The Blackbird Singularity

by Matt Wilven

  He glances over his shoulder nervously. He seems a little bit hyper. I’m now working on the assumption that this meeting is a set up. I’m about to be analysed in some horrible, probing way.

  “There’s someone I want you to meet,” he says.

  This could be worse than I expected.

  A shrink?

  An intervention?

  I follow him, scanning all the tables. There’s no one I can imagine we’re going to end up sitting with. The person we’re heading towards makes the least sense of all: a teenage Japanese girl with large breasts and a surly glare.

  Sergio sits down beside her and proudly puts his arm around her shoulders in a possessive and sexually satisfied way. His smile is beaming. She seems underwhelmed. I sit down apprehensively. This isn’t about me at all.

  “This is Mitsu,” he says. “Mitsu, Vince.”

  I was wrong about her age. Now that I’m up close, she looks to be in her mid-twenties. Her face is stubborn and gloomy. It was her schoolgirl look that threw me off: crisp white blouse, black cardigan, pleated grey skirt, white ankle socks with frilled edges and flat-bottomed patent leather shoes with a strap. Three of her blouse buttons are undone, revealing the wispy edges of what must be an enormous tattoo that creeps up onto her cleavage from all directions.

  “Hi,” I say, offering my hand.

  She reaches for it limply, barely makes contact and is seemingly appalled by the formality of the gesture. She has the vacant disinterest of an extreme masochist and radiates emotional trauma. I smile awkwardly and look back at Sergio.

  “I’m in love,” he says.

  Mitsu looks at him disapprovingly.

  “So I see,” I say. “When did, this happen?”

  Unable to bear hearing what Sergio is about to say, Mitsu slides off her chair and walks towards the toilets. I can’t help but watch her walk away. Her nonchalance, alongside the thinly veiled sexual statement her clothing makes, is hard for the libido to ignore. Every man in the place watches her lustily, even the family orientated proprietor at the cash desk. I notice that she has the word December tattooed in red ink on the back of her right calf.

  “December?” I ask.

  “Isn’t she amazing?” he says, shrugging.

  “What’s going on, Serge?”

  He tries to compose his face, project some seriousness, or empathy, but he is full of lust for his overgrown schoolgirl.

  “I know,” he says, unable to control the glee creeping onto his face. He takes a breath and tries again. “I know.”

  “Does she know?”

  “That I’m married?”

  “No. Does Gloria know?”

  “I’ve left her,” he says, pausing for a second before asserting himself with a single nod.

  “When?”

  “This morning… I’ve never felt like this, Vince. She blows my mind.” He looks over his shoulder. “She does anything I say. An-y-thing.”

  “Please,” I say, holding a hand out for him to stop.

  “You should hear some of things that come out of her mouth. She’s from a different world.”

  He smiles, shrugging again.

  “And Gloria?”

  “I’ve never felt like this… It’s passion. Real passion.”

  “Is Gloria okay?”

  “Gloria?”

  “Yes. Gloria.”

  “She doesn’t know. Not yet.”

  “Doesn’t know what?”

  “Well, anything… But I can’t go back there, Vince. That life is over. It’s done.”

  “Okay. Okay. Stop. Do you realise what you sound like?”

  A flash of resentment passes across his face but is quickly displaced by joy.

  “I don’t expect you to understand.”

  “What do you expect?”

  He glances over to the toilets.

  “I need you to tell Gloria for me.”

  “What?” I say, standing up, intuitively beginning to leave.

  He jumps up, runs around the table and stands in front of me. He has somehow grabbed a white envelope during these quick movements and now holds it in front of him.

  “Please. Just give her this.”

  “No way. I’m not implicating myself in this,” I say. “She’ll think I knew.”

  “The letter explains everything.”

  “So? Drop it through the letter box.”

  “She deserves more than that.”

  “No shit,” I say, laughing with disbelief. “You’ve been married eight years.”

  “But no kids,” he adds, with a half-smile, as if this is a saving grace.

  “Lyd said you’d been accusing her of cheating.”

  “She’s been at it for months. Trust me. I know she has.”

  “No. I’m not getting involved in this. You can talk to her yourself.”

  “I can’t,” he says, his smile beaming for a split second as he sees Mitsu exiting the toilet. His expression is suddenly urgent. “Mitsu says it has to be gung-ho, just the two of us, no turning back, Bonnie and Clyde, Micky and Mallory, you know?”

  “You’re married. She’s… I don’t know what she is.”

  “I know. I know. But you’re the only person I can ask. Please.”

  He looks her way again and desperately forces the envelope onto my chest. I shake my head, fold the envelope and put it in my pocket. He mouths Thank you, and tries to insist that I sit back down as she slouches onto her seat. I refuse but I’m still too intrigued to leave.

  “How did you two meet?” I ask, standing by the table.

  “Casino,” says Mitsu, lethargic, a slight accent.

  “You’re not gambling again?” I ask Sergio.

  “Not anymore.”

  “When was that?”

  “Three weeks ago,” says Mitsu, bored.

  “Three weeks. And now you’re… Jesus… I should go… Sorry, Mitsu. Something came up whilst you were… in there.”

  She does not acknowledge this. Sergio jumps up and follows me for a couple of steps.

  “Thanks for this, Vince,” he whispers, patting my shoulder.

  “Yeah,” I say, walking away.

  I step up to Sergio and Gloria’s house and ring the doorbell. Gloria answers in a frilly black negligée, stockings and a silk robe that is open and hanging by her sides. Her face is heavily made up. The sight of her breasts bulging and her curvy thighs pinched by the stockings is a complete surprise to me. Up until recently, this would have been completely out of character. When me and Sergio get drunk together, he sometimes whinges about their sex life; how she never goes down on him, how their sex can never just be about fun or fucking, how there’s too much inhibition and emotional preciousness, how, unprovoked, during bedroom conversations, she needlessly lectures him about her refusal to be “a man’s prize”, or about sex not being a fantasy of power and worship. These are not the irks of a man whose wife has an outfit like this.

  Seeing me, the initial sexual confidence drains from her face, her spine slouches and she quickly closes her robe and ties it up.

  “What are you doing here?” she asks, poking her head out the doorway, looking both ways and then grabbing my arm and dragging me inside. “You’re going to have to be quick.”

  “Jesus, Gloria.”

  “What?” she asks, impatiently. “What?”

  “Nothing. It doesn’t matter.”

  She slants her head at me as a warning.

  “What is it? Dinner? The four of us some time? Message for Serge? Something from Lydia? What?”

  I take the envelope out of my pocket.

  “Message from Serge,” I correct her.

  “Fine, fine,” she says, snapping it out of my hand, barely recognising the irregularity of this. “Go. Go.”

  “Okay,” I say. “I just want you to know, I didn’t know anything about it until this morning.”

  It now dawns on her that this situation is strange. She closes the door with a confused expression, glances at me critically and
then opens the letter. Reading it, her frenetic energy depletes in seconds. By the time she’s turned the first page she is sitting at the bottom of the stairs barely able to keep her head above her shoulders.

  The letter is long. As she is reading the final page the doorbell rings. Gloria looks up with a dumbfounded expression, as though she’s not sure what the noise signifies. Her eye make-up has run down her cheeks. Her crying has been silent.

  “I’ll get rid of them,” I say.

  “No!” she shouts, suddenly coming into herself.

  She panics, flings the letter aside and runs towards me.

  Bemused, I look through the clouded pane of glass by the side of the front door and see the blur of a familiar figure that I can’t quite place.

  “No!” repeats Gloria, trying to forbid me to even look.

  She stands in front of the door and pushes me away. Intrigued, and fairly certain that I know the person outside, I try to reach around Gloria’s waist for the door handle but she thrusts her breasts out at me, forcing me to take a step back and desist.

  “Don’t,” she says, serious, broadening her stance.

  To my horror she seems to be implying that there could be an accusation of assault in store for me. She’s desperate.

  The doorbell rings again, twice in quick succession, and is followed by immediate, heavy knocking.

  “Gloria? I can hear you. What’s going on?”

  The voice is muffled. The identity of this person is dangling just out of reach, it won’t come to me, but Gloria sighs, her protective stance slumps, and, presuming that the game is now up, she opens the door.

  Peter, Lyd’s big brother, is standing in the doorway in a Prada suit, holding a chilled bottle of Cristal. His face does not falter from its relaxed, overconfident smile when he sees me.

  “Alright, Vince? What are you doing here?”

  Back home, sitting in a chair on the patio after a late lunch, my feet up on the round outdoor table, I can barely stay awake. The stress of the morning was exhausting. Gloria and Peter have forced me into a corner, making me swear that I won’t tell Lyd about them. I hate lying to her. I’m deceiving her enough as it is. The hope of getting things back to our usual open and honest state is the only thing keeping me on course. Another secret feels like too much, a step too far.

  I’m also worried about what Sergio and Gloria are doing to each other and, even though it is a relatively small aspect of the situation, I feel personally betrayed by their lack of regard for the friendship the four of us share. There was a time when we could sit around this outdoor table without a negative thought crossing between us. With these affairs, those days are gone. They’ve thrown what we had away.

  I try to think about writing to distract myself from the pressure of all these lies and betrayals. There’s a quote on a Post-It that I’ve stuck on my desk that’s been working its way into the story. Something Kant wrote. It’s slowly becoming a theme in the work, connecting the different narratives.

  On the great map of the spirit only a few points are illuminated.

  I say it to myself a few times, trying to mull on how it relates to the fictional events, how I can make it resonate, but I can’t concentrate on concepts or imaginary people. The sun is shining and, today, after Mitsu, after Peter, brightness is enough.

  Next door’s cherry blossoms are blooming; glorious pinks and whites. The sunlight makes them look unreal, blurring all the edges with the intense purity of their colour, creating clouds of candy floss and marshmallows.

  My eyes keep giving in to sleep. My head lolls, dips, and then jerks up, awake. I do this again and again and, between the snoozes, through the cracks, the colours of the trees gleam. Each time I slip away it’s for a little while longer. It starts with a second, two seconds, four, gradually moves up to a minute. Somewhere along the way I’m unconscious long enough to call it sleep. Five minutes. Ten minutes. I start waking with my chin on my collarbone and a crick in my neck. Finally, I sleep for so long that I lose track of time altogether.

  A dull strain in my ankle wakes me. I open my eyes and see that Blackie is standing on the tip of my right foot, sideways, in profile, his black left eye with its golden ring piercing me intensely. His shiny yellow beak is glistening in the sun, clouds of pink-and-white blossom pulsate behind him. This is the first time he has come to me since I annoyed him over a week ago. It’s the first time he’s ever come to me without my coaxing him with sultanas.

  He stands in silence. He’s not here for food. He is here to show me his true self. But he is extremely disappointed in me. After seeking and gaining his trust, and making him a part of my journey to a new self, I showed him off like a trained pet. He must gaze into me and see if I have the conviction and integrity to see my journey through. I’m not sure how he tells me all this. It is implicit.

  He jumps, turns one hundred and eighty degrees and faces the opposite direction, still on my foot, looking at me with his other eye. Uneasiness rises in me. Showing me his profile like this is a demonstration of his power. He is turning himself into a symbol, a pure being, and by doing so he is opening a chasm into another realm. Behind him, in the amorphous pinks and whites, there is an ancient world, older than I can imagine, and he is one of its messengers.

  He jumps again, this time he lands facing me. His eyes contain the unflinching supremacy of nature. There is no compassion in their black depths. He sees me for exactly what I am. I feel deep and sincere shame and this shame forms a bridge between us, connects us. His beak opens and, as I look down his throat, something, an idea, a message, pours out from inside him, from beyond him:

  I will save you if you try with all your heart. I will protect you. But if you are weak, I will leave you to be devoured. I will stand aside as your world falls apart.

  “I’ll try,” I whisper. “With all my heart.”

  My eyes are closed. I’m not sure how long I’ve been asleep. The entire blackbird experience could have been a dream but when I open my eyes I find myself face down on the lawn. My head is throbbing. I have no idea how I got here.

  Blackie is standing in profile about a metre away from me on the grass. He jumps one hundred and eighty degrees and my headache calms slightly. He jumps one hundred and eighty degrees again and I feel almost normal, as though nothing has happened. He is just a bird on my lawn.

  – chink-chink, chook-chook, chink-chink, chook-chook –

  (Goodbye.)

  He flies away.

  SIX

  Human beings have three types of photoreceptor in their retinas: red, green and blue. This is the reason they see the range of colours that they do. Their spherical eyes are only able to focus on one thing at a time, changing the way they perceive, understand and interact with reality. Birds, on the other hand, have four photoreceptors and their cones’ maximal absorption peaks are higher, enabling them to see ultraviolet light and countless additional variants of colour. Their eyes are also flatter so they can focus on lots of things at once. However, the unfathomable difference is the fourth cone. Birds see a whole field of visual information that is beyond human comprehension. People can try to guess what it is by studying the behaviours and attributes of birds (some experts say polarised light, others magnetic fields) but in the end they have to accept the limitations of the imagination and admit that birds can see an entire dimension that people are unable to envision.

  I wake up at around 5:30am and decide to get up and make Lyd breakfast: orange juice, porridge with seeds and sliced dates, coffee, toast with butter and honey – a basic but broad weekday breakfast. I listen to Lucille Bogan as I prepare it.

  After showering, Lyd arrives in the kitchen wearing her white robe. The idea of me eating into the few private minutes she has in her day annoys her at first. She relaxes when she sees the breakfast laid out for her and even more when I turn my music off.

  “I won’t have time to eat all this,” she says, almost apologetically, running her fingers through her hair to distribute whatever
product she puts in whilst it’s still wet. “I’ve got a big day.”

  I approach her.

  “I know,” I say, reaching for her waist. “I just wanted to treat you.”

  She lifts an eyebrow and registers how tired I look.

  “What are you doing up at this time anyway?”

  “Just woke up,” I say, reaching for the knot at the front of her robe.

  She flattens my hands to her stomach.

  “I usually just grab an apple,” she says.

  “You should be eating properly. All the critical growth happens around this time. Organs, all that stuff.”

  She’s amused that I know more about her pregnancy than she does.

  “Really?”

  “Really.” I submit to her amusement with a smile. “I’ve been reading up.”

  I slide my hands from under hers, around her hips and down her robe until I’m touching the skin of her lower thighs. At the first indication of upwards movement, she takes a step back and looks at me with a playful warning.

  “We don’t want to interrupt the critical growth, do we?”

  I move away with a half-amused, half-rejected smile, wondering when we last had sex. My libido is pointlessly blazing. It has been for days. Lyd walks over to the breakfast counter and pulls herself onto a stool with a sigh.

  “You not eating?” she asks, skipping the porridge and spreading honey on a piece of toast, no butter.

  “Too early,” I say, patting my stomach.

  “For you or your little friend?”

  She drinks half of her orange juice, whipping an amused glance at me.

  “He doesn’t come anymore.”

  She glances again, this time with a frown, but quickly dispels the need to worry. She begins eating her slice of toast.

  “Oh well,” she says. “I’m surprised he kept it up for as long as he did. Maybe he got bored of sultanas?”

  “Maybe,” I say.

  It doesn’t occur to her that I would lie about the importance of Blackie’s role in my life, or that my heart might be racing at the mere mention of him.

  “He’ll probably come back,” she offers, but with a tone that suggests that it’s unimportant either way. “Creatures and habits and all that.”