Lights Out

by Douglas Clegg

  Twilight came, and back at home, Jeanette made it bath time for the boys because of the dirt all over their faces.

  I went to the second floor bedroom window, and climbed out onto the ledge, and sat on the roof. Smoked a cigarette. Leaned back, and looked up at the veiled sky and the darkening clouds in the distance.

  Distinct voices of the birds. Not just the usual cacophony. I felt as if my ears had begun to notice precisely how one sparrow chirped, how the swallows spoke to each other, and those starlings — their nastiness, their territorial voices that spoke of battle and ownership. I began to hear something in the world I’d never really heard before.

  5

  “Are you all right?” Jeanette asked that night. We lay in bed. Lights on. She had just put down the book she’d been reading.

  “Of course.”

  “You’re staring at the ceiling.”

  “I’m thinking. You know, there must be something weird about life. We took that little guy in for five days, and now I just notice birds. I’ve never noticed them before.”

  “What’s that called?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s called something. When you didn’t notice something. Then you do. Then you notice it’s all around you all the time.”

  “Crazy?”

  She grinned. “No. No. And it’s not about something being ubiquitous, either. It’s something else. Like when you’ve never heard a word before, and suddenly, once you’ve heard it, it’s everywhere you look.”

  “I keep listening for him.”

  “For who?”

  “Fledge.”

  “Honey,” she said. “Aw. Poor baby. I miss the little guy too. You should be proud of yourself. You rehabbed a bird and set it free. That’s what life should be about.”

  “I read about starlings. Online. They’re non-native. They were brought here by a guy who released a hundred of them in Central Park in 1890. He wanted to introduce birds that were in Shakespeare’s plays. So he brought starlings, among others. I read that in the wild they don’t live all that long. In captivity, they can live up to twenty years.”

  She lay down and turned to me, her eyes like warm muddy pools. “I would rather have a few years among my own kind, with a life of mating and birth and, yes, even death, than twenty years alone in a cage.”

  “He wouldn’t have been alone,” I said. And then, “Aw, this is silly. I’m silly.”

  “Yes, you are. It’s not about the bird, is it?”

  “I told you before. It’s about loss.”

  “I know. Life does have a lot of loss in it. You’re almost forty. You’ll probably start buying sports cars and chasing blondes.”

  “No. I’m not that guy,” I said. “I just hate how life takes everything away.”

  “That’s ridiculous. Think of all the people in the world and what they don’t have. Now, think of all that you have. And tell me how life takes everything away from you.”

  “Not from me, personally. From everyone. Nobody really tells you that when you’re Rufus’ age. We protect our kids from it. But it’s there.”

  “God. That fucking bird,” she said.

  She turned away from me, and reached over to flick the light off.

  6

  That was ordinary life, but the extraordinary had entered my life through the voices of birds. Whenever I went outside, or opened a window, I heard them. Too many of them. The voices all going on about food and shelter and war and children and work and flight and anger and joy. I could tell that much from the tones of their voices. I noticed that when a storm came, the gulls from the bay — a good hour from us — suddenly were on our rooftop. But then, I began to hear the voices of the birds change when a storm was predicted, as if they knew, many hours before a thunderstorm reached us, that it was going to descend. Any changes in their voices, or the amount of bickering, heralded nestlings. I began to hate crows, for I saw them dive for the babies, and heard the awful wailing of the mother birds at the death of a child.

  Then, one evening we watched a TV show on a Wednesday night; it was still light out; I began to hear the birds squawking and thought I heard Fledge, so I went to the window, opening it.

  “What’s up?” Jeanette asked.

  “I heard something.”

  She turned the television’s volume down, and listened. “I don’t hear anything. What was it?”

  “Nothing,” I said. I had begun to lie to her about hearing the birds outside. Listening for Fledge, trying to see if there was a message I should be hearing. That’s what I had begun thinking: there was a message that might be delivered to me. Delivered unto me — it had begun to seem religious to me. Birds brought omens. God might speak through birds. I knew that was just my imagination, but something spiritual had entered my life through the sounds of the birds.

  I took a day off from work, but didn’t tell my family. Instead, I took some binoculars and spent the day up in my sons’ tree fort, which nearly went into the thick woods behind our house.

  I took water and sandwiches and soda; when I had to pee, I just peed off the tree. I listened all day to the birds, and I began to feel a change within me — toward nature. It made me sad in some way, because I began to see my wife as someone who would never truly understand me, and with whom I might never genuinely communicate what was within me. I loved my boys, but I knew they had other lives to live.

  They, too, would develop their own secret languages and matings and lives.

  I might never understand them fully as I could never fully comprehend my wife.

  I began to take personal days off from work, and just wander the woods, or walk along the bike trail. I’d get lost for hours at a time in the deep forest that should not have been there — for there was a shopping mall two miles away, and a town on either side. Yet, a forest existed, and I could lose myself in it for half a day without seeing another human being.

  There were arguments at home that escalated into shouting matches.

  I became less tolerant of the boys’ behavior when they crossed a line. At work, I just didn’t deal with others much and spent most of my time pretending to be buried in projects that I knew I’d never finish. On my lunch break, I’d go out to the park and sit and listen to pigeons and yet more starlings, and watch as they flew and stole bits of food from near the trash cans and dive-bombed someone who sat too close to a hidden nest.

  On a bitter day of bad reports at work, and a wife who didn’t even want me to come home, I walked along the bike path in the woods, and could not stand the voices of the birds anymore.

  I wept in my wife’s arms that night, and told her I had some kind of madness in me. She cooed into my ear and told me she loved me and that it would pass, whatever it was, and if it didn’t, we’d get help.

  “It’s all the loss,” she said. “You didn’t cry when we lost the baby. You didn’t cry when your mother died. That bird did it. It reminded you of loss. It got to you.”

  The bird had changed me. The bird had never left me. I longed for the kingdom of birds rather than the kingdom of men. The voices of birds seemed, to me, to be more about life than the voices of mankind.

  7

  A call came in to work for me, but I didn’t pick up. I just let my voice mail get it, and it wasn’t until my wife messaged me on the cell phone that I paid attention.

  She wrote:

  Emergency Room.

  When I got there, she was trembling and pale. I held her, and she whispered, “William.”

  Strangely, I noticed a man nearby who looked as if he had just done something terrible. He spoke to a nurse and mentioned “birds.”

  I suppose that was why I noticed him at all. Later, I learned that he had been the one driving the car.

  8

  During the six months after my son’s death, I began to listen only to the birds. I barely acknowledged Jeanette, and though I loved Rufus dearly, I could not bear to look at him for he reminded me too much of his little brother. I smoked m
y Gitanes in the open now, for my wife could not chide me during this time.

  I spent long afternoons and evenings out on a lawn chair, beneath the sycamores and maples, my eyes skyward as I watched the dark flocks of starlings readying for winter. Their words comforted me, and took me elsewhere as they spoke of distant places of warmth and insects. Though I often thought of William’s warm fingers in my hand or his soft whisper at bedtime, the birds told me about life and death and loss and continuations and how the spring brought hope and summer brought plenty. I also heard about the deaths of birds, of sorrow, of a mate shot down by a thoughtless boy with a gun, of marriages and the ends of marriages, of wounds that never healed, and feuds between siblings that continued to the end of life.

  Laid off from my job by October third — in a massive layoff that left thousands without work — I came home to an empty house. By empty, I mean, bereft, without human voice. Jeanette and Rufus had left a couple of weeks earlier to stay at her sister’s in the next town over, but they would be back (so my wife promised) or things would change or something. I wasn’t clear on the details.

  In the early morning, I went out in my boxers and sat on the back lawn. The earth had turned hard and cold, and the wind was strong. I listened for the birds, and leaned back, my arms crossed behind my head. Still sleepy, I began to doze when a voice brought me up from sleep.

  What the voice had said, I am not sure. It seemed like my name or a name. The sound was nearly like a child’s voice. Perhaps I had been dreaming that it was my dead son’s voice.

  I opened my eyes. There, on a slender leafless branch above me, a starling. Dark, and mottled with the yellow stars of adulthood, and — I was sure — it was Fledge himself. Watching me.

  “Fledge?” I asked, but then laughed at my foolishness for asking a bird its name.

  The bird cocked its head to the left and the right, and then hopped down to the ground. It fluttered over and hopped up on my chest. It began squawking and making a whistling sound that was a fairly good mimic of my own whistle.

  Then, it hoped closer to my face.

  Instead of a whistle, it spoke to me. “William,” said the bird.

  As I lay there, stunned by this hallucination, the bird flew away.

  9

  Now, of course I thought I had lost my mind, but I had to know something I didn’t know before. Something I’d never really asked or followed up on.

  I went to visit the man whose car had hit and killed my little boy.

  10

  “Yes?”

  The door opened, and the man, who I guessed was about fifty, opened the door to his apartment. He lived in a rough neighborhood near the city, but had not lived there at the time of the accident. He had lived, the day when my son stepped off the curb, in a nice house, larger than my family’s place, but the death of my son had changed him as much, if not more, than it had changed us. His own life had fallen apart. His wife and he had divorced. He had a grown daughter who blamed him, though it had been apparent that he had been driving the speed limit and had done what he could to avoid hitting my son and several children who had stepped into the street in heavy traffic. He had only hit my son, but four children’s lives had been spared, including my eldest, Rufus.

  Yet, his life had spiraled downward.

  I saw it in the apartment building, which was dark and filthy.

  I saw it in his eyes, as well. “Oh,” he said, recognizing me. He didn’t ask the next question, but it hung there as if he had: What do you want?

  “You said something. I barely heard it. I guess I wasn’t listening.”

  He opened the door a bit wider, but looked at me with a kind of anticipation as if I might swing a punch at him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I really am.”

  “You said something about birds,” I said.

  “Oh.” He looked over my shoulder as if expecting others to be with me. “The birds.”

  “What was it about birds. I overheard it. We were standing there, at the hospital. But I just caught the tail end of it. I didn’t even know who you were at the time.”

  “I can’t remember,” he said.

  “It’s important. To me.” Without realizing it, I had begun sobbing, and I suppose my body heaved with each exhalation of grief.

  He came out into the hallway, and put his arm around my shoulder. “Come in. I’ll get you some water.”

  11

  Inside the apartment, on a green, worn couch, I sipped from a glass. Vodka, not water. It tasted good.

  He sat across from me. Behind him, the television was on, but the sound had been muted. “I don’t remember about birds. Look, I’m sorry. I have nightmares about what happened. I see his face.”

  “Me, too.”

  “I see all their faces. If I had only…if I had only stopped for the ice cream my wife wanted. If I had just taken the short cut instead of driving down Apple Valley Road.”

  “I know. I think if I had just made him stay home from school. If I had just told Rufus not to play after school. ‘If only’ drives you nuts. I’m weary from it.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You said something about birds. At the Emergency Room. You were speaking to a nurse.”

  “Oh,” he said. A shadow passed over his face. “Oh. The birds. I saw them. Blackbirds. I think that’s what the kids were doing. There was a bird in the street. I saw it, too. Just sitting there, and I thought it was going to get hit by somebody. I think that’s why the kids went in the street. Maybe I’m wrong. I don’t know.” He emptied his glass, and sighed. “Does it matter? I’m sorry. I’ll be sorry for the rest of my life.”

  “It was an accident,” I said, and then rose, setting my glass on the glass table.

  12

  I waited for Rufus after school. When he saw me, he looked at me as if I were the enemy. He walked cautiously to the car, and leaned into the open window.

  “Come on, I’ll drive you to Mom’s.”

  “She’s gonna be mad.”

  “She’ll be mad when she sees me. At least she won’t be mad at you.”

  Driving him to his mother’s place — which really was his aunt’s large home where they were staying for a few weeks until everything somehow either worked out or didn’t — I said, “You doing okay?”

  He remained quiet.

  “I want to ask about something.”

  Again, no response from my boy.

  “All right. Look. That day. That day. Was there a bird? Or a flock of birds?”

  He looked at me, his eyes seeming to flash with anger. Then, back to the road ahead. Then, he blurted, “Don’t ever talk to me about that day again. I mean it. I never want to think about it.”

  As I dropped him off at his aunt’s house, he slid out of his seat and had not yet swung the door shut. I said, “Just tell me. Why did you go in the street at all? There was traffic.”

  “Ask William,” Rufus said, his face a mask of childhood fury, which was both pale and burning. “He’s the only one who knows. I was trying to stop him. I was trying to stop him. Nobody believes me. I was trying to stop him!”

  13

  My wife called me on the cell phone ten minutes later and yelled at me for making Rufus upset. She said he had gone all fetal and wouldn’t talk to anybody and that if I showed up at his school again she didn’t know what she’d do, but she’d do something.

  I barely heard her — the birds were talking outside, and I went out to them and tried to decipher what they were saying. Winter had not quite come ‘round the bend, but autumn had exploded briefly like a firecracker and stripped the trees bare.

  On the twisted branches, the dark swarms of starlings began chanting.

  I stood there, in awe of them, their beauty and their language and their flight.

  They spoke of journeys to sunlit lands, and of love among them, and of the legends of their ancestors and of the anger and fury at the deaths of those they raised up from birth. I wandered back through the yard, into the woods, and follow
ed them.

  I, earthbound, watched as they danced tree to tree to sky to telephone wire to rooftop.

  I began speaking in the tongues of birds and all else fell away, the whistles and warbles from my throat seemed perfectly natural. The starlings told their secrets to me.

  I knew my son’s final moments. The starlings told me what they had seen, what my boy William had done. It was in their songs, their exaltations, their chattering squawks as they surrounded me, a cathedral of dark birds.

  They shared with me the love I had taught him for even the smallest bird, the tiniest creature, in the road, to be rescued from the traffic of human monsters. I heard his footsteps on the street as he raced into traffic.

  The birdsong grew deafening. I clutched my hands to my ears, for I could not take what they told of my little boy.

  I pressed my fingers deep into the skin of my ears — and deeper still to the wax — to plug them up and keep the sound of the last moment’s of my boy’s life from entering my brain. The pressure was enormous as I pushed my fingers deeper still.

  And yet, I heard his voice as he shrieked, and the thud of the car against him — they warbled each note of his last moments of life so that I might feel I was there with him. I begged them to stop, but the birds continued their praise of my little boy. They mimicked his cries and the wheezes of his lungs and throat until he breathed his last.

  I felt as if I were there, with William, in the street, his head upon my lap, his eyes turned upward, his small body shivering.

  As if I held his small body and looked up to God in the sky, but only saw the birds that had witnessed his death. The birds that had lured him into the street. The birds that had begun to drive me to madness with their terrible words and sounds.

  Their voices, telling me of other secrets, of those who had died in the past, and the deaths to come.