The Bird Market of Paris (12 page)

The neighbor stopped his Porsche six blocks from my house because the roads were impassable. He agreed to climb over the debris with me, so we picked our way over large, dangerous piles of rubble, navigating boats and wrecked cars. The neighborhood smelled like sewage and baking seaweed. The unforgiving August sun had returned and was cooking everything it touched.

The neighborhood was so destroyed, so changed, that I became lost on the way to my own house. Not one landmark or street sign remained. Some of the mountains of wreckage were ten feet high, and by the time I approached my block I was dirty and sweaty, scratched on my arms and legs like I'd fought with a cat, and I was bitten all over by giant red ants that had taken over the piles of organic debris. I had little hope that my cats and birds were alive.

The terrain was bizarre, but the strangest aspect of the scene was the absence of birds. No birdsong; no fluttering and cawing; no flocks lighting on power lines. The bird world—so much of my own world—had gone dead.

Of the hundreds of boats that had been secured in the basin, only a handful remained, including Larry's sailboat. It no longer had a mast, but there it was, tied up by a single line to our dock. The rest of the basin was all brown water, sunken boats, and wrecked docks. Two boats slumped in our front yard, a Chris Craft open fisherman named
Daddy's Girl
and a small dinghy with the name
Patience
stenciled in cursive on its stern. Our boat was gone. Our sea grape tree had been severed at the base. The coconut palms had lost their heads. The neighborhood's old shade trees were lying on their sides, their gnarled roots reaching ten, fifteen feet into the sky like giant, bumpy dinner plates.

I climbed a mountain of seaweed on my hands and knees, wheezing from the exertion and filth, and listened to the silence. There was not even the buzzing of flies.

Then, as I approached the house, the sweetest sound breached the silence: birds. Lovebirds. They were alive. I ran the rest of the way, jumping over downed power poles, furniture, and hunks of rooftops.

I didn't need my house key. The house no longer had doors. Inside were mountains of seaweed, hundreds of live crabs, and dozens of dead fish. The fish littered the living room. Our furniture was no longer in its place. Couches were outside on the patio and shoved into the kitchen. A pile of debris reaching almost to the kitchen ceiling blocked the door. A water line on the wall in the living room from the storm surge was seven feet above the floor, well over my head. The shell of our house was there, the foundation was there, but the guts were flood ravaged and shattered, and the sewers had backed up, coating the floor with fetid muck.

I picked my way to the blocked bird room, sneakers sinking into the gunk and making a sucking noise each time I lifted a foot. The little aviary I had wheeled into our rec room was intact, and all ten black-masked lovebirds had survived—the water hadn't risen as high in the back rooms.

The bird room was another story.

There was Bonk, clinging to the front of her cage. She rattled the cage door and chirruped at me. The other cages were scattered everywhere, sodden and broken, and in them my other lovebirds, dozens of them, were dead. The cages were bent and mangled, the bodies of the birds soaked in salt water, dark and limp. One yellow lovebird flew around the room and I grabbed her. She bit me hard, and I couldn't blame her.

I overturned a bent cage and pulled out a young seagreen lovebird named Lala. Her body felt cold and wet, her wings drooped, and her head slumped. Birds vibrate like a Bach fugue through tiny subwoofers when you hold them. Maybe it's their souls that reverberate with such force, and her soul, her song, was gone. I had intended to put her in the aviary as soon as her wings grew out; she had never experienced flight. I cried and held her to my chest.

I pulled out Birby, then Bunky, and another, Batty—Bonk's children, all silly names starting with the letter “B”—until I had a dozen dead birds cradled in the front of my T-shirt: babies that Bonk had fed, nurtured, and loved.

Chicky, the little renegade who released my other birds from their cages, was dead inside his nest box with his mate, Holly, and their eggs that would never hatch. They had hunkered together as the water rose.

Bonk's mate, Binky, was also dead. Bonk must have known he was gone, because she clung onto the front of the cage and shrieked over and over—to me, perhaps, but also to him. Lovebirds stay next to the bodies of their fallen mates, even when danger is nearby. I stood in the rubble, arms full of dead birds.

I can imagine only so far into their storm. The water rose and the birds stacked at the bottom climbed as high as they could before the water overtook them. Then the cages floated and the ones stacked on top tumbled into the water, giving the birds a few moments to find a way to keep from drowning. From the appearance of objects in the room, the water hadn't become violent there—it had just lapped in and drowned them.

In the back room, six of the sixty birds I had placed in there had survived. The water had risen to the halfway point of the cages on the counter, sparing the birds in them. Miami Bird, the red-lored Amazon parrot, was salt-water stained from the chest down, one-half of her a dark algae green instead of iridescent lime. She whistled and cooed and her irises pinned in and out with excitement at seeing me, and she lifted a foot and waved, as I had trained her. I bawled. What would I have found had her cage been situated a few inches lower?

None of the survivors—sixteen lovebirds and Miami Bird—had food or water. The salt water had washed away those supplies. There was no way to find seed or fresh water. The neighbors had parrots, so I ran to their house. All their birds had survived, but they didn't have fresh water, either. The neighbors said they'd look after my birds as best they could until I returned for them.

While I inspected the damage to the rest of the house, Gladys and Paisley emerged from the rubble, yowling, raked fur wet with mud and standing on end. The nails on their front paws were raw and meaty, scraped down to the bone. They must have clawed all night in the water to save their lives. I found my BaaBaa on the floor of my room covered in sewage, the ratty blue security blanket Nona had given me when I was three. I gathered the cats into the wet, stinky blanket and carried them out of the house. Paisley had been a wild cat with a mean streak, but she grasped me around the neck and kissed my face and wouldn't let go.

I called for Emmeline, the mute, but she didn't appear.

The guy who had driven me home didn't want me to sit in his new Porsche with a dirty blanket and two filthy cats. I cried and stood in the middle of the street, cradling my terrified cats, looking and feeling like a refugee, too numb to plead or fight, and he relented. I didn't know where my parents were or if they were alive, and there seemed to be no working phone for miles.

Matt's family bustled around the house, sweeping and tidying despite having no windows, doors, or running water. They were trying to put things back in order. But I couldn't put my world back together with a mop and broom. It seemed to me that I had killed my birds, my friends, as if I had plunged each of them into the water and watched them drown. I stepped into the five inches of rainwater still in Matt's sunken living room and knelt to wash my sewage-covered hands and face. I stared into my reflection, muttering and rocking back and forth, repeating that I had killed them, that it was my fault. I slapped the puddle so I wouldn't have to see my face.

Gloria tried to pull me from the water, but I resisted. She pulled me to my feet and shook me. It was like one of those moments in a movie where someone slaps the hysterical person, and I think it almost came to that. I screamed until a stranger, a man, walked into the house through the nonexistent front door. We all stopped talking and turned to look at him.

“What's going on here?” he asked cautiously. “I heard yelling.”

Silence hung in the air for a moment, and then I rambled about not knowing where my parents were and about the dead birds and cats, and I don't remember what else, but little could have made sense to him. I was crying the whole time.

“I have my wife and daughter in our truck and we have a stop to make, but you're welcome to ride with us,” he said. “I'm a minister, it's OK.”

Gloria said she would care for our cats and my ten young lovebirds until I could return, and I left with the stranger, carrying nothing but my grief and a wild baby bird.

*   *   *

We drove for four grueling hours around the rubble, the remains of the city, forging through dangerous intersections without traffic lights, past businesses and homes razed to the ground. I glared out the window, unable to answer even the simplest of questions. I was numb, but I didn't feel shot up with Novocain—I felt like the needle.

I reached my family and managed to thank the minister for the ride. A fallen tree blocked the driveway to the house where my parents and Poppy had spent the night, and they couldn't move their SUV. I told them about our house, the wreckage, the yachts standing on end on top of homes, the dead birds, and about our missing cat, Emmeline. There was no horror on their faces, no sign that they understood what I had seen. I wept, Poppy holding me to his chest.

Trees and power lines were down in West Kendall; there was ample roof damage, and screened-in patios were demolished, but my parents and Poppy hadn't been smacked by the hurricane's full force. They had slept through the storm. They had no phones or electricity, but they had cold running water.

I wanted a shower and needed a drink; but since Poppy was there, I managed only the cold shower. By the time we reached our house the next afternoon, the smell was twice as bad as it had been the day before. The sewers in the neighborhood had backed up even more, and the fish and crabs in the house had rotted in the heat. I gagged as we picked through the rubble. My dad cried at the wasteland that had once been our home. We had nothing: not one item of clothing except what we were wearing, not a piece of furniture, not one old photograph.

We mucked around in the sewage on the bottom of our rooms and found a precious few items to keep. Poppy found some of his old coins. I found a pair of silver heart-shaped earrings. A few objects on my highest shelf were still there, too, including Bonk's first eggs and the globe Nona and Poppy had given me for my ninth birthday. I found photos of other people and a suitcase that wasn't ours, and there was a soggy dining room chair in the hallway that no one recognized. I figured most of our furniture was in someone else's house, as if the entire neighborhood had held a giant involuntary swap meet.

We drove from hotel to hotel in North Miami Beach and found a vacancy in a squat, '50s-era motel. There was still no electricity, but we had hot running water, and the hotel bar had warm beer. After three days, the Army cleared the roads enough for us to drive to the site of our former home to retrieve the surviving birds. Emmeline was still missing.

We had a friend in Fort Lauderdale with a large aviary on his screened porch, and he agreed to take my birds until my parents and I found a place to live. I opened their cages inside the aviary and turned on the hose and sprayed them down. They drank and bathed in the fresh water. They had full flight and freedom, but they didn't leave their water dishes for nearly half an hour. Bonk dipped her head into the water and soaked herself in it, wetting her chest and wings. The salt water must have burned their eyes and skin. I hadn't spent more than a couple days away from Bonk in over four years, and now she would be without her mate and without me.

The grief pressed on me, waking up, sitting at lunch, going to bed. It had roots, and bloomed into a quiet suffering I couldn't express. I wept for days and couldn't stop. I drove to the wrecked house every day and scanned the sky, wishing that some of the birds had escaped.

My grief branched further and breached all my walls when I realized Emmeline was truly gone. I walked through the neighborhood asking everyone if they had seen a black and white fluffy cat, and I yelled her name for hours. Despite being mute, she could hear.

“I think Emmie was washed out to sea,” my dad said, hugging me. “You aren't going to find her.”

Ten days after the storm, on the last day of searching for Emmeline before I'd desert that house and never return, in the last five minutes that I would ever be in that place, my parents waiting in the car, I lifted a fallen closet door and found Emmeline curled in a hollow underneath it, unable to escape from the pocket in the rubble around her. She looked at me and mouthed a huge, mute meow that would have been audible across the street had she been able to make a sound. I plucked her up and rubbed my face on her dirty fur. We all cried when I stepped into the car with her, grateful for one small miracle.

I didn't see Bonk for more than six weeks. My car survived the storm except for a shattered windshield and a beating to the paint job, but my parents sent it to the body shop, and I had no transportation to visit the birds. We moved from hotel to hotel in North Miami Beach with the cats, away from the trauma of the storm, but still without electricity.

The wild baby bird Matt had found languished and became quiet. He stopped crying and begging for food. The inside of his mouth became sticky and he couldn't perch anymore.

Maybe I wasn't feeding him enough, or perhaps not feeding him his native diet? My life was so unsettled and my environment so changed, I didn't have the resources to find out what kind of bird he was, or take him to the veterinarian. He wasn't weaning onto anything I tried—seed, fruit, suet, meat. Nothing worked. We visited one of my parents' friends in north Fort Lauderdale who happened to have a few books on wild birds, and I found him in an illustration after an hour of searching.

The little guy was a red-whiskered bulbul,
Pycnonotus jocosus
, native to China, India, Pakistan, Thailand, and Burma. In the early 1960s, fewer than ten red-whiskered bulbuls had escaped from a rare bird farm in South Miami and established themselves in the subtropical environment. In the next ten years, their population rose to about 250 and kept growing, adapting to South Florida and thriving on wild figs, jasmine, and the berries of the Brazilian pepper tree, also called the Florida holly. Bulbuls weren't native, but people didn't consider the pretty little birds pests, and put out feeders to attract them. Their range in South Florida remained small, mostly in the Kendall area of Miami, where they were first released. That area was now destroyed.