Andrew R. Touhy
The woman who lives upstairs has a beak and two flippers for hands. The flippers she covers with woolen mittens, to hide the fact of them from the world, and because their taut skin and slim, hollow bones grow cold easily. Most people politely ignore the beak, hooking impressively from where her lips should be, and so she believes no one thinks it strange. Her beak certainly is strange. But what troubles us, what is impossible to ignore, is the noise she makes from above.
Nightly, we are waked by the sound of a heavy desk scoring the length of the hardwood floor. The desk is positioned and repositioned, pushed or dragged into place, followed by the faint scrape of its chair. Dresser drawers groan open, moan shut, their sharp wooden edges dropped noisily time and again. Books are thrown at walls, their muffled thumps like distant thunder or fireworks—and then the bookcases themselves are overturned, or perhaps lifted and dropped. Every night the bed frame is wrenched apart, the box spring and mattress landing with a resounding flat thud that spreads across our ceiling, causing the chandelier to quiver and our bed to vibrate. Just when we think she’s finished, she spills her marble collection from its bowl, the dozens of little glass balls striking and rolling en masse down the sloping floorboards, pooling together above our heads.
We wake angry and upset. We are tired and tired of her. What in God’s name is she doing? we ask, grimacing, pulling the covers over our heads. In our most forgiving mood we imagine that she can’t keep hold of objects. Do flippers have thumbs? Are they webbed? In all likelihood hers are paddlelike: flat, blunt, slippery as fish. Plus she wears mittens, which can’t help affecting one’s sense of touch and ability to grasp. So it’s through no fault of her own, exactly. She is clumsy and this clumsiness must be deeply wounding and lead to terrible fits. Then again, maybe her hands are creatures with a will of their own. Born hated, cruelly betrayed, they play master to their host, lashing out at an unkind world by ransacking and rearranging her room. Or perhaps it may be only that she’s ill-tempered and impatient by nature, the kind of person who depends, sadly, on physical violence for pleasure and relief. In our rare joking mood, we offer that she may simply be an overzealous student of feng shui.
We have tried running a fan on high. The whirling hum only acts as odd accompaniment to the now familiar noise of the woman.
We have tried earplugs—foam, wax-cotton, silicone. Even in that spongy silence, she is in our ears.
We have thought to climb out our window and up the fire escape. We want not only the noise to stop—to find a way to make it stop—but desperately to confirm our suspicions, satisfy our curiosity, see with our own eyes this woman and her inscrutable nightly performance. But the thought of peeping in on her life, of violating her privacy, makes us uncomfortable. In truth, we are nervous. Without wanting to, we have come to demonize the woman, and find it hard to believe that she doesn’t sense our hatred. That it isn’t in some way reciprocated. What if she catches us, hands cupping our faces, peering in? We see her: coming at us from the shadows of the room, flippers raised, fanned out and perhaps dripping, craning her long neck forward, dire, blood-chilling shrieks emitting from her parted beak, stabbing at the air, as we, barefooted, already unsteady on the slatted catwalk, attempt to slip down the narrow ladder, three stories above the concrete back yard, in our nightgown and pajama bottoms. Or worse, more troubling: what if storming up the ladder, ready to embrace our rage, to beat on the window glass shouting, we were to discover the woman on her knees, shoulders shaking under a pink robe, one bare bulb swinging overhead, throwing light on the walls and upended furniture and clutter surrounding her weeping into the floor: flippers rise to touch her face, arrange and then stroke her hair, slide gently down to cross her chest and squeeze until, eyes closed, beak nuzzled to neck, she quiets between them. What now? we can hear ourselves ask, ashamed to be watching. Our voices strange, despaired. What now?
Meanwhile, tonight in our room, our pet bird stalks about in his dark mood: inexplicably nervous, suddenly enraged. He pulls at his bundle of coiled pink cords that stretch and snap like rubber bands, rattling the cage. He grinds his beak along the chalky edges of a cuttlebone until he finds the metal clasps that hold it. Working them loose, he watches the cuttlebone go knocking down. He bristles when we shush him, ivory-white quills rising like spines among his fluffed green feathers, one beady eye on us, blinking. He climbs higher. No toy goes unmolested before he scuttles off.
Shush, we say. Now shush.
On the lower perch again, he bobs and squawks, bobs and squawks, as if, by bouncing heavily while crying at top volume, his weight might splinter then crack the wood. He hunches forward, eyes narrowed to black slits behind the two hard pinhole nostrils that crown his bill, and spreads his wings to their full width: beats once, sending chaff and wisps of down swirling to the floor, and then again, littering pellets, seeds, and food flakes across the dresser beneath his cage. He stops flapping only to thread his thorny nails through the thin bars of his cage. The tiny knuckles of his dry, scaly claws, so much like our own segmented fingers, curl around.