The Blackbird Singularity

by Matt Wilven

  Your reply will be appreciated,

  Thank you.

  *CHARLIE*

  I’m glad that I’ve finally read it. Having deleted it so many times, it was beginning to seem like an unstoppable force in my life. Its persistence had made me think that it really might be from Charlie, because it was behaving like my memory of him behaves. I’m amused by how relieved I am about the fact that it’s just the usual sort of scam but then I feel sad about Charlie, sad that I’ve been whitewashing his memory out of our lives. Then it occurs to me why I saw a blank screen at the ultrasound. I click reply and start writing.

  Dear Charlie,

  I hope you know that you are still a very real part of my life. The pain of losing you was so intense that I had a breakdown. When I started putting myself back together again there was a little part of you in every single piece. You became part of me, so I could never lose you.

  As you know, me and your mum are going to have another baby. I don’t want you to be jealous about this. Nobody will ever replace you. I know you probably want me to forget about the new baby but I have to be its father and try to love it. I want us all to stay together. Please try to understand. Try to let me be happy.

  Love from,

  Daddy

  I click send. A couple of seconds later a new message appears in my junk folder.

  From: *CHARLIE*

  Subject: (1) Re: direct contact…

  I click the cross in the top right corner and close the Internet window. That’s enough communicating with my dead son for one day.

  After a near silent dinner, I spend the rest of the evening reading through my first six chapters again; deleting an adverb here, changing a comma there, wondering what it is that links these stories together. I don’t dare write for fear of casting my net too wide, creating blind alleys and unanswerable questions. I need the idea to talk to me before I move forward but the project has become silent and inert.

  Lyd is asleep when I get into bed. She looks peaceful. Sometimes I forget how much grief there is inside her whilst she’s awake. This is how her face used to be, especially in the mornings, before all the mathematics and physics started creeping back into her head.

  I’m trying to stay still so I don’t wake her but I can tell that it’s going to be another sleep deprived night. I’ve always been unable to wind down at the end of the day. It seemed like I spent half of my childhood lying awake in bed. This is something that lithium helped me to forget. Its chemical fuzz allowed me to slip into sleep in minutes.

  Thirty or forty minutes later I’m trying to control my breathing, easing my brain into unconsciousness, when I hear the pitter-patter of tiny feet run across the ceiling. My body tenses up and my heart starts beating fast. Lyd, sleeping next to me, rolls over, momentarily disturbed, and makes a quiet moaning sound.

  I get out of bed and walk down the dark hallway. As I get to the baby’s room I stop and put my ear to the door. It’s silent in there. I turn the doorknob and walk in. The curtains are open so it’s marginally lighter than the hallway. Everything is still. The room is white, soulless. The empty crib sits in the corner.

  Little feet run along the ceiling again, directly over my head.

  “Charlie?” I whisper.

  I pull the string that unlocks the attic door and lower the pull-down ladder, slowly to make doubly sure I don’t wake Lyd. The thin metal crossbeams hurt my feet as I ease my weight onto each step. My heart is racing. My throat is dry.

  My head emerges above the floor of the attic.

  “Charlie?” I whisper again.

  There’s a faint giggle, over in the corner.

  “Charlie?”

  I climb up into the attic and after two steps nearly trip over a box of Christmas decorations. I stop still, listening for Lyd. I don’t think I’ve disturbed her.

  Moving the box aside, I remember tinsel in Lyd’s hair and Charlie banging his spoon about in his high chair, cranberry sauce all over his face. A new toy fire engine that he wouldn’t eat without is knocked to the floor. He doesn’t cry, he giggles. I hear this same giggle to the side of me.

  I keep a torch by the edge of the hatch so I grab it and turn it on. I shine it to the right side of the attic, where the giggle came from. The yellow spot of illumination passes over Charlie’s empty high chair.

  There’s a lot of his stuff up here now; his crib, boxes full of bottles and bibs. Then there’s all the things from his room. Everything he ever had.

  A round shadow swings across the back wall and disappears behind the boxes full of Charlie’s toys.

  I close my eyes for a couple of seconds. I try to tell myself that these sounds and shadowy movements are not real, they are symptoms, but either way I know I have to face them. A tear slips down my right cheek, my hands are shaking. What if I see his face?

  I approach the pile of boxes where the round shadow vanished. A new noise is coming from behind the boxes now, one my brain can’t decipher. My ears are struggling to hear Charlie but the dots don’t connect. The sound is distorted, lost between two places, like a dream language scrambling into nonsense as I wake.

  I move towards this fuzzy sound and peer behind the boxes. The noise becomes louder, more high-pitched. I shine the torch into the corner and see something tiny moving down on the floor. My eyes won’t inform me as to what it is. To get a closer look, because of the slope of the roof, I have to get down on all fours.

  As I lower myself, my knee crunches on a horrible cone-shaped object full of painful little nubs. I almost cry out but breathe through the sides of my teeth instead. I shine the torch towards the object and see the red 1960s robot. I stand it up by the sidewall and look back into the corner.

  After this small bout of pain everything is clear and focused. There are three little fledglings chirping in a small round nest. A quick look around reveals that there’s a crack in one of the nearby roof tiles through which the mother must have been coming and going.

  “Vince?”

  I crawl backwards, sliding the nest along with me, then stand up and see the silhouette of Lyd’s head popping up from the hatch.

  “It’s okay, honey,” I say. “Go back to bed.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “It’s just a nest of chicks. I heard them chirping. That dead bird today must have been their mother.”

  “Chicks?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are they okay?”

  “They’re distressed. I’m going to take them outside, put them in the evergreen next to the other nest.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes. They’ll die up here on their own.”

  “You scared me.”

  “I’m sorry, honey,” I say, carefully lifting the nest.

  “I thought it was Charlie.”

  “What?” I ask, quickly turning my head towards the hatch.

  “I hope they’re not starving.”

  “They’ll be fine,” I say. “Go on.”

  “Do you want me to leave the light on down here?”

  “No, my eyes have adjusted.”

  “Okay. Night.”

  “Night, love.”

  I carry the nest over to the hatch and carefully sit down with my heels on the ladder. I turn off the torch, leaving it in its usual place, and descend the rungs slowly, putting my weight onto my pelvis, sitting on each crossbeam to stop my heels from slipping out from under me.

  By the time I make it to the ground the three chicks are frantic, squealing for food, scared. I hold them towards the window to see them better. They have no feathers and there are still shards of egg around them. Their skin is purply-pink and their eyes big and blind.

  As I walk them through the hall, Lyd calls:

  “I can hear them.”

  “Do you want to see?” I ask.

  “No. I think it might upset me.”

  “Okay. I’ll be up in a bit.”

  I carry the nest downstairs and through to the kitchen. I have to put them down on the c
ounter whilst I open the sliding door. Brisk air rushes in. I’m still barefoot and in my boxer shorts but I can’t be bothered going to get dressed. It will only take a minute. I’m worried about exposing the featherless chicks to it but I decide that most chicks are outside and that it might be warmer in the middle of a bush. This is their only chance.

  Out in the back garden, their chirping is dampened. They seem quieter and smaller heard alongside the sounds of the wind and the moving leaves and branches. Or perhaps, beneath the sky, they have sensed danger and actively become more discreet; a warning from their genetic memory.

  I walk over to the spot where Blackie and his partner live. At the foot of the evergreen I hold the nest forward and try to move one of the bigger branches aside with the outside of my wrist. As I do this I hear an aggressive:

  – SEEEEEEEE! –

  An extremely irate female blackbird rushes out of the bush and flies at my face. I fall backwards and drop the nest. I have no time to regroup and check the chicks because the bird, Blackie’s partner, is following through with her attack.

  I feel a sharp peck on the top of my head.

  – SEEEEEEEE! –

  A tiny talon scratches my cheek.

  The fluttering of wings seems to be everywhere. I turn my back to her and scramble away from the bush. There’s another peck on the back of my neck, one on my shoulder and then one at the back of my ankle. After that she’s gone, back to her nest and chicks.

  I sit on the edge of the patio to collect myself for a moment. The surface is cold and quickly brings me back to my senses. I cautiously step sideways, moving back towards the bush with my head lowered and my elbow up. The nest is upside down on the lawn.

  As I get closer I see one of the chicks about thirty centimetres from the nest. It’s still and quiet and has died at some point in the commotion; perhaps from the fall, maybe I scrambled over it.

  I lurk down even lower, sending my knees out sideways, and tip up the edge of the nest. Beneath, the two remaining fledglings immediately raise their beaks into the air and begin chirping. I delicately place them back into the slightly dishevelled nest. One of them tries to feed from my finger as I lift it. It occurs to me that I might be issuing these chicks a death sentence (without their mother to keep them warm) but I don’t know what else to do. I go to the other end of the garden and embed them as deep into the evergreen as I can.

  I pick the dead chick up off the lawn, careful not to split its thin skin open, and carry it to its mother’s grave. It’s still warm. I scoop out a couple of handfuls of dirt and then bury it. I tell myself that this does not have to be a sign. My life and the blackbirds’ lives are not cosmically engaged. It could mean anything. If it was a test it could have been to see if I would feel a sense of duty, a need to nurture, a desire to protect. I’m making a vested effort not to think the worst.

  Wincing at the chirps of the chicks I have left alone in the bush, I head back inside, wash my hands, check to see if Blackie’s partner broke my skin (she didn’t) and climb back into bed. Lyd is asleep and keeps her back to me. I stare up at the ceiling, wondering if I’ll ever hear those pitter-pattering feet again.

  THREE

  In an old myth, a prankster promises two lovers that one day they will find a pot of gold at the foot of a rainbow, just so long as they hold on to each other. Wandering through the greenest lands, they rush towards each rainbow they find with their arms and shoulders entwined, the promise finally coming true, but as they near the point where the colours touch the ground the pair always find their arms untangling and their hands pulling apart. They are never quite heading in the same direction and, at the vital moment, they always separate, each blaming the other for running the wrong way. All their lives they never once imagine that they are seeing two separate rainbows. It’s right there in front of them, right in the centre of their world.

  After signing in at reception and getting a visitor’s card, I swipe through the barriers and walk into the lobby. It’s a vast space. The back wall is a fifty-foot black marble monolith. The six lifts and two stairway entrances are framed with brass. The sidewalls are white-polished oak. The floor is covered with giant black rectangular tiles with embedded flakes of silver and crystal. I can’t remember which side I’m supposed to get the lift on.

  Two black marble doors open in the centre of the shiny back wall; an executive elevator I didn’t know was there. Curious, I look over to see who’s coming out and immediately fill with disgust. It’s Ajwan White; a writer whose work I hate.

  He’s one of these accidental zeitgeist novelists who continually trades off the success of his first book. His work is gimmicky and full of cheap tricks but a passing fashion for “spiritual postmodernism” meant that he was given a big marketing budget. All his main characters are narcissistic idiots who have big epiphanies and then change for the better.

  I’m trying to look away, to choose between right or left, but something seems to be wrong with him. He moves his spine diagonally backwards. He ducks down and runs forward. He scratches manically at his ear with both hands. He turns one hundred and eighty degrees, ducks lower, then turns one hundred and eighty degrees again. Just as he looks like he’s going to calm down, his spine jolts and he flings his right arm out in a big arc.

  Watching him, I feel a little bit light-headed. The black marble swells and distorts. I close my eyes for a couple of seconds. When I open them he is looking around, panicking again, and he starts running back towards the lift. The black marble doors are sliding closed, he’s not fast enough, and he ends up pushed against them. He quickly turns and looks in the air around him. His nerves begin to settle. He walks away from the shiny black wall grinning and shaking his head.

  I’m standing in the centre of the lobby and still haven’t chosen left or right. Despite the fact that I’m clearly just watching him I’m also eager to imply that I’m not interested in the fact that he’s walking towards me.

  “Did you see that?” he asks, smug, amazed by something pitiful, probably about to “change” for the better.

  I look over my shoulder to check for other people. He’s talking to me. The bastard is talking to me.

  “What?” I ask, annoyed with myself for engaging.

  He laughs, leans down, puts his hands on his knees and breaths deeply for a second. He’s bathing in my attention. Pathetic.

  “Phew! There was a wasp waiting for me when the lift doors opened. It came right at me.”

  “A wasp?”

  “I know.”

  “I thought you’d lost it.”

  “I nearly did… I’d love to know if they get a kick out of doing that to people.”

  “I doubt it.”

  He looks around and decides he can finally be fully calm.

  “Sorry, but you’re Vincent Watergate, right?”

  “Vince,” I say, he doesn’t seem to be offering his hand so I’m not either. “And you’re Ajwan White?”

  “Adge… I heard we were at the same place. Come for your monthly bollocking?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I don’t want to keep you. But after the wasp I felt like the ice was already broken… I just wanted to say that I thought All the Leaves Have Fallen was… well… you wrote a beautiful book. Really underrated… I can’t believe it didn’t take off.”

  “Thanks.”

  “The relationships, the emotional spectrum, so understated, but so complex. We don’t know who to love or who to forgive. Everybody’s so… human.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Really. I never do this.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “You should be the one doing all the interviews and signings.”

  “I wouldn’t want to,” I say. “I read I Is No More Than the Man Who Says I.”

  “A mouthful, isn’t it?” He laughs. “God knows how it sold so well.”

  “Yes. I imagine you sold more than Barthes ever did.”

  “Thank you,” he says, accidenta
lly accepting a compliment that he hasn’t been given. “And it’s nice that you got the reference. Not many people did. Like I said, a miracle it took off the way it did.”

  “Advertising,” I say. “I suppose corporate investment creates a sense of value.”

  He finally senses that I’m not a fan. He’s not an acute observer.

  “Well,” he says, amused by my disdain, “I just wanted you to know, you know, how much I enjoy your writing.”

  He waves awkwardly and walks away shaking his head. At the barriers he pulls out his wallet and holds it over the scanner. It detects the magnetic strip of his entry card inside. The guard nods and smiles at him as he walks out the front door. He doesn’t hand in a visitor’s card. They must have given him his own card. He can come and go as he pleases.

  I take a lift on the left and get lost in a labyrinth of identical corridors, small offices and kooky bureaucrats. After a few horrible minutes I knock on a door and get directions from a woman who looks like I asked if she had a spare kidney.

  My agent, Angela “not the dead novelist” Carter, has frizzy brownish-blonde hair cut like an old lady (even though she’s not even sixty) and huge glasses that have been in and out of fashion twice since she bought them. Unlike every literary critic in the country, she loved my first two novels.

  “Vince. Good to see you.”

  She says this like a grandmother who once had high hopes for her now disappointing grandson.

  “You don’t represent Ajwan White, do you?”

  “I wish. Ha! No. He’s a top-floor author.”

  “He’s a hack.”

  “Of course he is. Sit down. Sit down… Do you want a drink?”

  “I brought you some more pages.”

  I try to hand her my fourth, fifth and sixth chapters but she puts out her hand in a halting motion, forms a mock-repulsed pout and shakes her head.

  “That’s not why you’re here.”

  “I’m writing some really good stuff.”

  “I don’t doubt it.”