Why Do Birds

by Rob Hoerburger

  There was no sound at all throughout the dream. She realized that the girl was deaf.

  Though she still never saw the girl’s face, she was able to make out the fragments of the label on the record the girl had thrown into the wall. It was their Hits album, in black shards on the floor.

  But the dream didn’t end there. Suddenly she herself was pinned, against a chain-link fence. From the other side she could hear those hits from the collection, that first bulletproof 12 (or in music-biz parlance, “bulleted”), from “T.” to “T.” (chronologically), “W.” to “C.” (sequentially). She wasn’t singing them, though. They were chirpy instrumental versions. She turned to see that they were coming from 12 soft-serve ice-cream trucks parked in a lot on the other side of the fence, all playing at the same time, louder now, bearing down on her in caloric measures. She tried to break free, but the wind kept pinning her to the fence. She was wearing the purple silk blazer that she wore during the photo shoot for the solo album, in the picture taken by the Vogue photographer, and it kept getting sucked through the diamond-shaped holes in the fence.

  The only way was forward, but in front of her there was a thoroughfare with cars zipping by. In the inky half light she could make out a church on the other side of the street, a narrow crumbly brick structure with two slender stained-glass windows. In one there was an image of a young Latino man with a guitar; in the other an older, heavier white man with a leering smile and a tuxedo jacket. A procession was making its way into the church, hooded figures in chocolate-brown robes, cinched with belts made of lemons.

  Then, a whistle. In the middle of the street there now stood a crossing guard, beckoning her. She broke free of the fence and started to move in staggered, windblown steps; when she got to the guard she realized it was the officer who stopped her that day in the subway, in full uniform now, but instead of a gun in his holster there was the paring knife he’d examined from her pocketbook. She thanked him, but he just smiled and waved her across the street.

  She made her way to the end of the procession and was starting up the pyramided steps into the church, hay-colored grass and fresh tree stumps surrounding them, when she caught sight of the cornerstone — “Church of St. Blaise, est. 1959.” She’d never heard of a St. Blaise. Or seen a church like this, so dark and gloomy. The churches of her childhood were bright places, simply adorned, blond-wood pews, the architecture of the major triad, apostles and saints with happy, picnic-going countenances, Jesus a genial master of ceremonies. These were the places where the brother played the organ; once during services he’d sneaked in a Beatles tune. She was the only one who noticed.

  But this church was ornamented, sculpted, arted, bulky, with votive candles in every corner and alcove, booths with heavy burgundy curtains, and on the walls, six frescoes on each side, fog seeming to rise from below. Each fresco had a scene from one of their 12 “bulletproofs.” Stars falling down from the sky. White lace. A sad guitar. Birds on a telephone line. A transistor radio from the ’60s. And so on. Now at the back of the procession, she tried to focus in front of her. On the altar, facing the line and holding what appeared to be long candles tied in an X, was a hulking figure in a purple-and-gold chasuble. She couldn’t make out his face, not yet. But the figure on the giant cross behind him was unmistakable. It wasn’t Jesus, but someone with a similar frame, exposed ribs and oddly defined pecs. It was the cart guy from Sixth Avenue. Only now he was wearing horn-rimmed glasses.

  The procession moved in jitters, fits and starts, as some of the hooded creatures stopped in front of one of those frescoes, kneeled, arms held out like a drummer reaching for the high hat or the free cymbal, and spoke, recited really, a few words from the song the fresco was depicting. As she got nearer the front she realized the hulking figure in the chasuble was putting those candles on the shoulders of each processor and chanting something. Finally there were just two left in the line, she and the processor ahead of her. The priest or whatever he was rested the candles on the leading processor’s shoulders, so that the neck fit into the space on the top part of the X. And he said, “Through the intercession of St. Blaise, may you be protected from all diseases and afflictions of the throat.” Well, she could go for that.

  As the processor ahead turned to leave the altar, the hood fell off and she could see again the profile of the girl from the record store. When she got in front of the priest she stuck her throat out to receive the candles and the blessing. But the candles vanished. She looked and realized the priest was the subway busker. He had a small silver receptacle in his hand now, dipped his fleshy thumb and index finger in it and wiped some black substance on her forehead. In his basso profundo, he said, “Remember, woman, that you are moon dust, and to moon dust you shall return.”

  She woke up and reached for the laxatives behind the pillow.

  Then a notepad on the nightstand. She wrote down the words “Too Much Love” and went back to sleep.

  22. New York City, Summer 1982

  Before the attack, Andy had worked seven days straight. A full week of scruff and city stink on him. In every borough, hours spent on the subway, following tourists in cowboy hats and chaps, a kindergarten class walking down Broadway, a drunken 20-something stumbling out of a bar in the West Village, a student on crutches outside Bronx Science, a trio in Astoria turning over and twiddling screwdrivers in their hands like majorettes, a parade of leering pervs in Hell’s Kitchen. When he worked long weeks like this, he sometimes couldn’t tell the potential victims from the potential perps, who were the truly vulnerable ones. As much as he liked being the lone wolf, mailing in his reports, getting his assignments on the phone, not even having to go into the station for his paycheck, the isolation that he seemed to crave his whole life had become a self-imposed solitary. The phone calls to his parents in Florida were the highlight of his week, practically his only opportunity to speak for days. “Are you dating anyone?” his mother asked the son who’d never brought home a girl, or went to a dance, or seemed interested in dating at all through high school and college. “Who’s got time?” Andy said. “Too much work.” It was a stock reply, but a true one.

  But what was really getting to him, still, was the woman with the lemon. He didn’t even know if she was the famous singer, but just the chance that she could be, that he could connect somehow to that day long ago, to that boy who made him feel, just for a few minutes, the way he’d never felt before or since, to that perfect music, kept her on his mind. But how was he going to find her?

  And then there was the bump on the back of his head. He had her to blame for that too.

  His obsession with her had led to his first big fuckup on his undercover assignment. He was on the Lower East Side, near a playground in East River Park where dealers were known to show up around midday. Squad cars did regular sweeps around the area but could never quite root them out; the dealers got used to the patterns and seemed to have a sense for when the cars would roll through. Andy figured he needed to keep the dealers guessing, make them less sure of their footing, mine the place to blow up their expectations.

  The dealers would often case out the most vulnerable, the kids whose parents didn’t come to pick them up or who didn’t have travel buddies to get them safely home, which was usually one of the nearby projects. They’d hang out across the humid street, trail the kids to a nearby bodega, some as young as 8 or 9, strike up friendly conversations, show off their new high-tops or bling, hand out some candy or a soda, establish the trust, maybe offer some quick cash to run a bag for them. You can’t save them all, he thought, invoking something he’d heard in some class in the academy. Crime will always exist. You can’t stop it all. And, from long ago in church: The poor will always be with you.

  Still, he did what he could, the usual getting in between when the kids were dismissed, or pretending to browse in the bodega so there could be no alone space for the kids and the dealers, intentionally dropping things, bumping, loud scuffs of his shoes on the floor, one time whirring a
pocket New Year’s Eve noisemaker, to break the flow, even dropping small flyers on the sidewalks around the playground, no bigger than the size of dollar bills, that said: Stay clean. Or, Drugs kill. He’d carry small packets of pepper to make himself sneeze, so that in the next aisle, the spiel of the dealers might be disrupted, if even for a second, to maybe allow the kids to escape the pull or, he hoped, even to let the dealers reconsider what they were doing, find for a few seconds their better angels. On his third day there, he was behind the Sixth Street overpass, close enough to hear the indistinct swell of kid giggles and shouts coming from the playground. It made him think of the singer’s big hit with the kiddie chorus. His ears had flinched when he first heard it almost a decade ago — why is she singing a song from a children’s TV show, he thought, and why is this la-la chorus taking up space where she could be singing? But the song grew on him; her vocal couldn’t mask the sadness that made the song’s cheer-up message so necessary and unfrivolous. He bought the single, the last one of hers that he took into his collection back then, one of the last records he bought before he turned off the radio for good, or what he thought was for good. He liked disco, which was getting popular then, but couldn’t marry it, couldn’t own or be owned by it. Anything new now seemed only to sully the purity of those good years, of those perfect records of the girl, of that perfect boy.

  And the song was running through his head as he started to move out from the bridge, occupying enough of his attention for him not to see, or to sense, the danger behind, the thwack out of nowhere to the back of his head. As he crumpled to the ground, he was barely able to pick up his chin and see a limo passing on the F.D.R., its window rolling up.

  Andy could feel the warmth of the blood on the back of his head and consciousness slipping away, but he knew he couldn’t pass out. And just as it was the song that might have dulled, or at least diverted, his senses long enough not to feel the attack coming, so it was the song that saved him. He played it in his mind to keep his focus as he dragged himself behind an ancient elm tree. Four bars of recorder. Four of the Bacharach-y trumpet. Then her voice touching the wound, a vocal Veronica’s cloth, its balm nudging him back into consciousness, helping to heal him. When he got to the part of the song where the kiddie chorus was unleashed, he just went back to the beginning. Three, four, five times, and he was able to pull himself up against the tree trunk. Two or three more, and he pulled out a handkerchief and his water bottle to mop up the blood, which had slowed to a trickle. Three or four more, and he was able to rouse himself and stagger away from the park and toward a cab and an emergency room.

  He didn’t need stitches, but he was dizzy, and the E.R. doctor told him to take a few days off. Now on his couch, he touched the bump on the back of his head as the singer floated into his thoughts. You can’t save them all, he thought. But maybe he could save her. He considered writing a letter. The fan-club address was listed on the albums. He scratched out a few lines:

  Dear _____,

  I know this might seem like an odd question, but were you stopped by a New York City cop in a subway station several weeks ago? You took a lemon out of your bag. . . .

  If the situation seemed ridiculous and implausible, childish even, the letter was even more so. He balled up the paper and tossed it in the trash can. He dozed off on the sofa while watching TV, and when he woke up, there was a Unicef commercial on with a half-naked, emaciated African child slogging through puddles, dark saucer eyes pleading and practically filling up her whole face, a pan with muddy gruel in her hand. The commercial gave Andy an idea. If he was going to find this woman, going to track her, he realized he needed to think like her. He’d already tried to piece together some kind of puzzle from the music. Yes, she was clearly trying to make herself disappear. But that didn’t draw any bead on her potential behavior, where she might go, what she might do. He had to get further into her head.

  He walked into the bathroom and pulled off his T-shirt. He ran his fingers up his torso, splaying his fingers slowly, pressing in, pincering his nipples in the valley of his thumbs and index fingers, almost a magnetic pressure between them, shooting a skein of pain down his side and leg on each side. Then he started his way again from the bottom and pawed and pulled the hair and flesh this time. There was too much fuzz on his torso for him to really tell if what he had in mind was possible. He got some paper towels from the kitchen and spread them into the sink. Then he took out his electric razor and starting trimming, slowly, evenly, in upward streaks from his navel, through his ribs and around his nipples, to where the hair stopped just below his Adam’s apple, deeply breathing in and out to the mild buzz and cool steel of the trimmer. He shook off any loose hair and then coated his torso in shaving cream, put a new blade in his razor and worked it in the same direction he had the buzzer. Wiped it off, felt for any rough spots and did it again.

  He sucked in his now-smooth stomach, such as it was. He could see the ribs through his arced, folded-in skin. But his pecs were still mini-mounds of muscle. Everywhere he pushed, poked, pinched, too much sinew was responding. And as much as he tried to straighten his arms at the elbows, he couldn’t entirely de-emphasize the definition in his biceps either, somewhere between a ripple and a bulge. He ran his hands down the boughs of his legs, so thick from soccer and all the walking he did on the job that his fingers couldn’t fit all the way around them until the ankles.

  How long would it take him, he wondered?

  It’s not as if he ate a lot to begin with. There was food in his refrigerator, but it, like his cupboards, was a minimalist scape. He was no stranger to fasting, either. When he was a kid, there were always what he called the God gimmes, that is, what he gave up for Lent. Other kids at school joked about giving up spinach or liver or homework; Andy really gave up things he liked: Milky Way bars, ice cream, one year even TV. That weekend he spent at the seminary there had been something called a Poor Peter’s fast, where you’d not eat all day and then for your evening meal have only broth or stale bread. Surviving the academy. The days when he was in uniform and had to work a double shift, or when a weekend soccer game ran long past regular mealtime, when he’d just forget to eat. Or a birthday party at the precinct, and he’d want to have some cake but got lost in his reports and missed it but then didn’t miss it. Those five years when he stopped listening to the radio.

  But still, to get to the starvation point? To look like that African kid in the commercial? To look like what he imagined the woman did underneath the layers of clothes? As he swept up the wiry clumps of his chest hair from the bathroom floor, he wondered again: How long would it take?

  He tried it. He made fewer trips to the grocery store. Put small helpings on his plate, then moved them around, delayed eating as long as he could, then ate only half of what was already not there. Subsisted on nibbles and sips. Held his breath when he got near roasting nuts on the streets, backyard barbecues in his neighborhood. After a week of this he started to feel dizzy, overtired, irritable. But after the second week, he could also feel another muscle growing, flexing. It was the muscle of self-denial, the power of mind over body. After the third week, he stepped naked on the scale in his bathroom. Only a couple of pounds down. And he looked in the mirror. No appreciable difference. He still had muscles. This was going to take some time, as the woman or maybe-woman once sang.

  Then he put his clothes on and went out and got a pint of Häagen-Dazs mint chip and ate it all in one sitting.

  So much for that experiment, he thought. But it did teach him something. To get to that vanishing state, the woman probably had to have been suffering from this affliction for months, maybe years, something that her gradual voice dissipation had already suggested to Andy. He didn’t need any medical training to know that her body couldn’t sustain that kind of abuse much longer.

  Whoever she was.

  23. Queens, N.Y., Fall 1982

  Sib knew she could write. In her last semester alone, she did a 10-page paper on Hamlet and got an A from a to
ugh Shakespeare professor. Her senior thesis for her American Studies class, “Why Disco Doesn’t Suck: Sister Sledge and the Dissolution of the American Musical Conversation,” was 75 pages long. Part I was “Racism and Homophobia: The Backlash.” Part II, “Bad Apples: How Nixon and ‘Baby Face’ Spoiled the Whole Bunch.” Part III: “All Politics Is Personal: The Pavlovian, Huxleyan, Pharmacological Effect of ‘Rock the Boat’ and a Returning Sense.” Another A, with comments from her professor — a graying ponytailed guy who moonlighted as a columnist for The Village Voice and whose gut seemed to thicken as the semester wore on — along the lines of “You make a surprising, compelling argument.” Sib realized that her defense, her love of disco, was rooted in the fact that it was just gaining a foothold when her hearing returned. Even now, eight years later, “The Love I Lost” or “Rock Your Baby” or “Get Down Tonight,” already premature musical relics to most of the rest of the world, would overwhelm her with happiness chemicals. Sure, some of it was terrible, but wasn’t that true of any genre? The effect would wear off only when she would start to dance, and remember the basement parties, and start missing Kieran, and her mother.

  How would they attack their very own song? It would have to be something like only 50 words long, maybe less, some of them probably repeated. She had two collaborators in Timmy and Larry. Timmy had a way with words; Larry could make up tunes on the spot. They had a title, and general musical and lyrical contours: Write a ballad with bite, not swill like Air Supply or “Endless Love.” The theme of the words, that you can have too much of a good thing, should be complemented in the music, which should be catchy but not cloying. All the ideas were in place.