by Unknown
This is certainly not the only time pigeons were used as symbols for the faulty human soul, for its penchant to sin. In The Odyssey, after Odysseus and Telemachus sleep with maidens who then prove themselves disloyal, Homer recounts:
With that, taking a cable used on a dark-prowed ship, [Odysseus] coiled it over the roundhouse, lashed it fast to a tall column, hoisting it up so high no toes could touch the ground. Then, as doves beating their spread wings against some snare rigged up in the thickets—flying in for a cozy nest, but a gristly bed receives them—so the women’s heads were trapped in a line, nooses yanking their heads up one by one, so all might die a pitiful ghastly death . . . They kicked up their heels for a little—not for long.
Once again, the pigeon-as-simile appears in the lexicon of punishment.
And so, doubly heartbroken by losing Eurydice for the second time, Orpheus returns to the surface and plays his music only for inanimate objects, trying in vain to wring tears from the trees and rocks. He swears off the love of other women, becomes an unrepentant misogynist, and takes any further sexual act in the form of pederasty. Angered by the destructive ways in which he fetishizes his grief, an all-female mob of Thracian bacchantes attacks Orpheus and tears his body apart, as if the carcass of a beast in the amphitheater. The women toss his still stubbornly singing head into the Hebrus River, and heave his lyre to the heavens, where it now plays for the satellites, Bartholomew, the deaf ears of the Voyager Golden Records which silently imprison so much sound.
Bacchus, enraged at the vigilanteism of his murderous female constituents, turns them into trees, doomed to be forever rooted in one place, their branches adorned only by pigeons weak enough to be tempted by the bait traps of the cunning fowlers of the world.
Strange how our narratives turn our very human need for reassurance of love in the face of tragically intense (or even just vaguely unique) circumstances into a punishable offense: Orpheus and Eurydice, Izanagi and Izanami, Lot and his wife, all of which carry auxiliary dogmas about creation, birth, rebirth, metamorphosis . . . In these stories, doubt is punished, but in life, doubt is paramount, the essential, if ephemeral, counterpart to food, water, and air in the survival game.
“An impossible repetition,” Mehdi Belhaj Kacem might have called these narrative tropes in Transgression and the Inexistent. “To begin with, event is repetition: mimesis . . . instituted repetition becomes a ‘second nature’ of our daily life”; the sort of redundancy—chained to a suffocating hindsight—that characterized the fate of Sisyphus, and made of him a technomimetic animal: a rotor, a gear, a gyroscope, a tweezers.
“It is indeed the incompletion of his love story,” says Sophie Chiari of Orpheus in Renaissance Tales of Desire, “which seems to him totally unbearable . . . [and he becomes] a dangerous and irrational creature. Love, thus, cannot be reduced to a spiritual form of desire. Its consummation is what makes it real.”
So, we put up decorations, and feign interest in them until the interest bears the dimensions of reality; hang art on our walls, diamonds from our fingers; stuff pigeons into our coops and our lunch-bins, fix them onto our rafters and our trees, and alternately use them and worship them, love them and hate them—all to serve the kind of myth we birthed from our boredom, to keep busy, until the stories with which we’ve laden them bear such an overwhelming and conflicting epochal arc that they can stand in for ourselves. Even the secrets stymied in our hearts are doomed—by way of heartbeat—to the underworld redundancy that so plagued the souls of Tartarus; the heart ever looking back on itself for that next known hiccup, reassurance made electric and innate inside of us.
But unlike Sisyphus, we are not entombed in myth to the point at which evolution ceases. We can better bear our burden by affixing it to something exterior—the feet of the birds we’ve so judiciously complicated—and setting it into the air, the upper world, where things are free to love one another and to tear one another apart in a more forward-moving sort of way. The most we can hope for is to be like those things—to have our best instruments tossed skyward after the terrestrial world has ripped our heads off for our transgressions. At least Orpheus knew what his best instrument was.
In this way, we can make of the pigeons, and the diamonds tied to them, beasts who straddle both worlds (if there’s nothing to fall from, one can’t fall from grace), and who can deliver to us answers from one that the other cannot offer. Of course, we try to believe this against the strong odds of our realizing that they’re just birds and rocks with which we happen to be sharing the planet right now; realizing that the ways in which they navigate and throw their light are unanswerable except in this reductive sort of way, and in this sort of way, bathed in soft mystery, we tell ourselves we can commune with them, communion being just another moving part of appropriation. Redundancy is the mask we pull over silence.
In the myth, Orpheus’s head floated downriver, and though his soul was reunited with Eurydice in the underworld, the fate of his head remains debated. If De Beers’s “forever” myths are any indication, it still sings, having fallen through space, time, story, and landscape, the river emptying into a plain rife with diamonds, the head descending and descending some shaft until it landed here, on the shoulders of this man welding something to something in the Namaqualand abyss—itself guarded by a diamond gate of sorts—doomed to be concealed for all eternity behind this mask, its song sung now only for itself, reverberating against the helmet walls, never again reaching the ears of an audience who, as a result, will know less of rapture.
*
“ORPHEUS?” I ASK THE MAN IN THE MASK. NO ANSWER. BEHIND him, the pigeons of Die Houthoop resist the temptation of his sparks and live, if not in the heavens, then in all unlikelihood on this corner of ruined earth where their species is corporately hunted.
Since Mr. Lester is due to arrive only at midnight, I decide to take a nap, ready myself for the encounter. I lie down next to Louisa and doze for an hour or so. When I wake, there’s no man in the welding helmet. Jackie’s presence is testified to only by the sound of dripping water in the house, of a fork colliding with a knife. In the aviaries, the shivering of wings. In the coops, low, ground-level flops. It’s late, but still too hot. The piles of junk—decorative and otherwise—seem overcooked, strung out. Hordes of lizards scramble into the loneliness, each one damaged, missing a body part. In the house, a plant sprouting from a composite pelvis is watered. A tine comes together with a blade.
Chapter 11
Champagne and Death at Dark
The Origins of a Pigeon Obsession
A FEW YEARS AGO, WHEN RUMMAGING THROUGH THE STORAGE closet at my parents’ house, I found my old baby book—a scrapbook my mom compiled of my toddlerhood interests. It was filled with Post-it note addendums, marginalia, paper clips, and staples. My own desire to fetishize the artifact pointed to a disturbed and disturbing self-absorption, and as I squatted in the shadows of the closet, smelling the sweet rankness of old sleeping bags, and opened the cover (which had an orange pterodactyl on it), I felt a measure of shame wedge into the crevices of my excitement. According to my mom’s evenhanded documentation, I was, at four years old, prone to disappear among the stacks of local libraries, seeking out books on ghosts. In 1980, under “Interests,” my mom wrote, in blue script, “Anything ghoulish.”
It would take another five years for me to marry said interest with birds. I was in fifth grade in 1985, and my English teacher, Mrs. Bircheim, as evidenced in the yearbook pictures, bore the most robust perm in the whole of Aptakisic Junior High—even more so than head cheerleader Joelle Manewith, more so than Spanish 1 teacher Mrs. Lipcott. Mrs. Bircheim was built like a stork, if not a pigeon, and when she swallowed her spit amid lectures on climaxes and participles and Johnny Tremain, she swallowed with her whole body.
Portions of the junior high school were still under construction and walled off with Visqueen, those thick sheets of translucent plastic, behind which we would watch ghostly men in ghostly blue jeans and yellow
hard hats bolt together the rafters in which pigeons began to roost. Occasionally, a pigeon would find its way beyond the construction curtain and into the locker rooms and classrooms, staff lounge and cafeteria, where its cries would commune with those of the bird-fearing students and teachers, until Mr. Dino, the resident janitor, stalked the hallways brandishing his mop like a lance.
In 1985, smuggling allowed many world economies to survive—cocoa from Ghana to Togo, peanuts from Senegal to Gambia, onions from Nigeria to Niger, diamonds from South Africa to the United States. Protected from all of this illicit trade by the humid green cinderblock of the junior high classroom, its smells of pencil shavings and pigeon shit, its communal-use protractors and compasses and art-gum erasers, I thought of escape, and of blood, and of anything more dangerous than agreements—subject–verb, or otherwise.
My friend Ryan and I began meeting after school, lying on our bellies on my bedroom’s beige carpeting, notebooks split open before us. We decided to collaborate on a serial—linked gross-out stories called “Death at Dark” (II, III, IV . . . ), which featured an anonymous serial killer and an ever-fresh set of victims. We sensed in these stories the beginning of a conversation, and we wanted it to be more than one-sided. We decided to show our extracurricular work to Mrs. Bircheim, who—in spite of the derivative subject matter—was so excited that Ryan and I were inspired to write beyond the parameters of her syllabus that she allowed us to present each new installment aloud to the class. Mondays began with our readings, and soon we realized that to keep our audience riveted, we needed to ratchet up the gruesomeness with every installment.
It was “Death at Dark XXI,” I think, that culminated with the killer forcing a man’s hand into a sink drain and turning on the garbage disposal. I remember the description (it was mine) of the man’s stump as he removed it from the drain, the blood “running like egg yolk down his wrist.” Just as the victim was about to run from the kitchen, a pigeon flew through the open window into the house. With one hand, the killer grabbed the man by the collar, and with the other, he snatched the bird out of the air, mid-flight, and in a movement like modern dance, stabbed the man in the heart with the bird’s head, the pigeon asphyxiating in the chest cavity, wings madly flapping. In the story, man and bird die simultaneously, their spirits braiding and ascending like DNA; and, as we read this to our rapt classmates, Shannon Everly—the cheerleader on whom I had a serious crush—started to cry. Duke Lee, the class clown, began to mock-wail, ridiculing Shannon, and I didn’t know what to do, how to feel about this.
Mrs. Bircheim banned us from reading any further installments. We had gone overboard. I was confused, but electrically so: our writing had power. I sensed some kind of potential energy in this—a little delicious, a little malign, and wholly addictive.
Later that year, at the Spring Fling dance, I sipped magenta punch, checked my zipper, and smiled at the adult chaperones, until I worked up the courage to ask Shannon—who wore a pink, poofy-sleeved dress—to dance. And this was not just any dance, but the famed and nerve-racking Champagne Snowball dance, wherein the DJ, a middle-aged man in a white button-down shirt and white button-fly jeans, would lean into his microphone at various intervals during the song (it was Whitney Houston’s “Saving All My Love for You”), and, mustering the sort of vocal inflection that depended on the creepiest kind of lechery, the spittle glowing disco-ball silver on his lips, his blond mustache rustling breathily and too-loud on the grille, croon, “Cham-paaaagnnne.” At this directive, we young dancers were supposed to express some sort of affection for each other, be it the quick hug,a or smile, or hand squeeze, or—for the courageous few—a kiss on the cheek, and then part ways, searching in the half-dark like bemused electrons for another dance partner with whom to finish the song.
I was shocked when Shannon said yes, and she said yes within earshot of Mr. Morteo, the balding social studies teacher with a toothbrush mustache, who nodded at me and winked in that Attaboy sort of way, in spite of my failing his class. Shannon’s bangs were bigger than ever that night, and above her ears, her hair was laudably feathered. The DJ cranked the volume. Whitney sang her heart out. Shannon’s hands twined around my neck, bunched my garage-sale sport coat. She smelled like hairspray and herbes de Provence—predominantly chervil and lavender. This was clearly a soap more expensive than the purloined motel soaps my parents supplied. She wore stud earrings that looked like real diamonds.
I had the sentence in my head for a full thirty seconds before I spoke it, and I knew time was limited. I knew the DJ was about to say, “Champagne.” It was still a full decade before the Revolutionary United Front began their reign of terror in Sierra Leone, commandeering the local diamond mines; still a full decade before they began amputating the limbs and lips, ears and tongues of farmers and families who kept pigeons, before emptying their AKs into the birds themselves.
“I’m sorry I made you cry,” I said to Shannon, and she finally looked at me. I felt as if I would tip over like a tree. We were shadows among shadows.
“It was the bird,” Shannon said. “That the killer stabbed that man with that poor bird.”
I didn’t know what to say. I think I was confused, or concerned that Shannon lent her heart to the dead bird over the dead man.
I said, “Oh.”
Her fingers adjusted on my shoulders. They tightened, and so did I.
“I have a mynah,” she said. “She’s my best friend. My parents had her before I was born. I’ve known her my whole life.”
I didn’t want to admit it, but I admitted it. “I don’t know what that is.”
“It’s like a parrot. She’s yellow and black. She talks.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She told me that the mynah would talk her to sleep as an infant, though, of course, she had no memory of that. For no good reason, or for all good reason, I said it again: “I’m sorry.”
Shannon looked down, and I realized that there was not only a power in writing, but in birds too. I was going to ask the mynah’s name. I promise I was. But beyond Shannon, within the cage of disco-ball light—the thousands of facets—I saw one of Aptakisic’s stowaway pigeons fly into the gymnasium from the construction zone. Alarmed whispers punctuated Whitney.
But that’s just an old fantasy
I’ve got to get ready, just a few minutes more
As if anticipating what was to happen next, Shannon pushed her face in between my neck and shoulder, and it was hot there, and it was wet there, and I could feel her body bounce, as I watched Mr. Morteo put down his cup of punch, put down his oatmeal-raisin cookie, and with a shoe that in my memory was huge, out of proportion with the rest of him, kick the pigeon along the length of the refreshments table. The first blow stunned it so that it couldn’t take off, merely flap as it tried to walk away. Its sounds weren’t audible above the song. The shadows danced, and Shannon hid her face, and I briefly thought she was clairvoyant, and I couldn’t believe that no one else was seeing this. Behind the drape of the paper tablecloth, I watched Mr. Morteo, social studies specialist, bend his right knee, lift his foot into the air, and stomp, finally, down. His thin hair, once combed-over, hung in strings over his face. He looked surprised, and guilty, as if he had just meant to shoo it away, not kill it, but his body overtook him. For that moment, he looked like a boy, not a teacher. He dragged the sole of his shoe over the elastomeric floor.
“Cham-paaaagnnne,” said the DJ.
Shannon lifted her head. She looked startled, but certain.
In the scattered light, Mr. Dino squatted, rose, dustpanned the carcass into a rubber trashcan on wheels. I took my hands from Shannon’s hips, the cloth there having made my palms itch. She leaned in, and I didn’t know what to do. My hands hovered in the air. Disco-ball light spilled over my fingers. Shannon breathed out through her nose. Lavender, lemon peel, rosemary, salt. The pigeon thumped the can bottom and, in this way, I was, for the first time by anyone outside my family, kissed on the lips.
/> Shannon walked into the dark, and I stood there, not wanting to search for another partner, not wanting to be standing up at all. I wanted to follow her, but I couldn’t move, something futuristic and feathery opening up in my chest. The desire to lift off, the desire to keep secrets, or something even more ephemeral than that. I didn’t know it then, or couldn’t attach words to it, but I think I desperately wanted to say I love you to someone.
Bartholomew Variation #5
MSIZI’S MOTHER ALWAYS UNPACKS THE BAGS AT THE BIRD’S FEET indelicately.
Bartholomew flies toward some vision of her, in her threadbare pink bathrobe, tough bare feet on the concrete kitchen floor, her belly pressed to the oven, stirring cornmeal porridge.
Below, a shirtless man roasts a donkey leg over a fire built of desiccated cactus paddles. The smoke rises, and the bird is sandwiched in.
Bartholomew is neither here nor there, flying toward neither here nor there. He can be the pigeon that the early Dutch and British colonists here believed him to be, dependent as they were for their medicinal cures on Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum. He can be the sort of pigeon whose head can be cut open and bled out onto the soles of the feet of men and women suffering from headaches (“The Soales of the feet have great Affinity with the Head”). His brain, when smeared onto the feet of the afflicted colonists, was said to have cured “Frenzy, Melancholy, and Madness.” He can be the pigeon whose blood failed to cure the sick infant of one of the early diamond mine bosses in Kleinzee, who painted the baby’s chest in vain with a red cross. He can be that same pigeon eaten by the grieving mine boss and his wife, in pie form, after they buried their child in the dust. He can most certainly be the pigeon that, if found perched on the edge of a diamond mine, the early colonists believed to be an “Aderyn y Corff,” or “corpse bird,” a prognosticator of death by collapse. If Bartholomew’s belly feathers were even whiter than they are, these early colonists would have been even more frightened of him, associating as they did the color white—the color of their own skin—with vengeful ghosts.