A Box of Birds

by Charles Fernyhough

  I call James.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Finding James

  ◉

  As I sleep, the camera keeps filming the building. The night is picked apart frame by frame. Most of it is shadow, blotches of oversaturated darkness that seem to rotate, as though a dirty lens were turning, as the street updates itself on a three-second refresh schedule. The ground is wet with metallic streetlight. Where the cam catches the source of the light, a ray of it stretches upwards to form another star. The church is grey, a human face in moonlight, detailed in lines of shadow. The solid blue-blackness of total video darkness spreads to another part of the screen. The blotches swirl and reconfigure. Maybe one of them turns into a man.

  I don’t sleep, actually. Thoughts go by, vengeful and slightly crazed. I keep still while time moves past me. I’m a camera, filming a locked door.

  I get up and sit in the window. The piazza is an empty inbox, downloading loneliness with the sound of taxi brakes. His train gets in at 8:30. I told him to be down there at nine, outside the department store. I said I wanted to talk to him first, in private. When he comes, I’ll watch him standing by the phone booth for a while, until he starts to need me more than I need him. Then I’ll go down the back stairs and jump into the first taxi that goes by.

  At 8:30 Via Leone is busy with office workers. I told James the name of the church, but I kept the directions quiet. He doesn’t know it’s on the other side of the Adige. I’ve still told him too much. I forgot about his ego, his need to be there first and leave his mark, scratch his name on anything of value. At 8:40 it dawns on me that he’s not coming. It’s a relief, in a way, not to have to walk there next to him, wondering which lie he’s telling now.

  I leave the hotel, alone, at a quarter to nine. A few minutes later I’m in a taxi.

  It takes twenty minutes to get from Porta Leone to the north-western suburbs of Verona. James is in every car. I see his silhouette in the window and a spurt of fear breaks through me. When we stop at traffic lights I’m strangely glad for the automatic locks on the doors. I don’t know why I think he’ll hurt me. His cruelty has always been a hands-off sport. All he’s ever wanted is to spare me the facts, knowing that I need confirmed knowledge like some people need holidays. Cutting me off from certainty: that’s hurt enough for me.

  Via della Concezione is deserted. The church soars silently from behind a parade of half-parked, half-crashed cars. I stand in the road and look up at the buildings opposite, trying to guess the point to which my image is being gathered. I’m a blur on a webcam, a character trying to understand her place in a video game. They say that you only start understanding who you are when you see yourself as others see you. Maybe James is right about that. Sometimes you can get a better idea about yourself by being someone else.

  The door is heavy, enough to make me think it’s locked. There’s a porch, filled with polish smells and a distilled blackness. Then another door. I hesitate, feeling its wooden weight pushing back at me. I don’t need to be doing this. I could walk away, right now. But then I’d never get to know Gareth’s big plan. And James would never get to know mine.

  I push on the door. Wings in my face. Dark bodies startling against walls. A feeling of the most intense exhaustion, a delirium of sleeplessness turned outwards into scattered energies. The roar of them. Their chatter and whirr.

  The church is full of birds. After the glare of daylight I’m fully blinded, and it feels as though I could only have come to this greenish, suboceanic realm through gravity, in a descent from somewhere. As my eyes adjust, I can see that the light is mostly coming from above, from a few chinks of sky between shrugged-off roof tiles, and a stained-glass window above the altar. The reflected light strengthens and clarifies, and the walls resonate with a faint blurred restlessness, the muted twitter of hundreds of trapped lives. Cages, stacked high in unstable towers, ranged in rows along stone windowsills and smashed, dust-logged pews. Some lay fallen and broken, their occupants flown. Others hold a moving body, silvered and quickened by the strengthening twilight. There is a design here, connections I don’t understand. That’s all we are: connections. I realise with a pang that Gareth meant every word.

  The roof of the aviary is coarse netting, held up on scaffolding poles. The church has a second skeleton within its shell, as though in preparation for a renovation. I walk along the nave and stop at the altar. Feathered weights blunder against me. I’m a life form that evades their radar, turns bird grace into clumsiness. There’s a distant percussive sound, like an intercom coming on but no one speaking, echoing in the high corners of the building. A thrush thuds past me in the gloom. The hubbub throbs and then quietens again. I can see some of the birds settling on ledges, folding effortlessly into inscrutable poses, preening themselves as they settle down to wait.

  Then the ringtone of a mobile phone, patiently rising above the murmur of the aviary.

  ‘Better get that,’ a voice behind me says.

  I don’t look around. If I look around, I might change my mind.

  A display screen flashes on the seat of a pew in one of the front rows. I hear James behind me, getting up and shuffling across to the aisle. I go over to the phone and pick it up. The caller ID is flashing: ANSWER ME.

  I press the touchscreen and put its glow to my ear.

  ‘Miss?’

  I never guessed how much the sound of his voice would affect me. After all this, he still won’t call me by my first name.

  ‘Gareth? Where are you?’

  ‘I’ll tell you later. Is he there?’

  I turn to look. James is watching from the gloom of the nave.

  ‘He’s here.’

  ‘I might have known he’d try to spoil everything.’ I hear Gareth hesitating, suppressing a tremor in his voice. ‘Still, you’re going to learn the truth about him pretty soon.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’m working James out.’

  Gareth’s breath rasps at my ear. I imagine him looking around his place of safety, his big eyes scanning the corners for danger. I once thought that I could never properly earn the trust he wanted to place in me. But perhaps that’s changed now.

  ‘Why did you take the data?’

  ‘Because I wanted you to understand. I wanted you to listen to me. You were the only person who seemed to care about this.’

  ‘This wasn’t worth it, Gareth. The problem of materialism is not worth risking your life for.’

  ‘It’s everything, Miss. It’s how the ghost gets into the machine. It’s how a dumb lump of flesh can inherit a soul.’

  James hasn’t moved. Keeping track of him means risking him overhearing. I turn my back on him, cupping the phone in my hand, and move closer to the altar.

  ‘Where are the data now?’

  ‘They’re all around you.’

  I look up. I can see boarded-up windows where before there was just blackness. Tiny ledges that would once have held shrines. Every surface is a perch for something feathered, something flickering.

  ‘The birds are the data?’

  ‘Kyrie eleison, Miss. You have learned something from all this. Listen, I have to go. Watch carefully. I’ve put on a show for you. Try to understand. Take this phone with you when you go. I’ll call you. And don’t tell James anything. Let him talk. Find out what he knows.’

  There’s a thud, like a microphone being dropped, and then music starts. I pocket the dead phone.

  ‘I get it now,’ James says. ‘He’s here, but he’s not here. Trust Gaz to always want to be one step ahead.’

  I feel him move in beside me. We left each other five days ago, at the roadside in the rain. There wasn’t time for long goodbyes. He had his unfinished business with the security man, and I had to get away. What did we not say then that we should have said? I glance at him, hating my weakness. His eyes make stained-glass reflections. Whoosh. Just whoosh.

  ‘I know how you know now,’ he says. ‘I saw the bird market. Piazza dell’Erbe. Gaz must have spent a bit
of money there.’

  I could have guessed that he would get there before me. It seems odd, after all this, that I came to Verona and I never even went to look at the bird market.

  ‘He told me about it. Before Easter, when he came up to my lab. He came here with his family as a kid. He was giving me a clue, even back then.’ I glance at the pews behind, suddenly anxious that James might not have come alone. ‘That’s how I knew he was here. That was what I was supposed to remember.’

  ‘Verona,’ he says. ‘Sounds a bit like Vienna.’

  Maybe we can both see the funny side.

  ‘Where’s David?’ I say.

  ‘He’s coming.’

  I start shaking, quietly, like a timer going off.

  ‘Does he know?’

  ‘He knows everything.’

  The nave behind us is empty. The music has stopped, and a voice is speaking from the dark corners of the church. It’s Gareth. He seems to be reading aloud. May not a man ‘possess’ and yet not ‘have’ knowledge in the sense of which I am speaking? As you may suppose a man to have caught wild birds — doves or any other birds — and to be keeping them in an aviary which he has constructed at home; we might say of him in one sense, that he always has them because he possesses them, might we not?

  ‘Plato’s aviary.’ My voice is drowned out by a spasm of flapping. ‘That’s the point of all this. How a system that is purely physical can become conscious, aware of its own workings, its own past.’

  ‘That’s it. He’s created one big feathery mind. All you have to do is jog its memory!’

  He runs at the cages, shouting. The flapping of wings clatters around the church. Through the stained-glass window above the altar, the sun prints him with a stencil of colours.

  ‘OK, so I got the wrong city.’ He turns back to me, breathing hard. ‘But still. I thought you were going to wait for me.’

  I put a hand in my jeans pocket. The cutting from the Corriere is still there. But I don’t think I need it now. Just keep him talking. Let the lies prove themselves.

  ‘I said I was going to call you. If you had other ideas, then that’s your look-out.’

  The music starts up again. If Gareth is controlling this, he must be listening.

  ‘What are you, James? What am I dealing with?’

  The question pleases him. That’s what all this has been about: finding James.

  ‘I’m this idiot who’s in love with you. I can’t help it.’

  ‘You can’t help what you are?’

  He shrugs, enjoying himself.

  ‘This stuff that happened to you. Is there no way you can beat it? Is there no way you can get bigger than it? I mean, I don’t understand therapy or whatever, but people go through all sorts of traumas and they get over them. Why not you?’

  ‘It’s a process. It takes time.’

  ‘How much time? A lifetime? Could you die not knowing?’

  I feel his hand on my arm. He knows I know something. He wanted me to know. The letter, the excessive detail about David Overstrand: it was all there to ram the point home. That Bankstown Underpass is a fairy tale. Not the truth that makes the stories true. The lie that reveals nothing but lies.

  ‘I’m learning,’ he says. ‘I’m learning all the time.’

  ‘So these fads. All the gods you’ve prayed to in the search for yourself. Which of them is right? Which of them is the truth?’

  ‘The method is not the truth. The method is the method. Science is a philosophy which holds that a certain method is privileged above all others.’

  ‘You believe that? Still?’

  ‘I won’t judge you, Yvonne. You want me to judge you, but I won’t. I love you. I trust my emotions on this. I want you to find out who you are.’

  I pull my arm away. I never imagined what it would be like, today, to have him touch me.

  ‘I know who I am, James. I’m a person who refuses to find herself. Because I don’t believe there’s anything worth looking for.’

  He shakes his head. ‘You’re kidding yourself. You disprove it every time you use the word I.’

  I slap his face, as hard as I can. My fingers come away stinging.

  ‘There. That’s all I am, James. Flesh and blood and chemical reactions. There’s nothing more.’

  ‘No.’ He dabs at his cheek, gorgeously aroused. ‘I think you know who you are. Why would you do anything if you didn’t have a self? Why did you come here today, if there wasn’t a you to want it?’

  ‘I came here because you said you loved me. I want to know what love is.’

  ‘Love is a story,’ he says. ‘The funniest one of all.’

  He goes over to a cage and peers in. He has his back to me, crouching. Telling the truth about a man: it’s not like shooting him. You don’t have to look him in the eye.

  ‘I’ll tell you a story, James. It’s about a boy who realised he had nothing inside. So he went out to try and find some meaning for his life. He thought he would do whatever it took to find himself a story.’

  ‘I know that one. It’s not funny at all.’

  I wait, wondering how to say it.

  ‘You lied to me about Bankstown Underpass. David Overstrand didn’t pull up out of the traffic and save your life. He’d already been dead for two years.’

  He still has his back to me. When he speaks it’s quietly, to the bird.

  ‘I know my truth, Yvonne. I know my story.’

  ‘But it isn’t true. You made the whole thing up.’

  He coughs out a laugh. ‘Now why would I want to lie about that?’

  ‘Because it made you. It gave you something to be. The failed suicide. The guy with the guilt. The man with the trauma he can’t speak about. Without it you were empty. Like me: an empty box.’

  He reaches for the latch of the cage. The door swings open. He crouches back on his heels and watches the bird hop onto the sill, and then, with a final vigilant head-twitch, take flight.

  ‘I feel sorry for you, Yvonne. You can’t help trying to rationalise. You’re given a choice between thinking and feeling and you choose brainpower every time.’ He looks up at the broken ceiling, tracing the bird’s trajectory beneath the rafters with a kind of pride, as if he himself had given it the gift of flight. ‘I know what the truth is. I can feel it. My whole body tells me. Your trouble is, you won’t trust your feelings. You won’t trust your love.’

  He turns to me. His smile breaks my heart. My voice is firm, fighting to be strong. I want him to tell me that he’s not been lying. I’d believe him, even now. But he says nothing. He won’t even answer the charge.

  ‘You’ve lied to me from the start, James. You’ve lied to yourself. Not about what you’ve done or where you’ve been or who you’ve been sleeping with. You’ve been lying about the big stuff. About the one thing you could supposedly only tell the truth about. About who you are.’

  He reaches for my hand again. I let him. It’s the last time.

  ‘You love me, Yvonne, but you won’t trust that love. You feel it in your heart, in your body. But your cortex throws it out. It doesn’t make sense. It won’t compute.’

  ‘Don’t try and tell me what I feel. You’ve had me, but you’ve never known me.’

  Now he pulls me closer, tries to hold me. I’m losing it. It’s all I want him to do.

  ‘You’ve never loved anyone, Yvonne, because you’ve never let go. Your head runs the show. Your heart never gets a look-in.’

  ‘Well, maybe,’ I’m crying now, not trying to hide it, ‘I’m happy with that.’

  ‘You’re fooling yourself.’

  ‘No. I’m just waking up.’

  There’s a crash from high up in front of us. A bird has struggled so hard against its bars that it and the cage below have toppled over. The music has stopped, and Gareth’s voice is speaking again.

  And yet, in another sense, he has none of them; but they are in his power, and he has got them under his hand in an enclosure of his own, and can take and have them whe
never he likes — he can catch any which he likes, and let the bird go again, and he may do so as often as he pleases.

  ‘Listen to what he’s saying, James. Isn’t it time you took what you came here for?’

  ‘I didn’t come here for the data. I came here for you.’

  ‘Well, David wants the data. What time is he coming?’

  The bluff surprises him. He seems to stiffen.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  So let us now suppose that in the mind of each man there is an aviary of all sorts of birds — some flocking together apart from the rest, others in small groups, others solitary, flying anywhere and everywhere.

  I smile at the words. ‘Are you going to let him find you here?’

  ‘I don’t give a fuck about the data. I don’t give a fuck about David. I want you. I love you.’

  ‘Is he coming?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘David. Is David coming?’

  We may suppose that the birds are kinds of knowledge, and that whenever a man has detained in the enclosure a kind of knowledge, he may be said to have learned or discovered the thing which is the subject of the knowledge.

  ‘What do you think?’ he says, staring in irritation at the broken cage.

  And thus, when a man has learned and known something long ago, he may resume and get hold of the knowledge which he has long possessed. Shall we say that he comes back to himself to learn what he already knows?

  To learn what he already knows. But that’s it. I already know.

  ‘We’re not waiting for David at all, are we? We don’t need to.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’