They were everywhere you looked. In the morning, they were in your driveway as you fetched your newspaper. You’d find a decomposing sparrow while ripping out moldering tulips. Driving along the deserted coastal highways, dead gulls littered the shoulder of the road like old beer cans. People were afraid to go outside; fearful that they’d hear the awful thwack of a small body breaking on contact with the earth.

Everyone had an opinion as to the cause. My father, when he called, blamed carcinogens from the nearby refinery. My mother thought it was a leak at the nuclear power plant.

“In five years, we’ll all be growing tumors and eleventh fingers. Babies are going to be born with no skulls, or with elephantitis. You should leave while you still can.”

The pretty barista at the seaside co-op where I bought my afternoon coffee blamed the excessive heat, and, by extension, global warming.

The professor whose house I was watching for the summer told me, before he left for a tour of Central American archaeological sites, that he thought it had something to do with lunar cycles and tides.

The girl I was wasting my summer with thought it was an epidemic.

“It’s probably a disease. Some rare bird collector, some rich guy who thinks it’s his god-given right to do whatever the fuck he pleases, probably brought a bird over from Africa or Southeast Asia, something not native, and then got careless and exposed it to a native bird. And that’s all it took. Like Cortes and Mexico,” she said.

She was seventeen and growing more beautiful by the hour. I had no business in her company. She was taller than me, dark haired and melancholy.

“Do you know what I’d like to do?” I told her.

She looked at me incredulously, putting down her copy of Keats. It was a dour, fishy day at the beginning of June. She was barefoot, wearing bikini bottoms and a tank top.

“I’d like to eat you out. I’d like to undress you, preferably very slowly, and then I‘d like to go down on you for hours, three at least. I dream about that. I think it’d be the happiest few hours of my life.”

“Mm. That sounds nice. I’d like that, too,” she said, and then she went back to Keats, and I resumed DeLillo.

Later I drove her home with the windows down, and we listened in silence to the sultry cadences of summer. The cicadas and the grackles, the baritone howl of a fishing boat lost in the night. Every mile or so, we passed the small, ruined corpse of another bird. Somewhere unseen, the sea collapsed inexorably.

~

I set myself a goal: to read two books per week from the professor’s imposing library. I failed by the end of the first week, not having completed even one. I blamed this failure on ambition. I’d started out with DeLillo’s massive ‘Underworld,’ when I should have started with something small.

Then it took me ten days to read ‘Mao II,’ and I felt the whole summer was already lost; my whole life was already squandered.

My friends already had careers in the great Northeastern metropolises. Poorly paying, entry level jobs at tech firms in Brooklyn or medical labs in Baltimore, law firms in D.C. or banking houses in Philly. They had studios in Park Slope and Rittenhouse, serious girlfriends, and no benefits to speak of. They’d joined the slog, waived their flag, and I was mostly jealous, and feeling left behind.

I was twenty-five and drifting, secluded but also bombarded. I spent hours on my computer, doing nothing. An afternoon would disappear amongst the labyrinthine folds of the internet: shit upon shit, the digitized lives of others.

Every evening at dusk I would walk the perimeter of the property, smoking a cigarette. I wore musty work gloves and carried a plastic bag, into which I deposited the day’s mangled corpses: two sparrows and a robin; a blue jay and a sparrow; two robins and two sparrows; a gull and two sparrows. Then I’d bury the bodies in a trench at the edge of the road, or I’d throw them in the trash.

~

“No one sees them falling,” Samantha said from the kitchen, a cup of tea steaming in her hand.

I looked up from ‘Underworld.’

“The birds,” she clarified, though it wasn’t necessary. “I don’t know of anyone who has actually seen them fall. You find their bodies. Sometimes you hear them land. But nobody actually sees them fall.”

She padded softly through the study, its high vaulted walls filled with more books than I felt a reasonable person could read in three lifetimes.

“Do you think he’s actually read all these books?” I asked.

She sat across from me and curled her legs beneath her. She was long and formless, no hips to speak of, legs that ascended forever. There were moments when I thought I’d gladly die to spend one day, just one whole day, fucking her.

The cottage was one of those breezy ones, open to the briney wind. Outside, the day was dying slowly.

“Have you seen any of the birds fall?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“I once saw two eagles making love,” she said. “They were way up against a very blue sky, circling one another. And then they collided, or so it looked, and started to fall. Fall isn’t the right word. They started to plummet. This fierce, violent couple, racing to the earth. And then, at a really late moment, they’d come apart, suddenly, and they would ascend, and ascend, and then it would start again, the falling. And every time, you worried they wouldn’t separate in time, that they’d just plow into the earth together. Of course, part of you wanted to see that, too. Eventually, I forget after how many times, it was over. I remember that, after the last fall, it felt like breathing again for the first time in years.”

She cradled her mug of tea like my mother used to. She got up and floated around the study, her fingers tracing the spine of an occasional book. It seemed to me like the scene from a pleasant dream that was about to descend into something horrible.

“Do you ever think about how many books you have left in your life? How many you can realistically read before you die? I figure I’ve got until sixty, maybe seventy years old, if I’m lucky. So let’s say forty years left. If I read one book every month, which is probably my actual pace, if I’m being honest, that’s twelve books a year. I’ll be generous and say I read fifteen a year. So what’s that? Six hundred books left. Not all that many, when you consider how many books there are, historically, and how many more are published every year. It’s like trying to swim across an ocean that only gets wider as you get older.”

She looked at me like I was talking ridiculously, which I was. She went up on her tip-toes to get a better look at something. On the undersides of her legs there were pale slivers, like two slices of pie, untouched by the sun. I thought: what a gracious world that permits me to witness such things while all around me birds are dying for no reason at all.

~

That night I had a dream. It was Carver, of course. I found him at the bottom of a stairwell, and water was rushing in gasps down the stairs. “Ray,” I said, though it wasn‘t my body, it was an actor playing me, “aren’t you afraid of getting wet?” Carver looked up at me, cigarette in hand, and wretched his face in disgust. “Of course not, Lo. I’m already soaked.”

“Ray, I’ve got a question for you, one that’s been puzzling me and you’re the only man who can help.”

“Go ahead and shoot then, Lo.”

“Well I’ve been getting to wondering when, exactly, at what age, exactly, a killer whale’s eyes turn from blue to brown. It’s been dogging me for a week now, and I’ve been meaning to find and ask you, since everyone knows you’re a killer whale expert, Ray, the best around.”

“That I am, sure.”

“Then I’m hoping you can help me. See, I much prefer the whales when their eyes are blue, it’s a damn sad thing when their eyes turn. It breaks my heart, Ray.”

Carver took a drag of his cigarette. He looked like he did in those later years, strung out by the tobacco and the booze. Though it made him more attractive, it really did; added chiseled depth to his face, a tragic authority. I wanted to tell Carver how good he looked.

“Well it’s your lucky day, Lo, your lucky day I tell ya. I happen to have a whale right here with one blue eye and one brown eye. So you’ll see there’s not really a clear answer to your question, it’s really a matter of individuality on the whale’s part. You just never can tell when his eyes’ll go.”

“You look good, Ray, real good.”

“Thanks, Lo. That means a whole lot coming from you.”

He passed me a cigarette.

“This shit is killing me, Ray. This internet, the access to everything. Nothing’s a mystery anymore, Ray. Not one thing. I’m so numb anymore. I lose myself down these paths that I never even imagined, and I don’t know how to come back from them.”

~

I was woken by that most mournful American sound: sirens bleating, breaking the soft susurrus of a summer night, filling the emptiness with their reckoning.

They were very close by, and utterly terrifying. For a time, I stayed in bed, paralyzed with a fear I couldn’t place. Finally the sirens stopped their baleful screaming, though their lights still reverberated silently on the ceiling. I went to the window. An ambulance and two police cruisers were parked next door. The modest house was awash in seized red. I hadn’t met them, these neighbors. They didn’t go out much, but I’d seem them a few times. They were an older couple, starkly Scandinavian. A tattered Swedish flag hung above their door. A middle aged man lived with them, too. He was, I presumed, their son. I sometimes saw him standing in the backyard, pacing briskly, maniacally. He affected an air of mental illness, unshaved and unkempt, wearing stained sweat pants and a heavy sweater, even during the day’s hottest hours. I stayed looking for a long while, but all I could see were the lights strobing, a few cops smoking with competent disaffection.

By the time the scene cleared, the sky to the east was blinking white with dawn. I went downstairs, made a cup of coffee, and sat alone in the study while the light turned, imperceptibly, from plum to grey to white to a fine, liquid vermillion. It was, I thought, like staring at your face in the mirror and watching for blemishes: the deepening of a wrinkle, the emergence of stubble, the small hints that tell you how your life will someday fall to pieces.

~

I made my nightly rounds, avian coroner for a few minutes. Samantha was sitting on the patio, drinking sangria she’d made. The patio reminded me of a ruined courtyard from a dream I’d once had; overgrown with weeds and wildflowers, dusted with dander. The wind was singing magnificently, and the neighbor’s willow tree was dancing, flinging its arms with unencumbered grace.

“Do you know what’s the problem with your poetry?” Samantha called. She was reading a chapbook I’d self published the prior summer.

“A lot of things. Namely that it’s not very good.”

The field of wild wheat behind the house shimmered white beneath the elegant wind.

“Have you read Mary Oliver?” I asked, picking up the mangled body of a grackle. I must have missed it the night before; it had been already been picked clean and hollowed out.

“No,” she said.

“You should.”

She was sitting legs splayed open on the weedy ground, basking in the last sun like a happy black lab. Many years later, walking along a beach in South Florida, the wind would shift in just a way that I would remember this exact moment: her legs spread apart so that I could see her white panties if I looked closely, her head cast back, my poems open in her lap.

I sat down beside her with my bag of dead birds. The stone was still warm, warmer than the air; that wonderful retention of heat. She passed me a glass of sangria and I watched the wheat shiver while she continued to read.

“The problem,” she said after I’d finished my first glass and was already working on another, “is that you’re too concerned with style and technique. You love ideals and dreams and old forms. You keep trying to fit your life into these antiquated structures. You should stop. Also, you should try falling in love with real women.”

I shrugged. She poured a second glass for herself; the melting ice clanked sweetly.

“What I’m trying to tell you is that your life is artifice. Except, at rare times, your writing. But only the fervent poems, the desperate ones that are obviously written in the middle of the night. But mostly, you’re too ashamed to abandon structure.”

I rested my chin on my hand and looked at her sideways. She reminded me of one of those reclining beach chairs. Eventually she got up and walked to the other end of the yard, pirouetting every few steps, like a wilted magnolia petal caught in the dazzling wind.

~

News of what happened at the neighbor’s house trickled out slowly, like a stream during a drought. I overheard people talking about it at the co-op or in the street. They spoke close together, heads bowed, in the hushed tones reserved for sensitive, shameful matters; the tones reserved for unspeakable tragedy. Much of the news was contradictory, or sensationalist. The husband had lost his mind and killed the son. The son had pulled a gun on the father and held the mother hostage. The father had suffocated the son in his sleep. The only thing that seemed clear was that the son was dead, and the parents had gone into exile. For a week or so, this new mystery replaced the falling birds as the main topic of conversation around town.

~

“Are there any boys your age?”

“Of course. Not now, you know, but in the past.”

“Well what about them?”

“They were fine. Awkward and self conscious and deceptive.”

“We don’t get better with age.”

“There was one I might have loved.”

“Yeah?”

“He was a year younger than me, actually. He played baseball, centerfield. I went to his games with his parents and watched him roam the outfield. He was like some wild animal out there, like it was the one thing he was born to do. He couldn’t hit, but it didn’t matter. God, he was beautiful in the outfield.”

“You’re a baseball fan?”

“I can be. I like sports when they’re beautiful.”

“What happened?”

“He fell for somebody else.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It happens. I suspect it would be boring to love one person your whole life. Besides, he would have stopped playing baseball eventually.”

“And you didn’t love him otherwise?”

“Probably not. Although I was looking at some of his pictures online the other night. His new girlfriend posted some pictures they took for her photography class. They were black and white and he was sitting in bed. And he was propped up in exactly the same way that he would be after we made love. I’d go to the bathroom and come back and he’d be sitting there, propped on his left arm, watching me. He said he liked the sound of me peeing.”

“I could see liking that.”

“He had the exact same look on his face, too, in the photo she took. His new girlfriend. And that almost killed me, seeing those photos. I realized that I’d always thought of that look as being mine. The way he held himself and watched me. It was mine, and now it’s somebody else’s, and someday it will probably be somebody else’s and she might feel the same pain as me. Though I hope not, honestly. It hurt like hell, for some reason. I hadn‘t thought of him in a while.”

“Well, again, I’m sorry. I know that’s an inadequate response.”

“That’s ok.”

“Do you know what I imagine?”

“What?”

“I imagine you walking through this house totally naked. Just walking around casually, getting a glass of water, going to the bathroom, looking at a book on the shelves. Walking around naked and comfortable like it’s your home.”

“And you’d think it was yours, that memory. But someday it won’t be. And someday after that we‘ll both be dead, and anyone we ever loved will be dead, and no one will remember me walking around, naked and young.”

“What a shame that is.”

~

The morning the neighbors returned was dour and pewter, and followed a night of dense rain. I tried to go for a run but my body wasn’t willing. My legs were cinder, my heart was a drum. I collapsed on the side of the road with exhaustion, laying down beneath a Japanese maple. I lay there and listened to my heart and looked up the tree’s gnarled spine. A car pulled up. I realized my legs were dangling into the street. A woman appeared over me. It was the woman who lived next door. She was tall and thin, with moderate features and exceptionally white hair.

“Are you ok?” she asked in thinly accented English.

“I might be dying, I think,” I said, my voice sounding very refracted and far off. “But if so, that’s ok. Just leave me. If I’m dying, leave me, please.”

She considered this a moment and then knelt down beside me. She put a hand on my forehead. Her palm was spectacularly cold. She kept it there for perhaps thirty seconds, deduced that I probably wasn’t dying, and walked away without saying anything else.

When I started to run again, I was disembodied and I absolutely flew. My legs vanished like apparitions in sunlight. My heart? Well, it was not my heart, nor anyone’s heart. It simply ceased, for a while. Inert as a skeleton after death. I ran without cadence or rhythm, and my form fell utterly apart. I moved without being, or I was being without having to move. It didn’t make sense. It was a new sensation, a thing not of dreams or of fantasy, or even of childhood. It was death, approximately. It was the diffuseness of death.

When I finally I arrived home, I keeled over and vomited into an azalea bush. Inside was the corpse of another dead bird.

Next door, the neighbors had taken down the Swedish flag.

~

I saw them sometimes, walking to the car, or standing in the back yard. I never saw them together. The woman would wave in a friendly, cautious manner; like she thought I was the mysterious one. Every time I saw them, I was gripped by an almost overwhelming urge to ask them about what had happened, and, at exactly the same time, by an even stronger urge to conceal this initial urge, this incursion into their private lives. I’m sure everyone felt the same way I did. I’m sure their conversations were fraught with tension; that they sensed this struggle in the eyes and necks and mouths of anyone they spoke to. I admired their grace, their ability to keep moving. But I also found myself watching closely for symptoms of grief. I found it disconcerting when I saw them smiling. I wondered how she could water her garden or how he could sit out back and listen to a baseball game, sipping a beer.

~

“Hello? Hello?”

“Hey, Dad. Hey. I’m here, Dad.”

“Oh, hey. Hey.”

“What’s up?”

“Oh, nothing. Just calling. We hadn’t heard from you in a while…”

“I know. I’m sorry. I’ve been busy.”

“Oh?”

“Just trying to write. Taking care of the house. Burying dead birds.”

“I can’t believe no one’s figured it out yet. Did you see the news report the other day? They brought some bird expert up from the Amazon. He said he thinks it might be some kind of mass suicide. Could you imagine that?”

“Seems a little absurd to me.”

“Well, yes. Me, too, but it’d be pretty wild.”

“It would be.”

“So. How are you?”

“I’m fine.”

“Good, good. Are your plans for the fall any more concrete than when we last spoke?”

“Not yet. Still kind of playing it by ear.”

“You know, if you want, I could get you an interview at the school.”

“At your school?”

“Yeah. Yes. At my school.”

“I appreciate that, Dad. I’d have to think about it.”

“Of course…of course. I just…I worry. If you aren’t careful, someday you’re going to wake up and realize you’ve wasted your life. I keep beating myself up. I feel like Mom and I were too easy on you, maybe. That maybe we got it all wrong. I keep thinking, if only we hadn’t been so dreamy, hadn’t let you be so independent…if only we’d stressed pragmatism and sacrifice a bit more. It keeps me up at night, it really does.”

“I know it does, Dad. And I’m sorry. That’s the last thing I want.”

“No, I know. It’s just, your grandfather was such a hard ass with me, if

you’ll excuse the language. Don’t get me wrong, he was a good man. Your grandfather was an extraordinarily good man. But he was of his time, you might say. He was very stern. There was never any thought of finishing school and not getting a job. There just wasn’t this period, back then, of finding yourself, so to speak. Which is what you’re doing, I guess. Finding yourself. That wasn’t even in the vocabulary when I was growing up. And I just worry that maybe I reacted too strongly to the old man. That maybe I went too far in the other direction.”

“You didn’t, Dad. I’m not finding myself. I know what I love. I’m pursuing that.”

“Yes…I suppose so. But I guess, I guess you can’t always just do what you love. I feel like we didn’t stress that enough. We let you quit piano. We let you quit basketball. I just feel like we should have made you stick with things a little more.”

“I’m ok, Dad. I haven’t knocked anybody up. I haven’t gotten married. I live cheaply. I’m more efficient and resourceful than you and Mom, you know.”

“Well…well ok. Ok. Think about the offer at the school, ok? I think you’d make a great teacher. So does Mom. If not for me, consider it for her. I think she’s losing more sleep than I am. It’s very hard on her, you being out in the world, drifting around, without an end in sight.”

“I’m sorry. You know I don’t want to hurt you guys.”

“I know. I do know that. And we love you. We love you.”

“I love you, too. Tell Mom I love her.”

“Ok. Will do. And don’t hesitate to call. Try to call a little more, ok? Just so we don’t have to worry.”

“Ok.”

“Ok. Take care of yourself.”

“You, too, Dad.”

~

I was sitting on the patio in the morning light, reading ‘Moby Dick.’ Two blocks away, the bells of the old Unitarian church announced ten o’clock. I thought of its steep, terraced graveyard full of smooth, illegible headstones. Many of the headstones had fallen, victims of gravity or wind or teenage debauching. I walked through the rolling cemetery often, before dawn of sometimes in the velvet after-dinner hollow. Stepping over the anonymous bones of puritans and whalers, patriot generals and declaration signers, thinking of all the poetry I wasn‘t writing, all the time I was wasting, all my friends rushing ahead of me towards marriage and financial security.

The patio was a fragrant, shady cloister of forsythia and honeysuckle, lilac and roses. I hadn’t read Melville since college, and it seemed the thing to do. I’d forgotten nearly every word and sequence of ‘Moby Dick,‘ save for the early scene where Ishmael walks through the empty church and studies the graves of lost mariners and the final coda where the aptly name Rachel corrals her orphan. I thought, more and more, that the only thing a reader retains of a book is its images, and that the words, for all their meticulous beauty, don’t much matter beyond pure function. Paint me something, I want to tell writers in love with complex syntax and diction, with wordplay and rhythms. What I wants to say is: I don’t give a fuck about your esoteric intelligence.

Some mornings I read Updike, too.

I listened to sprinklers percolating, the irritated prattle of a weed whacker, the curt bite of garden scissors. I imagined old Updike in his smoke stained office, lambent as a lighthouse through fog, guiding lost ships to port.

But this morning Ahab was careening into the pearly void. Then, out of nowhere, a tiny black meteor streaked across the sky. It landed just a few feet away in a quiet, quavering heap. I looked up, as if I might see a giant hand throwing small birds out of the air.

Reluctantly, I got down on my hands and knees. The stone was already scalding. I crawled to the patio’s edge, where the sparrow had fallen. I leaned in so my face was practically devouring the broken bird. My heart palpitated.

The little thing was still alive.

Its wings were a pulpy mess. Its spraddle legs were shattered. But, incredibly, miraculously, it was still breathing.

I hadn’t felt that kind of joy, or relief, or terror in years; maybe ever.

But what then?

I was afraid to touch it, afraid that my clumsy hands might extinguish what fragile life remained. But if I left it there, on the scorched stone, it would surely die. The thought gripped me: I must do everything in my power to save this small, fallen creature. If it died, I would be destroyed.

Inside the house I found a sturdy piece of printing paper. I delicately slid it under the bird - its chest still heaving at irregular intervals - and using two hands, I very slowly lifted the makeshift stretcher. Its weight was an impossibly small amount, almost nothing. And yet somehow, the same systems as my own cumbersome systems lay cradled inside, functioning just as bravely.

I gently deposited the bird beneath the shady, braided fronds of a forsythia. I filled a milk cap with water, and left it a few inches from the bird. I brought a few crumbled pieces of bread. I tried to go back to reading, but it was impossible. I spent every few minutes obsessively checking to see that the bird was still alive.

Morning gave way to afternoon, which gave way to evening. I barely noticed.

Samantha called.

“Do you want to pick me up?” she asked.

“I can’t. A bird fell. A sparrow. It’s still alive. I’m trying to nurse it back to health.”

“Do you know how to care for birds?”

“Not at all. I don’t think it’s difficult.”

“Pick me up. It will take ten minutes. I’m an expert at bird care.”

“Really?”

“No. Come pick me up. I miss you.”

“Ok,” I said reluctantly. “Ok.”

~

That night I drove her home, taking the long way, the road along the coast. Fleetwood Mac was on the radio. She reached over and took my hand, lightly, intertwining her fingers with mine, humming along with the song, thumping my fingers in rhythm, looking wistfully out to the feckless ocean.

~

The bird seemed to get stronger. Its limp was less pronounced. It carried its wings with more confidence. I brought out bread crumbs in the morning and at dusk. I spent most of the day in the backyard, watching for predators: stray cats, larger birds. Whenever I had to pick Samantha up, I sped like a madman on my way over and back. She grew tired of standing guard and went inside to watch television, or to make lunch, or to nap.

On the fourth morning, I was bringing out a fresh milk cap of water.

“What’s that you’ve got there?”

It was the old man. He was straddling the property line. When I looked up and smiled, he stepped over. He was about my height, with a face that was more creased and eroded from up close. His hair was mostly gone, and he had extremely thick glasses. He knelt down beside me.

“Well look at that,” he said, reaching out towards the bird’s open, but silent mouth.

“It fell a few days ago. Right at my feet. I couldn’t believe it was alive.”

Then I remembered the son, and all I could think of was hiding my desire to ask about him.

“What are you feeding him?” He was engrossed in the bird.

“Bread crumbs.”

“I’ve found they like oatmeal.”

“Really?”

He smiled raggedly, but not without pleasure or joy. “Oh yes. Layla and I have nursed many birds back to health. Squirrels and rabbits, too. Layla,” he called. “Hey, Layla?”

His wife appeared on the back patio.

“Come over here and take a look at this.”

She walked over slowly, a dish towel in her hand. She smiled at me.

“You didn’t die, I see,” she said.

I laughed. “No. Thankfully.”

“I’m glad.”

“That makes two of us.”

She knelt down, too; the three of us were kneeling with our heads buried in the forsythia.

“Oh, look at you,” she said. Then she reached out and, very gently, picked the bird up in her cupped hands. It was a deft, tender maneuver. The old man hadn’t lied; this wasn’t their first time with a wounded animal. She brought it up to her face while the bird squirmed and squawked in terror. “Are you feeding it oatmeal?”

“No, bread crumbs.”

“Try oatmeal.”

“Ok. I will.”

She smiled and cooed to the bird before setting it back down. She sighed deeply; the kind of motherly sigh that pierced me through with sorrow.

~

“Can you sleep over?”

“No. I’m seventeen.”

“Your parents still let you see me.”

“That’s because I lied and told them you were twenty-two. They still think you’re a total creep. But an acceptable creep.”

“You know, it’s very likely that someday you’re going to look back on this whole thing and think that I’m a creep.”

“Probably.”

“…”

“Don’t look so hurt. You said it.”

“What do you do? When you aren’t with me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean life-wise. What do you do?”

“I’m seventeen.”

“Well you must do something.”

“Sure. I go for runs. I fuck around on my computer. I finger myself. I talk to friends. I read writers that are a lot better than you. I make notes on your poems and think about how to make them better. I go out with my friends.”

“What do you guys do?”

“I don’t know. We go to parties. We drive around aimlessly. We went bowling last week. It’s all very mundane. I’m excited to get out of here.”

“You’ll miss it someday. When it passes and you realize it won’t be coming back.”

“What’d you do when you were seventeen?”

“The same stuff. There was this old mansion in the woods. Or, it was the ruins of a mansion. We had parties there. We played video games until four in the morning and then went to a diner and drank coffee and smoked cigarettes until dawn.”

“And you hated it and felt trapped by it?”

“And felt that it was all an awful, immature interlude until my real life began.”

“But now you miss it.”

“I’ll never be that young again.”

“What are you going to do when the summer ends?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where else have you lived, besides here?”

“Philadelphia. Harrisburg. Outside of D.C. I spent a summer living in a tent in Maine, breaking rocks with a pick axe. I spent a winter in Paris.”

“How was Paris?”

“Cold. Lovely.”

“Did you write a lot there?”

“No. I walked a lot and I drank a lot.”

“Were the women pretty?”

“They weren’t my type. Too skinny. You’d fit in well there.”

She smiled at this, shy but proud, and looked away.

“I don’t know. I’ll probably sleep on a friend’s couch for a few weeks. Maybe in Brooklyn. Or I’ll visit my parents.”

“What do they do?”

“Dad’s a teacher. Mom works for a tech company and makes more money than Dad, which drives him nuts. Though he‘d never admit it.”

“Are you close with them?”

“Sometimes. They’re good people, but they don’t always understand the things I decide to do.”

“Like work shitty jobs and try to write poetry.”

“Sure.”

“…”

“What?”

“Nothing. You’re smart, that’s all. You could be doing a lot more. Maybe living less selfishly. That’s all. It seems a little wasteful.”

“It’s difficult to explain. I mean, I‘m not destitute.”

“No, you live with friends or house sit for your professors. Your parents pay your cell phone bill.”

“They do. I’m very grateful for that. Look, I’m not always proud of it. Again, it’s hard to explain…It’s something I have to try, ok? I’d regret it if I didn’t. There’s no fulfillment, for me that can compare with being in the midst of writing, really being inside of it, to the point that it doesn’t even feel like my writing. It moves me in a way nothing else does. And I think I could be really good at it. I think I could move other people, too. I think I could carve out a small space in this world that’s uniquely mine, that I’ve fought for, that I’ve endured poverty and ridicule to carve out. All my friends are like ghosts. They bitch about their jobs but keep going back. They dream about the weekend, about a few beers at the bar, a joint at home, and some show on TV. The thought of that revolts me. I’ll die to avoid that. Even if it means everyone that loves me thinks I’m a failure behind my back. Which they do, mostly.”

“It’s admirable, in a selfish, immature way.”

“Well, you’re seventeen.”

“Yes, and all my possibilities are still open and unexplored. Which is what you like about me.”

“Sure, but not just that.”

“And soon they’ll begin to close, one after the other. My life will narrow.”

“Or you’ll fall in love with something, and choose to narrow your life.”

“Not likely. It narrows whether I fall in love or not, doesn’t it?”

“…”

“Sometimes I wish I could live about a thousand different lives. One to be a writer. One to be an astrophysicist. One to be a telemarketer in Calcutta. One to be a coal miner in the hills of China.”

“One to be a photographer in Paris.”

“One to be a janitor in Allentown, Pennsylvania. One to be a pilot.”

“One to be a Wall Street banker.”

“Do you know what you’ve never told me?”

“What?”

“Why you think the birds are falling.”

“I don’t know. Some things are total mysteries.”

~

One evening I brought out my cap of water and the bird was gone. I spent half an hour searching frantically, scouring the garden bed on my hands and knees to see if it had maybe wandered off, searching for signs of a struggle, for cat tracks of stray feathers. What I found was nothing. The bird was gone. I stood for a long while in the cooling dusk. The sounds of a baseball game were drifting out from the neighbor’s house. I fought the desire to walk into their house; to ask them what had happened with their son.

I stood in the fecund opulence. I drank the sweet, hot fragrances; gulped the dulcet and invisible hymns being chanted in the field. I measured all of it at the finite depth of my conscience; tried to marry myself to such abundance, and then tried to imagine all of it happening in my absence. I tried and tried to measure the weight of such beauty in my wake, in the wake of all sentience. Why does such grace occur if there is no species to appreciate it? It does, it has, it will.

What I felt, standing alone in the somnolent gloam, was a creeping waste. A vast and barren precipice. And I couldn’t decipher if it was mine alone, or if the plangent insects and the flowering trees shared this intuition. What it was, quite simply, was the emptiness of mortality. Of knowing that you will die but not knowing when. Of knowing you will die and not knowing what comes after, but fearing that it is an infinite nothingness.

~

She is lean and lissome like a muscular deep water fish. She moves so fluidly, her body at home in the complex mechanisms of athletics. We are in a wide field of freshly cut grass with a cooler of chilled beer. She is hitting golf balls like a natural into the watery abyss beyond the field, and the sun is lolling about in rich streaks of vermillion and scarlet. Mosquitoes everywhere, the almost electric humming of a million unseen insects and amphibians. Most of them as ancient as the dinosaurs, as ancient as Pangaea. She coils back, torqued like a lethal snake, and then she unleashes in this graceful parabola of sinew and muscle and skin. She comes back, practically swaggering, swinging the club like a billy club, with an insouciance she hasn’t shown before.

In that moment I’m confident she’ll forget me.

~

“Do you know what else I’d like?”

“What?”

“Not just a thousand lifetimes. I’d like to die a thousand times. I’d like to know what it feels like to drown. I’d like to know what it feels like to pull over on the side of a bridge and throw yourself off of it. I’d like to know what it’s like to be on a plane as it’s going down. The certainty of knowing. I’d like to know what it’s like to feel your heart stop.”

~

She led me through a deadwood swamp. The trees stood pollarded and hollowed, their roots exposed like the awful inverted nests of some terrifying predator. Their shadows were ghastly and stark. She walked a few steps ahead of me. A thin line of sweat showed along her spine, disappearing into her shorts. A brutal heat wave had fallen. The sky was hazy and impenetrable.

“I used to walk back here with my grandparents,” she said. She stopped and turned around. The silence, the stillness. She pulled her hair up, and I admired the length of her arms, their wet undersides. She smiled sheepishly. “My grandmother was married by the time she was my age.”

“Yeah?”

“We used to have this old farmhouse in the mountains. We would go their during the summers, or for the holidays. I remember one night I shared a room with my grandmother. I think I was fourteen. It was the year before she died. I think, then, that she knew she was dying and no one else did. We started talking, very openly. It’s not easy talking to your grandmother. She asked me about boys, love, that kind of thing. I was pretty mortified. But then she started talking about when she was my age. Started telling me about going to the drive-in with boys, about boys from her school she had crushes on. About dances they would go to in barns, drinking apple cider and sneaking in brandy in their garters. And there was this one boy she kept mentioning. Fuck. I can’t remember his name. What was his name?”

She was absently playing with her hair, her arms still raised. I’d inched closer. We were almost touching. We’d become so easy together. I think I could have reached out and run a finger along her armpit and she wouldn’t have cared. But I didn’t. I watched her and had an image of the two of us, many years later, meeting up for one of those late night breakfasts, after the bars, in a basement café tucked under the East village. Runny eggs and link sausage, toast soggy with butter and yolk. An old lover she’d called on a lonely whim; the poet with the ancient and Neolithic face, and the splotchy beard and the muddy eyes. The buoyant and vestigial affection that would dance between us like the smoke from the tabletop’s candle.

“God, I wish I could remember his name. She kept coming back to him. I’d never heard her voice this excited. It was horribly clear, even to fourteen year old me, that she had been in love with this man. That she’d clearly spent her whole life in love with this man who wasn’t my grandfather.”

“What happened to him?”

“He joined the Marines. By the time she saw him again, she’d married my grandfather. God, I wish I could remember his name.”

“My parents moved this winter. They’d lived in the same house for twenty odd years. So it was a production moving them out. I actually came home for a whole month just to help. And I remember finding all the old photos and letters they’d kept. Both of them kept letters from old boyfriends and girlfriends. All these things that we save because we think they’re important, and then they just gather dust.”

She started to walk again.

“It was incredible to see all these old photos. When Dad was my age, he was already married. Mom was pregnant. They looked so young.”

She glanced back and smiled. A few strands of hair were stuck to her cheek.

“And here I am. What have I done?”

We emerged from the deadwood forest on a dune overlooking the ocean. The beach was completely deserted. She ran ahead of me and then fell to the sand. I caught up and sat beside her. The breeze whipped violently around us. I sat Indian style and her legs were spread in front of her, crossed at the ankles. We sat like this for a long time, watching the grey swells roll in and collapse.

Then she stood up and took off her shirt, unhooked her bra. Her back was slender, the bones of her spine prominent. She arched forward and let her hair down. The wind had its way with it. She slipped her shorts and panties off in one elegant motion, like it was a dance she‘d rehearsed. Then she was naked in the wind. The swells were still breaking, but they seemed distant, somehow artificial. She was pale where I’d dreamt she was pale. She didn’t look back as she moved towards the water; slowly at first, but gradually breaking into stride. She fought her way through the surf while I took off my shirt, my shorts, my boxers, and ran after her. I crashed into the frigid North Atlantic while she went completely under. She emerged further out. She swam away from me for a while, before circling back. Her legs were out in front of her, kicking water into my face. I was shivering with the cold. She pulled me into her with her feet and kissed me. Curtly, once, then again with more warmth, bringing her arms around me, letting her weight fall against me, wrapping her legs around my hips. She reached down and grabbed me and laughed, swallowing a mouthful of water, breaking into fits of coughing.

“It’s very cold,” I said.

She laughed again. “Silly boy.” She kissed my cheek, then my forehead, my nose. There was the cold of the water, the body warmth of her mouth. I fell back into the water, submerged, and took her with me.

It was the youngest I remember ever feeling.

~

While she was asleep, I turned her hands over in mine, over and over. I used to study dead leaves the same way, when I was a boy raking leaves with my dad. I studied their topography, the swales and dells, the fine, fragile fissures that constituted her own map. What meticulous perfection, I thought with awe. It was the same awe I felt when, years later, I first saw the American West from a plane; the slithering canyons and broad plateaus. I couldn’t believe there wasn’t dialect for such symmetry, this communion of flesh and geologic time. It was also visible in the meridian of spine and tree, in the veins of a riverbed and the involute fingers of a mountain ridge. The deepening song of water, the soft susurrus of wind. Light that revives and smelts. I kissed her wetly on the neck and she turned to me, befuddled and suddenly awake.

~

By the end of summer, the birds had stopped falling en masse. There were still stragglers, of course: a stray gull at roadside, a sparrow clogging the gutter. But the mass death lifted as mysteriously as it began. No one ever, definitively, answered what caused it.

The weekend before I was to leave, I was weeding the back patio. Samantha was inside, making a pitcher of sangria and egg sandwiches for lunch.

I looked over and saw the old man, staring off into the wheat field behind our houses. He looked like his son, or like his son would have looked, I thought. Then, I didn’t know anything about that. He finally saw me and waved. I held up a hand, and he started to walk over.

“May I?” he asked, stopping at the yard’s threshold.

“Of course.”

He walked to the edge of the patio.

“I was wondering,” he said, “about that bird you were caring for. Did it survive?”

“I’m not sure. I came out one night and he was just gone. I’m hoping he flew away, but I don’t know. He might just as well have been eaten, too.”

He pondered this and rocked back and forth on his heels.

“Well, you did what you could, after all. You did the right thing by caring for it.”

He flashed a frail, internal smile. I wish that, then, I had told him how sorry I was about his son. But I didn’t. I smiled dumbly, and I’m sure my face told him the same thing as everyone else’s face: that I had questions I wanted to ask him; questions that would outlive him.

“Well,” he said, “I’ll let you get back to work.”

“Ok. Thank you.”

He walked back across the yard. He stopped like he was going to say one more thing; giving me one last chance. I didn’t take it.

I never saw him again.

~

A storm was coming. The long week of extraordinary heat was fracturing into immense wind and tumescent cloud. The world seemed perched on the verge of entropy.

We took the long coastal road to her house. Lightning exploded out over the dark water, reflected on its surface.

“Look,” I said.

“No advice. Please, no advice.”

“Ok, then.”

At one point she started to cry. She took my hand and clenched it so hard that I could feel my knuckles going white. I was trying to think of something to say, but I was failing. There was simply nothing to be said.

I stopped in the street.

“Ok,” she said.

She kissed me, briefly, almost professionally.

“Your writing.”

“Yes?”

“Stop trying to be other writers. It’s not about form, I’ve realized. You can’t be Rimbaud or Hass or Gilbert. You can’t be Keats or Muldoon. So stop trying to be. Write simply and honestly, ok? The rest of it doesn’t matter.”

“Ok.”

She kissed me again, less professionally; more like a young girl trying to hold onto something for the rest of her life. Then she got out and sprinted across her lawn, the sky quavering with fibers of light.

I couldn’t make myself go home. Empty roads are so seductive. They are, I think, the American catharsis. At some point, the sky shattered into heavy rain. The wind let all hell out. Lightning lapped in ephemeral, luminous arteries. Trees contorted as psychedelic dancers, or epileptics. Branches came clattering down, thundering like dismembered bodies. Still I couldn’t bring myself to go home; the world deconstructing around me. The street lights flickered, hummed, then went silent. Lightning illuminated the silhouettes of other lives: the cars and gardens and porch additions. The rain soon exhausted itself to a trickle. The wind fell to a whisper. The lightning still went, though, like the last synapses before death. Sirens screeched. A mist levitated off the slick pavement and broken branches reached for me like hands from the grave. Far off, the horizon was a vestigial ember. Still the lightning was a precise chorus. And then I saw her: a girl on the swing set outside the old elementary school, swinging high, legs like sinewy pistons. It couldn’t have been Samantha, but for the rest of my life, this is how I have remembered her. A girl carving the charged air in easy parabolas. I wanted to yell out: Are you crazy? Do you have a death wish? But I watched; my voice was lost. The lightning fell around us like a cruel ballerina, pirouetting. The swing creaked and moaned in its hinges, and the opaque form of the girl ascended, descended, threw her head back and fell into the last light.