The Annual Migration of Clouds

by Premee Mohamed

  “Was that Henny? He didn’t want to come in?”

  “He had to go back to the shop.” I reach into my jacket, touch the envelope, stop.

  Mom is humming, scrubbing herself with a rag, dipping into the warm water, just like we do every week, but there’s something different about it now, as if the letter

  (as if my disease)

  has slipped a lens over my eyes so that I can see

  (as if the hyphae have gently adjusted something, hoping to help)

  more clearly what I would be leaving behind: the body familiar not only because I have seen it all my life, and not only because it is shaped and proportioned just like mine, but beloved, because it belongs to her; and to the fucking Cadastrulamyces infection that roams across it like a river delta seen from space, huge twisting ropes of it, thrumming, braided, writhing under the skin and clearly bump-bump-bumping across every rib and vertebra.

  This will be me one day: it gets more like this the longer out of dormancy it is, though in some people

  (hosts)

  it stays this way, squirming and dark; and in some it bulges out their limbs and backs and faces, knocks out teeth or eyes, eats ears, amputates fingers; and in some it brings paralyzing vertigo and narcolepsy, amnesia and dementia; and in some it just goes what we call in a truly hilarious understatement off and recedes till it cannot be seen except as a thin sky-blue tinge under corneas and fingernails while it overloads every nerve in the body and causes pain so nightmarishly terrible that the victims swiftly lose their voice from screaming. And you never know how it will go. You never know how the lottery will play out. The odds could not be calculated even when it was shiny and new and the world had not ended. Its intentions remain absolutely opaque, always.

  You want to ask, What are you dooooooing in there, but you also live in terror of it answering.

  I never speak to mine.

  I wonder if my mother speaks to hers.

  “Are you hungry?” she says, the age-old question, and I laugh and say no, the age-old answer, and then I fidget while she finishes, tips the grubby water into a pot of tomatoes, and gets dressed.

  “I have big news. The biggest. The —”

  “Oh my God, you’re not going to tell me you’re pregnant!”

  All the blood has washed out of her face; I can’t tell if she’s delighted or horrified, but I’m too excited to care, and I plunge on, digging in my jacket for the envelope. “Mom. I didn’t get knocked up. I got accepted to Howse University!”

  “What?”

  I wait for her to shriek, leap into my arms, but she’s too stunned — like Henryk in those first few seconds — her mouth hanging open, poleaxed.

  “Have to do everything myself.” I laugh, and pull her into a hug. She laughs too, an uncertain squawk, and I let her go. She sways onto a stool, puts a hand to her forehead. Unlike Henryk, who turned crimson, Mom is ashen; the subdermal curlicues of fungus at forehead and chin stand out like soot.

  “Don’t faint!”

  “I’m not going to faint, baby.” But her voice is weak, and for a few horrible moments I can only think, This is it, I killed her, heart attack time, she’s about to die of shock.

  The moment passes. She rallies, pinkens, puts an elbow on the counter, even grins. “Well that’s really amazing, isn’t it? That’s quite something.”

  “Yes! Oh man. I’m so excited I think I’m gonna explode. I told Hen first, I’m so sorry, but like — he found me on the steps and — look, when you try to rip it, maybe we’ll have to go into the stairs so it’s really dark, but —”

  “All right, now calm down.”

  She’s right, I’m tripping over my words, running out of air. I stand there still laughing, wondering if something’s pouring off me that she can see, like Hen’s sunshine. I give her the letter when she holds out her hand, and she unfolds it, reads it, strokes the paper, her eyes roving up and down the sheet, up and down and up again, as if she is looking for something beyond the words, like a hidden drawing or a secret acrostic.

  “Try to tear it!” I say again.

  “Just a minute.” She looks up at me, dark eyes, greenish whites where the disease encroaches. “Well, I’m very proud of you, you know that.”

  There’s a but coming. I take a deep breath, let it out slowly. There will be objections. Of course. It is understood that birds leave nests, but humans are not birds, and we all have to remember that. We can’t fly, we can’t hunt. We’ve all had the talk a hundred times, in slight variations, as if all parents have been given a clandestine copy of a script that has survived throughout the generations since we moved from the trees to the plains. In short, for years the world has only gotten worse: you can’t just leave the nest like that.

  And yet when it comes, it is not what I expect.

  “But it says here you have to be at the marker in two weeks. No, thirteen days . . . Reid, I know you’re excited, but let’s just sit and think about this for a minute, hmm? Do you really think you’re prepared for this? That you could get there in time and alone?”

  “I . . .”

  “And the thaw’s started.”

  The thaw. The closest we have to the title of a prayer. And yes, I know that, I’m outside all the time, Henny smelled of it this morning, but I didn’t stop to think about it. The thaw, when we dig out from the snow and examine what the winter has left us to work with for the coming year: where we can still plant or pasture, what greenhouses have been spared. Not one of us can be absent at this time of year. Mom didn’t need to say that.

  “Baby, I know we’ve all heard about places like this. The last remnants of the old world, isn’t that what they’re supposed to be? It was okay that they left everybody behind, because they needed to save what they had, to make sure they could help with recovery after everything that happened? And I know it’s a, a, a very interesting idea, a really attractive idea. But . . . you don’t really think this place is real, do you?”

  I stare at her, unable for a moment to summon words. “Not real? Mom, we’re talking about a school, not . . . not Santa Claus.”

  But even with the glowing device in my palm (returned to me quickly and efficiently as if I had handed her a burning ember), it’s not enough. I’m torn between laughing and shouting; her cool nervousness is throwing me off.

  “We can’t even spare someone to go with you. And would it be any safer with two than with one? Anything could happen on the road. Come on, you’ve always done so well in school, I know you’ve got a good brain on you,” she says gently. “Now, if you just step back, you’ll find yourself thinking: slow down. Slow down and think.”

  I don’t have time to slow down and think, there’s two weeks left, there’s . . . “Mom, they only accept a couple of students a year. From anywhere, not just here. Mrs. Cross has been telling us that for years. It really is less than a one-in-a- million chance.”

  “Well, I’m not going to stand in your way. If you decide you do want to leave us.”

  She smiles, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. Behind her on the lab bench I notice an open metal box, a rag next to it, the enamel pins within a little captive flock of bright birds. Cleaning Grandma’s collection. I wonder if I will be allowed to take one as a souvenir when I leave. I have my favourites: the unicorn, the black cat.

  Best not to ask now. I know she’s happy for me; she just needs a minute. I do too, I think.

  I wonder if she said that to Dad when he left. If you decide. If. Because leaving is not what we do.

  3.

  There’s so much to do today. Spring is coming. The world is swinging back around to sun, the most familiar thing in the whole world and yet it still manages to surprise us when the days begin to lengthen every year, like: Hello, me again, don’t you remember my face? All our terraces and beds and rooftop gardens the same old things but new too, revealed in strange new shapes by
the melting snow; and the strengthening wind returning, carrying (we hope) clouds fat with rain. Maybe the same ones. How often have I looked at them and felt that strange déjà vu, the sensation that I have seen that exact shape and size and colour of cloud before, even though I know that’s not possible? In spring, everything stays the same while it gets ready to change, but change it will. It is our most nerve-wracking time.

  The sun is still a comfort. The sun, the clear air. I strip to my underwear and lie on my bed to soak it in, letter clutched to my stomach, the light making a tiny torch of each hair on my legs. All around us the sound of other bodies, other motions: clunk, thump, shuffle, snore. But in my office, it is just me and the sun, and the ants gleaming on the wall like a trickle of ink, shiny little polished backs. Clean and fussy as a magpie. It won’t be like this at Howse. But I can’t imagine what it would be like instead. I’m too scared to think straight. And yet as I think I got in, I got in, my stomach does a flip under the letter, the same motion each time, a dog doing a trick.

  We so rarely say sick, we don’t even say the name of the monster inside us. But when you get right down to it, how can I leave Mom, sick as she is? What if her Cad goes off? And how can I leave everyone else here? I have nothing to look to as an example, I have no one to model myself after, only those who have died and those who have abandoned us. Because it’s not that people don’t leave at all, it’s that it’s so rare as to be talked about for literal years, and each time, there was a sense (dim but persistent) of betrayal, grief. Maybe they did not leave behind a parent or a child or a partner, but they were leaving the rest of us. And we cannot spare anyone. First principles. So we rage and we mourn. Every time. Years in between.

  In one sense, she has the entire community; but in every other sense, she only has me. For years I’ve been all she’s ever had, and vice versa. Not one of those things you stop and think about till you’re forced to. I can almost taste her fear in the air: for me, for herself. Supposing something happens to you. I’ve never been outside city limits. What if something does happen? Alone out there, with my useless letter, the useless gadget.

  And “even real,” what the hell does that mean? Mrs. Cross has been doing the applications, the essays, the swabs, the forms for years. Decades. Why wouldn’t they be real?

  And what about the tracker? No one here has the ability to make anything like that. There are probably only a handful of people in the entire city who have seen artificial light. Hell, when I saw it, I stared for so long I thought I’d hurt my eyes. Look at that. Magic. Where did it come from, if not someplace that held onto everything that the rest of the world had lost?

  Mom’s right, though. I haven’t said yes. It’s still an if. It’s not an acceptance till I turn the tracker on. Not really. To them, I haven’t said yes. I haven’t said no. When I am nearly at the front door, that will be when I accept.

  Front door. Do domes even have a front door? I guess you could put it anywhere. But is that really where I want to go in the first place? When things began to fall apart, that’s where rich people went. They said: This is the only place you can live. A strange thing to say, first off, because since we were kids the saying has been A city is the only place you can live (and you only need to look around you once to see that it’s true).

  But I guess proverbs evolve. Quick, too. Just like everything alive back then, between the droughts and the fires, the storms and the plagues and the thirst, they had to evolve in the space of just ten or twenty years, or perish. And in that space, the haves burned the last of the wet fuel as they raced to find sanctuaries they could fortify, secret spaces they walled off from the have-nots, to ride out the great disasters with their own kind, leaving us to fend for ourselves. Money poured into survival assets for the fast short fall, and then both money and assets were gone, drained away from everybody else forever, into a dry world with a few tiny shiny droplets on it in unmapped places. Like splashes of water tossed onto the dust, unabsorbed.

  (Or so it’s said. Or so it’s said.)

  I’ve never seen one of the domes. None of us has. None of our parents; none of our grandparents. Like the Cad, our ignorance has been passed down perfectly intact, maybe even gaining potency with each generation. Does that mean they’re not real?

  If they are real, are these people I want to go towards, in preference over my own people? The ones who abandoned us? Their descendants?

  For several breaths (stomach revolving steadily, in great pain, a Catherine wheel) I picture myself very clearly: standing on a highway surrounded by mountains clothed in dead golden-red pines, the cold wind whistling through my hair, farther from home than I’ve ever been in my life, and no one coming to get me. Or worse: someone coming to get me. We’ve seen the aftermath of that. Blood-smeared kennels and shackles, withered placentas, teeth trickling like salt from lifted cages.

  No. That won’t happen. I will not let that happen. (Probably, my Cad will not let that happen. The medical literature says it wants to live. It wants me to do safe good things. They say it nudges you. Keeps the knife from your knuckles. Dodges you past the upturned nail on the sidewalk. Don’t think about it, don’t think about it, don’tdon’tdon’tdon’t. Because if it does then what does that mean. What does it mean. Just your body, right? we ask hopefully. Just your muscles? Just your nerves? People go quiet and look away. I hate it. Hate. If it fucking dares. To. Even once. No. Don’t think about it, I said.)

  Maybe they have cured it, at this university. Maybe that is why in their application they ask for the cheek swab. Maybe they even privilege those applicants, maybe that adds something to your score.

  My stomach flips again, brightly, hopefully, before I can squash that thought down. No, I’m sure they haven’t cured it. They had decades to find a cure before everything began to fall apart, and even with all the immense powers and secrets of the old world, they never did. Everything was too late.

  I rise, dress, comb my hair, tie it back. Rested long enough. Nothing moves until you move, Mom always says. The letter and tracker I stuff into the only secret place in my office, a tiny gap between two of the cinderblocks that form my bed, which I then re-cover with sheets and blanket. In truth I don’t think the ants would be interested in either, or more accurately I don’t think the ants would perceive either item as food, but you never really know what ants think.

  The morning necessaries: dried clothes freed for good behaviour, folded, put away; flat spots dusted; rags washed and rehung; chamber pots emptied; compost rotated; vegetables monitored, trimmed, and given a long serious chat about self-esteem. Mom is embarrassed that I have never outgrown talking to our plants, but she also has to admit that I can coax more food out of the pots than anyone else in our wing. “Cause and effect,” I always tell her.

  “You’re perverting the good name of science, Ree.”

  We walk down to the Dining Hall for breakfast, and then, as we had discussed yesterday (before everything changed, I tell myself, trying to recover my earlier excitement) we visit the allotment we share with our floor, Macyk Gardens, between Rutherford and Half-HUB. A few others are out already; we wave to Van and Larsen and stand on the far side of the fence.

  It’s too wet to seed — thigh-deep craters of meltwater glimmer in the last of the snow. Erosion on the west side: Severe gullies, I write on my slate. And we’ll still see night frost for a couple of weeks at least. We’ve been planning all winter, just like everybody else. Colour-coded dots and crosses, triangles and squares, wiped off the tile, started over. What will fit here? What will fit over there? What needs light, what needs water, what needs supervision from rabbits or bugs? We do not say: Unfit to be planted. We say: Needs extra work. Then we build all the extra needs into our planting and harvesting schedule. There’s never an empty . . .

  . . . there’s never an empty spot of soil. There’s never an empty shelf in a greenhouse. And there’s never anyone to spare. Not anyone who c
an lift so much as a teaspoon, a single canola seed. It’s not just Mom I’d be leaving. It’s . . .

  Unmoving, still studying the water-pocked soil, I frantically count days in my head. Farrow, drain, test, lime or ash down. Pick rocks (even after so many harvests, we are still finding bits of concrete and asphalt and brick in the dirt). Compost. Sludge if needed. Test again. Stake. Label. Seed. Thin. Weed. Guard. Labour has been allocated down to the minute for months because what we support is a community that includes people who might be unable to work at any moment. Oh my God.

  I just have to think. There’s always a way around things, isn’t there? It’s not a wall. It’s a fence. You can climb fences. I wish I could just sit down and think.

  Mom says nothing, but it must be coming off me like sweat; blithely, we walk the foursquare of the field, chattering about seed swaps, which mystery envelopes we might win at the Farrowfair across the river next month, Greenhouse B repairs (nearly done), our chickens, Yasmina’s miscarriage, Mr. Lakusta’s novel. Think, think.

  “Folks are saying this might be the year we go out’n the limits,” says Larsen when we reach her side of the fence. I have no idea how old she is. Freckly brown skin eggshell-smooth under her thick, intricate hair. I like Larsen but more importantly I respect her ability, badger-like, of digging things up. She always has news no one else has.

  “Yeah?”

  “Opinions are divided,” she admits, and jerks a thumb at our allotment — the decades of painstaking work to rebuild this soil from the scraped-clean stuff beneath the pavement. “They’re still jawing about it. No one wants to say. Or no one wants to be the first. But there’s seed, there’s space, they say. Only the dirt and the sweat might be needed now.”

  “Where’d you hear that?” Mom says, casually. Always testing.

  Larsen shrugs, watches her from under thick lashes. “Talked to the Dudas boys last night.”

  Such are sufficient credentials; they are our self-proclaimed local soil scientists, and these days, if you proclaim yourself anything, you must be able to back it up, or the entire city will quietly turn its back on you. A lie is worse than a rust, they say. Powdery-soft, stealing from leaf to leaf till the whole field is crumbling and rotten. We have to trust each other to survive. Trust each other to work, and to tell the truth.