The History of Soul 2065

by Barbara Krasnoff

  The man’s face was a dangerous shade of purple. He didn’t seem to be armed, and he didn’t make any attempt to come in, so I said, “One minute,” and closed the door. I unmuted the phone, told my client I’d call him the next day with my estimates, hung up, and opened the door again.

  “Yes?” I asked.

  “It’s your friggin’ birds,” Halloran said.

  “My birds?”

  “Your birds. From your goddamned feeder.”

  “Oh. Okay. What about the birds?”

  “They’re crapping on my sidewalk and on my lawn,” the man growled.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your birds! This morning, they started leaving their goddamn droppings all over my front walk! And my chair! And my grass! The stuff is impossible to clean up. What are you going to do about it?”

  Halloran stepped aside and let me look.

  It was as though the Hallorans’ property had been struck overnight by some weird sort of disease. Their walk and their lawn were marked all over with ugly white blotches. A small folding chair that Halloran had put out was decorated with long white streaks.

  It was pretty damned disgusting. Not to mention funny.

  “You going to stop it or am I going to have to call my lawyer?”

  Okay, it was Alice in Wonderland time. I lost my temper and any type of neighborly restraint. “I’m sorry, but are you insane?”

  “Your birds are messing up my property!”

  Maybe it was the dead squirrel, maybe it was just exasperation, but I’d had it. “You stupid bastard, what are are you talking about? You think I’m ordering the birds to shit on your stuff?”

  “It’s your damn feeder!”

  I began to laugh—I couldn’t help it. “Who the hell do you think I am?” I sputtered. “The fucking birdman of Alcatraz? I don’t tell the birds where to do their thing.”

  But the man just wouldn’t let go. “Then why aren’t they doin’ it in your yard?”

  I looked, and damn, but he was right. The white stuff was all over his walk, his grass, his chair—but the only evidence of the birds on my side was a scattering of seed hulls.

  “Huh!” was all I could say.

  As though to underscore the puzzle, a grey pigeon walked serenely from my lawn, where it had been searching out any seeds that had been knocked to the ground, and over to Halloran’s lawn chair. It fluttered up to the seat, serenely lifted its tail and left a gift in the center of the green plastic webbing. It then looked at us, unashamed.

  At that point, I wouldn’t have been surprised if the bird had started a conversation like some come-to-life Disney cartoon. Halloran and I just stood there and gaped while the pigeon coolly ran a couple of its feathers through its beak and flew away.

  “So?” Halloran asked, apparently not impressed by the idea of a wild creature purposefully using his chair as an outhouse. “Are you going to take that feeder down?”

  “I’m not sure I should,” I said, still watching the small birds fluttering around the seed. “Mrs. Delaney said…”

  “Robert? What’d he say?” Mrs. Halloran, her hair teased into a tall structure that looked like one of the birds had built it as a nest, banged out of their door and strode over, her eyes already narrowed and ready for battle. “Is he going to take it down?”

  “It was Mrs. Delaney who put up the damned birdfeeder,” said Halloran to his wife.

  “No, it wasn’t,” I said. “I put it up. She just suggested it.”

  “Damned, indeed,” said Mrs. Halloran, totally ignoring me. “Didn’t I tell you that she had something to do with it? I swear, if we were living in my mother’s time, I would have reported her to the priest years ago.”

  Her husband scowled at her. “I don’t give two cents for what your mother would have done. What I want to know is, what are we going to do about this?”

  “Well,” Mrs. Halloran asked, “what does she want?”

  They both turned and looked expectantly at me, like I’d know the answer to whatever it was they were asking.

  I shrugged. “It was the day the squirrel got caught in your trap,” I said. “I helped her bury it, and she told me to buy the feeder.”

  “You see?” Mrs. Halloran said to her husband, “I told you that you should be more polite to her. Now she’s helping out strangers instead of us, who are practically family.”

  Halloran looked exasperated—I wondered if he had less faith in the value of those family connections than she had—but before he had a chance, she turned and glared at me.

  I took a breath. “Look, Mrs. Halloran,” I said. “I’m new here. I don’t want to make trouble. I’ll tell you what. If you stop laying traps and setting fires, I’ll do some research, ask around, see if there’s something out there that will keep animals off your lawn without either killing them, or driving the rest of us crazy. But I can’t guarantee anything.”

  “Nothing doing!” she said firmly. “We can’t wait for you to find some ‘acceptable’ way to keep our lawn clean. You wouldn’t care if every stray animal in the neighborhood used our yard as its private toilet!”

  A small flock of about 15 starlings fluttered down to the Hallorans’ lawn. We all watched as they lifted their tails and flew off again, chattering gaily.

  She looked back at me. I just smiled.

  “Fine,” she said through gritted teeth. “We’ll stop. What we want doesn’t matter. Just tell that witch to leave us in peace.” She stamped back into her house, her hair quivering slightly on top of her head.

  Her husband watched her go and then turned back to me. To my surprise, he almost looked apologetic. “Look, I don’t really care if the feeder is up or not if you can just stop the birds from messing up our property.”

  He almost made me feel a bit guilty. “I’ll go talk to Mrs. Delaney,” I said. “And could you tell your wife that I didn’t mean any harm by putting up the feeder?”

  “Sure,” said Halloran. “But she won’t believe me.”

  A mockingbird that had been eating at the feeder chose that moment to flutter up from the perch. As we watched, the bird rose, circled Halloran’s chair three times, and then flew to the tree that loomed over the center of the courtyard. It came to rest on a wide, bare branch well away from the Halloran’s walk, sang for a few seconds—it sounded just like a car alarm—and daintily lifted its tail. A small white parcel hit the roots of the tree.

  After a moment, I said, “It looks like I won’t have to go talk to Mrs. Delaney after all. Would you like some help cleaning up?”

  “Nah,” said Halloran. “I’ll call my son. He owes me some money anyway; this will square us.”

  We shook hands. I went indoors, sat at my desk, and looked out my windows at the birdfeeder, where a couple of finches were daintily picking through the remainder of the day’s seed. Behind them, the sun was beginning to set. I could hear Halloran raking through his lawn, probably looking for any last traps. Across the way, Vivian was scolding one of her kids for not doing his homework. Other neighbors were, I knew, cooking dinner, or watching the news, or smiling at a joke. Mrs. Delaney was doing—whatever it was Mrs. Delaney did when she was alone. And over us all, the Bay Court tree.

  I closed my eyes. “Whatever my future holds, Benjamin mi amor, I will always love you,” I whispered.

  There was no answering voice in my head. But for the first time in a long time, I felt something like peace.

  An Awfully Big Adventure

  A story of Benjamin Weissbaum, Sophia’s grandson

  1962

  “Is there going to be a war?”

  Ben was seated crossed-legged on the living room rug, staring into the gray glowing universe of the TV screen, made even brighter because the lights were turned down. Behind him, his mother and father sat on the couch. They were very quiet.

  The man on the screen was President Kennedy—Ben knew that for sure. The President stared slightly to the right of the TV screen and spoke for a long time about a lot of things
that Ben didn’t understand. The word “missile” was mentioned several times; Ben knew what missiles were. And the word “nuclear” was there as well, and that was also a dangerous word.

  The President wasn’t smiling, as he sometimes did when Ben saw him on television. But what was even scarier was the silence in the living room—his parents weren’t arguing about what the President was saying, or talking back to the screen, like they always did. So despite the flood of unfamiliar words, Ben understood that something very bad was about to happen.

  “Papa, is there going to be a war?” he asked again, needing reassurance. Ben was quite ready to keep asking—he knew how to be persistent with his questions. But he didn’t have to wait long.

  “I don’t know,” his father said. “Now be quiet, Ben. Mama and Papa need to hear this.”

  And with those words, the bottom dropped out of Ben’s world. A simple fact of his life had been that his father knew everything, could explain everything, and could make everything better.

  But not this.

  * * *

  That night, Ben dreamed.

  He was walking in the playground that was next to his apartment house. It was usually filled with kids playing and mothers talking together (and yelling at the kids), but for some reason there was nobody there; it was deserted. He was alone. A siren screamed; a siren like the ones that were sometimes tested in his neighborhood.

  And suddenly he wasn’t alone anymore; the playground and the street were filled with people, but they weren’t playing and chatting and arguing; instead, they were crying and moaning. Some were lying still, as though they had decided to go to sleep on the pavement; some were twitching and making low, unhappy sounds. There was snow falling from the sky, even though it wasn’t cold at all, and it covered the crying people.

  A woman ran up to Ben and then stopped, as though she was disappointed. “Have you seen my little girl?” she asked. “Have you seen Susan?” But she didn’t wait for an answer and ran on.

  It was very scary. Ben looked around, and then suddenly, right in front of their apartment house, he saw his father. He was facing away from Ben, but Ben knew, with the assurance that came in dreams, that it was him. He ran over, calling as loud as he could, “Papa! Papa, I’m scared!”

  His Papa turned around, but instead of picking Ben up and comforting him, as he usually did, he just stared at him. And suddenly Ben realized that his Papa’s clothes were torn and bloody. He looked at Ben with wide, blank eyes, as though he had gone somewhere inside himself and didn’t know his own son. It was as if he were turning into a monster. The one that had scared Ben so much on TV.

  “Papa!” he called, and put out his arms. But his father still didn’t recognize him. And then the skin started to peel off his face like the skin of a banana.

  Ben screamed and woke up.

  He climbed out of bed and ran into the living room. His father was still watching the TV, smoking a cigarette, his long legs stretched out in front of him. His mother was sitting at the kitchen table, looking at a newspaper.

  Ben jumped into his father’s lap, wrapped his arms around his chest and breathed in the familiar smoky scent. “Ben, what’s wrong?” his father asked. He put out his cigarette in a nearby ashtray and settled Ben more firmly on his lap. “Did you have a nightmare?”

  Ben nodded, still seeing the vision of his father with cold, uncaring eyes and peeling cheeks, still needing reassurance that it was unreal, that it didn’t, couldn’t happen.

  “What did you dream?” his father asked.

  “There was a war,” Ben said, suddenly realizing that this was what had been happening, why all the people had been so sad and frightened. “There was a war, and you turned into a Frankenstein monster.”

  “I knew that we shouldn’t have let him watch the speech,” his mother said nervously. She stood, walked over, took the cigarette from Ben’s father and took a long pull on it, which was funny, because she hardly ever smoked. “I said so, Willy. A child his age shouldn’t have to think about such things.”

  His father was silent for a moment as his mother sat down on the couch next to them.

  “Now, listen to me, Ben,” he finally said. His tone was serious, so Ben sat a little straighter and paid attention. “You know that sometimes grown-ups have disagreements, right? And sometimes those disagreements are serious.”

  “Like you and Uncle Harry?” asked Ben. He remembered when his father and Uncle Harry had yelled at each other about Communists and blacklists and other things until his mother pulled him out of the room. Soon after that, Uncle Harry went home, and he hadn’t seen him since, although Aunt Isabeau, who was married to Uncle Harry and was Papa’s sister, still came to visit sometimes.

  “Yes, like that,” his father said. “Well, sometimes countries have disagreements, too. And sometimes, when they can’t resolve those disagreements, they start a war.”

  “Like the one you fought in,” Ben said. He had once found, in the bottom drawer of his father’s bureau, a medal in a box and a photo of a thin young woman with very short hair and wearing clothes too big for her who looked a little like his mother—and a little not. But Ben had never told either of his parents that he’d found the box and the picture. Somehow, he knew they wouldn’t like it.

  “Yes, like the one I fought in. Well, our country is having a disagreement with another country, and there’s the possibility that it may lead to another war. But whatever happens, you know that your mother and I will always take care of you, and keep you safe.”

  Ben nodded.

  “Now, do you have any questions?”

  Ben thought a moment, and then said, “Can I see the magic numbers?”

  His mama and papa looked at each other for a moment. Then his mama reached over and pulled him over to her lap. “Will that make you feel better?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  She smiled slightly and said. “Very well. I think this is a good time for the magic numbers.”

  She reached around him and pushed up the sleeve on her left arm, and then turned her forearm up in front of his face so he could see the writing, light blue against the pale brown of her skin. He reached out with his forefinger and touched each, one right after the other, reciting the one letter and each number to himself in a soft whisper as his finger moved from left to right: A15384. He did it as slowly as he could, to make sure the magic would work and the moment last as long as possible.

  “Better?” asked his mama as he touched the final number. He looked up at her and smiled.

  “Good,” she said. “Now, you go back to bed. And don’t worry—the magic numbers will protect you.”

  She lifted him down from her lap and gently kissed his forehead. “Good night, Benjamin.”

  “Good night, Mama. Good night, Papa.”

  “Good night,” his papa said.

  Ben walked out of the living room and into the hallway that connected it with the bedroom. He paused then, listening.

  “We should take a vacation, Willy,” said his mama. “Tomorrow. We could take money out of the bank and go somewhere. Somewhere in the center of the country, away from the cities. Find a motel and wait there until—well, until we find out what happens.”

  The couch creaked. “Where would we go, Gretl?” his papa asked. “Cities all over the United States are targeted.”

  Ben’s mama spoke in a fierce whisper. “At least we should send the boy away. Somewhere he’ll be safe. There must be someplace. We need to make sure he gets away in time; we cannot wait until it is too late, the way my parents did…” She began to cry quietly.

  Ben peeked around the corner. His papa’s arm was around his mama’s shoulders. “If there’s another war,” he said, “there won’t be anywhere that’s safe. And this time it will be everybody who is in danger.”

  Ben turned and went back to his room, closed the door very quietly, scrambled onto his bed, stood on his pillow, and pushed aside the curtains of the window that was just behind the head
of his bed.

  Their apartment was three stories up. Ben loved looking down at the street after bedtime—at night, the gently glowing street lamps made it look foreign and magical. Ben would usually watch the people pass by and make up stories about who they were and where they were going. But now, all he wanted was reassurance that the street was still there, just the way it had always been: the shuttered stores, the bump in the middle of the street that made the trucks bounce loudly, the pigeons pulling pieces of uneaten bagels out of the trash cans and the deli on the corner with the neon Coca-Cola sign that was never turned off.

  It was all still there. And, he reminded himself, he had touched and recited the magic numbers. They would keep him, and his family, safe.

  “Can we make a deal?”

  Ben turned, and stared.

  There was something wrong. While the lights from outside still illuminated the walls, there was smoke in his room, so thick and dark that he couldn’t see his nightlight where it was always on, next to the door. Ben’s mama had been in a fire once, and she told him how she had run out of the house and closed the door so that the fire wouldn’t spread. Ben wondered if there was a fire in his room and if he should run out and close the door. But that would mean running through the smoke which was now thick and rolling and reaching up to the ceiling.

  “What do you want? Can we make a deal?”

  The voice came from the center of the smoke. This couldn’t be any normal fire—fires, as far as Ben knew, didn’t talk—and so he stood on his bed and said loudly (because he wasn’t sure how well smoke could hear), “My name is Ben! Who are you?”

  There was a moment of silence. Then suddenly, like water going down a drain, the smoke swirled down and away, until none of it was left. Instead, a woman stood in the middle of Ben’s room, among his trains and books and sneakers.

  Ben squinted at her suspiciously. She was obviously a grown-up, but she wasn’t dressed like his mama, or any of her friends, or even any of the ladies he had seen on TV shows. Instead, she was dressed in a white tuxedo (Ben knew it was called a tuxedo because he had seen a man wear one on TV), red high heels, and very bright red lipstick. Her hair was black and long and covered one eye.