Of course, this sounded nothing like a parrot or other talking birds. Some denied that it sounded like words at all, and for them it was an earworm relentlessly dogging them during dreaming or waking. The worst of the bunch had the sloshing before the voices. Yes, there were multiples, asking, “What’s really in there?” repeatedly, sometimes with annoying irregular gaps between and sometimes with hints of the sloshing.
The wealthier ones with the earworm issue, a decidedly disproportionate but by no means exclusive sector of that population, hired people to kill as many of these birds as possible. Older and more confused members of the earworm group, those who did not wander in front of transports and kill themselves or wind up in virtual comas, had some vague fear and memory of something called “the endangered species list” and secretly worried that the birds might be put on it if too many were killed. That was a baseless concern and one that, in any event, did not plague most of their ilk.
Anyway, these birds had once been in the tropical climes exclusively but began coming further and further north as the Earth heated and corpses began to mount in the brown hemisphere from heat and storms. That is not our concern.
This is the story of a girl who, at first, only knew about these things through video implants and screens and one such bird she happened to take in as a pet. It would be more correct to say that the bird lived with her for a while. She called it a pet because she’d never had a pet, had only seen pets in videos and didn’t realize that even the people from the last century had stopped using that word to refer to non-humans that lived with them. But that may have been difficult for even a smart child to discern.
She was indeed a smart child. Her mother wrote books, though very few people read them, and her father did something scientific with the innards of video implants or their plasma or both that related to how we see and perceive digital video, how we are now absorbed in it the way we used to be absorbed with each other and with trees and clouds and things like that.
His explanations of his work were hypnotic in that, a few seconds after he began talking, a narcotic drowsiness overcame even the most alert listener. Only his coworkers had the vaguest outline of what the company paid him to do.
But everyone understands what an author is or does or has some idea that such a person uses words to communicate ideas even if those ideas are at times obscured by their expression. Such was the case with the Girl’s mother, whose work was praised unceasingly by people who had even more difficulty earning money than she did.
At one point, her husband’s company was sold to another company and, try as he might, her husband found himself unable to explain, and thereby justify, what it was he did. The people in the newly formed personnel department and even their supervisors ended up with their heads on the table or slumped in their chairs minutes after he began talking. They had scheduled meetings with him because they’d even become sleepy when they’d tried to engage his video presentations. They didn’t realize that his actual speech brought on a level of stupor rivaled only by the most powerful drugs. One unfortunate executive had to recuse herself from assessing his work altogether, because whether she engaged his presentations or his voice, she had flashbacks of lapsing into a coma from a rare tropical illness.
There were two other scientists at the newly formed company who had some interest in trying to harness and sell this infectious, narcoleptic ability. But they were too busy working on their own discovery. They had found a way to merge humans with insects, a project they thought might save their jobs despite the merger. So the husband of the Author was left to his own brain-deadening devices.
The effect on the family income was such that the Author had to step up and try to write a traditional story, one that would attract more than academics that were just shy of inducing the sort of boredom so deftly brought on by her husband. It was not easy for her.
Morning after morning, she would rise early and try to create a straight narrative and to resist lapsing into obscure poetics.
i read the tornado
to see why we’re invisible
when the puzzle shakes out
and the stars all shout
but i’m still in doubt
She did feel herself getting closer to being able to construct stories that might attract the money of large numbers of people when she began reading fairy tales at night to prepare for the next morning’s writing. It brought her poetry more down to earth.
horse racing seemed simple at a glance
but oh the rolling quake of hooves
the dirt flying and sanctifying
the electric silk of the jockey uniforms
making them like some
overgrown sprites astride
four-legged juggernauts
and all of it balanced
on the point of a wager
a guess
on who could go a certain distance
before the rest
each rider assigned a beast
It was during this phase in her writing that the Author began to notice strange sounds. But it was summer, and as bad as the air outside had become, they could no longer afford climate control, and it was the duty of the first person who woke to open the windows. With the windows open, it was hard to tell where the sound was coming from. But after a few days of distraction, she decided she had to find the source of the sound and stop it if she could. The investigation led her to her daughter’s room.
Standing outside the door, the Author assumed the Girl must have been screening something odd. Actually, the family wasn’t much for video, so most screen fare seemed as odd to them as their Author and Scientist work was to most other people. But this sound seemed both odd and familiar. The Author recalled an audio news item just as she knocked on her daughter’s door.
When the Girl opened the door, the bird, perched in the open window, loudly seemed to ask, “What’s really in there? What’s really in there?” Fortunately, its head was poking in the room and its butt was outside, because the bird delivered each question with massive droppings.
The Author was happy that the bird’s waste fell outdoors. But she wanted the entire bird to be outdoors. It startled her, and the sound it made was even more startling, off-centered. It did not look like a bird that should be able to talk, like a parrot or myna, and that, combined with the that fact it didn’t even look real—it was pudgy with a short beak, pink feathers, and blue-tipped wings—made it feel like it could have been a chicken or, for that matter, a chipmunk talking. Its voice seemed like a Frankenstein part grafted on to it, something that worked against the laws of nature.
You have probably guessed that the Girl felt quite differently about the bird. While she was also glad its butt was sticking out of the window when it dropped its load, that was about the only point of agreement she and her mother had on the creature.
The Girl was a great reader who had trouble hearing. She had awoken one morning thinking her hearing was normal because the bone-cracking call of the bird pulled her from sleep like nothing ever had. The source of the sound was just as startling as the sound itself, for she recognized the bird from a painting she’d seen in a picture book about communists (Don’t Try This at Home), a picture of a woman and a man holding hands, the man’s strange eyes and disproportionate size relative to the small woman whose head was tilted at a slight angle that somehow matched her quizzical smile and her eyebrows being almost one line. Above her, with a banner in its beak, was a pink bird with blue-tipped wings that seemed too chubby to fly, a feathery carnival prize come to life just for the painting.
It had taken days for the Girl to make out the sounds that followed the breaking noises, which she did not associate with the sound of bones cracking. The sounds following the breaking noise were quieter and quicker. They were almost whispers, reminding her of how her parents sounded when they were arguing, which was often, and not wanting her to know they were arguing.
She could tell that her mother thought the bird was as sta
rtlingly ugly as she thought it beautiful. What to do?
“The first time I heard it, I thought my hearing was fixed,” said the Girl in as matter-of-fact a manner as she could.
The mother wasn’t sure about the hearing part. She was sure that the Girl so loved the bird that she associated it with healing. The Author fought her inclination to kill the bird with the heaviest, sharpest object she could find, bury it, or better still, pay someone to incinerate it with an added bonus if they provided proof of its demise. Instead, she bent her unsteady knees and clasped the Girl in her arms.
***
After the Girl had run away to be with a group of musicians—real, barely legal, live performing musicians—the Author would often replay the scene with the bird in her head. It had been the most connected moment she and the Girl had had since the Author had birthed her, and the only one both of them could share. For the rest of her life, the Author alternately regretted and second-guessed her choice to write about musicians.
But here it should be noted that the Girl didn’t exactly run away, or it didn’t exactly feel like running away. The Girl’s hearing was thought to be bad, but it was simply extraordinary in a somewhat dysfunctional way. To her ears and mind, the Bird’s chest-cracking sound was slightly muffled percussion, and the questions that followed (if there was not sloshing) were singing—a pleading, plaintive singing—but singing nonetheless, and singing that called to her in a way nothing else had.
After days and nights of pondering the sound, sometimes losing sleep over it (why did it matter to her so?), she somehow imagined or decided the Bird was not the original source of the sound, but that it was imitating someone, a human that it had once been with. She imagined it at the window of a singer, day after day silently absorbing the rigorous practice, or thrilling the singer with its imitations of her. The singer she imagined was a woman younger than her mother, who looked a bit like her mother and perhaps even a bit like the Girl, and who sounded like her mother but with a deeper, clearer voice that when pushed had a bit of an edge to it.
This Singer in the Girl’s mind did not hold back much in singing or in life in general and the Bird, being a bird, had no way of knowing or interpreting the emotion that swirled around the room. So, before it sang, it emitted a percussive sound to get the attention of the listener, to say oye, hear ye hear; bright, loud beats in the place of welcoming trumpets.
Then the Bird would really open up, and the voice of the Singer was somehow more plaintive coming from something that looked like it rose from the drawing of a child that couldn’t resist combining unlikely colors or making the wings so chubby that they brought to mind feathered bees, rotund, with blue and pink stripes.
In the run up to the running away, the Girl had begun to read some of her mother’s work. It made her ponder.
it is not magic that keeps the vampire
from seeing itself in the mirror
it is blinded
by the only appetite it has ever known
“You know mom, I don’t get the vampire thing,” the Girl began one of her interrogations. “I mean, this poem feels serious but, vampires?”
“It’s just a stand in for people who run the society and please don’t go repeating that outside of the home,” her mother admonished.
“And we’re supposed to know that how? Seriously, I could recite this poem all day and no one would get it so what’s the problem with going public?”
“No, no, not the poem, it’s the explanation you shouldn’t repeat.”
“Mom, if no one’s interested in the poem, I don’t think you have to worry about anybody fighting to find out what it means.”
“Thanks for your support. Don’t you have some required reading to do?”
This was not how the Girl had intended the conversation to go. There were other things in the poem she admired, and later she even understood that the vampire thing was about how people who did bad things to other people were compelled to do so. It didn’t just happen. Nothing just happened. But the Girl had difficulty restarting the conversation.
Whenever she thought she’d worked herself up to the point where she could say, “Mom, I get it: everything is caused,” the Singer would pop into her mind, the Singer who emoted seemingly without cause, who could have sung in a dead language or in nonsense syllables and still put across everything she felt and had known and wanted.
As much and as many times as the Girl wanted to go back to her mother to resolve things, it all seemed somehow useless. What she wanted was to be held by her mother as she had been when her mother had come into the room and discovered the Bird. In that moment, the Girl had had everything, her mother’s warm slender arms around her back and a hand on the Girl’s head pressing her into her mother’s shoulder where there was just enough room to breathe and between the Girl’s eyes and the base her skull was the song that ran out of the Singer and through the Bird.
But now, thinking on the moment, the Singer she imagined as the source of the Bird’s pleading song left her feeling as if there was no use talking to her mother. The most brilliant words were stupid and her words weren’t even as brilliant as her mother’s that had to be explained, and explanations were stupid and so on and so on. It was much easier to remember and to be lost in the song and so that is where she remained, even through her required reading.
***
Before the Author learned to tell a story that could be sold to many people, and after her husband the Scientist lost his job, he became desperate to find work. It seemed unwise to him to rely on his wife selling a book as a good source of income. He loved her work but had stopped trying to tell people about it because they would become unconscious and that would bring the conversation to a close. As you have probably guessed, he spent a lot of time with his own thoughts, which was ironic given the nature of his research.
The thrust of his research had begun years ago. There had been an incident that made him certain he could find a way to link people into one another’s conscious minds, if not the subconscious. It was all part of a clinical trial where he and his wife had met. She had volunteered to be a test subject for a study on psychotropic, or psychedelic, drugs, depending on how you pronounce it.
He just happened to walk into the area where she was being interviewed when the screening device began to ask the same question over and over. She was about to walk out before he cut off the machine and began conducting the interview himself.
The sound of her voice took him away from the content of her answers. What she said was clear enough to him. She did seem to use many words for things he thought of as being easier to describe, and though she was not speaking loudly, there was a certain stream of force to her words. It enthralled him. He was sure he’d heard nothing like it. It was perhaps the one thing he’d encountered since childhood for which he had no point of reference but that nonetheless made him happy.
Towards the end of the interview, he realized his speaking had not caused her to fall asleep, that she had not so much as yawned. He became so nervous with happiness that he had to enter codes more than once to process the interview. Despite his agitation, the woman thought he was now more real and relaxed than when he calmly took over the interview from the device. She hoped that she’d had something to do with that.
As for the actual experiment, she’d had psychotropics before and found the idea of being paid to take them quite attractive. She wondered what he would be like on mushrooms. Perhaps it would open his more human side up to the codes he knew and the codes would be changed.
She didn’t take all of the drugs the experimenters gave her and managed to smuggle what she saved past the guards and into the control area where the Scientist sat, somewhat isolated at his workstation.
“Have you had any of this Bliss Garden brand?”
Her voice caught everyone’s attention. Hardly anyone there communicated by speaking and she was not authorized to be there in any event. She set the container of relief drink down on the area of h
is desk where she thought he would put food from home or personal items, though she couldn’t imagine him with either. She smiled at him as no one else had, as if the two of them had a history of the most intimate communication.
He was in an unnatural state. Little else mattered to him beyond the sound of her voice. For instance, it barely registered to him that the container she gave him was open. Even the Bliss Garden, the only relief drink dispensed in his area for all of the years he’d been there, seemed new in her hands.
***
The study was well under way when he began to notice a distinct change in his perception. He was watching himself conducting the interview with the Author. But instead of answering the questions, she was laughing approvingly and pointing to a set of wings growing out of his back.
He didn’t know what to make of her laughter or his wings. He was wholly focused on the sensation that he was seeing the world from inside the woman’s mind. This new perspective excited him so, he had the urge to run out of the facility and re-experience all the books of fiction and poetry he’d avoided in school, every piece of artwork, music, film, and dance he’d ever had to screen. He managed to fight that urge because it might cost him his job. At the same time, the thought of getting paid for doing science became more absurd by the moment.
Everything in his head was now madly spinning around the desire to exchange what was in him with someone else, to trade who he was with another person and simultaneously to know that experience through what he had always thought was his own consciousness.
The very idea of being able to engage people without boring them senseless made him almost immobile with a strange joy. The loneliness that had tracked him like a hound, that he had been trying to deny since childhood, felt too close to ignore. It almost had a face, a presence he could grasp and dispatch.
The Official Report on Human Activity Page 10