When Hazel didn’t, Byron’s nonplussed solution was to wait it out. He likely assumed the offer was so overwhelming to Hazel, in a good or great way, that she was in shock and needed time to process. Maybe a lot of time, right? Since it was such a wonderful proposition. Byron had stayed like that, on one knee with the box extended outward, for the entire argument that followed; he seemed to have strong feelings that this staged position was the key to changing her mind. He was still like this, smiling, insisting to himself that if he stayed in a classic pose of devoted inquiry a few moments longer everything would fall into place, when Hazel turned and left the room. She was crying and disgusted; he was calling out after her—Hazel, stop and think for a moment! What is love if not progress? What is love? What is love?
Now she emitted a wolverine growl and pounced upon the flamingo, tackling it to the ground. Wrapping one arm around its middle, she gripped its long neck like an oar with her other hand and used the flamingo to help prop herself upright and walk along.
Many of the yards they had to pass through were booby-trapped with motion-sensor lights: when they’d walk past these, or through a stretch of particularly clear moonlight, the flamingo’s glass eye appeared to power on and glint at her with a furious bewilderment. Hazel worried it had reservations about its forced relocation. “I’ll take you back tomorrow,” she promised, a total lie. Even if she were still alive tomorrow, she had no plans to return it. The bird was inanimate, yes, and Hazel had never believed in hunting, but having taken it down by summoning her hatred of Byron felt like a trophy kill in a way that pleased her.
“You’ll like my dad’s friend Diane,” she assured the bird. Maybe the doll and the lawn ornament would be able to communicate with each other. She liked the thought of her father having to pretend the flamingo was real if she had to pretend the doll was real.
Plus her father seemed to be in a far better mental space than she was. Acting as though the bird could understand her and was her beloved confidante might be the very best thing. “You and me for a little bit,” Hazel told the flamingo. “Let’s give it a try.”
When they arrived at her father’s doorstep, as with any partner who’d helped her drunkenly stumble home, Hazel felt the need to instruct the bird about what to expect inside. “We have to be very quiet,” she whispered. “Dad’s asleep. There are obstacles we’ll have to watch out for, like a large wooden box that you might assume is a coffin but isn’t.”
She unlocked the door and turned the knob.
Remembering her junior high and high school days, part of her felt like she’d become a delinquent teenager all over again and worried that her father would be waiting up, sitting on the couch with his arms crossed. Diane would be next to him, dressed to the nines in one of her mother’s now-vintage outfits, her plastic face somehow remolded to have forehead wrinkles of displeased judgment.
Or worse, that Byron would be sitting there, or someone he’d sent.
That would be the end. But if it was her father, she could simply shut the door, take the flamingo into the backyard, and curl up with it there. It had been a long time since she’d held someone else during sleep. Byron’s skin always felt refrigerated, and in sleep his pulse slowed down to a low, controlled speed that seemed akin to hibernation. In the beginning of their relationship, back when she thought that she was maybe almost starting to like Byron, or was right about to almost start, laying her head upon his chest was a difficult exercise in anxiety. After every beat of his heart, there was just enough pause to make her nervous that the next might never come.
Not long after, though, she’d secretly started hoping that it wouldn’t.
7
HAZEL CRACKED THE FRONT SCREEN DOOR AND WAS RELIEVED TO hear snores ringing out from her father’s bedroom. The last time they’d both slept under one roof was the night of her mother’s funeral, when Hazel had gotten so drunk that the thought of getting in a vehicle made her nauseous; she’d slept on the sofa until her father’s snoring woke her, then she’d turned on the TV. Her brain was soft from stress, and in this vulnerable state, the program that came on easily pushed through the surface layers of her consciousness straight into a permanent memory—it was an aerobic-exercise show, presumably for effervescent insomniacs. The lead woman’s eyes and smile gleamed with unfiltered sadism; her growling chorus of Burn! Burn! Burn! made her seem a recent transplant from 1690s Salem—she’d ditched the bonnet and donned a leotard. Full proof of her evil powers came next: the remote control’s batteries inexplicably stopped working, and to Hazel’s dismay, the longer she watched the mechanical violence of the woman’s kicks, the more hypnotic the program became. In the background, one woman performed at half speed and yet another performed at quarter speed; watching all three at once was an almost-pleasant optical illusion. But the aerobic leader’s eyebrows were harshly triangular; Hazel found nothing pleasant about those. They made her feel very unsafe. Their arched points looked capable of perforating the television screen, maybe opening up a spatial vacuum that would suck Hazel in. Then she’d have to perform a kick routine at one-eighth speed for the rest of eternity. During this entire nightmarish fantasy, her father’s snores had been a metered background sound track, and hearing them now, Hazel began to feel the woman’s kicks as punctuated jolts to her temple. “We should go lie down,” Hazel said to the bird. “We’ve had a big day.”
The hollow flamingo was picking up vibrations from her father’s snores, which made the bird seem to be alive and nearly purring. Getting down the hall and back to the porch without crashing into furniture would take balance. Hazel thought of tightrope walkers and the balance sticks they used. A factoid she knew from Gogol was the more technical term for tightrope walking: funambulism. It struck her as an odd word for it—tightrope walking seemed scary, not fun. One of Byron’s earlier triumphs was the creation of a thick fiber-optic rope that could transmit several networks’ worth of information in seconds; the project came to bear the moniker Funambuloptics. It was sold as part of a defense contract for more than twice what the company was worth at the time (which was already more than nearly every other tech company in the world was worth), the reason being that if it were dangled from a helicopter, or hosed in through a window or a pipe, it could capture every particle of information on every computer inside the building without any human being having to be present. In theory, of course. Everything Byron’s military-contract units made only worked in theory. Nontheoretical use would violate international law.