September 01, 2005

The Bird

by Chris Miller

The woman I picked up at the Parents Without Partners singles dance at the Victoria Park pavilion last night is sleeping in my bedroom, and I am sleeping in the spare one. From across the hall, I can hear her snoring. She should have her adenoids out or something. It sounds like someone trying to smoke wet grass through a hookah filled with WD50 motor oil and rocks.

There is this other annoying sound too. It’s coming from inside the soffit on this side of the house. Last Friday, when a different woman that I had met at an over-thirty singles dance at the Knights of Columbus center was sleeping in my bed and I was sleeping over here because I can’t stand being crowded and she kept pushing over into me like a heat seeking missile, I had thought it was a squirrel. But it is not a squirrel. It is a bird; and it is almost dead now.

The name of the woman who is comatose in the other room now is either Sally or Shirley or Cheryl. She was already drunk when she told it to me. But I am pretty sure it is one of these. I guess it could also be Charlene. When I first saw her staggering around on the dance floor with this natty Portuguese man, clutching her Coors Light, I had thought she might be too old for me. I mean, she looked to be practically my own age. But I have always been a sucker for blondes—especially fake blonds—and she had pretty good legs for an old gal too. But mostly I liked her sense of humor. After I had asked her to dance and she was grinding on me to Strokin', taking slugs from another Coors and clinging to my neck to keep vertical, I asked her how long she had been a member of PWP.

“You mean People who just Wanna get Porked. Nah, I go to their dances now and again is all

“I too am not a member of Parents Without Principles,” I shouted above Clarence Carter’s multidirectional stroking song. It took her a second, but then she laughed about twice as long and hard as necessary and tried to grab my ass with the hand she was holding the beer with, pressing the bottle in between my cheeks.

I went to the PWP thing last night, hoping to run into the snuggly lady (I think her name was Rachael or Rebecca) from the weekend prior. We had kind of agreed to try to hook up again. But I guess this was when we were necking at the tables and not after she had come home with me. Still, I was a little disappointed and even chagrined at my having been informally stood up. Aside from her predilection for somnambulant cuddling, she was okay, not too chatty, cute in a weathered sort of way. The next morning we even enjoyed a deep and uninspired kiss—bad breath and all.

I thought about Rachael (or whatever her name was) while I put up my extension ladder, and continued to think about her while I climbed up and stapled a small piece of nylon mesh over the hole that I assumed a squirrel had gotten in.

From just before dawn, for at least an hour, I had heard it poking and scratching away, imagined it gnawing its way into my ceiling, through electrical wires and flex tube piping, wishing I could magically transport it to the bottom of the ocean or the core of the sun or just whack it on the head with something solid. Envisioning my house being chewed though by this rodent was even more annoying than having some semi-stranger sprawled across me, but I stayed where I was until I heard her get up.

Last night though, I thought I might have fallen in love with Rachael a little. It hurt when she didn’t show. Even though I knew it was just a case of only being able to want what you can’t have, it hurt. But, with Sally (or whatever her name is) draped around me like a barbeque apron and her Coors Light half stuck in my ass, I began to get over it.

I have seen a squirrel bore through half-inch plywood like it was toast—aluminum siding too. I figured that, after I had screened shut its entryway, my squirrel would waste no time chewing its way back out. Then I could put something more substantial, like galvanized sheet metal, over the hole. I hung around for half an hour or so waiting for it to do this, and thought about how Rachael had giggled through most of our foreplay, which wasn’t much, and then on through our love making, which also wasn’t much. It struck me as nervous, almost neurotic, laughter; and so I didn’t take it personally. Besides, it added a certain something.

The squirrel never showed. Even after I went inside and banged on the kitchen ceiling with a broom handle, it never appeared. Instead, a plump black starling lighted in a tree branch near the covered hole. The way it tilted its head at a bunch of different obtuse angles made it appear confused. It seemed to be looking at me. Occasionally it would emit a melodious tweet. Then, after ten minutes or so, it gave up and flew away.

Two years ago, a siding installer sealed in a nest of baby birds at the opposite corner of the house. You could hear them twittering and chirping inside when he was done. We both felt pretty bad, but he said, the way siding interlocks, he’d have to pull off the entire strip in order to reopen it. The mother bird, which had left to scavenge for food, returned, and, for an entire weekend, shrieked and flew against the corner of the house, dying of exhaustion while its doomed babies cried. So I had to assume that the bird singing in the tree after Rachael left was the father. And that the mother was trapped inside on her nest.

“I need a glass of water,” said Sally after she had kicked her heels off by the door and I had escorted her up to my bedroom. “Leave the light off.”

I hadn’t been planning to turn the light on. A streetlight below the bedroom window already provided adequate illumination. I fetched her water.

“I need it in a bigger glass,” she said when I returned.

“I can get you more,” I offered.

“No,” she said. “I need to have it in a wider glass.”

I brought her water in a Brunswick Lanes glass I had once won in tenpin league for bowling a six-hundred series.

Sally pulled her upper and lower dentures out at the same time with a sucking pop, and dropped them in my trophy glass. Then, after placing the glass on her nightstand, she padded off to the washroom. In the light from the window, her teeth leered at me, lipless and clenched as though angry or in pain. At midnight PWP had served their “meal.” I remembered saying, “No wonder they can’t find partners. These are the worst sandwiches I have ever eaten. What is this shit they’ve smeared in them? Cat food?” Tiny particles of white bread and raw vegetable swirled around in the water with her teeth.

In the washroom, Sally emitted a loud fart before she began to pee. Then I heard her gargling. Because I was coming down off acid, everything was probably more graphic and sensual than it need have been, and might also explain why I had found PWP's midnight snack so unpalatable. Up until that morning, I had not taken acid in almost thirty years.

All week I had felt bad about the bird, even sleeping in the spare room for no other reason than to follow the progress of its demise. It was probably sitting on eggs, so letting it out and then closing up the hole might have been even worse. That is assuming it would even be willing to leave. And if it did leave, what would replace it? The first night of its incarceration, from about 4:00 AM on, it skittered back and forth the length of the soffit, never making a peep. One peep might have been all that was needed to establish a connection and free me from my inaction.

By Wednesday, all it seemed to want to do was scuffle around in the corner where its nest was, and even this not for very long. Now that it was dying, I no longer wished that it was dead. I wished that it could find a way out of the situation; although not enough to actually do anything. I wondered what was going through its mind.

I told my mom about the bird when I stopped by her house on my way to work this morning. My sister was there too. They both felt I should let it out. They said that if it was a person trapped up there, I would do something. And I said that even if I knew that when the bird died, someone, say over in China, would have to die too for some metaphysical reason, I still probably wouldn’t bother.

They pretended not to believe me.

My mom told me that she had found an old wallet of mine when she was “going through” my “university things.” She gave it to me. It still had my student card in it. My mother saves things that would otherwise be discarded. She still has my General Arts diploma. She still has my butterfly collection from when I was five years old. She said she wasn’t sure how she had acquired my wallet from that era, that maybe it had become separated from my laundry.

At work, in my cubicle, I examined my old wallet, and found, in the same plastic slot as my student card, a hit of three-eyed-toad blotter LSD. I remembered the icon, probably because I hadn’t done a lot of blotter. Windowpane was cleaner and more consistent. Orange Sunshine barrels were my second choice. I remembered the toad blotter as being strong enough, probably around 150 micrograms, but also as being a little tough on the gut, not the cleanest. The toad had turned from green to brown over the years. I didn’t realize I was going to drop it until I felt my throat constrict.

Anyone who has dropped acid more than a few dozen times will probably tell you that it is no fun. Acid is not a fun high. Except for maybe the first few trips, it’s not a high at all; it’s a change. You become someone else. At least I always did. For most of the early seventies, I was me (albeit wasted) and I was this guy called Joe. Where I was pragmatic and lazy and kind of fearless and stupid, Joe was spiritual, honest and anxious. Where I was drawn to escape and death, Joe was drawn to coping and life. Joe could no more imagine suicide than he could imagine eating his left foot—shoe and all. Joe was much more popular with women too. I was always jealous of him for this. Girls that wouldn’t give me the time of day came on to Joe with embarrassing abandon—embarrassing to Joe that is. But Joe never knew how to follow up on their overtures. After they had insinuated themselves into his room, onto his bed, and sat gazing into his hugely dilated pupils, he would talk to them. Or, more accurately, they would talk to him. For unlike me, words did not come easily to Joe. He felt transparent enough without them. Joe did not wear his heart on his sleeve the way I did. Joe, you see, was a listener. Joe listened to people.

I, of course, was not above building on the groundwork Joe laid. I had some nice girlfriends, even some nice wives. They all had trouble figuring out how I could be such a prick.

I sucked on the blotter for a while before swallowing it. My mouth began to water and I wondered if I would eventually throw up. Immediately I felt different. But I knew from experience that this was only a placebo effect, my body preparing, Joe dreaming. I walked to our company’s little kitchenette and made myself a green tea in the microwave.

Stewart, another web developer, was there preparing a Carnation hot chocolate from a foil packet he had purchased from the vending machine. After tearing open and pouring its pre-over-sweetened contents into his large stained Cisco mug, he piled on about four tablespoons of coffee creamer powder. Then he added enough sugar to almost half fill the cup. When the tea kettle began to whistle, he unplugged it and began to stir hot water into his mix. It looked like Compound-30, the mud I used to use to do drywall repairs back when I was a subcontract painter of low-end townhouses and apartments.

“It’s no wonder your bowels are irritable,” I said, watching him stir his sludge. Stewart has irritable bowel syndrome. He also has sleep apnea and some minor personality disorder that makes him think he is a genius and also makes him kind of hard to like. “You do realize you are about to ingest enough aluminum to give five people Alzheimer’s?” I sipped my tea. I was still myself.

“You might have to field a few calls today,” he told me. “Dwight and Belinda both called in sick.”

“Why? Can’t you?”

Stewart took a tentative sip of his concoction and smacked his lips. “Oh, I will, I will. But you might have to handle some of the overflow.” He took a bigger sip, and burped.

Back at my desk, I checked my stocks via Yahoo’s financial page. I have this little lump under my right eye. My doctor said it was nothing to worry about, that it is just a very minor hematoma, probably the result of an injury, of being poked or something. That was a couple of years ago. I check it so often that I can’t say whether it has grown since then or not. That is the way I check my stock portfolio, which is definitely shrinking.

I have not done any useful web development work here in several years. Lately I have not done any work at all. No one seems to care. I always have a few projects in front of me; I just don’t work on them. Eventually they are forgotten or handed off to someone else. I have decided to become a writer.

After checking my stocks, and deleting all my spam, I logged onto my favorite writing forum. People post all sorts of short creative pieces there. We are all looking for feedback, for affirmation, validation—for praise and love—and to have our stupid grammatical errors pointed out as well. A lot of the writers there are young. I try to be nice, helpful and supportive in my critiques. I have only made one person give up so far this month, a talented young girl from Africa. So maybe I am starting to get the hang of it.

Trying to read a story about the puerile antics of some teenage paintballer, Joe begins to notice that he is reading each sentence over several times. The grammar is flawed, the structure awkward. He is trying to come up with something helpful to say about it. But it doesn’t seem to want to say anything to him. The words on the screen are beginning to shift around as though trying to jostle for better positions. He has completely forgotten the previous sentence, all the previous sentences. His hands look very far away on the keyboard.

“Unsurprisingly, the ball bounced,” he reads. He reads it again. What does it mean? He reads it once more backwards, and it seems to make more sense. He begins to laugh. My phone begins to ring. It reverberates in his ears; concerto for phone and buzzing head. Every time it rings the words on the screen stop their pushing and shoving, turn scarlet and vibrate. Joe can’t stop laughing. He can feel the phone ringing in his testicles. It tickles a little.

Stewart strolls into my cubicle cradling and blowing on his mug of paste. Some has spilled down the side of his cup. The smell of it is strong—chocolaty and sickening. Joe feels like his nose is in it, like he is licking it off the side of the cup. He can feel the smooth, hot, glazed ceramic against his tongue.

“Are you going to pick that up?” asks Stewart.

Joe picks up the phone, cradle and all. He resists the urge to tell Stewart that he has just dropped acid, and that he is out of commission. It is all coming back to me—to Joe—now; like riding a bike, like he was never away. When drunk or on downers, you feel inconspicuous, like you blend in, like no one can tell; or, if they could tell, that they would see it as an improvement. With tripping, it is just the opposite: you feel like everyone is wondering what is wrong with you. But they aren’t, and even if you tell them, they won’t believe you. Joe has learned to keep his mouth shut.

Stewart farts. “Very funny,” he says, fanning his fart with some specs that he lifts off my desk, specs that I have never looked at. “Excuse me,” he says as he leaves. A few seconds later, Joe is not certain Stewart was ever there. Then he smells the fart; it is somehow reassuring. The phone rings. Colorful words dance.

Joe lifts the handset to his ear. That is what people do, he believes.

“Hello,” says a voice. “Hello?”

Joe says, “Hello,” back. He feels that he has said too much.

“When I type an email, a lot of the words are underlined in red or green,” says the voice.

He clicks on my email icon. He thinks that is what he is supposed to do. Then he looks at the carpet. The colors in it bleed into interlocking paisley shapes that squirm as though they are alive. There are many shades of red and green. And there are words. “Unsurprisingly, the ball bounced,” he reads. He thinks he is starting to understand.

“I know this is because I have typed something wrong,” says the voice. “But I don’t care. How do I turn it off?”

“I don’t know how to turn it off,” says Joe. He looks at the words in the carpet. He can no longer read them. They are just random letters and symbols now. But they seem important. “What is it like not to care—not to care about words?” He wonders if he has said this out loud.

“You’re a big help,” says the voice.

Joe hangs up the phone and thinks about this until he can’t remember what about it made him feel good. He has to pee. But it can wait. He doesn’t want to bump into anyone.

Joe clicks on the forum post button. He wants to write something, something that will help people understand him. He wants to understand himself. He enters my user id and password, feeling like he is hacking into a stranger’s account. He types the word “My” and then deletes it. It feels wrong. So does the word “I.” He deletes it too after typing it. He can’t even think of a title for his posting. It’s frustrating.

In Microsoft Outlook, Joe begins to scan through old sent messages. For some reason I never delete them. Some of them are years old. He is positioned over one with a subject line that says “Chaos” when my phone rings. The word leaps off the screen towards him. He looks away. But for a while, wherever he looks, he sees “Chaos” shimmying to the ringing of the phone.

He clicks on it. It is an email I sent to my father several years back; around the time I thought I had discovered a connection between the speed of light, the fourth-dimensional curvature of the universe and Hubble’s constant. I thought I had discovered a geometric basis for relativity and could calculate the quantum interval of time. I had also considered that I might be losing my mind.

Joe cuts the body of the text and pastes it into the message box of his posting. He calls it “Chaos”—of course. He has to pee more now. But it can still wait. The text reads as though the author is either very smart or wishes others to believe that he is:

I'm working on encryption again. Any good encryption algorithm will convert bodies of homogeneous (say all zeroes) or highly structured (like text) data into seemingly random data. For all intents and purposes the result is chaos, white noise, meaningless garbage. Values are evenly and haphazardly distributed. The binary image is indistinguishable from that created by flipping a coin zillions of times. The stream can be used anywhere random number streams are required and withstand any probabilistic scrutiny.

And yet, by passing this data through a specific algorithm it is returned to its original highly organized form. Aside from how it was generated, what is the actual difference between this data and that generated by flipping a coin? Is it that it contains hidden orderliness, or only that we know how to find it? It appears given that the ostensibly chaotic can in fact be highly organized. But is it possible that all chaos is illusory, that true meaninglessness does not exist? Or is it perhaps exactly the opposite?

I have written a haiku to express my confusion here.

Chinese sounds funny
Pi must go on forever
I myself will die

He doesn’t understand it, but decides to trust the author. There is a haiku at the bottom though, and the last line reads, “I myself will die.” He doesn’t like this line. He changes “will” to “must.” Then he clicks submit. Then he decides to pee.

The door on the washroom stall is so badly fitted that you can see who, if anyone, is sitting on the toilet as soon as you walk in. Stewart is sitting on it. His pants are in a ball on the floor by his feet. It stinks in there. The room is redolent with a pungent scatological stench.

“Is that you, Chris?” asks Stewart. He knows it is. He is just making conversation. “Will you call my wife?” Stewart carries pens and pencils in his shirt pocket in a blue plastic pocket protector. He uses one to scribble on a yellow sticky notepad that he also keeps in his pocket. Then he holds a tiny slip of yellow paper through the gap in the stall door. “Tell her to bring me a change of clothes.”

Joe is not in the least flustered or surprised. Everything that happens to him is strange. Nothing is stranger than anything else. He accepts Stewart’s note.

The holes in the bottom of the urinal shift around while he is peeing. Out of discretion, he tries to pee directly into one near the middle, so there will not be a splashing noise. It is a moving target.

“I thought it was a fart,” explains Stewart.

Walking back to my desk, Joe remembers the bird trapped in my soffit, and is seized with a surge of guilt bordering on panic. It is like he is the one trapped in the soffit. He remembers my reading somewhere that birds ferry our souls away when we die. The best way to handle a panic attack is to not let it frighten you; that is to say, to not let fear itself frighten you. Examine it objectively. Know that it will pass. It passes.

Back at my desk Joe refreshes the forum window. Already, he has five responses. He tries to concentrate on reading them. The first is from an English Lit. major who has stopped sniffing glue. He likes it! He says that it pisses in the face of convention, and likens it to an upside down urinal. He thinks that I need to give it motion though, to subjectively expound on it a little. Joe waits for another surge of panic to pass.

The second is from a Batman aficionado who writes, “You kind of lost me on this one, Chris.” Joe feels another surge of guilt. He doesn’t like that he has made someone feel lost.

The third writes something even more convoluted than his posting. Joe wonders if he has messed him up too.

The fourth says that it would be better if he had used some word other than just repeating “must” in the last line of the haiku. Joe starts to feel a little paranoid, like he has been found tampering with something that does not belong to him.

The fifth says that it makes her think of something her physics teacher might have written on the chalk board, but then supposes that it might have some merit as, “adequate mind shake material.” Joe feels better.

Joe notices that he is clutching a yellow sticky note in his right hand. Then he remembers Stewart sitting on the toilet waiting for fresh pants. It seems like long ago, another era. Although he does not feel like talking on the phone, he punches in the number. A woman picks up.

“Stewart needs clean pants,” he says.

“Oh dear!” says the woman.

“He thought it was a fart,” he explains. Then he hangs up.

The trip does not last as long as I expected it to. The peak runs only a few hours. Crashing takes longer. The transition from Joe back to me is more stressful than going the other way, probably because it is so much more gradual, and because we do not enjoy sharing the same personality.

We did not enjoy sharing the same personality. But, eventually, I took over—again. And now, here I am, lying in the middle of the queen sized bed in my spare bedroom, listening to Sally snore, and to the death throe flutters of the bird. In the dark I can still see ghoulish images writhing on the walls and ceilings. But they don’t interest me. They are my creations.

We did not have sex. Sally came back from farting and peeing and gargling in the washroom, and pulled her short black dress over her head, laying it carefully on my chair, on top of my clothes. She was not wearing underwear. The dim light from the window made her hair look white, even her narrow tangled swath of pubic hair. Her toothless condition made her look both young and old. I studied her with my eyes open while she kissed me. Her kisses tasted like beer and Listerine. Her gums were soft and yielding, smooth and faceless. Her features began to take on those of Rachael of the weekend prior. Then she looked like my second wife, my first, an old girlfriend, another. I eased her down onto the bed. On her back she had no shape. Her sparse, loose flesh seemed to slough down into the pillow-top mattress, leaving behind only dry skin stretched across bone—like some starving, dehydrated, featherless bird.

“Let me do everything,” I said. “Let me do all the work.” I smoothed my hand down her chest. Her breasts had parted. I did not touch her nipples. I only massaged her skin, with long gentle strokes. I lay my ear against her sternum, and listened for her heart. At first I couldn’t find it and became afraid. I listened more closely, reminding myself not to overreact, that Joe still had some influence over me. Then I found it. Above the sound of air wheezing in and out of her lungs, I found its rhythm. It was slower than I had expected. When she began to snore, I folded some blankets over her.

Joe is nearly gone now, probably for good. The bird is almost dead. Or perhaps it is, now. It is time that it was stirring, but I don’t hear anything. I wonder if its babies will hatch; or if they will sense its death and join it there. I wonder if Sally will stay for a cup of coffee when she gets up, or if she will just make her excuses and flee. I wonder who will carry my soul away.

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