No Birds Sing Here

by Daniel V. Meier Jr.

  His pockets were empty, not even the most insignificant penny. He even searched the floor of the phone booth. Nothing. He would have to go back to Malany and explain everything, hoping that she would not refuse.

  Driving back, he almost wished that she would refuse. He wanted her to throw a bitch fit. Any excuse now would be enough to put him back on the road, back to Herschel. He longed for something familiar: the morning ritual of Herschel, the cat fights in the back alley, the complaining regulars of the diner. He wanted to resume the daily development of his psychic powers and the trips into fantasy that writing gave him.

  Yet, somehow, he felt that he had taken an irreversible course, a path to destruction that is the inevitable fate of those who are free to choose. Did he choose? Was he ever free? These questions stayed with Beckman, constantly repeating themselves, demanding answers.

  He pulled up to the motel cabin and, with superhuman effort, switched the engine off. The world seemed in a gray mist of despair. He struggled out of the car and leaned against it, hardly able to move. The mental tape that his thoughts ran on had become a tangled jumble of spaghetti. But, after a while, he assembled enough coherency to walk to the cabin.

  Malany was sitting up in bed, knees up, supporting a thick notebook.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve eaten?” he said.

  “Of course not.”

  “Well, I’m starving. I have to eat something.”

  “As long as you’re obsessed with it, naturally you’re going to feel what you call hunger.”

  “Malany, I have to have some money.”

  “So you can satisfy your cravings?”

  “Yes,” Beckman spoke through clenched teeth, his whole body quivering almost out of control.

  “Really, I don’t know how you expect to become a writer as long as you put that first. All you’ve been doing since we left is grumbling, and I’m beginning to believe you like it.”

  “All right, all right.” Beckman threw up his hands. “If you don’t want to read your poetry before the local poetry society tomorrow night, okay. I’ve done what I could.”

  “You arranged a reading?” Malany asked. The notebook slid from her knees.

  “Yes. At the library, seven thirty. You can probably sell some of your books, if you want to. Look, just enough for a hamburger. I’ll get out of here, and I’ll send you the money when I find a job.”

  Malany reached under the bed and extracted a $10 bill from the white envelope. She shoved it across the bed to Beckman.

  “Beckman, don’t get so upset. You’re sounding positively manic, even suicidal. Take the money, feed your appetites. Obviously, that’s what it’s going to take to improve your physical condition.”

  Malany was right. After Beckman had eaten, his perspectives fell back into sync. He parked the car on the main street of town, what the librarian had called First Street. A faded green sign, strapped to a corner lamp post, authenticated it. Buildings, looking out from plastic and glass facades of the last decade, still had the architectural charm of the more substantial facades of the 1890s. Even some of the original names, those nearest the top of these buildings, remained uncovered. Beckman wanted to be sure to remember to mention it to Malany.

  He noticed a bookstore after several blocks of trance-like meandering. It was a long room slightly wider than the entrance door, and appeared to be operated by a paraplegic. The merchandise was mostly paperbacks, new and used. The proprietor wheeled his chair through the narrow spaces.

  “Only the cockroaches can move faster,” he said, openly sarcastic and without humor.

  “Do you even have room for cockroaches?” Beckman said.

  The man frowned. Beckman felt a psychic surge. The man’s hate was very strong.

  “Something I can help you with or just looking?” The paraplegic manager said, sneering on the last two words.

  “I was looking for something on psychokinesis.”

  “Psycho what?” the man blurted.

  “Psychokinesis.”

  “What is that, some kind of occult stuff ?”

  “No,” Beckman exaggerated a tone of patience and consideration. “To put it simply, it’s the study of mind over matter.”

  “Hah! That’s the last thing anyone needs around here. Everyone would be dead in an hour.”

  The man smiled and waited for effect. He was the local jester, safe in his wheelchair, denuded of a noble self-image, ignored and isolated, allowed the luxury of his cynicism. Even a paraplegic was not totally immune, however. He had his limits, like Voltaire. The wrong word to the wrong ego, and he would know what real power could do.

  “Do you have anything?” Beckman stared, fascinated with the sheer physical grotesqueness of the man.

  The man, smitten by Beckman’s directness as well as his morbid fascination, twisted his face into a heap of wrinkles. His eyes bulged dangerously out.

  “I don’t know!” He all but screeched. “I’ll have to look.”

  Beckman glanced at his watch. “I don’t have time now, but I’ll be back tomorrow.”

  The man slammed his tiny, withered fist down on the arm of his chair. “Why must I be tormented so?” he shouted after Beckman. But Beckman had already closed the door and was striding to the car.

  Beckman began his advertising blitz by allowing Malany’s car to be violated by the same mono-toothed gas station attendant. When the man had finished and stood breathing heavily next to the window, with dirty outstretched palm, Beckman shoved the money into it along with several of the newly printed leaflets. He watched as the automobile rapist counted the money, then stared with bewildered amusement at the announcement of Malany’s poetry reading.

  It was too late to start seriously circulating them; and if she could, Malany would be eating a dinner of concentrated vitamins and energy supplements. The thought of eating instantly formed a glossy mental image of a fat cheeseburger spiced with a half inch slab of onion, an inch slice of red tomato, bright green lettuce sprinkled with droplets of water; tangy, eggy mayonnaise, and a frosty mug of beer. He drove around randomly until he found what he felt would be the right place. It was a block away from First Street. A small neon sign over the door sputtered the name Sandbar. Beckman found a parking space behind an undatable Buick bearing a bumper sticker: Put God Back in Our Schools.

  The place was crowded, but it was a quiet crowd. Muted murmurings flowed past him with Doppler fleetness. Several men at the bar moved aside to make room for him. It was their only indication that they were aware of his existence.

  Beckman was still hungry, so hungry that he decided at that moment the worst possible death had to be starvation. The bartender, a woman masked in Cleopatra eyes, glossy red lips, and the non-permeable skin of a cadaver, stood before him, silent.

  Beckman asked if her establishment served cheeseburgers. The bartender nodded. He promptly placed his order for their deluxe, as pictured on the grill’s exhaust fan.

  “And a beer,” he added awkwardly in an absurdly loud voice, above the general noise level of the bar, toward the retreating figure of the bartender.

  Beckman trembled with joy at the arrival of his cheeseburger. The bun was splattered with dots of fat, and bloody streaks of hot grease ran down into his plate. The beer was equally delightful, an opaque yellow, with icy fingerprints on the glass. Beckman’s mouth foamed wet as a carnivore’s. Such was his excitement that he felt an imponderable desire for that first orgasmic bite. One of the tomato slices dropped onto the bar. He didn’t stop to pick it up but, at the first soft feel of the bun, the tangy cheese, the fleshy, earthy mix of meat and onions, unashamedly committed his hunger to unrestrained flight. The first swallow of beer was a good, but lower peak, and each bite and swallow peaked lower and lower, but never really faded. The man standing next to him abruptly spoke to him with deathlike urgency.

  “I was married a whole year,” he said.

  Beckman hesitated, then nodded to show that he would listen. The man, chalky in the dim f
luorescent light, seemed not to notice. He continued, “There wasn’t a thing we didn’t do. There was hardly a night or day that we didn’t try something new. We both read every sex book printed. We attended the porno shops regularly, every Sunday. We even made a trip to New York to see the Cathedral of Erotic Art. And then one day she was gone; the books, the paintings, all gone. All I ever wanted was for her not to leave. I didn’t really care about the sex and all of the surreal antics that went with it. I tried to tell her, but she hated meek men, she said.”

  Beckman wanted to leave. He made a motion to move from his place at the bar, but the man’s stone face held him.

  “If she were to come back tomorrow and shit on me every day, I would still beg her not to leave. She would hate me for it, but I would still beg her. How else do you tell somebody?”

  “Tell somebody what?” Beckman heard himself asking, but the man had rotated toward the new noise. People nearest the door were greeting someone called Motoe. Motoe limped around the bar room on a twisted right foot, enjoying the slaps on his back from the customers. The sound of his singular name reverberated about the room, bounding from wall to wall, seeping into every crack and hole. He laughed and waved his withered right arm at each eruption of his name. As the eruptions subsided, a space was cleared around Motoe in the center of the bar room. A column of light appeared from ceiling to floor and seemed to trap Motoe’s disfigured body in its glowing cylinder. Silence fell like the silence following an automobile crash. Music from a fifties-style jukebox began; slow, swaying music. Motoe moved disjointedly in time with the rhythm, his one good arm reaching out of the cylinder of light, his face serene with half-closed eyes and open mouth.

  The crowd moved and giggled. Then the music got faster, moving in rhythmic steps to the single drumming pulse . . . ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom, faster . . . Motoe, keeping time, writhed and flailed his withered arm in and out of the cylinder of light. His face contorted in pleasure or pain, his hips pulsating wildly, and the crowd shouting the lyrics in unison.

  The place throbbed with rhythm, expanding and contracting around its nucleus, Motoe. It hummed with inner life. The collective psychic force of the crowd was too much for Beckman. He had to get away or he felt that his mind would be shorted out, that it might even explode out of his head. He might even be absorbed into Motoe’s cell and be lost forever. Escape! Escape!

  He slid along the opened space in front of the bar, toward the door. Looking back for a moment, he could see only flashes of Motoe’s gyrating body disappearing at the center of the pulsating crowd, and a sound like the tearing, renting power of a rocket engine screaming.

  Beckman left the bar in a hurry, ignoring what sounded like someone calling to him in the street, “Hey, Mister, where ya going? Hey, buddy, come back.”

  The rest of the town was quiet. The Sandbar sign buzzed and flickered incongruously. It was the only noise in the street. Had he fallen asleep at the bar and only dreamed it? Had he suffered some sort of mental breakdown? He even considered the attractive possibility that some alien spaceship had landed behind the bar and was using it as a base of operations. Beckman arrived back at the motel. The events of the Sandbar still held his mind. As he pulled into the parking area, he saw the polished, black limousine with New York plates. It was hard to miss. It was the same brand new 1981 Lincoln Continental that he had seen at the last motel. It passed quickly under the light of the exit driveway and sped in a blur of red, amber, and white light out onto the highway.

  Malany was sitting in bed, hunched intently over a book. “Where have you been?” She made a face with a wrinkled nose. “You smell like meat and cigarette smoke.”

  Beckman ignored her for a moment. He flopped down in the only chair. “I’m only human,” he said apologetically.

  Malany looked disgusted. “More human than I realized.”

  Beckman pretended to ignore her.

  “Oh God, Beckman. You’re such a defeatist. I’ve learned that about you.”

  Beckman smiled and brought out the leaflets announcing her poetry reading. He told her of his call to the newspaper and his plan for distributing the leaflets. Malany was truly, genuinely pleased, and even though she said nothing about the composition of the leaflets, her eyes glittered when she saw them.

  “Would a defeatist even attempt what I’ve done, and would he succeed?”

  Malany reached over and patted him on the cheek. “Poor Beckman. You know, you’re in the wrong field. You would make a brilliant conman. Sales is certainly your forte, darling.”

  Beckman pushed her hand away. “There’s no need to be cruel, Malany. You haven’t even read my stuff.”

  “Oh, yes I have,” she smiled.

  “Well, you had no right.” Beckman jumped up. “Where is it?”

  Malany, in mock sincerity, pointed to his case. He rushed to it and quickly examined his papers.

  “Don’t you really want to know what I think?” she asked.

  “You’ve already said. Be a salesman, be a con man, wasn’t that it? Or haven’t you had all of your fun yet?”

  She started to speak, but Beckman, scarlet-faced, shouted, “No, goddammit, I don’t care!”

  Malany was unmoved, impervious to his anger. Beckman, feeling intensely ashamed, begged forgiveness with his eyes. She denied it, and then he begged for it with his heart and with his voice. He was on the edge of tears. Malany, cool as an oriental queen, offered her hand to kiss. Beckman, in religious humility, accepted it, kissed it, caressed it gently, and begged and begged like a monk praying over a holy relic.

  Beckman scrambled out of bed when he realized that the sound he heard outside was Malany’s car, and that he had slept well past the time he had conditioned himself to awaken since the age of twelve. Malany’s car door slammed. Her footsteps on the gravel, strong and militant, came toward the cabin. She came in, breezy and unnaturally pink-cheeked, waving a paper bag with greasy spots on the bottom.

  “Your junk food. Enjoy it in the worst of health.”

  “Why didn’t you wake me?”

  “You looked so guiltless, so pubescently sweet, that I actually didn’t have the heart.”

  Beckman dug into the bag and started eating the doughnuts.

  “Did you happen to pick up the local paper?”

  Malany smiled like a lover. “Yes.” She eased the small daily from its hiding place behind her back.

  “It’s on the third page, at the bottom, in their entertainment section.” Despite this, Malany seemed pleased and anxious.

  Beckman, his cheeks puffed out with chocolate doughnuts, asked if she wanted to help him distribute the leaflets. Malany quickly accepted.

  “It won’t be easy,” Beckman warned. “There will be insults and disappointments.”

  “But you can handle that,” Malany said with complete seriousness.

  Beckman couldn’t deny that he was elated with her confessed confidence in him even if he didn’t totally share it. Perhaps it would not be as bad as he had made it sound. This was a new field, a field of creative action depending much on improvisation, spontaneity, and planning. It had all the elements of the adventure stories he had liked to read, but this included fraud, deception, and the horror of doubt. A true hero never had doubt, and if forced into fraud or deception against his enemies, it was always for a good and final result.

  A gray, misty despair cast itself over Beckman. Seeing Malany at last happy for the first time since they had begun this journey did not help. He felt inexplicably hollow and, he had to admit, afraid.

  She insisted on going with him and followed, haughty and triumphant as a Roman empress of the Antonine days. Beckman and Malany paraded through the one main street of town, stopping indiscriminately at every store and stand. Some owners laughed outright, some ordered them out with angry words and some, with skeptical curiosity, allowed Beckman to distribute the leaflets among the customers.

  When they had reached the end of the street—that is, the part where the gaudy busi
ness of retail buying and selling tapered off to the hard reality of wholesale buying and selling, where weathered and rundown warehouses joined abandoned shells of buildings, housing only desperate rats and human derelicts—Beckman distributed what was left of his leaflets on the street corner. They were across from the bookstore of the paraplegic. Beckman was hustling the leaflets in newsboy style when a police car screeched to a stop beside them.

  “Come and see, come and hear the poetess of world renown, Malany. At the public library, tonight at seven thirty. Come and see. Come and hear . . . ”

  Two policemen rolled out of their car and surrounded Beckman and Malany. The one facing Beckman stared down at him from under the black bill of his cap. One hand rested on his nightstick, the other on the handle of his gun.

  “You got a permit to hand this stuff out? Lemme see what this is, anyway. Hand it over.” The policeman stuck out his hand.

  “Don’t do it!” Malany shrieked. “He hasn’t got the right.”

  “City ordinance 905 prohibits the distribution of any advertisement or solicitations of printed matter related to commercial or private use without a properly authorized permit.”

  Malany began screaming, “Rape! Rape! Rape!”

  “Oh, shit,” the other policeman said, casting a look of alarm at his partner. “Now cut that out,” he shouted at Malany. She threw herself against the nearest policeman. “Rape, rape, rape!”

  The bookstore owner had rolled out onto the sidewalk and shouted a litany of names he was going to call. Derelicts drifted out from their condemned homes to watch the confrontation. People from the retail shops began to gather at a respectable distance; cars slowed down with curious faces in their windows.

  “Awe hell, Tommy, let’s go. These two are crazy.”

  “We can send the wagon after ’em.”

  The two policemen hurried back to their car and left with much tire squealing and blue smoke. Malany was nervous. It had been an effective but desperate maneuver which could have easily gone the other way and turned the policemen into club-swinging combatants.