Procedimiento estadístico

weather

Icarus turned to watch a lorry from the Hellenic Environment Centre refuel the Ionian Sky, before staring into space for an extended period, enjoying the meaningless vacancy for as long as she could before W urged her on.

‘You finished yet? It’s already four weeks since our quest began. Two-hundred-and-twenty bicycle years and almost two-million human years since time began, but closer to being out of time entirely, and passing.’

Icarus gave W’s handlebars a gentle squeeze and smiled – one of her sadder, upside-down smiles. ‘Far from it, W, I fear we haven’t yet begun.’ Nonetheless, she gathered her limbs together:

your foot bone connected to your whistle bone, your whistle bone connected to your climate bone, your climate bone connected to your bicycle bone, your bicycle bone connected to your hip bone…

At least she was still a woman: to have radically complicated her own variant on hybridity would have confused everything right then.

‘Come on! We’re never going to rebuild climate change in time for Athens at this rate!’

Icarus grinned, levered W and his panniers off the concourse and pushed him into the terminal. In weather glass world, time had proven both flexible and circumstantial, far removed from modernity’s linear understanding of it. According to the weather glass clock there was always time for a morning cappuccino and a biscuit.

Inside, Icarus settled into a plastic chair, blew into her coffee, and wrapped a jersey around her shoulders to guard against the over-enthusiastic air-conditioning. It was hard to give

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weather glass world credence in retrospect. The flight had been pure adrenaline, the experience of her life, a cultural and aesthetic spectacle! There had been nothing quite like the cyclists taking over the Sunday morning skies. There had been nothing better than allowing the weather to sweep her south along the Aegean coast, at the speed of the gale. There had been an abundance of coffee and cake, and she’d believed in the unicorn and he’d believed in her, and that had been a bargain! She’d believed in climate change and it had believed in her, and that had made all the difference! If Icarus had chosen a landscape it might have been like Tuscany: you could actually see the cuts and angles in the land, where humanity had inscribed meaning from it –

– a shifting microcosm of the world, constantly being re-patterned, and her participating in the process as she went! Yes, Icarus had rewritten, and was still rewriting, her fate, no matter whether it was the kind of rewriting Zeus desired. There was no fixed identity called Icarus nor a stable fate, just a flexible story and her memories, there for the rearranging. And Zeus could frankly sod his desires if they were contrary to whom she had become. Who else could she possibly be? What was she trying to prove? She was never was going to have been an Anglo Saxon messenger for Zeus’s whims.

If only the whole experience had been less personal!

If only the world had applied the weather glass in more open-ended, flexible ways!

If only the rest of humankind had travelled through the weather glass with her, rather than objectifying her from beyond. It was all very well participating in weather glass world, but at what price the traveller in a world that otherwise remained unchanged?

Icarus felt not only cut-out, but cut-up, where the world’s conjoined hubris and teleological ambitions and machismo and capitalist greed and fear of apocalypse had self-harmed upon her. Above all, what Icarus would never forget about weather glass world was the behaviour of its men: exposing themselves at traffic lights, stalking her, shouting at her for cycling through their country alone, refusing to believe the nature of her quest, interrogating her gender! On the ferry a neighbour had reassured her ‘it was ok,’ the men had ‘meant no harm.’ Pray tell her which part of that interrogation had been ok? Did they think her identity would be written on her

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underwear? And to top it all off, if, as she had come to conclude, she was the person who emerged from her relationships, then this harassment had become a part of her!

‘So are we travelling back through the weather glass to Athens?’ W interrupted, seeing Icarus fade with every sip of coffee.

Icarus paused, and looked into space again for a few moments, before shaking her head. Weather glass world had been like inhabiting the state of climate change – a utopian, temporary state – which she now preferred to negotiate. ‘I’m too tired W. Let’s just pretend?’ Nonetheless she filled the weather glass and watched the water settle low in the spout. Fair weather. The most superficial type of reading of all – but she’d take that all the way to Athens if she could! Finally Icarus picked up Through the Looking Glass and read its final page as if it might possess some clue as to where to go from here. ‘Now, W,’ she began, ‘let’s consider who it was who dreamed it all…?’ That was a multi-choice question if there ever was one.

It was already eight o’clock when they set off, seven o’clock Italian time, and the coastline was already mountainous. Icarus struggled up the first headland, but the view from the top took her breath away. Helios’s morning rays had carved grooves in the landscape north towards Albania, while boats scuttled back and forth between the mainland, the breasts of Corfu, and beyond. And despite everything that had happened lately, when Icarus rolled W world-wearily off the headland’s lip there was no denying the feeling of warm wind in her hair, nor the poise of the heron standing thigh deep in water, nor the taste of the salty blue sky on her lips and a certain lightness in her limbs. There was no denying the possibility of the world and the unending creativity of its processes of change. She was so tired it was almost as if she was floating.

Today’s cycle took them through the Epirus region of Greece, one of the country’s poorest areas: home to partisan rebels during the German occupation and ostracised by the Greek government ever since for their communist sympathies. ‘Revolutionaries. Your kind of people, W,’ Icarus said, winking. These days Epirus was an easygoing revolutionary backwater given over to low key tourism. Icarus already felt less hassled. The lad unloading nectarines into a village shop moved W gently from his way, and the Greek man with the handlebar moustache

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happily directed Icarus towards the ‘difficult way’ along the coast road, if that was how her stupidity chose to go. Icarus barely made it ten metres up the track before W’s wheels sank into the sand, and she returned to the main road, the ‘easy way’:

continuing is slipperiest content sidling east

thirty years of non-existent past flying past the window just like history

the weather was prone to change

coldness celsius

or walking upon the unforgiving surface of the clouds

the ceilometer proved insensitive to our failures in our repeated quest for sustained fleeing /

otherwise known as flight

Icarus was already dreaming of stopping off early and spending the day sleeping beneath the nearest available parasol on one of any number of sandy coves, but no matter how sleep- deprived she was, there was still a conference to reach, and she could do with being fifty miles closer. They had made up time through the weather glass but there was still a long way to go, and Icarus’s route decision had just made it even further. They weren’t heading straight across the Pindhos mountains. One of the two roads across the mountains was infamously treacherous, even in a car. The second was a dirt track for fifty miles through snake and bear- infested backcountry. But neither were they travelling the boring, obvious route to the south of the mountains, along which accommodation options became increasingly limited. Over the next few days they were going island hopping – Lefkada, Kefalonia, and then across the breadth of the Peloponnese peninsula – just because she could!

‘But do we have time?’

Icarus shrugged her shoulders. She was even unsure what this question even meant any longer.

Everyone had once had a hold on the next town of Parga: the Venetians, Napoleon, the Russians, the Brits, who had sold the town to the barbaric rule of Ali Pasha in the early nineteenth century, and now tourism. Yet the concrete developments didn’t reach far up the hillside, and the town retained some charm with its red-tiled villas gathered around a turquoise cove and a small, commercially operative fishing harbour. But for Icarus the timing couldn’t have been worse. Signs for rooms to rent – DOMATIA – were everywhere, and who could blame the hotel touts interpreting her horizontal lunch as an advanced stage of fatigue. Meanwhile if it hadn’t been for the stubborn woman with arthritic fingers in the campsite at the