She could not have made a worse mistake with him. His pink face went the color of a pickled egg. He dropped his tablet and his command of grammar. “Youse were hiding behind that mirror or something!” he roared. “Trying to make a fool of me. Youse—”
“Fine. It didn’t happen,” Sassy said.
Her dead calm, more dead than calm, startled the yelling out of him. He stared at her.
“And if it didn’t happen, I’m not here, right?”
She felt so wooden she almost believed it herself.
“None of this happened,” she said.
The cop swallowed. “That’s a good idea,” he said.
Sassy said, “I don’t exist.”
“Okay, miss. Um, sure,” said the cop in a thin voice out of keeping with his thick neck. His skull under his buzz haircut must have been not as thick as it appeared. “Fine by me.” He backed toward the door. “You don’t exist,” he agreed, and he was gone.
It was the black Egyptian-cat-goddess hair tech at Rapunzel’s front desk this time. She greeted Sassy with wary-eyed reserve. “Oh. Uh, hello again.”
“Hello.” Sassy felt suddenly very much aware that she was wearing the selfsame sweats as before, a bit rumpled from drying in the maids’ locker room. She had slept on a lumpy sofa in the employee lounge, and she had slept badly. Her hair felt stringy. She wondered whether she might request a complimentary shampoo.
Probably not. The young woman, what was her name, Romaine, seemed eager to be rid of her. “You came back for your coat, right? I’ll get it.” She fled toward the back.
Sassy had forgotten all about the coat. She had so little left that when the girl brought it to her it felt like a celestial gift. She put it on at once and comforted her hands in the pockets—whoa. Car keys! That, and she actually had a few dollars in there.
Not that car or money would be of any use to her where she wanted to go. She asked, “Actually, what I came for—may I see your oval mirror for a minute?”
“No.” Romaine sounded most unprofessionally abrupt.
“I have to.” Sassy darted past her, heading for the cubicle.
“No! You can’t.”
Sassy ran, lunged at the cubicle door like a sprinter lunging for the tape, flung it open, then stood there as the young woman clunked up to her in her platform heels.
“You can’t,” Romaine repeated.
Sassy could see why. The mirror wasn’t there—only a startled hair technician and an older woman in a perforated plastic dye bonnet. The latter was starting to look pissed off.
“We got rid of it.” Romaine pulled Sassy away by the arm and closed the door. “You’d better leave, ma’am.”
“You got rid of it?” Sassy repeated, as blank as a parrot.
“Not me personally. Management. Ma’am, this way.” The young woman steered her toward the exit. “I’m asking you to leave the premises—”
“They were that afraid somebody else would dive through it?” Sassy was still grappling with mirrorlessness.
“—without any further disruption.” Romaine shoved her toward the door.
Sassy left.
That day she cleaned rooms with a lack of luster, shedding her uniform to grab a shower and shampoo in one of the bathrooms as she was scrubbing it, for which infraction she received an unsatisfactory rating from her shift supervisor.
Camped out on the sofa in the lounge that night, she could not sleep at all, and it was not just a matter of through traffic and lumpy upholstery. It was not just a matter of having been chewed out. It was not just a case of being homeless and almost penniless. It was not just being divorced and having to contend with Frederick—
Well, maybe it was partly Frederick. The thought of him jolted her up off the sofa and sent her wandering through the Sylvan Tower’s filigree lobby in the dim light of 2 A.M. lonely.
She could almost hear the place breathing, it was so quiet, so glassy still under the great vault of the atrium, so shadowy beneath the feathery trees. Sassy leaned on a wrought-iron balcony railing and stared down six stories into the fishpools swimming with warm glints like amber stars; goldfish, or the rippling reflection of neon? Sassy couldn’t tell. She couldn’t see any reflection of herself, not even a blue budgie.
Frederick. The nebbish. The narcissus without a reflection. Man without a self.
He stole my soul. Over the years. He’s a black hole soul sink.
Vaguely Sassy wondered why he didn’t have one of his own. Maybe there weren’t enough souls to go around. That made sense, the way population increased. Each generation had more people than the last, so if you believed in reincarnation, which made more sense than wings and a harp when you thought about it, if souls got passed down then some people got born without one. And then what to do? A resourceful person would probably grow a perfectly nice homemade soul from scratch, but someone like Frederick—he would just want to snatch somebody else’s soul like one of those nasty water spirits snatching somebody’s reflection. A soul snatcher, that was what Frederick was. A malevolent lurking soul snatcher. Stealing hers because he had none of his own.
Racquel was right about him.
The thought of Racquel put a point like a spearhead on Sassy’s despair. Was he okay? Would she ever see him again? Did he hate her for getting him into this bizarre mess called her life?
She had to get back. Back there. Back to her paradise, his perdition.
Please.
Sassy had long ago stopped believing in God—although she did somehow believe in the soul, she knew in her heart that creatures were more than just hunks of meat moving around, she even felt that trees were more than just oversize broccoli, and maybe that was sort of the same thing as believing in God—for whatever inchoate reason, she tilted back her head to gaze up at the sky as if that might somehow help. Except she could not see sky. She looked up, up at dusky atrium soaring above her, balconies, vines, canopy of glass the sick tongue-gray color of the city night, plumy tops of ficus trees—her heart turned over with yearning. She had never, she realized, been in the forest of lost dreams at night. What was it like? Did tree frogs sing, or human voices, or spirits? Were there wild cries echoing, the crackings and whistlings of night birds, the caroling of foxes and wolves? Somewhere did a flute sing? Did stars nest silver in the treetops? And the moon—was it a curling white feather in the sky there, a single sickle feather from a white cock’s tail?
For a moment she could almost see the moon, the stars flocked in the treetops like sugar doves, she imagined it so ardently that it all melted together, the ficus and the glory forest and the canopy overhead and the canopy of leaves she remembered—but then it was just the Sylvan Tower again.
Just for a moment … but now it was gone.
And everything was too hard, too glass and steel and smog and smell of disinfectant cleanser, and Sassy couldn’t bear it. It wasn’t fair.
Head thrown back, she cried out, not caring who heard her.
“Oh, poop!” she cried to the uncaring realm of locked floors and suites.
In the listening silence that followed, the echoes of her angst faded away.
But then, as she sighed a breath that solved nothing and lowered her head, there came another sound. A feathery whirring bore down on her out of the shadows.
Skreeek!
It cried out even more loudly than she had. And joyously. Sassy felt almost sure she heard joy in that wild cry. Startled, she flung up her arms as a warm plop of bird poop annointed on her shoulder—startled, but not afraid this time as she felt her visitor landing on the temple of her glasses.
“Hello?” She put up a hand cautiously and brought it down with a parakeet thereon.
The parakeet.
Its little warm feet gripped her forefinger. It fluttered its wings to keep balanced but did not fly away. It tilted its yellow head to look up at her face, and its beak emanated a sound too tender to be labeled a mere chirp; it was a bird-whisper such as it might have breathed to a lover.
“Goodness,” Sassy said. “Mercy. What in the world am I supposed to do with you?” But she felt warmth start in her heart and radiate to her face, she felt herself blinking and smiling because—because there still was a connection between her and—there. How, she had no clue, but on her hand perched a visitor from the lost realm of her soul. And she was no longer so alone.
TEN
It was hard to remember that she had thought all her troubles would be over once she found the parakeet. Now he was here, but she didn’t know how to get him to restore her own proper image in her mirror, and moreover she didn’t much care. Reflections just didn’t seem so important anymore. All she cared about was getting back to the forest, and back to Racquel.
It turned out to be surprisingly impossible to find an oval mirror. Throughout the rest of that night and the next morning Sassy ransacked the Sylvan Tower for one, searching the locked floors and the boutiques and even the storerooms, while the other employees cast sidelong glances at her, like there was something wrong with being obsessed? Something odd about being homeless and prowling with a parakeet following you everywhere? Wherever she went, it flew along with her or rode on her shoulder, accenting her sweatshirt with its poop.
Sassy was experiencing an exalted form of desperation which made her care not whether people stared at her or whether there was poop on her sweatshirt. The only point of light in her life right now was the parakeet. Its devotion made her feel warm and humble. On her way around the lobby’s sixth level, she held out her hand and it landed on her. “Twee!” it cried at her with a fey joy. “Twee! Twee! Twee!”
“Okay, I’m Twee,” Sassy agreed. “And what’s your name?”
She spoke rhetorically, like a doting pet owner, but the parakeet answered with a cheep.
“Kleet?” said Sassy onomatopoetically. “Okay. Kleet, I am starting to think it is a conspiracy. They took all the oval mirrors away.”
By noontime she could no longer joke about it. Hunger and exhaustion and discouragement caught up to her, and she ducked into the mezzanine ladies’ and leaned on the edge of a sink, feeling like she might either puke or cry. “Kleet,” she asked—for the parakeet had ducked in there with her, of course—“what am I going to do?”
“Twee! Twee! Twee!”
Sassy looked up, and her despair softened into a bittersweet smile. Wings fluttering ecstatically, Kleet was greeting her blue budgie in the mirror. After his first three shrieks he gabbled tenderly, beak to beak with Sassy’s reflection. Her poor budgie, it looked as glum and hassled as she felt, its cobalt feathers rumpled, and it looked as if it wanted to swoon in Kleet’s arms. Or wings. Whatever. Just behind the glass, it—she—pressed close to him as he crooned and twittered and tried to nibble at her cheekfeathers.
“Kleet,” Sassy said, “you’re smarter than people. They can’t even see her.”
They look at me and all they see is a dumpy dumped housewife with squirrel-gray hair.
As if he could hear her thought, Kleet whirred up suddenly to perch atop her much-impugned head. “Twee! Twee! Twee!”
Sassy put her hand up and brought him down where she could look at him. She loved the feel of his vermicular feet gripping her finger. She loved his round eyes in the sides of his no-neck head. She loved his feathering, as yellow as daffodils, as green as Eden in sunlight.
“Twee,” he said to her earnestly.
“Kleet,” she wondered aloud, “what are you trying to tell me?”
In all his short life Kleet had never felt so loonishly happy, so blessed. She had called to him once again, his deity, she had called to him from the hardair world and the force of her clarion summons had startled him from his sleep, he had flown to her, he had found her again, and—this was the dayspring of Kleet’s great joy—she had extended her pale holy twigs to him in greeting. She had allowed him to perch thereon. She had spoken to him by name.
And as if this were not ecstasy enough, Deity had shown unto him an azure princess of a parakeet—it was the first time Kleet had ever encountered one of his own kind, and she was female and so fair, so lovely melting blue, and—true, she was sealed away from him behind the mystery of hard air, but—but would she not soon, somehow, be his mate?
“Twee!” Kleet sang in rapture and rejoicing and holy praise. “Twee! Twee! Twee!”
His was a living deity. A tree that spoke and walked. A very descendant of the One Tree.
Long ago, in the Great Time, Kleet knew, there had been the One Tree whose feathers were all colors, not like the mostly green feathers of the sleepy trees today. The One Tree’s feathers were iridescent blue like jays and yellow like canaries and bronzegold like pheasants and flashing red like tanagers and flamingo-pink and toucan-orange and hummingbird-puce and green like—like parrots, of course. And parakeets. And like parakeets and linnets and larks and nightingales, the One Tree sang. There were no birds back in those beginning times, and no other trees except the One, but the One Tree sang like every bird that was ever to be and grew great enough for every tree. And as the One Tree grew and sang, it lifted its branches and took flight. It darted up like a skylark, it soared like a sea hawk—but it did not leave the earth. The One Tree’s roots grew to the core of the world, and such was the greatness of the One Tree that when it flew, the whole world flew with it.
Kleet knew these things, not because any mentor had ever told him, but because they were true. From his hollow-cored bones he knew them.
But, his bones told him, the One Tree became lonely. Flying through the vastness of being, the One Tree found many worlds, worlds like eggs and worlds like stones, worlds made of fire or ice or fog or dew, worlds with many sorts of creatures living on them—but never another world with One Tree like itself. With each world it found, the One Tree grew lonelier.
Then out of the solitude of the One Tree there came the First Winter and the Great Molting.
Kleet understood the loneliness, the solitude. He had felt them.
Sadness had made the One Tree shed all its plumage. And that was the end of the solitude of the One Tree. Each feather shed by the One Tree flew up and became a bird, each according to its color or colors, all the many birds in the world, far beyond numbering. But the molting of the One Tree did not stop there. When all its feathers had dropped, the One Tree itself began to molt apart, twig by twig scattered far, far by the winter wind, branch by branch falling, and finally splinter by splinter cracking like a great shellbreak, until every part of the One Tree was leveled to earth.
And each twig, each splinter, each branch, grew into a tree, all the many trees in the world, far beyond numbering.
Trees were dwindled, diminished remnants of the One Tree, Kleet knew, sleepy stupid things that no longer sang or flew. Still, many trees molted upon the coming of winter, remembering the One Tree.
And many birds still flew to trees for comfort, remembering the time when Bird was Tree and Tree was Bird. Sitting in the heart of Tree, singing, Bird knows itself to be the spirit of Tree.
Sitting upon the warm lifted five-twigged limb of Sassafras, singing, Kleet knew her to be Deity. BirdTree.
“Twee,” he sang her praise. “Skreek. Skreeeeek! Kek kek kek Twee!”
And she sang back to him, skreekings he understood not at all, although the music of her singing swelled his breast fit to burst with joy. Deity sang:
“Birdie, birdie in the sky,
Why’d you do that in my eye?”
“Sassy! Hi,” Lydia said. “Come on in.”
Surprised that the big poopy woman remembered her name, Sassy smiled mistily. She hadn’t thought Lydia would know her; these days she didn’t think anybody knew her or cared. She carried Kleet nestled to her gravitationally challenged bosom under her coat, because it was cold out, and she had been feeding herself and Kleet on junk food filched in the employee lounge, she was missing work, not that she gave a flying leap, and she had spent her last few dollars on gas to get to Lydia’s apartment. But Lydia’s greeting made her smile.
She didn’t feel like making small talk, though. As soon as she had stepped into the apartment (watching the floor so as not to trample other bipeds) and Lydia had closed the door behind her, she opened her coat to show Lydia the parakeet clinging like a honeycreeper to her sweatshirt.
“Twee,” said Kleet.
“Oooh!” said Lydia, her homely voice hushed like dawnlight, her homely face soft and bright like sunlit forest mist as she gazed at Kleet, as Kleet gazed around him.
“Kek kek kek!” With a cry that for once was not “Twee,” Kleet flurried into flight, zooming toward the other parakeets.
Lydia wore, swear to God, the same rib-knit too-tight poop-on-the-boobs T-shirt as before. But Sassy felt no revulsion this time. She took off her coat to reveal her own sweatshirt spangled with poop.
“He loves you,” Lydia said.
“Are you sure?” Sassy felt not so certain. True, Kleet liked it when she sang, and she could not recall that anyone else, human or bird, had ever liked her singing. But Kleet had not yet bitten her. Sassy sported no blood blisters on her face.
Yet—of all the angsts she had been experiencing since Frederick had so rudely snatched her away from where she wanted to be, for all of her desperation, she had not felt that old familiar misery labeled “Nobody loves me.” There was Kleet.
And there was Racquel.
Oh. Oh. Momentarily Sassy felt her breath stop.
Nah. Just a brain spasm.
“Sure I’m sure. He adores you.” Clearing a cockatoo and two baby parrots off the sofa, Lydia sat down. Sassy started to sit beside her, but then another brain spasm seized upon her.
“Lydia,” she requested, “do me a favor, would you, and come stand in front of the mirror?” She wanted to see what sort of a bird the big, soft-spoken woman was.
“Sure.” Lydia shooed away a conure that had landed on her head and heaved herself to her feet again.
An owl, Sassy bet herself as she led the way to the wall mirror with the parakeet shelf in front of it. Lydia would be an owl or maybe a dove, something soft gray fluffy and otherworldly and wise.
Plumage Page 14
