her Nigerian friends, “It’s as if I was born the day I moved here.”
Mrs. T would pause, squeezing the tea bag between her fingers, before saying, “One starts to believe it, too. Everything begins to revolve around this crazy place and what’s going on here, as if Nigeria were the whole world. And for all I know anymore, it is.”
Flannery turned over those words as she sat in front of her computer in the middle of the night a few days after finishing Brandon’s photo project. The numbers on the screen weren’t making sense. Nothing made sense. Everyone else in the lab had gone home, but Flannery couldn’t bring herself to leave. If she sat there long enough, something would begin to work. It had to.
When she blinked, she saw images of snow crystals, shimmering with the pink and blue light from the color filters, turning like stars. She saw the drip, drip of the dropper as Brandon coated the ice wires. To distract herself, she opened up the university database and searched for Brandon’s new bacteria. Pseudomonas syringae. The first article she found claimed it could raise the freezing temperature by up to five degrees, which was really astounding.
People often had the misconception that snow was frozen rain, but, in fact, sleet was frozen rain. As a section of the atmosphere cooled, relative humidity increased until the point of supersaturation. Snow was created from this supersaturated vapor without going through a liquid stage. Flannery wondered what might happen if one scattered Brandon’s bacteria as an aerosol into the sky where, in enough numbers, it might also be able to stimulate the creation of snow at above-freezing temperatures in clouds. She clicked through more articles but could find no evidence that this had ever been attempted.
Once ice crystals or snowflakes began to form, they grew in size by sucking humidity out of the air nearby, causing more water droplets in the cloud to evaporate and fill that space. Snowflakes then continued to attract this vapor until becoming too heavy to remain in the cloud, falling to earth. Snowflakes, like raindrops, needed a nucleus around which to form. It was usually dust or soot, but it didn’t have to be. It could also be bacteria. It could even be bacteria that happened to make water freeze in above-freezing temperatures. And this is when it struck her: Snow was heavier than water. Snow took longer to evaporate back into the atmosphere than did liquid rain and was more likely to make it to the ground.
Flannery thought about the virga in West Texas, streaks of rain appearing to hang beneath a cloud but evaporating before hitting the land. It was phantom rain that did nothing to help the crops or pastures. Their whole family would sit out on the porch to watch, her mother’s wheelchair creaking from her flickering movements: Phantom rain. Phantom mother. Phantom rain.
The virga phenomenon occurred in the Sahel, too. She’d seen it in Kunle’s home village in Bauchi State at the end of the dry season because, in the village, everyone was up with the dawn in line with an agricultural tradition that hadn’t been much affected by electricity. (Power was even more sporadic here than in the cities, averaging less than an hour per day. Occasionally, someone would yell, “Up NEPA,” and everyone would rush to plug something in, to charge whatever they had.) Flannery and Kunle were in town for Easter that year. A wrap draped around her shoulders for warmth, Flannery walked with Kunle at dawn up the main dirt road, rough and rocky, as it wound from the village into dusty farmland, which was where they saw virga in the distance, like the mirage of water in the desert. It made her thirsty.
Kunle’s village was beautiful in its way—a pastoral answer to the maddening crowds and jammed roads of the major Nigerian cities. Women carried water on their heads, to and fro from the wells. Cocks fought and chased each other while the occasional teenager kicked up dust on a motorbike, probably going nowhere, killing time. They passed bundles of finch-red sugarcane, a mud hut with a chalkboard outside advertising Arsenal versus Manchester United, an empty schoolroom with the letters of the English alphabet painted on the wall. “F” was for Flower; “G” was for Gun. There was a sign, showing a young woman wearing a headwrap, that said EARN RESPECT. DRESS DECENTLY.
Back at the compound, Kunle’s mother would shake her head at Flannery and say, “Waka waka.” Although not fluent in English, Kunle’s mother had learned pidgin in the years she and her husband lived in Lagos during his military service. Waka waka referred to a person who was always walking from place to place. Their morning walks, without purpose or destination, were inexplicable to a woman who worked so hard that all she wanted in her spare time was to rest.
Kunle’s mother was not exactly a warm woman—she’d lived a hard life and showed her love through backbreaking labor: in the field with the yams or preparing huge meals in the kitchen, which was just a fire pit covered with a thatch roof to protect the caldrons and mortars from the rain. There wasn’t a single indoor common space in the entire compound. In the mornings, Flannery watched family members emerge from their various rooms, which opened directly to the outside, squatting in doorways to brush their teeth or wash their clothes in a soapy bucket. Then, if they weren’t going out to the field, they might set up stools and chairs in the shade around the cooking hut to chat and relax. Someone might catch a chicken to pluck and cook for lunch, the men cracking bones afterward with their teeth, sucking out marrow.
At night, after dinner dishes had been washed and total darkness fallen on the compound, Kunle led her inside his mother’s quarters where they would sit on a low bench along the wall. His mother would be curled in motionless exhaustion on a chaise-longue-shaped wooden chair, the shadow of her sharp profile cast by the low light of the kerosene lamp perched beside her on the swept concrete floor. There he and his mother would talk, the two of them, in their own language.
And later, on a mattress in the privacy of Kunle’s room, Flannery’s head on his chest, he would tell her what she already knew about the slow, creeping death of this village and his mother’s way of life. “Our field is three times bigger than it was when I was a boy, but the harvest is one-seventh of what it was then.” He stroked the inside of her arm with rough fingertips. “A well is there one day, and the next is buried in sand.”
“And it’s probably too late.”
“Never too late.”
Flannery’s eyes were closed, but she smiled into the dark. This sort of magical thinking was one of the things she loved about him. Her hand felt for his face, and she traced the lines of scars that ran along his cheeks like a terrace, like a shoreline, a place where the map ends. They were the mark of his people, done through ritual scarification when he was a boy, but she imagined they were the scars of the land, of West Africa itself. She thought briefly of her own family and other kinds of marks and scars, unchosen, that separated them in a different way.
She could feel his breath on her neck when he asked, “Could you live here? Could you make your home here with me? In this fading place?”
“Yes.” She said it wi
thout hesitation. In this place, she was free. In this place, she was special. “Oh, yes.” And the grand idea, the expectation of making their lives together in Nigeria, never altered over the next three years, though there were moments when she wondered if she’d eventually end up like Mrs. Tonukari: bitter and afraid.
Once, Kunle took Flan to swim near a beautiful waterfall on the Gontola River, which otherwise wound wide through lazy side channels and eddies. It had rained the night before and the water ran the color of cappuccino from all the topsoil washing away. They swam, only slightly afraid of the freshwater parasites with their long names and longer lists of symptoms, in a calm spot where the water pooled. An old man stopped to sell them palm wine and later told Flan he’d once been to Texas.
“Where in Texas?”
“You know,” he replied, “Texas.”
After Kunle left to find lunch, a group of women and children from a nearby village arrived at the river, circling Flannery, coming forward, then retreating, not knowing what to make of her invasion. Eventually they settled nearby and stripped down to their underwear, washing themselves and their clothes at the same time. She felt her whiteness but wanted to believe it didn’t fully represent her. She wanted to plead with them: I am not the place I come from. Instead, Flannery climbed out, shaking off the water like a dog.
In the lab, these images and memories of Nigeria played over and over in Flannery’s head as she worked, day after day, on her new idea based on Brandon’s bacteria. She was determined not to forget who she was doing all this for. Not to forget her promise.
A few weeks later, when Flannery finally met with Brandon in his office, she was ready. She explained to him about the prevalence of virga, the rain in Nigeria that never made it all the way down to the fields. But, she told him, pointing to her calculations, if she could seed clouds with his special bacteria to make it snow instead of rain, the precipitation would be heavier and colder, less likely to evaporate. The ice crystals could be grown in clouds over specific areas, and as they fell to the ground they would melt, causing precipitation that had a chance of hitting the soil.
Migratory Animals Page 15