Flight Behavior

by Barbara Kingsolver

  "Have you got enough to eat there?" she could not help asking.

  "It will have to be," he said. She risked a glance at his face, and he disarmed her with a look of frank gratitude that made her falter. For what? She had nothing to offer. She'd been so flustered this morning, she hadn't even brought a thermos of coffee.

  "You know what I could do," she said, winging it utterly. "I could make a pot of soup this afternoon and bring it up here to feed everybody. Pete wants me to take those pillowcases of butterflies to the lab. If you all mean to be up here till dark, you'll need more than a sandwich to go on."

  "It's so funny you mention that. I was just thinking of my wife's noodle soup."

  This, she found, was not what she wanted to hear. "Is she a good cook?"

  He smiled, rubbing his chin with the back of his hand. "She is a terrible cook."

  Dellarobia was unconscionably cheered by this news. "Well, I make a pretty decent chicken noodle soup. I could probably get it up here in a couple of hours."

  "I think that would make you the queen of our tribe," he said. "Especially the Three-Fifty boys. I don't think they've had a proper feed in a couple of weeks." Roger and Carlos had finished playing Robin Hood without incident, cleared their trash, and sauntered back to the body count. Practically whistling while they worked.

  "Why does Pete call them that?"

  "It's their organization. Three-fifty-dot-org."

  "But what does that mean?"

  "Parts per million," he said in a muffled way, between bites. "Honestly, I'm a little worried about those two. They exist on political commitment and gorp."

  She thought: Gorp? But asked, "Parts per million?"

  "Three hundred fifty parts per million," he replied. "The number of carbon molecules the atmosphere can hold, and still maintain the ordinary thermal balance. It's an important figure. I suppose they want to draw attention."

  Roger came back to retrieve his coat from where he'd left it on the ground, offering a quick little wave. The coat was patched copiously with duct tape. If he gets cold enough, Dellarobia thought, maybe he'll tape up those bare legs as well. She wondered if she should offer to find him some trousers at Second Time Around.

  "It's a greenhouse gas, carbon," Ovid added. "It traps the heat of the sun. That number has been going up. Right before our eyes, as they say."

  "You're telling me somebody counts the atoms?"

  "It's not very difficult. With the right equipment."

  Her heart was still thumping like a drum, as it had all morning whenever she saw or thought of seeing him. But his talk steadied her, and his vulnerability. He had practically swallowed his sandwich whole. She set hers aside and dug in her purse for something presentable in the way of an emergency food supply. "So the carbon goes up, when we burn oil and stuff." She was working to hold her thoughts in place.

  He nodded. "Up, up, up."

  She found what she was looking for, a single-serving cup of diced peaches, and handed it to him. "So what goes out of whack, when it hits three-fifty?"

  "The thermal stability of the planet." He studied the little plastic cup for a moment before grasping and pulling off the foil seal. She watched him down it like a glass of water, and tried to think of any other edibles she might be carrying on her person.

  "What are we up to so far?"

  He swallowed a few times before speaking. "About three-ninety."

  "What? We went past? Why hasn't everything blown up?"

  He studied the empty cup in his hand. "Some would say it has. Hurricanes reaching a hundred miles inland, wind speeds we've never seen. Deserts on fire. In New Mexico we are seeing the inferno. Texas is worse. Australia is unimaginably worse--a lot of the continent is in permanent drought. Farms abandoned forever."

  She pictured orchards like the Cooks' dying on the other side of the world, for the opposite reason. Rain being sent to the wrong places, in the wrong amounts. "Why wouldn't they just irrigate the farms?" she asked.

  "Because of firestorms."

  "Oh."

  "Walls of flame, Dellarobia. Traversing the land like freight trains, fed by dead trees and desiccated soil. In Victoria hundreds of people burned to death in one month, so many their prime minister called it hell on earth. This has not happened before. There is not an evacuation plan."

  She remembered telling Dovey that hell had gone out of fashion. They sat in silence. Through the trees she saw Carlos stand up from his crouch and do some kind of a yoga pose, folding his arms together over his head to stretch his muscles. They never complained, those two boys. "Is the number still going up?" she asked.

  "Everything that has brought us here continues without pause," Ovid said.

  She thought of Cub kicking at the frost. "So will winter just end, then?"

  "I suppose it might, but it wouldn't be our worry anymore. It will only take a few degrees of change, global average, to knock our kind out of the running."

  She stared, her first completely direct look at him since the accidental sighting. "What do you mean, out of the running?"

  "Living systems are sensitive to very small changes, Dellarobia. Think of a child's temperature elevated by two degrees. Would you call it normal?"

  "A hundred, that's low-grade fever," she said. "Aches and chills." Dellarobia disliked the thermometer she kept in her makeup drawer, the treacherously slim glass pipe and its regime of wakeful nights, the croups and earaches. Her children's cheeks hot to the touch, their racked sobs that wrenched her will for living.

  "And if the temperature keeps going up?" he asked.

  "More? At a hundred and three I'd head for the emergency room. That's four and a half degrees. More than that, don't make me think about."

  "Interesting," he said. "I just read a UN climate report of many hundred pages, and its prognosis for a febrile biosphere matches the one you just gave me in a sentence. Degree for degree."

  She felt very unsettled by the fever talk. Just the smell of rubbing alcohol weakened her knees.

  "It keeps me awake nights, that report," he said, shadowing her thoughts. "A four-degree rise in the world's average temperature might be unavoidable at this point. So we are headed for the ER, as you put it. The accumulation plays out for a very long time, even if we stop burning carbon."

  "If you stop something, it stops," she said, sounding a little too fine.

  "We used to think so. But there are unstoppable processes. Like the loss of polar ice. White ice reflects the heat of the sun directly back to space. But when it melts, the dark land and water underneath hold on to the heat. The frozen ground melts. And that releases more carbon into the air. These feedback loops keep surprising us."

  How could this be true, she thought, if no one was talking about it? People with influence. Important people made such a big deal over infinitely smaller losses.

  "So it's not a question of having Floridian winters in Tennessee," he said. "That is not even under discussion."

  "Is there some part of this I can actually see?"

  "You don't believe in things you can't see?" he asked.

  She thought of Blanchie Bise and Bible class. The flood of Noah, Jesus. She did try. "It's never been my long suit," she confessed.

  "Your children's adulthood?"

  That nearly floored her of course. Or creeked her. Since that's what was below this log, if she'd swooned off of it. How dare he belt her with that one?

  "A trend is intangible, but real," he said calmly. "A photo cannot prove a child is growing, but several of them show change over time. Align them, and you can reliably predict what is coming. You never see it all at once. An attention span is required."

  It occurred to her that she didn't have a single photo of her kids from the last six months or more. Maybe Dovey did, in her phone. She should be sure to get some before Preston's baby teeth fell out.

  "I can break it down for you," he said. "Water, you can see that. Warm air holds more water. Think of condensation on a windshield. Multiply that t
imes all the square meters above you, and it's a hell of a lot of water. It evaporates too quickly from the hot places, and floods the wet ones. Every kind of weather is intensified by warming."

  "So flood and fire, basically. Like the Prophecy."

  "I don't know about that. What does the Bible say about the ice albedo effect?"

  He was mocking her, probably. "I don't think the Prophecy applies in real-world terms," she said. "People assume it's out there, I guess. The lake of fire and everything. But they figure it's still a long way off. Way past the end of T-ball season. After the kids' graduation, after the wedding."

  She stopped, before Cordelia and Preston came into this picture. The afternoon was already waning, its softer light filling the sky like a liquid seeping between the trees. Ovid's attention to her felt like a promise, and she wanted to trust it, only that, not the particular words. To leap, and forget the crash landing. She finished her sandwich while he talked. He told her that forests absorb carbon from the sky, but not when they are dying of drought or burning. That oceans also buffer the atmosphere, but not when their carbon levels make them too acidic for life. The oceans, he said, were losing their fish.

  "And coral reefs. Have you ever seen a coral reef?"

  She wished she could just touch his hand and stop this. She noticed the crow's feet around his eyes, his exhaustion. It must have been true about this keeping him awake. "I've seen the beach," she said. "I guess that's not the same."

  "One day I will tell you about the reefs. It's all I wanted to do as a boy, swim in the reef and make my little studies. My mother said I would turn into a fish."

  She couldn't see these things at all, stricken forests or killing tides. What she saw was the boy inside a man who was losing everything. She felt the way she did when her children howled over outcomes she couldn't change. Helpless. Everything goes. "They say it's just cycles," she said after a while. "That it goes through this every so often."

  He let out a little hiss between his teeth, which scared her. "All right. In the Pleistocene most of this continent was under ice, and the rest was arctic desert. At other times the ice caps melted and this very place was under the ocean. So yes, cycles. With millions of years between events, my friend. Not decades."

  She did not like my friend. She did not hazard a comment. But he prodded. "Dellarobia, what do you see?"

  "We've never had rain like we did last year. I'll grant you."

  "I'm asking literally. What do you see?"

  She looked at the trees, the forest floor. "A million dead butterflies," she said. "Sorry as hell they ever landed here."

  A live monarch dropped through the air and landed on a clump of grass near Ovid's boots. She watched it crawl slowly to the top of the drooping seed head, clinging upside-down beneath the arc. It folded its wings together, closing up shop for the night, waiting for a better day tomorrow.

  "Humans are in love with the idea of our persisting," he said. "We fetishize it, really. Our retirement funds, our genealogies. Our so-called ideas for the ages."

  "I really hate this. What you're saying. Just so you know."

  "Sorry. I am a doctor of natural systems. And this looks terminal to me."

  In the branches over their heads, small bursts of butterflies exploded into the sun like soundless fireworks. The beauty was irresistible. "I just can't see it being all that bad," she said. "I'd say most people wouldn't."

  He nodded slowly. "Do you know, scientists had a devil of a time convincing people that birds flew south in winter? The Europeans used to believe they burrowed into muddy riverbanks to hibernate. They would see the swallows gathering along the rivers in autumn, and then disappearing. Africa was an abstraction to these people. The notion of birds flying there, for unknown reasons, they found laughable."

  "Well," she said. "I guess seeing is believing,"

  "Refusing to look at the evidence, this is also popular."

  "It's not that we're all just lazy-minded. Maybe you think so." She struggled to articulate her defense. On first sight, she'd taken these butterflies for fire and magic. Monarchs were nowhere in her mind. Probably he wouldn't believe that. "People can only see things they already recognize," she said. "They'll see it if they know it."

  "They use inference systems," he said.

  "Okay. That."

  "And how do they see the end of the world?" Ovid asked. "In real-world terms, as you put it."

  She considered this for a long time. "They know it's impossible."

  He nodded, surprised. "Golly. I think you are right."

  She took the plastic cup from his hands and wrapped it in the cellophane that had held her sandwich. She could feel where her fingertips had brushed his. "I don't know how a person could even get through the day, knowing what you know," she said.

  "So. What gets Dellarobia through her day?"

  Flying from pillar to post, she thought. Strange words. "Meeting the bus on time," she answered. "Getting the kids to eat supper, getting teeth brushed. No cavities the next time. Little hopes, you know? There's just not room at our house for the end of the world. Sorry to be a doubting Thomas."

  "Well, you're hardly the first," he said. "People always want the full predicament revealed and proven in sixty seconds or less. You may have noticed I avoid cameras."

  "You did well, though," she insisted. "Explaining it to me. I'm not saying I don't believe you, I'm saying I can't."

  "You underestimate yourself. You have a talent for this endeavor, Dellarobia. I see how you take to it. But choose your path carefully. For scientists, reality is not optional."

  "Are we at least allowed to hope the butterflies will make it through this winter?"

  He leaned forward, peering up at the sky. "That is not a little hope," he said.

  She thought of other times, other dire news. Pregnancies, wanted or not. It was never real at first. She recalled the day of her mother's diagnosis, holding her bone-thin arm, its yielding skin, walking her out of the doctor's office onto the crumbling, shaded parking lot. Little humps of moss that swelled along a scar in the asphalt like drops of green blood. All these vivid external details suggesting nothing had changed. They'd decided to go to the grocery with no more mention, that day, of the end of the world.

  Suddenly she felt an acute craving for the Diet Coke she knew to be in her purse. She dug it out with little trouble, cracked it open, and offered Ovid the first sip, but he held up a hand and shuddered as if she'd offered a bite of dirt. "My wife drinks those diet things," he said. "Aspartame, or whatever it is. It tastes like soap to me."

  She threw back a slug of the fizzy, tepid liquid, noting that it did as a matter of fact taste a little soapy. But caffeinated. She pictured an obese wife chugging diet sodas and burning toast in the kitchen. "What's your wife's name?"

  "Juliet," he said.

  Give me a break, she thought. "So, Pete says I need to hang up those pillowcases indoors, to give the sleepers a chance to wake up. I count the ones that crawl up the sides, and keep track of numbers, and then what? Do I bring them back up here?"

  He clapped his hands together, smiling. "No. This is good, you will like this. We give the sleepers one last chance to sink or swim. It can be a lot--maybe two-thirds of these bodies on the ground are actually alive. But you have to give them every chance."

  She thought of Preston's veterinary book, with its surprising advice on lamb resuscitation. "What do we do, butterfly CPR?"

  "We pitch them into the air one at a time. It's sink or fly, really. Last winter in Mexico we launched them from the balcony of our hotel over a courtyard where people were dining. Everyone was cheering for the flyers." His smile grew, remembering that happier place. Dellarobia wished she had been there with him, or anywhere at all, even if it meant flinging herself to the void. To be given the same chance.

  "I will come back down to the lab while we still have enough light," he said. "To help with that. I don't suppose you have any balconies at your house."

  She r
aised one eyebrow. "Not hardly. Do you?"

  She should let him speak of his home and his wife, if that's what he wanted. His Juliet. She did ask. But he merely said, "No balconies."

  So that's how it would be. She would go home to make soup that was better than Juliet's, and return here as queen of this tribe. At dusk she and Ovid would climb together to the barn loft. They would stand in the open door of the haymow and take these butterflies in hand, one at a time, and toss them into the air. Some would crash. And some would fly.

  11

  Community Dynamics

  Dellarobia's phone buzzed. A text from Dovey, one of her church sightings: GET RIGHT OR GET LEFT. Dellarobia texted back: LTS GO.

  She was nowhere near ready to go, still in her bathrobe and ratty yellow slippers. But Dovey was one of those people who traveled in a medium-size pod of tardiness on which others came to rely. Dellarobia poured herself a second cup of coffee and pulled out a kitchen chair to put her feet up. In a lifetime of hearing people celebrate weekends, she finally saw what all the fuss was about. By no means did her workload cease on Saturday, but it did shift gears. If her kids wanted to pull everything out of the laundry basket to make a bird's nest and sit in it, fine. Dellarobia could even sit in there with them and incubate, if she so desired. Household chores no longer called her name exclusively. She had an income. She'd never before understood how much her life in this little house had felt to her like confinement in a sinking vehicle after driving off a bridge. Scooping at the toys and dirty dishes rising from every surface was a natural response to inundation. To open a hatch and swim away felt miraculous. Working outside the home took her about fifty yards from her kitchen, which was far enough. She couldn't see the dishes in the sink.

  A steady ruckus rose from the living room, where Cordie sang at the top of her lungs, "Lo mio lo mio," something she'd learned from Lupe's little boys. It meant "mine" in Spanish, Preston had explained, astonishing Dellarobia with her first sense of being an outsider to her children's lives. Preston was now making vocal crashing noises, each followed by howls of make-believe pain from Cub. She scooted her chair forward to peek through the doorway. Cub lay on his back on a blanket outstretched on the living room floor, with Preston beside him arranging an armada of vehicles: Matchbox cars, a red plush fire engine, a plastic tractor.