Alexis drew a deep cold breath and awoke in her room at the Angeline.
The heat was off and she could see her ghostly breath. She could hear a pigeon cooing outside the foggy windows, scratching at its nest. Beside her in the bed she saw the silk monkey. She stepped out of bed onto the same creaking board that had been there beside her bed forever. It was, she knew, her last morning awakening in that bed. She rubbed a peephole in the foggy window, still hoping to see Habib, but outside it was just the pigeons.
She padded to the bathroom to brush her teeth. The hotel was freezing and she shivered in front of the mirror. Then she heard something. Something odd . . . a tapping, or a squeaking . . . a squeaking and a tapping. She spat out the toothpaste, rinsed, and headed out to the hallway. The sound had been coming from Ursula’s room. Maybe Ursula was in distress? She knocked.
“Mffff—alla,” came the muffled voice from within. Then a scary silence.
Alexis pushed the door open and, lo, standing buck naked beside Ursula’s bed stood Deaf Donald, holding a Scrabble board and Ursula’s peg leg.
“Oh. My. God.” Alexis’s face went red and she stared on in shock, paralyzed with wonder and fascination and horror. Ursula pulled the sheets over herself, shouting, “Aarrrggh!” and Alexis backed out of the room, muttering apologies.
Wearing a coat and scarf and woolen gloves, Alexis headed downstairs. No one else was up yet. She continued down to the basement, for one last visit with the phantoms. When she was younger, the creaking in the Hotel Angeline had always seemed, to her, like the unintelligible murmuring of those ghosts. Down there that morning, she ran her fingers along the dusty lid of a grand old teak coffin, its top half open, revealing a zebra-print fur interior.
“Mom?” she said.
No one answered. Alexis shivered and headed upstairs again.
Deaf Donald and Ursula, now dressed and composed, though his silvery hair was still quite askew, were in the sitting room. Ursula was hunched over the fireplace lighting the season’s first fire.
Donald turned to Alexis and smiled apologetically.
“Sorry!” he yelled, apparently thinking he was whispering.
“It’s OK,” she said, although the image of his pasty pale torso, the dark brown nipples (three of them!) would be forever scalded onto her memory.
“Heating’s off!” Ursula yelped, her head still in the fireplace. “Damn cold in this place, you know!” she continued.
Alexis settled down with a cup of tea and some soggy, stale Ritz. Over the next twenty minutes the rest of the motley residents shuffled down the stairs. They all cast sideways looks at Alexis, smiled with their lips pressed together furtively, but no one mentioned her pending exodus. Uncle Burr seemed far less dignified than Alexis was used to, sitting, disheveled, on the same couch he’d slept on. He still had paisley upholstery lines imprinted on his cheeks.
Once they were all there, Otto Kenzler produced the sherry, saying, “Well, if we’re going to be freezing our asses off, we might as well get drunk, too! Ah? Ah? Scheisse!”
Roberta, wearing a silk bathrobe over her plaid pantsuit, had Pluto draped over her shoulders and wrapped around her waist like a belt. She stood by the mantel, keeping Pluto warm.
Mr. Kenji was the last one down, and he had a bonsai in his hands. He walked right up to Alexis and held out the bonsai toward her. He grinned and blinked at her.
“Thank you. It’s . . . it’s beautiful.” She wasn’t going to cry, she’d determined that, but already it was starting to be hard. She felt like Frodo at the end of Lord of the Rings, weepily bidding farewell—in gauzy, soft-focus, unnecessary slow-motion—to the other Hobbits and to all of his pointy-eared friends.
Kato and Kevin, clad in matching houndstooth greatcoats, entered from the cold outside, a shopping bag between them, each brother holding one of the handles. The bag was obese with Fig Newmans—dozens of packages of them. The twins set them down on the table.
They pulled Alexis into a hug and the others gathered around, forming a giant group hug around her.
“We’re going to be . . . ,” Kato said.
“Sorry . . . ,” Kevin added.
“To see you go,” Kato finished.
By now Alexis was tearing up.
“What’d they say?!” Deaf Donald bellowed, and everyone laughed.
Back upstairs, Alexis surveyed her room one last time. She heard a tapping at the window. She figured it was just the pigeons, but she rubbed another peephole in the glass just in case and there, in a pile of lead gray pigeon feathers, stood Habib, his black beak glinting in the morning light. He had something in his beak, too. She pushed open the heavy window and Habib hopped over toward her on the ledge and dropped LJ’s cheap silver disk onto the ledge. She picked it up. He squawked loudly and squawked again, then flapped off noisily into the crisp air.
“You ready?” Uncle Burr said.
She turned around and gazed at him, annoyed that he’d broken the spell.
“What do you want?” she said, and gave a loud sigh.
“Can I show you something?”
She shrugged, unsure of what to make of him. She wasn’t ready yet to see herself living with him. He was no replacement for her mother, for LJ.
“C’mon.” He led her down the hall to LJ’s room. He opened the closet and shoved LJ’s musty old jackets aside, rapped on the wall behind. “You ever seen this?” he said.
“What are you talking about?” she asked, and crossed her arms.
“This.” He banged on the wall harder and a large section, perfectly rectangular, popped out.
She followed him inside and up a set of steep stairs to an attic she’d never seen before. She’d seen the old dormers up on the hotel’s steep roof but had not known there was anything up there. But now, here she was in this dusty old place with bird’s nests littering the corners and bird shit spackling the floors. The windows were cracked and browned by decades of smog and there was no seeing out. The ceiling was a thin lattice of wood with fleecy, ancient pink-gone-umber insulation bulging out and hanging loose.
“Why didn’t anyone . . . ?” she started.
“Use this place?”
“Yeah, it’s awesome.”
“I came here, all the time, as a kid. Here . . .” He walked over to the far corner, where a mildewed old cardboard box sat. He lifted it up, but the soggy bottom gave way, dropping the contents onto the floor. He kneeled down and smiled ruefully at the objects littering the dirty floor. Alexis saw old, chipped Matchbox cars and old beakers and tubing and Pyrex bottles from the mortuaries.
He picked up a box of matches, “I was a bit of a troublemaker, used to try some amateur chemistry in here. Almost blew up the house more than once.”
She laughed involuntarily and then pulled it together again.
“This was our place to come as kids, you know. The hotel was crazier then than it is now, if you can believe it. We had a bearded lady here for a couple years, barked like a dog in her sleep. Helga. She made great gumbo, though. Was sorry to see her go in the end. That’s the thing with a residence hotel, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. It wears on the soul, eventually. Not all that much better than mortuary living, I bet.”
“Is that why you left?”
“Anyplace you can’t leave eventually feels like a prison. I needed to break out, make my own life.”
“So you left my mother here to handle everything alone.” Alexis meant to say it matter-of-factly, but the accusatory tone couldn’t be hidden.
He bit his lip and shook his head, looking at the floor and, after a moment, said, “Yes, I did.” He sighed. “But maybe, near the end, she came to understand, in a way.”
“When she decided to sell the Angeline herself.”
Uncle Burr met her eyes, looking somewhat startled. “Yes, well, your mother still didn’t really want to sell the Angeline, but she had started to think maybe she should—to give you a better future.”
Alexis felt a little dizzy. It had n
ever occurred to her before that her mother might have placed her welfare above the Angeline, above her duties to the tenants. For the first time, she could see how maybe her mother wouldn’t have wanted her to shoulder all these burdens alone.
She picked up one of the Matchbox cars, a chipped red Mustang. “This is cool,” she said.
“It’s yours, if you want it.”
She looked at Burr askance, slipped the car into her pocket. She picked up another car and put it in her pocket, too. “Thanks,” she muttered.
Once they’d dressed in their funeral best, Alexis and Uncle Burr set out for Lakeview Cemetery. It was misty still, Capitol Hill draped in a cold and heavy fog that wouldn’t burn away for anything. She kept an eye out for Habib, saw plenty of crows, but none of them were him.
“You know Angeline herself—daughter of Chief Sealth—is buried up there, too.”
“Same place? Really?”
“Bruce Lee, too, actually.”
“No shit.”
“Yes shit. Kung Fu-ing out of his old box, I’ll bet, kicking his way to the surface.”
She smiled at that, too. Burr confounded her with his charm, that old asshole. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad in Sedona, after all. The weather sounded like hell, though. They fried eggs in the parking lots of their Kmarts. They baked old people to death in their houses. It was hostile to humanity, that kind of weather.
“I’m not going to start wearing shorts,” she said.
“Fine with me,” he said. “But if we go on a hike . . .”
“A hike?!” she belted. “Hell, no!”
Now it was Burr’s turn to laugh. “You’ll want to, I promise. It’s beautiful. You heard of the Grand Canyon? There’s a reason they don’t call it the Dumpy Canyon, you know.”
They crossed Twelfth and continued up the hill to Fifteenth. They turned and continued on toward the cemetery. As they crossed John Street, Alexis slipped her arm under his and he patted her hand, but said nothing.
CHAPTER 31
STEPHANIE KALLOS
IT BEGAN LIKE THIS, WHEN the girl was smaller and had about her less sadness, less confusion, less heaviness of spirit, and the old man who was like her father but not her father moved with greater ease.
Habib—who should technically be Habibah (but how was the old man to know, and besides, such things as sexual identity have long ceased to matter)—used to see them every day, when she began her long journey home to the rookery at the top of the hill.
A city dweller by choice (for Habib has always found humans endlessly fascinating, and not nearly as stupid as many of her kind believe) she liked to take her time going home, observing the humans along the way—for this was her work then: to observe, to learn, to apprentice herself to the ways of people so that, eventually, she could be of some use.
Habib would fly for a while, then loiter, greedy to learn as much as she could about these flightless, featherless creatures—above on the wires or fences or roofs, or below on the pavement—always making a great deal of noise. (Habib learned early on that humans are irritated by noisy animals, concluding that they are stupid, and thereafter ignoring them. This can be a great advantage for one who is in the business of observing.)
The old man with the ponytail and the girl walked the same way at the same time every day—from a small neatly groomed brick building where there were many young humans to a tall wooden building with the shabby look of a molting bird where there were no young humans, just more old ones like the man. And a woman with sparkling feet! They were an odd pair—the old man and the girl—hardly birds of a feather.
And yet there was between them a rare kind of connection, something sensed, invisible, a bond not comprised of language or gesture but something wordless and unseen and—in that sense—very like the bond between animals.
The girl even hopped like a bird in those days! And spun and skipped and flitted, dashing a few steps forward, but never too far from the man, as if she were tethered to him, and the shadow that shrouded the old man would lift a bit, a loose-fitting garment being teased away from his body by a breeze.
Habib’s rookery at that time was in a park at the top of a hill in an old part of the city. She chose this—to reside among humans, and in a big city—but not for the reasons some of her fellows did, which was because of the easy access to an endless variety of food and the plentiful opportunities to annoy, taunt, and humiliate. (Habib has never been proud of these tribal tendencies; just because it is easy for crows to mock humans does not mean that it should be done).
Habib (who has had many names before and will have many more) chose to live in the city because she is intrigued by humans—chiefly by their insatiable craving for suffering.
She chose this park specifically because of the plays.
In this park, each summer, actors put on the plays of Mr. William Shakespeare. Battles and romances, all the dramas and absurdities of human life, played out under the trees where Habib sleeps. And so often in these plays there is talk of birds!
“The crow makes wing to the rooky wood: Good things of day begin to droop and drowse. . . . It is the lark, the herald of the morn, no nightingale. . . .” Ah, Shakespeare! Now, there was a human who appreciated crows—not only writing about them, but in the very rhythms of crow-speak: cuh caw cuh caw cuh caw cuh caw cuh caw!
One evening another time, not as long ago as the first, Habib heard a pounding noise like the hammering of a bachelor thrush trying to attract a mate (although the season was wrong) and looked down and saw a light in a place where there had not been light before: a window, a patch of gold on the dingy roof of the old hotel where the hopping girl lived with the old ones and the one with sparkling toes. (Habib had been longing for an excuse to get closer to that one!)
Habib circled, spiraling down.
Standing squarely in the rectangle of light was the old man, the shrouded one; he was the source of the pounding noise. He was doing something that required him to look up and strike against whatever it was that was above his head.
Habib was intrigued. She perched on the nearby chimney, where she could continue to observe.
The old man talked to himself as he worked: a nonstop babble that seemed to serve no purpose other than to make him more and more angry.
And then, from another place in the building came the sound of what Habib had come to understand was human song. It was the voice of the girl, Habib realized.
The old man stopped banging, stopped making himself angry with words, and sat down on the floor. He lit a cigarette. He stared beyond the window, up at the sky. Habib had not seen him like this. She had not seen his face, his blue eyes, his essence: He had the look of a man who was earthbound but longed for freedom. The look of a man who had been staring at his own shadow for too long and didn’t know how to stop.
That is the cause of human suffering, in Habib’s opinion: Humans are like the Crow of legend, Crow who became obsessed with her shadow, pecking at it, tearing at it, scratching at it, until she woke her shadow up and it ate her so that Crow is now dead and her shadow is alive.
Humans cannot stop staring at their own shadows, at some shape they think is fixed, a shape that they come to believe is real. Everything constricts to that shape; they become only that, nothing more, and then they are dead.
Oh, life for humans on this planet would be so much less fraught with sadness if they could know one thing: that shape is an illusion. The woes and angers, the confusions and pains—all these are born of that narrow vision, that staring into the unchanging shape of one’s own shadow.
There are worlds beyond this one. There so many other shapes to fill.
So there he was, the old man, looking up into the sky as it began to darken, wanting to see to something beyond himself—building a window to the stars!—but unable to see anything but his own sad shadow.
When death came to that place where the old man and the girl lived, and Habib heard him crying over the one with sparkling toes (who must have been
his mate) she hurled herself against that very same window when she knew the old one was there to hear, and she let herself fall into that dark, dirty, treeless alley, knowing that she was saying good-bye to the park and the broad, open views of water and sunsets and her comrades in the rookery and the actors and the words of William Shakespeare.
But she was happy there, as much as a crow with a broken wing can be happy. She loved the colored glass in the old man’s room and the strange lingering smells that they contained, and his cawing, excitable voice, and riding on his shoulder and being so close to other humans.
And she grew strong and she watched and learned and she was of use. She commanded a rescue, shattered glass, witnessed grief, returned what was lost, whispered what wisdom she could to the living and the dead, and now this intervention was over.
Habib knows it is over, because she is looking down at the girl (who is, after all, still a girl) walking through a park with another father who is not her father. An animal bond is forming between them. The girl is learning to fill a new shape.
And that is all Habib can hope for.
CHAPTER 32
JAMIE FORD
ALEXIS STARED UP AT A partially pregnant sky. Typical Seattle, overcast with a hopeful, glowing luminescence. She wished it would rain. She wished the sky would make up its mind, as she had.
Looking down, she regarded the hole in the ground—a resting place for her mother, swiftly dug with a trowel Otto had purloined from an army surplus store. The makeshift grave looked meager, unceremonious compared to the massive granite headstones that dotted the damp, mossy hillside of Lakeview Cemetery.
Milling about the dewy grass was a collective of residents, past and present. In place of flowers, Mr. Kenji had provided assorted greenery from the hotel, potted plants and planted pot.
Alexis dreaded that it had come to this. She wished her mother had been afforded a real funeral instead of this drive-by-shooting version—she and her family from the Angeline, quickly interring . . . something.