Missing boats is a family trait.
* * *
Fun with the bellboy abandoned, the bird turns to business. Is he tall?
I know she means the groom. “No.”
Does he have all his hair?
“It is in fact his distinguishing characteristic.” I tell her he is an elementary school principal who coaches basketball, plays guitar, and sings to second graders about the solar system. Everyone loves the planet song.
Show me a picture.
I scroll down my personal web page, but there is only one picture of a tree at dusk. “I keep meaning to add more.” Searching my phone, I find a picture of him holding three basketballs, the straps of several duffels hoisted over his shoulder. Oh, she says. He’s white.
“We’re white,” I say.
She says, Kind of.
“We’re considered white now,” I say, insulted that she hasn’t mentioned his clear green eyes, or, like, his ability to carry several things at once. “… the world is run by computers, and you’re a bird. Not to beat a dead horse.”
She is frustrated with me but will say what she has come to say. More of an understanding with space than movement, she intuits from table edge to sofa back. She lifts her beak as to achieve a silent auditorium a composer raises his wand.
What I want you to do is find your brother.
Of course, I already know. Knew before she asked about the Internet, knew before rounding the corner to the antechamber and finding a judgmental budgie, perhaps even before, when I—balancing my room key, wallet, phone, and toothpaste—reached the door and realized I had no way of opening it and had to place each item on the ground, turn the knob, collect them again, all the while a turbulence spreading beneath my breastplate, which contained the maddening carbonation that could signal only one person. Tom. The thrilling dread that precedes his presence perhaps his only reliable quality. As kids, we slept pressed together like deer. The type of brother who will be your plus one to the play party or log roll, extol the virtues of heroin so lovingly you cry, clear dawn’s crust from your windshield, but will not have brunch with you, or meet your best friend, or join you on the errand, or even answer his phone. The image I summon when thinking of him is akin to a certain laughing trouble. Any conflict I’ve ever encountered—and any alchemy—the tendency the world has to upend: unexpected money, a pretty line of stray cats, a bird-shaped grandmother, holds him as an ingredient.
Even the bird’s timing is pure brother, right before a wedding, what most people would regard as a joyful event. This is typical for my family, who treat happiness with suspicion. That very morning, I congratulated myself on completing the transition into normalcy without their destruction.
The bird and I both know he has been the silent member of our conversation all along.
If it helps, she says, you won’t find him.
“I won’t find him,” I agree. “Because I’m not going to look.”
Do you know where he is?
“I assume in the city somewhere, hiding in a theater.”
How long has it been since you’ve seen him?
“Seven years?”
The last time I saw Tom was at his own wedding, where he lay bloody on a gurney, asking me to hold his hand. It’s just that I’m so deeply unhappy, he says, in memory. I remember the taste of vanilla and his anemic, furtive fiancée, Sara Something.
You’re not going to find him, but it’s important that you try, she says. You’ll do it.
“I won’t.”
Her narrow eyes narrow further, narrow more. Where are we? What’s this murky room with only a couch? It’s like we’re in a stew.
“It’s called an antechamber. A room before a room.”
A room before a room, she says in that way she has, that cuts through our tense and familiar squalls. And what is your job? The non sequitur means to stall until she can figure out another way to get what she wants.
“I work with people who have traumatic brain injury. Normally they’ve been hurt in car accidents or on the job. I tell their life stories in court. Like my client Danny. He drove a big-rig dessert truck and was injured while filling it with gas.”
I guess somebody doesn’t like Sara Lee. The room’s grip releases. She performs inventory of what on her hurts. Pain is different now, she concludes. It’s more like sound in another part of the house. But I still hate my ass. Asses like ours never leave, even in the afterlife.
“You don’t have an ass,” I remind her. “You’re a bird.”
A bird today. Myself again tomorrow. We could disagree for eternity but there’s no one I’d rather sit with. I spread jam onto a scone and hold it out for her. Where does it come from—beat a dead horse?
“Probably from people who like horses.”
Or hate them. Her beak cannot find purchase on the pastry. The afterlife is truly cruel. Being a bird is exhausting. I’m obsessed with cleaning these. She runs her beak through her tail feathers.
I ask what she’s learned about humans by being dead and she says, They ask for signs a lot. They’re always looking for proof like, If you exist, rattle the mailboxes. But you never asked for a sign. She quiets. You never reached out. Why?
“I asked once and it didn’t happen.”
And you never asked again. It’s like a song.
“A song,” I say, and she says, A sad one.
“What is it like?” I say. “To age and die?”
A sigh flutters through her corduroy belly. Aging is easy, like falling down a hill. No choice involved. It’s reconciling yourself to loss that’s hard. I was eighty-five when I died. But I felt nineteen. I used to forget how old I was. I’d talk to you for long enough I’d think I was you. Then I’d look in the mirror and think, ack, who’s that old woman? A burst of shivering compels her from one cushion to another. Had I been anything other than a sheltered fool I wouldn’t have worried at all. I had the slut gene. I should have used it more. It’s in the family. You walk across the room, people pay attention. It’s not because we’re beautiful. We’re gnarled things who look like we’ve been pulled from the earth. Root vegetables: potatoes or turnips. Half of us miserable, the other half deluded. You’ve seen pictures of your cousins. However, we are possessed of the self. All arrows point toward us. A blessing and a curse. Not your mother, she was born complaining. Believe me, I was there. No fun at all. That will always be her fault because I made life nice for her. She married a man who couldn’t summon up enough juice to break a glass and lives her life doing cross-stitch, the only thing she’s ever liked. She’s rich enough now that she can afford to be good at only one thing. You kids don’t like your mother and I can’t blame you. But it’s a mistake to assume she doesn’t feel pain.
The bird warbles, a mournful sound. As a girl, I liked to press her supple lavender cigarette case against my cheek. She was a real bummer, your mother.
“She still is,” I say.
How’d we get talking about her? Let’s get back to the main event. Me. And how I didn’t use my body enough. Those of us with able bodies have a responsibility to use them as much as we can. Given another chance, you wouldn’t believe how I’d use it. Threesomes. Foursomes. Moresomes. Smoking is a joy of life. Good lord, why did I ever give it up? My teachers called me disruptive. I should have disrupted more. In 1975 the most stunning man I’d seen up close approached me at a convenience store and asked if I’d go to his hotel room to make love. I’m holding a soup can and a bag of oranges and am not a woman men cross streets for. I say no, because I was married. What a waste of a waistline. What a disappointment life is most of the time. Divinity opened itself up to me in aisle four and I said, nah, I’ll just be taking these oranges. If it came around again, boy, I’d meet it. And I’d smoke like a house on fire. Disrupt! Disrupt! What fucking else are we here for?