by David Deans
Naturally, since it was probably a bad idea to repeat my astonishing transformation while the above described Hashes were up and about (No, I don’t think we have met before, actually), I waited for night before making my first attempt to do so—which in any case, alas, proved a failure.
The TV off, the house gone quiet, I closed my eyes tightly, ruffled up my feathers, held shut a lungful of air, and, well, sort of squeezed as hard as I could—imagining that I could somehow transmute myself into a man by sheer willpower alone. I let out my breath and opened my eyes: in the little round mirror, attached on the outside to the bars of the cage, I confronted a rather sheepish and dimly lit reflection of an African gray parrot, perched and feathered as before. I did the special wink and tried it again: composing myself, shutting my eyes, inhaling another—if not the same—lungful of air, and squeezed even harder. But again to no avail.
The truth is that it is more difficult to flip from being a parrot to a man than it looks. Of course, not really knowing what on earth had brought that transformation about in the first place, I wasn’t quite sure how I actually intended to repeat it. A little inventiveness was going to be key. The next night, for example, I tried flying round and round the living room airspace in a circle till it made me go dizzy. But that didn’t work either. The night after that I tried running up to the top of my ladder and giving the mirror a wink, then running back down, doing this over and over. Quite how that sort of thing was supposed to work I don’t know but in any case there was again no result. The night after that, I tried secreting myself under a doily and reciting the well-loved enigma, Who’s a pretty Polly, who’s a pretty Polly! Once again, I remained firmly imprisoned within the genus of parrot.
As the week wore on it became apparent that my experiments were getting me nowhere and I not unnaturally began to grow discouraged. Perhaps I was deluding myself? Perhaps I would never again get the chance to be a human being? Perhaps I never had been a human being in the first place—and that ride in the car to the diner had only been a dream?
I was on the verge of giving up hope of ever resuming my admittedly very fledgling existence as a human being when, earlier on that morning of the thrice-cartwheeling birdcage, I happened to witness something that gave me fresh hope. The family breakfast was over. Matilda was clearing the table. Bob was upstairs digesting his Cheerios and packing his business trip suitcase. By hopping from one perch to another I could watch them in turn. Betsy and Jane, for example, now nourished by the goodness of Froot Loops and armed with hockey sticks, pigtails, and impeccable homework, had set off to the corner to wait for the yellow bus to come and take them to school. Bobby, the little rascal, was lagging behind—his satchel nowhere to be found—until I saw him running out to the car in the driveway: of course!—yesterday he’d not come home on the bus at all. He’d gotten a lift back in the car from junior baseball.
From my vantage point at the living room window, I watched him clamber into the back of the car and, seconds later, emerge triumphantly with the satchel aloft—in the process of which his feet just happened to scuff something out from the backseat and onto the pea stone. It was the partially crushed fish burger box the waitress had given me at the diner, with the cute little sailboat straw mast still in its roof. I knew then that my nocturnal humanoid joy ride had not just been a dream after all.
Bobby, satchel in hand, was by now trotting up Remington Drive to catch up with his sisters—oblivious of his role in uncovering the burger Medusa and in jolting my memory regarding the visit of the vet. Bob had meanwhile himself set off in a bright yellow taxi for Belmont International Airport for his business trip—more on that in a moment. That left just Matilda, my favorite. I watched her getting ready to head out for the shops: applying a light touch of mascara and then setting off down the porch steps, her heels receding from earshot.
One thing I’d not yet considered, in my somewhat ad hoc approach to discovering what had turned me from a parrot into a man, was the role that a visit from Dr. Horowitz, the picture book vet, may have played. It seems obvious now of course, but it wasn’t till Bobby kicked out my now unmanned and slightly storm-damaged Medusa that I recalled it at all. I remembered how on the day preceding my first metamorphosis, Dr. Horowitz (half-moon glasses, stethoscope, and an identical twin to the picture book doctor) had paid a house call to our home on Remington Drive for a rigged-up picture book demonstration—with myself playing the role of patient, and Matilda acting as his assistant.
A feces sample, notwithstanding the rigged-up nature of the business, was collected by means of a spatula from the base of my cage and winged forth to a laboratory located on the far side of Belmont in the bowels of the veterinarian school for a follow-up analysis. But no need to wait for the results—this was psittacosis, announced Dr. Horowitz, “make no mistake!” And yet I had neither the shivering nor the rheumy eye discharge, nor the “fluffed-up scrubbiness” of the feathers, none of the horrible symptoms of that nasty dreaded disease. In fact, I was as fit as a fiddle. Nevertheless, up popped the gladstone bag, brimming with bottles and other weirdly shaped containers. Tablets were selected and ground into a powder with a mortar and pestle. To the pulverized pills was then added a mystery tincture from an unmarked blue glass vial (oxytetracycline?) that produced a crazy plume of purple smoke.
Like the model parrot, the loyal mascot, I had taken part in the demonstration in good faith. At the same time, I was watching the subsequent pharmacological preparations with a gathering sense of foreboding. On the vet’s departure, a conscientious Matilda—as per Dr. Horowitz’s instructions—had taken my cuttlebone and dipped it into the mortar, allowing it to absorb the pharmacological paste (a curl of wet icing sugar on the end of a rusk), which then was allowed to dry before being wedged back into the bars of my cage. Now, most likely the reason I’d not at first made the connection between Dr. Horowitz’s visit and my extraordinary transformation later that night was, I now realized, because of the time lag between my ingestion of the concoction (via my brush-your-teeth-type sharpening scrape on the cuttlebone) and the kicking in of its actual effects. By the time the effects did kick in, when I fell off that magazine rack at a quarter to three in the morning, I’d long since forgotten about the events of the day before.
After my recent run of disappointments, I was excited by my new theory, and, prompted by the sight of my little carton Medusa, I was impatient to put it to the test. With Matilda gone I was once more alone—just me and the audiocassette of Everyday Accidents and Domestic Mishaps going round and round on the same bunch of everyday accidents and mishaps. I felt I could risk an experiment without needing to wait for nightfall. So I sidled along the elm branch toward the bars of the cage from which the cuttlebone protruded. (I should say that I rarely actually ever go inside the cage: it’s really kept more as an accoutrement holder—for the ladder, the mirror, the seed tray—than as a cage per se.) For a few moments, I just stared at the cuttlebone, my head cocked over first to one side, now to the other, pondering its medicinal properties. Summoning up the courage, I leaned in toward it and scraped it with my bill. It made a rasping sound, like fingernails on a blackboard. I scraped some more to keep my bill sharp and true.
And, well, that seemed to be that: no fanfare, no stars and stripes belting into the wind. Ho hum, said I, and sidled back to my favorite section of the perch (a knot on the branch, which stops you from sliding round and hanging upside down like a bat). Here, I said to myself, I might wait at no loss of profit. And, bearing in mind the time lag between ingestion and kick-in from my first experience, I readied myself for the long haul. Might as well listen to the audiocassette of Everyday Accidents and Domestic Mishaps. Basically, it wasn’t worth moving to a less precarious location (where the views are invariably inferior to those from less stable aeries) for a good couple of hours yet—or at least that’s what I believed. What reason had I for thinking the magic transformation would this time happen so much more suddenly, so much sooner than last?
But rather than dash off for another spin in the car to pay my respects to the waitress (like in The Milkman Always Rings Twice), I decided it prudent—it being broad daylight—to remain for the meantime in the house, away from the eyes of curious neighbors. In any case, there was plenty indoors to keep me out of mischief. So I set about accustoming myself to the sheer physicality of the human world—enrolling myself in a self-taught total-immersion crash course, thereby familiarizing myself with human spatialities, binocular vision, and 3-D perspectives. Master the small things first, I told myself, the basics, and who knows, I might go for another spin in the car—to the mall, for example. The parking lot is convenient and safe. Even-keeled, barefoot, in a seemingly tailor-fitted two-piece (African?) gray serge suit and a starched white collar garnished with a loosened, rakish necktie (from my master’s abandoned wardrobe?) I padded about from one room to the next, confirming for myself the geography and layout of the residence Hash.
I could now open doors for myself—no need to wait for someone to open them for me. I tried pushing one or two, rocking them on their hinges to gauge their weight and resistance should the need ever arise, for example, to flee from some pursuant murder investigation along a door-rich hospital basement corridor with the doors getting smaller and smaller (and the ceiling sloping down at an angle). In a sonorous but pleasantly robotic baritone and with an astronaut’s precision, I narrated my own actions in the audio-course house-style: “I am walking toward the door, I am turning the handle, I am picking up the book,” now and then pausing to try my hand at various wholesome time-saving appliances—such as the valet overnight suit press. Talking of suits, Bob’s half of the wardrobe contained a neatly pressed row of identical, calendrically arranged two-piece pin-striped 24/7 Big Boss business types, one of which appeared to be missing. It was like being inside an IKEA catalogue come to life, or a gigantic dollhouse with the roof off—all very modern in that retro, stuck-in-a late-1950s-early-1960s-time-warp course-book kind of way. There were rounded corners on the stove top, there were ducks above the mantelpiece, and there were those high saloon-style stools at the breakfast bench in the kitchen. In every single room there was a three-foot-diameter wall clock. For the first time, I was able to rifle through Bob’s home-study work desk (located for some reason in the living room) with my own two hands. A nearby bookcase was occupied by a richly embossed catalogue-order set of encyclopedias, as yet unconsulted.
Frequently consulted, on the other hand, were duplicate copies of the Acme Institute course book Forward with English! These I found distributed throughout the house in strategic locations—popping up like mushrooms on a kitchen counter, on a proverbial coffee table, on a window ledge in the downstairs toilet, on the phone table in the hall, too many to mention in all. Bookmarked in the traditional manner or spread-eagled over the fat arm of a settee, they each appeared to have been suddenly abandoned at some particular section: Verbs for Special Occasions, Adjectives for Big Business—as if someone had been mid-cram for an important certificate exam and had decided to just walk out of the house and not come back, like the tale of the Mary Celeste. There was even a copy of Forward with English! on the bedside commode in the upstairs master bedroom.
And it was at this bedside grammar that I happened to be browsing (still barefoot and with the insouciant necktie, silently mouthing along to the section on First Steps), where my flow was interrupted by the click-tack clack-tick of a woman’s heels coming along Remington Drive, the velvet rhythm and impact with which I was only too familiar.
I suspended my reading. Holding my breath and holding my place (this is a finger) with my finger, I threw a look toward the bedroom window and from my angle of vision observed a pointy fifties-style ladies’ sling-back entering from the left-hand pane. I caught it just in time to see it scrunch into the pea stone that bedded the piebald spat-like tires of the Plymouth Fury. The shoe was strapped snugly to a foot that was attached in turn to a calf, protruding, with a nice shapely curve from the hem of a light summer raincoat. I did not need to ascend any higher to know the foot belonged to Matilda. It was like that bit in The Cat in the Hat where Mother’s ankle in the frame of the window is spied by the goldfish from its startled Cassandrian teapot.
But how much easier to explain the mess in The Cat in the Hat story than to explain the mess in mine!
2
First Steps!
You find yourself inside the picture book world of an English-language teaching manual for second-language users. From the following list, choose the one that offers the most plausible explanation as to how you might have got there:
a) You are at the theatre for a contemporary production of Six Cartoon Characters in Search of a Grammarian. During the intermission you decide to stretch your legs, soon getting lost in the theatre’s maze of faded Victorian corridors and brass-banistered Escher-like stairways. At length you come to a dwarf-size door, partly obscured by a red velvet curtain. Having ducked through the little door, you find yourself in the picture book protagonist’s garden, vividly replete with flower beds, lawn sprinkler, white picket fence, and apple-pie wife, who appears to be summoning you from the veranda. The little door (marked on the picture book side MISCELLANEOUS PROP CLOSET) has shut fast behind you with no sign of doorknob or key, or
b) Your town has been dismantled overnight by a fastidious team of malignant demons. Every last building—from the mock colonial bungalows with dormer windows and white picket fences to the bright-fronted chain stores and offices, from the cinema multiscreen and mall complex to the Hotel Bristol—has by morning been replaced by its full-scale life-size LEGOLAND equivalent. Along with the other traumatized inhabitants, you awake to find your command of your own mother tongue, English, is all but gone and henceforth you will be obliged to spend a great portion of your time attending classes in order to learn a replacement processed-cheese dialect in a hermetically sealed reality-TV environment from which there is little chance of escape. The businessman’s narrow-brimmed fedora has meanwhile undergone a dramatic revival, or
c) You are Orpheus Hash, erstwhile Argonaut, enchanter of rock and tree, come to rescue from the picture book the slender flower-gathering Eurydice Matilda. On the brink of escorting her away from Forward with English! you turn to her claiming to be descended from parrots, whereupon she is snatched once more from your arms. Heart-broken, having blown your chance to be reunited, you then scorn the advances of the Thracian women at the feast of Bacchus, who, perceiving themselves spurned, tear you limb from limb. Your decapitated head and inflatable lyre bob over the sea to the island of Lesbos, where (according to epic tradition) you regale the island inhabitants with exercises (oral) from the grammarian picture book, or
d) Bearing an uncanny resemblance to the lead protagonist in a grammarian picture book (of whose parallel gestalt-switch existence you had hitherto only ever been partially aware), you have been unwittingly commandeered for some kind of set-piece demonstration, apparently now gone horribly wrong, for the Everday Accidents and Domestic Mishaps page, or
e) You are a grammarian detective. It is half past midnight. You have just received by telephone a reliable tip-off that a nonsense virus has managed to hack its way into the course material for Forward with English! where under the cloak of anonymity it has already begun to wreak untold havoc. You don raincoat, hat, and gun and set off into the alleys and shadows of the rainy night in pursuit….
3
An hour or so before my second spectacular metamorphosis, Bob T. Hash III had packed into h
is maroon-hued, zip-shut traveling suitcase a pair of freshly ironed sky-blue polyester shirts, a fat bestselling detective thriller, and his businessman’s toiletry kit (Br. Eng.: “businessman’s sponge bag”). According to his time-honored agenda, Bob was about to take a short day-away flight to attend an afternoon conference in a neighboring state, and was due to fly back to Belmont that same evening. But the very fact he was taking a plane at all meant he was obliged by picture book protocol to pack the standard business trip luggage (please see page 15 of the picture book, where standard business trip luggage is shown neatly laid out beside the waiting suitcase). Bob put the things inside the suitcase, zipped up the lid, checked his wristwatch, ticket, and passport, and made his way downstairs. In the hallway he unhooked a light-colored raincoat, folding it over his arm with the briefcase. At the top of the porch steps he pecked his wife good-bye like in an advertisement for cornflakes and climbed into a bright yellow taxi that, as if by magic, had drawn up in front of the house.
“The Belmont International Airport, my good man!”
However, the person thereat deposited some twenty minutes later was unrecognizable as the person whom, from the vantage point of my all-seeing window perch, I had watched board the taxi twenty minutes beforehand. This was because, as I would later find out, during his trajectory through leafy grid-pattern suburb and along the new ring route to the airport on the other side of Belmont, Bob had replaced his drab gray necktie with a fluorescent shimmering palm tree clip-on and had slicked a fake tan onto his face. To his scalp he had applied a more generous dollop of Brylcreem than usual and replaced his trademark thick-rimmed Clark Kent spectacles with a pair of wire-rimmed mafia-style Starsky and Hutch sunglasses, affixing to his upper lip a drooping jet-black Zapata false mustache he’d procured from a practical-joke shop—the overall effect being to turn Bob into the spitting image of Señor Gonzalez, principal protagonist and Bob’s own counterpart from the Spanish course ¡Vámonos—adelante con el Español!, whose self-contained picture book universe ran parallel to Bob’s own and in many respects shared the same basic format and lifestyle. In any case, anyone who had not watched Bob get into his taxi could have been forgiven for thinking it was Señor Gonzalez, and not Mr. Hash, who got out of the taxi at the airport.