The Annual Migration of Clouds

by Premee Mohamed

  “Don’t say that. It’ll be harder to hunt.”

  He glances at me. “Is your mom really mad at you?”

  “No.”

  “Oh. Because for a minute there I thought . . . ”

  I let him think it. We sit in the willow bush and listen to the breeze in the frozen forest. In the old days, we would have pointed upwards, made little wagers on which cloud would reach the top of the Stantec tower first, across the valley. Now of course we are too old for that. People our age are already getting married, finding new offices to live in, playing house.

  He too could do whatever he wanted. No parents to tell him not to. No guilt, no shame. No mom to accuse him of laziness, disloyalty. Faithlessness. Turning your back on your only family: no one will say that of him. Hantavirus, a long terrible time of it, maybe a week, two weeks. Ripped through campus like a tornado, even though they said you couldn’t pass it from person to person. Eighty dead at the end. Too many for our deadworkers, who collapsed, exhausted, napping upright against buildings and leaning on trees. And Henryk suddenly an orphan at fifteen. The great disaster, a child outliving his parents, both at once, no warning; he had gotten it too, but recovered. His hand on my sleeve at the memorial. We could not bring ourselves to embrace.

  But you were done being parented at fifteen anyway, I had told myself, and meant it. Done with that complicated two-step of guilt, duty, love, obedience, and adulation; ready to join greater society as an adult, source of knowing instead of sink. And anyway we had all been raised just as much by each other, and our neighbours, our dozens of teachers, the caretakers in the big communal daycare, the river, the birds. The black and the green and the blue.

  “I was up late reading.” Henryk stifles a yawn in the crook of his elbow, and slowly unhooks his bow. “How come you didn’t sleep?”

  “I wasn’t up late. I was up early. I wanted to go look at the platform in quad.”

  “Oh. When I went before work, it was down already. Did they hang the guy?”

  “I don’t think so. There was a lot of blood. Didn’t the Flags give you anything to put up in the store?”

  “No, nothing.”

  “Christ.” Unbidden, my thoughts are again of my mother: all up in McKinnon’s face, a foot and a half shorter than him, thrusting her finger at his beard. Who took that confession? Who wrote it down? She thought that mattered. The Flags, very clearly, did not. “What were you reading about?”

  “Just Cad. The history and stuff. Did you know Mrs. Montpelier has a whole library about it? Nothing else.”

  “No, I didn’t know that.”

  “In the Chem building. I had to pay for the lantern, but the books you can look at any time for free so long as you don’t take them outside. There’s some really interesting stuff in there.”

  “Mm.” Does Mrs. Montpelier have Cad? I can’t remember. There was a time when I kept a kind of running list in my head of people I knew to have it, updated as their diagnoses were confirmed (particularly during that hanta outbreak, when I had noticed that no Cad people had caught it) and again as people died of it. But now there are too many.

  We are talking, I remind myself, not about some obscure medical curiosity but about me. My disease. What lives in me. Not an academic exercise, something we wrote papers on in school (though we did, in grade six and again in grade eight). But it still seems so distant. I look down at my thumbnails in the shade of the branches, as if in the last two minutes I have been suddenly cured. Nope. There they are: the tiny trees. One seems to shift subtly, like the kick of a fly’s leg. I look away at once. Please don’t remind me that you’re in there. Let me pretend I’m alone.

  Henryk says, “Remember, they said it started in Europe, and then vanished for a couple of years, and then popped up everywhere? Or it looked like everywhere? And everyone said it was being released from the melting permafrost —”

  “Or bioweapons or whatever.”

  “Yeah. Or a lab accident. Or a government experiment. I mean people thought it was definitely bioengineered, and it was the Russians.”

  “Everybody thought everything was the Russians,” I say. “That’s literally the only thing I got from most of grade eight.”

  “Except the Russians, who thought everything was China.”

  “And the Chinese, who thought everything was the Americans.”

  “I wonder whatever happened to America,” he says, then shakes his head, briskly, getting back to his secret library visit. “Anyway, I found out some people thought it was aliens. From a meteor that fell in Latvia. A really big one. The book had a picture, it was all burnt up from going through the atmosphere, but it was still as big as a car.”

  I think about Latvia, the modest blob of green on the globe, bounded by faded sepia lines. One in a million shot, with the gigantic pink swath of Russia just next door. “Some aim.”

  “Yeah. And then there was another theory that it was because the oceans were getting so hot, and some deep-sea fish with it came up to where they weren’t supposed to and spread it into fish that people were eating.”

  “And heat doesn’t kill the spores.”

  “Exactly. Exactly.”

  Nothing kills it. They taught us that, too. They tried chemotherapy, radiation, antibiotics, antivirals, predatory fungi, bacteria, phages. Dialysis: swapping old blood for new. Blood substitutes, even. People tried to burn it out, cut it out, starve it out. And died: either from bloodloss or shock, or the symbiont reacting somehow, thrusting itself into bones and nerves, closing around organs like a vise, when it had once wrapped them in the most delicate filigree. Once you have it, you have it. Forever.

  “It doesn’t matter where it came from,” I say slowly.

  “No, I mean of course it doesn’t. I just keep thinking about it. I mean, this . . . thing. Alien thing. Deep-sea thing. On top of everything else.”

  “Yeah. Timing.”

  “Timing, exactly. The scientists thought it was adaptive at first,” he says, making a conscious effort not to look at me. “A vestige from its original host. But it became maladaptive when it spread into people.”

  “Understatement of the century.”

  “The last of it, the last of the research, was about the hyphae,” he says quietly. “They were trying to characterize what it makes. What it put into the bloodstream.”

  Hen, I want to say, even before he’s finished, don’t. Don’t. Instead I stare wide-eyed at the ground, trying to find patterns in the leaves like you’d find in the clouds.

  “Toxins, a ton of toxins, stuff that looked like snake venom, spider venom, fish endotoxins. A lot of small molecules and proteins that resemble neurotransmitters. They figured that’s how it controls people’s muscles once the infection gets past a certain point. Preferential, uh, what do you call it. Receptor/substrate pathways. They shout louder than your own chemicals. Cool, huh?”

  “Mmph.”

  “It just means nerve,” he says hastily, glancing at me. “Neuro. It doesn’t mean brain. It doesn’t mean —”

  “But they didn’t look at that. Did they.”

  “I . . . I don’t know. The book didn’t say.”

  My knee begins to jiggle nervously on its own, as if I were sitting in class; I quell it with an effort. “Howse must have figured out a better test. More accurate.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I thought maybe they cured it, I thought . . . maybe people don’t die of it there. I . . . ”

  He nods, reaches over, puts the back of his wrist on mine for a second. “I keep thinking about Nads. How proud she’d be of you for getting in. How she would have loved your essay.”

  Oh God. The name unspoken for years. Sweeter to the tongue than ice. A wrench to the heart: gentle, lovely Nadiya, who had always been with us, the third side of our triangle, who at thirteen was diagnosed with Cad and had it go off within three mont
hs of those first faint green markings. Fucking hell, and it had seemed so hugely terrifying back then, and unfair, unjust, that you should be beautiful and good and die screaming, distorted beyond recognition, even the face all wrong, the skull all wrong. When the clumsily refined products of our minimal, hardy-zone poppy harvest could no longer quell the pain, her family took her to Calgary to die. Gone in the middle of the night. No goodbyes.

  All the shit we had managed to get up to. The kitten ranch. The arrow business. Our air band, complete with hand-cranked record player. That time we climbed the High Level Bridge across to the Legislature and picked excitedly amongst the crumbling ruins, dodging a sudden stonefall by mere seconds. That should have been years, decades, a lifetime together. Nads and her big deer eyes with their impossibly long, silky lashes, like feathers.

  It occurs to me that if she had not gotten sick, she probably would have been the one to get into the university. They would have wanted her so badly. If anyone. Not me. Her.

  “I miss her. It’s bullshit that she isn’t here for this,” I say.

  “It is. I know.” The wind picks up; he buttons his jacket to the top, cringing further into the willow for the little shelter it gives. “I think I was in love with her.”

  “I don’t blame you,” I say, casually, though the shock of it rocks me back on my feet for a second, ending, like the aftermath of a tornado, in a sick, dark little twirl in my stomach, a small storm destroying a few last buildings; I feel lightheaded. Don’t be an asshole. For fuck sake. We were all kids together, kids get crushes, and she was beautiful, remember that? And what is beautiful these days but each other? So graceful. Her laughter, that held nothing back. Henryk in love with her: come on. Like you know what the word means at that age. It doesn’t mean anything. And so what, anyway? It’s just Henny. It’s not like . . . Stay casual. Don’t pause too long. “You never told her?”

  “I was going to. Then I couldn’t. I thought maybe . . . I don’t know.” He waves a hand listlessly, staring down at the river. “Girls, right? Thought maybe I’d get you to tell her. Then I thought that was a stupid idea. I mean. What, I couldn’t talk to her myself? The three of us talked to each other like twenty hours a day.”

  “Yeah. Stupid idea. Glad you didn’t do it.” Still, my stomach spins; I feel gross, even a little nauseated. I wish I had more ice to chew. I pick off a willow twig and stick it between my back teeth: acrid taste of chemical sap. You’d have to chew a bushel of it to relieve this level of pain, but my tongue is momentarily distracted.

  “Mom would have been so happy. I kept thinking that. She loved Nads. She would have loved for her to be, like, part of our family or whatever. When we were older.”

  “Everybody loved her. It’s not fair, that . . . ” I give up, shrug. We’ve said it all before. Everyone did. Nothing’s fair. Nothing’s ever been fair. And nothing (this is the really important part) ever will be.

  Long minutes pass in silence. There: something rangy hopping downslope into view. For a second it is as if the undergrowth has come alive, the grey of dead leaves and grass, but no, it’s a rabbit all right. Uncaring of us, maybe because it cannot smell us yet. Human voices are a distant thing to it, probably. Not a threat. Or maybe because we are down here so infrequently that generations and generations have told themselves that we aren’t a threat. Not really.

  It’s about thirty paces away. Stealthily, Henryk raises his bow, then grimaces in dismay. Knew it from looking at it: needs restringing. He won’t get enough draw to skewer a boiled potato.

  I heft my spear instead. I’m no good with it, but at this distance it should barely matter, and I slot it delicately into its holder and rise to a crouch so my arms don’t get tangled in the willows. Inhale. Sight. You don’t want to tag it in the ass, because it’ll just take the hit in muscle and bolt to escape the pain. The head, or the back of the neck, that’s what you want. No pain to run from. Just darkness.

  Something flickers in the corners of my vision. Branches? Bugs? Like eyelashes, but weightless, without colour. Have to ignore it to aim, everything crisp for a moment, bright and sharp, even the sun moving obligingly from behind a galloping cloud, the rabbit oblivious, munching, hunched, and everything as still as a drawing.

  Draw back. Line up shoulder and hip. Release.

  The rabbit flattens with hardly a sound, only the solid chunk of the thick glass point crashing into the bones of the spine. For a second I cannot even believe it worked — surely I fucked up, and it will rise, and scream, and stagger around in the half-eaten grass, spurting blood. But no, it’s well and truly down, and Henryk whoops.

  “Shit yeah! Hail Nimrod, mighty hunter!”

  “Whaaat the shit! First shot!”

  “I’ll go grab it,” he says, and hands me his bow, and slides down the slope. And then several things happen at once.

  Even before the shapes flow out of the trees, there is something spilling into my eyes, dark first then bright, so that it seems the sun has focused all its rays on the gilded painting that is now being composed by the sure hand of a master: Boy, Rabbit, Dogs.

  “Hen! Hey!”

  He is watching his footing on the slick grass, only looks up at my shout. Everything seems to be stuck, jittering. Too slow. Realization dawns on his face at the speed of a real dawn, light cresting the horizon for hours; the sprinting ferals seem to run through cobwebs. Teeth bared. Ribs bared too, like a second set of jaws embedded in their mangy skin.

  They lunge for the rabbit at first, and then — visibly, with the full thrill of anticipation and delight expressed in dog body language — realize that bigger prey is steps away.

  I drop the bow, begin to run for him. I make it one step before something inside me locks — slams shut like a door, freezing me in place. For breath after breath I can only watch, terrified, paralyzed, as one dog, black with yellow spots, seizes the rabbit and worries it in its jaws, and another, coyote-gold, leaps for Henryk, knocking him onto his back so they disappear into the bush. A despairing yell, the crunch and clatter of breaking branches. And I can’t move and he’s alone and this has never happened before and —

  No. Fuck you and the fucking hyphae you rode in on. Fuck you, fuck you, and through first immobility and then agony, like running with a charley horse in every limb, I force one foot to move, the other, nerves on fire. I shove myself down the slope, wade into the dogs, keeping my hands far from their snapping jaws. Screaming mostly in pain, but hoping to scare them too, arms waving, grabbing the dropped spear, jamming it into faces and open jaws, running-sliding for Henryk, who is shrieking under a mass of fur and mange and about two steps from tumbling onto the rotten ice of the river.

  Groaning with effort, it is like something inside me burning away, a little puff of kindling disappearing in the fire, fighting against the darkness that I have only temporarily driven back from its rightful claim. The spear tip breaks with a high, sharp note that sends a couple dogs yelping away, but I wade in anyway, slapping and stabbing, till Henryk can struggle to his feet.

  The pack disperses at last, seeing us upright as a united threat. By the time we claw our way back up the slope, I expect the rabbit to be gone, but it remains, harried a little, next to the green ice glint of the broken spearpoint. One dog lies nearby, still weakly thrashing. We give it a wide berth.

  We are soaked in thin mud, Henryk is shivering, his jacket hood filled with snow. All my muscles hurt as if I’ve been hauling bricks. Back, neck, legs, where I forced them to move against the will of the nameless invader. They’ve never had to work that way. Walking is a struggle, but we have to get out of here.

  “W-wuh-we should put it out of its, uh, its muh-misery,” Henryk manages, looking at the dog. It’s a particularly nasty specimen, black and pink and half-skinless, nearly lipless, the teeth exposed and shining, so sharp they too look like the broken edge of my spear. It must have been very hungry to come at us like tha
t. Or maybe not. We’re not so big. And there were ten or twelve of them. We need to start moving in a pack, I almost say.

  I don’t know if I can kill it, with my spear tip broken. The sling won’t do any good at such close range. An arrow, maybe, into one of the big veins of the neck? But I don’t want to get close enough for it to snap at me. I’m shuddering, my teeth chattering. “Where did that phrase come from, anyway. Misery. Why not something else.”

  “Ennui.”

  “Weltschmerz.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know. I read it in a novel.”

  I suppose it’ll have to be an arrow. I take one from Henryk’s quiver then stop dead: the dog’s body ceases trembling as we watch, the bony back legs kick out — once, twice — and it falls still. But there is still movement within it: deep, deep within, where

  (where the being lives, the manythreaded monster, where it lives dark and green and held you back, where it said don’t go, it’s not safe, let him die, deep in that place, that same place)

  the guts might be trying to expel a tapeworm, something, a

  (parasite say it)

  denizen shocked by the sudden ruination of its home, all the lights going out. The side heaves, the dry gritty hairs standing up on end like dead trees, and then something small bursts between two ribs, half an inch, an inch, a blink and it is as long as my hand, a tiny bluish fern, swelling at the top. Not blooming. Not exactly. A fat swelling, fleshy, foreign flesh, chitin-looking, iridescent green and black. Mushrooming. Oh my fucking God.

  I grab Henryk’s arm. “Run. Go!”

  “But —”

  My shove catches him in the small of the back so that he falls, swearing, but then he’s up and dashing back towards the stairs. I snatch the rabbit, getting closer than I want to the sprouting monstrosity, which waves in the still air as if sniffing, scenting, pausing to face me — the swelling as big as my fist now, emitting a slow stream of smoky spores but giving every impression that it’s about to burst.