How Do You Like the Birds?

Nobody in Pine River knew much about Mrs. Mangham. In fact nobody but Dr. Taylor, the town physician, knew that she was dying. It was cancer. Cancer that by the time it was discovered, had spread so profusely there was nothing Dr. Taylor could say but, "How can we make you more comfortable?"

Of course, they all noticed when Mrs. Mangham's hat shop on Second Street closed.

"It was an odd place," Mrs. Taylor said to her husband one morning over a breakfast of whole-grain toast and hot tea. "And no one really wears hats much anymore, do they? At least not the silly things she was selling there."

Dr. Taylor bit into his toast and nodded. Doctor-patient confidentiality, which he held in the highest regard, restricted him from saying anything else.

Three years earlier, Dr. Taylor had visited Mrs. Mangham's hat shop. He stopped in to pay his condolences for the death of Mr. Mangham, who had been his patient and had passed just a week prior. Mr. Mangham had died quietly in his sleep. Dr. Taylor was called to the Mangham residence at 4 o'clock that morning. Mrs. Mangham was smoking a cigarette and eating a red popsicle on the front porch swing. She looked childish swinging there in plaid pajamas with her grey hair falling down over her face. "The bedroom," she said, slurping the popsicle, "is on the left past the kitchen."

When Dr. Taylor came back outside to confirm the death, Mrs. Mangham was gone. The cigarette butt lay cold on the porch swing, stained with red syrup.

Her strange disappearance had prompted Dr. Taylor to visit the hat shop the next week. A small wind chime jingled over the front door as he entered. Mrs. Mangham, her hair pulled into a tight, serious bun, sat at the back of the store on a wooden stool with her eyes closed. The hats were indeed quite silly. And there were hundreds of them packed into the tiny shop.

The hats hung from floor to ceiling on tall brass hat racks. There was a rack of men's fedoras in brilliant colors: orange, teal, flamingo pink. On the far wall was a towering rack of top hats sorted by size--the ones nearest the ceiling nearly three feet tall. There were three racks of bonnets, ornamented with strange objects. One had a dozen strings of dice hanging from it. Another had taxidermied parrots pinned to it with terrifyingly large safety pins. There were hats upon hats, but nothing he could imagine anyone in Pine River wearing except on Halloween, or to announce a sudden change in sexuality or mental stability.

"Hello doctor," Mrs. Mangham said quietly, her eyes still shut.

"Mrs. Mangham," he stuttered, momentarily forgetting why he had come, "I've never been here before. Interesting place."

"Would you like to try something on?"

"Oh. No, thank you. I really just came by to offer my condolen--"

Mrs. Mangham, eyes still closed, held a finger to her lips to silence him. "Why don't you try the bonnet there? The one you were just looking at."

"I really don't wear bonnets, Mrs. Mangham. I really just came to say--"

"Try it on, my dear doctor. The one there at the bottom, with the sweet birdies. I think you will find you like what you see."

Dr. Taylor plucked the bonnet off the rack, surprised by the weight of the six stuffed red parrots. He glanced over his shoulder to make sure no one was watching through the shop window, and tied the bonnet to his head.

"Gaah!" Dr. Taylor bellowed as a sudden explosion of noise filled his ears. He instinctively tried to cover them, and was nipped by the sharp beak of one of the birds. "Caaw!" it screeched. The six birds had come alive and flapped fervently to escape the bondage of the large pins that held them to the bonnet. The sound of their beating wings thundered in his ears.

"My dear doctor," Mrs. Mangham's voice came softly, sweetly, but with such clarity it was as though she were inside his head.

"My dear doctor," she said again and Dr. Taylor looked to where she had been sitting. In her place was a young woman, the most beautiful woman Dr. Taylor had ever seen, standing up on the wooden stool, entirely naked.

"What do you see?" she asked him. He said nothing and so she asked, "How do you like the birds?"

At this, Dr. Taylor suddenly felt weightless. The racks of hats all around him began shrinking into the floor. The young woman on the stool sunk downward. The floor moved away from his feet and Dr. Taylor realized he was floating. The birds flew upwards, carrying him by the bonnet toward the high ceiling of the hat shop.

"What is happening?" he called to the woman, his shoes hovering above her head.

"My dear doctor," Mrs. Mangham's voice sounded crystal clear inside his skull, "this is your fantasy. What do you wish to happen?"

"I want to be let down."

At that, the birds ceased flapping and fell stiff against the sides of his head. The floor rushed back up to his dangling body, and he collapsed at the base of the stool.

"Doctor Taylor," Mrs. Mangham, fully dressed, helped him to his feet and removed the bonnet. "You mustn't reveal what you have seen here." Dr. Taylor, who of course held doctor-patient confidentiality in the highest regard, nodded.

"Also, doctor, I would like to set an appointment with you. I'm afraid I've felt an odd lump in my left breast."

Three years later, on the day Mrs. Mangham died, someone reported a flock of bright red birds in the town park--a breed no one recognized. They were seen once and never again, and no one thought much of it except Dr. Taylor who had, for one absurd moment and for the rest of his life, learned how it felt to fly.

I'd Run With the Wolves

They say that youth is wasted

On me and on all of us.

I'm far too vain to notice.

I'm far too young to care.

I'd run with the wolves. If you'd let me

I'd run with the antelope too,

Just to feel the hot breath

Of my own self in pursuit.

I'd stand on the edge of a building

A knife stuck in my chest,

A crowd of humans behind me--

The way to Heaven at last!

Angels play their instruments gladly

In the sun that browns their skin.

Then they play their instruments sadly,

In memory of all their sin.

The road to hell is paved

With diamonds and gold and fur.

You walk it, your feet grow warmer.

I walk on it straight to her.

In the fading light of the bedroom,

A hand caresses my neck.

The touch feels so familiar, until

I awake in the dark and the sweat.

A wolf joins the pack as a killer,

Which is why I choose to stray.

I'd rather the blood in my mouth be my own,

I'd rather feel the heat than the shade.

Under The Knife

The obstacle is the knife. And the surgical mask. And the latex gloves. And the scrubs.

It's the nurses' anxious eyes, the patient's pale skin, and the rhythmic blips of the heart monitor.

It's the medical journals, the notes from the conference in Tokyo last fall, the lessons forgotten from medical school. It's the remembering and the forgetting, and the worry that I might forget or not remember again.

It's the acknowledging. It's appreciating the phrase, "It wasn't your fault." It's understanding, "It could have been any of us."

It's keeping my breathing even, steadying my hands.

It's scrubbing down, snapping on, stepping into, reviewing, peering over. It's reviewing again, assessing, re-evaluating, assessing, re-evaluating, assessing, re-evaluating.

It's angling the light. It's taking the knife and making the first incision along the same line as the last one--who's not yet cold in the morgue under my feet.

The Sun Through The Clouds

Mitch stood in the sand and let the waves wash over his black leather dress shoes.

"These are the highest quality Italian leather," the saleswoman told him, "They'll never crease from day-to-day office wear."

"What if I wear them in the ocean?" Mitch asked.

"Why would you do a silly thing like that? Now, size 10 fit all right?"

The salt water licked at the polished black leather, it swirled and eddied around his heels. It snuck over the cuffs and soaked his black nylon socks. He wiggled his toes and felt the wet insoles squish.

It was cloudy, but the heat of the sun pushed through the thin grey veil. This was Santa Monica after all, the sun was relentless.

Mitch took off his glasses, the thick-framed ones with the designer's name printed in silver along the temples, and dropped them onto the wet sand at his feet. He unbottoned his shirt and dropped it too, delicately on to the sand. His belly ballooned within his white undershirt, stretching the cotton tight under his yellowed armpits.

He pulled his wallet out of his back pocket and gave up the bills to the breeze; $1's, $5's, $20's, $100's. With a flick of his wrist he sent his Driver's License spinning like a frisbee out into the surf. It floated there for a moment, visible only as a small blur to Mitch, and then it was lost under the next breaking wave.

The waves beat on and on. His trousers were soaked to the knee. He pulled a small scissors from his pocket and cut off large chunks of grey hair that he had grown to shoulder length and heretofore kept healthy with fish oils and Vitamin E. The strands of hair, long wispy pieces of his DNA, he too set free on the wind.

He felt the urge to drive the scissors into his thighs, the backs of his hands, his ribcage, his eyeballs, his ears, the roof of his mouth. But, no. They would allow him on the ferry soaked, shirtless and bald maybe, but not likely bloody and blind.

"Yes," he said, "size 10 fits fine."

I've Made My Mind

I re-read the letter I had written to myself before the surgery. It was a summary of my life: family history, names of close friends, former professions, ex-lovers, current lovers, likes, dislikes, allergies, addresses, phone numbers, computer passwords. But at the end I had written a strange sentence: At least now, everything will be for certain.

I thought it a strange thing to write to myself, and I told the doctor to include that thought into my new Thought-Bank. "At least now, everything will be for certain" is a strange thing to write to one's future self. He included everything from the letter, of course. But, per protocol, did not record anything of the first five hours after I woke up from the surgery.

Therefore, my memory now begins with reading the last line of a letter I had written to myself the day before. While reading the letter I was eating a sesame-seed bagel with strawberry cream cheese, sitting in the cafeteria of a hospital that smelled unquestionably sanitary. The woman to my right had grey hair that shot off her head at alarming angles.

My second memory is of the doctors teaching me how to use a toilet.

This is, I supposed, what any second beginning is like. A doctor explained to me the concepts "apartment building" and "supermarket." They sounded terrifying, and I asked if we could return to colors, or possibly adjectives.

"It's your mind," she said, "we can put into it whatever you like. Now, do you recall 'repulsive' ?"

All The Violence of All The World

I walked into the Arizona desert as the sun was setting. The cliffs to my right were stained blood red in the waning light. The cacti were smaller than I thought they might be. I left the car engine running back there on the side of the road, a Neil Young tape hopping from Side B to Side A and back again. Three empty bottles of Jack under the passenger seat. Empty, the passenger seat, for the last 1,000 miles.

I heard a rattlesnake, or the wind in the brush, and it reminded me of the story my grandmother told me of the highest mountain in Africa that disappeared into the clouds. Only one man ever climbed all the way to the top, and he was so stunned by what he saw that he never came down.

"What did he see?" I asked.

"All the bloodshed across all the world," my grandmother said. "He saw beyond the seas to the other side of the world where women killed their babies, and men killed the women for killing the babies. He saw where the white man came from and how he used the guns he brought to Africa to kill his own brothers and sisters. He saw hatred to the west and to the east, and he feared the end of humanity."

"What shall we do?" I asked.

"There is nothing we can do," she said.

"Surely," I begged, "there is something!"

"Be good to those around you," she said, "take care of them, and when the violence of the world closes in around you, they will take care of you too." She kissed my cheek.

A bee landed on my cheek in the Arizona desert that night as the first stars came out. It did not sting me, but I felt the violence of the world closing in and I vomited on a dry sage bush.

Love and Hate

In the house I grew up in, we had magnetic poetry on the fridge. Nobody ever really spelled out anything profound, but once when I was about eight, my mom spelled, "Do not trust anyone." It stayed on the fridge untouched for years while other poems came and went. School papers, wedding invitations, summer vacation pictures, coupons, newspaper clippings that mentioned my father, church bulletins, obituaries, recipes, while-you-were-out notes, to-do lists, to-buy lists, to-sell-at-the-next-yard-sale lists, parking tickets, court summons, business cards, inspirational magnets, dentist appointment reminders, labels of favorite bottles of wine, niece's artwork--all danced on and off the face of the fridge in the eternal waltz of time hurtling onward, except for my mother's poem.

"Do not trust anyone." The phrase stuck in my head when I went to college, and I remember when the girl I was dating explained birth control to me and how we really didn't need to use condoms, I said, "I just really don't want to have a baby right now." What I was thinking was, Do not trust anyone.

I had a job as a waiter for after that, and there was an old man who came to the restaurant every Wednesday and always complained about the food. He ordered the same steak each week and complained to me how bad it was. I told the chef once and he admitted that the man had been coming for years, every Wednesday. He complained so much that the chef now pissed on the guy's steak each week when he cooked it. "The kitchen stinks for a while afterward," the chef said, "but that old fuck gets what he deserves. And then he's right at least, the food should taste like shit." It was the most disgusting thing I ever witnessed.

So now when I order at restaurants, or get in the back of a cab, or let a stranger use my camera to take a group photo, or sip out of the same bottle of Jack Daniel's as someone I just met, or dance with a girl at a club, or unsheathe a new razor head, or read what SPF 30 really means, or listen to the President make promises, or let my dog sniff another dog, or turn the paper to the continuing story on Page A12, or cross the street before the little white man appears, or play catch with my nephew, or try on a shirt in the fitting room of the store, or worse a swimsuit, or worse a hat--I think of my mother's unbroken poem, "Do not trust anyone." And I shudder.