The Annual Migration of Clouds

by Premee Mohamed

  “Ow! You need a time-out!”

  “What are you doing?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know damn well what I mean!” I glare at him till his face begins to waver. In this light his no-colour eyes seem even more watery and wan — shaking, then still. When I was diagnosed with Cad, he bawled in front of me, and my first reaction had been utter shock: as often as we had gotten hurt, as often as he had been beaten up and humiliated, and me too for merely associating with him, even as we had seen our closest friend dying of it, still I had never seen him cry. Even the next year, when his parents died, he had not cried. “I oughta throw you in the shitpond and hold you under. You’re going to get yourself fucking killed!”

  “Oh, and you’re not? What makes you so special, huh?”

  We narrow our eyes at each other, not quite joking. Or I’m not, anyway. He never would have agreed if he had been alone, I know. He would have laughed it off. Thanked her for the offer, maybe. Given her a dozen other names. Not mine. He only wanted in because I was there, and I was asked. It’s scribbled all over his face.

  Finally, he looks away. I do not remotely feel as if I have won, or that any of the questions I meant to ask him with my look have been answered, which I feel is deserved; use your words, kids, they used to tell us. After a minute I nudge him with my elbow, not exactly an apology. If we cannot agree on our motivation, we can at least agree on our inexperience.

  “Listen, let’s go look for rabbits tomorrow down in the valley.”

  He perks up visibly; even his hair seems to spring a little off his forehead. “Yeah! Like, a recon mission. Like spies.”

  “Bunny spies.”

  We briefly discuss logistics, where to meet, what to bring (unaccountably, we are both out of arrows; I have shafts, but no time to re-tip them), where to climb down. A silly mission; thirty or forty families on campus breed rabbits for fur and meat, and generations of jealous trading and competition have produced juicy refined multicoloured monsters as big as toddlers, so of course no one wants the skinny, gamey wild hares; even their thin pelts are worthless compared to our spoiled domestics. But we haven’t hunted in months, and we have lost our old familiarity with the movement through brush and limb, mud and tree. We need that back.

  I wonder what they farm at Howse. But a place that can make paper out of not even spider silk but designer bacteria counterfeiting the stuff must be doing things that we only read about from before the disasters. Not farms but cloned livestock in white-lit aerodromes. Or not even. Less messy than that. Vats, or lab meat, grown in neat lozenges. Clinical and clean. No one would farm if you could help it. Not real animals, with all the different ways they can sicken and die. They would think differently in the domes. (Oh God. Oh God, what will I do there, what if I fail, what if they realize city people are different, what if living here has broken my brain, what if —)

  (No. They lived through all this too.)

  (It’s not the same!)

  It was not instantaneous, the “end of the world,” the way it is in nightmares. The sky didn’t tear open around an asteroid, the earth didn’t swallow us up. And of course, the world did not end at the same time for everyone. No one back then would have been able to say: This is the day our world ended. Or even: This is the year.

  On a human scale it was slow enough that for a long time it did not seem truly dire; on a geological scale it seemed that nothing was happening; till suddenly the feedback cycles tipped over, became too front-heavy to regulate themselves. Nothing could be shipped or driven between cities, let alone countries. Parts could not be found or made to meet the maintenance needs of stopgaps: wind turbines, solar panels. And then the lights went out. Flickered feebly back on, as governments and billionaires threw money at the problems. But money was no more help than marches. You could not buy a new world into existence. And at last, the lights went out for good.

  So here we are. The survivors of the darkest years, the descendants of those who spent decades clawing back into the light. Maybe the people who run the dome will look at me like I am some strange animal, some unevolved thing. I hope they will not.

  On my way out of the store, back into the mud and the ice, someone else comes in and unwinds the scarf from his face to make sure I see his nod — Rene, distracted and haunted, the shadows under his eyes like ink. I pause to watch him cross to Bashir, watch them speak. Sun speeds after cloud, a stray stream of brightness unfortunately highlighting Bashir’s slender arm as he rises and writes a name on the board behind the counter. I can’t see from here, but it’s under the longest and most populated column, in which the letters are barely an inch high — suicides. I don’t recognize the name; they must live on the other side of campus. I give Henryk one last wave and go.

  6.

  Before sunrise I dress and slide quietly outside, blocking the side door with my foot at the last moment so it does not slam. The mist is so thick that I leave a clear wake behind me, swirling in sluggish spirals. Darkness, the pre-shine of dawn. A chickadee sings. Little survivor, they don’t migrate; none of the migratory birds come back now. This one hunkered down over the winter. Hardcore. (What does that mean? The core of what? We get half our slang from water-swollen novels spanning decades. An endless puzzle, figuring them out.)

  In the fog, I make out two familiar silhouettes about a second before I run into them; no way to hide, so I stop and say hello. Yash looks up from her slate and gives me a sneer of greeting. “What are you doing out here, eh? Up early to make trouble?” Before I can respond, she points imperiously at the bare square of ground at their feet, already marked with twine and stakes. “Look at this. My love, the great barbarian, the Visigoth, she wants to destroy the entire history of artistic achievement —”

  “Oh, come on, Yash —”

  “— and plant flowers!”

  “Not on all of it! Just around the border!”

  I pretend to be appalled, and I stand with them for a moment, studying their paint garden. Dead sticks of perennials, bare scoops of last year’s annuals, filled with ice. In this they plant only things that can contribute to their paintings or, at the very least, dye, but there is no market for it, not really. And I suppose if I were nearing a century and had lived through the end of the world, I might like to say “fuck it” and plant some flowers too. Mal smiles at me as if she can hear what I’m thinking.

  “Horrible,” I tell Yash consolingly. “I hate it as an unfilled can.”

  “Exactly. Exactly, I tell her, art is all that separates us from the beasts of the field.”

  “Flowers are art,” Mal protests.

  “Art that dies.”

  “Everything dies.”

  Yash throws her hands up, nearly dropping her slate. While they bicker, I slink away, leaving only my trail in the fog.

  Even this early, there are others out. The trick to moving unseen is not to skulk or hide behind things, but move fast, confidently, so that it seems that you have somewhere to be, and that somewhere will soon be out of the person’s field of vision. I put my head up and throw my shoulders back, my scarf flapping behind me. It’s a couple of degrees above freezing; the walkways have a thin slick of ice where they hold the night’s cold separate from the air.

  I don’t know what I’m doing except that I stayed up too late last night wondering if I would hear what they were doing to the kidnapper — whose name I have never heard. Another unnamed. I move fast to the edge of quad, hiding behind one of the huge dead trees in case any of the Flags are still there. But no one is.

  The platform is untenanted, somewhat tilted, as if hastily assembled. They keep it in Sub, I remember now. You don’t see it very often, you forget what it looks like. Bring it out for speeches sometimes, warnings, announcements, whatever. And this. Things like this. I should not be here: but I want to know something that no one else knows. That Larsen does not know, that Henryk does
not know. I want, maybe, to touch the cord they use and reuse, bright orange in the darkness.

  But this was clearly not a hanging. The platform bears an enormous splattered stain, fresh, soaked deep into the wood. Not frozen — too salty to freeze at this temperature. A relief map: I know enough of blood to know that it piles up sometimes when it pools. When it is spilled, and then sets, and then more is spilled on top. Bootprints walk in and out of the pool. Even bare feet, every toe visible. Something small and red lies on one corner of the platform, prevented from rolling off the slanted surface by a knot of wood. As I sidle closer, breath held, in case someone is coming up behind me (or around me, in the fog) or (God forbid) underneath the platform somehow, oh my God, my heart couldn’t take it, I see that it’s just a finger. I thought it might be something worse.

  A pinky, I think. He had very small hands, whoever he was.

  It’s over. I am glad I did not see or hear it. Obscurely, I am also glad that Henryk didn’t.

  Not that we haven’t seen things. Only that once, generally, is plenty.

  I wonder what they do in the domes if they catch someone like this. Or do things like this simply not happen there? No, they must have a system. People are people wherever you go; and they aren’t any better than us.

  7.

  By the time I meet Henryk over by the Drop, I am tired and cranky from the morning’s work and skipping lunch. He doesn’t look like he’s faring much better. First things first we must get that out of the way.

  “You look like shit,” I tell him.

  “You too. And you need a haircut. That rat’s nest.”

  “What, so I can look like you?”

  “You wish,” he says loftily, because I have walked into it, “you could look like me.”

  “Up yours.”

  “Up what, I always wonder,” he says. “I mean, yours could be anything.”

  “I don’t know. It’s just such a mom thing to say. So it must be something really terrible.”

  The stairs down to the valley gleam in the long afternoon light, soft-edged gold, two lanes marked in dark parallel smears. Going up, going down. Every couple of years they have to be re-plumbed, levelled, and shored up, for the ground beneath them has been eaten away far below their original footings. But here it’s either climb the stairs or take a rope down, and we’ve both been ropeburned enough.

  We hang onto the railings and descend slowly, putting both feet on each step, like toddlers, ignoring the magpies that flutter down to laugh at us. Very funny. Magpies always seem to want to know what you’re doing; and once they know, they want to supervise. “Go away,” I tell them. “You’re terrible spies.”

  “Don’t talk to them, you’ll only encourage them.”

  “Where did you read that?”

  “Some old lady told me. I don’t just read, you know.”

  We wind between stumps and saplings, step through dogwood, rose, handsy willow, batting away the light branches, dried-out and stiff from the long winter. Sap has not risen yet, and the few inches of remaining soil are still frozen above the bedrock. Strong sweet musk of last fall’s leaves, exposed by the melting snow and forming slick rugs under our careful feet. A smell of childhood. Running wild in the dust and the smoke, sliding on these leaves in the understorey. Patches of snow remain in the shade, dirty brown and grey, but the droplets that melt from the icy trees are impossibly clear, sparkling and catching the sun and flying into our upturned faces like rain.

  “What did you bring?” I ask.

  “Sling, spear. You?”

  “I found a couple of arrows, but they’re all shit. From two summers ago. Remember when McKinnon had that workshop thing and we all made like a hundred of them?”

  I glance at the bow on his back, white PVC like mine, smudged with grimy fingerprints. The string doesn’t look too good, but I guess if his arrows are shit too it won’t matter. Mostly, I think, we came to get our legs back under us. Like going back to sea.

  “It’s funny,” he begins, “because, like, back then . . . ”

  “They didn’t even eat rabbit. You never see it in the cookbooks.”

  “Yeah. And if you wanted one you could just shoot it with a gun.”

  Back then, back then. Back then and their guns. We don’t even know what we mean exactly when we say back then, or Back Then, capitalized, like Anno Domini; what time period, in years. Yash and Maliah’s long-ago girlhood. Before Cad. Before the ultrastorms — the Big One and then the next Big One and then the next and the next and the next, often but not always roaring into the river valley like a giant stubbing his toe and collapsing into impotent rage and debris on our side. They didn’t cause the end of everything, we figured; everything was ending anyway. But neither is it very clear what did cause the rift between Back Then and now. So much burned and blew away, leaving no trace, like a carcass that did not fossilize.

  As we mine out the landfills (at least they left us a lot of plastic to reuse; that was thoughtful) and burrow into basements and archives seeking the books that our ancestors did not burn to survive the winters, you feel it sometimes, rage filling you like an updraft of hot air from a fire, lifting you from the shoulders or blowing through you like a tornado — rage that we missed it, missed it all, and rage at those who got to have it in the specific way that took it from us.

  And we don’t even know what it is. Only that we want to get back to it, and we never will, because they made that impossible. What has been broken has been broken in a way that can no longer be fixed.

  Reading about it all in novels: smartphones, internet, satellites, the ISS, movies, cruises, road trips, texting, trains, flying in planes over countries with the cloud shadows moving dark and wet over the land like ink; but also all the things they wrote in there that they did not mean to write about because they were too normal, letting us look at them from the corner of their eyes. Restaurants. Rice. Dumpsters. Condoms. Bosons. Irrigation. Pensions. Bananas.

  I think: My fucking Christ, imagine a world where you could fear flying.

  Henryk feels it too, the rage I mean, the upward pull of it, when you know there’s no starting over. When you know that everything we needed to start over was thrown away or burnt up decades before we were born. We can’t have any of that.

  Maliah told me: They said to us, We’ll keep the lights on as long as we can. And they did. You could flip a switch and at least there was light. We could not run our stoves or our fridges but light, always light. Then brownouts, then blackouts. The panels broke and no one could fix them. No more diesel for generators and no more coming. Click, click, click. (Her long beautiful willow-gold hand gesturing at the dead switch on the wall.) Till finally we all had to admit nothing was coming back on. It was dark always. Now, babies crawl around without fear and put their tongues into the sockets like there is milk inside.

  I hadn’t understood every single word in that story (diesel, for instance: that was clothes, wasn’t it?), but I had understood enough. Back Then, they had built things you couldn’t fix when they broke. The time to be angry at them for doing so is long over. And the world burned anyway: and there was no water to put it out, nor will to carry a bucket. And those with the water hid themselves and it away and pretended the flames did not exist.

  That’s where I’m going, though, I think. To a place where they hoarded that water. I wonder if this is part of reparations, or just guilt. If they are doling it back out too late — spurred by pity or charity or morbid curiosity — to those who burned.

  Henryk has not noticed my woolgathering, as I stare at his bow, joggling unevenly on his back as we pick our way down to the trails. “What about here?” He gestures at a low, dark clearing, cluttered with dogwood. A few thin shoots of grass have begun to sprout, startling green against the snow. The rabbits have had nothing good to eat in months; bark, maybe lichen. They’ll want fresh grass. I decide to take its prese
nce as a good omen.

  We cast our eyes to the ground, looking for their neat round poops. The North Sask is as high as it’ll ever be — with the glaciers gone, it’s mostly snowmelt now, and the occasional rain. It will not approach the banks so closely for the rest of the year. The sound is soothing, like the wind through the bare branches, still dripping icemelt on us. I glance around for clear icicles and break off a couple to suck on, the water so pure it tastes sweet to the tongue.

  “I don’t really want a rabbit,” I tell him, chewing on the ice. “I want a bucket of maple syrup.”

  “Me too,” Henryk says around his. “I’m tired of vegetables. I want sweets.”

  “Oh, but we need vegetables to grow big and strong!” I chirp in my best Mrs. Cross voice.

  “That was horrific,” he whispers. “Uncanny. Please do not do that again.”

  “You think I’ll scare the bunnies?”

  “I’ll let you know when my soul comes back to my body.” He snaps off another icicle and gives it to me. “Here. Don’t talk.”

  We circle the clearing, finding a couple different types of shit, all old, and no prints. Down the trails, then, closer to the water. Here you can smell the river’s breath, fast and clean, drowning out the heavy scent of the rotting leaves. It doesn’t smell like spring yet, but it does smell like thaw. See it through the trees: blackly glittering through two cliffs of stubborn ice. More green here, sprouting on the edges of the narrow foot trails, tiny wheatgrass and thick strappy crabgrass, some nibbled down. “There we go.”

  The air is still, the ground emanating cold. We squat in a tangle of willow, find canes to take our weight. Behind us rattles and clicks, like the beginning of a song. For all the stillness, clouds curdle and race across the sky. “Look how fast they’re going.”

  “I hope it rains later.” Henryk glances around for another icicle, and clucks in exasperation.