Migratory Animals (20 page)

She told Flannery about when Nigeria was the center of the West African publishing world, when Magazine Road in Ibadan was lined with presses and everything was “more lively.” Flannery remembered thinking how it always felt she'd arrived too early or too late to the party in this world. But Mrs. T's nostalgia wasn't based on illusions, and Flannery saw it on the faces of Kunle and other Nigerians, too: so much promised, so much squandered.

Mrs. T had a number of Nigerian friends, but she latched onto Flannery because she was lonely for someone to talk to about her life before coming to Adamanta. She claimed that, to her Nigerian friends, “It's as if I was born the day I moved here.”

Mrs. T would pause, squeezing the tea bag between her fingers, before saying, “One starts to believe it, too. Everything begins to revolve around this crazy place and what's going on here, as if Nigeria were the whole world. And for all I know anymore, it is.”

Flannery turned over those words as she sat in front of her computer in the middle of the night a few days after finishing Brandon's photo project. The numbers on the screen weren't making sense. Nothing made sense. Everyone else in the lab had gone home, but Flannery
couldn't bring herself to leave. If she sat there long enough, something would begin to work. It had to.

When she blinked, she saw images of snow crystals, shimmering with the pink and blue light from the color filters, turning like stars. She saw the drip, drip of the dropper as Brandon coated the ice wires. To distract herself, she opened up the university database and searched for Brandon's new bacteria.
Pseudomonas syringae
. The first article she found claimed it could raise the freezing temperature by up to five degrees, which was really astounding.

People often had the misconception that snow was frozen rain, but, in fact, sleet was frozen rain. As a section of the atmosphere cooled, relative humidity increased until the point of supersaturation. Snow was created from this supersaturated vapor without going through a liquid stage. Flannery wondered what might happen if one scattered Brandon's bacteria as an aerosol into the sky where, in enough numbers, it might also be able to stimulate the creation of snow at above-freezing temperatures in clouds. She clicked through more articles but could find no evidence that this had ever been attempted.

Once ice crystals or snowflakes began to form, they grew in size by sucking humidity out of the air nearby, causing more water droplets in the cloud to evaporate and fill that space. Snowflakes then continued to attract this vapor until becoming too heavy to remain in the cloud, falling to earth. Snowflakes, like raindrops, needed a nucleus around which to form. It was usually dust or soot, but it didn't have to be. It could also be bacteria. It could even be bacteria that happened to make water freeze in above-freezing temperatures. And this is when it struck her: Snow was heavier than water. Snow took longer to evaporate back into the atmosphere than did liquid rain and was more likely to make it to the ground.

Flannery thought about the virga in West Texas, streaks of rain
appearing to hang beneath a cloud but evaporating before hitting the land. It was phantom rain that did nothing to help the crops or pastures. Their whole family would sit out on the porch to watch, her mother's wheelchair creaking from her flickering movements: Phantom rain. Phantom mother. Phantom rain.

The virga phenomenon occurred in the Sahel, too. She'd seen it in Kunle's home village in Bauchi State at the end of the dry season because, in the village, everyone was up with the dawn in line with an agricultural tradition that hadn't been much affected by electricity. (Power was even more sporadic here than in the cities, averaging less than an hour per day. Occasionally, someone would yell, “Up NEPA,” and everyone would rush to plug something in, to charge whatever they had.) Flannery and Kunle were in town for Easter that year. A wrap draped around her shoulders for warmth, Flannery walked with Kunle at dawn up the main dirt road, rough and rocky, as it wound from the village into dusty farmland, which was where they saw virga in the distance, like the mirage of water in the desert. It made her thirsty.

Kunle's village was beautiful in its way—a pastoral answer to the maddening crowds and jammed roads of the major Nigerian cities. Women carried water on their heads, to and fro from the wells. Cocks fought and chased each other while the occasional teenager kicked up dust on a motorbike, probably going nowhere, killing time. They passed bundles of finch-red sugarcane, a mud hut with a chalkboard outside advertising Arsenal versus Manchester United, an empty schoolroom with the letters of the English alphabet painted on the wall. “F” was for Flower; “G” was for Gun. There was a sign, showing a young woman wearing a headwrap, that said
EARN RESPECT
.
DRESS DECENTLY
.

Back at the compound, Kunle's mother would shake her head at Flannery and say, “
Waka waka.
” Although not fluent in English,
Kunle's mother had learned pidgin in the years she and her husband lived in Lagos during his military service.
Waka waka
referred to a person who was always walking from place to place. Their morning walks, without purpose or destination, were inexplicable to a woman who worked so hard that all she wanted in her spare time was to rest.

Kunle's mother was not exactly a warm woman—she'd lived a hard life and showed her love through backbreaking labor: in the field with the yams or preparing huge meals in the kitchen, which was just a fire pit covered with a thatch roof to protect the caldrons and mortars from the rain. There wasn't a single indoor common space in the entire compound. In the mornings, Flannery watched family members emerge from their various rooms, which opened directly to the outside, squatting in doorways to brush their teeth or wash their clothes in a soapy bucket. Then, if they weren't going out to the field, they might set up stools and chairs in the shade around the cooking hut to chat and relax. Someone might catch a chicken to pluck and cook for lunch, the men cracking bones afterward with their teeth, sucking out marrow.

At night, after dinner dishes had been washed and total darkness fallen on the compound, Kunle led her inside his mother's quarters where they would sit on a low bench along the wall. His mother would be curled in motionless exhaustion on a chaise-longue-shaped wooden chair, the shadow of her sharp profile cast by the low light of the kerosene lamp perched beside her on the swept concrete floor. There he and his mother would talk, the two of them, in their own language.

And later, on a mattress in the privacy of Kunle's room, Flannery's head on his chest, he would tell her what she already knew about the slow, creeping death of this village and his mother's way of life. “Our field is three times bigger than it was when I was a boy,
but the harvest is one-seventh of what it was then.” He stroked the inside of her arm with rough fingertips. “A well is there one day, and the next is buried in sand.”

“And it's probably too late.”

“Never too late.”

Flannery's eyes were closed, but she smiled into the dark. This sort of magical thinking was one of the things she loved about him. Her hand felt for his face, and she traced the lines of scars that ran along his cheeks like a terrace, like a shoreline, a place where the map ends. They were the mark of his people, done through ritual scarification when he was a boy, but she imagined they were the scars of the land, of West Africa itself. She thought briefly of her own family and other kinds of marks and scars, unchosen, that separated them in a different way.

She could feel his breath on her neck when he asked, “Could you live here? Could you make your home here with me? In this fading place?”

“Yes.” She said it without hesitation. In this place, she was free. In this place, she was special. “Oh, yes.” And the grand idea, the expectation of making their lives together in Nigeria, never altered over the next three years, though there were moments when she wondered if she'd eventually end up like Mrs. Tonukari: bitter and afraid.

Once, Kunle took Flan to swim near a beautiful waterfall on the Gontola River, which otherwise wound wide through lazy side channels and eddies. It had rained the night before and the water ran the color of cappuccino from all the topsoil washing away. They swam, only slightly afraid of the freshwater parasites with their long names and longer lists of symptoms, in a calm spot where the water pooled. An old man stopped to sell them palm wine and later told Flan he'd once been to Texas.

“Where in Texas?”

“You know,” he replied, “Texas.”

After Kunle left to find lunch, a group of women and children from a nearby village arrived at the river, circling Flannery, coming forward, then retreating, not knowing what to make of her invasion. Eventually they settled nearby and stripped down to their underwear, washing themselves and their clothes at the same time. She felt her whiteness but wanted to believe it didn't fully represent her. She wanted to plead with them:
I am not the place I come from.
Instead, Flannery climbed out, shaking off the water like a dog.

In the lab, these images and memories of Nigeria played over and over in Flannery's head as she worked, day after day, on her new idea based on Brandon's bacteria. She was determined not to forget who she was doing all this for. Not to forget her promise.

A few weeks later, when Flannery finally met with Brandon in his office, she was ready. She explained to him about the prevalence of virga, the rain in Nigeria that never made it all the way down to the fields. But, she told him, pointing to her calculations, if she could seed clouds with his special bacteria to make it snow instead of rain, the precipitation would be heavier and colder, less likely to evaporate. The ice crystals could be grown in clouds over specific areas, and as they fell to the ground they would melt, causing precipitation that had a chance of hitting the soil.

“This bacteria causes things to freeze in above-freezing temperature—but not by much. Enough to do this in West Africa?” Brandon looked like he hadn't slept in days.

“I don't know yet,” Flannery said, truthfully. “Depends on how high up in the atmosphere we can make the process viable. Will you help me? Let me use your ice chamber?”

“You'll need a certain level of moisture in the air to form around the bacteria.” He rubbed his eyes. “Will there be enough?”

“Yes.” Flannery was aware her voice sounded more stubborn than reassuring—not just hopeful, faithful, like Kunle's magical thinking. “I think so.”

“You can't use the ice chamber.” Brandon sighed, taking the pencil out from behind his ear and making marks on a blank sheet of paper. Flannery's heart seized.

After a minute of ignoring her as he scribbled, Brandon looked up and said, “We'll need something bigger than my ice chamber. Much, much bigger.”

Flannery stayed up the rest of the night, fiddling with Brandon's numbers, experimenting with computer models. She wasn't sure at what point she put her head down on the desk and began to daydream. Or was she falling asleep?

“You know that whatever it is I'm developing won't save your mother's farm.” She said this in her head, in the mush and muddle of dreamscape. “It takes years for advances to make an impact.” Kunle was not there to hear her speak and yet he was.

“So what are you going to do?” he asked, his voice like a caress along her neck. “Make it snow in the desert?”

She tried to keep her eyelids open but their tiny veins filled with liquid metal, weighing them down. “That's exactly what we're going to do,” she said, or maybe did not really say, becoming lost in the thicket of sleep. And in her dreams, snowflakes and tiny grains of sand were harmlessly swirling together through the atmosphere, a sandstorm of snow. And in her dream she reached out a hand to touch them, and they were warm. And they were cold.

And in this place where snow and sand mixed together, her sister was not dying. And in this place she had no sister at all.

M
olly's arrival at the ranch, holding a suitcase and two burlap sacks filled with iris bulbs, was more or less having its desired effect: Alyce was working on her tapestry.

Still not sleeping in any traditional sense, Alyce spent the daylight hours dozing on the sofa, in and out of strange dreams filled with dirty-winged birds and nests made from her own things, tapestries and dish cloths and cheap jewelry passed down from her grandmother. She oozed through the kitchen nibbling on stale crackers, absentmindedly watched reruns. She pitched back and forth in the rocking chair on the porch as mohawked roadrunners hopped their way through the yard; as quick as the insects they hunted, they barely noticed her, occasionally flipping up their long tail feathers in a show of indifference. During the day Alyce seemed to float in a vat of molasses.

But her torpor lifted as night fell. She walked the perimeter of the ranch house locking doors and turning on lamps; they ate a late dinner standing in the kitchen, Alyce picking at a turkey sandwich on rye, Molly devouring the same along with sides of collards or pasta salad or beets plus whatever Alyce couldn't finish. Alyce was amazed by all that Molly could consume. Alyce used to carry a piece of paper in her pocket with quotations given to her by her first therapist: Believe your family is worth living for even when you don't.
Hold on to the memories depression tries to steal and project them into the future. Eat when food revolts you.
One out of three ain't bad
, Alyce thought, shoving another bite of sandwich into her mouth, forcing herself to chew.

Before Molly trundled off to bed, Alyce would wrap her arms around her friend's shoulders, elbows squeezing in tight, and allow whatever dark energies pooled inside this woman to flow into Alyce's own hands, her knotty-knuckled weaver's fingers. Then she went into her studio and worked.