Emergency systems not triggered by the beetles switched on. A transparent sheath slid over her eyes and echolocation switched off so that she might rely on tracers and infrared in the midst of maelstrom.
Then the storm hit and she had nowhere to hide, no plan, no defenses, just the compass pulsing inside of her, and a body pummeled by winds gusting in all directions, trying only not to crash or be ripped to pieces.
The Strange Bird’s strength failed her, and she tumbled, rose and fell only because the wind willed it. Perhaps she called out before something dark with weight spun toward her out of the maelstrom. Perhaps she made a sound that was a person’s name as it struck her broadside, smashed her into a well of turbulence, knocked the consciousness from her. The Strange Bird could not remember later.
But whom could she have called for help? There was no one to help her, was there?
The Prison
When the Strange Bird regained consciousness, head ringing, she found herself in a converted prison cell in a building buried in the sand. Only the narrowest foot-long slit of window at the top near the ceiling revealed the presence of the sun. All was dark and all was hard—the bench set into the wall like a long, wide treasure chest was hard. The walls were hard. The black bars, reinforced with wire and planks of wood, so she could not slip out, were hard. No soft surface for relief. No hint of green or of any life to reassure her.
The smell that came to the Strange Bird was of death and decay and untold years of suffering, and the dim-lit view that spread out before her beyond the bars was of a long, low room filled with odd furniture. At the far end an arched doorway led into still more darkness.
The Strange Bird panicked, felt a formless dread. She was back in the laboratory. She could not find her way out. She would never truly see the sky again. Thrashed her wings and screeched and fell off the bench and onto the bare dirt floor and lay there beak open, wings spread out, trying to appear large and fearsome.
Then a light turned on and the gloom lifted and the Strange Bird saw her captor. The one she would come to think of as the Old Man.
He sat atop an overturned bucket next to a rotting desk and watched her, the rest of the long room still murky behind him.
“Beautiful,” the Old Man said. “It is nice to have something beautiful here, in this place.”
The Strange Bird remained silent, for she did not want her captor to know that she understood, nor that she could, when she wished, form human words, even if she did not understand all of those words. Instead, she squawked like a bird and flapped her wings like a bird, while the Old Man admired her. In all ways, she decided to be a bird in front of him. But always, too, she watched him.
The Old Man had become folded in on himself over time. He had brown skin but pink-white splotches on his arms and face, as if something had burned him long ago, tried to strip him away from himself. He had but one eye and this was why when he stared it was with such purpose and intensity. His beard had turned white and so he looked always as if drowning, a froth of sea foam roiling across his chin, and with flecks of white across his burned nose and gaunt cheekbones. He wore thin robes or rags—who could tell which—and a belt to cinch from which hung tools and a long, flat rusted knife.
“I rescued you from the sands. You were buried there—just your head above. The storm had smashed you out of the sky. You are lucky I found you. The foxes and the weasels would have gotten to you. You would be in something’s belly by now. A special meal.”
The Old Man did not resemble a lab scientist to the Strange Bird and did not talk like a scientist, and his home was no laboratory the more she saw of it. She settled down, relaxed enough to search for injury, discovered soreness and strain but no broken bones. Feathers that had been lost but would grow back. She preened, checked for parasites, split two against the edge of her beak, while the man talked.
“My name is Abidugun. I was a carpenter like my father before me and his father. But now I have been many things. Now I am also a writer.” He gestured to a typewriter, ancient, atop the rickety desk. To the Strange Bird it resembled a metal tortoise with its insides on the outside. “Now I am trying to get it all down. Everything must be put down on the paper. Everything. No exceptions.”
The Old Man stared at the Strange Bird as if expecting a response but she had no response.
“I sleep in the cell when I don’t have guests,” the Old Man said. “The prison is all around us and below us—many levels. I was once a prisoner here, long ago, so I know. But that is ancient history. You don’t want to know about that. No one does.”
Although the prison was vast and the wind echoed through its many chambers during sandstorms, the Strange Bird would learn that all the Old Man’s possessions existed in this long room, for it was where he chose to live and the rest was nothing but hauntings to him.
“I am the only one here,” the Old Man said, “and I like it that way. But sometimes having guests is a good idea. You are my guest. Someday I will show you around the grounds here, if you are good. There are rules to being good that I will share.”
Yet he never shared the rules, and the Strange Bird had already seen the three crosses that stood in the sand outside, which she thought were perches for other birds now long dead. She had seen the tiny garden and well next to the crosses, for she turned echolocation back on and cast out her senses like a dark net across a glittering sea to capture whatever lay outside her cell. The well and garden were both a risk, even disguised as abandoned, derelict, overgrown.
“I am Abidugun,” he said again. “You I will call Isadora, for you are the most dazzling bird I have ever seen and you need a dazzling name.”
* * *
So, for a time, the Strange Bird became Isadora and responded to the name as best she could—when the Old Man fed her scraps, when he decided to read her stories from books, tales incomprehensible to her. She decided that even as she plotted to escape, she would pretend to be a good pet.
But in the lab, the scientists had kept her in a special sort of light that mimicked sunlight and fed her in its way, and now that she had only the barest hint of any light, she felt the lack.
“You should eat more,” the Old Man said, but the kind of food he brought often disgusted her.
“Life is difficult,” the Old Man said. “Everyone says it is. But death is worse.”
And he would laugh, for this was a common refrain, and the Strange Bird believed someone had said it to him and now he was under the spell of those words. Death is worse. Except she did not know anything of death but what she had seen in the laboratory. So she did not know if death was worse. She wished only that she might be that remote from the Earth and the humans who lived upon it. To glide above, to go where she wished without fear because she was too high up. To reduce humans again to the size she preferred: distant ghosts trudging and winking out to reappear again, looped and unimportant.
* * *
Beyond the dune that hid the Old Man lay a ruined city, vast and confusing and dangerous. Within that city moved the ghostly outlines of monstrous figures the Strange Bird could not interpret from afar, some that lived below the surface and some that strode across the broken places and still others that flew above.
Closer by, etched in the crosshairs of her extra perception … a fox, atop the dune, curious and compact and almost like a sentry watching the Old Man’s position. Soon, others joined the fox and she glimpsed the edges of their intent and, intrigued, she would follow them using echolocation whenever she sensed them near, when there was nothing else to do, and for the first time she experienced the sensation of boredom, a word that had meant nothing in the laboratory for there had been nothing to test boredom against. But now she had the blue limitless sky to test it against, and she was already restless.
Her senses also quested down the many tunnels and levels of the prison when the Old Man went hunting, so she might test the bars, the planks of the wood, the wire in his absence. The Old Man often disappeared into the maze down below, with hi
s machete, and hunted long, black weasel-like creatures that lived there. She listened to the distant squeals as he found them and murdered them, and she saw in her mind the bubbles and burrows that were their lives become smaller and smaller until they were not there at all.
How in their evasion and their chittering one to another did the Old Man not realize their intelligence? On the mornings when the Strange Bird woke to find the thin, limp bodies of the black weasels lying half-in, half-out of a massive pot on a table halfway across the room, she felt a sense of loss the Old Man could not share.
The Strange Bird knew, too, that the Old Man might find her beautiful, but should he ever be starving, he would murder her and pluck her dazzling feathers and cook her and eat her, like he would any animal.
She would lie half-in, half-out of the pot, limp and thoughtless, and she would no longer be Isadora but just a strange dead bird.
The Foxes at Night
The foxes came out at dusk and peered in through the slit of the Strange Bird’s cell at an angle where the Old Man could not see them. Their eyes glittered and they meant mischief, but not to her. They sang to the Strange Bird a song of the night, in subsonic growls and yips and barks. They were not afraid of the prison or of the Old Man, for they were not like most foxes, but more like the other animals she had known in the laboratory—alert in a specific way.
So she sang back silently to them, as a comfort, there in the cell, and when the moonlight lay thick and bright against the gritty cheek of the sand dune, the foxes would gambol and prance for the sheer delight of it and beckon her to join them, would let her into their minds that she might know what it was to gambol and to prance on those four legs, then these four legs, to see the world from a fox’s level. It was almost like flying. Almost.
The Strange Bird knew that in those moments, the foxes could see into her mind, too. That the pulsing compass allowed this, attracted them. Yet as time passed, this fact did not concern her, for the freedom was too exhilarating and her prison too dank and terrible. In time, she wanted them to know her mind, for fear she might never be free, that they might take with them across the sands some small part of her.
Soon, she understood the foxes better than the human beings of the laboratory, or her captor the Old Man, and could call to them from across the sands and they would gather at the top of the dune and talk to her. Querulous, they would ask her questions about where she had come from and what it felt like to drift so far above the Earth. Is that place better, where you came from? Would we like it? Worse than your prison? How did you escape?
At night, too, parts of her still drifted off as they had before, through the slit of window in her cell, microscopic tufts that would leave her to become something else somewhere else. She could not know what it meant, what agreement her body had reached with the biologists in the lab that she had never said yes to.
But the foxes celebrated this leaving, for they would jump up in ecstasy at those moments, and snap in play with faux ferociousness at the microscopic things that left her, as if to herd them on their way, up into the sky, to drift and drift, and to never rest.
The Old Man’s Story
The Old Man never opened the cell door but only slid the horrible food in through an opening that he closed with a nailed plank of wood. He seemed to know that the Strange Bird might be able to escape through such a space and into the room without hurting herself.
As he shoved the food in, the Old Man always said, “You’re good, Isadora. You’re good, I can tell. You are beautiful and good.”
But what was good and what was beautiful and why were these things important to the Old Man?
Nothing in the laboratory had seemed good to her, and beautiful was form without function. Anything that might be beautiful about her had a purpose. Anything that was good about her had a purpose, too. And still the compass pulsed within her and at times drove her frantic with the need to escape and thoughts of the dark wings, how they had disbanded and pulled apart and yet come back together.
The foxes had put the idea in her head—that she might escape by becoming a ghost. If she became a ghost, the Old Man could not see her and would think she had escaped and open the cell door so she could truly escape. The Strange Bird knew that the idea of ghost and ghosting meant something different to the foxes, but still she meant to try.
So she lay in the darkness at the foot of the metal bench, where the glimmer of sunlight could not reach, and she would grow very still and those neurons of her brain that lived natural in her feathers would alter her camouflage, dull the iridescence, practice matching the exact hues and tones of the prison cell. Her natural camouflage was meant to show dark from above and light from below while flying, so it took conscious effort to do otherwise.
All while the Old Man talked to her about his memories of people and places she did not know and did not care about, and eventually mention the gloom and put on more lights, which meant taking slow-writhing white grubs that glowed and shoving them into divots taken out of the ceiling. By how he still complained of the gloom the Strange Bird would count her progress in becoming less and less visible.
“My eyes must be going bad,” the Old Man grumbled, but he could not afford to use more light, for the grubs would be food if the weasels grew more cunning, if his garden began to fail.
Then he would continue his sermon, as if a broken-down version of the chaplain in the laboratory, who would spend so much time in senseless talking to the animals.
“I am not the man I was. This place was different once. There are more people out there. All sorts of things out there. But I would not last without shelter. It takes someone younger, stronger. Someone who isn’t worn-out—and I know people will come here soon enough and wrest even this from me. And in the other direction there’s just desert and wasteland and nothing good. You should know—you came from there. And this was the town I grew up in, although none of it is left. They’re all dead now. Now it’s just me and the lizards and the weasels and a toad or two. And sometimes an intruder. And now you.”
The Old Man could mumble like this for hours, sometimes rant and rave and become other than what Isadora thought he was. But even this the Strange Bird welcomed, for she understood him better and better through this repetition and she began to know not just his speech but his moods, to recognize the self-inflicted wound at the heart of him.
A favorite subject was of the city that lurked so near beyond the dune. Whenever the Old Man spoke of the city, his tone would grow hushed and his aspect fearful and the Strange Bird would remember the shadow of the monsters she had sensed.
“Best not to speak of that. Best to go on living and not think of it, either. Tend the well. Tend the garden, look not to the horizon.”
From the city came guttural moans and roars, faint, and Isadora could tell that the Old Man could hear them, for even the most distant could make him shudder as he sat at his desk with the ancient typewriter, his back to her. Because he called her beauty distraction. Because he needed to peck away at what he said was his “great story.” The story of his life and “how the world came to be this way, Isadora.”
Yet she knew reports and stories from the lab, and she knew his could not be too great a story. For he had no typewriter ribbon left and only fifty sheets of paper and he counted on the stabbing imprint of the keys to make an impression like a branding, and when he had used the fifty sheets, front and back, he would start again, typing over what he had already impressed upon the page.
“For you see, beautiful one, my Isadora,” he said, “it is a way of marking it all in my head. I type it to remember it, and if I never find more paper, still it is more real in my head and someday I shall get it down right, and forever.”
But Isadora believed it was more that the typing helped the Old Man forget the trauma of what he did not want to remember, for he stopped ever more often, racking his mind for details that she knew must have been buried on the impressions made on the paper and lost to him, except i
n the crisscrossing nonsense pattern of jumbled letters. If he could only leave everything there on the page, it could not live within him. She had no such outlet, and everything lived within her every moment, but she did not envy the Old Man his typing.
By the second week of her captivity, if the Old Man became too overwhelmed by his task, he would stop and talk to her instead, tell her what he had meant to tap out through the keys.
“Once, I had a birthday cake. Imagine it. I remember, age twelve, and I blew out all the candles and it was so sweet and moist and lovely and my face was sticky with it, because my brother smashed my face into it. I’ve never had a cake like it, and my friends were all there. Someone juggled oranges. I haven’t seen an orange in so long. Or an apple, either.”
A pause, a confusion in the single eye that stared so intent at Isadora. The flicker, the flutter of the eyelashes, the wince in the act that let Isadora know something within hurt the Old Man, something old but potent.
“No one understands anymore. It is all lost.”
Yet what had been lost? The old world had been no better for the Strange Bird’s kind than the new. Just different.
Then, said tentative by the Old Man, almost furtive: “If I let you out of your cell, you would stay with me? If I did that, you would stay, wouldn’t you? If I trained you to stay?”
But she was silent and would not answer, because she knew the word train only from the lab, where it had meant pain and suffering, and because the Old Man had grown grim-looking and closed-off and in that mood he could be cruel.
So she only relaxed her camouflage, puffed out her feathers and turned more iridescent and allowed color to burn across the feathers like a wildfire, and as far as the Old Man was concerned, that was her answer.
That she was beautiful, and therefore good.
The Old Man’s Secret
One night, the Old Man came out of the tunnels into the room bearing a special treasure, as he called it.
“Alkie sardines, Isadora,” he said, holding out a handful of tiny dry silver fish. “The Company makes these, or made them. I would have to go into the city to find them, but I stumbled on these down in the underground. Alongside a skeleton, yes, it is true, but he did not need them or any other thing.”