With the calm eye of a clinician, he reviewed the circumstances of the morning’s fermentation in the basement lab over at the med school. He’d been there by himself, and was wearing rubber gloves. He was certain he’d not been so foolhardy as to touch his fingers to his lips. The active ingredient must have been absorbed into his bloodstream through his nasal passages. He put his finger to his nose. Yes, it was running. He tasted it. Slightly bitter, but not at all unpleasant.
Pulling a small black notebook and pencil out of his pocket, he checked his watch, jotted down the time, and made his initial observations. The first hallucinations he was aware of appeared around 5:00. Or was that reflection he saw in the store window a hallucination? Had that tailback really been arrested for sodomy in Greenwich Village? He’d call him up, see how he was doing, just to make sure.
Friedrich walked toward the shrieking, feathered apparitions with a smile on his face. In fact, he was grinning from ear to ear. This is why, at seventeen, after reluctantly leaving his brother in the care of a blind great-uncle who used Homer as a Seeing Eye dog, Will had climbed on top of a boxcar and headed west with $1.17 in his pocket. He had ridden the rails with bums, hobos, and men driven mad by lack of employment, and counted himself lucky that he ended up in California picking fruit for twelve hours a day, two bucks a week, and had told himself he had it good when he found a job in a cannery, all to save up enough money to go back to college.
This is why he had become a psychologist and taken a job at Yale at a salary that forced him to put off going to the dentist. Yes, this moment made even the indignity of having to teach Ivy League freshmen snobs statistics seem like time well spent. He, William T. Friedrich, had discovered something. Willy Friedrich, the farm boy from southern Illinois, had just stepped off the beaten track of what was on the pages of other men’s textbooks into the untouched wilderness of the unknown.
Hofmann had accidentally discovered LSD in 1943. April 16, to be exact. Will noted that his hallucinations weren’t like the distortions Hofmann had experienced. These parrots in his mulberry tree were goddamned perfect. There was a pair of macaws, one blue, one red, both with yellow eyes; a green-cheeked Amazonian; gold-headed parakeets with green wings and a tail feathered in turquoise; cockatoos that shouted obscenities and asked questions in Spanish and English; a threesome of lovebirds, and a drab but loquacious African gray. Friedrich recorded that he felt no confusion or disorientation in crisp penmanship; his handwriting was neater than usual.
His mind never felt sharper. It had been more than a year since he had read Hofmann’s extract. And yet now, as he stood beneath these imaginary parrots, watching them bicker and squawk and flirt and fluff their feathers—Christ! Two of them were copulating—he could recall Hofmann’s words verbatim: “I was seized by a peculiar sensation of vertigo and restlessness. Objects, as well as the shapes of my associates in the laboratory, appeared to undergo optical changes. I was unable to concentrate on my work.”
Friedrich penciled, “No sense of vertigo—no fear.” Friedrich stood on one foot, closed one eye, and slowly touched his forefinger to his nose, and then added, “No loss of motor skills.”
Connecting the dots from the laboratory to what was happening in his mind, he wondered aloud, “Why parrots?” Was it because he had been bitten by one at age eleven at the Illinois State Fair in Urbana? Could it have something to do with the fact that parrots talk without understanding a word of what they are saying? Or was it simply that when his henna-haired mother reversed the charges on her late-night long-distance phone calls, warning him of train wrecks, car crashes, and fires that had not yet occurred, her voice had the same shrill, slightly hysterical shriek as that macaw who kept calling out, “Here they come, here they come.”
There was no question Friedrich had stumbled onto something wondrous—until the African gray shit on the shoulder of his one good suit. Any hopes he had that the nausea of disappointment that gripped him might be a hallucination of humiliation stemming from his manifest self-doubt vanished when his wife, Nora, stepped out of their front door with their toddler, Jack, on one hip, and little Willy clinging to her leg like a limpet, bird book in hand.
“We’ve been watching them all afternoon.” Will stared at his wife, then at the birds. That he hadn’t even been the first to see the damned parrots iced his humiliation. The only positive emotion in his body was relief that he hadn’t run inside and made an even bigger fool of himself by calling Bunny Winton. When he didn’t respond, his wife called out, “Well, what do you think?”
The question was posed with a casual and cautious amusement. Nora was guarded with her opinions. Not because she didn’t have them, but because she experienced them so strongly she felt betrayed and slightly carsick when they weren’t shared by those she loved.
Looking up at the parrots, trying to think of something to say that would hide how ridiculous he felt, Dr. Friedrich didn’t see the gravity with which her full-lipped smile dropped from her face when he turned away. Dr. Friedrich misdiagnosed his wife’s wariness as fear of failure; he too wanted to see his own feelings reflected on those he loved.
They had met over the Bunsen burner in organic chemistry class. There was still heat, but after nine years of marriage it didn’t warm him the way it used to. Her ability to laugh at life, once so seductive, had now begun to make him feel small. She thought it was amusing buying secondhand dresses at Nearly New, especially when the dean’s wife recognized the flowered frock Nora had worn to the faculty tea as a dress she had donated. Friedrich was terrified by her ability to brag aloud at these same teas about saving twenty-five cents a week on shampoo by washing the family’s hair in an emulsion of dishwashing detergent and lemon juice mixed in an Erlenmeyer flask. He loved her when she waylaid others with her intelligence, correcting a French professor on an irregular verb, or beating a physicist to the atomic weight of iodine when they did crosswords during the period breaks at the Harvard-Yale hockey game they had attended to please the dean, who placed great weight on school spirit. Friedrich was proud of her mind. Except, of course, when it ensnared him.
Nora was still waiting for her husband to reveal his feelings about the parrots. “They’re wonderful, aren’t they?” Lipstick being her one vanity and extravagance, Nora smiled a shade of Helena Rubenstein called Desire. Her cheeks were dimpled, her hand was on his shoulder, but all the time he knew she was thinking, Hell’s bells, if coming home to find parrots waiting for you doesn’t make you happy, what in God’s name will?
The door slammed. His daughters were now dancing around him, laying claim to his attention and the parrots overhead. Fiona, the eldest, ebony-haired like her mother, stood on tiptoes to cast a bigger shadow. “The red macaw’s mine. He’s indigenous to South America. Did you know that, Daddy?” Fiona had an impressive vocabulary for an eight-year-old.
“It’s not fair.” Lucy—blond like Nora’s aunt Minnie, had a predilection for troubling theological questions: If people go to heaven, why not dogs? And insects? And vegetables?—protested, “You just want that macaw because I called him first.”
“I have to make pee-pee.” That was Willy.
Friedrich wished his son didn’t bear such a striking resemblance to his own older brother. It wasn’t that Homer was unattractive or that Friedrich didn’t like his sibling (Homer was handsome, in fact, and Friedrich loved him), it was just that Homer, now thirty-six, would have been hard-pressed to outscore Lucy on a Stanford-Binet intelligence test. “The word is ‘urinate,’ Willy.”
“He’s barely three, Will.”
“It’s less confusing if you teach a child the correct word first.” Since Willy had already wet his pants, the point was moot. Will picked up his son and gave him a hug and a kiss to make up for Homer.
Nora was about to go inside for dry pants when Fiona began to shriek. “My bike!” Friedrich had forgotten about that.
“I warned you not to leave it in the driveway.” He hadn’t wanted to say that, but . . .
>
“We can fix it.” Nora put Jack down on the lawn and extracted the twisted Schwinn from beneath the DeSoto.
“It’s my fault. We’ll buy you a new one tomorrow.”
“Can I have a new bike, too?” Lucy, like most middle children, felt lost in the shuffle.
“We can’t afford it,” Nora protested.
“I can and I will.” It was the mantra he lived by. Wiping the parrot shit from his shoulder, he handed Willy to his wife and tried to regain his dignity with a joke. “I think the gray one’s depressed.”
“How so?” Nora tried to straighten the twisted wheel.
“I see the same look in my eye every morning when I look in the mirror and shave.”
Nora knew her husband defined depression as paralyzed rage. She laughed only because, as Fiona sobbed, Jack began to cry, and she didn’t want to make it a trio. Her lip trembled, her eyes watered up, just the way they had when she misspelled “ennui” in the state spelling bee. As soon as the last letter was out of her mouth, she knew she’d made a mistake. It was too late to take it back. She didn’t like to think about her marriage the same way: “Is that how you feel about your life?”
And then a smaller but genuine miracle happened: “Not when I look at you.” That it was what she needed to hear didn’t mean it wasn’t true.
Dr. Friedrich’s dreams of greatness began when he was nine and would sneak down to the root cellar where his mother made Homer sleep as punishment when he’d wet his bed in the summer. In the winter she was less cruel. In the cool, earthy dark, smelling of parsnips and potatoes, Will would put Homer to sleep with talk of all the wondrous things they’d accomplish together when he was grown up. Holding open a frayed atlas someone had purchased at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1903, running his fingers across maps where the hearts of continents were still marked “unexplored,” Will would confide, “After we find the new tallest mountain in the world, President Calvin Coolidge himself will give us a medal and the money to build a rocket, like Buck Rogers, only better, because it will be real. And I, I mean, we’ll . . .”
In 1952, the six inches between one’s ears were the least explored territory on the planet. And the chemistry of feelings was thought by most to have as little to do with hard science as Kryptonite.
A thirty-three-year-old man who can’t afford to replace a bicycle and thinks a flock of parrots in his tree is a sign he’s on the right track is worse than lost; he’s fallen. Feeling like he was sliding from the peak of a glacial mountain of narcissism, Friedrich reached out and grabbed hold of his wife like she was the last rung of a rope ladder dangling from the edge of the world.
“Why are you doing that?” Fiona had never seen her parents kiss on the mouth. Not like that, and never on the front lawn.
“Because we’re happy.” Nora giggled as her husband buried his face in the softness of her neck.
“Mama’s Sleeping Beauty, and Daddy’s waking her up.” It was the other way around, but it was also Lucy’s favorite fairy tale.
“That’s stupid.” Fiona watched jealously as Lucy threw her arms around her parents’ hips, pressing them even closer.
Feeling left out, Willy pawed at his father. “Uppee me.”
“Kiss.” Jack wanted in too. Their embrace had more limbs than an octopus.
Friedrich was about to whisper in his wife’s ear, “Let’s get a babysitter and go to bed,” when he felt a small hand on his penis. Lucy? Jack? Oh, God, please not Willy. He hoped it was his wife. “Was that you?”
“Was me what?” It had been more than a month since they had had sex. An erection flagpoled the front of his pants. Nora laughed.
Fiona was staring at his fly. Or was she just refusing to look her father in the eye? Will knew he was certifiable when he found himself imagining his daughter replaying the seminal moment of her sexual dysfunction to an analyst twenty years and a bout of nonorgasmic nymphomania later.
Will, hand in his pocket, was nonchalantly trying to girdle his erection behind his belt buckle when a foreign accent inquired, “Dr. Friedrich, in your professional opinion, do you think a tree full of parrots will have the same effect on my wife?”
It was Jens. The animal behaviorist lived across the street. Bristly, yellow hair, solid, and warm as a Dutch oven, so obviously a foreigner (shorts, sandals with socks), Jens had been the first person on the street to take notice of the parrots, which were still jabberwocking and squawking in the mulberry tree. His wife, Anka, and their twin girls were running across the street, blond and red-faced like figures from Brueghel dropped into suburbia. And a half block away, Fred Mettler, a physicist with a glass eye who had worked at Los Alamos, and his wife, the den mother of Fiona’s Brownie troop, were being pulled toward the parrots by their three children, the youngest of whom, due to a fondness for running in front of cars, was kept on a leash.
After that, news of the parrots rolled through Hamden like ball lightning. It was spread via word-of-mouth, telephone, and children on roller skates. Buzz-cut boys with slingshots dangling from back pockets, girls in smock dresses tied in the back with bows, like presents waiting to be opened, shortcut through backyards, jumped fences, and rampaged through freshly planted gardens to glimpse the birds. Crabby old ladies and professional grouches, who waited on porches and sat behind draped windows, eager to report youthful trespass or misdemeanor, barked, “Johnny, Susie, Bill, Fred, Sam, Wendy, Gus: I’m calling your mother right now and . . .”
Mothers put dinner on hold to see for themselves. And husbands used to being greeted with a highball at the door found cryptic notes re: parrots in a mulberry tree on Hamelin Road.
And from their little starter house subdivision, the rumor of feathered fun moved up the hill, to the big old homes on the ridge, with maids’ rooms, and views, and broad lawns landscaped with shade trees and boxwoods older than the century. Streets where PWMs lived next to bank presidents and businessmen who ran companies founded by their grandfathers. A world Friedrich drove through once or twice a week, sunk low in the White Whale so as not be recognized, just to see what life would be like once his name was in the textbooks.
An hour after he first saw the birds, Friedrich’s threadbare patch of lawn was crowded not just with fellow academics connected to Yale, but with neighbors they never talked to and never knew they had—car salesmen, insurance brokers, bakers of bread mingled with headshrinkers and meteorologists, individuals who were richer and poorer for their ability to recite poetry in five languages or their intimate knowledge of the defenestration of Prague. As the parrots cackled and called out, “Hello! Shut up! Close the door!” and one tangerine-winged cockatoo wailed plaintively, “¿Donde está Marjeta?” over and over again, town and gown cracked witty, wise, and dumb about what had brought the birds to town.
“Ten bucks says somebody who owns a pet shop isn’t very happy right now,“ opined the car salesman, who invited Friedrich to come down and test-drive a Nash.
“I called Creedmore’s Pets and the University Zoo. Nobody’s missing,” said Sergeant Neutch, a Hamden cop who looked like a turtle who’d misplaced his shell.
A teaching assistant who’d written her doctoral thesis on Don Quixote volunteered, “The macaw speaks Spanish with a Madrilenian accent.”
“They were unloading a freighter from Bolivia down at the harbor this morning. Maybe they got locked in the cargo hold.” That was the policeman.
“Bolivia is landlocked,” Jens interjected.
“Okay, Einstein, what’s your explanation?”
“Commies.” Jens winked at Friedrich.
“Are you telling me communists are using parrots to spy on us?” The cop was interested.
Jens put his finger to his lips. “Don’t let them know we’re onto them.” Everyone who knew Jens and his wife were both card-carrying communists laughed.
“Maybe the hydrogen-bomb testing has affected migration patterns,” suggested a botanist who had a toadstool named after him.
It was the phys
icist’s wife’s turn. “Fred says in twenty years we’ll have atomic-powered vacuum cleaners.”
“What’s a vacuum cleaner?” Nora deadpanned.
Nora prided herself on her lack of homemaking skills.
“What if they have a disease?” A mother pulled her child away from the tree.
“You mean, like, parrot fever?”
“What if they’re radioactive?”
“What about parrot-toe-nitus?”
“Is that like an ingrown toenail?”
Friedrich excused himself from what passed for wit to bring a chair out from the living room for a pregnant woman who looked like she was going to faint, directed several children to his downstairs bathroom, and heard the driver of a kosher butcher’s truck, on listening to the cockatoo call for Marjeta, tell no one in particular, in a thick, consonant-heavy Mitteleuropean accent, “Marjeta was my sister’s name.”
Friedrich wondered but didn’t want to ask what had happened to her. He cheered himself by giving Jack a hug and, at his wife’s suggestion, headed toward the backyard to get the picnic benches.
Will was just lugging the benches around to the front of the house when he heard, “Portentous, don’t you think, Doctor?” He didn’t have to look up; he recognized Bunny Winton’s voice. Her la-di-da accent no longer offended him; he found it amusing. It made it seem more like he was acting in a stage play about a research project rather than living it.
“What?” He hadn’t expected her to come see the parrots, and he had no idea what she was talking about.
“The parrots; they’re a good omen for the start of our project.” She was surprisingly superstitious. She kept her keys on a rabbit’s foot and a four-leaf clover in a crystal heart dangled from her charm bracelet.
“Let’s hope.”
“Sorry I wasn’t at the lab this morning. Carol broke her arm at school and Thayer couldn’t pick her up, so I had to play Mom.” Carol was her twelve-year-old stepdaughter, and Mom was a game she had almost convinced herself she had no interest in playing.
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