Flight Behavior
Page 81

She thought of Blanchie Bise and Bible class. The flood of Noah, Jesus. She did try. “It’s never been my long suit,” she confessed.
“Your children’s adulthood?”
That nearly floored her of course. Or creeked her. Since that’s what was below this log, if she’d swooned off of it. How dare he belt her with that one?
“A trend is intangible, but real,” he said calmly. “A photo cannot prove a child is growing, but several of them show change over time. Align them, and you can reliably predict what is coming. You never see it all at once. An attention span is required.”
It occurred to her that she didn’t have a single photo of her kids from the last six months or more. Maybe Dovey did, in her phone. She should be sure to get some before Preston’s baby teeth fell out.
“I can break it down for you,” he said. “Water, you can see that. Warm air holds more water. Think of condensation on a windshield. Multiply that times all the square meters above you, and it’s a hell of a lot of water. It evaporates too quickly from the hot places, and floods the wet ones. Every kind of weather is intensified by warming.”
“So flood and fire, basically. Like the Prophecy.”
“I don’t know about that. What does the Bible say about the ice albedo effect?”
He was mocking her, probably. “I don’t think the Prophecy applies in real-world terms,” she said. “People assume it’s out there, I guess. The lake of fire and everything. But they figure it’s still a long way off. Way past the end of T-ball season. After the kids’ graduation, after the wedding.”
She stopped, before Cordelia and Preston came into this picture. The afternoon was already waning, its softer light filling the sky like a liquid seeping between the trees. Ovid’s attention to her felt like a promise, and she wanted to trust it, only that, not the particular words. To leap, and forget the crash landing. She finished her sandwich while he talked. He told her that forests absorb carbon from the sky, but not when they are dying of drought or burning. That oceans also buffer the atmosphere, but not when their carbon levels make them too acidic for life. The oceans, he said, were losing their fish.
“And coral reefs. Have you ever seen a coral reef?”
She wished she could just touch his hand and stop this. She noticed the crow’s feet around his eyes, his exhaustion. It must have been true about this keeping him awake. “I’ve seen the beach,” she said. “I guess that’s not the same.”
“One day I will tell you about the reefs. It’s all I wanted to do as a boy, swim in the reef and make my little studies. My mother said I would turn into a fish.”
She couldn’t see these things at all, stricken forests or killing tides. What she saw was the boy inside a man who was losing everything. She felt the way she did when her children howled over outcomes she couldn’t change. Helpless. Everything goes. “They say it’s just cycles,” she said after a while. “That it goes through this every so often.”
He let out a little hiss between his teeth, which scared her. “All right. In the Pleistocene most of this continent was under ice, and the rest was arctic desert. At other times the ice caps melted and this very place was under the ocean. So yes, cycles. With millions of years between events, my friend. Not decades.”
She did not like my friend. She did not hazard a comment. But he prodded. “Dellarobia, what do you see?”
“We’ve never had rain like we did last year. I’ll grant you.”
“I’m asking literally. What do you see?”
She looked at the trees, the forest floor. “A million dead butterflies,” she said. “Sorry as hell they ever landed here.”
A live monarch dropped through the air and landed on a clump of grass near Ovid’s boots. She watched it crawl slowly to the top of the drooping seed head, clinging upside-down beneath the arc. It folded its wings together, closing up shop for the night, waiting for a better day tomorrow.
“Humans are in love with the idea of our persisting,” he said. “We fetishize it, really. Our retirement funds, our genealogies. Our so-called ideas for the ages.”
“I really hate this. What you’re saying. Just so you know.”
“Sorry. I am a doctor of natural systems. And this looks terminal to me.”
In the branches over their heads, small bursts of butterflies exploded into the sun like soundless fireworks. The beauty was irresistible. “I just can’t see it being all that bad,” she said. “I’d say most people wouldn’t.”
He nodded slowly. “Do you know, scientists had a devil of a time convincing people that birds flew south in winter? The Europeans used to believe they burrowed into muddy riverbanks to hibernate. They would see the swallows gathering along the rivers in autumn, and then disappearing. Africa was an abstraction to these people. The notion of birds flying there, for unknown reasons, they found laughable.”
“Well,” she said. “I guess seeing is believing,”
“Refusing to look at the evidence, this is also popular.”
“It’s not that we’re all just lazy-minded. Maybe you think so.” She struggled to articulate her defense. On first sight, she’d taken these butterflies for fire and magic. Monarchs were nowhere in her mind. Probably he wouldn’t believe that. “People can only see things they already recognize,” she said. “They’ll see it if they know it.”
“They use inference systems,” he said.
“Okay. That.”
“And how do they see the end of the world?” Ovid asked. “In real-world terms, as you put it.”
She considered this for a long time. “They know it’s impossible.”
He nodded, surprised. “Golly. I think you are right.”
She took the plastic cup from his hands and wrapped it in the cellophane that had held her sandwich. She could feel where her fingertips had brushed his. “I don’t know how a person could even get through the day, knowing what you know,” she said.
“So. What gets Dellarobia through her day?”
Flying from pillar to post, she thought. Strange words. “Meeting the bus on time,” she answered. “Getting the kids to eat supper, getting teeth brushed. No cavities the next time. Little hopes, you know? There’s just not room at our house for the end of the world. Sorry to be a doubting Thomas.”