The Birdwatchers

Three months into Ava’s new job, and she has never once gone home on time. It bothered her at first. She felt that she was losing valuable free time, that her boss was disappointed at her sluggish pace, that her life had simply become a cycle of sleep, eat, work, sleep, eat, work with no time for her to socialize or to engage with her hobbies. She used to knit and play the ukulele, but now she has moved to the city and taken a high paying job and all she can do is work.

As the weeks stretched into months, her long hours bothered her less and less. She accepted that a social life was something you had in college and relinquished in your twenties in exchange for a career. Her boss, a skinny old man named Joel, didn’t care how long she stayed as long as the work got done, even if it meant she got paid one or two hours of overtime a day (another benefit to staying late.)

Ava is an executive assistant, and the bulk of her job is replying to emails on Joel’s behalf. Most are about scheduling meetings, some are colleagues wanting his opinion on industry goings-on, and still others are poor hopefuls trying to get his eyes on their work. Ava deletes any email that falls in that last category. If they want Joel’s attention, they’ll have to get a job just like she did.

Of the other two categories of email, Ava is almost always replying to another assistant. That’s how the business works, the executive stays in his office and stares out over the city, and then in the bullpen the assistants type away at their computers, relinquishing their own identity for ten hours a day to become a living, pulsating extension of their boss, speaking in his voice and organizing his life, joking and bonding with his friends who are in turn are speaking by use of the same human mouthpiece.

Currently it is four past seven, more than an hour after Ava was supposed to leave, and she is scheduling a meeting for Joel to talk with a studio head about one of his new writer clients.

How is Tuesday at 11? Ava asks. She does not expect the studio head to accept this. The unspoken industry standard is to not even consider reaching an agreement until at least the third proposed meeting time. Sure enough, he counters with Wednesday at 2. After going back and forth for nearly fifteen minutes and at least 10 emails, they finally agree on Friday at 12:30.

And with that, Ava’s stack of emails has reached its daily terminus. By the time she returns tomorrow morning there will be another mountain to sort through, but for now she can close down her computer and trek home. She is about to log out of the computer when something catches her eye.

The assistant she had just been in correspondence with signed his name at the end of every email. Most assistants remain anonymous, leaving their bosses name and address and embracing their role as a partially autonomous organ. Named assistants not unheard of, but those who do tend to not last very long in the job. Ava does not know why, nor in truth has she been an assistant long enough to verify. Despite convention, there, at the bottom of the email, is the name of Ava’s comrade: Colin Simplicio.

Ava doubts that it is her Colin. They haven’t spoken in more than a decade, but based on how he was in middle school it seems unlikely that they would have ended up in the same business, in the same city. Colin and Ava were both troublemakers, but they were troublemakers of a different sort. Ava broke the rules because she was too clever for her own good. The small town they grew up in was too boring for her, so when she reached puberty she acted out to prove herself better than it. Her parents, a doctor and a lawyer, were wise enough to move her to a better school after she was picked up by the cops. There Ava found a place more suited to her intelligence and, sufficiently challenged by schoolwork, remained on the right side of the law for the rest of her young life.

Colin’s parents were mean drunks, and so he also wanted to be a mean drunk. He acted out because he was taught to be cruel and stupid, or at least that’s what Ava’s therapist told her during her transition to her new school, when she asked why she couldn’t see Colin anymore. He stayed at their old school and the last time she saw him was at a party years later, when everyone was home after freshman year of college. He was there to sell coke to college kids. She bought some from him, but besides that they did not speak.

The thought of sending Colin Simplicio an email to confirm his identity crosses her mind, but she throws it out almost immediately. It’s certainly a coincidence. Colin would never get this job. He’s probably still selling drugs to eighteen year olds. She logs out of the computer and slings her bag over her shoulder.

“Joel, I’m going home.”

“Alright, see you tomorrow.” Joel is in his office with the door closed. He always stays at the office later than Ava does, though she can all but confirm that he never does any work. She leaves the office and presses ‘down’ on the elevator.

Ava pays 30 dollars a month to park in the garage underneath the office building. It would be free to park on the street, and for the first few weeks she did, leaving her car on a side street a few blocks away. There is a homeless man who lived on her route and every day she passed him Ava would give him five dollars out of her wallet. After her first month she had a phone call with her father, and he pointed out that parking on the street was costing her five dollars a day, five days a week, which was more than 100 dollars a month. She’d be saving money if she sprung for the parking garage. Now Ava has the elevator let her out at the basement rather than the lobby, and she only sees the homeless man from the window of her car as she drives past. She wonders if she would recognize Colin if he was homeless. She hardly recognized him when he sold her cocaine, and that was more than half a decade ago. As she thinks she realizes that she probably wouldn’t. More than likely she would just hand him a small bill and keep walking. On the other hand, he might not recognize her either, grown up with her hair cut short, dressed up in her work clothes.

The elevator stops and the lattice of Ava’s thoughts shatter. She gets her mind back on track: Home, Dinner, Sleep. Wake up in the morning. Go to work. Repeat. She is barely done formatting herself into that mantra when she realizes the elevator doors have not opened. The light-up buttons on the side panel flicker between ‘lobby’ and ‘garage,’ like the elevator is unsure of which floor it is on.

“Hello?” Ava calls out, but there is no response. Maybe the elevator is stuck in between floors. She reaches to press the emergency button but before she can the door slides open, smooth as butter, to reveal the parking garage. Confusion plays in her brain for a moment before she casts it aside. Nothing to worry about. An electrical issue, perhaps.

“Ava? Is that you?”

The voice comes from the shadowy depths of the parking garage, perhaps twenty yards from Ava and nestled between two cars, as a person would be if they had just noticed her right as they were about to drive away. She peers into the dark and can just about perceive a human shape where the voice came from. The edges of the shape flicker and twist and Ava almost thinks she’s imagining it, that the voice is coming from the inside of the car or somewhere else.

“Ava, it’s Colin.”

It can’t be. Why would he be in her parking garage? Even if he was in the city, even if by some chance he was in the same business as her, he couldn’t possibly be working in the same building.

“You know, Colin from middle school?”

Colin steps out from the shadows between the cars, the shape of him solidifying into a human being. Ava was wrong, she does recognize him. Last time she saw him he had long wavy hair like the kind that was popular when they were kids, but now it is short and neat and professional. He has a little stubble, and thick rimmed glasses, and if pressed she would be unable to name even a single physical trait that she recognizes from when they were friends. All the same, she has no doubt that it is him.

“Ava? Hello?”

She chokes back her apprehension enough to adopt a measure of composure and say, “Colin Simplicio? This is a surprise..”

“Yeah,” he says. “I live here now.

“How’d that happen? Last I saw you, you were. You were.”

“Hah, yeah. That's a long story. What are you doing out here?” Colin betrays no discomfort as he pivots the direction of the conversation away from himself. His expression is so placid as to feel almost rehearsed.

“I’m Joel Caro’s assistant at Meridian Entertainment.”

“No way. I think we were emailing each other earlier.”

“You’re with Atomica?”

“I got the job a few weeks ago.”

“Well, pro tip, don’t put your own name at the end of an email when you’re speaking for your boss.” Ava says this with a friendly grin, hoping that her old friend doesn’t take offense. “Don’t ask me why! People who sign their names don’t usually last long.”

Colin has been smiling ever since he emerged from the shadows, and now his smile widens and opens and he laughs just like he did when he was young. “That sounds like superstition to me.”

“I swear it’s true.”

“How can you tell?”

“I- I don’t know, I just can. You know.”

“Like superstition?”

Ava’s parents pay for bimonthly therapy sessions to help her manage her anxiety. Ever since high school, Ava has struggled with executive dysfunction and infrequent panic attacks and she overcomes them with low dosage medication and long standing relationship with Doctor Amelia Reed. In their sessions Doctor Reed helps Ava identify unhealthy coping mechanisms so she can eliminate them using mindfulness techniques. One of the most prevalent indicators of her defect (though she is told repeatedly that she shouldn’t think of it as that) is her tendency to invent rules in her life and career. In college she would avoid walking on brick for fear that it would cause her to flunk out. After graduating, she would avoid drinking milk out of concern that it would dull her edge and prevent her from getting a job. In recent months she has prided herself on her ability to catch these small errors and correct them, and the fact that this one has slipped her by afflicts her with the troubling thought that her machinery has broken down, that she can no longer trust her senses in the same way she could mere moments ago.

“I guess,” says Ava, trying her best to contain her insecurity. “Ha ha.”

If Colin notices anything his friendly countenance does not betray it. “There’s nothing wrong with being superstitious,” he says. “Say, is there any way you can give me a ride? I live a few miles north and I don’t feel like walking.”

Ava is about to agree but she catches herself before the words can clear her throat. “Don’t you have a car? What are you doing in the parking garage?”

“My boss wanted me to get something from his car before he went. Come on, your car is right here.”

Sure enough her car is right there, one of the ones that Colin had emerged from between. Did she park there? She is almost sure she didn’t. In fact, she is beginning to notice that the parking garage doesn’t look like it used to. It’s a different garage than usual, the elevator is in the wrong place and there are too many parking spots. “What is this?” she says.

“What do you mean?” Colin is still smiling, more like a photograph of a model on a billboard than a real person.

“This isn’t- I don’t know-” Ava turns back to the elevator but is stopped in her tracks. The door is not there anymore. Just flat concrete. She turns back to Colin. “Who are you?”

What speaks next does not come from Colin. It comes from somewhere behind him, in between the thing that is not her car and whatever is next to it. It’s baritone voice rumbles and crackles like an old radio straining to be heard over a subway train. Ava is locked in place as it speaks, but by her own fear or by some external force she does not know.

“Poor thing,” It says. Then, to something behind it: “I didn’t mean to scare it.”

“What’s its name?” says the something behind it, in the same crackling hum but a few octaves higher in pitch. Colin is still smiling at Ava, but now his edges are blurring into the darkness behind him, like a bubble of colored paint straining out of a vat of pitch. The dark has a shape but Ava can’t quite make it out. It seems to change shape but it doesn't seem to move, and sometimes she thinks she sees human features flicker in and out on either side of Colin. An eye here, a mouth there. She is reminded of the type of tumor that grows hair and teeth inside.

“Ava,” The first thing says, and it pronounces it like Ay-Vah, the syllables unfamiliar on whatever passes for its tongue. “That is the name it calls itself. Every day it migrates from the tower above us to a smaller mound right about-” -Ava watches the darkness behind Colin pulse briefly- “-There.”

“Please let me go,” Ava pleads. She listens to true crime podcasts on her way to work. Serial killers are her favorite to listen to. The podcasts have not had a beneficent effect on Ava. She lives in constant suspicion that someone is going to snatch her, that it is only a matter of time before she finds herself tied up in a trunk belonging to the next Ted Bundy. To her fear-addled brain, that is what is happening to her now.

“I won’t tell anyone about you. I’ll do anything you want. Just please don’t kill me.” She fights back tears, still unable to move.

“What is it saying?” the thing with the higher voice asks.

“Oh, it can’t actually speak,” replies the baritone. “Or at least, it doesn’t know what it’s saying. It’s a mimic. Sometimes they hear things we say and then they chatter back and forth to each other. See, watch:”

For the rest of her life, Ava will be trying to remember the exact sound that the baritone thing made at her that day. It is pure noise at first listen but as it goes on she notices it folding in on itself , changing tone a thousand times in a moment, words and meanings filling her skull so rapidly that she cannot hope to comprehend even a single one. The noise is so loud that the specter of Colin shakes and flickers as it passes through him, so loud that the concrete of the false parking garage buckles and bends. She can withstand the onslaught for four seconds before she blacks out.

When she regains feeling she is curled up on her side and she is babbling, trying as hard as she can to replicate the sound the thing made. “Hkkk,” she says, and then she screams, and then she tries to combine the two. She says profound things about culture, politics, and science without comprehending a word, and then she tries to say the profound thing faster and louder. She screams again. None of it compares.

“See?” says the baritoned thing. “Just a mimic. Not a sentient thing like you or I.” Ava feels a gentle force lift her off the ground and set her back on her feet, then something cold and damp like a thick fog pats her cheek.

“What do we do with it?”

“It is uninjured, it’s still young. Not ready for us yet.”

“Can I keep it?”

“Livestock do not make good pets. We will return it to its mound.”

Ava is pulled forward, her feet dragging on the floor, toward the source of the voices. She passes the Colin-shaped thing and it smiles at her, and then it waves, and then it vanishes. She struggles against the pull, but she is still rattled from the profound noise. Not that it would have made a difference. She is going where the thing wants her to go.

She cannot pinpoint the moment she transitioned from the parking garage to what came next, but after some indeterminate amount of soupy time she finds herself suspended in an infinite space, devoid of sights or sounds or smells but pungent with sensation. Things move around her, the same genus of the ones that trapped her. Hundreds of them, milling and swarming, as if workers in a factory or a farm. She becomes aware of a powerful sense of movement, and suddenly she opens her eyes and realizes where she is: Just below ground, at the bottom of the city, a massive pocket network of the unseen and unheard. It sprawls out into the suburbs, pulsating and strong, a foul amalgam of moving parts that leeches off the city like a parasite, taking energy from the homes and businesses, the streets and the sidewalks. Detritus flowing in rivers and pools, a sewer of history.

She sees things, as she is shunted through the sidewalk place. She sees starlets in their prime, known and beloved nationwide and ten years later forgotten. Politicians with designs on last power or a better world, abandoned and left to the soup. Loan sharks and entrepreneurs, activists and comedians, mobsters and prophets, the entire history of a city lapped up and swallowed. A century or so ago, there was nothing here. Another century down the road and there will be nothing again. The survivors will forget. The sidewalk place will recede, it’s mission complete.

And then true, corporeal sensation rushes back to her and she is covered in wet dirt. She spits, rises, and vomits. When she has finished, she opens her eyes and takes in her surroundings.

She is on the front lawn of her apartment complex. Her car is parked on the street in front of her. The sprinklers are running.

The things deposited her right next to the sidewalk, just underneath the lawn. There is an outline of her indented half an inch into the soil, haloed in bright green grass. She breathes. Vomits again. She vomits until all that’s left is phlegm and bile.

The next morning, Ava calls Joel and quits. She gives no notice, and he screams insults at her until she hangs up. She doesn't know what her next move is. Hers is not an industry that is easy to re enter once you leave.

Next, she combs social media for Colin. He does not have an Instagram or a Twitter. All she can find is his old Facebook page. It hasn’t been updated since high school.

In the coming months, as rent and food delivery eat away at her savings and the missed calls from her parents become more frequent and more frantic, Ava finds herself walking down into the basement of her building. There is a coin laundry there, and a small parking garage. She stands a few steps down on the stairs, so that half her body is above the ground and half below. She waits there as the fear instinct builds in the back of her skull, and when it becomes too much to bear she runs, full sprint, back to the safety of her bed.