“Maybe.”
“I forgot. Pigeons are like your therapy dog.”
“They’re not like dogs at all,” Martin said. “They can fly.”
* * *
—
They left the apartment and walked through the garbage room, trash bags so full, they bulged over the edge of the plastic bins. Martin was used to the stink, and maybe Ruby was, too—or maybe she was pretending to be for his sake. She didn’t crinkle her nose, but she did dig her fingers into the old kaiser roll he’d given her. When they passed the elevator-motor room and the smell dissipated, she cleared her throat. “Caroline’s having a party upstairs tonight.”
“Okay,” Martin said.
“Kenneth just left on another vacation. She’s house-sitting for him.”
House-sitting seemed like a fancy term for staying at her dad’s place while he was on vacation, but Martin didn’t want to argue. “How’s Caroline these days?” he asked.
“She’s fine. Doing a lot more of her sculpture stuff.” An edge in Ruby’s voice. “And I guess throwing boring parties in her dad’s penthouse. I’m not even sure I’m going tonight. I don’t know most of the people she invites.”
“You do what you want. Doesn’t matter to me if you go to Caroline’s party.” Martin pushed open the fire exit door. “All Caroline’s party means to me is that I’ll have to spend tomorrow morning cleaning beer bottles off the roof.”
“Caroline would clean up the bottles if you asked.”
Martin laughed.
“She would. You’re kind of an authority figure to her. Once she called you the Guardian Angel of the Basement.”
The Guardian Angel of the Basement. Just a stupid name so Caroline could pretend he wasn’t a human being employed by the building, but was rather some spirit watching over them, not out of the need for a paycheck but out of some higher celestial obligation. No way in hell Martin was an authority figure to her. Though yeah, Martin had often watched Caroline and Ruby on their playdates when they were small. He read them fairy tales or brought them to the Alice in Wonderland statue in Central Park. When the three of them were out together, Martin had imagined people thought the girls were siblings, that he was the father of both of them, and that nobody could tell one of them lived in the basement and one of them would live, once construction wrapped, in the penthouse.
* * *
—
It was even colder outside than he’d thought, but he was wearing a fleece vest and the air felt good, dignified, somehow, in its glacial bite. Too early for a lot of traffic or construction noises, for the roar of renovation. Although the sky was only just starting to lighten, his pair of pigeons made their alert thrumming throat sounds as soon as they saw him in the courtyard. He did not keep them caged up, of course, and they were not exactly his, even if he thought of them that way. Still, he was part of what sustained them, and that felt nice. Ruby handed Martin a roll. He tossed the bread at the birds and they left their perch to tear at it.
Martin had killed pigeons many times. People often spread pigeon-prevention gel on their windowsills, which would stick to the birds’ wings. Then Martin would find wounded and disfigured pigeons flopping around the courtyard, too injured to be saved. There was nothing else to be done in those situations. The hawks and owls and falcons could only eat so much. When he wasn’t killing pigeons, he was often chasing them away. They liked to nest in the stone scrollwork around the awning over the front entrance. At night he sometimes had to step outside the front of the building with a big stick—a sixteen-foot-aluminum-extension-pool-cleaning pole, the pole duct-taped to a paint-roller handle, the paint-roller handle duct-taped to a broomstick—and try to discern pigeon shapes among the shadows in the scrollwork. If the pigeons slept in the scrollwork, they would nest in the scrollwork, meaning they would shit on the scrollwork, and on the awning, and on the heads of tenants.
Luckily the pigeons on this ledge, the pigeons he fed, weren’t technically nesting on the building’s property but on the property of the Lutheran church next door. Martin could enjoy these birds the same way he could enjoy the birds in Central Park—as a spectator. In the time since Martin’s interest in birds had begun to develop, a whole dimension of the city that had been invisible was now radiant. Trees once filled with chirping noises were now filled with distinct melodies, with names. Cedar waxwing. Baltimore oriole. Fox sparrow. Once, a summer tanager. Often, mourning doves. And cardinals, bloodred and bold. But the other bird-watchers he’d met didn’t care for pigeons the way Martin did. Rats with wings, they called pigeons, as if the wings were not the essential difference, marking what would otherwise be a plague-pissing pest as something nearly fantastical, or at least gravity-defying.
“How often do you feed this pair?” Ruby asked. She was shivering a little under the thin coat she’d thrown on.
“Most days before the sun is up. They help me, sometimes, with the whole anxiety thing. I can tell them apart, too. See the one with the two black bars on its wings? That one’s more aggressive.”
“Watching the aggressive pigeon makes you feel calm?”
“I don’t know.” Martin looked away. “I just think they’re cool. The patterns on their throats. They’re beautiful.”
If only they were not so beautiful, if only the plumage on their throats was not so iridescent. It would have made killing pigeons easier. A sudden rising anger in him. He had never told Ruby about those birds, their gel-weighted wings. But now he wanted to tell her what he had done to the birds in order to keep this job, for her, for her future stability, a stability she’d damaged with her academic choices. He wanted to tell her there were some kinds of debt she didn’t even realize she owed, debts no dream job would pay back.
He hadn’t always felt this way about Ruby’s choices. He had been impressed she had gotten any significant scholarship money at all. But what had she done with it? Ruby had taken a mix of art history and literature classes, courses in American studies and creative writing and visual arts. She had to complete a final senior project, but the school had no majors or minors or any of that, part of their effort to encourage students, so said the pamphlets, to become skilled at the challenges unique to the twenty-first century, to hone their minds to think outside of the box. Somehow Ruby had been increasingly drawn to creating frozen moments inside boxes, culminating in her final college project: Four elaborate shoebox dioramas featuring the dumpsters behind the campus dining hall. Each diorama showed the dumpsters in a different season—a reference, Ruby said, to Monet’s haystacks. She had sent Martin and Debra some photographs from the show and a copy of her artist statement. I am interested in the way dioramas generate stories while sidestepping traditional narrative forms of rising action and conflict. Instead, the diorama form immobilizes and captures a moment we recognize as part of a story larger than the form itself.