The Blackbird Singularity

by Matt Wilven

  “Yeah, he’s here now… No. How could he? He never leaves the house. Ha, ha… Let me look at him… Yeah, he seems to be on pretty good form… Okay, I will… Okay. Bye, love.”

  She hangs up.

  “I’ll have you know I’ve been out running,” I say, “today and yesterday. Was that Jayne?”

  “Gloria,” she replies, quickly descending from a world of open and carefree friendship into a more stressed and evasive mood.

  “Did you tell her?”

  “Tell her what?”

  “About the pregnancy.”

  “No. Jesus, Vince.”

  “Sorry. How is she?”

  “She says hi. She’s good. Sergio’s being a dick though.”

  “Oh?”

  “He’s hounding her. Asking who every text’s from and if everyone in the office wears clothes like she does. I thought he was better than that.”

  “Come on, Serge is a good guy.”

  (Me and Sergio were friends before her and Gloria but now they meet up more than we do.)

  “He’s acting like an ape.”

  “She has changed though. She used to wear all those dark jumpers, loose trousers, everything covered up. They’ve been married eight years and she’s suddenly started dressing provocatively. What’s he going to think?”

  “She can dress however she wants,” says Lyd. “It’s good that’s she’s coming out of herself.”

  “I didn’t say she couldn’t, or shouldn’t, just that—”

  “If Sergio can’t deal with the fact that his wife wants to feel good about the way she looks—”

  “It’s not that. I think he just—”

  She sees that I’m flustered by her aggression and restrains herself.

  “We said we wouldn’t do this,” she says, smiling, changing tack. “And she does seem a little bit too relaxed lately, doesn’t she? I wonder if she’d tell me if she was sleeping with somebody else. Sometimes you just can’t tell. Who really knows anybody?”

  “What if there were no rhetorical questions?” I quip.

  Lyd rolls her eyes.

  “So, good day?” she asks, insinuating that I’m chirpy again.

  “I’m getting a lot out of these new ideas I’m working on. But I’m not really ready to talk about them yet.”

  “Still in the delicate stages?”

  “Yes, like you,” I say, moving in to hold her.

  She tries to turn her head away from me.

  “Hey,” I protest, gently moving her face back towards me. “We’ve got to talk about it at some point.”

  “Not yet.”

  “After dinner?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Definitely?”

  “Maybe,” she repeats, slipping out of my arms and grabbing some of her things to take upstairs.

  “Do I not even get a kiss?”

  She comes back and petulantly kisses me on the cheek. It’s supposed to be funny but I watch her disappear with concern. Her wit is an act that has no joy in it.

  I take my time making dinner to give Lyd some space. I cook an onion paste and a curry paste. I roast lots of sweet root vegetables in olive oil and seasoning. I mix them all together and add lots of tomatoes and cream. Then it’s just a matter of waiting for it all to simmer down whilst I put the rice on.

  Lyd loves curry and comes into the kitchen inhaling the aroma with her eyes closed.

  “Smells delicious,” she says, approaching the fridge and taking out a quarter-full bottle of white wine.

  “Five–ten minutes,” I say, adding some cloves and coconut milk to the rice and quickly checking to see if she’s pouring out the whole quarter-bottle.

  She is.

  “What?” she asks, spotting my glance.

  “Nothing.”

  I open the crockery cupboard and begin setting the kitchen table. Lyd helps and then takes her large glass of wine over and sits down.

  “You know,” she says, “my mum smoked twenty a day back when I was a bunch of mushy cells.”

  “And you blame her for having a small lung capacity whenever you get the chance.”

  I give the curry a stir.

  “I’d have found another axe to grind.” She takes a sip with a smile. “She knows I love her.”

  “I can never imagine your mum smoking… So, it’s sinking in a bit?”

  She looks at me blankly.

  “The mushy cells?”

  “A bit,” she sighs, looking away from me, towards the steamed-up glass of the sliding doors.

  I test the rice, there’s still a tiny bit of crunch.

  “We’re going to have to talk about Charlie’s room,” I say.

  Lyd skips a couple of beats before replying.

  “No. We’re not.”

  I turn to her.

  “No?”

  “There’s plenty of other things to talk about first.”

  “True,” I concede.

  “It’s early days.”

  “I know.”

  “You’re always off in the future.”

  “I’m just trying to make sure we’re ready for what’s coming.”

  “Like I said, it’s still early days. Try not to get carried away.”

  “Okay. But don’t start using caution as an excuse not to talk about it.”

  “I’m not.”

  “I hope not.”

  I drain the rice in a colander and begin dishing out our food. I’ve made enough for four or five. It will serve us twice so I get some plastic boxes out and put the surplus in them.

  “Are you okay, honey?” asks Lyd. “You seem very… lucid.”

  “Me? I’m fine.”

  I nod, perhaps a little bit too enthusiastically. Lyd tilts her head slightly.

  “Okay.”

  We don’t talk much over dinner. The curry has taken a while to cook so we’re both hungry. We barely look up from our plates. Once we’re done, Lyd says that she’s tired. She can’t seem to shift her headache from yesterday. I can leave the pots and pans. She’ll do them in the morning.

  I stay downstairs and do the washing up anyway. Cooking, cleaning, tidying up; I don’t mind doing chores. I find them calming. And since Lyd is the only one earning any real money at the moment, doing most of the housework seems fair enough.

  Drying my hands on a tea towel, I notice that they’re trembling again. I grip and release the tea towel three times, slowly and firmly. I’ll have to be careful Lyd doesn’t notice these tremors. My promise to keep taking lithium is an important part of our relationship but my gut is telling me to stop. I have to stay sharp, get back in touch with myself.

  I lie on the couch in the living room, staring at the ceiling. My mind wanders back to Charlie in the hospital, the day of his death. Astrocytomas are devouring his brain and spinal cord. We’re entrenched in the stress cycle of his procedures: CT scan, MRI scan, biopsy, surgery, radiotherapy. We’re hardly sleeping and rarely going home. Charlie has been having fits, losing his hair, vomiting in his sleep. It’s beginning to seem like the hospital is trying to kill him, not save him. It’s an institution of torture.

  We’ve been living on the precipice of his death but when we’re warned that today might be the day it seems like we haven’t had a chance to prepare. There has to be something we should be doing, something we haven’t thought of yet.

  We sit on either side of him, both hold a hand and wait for the cancer to eat that final cell which will turn out his light. It takes sixteen hours. He’s unconscious but makes soft, intermittent whimpers. When the sound of his flatline finally comes it tips all of my darkness out into the world. At first, Lyd thinks I’m crying but it’s laughter, manic laughter so deep that it’s silent.

  Months earlier I asked one of the doctors why it’s called astrocytoma. He told me it’s because the cancer eats star-shaped brain cells. After this I started thinking of Charlie’s brain as a universe plagued by a tiny black hole, swallowing all his stars. He started with a billion, you could see them in his e
yes, and the cancer ate them up one by one until there were almost no stars left.

  In the instant that I hear the flatline I imagine that Charlie’s universe is the actual universe and that our sun, the last of the stars, has just been devoured. Everything is submerged in total blackness, the world is falling off its orbit, the moon is crashing into the Pacific Ocean, violent black winds are throwing clouds of people and cars and trees across countries and continents. Within moments there will be only chaos and death.

  All this in a second.

  Then I realise that the black universe where everything is about to die is not Charlie’s, it’s mine. This is the joke, where the laughter starts. It’s the irony of not being connected to my emotional self. My feelings are in a dream universe. My actual body is relieved, happy, escalating towards euphoria. I’m divided in two. Reality’s a trick. It’s all one big joke.

  After the laughter everything turns white. Credit card receipts tell a story of three manic days where I manage to spend much more than our life savings on hundreds of powerful torches and expensive lighting devices. At some point I crash our car. I vaguely remember telling everyone I meet that the night sky is a memory, that the stars are already dead, the light’s about to end, we all need torches.

  My delusions spike in a dark police holding cell where I keep demanding, in a shrill, loud voice, that the universe turn the sun back on. But every time I shout sun I start having these visual flashes of Charlie, dead in his hospital bed. Eventually, I figure out what’s going on and have a fit of despair. They send me to a psychiatric ward.

  After a couple of weeks of deep, silent grief, I start seeing the hoops they are holding up so I begin jumping through them. After another couple of weeks they diagnose me with stress-induced bi-polar disorder. Apparently, it’s a relatively common way of not dealing with problems properly.

  They prescribe a lifetime of lithium. It makes me feel confused and fuzzy so I intend to shrug it off once I get out but Lyd says that she won’t take me back unless I promise to stay medicated. She is weak and barely able to talk but her relative resilience and strength fill me with inadequacy and shame. She has dealt with our son’s funeral on her own whilst I was out there ruining what was left of our lives. I can’t believe that anyone could have the depth of character to forgive me, but she does.

  This was almost two years ago.

  When I asked her why she had taken me back she answered:

  “You loved him so much that you lost your mind.”

  I’m still on the couch when I wake up. It’s morning, already light outside. There’s a yellow Post-It note on my forehead: If you’re an idiot, read this. I produce an almost non-existent snigger and sit up. My bodyweight is heavier than usual. I feel woozy and morbid.

  Lyd’s laptop is on the coffee table. I look up lithium withdrawal on the Internet and find that the only real side effect is a fifty-fifty chance of relapsing into mania. This dark gravity inside of me is all my own. My hands should stop trembling, not start, yet they tremble as I type. I clear the search history and go into the kitchen for some apple juice.

  Outside, in the back garden, the blackbird from the day before is back and when he sees me through the window he starts doing his lawn-and-birdbath routine. I grab the bag of sultanas from the cupboard and open the sliding door. He flies up onto the fence. It’s a chilly morning but, since I’ve woken up fully clothed and full of heavy shadows, I decide to take my apple juice outside and sit on one of the patio chairs. The blackbird watches me warily. When I throw a handful of sultanas onto the lawn he chirps up into the air:

  – choo-chin-chink-chica-chin-chink –

  After a few moments of anticipation he flies down and starts eating. It seems his call went out to his friends because, one by one, five more blackbirds fly down onto the lawn and begin eating the sultanas with him. As each bird arrives, the joy in me increases. I feel the sort of vacant serenity that I used to feel when I watched Charlie playing with his toys, unnoticed from his doorway. I’m looking in on a secret world. I’ve had a big hand in creating it but I’ll never be able to truly join in or fully understand it.

  Tensing all of my muscles against the bite in the air, I keep feeding them. Every time I throw more sultanas they all panic and fly up onto the fence and then, one by one, make their way back down onto the grass; always my little friend first.

  After ten or twenty minutes, my feet go numb and my fingers turn blue but I feel inspired and capable and I’m wondering if the blackbirds have anything to do with my newfound creativity. I go up to my office and lose myself in yet another new story. Words fall through my pen with ease. I’m picking all the right details. The momentum is electric. Writing hasn’t given me this much pleasure in years. I get into it so deeply that when Lyd comes home I’m still unshowered and in yesterday’s clothes.

  I go downstairs sheepishly to say hello. She’s standing in the dark behind the front door in her long beige raincoat, holding her briefcase and handbag, eerily still.

  “Lyd? Lyd?”

  She drops her things, falls to her knees and hunches over.

  “What’s going on?” I ask, rushing over to her.

  “I can’t do it,” she whimpers.

  I stroke the back of her head and sit down next to her in the dark hallway.

  “Talk to me,” I say.

  She’s silent.

  I rub her head so she knows that she’s the centre of my thoughts. I prompt her to speak a few times but she either ignores me or repeats, “I can’t do it.” When she eventually sits up, she wraps her arms around her legs and tucks her face behind her knees. I swivel round next to her, in a similar position, with my back to the front door. We’ve been staring down the dark corridor for a long time when she finally speaks:

  “Remember when we took him to the duck pond and he shouted, ‘A golden fish!’ and that whole family smiled at us? Even the kids.”

  “And then he kept saying it because he knew it was cute.”

  “Yes. Was that the day when he first saw a caterpillar? What was that sound he used to make?”

  “Woooaaah,” I say, impersonating Charlie.

  Lyd starts to laugh but chokes up with sadness.

  We reflect a while.

  It’s the first time she’s started a conversation with a memory of Charlie in over a year. For months after I got back from the psychiatric ward almost every silence was followed by, ‘Remember when…’ He could come up in the middle of anything: talking about the electricity bill, making a cup of tea, watching the shadow of the television pass along the carpet. Our grief was so all encompassing that remembering him was the only thing we were ever really doing.

  After about six months Lyd didn’t want to talk about Charlie anymore. She turned her back on the idea of him, wouldn’t visit his grave, closed his bedroom door, and punished me with terrible moods if I brought him up. Even these days she doesn’t really like to talk about him so this mentioning of him seems like a step forward.

  “I know it sounds stupid,” she says, eventually breaking the silence, “but I didn’t believe I could get pregnant again. I thought that part of me was dead. I never even imagined… In my head, we were these shadow people, and all we could ever have was a shadow life. That’s one of the reasons why we had to stay together. It wouldn’t be fair to whoever we met next. It wouldn’t be real. You know?”

  “Sure.”

  I put my arm over her shoulders.

  “But now, with this… I don’t want to be some kind of shadow family. It’s not right. It’s not how it’s supposed to be.”

  “It doesn’t have to be like that.”

  “How could it be any other way?” she asks.

  “It’s impossible to know how a baby will change things.”

  “Maybe.”

  “This could be the best thing for us.”

  “I doubt that,” she says.

  “But maybe it’s time for us to start trying a little harder?”

  She nods
and looks at me with a frown.

  “Why are your hands shaking?”

  I look at my right hand on her shoulder. The tremble has expanded into a shake.

  “I haven’t really eaten properly today,” I say, pulling the hand away from her. I try for humour, “And it’s emotional, down here, behind the front door.”

  She smiles, with love, sadness, but also an unanswered question behind it all.

  “Come on,” I say, shifting the weight off my pelvis. “Let’s get up.”

  She begins to stand. I rise with her.

  “What’s for dinner?” she asks. “Do you want me to make something?”

  “I’ve not really thought about it. There’s that leftover curry.”

  “Sounds good.”

  We walk in the dark towards the kitchen. My hand hovers along the wall and starts feeling for the plastic of the light switch. I stop, stroke up and down, move my hand around in circles. It seems to have moved. Lyd steps up and reaches for where she thinks it is but she doesn’t find it either. We grope around in the shadows for a few seconds.

  “Is this even the right wall?” she asks.

  “I can’t remember,” I say. “Is it over there?”

  TWO

  Not many animals adapted to the cities but certain kinds of scavengers thrive on human waste: pigeons, rats, mice and squirrels. Foxes too, with their guile and their burrows, made headway. But something happened to these animals in the transition. They became dirty and dishevelled, sooty and infested. However, one of the earliest colonisers managed to maintain its natural dignity: the common blackbird. After hundreds of years living in cities the civilisation still slips right off them. Sometimes a person hears one singing the song of the car alarm or the mobile phone but these whistles are not the tainted echoes of the technological era, they are full of imitative joy. The blackbirds are singing about a subject larger than the city, the thing above and below it, inside and out: boundless, endless Nature.

  Two weeks later. Saturday morning. There’s no ice on the ground but it’s still cold. Lyd is out shopping for a meal for her family. We’re going to break the news to them tonight. Most people wait a couple of months but Lyd is too close to them to keep anything big like this quiet.