Migratory Animals (24 page)

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
.

She would walk him inside a stone house to find a jar of honeycomb on the shelf, and she would lift the waxy cells out of the container
and press it into his hand, dripping with sticky honey that he would lick from the tips of his fingers. Look, she would say, how the honeycomb has a similar structure.
If you should ask the geometers on what plan the cells of bees are built, they will reply, on a hexagonal plan. The answer is clear from a simple look at the openings or entrances, and the sides that form the cells.

And that is not the only thing in nature. From a bowl of fruit on the wooden table she would grasp a pink pomegranate and cut it open, letting the seeds spill out. They would stare at the pulpy hexagonal caves where the rest of the seeds remained trapped.
The material is certainly not a factor because the bees do not find rhombic plates of this kind already in existence anywhere. And the cause of the shape of the pomegranate seed is thus in the soul of the plant, which is responsible for the growth of the fruit.

Kunle would look at her and nod but say that snowflakes were not bees nor were they pomegranates. Snowflakes were not alive.
No such purpose can be observed in the shaping of the snowflake, since the six-cornered arrangement does not make it last longer, or produce a fixed, natural body of definite and lasting shape. My response is that the formative principle does not act only for the sake of ends, but also for the sake of adornment.

Flannery would nod and lead Kunle back outside to look at crystals from inside the earth. They were also made from self-organizing molecules, which was why diamonds and rubies and emeralds each have a particular pattern of facets. Pliny the Elder thought quartz was ice frozen so hard it could not melt.

At this point Kunle would take her hand and bring her into the winter bathroom, where they would slowly strip off their coats and clothes to stand naked, staring at each other's needy bodies. He would point to the snowflake-like frost on the window from where the glass came into contact with the steam of the hot bath
when the
rigor of winter comes up against broken windows. . . . For what entrance, what exit, what narrow openings, what struggle can there be in the wide fields of the air?

Kunle would hold Flannery to his chest as they stood surrounded by the steam and frost of seventeenth-century Prague. They were together. Flannery would feel her own body slowly become the shape of a snowflake, beginning with the hard, brilliant crystal center and expanding out to the delicate branches made of hair and fingernails. She would begin to fall through the night sky;
all the tufts point outward from the center of the star or double cross, almost like the needles on the branches of firs—which is proof that the formative force builds its nest in the center and from there distributes itself equally in all directions.

Two days later, Kunle called. Flannery had just arrived home after another long night at the lab and was picking up her mail at the apartment complex office, a small brown package from Molly.

Kunle had read through her data, he said on the phone, and was not impressed. He could hardly believe she was extending her stay in the States to work on something as ridiculous as cloud seeding.

She felt her body turn red, a rising warmth. His voice was a stone being thrown at her. “Did you even look at the proposal? The numbers are showing it could work if we seed in the troughs of high-pressure cells.”

“With potentially disastrous results for neighboring regions . . .”

“We don't know. . . .”

“Let me land. What you're doing,” Kunle told her—accused her, “is for yourself. It's no longer about my country. It's not about anyone but you.”

He sounded so far away. Flannery panicked. If only Kunle were right here, with her. Then she could explain things properly. She
closed her eyes. She silently, reflexively began reciting the types of snow crystals she'd learned in graduate school: diamond dust, stellar dendrite, sectored plate, split star, needle, chandelier crystal . . .

“If you cared about me and my family, you'd be here. You'd be with me in Adamanta.”

Diamond dust, stellar dendrite, sectored plate, split star, needle, chandelier crystal . . . on the other end of the line, Kunle went on talking and talking, his voice rising and falling, but the words blended together until it sounded as if he were speaking a different language, his real language that she did not understand. Flannery hung up the phone. Just another dropped international call, she would tell him later. So sorry. So, so sorry.

She looked down at the package in her hands, her sister's name scribbled in the return address box, and felt confused and numb. Kunle was wrong about her project. Flannery was determined to show him just how wrong.

I
f he were asked, which he never was, Santiago would say he was hanging in there.

One cold Saturday in early November Harry's two boys played video games with lots of explosions and hung from the exposed beams of the upstairs, screeching like howler monkeys, forcing Santiago to escape into the relative quiet of the fire station's still-unfinished downstairs bathroom. He placed a sheet of particleboard over the bathtub to create a makeshift desk for his laptop, sitting cross-legged on the floor strewn with jagged bits of tile samples.