The Magpie's Return

by Peter Wright

  “If all of us have been hurt, then there are some who’ve done their fair share of the hurting.” I stuck a forkful of chicken into my mouth. “It’s only logical. Law of averages and everything. I’d be glad to show you some statistical models.”

  “She has a point,” my mother said.

  “Indulge me, please.” My father smiled. When I think of my father, I see this smile first, a welcome for me, an embrace of the world. “It’s a small favor for the greater good.”

  I’m gathering another sawdust pile when a woman’s voice calls. “Hey up there.”

  The woman on the sidewalk holds a hand above her eyes, her other hand resting on her belly’s pregnant curve. “Hey, Dr. Klein,” I say.

  “Doesn’t seem right they have you working all alone.”

  “Dad’s in the basement.” My voice lifts above the cicadas’ thrum. Phyllis Klein is our across-the-street neighbor and a professor in my father’s department. She’s already recruited me for babysitting, a task which I’ve never done and am secretly afraid I’ll be terrible at, my life without the sibling I once secretly pined for, my inexperience certain to lead to fumbling. A child so fragile and me so naïve and clumsy.

  Dr. Klein moves aside as Slater and his pug approach. At the lot’s edge, the dog lifts his leg and pisses on a woodpile. Slater stares, a gaze simple and unapologetic. He gives the leash a yank, and the pug yelps. They waddle a retreat, the dog’s gait an echo of its owner’s. I pick nails from the sawdust and sweep the pile over the floor’s lip. In me, a balancing. My sneakers at the floor’s edge. My father’s advice. The unkind words simmering in my gut.

  Our official move-in day falls on Trick-or-Treat night, and despite the fact that our gas line has yet to be hooked up and nearly all of what we own remains in boxes, my parents make a twilight trip to the store for candy. I was never much for Halloween, its ghouls and costumes a bit silly for a logic-grounded child. The heat may not work but the doorbell does, and Chestnut barks with each ring. Between handing out chocolates, I sit by the window and study the lit cone beneath the opposite curb’s streetlight. A cowboy appears. A robot. A soldier and a squad of cheerleaders. Their passings temporary, glimpses before they cross back into the dark.

  The traffic increases and so does Chestnut’s frenzy, and when the barking becomes too much, I take the candy bowl and sit on the front stoop where I discover a forgotten mask. The mask is simple and black, an oval to cover the eyes and nose, the kind of getup worn by bank robbers in old movies. I test the elastic’s anchoring staples and imagine the mask’s journey. An excited child, a costume unraveling an item at a time. I slide on the mask. The elastic band pinches my hair, my vision narrowed. Inside, my parents smile, yet when I check the foyer mirror, the mask makes me feel as if I’ve stepped back, a receding into someone myself yet not. I surprise both my parents and myself when I ask, “Is it OK if I go out, just to walk around?”

  My mother fashions a blue sheet into a cape, a knot around my throat and a satisfying flutter as I walk. The night cool, a tingle on my bare skin, the faintest parcel of breath as I cross the streetlight’s shine. I’m fourteen—and nothing irritates me more than being treated like a child—but then come moments like this when I yearn for nothing more than childhood’s diversions of simplicity and belonging. So I walk, a secret child for the next half hour. I return the stares of jack-o-lanterns and bed-sheet ghosts. I’m bag-less—my desire not for sweets but to observe. Nearly all my fellow travelers are smaller than me, and I’m surrounded by an undercurrent of murmurs and rustling footsteps. A boy dressed like a dog, a rope leash around his neck, bumps my side, his focus on his open bag and the take waiting inside. The children reckless, costumed dashes across empty streets. On the lawns, candy wrappers, testaments to impatience and illicit thrills. I, too, am thrilled, or at least intrigued. This pointless parade, a sugar-driven folly. This chance to walk amid a childhood I’d once believed too frivolous but for which I have a sudden yearning, an appreciation just as my time to be part of it fades.

  I return to the smell of fresh paint and Chinese takeout. My father places a log in the fireplace. There’s dirt under his fingernails, the day spent readying his garden before the frost, his meticulously arranged pteridophytes and angiosperms, lineages dating back before the time of men. What his beds will lack in blooms they’ll atone for in texture and in stories my father, if asked, would be happy to share.

  He steps back, and I set a match to the kindling, my cape still on, my mask pulled atop my forehead. I sit close, drawn to the fire’s crackle and warmth. Bach on the stereo. My mother with a red pen and proof pages, her collection going to print after Christmas. My father with his head on her lap. This communal gathering rare, my father’s fall split between campus lectures and evenings working alongside his brothers, my ninth-grade year already a quarter done, my evenings’ homework, my afternoons spent at practices and games. We’re in the season’s last weeks, our team’s derailing self-sabotages less frequent, a recent winning streak and the possibility of a .500 record. I turn another page in my text. Differential equations and linear algebra—an independent study with the chair of the high school math department, a course where I’m the teacher as often as I’m the student. My daily trips to the high school now last period, a release into the sun and the welcomed escape of not having to return to the Wolf Pack’s waiting stares. I enjoy reading ahead in my texts, the connecting of the present to what waits, units on improper integrals and first-order equations.

  I study the flames, and the grid returns to my thoughts, and on it, waves as beautiful as the notes from Bach’s harpsichord. I pull back the fireplace’s screen and poke a log veined in orange. Sparks climb the flue. My father can diagram the formula for combustion, the fuel waiting for the spark, the fire’s need to breathe. My mother could write a poem about warmth and consumption. Let me cast my meridians and parallels upon the flames. Behind their gasping dance, I imagine parabolas and undulations. An underpinning of logic. A whispered secret I lean close to hear.

  The radio plays the top-of-the-hour news report. This bloody marathon of an election nearing its end, halleluiah and amen. McNally in a do-or-die barnstorm across the rust belt and heartland, and the report plays highlights from his Toledo speech. A hoarse tirade, his dust and gravel buzzwords lifted by his followers: One America. Holy America. McNally mentions his opponent, the name spat from his tongue. The crowd cries in return—curses and threats and the promise to take to the streets should their man lose. My eyes glaze over, their focus lost in the flames. McNally rails. The media. The elites. The multiculturalists. All traitors against a once-great nation. Another report from outside the rally. Clashing mobs and the wail of sirens. I close my eyes and see it all. Confession number three: the anxiety that I’m slowly losing my mind, the lightning out of control, a storm of figures and ideas and theories and a hundred thousand scenarios, an internal thicket which I fear I will one day enter and never leave. There are nights I don’t sleep, my eyes dry and bloodshot, and in dawn’s lifting gray, I think of the insomnia of Edison and Newton and Shakespeare, and I know for each of these there waits a multitude of van Goghs driven mad by a brain on fire. Tonight, I listen to the radio, and I think perhaps the madness isn’t within me—it’s all around, waiting to drown us all.

  I turn and the fire warms my back. My father asleep, and I speak softly. “You know his winning isn’t impossible.”

  “It’s closer than I’d like.” My mother props her glasses atop her head. “But I’ve got to believe the basic goodness of people will win out.”

  “Now you sound like Dad. Only you sound like you’re trying to talk yourself into believing it.”

  “Perhaps forced optimism is better than the alternative.”

  “Sometimes I think he should spend a day with me in school.” A pop from the fire, a knot in the wood. I lower the mask over my eyes, and my mother smiles. “There have been studies that indicate one’s moral and ethical selves don’t change too much a
fter the age of twelve.”

  “I can see that.”

  “In which case, the percentage of the population who’re dim or boneheads or assholes should be enough to have us all be nervous come Tuesday.”

  She straightens one of my father’s curls and lets go. “Let’s bank on the other percentage being a little higher. At least until this time next week.”

  Chestnut patters in and settles in my lap. “How do you think Slater will take it?” In the past weeks, his yard has grown choked with McNally signs, the sea of red and white overtaking the grass and dropped leaves. “He’s rather invested.”

  “How do your junior high friends act when they don’t get their way?”

  “It’s not always pretty.” I turn back to the fire. The flames’ dance reminds me of the tube man I saw on a hazy summer morning. “Not pretty at all.”

  History is a study of survival. The histories of nations—and, on a smaller and more poignant scale, the histories of individuals. Consider the woman who swims twenty miles from shipwreck to shore; the man given up for dead who staggers, bearded and skeletal, out of the wilderness. I imagine such scenarios involve a series of self-struck bargains, the choosing between the agony of survival and surrender’s bliss. The body, despite its dominance in the physical world, bows to the will.

  I have never endured that scale of pain and deprivation, and I wonder, if tested, how strong my will would be. Yet I can appreciate the act’s mechanics of mind over body for I’ve trained myself to wake throughout the night and write in my dream journal. In the dark, I push to the surface, forcing back sleep’s weight, my pen scribbling, my words lifting and bunching as I wrestle the fading images. The more disciplined I’ve become, the more I remember, and I have some entries that stretch, epic and surreal, for pages. Perhaps these fragmented narratives are simply the sputterings of an uncoupled mind. Or perhaps they’re invitations from another dimension, one of truth and chaos and encoded in symbols I’ll never understand. This morning, the first of a new year, I wake in ashy light, the room’s chill on my nose. My scratching pen hustles to keep pace—a room like my bedroom yet not, a flashing blue light, my unexplained paralysis, and in the room’s center, a monkey with white eyes and backwards feet, my hockey stick clutched in its paw. The beast utters an indecipherable yet human language as it shuffles toward me. Or is it away?

  Chestnut shakes himself from the blankets. He leans forward, paws outstretched, head low and rear held high. His black snout twitches, and he licks my hand as I write. I rub the smooth spot beneath his chin, and the dog answers with moans, his eyes closed. My family and I greeted midnight with noisemakers and banging pots. Accompanying us, a house of half-drunk professors—chemists, biologists, physicists. The writers of reports and books. Most carrying the scars of their teen-selves, the wallflowers and late bloomers (a side joke I shared with my father—the mix of botany and teen angst). Most still hampered by awkwardness, the vexing soup of human interaction, and in me, a sympathetic kinship, the seeing of myself in their self-consciousness and staked distances. All of us question-askers, a step removed from trends and fashion. I studied the ones flitting along the edges or alone in corners. Our neighbor Dr. Klein, her five-month old sleeping in her arms. Dr. Lowden, who’d first introduced me to the slippery realm of quantum mechanics on the sidelines of a faculty softball game. Dr. Hamill with her child’s whisper of a voice and her recognitions from Guggenheim and the Royal Academy. Dr. Lowden, or at least this world’s version of him, slipped out unnoticed an hour before midnight. Dr. Hamill surprised us all with her raucous, arm-flailing charades performance. Then midnight with its hugs and kisses. The chemistry department whipped up a fireworks display from cleaning products and ash from the fire pit. They twisted newspaper funnels and stuck fuses in punctured tennis balls. The explosions colored the dark, and Chestnut ran looping circles across the yard before becoming the first to pass out. A celebration, yes, but the beneath the revelry, a sober, ever-more-real truth. The seven-week election hangover, McNally’s narrow victory, and the night’s conversations interspersed with hushed exchanges. The fire-bombings of mosques and synagogues. McNally’s continued attacks on the elites he blamed for the nation’s abandonment of God.

  I pull back the covers. My thick socks glide over the hardwood, and my body remembers the days before a roof and how I’d shuffled on sawdust. Chestnut in my arms, and his tongue laps my fingers, the thump of his heart against mine. On the stairs, I pass through a moment, a summer day, the slant of blazing sun, my father and uncles, our legs dangling over the stairs as we sipped cold drinks. Ghosts all around, and the July sun and my uncles’ voices give way to the dim living room. The lights shine on the Christmas tree, a straggly thing cut from the riverbank. I’d worked the saw, the sap on my gloves and my father’s contention that the tree’s imperfections gave it a personality one couldn’t buy on a lot. His smile obscured by the steam from his mouth, and me doubtful at first but then won over. The tree full of spaces and our ornaments adrift in the emptiness. The branches shining in a light unknown along the river. Yes, I have to admit, it is beautiful.

  I’ve slept in. A growing habit, my lethargy on unclaimed mornings, later than last year, later still than the year before. Weekdays, I rise with my alarm. I mutter curses until I become human under the shower’s splash. On weekends, I can doze until noon, Technicolor dreams and my journal filling. The sleep of teenagers, my father says. The replenishment of bone and muscle. The capillaries struggling to keep pace. A brain alight with new chemicals.

  I set Chestnut down on the landing. Beer bottles crowd the coffee table. Glasses puddled with melted ice, rims red with lipstick, and the alcohol mingles with the pine’s scent. A littering of folded paper scraps—last night’s charade answers. I pick up the nearest. Santa’s Workshop, my mother’s neat script. I’d expected good smells from the kitchen. French toast and cinnamon, my mother’s strong coffee. I listen for my father’s jazz, the clatter of skillets, but hear only low voices from the TV and the click of Chestnut’s nails. I pause at the kitchen entrance. “Mom?”

  My mother emerges from the family room. The hair that had once been as long as mine now trimmed above her shoulders, a framing for her pretty face. Still in her robe, she shares no greeting or morning smile, her eyes puffy. All of it odd—my mother the early riser, the completer of chores, her quiet morning hour at her writing desk, even on a holiday. Her expression hollow as we embrace. Her robe soft against my cheek. Her hand lotion’s flowered scent. She offers a lingering kiss for my forehead.

  Chestnut brushes against my shins, and I step back. My mother’s bloodshot eyes remind me of the call that brought news of my grandfather’s death, how I knew something terrible, something destined to change us, had happened even before she’d hung up. “What’s wrong?”

  Her arm around my shoulder, she guides me to the family room. My father in his pajama bottoms and sweatshirt. The remote in hand and the TV muted. He pulls Chestnut onto the couch. The TV light blue on his glasses. I sit beside him, the silence and incongruity making me feel like I’m still dreaming, and I say nothing, not wanting to break the spell and set the terrible thing I feel hovering over us in motion. He hugs me then turns back to the TV. My mother sits on my other side. My chest tightens, the sensation of being underwater.

  My father clicks the remote. The news on every channel. Shaky cell phone footage, horizons of mushroom clouds. Talking heads and streaming banners. Heaven’s view from a satellite, blossomings almost beautiful. Governments that no longer exist. First India and Pakistan, the border simmering for generations. Pride and territorial claims. Water rights and snow-capped mountains, a disputed region ninety percent of my classmates would be hard pressed to find on the map. Different Gods, different tongues, but their bread made the same. The same fruits ripened on the trees. Each loved their children. The war spread in minutes, China then Russia, North Korea. Aggressions and accidents and failed brinksmanship. A thousand cities reduced to carbon. Numbers I can
comprehend, a toll I can not. Computer models predict the fallout’s spread. Clouds destined to fatten and circle the world.

  My parents dress, but I remain on the couch. I overhear their plans, my focus on the TV. The next six hours see them coming and going, the cold carried on their passing hugs. They return laden with shopping bags, and in the kitchen and dining room, a growing array of boxes and cartons, vitamins, bandages, ointments and tampons, soap and detergent and toothpaste. Cans of soup and vegetables and fruit, powdered milk, crackers, more. The front door opens and shuts, the rattle of my father’s truck pulling into the driveway then backing out—movements like a time-lapse film. Their frenzy accentuated by my stillness, my body numb. My father returns from his last trip without his hat and his jacket sleeve torn, stories of supermarket bedlam as the shelves emptied. Outside, sirens and a stiffening wind. We sit close on the couch, the TV still on. All of us witnesses.

  We eat hours later, remembering ourselves and our hunger. Our New Year’s feast—black-eyed peas and cornbread, pork and sauerkraut—traditions of luck, a superstition that today leaves me hollow and shaken. A report from the local news—a supermarket shooting and a twilight curfew. A special report is broadcast from the White House. The President urges calm, an assurance order will be maintained and that the transition of power won’t be halted. My mother and I bundle up and walk Chestnut. We turn up our collars against the cold, and my eyes water in the breeze. The sky blue and white and veined by branches, and I imagine a current of human smoke circling the earth. My thoughts clearer but still muddied, the logic to tie it all together missing. We pass Dr. Klein pushing a stroller. We exchange hugs and ask if the other is all right. My hand reaches for my mother’s. Chestnut sniffs a dropped branch.