The Wallcreeper (14 page)

Being even shorter, I pondered her tragedy abstractly and could think of nothing to say.

“You know how my legs got like this?” she added. “You give up eating when you’re nine because you don’t want to be fat like your mom. But mom wasn’t even fat! My whole growth spurt, you know where I invested it? In my hips. My pelvis is so wide, I could give birth to a calf. At least you had the sense to get married the first time somebody asked you. You can sit on your ass and keep trying to have a baby until kingdom come. I don’t even want to know what kind of guy would marry me now. I was stupid to think I could do any job I wanted and it wouldn’t rub off. Now I’m starting to acquire the stripper habitus, and pretty soon I’m going to be forty-five, preemptively shoving my butt in my fiancé’s face so he doesn’t shine his flashlight at my tits.”

“A life laid waste before it began,” I said, quoting Stephen’s frequent references to the profoundly discouraging climax of the classic Icelandic novel
Independent People
by Halldór Laxness.

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

“No, seriously. You act like you’re trapped in Tukwila, but I bet your boss is surprised every time you show up for work. I bet your landlord wonders what’s wrong with you every time he gets a check! Tukwila is a place people walk away from and never look back.”

Tukwila, in my opinion, was the trap in the drain. Nobody lives there voluntarily except people who saw nothing but westerns before their grandfathers pawned their TVs. If your basis for comparison is the town Clint Eastwood paints red and renames “Hell,” you might like the suburbs of Seattle just fine. For me, even the city was a stretch. Easterners hear “coffee culture” and think of Vienna, not longshoremen idling their pickups at a drive-through. They don’t know the uniform polo shirts at Starbucks are the alternative business model for when you want women customers to let their guard down. They hear “beach” and think of sand, not prefab boathouses selling onion roses and buckets of beer.

Stephen claimed on the phone to be sad I hadn’t really been pregnant. “It’s true!” he said. “A baby from that needle-dick would have been cute!”

I said I would do my best not to get pregnant again until I saw him. Then I told him the really stunning news: Tukwila was swarming with little tiny birds called bushtits that look like long-tailed tits, only cuter, because smaller. Much smaller, and even cuter.

“No way!” Stephen said. “You told me Tukwila is like a trailer park on the moon!”

“I lied! It’s the heart of darkness! There are flickers all over the place! They’re nesting in the façade of H-Mart!”

“Flickers! Too cool!” Stephen said.

We had to yell because my sister didn’t have a landline or even a real computer. She had inferior versions of everything in the world on her phone—entire news stories that read “Italian Assassin Bomb Plot Disaster” or “Lindsey Surgery Denial Scandal About-Face,” Voice over IP, little tiny bushtit-sized e-mail messages from men saying things like “Busy tonight? Me, too” and “Can’t stop thinking about last March.” Her phone service was a joke, but the price was right. She would have been ashamed to use anything else.

We went out for karaoke that night with some of her colleagues from the coffee place. She sang “Because of You” and I blushed. I sang “Waterloo” and thought of Stephen. I got drunk and told them they should unionize, and my sister told me to shut up and sing “How Soon Is Now,” to which she cried.

Out in the parking lot, she said, “Watch me,” and waited until we were all staring. Then she ran a few steps and did an aerial cartwheel, landing neatly on the soles of her boots.

We stood dumbstruck and dumbfounded.

“Gymnastics is forever,” she said. “It’s like riding a bike.” She did it again.

We all began to laugh. The strength and beauty of what we had seen was so incongruous. My sister, dancing on air. Levitating like a crane. And without a conspecific anywhere this side of Chicago. I had to get her out of there.

In the car, we tallied her marketable skills. It was a short list: Latin, Greek, exotic dancing, coffee drinks. I said it was very promising. “You would get a job in Berlin so fast,” I said. “You would have such a good time. You would meet such cute guys.”

“I’m there,” she said. “I have nothing to lose.”

Most of the time, when people say that, they’re sort of kidding, but in her case it was literally true. My sister Constance folded her tents in Tukwila and bought a flight the same day as mine.

Stephen was up near Kossovo, counting fervidly. He had learned to identify birds of prey by the hairballs they coughed up and the precise arrangement of their victims’ feathers around a stump. He had a book about feathers and another book about seagulls and the many eerie transformations they undergo on their way from being indistinguishable to being basically identical. There was always something going on—some promising-looking habitat to map for its potential. But Albania wasn’t Wörgl. He seldom got close to a live bird. Albanians shoot to kill, and they kill to eat, which makes them less repugnant than non-hungry hunters but more lethal. Birds on the move were invisible and nearly silent. They knew better than to draw attention to themselves. They carried on their courtships like hustlers cruising a church picnic, and defended their territories like Beau Geste.

New migrants weren’t always up to date. Big flocks would land, or try to, then circle bewildered while one after another was mown down in a flurry of lead. Some liked the look of Albanian wetlands and decided to molt there—the last decision they would make in this lifetime. Birds were executed for the crime of tasting good or the crime of being stringy and gamy. But the hunters and their decoys and semi-automatics couldn’t be everywhere at once, so Stephen found plenty to count.

Or count and revise: thirty-five dunlins that landed, seventeen dunlins that took off, six dunlins that made it over the next ridge—an attrition rate that would clearly result in no dunlins at all one stop later, but maybe the hunters are all on this side today. The potential was what mattered. Even in Canton Geneva, there’s always the “first disturber,” the windsurfer in neoprene who heads out on the first sunny day in February to divest a lake of thirty thousand birds and leave you extrapolating what might have been. Counting bush meat in the market in Shkodër was just another way of acquiring a basis for extrapolation. If a species can’t show itself without being shot at, it’s comforting to think it’s timid. If no nests have been seen for the past ten years, it’s nice to know the species requires perfect isolation to breed. Without the tips of icebergs, humankind would already be very lonely.

I didn’t fly on the day I had planned. Constance caught a direct flight to Berlin, and I sat in a coffee shop glued to a laptop.

Gernot had sent me a link to a news story that made my spine stiffen: flooding near Dessau-Rosslau. Destruction on a vast scale. Unknown perpetrators had caused the inundation of the Steckby-Lödderitzer Tree Farm, which was strictly protected, for the love of God! If oaks and alders were to drown, the article threatened, the potential damage would be in the zillions.

Gernot told me to take it easy, but legal issues feel different when you’re a foreigner. I imagined getting no farther than a cell in Schönefeld airport before being deported to a pit on Rikers Island. I had always thought major flooding came with the spring thaw. “Those are the Alps,” he corrected me gently. The Elbe trickles down from bone-dry sandstone. Its flow is more dependent on the central European rainy season, otherwise known as summer vacation—the reason Germans are to be found in such large numbers in July and August on Mediterranean beaches where it’s too hot to move or breathe.

“No baby birds drowned, did they?” I asked. Ground-nesting birds had been a particular concern of mine since I discovered their existence.

Gernot said late summer is bird happy hour, when birds fly around in adults-only flocks, and that I should stop beating myself up.

Mainstream environmental groups weighed in to say that while the execution was sloppy, it’s the thought that counts, and riparian forests by rights ought to be underwater every so often. Local people began writing letters to the editor, demanding to know why the dikes and cladding couldn’t be removed by the long-term unemployed at union wages. Olaf published an editorial pointing out that the would-be radical environmentalists had made fools of themselves by assisting in a reclamation-compensation measure that would soon be fully funded with attendant trickle-down effects—his usual blend of wishful technocracy and wheels-within-wheels irony, leaving at least one reader depressed, yet confused.

Others wondered aloud where the hunters and the WSA had been all that time. Somebody should have noticed something.

I agreed. We had both expected hunters to catch me red-handed. They’re under contract to hunt in the Tree Farm, which is mostly the no-humans-allowed core zone of a UNESCO biosphere reserve. Killing deer and wild boar helps protect young trees, rare fungi, ground-nesting birds et al., at least supposedly. But I didn’t see a single hunter all winter. Gernot claimed it was because the hunters aren’t allowed to feed the animals in core zones, so there aren’t any to speak of.

Except he was wrong. He circumscribed his movement to avoid disturbing the wildlife, so he didn’t know the core zone was crisscrossed with wild boar highways like a motocross park. I was secretly glad the pigs were afraid of me. I can’t begin to imagine what they all ate. Do pigs eat cannabis? There was lots of it growing back in the core zone.

I flew two weeks late, and arrived to find Constance in bed with Stephen, helping him drink a smoothie.

“We didn’t do anything,” she said. “He’s a complete mess!”

It was getting to be a pattern: blissful happiness in the Balkans, precipitous flight home, withdrawal symptoms. But he had no needle tracks or anything to really give me pause.

Constance had no interest in Stephen, she said. She was in love with Berlin. “This is my town,” she said. With the help of a few names he had given her, she already had a go-go dancing gig at the Berghain and was a ticket taker at SO36, an alternative discotheque only a hop, skip, and jump from our house.

I asked for a second opinion. Stephen said, “Obviously your sister is Venus in furs with bells on, but it’s you I love.”

I shook my head and rolled my eyes. “Obviously. She’s been perfecting her sexiness on a professional level for five solid years while I’ve been learning birdcalls! What did you expect? I mean, I’ve had better men than you, too, but it’s not your job to be the fuck of the century! We’re married!”

“That’s so true!” he said. At least we had that straight.

I offered to bring him breakfast in bed. While he was eating, he said, “Seriously, we should try to have a family and spread all this stability around. Share the love. And what better time to have a baby than when your sister is living with us?”

“Guess again,” I said. “If you think she’s going to be a huge help with a baby, you’ve got another think coming. She’s going to be a very popular girl and move out within a month.”

He sat up leaning on his elbow to steal foam from my cappuccino with the marmalade spoon, and I involuntarily reached over and petted his head.

“I sometimes think about how I used to just work and work and work like a workaholic,” Stephen said. “And the rest of my life was balancing my hobbies. Music and birds. Darkness and light. Did you notice how I’ve sort of slacked off with the music?”

“I thought it was because you found a way to combine birds and drugs.”

He lay back and groaned. “Jesus,” he said. “You’re right. So much for that.”

“So now you figured because you’re off Special K, I’d be all on fire to have a baby. As a reward for you being scared straight and not falling in love with the contortionist geisha.”

“That’s not it either. It was more like I had this whole theory about how, through my activism, I was uncovering the dark side of the birds, which is all the things threatening them. Because if you’re into wild birds and their lives in the wild, you can’t think of the danger they’re always facing as a threat. As darkness. You just can’t. There’s no point. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Nobody dies except to feed somebody. All of us are somebody’s next meal. But with a river some asshole wants to turn into free money, the Lord doesn’t have anything to do with it. So that the absolute worst thing in life, which is death,” (he lay back on the pillows and spoke slowly to make sure I understood) “is the only bad thing you can actually ever really accept, because you have no choice. It’s never an acceptable option, so you just deal with it. You make a virtue of necessity. The way I’m dealing now with my body being a destroyed piece of shit after I treated it like I could just go down to the machine shop and get a rebuilt one after it wore out. I mean, I accept that I’m mortal, but I had to accept it anyway. What am I trying to say?”

“I don’t know.”

“Right. So these karst fields in the Balkans that they want to turn into hydroelectric projects, it’s unacceptable. Maybe you can accept a tsunami, but you can’t accept this. You can’t.”

“What are you trying to say?”

He sat up again. “That you were right to tear down those levees. I’m proud of you.” He put his arms around me and hugged me very tight.

At that point I should have realized that he had some kind of sabotage project in mind, cooked up in long hours of staring at empty skies over remote Balkan villages while coked to the gills on whatever, but I was too busy wondering who had washed him in the blood of the lamb.

Working the door at SO36, Constance met a German-American party girl from Minnesota via Bad Homburg who put her in touch with the principal at an English-language private school, and after about a month in Berlin she started working as a fifth grade Latin teacher. The school set her up with a work visa and even wrote her résumé. The kids loved her, the parents loved her. She said she could get me and Stephen a deal on tuition. She rented a sunny fifth-floor walkup in Prenzlauer Berg and started dating a management consultant who practiced Tibetan Buddhism. She was making maybe sixteen thousand dollars a year after taxes, but she wasn’t on welfare, so in Berlin she was solidly middle class.