CLAYTON PAUL

What the Birds Wrote

A miracle, that man. I sat watching the bulbous grandpa, his sweaty grin spreading as he hunched and rose once more from his foamy bucket and flung his arms to the sky. The children of Arab mothers and insurance salesmen, of landscapers and gay couples and bankers scurried around him, chasing the humongous bubbles he sent over all our heads—some persevering higher and hovering as angels around the spires of the cathedral. A modern-day saint, him. To get the little ones laughing. And the parents, all cautious curiosity, unsure whether joy such as this could ever be felt again by someone to whom the terrors of the world have been made known.

The cobblestoned courtyard seemed busy for a Tuesday morning. Some looked twice at me leaning against the church’s stone wall, arm dangling over a protruding gargoyle—our cheeks together, something faintly fraternal in our lewd dispositions—and the cans of beer beside me. But most passersby took me as a fragment of the cityscape, as a tone in harmony with the whole, like a bench or a trashcan, prevailing and insignificant as the pigeons grazing around our ankles. If you ever want to become invisible, wrap a blanket around yourself, take a seat, and start drinking in the daytime. If you like it, stay for a while; there is a calmness here, a respite from the days we’ve inherited.

*

It had been two weeks since I’d found the spot. At first, days went by between my afterwork visits, but one morning I realized that my time was not worth dividing. The cathedral called to me that morning from a great distance—only its points, like twirled daggers puncturing sky, were visible from my office across the city. Like a settler in a virgin land, I found a nook of my own and stood with my back against it, pressing it close to me and claiming it as mine. A man gets tired all day in the sun, and a lean becomes a sit, and when a man is truly good and tired, even sitting is heavy work. Soon I was dozing in the shadow of the cross. Stone walls thick as these permit no sound to pass, but sometimes the great doors of the church were propped open and the resounding sermons reached me where I lounged. It was here I learned a man cannot serve two masters.

*

My sister was up in arms about the heroin and couldn’t be made to understand what I kept telling her: it was not the case this time. I hadn’t touched it. I had not even dipped a toe in that black lagoon where so many, like dinosaurs in a tar pit, become immobilized.

So why then? She demanded. Why had I shed so many layers of my life over the past few weeks? She wanted to know, and I understood—the buttresses were collapsing. There was Mona, of course. I’d cut ties with her suddenly and offered no clear reason. Throughout her wailing I could only explain how urgent it felt. My sister thought Mona was good for me; but she, of course, knew the ways of parting as well as anyone.

When I appeared on my sister’s doorstep Friday morning, a few days before I became a full-timer, she asked why I wasn’t at work. I told her I wanted to spend time with my nephew, and she chewed her bottom lip. She let me accompany them to the park, even let me push the stroller, but when I picked Collin up in my arms, she hovered nearby. All these changes would have been fine, she told me, but what she couldn’t wrap her head around was why I was giving up my apartment. Why on earth, she wanted to know. Why on the Lord’s earth? Freedom, voyage, predestination: well, she didn’t like any of that and told me so. Heroin, she said, that’s what it is. When did it start?

I prayed some evenings when the buskers played in the square, and folks spun one another around, dancing on the cobblestones in the twilight, when the goodwill of the cathedral and of all humankind welled up in my chest. I drank and I prayed again and again for my sweet sister. That her heart be made whole again; she who’s never felt a gentle touch. Deliver her, I said some nights, repeating it to those few stars that flicker above the city.

*

Heroin, she said, over and over, when I moved the boxes from my apartment to her garage. Her pasty flesh was red from the sharp morning cold, breath steaming, exhausted eyes going now and then to Collin, already buckled up in the warming car. She just knew it and so why didn’t I go ahead and tell her, she wanted to know. Can’t you stay strong this time? Collin loves you like the summer, she said. He’s your biggest fan.

After the boxes were stacked, she took me with her to drop Collin off with Aunt Holly, who looked after him while my sister waited tables. I waited in the car but squeezed him tight in the front seat before his mother took him inside. In my arms, the boy pushed his peanut butter and jelly cheek to mine, and the scent of his hair, painted with the same brush as mine, was earthy and somehow fundamental—it gave me visions of Christmas choirs with my sister, and the moon in October seen from a trampoline, and of orange slices passed from hand to hand.

Aunt Holly waved from the porch as my sister pointed back at me and passed her the child. My sister got back in the car and told me that she and I were going to have a little chat. She didn’t have to be at the diner for another hour, so we drove into the city and walked through the old town by the harbor with coffee in hand.

She prattled on about things of no importance whatsoever. But intuition struck me as we walked, and I realized the questions she assailed me with might be answered in a single moment. As I steered us towards the looming spires, I bounced with anticipation and hope. If she beheld my sanctuary, even for an instant, she would see all.

Holly put mom’s house on the market, she said as we walked. I think you thawed her heart a little this morning. She won’t pay for your whole stay, but I could do half. The facility is mighty nice. They’d even have a church you could attend, if that’s what you’re interested in now. Six months. Imagine it, you’d be with us for Christmas if you start soon.

*

As we passed by my little nook in the world, I stopped and made a big show of throwing away my coffee, but really, I positioned myself so that she might see what was directly behind me. The corner where I normally sat looked empty without me, and the stone wall like a sheetless mattress, naked to the wind, and the gargoyle lonesome without its person. Her eyes wandered and grazed the place, and for the briefest moment I saw something in her face, a shimmer of recognition. But just as quickly she turned and walked on.

I called out to her: wait and just look at it, will you? I took her hand and led her to the dusty ground where I had taken to sitting for so many hours. Look at it, I said, pointing to the dirt itself.

The wall’s charm was lost on her, but maybe she could discern the stories the pigeons had scratched and pecked into the dust. Minuscule prints forking out into overlapping orbs, telling of things I needed her to read, and one most of all—a promise, written in the earth by one very fine pigeon, whose style distinguished itself as all his own. Would she see it? An ode to the spirals we’d braved all those years; a symphony notating the shadows of a changing face.

For a moment I thought she might cry. But then she hugged me and led me back into the crowded square.

*

She didn’t want to leave me there in the city, refused to at first. But I raised my arms and looked around, saying: Here? Near the gates of Paradise you leave your brother. Worry, yes, but not for me.

Come by the house when it’s all done with, she said. Take this. She pressed folded bills into my hand. Let this be the last one. Please, let us be done with it after this.

My dear sister, sweet child, I said, but she closed her eyes and hurried away.

*

The old man packed up his bubbles and left. Children returned to parents, and the parents’ faces were suddenly stern, as if they wondered now why they’d allowed it to go on so long. The scene concluded; the crowd divided and dispersed. Even the pigeons returned to their nighttime places.

Soon evening settled over the courtyard and, as always, the cathedral’s face grew colder in the gloom. I thought of all the cigarette butts out there after the busy day, dropped between the cobblestones, nestled like vipers, lying in wait for a sinning hand. But to touch even one rung of that ladder. . . Collin loves me like the summer, she’d said. My biggest fan. The little snake charmer, him. He’d spared my hand viper bites before. Like the summer he loves me, the kid. I remembered how the stars looked the night he was born. White fire, flashing and reeling in the heavens, Beelzebub and Azazel and the rest of them cast down by the Archangels, the great battle smeared across the sky above me when Aunt Holly called and said I had a nephew. Get better soon, she’d said, he looks like you.

What choice is there in such things, really? Jesus Christ himself told us the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.

*

It was dark now, and I was halfway through my little mound of cigarette remnants when the doors of the church opened, and two men emerged. They locked up behind them and stood speaking for some time. When they parted, one of them, a tall man with glasses and a robe flapping out beneath his jacket, walked past me. He hesitated, looking me over and glancing at my stained blanket and the empty cans. He shook his head, and for a moment it seemed he would walk on, but then he raised a finger like a flaming sword and told me I shouldn’t be here. This is not your place, he said. I told him about the promise scribed in the dust, but he stopped me. I don’t want to see you here in the morning, he said and left.

I sat up all through the night, mulling over what the birds had written, wondering if I’d gotten something wrong, and drinking what spare change allowed me. It didn’t seem right to be banished from the place I’d found, my own nook in the world. There are stories about you too, I had told him, but he waved his arms around in the air like he was shooing away pigeons.

As the moist dawn filled the empty courtyard and the cathedral’s bells sundered the stillness of the air, I stood and collected my things. Walking into the sun, already gleaming off the central station’s domed glass ceiling, I saw it was a fine morning and felt my body bobbing along like one of the little boats made of sticks and leaves that Collin lets loose into the creek. The station at this time of day was as good a place as any. I would see who or what might be found there.

Clayton Paul, originally from the wet and wild coast of Washington state, is a writer living in Bonn, Germany with his brilliant wife and clever cattle dog.