Dennis and I set off, leaving the opossum, the mole, and the junco to argue about which of them benefited most from the recent resurgence of the honeybee population. The opossum licked his lips while describing the thrill of tucking into a freshly broken-open hive, while the junco screamed about the sanctity of pollination and how the bees bring luck to the ones they choose. The mole yelled mostly unintelligible things. Blinded by their egotistic squabble, they managed to miss the very thing they had in common—mutual reverence for the bees of this world.
So it was back to me and Dennis again, our little murder, just how it should have been. We headed north, the trees shivering their leaves in approval, breathing relief into the wind. Their desperate pointing had stopped. A couple of blue-assed flies flitted around Dennis’s scab. I called them “opportunistic troglodytes” and then called them lunch. Flying low with contented flaps in the shade of Dennis’s shadow, I thought about the other worlds I’d learned of. Worlds that had always been here, but that I’d never seen or even heard about from the confines of our little house in Ravenna. Maybe it was because the MoFo world was so much louder. It drowned everything out with its clamor and fluorescent lights and bubbly pizzazz. And yet I felt a tickling cognizance, dewdrops beading in my mind. Perhaps I’d always known, always been aware that there is more to be seen than what is in front of me. Perhaps I’d deliberately chosen not to acknowledge the story a flower tells or the particular vibration of rocks. When the mole spoke of The Mother Trees, I didn’t question him because somewhere deep down, below feather and skin and bleached bone, I knew. As we made our plodding way toward Seattle’s central zoo, I thought about the life I’d lived between four walls and wondered how different I was from the animals in the enclosures.
I tuned in to Aura, listening to the back-and-forth of birds. There was much chatter over the missing eggs of a willow flycatcher, a band-tailed pigeon pined for its mate, and there were concerned murmurs over the unknown whereabouts of “The One Who Spits.” We filled our bellies and bladders so that my partner could douse what was left of our fine city in urine, and then we set off again. I rode Dennis, reluctantly leaving the loose, slippy, dark fur of his back only to do recon. The area directly north of Dr. Jose Rizal Park was quiet. Quiet in that dangerous, pernicious way that invites you to relax and lose your vigilance.
Midair, I spotted a gaggle of MoFos flocking on top of an RV. Growling and braying, they obsessively drove their nails into the RV’s rooftop. Many more of them—some burnt, one faceless, one wearing a flagpole in her neck—thronged the RV, rocking it from side to side, a vehicle so full that parts of MoFos stuck out of its windows. Returning to Dennis and terra firma, I called for him to follow me with a whistle and a “Come ’ere, boy!” and we carefully avoided them by passing through a neighborhood. The first house we approached had an Etch A Sketch doodle of tire tracks across its lawn. A leggy Japanese maple lay on its side, the casualty of the car’s hasty retreat, its leaves curled at the edges as if it had been grasping at something just out of reach in its final moments. The driveway was littered with credit cards and crumpled cash notes. Big Jim used to tell me that “money talks,” but this stash was mighty silent. I suspect this is one of those MoFo expressions meant to confuse, like when I wasted an entire afternoon searching the yard for an ax and a body because Big Jim said he’d buried the hatchet with his friend Mike. I picked up the shiniest quarter, then dropped it upon realizing how pointless caching it would be given our new nomadic life. Old habits die hard. The neighboring home had a moss-shrouded roof and a MoFo that caught us off guard. Dennis shot across the street and hid behind an abandoned table shielded by a sign that said, “Lemonade $1” in chubby chalk writing. I rose above, scanning for more craned necks. Finding none in the immediate vicinity, I lowered enough to get a better look.
The MoFo’s neck was bent unnaturally at an inquisitive ninety-degree angle, and he had four gashes deep in his forehead. He wore a once-white Cougars shirt, now covered in bright paint splashes and filth, the red predator cat emblem barely visible. The MoFo had worn a ring of mud into the overgrown front lawn. Who knows how many times he had trudged this constricted circle, the leash—attached to an enormous dog collar around his dislocated neck—taut and tethered to a wooden stake in the ground. Several feet away, someone had erected a small white cross festooned with photographs of a young, athletic MoFo. Candles and letters acned with purple hearts crowded the stem of the cross. Another sign, Sharpie on plywood, sat near the tethered MoFo. It read, “LEAVE MY SON ALONE.” Family. I was at once haunted by the image of the minivan on the freeway of death, the decal stickers on its back windshield showing its MoFo occupants in superhero garb, alongside another white outline with a smile and a floppy tongue—the family dog. A domestic. I fluttered over the MoFo and landed on the windowsill. Poking my head through the glassless window frame, I was walloped with an olfactory offense. It was worse than the rotting, neglected garbage that now speckled Seattle, worse than Nagartha’s homemade patchouli oil deodorant or Big Jim’s post-camping boxers. The dog, a Boston terrier, lay quietly in the living room, a bone-shaped chew toy by his side. Under his paws was a small collection of T-shirts that probably held the smell of his MoFos. The terrier had been partially eaten, possibly by the ones who raised him, bitten by the mouths that taught him to sit and how to be in the world. I was angry, fueled with rage that some wild monster with no regard for the laws of life got to thrive and build a lair in King Street Station and this family member, no doubt a loyal and loving companion, was here. Feeding maggots.
I shot back to Dennis as if filled with diesel and sriracha; I was fucking going to do anything I had to do to get The One Who Opens Doors on my side. Before we moved on, I checked the next couple of houses for signs of MoFos and domestic life. If there were pets in any of the homes, I couldn’t see them. I was met with closed windows—glass intact, which threw me—and doors I couldn’t open.
We passed a house that had at some point caught fire and was now charred, black and white as an old photo. The only sign of remaining life was the crispy pages feebly attempting flight from books, their spines black and broken. Down the street, perhaps inspired by the blaze, someone had made a bonfire and stacked it high with logs and deceased cattle. Closer inspection revealed that only one body was a cow. The rest were MoFos. Parts and pieces, still twitching and writhing in spite of everything. These were the things that were hardest on the eyes, even tougher to digest than apple seeds. I guess when the spirit of a species leaves us, it doesn’t go easily. I ushered us past and didn’t comment on the horror all around, concerned for Dennis’s mental well-being. I reminded him that we were on our way to meet The One Who Opens Doors, a MoFo like our Big Jim with a clever brain and kind fingers. I had to keep Dennis afloat—to stave off what Onida had called The Black Tide—so I told him jokes about promiscuous blondes and even one I’d made up, which I was exceedingly proud of.
“Hey, Dennis. What did the koalas say when their keepers shaved them?”
Dennis awaited my response with baited dog breath.
“Eucalyptus. Get it? You-Calipped-us!”
I’m pretty sure he snorted in delight. I reminded him that it was a Shit Turd original.
Dennis and I passed more housing, even one that was covered in crudely tacked sheet metal, with no visible windows or doors. Covering your crib in sheet metal is a pretty intense “back off.” But amidst the darkness of that zoo-bound march, there were undeniable sun spells. Close to that metal house, in a stand of magnolias that had erupted into a confection of pink and white, came a chittering. Three golden lion tamarins shot across the arms of the magnolia trees on a medley of cheeps, their funny little gray “what’s going on?” faces and flat-ironed noses framed by a mane of flame-orange hair. They hopped and scurried along the branches, sending pink and white blossoms snowing onto Dennis, who came to life barking at them, padded paws slapping against the tree trunk. His droopy eyes lit into a warm amber, and his bulky body gained a little more
bounce.
I watched them torment my partner playfully, enjoying it all—tree, dog, and monkey, all taunting one another in a way we were now desperately craving. Vibrancy. Zest. Life. The high-pitched cheeping suddenly stopped and the tamarins—perhaps experiencing life at a different pace from us—took off, tangerine tails trailing behind them. The third tamarin stopped midbranch, turned, and nailed me squarely with Milk Dud eyes. Nothing was said, just a silent exchange that didn’t need translation. We recognized the great change that had occurred and I knew we were both unsure of what it would bring. We saw one another. The tamarin turned to catch up with the others and exposed two tiny orange nuggets fused to her back. New life. It gave me a jolt, a Red Bull rush to the heart. It was so refreshing, I was only mildly offended that it was the tamarins who had put the pep back in Dennis’s step.
We ushered each other along and I reminded Dennis about the big thing Big Jim did, the thing we can never forget. He listened wordlessly and then stopped in his tracks. With a whimper, he stared at an enormous structure covered in blue tarp that hadn’t looked like much from the sky. The tarp billowed and rippled where something underneath moved. A forklift sat nearby. I fluttered to the top of the forklift and contemplated whether it was worth going near the breathing tarp. Oh yeah, wait, crow. A fly around the blue tarp mountain revealed that it was as tall as a magnolia. I selected a piece of the tarp that wasn’t moving. It felt rough, crinkling in my beak. The plastic, blue material was heavy and I flapped and flapped, yanking hard until I felt the tarp beneath me start to give way. I opened my beak and rose above. The heavy tarp fell on itself, causing a great section of it to slip off the mountain and reveal what had been sequestered underneath. Dog crates. A mountain of dog crates. And stuffed inside each one was a MoFo. A MoFo in a designer suit, one in yoga attire, another swaddled in some sort of homemade armor. MoFos of all types and colors and degrees of degradation. The tarp’s movement animated them and they responded in snarls and hisses. Attached to one of the crates was a sign. I swooped closer to read, “DO NOT REMOVE TARP. TRANSPORT TO AREA 7.”
At this point, I was wholly absorbed in reading the black letters—and fixated focus, in this New World, spells certain doom. I slipped up. I lost my vigilance. Fingers, dexterous and long, snatched my left wing, curling around it. I shrieked, a panicking flurry of midnight feathers. Dennis burst into a barking frenzy, his booms getting louder as he neared. The fingers pulled me in, crate bars getting closer and closer. I was heading into a noxious smell, into yellow teeth with lumps of rotting tissue between them. No! I contorted my body with a sharp twist and shot backward, freeing myself of the dirty digits. The MoFo who owned the hand stared at me from its crate, a caged prisoner who was feral and free from the bars of sanity. It was a female MoFo, and at once I knew her because I don’t forget faces, even ones that look like they’ve exfoliated in the garbage disposal. She was a local news anchor who had brought us stories of heroes and horrors. She still had her TV red dress on. Big Jim would be falling over backward if he were here. He loved this local news anchor and I approved. She had kind eyes and seemed to be able to afford more clothing than a lot of Big Jim’s TV crushes.
Dennis stopped barking, but trotted nervously at the base of the crates, licking his lips. He didn’t like any of this, not the threat on his partner or the unstable MoFos. He’d also never been great with crates. I thought it best to keep moving—it’s harder to catch a thing in motion.
The sun played hide-and-seek behind clouds, bathing us in light when it saw fit, mimicking our unsettled mood. Our journey north became more and more pressing with every pawprint. Dread sat undigested in our bellies like day-old ramen. We stuck to open roads, walking toward a horizon of hope. Hope that balanced on the mysterious, faceless frame of The One Who Opens Doors.
From the air, I made out a mass of MoFos ahead—hundreds and hundreds of bent bodies. These ones were also swarming, an army of craned necks and shedding skin, all looking up. It was horrible to see them from the sky, a frenzied horde with bloodred eyes staring up at you. But it turns out they weren’t staring at me. I descended to find them teeming around a lamppost, stretching their rotting limbs, and coughing out their intention in thick, mucusy bellows. Their leathery fingers slipped off the post, and those who lunged up the pole smacked it hard with their bodies, sliding back down to be swallowed by the crushing rabble below. I flapped closer to the post to find it was slick with some sort of grease. And at the top of the lamppost, dangling from a wire fastidiously twisted around the lamp head, was a cell phone. I flashed back to Big Jim, after his eyeball fell out, how he’d chased me down like a possessed fiend when I had his cell phone. I flashed on the napkin scrawled on by the MoFo lady trapped in the oyster house: Tell Peter John Stein I love him. Tell him but DO NOT USE YOUR PHONE. The MoFos—searching red eyes and stooped skeletons—were hunting for phones. This was bait. A trap set as a way to lure them in or away from something.
I whistled for Dennis, and we snuck around an abandoned apartment building to avoid the hysterical mass. We made it to Fremont, where I insisted on a short detour, zipping through the smashed glass doors of a place called the Flying Apron. Dennis and I, being from a family of devoutly religious eaters, committed not only to socially designated meals, but also less traditional mealtimes like, “it’s already Taco Tuesday in Sweden,” “tater tots are mood-enhancing potato pillows,” and “cheese is the cure for boredom.” The thing about family traditions is that they are sacred and should be upheld at all costs. The Flying Apron—singing its gluten-free, vegan status in swirly writing—turned out to be a quaint little bakery, or it probably was before its tables and chairs had all been smashed to splinters. Wall hangings lay in shards on the ground. Its exposed kitchen was blanketed in winter white, doused in some sort of flour. It was empty of mobile occupants, but for one apron-clad MoFo who was too busy smashing what was left of its cranium onto what was left of a hanging mirror to notice us.
I carefully selected a treat from the counter of surprisingly intact goodies with pink identifying labels. I got to work on a vegan chocolate chip cookie made with garbanzo flour, plucking out the chips with concerted effort. It had aged nicely and had the complex consistency of compacted sand. Dennis helped himself to three apricot thumbnails, a blueberry–oat scone, a rock-hard portobello mushroom sandwich, half a cardamom chai cake, three green tea macarons, a cinnamon roll, and a pumpkin ginger muffin. Dennis is effectively waste management on legs. I’d always had a glorious daydream of signing him up for Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest on Coney Island. I’d show up as his manager, you see, decked out in a pinstriped suit and hat, and George Shea would pat me on the back and come up with some witty name for Dennis. “The Rapacious Rapscallion of Ravenna!” “The Peckish Puppy with Peristaltic Pancreas Power!” Then I’d carefully go about placing some serious cash with the bookies.
My strategy was not to hang around anywhere for too long, so once we’d ransacked the Flying Apron’s baked-goods counter, we fired up our jets, made like geese, and got the flock out of there. Before we knew it, with our hearts in our throats and sustainable, gluten-dairy-egg-soy-corn-free, alternatively sweetened treats in our stomachs, we’d made it to the Woodland Park Zoo. The sun was settling into the horizon and the sky suddenly darkened with the black bodies of crows. College crows were flying northeast, heading to their stupid night roost to snuggle up together like a bunch of poop terrorists. They chatted about plans for the evening, some calling out to me. I ignored them. They were not my business.
As I sat atop my trusty hound, preparing to cross the abandoned west parking lot of the zoo, we spotted a red GMC Yukon that sat unnaturally upright—trunk on the ground, hood in the air—against the bole of the European white birch it had collided with. Two titan trunks had done battle. It was the birch that had survived. But it had suffered, parts of its bark peeling like sunburned skin, and I bowed my head in respect, thinking of The Mother Trees. “I’m sorry this happened to you,” I t
old the tree, feeling a prick of self-consciousness. Everywhere I looked was more vibrant, more alive—like I was seeing it in 4-D—in the new knowledge I’d acquired. Life is not the same once you’ve learned just how deeply a tree can feel.
The parking lot meters had their glass screens smashed out. One lay in trampled pieces, dried blood smearing the mashed metallic keypad. Preparing to follow the ramp that led down to the entrance of the Woodland Park Zoo, a sharp breeze ruffled my feathers.
“Alliiiiveee…” I heard the word, a thin whistle that whipped through the air on the limpid wings of a dragonfly. Dennis stopped. I recalled the words of a mole with icing-pink hands: Under the soil is like…magical…and that’s how the trees truly talk, none of the aboveground whisperings that take so much of their energy. It’s not their real language, see? That’s why, if they’re talking to you, yous better be listening, because they are making a mighty fine effort. I had heard the effort. Dennis and I both turned to face the house that summoned us. It peered from behind an enormous Douglas fir, timid and tiny with a teal and white paint job. An exposed brick chimney rose like a surrender flag. And then I noticed one of the fir’s colossal branches was pointed toward the teal house’s front door. A shiver scurried up Dennis’s back, jumping species to scamper up my legs and under my down.
“Alllivveee…” The silvery voice sounded out again.
“Yup, I got it!” I squawked to no one in particular, suddenly feeling like a blue-footed booby. I was really living outside my comfort zone these days. Then a thought struck me. Alive. Could it be? Could there be a healthy MoFo inside this home? My whole body began to shake with excitement, my beak chattering uncontrollably. Dennis ambled up the short driveway and stone steps to a teal front door. The Douglas fir loomed above, a silent guardian. The door remained closed, an impenetrable obstacle, essentially Fort Knox to me, Dennis, and the Douglas fir—The Ones Without Opposable Thumbs. I pecked fruitlessly at the door handle.
Hollow Kingdom Page 11
