J.A. Tyler
AN ABSENCE OF BIRDS
I stood on our small balcony. There was no wind. I’d left the sliding glass door ajar. At the cusp, the air from the room mingled with the outside. The night was dark, late. The stars winked blue and white and red in shivers. I was barefoot.
Okay, he’d said.
Okay, I’d said back.
I’d come out here for a breather. The stars an accompaniment.
I’m not, I don’t, I mean. He false-started until the wind left his lungs and the exasperation went silent. I hadn’t said anything. I didn’t even know what I was battling against. There were little faults, fissures easy to gloss, yet the aperture widened.
Inside, the detritus of takeout. White cardboard tents and foil. The television rolling, news overtaking the late late show. There was carpeting. Furniture. Floor lamps. Wall decor. A math of normalcy. I know, I know. The little things. What I do, don’t do, I’m just, fuck. He bloated into curse, the cursory. But that doesn’t mean, you can’t mean it to mean. There was so little to control. I’d crossed my arms. The rest is more scrawl than story. It seemed so innocuous.
Sarai? He’d said, though my name no longer felt right in his mouth.
/// /// ///
Someone suggested looking to the birds, and that’s when the world noticed they were gone. Not a feather left to speak of.
At the St. Louis zoo, long before this, we’d held hands in the swelter of the bright afternoon and watched a cardinal flit and poke around an empty pen. In the west, they’d rarely witnessed those red plumed heads and black masked faces. Those orange beaks. Standing there, holding hands, we felt impenetrable.
No one has seen a bird in years.
/// /// ///
When the door clicked resolutely behind him, I wasn’t sure of anything. Where he was headed. If he’d come back. If I’d still be there when he did. He’d shoved a duffel with a mishmash of clothes, a toothbrush, his keys. I didn’t storm after him. Maybe, as in some movie-still, he was holding a hand on the other side of our apartment door in a posture of devotion or willingness. I didn’t do the same. He walked away down the impossibly long hallway and I stood, taking in the congealed leftovers, the noise of an unwatched television, sun slowly ascending, a request for him to give me space.
I didn’t text. I didn’t call. I let him go. I let him float like a balloon against the sun, the day warming, waiting for the distant burst, for the fragments to wearily rain. Instead, all the planes fell.
/// /// ///
They still occasionally hold flight contests in abandoned parks where only glass shards and dirt grow, the moon in its impregnable residency. Contestants step up to the line and point paper airplanes out into the dim light. With each snap of a wrist, with every flick of a hand, the semblance of hope is rendered anew, as if we could so easily regain our balance. Some planes muscle a trajectory akin to flight, but it never holds. Sustain is impossible. One after another planes flutter to the barren ground, sponsors receding, their pockets redoubled with disappointment.
Military officials held out the longest. Fighter jets plummeting, bombers dropping, helicopters unable to hold any upward principle. Charred pilots littered the runways. They’ve locked themselves behind bunker gates.
The crackpots have never stopped. Any given moment you can still find one of them on a hillside, balsa wings attached, ready to flap and strain into broken ankles. Or the overachievers leaping from high peaks, smearing into splinters and blood, a cacophony of crushed spirits.
/// /// ///
I cleaned up the cartons and containers, wiped down the counters, arranged the pillows until they looked perfectly unused. Seated in a chair, the rising sun gleamed on my face. If I’d known it was the last one, I would have soaked longer. Still, I didn’t call. Didn’t text. I wasn’t waiting for him to appear in the doorway, to hear his key in the lock. I didn’t want him to disappear either. I only wanted a little room to breathe. The sun on my face was a placeholder, the wondrous warm bleat of its rays.
He might have boarded a plane. He might have thrown himself from a bridge. He might have receded like a wave gently back into the bosom of the shore.
I love you, he’d said.
I’d gone to speak, then hadn’t. It wasn’t malice.
I love you, he’d said again, then reached for my face, happy to overlook the unsaid.
I did love him. Only there were snags in the surface, the crackling of ice about to split. I worried for my footing. I didn’t want to be half of a whole.
That afternoon I went to the park. I sat on a bench. My mind was elsewhere. The phone remained silent. The sun radiantly waned, a humor of resolution flanking its corona.
From there, I watched the first plane come streaking across the sky. A simple contrail before it stooped, lowering, and I absorbed it as I would have a tv screen, the blue a backdrop. It came closer and closer, nosing toward me, as if it was aimed directly at my heart.
The explosion was deafening, blew shards of bark from the trees. My hair was whirled, my eyes crushed closed. A plume of black smoke rose and a burst of fire bellied outward, skinning my cheeks. The blast knocked a mother and stroller and baby aside. She scrambled up to grip the child, checking for wounds, running from the park. My ears rang and my forehead burned. I wandered across the park. I passed the abandoned stroller, heading toward the mélange of fire and smoke. On the way, several more planes fell in the distance. They streaked contrails morphing into explosions, their metal bodies plowing the earth, screaming with shrapnel and fire and black clouds.
The planes fell, rained, coating the skies until the smoke choked everything, thickening with catastrophe. No one understood. The precepts of flight had simply vanished. The landscape was a litany of wreckage, masses of fuel and collapse, buildings and bridges caved, neighborhoods torn, chain reactions of explosions, the first step in our obliteration.
When I rounded the corner I saw our building was window-broken and debris stained, brick-broiled but still standing, the plane having crashed into the adjacent complex.
I ran up the stairs. I don’t know what I was expecting. Him to be standing there. The world to reverse. My heart to freshly open. There was chaos in the stairwell and the hallways. People running, shouting. Some went to help across the street. Some merely flounced around like caught fish. Others were mute and morbid-eyed. I fought past and pushed the key into our door.
Inside was unaltered except for the shattered sliding glass door, where the curtain now curled, leaving a perfect view into a newly devastated world. The sky was matted gray, the sun obscured by rolling smoke, a constant drone of sirens blazing amid the flames and screaming.
/// /// ///
When our upstairs neighbor found out her sister had been on one of those planes, she hurled herself from the roof, landing brokenly on the pavement. A dog came to sniff the body before trouncing elsewhere. Another explosion bulged the air in the distance. I held my phone without pressing any buttons. On the mantle was a picture of me and Adi, smiling, the background a beachy tangent of former civilization.
By the time the smoke thinned, the blue of the moon was slowly lapping the sky, mixing with the smoldering orange and the red blue of emergency vehicles. With so many others, I dug through the rubble of the apartment complex across the street. I dug until my nails were shredded. I dug until I couldn’t see anything except chunks of wall and endings. In the middle of it, I found a hand, pale, the arm extending from a pile of mashed building. When I pulled, the arm came free of nothing. I held onto the hand for longer than I should have. It was the only life I’d found. The rest had been taken beyond structure. I placed it on a couch cushion, and the cushion floated away like a lily atop a puddle of water and fuel and blood.
The sirens droned, incessant, every emergency worker tied into one of ten thousand devastations, no hub to return to, no relief workers to take their place. It was the start of our unspooling.
I sat on a chair facing the blown balcony. Several times throughout the night there’d been a pounding at the door and I’d called his name. Adi? I don’t know if my voice sounded hopeful. No one responded and the knocking went away.
Before the world collapsed, on an early morning walk, trees silhouetted in bare light, we’d stood watching the tufted peak of an owl perched atop an eave. He’d said how an owl’s head could turn full-circle. It can’t go all the way around, I’d said, but I get what you mean. He’d sighed, and the owl had flown, its wings breathing for us.
I took out my phone and texted him for the first time since the first plane.
Adi?
/// /// ///
Like so many, I spent the next morning waiting for the sun to rise. News programs blared recapitulations of nothing. No one knew what was happening. Every plane in the sky had fallen, ripping open the lands below. Tens of millions of victims. Hundreds of millions. Numbers eluded the anchors, who only repeated whatever vague reassurances piped through their earpieces. Smoke drifted across the vantage of the shattered patio door. Every so often, a new explosion sounded or the final dying wail of a siren unwound from its battery. I waited, but the sun never came. My fingernails were gnarled from the all-night rubble dig, my eyes blaring from lack of sleep. My phone made no response.
Adi – are you okay?
…
Please
…
I’m still here.
…
/// /// ///
A golden moon. The slivered moon. An obscured moon. A new moon. The moon’s face. The man in the moon. The moon as a grin. The moon as a jaw. The moon hanging heavy on a low skyline. A harvest moon. A new moon. A blue moon. A blue moon. A blue moon. A blue moon. A blue moon.
/// /// ///
There was nothing wrong with him, nothing wrong with the relationship. I just didn’t know how far I could carry it. It felt too much riding a tandem bicycle. I’d started wondering if we’d keep ordering the same Chinese food, watching the same tv. Wondering if we’d devolve into some singular entity.
My phone chirruped, a solo bleep, and I jumped and snatched the phone to find a blank screen. The usual bright icons illuminated with a touch, but there were no messages, no missed calls, no notifications. It was a tiny glimpse of what would be the next anomaly. The ghost of him. A failed conjuring.
Glass flecked the carpet, crunching beneath my shoes as I wandered in front of the smoke fading in from the ember of a city. A false flower bloomed in a vase on the kitchen table. My keys sat on the counter. A coffee cup soaked in the sink. These were vestiges. I was imperiled with stagnancy.
Adi, was this our fault?
I typed it but didn’t press send, letting the phone lapse into darkness. It was a thought that had stained me since the first blue moon. The air never warmed. The military was swarming, trying to catch water with a sieve, no enemy to swat.
I remembered when we’d met his mother, out there on the beach, and we’d flown back to this middle state buoyant with familial approval. We’d bought a set of flatware. We’d spooned beneath a down comforter. We’d been comfortable.
/// /// ///
People still go out bird watching, hoping to catch a glimpse of one. In groups, in pairs, in teams they flush burned marshlands, tangle through leafless brush, puzzle through the gnarled and lifeless limbs of once forests. A young boy claimed he found a nest in the lower nestles of a spruce festooned in brown needles, but it turned out to be a plastic grocery sack browned with blood. There are no birds left.
/// /// ///
Two buildings down the street had collapsed during the next blue lit day, the damage to their structures like massively receding gums. They’d toppled, crushing people. Car collisions muddled every street. Apartments all over the city were abandoned, everyone scrambling for loved ones. I only understood casually. The screaming never quieted. I chose to hunker down. Several times shipments were brought to the doorstep of the apartment complex. Military rations of first-aid, food, bottled water. I let other families have them, subsisting on whatever fridge remnants lasted until the power snapped. Canned miscellaneous after that. For an entire week, only a sleeve of crackers and the water I’d stoppered in the sink before the plumbing went sour. More and more end of days, and me just waiting, for what?
/// /// ///
Every time I called him, the phone cut mid-ring. Each text was met with interminable ellipses.
Adi, I’m here. At least let me know you’re okay.
…
Adi – are my calls going through?
…
Adi. Text.
…
At some point, it became like sending messages to the dead. I refocused my energy.
Does it hurt where you are?
…
Is death a relief?
…
Should I come too?
…
Eventually, my phone died too. The signal had broken countrywide anyway, hammered with digital garbles. If I did love him, it was too late. I only had questions left.
When the fire alarm was triggered, I craned over the balcony to look for new peals of smoke or fire, but saw none. I opened the door to gauge an exit and found a woman dragging a small boy by the hand, sprinting down the hallway, her apartment door left open, two suitcases trailing them. Inside a different apartment there was a pounding, like a sledgehammer on the wall, and a man shouting No No No. I closed and locked the door.
Before the food ran out, I opened the apartment door a second time and saw three men in ski masks crouched over a body in the hallway. Each man had some blunt weapon raised. They stilled when I looked then resumed the muffled thudding.
I spent the entire next blue night staring at a bottle of pills.
In the aqua-tinted morning I packed a backpack with my remaining candles, a few canned vegetables, a dull pocket knife, and my dead phone. More than half of the block had already gone up in flames, no firefighters left to battle it. The rest, the brick and cinderblock buildings, had begun to reek of bad tides and mounting violence. Our neighbor’s body, the one who’d jettisoned herself from the roof, disappeared one night into the wresting jaws of a pack of feral dogs. Assault rifles were slung across the bodies of people passing on the street below. There were late night shouting matches conferring only terror and impatience. Adi hadn’t texted, hadn’t called, hadn’t returned.
/// /// ///
It had been a warm dusk night, way in the way back, when I’d told him about my dead family. Mother, father, little brother. I told him there were scars all over my heart. We were watching the bats swoop and swirl. He’d wrapped his arm around me, and I’d nestled in. There was a space there, against him, where the world seemed briefly griefless, before the rattling of my heart came back, blackly iridescent.
/// /// ///
I tucked the photo of us from the beach into the top of my bag and wrote a letter for him, the writing coming through a fog of tears and soot.
Adi,
I guess this is it. The neighborhood is mostly gone and the people are turning violent. I don’t know where you are, where you’ve gone, but I’m going to look. I’ll follow my heart I guess, because I have no other map. Do you think that will be good enough? There is so much more we have to say to each other, even though I don’t know what it is. If you come back here, if you read this, find me out there. I’ll be the one looking for you. I took that picture of us on the beach out by your mother’s place. Remember the way the water reset the sand with each wave of its long arms? I can’t thank you enough for showing me. That, if anything, deserves a proper goodbye. I hope you’re still alive. I hope this wasn’t all our fault. I hope we can talk soon.
Sarai
As I opened the front door to go, I thought I heard the call of a bird, sweet and feckless, somewhere outside the broken sliding glass door, but I didn’t go to look. Instead I only hesitated, listened to the reigning silence amidst the ground zero static of the world ending, and walked out into the abyss.