Migratory Animals

by Mary Helen Specht

  The image made Molly think of her sister, something in the expression, in the tilt of the head. It wasn’t even a human figure and yet, if she squinted, she could almost believe her sister was standing at the corner of her vision. Almost. If like Ovid’s Philomela—raped and her tongue ripped out, with no other means to speak—Alyce was trying to tell her something by weaving this tapestry, Molly did not yet understand what it was.

  She grabbed the packing tape from the cabinet and quickly walked out of the room.

  Molly left the ranch, driving out of the gate and down the country road toward a forked Y where the blue post office drop box sat exposed in the sun. It was the farthest she’d been from the ranch in weeks. The rural isolation felt protective but also like a strange purgatory, an anteroom before the end.

  From years spent around scientists, Molly knew there were two theories about how the universe itself might culminate: expansion or contraction. In the expansion scenario, the universe would just continue unfurling from the Big Bang until the pull of gravity that held galaxies and solar systems together weakened and the energy in stars dimmed. Everything would get farther and farther apart, growing colder, snuffing out.

  Proponents of the second theory thought the outward-thrusting universe would achieve a final point of tension, like a balloon reaching its limit, at which point everything in the universe would begin to reverse course, contracting back into the single point of origin, a pebble of fire.

  Molly didn’t have feelings one way or the other about what might happen to the universe—frankly, she didn’t really care, seeing as how humans wouldn’t be around for the big reveal—but nevertheless, as she’d sat at the kitchen table earlier wrapping her mother’s journal in bubble wrap, this thought crossed her mind: most people’s lives are like the second theory. We contract back in on ourselves. We slowly lose the ability to work, to remember, to function. We lose friends and know fewer and fewer people in the world. Mostly this happened later, in old age. But not always.

  From watching her mother, Molly knew this cycle sped up when a person became terminally ill, the heavier burden shared between fewer people, the seraphim who tacitly agreed to take on the difficult emotional and physical work of transporting you to the other side. In the middle stage, when the chorea had worsened but her mental faculties were still mostly intact, Molly’s mother sometimes cried as she took pill after pill, each swallow more difficult than the one before.

  As Molly rolled down her window to drop the package into the mail, Flannery’s address staring back in bold, black ink, she almost began to cry herself. Dropping her mother’s journal into the yawning hole of the postal system seemed like a betrayal. But her mother had been gone a long time. Her mother’s story was not necessarily Molly’s, though they would die the same way. Molly wanted to remember her mother for other things: For turning suddenly to spray them with the hose as she worked in her garden, tiny hands in oversized work gloves. For practicing her cockney accent, in preparation for Pygmalion auditions, during their Friday-night spaghetti dinner.

  Molly forced herself to wonder why she felt compelled to send the journal on to Flannery, as if her sister would know what to do with its unholy heft. As if by being free of the disease, her sister deserved some role in Molly’s disintegration. But the real reason was that Molly wasn’t sure she remembered her mother spraying them with water or speaking in a bad cockney at the dinner table. Those were stories Flannery told; it was Flannery who translated their mother’s life for Molly.

  As she drove back to the ranch, Molly felt like a leech. A bloodsucker. Flannery had her faults, to be sure, but Molly was only beginning to understand how much and for how long she’d used her sister, too.

  Growing up, Molly believed Flannery understood things about the world she herself did not. And this was probably true at first. In a house full of secrets and illness, Flannery was older and grew more quickly attuned to the subtle gambits living there required. Flannery knew when to turn up the pink jam box to drown out sobs from the other room. When to nudge their parents out of silence by catapulting canned spinach or mashed potatoes onto the pink antique wallpaper. And when to just disappear from the house altogether, sitting one-behind-the-other on the Nash “Executioner” skateboard and rolling down the bumpy asphalt hill.

  Molly got through by following directly in Flannery’s footprints: keep your head down, put one foot in front of the other, don’t look up or around because vultures might be circling. She followed Flannery to Marsh and co-opted Flannery’s friends—it was what she’d always done. She also fell in love with them, like she fell in love with worlds in her illustrated books as a child, thinking if she managed to pry her way inside, the characters there would protect her from whatever lurked in the dark water below the ocean surface, so deep she couldn’t begin to fathom what it might be.

  Flannery moved to Nigeria the same year Molly and Brandon lived in Ann Arbor for Brandon’s postdoc, and it was the first time Molly had been entirely separated from her father and sister and sister’s friends. She remembered it as a time of waiting. Waiting for Brandon to meet her at a fancy hotel bar, for example, an Asian woman with an enormous diamond ring sitting a few stools down talking to the bartender about her husband’s organization: something that involved repairing limbs. The bartender made an amaretto sour for the woman and a martini for her husband, just arrived with their twentysomething daughter who whispered “Make it neat” to the bartender; they all laughed. The woman handed the drink to her daughter and said to the bartender, “They’re really the drinkers.” Molly eavesdropped as the father told his daughter, who must have been a University of Michigan student, that he was proud of her but that she had to be—he pointed upward—“top, top, top to get into PhD.” Molly felt alone. She thought of the volunteer group that stood on the corner of a major downtown intersection during the dark, brutal Ann Arbor winter with a sign reading FREE HUGS.

  When she finally saw Brandon walking across the room toward her, smiling—they were meeting to celebrate his first publication—everything was suddenly all right again. He was her most precious representative of the magical, safe environment her sister and her sister’s friends created for Molly, like a tortoiseshell. She remembered thinking in that bar in Ann Arbor that the fact was, in the real world, you couldn’t be with everyone you loved. You had to pick one person, follow him, and hope he followed you.

  But now, as Molly pulled her car in behind the ranch house and turned off the ignition, watching Alyce emerge from the door and sit heavy on the porch swing, she thought: What if your life turned out to be more than one person could handle? Molly wanted to pick up the phone and call her husband, dial the only number she knew anymore by heart. She imagined what he might be doing at that very moment: walking down a bland, institutional corridor, his heavy bag hanging crosswise on his shoulder, but also feeling burdened by all the things lost: the loss of his youth, of his parents’ language, of the security of a social fabric where one could count on raises and tenure and stocks going up over the long haul, of his wife.

  Molly knew Brandon would try to comfort her, but in that moment she could not bear the thought of his confused, wary, frightened form of comfort. If a woman cries and nobody is there to see it . . . ? She didn’t make the call.

  FLANNERY

  Flannery’s life was now pushed along by an all-consuming current: lab, sleep, Kunle; lab, sleep, Kunle. She was focused. She was an arrow on the way to its mark. Her sister’s disease was the air around her, impossible not to breathe in with every breath, but possible to ignore in that way one always ignores the unconscious workings of the body.

  Brandon helped her begin new calculations, and Flannery existed to make them work, returning to her apartment only to sack out, shower, and have long, meandering conversations with Kunle on the telephone as she trolled the Internet looking for nearby silos to house the custom ice chamber that was their next big move. Every step forward in the project felt like a step closer to Nigeria
.

  As weeks passed, her love for Kunle became like light through a prism, each beam emerging as a different color. Some days it was a love that made her sick to her stomach, an anxious and jealous love, an insecure love of long violet days. Some days she loved him to obsession, to distraction, almost to the exclusion of all other thoughts, a bright red pulse. The timbre of his voice became home.

  Their relationship reverted to its earliest phase. They talked on the phone like teenagers, flirting and teasing each other, revealing old secrets from childhood. They talked about what they were wearing and eating, what they dreamed about at night, what they overheard on the bus. They played each other new favorite songs, holding a cell phone up to computer speakers. When she didn’t think about Molly, when she was able to keep everything compartmentalized, Flannery would even have said she was happy.

  But though they talked every day, stories and anecdotes spilling out of them, and though Flannery was pursuing the cloud-seeding project for Nigerians like Kunle and his family, they rarely spoke of work or her progress in the lab. He asked, but she put him off. She told herself it was because he wasn’t a snow scientist, an Iceman, and wouldn’t understand the intricacies of what she was up to.

  But one morning he brought it up again, more forcefully, wanting to know why she’d changed projects. “Flan, explain it to me again. Why is this taking so long?”

  “Because it will work.” Flannery was at her apartment eating breakfast, mopping up the last bits of egg yolk with a slice of charred toast.

  “But if you just keep starting over . . .”

  “What I’m doing could save the Sahel. Maybe. Eventually.”

  “But when will you be back?”

  “You’re not hearing me,” she said between bites, spearing triangles of grapefruit, slipping them onto her tongue and pressing out the sour juice with the roof of her mouth.

  “I hear another white person convinced they’re going to save Africa from itself.”

  “Don’t.”

  “Send along your data,” he said. “I have to go now if I’m going to make it to evening service, but e-mail me what you’ve got so far.” Kunle’s church was called Redeemed and consisted of a small congregation in a concrete strip mall. Back in Nigeria, Flannery’s favorite part of Sunday was watching Kunle press slacks and a white button-down oxford, standing next to the ironing board in his boxers, stroking hot metal over cloth with a gentle precision.

  “I’ll e-mail it to you.”

  After breakfast, Flannery didn’t feel like going directly to the lab. The conversation with Kunle had left her feeling at loose ends. On a whim, and perhaps also putting off the task of organizing and sending her work-in-progress to Kunle, Flannery decided to attend church herself. It was Sunday morning on her side of the world, and there were several churches nearby. Surely one of them would have a service. While Flannery didn’t believe in God per se, she liked the idea of a solemn space where she could sit and think, of being in church at the same time as Kunle, mirroring him across an ocean.

  Wearing a floral consignment-store dress with a high waist, she walked ten minutes to the orange-brick Methodist church that she’d passed so many times without thinking and settled down into a pew beneath a stained-glass window depicting Jonah being swallowed by the whale. As she waited, Kunle’s accusations came back to her. Was she doing the wrong thing? Just another white person trying to save Africa from itself? She remembered when two men were digging a ditch for a sewer pipeline behind her house in Nigeria, and she watched them from her kitchen window. They were waist-deep in the hole, scooping out black dirt with shovels. Not wearing shirts, their torsos glistened with sweat, smooth and hairless as newborns; wiry and chiseled; darkest, shiniest obsidian she’d ever laid eyes on. At that moment Flannery was a redneck who whistled obscenely from a truck. Or she was Lorca writing Spanish poems about gypsy women.

  After a short processional, the entire church stood and sang “Glory Hallelujah,” gospel style, hymnals yawning open.

  “Church in the morning, science in the afternoon,” she used to say to Kunle as they walked back to campus, linked arms swinging alongside their bodies.

  “Whatever you do, just don’t call me a ‘freethinker,’” he would joke, mocking the fact that this was a derogatory term in Nigeria for atheists or agnostics.

  The sermon that morning in the small church in East Austin was on the parable of the talents. The landlord goes away and leaves his “talents,” or money, with three servants; the first two invest what they were given and double it while the third simply buries his in the ground for safekeeping. Upon the landlord’s return, he praises the first two for their enterprise and castigates the third for laziness. The minister at the pulpit, swaddled in billowing, wine-colored robes, told Flannery and the rest of the congregation that this parable had very little to do with money or the stock market “as some capitalists would have it.” He claimed it was about not wasting what the Holy Spirit had given you. Do something real with your personal talents; take risks out in the world.

  As she listened to the call-and-response between the preacher and congregation, Flannery’s hands became fists. She wished Kunle were sitting beside her on the pew, listening to her vindication. Do something real with your personal talents, the pastor had said. Take risks, he’d said. Change the world, was what she heard. She needed Kunle to understand that this was what her cloud-seeding project could do. Where was his magical thinking now?

  At the Climate Institute in the middle of the night, the only noise was the squeak of the janitor mopping the floor with long, mechanical strokes. Some nights one or two graduate students roamed the halls, having started an experiment too late in the day, held hostage by the unhurried pace of biological or chemical processes. But not tonight. Tonight it was just Flannery and the janitor and Kepler.

  It was common to hear ice specialists tell students the earliest scientific account of snow came from Descartes, whose “Les Météores” described the product of winter storms as “little roses or wheels with six rounded semicircular teeth. . . .” But, decades before, Johannes Kepler, the astronomer who discovered the laws of planetary motion, wrote a small, little-known book, a New Year’s gift to his patron in 1611, called The Six-Cornered Snowflake. Flannery’s copy, dog-eared and worn, had the original Latin on the left, the English translation on the right.

  In the background, Flan was running numbers through her computer model as she had every night this week, and as she sat at the long white table in front of the big white screen, she reread Kepler’s little tract of intellectual curiosity, following along as he attempted to puzzle out the question of why snowflakes, when they first fall . . . always come down with six corners and six radii tufted like feathers.

  The computer modeling for something like cloud seeding was slow and arduous. She played with humidity percentages and temperature; she adjusted the software’s equations and started over. It would work eventually. It had to. Flannery waited.

  She’d heard nothing from Alyce or her sister in weeks, and their disappearances from her life made her feel both excluded and relieved. But mostly she didn’t think about them at all. She thought about her project, about Kunle and Nigeria and snow falling in the desert.

  Flannery took comfort in Kepler, imagining the young astronomer during a dark Prague winter, crossing a bridge over the Moldau under moonlight, watching flakes from a snowstorm bearing a likeness to the stars alight on his coat before evaporating into shapelessness. Even the earliest known scientific drawings of snowflakes were done fifty years after Kepler’s book, in the 1665 Micrographia where Robert Hooke used a crude microscope to first view the intricacies of snow crystals up close. Even he had to draw them from memory, though; they melted too fast.

  Kepler had nothing but his eyes and his mind to ask who shaped the little head before it fell, giving it six frozen horns. It was not really less magical to Flannery now than it was to Kepler then. She knew snowflakes were six-cornered because
of the crystalline geometry of ice molecules—something that took three hundred more years and the x-ray machine for scientists to discover—but they still used the word morphogenesis to describe the process of water vapor condensing into snow. A self-assembly. A spontaneous creation of form. As though snowflakes were indeed motivated by a kind of soul, or what Kepler hypothesized to originate from the facultas formatrix, an enigmatic, shape-giving force that radiated from the bowels of the earth and its vehicle is vapor, just as breath is the vehicle of the human soul.

  On this nighttime wandering with Kepler’s book, Flannery fancied she was the astronomer and Kunle her patron, to whom she tried to explain snow crystals. Psalm 147:16 reads, “He giveth snow like wool; he scattereth the hoarfrost like ashes.” Flannery imagined holding a handful of beautiful six-cornered stars out to Kunle, who had never touched snow before, as a gift. Like the gift of this small book that Kepler presented to his friend, except Flannery’s gift would be better. Flannery’s gift might transform the small, shriveling yam farm Kunle’s mother slaved over into something green and vibrant again.

  Dressed in Kepler’s coat, she would tell Kunle to look closely and ask if he thought it formed such a shape according to the dictates of the material, or rather out of its own nature, to which would be innate either the archetype of beauty that is present in the hexagon or an understanding of the purpose which that figure serves.