The Strange Bird: A Borne Story

by Jeff VanderMeer

  The Company? She did not know what that meant, but over time his mentions made her think of it as like her lab, but much larger.

  He tossed a couple on the floor of her cell, held on to the rest, and then, giving her a big grin, shoved a half dozen into his mouth, crunched down on them, savored the taste, and swallowed them almost whole.

  “Delicious, Isadora! Delicious. Try them. Try them now.”

  So Isadora did, surprised how little like fish they tasted, how much more like nectar, and by the liquid warmth that crept over her after they had disappeared down her gullet. Soon after, she felt as if floating and when she looked up the Old Man was hopping around in front of her and then twirling, arms held out as if hugging an invisible partner, and coming to a stop on flat feet to stare into the cell.

  “Do you feel it? Do you, Isadora? This is good stuff. The best.”

  His one eye was bloodshot and the white on his face had turned deep red. He had a wild look to him, as if something inside was eager to get out.

  But Isadora was too giddy to feel the danger of that, saw only that for once he seemed happy, and, in her way, she matched the Old Man step for step as he began to dance, flapping her wings as well, and hopping up onto the metal bench. Lost in the thought of dancing as another kind of flying.

  Then, at some point, the Old Man got an idea into his head and stopped dancing long enough to haul over an old full-length mirror, cracked and worn. He held up the mirror to the Strange Bird, perched on her metal bed in the cell. Even with the bars and wire in the way, the Strange Bird could see her reflection.

  It was the first time she had seen herself, her whole self, and what fascinated her was how color seeped and leached and spread and faded across her body even as she watched. How it fled across her feathers and welled up and that she could be so light in some places and so dark in others.

  “You see, Isadora?” the Old Man said. “You see? How beautiful you are? Don’t muffle that. Not in this world, so drab. Not in this world. You are like a blazing flame. A valuable flame.”

  Isadora the bird bobbed her head up and down.

  “Good, good, good,” the Old Man muttered, but she did not sense from him that her response was enough for him, or what response he had hoped for. He began to dance again, but Isadora did not join him this time.

  When he became dizzy, the Old Man stopped dancing, while Isadora perched on the metal bench, waiting for the next thing. He held his head and slumped into his chair at the desk.

  “You are a good friend, Isadora,” he said, although she was no such thing. “You have made my life here better. Just looking at you has made it better.”

  He gave her a sharp glance. “Do you want to know who I named you after? Well, do you?”

  He did not wait for a reaction but turned back to the desk, rummaged through a door, brought out a small metal circle, about two inches thick, set it on his knee, and pushed a button in the side.

  To Isadora’s delight—drunk for the first time, there in her cell—an image sprang up above the metal circle, of a woman, dancing, a woman in a dress, with a smile on her face.

  “This is Isadora,” the Old Man said. “I knew her, I knew her back then.”

  The woman spoke, just two sentences: “Oh, Charlie, this is silly, isn’t it. Turn that off.”

  But he played it again, and then again. “Oh, Charlie, this is silly, isn’t it. Turn that off. Oh, Charlie, this is silly, isn’t it. Turn that off. Oh, Charlie, this is silly, isn’t it. Turn that off.”

  Isadora the bird couldn’t tell at first that the Old Man’s expression had become grim, that he sat more stiffly each time he replayed the recording, could not interpret the emotion transforming his face.

  “Oh, Charlie, this is silly, isn’t it?” the Strange Bird said, in the same voice as the recording. She had learned the trick in the lab, where she had learned all else. It had pleased the scientists; she hoped it would please the Old Man.

  The Old Man sat bolt upright in his seat, set the metal circle aside on the desk.

  “Oh, Charlie, this is silly, isn’t it?” the Strange Bird said, still in the woman’s voice. “First we separate the surrounding tissue from the heart and lungs and then we gently insert the device into the side of the aorta. Then you will need to suction the blood away. Then you will need to suction the blood away.”

  “Shut up,” the Old Man said. A vicious, scared look.

  “They broke contain,” the Strange Bird said. “They’re in the compound. We’ll be cut off. They’ll slaughter us.”

  “I said shut up!”

  “What choice do we have? If we don’t kill them, we’ll starve to death. It doesn’t matter how distasteful it is, how much you hate it. How attached you are.”

  The Old Man threw the metal circle at the bars of the cell and shouted, “I said to be quiet! Be quiet right now!”

  “And the bird,” the Strange Bird continued, as if she could not help herself, but now was committed to relaying the last things she had heard in the lab before her escape, in the voice of the woman the Old Man had cared about. “And the bird can fend for itself. We have nothing to get at it with. So it will just stay up there, staring at us like a freak.” They had run out of bullets. Had stared up at her with a hunger unlike the hunger of scientists. All except Sanji, who was busy opening the air duct.

  But now she was silent, with the Old Man pressed up against the bars, his face a quivering mess, the one eye wide. She had shared with him and he had ignored her.

  “You don’t understand anything, Isadora,” the Old Man said, weeping, and then he whispered his secret, in a hiss that promised damage, that foretold her own death.

  It was not a secret Isadora the bird cared to know, nor did it surprise her. Nor did she understand all of it; she just knew that hearing it made her think again of the pot with the black weasels’ limp bodies hanging half-in and half-out.

  “If I must, I will kill you, Isadora, rather than be mocked by you. So you shut up. You must shut up and I must never hear that voice come out of you. Or I will kill you. Or I will leave you in that cell until you starve.”

  But Isadora the bird heard none of it, for he did not have to tell her that he might kill her. She knew. No, Isadora the bird was thinking of the lab and the night the animals had been lined up to play a game called chess in a corner of the vast blood room, one holiday when discord had pulled the scientists into separate factions.

  Each tile part of the chessboard, ostriches for knights facing each other across the board, and lions and hyenas, porcupines and storks, even giant salamanders and mudskippers, for the terrariums had yet to fail.

  How the animals, as she watched from her perch on Sanji’s shoulder, stood so still and quiet, afraid they had been brought there to be slaughtered, for it was still the blood room. Sanji drunk, all of them drunk or they would not have herded the animals down there, and all armed with guns or prod sticks, still drinking, some of them dancing as the Old Man had danced.

  The way the staff had nudged the animals to move to play a game they did not understand, the roars of laughter that were also roars of desperation. How they did not know how to carry on, that soon, they knew, it would turn worse and worse still. Turning to the right in their cages, alongside their charges, turning right forever, because there was nowhere to go.

  Was Sanji a prisoner of this, too? Were the scientists free to leave or not? And before the world caught up with them, would they finally discover what they sought in the flesh of their creations, and set free the animals and abandon the lab?

  As she had watched what Sanji called chess, the Strange Bird knew that would not be the outcome. No matter what affection the scientists felt for their charges, it would not end that way. It would end in the blood room, the animals in their ranks, waiting for the end.

  The Strange Bird had wondered at how she could think such thoughts, that she could be allowed such a rebellion, even if silent and only in her head.

  The Second Dream


  In the second dream, Sanji holds the apple in one hand, the knife in the other while she walks down a beach in the shadow of stark cliffs, barefoot, in the surf. There is no one on the beach besides them. There is no one out to sea—no boats, no swimmers.

  The Strange Bird walks beside Sanji. The Strange Bird is human but has no sense of her body; she might as well be molecules of air. The Strange Bird is overwhelmed by the sea salt and the rush of the waves and the wind that is both so strong and so gentle. The sand is cool and the lines of rocks half-submerged by the surf dark and covered in seaweed and limpets. Though she cannot see a sun, she knows that it is near dusk by the quality of the light. Though she cannot see a building, she knows there is another lab up on the cliffs, beyond the tree line.

  For a long time they walk side by side, and Sanji looks only ahead and says nothing. The Strange Bird feels a compulsion to speak, but she cannot speak. She is still a bird. She is a bird. She is a bird. But she is human and walking beside Sanji, while up in the sky the real birds wheel and caw and search the sea for fish and other food. Some of them are not gulls or terns but albatross, and the Strange Bird knows that they have never felt the land beneath them, but have forever soared, and even as she watches they bank and then rise higher and higher until they leave their brethren behind.

  “You will leave me for this place,” Sanji says finally. “You will have to leave me someday, and then you will need to be smart and clever and brave. You will have to be very brave, if what we have done is to survive. And I will be brave with you. We will find a way.”

  The Strange Bird wants to reply, has words to say, but she can say none of them, for when she looks down her body is not hers and like the albatross she disappears into the sky, pulled up into the sky like being ripped from the beach by an invisible hand.

  The Escape

  Isadora the bird chose a night to become a ghost that was already pitch-black, and she perched on the dark floor in the corner and she concentrated her thoughts and she tried to imagine she was not even there, and in aid of this she shut down all of her systems, her senses, all except sight and hearing, and she became so very quiet. And after a while she knew she had become invisible, that her atoms had become indistinguishable from the bars, the floor, the wooden blocks across the bars.

  While the Old Man banged away at the typewriter, back to her.

  She imagined that it would be a little like her escape from the lab, and she was ready for that. The Old Man would be confused, would think she had escaped and open the door and she would fly out in a storm of wings, battering his face, and escape to the underground with the weasels. That she would, in time, find an air duct. That she would find her way to the surface and to the light.

  Instead the Old Man finished his maniacal typing and tried to feast his gaze upon her, saw her nowhere, and shuffled to the cell bars, looming over her in the corner, and looked right through her.

  A rheum of confusion spread across his features. A sense of loss, of unexpectedly fresh grief. But then he recovered, began to smile, and then to laugh.

  “Ah, Isadora, you are a cheat. Why have you become such a cheat? You are all the same, in all your different ways. Each of you has a trick. There is a trick to you, but you’re not as tricky as you think. You are not as tricky as I am. I know all the ways of prisoners. Do you think I have not seen this before?” And she thought of the three crosses in the sand. “I will not open the door. Oh, no, Isadora has flown the coop! No, I don’t think so.

  “And trying to trick me while I do such important work! After I have been so kind to you. Reveal yourself! Show me yourself! I will not open the door. Reveal yourself!”

  His face had darkened and he was stamping around, punching the air. But she did not move, did not give herself away. Her plan had failed, but she at least did not want him to see her transform.

  Then the Old Man said, in a clipped, hurt tone, “I could keep you here, but if something happened to me, you would be stuck. I do not like the thought. Would not want it done to me. Not to me. No matter how good or bad I was.

  “So, I will give you a good home. A better home. Since you are so desperate to leave me. I will take you into the city and sell you. That is the best for everyone.”

  Was it best?

  * * *

  After a time, the Old Man calmed down and went to sleep. She could see him from the bench. He had lost weight that week and his beard was now so thick and messy that it looked like a nest. They had not been allowed nests, back in the lab, yet she knew nest in a way. His eye was more and more restless and sometimes his hands shook.

  The foxes did not come that night. The moon did not come out. She lay in the darkness, exhausted, and felt the itch in her wings, the ache, how cramped the cell was, and so dull. It was, in a way, worse than the laboratory.

  The Old Man’s secret was still in her head, unspooling and respooling, never quite there, never quite gone.

  The Strange Bird had not enough experience of human beings to know which were rational and which were not. No one in the lab had been, in the end, rational.

  The City

  The next day, the Old Man drugged her food and when she woke, she was no longer in her cell but in a sack, swung over the Old Man’s shoulder. They were headed for the city. She sensed it was midafternoon.

  Blind and bound, the Strange Bird jostled in the sack. The Old Man spared no thought for the jostling as he walked down the underground passage, through the maze of the prison. Cared not if she was bruised or harmed, and from this she knew she might as well be meat to be sold as wonder to be marveled at. But she was not afraid, or at least not of the dark. For she could sense so many creatures all around: the lungfish hibernating in the floor beneath, the weasels in the walls, the salamanders in the ceiling, and spiders and worms everywhere. If she could not have control, then she would reach out and take comfort in everything that existed beyond the borders of her self.

  Ahead, the Strange Bird could “see” the branches and pathways of the tunnel system, and discern which the Old Man might take and which he might not, thrilled at the danger when he came so close to some vast shape hidden behind a wall, a fellow traveler, shy and afraid of the light held by the Old Man. He had never known and would never know that he shared these dark places with such a thing, but the Strange Bird knew.

  “Some secrets are between us,” Sanji had said in the lab, in the evenings of those last days, when the other scientists were in their quarters or on sentry duty at the barricades. When Sanji would continue to work on the Strange Bird. Always with a local anesthetic, so the Strange Bird felt nothing, never became alarmed, but would be alert for these one-sided conversations. Why did Sanji want her to have the memory? She did not know. She just knew that confinement in the sack made those words come back to her, these moments when she could say nothing in return but must receive so much.

  “Bird brains are almost as good as human brains—just packed tighter. But you’re not just a bird brain, are you?”

  Then what was she? If not “just” a bird?

  * * *

  The sky of late afternoon, and the Strange Bird pulled out of the sack, but swung by her legs, the Old Man wearing gloves for fear of her talons, and her working hard against the dizziness of being upside down, of seeing the arc of the rocky ground, cut through with rivers of sand come close only to recede, and reminded of a swing set, and how reminded? For that could not be her memory, nor Isadora’s. That could only have come from the lab, from some other source. When had she been on a swing set? Everything dislodged, made into a pendulum, and glad only of the glimpse of the sun below her and then, on the upward swing, a bit more toward her, and then cut loose again, falling away again.

  They had come out of a hole in the ground disguised by dusty canvas, crawled up onto the surface, the Old Man cursing, slapping her through the sack once, twice, as if it were the Strange Bird’s fault, the discomfort of the journey, the length of it. But now the Strange Bird could te
ll, at the apex of the swing, that they were in the ruined city.

  Soon, she would be sold. Soon, she would be elsewhere.

  She held her wings close against the rope, stayed compact, preferred that ache to what might happen if she relaxed and her wings fell out of position. She knew the Old Man would not stop should she injure herself against stray rocks, which already she must avoid by moving her head from side to side.

  The smell of this place struck the Strange Bird as unnatural. The metal, the rust made her think of the flecks of dark wings, fading into swarm. The hint of tainted water and the funk of rotted flesh. Through lanes bounded by gaunt trees and yellowing bushes, with yellow grass, they crept, entering and exiting labyrinths of cracked girders and half-collapsed houses. Glimpses of tiny creatures shadowing, unsure if they were predator or prey, and her compass spinning wildly.

  But there came as well tremors in the middle distance and a shuddering through the air and the Old Man spit to the side and picked up his pace. He stopped at the edge of a crumbling courtyard full of dirt and gravel and odd moss, bordered by four brick walls jagged and torn at as if by monsters.

  “Not here, not here,” he muttered. “Why are they not here?”

  Surely it would be only a moment she would need—to plunge into the sky, to rise and escape and no longer be captive. That moment when he or someone must loosen the rope around her feet. Or could she break it? Could she tense and break the rope, or could she think herself strong enough to flap her wings and fly away even bound? Even weakened as she was by captivity.

  Then, so that even the Strange Bird who had been Isadora could see it … a shadow appeared along the edge of the world, view constrained by the courtyard and the ruins beyond, something enormous launched in flight, seen indistinct. It could not be a bird by the shape. It could not be anything that the Strange Bird had ever seen fly.