The Great Migration was set off like a spontaneous explosion of despair; as if everyone had exactly the same idea at exactly the same time; the ones who were left behind in the city because they could not make it aboard the last planes, or the last trains, or the last boats: To get out and away as fast as possible, that’s what almost everyone wanted. Southwards, or at any rate towards what once used to mark the South, though the use of such terms was virtually meaningless now, compasses swung all over like mad, and only the fading memory of bearings remained – for a while more, we hoped.
And so it happened. Hundreds of thousands from every corner of the city begun to group together in the streets joined by the folk from further afield whom the glaciers sliding rapidly off the mountains pursued. “We’re just passing through,” the passing folks would say, “heading south. Our lands are completely ice-capped, our homes are no more, all we got is our lives. Stay here, if you like, and starve, and let the black marketeers do with you what they will. We are not staying with you in this or any city. Perhaps we will be saved, if that would be our fate, perhaps not. Even death is better than staying among those scoundrels.”
It was these people’s stories that crashed the last remaining doubts of those who stubbornly hoped for a miraculous return to normality. The Cold gave no sign of retreating. The darkening stayed undaunted. No one remembered the last dawn or the last dusk, so long ago was when the sun last shone. The glaciers approached, mincing everything in their path.
Many citizens followed the northern folks right away. They put together whatever they could—food they’d set aside, warm clothes—into bundles. You could see families amassing their miserly possessions in supermarket trolleys and setting off on the road of no return, to the uncharted lands where they hoped that sunrays still floated, to the secret hideout of the vanished birds.
The road of the Great Migration would be long and full of uncertainty. Judging by the ruthless display put up by human nature since the very first days of the Cold, the migrants—as we would all be called now —had to take precautionary measures to protect themselves. Who knows what we would meet on the way? Who could imagine the depths of depravity and desperation that awaited them?
Several armed individuals showed up then, to offer their services. Ex-soldiers or ex-criminals for the most part, but it did not matter; the migrants needed protection and it was a fair exchange: food for weapons and the will to use them.
Many black marketeers saw that their days were numbered and decided to follow, despite the obvious fact that they couldn’t carry their food dumps with them. Some—the most far-sighted—struck deals with the migrants, were forced to share, became migrants themselves. Others preferred to form their own groups, the patricians of the Great Migration, those who intended to have the most. But they didn’t last long, those wishful thinkers. The long march, mile after mile on foot through the deep snow, became the great leveler, the ultimate social equalizer which soon dissolved the divisions between the haves and the have-nots, the patricians and the plebeians; the weight a man could carry became the absolute measure of meritocracy. We had returned to the nomadic life, the storing of goods was a thing of the past; you had to carry your own. After several bloody clashes with the migrants’ protectors, the last of the black marketeers realized that everyone shared a common fate now. Share or die, that would be from now on the only, common, law.
Finally, there were a few who could not bear the sight of their
wealth left behind. They felt they had stockpiled enough to keep them for a long while. No need to wear themselves out, quit their homes, stagger under heavy loads or freeze on marches into uncertainty. “It cannot be,” they reasoned, “someone somewhere must be trying to get things back to normal, back to how they were, with suns shinning and seasons changing, with carefree strolls through squares and malls, with cars and better cars. How long could they take? One, two, a dozen years? They’re experts for heaven’s sake, they know what they’re doing, they’ll be international summits taking measures, launching satellites, doing whatever it took to get the planet back in synch. The solution to the Cold was a matter of time. We’ll wait. Better stay next to our food supplies where eating is effortless, than pointlessly wandering in that directionless spasm of reckless nomadism”.
Besides, they were content to be left in the city alone, with no one to bother them, in peace to enjoy their food, their drink and the favors of those who had decided to keep them company.
We never learned what became of them. But if we can take heed of the migrants’ tales, their descriptions of the glaciers’ furious impetus, their unstoppability, then good fortune must not have smiled upon them; a day must have come when they were flattened beneath the crystalline mercilessness of innumerable tons of ice, as they slowly slid from former poles to the former equator, like an immense and voracious reptile, oblivious to anyone’s expectations.
The gun which the explainers had given me would soon help me find a job as protector to a small group of migrants.
I’d come out of my hidy-hole, taking deep breaths, recovered somewhat. The horror would slowly fade from my eyes and my nostrils, the dwarfs’ screams would recede from my ears, the dismembered explainers would find a dark and distant corner of my mind to make their sojourn, a secret place where all terror, ghosts and monsters usually go to rest; and woe betide us if they ever decide to awake.
I wandered the streets that now buzzed with life. Having regained my composure, I wondered how I could bring my mission to fruition. The explainers had mentioned that Feynman had been busy with something on Crete before he disappeared. Without maps and directions, without travel agencies, airlines, custom posts, police and telephones, how was I to find a lost island and a lost man? How was I to chart my course across a planet of a never-ending twilight, where night and day ceased to exist?
And then a miracle happened. My first miracle. I noticed Feynman’s name scrawled in red paint on a wall.
Before I’d had time to recover from my surprise, I noticed his name again a little further down, on another wall, and yet another, a road full of Feynman, on walls, under windows, beside doors, on abandoned shop windows.
I followed the written name, hardly breathing from excitement, from wall to wall and from alley to alley. It seemed like I was turning the pages of a strange book that had the same word on every page, each time bearing a different meaning, a little further down, just past a bend, round a corner, opposite a junction. Except that the various meanings were completely incomprehensible and unconnected, like the city walls and corners on which they were written. “Maybe this isn’t a book,” I dared to think, “but a thread, a ball of string unwinding in a labyrinth.” And what joy I felt then, because what could be more natural than a labyrinth for a scientist to lose himself in, a man who knew everything, a mind full of cares and complex calculations who could help us
find the sun again, the colors and the heat we missed.
And then I saw a person, the creator of the incomprehensible signs, the tireless worshipper of repetition. Armed with a can of red spray paint and an excess of obsessiveness, writing Feynman’s name on yet another wall, giving the letters a different shape and thickness, putting them in order, slightly angled, irregular and ill-matched at times, constantly trying out new incomprehensible versions.
I shouted to him to halt. I didn’t want to harm him, just to ask him a few questions, why he wrote that name, if anyone had told him to write it, and what did he knew of Feynman (if anything). It was hard to find any information on anyone these days, not like before when we had information coming out of our ears.
“Stop!” I shouted, “wait!”
But he took fright and to his heels.
I chased him along the near-by frozen, perilously slippery streets, through parks that had once played opened their gates to tourists but now looked like cemeteries from another age, round car parks packed with abandoned vehicles. I’d have pursued him to the ends of the earth if needs be, my mission had seeped inside me and I could not get it out.
I caught him up in a square. That’s where he stopped, panting, with me a few meters behind him, my heart in my mouth.
“I want to talk to you,” I told him, “that is all, nothing else.”
There were many other in that square. A strange group. Standing in a circle around a naked man who hung up on a column. Admiring his resilience to the Cold—he wasn’t shivering, his teeth weren’t even chattering—his skill at clambering up to balance atop columns. Some had fallen to their knees, entreating him to bless them; perhaps they, too, could deny reality, become pillars for their dreams to clamber up, and from there, one after another in a row, their dreams would pierce the clouds, find a way out from the relentless twilight of the Cold, touch the sky. But he stood there still and silent. And he would stand there forever, that’s what he’d resolved, in a silence that grew ever more intense until, in no time, you could not hear what you were saying.
“He (the man I’d been pursuing pointed at the naked stylite) sent me a dream and an order to write one word—Feynman—everywhere. I don’t know why, I no longer ask why. What have questions ever done for us: nothing, my friend. The age of questions has passed and been, I follow the will of ascetics on columns, nothing else.”
He left me and went to stand with the others who watched the man on the column with adoration and admiration. “If only we could build him a temple,” they thought, “to protect him from the Cold, even if he needed no such thing, even if he couldn’t care less for a warmer place - to worship him more easily.”
I pushed and shoved, tried to get as close to the stylite as I could. The silence was deafening, but I summoned all my strength and shouted, “I’m looking for Feynman. Do you know if he’s alive, where I can find him?” and such like.
But I got no response. However loud I shouted, however long I persisted, the naked man remained quite still atop his column, not paying the slightest attention to my entreaties and appeals, begotten in silence, until the onlookers pushed me away. “Stay away, don’t shatter his silence,” they shouted in anger. “His silence is all we have, leave and don’t come back, find that Feynman yourself; we’ve found the man we sought, what do we care for the quests of others?”
