Blackbird

by Michael Fiegel

… which is where teenage me spent most of that morning, back after they had discarded me like a used paper bag. While I was in the restaurant bathroom being ill from eating eggs, I had plenty of time to occupy myself with numbers and letters, scratching out graffiti on the wall of the bathroom stall. The individual digits from the serial number on the twenty they had left me. It had to be meaningful, but I needed to figure out how. Eight numbers and two letters …

  “Can I help you, son?” asked the manager after about an hour, knocking on the stall. I took the hint and left, then crossed the street, bought a pack of gum and picked up the public phone. I no longer remember the entire number, but I recall it started with B, followed by the numbers zero and two. On a telephone keypad, it made a lot more sense: 202, the Washington, DC area code. I dialed the rest, seven more digits, and then waited. And waited. The phone rang and rang, and I thought for a moment I had misdialed, or maybe gotten the wrong idea entirely. But then an answering machine picked up. It beeped immediately, without a prompt.

  “Hello,” I said tentatively. “I got this number from a twenty doll—”

  Someone picked up the receiver on the other end.

  “Where are you?” said a voice, heavily distorted.

  “Ashland. Pennsylv—”

  “Get to DC and then call again. Not before.” Click. Immediate dial tone.

  I could have gone anywhere, done anything. They—whoever they were, whoever my father had been working for, or against—were done with me. But for some reason, I was not done with them. These were powerful people, doing powerful things, like putting phone numbers onto actual currency. I had nothing tying me down. No obligations. All I had was an invitation.

  So I took it. I got to DC, and I called the number back.

  And that is how it began …

  • • •

  … and this is how it ends? I can’t help but wonder as the cramps hit me hard. I hide it as long as I can, but then there is one that is just a bit too much, pain cresting above pain. And it chokes the words from my throat and doubles me over, erases the ache in my arms, makes me feel whole again for a moment, like Humpty Dumpty, falling off the wall. Inexorable.

  Someone says something. I try to answer, but my throat is past itching and into swelling. Time ceases to have meaning. It takes everything I have just to breathe. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see him knocking on the door, yelling at it. Back and forth. Then, finally, he opens it and the woman come in after him. Shapes and shadows and echoes.

  “… drugs maybe …”

  “… how much …”

  I’m in and out, ears ringing, vision dimming. Heart pounding. It’s never been this bad, but then that’s how it works; each time is worse, until it gets so bad that it kills you.

  “… could we …”

  My head hits the pillow, lands on a bunch of napkins and loose fries. With nothing else to do, I find myself counting them like some sort of vampire, deducing nothing as my vision fades out. Sherlock Dracula, done in not by garlic, nor any criminal mastermind, but by mayonnaise.

  There’s a rush of white noise. And then there is darkness.

  And then.

  Flock Theory

  01/22/2017

  The last words we spoke to each other were meant to be lies.

  “When will you be home?” he had asked, wandering into the kitchen as I pulled on my work shoes. I ignored him, passive-aggressively untied and retied the same lace.

  “Seven,” I said, picking a random number. “I might work late because I love my job so much.”

  I realized he was putting on a coat, and this was turning into a race to see who left the house first. I decided to let him win and went for the same lace a third time.

  “I am going out,” he said, as if it wasn’t obvious.

  “Going to look for a job?” I asked. I expected one of his long silences in response to my sarcasm, but he jumped right in.

  “You want me to work in a diner, too? Maybe I can get a fast food job. Put on a blue collar and a name tag and a hair net. Is that what you want from me?”

  “It’s apparently good enough for me,” I mumbled.

  “No,” he said, hearing me. “It’s not.”

  He grabbed a stupid-looking fedora from the coat rack that he’d never worn before—never would again—and jammed it crookedly on his head. He turned and considered himself in the mirror beside the door. He looked ridiculous.

  “How do I look?” he asked.

  “Handsome, as always,” I said.

  He nodded, stepped into the hallway, then paused.

  “I promise,” he said over his shoulder. “Things are going to change.”

  And then he was gone.

  In the end, after it was all done in the diner, all I had to show for my betrayal was an envelope stuffed with what looked like a thousand in mixed bills; a slap in my face, harder than Edison’s best. Was that what I was worth, or all that Edison was worth? It may as well have been three dollars in dimes.

  Then—just before I walked out forever—the man had pulled a folded twenty from his own pocket, placed it on the table, and slid it across with his index finger, smirking. A tip? I jammed it in my pocket without looking, without thinking to be insulted, then ran out to the alley and got into the Sonata, shaking like something was after me. I suddenly remembered something Edison had said, years ago. A lifetime ago.

  “When will I be grown up?” I had asked. He thought about that for a moment.

  “You think a thousand dollars is a lot of money, right?”

  I had nodded. It was. Very, very much.

  “Well, when you stop thinking that. That will be when.”

  I sat in the car for a half hour, rolling that thought around in my brain as I breathed rancid fumes from the grease bin behind the diner, waiting for something. But there was nothing, not even a sound to indicate what was happening in there. Maybe he knew it was a trap. Maybe he knew I had betrayed him. Maybe I could save him.

  I flipped open my burner and scrolled through the list for Edison’s latest number, stored under “Pizza.” Then I sat there, just staring at it, until the screen darkened. He’d probably turned his cell off. Would it matter? Maybe the attempt would matter? What if I called, and they answered?

  None of it mattered. Before I could decide, a black van drove past the far end of the alley. Them, I knew immediately. Without thinking I dropped the cell on the seat, started the car, and followed. I don’t know why. Instinct? Denial? Maybe just morbid curiosity. I hung back like he’d shown me, tried to remain a block away, a turn behind, cars between us. I trailed like a coward for half an hour as we went south on 5. At last the van got off in SeaTac and pulled into a fast food lot a bit north of the airport. I kept going past the lot but got stuck at the light on the corner, and just as it turned red someone got out of the van. A man. Scary big, dark like a bruise. He just stood right there and looked at me. It wasn’t angry or threatening. It was just a look, maybe pity, maybe disappointment that I still didn’t get it. He looked at me until the light turned green, until I knew: it was over.

  I drove home crying, trying to distract myself with crazy plans. I could have done anything at all, everything. I wanted all of it and none of it. Every time my mind whirled round like a roulette wheel, slowing, near deciding, the little ball of guilt inside me would skip out of line and toss everything back into disarray.

  I knew I’d have to make a decision soon, but when I got home, I didn’t feel like I needed to be in any particular hurry. If they had wanted me dead, I’d be dead already. So I had time to plan. To think. Hours, at least. Maybe a day or two. Almost too much time.

  I did what I’d done back in DC when he’d left me alone: I cleaned. Probably on a subconscious level because he would have, though he would have used fire and I didn’t want to disturb the neighbors. My head swam, like there was ammonia in the bleach, but it was nothing so lethal. And maybe it was an hour, maybe a day, but ultimately there was nothing left to clean but
myself. I angrily kicked my jeans into a ball, stripped down, and plunged into the shower so hard I cracked my shin on the soap dish. I turned the water on and stood there naked under the cold, numbing my skin to a shiver until finally the hot caught up and burned it all away. Guilt, rage, sadness, despair, all dripped off and bled down the drain. Sorry for myself, I knew.

  Tears are for the survivors, not the victims.

  When the water went cold again, when the wrinkles on my hands felt as if they’d drop right off, when I had run out of tears, I finally gave up and collapsed in the tub, turning the water off. Sat there listening to the shower head drip, to the squeal of my bare feet against the pockmarked tub, listened to the water heater banging on the pipes because it was empty, and alone, and it had nothing to do but start all over again like me.

  It was almost time to fly.

  • • •

  The last time he’d mentioned flying, we were at some rinky-dink pumpkin patch I’d dragged him to, an hour north of Seattle and halfway to nowhere. Halloween eve, two weeks before the club. Most of the pumpkins were gone. Most of the few that remained were rotted out, green and black, as if smashing themselves preemptively. But it meant there were fewer people about and that meant we could maybe try for normalcy, which I was still convinced was an option.

  “Flock theory,” he said, pointing at the blackbirds, wheeling about madly in the air over the corn maze, black and black and then a whisper of red like blood.

  “A flock?” I asked. “I thought it was a murder.”

  “Murder of crows,” he said. “Flock of blackbirds.”

  “Murmuration of starlings,” I said. “Unkindness of ravens.”

  He looked at me strangely.

  “Animal Planet,” I said.

  We watched the birds for a while longer while I played with my cell, one of those brief windows when he allowed me a device manufactured in the current decade.

  “Birds in the air, herring in a current, whatever,” he said, right back onto his earlier train of thought. “Each member of the group knows where to go, how to react, all based on countless small independent decisions. Instinct. Any one of them might make a subtle change that affects the rest. No way to tell who is leading because no one is leading. Each one has a tiny piece of a tiny piece of a bigger picture that no individual is ever completely aware of.”

  “Anonymous,” I whispered.

  “Order in the chaos, all self-organized. You take one out, the flock remains.”

  “Cloud.” I showed him my screen. “Google says it’s ‘cloud of blackbirds.’ Like the Internet.”

  “To destroy the fl— the cloud, you have to dig deeper, disrupt the system. Deceive it, throw up plate glass windows and mirrors, lay down poison and plastic, and let them do themselves in. Make things unnatural, unpredictable. Then each individual has to react separately, and it does, and that shatters them. No cohesion, no flock. No cloud.” He paused, then added, somewhat randomly, “If the magnetic poles shift, all the birds will die. They will have no idea which way home is.”

  I thought he was lying. Animal Planet hadn’t said anything about that.

  “Point is,” he said with a pedantic tone, “if they ever come for us, that is how they will do it. Something unexpected. Something we cannot possibly adjust to.”

  “Maybe they won’t come,” I said. “Maybe we got away.”

  “No,” he said.

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  He pointed. The blackbirds continued to loop back and forth on invisible currents, unceasing. Definitely cloudy, I thought.

  “How do they know?”

  We sat in silence for a moment. It was getting a bit chilly, so I decided to test his theory, and impulsively moved a bit closer to him, resting my head on his shoulder before he could react. That lasted about ten seconds, and then he grew uncomfortable and stood up. A single strand of my hair clung to his jacket like desperation. A small victory.

  “We should go,” he said. “Before it gets too late.” And then he walked to the car, leaving me alone to watch the birds, trying to find a pattern in the pointless current, the sudden reaction to something unseen. Wondering, maybe, if it was already too late. I waited until I heard the door slam before I got up, and then I took my time picking through half-rotten pumpkins, knowing he was watching, irritated with my passive aggression.

  That night, I tried carving mine into a frowny-faced Edison, but I screwed it up and did a vampire instead. Same thing, I figured. I tried toasting some seeds but set the smoke alarm off. He didn’t carve his at all, just let it rot from the inside out, until we threw them both into the compost bin on Election Day. Like the election itself, it was quite a mess, but I didn’t see any way to avoid that. Some things are just messy.

  • • •

  I was done with memories, by the end of the day. With cleaning, too. I had even dyed my hair, using up the last of his black, since that’s something he would have done. All that remained was packing, so I got to it. I thought it would be harder. Our things had never merged, barely touched, my things in my room, his in his, the rest of it just shared nothings we’d picked up along the way to nowhere. Everything I really cared about fit in one small backpack: a few meager books, some clothes, and my laptop. I had plenty of room for more, so I pushed open the door to his room, slowly, as if I expected him to be in there, asleep. More than once I’d crept in there, stood at the foot of the bed, watching him. He liked to think he was a light sleeper, but he never woke up.

  There wasn’t much. There never had been. I drifted over to his decades-old laptop, which was still on, warm. It was mine now, I supposed. The fan disagreed, buzzing angrily as I sat down and fingered the track pad, gingerly, just enough to light up the screen, bring up the password prompt. Was he inside here, somewhere? As if it mattered. None of us is what we were; we are what we are now. Moving targets.

  Reverently, I closed the laptop, unplugged it and wrapped the cord around, strangling it shut before swapping it out for my own. There was no way I could leave it behind, too.

  I considered the envelope in the other room. Full of tens and twenties I knew I could never spend. Counterfeit, traceable, something. There was no way they’d let me get away clean. Whoever they were. I thought the more I knew, the more I’d understand, but it was the opposite. The more pieces I added to the picture, the cloudier it got. Full of whys and hows and ifs.

  I took the money with me anyway. Just in case.

  Then I took some weapons, each wrapped in pieces of his clothing, half of them still containing price tags, never worn. A few other things, some loose change, some random IDs and cards, some pills and extracts and tinctures, needles and vials, medicine things, suicide things, things that were dangerous, anything I wouldn’t want the next door kids finding. Dumped it all in my faded pink backpack, slung it on my shoulder, considering the weight. I looked around his room for something more, but there was nothing else to take. It was like he’d never been there, like he’d never been. I half wondered if he had.

  Dizzy, I went to the bathroom and splashed my face with cold water, shut my eyes, and counted. On ten, I grabbed my things and walked out the door forever.

  I was on autopilot for the next hour. Somehow I got the car loaded and got inside, started it and drove off towards nowhere, numb and unfeeling. For some reason, I migrated south, airport-wards. At first I thought I was trying to escape somehow. As if I stood a chance of that. With no ticket and a bag full of guns and drugs, I’d end up in a small room with a large man wearing a rubber glove. If I was lucky.

  Regardless, I found myself taking the SeaTac exit, found myself back in the parking lot of that same fast food restaurant I’d last seen him at. Or at least, the van they’d had him in. I don’t know why I did it. Maybe to be close to him, one last time? Or maybe I was just hungry. Regardless, I managed to steal a parking spot near the door, grabbed the backpack just in case some kids decided the car looked ripe for the taking, and went inside before I rec
onsidered. Rather than feel strange to be alone, I felt comfortable somehow as I took my place in line, scanning the menu. For the first time, I could choose anything I wanted. Anything at all.

  I had nearly made up my mind when Delia walked in.

  Delia from the diner, the new girl, the oh-so-convenient new arrival, so eager to work long hours overlapping with my own. The helpful ride home, the shoulder to cry on, the confidant. Delia the romantic, always trying to find out more about my relationship, yet so, so vague about her own. The girl who always seemed just a bit too old, a bit too confident, a fact I’d overlooked because I never played at my age either. I had been played, for months.

  She queued up two people behind me, didn’t seem to notice me for the crowd. No surprise, really. I’d always been in uniform, always worn my hair up, high and tight. That day it was down, loose on my shoulders like a cloak, left to dry after I’d dyed it and trimmed my bangs. Every time she glanced away I snuck a peek and built a story. She had a list along with her money. Her brow was sweaty and she was winded. She looked extremely irritated. If nothing else, that was proof she had been in Edison’s presence recently. He must be close.

  It was not necessarily logical, but it was intuitive. This is where they’d been the day before, right after they took him. The van wasn’t outside that I could see, so she must have walked here. She was one of them, and they must be shacked up nearby. A hotel, maybe—I didn’t see any through the window, but I swore I’d driven past one to get here, just a block or two away. There were other explanations, but none that fit so easily. All that remained was to act.

  Or not.

  So maybe Edison was close. So what? Wasn’t this my chance to get away, throw away the past, and flee screaming into the future? Wasn’t it a chance to get out of the cage? A chance to decide what I wanted to do on my own, for myself and no one else? To fly free and clear?

  But then I considered the rest of the story, the bits that Delia couldn’t tell me. Chances were probably very good that they were doing to Edison what Nick and crew had done to me back in San Francisco. What they would probably still be doing, for all I knew, if Edison hadn’t …