Birdbeaks of Light
by Jedd Cole
The inward look unfolds and a world of vertigo and flame is born in the dreamer’s brow: blue suns, green whirlwinds, birdbeaks of light pecking open the pomegranate stars, and the solitary sunflower, a gold eye revolving at the center of a burnt slope…
- Octavio Paz, “El cántaro roto”
***
Tristan was dressed in a white paper gown, on a white bed, under white sheets, between white walls, over a white plastic floor. In an instant, he felt a settling down, a clicking weight as of levers, gears, tumblers all falling into place. A stiff shroud of satisfied realization seemed to brush across the white hairs on his chest, moving toward his neck and his chin and his mouth and his nose and his eyes.
There were people around him. Four people. They were. They were.
“Who are you people?” he said. The words unsettled him. He felt vaguely surprised by the sound of his voice, and the anger in it.
On his left was an old woman. Beside her a young man. On the other side of the bed, a middle-aged woman and a little boy. This woman’s arm wrapped tightly around the boy’s shoulders. In all their faces was a cringing expectation, a wrinkled, artificial age.
The old woman leaned over. “I’m Rosa. I’m your wife, Tristan.” She spoke slowly and pointed to the others as her mouth moved.
Of course! He knew she was Rosa, his wife. Of course! His family—his son Jorge, the firstborn Isabela, the grandson Rincon. They were here with him. Of course, he knew that. He knew.
He grew suddenly annoyed by their introductions. “I know!” he rasped. “I know who you are.”
And then he didn’t know. The whiteness of the room felt reminiscent, though. He searched with what felt like his hands to remember why. Why. Why was there a flower in that vase, interrupting the blank plastic room?
A man entered the room. He had white hair on his head. He wore a white coat. White pants. White shoes. Reinforcements of blankness. But it triggered something. A bolt of lightning launched from the tiny metal on the man’s clipboard and touched the flower in the vase and touched Tristan’s hands over the blanket and anointed his eyes that saw now the color of the flower: red. It was a Strelitzia. Bird of paradise.
He was going to die.
“Hello, everyone,” the doctor said. “How are you doing, Sr. Trujillo?”
Dr. Tejano. That was his name. For a brief second, Tristan could not see the others, and felt a kindness in the doctor that he could not explain. Then he remembered the others, and he felt bitterness tingle somewhere near his fingernails. A thousand whys seemed to float around him, white in the white room like snowflakes mocking everyone in it.
The boy—his name?—Rincon—fidgeted and looked worriedly at the doctor from under the umbrella of his mother. Was she his mother?
“Isabela,” he said, “is that your boy?”
She nodded. “Yes. Rincon.”
“Yes, I remember.”
Three empty seconds ricocheted against all the white surfaces. The path of it framed the face of Dr. Tejano, who looked sad. Tristan’s eyes met all ten eyeballs that floated in the room. Strange, he thought, he could see his own eyeballs.
“Well,” the good doctor said, “let me just go over a few things once more.” He flipped some pages up from his clipboard. “The process will be completely painless. It will start with intravenous introduction of the tranquilizer, followed by the cyanide solution once completely unconscious.”
Tristan turned to look at the old woman. He was uncertain why. “Rosa, what’s going on?” he said.
Whatever she said was covered up by the doctor finishing with, “It should be peaceful.”
There was a chorus of soundless nods around the bed. The doctor looked toward Tristan and smiled a plastic smile directed at the wall behind the pillow. The sterile expression elicited a wrinkle somewhere deep in Tristan’s body, and he felt the urge to cry, to look meaningfully into someone’s eyes. He glanced at the five people around him, but he was unsure whose eyes needed his gaze. Tears began to swell up, but he found them curbed by an unsolicited wave of something resembling pride.
***
Tristan was sitting now, on the top of a sand dune that rose from a sea, a field, a world of sand dunes. It was a desert. It was night, because the sky was an ocean of blackness with great shining needles and orbs of lightning that danced million-year pasodobles. But it was not night, because the land, the dunes underneath his body, were lit with gold as from an unseen sun. The stars were like mirrors reflecting it from around the curve of something infinite.
For a while, Tristan watched the stars hovering and shifting and dancing in their great spanning orbits. It seemed four hundred years passed in a single breath.
He got up and began walking. The sand absorbed his bare feet and the gold of it traveled up his legs. No, it traveled down. As he moved, he saw that the light of day upon all the dunes came from his own body. He thought he felt like a sunflower blossom. The air was still until he moved through it, and then his body caused a breeze that stirred the sand into tiny waves around his ankles.
While he was turning upon the dunes, he suddenly remembered an image of a town in Mexico by the side of an empty arroyo with cactus and large rocks and small baked houses. He was a little boy. He was playing with an orphaned chaparral hatchling at the end of a stick he carried.
Tristan stopped turning and looked down at himself. He wore a white hospital gown. The breeze settled behind him, touching a line of nakedness along his back. He felt uneasy, as if he were about to go somewhere and had forgotten to grab his wallet and keys.
Where was he going?
Looking back at the dune, he saw there a series of white statues. They shone brightly with the gold sunlight that was not sunlight. The statues were pristine, flawless, sticking out of the sand as if their roots were buried very deep. An old marble man lay on the ground at the center of the peak, his head on a marble pillow. He was surrounded by four figures: an old fawning marble woman, a young marble man beside her, a somewhat older marble woman opposite him, with a little marble boy. Tristan was perplexed, and felt a pit in his stomach, a latent distress.
He walked up and touched the statue of the young man. He saw him come to life, but he was small. Tristan was bouncing the boy on his knee and made sounds like a horse neighing. A teenage girl walked by and frowned.
“Aren’t you a little old to play pony with papá, Jorge?” she said, with a note of sororal contempt. Tristan put Jorge down by lifting him up underneath his armpits, and motioned for the girl to come to him.
“Isabela, come here,” he heard himself saying. She stopped in her tracks and turned, but stayed where she was. “Do you not hear? Come!” he said again.
The frown on her face turned to a straight line. She stepped slowly toward him. Tristan saw, felt his arm reach out and strike her on the side of her face. She recoiled, beginning to cry.
“I’m sorry!” she said.
“You will not treat my son that way,” Tristan said. “And you will not disrespect me again. You are obstinate, and it will end.”
He said nothing for a moment and glanced at Jorge, who sat on the floor a few feet away against a couch, cradling his legs to him and staring at Isabela. Tristan looked back at her.
“When will you respect your father?” he said. The sound of it seemed to suck out other sounds from the world. “When, Isabela?”
She whispered, “You’re not my—”
“What?”
“Right now,” she said louder.
“Then stop crying,” he said. He watched as she straightened up, made a tight sniff and took a deep breath. A tear dripped from her chin, but her face returned to its straightness, with the addition of a bright red spot on one side.
Tristan withdrew his touch from the statue, and the pit in his stomach rose to his throat. Regret came up with a trickle of bile. He looked at the statue of the old woman. A moment of hesitation passed over his eyes, but he touched its white shoulder anyway.
The dappled light of a white moon shone through leaves of a tree. Green things became blue and gray in the night light, and he was kissing the hand of a beautiful young woman with a diamond ring on her finger.
“Rosa,” he said. She smiled in the silver cloth of night.
They touched each other, hands traversing the worlds of each other; but their lips met and abided together for a long time. He trembled, seeing and not seeing, feeling and not feeling his wife. His wife. With a ring on her finger.
No. He looked down at his own hand. There was no ring on his finger.
Tristan withdrew from this statue also, feeling his face tighten, his brow wrinkle. He glanced back at the statue of the young man. A vague remembrance of a knee bouncing. Someone yelling. Had it been him? A crack now ran through the length of the statue, a very thin hairline fracture, barely visible. But Tristan saw it. Looking back at the statue of the old woman—Rosa—there, too, was a crack. And there, another, silently dissembling its whiteness with a line of microscopic shadow.
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He touched the statue of the middle-aged woman.
“I love him!” he heard her shout.
“Stop crying, Isabela,” he said. “You’re twenty-four. Stop being childish.”
They were in a darkened bedroom, with the door open to the rest of the house. The shades were pulled over the windows, and they glowed with yellow afternoon light. The room was hot. Sweat glossed both of them.
“Maybe I want to cry, huh?” She wiped her nose. “Hating you makes it easy.”
He hit her on the face. Twice. She fell onto the bed. He stood, legs wide, feeling his chest fume with heat. She looked up stolidly, trained by now to become a stone against punishment. But he still felt waves of radiation coming from her boiling eyes.
“Stupid! He’s garbage. A good-for-nothing!” he heard himself say. “I forbid you to see him again! I’ve spent too much on this family, too much money and too much life, to see you waste it on some hippie trash!”
She stood up slowly, straightening her white blouse and brown skirt. She had indeed stopped crying. “He’s not like that,” she said. Her voice came out low and husky. “But I don’t need to convince you.”
Tristan stood still as she walked away. When she left the room without looking back, he saw Rosa follow from outside with quiet sobs of commiseration. His fists became balls of hot lead and he shouted, “I’d better not see your face again, Isabela! You are not to come back, you hear me? You hear me?”
No response.
Tristan lowered his hand from the statue. The crack circumnavigated the head of the sculpture before his eyes, and one side of the face sloughed off. It fell into the golden sand without a sound.
He looked around. The two statues opposite had broken in various places as well, blank white body parts already half embedded in the earth.
Tristan reached out, trembling, and touched the little boy. Nothing happened. Nothing at all. He cried, feeling the tears fall like tiny black seeds into the golden sand, disappearing. He fell to his knees.
Looking up, he reached out as if to touch the statue of the serene old man lying on the ground. He could not do it. His arm quaked like an icicle on a glistening winter tree. It came back and ran itself over his face.
Tristan stood up, and a little ways down the gentle, empty slope of the dune was a dead tree. It was ancient and mangled, twisted by invisible hands. Perched on a branch was what looked like a great bird. He walked down the sand until it stood tall before him. The tree was stripped of bark, and had holes in it.
The bird looked down at him from its branch. It was Cumecócari, an Imperial Woodpecker. Black feathers were carved with white at the edges of its wings. Its crown stuck up like a hat, red like blood. Its head was sideways, and one brilliant yellow eye gazed into both of his from its tiny black pupil.
He heard its voice: “Tristan Trujillo.”
“Is that my name?” he said.
The bird’s head tilted a degree. It said nothing.
Tristan wiped his face, which was moist with tears. “I must know why I am here. I am afraid.”
The voice without movement: “You are here by your own making. Twenty years ago, your genome was mapped and a strong proclivity to dementia was found in your blood.”
Dementia—its syllables moved across Tristan’s lips.
Cumecócari continued: “You arranged to be euthanized when you could no longer care for yourself.”
“I don’t remember,” he said.
Cumecócari reached up and pecked upon the sky, plucking one of the moving stars from its black bed and dropping it into Tristan’s hands.
He saw pieces of his life in the pearlescent skin of a clamshell. He remembered the pen in his hand curling his name upon the paper, the doctor—Dr. Tejano, as it said on the line above his—smiling and reassuring him. “You’ve made a good choice, I think, Sr. Trujillo,” he said. “Most people make the same choice.”
“Will I be able to alter this decision,” Tristan asked, “if I change my mind?”
The doctor’s face grew serious. It reminded him of someone. A girl. A red mark on her cheek. “If you have any concerns, please come see me.”
The light faded from his hands and he looked back at Cumecócari. “Show me more.” The bird pecked another star.
He saw himself dancing with his wife a few nights later. What was her name? He had a ring on his finger now—she had a different one on hers, without a diamond. He told her about the decision he made with Dr. Tejano.
He felt so forgetful. Why was he so forgetful?
“Tell me why I’m here,” he said to the bird.
“You are dying,” it said. “It is happening right now.”
“I can’t remember anything. Show me more!”
The bird’s head swiveled to the other side, judging him through the other eye. It was purple. “No,” it said.
“But I can’t remember! I want to remember before it’s over. I can’t remember!” He turned and saw a pile of broken marble bodies on the sand dune. “What’s that?”
Cumecócari said nothing.
Tristan saw, felt his arm reach out and grab the bird by its neck. It fluttered and struggled, great wings flailing. It was almost the size of a man. He struck it over and over again with his balled fist. Finally, in desperation, he reached down and pulled. Its mournful call warbled in his ears, then suddenly stopped with a crunch as Tristan pulled its beak from its head. Droplets of blood dripped from his hand as he held it up and reached for the stars moving above him.
He pecked at them until they fell to the ground. He snatched them and looked into their memories, the life that had followed him in the shadows and hid in the hairline cracks of skulls. One after another, he plucked the stars from the heavens and slavered over them more and more desperately.
***
It seemed he spent a thousand years looking into the stars. He couldn’t remember which ones he had already seen, which ones were new. He kept forgetting their names. His wife. The ring. A daughter. His daughter? He didn’t know. He was like a broken water cistern in this desert. He looked back, finally. A hill. There was nothing. Had there been something there before?
And then it came to him, an odd memory, unasked for. Of all things, a line from a poem: Pero a mi lado no había nadie. But by my side there was no one. Only the plain: cactus, thorns, great rocks that cracked under the sun.
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About the Author
When Jedd Cole is not writing stories, one can find him brooding over the pages of other worlds both real and imaginary (but mostly imaginary), usually accompanied by his wonderful wife. Jedd’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in the East Fork Literary Journal, New Dead Families, and Daily Science Fiction. Jedd manages a creative writing blog at electricdidact.weebly.com.
“Birdbeaks of Light” © 2013 Jedd Cole
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