How to Find a Flock

by Chris Vola

  *

  It doesn’t matter that, as far as I know, the Park Ranger didn’t try to touch me or take off my clothes or follow me down the stairwell when I stood up, stumbled to the unbolted apartment door and pushed through it without saying anything. That it took me two hours to find my car and another hour of pulling the trigger and heaving in a McDonald’s bathroom until I felt clearheaded enough to drive. That the name he’d given me wasn’t in any National Park Service employee database or that the apartment wasn’t registered with the city’s housing division. That I didn’t eat for three days and came tantalizingly close to getting fired. That I couldn’t stop thinking about the red shirt with the smudge, the antlers.

  None of it matters.

  Because it’s been over a year since that latest debacle and it’s past happy hour and I’m still standing near the awkward center of the sidewalk clutching the binder, my hair sagging with moisture against the collar of my florescent shirt.

  Because nobody, including me, gives a shit about Croatian orphans or whoever I’m supposed to be championing.

  Because I still haven’t saved close to enough money for a proper thru-hike and my car is about to die.

  Because Robbie’s idea of being a competent regional coordinator includes sending dozens of text messages every day like the one I just got: “‘Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm’ – Winston Churchill.”

  Meaning, fuck.

  More rain droplets roll from my forehead into the corners of both eyes. I’m unable to prevent them from entering, from dancing across my corneas in defiance, turning the flickering shapes on the street into a mass of tiny horned creatures that want nothing more than to bury their jaws into my skin. I crash into one as I try to fight my way to the edge of the sidewalk and she curses and I’m rubbing, shaking, slapping, and continuing to do so until the shock of contact has been removed.

  But the damage has been done. Squinting the liquid off my face, I feel the venom surging through my body, the years of tiny bites, so close together, so sunk in with time that I imagine red lines have been etched beneath my arteries. My marrow starts to burn with these parallel and perpendicular lines, with lines intersecting to create a prism that’s only red, closed, no chance for any other colors to enter.

  I need a beer, a bottle of water, a tube of bacitracin.

  Anything to stop the burning.

  A tall shape extracts itself from the howling din, pauses, steps toward me. Smiling, calm, his yellow hair illuminated in a street light’s halo. Blue and white checkered shirt.

  “Hey, ah, Marissa?” He’s skinnier than I remember, older, healthy 401(k) gleam, no more fake-diamond ear studs.

  The same too-thick wrists.

  And the name’s wrong, though he’s close.

  “Marissa in Kappa, right? You lived with Kelsey Donovan freshman year? Didn’t –”

  I tuck my binder between my arm and hip, turn and start moving toward the park, the belching plastic chimney, the bums. Remembering the brochure the Park Ranger gave me, I try to follow the main path, the white blazes. But it’s totally dark now and the mist keeps getting thicker.

  And it keeps raining bodies, so many bodies between here and where I need to be.

  How to Find a Flock

  He would come home from bartending to his basement apartment and sit in his office chair and look out the porthole at the courtyard that was really three brick walls facing each other, a grimed-out, pointless nook carved into the backside of the building. It only got natural light in the mornings, according to Liz, and (also according to Liz) was spackled with the kind of standard city refuse that, under the right conditions, might be responsible for the deaths of certain shore birds and most species of lesser shelled reptiles. He would wake up around two in the afternoon, when shadows accumulated faster than trash bags chucked from the roofs of adjacent buildings, and, making sure Liz wasn’t there, twist his slightly webbed feet back and forth and look at them.

  He would say things to himself and laugh and sometimes tweet them and hope others would laugh. Sometimes one of the handful or so friends with whom he kept in semi-regular contact would email or text him, asking about the tweets, asking how he was doing, if everything was okay, and he would respond, asking the friend if he or she wanted to meet for a beer or a coffee. Sometimes they would meet for a few beers or whiskeys (never coffee) but usually they wouldn’t.

  He would bare his teeth, faux-dramatic behind the window, at mongoloid pigeons bathing in Whole Foods wreckage and Tupperware streaked with non-hydrogenated soybean oil, at the pair of rats and an earless cat sipping from the same Dr. Pepper puddle in a grudging silence that befitted their larger African cousins, at the condom wrappers – which always seemed to be Magnums – those golden totems of fertility strewn across the murk-lit concrete. He would walk to the hardware store and buy half a dozen canisters of rat spray, maybe a commercial-grade dustpan or a vacuuming apparatus. He would turn on the TV and watch people, who for the most part had non-weird extremities, and forget about the cleaning. He would go into the kitchen and look in the pantry for sunflower seeds, not remembering he had left the porthole in his room open and that it was still open.

  Liz came over sometimes, usually from 11pm to 7am on the two or three nights a week he didn’t bartend. Or she’d cab it to the bar when she finished up at the museum where she was a conservator, restoring nineteenth-century lithographs by scalding them, gently, in alkaline solutions of varying pronounceability. She never wanted them to go back to her place because she liked to “bring my work home,” a phrase she would utter with such an uncharacteristically foreboding lilt that he didn’t dare to question what it meant. Her recent projects had been Audubon’s, The Fowls of California or something like that. He’d been introduced to her at a bar (not the one where he worked) by a mutual friend, a software engineer named Kaitlyn who was chief amongst the concerned emailers, without first seeing a profile picture of Liz or even an unfocused group shot, which made the after-hours grope-fest that first night and the subsequent ones seem pleasantly retro.

  Liz would be sitting at a booth, drinking whatever he served her, swiping emails on her phone, occasionally glancing at a catalogue of art featuring romanticized wildlife, and after last call and after the barback went home he’d lock up and they’d engage in rushed, friction-y pre-fuck acts in the employees restroom. They’d cab it to his apartment.

  He liked that her hair, under the saccharine glow of the reading lamp he’d duct-taped to the bed frame, burned like November leaves. He liked the panic dancing behind her Klonopin eyes when she talked about the Chinese retail boom “stupendously fucking up, like, all of our ecological footprints,” about the biohazard suit hanging in her closet just in case. Her sinewy scrubbed-naked nails digging under his clavicle, the non-webbed toes wriggling against his thighs.

  Her ultra-pale whiskey cheeks flushed in pixel-light.

  “Your skin is like, lunatic-beautiful,” he said to her one night, impersonating a character in a show where, according to her IMDb app, menopausal matriarchs balanced “envious social calendars, challenging careers, and motherhood, with the hustle and bustle of the big city all around.”

  But also he meant it. He was staring at the courtyard.

  She laughed without looking up from her phone. “If you’re ever going to start cleaning up back there,” she said, “make sure you get the milk jugs and those gross seed bags somebody covered in shrink-wrap.” She sighed. “They’re primarily composed of polyethylene, which, oh god, has a half-life of like fifty years. And you left the TV on again.”

  He looked at his feet. He looked at Liz. He told himself that her skin was beautiful.

  One day he decided to call in sick and surprise her at the museum. He wasn’t sure what time her job normally ended so he sat near the bottom of the massive, Greek temple-ish front steps and looked at two vaguely Scandinavian guys fighting over a subway map folded over to reveal a blurry a
d with the words JOIN THE RAINBOW PILGRIMAGE in a bold sans-serif. He bought a falafel from one of the nearby food carts. He ate it and balled the aluminum foil wrapper and was going to chuck it at an obese squirrel whose diet probably consisted solely of halal food and hot dogs, when he remembered Liz reading him a study proving that aluminum was crappy at disintegrating in non-landfill settings and caused Alzheimer’s in fur-bearing lab creatures. He looked around for a trash can before giving up and dropping the ball between his feet.

  A humpbacked woman whose body type closely resembled the squirrel’s and a scrawny kid were camped out on a bench near the bottom of the stairs, interacting with a swarm of sparrows, pigeons, a trio of slack-winged gulls. The woman – ethnically ambiguous, dreadlocked, surrounded by a fortress of Baby Gap bags whose handles had seen several rounds of duct-tape reinforcement – cradled a Costco-size container of generic cheddar popcorn and was tossing kernels at snapping beaks, occasionally shoving a small fistful into her own mouth and wiping her hands on a greasy earth-toned v-neck. The equally grubbed kid (her grand/son?) would snatch uneaten popcorn from the pavement, hold out his dirt-browned palm. One unlucky sparrow with a broken leg or some sort of avian degenerative condition limped too close and the kid snatched it up, squealed happily, and started petting it as it tried to peck itself free. The woman just sat there, perma-smiling, wiping yellow-orange residue on her shirt and the exposed part of her globular chest.

  He was still kind of staring when Liz exited the museum, accompanied by a young-looking poster boy for gentrification in ball-squelching slacks and neon-rimmed sunglasses – a coworker? Friend? He’d met no one in either camp. Liz saw him wave and froze, unconsciously reached for the place in her purse where she kept her phone.

  They embraced, an awkward cheek-kiss-hug thing. Her neck smelled of hydrogen peroxide. She calmed down when he apologized for the “pseudo-stalker routine” and she smiled and introduced him to Michael, an assistant director of institutional development with inverted shoulders and a chemo-smooth complexion. They shook hands, noodle-soft, and Michael shuddered when he noticed the bench and its cheese-dust menagerie.

  Liz gestured toward the street and the crush of traffic, suggesting the three of them share a cab. As they walked, he kept turning to look at the bench woman who was now giggling loudly, tossing popcorn in a high arc toward where the kid was crouching on all fours, growling and competing with the biggest gull to see who could mouth-snatch more kernels out of the air; the kid was winning. The sparrow with the bum leg, lying on the ground a few feet away, had stopped twitching.

  “I, uh, forgot a file,” Michael mumbled, wiping his shaken hand across his thigh. “I have to get it. You guys have…fun.” He sprinted back up the steps.

  “Did you drop something?” Liz asked as they got into a cab. “You’re swiveling like the owl in the print I was working on today. Do you have a crush on Michael? He’d probably be into it.”

  “Nada, baby,” he said, impersonating someone but he couldn’t remember who.

  She mumbled something he couldn’t hear, snickered, and stared at her phone for most of the ride uptown. Later they drank whiskeys while watching TV, got each other off, and went to sleep.

  When he woke up, it was still early, the sunlight streaming in two parallel beams from cracks in the porthole shade. One of them snaked across Liz’s mostly uncovered body: hair that looked dull and gnarled, too-sloped breasts, asymmetrical fingers clutching shards of blanket. An ashen, hollow quality to the skin he’d never noticed, like days-old linen that had been hand-smoothed and folded to hide the inevitable purchase of stains.

  The lingering synthetic waft.

  Outside, there was a loud shrill, a noise that reminded him of something he’d heard the previous day outside of the museum. But he wasn’t sure if it was the same species or a bird at all. Then he heard a response. He crept to the porthole, slipped his hand under the shade and palmed the warm glass. He stood over the bed.

  “I’m going outside,” he whispered. Liz mumbled something that sounded like Asperger-sandwich and rolled over. “I’m going to sit in the courtyard.” He twisted her ankle, gently. “When I get back, you need to not be here, okay?”

  Better Than Ever

  Carly gripped the wet, limpid bases, tugged with her other hand up the shafts and shucked the heads in a brutal twist of fingers. She gripped and shucked, gripped and shucked until what had once been a cluster of carnations grouped together to form a single flower-like structure was now a petal-stained mess saturating the coffee table. Gripping the largest stem at its severed top, she squeezed out a dollop of whatever passed for plant blood and placed the discharge on her tongue.

  She watched the whole process in the fogged mirror of a dead flatscreen that was perched across the room next to the loveseat where he’d forgotten a sock with a nautical pattern and a MetroCard during his predawn stumble-out.

  She watched the sap dispel. The opening of lips, the disappearing.

  Partially buried under the wilting clumps, her phone began to blink and vibrate, the so-sorry texts arriving sooner than expected. Today had been something different though, impossible to reconcile with bursts of well-polished, 160-character apologia. He had to realize that.

  Johnny’s surface was a series of credibly two-dimensional plotlines and moderately appealing asides that circled at a constant drone, cannibalizing any kind of meaningful underbelly she might try to extract. The generically athletic shoulders and no-filter jaw that had secured him part-time bouncer work at a cocktail lounge where thin-wristed foodie bloggers paid seventeen dollars to be told which kind of artisanal ice cube complemented their palettes and where no one ever got bounced. The other gig as a work-from-home copy editor for a lifestyle website focusing on motherhood where he corrected typos in articles about the struggles of getting children to brush their teeth regularly and wrote headlines like Do You Ever Wish Life Would Give You a Second Chance to Achieve Your Dreams? The claims that it was all fodder for the novel he’d been working on since grad school that was currently languishing on the flash drive attached to his keychain and that he wouldn’t talk about.

  Everything he told her seemed smoothed over, externalized. She seldom got more than the smallest glimpse of who he really was, underneath it all.

  And that was okay, at first. Because that was what you did. You would study communications, merchandizing, and the Tumblr of every notable shoe enthusiast at a middle-tier liberal arts college in a state with shittier than normal winters so you could land – through the help of your cousin’s power-bottom boyfriend – a lower-rung position in fashion PR and move to the city with the majority of your “independent” and “edgy” friends. You would co-sign the lease on a studio in the farthest reaches of the Upper East Side (don’t call it Harlem) where your father would contribute half the rent, and even though somewhere downtown would have been better, at least it was Manhattan and not Astoria or Bushwick because fuck if your parents were going to let you skank it up around the outer boroughs. You wouldn’t mind your status as a sixty-hour-a-week coffee-errand peon because you would get to wear cute outfits and grab craploads of gift bags at client events and always have random shit to complain about at happy hour. Complaining would make you feel like things-were-happening. If you had to, you could fend off the inevitable mid-twenties emptiness by getting a masters degree in an existentially fulfilling field like social work or urban planning. But you would never let it come to that. You and your expanding network of amigas would scour your expanding collection of apps and find places to eat, booze, and watch people doing things that were rated highly by reviewers in your particular demographic. You would cross-reference these findings on group emails and make your social decisions based on them. You would go out more often than not. You would listen to electronic dance music, at first out of curiosity. You would read in a YouTube description that the music appealed to people because “Trance, Dub Step, and drum bass all have the ability to provoke deep thought and ind
uce deep-feeling emotion.” You would love the beats more after a bowl pack or a couple lines. You would attend as many electronic dance music performances as possible because they gave you the opportunity to wear minimalist attire loosely inspired by previous bohemian sects – cutoff denim shorts, neon-tinted aviators, maybe a florescent floral headband – as long as it was “neutral,” “eclectic,” and/or “earthy.” The concerts would seem like a more inclusive, Disneyfied version of the raves you’d been warned about when AIDS was still a viable scare tactic for grade-schoolers. You would go to a show at a pop-up venue and see him dancing by the speaker tower, alone, shirtless and wearing a neon snap-back and Wayfarers and you would look at him and not think he saw you but when you turned you would feel him move behind you in time with the beat, smell his Dentyne mouth asking if you knew his friend Molly and you would shrug and pretend to be oblivious and you would be dancing, dancing for a long time and not remembering the ride up the West Side Highway except for the reggaeton song he would yell at the driver to change, reeling hours later from the vodka (and yes, the Molly), nestling against his perma-shirtless chest and smiling in time with his snore-bursts. You wouldn’t be concerned if he didn’t text for a few days because he said he was a writer (which was sort of kind of like an artist) and was loath to leave the inspiration provided by his single-futon, probably mildewed apartment. You would accept the mildew because he was the kind of worthwhile, fascinatingly obscure project you had moved to the city for, mumbling about prehistoric extraterrestrial moon bases and the Singularity at night and waking you up to jarring-in-a-good-way, foul-breathed, half-awake, finger-induced orgasms and later some deeper ones, then turning over and muttering that no he wouldn’t want to get food before you got on the subway and that yes he needed to go back to sleep before work. You would accept this arrangement until he stopped accepting it, until he would make the decision to be more than the guy from Washington Heights you were “kind of seeing” when you left your friends at the bar sniggering into their guavatinis and finally opened himself, whatever that might mean. You would hope it involved a light emotional breakdown that you could wink-wink to your friends about. And maybe you would go together to the new place on East Houston that served smoked free-range elk tacos after checking out a not-too-touristy museum/cultural landmark/park. And maybe you would go to enough places together and do enough things that your experiences would start to feel like one big ball of shared-ness. And maybe he would stop untagging your Facebook photos. And maybe after a while he would move into your non-mildewed studio and your parents would be cool with it because he would pull a major one-eighty from the scruff life and start thinking about law school and you would be going back to school too but more importantly it would be at the same school and your class schedules would be coordinated, and maybe you would feel like you were finally making something bigger than what you had.