Birdmen

Mush. Mush. Mush. My feet cut into the soft ground with each step. They leave behind footprints gasping with pools of muddy water like blood leaving a wound. As my feet glide swiftly above the ground they make a sifting noise as they brush along the grass. Green. A green that is both grayer and greener on a wet and gray day like this. Dad died yesterday, and the path seemed so different knowing that he will no longer walk this path. He had lived alone. His house stands sovereign in a clearing surrounded by lush forests and green hills. A very calm area, with wind and sound that flowed much like he does. Did. It's funny. Today I feel a lot like him somehow. What does it mean to feel like someone? You can never live in any body but your own. Any skin but your own. But I’ve always been able to feel like someone else. Sometimes I even think with the voices of other people. And sometimes I feel like I carry their faces, their being inside of my own. Maybe that’s why I feel like him. Every time we spoke I got the feeling that he had done the same. Felt the same. There’s his house all modest-like. Modest in an elegant and sovereign manner, like a roaming Franciscan under the solemn vow of poverty reciting a silent prayer. The house always looks as if it will be gone if I turn my back on it but a moment. Brown, with white windows. Surrounded by grass and shrubbery and wildflowers and weeds and dandelions and green and green and green. The sky is very gray today, overcast with clouds. It just got done raining today. Maybe it’ll rain some more. Green is greener on gray days. Or I don’t know, maybe—bluer? Especially when it's all wet like this. Sad but in a somber, almost happy kinda way. Almost. Which pocket did I put the key in? Pants pocket? No. Left Jacket pocket? No. Right? Found it. The key slips in easy, but the door’s always been a tight fit. Gotta push real hard. Shoes. All three pairs he'd owned, lined up by the entrance both messy and tidy all at once. Books lying everywhere from the entrance to his bedroom winding from one end to the other like a breadcrumb trail designed to entice an old bookworm. That old-man-rug in the entranceway and the bigger old-man-rug in the living room. Brown. Lot’s of hardwood. He does love that old fashioned look. Did. Burgundy. Lots of old books in a color not too dissimilar to dried blood, as if to signify that the writers are long dead. Green. He had loads and loads of plants all healthy and well taken care of. More brown. Bookshelves everywhere in the house, both messy and tidy all at once. In sum: disorderly order.

Upstairs in the room with the huge windows he keeps his birds. I can hear them now. Up the dark wood stairs with their carpet runners with their archaic patterns takes you to the largest room in the whole of the house. Such a noisy room. Chirp. Tweet. Chirp. It is as if they’re carrying out some huge debate or important discussion so sophisticated that it flies right over my head. A conversation, the results of which could have weighty consequences. Like the British Parliament or the Roman Senate. Only, in the language of birds. Tweets translated into chirps and chirps into cooing and back down the chain that erupts into another sonic surge following some big misunderstanding. Can birds have misunderstandings? And more interestingly, can they discuss something with weighty consequences? It seems counter to the nature of birds. Birds, those flighty and light beings would never, could never discuss the weighty. It's something they know nothing of. The logic of the bird is not arborescent like that of the land animal, and therefore they’d never entrench themselves by debating, I think. I decide that this bickering is all an effect of being landlocked, caged birds.

I wish I could understand the languages of birds. A language and mode of thought free of groundedness. The language of flight. When I was a boy I could talk to birds. Not just birds either, but the entire chorus of voices of the animals of the forests of nature. One summer when I was eight I found a frog in a creek not too far from the family home. It didn’t flee, hopping right up to me landing at my feet.

“Nice day for a swim.” says Sir Frog. It is indeed a nice day for a swim.

“It sure is.” says I.

“Oh no, no, no I can’t understand you like that. You gotta croak and ribbit. Speak my language a bit. How could we talk if you don’t speak my language and I didn’t speak yours? Only way to talk is for us to speak each other's language.”

I can’t argue with the unassailable logic of Sir Frog. Let’s see, how do you conjugate that? Is it croak croak ribbit croak? The last deeper than the first two? I think so.

“Croak croak ribbit croak?”

“You askin’ me or tellin’ me? Besides, you’ve got a terrible accent. You humans’ve always got a terrible accent. But you speakin the truth and we see eye to eye. Tis a beautiful day ‘specially for a swim. Care to join me?"

The water is cool but not unpleasant, and even rather refreshing on such a warm summer day. The hotness and kinetic nature thereof juxtaposed against my melancholy. When one is melancholy, it is rather nice to bathe. When one is melancholy, it is rather nice to wallow in the mud and the water that is cool and dark and low. Right now I could have no better company than Sir Frog. When one is melancholy, I’ve come to find, one attracts the melancholy, who in between depressive episodes will hop to you like frogs with their clammy hands and moist eyes that drip tears with every blink. When one is melancholy it is nice to have other frogs with whom to wallow on the bottom basin of the creek on hot, muggy summer days that God sets against you to juxtapose your melancholy though you have enough clamminess and enough tears of your own.

But my boyish mind knows nothing of these concepts, for they fly too far above me who is in the mud in the creek. They fly in the future, in the now clothed in with words I’d think in the tomorrow. All I know of are creeks and shrubbery and frogs and dogs and cats and mom and dad and the family home and school. And even then I was newly initiated to the language and the muddy-melancholy logic of Sir Frog.

It's fun to play in the mud. It’s fun to play like this in the shallowness of a creek. Sir Frog is swimming gracefully dartin to and fro making his way toward the deeper regions. He’s coming back toward me in that muddy water. Brown in brown topped with the bright reflection of the sun. He gets out shiny and wet. He sits next to me in the mud, shiny and wet. Brown on brown sparkling with the bright reflection of the sun.

“Yesterday, I done lost my babies. Eaten up, along the bank by some fish. Misses Frog done hopped off somewhere. Must be the grief. But I tell you we go through the same song and dance every year. Some years none survive and some, if The Creek shall bless us a few will make it. The Creek giveth I say unto her every year, but she leaves just as she does anyhow. I stay here and wallow and croak and eat just as I do anyhow just as I am sure she does wheresoever she may be. And my eyes are eternally wet with tears but I say I will never and never have despaired of life. And sometimes, in staying here The Creek blesses me with the gift of a froglet that miraculously escapes the vicissitudes incident upon the lives of we humble creek dwellers.”

“Ribbit croak ribbit croak croak.” says I.

“Bodies of water, flowing like they do tend to bring us together. We who understand each other that is.” replies Sir Frog.

Dad’s walking along calling out my name. He was never too far to begin with when I went off as I did. He comes strutting along flowing like he does except only draggin that long face he’s had since almost 2 weeks ago. He’s looking at me half in the water half in the mud and confusion paints his face and washes over, then frustration paints his face and washes over, ending with calm laughter. He is a man that rarely gets angry. And though I’d never heard my dad speak the language of Sir Frog he sits beside me as if he were one in the mud and in the water that is cool and dark and low. And he sits beside me and Sir Frog the way construction workers sit together during a lunchbreak on a hard-workin-day with a hard-workin-sun and we were three. Basking. Three frogs on the bank of a creek. Dad has always done that. He always has a special way of becoming others. Getting low or high, becoming smaller or larger, louder or quieter to reach you, to be you. It was never a mocking or a cheap imitation, but an acknowledgement and an amplification of the frog, the bird, the child, the woman, the elderly, the happy, the sad in himself. And so it was with me the frog-boy, where he had become the frog-man.

“Your old man?” asks Sir Frog.

“Ribbit.” says I in the affirmative.

“What’s he saying?” asks Dad.

“He was asking if you were my dad,” says I, “and I told him yes.”

“Where’s his Miss Frog?” asks Sir Frog.

“Ribbit ribbit croak ribbit, ribbit ribbit croak croak.”

“Ah. Then me and him are the same.”

It’s been five minutes of us like this. Me talking to Sir Frog and Sir Frog to me. Me talking to Dad and Dad to me. I translating between the two of them much like how I do sometimes for Mom and Dad. It makes me think of Mom and how much I miss her. She called often but I don't miss her any less. She hadn’t been home for a little over two weeks. She went to stay with Grandma when I was supposed to have a sister but didn’t. When Mom and Dad had “lost the baby.” I told Dad about how much I missed mom and then we were talking about mom. At this point Sir Frog begins to swim away. Perhaps he understands us after all. I often feel like a translator between Mom and Dad. Like the connection between them, as if I was born and then they met each other after. Mom and Dad were very different anyhow so maybe they needed me to be a translator. Dad flowed and took things as they came. He rarely planned too far ahead, just ebbing and flowing. Mom was more jagged, more stern, more steady. She liked to plan far in the future and she was always the one to get angry. Both of them were kinda like water: up and down. Just in different ways.

When Mom calls the house from Grandma’s she speaks to dad for a very long time. Yet still, when I talk to her she has much more for me to tell Dad. Much more for me to say to him on her behalf. Dad in turn has things he says to me throughout the day that I know now he hopes I’ll convey to Mom. The same thing sometimes happens even when we are under the same roof. It is similar, I think, to when I had to learn the lesson of faking expressions that I know people expect. Sometimes I feel like the fake expressions of both my parents, and get confused on the causal order. Like the question of the chicken or the egg.

The calls of birds, that had become the call of the forest surrounding the creek, become again the sound of the room. Feeding the birds takes such a long time. I’m not sure why dad has so many. Nor why he only took on birds with broken wings or other such defects. I followed the instructions carefully. Feeding each one the exact amount specified. Letting them out of their cages for a little while to perch on the branches of the fake trees (and even the small real tree) he had in that room just for them. The only thing I didn’t do was let them onto my shoulder like he liked to do.

After locking the front door I leave on the path I had come. It has gotten quite dark so I’m using the flashlight on my phone to illuminate the path that descends windingly down the hill and into the woods. With each step I get deeper and deeper and the path gets darker and darker. The light from my phone is squeezed into an ever thinner ever dimmer ray by a thick darkness till the ray is gone and the path is pitch. Overhead, where there once was an evening sky slowly creeping toward the night with the glow of the dying embers of the sun, came suddenly the bright full moon out of season. It gives the impression of an eternal moon. The kind that haunts your dreams, stuck as if Hati had chased it too fast and dropped dead of exhaustion. Burned into the night sky like the rays of the sun through a magnifying glass burned into a dark, dead maple leaf. I am lost. Yet, I am in a familiar scene. I know that somewhere my Dad is about to notice me missing and will begin to look for me yelling my name into the dark wood but I do not know it just yet.

I had long since lost the path in the thick darkness of the wood. I heard a rustling in all directions as the wind ran her spectral hands through the leaves howling and whistling and whispering all ghostlike. All direction had collapsed like a crushed can into a binary of only the sky and jet black. I stepped frantically back, forth , side to side crunching leaves and twigs underfoot like bones in the jaws of a wolfpack. My left foot came up against a thick root and I had lost the ground underneath me, finding it again when it crashed against my body. Jumping back to my feet as fast as I could my hands fumbling and faltering under the weight of my body, left leg fettered to something vine-like taking me down again. And the wind, who had quieted down enough to humiliate me with the stark sound of my struggle in the bushes that had cut me on cheek elbow and knee cracking dry and naked against the dead of silence, had picked up again by the time I had risen to my feet. But now the forest was alive and dead all at once with wind howling with the voice of the netherworld. And that voice was stolen by a ghost high up in the trees only transformed into a screech befitting a banshee. I stood paralyzed unable to pinpoint its location; the nothingness spinning around me, and my chest unable to get a proper breath in. And behind my ears I hear the beating of a red drum completing the song of the netherworld. The rustling came closer like Mom's footsteps in the hall approaching my room when I knew should be sleeping, ending right above my head instead of under the door. And I heard a screech scratch against my ears and nearly broke my neck to look skyward squinting and harkening trying to apprehend the spectral form. And no sooner than looking back do I see the apparition craft its body out of the rays of the moon like a deadly spider weaving with its pale silk. Its face two white circles on different planes converging on a corner with a small sharp beak, and it is cloaked in a cape made of twilight both beautiful and frightening. And as it rapidly vanishes and reappears in the shadows of branches I notice that it is descending upon me. I duck as it swoops and swooshes above my head. I hear it perch back up on a nearby tree after I take a brave peak as it climbs back up gracefully on the wind. It screeches again and readies itself for another dive, but this time I stand tall head tilted glancing toward it. Finding some semblance of courage I took a full, deep breath and returned its screech. I swear I heard the thing shudder.

I had done nothing to stop it and it's beginning its descent. It stops short however snapping sharply onto the branch of a tree, draped elegantly in the luminescence of the full moon. It is no more than a barn owl and to it I am no more than a threat, or prey.

"Oh so you speak my tongue! By The Wind! It is harder to eat prey that speaks back."

I screech again voicing the full intent of my soul. Giving the most tearful plea for a pardon ever given by a boy to an owl in the history of pleas for pardons given by boys to owls who wished them harm.

"A pretty screech, for a human." says Lady Owl "But I see no reason why I shouldn't eat you. Or well, you're too big for eating. I see no reason I shouldn't claw out an eye or leave some deep wounds elsewhere."

I give yet another tearful screech at the top of the lungs.

"Running away from home? Lost in my woods in my hour? Family? Why that doesn't change a thing. If anything, I should give you a lesson and teach you not to quarrel with your mother or her sacred wisdom when you have not her wings. For an owlet who falls from the nest without first having been blessed by The Wind and The Sacred Flight must die or suffer a lesson never forgotten. By The Wind! I will give you this practical lesson in wisdom, for wisdom is as cruel as it is old. I'd already given you two screeches of warning. I will give unto you as much pity as I give unto the rats, and I will give unto you The Law of The Wind. For The Wind Giveth when It scatters the seeds unto the surface of the Earth, and taketh away when It lays waste to fields and to trees in a storm."

Just as she begins to swoop toward me I hear dad calling out my name. She is deterred and flees. Dad's flashlight blinds me and I run toward that blinding light. Later on in a book somewhere, I had discovered that barn owls are actually rather timid creatures. Never again did I run away at night. I had learned only to do so by day.

I make it to my car and the realization shakes me from memory. Yet I find myself again on its long obscure roads on this drive home that reminds me of the drives home from the hospital. Hospitals. Such dreary non-places. The sick. Such dreary non-people. Unless, of course, you or someone you know happens to be one of them. Dad had first gotten sick over a year ago. They'd found a tumor in his brain. Not much they could do. The headlights of cars driving by had that same bright sickening white as the hospital lights. Only without the sickening buzzing noise they made when the hospital room gets quiet. When Dad is too tired to speak and we; me, Mom, and Sis are too afraid to speak. Mom is too afraid to look at Sis, Sis to afraid to look at me, and I fix my gaze onto the floor. The walls. The ceiling. Whites, pastel pinks, mint greens, pale piss yellow. Colors that I feel could only make one more sick. The machinery with all its wires and buttons and beeps. In a way it was a little ironic I suppose. Dad had worked for 30 years as a software engineer for medical technology. Sometimes he even jokes about this irony. When he did have the energy to joke at least. Mom didn't like that kinda joking. I laughed with Dad though. For him on some occasions. In situations like this I think about the space between us. I wonder again why it was Mom and Dad got divorced in the first place. I wonder again why I didn't have a sister than and was only given one later. Then I'm reminded of that painful distance; I don't even have memories of those times in the family home. I was away at school. Those stories are locked somewhere deep in the heads and perspectives of Mom, Sis, and third whom, along with his perspective and memory, would soon vanish into the open roads of time. I walk into the front door of my home greeted by a family of my own. But I am still at the hospital. I am again reminded of that painful distance I felt watching Dad on the bed as Sis held his hand. Pen in hand at my desk I can only see the clipboard and pen of the doctor. That non-person who spoke non-words to us communicating neither words of hope or hopelessness. Symbols of pure waiting. Its all waiting. At the sink getting ready for bed I'm still trapped in yesterday. Looking at myself in the mirror I see Dad and Mom. The dead and the not yet dead. I see his face, that was always a little chubby, sick in my slimness. I see his eyes, always bright and darting, sick in the tiredness of my eyes that haven't slept in 2 days. Dad's hair is all gone. It was taken away, for as I had learned in church that is what The Lord is wont to do, and as I had learned in the hospital that is what chemotherapy is wont to do. He sits propped up by pillows, quiet as ever (he was never too talkative anyway). When that silence fell upon us again like a curtain threatening to separate us I had spoke:

"Dad, do you remember how we sat on the bank of the creek talking to that frog?"

He nods, "You were the one talking to it." he whispers.

We talk and talk. I talk. Dad hears stories he hasn't thought of in what I can only assume has been years, Sis and Mom hear stories they'd only heard from Dad's mouth. Squirrels, geese, ducks, and of course Sir Frog and Lady Owl. At the end Dad smiles faintly and says, "Always imaginative. I'm tired. Gonna take a nap." He never woke up. The Lord taketh away, and though I no longer believe in him he takes anyway.

-

I had a terrible nightmare last night. A dream really. Only, something about it chills me to the bone. I'm in the bird room with the big window and there's the bright pale light of the morning shining through only more ethereal. All the cages are open. The birds are all floating perched on some invisible form that shifts one way for about 2 meters then the other way. The birds are all silent, but I hear whistling that imitates bird calls. I woke up. That dream still haunts me now as I open all the cages as if for the first time. I put two little ones on my left shoulder and two others on my right shoulder and let one perch itself on my right arm. The others I perch onto the branches of the little tree. I begin to pace the floor like I'd seen Dad do in his retired years. I begin to whistle as I pace back in forth just as I'd heard Dad do in his retirement years. I let a few tears drop from my eyes, something I'd rarely see Dad ever do in all his years. I whistle and imitate the voices of the birds. For the first time in years I speak the language of birds. I remember all the times my Dad asked me to retell the story of Lady Owl. He'd always say he wished he could fly and speak the language of birds. Pacing the floor and whistling to the birds I can't understand a word they're saying. I really feel old for the first time. I feel like Dad for the last time.