Laura van den Berg - What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us

The space inside the taxi felt too small, the air heavy and sour, so I rolled down the window. I was hanging my head outside, gulping down the breeze, when I heard the most terrible noise, shrill and gloomy, like an off-key trumpet. The sound came again and again, until I finally sank into the car and closed the window.

“That’s the mating call of the Indri lemurs,” my mother said. “Ancient tribes in Madagascar believed that if you listened to the Indris long enough, your body would turn to stone from the inside out.”

I leaned back in my seat, wondering what my father would say if he could see me here. Things between my parents had been tense for years before he decided to stay in Alaska. Even with my door closed, I would hear them arguing about my mother’s incessant traveling, “incessant” being a word my father used to describe many of the things she did.

An hour later, the taxi dropped us at Hotel Le Dauphin, a fancy name for a two-story stucco building the color of putty. Before I could unpack, my mother was at my door, ready to go exploring. We wandered through a market, the drumbeats and hissing fires drowning out the Indris, which had been even more audible from my hotel room. I asked about swimming, how far we were from water, but my mother wasn’t paying attention. She ordered us red rice with grasshoppers from a food stand. No knives or forks were used in Madagascar, only large spoons. I started flicking the grasshoppers onto the ground with the lip of my spoon and my mother said, after all the traveling I’d done in the last year, that I should be more accepting of local customs, though I could tell she was dismayed by the food stand’s use of paper plates. At home, she would, for conservation, wring the water from paper towels and hang them to dry. Once, when I had over friends from school, they made the mistake of commenting on the paper towels. My mother lectured them about the earth’s dwindling reserves and, after dinner, she made us watch a documentary on the gibbons population in the Congo.

I poked the charred grasshoppers until they disappeared into the mound of red rice, then stared at my mother, trying to see her eyes through her sunglasses, a constant shield between herself and the world (she’d started wearing them all the time, even at night and indoors). We were physical opposites: my mother bronzy and tall, all sinew and bone, while I was dark-haired and small. It wasn’t until I began eating that I realized the earth, the dust, was red too — deep and dark like an open wound. It had already stuck to the legs of my mother’s jeans and stained the toes of my sneakers. I told her I couldn’t eat any more rice, soothing her protests by remembering to call her June .

Daud arrived from the Capital on a Sunday. He was in his mid-thirties, handsome and broad-shouldered. When I first saw him, I was coming down the stairs. There was no running water that morning and I was going to see what could be done. Daud stood in the small space between the stairs and the hotel entrance. Many of the ceilings in Madagascar had square holes that were only covered when it rained, and the sun beating through the skylight gave his skin a deep sheen. His nose was slightly crooked, as though it might have been broken once, and there was an unexpected delicacy to his ears. Their shape reminded me of seashells. A large patch from Antananarivo University was stitched onto his backpack. I stopped moving down the stairs. He turned towards me, his eyes narrowed in the light. I could hear the Indris; the heat was pressing against me. I had already gotten terrible sunburns, my shoulders flushed and peeling. My mother had joked that it looked like I was molting.

Before I could say anything, I saw my mother in the hotel entrance. If she noticed me standing at the top of the staircase, she didn’t let me know it. She swept into the room, dressed in khaki pants and a loose white blouse and her sunglasses.

“I just watched two Sifaka lemurs nearly kill each other over a mate,” she told Daud. “Don’t they have an amazing way of fighting, the way they spin across the dirt like dancers?”

“Their kind of love makes ours look easy,” he said.

“Did you know I was one of the first to photograph Golden-Crowned Sifakas?” my mother asked. “They were so rare, it took us weeks of trekking in the rainforest to find them. You’ve probably seen some of my footage.” I watched her take Daud’s arm and lead him outside, struck by how the light that made his skin glow only turned hers dull and gray. I knew she’d been rising before dawn to observe the lemurs — I’d often wake as she was bathing and dressing in the other room, as though our bodies were synchronized — and the malaria medicine had probably been giving her bad dreams. Her hair had looked brittle in that hotel lobby, her cheeks shadowed and sunken, although she’d also somehow never looked so beautiful, wearing her exhaustion with a regalness that seemed new to me. If I’d passed her quickly or been watching from another angle, if she’d turned her head towards the light a little more, I might have mistaken her for a stranger.

At the end of his days in the field, Daud returned to the hotel with red dirt streaked across his white T-shirt, usually humming a familiar-sounding song, which I eventually recognized as The Impossible Dream . He spoke English fluently, and I loved the way he could make my own language sound alluring. He told me about life in Antananarivo, teal and red motorbikes weaving around pedestrians, street vendors selling batik tunics and Zebu meat. About tribes in Madagascar that believed spirits dwelled in trees and planted one at each village entrance to keep away evil, about how the spirits abandoned the trees at nightfall and no one left their house after dark.

Daud spent his days with my mother, observing lemurs in the rainforest and trapping and tagging specimens, so they could analyze how deforestation had changed their patterns of eating and mating and nesting. Afterwards, we would have dinner together on the concrete terrace that extended out the back of the hotel. At these dinners, I became a kind of pet for my mother and Daud. During the day, they had lemurs in common and at night, they had me.

“Celia has the most astonishing memory,” my mother said one evening, after we’d finished our bowls of lichee and mango. She asked me to recite one of the lists she’d taught me since my father left, like European cities with the highest crime rates or the most polluted places on earth.

“Come on,” my mother urged. “Don’t be modest. How about pollution this time?”

I would have preferred to list the names of everyone who’d swum the English Channel, like Lynne Cox, who’d done it when she was only fifteen, or talk about Lewis Gordon Pugh, who broke the record for the coldest long-distance swim in Antarctica.

“Ranipe, India,” I began. “Then La Oroya, Peru, and Linfen, China.” From there, I moved to Dzerzhinsk in Russia and Haina in the Dominican Republic and Kabwe in Zambia.

“And of course,” I finished. “There’s Chernobyl.” My mother had always been fascinated by the ruined landscape of Chernobyl. Anyone who keeps a nuclear power plant in business, she liked to say, should have to eat their own plutonium.

“Peru?” Daud said in response to my list. “I wouldn’t have guessed that.”

“It’s because of the metal processing plant in La Oroya,” I replied. “And the toxic emissions of lead.”

“What else have you got?” he asked, ladling lichee juice into his spoon.

“A list of all the famous scientists who’ve committed suicide,” I said. “And how they did it.”