I began my exploration of global fiction this month by posting the prologue to my novel-in-progress MIGRATORY ANIMALS, where we meet Flannery (and her fiancé Kunle) in Nigeria before she is forced to return to the United States. The below excerpt is from later in the book. After being dropped off at her East Austin apartment after a wedding, Flannery flashes back to the events leading up to her arrival in Nigeria, ending with a moment where she begins to intuit the challenges that come with trying to make a home in another culture, leaving your first one behind. I hope you enjoy.
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Flannery pressed her cheek against the cool glass of the passenger side window. Clouds covered the moon and, at the edge of town, the streetlights barely gave off enough light to drive by. As dark trees moved against the dark sky, they looked like shadow puppets acting out a tale of horror, screeching and clawing at the air.
The neighborhood was still and the air carried an echo of accordion from the cinder-block Tejano bar behind her apartment building. Closing the particleboard door behind her, she tossed her dress into the hamper in the middle of the floor and turned on the shower. Showers wasted water compared to bucket baths, but she loved them. She remembered when she became old enough to take one by herself, how the light shot horizontally through the tiny window near the ceiling, illuminating the steam. The beads of water looked like dust but moved differently when she blew on them, somersaulting more slowly, with a delayed reaction, or what she would later learn to call viscosity. Back then, it was also how she imagined her mother’s brain: clouding up with steam, becoming obscured and slow.
Funny to think now that she might have become a scientist because of the curiosity that began in her parents’ beige-and-pink shower stall. When Flannery had focused on atmospheric dynamics in graduate school—her dissertation was on how Arctic snow melt affected atmospheric patterns of humidity—and began to study snowflakes, her family raised eyebrows. A snow scientist from Abilene, Texas? Where a white Christmas was an Elvis song on the radio? But maybe that was why she loved it so much. All precipitation was magical to her, extraordinary. On the rare afternoon it rained in Abilene, it was a holiday; the dust settled and everything smelled clean. This experience was something Flannery had in common with Kunle, with all Nigerians who lived in the hot and dry northern half of the country.
During graduate school in Madison, Wisconsin, in the department of climate system sciences (They called students in the more traditional Meteorology program “weather weenies.”), Flannery joined a lab run by a scientist doing work on the North Pole. She liked the idea of working with ice, with the process of freezing and the idea of stasis, however brief; life suspended.
Flannery turned out to be pretty good at her job, but after six months on an isolated Arctic research outpost to gather data for her dissertation, she wanted to thaw out before applying for the postdoctoral fellowships that were the natural next step for her research—and that would probably send her back to the North Pole or the Klondike or Siberia. When a grad school friend invited her to join the team of the current international EOP, intended to study changes in monsoon activity in West Africa as a result of climate change, she thought it would be a nice working vacation, a chance to get a tan.
EOP stood for “enhanced observing period,” when scientists interested in a similar phenomenon pooled their expertise and descended upon a particular area with ships and planes and satellites and land-roving equipment to spend a year measuring and recording an enormous amount of data at once. An EOP required an army of workers, hiring gobs of recent PhDs like Flannery as well as local scientists.
Flannery was assigned to lead a team performing measurements of air and soil in the Sahel region of Nigeria, stationed at the university in Jos. One afternoon, Flannery and a colleague were scheduled to teach three local scientists, including Kunle, how to interpret readouts from the machines before they buried them in the sand to protect the delicate processing chips from intense afternoon sun. Kunle was a no-show.
After the session, Flannery volunteered to follow up and was given vague directions to his room on the outskirts of the university campus, a long, winding walk through dilapidated concrete academic buildings surrounded by the red and yellow blossoming Pride of Barbados, which did its best to camouflage the university’s decline. She passed a woman in a bright green wrapper carrying a computer monitor on her head.
Arriving at an area of wild vegetation dotted with houses and residence halls, Flannery eventually stumbled into the ramshackle, overgrown “yard” strung with crisscrossing clotheslines. Kunle’s room was in a BQ or “Boy’s Quarters,” a term for the small building adjacent to a residence that, during colonial times, was used to house servants or “houseboys.” BQs—and his was no different—were usually a row of three or four rooms connected by a slab porch, which, since there wasn’t a proper kitchen, was where inhabitants set up hot plates and buckets of water.
When Kunle pulled open the door, Flannery held out a small bag of oranges, saying, “Ekaaro.” To her surprise, standing in front of her was the same preppy man she’s met at the canteen a few days before. Kunle smiled and invited her inside the tiny room he shared with three other graduate students, all from his home state directly to the east. There was one mattress on the floor (they took turns sleeping at different times), one desk, and above it a shelf stacked to the ceiling with photocopied textbooks. There was a small, fuzzy television set, and a wardrobe piled with suitcases, which the men lived out of since there wasn’t space to truly unpack.
He offered her a corner of the mattress, and she sat down primly, while he laid back against the wall, sighing with his whole body. He was covered in sweat and his face looked hollowed out, which, along with his close cropped hair, accentuated his prominant cheekbones.
“Malaria?” she asked.
He nodded.
“In Jos?” The unique plateau elevation of the city meant most mosquitos couldn’t survive there.
“I went home last week.” He smiled. “To my village.”
Despite his looking weak with sickness, Flannery could still feel the strong pull of physical attraction. His pleated slacks and soccer jersey were endearingly mismatched, and she had a strange and embarrassing urge to take them off and wash his feverish body with a cool, wet cloth. She wanted him, not sexually yet, but in some generalized feeling of possessiveness.
“I’m sorry I’m not in a better state. It’s not often I get housecalls from Americans. How do you find Nigeria?” This was a question everyone asked Flannery and the two other Americans working with her.
“I like it. I’m still here.” She flipped through the stack of photographs he offered as entertainment: Kunle as an undergrad lined up with friends and girlfriends, Kunle in the northwest during his Youth Service years.
“You try. You try small, small. But for how much longer?” he asked. The implication: foreigners always swooping down, rearranging things, then leaving.
They lounged together in an easy silence, her original mission forgotten. One of Kunle’s neighbors from Cross River state stuck her head in to offer them Calabar stew—“Done chop?”—with periwinkle snails. They sucked the snails from the shells and scooped up big chunks of leafy greens with balls of fufu.
Through the doorway, she remembered watching the brassy light of dusk slice through the branches of a mango tree, and thinking: what sort of horrible, beautiful place is this? She remembered touching Kunle’s forehead, burning with fever, and closing her eyes. Had she thought of her mother then? Of her mother’s worst days and Flannery’s many nights waiting for fevers to break and medicines to kick in? Of discovering her mother standing in the middle of the street without pants on, delirious, and leading her back inside? Maybe she did. But she had not yet realized that sickness follows you to the ends of the earth.