Wizard of the Pigeons

by Megan Lindholm

  She sniffed disgustedly as she stared at Wizard. As she sat down at his table, he immediately rose.

  “Where are you going? Don’t walk out on me, you dummy! We’ve got things to say. Hey! Don’t try to run away from it, because it won’t work. It’s right on your heels now!”

  He moved off rapidly, routed from the Waterfall Gardens.

  He had no magic to comfort them; why wouldn’t they leave him alone? Away from the protective walls, the wind blew cold and stiff. It crept up his sleeve to chill his wrists, it stiffened his spine with achings. He coughed and it made his head pound.

  He had to find shelter, warm shelter, away from strange people talking to him. The bus.

  The driver glared at him, but had to let him board. It was the Ride Free area. Wizard shivered his way to a seat in the rear, away from the doors that opened and closed to admit a gust of wind at every stop. He would ride it clear to Battery Street, then jump off and get back on a southbound one. He sat rubbing his hands and staring at his raw knuckles. For a moment he couldn’t remember how he had skinned them. Booth.

  Oh, God! His mind teetered dizzily between Wizard and Mitchell.

  The bus jerked and swayed from stop to stop. It had begun to rain, at first gently, then determinedly. The passengers on the bus increased, most of them damp, a few shaking drops from umbrellas as they boarded. Yet the bus was not full when a young man came down the aisle and took a seat beside him.

  Wizard slid over and leaned into the side of the bus, staring at the water drops on the window but heedless of the scenery beyond. He was so engrossed in his own misery that the soft voice of the man surprised him. He spoke in less than a whisper, his eyes fixed on the front window of the bus, his hands toying with a key chain.

  “I think she’s going to say we’re through.”

  Wizard’s body clenched. Mitchell receded. A tremble passed through him from head to foot. The magic was hovering, asking him to listen and balance with it, demanding that he give of himself what he could to those whose instincts sought him out.

  He began to sweat. It was here, and he had nothing to give, no Knowing, nothing to trade for these confidences. He had to force his shivering mind to focus on the words.

  “She said we had to separate, just until she knew her own mind. She said she knew she still loved me, but that she needed space to figure out how our lives fit together. So I told her okay. What else could I say? I respect her. I didn’t marry her to keep her at home in a box and take her out and look at now and then. Her independence was one of the things that made me love her. I didn’t want our marriage to change that. So I said okay, and I moved in with a buddy for a while, and I tried to give her some space. I’d call her in the morning, and at night, and then she said that it made her feel like I was checking up on her all the time. I wasn’t. I just wanted to hear her talk, hear her say she loved me and that I could come home soon. So I only called her twice a week after that. She talks to me, but I can tell she doesn’t miss me. She likes being on her own again. She even comes out and says it, that she likes getting up alone and grabbing a quick breakfast and heading to work. And after work she can shop and eat out, or come home and watch TV, and she never has to worry if it fits in with anyone else’s plans. She never has to hurry to be on time to meet me for lunch, or find a movie we both want to see, or wait to use the bathroom. She doesn’t miss me. And she doesn’t need me. So what I ask myself is, can you love someone if you don’t need them? And is she happy and fine all on her own, or is there someone else? Can it be she doesn’t need anyone, least of all me?”

  The bus lurched into the next stop. Wizard waited nervously, but nothing came to him. Whatever comfort he was supposed to give this man was not appearing. The magic hovered just out of his reach. He steeled himself and leaped for it blindly.

  “Love and need are two separate things,” he murmured softly. “A mother does not need her children, yet she loves them. Need may even destroy love. What have you been doing with your own life while she has been finding hers again? Are you still the man she loved, the man with his own interests and life, or are you standing in the wings, waiting for her to take responsibility for your happiness? Perhaps you should find your own life and resume it, so she can approach you without fear of being consumed by you. Your terrible need for her…”

  The man was rising, getting off at this stop, without waiting to hear what Wizard was saying to him. Such a thing had never happened before, and Wizard gaped after him, reeling defiled and useless. The bus lunged and roared on through its route.

  He sat in silent misery. It began to get steamy inside from the cargo of warm, damp humans. The seat beside Wizard sagged with weight, and he turned to find that a slender Polynesian woman had settled in beside him. He turned away from her and stared out the window.

  A manicured finger jabbed him in the ribs. “Pay attention!” she hissed. He knew that accent, but couldn’t place it. It was from the bad times. “I’ve got you cornered now, and you are going to listen. So quit playing stupid with me. It’s right in front of your nose, and you won’t see it. There is no time left for me to be subtle and let you learn at your own pace. When you are irrational, you are vulnerable. And another thing: You substitute tears for action. You want to know what is wrong with you? You found out, a long time ago, that it is much easier not to care. You pretended a distance between yourself and others until it became real. You stopped hurting when people you loved got hurt. You threw your pain away. There is a part of you that fears pain and wants to go back to that numbness. But that is where your enemy is waiting for you.He will attack you with yourself.”

  She was rambling, he didn’t know about what, but he did know he had nothing to give her. He didn’t want to hear her secrets and her hurts. He had no balm for them. “Beg pardon?”

  In a flash of self-preservation. Wizard turned an icy stare upon the little woman. “Were you addressing me?”

  She did not waver. “Yes!” she hissed. Another jab of the finger. “Pay attention. You are throwing away your weapons because you think defeat would be easier. You do not wish to take responsibility for yourself. You like to fumble and limp and be helped along. Winning would change all that. So you choose to forget that you are involved in a battle. You have turned your exposed back to your enemy. When you are defeated, you will say, ‘There was never a war.’”

  Politics were the last things on his mind today. He did not want to think back to that time. He spoke very softly. “You must understand. I have nothing useful to tell you. Beg pardon. This is my stop.” Wizard dragged at the cord over the window, standing at the same moment. He clambered over her multitude of parcels to reach the aisle. He stood swaying by the doors until the driver could find a place to pull over.

  There was no sanctuary for him today, he decided as he slogged down the pavement. The rain spattered him for two blocks, then he crossed the street and caught a southbound bus.

  The early dusk of winter was already claiming the sky. He felt relieved. He could go home. One advantage to sleeping in, he told himself, was that it made the whole day shorter. Less to deal with. The bus was crowded with early commuters. He stood for several blocks and then slipped into a seat beside a young student with her lap full of textbooks. She gave him a shy look and turned to her window. Wizard breathed a sigh of relief and sagged back in the seat.

  The student fidgeted next to him. She flipped open one of her books on her lap and began to study. Her lips moved as she read softly to herself. Wizard closed his eyes and let his mind blank out. It was as close as he had come to peace today.

  The girl’s sub-auditory murmurings were as pleasant a sound as water running over stones. He let it be a mantra for him, floating on the brushing sound. He began to make out words here and there. He listened carelessly.

  “Only a fool is presumptuous enough to attempt to judge the relative merits of the different realities. Better to let them blend in a potpourri of life. Who can suavely deny that there are po
ets in our asylums and killers on our streets? We may never hear the sweetest songs because we were unwilling to accept a new scale. This reality that we treasure and call sanity may be the purest form of torment to those we try to impose it upon.”

  A philosophy course, Wizard decided. The thought irritated him. He shifted slightly to put his ears out of range of her soft mutter.

  Her nails dug suddenly into his wrist. “All right!” she hissed angrily. “All right. I give up on you. Go throw yourself right back into it. But I’ll give you one last gift, not a story or clue, but a question. If it was such a good deal, why did you leave it in the first place? What overbalanced your scales?”

  It scared the hell out of him. He dragged free of her, leaving shreds of his skin under her fingernails. He stood up, staggering as the bus leaned into its stop. He pushed hurriedly past a fat man struggling to rise from his seat and was the first person down the steps. He fled.

  The storm rallied as he emerged from the bus. From a monotonous gray pattering it became a downpour of leaden streamers. In less than a block, he was drenched. His coat dragged on his shoulders; his wet pant cuffs slapped his ankles.

  Hunger was asserting itself too, harmonizing with the residue of his hangover. His pace slowed to a trudge.

  Streetlamps began to blossom in the dark. They dispelled the night, but not the rain that assailed him. His hair was plastered to his skull, and the scars on his scalp ached abominably. He passed brightly lit store windows where pilgrims and turkeys vied with Christmas trees for seasonal charm. The rest of the sidewalk traffic wore raincoats or carried umbrellas.

  They rushed past Wizard like lemmings, almost unaware of his passage. He watched their smooth plastic faces and tried to find some kinship with them. There was none. They were immune to misery such as his. They had homes, jobs, families, all arranged neatly in hourly slots of life. Not one of them, he told himself, was going home to a three-legged cat or a damp room haunted by a footlocker. No waitresses climbed through their windows. They would push open doors to warm apartments, to loving embraces and children playing cars on the carpet. He would climb through a dirty window into darkness and pigeons shitting down the walls. When had he made that choice?

  Occidental Square was in bloom. Crews had worked all day stringing the lines of small white lightbulbs through the bare branches of the trees. Now they shone through the night, a spring of white blossoms in the November rain. Wizard turned up his face to look at them, the rain streaking down his cheeks.

  For a few moments he was eased by the beauty. Then something rolled over inside him, and he saw only bare bulbs on electrical wires, artificial and silly among the wet black branches.

  He made a stop at the arcade to use the restroom. He drank cold water from his cupped hands and stared at himself in the mirror. His face had crossed the fine line between gaunt and cadaverous. His eyes were swollen and baggy above his hollow cheeks. A twentieth-century Grim Reaper stared out at him.

  He did not wonder at the looks he drew as he left the arcade.

  He took the pedestrian walkway that had once been a block of Occidental Avenue South. A tourist information booth sprouted up out of the bricks in front of him. But it offered no answers to any of his questions. He knew the booth had once been an elegant elevator car in some building. But the scrap of information fluttered away from his mind. He couldn’t remember which old building it had come from. Suddenly it seemed less than trivial. He trudged on to the corner of Jackson and Occidental.

  Across the intersection from him stood the building that housed his life. He stared at it. Wee Bit O‘ Ireland’s windows were brightly lit and decorated for the season. It only made the rest of it drearier. The inevitable black fire escape twined up the front of the building. Great Winds Kites had one of its creations dangling from the lowest landing of it. The rain was battering the gay and fragile thing. He nearly yielded to the impulse to run and tap on their window and remind them of its plight. The energy for such a rescue drained from him. It seemed only natural that all things bright and airy should end up sodden and battered.

  Faded white lettering gave a name to his home. The Washington Shoe Manufacturing Company. It hadn’t been that for years, but back in 1890, it had held the business to go with the name. The sign would still be there long after he was gone.

  He was a passing bit of biological noise in the city, with no real place in its petrous existence. He could no longer see the faces in the brickwork, feel the underlying life in the crouching buildings. The facts and continuity he grasped at had no connection to him, any more than the scorching moth could claim the laurels of General Electric. He had tried to become part of Seattle, to blend with the streets and buildings. He’d failed.

  Such a ridiculous quest. Why should he persist now in so fruitless a task? When all was said and done, what did he signify, with his listening attitude and his ridiculous ministry to the pigeons?

  He crossed against the lights and turned into his alley. Framed by the blackness of buildings, the King Dome glittered at the far end of the alley chute like a sagging faery toadstool. He tried to imagine himself down there, at whatever sports event was filling it tonight, cussing about parking his car, hurrying the family along to the game. Would he carry a little banner to wave and know all the team statistics? Would he tie himself into that as he had tied himself into the city? The brightness of the lights against the darkness made his eyes water until it shimmered like an underwater scene. Would it make any difference? There weren’t many wizards left in the world, Cassie had said. Now he knew why.

  His alley was as empty as his soul. He crouched beneath his fire escape and sprang. With weary expertise he hauled himself up and climbed to his fourth floor window. Crouching, he eased his window up.

  A warm odor of food and hot candle wax flowed out to greet him. Wizard froze, not breathing, becoming part of the night. Then, soundless as any shadow, he eased into the room and slipped to his doorway. A yellow light spilled from his den, its source a candlestump burning on one of the pigeons’ shelves. The birds had retreated from it and were eyeing it nervously. The cardboard had been propped in the window with his books. In the darkest corner where his mattress was, something sat up. Its single glowing eye bored into him.

  “You KEPT ME WAITING,” Lynda said petulantly. “Where have you been?” She dropped her cigarette on his floor and ground it out with her boot heel. Wizard came the rest of the way into the room, wondering if he were relieved that it was only Lynda.

  She caught him before he was halfway across the room, engulfing him in an embrace. She released him just as quickly, with a loud squeak.

  “You are soaking wet and as cold as a fish! And listen to that cough! Now, you get out of those wet things right now. It’s a good thing I decided to meet you here. I brought us some food, and a little something that will warm you right to your toes. I wanted to get you some clothes today, but I didn’t know the sizes. Now I wish I had guessed. Look at you. I mean it now, get those wet clothes off!”

  “Sshh!” he cautioned her frantically. “The stores downstairs are still open. They start staying open later this time of year. Don’t talk loudly and don’t thump around like that. Take your boots off.”

  “Oh, baloney! They’re two floors below us. And if they’re open for business, they’ll be playing music and listening to customers. You worry too much. Now, are you going to take off those wet things or do you want me to take them off for you?”

  She must have taken the line from a movie. He stared at her. She stood hip-shot, her fists tightly resting on her thighs. He wondered what actress she was imitating. Her tone was maternal, her stance sexually threatening. He shivered in his wet clothing.

  “I’ll take them off myself,” he said slowly. She would have taken any other reply as a challenge or invitation. With grave dignity be turned his back on her and slowly began to unbutton his shirt with chilled fingers.

  “Aaw, rats!” Mock salacious disappointment was in her excl
amation.“Well, if you won’t let me help, I’ll just get us something to eat over here. Let me know if you decide you want help.”

  He listened to her dragging things about. He glanced over his shoulder to see her turning his food box on its side for a table. Like a little girl playing house. He went back to staring at the walls. He pulled his soaked t-shirt off over his head. His wet hair draggled down the back of his neck, chilling him. She was still chattering at him, her voice not lowered at all. Her boots clumped with every stop.

  “Quiet.” he warned softly.

  She mis-heard him. “I said, did you hear about that murder down near the ferry dock?”

  He stopped moving, his fingers clinging to the waistband of his pants. “Knife,” he said dully.

  “Yeah, that one. You heard, huh? But they don’t put it all in the papers. A real mess. Only seventeen, they say. Some little girl playing hooker. Well, you can’t say she didn’t ask for it. Do you have any salt?”

  “No!” He suddenly hated her, her callous, shallow attitude.

  A woman had died this day. Died of a knife because he hadn’t been able to summon the magic to prevent it. Behind him, she went right on making domestic noises, rustling through his possessions with a calm assumption of domain. Why don’t I get angry? he wondered. Why don’t I turn and yell at her to leave, to get out of my life and leave me alone? Because I am tired and sick, he excused himself. From the back corner of his mind came the voice of the girl on the bus. “Because it’s easier to let her do as she wishes, easier to let her take command and responsibility. You coward!”

  “Because I am tired of being alone‘” He defended himself aloud. He had inadvertently injected the words into one of Lynda’s rare silences.

  “Me, too, baby. Well, we aren’t alone anymore, are we? Here, put on your robe and come eat.”

  He hadn’t realized how close she was. The warm dark cloth cascaded over his head and down his shoulders. He found himself shrugging into it, protesting as she tugged the collar down over his head, “I don’t have a robe.”