The Migration, page 18
“We need to do something. Jesus—what we need is leverage, eh? A way to make them listen to us. We need to understand what those things are.”
“Nymphs,” I break in and they turn toward me. “Bryan told me. His mother works for the hospital. The word doesn’t mean what you think though. It has something to do with the transformation. The Centre calls them that.” I lower my voice. “They must have suspected something like this would happen.”
“This is why we need to act,” insists Redmond. “They still aren’t telling us the truth, not about what they are. What this transformation is all about.”
“You think you’re the first to have thought of this, Reddy?” Liv asks. “There have been protesters outside for days—”
“I’m not talking about protesting.”
“And it wouldn’t stop anything. Do you know how many crematoria there are in Oxford alone? Think about how dangerous that would be. You’re not a revolutionary, Reddy, you’re an English major. What are you going to do, recite poetry at them?”
“Oh, love, how can you be so fecking cool about all this? The new reality is this.” He stabs his pool cue toward the picture of Martin. “It’s Martin with his bloody skull fractured. Them against us. Why do you think they want a list of who is sick? Haven’t you heard about what’s happening in China? Mandatory registrations, heavy fines for any family that disobeys or harbours a child without making weekly reports. If you don’t think they’re going to round up those kids then you’re delusional. Liv, I know you don’t want to talk about it but things are getting worse. If something happened to you…”
I make a sound of distress. Redmond turns. “See,” he says, “Sophie understands.”
“The nymphs matter.” I stare at the two of them, anxious to feel included in their plans. “You were out there in the churchyard. You must have felt something? There’s a reason all of this started. There’s a reason it’s happening now. There has to be.” Even as I say this, the words feel inadequate, naive, but Redmond nods eagerly until Liv rounds on him.
“Leave her out of this! If you want to risk your life acting stupid that’s one thing. But—” She stares at me, close to tears. “She’s too young.”
“I’m not,” I tell them, “I’m part of this too.”
But then the common room phone rings. Bryan is with the porter, waiting for me.
Liv urges me toward the door. Redmond looks as if he wants to protest, to say more but she won’t hear it. “You think you’re invincible, that they can’t touch you—”
“I don’t.”
“But the Centre wants to help us.”
“Redmond’s right,” I tell her as we cross the quad toward the porter’s lodge. “We can’t just do nothing and wait for the situation to get better.”
“Never mind about Reddy. Just pretend you didn’t hear it,” she says softly. “He’s always going off half-cocked like this. You need to take care of yourself.” I know that tone of voice, that protectiveness. And I wonder if back home she has a little sister, someone for whom she would give her life to keep safe.
27
“Hey,” Bryan says when he sees us. “What’s wrong?”
Liv shrugs, runs a hand through the tangle of her hair. Her gaze lingers pointedly on the glowing yellow bruise on Bryan’s face. Finally, she shakes her head, kisses Bryan lightly on the cheek. “See you both around,” she says quietly, as if we might meet each other on the streets like before.
“Sure.” His tone is quizzical. “You take care of yourself, Liv. And Reddy too.” She walks away.
When we’re back out on the street Bryan turns, takes me in. “It’s good to see you,” he says, and there is a rise of sweet giddiness I can’t control.
He still hasn’t recovered, not entirely. I can tell that much at a glance. He has the short, hobbled steps of an old man and his movements are jerky. There’s a glint in his eyes, a sort of inattention, as if his mind is wandering, he’s listening to music in his head. Kira would get the same look sometimes. I wonder if I do too. If that’s what Mom sees when she looks at me.
We walk along Broad Street. With him there, no one bothers me. The rain has mostly dissipated now and the clouds are breaking up, chased by a strong-blowing wind that sends bits of refuse skirling over the pavement.
“What happened that night?” he asks at last. “After you left the hospital.”
“I went back to the cement works. To find Kira. But it was too late to stop her. She’d already begun to change. I tried, though. I even climbed the side of the tower.” His eyebrows lift in amazement. “After everything I realized I couldn’t hold onto her.”
We pass the gates of Trinity College, which are locked, forbidding. “You know you’ve never stopped surprising me,” he says. “Not from the first day. You were just so—wild. So angry and in the moment but brave too, willing to take risks when everyone else seemed to just let things happen.”
“I wasn’t wild. She’s my sister, my responsibility.”
“Even so.” To the west, toward Osney, the sun is hanging low in the sky, limning the clouds in soft orange and heliotrope. Amber light gleams off the busts of the emperors mounted on the gates outside the Bodleian Library. A shiver of homesickness skates down my body, a kind of reflexive sadness but even that doesn’t last as long as it used to. He sees it and hesitatingly puts his arm around me.
“You all right?”
I shrug, shake my head but I say nothing. He understands. “Sometimes I think I’m still grieving. But grief doesn’t feel like the right word for it anymore. Kira never really died. And grieving for her now feels—I don’t know, somehow selfish. As if what I really missed was the place that she filled in my life, how it felt to be her protector.”
There are two inches between us but Bryan doesn’t close the gap. Still, being this close to him makes me feel as if my mind is a dark room filled with broken furniture, but he is slowly setting things right, clearing out the wreckage, opening the windows.
“We couldn’t have kept her there forever. There’s a point where protection just becomes another kind of imprisonment,” he tells me.
“I don’t know what to do now. How to reach her. I just feel so lost. As if all of this has been for nothing.”
We head up St. Giles toward the Martyrs’ Memorial, an old Victorian spire that looks like the blackened steeple of a cathedral sunk deep into the ground. Aunt Irene told me about it the first time we came into town, how three English prelates were burned alive here for opposing the Pope. We take a seat on the steps though the stone is damp. What must it have been like to have known so clearly what they wanted to do, even if it cost them everything?
“Did you ever used to watch zombie movies?” I pluck a daisy that’s wedged itself between two stone slabs and stare at it for a moment, wondering how it got here, how it managed to root itself in such inhospitable soil.
Bryan makes a face but doesn’t answer.
“It’s hard not to think about them with everything that’s happened.”
“Never liked them much, to be honest. The gore, you know, and all that make-up. It seemed so artificial. I never understood how we were supposed to find them scary.”
“I used to watch them back home. There was, I don’t know, something liberating about them. How when shit got real, you had to figure out what you were capable of. Like, could you open up your boyfriend’s skull with a shotgun when he was about to turn? In the end it was the survivors who knew who they were, where they stood with the world.”
Bryan is quiet for a long time. “So, what? Could you put a bullet up here?” He raps his knuckle on his forehead, an uneasy look on his face. And it occurs to me this is one of the first times it’s just been the two of us, no one else, no pressure or obligations. Kira is gone.
I tear off the petals from the daisy one by one.
The question is still hanging there and Bryan glances at me, waiting for an answer. His eyes are intense but shy too. I reach over and touch his forehead, thinking about making a quip, telling him what I’d be willing to do to survive. But it doesn’t feel funny, not after what happened to Martin. To Kira. What could happen to any of us.
What I feel is so intense that my breath catches in my throat. He moves toward me, I can feel him doing it and I want him to kiss me. He’s warm, so warm, as if someone lit a fire inside of him. But then his eyes widen and he jerks away. A huge shadow skates along the stone between us, across our legs and over the cobblestones.
From somewhere above comes a soft pfeffing sound, the noise a tablecloth makes when you snap it in the air to get rid of crumbs. Then I see it—like a wraith above the street. Its feathers are bluish-white with inky black at the tips, and there’s something ancient about the machinery of its body. Alternating bands of light and darkness ripple across the surface.
“Sophie,” he whispers but I shush him. We are both perfectly still, alone in the street. Are we the only ones who have seen it then?
The nymph rises above the peaks of the roofs, and turns a slow arc in the sky over the Ashmolean Museum. Then it passes by again, almost noiseless.
It isn’t Kira—but for a moment I don’t care, caught up in the vision of it. So otherworldly and strange. I search for a trace of humanity, a second self pinned to it like Peter Pan’s shadow but I can’t find it. It has given itself over entirely to its new form: a body shaped like a bullet, a long neck supporting a tapering skull. Its throat undulates. It makes a low, happy sound, a song in a minor key.
I see white, a flurry of feathers, then a different sort of whiteness.
Clouds, vast banks of them, stiff-peaked like meringue.
And I can feel the wind catching me, holding me aloft the way Dad used to swing me up in the air when I was younger. Restful, secure. My body is doing exactly what it is supposed to be doing.
There are other nymphs around me. Drifting through the smoke-grey sky, a slate ocean beneath them marred by choppy waves. I count twenty, thirty of them. There are more, I know there are, distant maybe but out there.
The sensation of their bodies moving alongside me, air ruffling our stiff feathers, making the soft down of our breasts and bellies tremble. My throat vibrates gently and the noise fills me up, not just noise, but something else—them, their thoughts. Ghost presences surrounding me, some close and some far, impossibly far.
But one among them is familiar. It’s like catching sight of myself unexpectedly in a mirror. “Kira!” I call.
The connection is breaking—I want to hold onto it, but it’s not enough. She’s too far away and the world is turning below us. The contours of the air are as clear to me as an elevation map. Light too, an unexpected rainbow glowing above the water, a magnetic pull in my blood. We turn together, nerves whispering with the same reedy music.
And then I’m back in my own body.
The nymph vanishes into the clouds, a vision of silver and shadow. I want so much to go with it. The pulling sensation stays with me, the certainty of it, the calmness.
Then Bryan and I are both smiling, laughing almost. He squeezes my hand and it’s as if the barrier between us is so thin I could jump from my body straight into his. But I’m crying too. The nymph has moved on: a crumpled linen ghost floating over the city. The only remnant of it is a thick acidic odor, chalky and sharp at the same time.
“She’s out there, isn’t she? I think I could feel her. Did you feel it too?”
“I don’t know. I felt something but it was weak. Too weak. Just…like hearing music in another room. There was something but I couldn’t make it out.” He shakes his head.
“We need to find them.”
“What?
My thoughts are beginning to coalesce, build into a purpose. “It’s the only way we can understand what’s happening. It feels like we’ve already passed a tipping point, doesn’t it? We’ve crossed into some strange, new, dangerous territory and no one understands what it means. Reddy thinks violence is the answer but I don’t know. When has it ever done much good? There has to be some other way.”
He runs a hand through his hair. “How do we do that? It’s just us, Sophie. Where would we even start?”
“I don’t know. Not yet.” There are still tears on my face, I can feel them. The nymph was trying to tell me something. It was as if it were trying to speak in a language of memory and dream. But the message was garbled, incomplete. Except for one thing: Kira is out there.
I know she is. This is my way forward.
The nymph has given me a gift, if only I can figure out exactly what it means.
28
The feeling stays with me, mingled certainty and fear, though I have no idea what to do about it.
Mom and Aunt Irene want me to keep working toward my A-level exams but nothing sticks in my brain. The news programs trumpet an endless flow of disasters. A hurricane has left most of Miami underwater and now it’s heading across the Atlantic toward us, a second surely on the way behind it, and a third. Commercial air travel has been completely suspended. My dreams are filled with violence. Images of half-human bodies sucked into the engines, churned up and spat out again. The army shooting them down.
Then a letter arrives from Jaina and I stare at it. The postmark is from days ago. I rip it open and devour the contents:
Dear Sophie,
This is strange huh? I haven’t written a letter since i was seven, even holding a pen seems all kinds of weird now, like—how retro, right? But my messages aren’t getting through and I wanted to tell you. well, you get it don’t you?
Mom says they look like angels.
There’s this way she says it—like she’s Carrie White’s mother. You remember us watching that, ewwwing at the pig’s blood and the way her eyes opened and i screamed? Carrie never really scared me—it was her mother, that crazy ole time Religion she caught so she locked her daughter in that freaky Jesus closet and the only happy part of the movie was when Carrie stopped her friggin hateful heart….
Mom got so happy when I finally tested positive, she threw me this trippy sort of birthday celebration with all her friends. They were chanting this Rumi poem about the body being a guest house and how I should welcome in the crowd of joys and sorrows and meet them at the door laughing which is great and all but it’s my frigging body right?
I dunno, feefs.
I used to love it how mom was different from all the other moms but now she’s talking about mother Gaia and how we should all be moving out east where there’s a commune forming or something. Somehow she’s even got dad on board with it. Maybe it’s because Melanie Britnell died. she drowned in her bath tub, i heard—but no one knows how she did it.
T-dot is clearing out, all the big cities are. Markeys is sick and Caroline and Aus and probably a whole bunch more but no one is saying. Here you can keep quiet if you want to and they have to treat you the same. Mom says it’s better this way because everyone can choose but they don’t tell us when someone dies and there’s this list we all started keeping—just for ourselves and it’s getting longer every day.
I guess mostly why i’m writing this is to say sorry because I get it now. What it must have been like with kira. i didn’t then. Sometimes i want to be like mom and just believe it’s all okay but I feel like there’s something rotten in me but maybe it’s sweet too. I don’t know how to trust it.
I just wish you were still here—that it could’ve been the two of us. I think you’d know what to do. You always watched to the end of the movie, didn’t you, when I had to pull the covers up you just kept watching. I’ll see you on the other side fee fi fo fum
For a while after I read it I can’t concentrate on anything. I sit on the bed, staring out the window at the Thames while I try to compose my own letter in response, but nothing seems adequate. I don’t even know where to send it. When Mom calls me down for dinner I tell her I’m not hungry. I try to reach Jaina on my tablet but all I get is an error message.
Suddenly the distance between here and Toronto feels monumental, uncrossable. I miss her so much. Her sharp laugh, talking in her bedroom, the smell of sagebrush all around us. I can’t remember the last time I heard from Dad. What if I’ve lost them both already?
I slide the letter into my notebook. It’s become its own archive, a way of remembering when the power goes out. It feels like we’re travelling back in time, circling back to those dark ages of terror.
And wonder, a small voice in the back of my mind insists. There were miracles too.
As I page through my notebook, the word appears again and again. Miraculum. An object of marvels, a sign from the heavens, a message.
And since the conjunction was in Aquarius it signified great cold, heavy frosts, and thick clouds corrupting the air; and since this is a sign which represents the pouring out of water, the configuration signifies that rivers will burst their banks and the sea flood. For his part, Mars in that sign denotes the sudden death which comes among many races, especially among children.
The first time I read the passage, I hadn’t understood. I’d thought they were the ghostly declarations of those who couldn’t grasp what was happening to them. They were terrified, searching for answers. But what if they weren’t wrong?
Now those words seem oddly resonant. Microcosm and macrocosm. They were dreaming about a poetic cosmos, with every earthly body shifting according to the order of the heavens. Everything connected, everything in sync, everything moving toward some ultimate purpose.
Maybe Kira is part of it, just as I am, just as Jaina is—all of us connected to something sweet and rotten at the same time.
29
Finally there’s a call from the Centre.
“There’s nothing to be scared of.” That’s what Mom keeps telling me as we follow Headington Road. “You know that, right? I’m just glad they’ve got back to me. I’ve been ringing them every day.”
Outside the hospital are furious swarms of protesters from all sides: students and their parents, environmental and antifascist groups, religious nuts. The noise is tremendous. Security guards have closed off the main gates, forcing them to the streets.
