Further Interpretations of Real-Life Events (16 page)

“No,” Tara says without meeting his eyes. “Not a woman for you. Not a woman.”

“Her thing,” Chick says again. “Ordure. Virus.”

“Okay,” Hayes says, unbuttoning his shirt and lying on the bed, “let's shut up now. We've already done our meaningful contact for the day. Let's pretend we're invisible.”

“Manhandle,” Tara says.

Irina attends their next show, and the next. During the finale, when the birds fly over the deck, she clasps her hands over her chest like a bereaved peasant. She must know what it means to be abandoned. The possibility exhilarates her, reddens her cheeks. Without her bifocals, which rest atop her head, her face reminds Hayes of a dam-made lake. Liquid, unfocused, hungry, with wildlife buried beneath. He can't stop staring at her.

The birds sigh as they return to their cage. They know, even if Hayes does not, that before Irina he is helpless.

H
ayes rarely leaves the ship. Where would he go? He'd rather roam the wide, empty decks when the vacationers are gone, visiting the exhibit of ships-in-bottles and the nursery full of babies who have no idea they're on a cruise. Pausing to smile and say hello to the handsome vacuuming hall-maids.

The only port he regularly visits is Tortola, because in Tortola there's a man who will massage Hayes's liver while Hayes lies shirtless on a mat in a dark room. The man says to him, “It is good time. Everyting you say here is highest secret.”

He strikes a match and lights a bowl of dried leaves. He claps twice and begins rubbing warm oil into Hayes's stomach.

His hands are conspicuous at first, moving across Hayes's abdomen along his rib cage. Once he starts digging in, though, his hands, or Hayes's awareness of his hands, disappear beneath a churning shroud of sensation.

“I now massage your liver,” the man says.

“Okay.”

“I continue until you tell me stop.”

Hayes closes his eyes and imagines he's being delivered to a butcher. He needs to be stamped with a grade. He's not happy about being cut up for parts, but he enjoys the process. He enjoys it like . . . He once worked for a couple, Betta and Tim, who operated the Farm Animal Reclamation Project. On their hundred acres lived an array of animals rescued from labs and factory farms. Pigs, cows, sheep, rabbits. Hayes was in charge of the rabbits. He fed and watered them, built hutches for new arrivals, named them, talked to them, and, most important, sent photos and personalized letters to each rabbit's adoptive parent.

Hello, I am Huggy
, he wrote to Val Downs of Chico, California
. I am an unreluctant rambler. I am always at the head of the pack, kicking out my hind legs in a crazy way!

Assigning personalities to the rabbits was difficult. Some were exceptional, but most were just kind of rabbity and dull. What could he say? Hello, I am Miss Minnie. I sleep nineteen hours a day! I think I'm depressed! Hello, I am Crackers. I enjoy eating and staring dimly at my fellow bunnies' droppings!

Betta and Tim held hands and toured the grounds, both immensely delighted in overalls. They waved to pigs and cows. At the rabbit enclosure, Tim clasped Hayes's shoulder and said, “Your adoption letters are incredible. Full of tenderness and hard-won insight. It's a gift.”

Hayes thanked him, and Betta added, “If animals could talk they'd say exactly what you wrote. They would shame us with devotion.”

Betta and Tim walked on to the sheep pen to collect wool and leave it in the woods for birds. Hayes envied their abstract love. It made him want to physically surrender himself to the rabbits, to lie in the center of their enclosure and let them accost him like a salt lick.

One summer, the rabbits began dying. One, two, then three four five at a time. They called veterinarians, tried quarantining the rabbits, changing their diet. By October they had all died. Hayes felt sad and unlucky—he missed them, even the dull, rabbity ones—but Betta and Tim were surprisingly calm. “A farm is a body,” Tim said. “When one organ stops working, the body must still endure.”

This comforted Hayes for about two hours. It sounded good. But if the farm was a body, and the body lived on, this meant the rabbits were the appendix or tonsils of the farm.

He had forty-seven farewell letters to write. He approached the task solemnly, trying to rid himself of falseness and showmanship.
It's me
,
Brown Sugar
, he wrote to Ward Yoder of Ogden, Utah.
I have died. I know the world won't be much diminished by my absence. But could you maybe think of me sometime when you cross a field or eat brown sugar? Thanks for adopting me. I loved you.

He collected what he knew about each rabbit, built the sturdiest nest he could. After a while, he felt tuned to every purr, grunt, and whinny on the farm. He saw secret alliances among the pigs, by how they jostled up and down the trough. Listening to the crows' aggrieved caws, he knew what they were thinking. They were thinking about the missing rabbits.

Here is what Hayes feels while the man in Tortola massages his liver: benign paralysis.

This is what he says: “I am being held hostage by two females. They say they love me. But they don't love me. They love a man named Ned.”

“Very high secret,” the man says.

“Would you take me home and let me sleep on a mat in your kitchen? You could massage my liver with your foot while you fry eggs.”

“The liver,” the man says, “when you cut up in tree pieces, it grow into tree new livers. Like starfish.”

“That's beautiful.” Hayes feels the man's hands again—still—kneading his abdomen. “I hope it's not true.” He asks the man to stop and the man does, raising his hands to signal that secret time is over. Hayes offers money, unfolded and organized by denomination. As usual, the man tucks it into the waistband of his shorts. “You pay me much more when we cured,” he says.

Hayes repeats it all the way back to the ship, through the market where tourists pollinate the stalls. We cured, we not cured, we cured, we not cured. He buys two cups of diced fruit for the birds. He's pretty sure his liver is permanently damaged.

H
ayes has run out of stories to tell during meaningful contact. His stories all smolder, spark brush fires, clear forests, leap rivers. The birds see kindling in every word. Their ideal story goes,
Once upon a time, the end.

They sit in silence until minute eight of meaningful contact. Hayes lies in bed in his underwear, eyes closed, pretending to nap. He sees the birds like slot-machine tabs on the backs of his eyelids. Nothing they say can be trusted, he knows this. Their love is instinctual, impersonal, a mechanism to shield them from harm . . .

“Woman no good,” Chick says. “Cruel. Children gather love cruel. Not Ned.”

“Ned suckling child,” Tara says. “Candy eat boxes of Ned.”

Chick is more perceptive than Tara. “Don't go, Ned,” she says as he's washing his face. “Don't go,” as he pockets his keys and tucks in his shirt. “Don't go.” He hears it as he's closing the door and until he's halfway down the hall.

Later, on the sun deck beneath stars pricking dusk into night, Irina takes his hand to make a point about . . . something important that he forgets the moment she takes his hand, and she will not let it go.

Irina says, “You have a way with them.”

“Children,” Hayes says.

“Birds,” she says. “You must train them well.”

“I haven't trained them at all,” he says. “I think they're the only ones doing the training.”

“That won't do,” Irina says. Her hand still clutches his. It is like a poultice moistly drawing his polluted humors toward it. “You must come up with rules for these birds, even arbitrary ones. No rules means chaos, looseness, emotion.”

Hayes thinks of the Seeing Eye dog with its special patch:
DON'T PET ME, I'M WORKING
. He studies Irina's warm red face, which seems to be moving closer to his, studies it until they are kissing. It is a long, panicked kiss, filled with movement and refrains and the dull, nauseating whir of the motor, which underlines every quiet moment on the ship. When they're through, Irina steps back and regards him at a distance, shy again. He feels dizzy. He whispers, “The male of the species is superbly equipped.”

She apparently doesn't hear him. “No rules equals misunderstanding.” They walk around the deck hand in hand. When they've made a complete circuit and have returned to where they kissed, she says, “I will never be lonely again.”

“You won't?”

“No no, of course I will,” she says. “But right now it doesn't feel like it.”

He doesn't want the kiss to be a prelude to anything else. What he wants is for a nature-show voiceover to say,
The male of the species is superbly equipped for these casual comings-together. Watch how happily he walks away. Watch him skipping.
Irina's bifocals rest on the end of her nose and it is dark and her mouth is moist and profoundly ajar. Hayes doesn't want to kiss her again. This first kiss can be its own beginning, middle, and end. It can be a well-stocked larder he can return to again and again in memory.

“Kiss me again,” she says.

He kisses her again.

I
t is not love, Hayes is sure, almost sure. It is not sudden, it's not electric. It is not the gossamer convergence of souls. It is not a death scene, a soliloquy, or even a rousing musical number. He doesn't feel pretty, he doesn't feel pretty or witty or bright.

He feels . . . frayed. He can't eat or concentrate or look at himself in the mirror. At night he dreams of Irina lifting, no, tearing away veils and himself saying yes, sure, of course, however, yet, maybe, but.

The birds know. How could they not know? They know. Chick and Tara molt early this year. They preen old feathers from each other's heads, leaving spiked pinfeathers. Hayes dreams of them, too. He's afraid he's going to wake up to the two of them perched on the spare pillow, preparing to peck him blind.

“Ned dry,” Tara says during meaningful contact. “Empty time. Run away. Run run away.”

“How do you two feel about rules?” Hayes says. “Like, from now on you have to call me Hayes. And: From now on no talking.”

“Oh, Ned,” Chick says. “When you go away go away. Downtime.”

“I'm not going anywhere. I'm the birdman.”

“Dogman. Rabbitman,” Tara says. “Miceman.”

“You want me to tell you a story?”

Both Chick and Tara shift their weight from one leg to the other. Their sharp pinfeathers look like war wear.

“About us,” Chick says. “Us about us.”

Hayes tells them about when he worked at his old college's psych lab, which tested the effects of maternal deprivation on newborn mice. It turned out that when a newborn mouse is separated from its mother, it goes crazy. It spends most of its time stumbling around, shivering, squealing. He worked nights, cleaning cages and refilling paper-towel dispensers. The students came in, fiddled with the mice, recorded their findings, left. Most of the time they, some five hundred mice and Hayes, were alone.

One night, tired of his job, tired of listening to the plaintive squeaks of motherless mice, he decided to free them. All of them. He found a big cardboard box, loaded them into it, and brought them to a field. He opened the box and turned it onto its side. Some of the mice scurried into the grass, some stayed in the box. Hayes went home pleased.

The head of the lab called him in the next day. He was a big, hairless scientist with furious eyes. He said . . . a lot of things. Hayes was an idiot, the mice were likely already dead, the type of mouse they bought was genetically unsuited to live anywhere but labs. What Hayes remembers clearest was the man staring at his chest, straight through to Hayes's crooked heart, and saying, “You thought you were a shepherd. You're not. You're a monkey governed by one or two petty attachments.”

“And you torture mice for a living,” Hayes answered. He hoped the scientist would punch him but he didn't. Hayes paid a fine and did some community service. He was too cowardly to ever return to the field, too afraid to find mouse corpses rotting in the high grass.

“Stop, Ned,” Chick says. “About us. About us.”

“It was just a story. Something that happened to me.”

“Five Neds,” Tara says. “One Ned five.”

“Five times,” Chick says.

“You mean I'm your fifth trainer? I don't know what you're trying to say.”

Tara says, “Hayes.”

“Nigh nigh nigh,” Chick says. “Corpse. Corpse shepherd.”

“Hayes,” Tara says again.

The birds are quiet for the remainder of meaningful contact, and for the rest of the day, and the next day and so on. Hayes goads them with fruit and new beaded ropes. He makes up rules for the three of them to follow. No more stories about him. From now on during meaningful contact he will read fairy tales, or brochures, the ship's newsletter. No more television after midnight. He tries to calm them by telling them how pretty they are with their fresh feathers. They stare into the mirror hooked onto their cage. They brood.

Irina, on the other hand. She blooms with naked fondness. She has become shyer, hiding her laugh with a hand, seldom mentioning her lap. Hayes has kissed her on each of the six decks and in two unisex bathrooms. When she invites him to her cabin, he always says he has to go take care of Chick and Tara.

“I'm going to be your little bird,” she says.

The children who come to their show still jockey to be near her. You, you, you, and you, she says. Chick and Tara fly farther and farther toward open water. They veer and swoop and glide. “What'll I do if they leave me?” he asks the children.

Irina clutches her chest, pledging allegiance.

The birds return with a sigh.

Their shows lately have been remarkable.