I am the birdman, I tell the children gathered on the deck of the ship, and these are my birds. I haven’t always been the birdman, I say. Before the birds I worked with dogs and I was the dogman; before dogs, it was rabbits, and I was the rabbitman; before the rabbits, mice. . .
I’m tired of revealing myself in careful increments, descending that spiral staircase again and again. I want to appear like lightning. I want children, women, counting off — one one-hundred, two one-hundred — and trembling when I finally make my noise. The interval between flash and rumble will be terrible, a lifetime.
My birds are a little shy, I say. Come, please come closer so they can see your lovely smiles.
The children step forward. Their faces remind me of expensive bicycles left unlocked. You have to make concessions with children. You want to startle more than you bore, but you don’t want to mar them. First rule of working with children: do not mar. I have trouble gauging my effect on them. At times I’m tempted to say, Hey kids, there’s a point in every man’s life when he has to admit he’ll never again make love on a picnic table.
The second, third, and fourth rules of working with children: refrain, refrain, refrain.
I say, These beautiful African parrots have willingly sacrificed the gift of flight to be here today. Their wings aren’t clipped, the cage door’s open, and they could fly away if they wanted, but they’d rather stay here and entertain you.
Chick and Tara, the birds, look so uneager to entertain. Isn’t their choosing not to fly enough for the children? No, it’s not enough. It is insulting. The children wander to the kiddie pool before the big finish: Chick and Tara taking flight around the deck, ascending, and then returning. Birds are too metaphorical! Our show is the second-least popular on the ship, a notch above something called the Muddy Cricket’s Sixteenth-Century Half-Hour. During the finale, though, I still get a queasy thrill. They could easily continue on to St. Croix, Cuba, Dominica, to live like dignitaries among fruit groves, but they don’t, but they could. But they don’t.
The birds say, and I have no reason not to believe them apart from the fact that I don’t believe them, that they love me. They say they’d miss me.
When their flight around the deck reaches its apogee twenty yards starboard, I’m sick with anticipation. I’m sure Chick and Tara are going to break orbit and leave me. But they return and alight on their spruce post, and I see resignation in their cracked eyes. I feel resignation myself. I feel it like a kite string dangling above my hand.
That’s our show, I say, but the children are gone. It’s just Chick and Tara and me. I unlatch their cage and they toddle inside.
We love you, Tara says. The reason they left, they know we’re not doing our show for them. We’re doing it for you.
You’re a good man, Chick says. No matter what anyone says, or thinks, or does. You make us happy.
Sometimes I feel like a chipped tooth, I say.
You’re a great man, a gifted man, Tara says. A bear among spiders.
Have a treat, I say, dumping a Ziploc of honeydew into their cage. The gray birds loudly devour the honeydew as I wheel them back to our cabin, thankful, silent, thankfully silent.
Part Two
My first day of work last year I was told to make sure the birds and I had forty-five minutes of meaningful contact every day, which meant me sitting on the bed in our cabin, telling Chick and Tara about myself while they scrutinized me from their massive cage, which was filled with colorful beaded ropes and chew toys.
Well, I began. I used to drive a dog-grooming van. A unit is what we called it. I went door-to-door in the unit. I groomed a seeing-eye dog once. When I was done, the owner, a woman in her thirties, said, Well, that’s the sorriest haircut I’ve ever seen. I apologized — maybe she was only partly blind — but she told me she was joking. She invited me inside and showed me everything the dog could do. He could turn lights off and on, and could work the ceiling fan remote, he even barked when the oven was finished preheating.
The blind woman was not unattractive. She had gray eyes with white white whites. She wore a matching blue outfit and I imagined a scenario where the woman tried on different clothes and the dog barked when she found ones that matched. Maybe he really liked a certain shirt and would pretend it matched when it didn’t. He enjoyed seeing her in her underwear, so he let her go through six or seven outfits before barking. But didn’t the woman know dogs were colorblind? Or that he just wanted to see her in her underwear? I felt sorry for her, until I remembered that it was my fantasy, and then I felt sorry for myself.
While I talked, the birds preened themselves in the mirror attached to their cage, seemingly ignoring me. I had about thirty minutes of meaningful contact left to go.
The blind woman asked if I would cut her hair. I said I wasn’t trained to cut human hair, but she didn’t mind. I brought her and the dog into the unit, cut her bangs, trimmed an inch off the back. Looking at the dog, I saw his haircut was indeed sorry. Hanks of hair on his legs, fur between his paws. He wore a vest with a patch that said, Don’t Pet Me, I’m Working.
I visited the blind woman many times. Whenever we made love, the dog began to bark, as if I might be injuring her. It’s okay! she yelled from under me. It’s okay! It’s okay! It was sort of offputting. Soon she had to shut the dog in the laundry room before we went to her bedroom, but he barked anyway, quick lurching barks like a werewolf’s heartbeat. She was remarkable, she used her hands as eyes. I think about her all the time.
Please, the bigger bird, Chick, said. Please never tell that story again.
This was the first time I heard either of them speak. I thought it might be a canned phrase, something they used in the show.
Tara lifted one of her talons to her mouth, delicately chewed a black nail. She said, We want to love you. This is how we are inclined. But stories are campfires. When they’re done, nothing should smolder, understand? Okay. Make it night now.
I found the cover and slipped it over their cage. I lay down listening to what I first took to be steady sleepful breathing. I listened and listened until I had no doubt: they were whispering to each other.
She shut him in the laundry room, I heard Chick repeat. She still does, from time to time. She shut him in the laundry room.
Often, very often, I have the urge to run around the ship yelling, Man overboard! Man overboard! Vacationers are so fearless and serene. Their only care is finding out what time the midnight buffet is, or what the complimentary daiquiris cost. Near the pool, they drive golf balls into the ocean. Wind-crazed gulls follow us toward deeper water. No land in sight! Goddamn: there was a time when an open sea meant something.
Today Irina, who coordinates children’s activities on the ship, comes to see the show. She is a thick officious Dutchwoman in drugstore bifocals who can adjust, with a swift clap of her hands, the alignment of planets. The children fight over who sits in her lap during the show, and then over who sits on either side of her, in front of her, behind her. All right, that’s enough, she says to a boy who tries to climb up her back. I am not a monkey bars.
The children, every eight days it is a new group of children, love this.
I am the birdman, I tell them.
With Irina in attendance, the children sit still, they listen. They volunteer. I place Tara on the shoulder of a sunburned little girl.
Can anyone tell me where Chick and Tara come from? I ask.
Eggs! a kid guesses.
Panama!
TV!
Her claws kind of hurt, the little girl says. They’re digging in.
That means she loves you, I say, tapping the spruce post twice. She doesn’t love everyone. Tara hops off he girl and Chick leans in as if to preen Tara, but I know she’s whispering.
There is a secret word, I tell the children. And if I say that word, even accidentally, my birds will fly away and leave me forever. What will I do then?
I don’t know what I’m saying. If Irina weren’t here, sitting in the center of the group and nodding solemnly at everything, the children would have wandered off to the inner-tubes by now.
You’ll cry! one of the children guesses.
You’ll find a new animal! You’ll be the something-else-man!
As I wheel the birds back to our cabin, Irina stops me in the hallway. She places a hand on my arm and says, Your show, it was so. . . I don’t even have a word. Yes I do: lapidary. It was lapidary. I can still feel it, to be perfectly honest, in my lap.
No, Tara says. No no no no no.
Irina leans close to the cage, the tendons in her neck quivering and sleek as a frog’s thigh. Is he all right? Irina asks.
She, I say. She’s fine. Sometimes she just exercises her, uh, thing.
Me, too, Irina says.
Make it night now, Chick says. Bye now. Bye-bye, hungry lady.
Voice is the word I want. Sometimes she exercises her voice. I’m too distracted by Irina’s gravitation and ruddy lewdness. She makes me feel like I’ve been caught eavesdropping. She still holds my arm. I feel her hand’s heat and my arm’s heat producing its own heat, and the feeling is alternately disconcerting and fine.
You didn’t handle that well, Chick says in our cabin. We still love you, of course, but you were pretty well outflanked. Her thing!
I never got my footing, I say. It happened so fast.
No, Tara says without meeting my eyes. It happened very slowly. It’s still happening.
Irina attends our next show, and the next. During the finale, when the birds fly over the deck, she always clasps her hands over her chest like a bereaved peasant. She knows what it means to be abandoned. The possibility exhilarates her, reddens her cheeks. Without her bifocals, which rest atop her head, her face reminds me of a dam-made lake. Liquid, unfocused, hungry, with wildlife buried beneath.
The birds sigh as they return to their cage. They know that before Irina I am helpless.
Part Three
I rarely leave the ship. I’d rather roam the decks when the vacationers are gone. We have an exhibit of ships-in-bottles and a nursery full of babies who have no idea they’re on a cruise. We have handsome vacuuming hall-maids, happy to oblige, happy to oblige.
The only port I visit is Tortola, because in Tortola there’s a man who will massage my liver. I lie shirtless on a mat in a dark room and the man says to me, It is good time. Everyting you say here is highest secret.
He strikes a match and lights a bowl of dried leaves. He claps twice and begins rubbing warm oil into my stomach.
His hands are conspicuous at first, moving across my abdomen along my ribcage. Once he starts digging in, though, his hands, or my awareness of his hands, disappears beneath a churning shroud of sensation.
I now massage your liver, he says.
Okay, I say.
I continue until you tell me stop.
I close my eyes and imagine I’m being delivered to a butcher. I need to be stamped with a grade. I’m not happy about being cut up for parts, but I enjoy the process. I enjoy it like. . . I once worked for a couple, Betta and Tim, who operated the Farm Animal Reclamation Project. On their hundred acres lived an array of animals rescued from labs and factory farms. Pigs, cows, sheep, rabbits. I fed and watered the rabbits, built hutches for new arrivals, named them, talked to them, and, most important, sent photos and personalized letters to each rabbit’s adoptive parent.
Hello, I am Huggy, I wrote to Val Downs of Chico, Calif. I am an unreluctant rambler. I am always at the head of the pack, kicking out my hind legs in a crazy way!
Assigning personalities was difficult. Some were exceptional, but most were just kind of rabbity and dull. What could I say? Hello, I am Miss Minnie. I sleep nineteen hours a day! I think I’m depressed! Hello, I am Crackers. I enjoy eating and staring dimly at my fellow bunnies’ droppings!
Betta and Tim held hands and toured the grounds, both immensely delighted in overalls. They waved to pigs and cows. At the rabbit enclosure, Tim clasped my shoulder and said, Your adoption letters are incredible. Full of tenderness and hard-won insight. It’s a gift.
I thanked him and Betta added, If animals could talk they’d say exactly what you wrote. They would shame us with love.
Betta and Tim walked on to the sheep pen to collect wool and leave it in the woods for birds. I envied their abstract love. It made me want to physically surrender myself to the rabbits, to lie in the center of their enclosure and let them accost me like a saltlick.
One summer, the rabbits began dying. One, two, then three four five at a time. We called veterinarians, tried quarantining the rabbits, changing their diet. By October they had all died. I felt sad and unlucky — I missed them, even the dull, rabbity ones — but Betta and Tim were surprisingly calm. A farm is a body, Tim said. When one organ stops working, the body must still endure.
This comforted me for about two hours. It sounded good. But if the farm was a body, and the body lived on, this meant the rabbits were the appendix or tonsils of the farm.
I had forty-seven farewell letters to write. I approached the task solemnly, trying to rid myself of falseness and showmanship. It’s me, Brown Sugar, I wrote to Ward Yoder of Ogden, Utah. I have died. I know the world won’t be much diminished by my absence. But could you maybe think of me sometime when you cross a field or eat brown sugar? Thanks for adopting me. I love you.
I collected what I knew about each rabbit, built the sturdiest nest I could. I felt tuned to every purr, grunt, and whinny on the farm. I saw secret alliances among the pigs, by how they jostled up and down the trough. Listening to the crows’ aggrieved caws, I knew what they were thinking. They were thinking about the missing rabbits.
Here is what I feel while the man in Tortola massages my liver: benign paralysis.
I am being held hostage by two females, I tell him. They say they love me. But they don’t love me. They love their grip on me.
Very high secret, the man says.
Would you take me home and let me sleep on a mat in your kitchen? I ask. You could massage my liver with your foot while you fry eggs.
The liver, he says, when you cut up in tree pieces, it grow into tree new livers. Like starfish.
That’s beautiful, I say. I feel his hands again — still — kneading my abdomen. I ask him to stop and he raises his hands. Secret time is over. I offer him money, unfolded and organized by denomination. As usual, he tucks it into the waistband of his shorts. You pay me more when we cured, he says.
I repeat it all the way back to the ship, through the market where tourists pollinate the stalls. We cured, we not cured, we cured, we not cured. I buy two cups of diced fruit for the birds. I think my liver might be damaged.
Part Four
I’ve run out of stories to tell during meaningful contact. My stories all smolder, spark brushfires, clear forests, leap rivers. The birds see kindling in every word. Their ideal story goes, Once upon a time, the end.
Our last trainer, Chick is telling me. We didn’t love him like we love you. Do you see? We appreciated him, we recognized his decency. But we never lost ourselves. He had a wife, what was her name again?
Tara lets out a long abject jungle screech.
Yeah, that’s it. With you it was instant attachment. We loved you before we met you, before we were born. What is it about him?
His tan, Tara says. His general demeanor. His loyalty.
We’ve reached minute eight of meaningful contact today. I lie in bed in my underwear, eyes closed, pretending to nap. I see the birds like slot-machine tabs on the backs of my eyelids. Nothing they say can be trusted, I know this. Their love is instinctual, impersonal, a mechanism to shield them from harm. . .
This woman’s no good, Chick says. Anyone so admired by children is dangerous. Children love tyrants, they love punishment and arbitrary shows of cruelty. But what happens when she turns her guns on you?
She already has, Tara says. She is more perceptive than Chick. Yesterday Irina took my hand to make a point about. . . something important that I forgot the moment she took my hand, and she would not let it go.
Irina said, You have a way with them.
Children, I said.
Birds, she said.
Later, on the sun deck beneath stars pricking dusk into night, we kissed. It was a long panicked kiss, filled with movement and refrains and the dull nauseating whir of the motor, which underlines every quiet moment here. When we were through, Irina stepped back and regarded me at a distance, shy again. I felt dizzy. I whispered, Don’t pet me, I’m working.
She didn’t hear me. I will never be lonely again, she said.
You won’t?
No, I will, she said. But right now it doesn’t feel like it.
I didn’t want the kiss to be a prelude. I wanted a voiceover to say, The male of the species is superbly equipped for these casual comings-together. See him walk away skipping. Irina’s bifocals rested on the end of her nose and it was dark and her mouth was moist and profoundly ajar. I didn’t want to kiss her again. This first kiss could be its own beginning, middle, and end. A stocked larder I return to again and again in memory.
Kiss me again, she said.
I kissed her again.
It is not love. It is not sudden, it is not electric. It is not the gossamer convergence of souls. It is not a death scene, a soliloquy, or even a rousing musical number. I don’t feel pretty, I don’t feel pretty or witty or bright.
I feel. . . frayed. Last night I dreamed of Irina lifting, no, tearing away veils and me saying yes, sure, of course, however, yet, maybe, but.
The birds know. How could they not know? They know. Both Chick and Tara molt early this year. They preen old feathers from each other’s heads leaving spiked pinfeathers. Which look like war wear.
What would we do if you left? Chick asks during meaningful contact. We don’t have the energy to love another trainer. What if he likes the kids more than he likes us? What if he has a spastic laugh?
We’ll have the energy, Tara says. We always do.
I’m not leaving you, I say. I’m the birdman now.
Chick says, What if he walks around shirtless, going from mirror to mirror calling himself Big Boss?
I tell them about when I worked at a college psych lab which tested the effects of maternal deprivation on newborn mice. It turns out that when a newborn mouse is separated from its mother, it goes crazy. It spends most of its time stumbling around. I worked nights, cleaning cages and refilling paper towel dispensers, things like that. The students came in, fiddled with the mice, recorded their findings, left. Most of the time we, some five hundred mice and me, were alone.
One night, tired of my job, tired of listening to the plaintive squeaks of motherless mice, I decided to free the mice. All of them. I found a big cardboard box, loaded them into it, and brought them to a field. I opened the box and turned it onto its side. Some of the mice scurried into the grass, some stayed in the box. I went home pleased.
The head of the lab called me in the next day. Big hairless guy with furious eyes. He said — well, he said a lot of things. I was an idiot, the mice were likely already dead, the type of mouse they bought was genetically unsuited to live anywhere but labs. What I remember clearest was him staring at my chest, straight through to my crooked heart and saying, You thought you were a shepherd. You’re not. You are a circus of petty attachments.
And you torture mice for a living, I said. I hoped he would hit me but he didn’t. I paid a fine and did some community service. I was too coward to ever return to the field, too afraid to find mouse corpses rotting in the high grass.
What, Chick says, are you trying to tell us? Mouse corpses?
I don’t know, I say. It’s just a story. Something that happened to me.
You’re our fifth trainer, Tara says. The other four made us watch TV all day, awful shows where friends trick friends for money. The other trainers didn’t hear us. You hear us. Do you know what we’re going to do?
No, I say.
Neither do we, she says.
The birds are quiet for the remainder of meaningful contact, and for the rest of the day, and the next day and so on. I goad them with fruit and new beaded ropes. I tell them how pretty they are with their fresh feathers. They stare into the mirror hooked onto their cage.
Irina, on the other hand. She blooms with naked fondness. She has become shyer, hiding her laugh with a hand, seldom mentioning her lap. I have kissed her on each of the six decks and in two unisex bathrooms. When she invites me to her cabin I always say I have to go take care of Chick and Tara.
I want to be your little bird, she says.
The children who come to our show still jockey to be near her. You, you, you, and you, she says. Chick and Tara fly farther and farther toward open water. They veer and swoop and glide. What’ll I do if they leave me, I ask the children.
Irina clutches her chest, pledging allegiance.
The birds return with a sigh.
Our shows lately have been remarkable.
Part Five
I am the birdman. Before the birds I worked with dogs and I was the dogman; before dogs, it was rabbits, and I was the rabbitman; before the rabbits, mice…
You should not dress your bird in a showgirl costume. They have a whip-sharp sense of decorum, their judgment is crueler, more exact than ours. When you tell your bird pretty bird pretty bird ask yourself, Do I mean that my bird is a pretty bird? Or am I speaking of a more general ideal pretty bird?
Do not tell your bird you are sorry. Do not mistake need for love.
Look your bird in the eye when you are lying. Scratch your cheek when you are telling the truth.
I am the birdman. I want, I want.
Chick and Tara flap their wings before releasing their perch. They fly away with a salutary caw. This is it. Irina stands, shedding children. The birds’ outlines become smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. And then they are gone, switched into sky.
I miss them already.
Irina takes my hand and leads me to her cabin.
