Monarchs

Monarchs “There are no straight lines in Nature,” Vane told me.“And all living things are trying to get somewhere else.” I was proofing an article on migration patterns for the scientific journal. Dr. Elias Vane, was a leading entomologist. A bug guy and one of the world’s foremost experts on migration. “Think whales routes and cattle drives.” “Old couples go to Florida each winter,” I said. “Exactly,” he said. “You see, we all have migration patterns. Repetition so deeply ingrained that all living things carry, but remain hidden even from themselves. Most of these paths can be understood by simple observation,” he said. “But sometimes even science cannot fathom what secret routes are in play. What ancient hungers and worries…what desires and fears…drive living creatures.” “For example?” I asked. “Take the monarch butterfly,” he murmured in measured tones. “Every year by the millions, monarchs try to escape the cold. They make an annual flight from central Canada to Mexico. They’ve been doing it for eons. Every year the route is the same, crossing over Lake Superior.” I thought of the tail end of the Friday evening rush hour, stragglers inching along on the interstate. “Nothing unusual about that,” I said. He continued. “Every year at the center of the lake, for no apparent reason, these millions of monarchs simply stop then make a sudden turn to the west for six miles before turning south again. Year after year they make that same turn at exactly the same point. We only discovered it using radar, but they must have been doing this same change of course for centuries.” “Wind shear from the water?” I asked. “No,” he said. “Some magnetic anomaly they can sense?” “No, we checked for that as well.” “Some kind of predator then?” “No… not that either. It was as if an invisible force demanded that they alter course. At first we thought there must be something obvious, something tactile we were missing. So we GPSed the spot. I myself took a research boat out to the exact longitude and latitude and waited.” He paused. “One morning from the water I saw the mass of them, a great shadow against the dawn. Suddenly they were all around me. It was like the sky itself was alive, hovering all around me, making the air tremble.” “Then, just as suddenly they seemed to stop. It was as though they and only they could sense something. Some invisible border…some monstrous barrier that they dare not breach. Something only monarchs could feel.” “Standing alone on the bow of that boat, the rustle of millions of wings shimmering all around me, it felt like..I don’t know how to say this…like I was not just a man anymore.” Dr. Vane turned away. Silent for a moment. "I could feel something in them that felt like indecision at first. Then surrounded, millions of wings beating in unison, I felt it clear. It was fear,” he whispered. “Of what, I do not know.” “Then, just as suddenly, the great swarm of wings turned together and flew away to the west. And I was alone on the water in a gently rocking boat trying to decipher some mystery only they could feel.” He paused. “I haven’t told anyone else that. I don’t know why, somehow I was sure you would understand.” “I suppose I do, in a way,” I said. Sara and I lived together in that old house by the river for about a year. It was her parents before they passed. Crumbling but charming too. The kind of place that hangs onto happiness, like it was pressed by memory into its foundation. The way sometimes love will, we burned for each other right from the start. That sudden blaze you are certain will warm you forever. It was like discovering someone else who could speak a forgotten language I thought only I felt hidden beneath words. There was a perfect silence between us, the kind that held both secret and vow. It possessed us. Love didn’t belong to us. We belonged to it. It took only weeks from the first scan. She died suddenly. The way it should never happen but sometimes does. That way that life carries some flaw hidden in our blood, until one day the weight of it becomes too much for it to bear. It happens everyday. The suddenness of it. People shake their heads. They pull their children close at night, say wordless prayers and try not to linger on the arbitrary unfairness. When death steps too close. Like, they’re sure it’s searching for some other poor soul to cull. There’s a kind of love that's like an electric current. Long after the power wanes you can still feel the burn of it. Something about it gets into your blood. You carry it like a scar from a childhood disease. So you surround it with cold time hoping that you might finally extinguish what every bit of you remembers. It weakens in Time but the signal never stops. Not really. I was inconsolable the way men often are. Quietly. Tearlessly. We eat our pain hoping it will inoculate us against grief. Suddenly all I had come to understand about the world seemed laughably naive and that betrayal was waiting quietly in the space between heartbeats and howling in my dreams. Cursing Fate and God, blaming hearts for feeling and Time for staggering on so slowly. Her sister got the deed. I moved out and she sold the place. It was torn down. A sign saying the property was the future home of the kind of strip mall that looks obsolete even before the last brick is put in place. And I stopped taking that road. By that place. And when I took the scientific journal job I decided to take the bridge route instead. It was almost six miles more and a toll. But there are other kinds of tolls that are far dearer. So, I suppose, I did understand the monarchs. The terrible senseless detours we make. Vane and I became friends of sorts. He would come by in the evenings with a six pack and we would talk the way strangers sometimes do when they trust each other. When they can feel something like themselves in another. We talked about things men tell themselves. About the routes we take each day. The ways to wealth. The forgotten paths toward happiness. About short cuts and dead ends and the long pilgrimage toward understanding and grace. “I have tried to live by science and logic,” he told me once. “But the truth is reason can only reach so far. There are things I’ve felt, that no amount of data can fathom. Things described only by a deep mystical intuition…far beneath the poor reach of science.” “You sound like a preacher,” I said. “No,” he answered. “I am a witness. Testifying to what I can only feel, and never name. We dance toward what we cannot grasp using these small steps we know.” He closed his eyes listening hard, “but there's something else... a music…a music we can only feel.” The journal was a bare bones staff so I had to fact check my own articles. I had a list of experts to check small data points and principles before final edit. Seismologists, various medical doctors, even a nuclear physicist. But I had a go- to guy that I used whenever I ran into a dead end. Murphy was a PhD teaching fellow at Harvard in microbiology. If I needed some insight or a quote on human evolution or why the Red Sox were cursed I would call him. Murphy was one of those big brained Irish slum kids from Southie. His father was an artist and drunk and his mother, a sucker for rebels and poets, was a librarian. For a time he sat on the fence between those kinds of lives. A lot of brawls, a couple disorderly arrests before he fell in love with books and then science. But even after the scholarships and awards there was a part of him that lead toward the shadows of life. It was like he was stained by his father’s inheritance in both blood and disposition. Murphy believed that biology quietly ruled all of history. He was sure we are all prisoners of our DNA. That it, not us, was choosing each course. Like it was some inscrutable the man behind the curtain in us all quietly deciding at every crossroad. Ethics and virtue, obscenities and crimes were not up to us. They were lurking in the double helix of our souls, already decided by the past. I asked him about the monarchs once. He thought a moment. “I don’t know…but I’m certain it has to do with what they endured.” One night Vane appeared, half drunk. He began to talk about his marriage. “At the start we were one of those rare combinations where both of us were touched by joy, the real thing, just from each other’s presence. We had an instinct for love. The genuine currency of love that everyone around us wished they knew how to earn.” "I had a photonics colleague, the study of light. He said the closest thing to light we have is love. Light is the fastest thing in the known universe. But when light changes to matter it slows. It becomes trapped in flesh and bone. I think love slows too. It can grow… heavier.” An elderly couple on their evening walk passed by hand in hand then disappeared in the shadows. “Do you remember that feeling. Being just out of school. You must have felt it too. The certainty, the straight lines to happiness and love. I felt like a king. A monarchs over all of life. I felt as unstoppable as Time. Success lay directly ahead. All I had to do was walk to where it was waiting.” “There are no straight lines in Nature,” I reminded him. Vane laughed. “That reminds me,” he said. “I finally solved the mystery of the monarchs.” “I was attending one of the usual conferences,” he said. “Pointless minutia.” “But one night over dinner I mentioned it to a teaching colleague. A geologist. Why would these monarchs change direction year after year? He listened intently, then asked for the coordinates. I gave him the longitude and latitude and he gazed at me.” “You know,” he said “100 million years ago the tallest mountain in the world was right where the center of Lake Superior is now. Over time the Ice Age glaciers from the north melted and wore away that mountain. We think it was at least as high as Everest. Impossible to scale. “How wide was it?” I asked. “We think it was six miles across,” he said. Vane looked at me. “The monarchs, generation after generation, for millennia are trying to avoid the mountain. A mountain that has not existed for 100 million years.” We listened to the silence until he rose unsteadily, staggered, then righting himself said goodbye. I raised a beer and whispered, “To the monarchs!” That winter Vane took a job at a new university three states over. More money, a promise to publish. We lost touch. But one evening that next summer he called. He was in town and wondered if the porch was free. He’d bring the six. He seemed much older and beaten in the way some men become as the odds get long and time gets short. He had the expression of a man irredeemably disappointed in himself. We talked around it for a while until I finally asked, “Are you going to tell me?” He looked at me, closed his eyes and began. “Something has changed… in me. I’m not the same. I have been taken by something I can no longer control.” He gazed at me. " I have lived my life pursuing facts but now…” his voice drifted. “I have become…my heart has become… small and foolish. Something I cannot fathom. Something untrue.” “I cannot identify any catalyst except perhaps Time. But I feel it all around me now, deciding for me. Some invisible force altering my course." He talked how the years worn away his mountain of expectations. And now even the absences…happiness and even love seemed impossible to scale. He talked about how his wife looked at dawn now, pale and fading, like a ghost of herself. And how lately the ghost of her had crossed over into his own eyes and he could feel himself fading too. Then about the new research graduate assistant. About the way she seemed to understand what he was thinking before he spoke. About how he couldn’t wait to get to the lab each morning. And how she touched his hand once by mistake and let it linger. About the way she smelled. “She smells like 21…like possibilities…” he said. “You see there is no fool like an old fool,” he said to me. “I’m a scientist. And now all I see is the evidence of my own decay. All my life I have demanded evidence and discipline. But suddenly reason has deserted me.” He looked up almost pleading. “sometimes it feels like I’m caught in a house that is burning down around me.” I sat quietly. What was there to say. “I haven’t crossed the line yet," he finally said. “What line is that” I asked. “You know.” “Cmon Doc. There’s not just one boundary line. You know that.” He looked at me. “You haven’t with your arms and mouth and legs. But you have with your spirit…your hearts just waiting to push you over the edge. Waiting to make you a stranger to yourself.” He stood and stared silently at me. He cleared his throat like he wanted to say something in his own defense, but it seemed too small for words. Then he walked briskly away into the darkness. Six months later he sent a note. About the divorce. He wrote, ‘The past and all I hoped life would be has become a mountain…too high to scale.’ He signed it…’Once a monarch…’ I had to call Murphy on a fact check later that week. He gave me a quote that worked, then asked if I was ok. “I hear something in your voice,” he said. I told him about Vane, the monarchs, about the demolished house and the way the shadow of what once was can loom large…larger than life itself. “Is there a physiological reason for people splitting up?” I asked. “You mean divorce?” “Yes,” I said, “Is there something in our biology that tries to divide us?” There was a long pause, he cleared his throat. “Yes, I suppose there is.” “Go on” I said. “All living cells die and then are replaced. It’s called mitosis. Every moment of every life, cells die.” He voice deepened, like he was describing something terrible and holy, some secret, buried in us all. “As a cell dies an adjacent cell offers itself. It tears itself apart trying to replace it. What’s living pulls itself in two to replace the dead.” “I don’t understand,” I said. “Mitosis is the cause of divorce?” “You want to know if there is a biological reason people split up. To me it’s obvious. Endless division is our essence. We have blinded ourselves to it..to the death and the rebirth…to the division that rules every second of every day. Life at its essential, irrefutable base is always tearing itself apart.” I listened to the hum of the wire between us. The way silence always seems to follow the truth. “This is a cycle?” I finally asked. “How long does their take for any human to cycle through having each cell replaced?” “Seven years,” he said. “In a way we're all children. There is never any part of any person that is more than seven years old.” “But what of all the memories? The joy, the heartbreak, the love and loss?” “They are little electrical impulses, ghosts, passed on from the dying." "We are innocents carrying the burdens of bodies that no longer exist. We are seven year old containers of memories that never happened to even the smallest part of each of us.” I thought of the swarm of monarchs each carrying the fear of a mountain they never knew. I thought of Vane carrying the memory of love he could not scale. And I thought of myself turning toward the bridge each night to avoid a pain that some other man, some other heart endured. I hung up. That night I walked down the street touched by the knowledge of the tearing apart of every living thing all around me. Each replacing the dead with something new. Each being passed the flickering light of memories and scars that never happened to them. The old couple, once more hand in hand nodded as they passed by. Some things last. Murphy would say their love, was passed like a beacon. Sixty years, just seven again and again and again. The next dawn I decided. I would take the shortcut. The house no longer existed. It hasn’t for 100 million heartbeats. That was another man carrying love and grief. Him. Not me.There was not a single cell left of all he felt. As I came to the intersection I slowed then pulled over. And I felt some deep warning rising like a current from the center of myself. Rising from cells that never felt her, but carried her none the less. Some part that carried the memory of an Everest of grief, impossible to scale. The way what was can loom large…larger than life itself, until you’ll make any pointless turn just trying to find your way around it. All around me I felt the air shudder with the shadow of beating wings. Whispering a truth older than reason, something of our nature that loomed like an invisible mountain. Far too high to scale. “There are no straight lines in Nature," I said to myself. Then I turned west and drove six miles to the bridge. WLM