Blackbird

by Michael Fiegel

  It is finished.

  For a moment, I wonder if this could have gone any other way. I consider the different paths we might have walked, going all the way back to the beginning. But there is no point second-guessing. From the moment I took her, we were always standing on the brink of something from which there was no return. From the moment it began, it was ending. We were always falling.

  Where will she go now? I only know where she came from, where she might have been if not for me. I have not kept close tabs on them, but I have seen enough to know that they have not fared well, and they would only have taken her down with them. If nothing else I gave her a decade to learn how to fly. If it had been them who pushed her from the nest, she would just be a fallen nestling, a broken, useless thing. Perhaps married young, like her parents, to raise her own as they raised her, teaching them dogma not worth teaching dogs. Mother, and wife, and broken. Falling on doorknobs and slipping in the parking lot, consoled by television, romance novels, fake friends who twitter and yammer about nothings. Computer games and diabetes.

  She would be ordinary, the only thing she never was with me. The only thing she can now never be. Not after this. I have cared for her and carried her, broken her and mended her, killed her and brought her back—and she did the same for me. And why? Because something must be done. The world moves—it is a horrid treadmill—and we must move, too, or die. It is cruel, and so must we be. But victim or predator, we are always moving, and moving targets are hard to make out. Hard to understand. Her biggest mistake was trying to hold on to what could not be; mine was in letting her try.

  I do not end here. For me this is a new start. But this part of me, this we: this ends.

  But now I am just stalling. Time to move.

  I have already gathered the things I will take with me, did that while she was out, once I had decided. Weapons, money. What pills remain. Identification. Four sorts, here; more in a box two hours away, one of the few caches I have left to draw on. The keys to the car. Nothing more. Nothing. I will leave the rest behind.

  I will leave these chronicles.

  I will finish this final entry, and close this laptop, and I will step into the kitchen, and walk past the fallen groceries, past the melted ice cream, and out the door. I will busy myself with plans, with somethings, with actions. Things are brewing, and I wish to be steeped in them. Perhaps I will attempt to reconcile with them. From every action there come opportunities, and perhaps they will recognize that. And if not, then I will act alone, as I so often have, doing what I can to rid this world of what corrupts it—the unwashed, uncouth masses.

  There are things to break and I must break them, before I am too broken to do so.

  Enough about me. This ends with her.

  From the moment I saw Xtian, I recognized something of myself in her. Now it seems clear what that was. “The lion is alone, and so am I.” We were both alone, from the start. Two individuals, never a couple of anything. Perhaps we were partners, but we were never equals, and I think partners must be that, at least. No, we were companions, even though I so immediately discarded that when she suggested it. We were animal companions. Two birds in the same flock. Or cloud. Going the same way, with the same penultimate destination in mind. And as is ever the case with companions, they become erstwhile, and it is time to sign yearbooks and say goodbyes and move on to ultimates, alone. We cannot be a pack of two. We were both designed to be alone. I hope she figures that out.

  Before I leave, I will turn one last time to see her, to remember her then, a huddled little blackbird, curled on the rug. And I will watch her in silence and I will wonder again why I took her in the first place. Why, if I knew she was meant to be alone, did I not leave her alone. Perhaps instead of yet one more suffix on the same question, there will instead be a final answer.

  And if not? Then at least there is this: that for a time, I walked with a girl named Christian, and she with me, and we were not alone.

  And that mattered.

  • • •

  The slam of the door punctuated a very long sentence. Ten to life. Minimum time served. I wished for a moment there were final words, a whimper to follow the bang, but it would have been pointless. From the moment I’d pulled the trigger it was over. We both knew it. There were no more words, no more arguments. There was just utter exhaustion and disgust, and finality. I felt like a ghost, cold and gray and empty, left to haunt a barren house not my own. No fear, no sadness. Just absence. There were no more lessons; there was nothing to do now but hit the ground or fly. It was time to be in motion, to be elsewhere. This place was through with me, and I with it.

  Only one question: where to?

  My eyes drifted to the balled-up paper on the kitchen floor. I reached down and grabbed it, pondered. And then put it into my pocket.

  No, not that. Not yet.

  So, fine. What then?

  I could easily have killed myself with possibility. Without him, there was no direction. Had I grown up and gone to school and done as I was told and listened to my elders like a good girl, I would have all of that. Not my own, entirely, but it would be something. It would be a thread to follow through the maze, a decision made for me. It was how everyone else did it and it seemed unfair I could not be led, too.

  I wondered at this as I packed the things I would spare from the fire: all of my guns, some of my clothes, what money I’d been saving, the laptop—I could almost understand him leaving me, but why would he leave that? More importantly, where would I go? Certainly not west, not with the memories, and not with the chaos we’d wrought. Maybe close by. North or east. Places I had been. Lived in. Familiarity, and comfort of a sort. Fewer decisions to make, fewer unknowns. I could take the time to get used to acting on my own. Build up my world slowly, one molecule at a time. One cell.

  “Practice,” he had said. Practice being alone. Had I been with him long enough to do this alone?

  Yes, I thought. Yes.

  Was it fate that sent Delia my way that day? Was it free will that pushed me to take him back? Was anything in my hands, ever?

  Yes, this once. Because in the end, it was me who chose to pull the trigger, me who was willing to end him. It was the choice that made all the difference, not the outcome. The outcome, after all, was assured. He’d seen to that. When I picked up his gun and pulled the trigger, I had no idea it was unloaded. I’ll always wonder if he knew that, too.

  And I’ll always wonder if it would have made any difference.

  Reverse Migration

  09/01/2018

  Of course I looked for him anyway. How could I not? A piece of me had fallen off and walked away. Phantom limb syndrome in its most extreme form. I knew he was gone, that it had ended by my hand. But though my mind was sure, my heart had to catch up. Muscles have memories. We fool ourselves far better than we fool others.

  Since Edison’s final gift to me was taking the car, my first problem was transportation. I spent a good chunk of my savings on an extremely used Camry born the same year as me, the first thing I saw on Craigslist that didn’t sound like a lemon. It was easier than I thought it would be, just gave the guy a wad of cash and took the title since he had no idea what “notarized signature” meant. I assured him the paperwork would all be on its way to the DMV next week, you bet. But the only thing on its way within a week was me, flinging myself desperately away and hoping I would catch something before I hit the ground.

  First was Buffalo, by way of Pittsburgh. I stopped three times, gas and bio breaks, but never ate, barely drank, drove the whole way with the radio off for some reason. Not enjoying the silence, but thinking it somehow necessary. And when at last I got into the city, I circled at least three times, trying to decide where to land. Like a ball in a roulette wheel, numbers and colors. 90, 190, 290, 33, 198, over and over. Until I picked a target and just went for it.

  I hit the old neighborhood first, parked a few blocks away from where we’d lived, then wandered aimlessly. All the homes were occupied, a
nd there were plenty of cars on the streets, but it seemed lifeless on some deeper level, as if it had died long ago and still hadn’t realized it.

  There was nothing there for me, so I moved on and drove to the few places I remembered well. The places we got ice cream. The Galleria. Anchor Bar. The Greek place where he got sick on bloody lamb. So much of what we did in Buffalo, what I remembered, revolved around food. Had we been avoiding conversation by filling our mouths? Or had he been fattening me up for the kill? I lingered for a while, sat on the small patio and watched cars trickle by while swarthy Greek men conversed in short sleeve shirts. Eating, and talking business, like we had. Secrets.

  I ordered dessert from Noël, and as I waited, I dared to pull the laptop out, hesitating, wanting to keep hope inside. I’d kept it charged since leaving Columbus, waiting for the day I’d get the courage to look. It argued like a cranky old man, but eventually spun up and asked me for a password. I tried a few and failed. Just as I was about to give up, to call it futile, I smelled it. Faint, but definitely there. I moved closer, sniffed at the keyboard, startling some neighboring diners. And yes, there it was, unmistakable.

  V - A - N - I - L - L - A

  I read somewhere once that Thomas Edison breathed his dying breath into a glass vial, and Henry Ford (the car guy) locked it away in a safe, thinking he had captured the great inventor’s soul. I can see the theoretical value for Ford, but what was the upside for Edison? In a best case scenario, his immortal soul was now trapped for all time. The only thing I can figure is that he felt it was holding him back, that leaving it behind would let the rest of him move on, unburdened. Wherever it was he thought he was going to end up.

  I’ll never know if that’s why my Edison left his laptop behind, but what I found on it certainly looked a lot like what I imagined his soul might look like.

  His desktop was a mess of shortcuts, horrid and scattered, some layered four or five deep. The trash was full and beyond, and though my brain itched to click “Empty,” I resisted. Many folders, many files, some going back way before I was born, if I was reading the time stamps right. Back into dates that didn’t make sense, dates that ended with eighty-threes and -fours. Meaningless, old people dates, file extensions I didn’t recognize. Chaos. That was fine. I could work with chaos. She was my friend.

  The first thing I looked for and found was a file dated September 8, 2008—the day he’d taken me. I opened it immediately, but I’d only gotten a few words in before I immediately closed it again, rubbing away the goose bumps. I made an alias to the file and stuck it in the corner of the desktop so I could find it again later. I needed something more relevant to where I was. Something from Buffalo.

  • • •

  091412.rtf

  She again wants school. I cannot and will not tolerate that. It is enough that the television has tainted her mind with prayers and slogans, history according to someone. She does not need any help learning wrong. I can teach her right.

  It seems hard to believe four years have passed since we met, since I took her out of her old life and gave her a new one, a chance at something better. Or perhaps worse; I have no idea. Four months and six days today, and she is already not what she was, yet neither what she needs to be.

  What that is, I cannot say.

  Would I make her into me? No. One is enough. Large events shaped me, pieces blasted off like Rushmore, creation in destruction. Rather, I have taken to this with a more delicate hand, shaving pieces here and there, slowly revealing what lies beneath. It is tempting to throw her into the fire, to see what happens. It might destroy her, or it might do what I have been unable to do. Push her out of the nest. And if she should fall? What would that mean for me? It is tempting to think nothing at all. But true?

  Perhaps it is worth the effort. The events of the Fourth continue to resound in unexpected ways. The border is still locked down, for one, and (at least supposedly) authorities are still on the hunt for the perpetrators, or so they claim. It seems a bit too obvious to me. Certainly no one important was taken out; I know their names from the news reports, and how little they were. But there has been a clear impact: trucks backed up across the bridges nearly to the county line, passports out and security checks, on both sides of the border. This must have been their goal. Fear is an excellent motivator.

  Perhaps I should keep that in mind for Xtian.

  • • •

  Fear as motivation. That entry of his was three months before he put me in a kill-or-be-killed situation in our apartment. It was interesting, reading into his inner thoughts at a time when a younger me had very little idea what was going on. But there weren’t any great insights to be had; all it did was confirm what I’d already figured out, that he hadn’t had any better idea what was going on than I had. I wasn’t going to find him in Buffalo. I had to keep looking.

  I tolerated the city for about a week while I decided where to go next, most of it spent in squalor near the airport. It seemed wrong to splurge, like I didn’t deserve that yet. I finally broke down and bought a map, and it served as a bedspread for half that time as I read through his chronicles, sometimes adding my own words where his own seemed insufficient. Looking for clues, talking to myself. Planning. Forward from here was California, but there was no way he would go there. And going backward? What would that get me? A convoluted out-of-the-way trip out to Syracuse, down through Scranton to Harrisburg, back to DC, where it began for us.

  It seemed the better option. Or at least, the least worst.

  So I drove back east, the way we’d come a decade earlier, trying to find the same rest stops and failing, many of them now gone, others lost to shoddy memory. I got lost in Rochester and stopped for food. I poked around the laptop some more, feeling more and more confident, less like an invader. It was mine now, wasn’t it? Beyond the initial password, none of it was protected, which I guess made sense. Everything here was past and gone. He only ever wrote about what he was doing immediately after doing it. There were no concrete future plans, nothing anyone could stop. If he had ever encrypted it before, he had decrypted it before he left. Possibly that last day, as I stared out the window while he spread vanilla extract on the keys. Maybe smirking.

  Still, it felt like there was something for me to uncover. Some way to find him. I wasn’t even sure why I was bothering, but I couldn’t have been more curious if a box of old love letters had fallen on my head while digging through his closet. There were pieces of him everywhere, and so much I didn’t know. Things he never talked about, feelings he never expressed.

  I was still convinced I might find him, too. Something deep down wanting to track him down, change his mind. So I followed the breadcrumb trail.

  I jumped back, way before he’d met me, all the way to the beginning. His beginning.

  • • •

  070483.DO

  DRINKING IS OVERRATED. HAD TO. WOULDVE

  SEEMED OUT OF PLACE HERE AND MY JOB IS

  NOT TO STAND OUT. MY FAULT FOR COMING

  DURING SOME ANNIVERSARY TODO AT HOTEL.

  FAKED INTEREST. SICKENS ME. MAY STAY

  A FEW MORE DAYS BEFORE 17927 AGAIN.

  COULD BE WORSE. COULD BE AFGHANISTAN.

  070583.DO

  STILL IN SUNBURY. SHOULD BE GONE, BUT

  NOT TODAY. HEADACHE. SHOULD KNOW BETTER

  THAN TO WRITE THIS. FIXER SAID THIS IS

  ONLY FOR SENDING UPDATES. THAT SEEMS A

  WASTE. ITS MY MEWS SO HOW WILL THEY

  KNOW? I CAN USE IT FOR NOTES. IMPORTANT

  REMINDERS TO MYSELF. NUM 1. NEVER DRINK

  NUM 2. NEVER TRUST ANYONE. ESP. WOMEN.

  090883.DO

  FINISHED MY FIRST JOB TODAY. KILLED

  SOMEONE. NOT THE FIRST TIME OF COURSE.

  DAD WAS FIRST. BUT HE WAS DYING AND

  THEY WERE COMING AFTER HIM. THAT WAS

  MERCY. THIS WAS WORK. OF COURSE I DO

  NOT KNOW WHY THEY WANTED THIS MAN DEAD

  OR WHAT THIS ACCOMPLIS
HES. NOT MY JOB

  TO CARE, ONLY TO GET PAID. WHAT I DID

  NOT EXPECT IS THAT I WOULD LIKE IT.

  • • •

  It kept up like that for some time, spelling gradually improving, along with everything else, as far as I could tell. But I kept coming up empty handed, missing some piece of the puzzle. The devil was hiding in the details, and there were just too many details. I shoved the laptop away, frustrated. I needed something to go on, some place to go. A week in Rochester was wearing on me, and even if I was slumming it, motel life was depleting my funds rapidly.

  My eyes drifted towards my backpack, imagining the crumpled yellow ball of paper inside, tempted. My version of the apple in the garden. An easy way out. Just a few numbers and …

  Numbers. I grabbed the laptop, scrolled back. There. Command-F. “17927.” Return.

  • • •

  061585.DOC

  They are not thrilled I have to relocate. They like having someone nearby to handle disposals. But they cannot really do anything about that now. Govt is buying everyone out of 17927 and it would be foolish not to take the cash and get out of here. It suddenly seems more urgent and I wonder what it was they dropped here recently that they want all of us gone, or digging up. I hear talk of shale and thorium. Some guy named Llewellyn. No idea. Regardless, I expected they would want me nearby but that is not the plan. Too many risk factors, suddenly. Understandable, sensical. Got a new number, and a new fixer, name of Craig. In the morning, I fly to El Salv. Craig has something for me to do there. First time out of country, first time flying. Hope I survive.

  103192.doc

  First time on the new laptop. Powerbook 180. I think it will do. Sick of swapping and at any rate this is going to be it for a long while, now that things have taken a shift. Govt declared eminent domain on 17927. Related? No clue. But if you wanted to hide something forever, that would be the way to do it. Either that, or dig it up. Things are quiet up top. Got everyone nervous, apparently. Craig says things are in the works, big things. Not sure what, exactly. I have heard NYC mentioned. And February. Nothing I will be anywhere near, nothing any of us will be close to. Except those of us who will be. Hope I am one.