“Just a little,” he said. He had broken four fingers on his right hand there, which required multiple plates and pins in the fractured digits, and several weeks in a cast, but the visit had nevertheless given him the impetus to seek employment as a photographer.
Kaye laughed, then took in the image again. “It looks brutal. And sad. Was it?”
“I guess it was,” he said. “But beautiful too.” It felt oddly good to have admitted that.
Kaye smiled. “Otherwise why go there to take pictures?”
“It reminded me of a place on the southern continent,” he said and mentioned the name of the city where the casualties had been the greatest. He assumed the assistant professor would recognize it from the news.
Kaye grew serious but there was no sign of pity in his eyes, only warm interest. “Tell me more about it,” the assistant professor said.
To his surprise he did.
9
HE DIDN’T KNOW HOW MANY PHOTOGRAPHS KAYE needed for his articles, but he had made several series of each owl, had become almost as familiar with their motion and energy as he was with the assistant professor’s. He was waiting for Kaye by the stairs to the sixth floor. Someone had placed a worn bright-red office chair next to the door. He was clearly not the only person used to waiting there. The intensely colored furniture was a hard affair with armrests that wriggled when he sat down on it and upholstered in a particularly coarse and itchy wool.
Kaye appeared around the corner from the hallway that led to the elevators, shot him a lopsided smile, then climbed the grated stairs to the locked door. He grinned back at Kaye, rose from the sofa, and picked up the camera bag. They had spent the previous night in the bedroom on the second floor of the assistant professor’s antique-looking house, without having worked in the owl room first. That had been unexpected, but felt too good to be alarming, at least for now. Kaye tapped in the key code and held the door open for him. As he passed the assistant professor and entered the stairwell, a warm hand traced his jawbone. He half turned and smiled before continuing up the steps.
The scents and sounds of the cloakroom, the mouse room, the owl room, and the auditory chamber, were now so familiar that they seemed ordinary, even comforting. As always when he was there, he wondered how he’d feel when the job was finished, and how much he would miss it. Kaye entered the recording room to turn on the computers and the sound equipment.
He set up his tripod and camera in the usual corner of the fake landscape and squatted with the camera remote in hand to wait for the assistant professor. Kaye exited the soundproofed room and returned with one of the largest owls sitting on his glove, a dark brown bird with bronze-colored eyes and long tufts of feathers that looked like ears on each side of its head, and lifted it to the tree to start the experiment.
Afterward, Kaye switched on the light in the recording room to signal that the experiment was over and that he could put the camera away. As he clicked the steel legs of the tripod together, there was a sudden beating of wings, a quick motion in the air, and a low shout behind him. For a brief moment he didn’t understand what he was seeing. The owl had flown from the tree and grabbed hold of Kaye’s head with its talons. Now the bird was flapping and fluttering with both wings extended, a reach that was easily as long as the height of a human being. Feathers, pieces of wood wool, and drops of blood spattered the walls and floor. Kaye was pulling at the owl’s legs and body, but it didn’t help.
There must have been a lot of sound, but it had momentarily faded. Instead, everything he saw stood out with bright clarity and time slowed down. He crossed the small space to the owl, took hold of the dark, scale-covered legs with one hand and Kaye’s head with the other to separate them. But the owl didn’t budge, its claws deep in his lover’s flesh. In the chaos of blood and hair and feathers he couldn’t see if the owl was clasping Kaye’s eyes, which was what he feared the most. He pulled at the owl’s legs once more, but its shape was so different from anything else he had trained on, he didn’t know what to do. How did he force a wild animal to let go of its prey? Spray it with water, yell at it, punch it? Kaye shouted something about not hurting the owl.
He pulled harder and managed to get a single talon loose, but the owl pecked his hand and he reflexively let go of the leg. Now Kaye’s face and shirt front were drenched in blood. Head injuries bled a lot, but how much more damage could Kaye take? He took hold of the owl’s head, managed somehow to keep the snapping beak away, and put the other hand around the bird’s neck. The animal stiffened and shrieked, as if it recognized the death grip. He twisted hard until the vertebrae came loose, like bolts unfastening in their nuts. The owl gaped and shuddered a few times, ejected a stinking mass from its cloacal opening, before it finally, spasmodically, fell away from Kaye.
There was no specific moment when the owl’s life ceased, just a slackening of the flesh and a cessation of the will and motion that had previously animated the flesh. Death was uncomplicated that way.
Kaye was clutching his head, blood seeping out between his fingers. He helped Kaye lie down and placed him in a recovery position. “I’ll call for an ambulance,” he said.
“On the wall,” Kaye muttered, beneath what looked like a mask of blood and clumps of curly hair.
The phone had the number for the emergency room of the university hospital written on the cradle in bold marker. He dialed it and gave the emergency team the directions to the institute and the door codes. The hospital was just a few buildings away on campus.
“We’ll be there immediately,” the person at the other end said. “Stay on the line and we will continue to assist you.”
“I can’t,” he said. “The patient’s in another room.”
“Do you know any first aid?”
“Yes,” he said. “I’ll help him and wait for you there.”
Without waiting for the reply he tore open the first aid kit by the emergency shower and took all the dressings and compress pads he could find.
When he returned to the sound chamber, Kaye was still bleeding, but breathing. He began to stanch the assistant professor’s wounds. Kaye had managed to protect his eyes, but his scalp and hands had deep cuts, soaked in red.
Kaye opened his eyes, the gaze weak and distant, and started struggling to sit up.
“Don’t,” he said and put a hand on Kaye’s chest. “Lie still, the ambulance is on its way.” He didn’t want Kaye to see all the blood. “How do you feel?” he said, to distract the assistant professor from looking around.
“You killed the owl,” Kaye groaned.
“I had to,” he said. “It wouldn’t let go.” He pulled down the zipper of his coverall, stepped out of it, and put it over Kaye. It was flimsy, but better than nothing and would cover some of the blood.
“You killed the owl,” Kaye muttered beneath him.
Since he wasn’t next of kin he couldn’t accompany Kaye in the ambulance, but the emergency personnel gave him a number to call and a floor on the university hospital to go to. He returned to the mouse room and washed his hands in the circular sink with liquid soap from the dispenser, glad the faucet had an optic sensor so there were no handles to sully. Afterward he pushed the faucet from side to side to rinse all the blood away and pulled out a generous amount of paper towels. He dried his hands, then the surface around the sink, clunked the garbage bin beneath it open, and tossed the moist paper in.
On the phone list by the door was a name he recognized: Narayan, one of Kaye’s post-doctoral fellows, and a senior one as far as he had understood from Kaye’s stories about his post-docs and graduate students. He pulled out more paper from the dispenser, moistened it with cold water, and wiped the blood off the phone and cradle. Then he dialed the post-doc’s number from the list.
“Narayan speaking,” a male voice said.
“I’m sorry to call so late,” he said, “but professor Kaye’s been in an accident in the owl room. No need to worry, he’s been taken to the hospital, but there’s a bit of a mess h
ere.”
“What happened?”
“One of the owls attacked during an experiment.”
“How is Kaye? And how’s the owl?”
“I think the professor will be all right,” he said. “At least he’s in good hands now. The owl... didn’t make it.”
“I see,” Narayan said. “Are you a new graduate student or...?”
“I’m the faculty photographer, I’ve been taking pictures of the owls with Kaye.”
“Right,” Narayan said. “Kaye mentioned that. I, God, what a shock, who’d think an owl would actually...”
“I should leave for the hospital,” he said. “The owl is still here.”
“I’ll be there right away,” Narayan said. “Can you let me know what floor Kaye’s in when you get to the hospital?”
“I will,” he said. “Thanks so much.”
He left the camera bag where it was, perfectly safe behind two coded doors, noted Narayan’s number on his phone, fetched his coat in the cloakroom, and rode the elevator down to the first floor. The brightly lit interior made him feel like he was sleepwalking or inside a dream. He suddenly realized that his shirt was full of ominous stains and removed it, then inspected his t-shirt and pants, front and back, in the mirrored walls while he avoided looking at his own face. He rolled the bloody shirt up and put the coat on instead.
A few months ago the news had repeated footage of a missing university student from a hotel elevator somewhere. The young woman, whose ancestry had been from the eastern continent too, was traveling alone on the western continent, where she lived. She had checked into a low-rent hotel which, probably unknown to her, had a history of suspicious deaths. The video from the elevator was the last anyone had seen of the young woman. Via the closed circuit camera some of the last moments of her life were broadcast and watched by millions of people, but only after she was gone, after she had moved past the reach of everyone else, out of the lit circle of safety afforded by civilization and togetherness, and into the darkness beyond. Weeks later the young woman’s corpse was found floating in the hotel’s water tank on the roof after guests complained that the water “tasted funny.”
In the elevator the young woman had pressed several buttons before she leaned out the door to peek into the corridor, as if she were checking to see if there was someone or something following her. She returned inside, squatted in a corner, and pressed all the buttons on the control panel. To him it had looked like she couldn’t see the numbers on the elevator buttons properly and had to bend forward to read them. In the photos released to the press the woman wore red square-rimmed glasses, but in the elevator she had used none. If her eyesight was that poor, why had she been in the elevator without her glasses? After the young woman’s body was found her death was pronounced an accident, because there was no evidence that other people had accompanied her to the roof.
He was certain the university elevator had a camera too and imagined how he might look if the clip was ever broadcast, in his moment of confusion and distress, desperately wiping blood stains from his shirt.
Outside, it was dark and quiet. It had stopped drizzling but the fog that had lingered all spring and summer still enveloped the city. The street outside The Institute of Biological Sciences was empty, the lamps shining like distant moons in the mist. He couldn’t remember the name of the street and was uncertain any taxi company would know where the building was if he called them to the campus without an address. There were no signs nearby, so he started down the road to the student center. It would still be open and there was usually a taxi or two outside.
The moist air cooled his hands and face. He sniffed his fingers. They smelled of copper and wood wool and animal droppings despite the wash. He hoped he didn’t reek as he sometimes had after fighting. The headlights of a truck parked on the pavement were reflected by the tiny droplets suspended in the air. He stared at the vehicle. The logo on its front and sides was displayed in pastel pink, blue, and green, with chocolate-covered wafer cones and red and yellow popsicles dancing around it. As he neared the ice cream truck, it started up a chimy tune and the driver’s face appeared in the side window. He shook his head and continued.
The phone rang. He jumped, then exhaled slowly before he pulled the phone out from his coat pocket and took the call.
“What’s that sound?” Katsuhiro, his younger brother, said. “Are you out buying ice cream at this time of night?” The tune from the truck was slowly receding, but not fast enough.
His first impulse was to hang up to free the line in case Kaye or the hospital called, but he couldn’t do that when he had already answered, so now he had to find a way to finish the chat quickly. “No,” he said, concentrating on keeping tension out of his voice. “Not really.”
Katsuhiro laughed a little at his curtness, but sounded tenser. “I was just calling to invite you over on Friday night, for beer and snacks. We’re testing a new game and have to report any bugs we find, but it’s polished beta code so it should be running smoothly. It’s beautiful, the areas are so big and there’s so much to do, great story, fantastic graphics, it’ll be fun, not work.”
Seeing Katsuhiro and his friends on the weekend was the last thing he wanted. He had all the reasons in the world to decline, but none that could be shared, and a no would have to be followed up with an excuse that at least sounded genuine. He tried, but couldn’t get any white lie going, his mind too busy sorting through the recent events.
“Yes?” he began, hoping that last-second pressure would jog his mind into action. “Why not?” Nothing. He clenched the phone till it creaked.
When they had been ten and twelve, Katsuhiro had once told him: “We have to like the same things because we’re brothers.”
“Of course we don’t,” he had said, to Katsuhiro’s loud and tearful sorrow. After that it seemed they diverged in most things, especially in relation to their father’s culture. He found he enjoyed its traditional performing arts, architecture, and crafts, although he felt distant from it. Katsuhiro, on the other hand, preferred the country’s widespread popular culture of games, animation, and movies, and spent years learning the language properly and later found work as a translator for computer games and films. He had always been impressed by Katsuhiro’s cultural flexibility while he himself avoided family vacations to both their father’s and their mother’s country as early as he could. First under the guise of participating in various sports tournaments, later to house sit, take summer classes, or work. Only as adults had Katsuhiro and he found a common ground, which they shared in brief and irregular bursts.
When his brother finally hung up and he could put the phone back in the coat, his hand was sore and imprinted with the phone’s corners.
At the university hospital he couldn’t face the mirrored enclosure of yet another elevator, and definitely not one with other people in it, so he took the concrete stairwell, ascending it two steps at a time. As he stood panting in the corridor of the floor Kaye had been brought to, a nurse told him that the assistant professor’s wounds had been disinfected, stitched, and dressed, the patient given a tetanus shot and antibiotics, and sent home.
“Did you really discharge him?” he said. “He lost a lot of blood.”
“The patient was young and healthy and we only do blood transfusions when it’s absolutely necessary,” the nurse said, giving him a pointed look.
He nodded. “I hope the patient didn’t leave all by himself?”
“No, someone came and picked him up,” the nurse said. “Don’t worry, I’m certain your friend made it home safely.”
“Thank you,” he said.
He exited the hospital’s main entrance and headed for the bus stop across the street. On the way there and while waiting for the bus he almost called Kaye twice. Instead, he texted Narayan on the bus home, rested his hands in his lap, and closed his eyes against the glare of the lamps in the ceiling.
At the honeycomb towers, Michael had let himself into the apartment, made
dinner for them both, and eaten.
“Sorry I’m so late,” he said, removing his shoes and hanging up his jacket by the front door. “The professor I’ve been working for had to go to the hospital.”
“Is he all right?” Michael said. “What happened?”
He rubbed his face. He felt terrible. “One of the owls attacked him. I guess something must have frightened it.” He went into the bathroom and turned on the faucet.
Michael was a quiet shadow in the doorway. “What about you then, are you all right?”
“Yes,” he said, “just need to clean up a little.” He turned on the tap and washed his hands thoroughly before wiping his face and neck with cool water. “Thank you,” he said, “for making food, and for waiting.” Michael leaned over and hugged him.
Yet later, when Michael was a warm silhouette next to him in the muted shine from the bedroom window, the image of Kaye’s face being torn into by the owl’s talons played over and over in his mind and he wanted to leave the bed, pull the clothes back on as quickly as he could, and run out the door. But then he remembered he was at home, so instead he forced himself to lie still and sweat among the sheets while he listened to Michael sleep inside the stuffy darkness.
The next morning he caught a bus to the old part of the city and walked the short distance from the stop to Kaye’s house. The windows were dark and it was quiet. The mist beaded the smooth triangular leaves that covered the trunk and branches of the monkey puzzle tree like plate mail, the droplets catching the gray light. The air smelled of earth and rain, with an undertone of rot. He pressed the doorbell, heard it ring inside, and waited. If Kaye was in bed, which the professor ought to, it would take time for him to reach the door. He hoped Kaye instead would open the lower right panel in the bedroom window and drop the keys to him, as on earlier occasions. But there were no steps in the stairs, no creaking on the floor behind the door, no window pane that opened. He rang the doorbell once more. Perhaps Kaye was asleep? Maybe he should have called before he arrived? A third ring only brought more silence.
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