You don’t want to talk about yourself, except to give the facts. What you want to talk about are the problems facing the people around you. Your charity-worker friend tells me that after you saw an advert for WaterAid you asked her to donate what little funds you had to the children who were suffering, because the way the system works, you weren’t allowed to do it yourself. She tells me, though she apologises for speaking because it is not her story, that you have been buying fruit and lentils for the children in the hostel because the food is so bad, it makes people sick, and you can see the children are malnourished.
You are a man whose eyes are bright with unspilled tears when you tell me of the horror of your journey here. But when you think of the people who have shown you kindness? That is when you break down and cry. You say, of the woman sitting with us, I would maybe have suicide, without her. When I ask you if the people in the city where you live are good to you, you say yes, because if you ask them an address, they will tell you where it is. They will tell you where it is.
I think about all the stories we tell about refugees and how they are always one story or another, never both at once. Tragic stories or threatening stories. Victims or aggressors. Never complicated, always simple, always with clean edges. Easy pigeonholes to fit people who have been forced to take wing.
But a hole is not just a pigeonhole. It’s the space between two things. It’s a hole that’s the gap between a word in Urami, or in Farsi, or in English. It’s the space between past and future, between old lives and new. Between years. When New Year came in March you went to the park in the city where the hostel is, and you sang songs welcoming the New Year by the water of the lake. What can a new year mean, when you are young and all you are able to do is wait?
I want to be useful, you say. I don’t want to spend my time in the hostel, waiting. And then you rub your eyes with one hand and you say, Please pray for me. You say, This issue is very distracted my brain, my mind. I want to quickly take a part in this society. And the culture. At the moment I haven’t any certificate, because I am an asylum seeker. And I don’t take a part in helping people because I don’t have any money, I don’t have any device for helping the people, and I think my living is very precious. Precious? You try the word out as a question, as if the word is itself somehow wrong.
I don’t like be spend it by the time, waiting, you say. Because I am young.
You are young. You are a student, an epidemiologist, a Christian, a refugee. You want to help people so much it hurts my heart. You are a man who I drive, after we have talked that afternoon, to the hospital so we can take a photograph of you standing outside the School for Clinical Medicine, because bound up in a sense of your future is this brightness, that you might one day be able to help, to work in medicine here. And you are also a man who tips back his head and laughs when we discover that the School has been closed for rebuilding, and the windows are boarded up and the palings mean we can’t see the building at all. We take pictures anyway. Us in front of the barriers. You alone, you with your charity-worker companion, you with me. We are all, all of us, waiting while the world is rebuilt.
Ants
At first there’s nothing notable about my drive back from the supermarket. I pass packs of schoolchildren on street corners, see a glossy SUV make a dickish manoeuvre at a roundabout, listen to someone complaining about something or other on the radio. Then my attention catches on something high and to the right of me. I tighten my hands on the wheel, pull into a roadside space a little further on, I lock the car and walk back, car keys loose in one hand, eyes turned up to the sky.
Some natural events track seasonal changes, and we treasure them for it. We wait expectantly for our spring swallows and swifts, the first summer butterflies; we listen for the mating calls of autumn foxes and deer. But in Britain we don’t have many visibly spectacular, large-scale yearly events whose precise calendar timing is unpredictable, like the spring spawning of thousands and thousands of silver grunion fish on Californian beaches for a few nights after a high tide. Even so, everyone here knows one. It doesn’t happen on the same day everywhere, but wherever you live, there’ll be one still, humid, bright day that triggers it, and today it’s happening right here.
Above me is a towering column of flying ants. I only know they are there because there’s also a column of about a hundred herring gulls borne on lean grey black-tipped wings, some cruising at rooftop height, others circling hundreds of feet above. They aren’t flying in the usual laconic manner, a lazy flap and glide from one place to another. They’re feeding. I can’t see the ants that they’re eating. But I know exactly where individual ants are, because every few seconds a gull twitches itself to one side, beats its wings once, twice, and snaps at the air. And another, and another. Above me is as much a feeding frenzy as any bait ball in a tropical ocean, but featuring gulls and ants rather than anchovies and sharks.
What I’m witnessing is the nuptial flight of a species of ant called Lasius niger, the common black ant of our town streets and suburban gardens. For the last twenty-four hours worker ants all across town and county have been enlarging the entrance holes to their underground colonies to make them big enough for winged virgin queens to emerge. The male drones, also winged, are already massing on the ground, and as the queens take flight, trailing pheromones, the drones chase them aloft. The queens take their pursuers higher and higher, waiting for males strong enough to reach them. They’ll mate, sometimes with a few different males from different colonies, in brief coincidences that herald the birth of tiny empires. On their return to earth, the drones die, while the queens rub off their wings and search for a place to start a new nest. Though these queens may live another thirty years, they will never mate again. Every fertilised egg they lay for the rest of their life will use sperm they store in their bodies from that one ascent on a summer afternoon.
I watch gulls from all points on the compass flying in to join the bonanza. The ants are caught up in a thermal of rising warm air, and as the incoming gulls meet its outside edge, the tip of one wing is tugged by the updraught; they straighten their wings, circle into it, and rise effortlessly. This tower of birds is an attraction visible for miles, an ephemeral landmark above a roadside church in a small country town. And these flocks of predators are one of the reasons why ants from a whole district all emerge at the same time; the more ants in the air, the more likely it is that some survive the onslaught of beaks. A red kite joins the flock, drifting and tilting through it on paper-cut wings stamped black against the sky.
We so often think of science as somehow subtracting mystery and beauty from the world. But it’s things I’ve learned from scientific books and papers that are making what I’m watching almost unbearably moving. The hitching curves of the gulls in a vault of sky crossed with thousands of different flightlines, warm airspace tense with predatory intent and the tiny hopes of each rising ant. It isn’t merely the wheeling flock of birds that transfixes me, or the magic of how the ants have carved out a discrete piece of unremarkable air and given it drama and meaning. It is that the motive power behind this grand spectacle is entirely invisible. This vast stretch of sky, the gulls, the imperceptible ants, is a working revelation of the interrelation of different scales of existence, and it is at once exhilarating and humbling. Humbling because this contemplation on scale and purpose can’t help but remind me that I’m little more than an ant in the wider workings of the world, no more or less important than any of the creatures here. Mesmerised, I watch a party of swifts pile in to take their turn at the harvest, wings scything, pink gullets open wide to scoop ants from the air. Craning my neck, I follow them up until the flock banks between me and the sun, and the fierceness of the light erases them from sight. My eyes water, and I look down to the ground I’d forgotten, to tarmac covered with the glittering wings of drones and queens all readying themselves for their first, and final, flight.
Symptomatic
Migraines: something like rain, something like a
bullet that’s only chambered one morning days after the threat of violence. A slug that ratchets through and slots into your spine before the slow shot begins with an umbrella-towering nimbus of empty pressure that makes you as dizzy as if there really were a storm-cloud of rising air growing, billowing up and outwards until its edges feather and coincide with your skull. Then come two thumbs pressing on your sinus and moving over your jaw, and strange strips of fast pain like summer lightning when you lift a cup, pick up a pen, burying themselves in your shoulder, deep into places which don’t exist until they hurt. And when the pain comes it is one-sided, sometimes on the left of your skull and sometimes on the right, although it is so intense it can’t be kept in either place, and it ripples like a flag cracking in strong wind, or thrums deep like a heartbeat, and sometimes one of your eyes waters, the one on the same side as the pain, and there’s what doctors call a post-nasal drip, which makes the world taste of scalding metal and brine. A few times, in the midst of my own migraines, I’ve had a strong and sudden intuition I’m made out of cobalt: partly it’s that taste in my mouth, partly how heavy I feel, but mostly because the interference in my brain runs sometimes along the lines of those delicate scrawls of blue-flowered decorations on ancient Chinese porcelain. Shipwrecks, bones, pearls. So yes, migraines put me in mind of metaphors, and then more metaphors, and more, for they are always too much in a way that makes them unbearable, all filters gone.
Thirty per cent of migraineurs experience visual disturbances with their headaches. I’ve had them only once, on a stormy night at a literary festival. I was busily signing books when a spray of sparks, an array of livid and prickling phosphenes like shorting fairy lights, spread downwards from the upper right-hand corner of my vision until I could barely see through them. In textbooks the phenomenon is called scintillating scotoma. It scintillated. I freaked out. I kept signing, kept smiling, gripped the inside of my shoes tight with all ten toes, and worried that I was going to die until the pain came.
Although they hurt, make bright light a brutal intruder and force me to take to bed and swallow as many painkillers as I am allowed to without harming myself, my migraines seem useful. Their utility isn’t in the pain. The pain is terrible. I hate it. I hate the time it takes from my life, my helplessness in the face of it, the tears soaking the pillows I’m curled around. But migraines remind me we’re not built with the solidity so many of us blithely assume. That the World Health Organization’s 1948 definition of health – a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity – refers to precisely no one, is a sweetly turned phrase more ableist than utopian. That perfection cannot be intrinsic to us, built as we are of chemicals and networks and causal molecular pathways and shifting storms of electricity; none of us are ever in perfect health.
Migraines are an incredibly common – more than a billion people suffer from them – but highly mysterious neurological condition. We’re not exactly sure what they are, though it’s likely they’re a tendency for the brain to lose control of its inputs, a sensory processing disorder that is partly inherited. We know that meningeal blood vessels around the brain dilate during the headache, and that migraines are associated with activity in the trigeminal ganglion, the base of the nerve network that governs the face and the muscles used in chewing. We know that migraines with auras involve waves of electrical activity across the brain called spreading cortical depression. In the midst of a migraine, not knowing is very much to the point. Pain wipes you free of knowledge, makes understanding utterly redundant. There’s nothing to know or understand. Subjects, objects, fail. All you are is all that is and all of it hurts.
Some people get migraines most often around the time of their period (three times as many women as men are migraineurs; sex hormones appear to play a role) and the correlation is pertinent to me not only because I am one of those women, but because menstruation is migraine’s closest cousin in my life. There’s no mistaking their occurrence – I bleed, or I curl up in pain and weep – and both involve a suite of premonitory symptoms.
It took me nearly thirty years to understand the robustness of my premenstrual pattern, but these days I know the week before my period will always include a single day in which I fantasise about murdering strangers, most specifically slow drivers, and another in which everything can reduce me to sentimental tears: supermarket adverts, the polished corner of an oak table glowing in the sun, a pigeon taking off from a hawthorn branch into the wind. For much of that week the voice of my interior critic is as seductive and honeyed as warm baklava. It tells me I am a terrible person and the worst writer in the world, and I believe it. But after decades of bafflement, these states are now something like old friends, and I greet them with a deal of archness.
The premonitory symptoms of my migraines are exceedingly specific. Two or three days before my head begins to hurt, my fridge fills with bottles of banana milk. I yawn a lot, become unaccountably thirsty. My joints ache. I shop for dark chocolate and sweet pickled beetroot. There’s dust-and-ashes tiredness, and a bad mood so remorseless that even the sweetest birdsong irritates. I can enumerate them now, yet when the headache arrives, it is always a surprise. I never see it coming. These symptoms are aspects of the migraine’s earliest stages, occurring in its prodrome, that part of it which precedes the pain. It turns out that some of the most infamous migraine triggers are not triggers at all – a desire to eat chocolate is just as much part of a migraine as the full-blown headache that follows.
After the pain subsides, the migraine’s postdrome begins, and it is a peculiar muse of mine. Though it makes me feel weak, muffled, slow and stupid, it’s inside it that writing comes easiest. Whatever is going on inside my brain makes the words flow, the world sharper; it tips me into days that seem newly forged and prone to surprising beauties. I’m writing at my kitchen table right now in the midst of a postdrome, a heat pack draped across my neck and shoulders to unknot muscles locked after two days of hurt. Just after sunrise this morning, I looked out over the back fence of my garden across a field of oats into the valleys and hills around my house, the sky nacreous and the lower-lying ground obscured by luminous mist. For a migraineur in fear of bright sunlight, the slow slide into autumn’s softer days and earlier nights is an enormous relief.
But something was off. I shook my head. Then I shook it again, and wondered if I were sicker than I thought, because I could hear a loud drone, a low-frequency roaring like the sound of an airliner overhead, but an airliner held somehow motionless mid-flight, for there was no dopplering, no shifting in the sound; the tone was as unmoving as the mist. It seemed to have no discernible source, was emanating from the ground, from the air itself – perhaps, I thought with a start, from inside me. Maybe this was some previously unknown annexe to my migraines, a novel auditory hallucination. The anxiety caught like brushfire and prickled in sharp, glittering waves along my skin until a woodpigeon started to sing in the tree above me, a low cooing sent out into the air at the same frequency as the noise all around, and with a slide of amazement running straight down the nape of my neck and rising in goosebumps along my arms I understood that the roar was pigeons, hundreds of them, gathered here to glean the spilled grains from harvest. They were calling from trees and hedges and fence-posts for miles around, all at once, and in such number that their individual songs dissolved into one. I was not imagining it. This was not a symptom. It was out there. And amid the roar of hundreds of other minds, I was overcome by delight. No matter how old I am, I thought, sometimes I’ll encounter things that are new. And perhaps my wonky neurology was reading too much from this experience, but sometimes, I went on to think, when you berate yourself, it might be the case that you do so needlessly. Sometimes it is not you. Sometimes the world is to blame.
I once told a friend about my perennial inability to recognise I’m in the midst of a migraine prodrome. Other people understand what their symptoms mean while they’re happening, I said. Most people. N
ot me. I said, ‘It’s weird. I wonder if I’m in denial on purpose, because I hate having migraines?’ She fell quiet for a while. ‘It could be that,’ she said carefully. Then she said, ‘There’s another possibility. Have you ever considered that your failing to identify the symptoms of your migraines while you’re having a migraine may itself be a symptom? Because some things are structured so that not seeing them, not comprehending them, is part of the experience of what they are.’
Migraineurs like me are experts in denial. We know how it feels, that fingertip pressure behind the eyes and heart, knowing it’s there and at the same time believing it does not exist. Which is why I keep thinking of migraines whenever I hear the news, although we have a much clearer understanding of the science of climate change than we do the science of migraines. As I write, forest fires in Siberia are tearing through millions of acres of slow-growing pine. The Amazon is burning. Villages are falling into the sea. Methane craters blossom across melting permafrost. Dogs drag sleds through meltwater. The hottest summer. The hottest summer, again. And again. Hurricanes lining up across the Atlantic. One, two, three. And while it’s easy to grieve over a photo of a starving polar bear, be terrified by the predictive pronouncements of scientists, feel the utmost grief and horror at the human cost of hurricanes or floods, it’s even easier to disavow the knowledge of systemic breakdown. We can’t connect the dots. We know we’re in trouble, but we shift anxieties to conjure terrors that are palpable, thinkable. We fret about the existence of drifting drinking straws and shopping bags that mimic jellyfish and ctenophores in trash-polluted seas. Some of us anchor ourselves in an imagined notion of home while home burns or drowns around us. Others conjure enemies who threaten our homes and familiar ways. We cleave to narratives online that canalise our terror into notions of cabals and great replacements, conspiracies fluttering like millenarian pamphlets, old hand-printed broadsides newly rendered in digital ink. But we know we’re in trouble.
Vesper Flights Page 6
