No Birds Sing Here

by Daniel V. Meier Jr.

  “You see, he thought that since I lived on the periphery of society and he had been cast out, that we automatically had something in common. This, of course, is true, but his motivation was all wrong. He believed that this situation allowed him the questionable luxury, and I know you don’t agree, of emotional interaction, sex—that sort of thing. I wanted it to be strictly platonic; me the poetess, him the book dealer. I thought perhaps his bookstore could become an arts center. I know it sounds like gross self-indulgence but after that scene at the reading, I felt determined to prove myself.

  “Anyway, he started the bit about being in love with me, wanting to have sex with me. I told him that I don’t have sex, but he begged me, crying like a child, begging me to masturbate him. I consented just so he would stop screaming. It was a disaster. His withered little organ would do nothing. It looked like a dried worm. Finally, when I was afraid that it would start bleeding, he rushed out of the store, naked from the waist down, and tried to run his wheelchair head-on into the street traffic. I realized that I had made a mistake, so I drove to the motel to find you. And you know the rest.”

  “But Malany, why me? I was just beginning to make it on my own again. It was all beginning to make sense. I don’t need you.”

  “Yes, you do, Beckman. We need each other. I can admit that now.”

  “Yes, I know. My con artistry and your literary artistry.”

  “Beckman, you’re oversimplifying again.”

  “Just being allegorical.”

  “I concede. Let’s just agree that it would be safer if we go west together. The people here are not yet ready for my work. It’s a mad, primitive, and receptive world out there in the West and, after what’s happened, I feel acutely vulnerable. I’m sure it’s only a temporary negation. It has to be, or I’ll never write again.”

  “Is that why you’re going west?”

  “Partly that, and partly to find “That New World.” A poet who has shaken off tradition and its solidifying restrictions no longer needs all that stuff about stability, sitting before the fireplace surrounded by an adoring family. To me it has become the seal of death, like when the paraplegic started his muddle about finding someone and love and all that. I would just as soon be told that I had terminal cancer.”

  “Suppose when we get to where we’re going, we find nothing but the Pacific Ocean. What then? Take the first boat going west? Jump off the Golden Gate Bridge? Isn’t that an ironic name for one of the most popular suicide spots in the world?”

  “Regardless of what we find, I don’t think it will be the smug complacency of the east. Almost anything’s better than that.”

  “Even death, Malany?”

  “Beckman, anyone who has descended into contentment and complacency is dead. Only the true artist lives.”

  “Now who’s oversimplifying?”

  They came to an intersection made more significant by the presence of a gas station and convenience store. Malany stopped at the intersection, looked both ways for traffic, then impulsively pulled into the gas station.

  “We need gas?” Beckman asked, looking over at the fuel gauge.

  “I want to exemplify what I mean,” Malany said.

  The attendant walked toward the car, wiping his hands on an oily orange rag, and framed his weathered face in the opened window.

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “Fill it up, please,” Malany said. She smiled unaccustomedly at the attendant. Then, reaching across Beckman, opened the glove compartment and searched its small, cluttered chamber until she found a pencil and an old pad of paper. The attendant returned after a few moments.

  “Didn’t take much, ma’am. Be anything else?”

  “Yes. I’m doing a survey for a possible television program on occupations in America, and if you don’t object, I’d like to ask you some questions.”

  The attendant glanced at his watch, wrinkled his forehead.

  “It won’t take long,” Malany assured him.

  “All right, what would you like to know?”

  “First of all, do you own your own business?”

  “Yes ma’am, as much as anyone can own anything who has to live on borr’ed money.”

  “Any other means of income?”

  “Little land under cultivation.”

  “Married?”

  “Yes.”

  “Children?”

  “Two boys.”

  Malany wrote the answers on the pad.

  “Do you have a cemetery lot?”

  “Not yet. Thought I would let that take care of itself someday.” The attendant looked to one side. “You say this is for television?”

  “Yes, a national survey.”

  “To tell you the truth, I don’t watch it much.”

  “Okay, when you do watch it what types of programs do you like?”

  “Oh, not much of anything. I seldom ever watch anything other than the news, maybe a baseball game now and then.”

  “Are you a subscriber to a book club?”

  The attendant shook his head. “Nope, can’t remember when I read a book last.”

  “Do you go to art shows?”

  “Nope.”

  “Would you say that you are satisfied with your occupation?”

  “That’s an awful strange question, ma’am, but I guess television is a strange business. But to answer your question, I’d have to say yes.”

  “Thank you very much. You’ve been a great help.” Malany put the pad and pencil back into the glove compartment and shifted into low gear.

  “The gas was $2, ma’am,” the attendant said. He was still framed in the window. Malany apologized, reached into her white envelope and withdrew a $5 bill. The attendant went back into the station and returned in a few minutes with her change.

  “Are you convinced?” Malany asked.

  “No,” said Beckman. “The man seemed to be alive to me. He had a sense of humor. He has obviously made some decisions about his life within the restrictions he found himself. He’s chosen honesty over criminality. He’s made some decisions about death. He has some pride and dignity. Yes, I’d say he’s very much alive.”

  “Oh, Beckman, you’ve missed the point. Don’t you see? He’ll never be anything else because he’s satisfied with what he is. It’s as final as death, never changes. It’s the difference between art and non-art. Art and real life are always changing, always evolving, never satisfied with current truths. Non-art and death put an end to all of that. Death is the ultimate satisfaction. Can’t you see that, Beckman?”

  “He didn’t sound exactly satisfied to me. I would say it was more like acceptance.”

  “That’s even worse, Beckman. That’s defeat.”

  “Oh bullshit, Malany. That sounds like the gratuitous logic of some art professor who has a steady job, a full stomach, and a real home to go to. The artist is no more important than any other creator. Can you really say that Bach was more important than Isaac Newton, or that Picasso knew more about truth than Einstein? In fact, and I know I risk being struck dead, I’m beginning to question the value of the artist anyway. After all, who really makes the world what it is? The artist? Or people like that gas station attendant or farmers or doctors who actually make things happen? What the hell can the artist do but present his version of what he thinks the world is and hope somebody with money will buy it? If nobody buys what we do, Malany, can we call ourselves artists?”

  “That’s convoluted logic, Beckman, and simply not true. Commercial success doesn’t determine what art is or who is an artist. Art doesn’t need sales to be art. It’s terribly naive of you to even think so and, I must say, I’m surprised.”

  “I was merely . . . ”

  “Beckman!” Malany interrupted. “I’m not going to discuss it with you as long as you’re in this adversarial mood.”

  Beckman knew that he had angered her and at once regretted it, but he didn’t feel like apologizing or much like talking. His dream of walking to California was ruined. No soo
ner had he made the vow than he broke it. Almost the moment he decided on a new life, he slipped back into the old. He was bogged down in a thick glue of guilt and self-hate, and he wanted to sleep.

  When he awoke, it was to the last desperate cry of someone calling his name. But it had been only the remnant of a dream, one that he could not remember. Or was it the sounds he continued to hear mixing above his head in the yellow, man-made light of the car windows? He started to sit up but hit his head on the steering wheel. Slowly he realized that he was lying on the front seat, head under the steering wheel. Malany was gone. He slipped his head past the wheel on the second try and sat up.

  The car was in the parking lot of a Holiday Inn, under a sputtering light. The form of Malany sleeping in the back seat was illuminated in an electronic orange. Beckman was thirsty, he had to urinate, and he was lost. “Lost” reverberated back through his memory. All of his orientations of time and place were gone. He didn’t know where he was nor what time it was. He felt like a small planetary body suddenly propelled away from a universe he had known, to spin alone forever.

  This electronically lit parking lot, half-filled with strange vehicles, and the contemporary church-like form of the Holiday Inn motel were his universe, all suspended in night. Being lost, to Beckman, was not simple disorientation. It was continued existence continued. Life after death, and he didn’t know what made him think of that. Was existence continued without meaning or purpose? If there was life after death, then it must be like being eternally lost. Beckman stepped out of the car quietly, gently closing the door. After checking to see if Malany was still asleep, he walked across the parking lot to the main entrance of the motel. There were no shadows in the main lobby. Everything—furniture, walls, doors, carpets—was all shadowless and seemed to come together without visible connections. The white light hurt Beckman’s eyes and he stopped, for a moment, just inside the door while his eyes made the adjustment. He smiled at the motel desk clerk who, rigid as a steel sculpture, watched him, rotating his head and body as a unit to follow Beckman with his eyes as he walked past on his way to the men’s room. Beckman stood over the urinal and thought about Henry Miller, and how right he had been to praise the pure joy and freedom of unrestrained urination. Is that what Herschel was experiencing? One look in the mirror, and he sympathized with the desk clerk. The past twelve hours had turned his jaw into a dark, prickly cactus. His clothes bore the stains and tears of his fall down the shoulder of the road. His hair lay piled and bunched on one side of his head. Beckman looked at his image in the mirror. He was who he should have been; he was recognizable. It was the other, the boy in the lobby, who was the alien and frightened. Beckman filled a sink with hot water. He studied his grotesque image for a long moment, not really displeased with it.

  He washed his face and arms in the sink, and wiped as many of the stains as he could from his clothes. His teeth felt caked with a soft, fuzzy slime. That would have to wait. He brushed his hair back into uniformity, walked out to the water fountain, gulped as much water as he could hold and left, smiling again at the desk clerk on his way out. There was no security guard paid to smite the wrongdoer, no nervous management ushering him out, only the intemperate light and the strange quiet of the carpeted floor.

  Outside, Beckman found himself in a group of people, all in evening clothes. They had been to a formal occasion and seemed unusually subdued for a group that large. They moved, en masse, out to the parking lot and Beckman moved with them, intrigued by their reticence and expressions of sadness. None of them seemed to notice Beckman. They were as cognizant of his presence as they would have been of an invisible spirit. Beckman even briefly wondered if he might have died somewhere in the motel lobby, possibly shot by the security guard he did not see, and this was to be his life after death.

  Then, as though obeying a pre-arranged but inaudible, invisible signal, the group dispersed. Couples moved in all directions away from him to be absorbed into the vastness of the parking lot. He stood alone for a moment, thinking about this unexpected encounter with his formally dressed, unknown guests of an unknown function and realizing also that he still did not know what time it was or where he was. He thought of going back into the motel lobby to ask the desk clerk but no, that would not do. He did not even look back at the motel for fear that it, too, might have vanished.

  Beckman walked to the car, almost at a trot. Malany was still asleep in the back. The keys, fortuitously, were in the ignition. He followed the motel driveway to where it intersected with a highway. There was the night glow of a town to his right and darkness to his left. Beckman turned left and, at the next intersection, stopped to read the road sign: I-42 East. Beckman turned left again and held the accelerator down past the speed limit, past the safe limits of the machine, toward the final, terminal end of gravity’s ability to hold him. The road had become a lighted blur leading them further into the night and pointed directly toward the stars. Beckman hoped, even prayed, that at the right moment they would find themselves in space; insular, self-contained, a small, safe world all to themselves. Just at the moment when he thought it could happen, Malany started pounding on his head.

  “Good God, are you trying to kill us? Have you flipped? Slow down!”

  Beckman took his foot off the accelerator pedal. He was frightened. Some other force between matter and energy had almost taken him over, had almost drawn him through its bright, translucent screen. The horror of it became recognizable, and he apologized with tears in his eyes.

  Malany settled back, and her breathing slowed down as she drifted back into sleep. When he was sure she was sound asleep, he switched on the radio. He didn’t want to be alone with his mind or with the car, which sometimes seemed to be aware of its particular existence. An all-night preacher was shouting power and redemption in a voice imitating the crashing of cymbals and pounding drums. Beckman thought of him, sitting in an atmospherically controlled radio studio; well dressed, well fed, screaming his carefully timed code words linked with the appropriate Bible quotations, into the night. It was a powerful station too, coming loud and clear from somewhere in Oklahoma, rebounding around the world, offering to fill unbearable voids, or supply that immutable but illusive world of safety and predictability. A world market of the needy and vulnerable. What special immunity did the sellers have? Wasn’t it true that the sellers never bought their own product? He thought of an encyclopedia salesman he once worked for who never owned a book, or the used car salesman who only rode the bus, or the pushers and frigid whores he had known; none of whom created or loved the things they sold.

  The question was, Beckman thought, was it ever possible to give up, completely, ownership of something created and loved? If Malany sold her poems, they would still be her poems. No one could ever truly transmute their name onto them. They would always be hers. Then Beckman understood why his mother had taken such great pleasure in stories of fallen virtue. The married preacher discovered in bed with the spinster organist were her favorites. She needed the thrilling reassurance that the sellers of goodness were no better than the sellers of guns or drugs or flesh.

  Thinking of his mother had always depressed him, often to the point of memory-destroying drunkenness or physical immobility. Thinking of her came like a sickness at times; with early symptoms of headaches, feverishness, and irritability, followed by loss of appetite, concluding in fatigue and days of incapacitation. He would not allow himself to get sick this time. He was on the move, going to California, a land full of sun and wonderfully out-of-joint people.

  It was growing lighter outside, and the character of the land was beginning to change. Ahead, he saw the bottom teeth of a dead carnivore, the jagged line of the first Appalachian range, capped in glowing orange light. Malany crawled over from the back seat.

  “Aren’t they beautiful?” she said.

  “Would you like to drive?” Beckman asked.

  Malany looked offended. “Certainly not. I need to absorb all this magnificence.” Beckman m
ade a profane noise.

  “You don’t like the mountains?”

  “No.” he said.

  “I can’t believe it. Even someone like you must be impressed by them.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Why not? Do you have an intelligent reason?”

  Beckman waited. “They are a barrier, like the ocean or a hymen. I don’t like barriers. They are not challenges but really negative forces that try to limit you before you reach your natural limits. Why should anyone like what they have to struggle against? Barriers are threats, potential killers.”

  They had started to climb. The road was now divided into two lanes for the climbers and one lane for those coming down. Trees blocked out the mountains but occasionally, through narrow gaps, Malany could see fragments of blue sky below. The engine continually whined under the strain of the climb, and their middle ears swelled and popped periodically. Beckman swerved several times into the passing lane to avoid the probable path of a suspiciously loose overhanging rock. Other cars, more powerful, with learned drivers, passed him with what he thought was incredible speed.

  They reached a turn where the trees had been cleared away and the pavement widened into a graveled pull-off area. A wooden sign identified the place as an “overlook”. Beckman stopped the car and set the parking brake, a meaningless but necessary gesture, since he knew it would not work. Malany got out and walked toward the pipe railing erected around the entire area. Her black dress flowed like a misshapen flag. Beckman kicked a large stone behind the rear wheel, just in case. A sports car roared into the overlook and came to a sliding stop. Beckman noticed a college parking sticker on the bumper. He watched, intrigued, as the two Joe and Jane college types walked to the rail. The boy leaned against it, trusting it completely, and pulled the girl to him. They spoke in whispers with touching lips, steam rising from their mouths in puffing clouds. The boy pumped and squeezed the girl’s buttocks with increasing frequency; both totally indifferent to the thousand-foot sheer drop only a foot away. Indifferent also to the checkered valley and sloping mountain behind them, the clear air, the painfully blue sky.