Nightmare Yearnings, page 3
* * *
Falling asleep that night was tough. Despite the curtains, light still bled in from the outside—camera flashes, mostly. The woodpeckers were apparently still on full display, though I didn’t bother to check; I knew what they looked like already. It took four sleeping pills and an eye mask to finally lull me to sleep sometime after 2 a.m.
I forgot to set my alarm for work, but as it turned out, I didn’t need it. I awoke to the sound of wings flapping and people gasping. The gasps didn’t surprise me—these were “extinct” birds, after all. What did surprise me was the loudness of the flapping. It sounded less like two mates getting frisky and more like a whole flock swarming. I wrapped myself in a bathrobe and shuffled to the window, parting the curtain just an inch. I jerked back when a fast, white-tipped wing rustled the window screen from outside. And before I could close the curtain, another and another. Dozens of the “extinct” woodpeckers zipping around my yard, catching insects. Cameras clicked and bird watchers whispered, but their noises were buried behind those of the birds.
I looked at the wall clock, turned my face away, then looked again. If this were one of my lucid dreams, the clock might have read 2:15 one second and 10:38 the next, but the time was consistent. I was most certainly awake, under-caffeinated but heart beating as if the opposite were true.
It was time to take a window tour, not daring to actually step outside but rather acting as a voyeur who didn’t wish to be seen, much less photographed. Moving from one window to the next, I could scarcely believe what I saw. Cars and news vans lined the block bumper to bumper, as if my house were the venue for a big pop concert. More expensive cameras than a red carpet event, and of course, woodpeckers in hordes. None of the birds seemed to move beyond my property line. None of them took up residence in my northern neighbor’s more spacious oak tree, nor did they seem interested in my southern neighbor’s bird feeder brimming with seeds. It was as if an invisible line marked their territory, and to cross it was to violate a law of nature.
As I stood staring, my phone rang. It was my Instacart delivery driver; I recognized his number even if I never answered his calls when he arrived with groceries. This time, however, I picked up, knowing there’d probably been a complication with the delivery.
“Hey, I, uh—it’s impossible to get to your door,” he said, the flapping of wings and clicking of cameras audible through the phone speaker. “I don’t know if you know this, but there’s—”
“Yeah, I know,” I said, not meaning to come across short but doing so nonetheless. “Can you put the bags on the sidewalk? I’ll—I can probably get to them from there.”
“I don’t know if you can, but, uh, sure.”
A terrible taste spread across my tongue. Not normal morning breath, but something like old coffee grounds soaked in lemon juice. I took a deep breath, thanked the driver, and hung up. It was time to see if I could get outside.
As soon as I approached my front door, a cacophony of clacking greeted me. Not just one woodpecker, but countless, drilling away at the door. So many that the wood shuddered in its frame. I backed up, wondering how soon it would be before they bore their way into my home and made a nest in my living room. I held my breath, unsure what to do, before deciding I couldn’t let it happen. I had to shoo them off, assert my boundaries, so I pounded against the door as if doing so might banish the birds back to extinction. But my pounding wasn’t met with a flutter of fearful wings. No retreat at all, in fact. The birds hammered harder, faster. The door was not long for this world, and soon maybe I wouldn’t be either.
I dialed Animal Control. If there was anyone who could handle this situation without violence, it would be them. The phone rang six times before someone picked up, and I explained the situation.
“Yes,” the woman on the line said, “we’re well aware and have a team in front of your house already. It’s an incredible sight, isn’t it?”
I hung up without saying goodbye. What use was it? Nothing I could say would convince her of the danger I was in, the terror that rocked me. Hell, she’d probably been dreaming about something like this happening for ages. A birdwatcher’s Christmas.
I was back at square one, waiting out the problem even as the swarm grew bigger by the second. The sound grew louder too. I could no longer distinguish between individual wingbeats and clack-clack-clacks. It was a thousand different rhythms playing simultaneously, blending into a seamless, deafening drone. And even when I put on the noise-cancelling headphones, the sound persisted like a bad case of tinnitus.
Again, I prayed, this time out loud, shouting myself hoarse. A prayer repeated over and over, sometimes addressed to God but more often to Mom. If she were here—in her room across the hall from mine—she would know what to do. Even if she couldn’t fix the problem, she would have made bearing it so much easier, her words a sedative, quieter than the swarms but so much more powerful.
Around lunch time, I stopped praying, my throat feeling like hot copper. I needed a drink, some milk to soothe the burn. Yet the fridge was nearly empty. A jar of pickles, some salsa that had probably fermented by now, and two eggs a month past their expiration date. My groceries were still outside, or at least I hoped they were. Maybe the birds had crossed the property line and gotten to them. Or if not them, the bird watchers. My stomach rumbled, vacant and bubbling and sick all at once. I laid down on the kitchen floor, eyes closed, and waited for the feeling to subside.
Somehow, I fell asleep. Perhaps out of exhaustion, or maybe out of shock. I don’t know. But when I awoke, there were ivory beaks poking out of the walls. Hundreds of them cheeping and thrashing their tongues, licking up wallpaper paste and pulverized plaster. I could no longer hear the sounds of the human world. No cameras clicking or cars pulling over or news reporters speaking into microphones with giddy disbelief. I couldn’t see any people either—the windows were a mess of feathers and yellow eyes.
“What do you want?” I screamed, and their beaks opened and closed and unfurled tucked-away tongues.
Food. Maybe if I gave them food, they’d leave. But no way would I feed them by hand. Sure, I’d never heard of a man-eating bird, but I’d also never heard of ivory-billed woodpeckers until two days ago. I didn’t know what they were capable of. I ran to Mom’s room, hunting for the grabber she’d used to get clothes off their hangers. Her room was almost untouched, bed made, still smelling faintly of perfume and urine. The only difference was the holes in the wall with beaks jutting out. I snatched the grabber from her closet and ran back to the kitchen, opening up the pantry. Inside was an ancient box of saltine crackers, probably stale, but if birds could wolf down moldy bread, they probably wouldn’t mind a stale cracker either.
I snapped each cracker in half and placed the pieces between the grabber’s pincers. Then I held an offering out to each bird, one at a time. Sightless as they were, their eyes cloaked inside the walls, they sensed the food and snapped at it, crumbs falling to the floor but most of the cracker sliding down their gullets in a single gulp. Still, the ones I fed didn’t retreat. If anything, they grew more restless, beaks slapping against the sides of their holes.
What was I to do? I wept. I begged for Mom—her spirit, her rotted body, her clothes animated to imitate her form. I didn’t care. All I knew was that I couldn’t do this alone. Without her strength, I’d end up dying. Screaming pleas shredded my vocal cords.
And then the birds stopped cheeping, stopped thrashing around inside the walls. My tears ceased. Something was happening. A moment later, thousands of wings beat, not as a wall of chaotic noise, but as a unified rhythm. A rumble shook the floor. Concrete cracked. A whoosh of wind blew up through the floorboards and I lost my balance, the grabber flying out of my hand. Vertigo hit me hard. A wave of dizziness so intense I retched. There was nothing in my stomach—just a thick slither of bile.
When I found my footing, I walked over to the kitchen window as if on a tightrope, bending at the knees to keep from falling. The window was still blocked by a cluster of feathers and eyes, but through a crack I could see only the sky. Not a single building or tree or human. The color darkened the higher up we got, from pale blue to navy to almost black. My breath thinned, and even as the floor steadied itself, my vertigo intensified. I sat down, counted my inhales and exhales.
Sometime around my thousandth breath, I realized I was no longer on the floor. I was floating, just an inch or two, but still—floating. So too were my fridge, my stack of bills, and Mom’s jar of old pesos. Again, I retched, but this time the bile floated with me, spittle parting from my chin and levitating away.
The wing beats grew quieter until they were silent—no sound in space. Still, I sensed we were moving, moving far faster than I thought birds capable of, this migration a cosmic one. I wondered for a moment if I was already dead. I grabbed a steak knife suspended in air and poked my finger, digging in until I drew blood. A crimson drop floated away like a planet falling out of orbit. So, I was alive. But how? And for how much longer?
I used the drifting fridge to propel myself to the window, gripping a curtain rod to stay in place. Once more, I found the crack between the feathers and unblinking eyes, and I peered into the blackness.
Except the blackness wasn’t pure. There was something far off. Lights. No, stars. A ring of stars. Golden and growing nearer each moment. A tingling warmth spread through my chest and flowed into my extremities. A weight lifted from both body and soul, as absent as gravity. I laughed a soundless laugh, terrified, ecstatic.
* * *
We’re getting closer now. I don’t know how long it’s been, but I’m coming, Mom. I’ll be there soon.
Gray Matter
“You know we found bits of him, right?” the cop says. “Forensics is still figuring out exactly what those bits are, but they don’t look like his outsides. You know anything about that?”
Asim sits in the interrogation room, still wearing his scrubs. The AC is broken—or maybe the officers turned it off—so he’s already sweat through his clothes several times over in the four hours he’s been here.
Amirah sits across from him. She’s dressed for her adult softball tournament, but Asim’s call pulled her away right before she stepped up to the plate. Amirah turns to the cops, taking a legal pad and pen out of her saddle bag.
“Will you give me and my client some time, please?” she asks.
The male cop rolls his eyes, and the female cop mutters something under her breath, but both leave, locking the door behind them. There’s a moment of thick silence, then Amirah leans in toward Asim.
“I’m missing a game for this,” she says. “Your sister’s pissed.”
“I know,” Asim says, and he starts crying.
“Shit, Asim. I was trying to lighten the mood, not—”
She sighs, then pulls an eyeglass cloth out of her bag to wipe Asim’s cheeks. Asim twists his head as if to deny his tears are there, but at Amirah’s touch he relaxes. After Amirah finishes, she puts the cloth back in her bag, then clicks her pen.
“You don’t have to tell me if you did it—”
“I didn’t,” Asim says, shaking his wrists in the too-tight cuffs.
“Okay, but I need to be able to defend you. Tell me what happened, from the beginning. Your version of the story.”
“You’re not going to believe me.”
“Your sister’s paying me to believe you.”
“Fuck,” Asim says, and he puts his head on the table—bangs it once but not hard enough to bruise.
When he lifts it back up, he cracks his neck and glances back up at the clock. 4:06. He’ll be late to work if he tells the whole story, but doing so might also keep him out of prison—or land him in an asylum. Either way, he doesn’t have much choice.
He takes a deep breath and begins.
* * *
Mr. Persson probably would’ve ended up in assisted living if his children visited more often. They had the cash to pay for it—Emma being a radiologist and Ari a pediatrician—but I’ve never seen them visit. In fact, I might have been Mr. Persson’s only visitor in the six months since his wife died. It was my job to help the man with his medication, do whichever chores were beyond his ability, and ask him about his interests. It wasn’t that I particularly liked talking about Clive Cussler novels or old Swedish films. It was more that encouraging the man to access his knowledge of those things would help preserve the memories longer. After Mrs. Persson’s death, Mr. Persson’s mind started unspooling like a fishing rod with a whale on the other end. Nothing could reverse the process, but certain measures could slow it down. In addition to encouraging trips down a crumbling memory lane, I sometimes did crosswords with Mr. Persson. When crosswords eventually proved too much for the man, we went to word searches instead. Still, a word I found in three seconds would take Mr. Persson ten times as long to find. But it didn’t matter. As long as I was on the clock, I could wait.
One morning a few months back, I was at Mr. Persson’s house after a long night of gaming with friends. I hadn’t slept much, but Mr. Persson and I were comfortable enough with each other that he didn’t mind if we took a mid-morning nap at the same time. There I was, lying on his couch, which was about a foot too short and a little musty but comfortable enough. Mr. Persson had popped in a DVD of some classic Swedish film to teach me the language, but the black-and-white picture and subtitles were enough to make me feel my lack of sleep. The man was in the bathroom, so I figured I could close my eyes until he came back without causing offense. As I drifted, a sound plucked me back into consciousness. I wasn’t sure if it was a dream or something real, but it sounded like Mr. Persson was whispering. I opened my eyes and sat up. The sound was coming from the bathroom, so I went to investigate, hoping the man hadn’t fallen or pissed himself before reaching the toilet.
When I opened the bathroom door, Mr. Persson was kneeling in front of the toilet like a sick-drunk college student, but he wasn’t puking his guts out. He was whispering into the bowl, his bony fingers trembling on the rim.
“Min älskling,” he said, “är du där?”
I knew that “min älskling” meant “my love.” He’d taught me that in case I ever met a pretty Swedish girl. We hadn’t quite broached my whole asexual thing yet, but still, the language lesson proved useful here. I felt a pang seeing the man whisper those words into the toilet. Dementia made people do strange things, and I’d hoped this stage wouldn’t come so soon.
“Mr. Persson,” I said, bending down and holding out my hand to him.
He turned his face toward me slowly. A stray pube clung to his chin from resting it on the toilet rim, but he smiled, totally unaware.
“She’s here,” he said. “She’s back.”
A shiver ran through me, and I tried to compose myself the only way I knew how—moving on without comment. I grabbed a wad of toilet paper and wiped off Mr. Persson’s chin. He frowned and grumbled a Swedish goodbye as I lowered the toilet seat.
“Do you want to keep watching the movie?” I asked, helping the man up.
“Nej,” he replied. “I’m not in the mood.”
“I thought you loved Ingo Bergman.”
“Ingmar,” he corrected.
He gazed longingly at the toilet once more, and I didn’t know whether to laugh or get the hell out of there. Neither option was terribly professional, so I instead escorted the man out into the living room. The whole time, I pictured those toilets in Australia that become home to ten-foot-long snakes hiding in the pipes. Not älskling material, if you ask me.
* * *
“Sounds like you and this guy got along okay,” Amirah says. “Too bad about his dementia—really changes a person.”
“Oh, you have no idea,” Asim says, massaging his temples.
* * *
It’s no surprise that plenty of old people still have sex drives. The ones who have a partner and the ability to have sex do it, and the ones who have no one still masturbate. Mr. Persson would sometimes excuse himself for that very purpose, and I knew what he was doing, but it didn’t bother me. Thing is, he was normally good at cleaning up after himself, but this one day was different. I think it was a week after the toilet incident. He left for the bathroom like normal, grinning and glancing over his shoulder at me as he hobbled across the carpet. I put my headphones in, figuring I’d give the man some sonic privacy. But three EDM tracks in, his voice cut through the music. It was a cry, but I couldn’t tell if it was one of pleasure or pain. I tore my headphones out and dashed to the bathroom, whipping open the door without knocking.
Mr. Persson was sitting on the toilet, clothed in only a sweater. A black ooze coated his waist, and at first I thought he’d had an accident, but whatever it was, it had a sharp, synthetic smell like diesel. The man had an erection, and my initial thought was that he’d used something as lube that wasn’t supposed to be lube. This happens sometimes with dementia patients—well, not the lube thing specifically, but mistaking one item for another; a tube of itch cream for a tube of toothpaste, for instance.
“Sorry for interrupting, Mr. Persson,” I said, averting my eyes while still speaking through a crack in the door. “Do you need any help?”
“She’s as good in the sack now as she was then, Asim,” he said, and he laughed.
Getting up from the toilet, he slipped on a glob of the ooze that had fallen to the tile, but thankfully he landed right back on the toilet seat. I opened the door and rushed over.
“Please, let me help you,” I said, gesturing for him to stay seated.
As I cleaned up the mess, Mr. Persson kept chuckling to himself, peeking below him into the toilet, muttering incoherent flirtations. I glanced around the bathroom to see if I could find whatever the hell he’d gotten all over himself. The trash can was full of used tissues, bloodied floss, and dulled shaving razors, but nothing out of the ordinary. I didn’t find anything strange in the medicine cabinet either—pills and toothpaste, mostly. With no obvious answers in sight, it was best to ask the man directly.
