Migratory Animals (19 page)

“I'm the spoiled shit?” Brandon reached for the wine bottle and snatched it using too much force, pinot splashing wildly, covering himself and his fellows in piebald purple. He tilted the bottle to his mouth and drank, and he didn't stop until the wine was exhausted and a steady dribble ran down his chin.

Harry looked stunned for a moment, and then, to Santiago's surprise, picked up Brandon's bowl of discards—eggshells, peels, the detritus of cooking for a crowd—and dumped them into the pot of braised cabbage. Brandon smiled, as if that were the easiest move in the world to counter, before he swept the resting pork medallions onto the floor, knocking Harry's wineglass off the counter in the process, shards of glass spraying their ankles and feet.

Santiago looked down to see his Iggy Pop T-shirt now stained a timeless plum. Bastards. So much for his thoughtful—and expensive—gift of a bro-down cooking class. As he reached to grab each of his friends by their shirt collars, he thought: What was in store for them if he, Santiago, the perennial wreck, was the one coping best? If he was the one acting most maturely and responsibly? The world must be divinely fucked.

The rest of the room was silent, fedora-wearing hipsters and blue-haired old ladies all staring at them as Santiago led his friends to the back stairwell, his familiarity with Foodie Farm's labyrinthine layout finally coming in handy. “Wait for me out there,” he told them, swinging open the door.

Santiago helped a begrudging Foodie Farm employee clean up the glass shards and spilled wine before returning to his place at the station. Alongside Ben, Santiago cracked egg after egg into a silver bowl, trying to imagine the rosemary custard it would become.

Whipping the heavy cream reminded him of the shaving cream with which they covered their naked bodies in college, running through the academic quad, high as kites, making ass prints on the first-story windows of the university library—back when Santiago was the one who had to be reined in, Harry and Brandon always ensuring that things only went so far, never allowing Santiago to get into all the trouble he was revving for. Now, he supposed, it was his turn to protect his friends from themselves.

Eventually, Santiago carried the plates along his arm, as he'd learned waiting tables, out to the back stairwell, where Brandon and Harry sat on different steps.

“Where did you get the pork medallions?” asked Brandon.

“Sarah Bird gave me hers and a man in a golf cart told us to leave.”

“We don't want to eat all your food . . .” said Harry, contritely.

Santi shrugged. “There's enough. We'll survive,” he said.

When they got to the caramelized custard, he told them what the Dutch say about something delicious: it was like an angel pissing on your tongue.

“An angel?” said Harry. “I like that.”

They all nodded thoughtfully. They licked their lips and were momentarily satisfied.

S
now wasn't white; the ice crystals that made up what was called snow were actually clear as cut glass. When light traveled through a snowbank, for instance, some of it reflected back, which made snow only appear white and fluffy as a cloud (not technically white, either, but the result of more scattered light from millions of droplets of water suspended in the air).

On the day two weeks before, when she had helped photograph snowflakes in Brandon's laboratory chamber, Flannery knew that this colorless, transparent nature of ice crystals made good lighting particularly important. She incorporated colored filters into the microscope in order for the hundreds of intricate shapes and structures to show up on the film in all their three-dimensional glory.

Flannery manned the custom-built machine, essentially a special microscope attached to a camera encased in a temperature-regulated box, while Brandon tweaked the chamber's settings to grow a series of his designer snowflakes. He started with minuscule frost crystals on the end of a wire. Then, he ran two thousand volts through the wire, the electric field attracting water molecules from the air to produce ice needles. Once the electrical current was removed, snowflakes began to grow on the tips of the ice needles, variously shaped depending on exact temperature and level of humidity in the chamber. Flannery and Brandon went through the process more than fifty times using different variations. As they worked, Flannery
had no idea that what they were doing would change her entire project. That realization came later.

“Just call me the Iceman,” Brandon boasted during hour six of the process, rolling up his sleeves.

“Just call you the obsessive-compulsive.”

Flannery's job was to use a small feather brush to move the best-looking specimens under the microscope-camera and capture them before their patterns smudged or evaporated. She'd done something similar in graduate school, but only with real snow coming down in real snowfalls. These electric snowflakes were a little different. They grew like perfect crystal flowers on the tips of ramrod-straight stalks. A bouquet of diamonds. In the microscope each one was a civilization of hexagonal plates and branching dendrites. So much useless beauty.

As they worked, Flannery couldn't ignore the change in Brandon: in place of his usual goofy warmth was the cold precision of a machine. He was doing what he could to hold it together.

“It's normal, you know.” She said it as they took a coffee break, waiting for the machine to spit sugared chemicals into their Styrofoam cups. “A lot of HD patients are in denial at first. It can take them a while to break through that. She'll be back.”

Brandon picked up his cup of steaming coffee and walked back to the lab without responding.

Later, Flannery noticed Brandon using a dropper to lightly coat the starting wire in a solution from a petri dish labeled I.C.E.9. When she asked what it was, he pushed the petri dish toward her.

“Take a look.”

She adjusted the microscope eyepiece until the blurry grayness sharpened into a handful of rod-shaped cells with messy flagellum sprouting from the poles. “Just what I've always wanted,” she said dryly.

It was
Pseudomonas syringae
, he told her, a bacteria plant pathologists had been studying for years; it showed up all over the world on trees, grasses, and domestic and wild animals. As it turned out,
P. syringae
caused water-based life-forms to freeze in above-freezing weather. “Gives me a wider range of temperatures to work with in the chamber.”

It made evolutionary sense that something had developed this kind of ability, thought Flannery. Freeze damaged a plant, breaking open membranes, making it easier for the bacteria to feast on the nutrients inside.

Brandon had asked her to photograph his snow crystal project because Flan owed him for helping her get set up at the Climate Institute and because he still thought of her as a snow specialist. An Iceman. At Marsh, she and Brandon had both taken a class from a visiting atmosphere specialist who first introduced them to the hidden world overhead.

Flannery had always planned to return to the States and go on the job market as an ice specialist, like Brandon had, after the yearlong EOP in Nigeria was over. Then, Kunle told her how, growing up, full-moon nights were an opportunity to venture through the bush to nearby compounds and chase girls. He also told her a proverb from his village: when the moon is bright, even the lame wish to get up and dance. Falling in love with him was a lot like a full moon: everything suddenly looked different.

At the time, Kunle was still working on his PhD because it took so long to finish school in Nigeria. After decades of harsh dictatorships, even the best Nigerian universities no longer had adequate funding or laboratories for educating PhD candidates in much more than the abstractions of book science, and even the professors they had always seemed to be on strike. To make money for room and
board, Kunle worked as a campus
okada
driver, wearing a bright orange vest and oversized helmet, ferrying students from the front gate to dorms and academic buildings on the back of a motorbike for thirty naira. Sometimes, Flannery showed up at the end of his shift; he'd free himself from the orange vest and they'd buzz outside the campus and into Adamanta for a beer before it was time for him to return the
okada
.

On the nights Kunle studied for exams at the building they called the Faculty, reading by the light of a rechargeable lantern, Flannery brought him suya grilled by vendors on the side of the road. They would sit on a concrete bench in the breezeway, devouring the thinly sliced peppered meat from its newspaper wrapping.

“I'm surprised an
oyinbo
can take the spice.”

“I'm from Texas. We have a thing called salsa.”

They talked about their childhood. How when she didn't know the words in school choir, she'd mouth
watermelon, watermelon, watermelon
. How, as a boy, he had to hide in the yam fields to find a quiet spot to read.

Because they worked together on the EOP project, Flannery and Kunle kept their growing intimacy a secret at first. When Kunle stayed overnight at her place, he woke at dawn so he could sneak out before the campus roads filled with people.

Still lying in bed beneath the mosquito net, half awake, she watched him bathe in the tub across the room. Coated in suds, he scrubbed his body, hair lathered white like an old man's before he dipped the plastic bowl into the bucket and poured water over himself in little sips. Toweling dry, he would turn to her, naked, and ask, “What do you like least about me?” He placed one leg and then the other up on the side of the tub, rubbing Vaseline into his feet and the crevices between each toe until the skin glistened. Before leaving, he would turn his head to the small mirror,
making sure there were no stray straight hairs caught on his shirt. Nothing to give them away.

Another time, they sat, hands grazing, on a wooden bench inhaling the smell of toner, trying to be discreet in the chaotic midst of the student center's dozen running photocopy machines, when he turned to her and said, “Everything has changed.”

So instead of going on the job market in the States, Flannery found a low-paying position at a small, underfunded research outpost run by a middle-aged, burned-out British scientist, who immediately began grooming Flannery to take over the project. She was no longer an Iceman. She was now a woman of the desert.

Adamanta was in many ways the perfect place for this kind of research. Despite the dangers of sectarian violence (which were significant, the city being located on the fault line between Christian south and Muslim north), they were surrounded by Sahel, the thin zone of transition between the Sahara Desert and the tropics. Desertification was causing the Sahara to move south, overtaking the Sahel. Plants died, and the soil was sucked of its nutrients before blowing away with the wind. This, in turn, meant less evaporation and more reflected sunlight from the land, further weakening the monsoon, causing even less rainfall. When African droughts first became severe in the 1960s, most Western scientists dismissed the cause as overgrazing by the natives. Africans weren't taking care of their land, they said. With climate change now a global problem, nobody dared say that anymore.

Flannery and her colleagues measured the speed of this process. How fast were the tropics becoming Sahel? How fast was Sahel becoming dirt? Could the process be reversed or was it already too late? Her boss, always in khakis and a stained T-shirt, would crouch over topographical maps and say, “It's not like we have the resources to change anything, but at least we can bear witness.”

Kunle eventually finished his PhD and began working part-time in her lab and as a lecturer at a small, local university. It was around this time that, through her boss, they first met Mrs. Tonukari, the Welsh woman and forty-year veteran of Nigeria who became Flannery's only model of a Western woman who'd actually built a life here and stuck it out over the long haul.

When Mrs. T came calling, it was without warning and often at the crack of dawn, revving the engine of her ancient Peugeot in the driveway or rapping loudly on the front door. Flannery would ride back with her, sometimes still wearing pajamas, sitting in the passenger seat and holding on her lap the woman's shopping basket full of red bananas, white bread, potatoes.

“If you don't do it first thing in the morning, around here it doesn't get done,” Mrs. T liked to say.

Once their car was stopped at a ramshackle roadblock. The young men wearing threadbare T-shirts and sunglasses went on and on about how some bullshit sticker on her car was expired. “Pay up,” they said, “or we won't let you through. Pay up or we'll tow your car to police headquarters.”

“Oh my,” said Mrs. Tonukari. “Oh no.”

They spent half an hour in the wilting heat while Mrs. T halfheartedly tried to talk the dubious security detail out of the fine, halfheartedly searched for naira in her purse, which contained multitudes of crap. Flannery looked straight ahead at the road strewn with orange peels and empty plastic sachets labeled “Pure Water.” Anyone could see the men weren't police, and they had no plausible equipment to tow a vehicle.
Bargain it down
, Flannery kept thinking,
and let's get the hell out of here.
But Mrs. T was the forty-year veteran of the country, and so they dealt with the situation her way: using flailing, panicky white fear.

Her house on the university campus—Mrs. T's husband had been a professor of engineering until his retirement—had the look of an old farmhouse, out back a clothesline and an overgrown garden, inside lots of books and knickknacks, candles in empty wine bottles, a wooden staircase leading to the bedrooms. She would make Flannery tea while telling stories and pulling books from her shelves, splaying them open to point to things. Books were not easy to come by in Nigeria any longer, and Mrs. T refused to loan any of hers out. Too many of them had walked off over the years, she said.