? A snapshot of a reflection in the Caddy’s driver’s-side mirror: dust roiling over a dirt drive, partially obscuring a naked man, facedown in the road with what looked like a garden trowel in the small of his back. I could not tell you why this picture was so joyous, so carefree. Some quality of the late-spring light. Some sense of escape, of effortless motion.
? A child—a girl—in a winter cap with earflaps, clutching a lollipop of enormous size. She smiled uncertainly for the photographer. A Paddington Bear peeked out from under one arm, where she held it clutched against her side.
? The same child in a coffin, her plump hands folded on the velvet bodice of her gown, her face smooth and untroubled by dreams. A scarf the color of darkest wine had been arranged artfully around her throat. Paddington Bear was under the same arm, peering out in much the same way. A gaunt hand reached into the frame, as if perhaps to push a curl of yellow hair back from the girl’s brow.
? A basement. The background was a wall of old whitewashed brick, with a narrow cobwebbed window set six feet above the floor. Someone had crudely drawn black marks in what I am sure was Phoenician script just below the window. Three rings of ash, slightly overlapping one another, had been sketched on the cement. In the one farthest to the left was a circle of smashed mirror. In the one farthest to the right was a Paddington Bear. In the central circle was a Polaroid camera.
? Old people and more old people. There had to be at least a dozen. A scrawny old man with an oxygen tube in his nose. A baggy old hobbit of a fellow with a peeling, sunburned nose. A dazed-looking fat woman, one corner of her mouth twisted in the snarl of someone who has suffered a severe stroke.
? And, finally . . . me. Michael Figlione, standing beside Shelly’s bed, an expression of sick terror on my moon-shaped face, the Solarid in my hands, the flash igniting. It was the last thing he’d seen before I started shooting.
I collected the slippery squares into a stack and put them in the deep pockets of the fluffy white robe.
The Phoenician had rolled back onto his side. Some clarity had returned to his eyes, and he watched me with a foolish look of fascination. He had wet himself, a dark stain soaking his crotch and down his thighs. I don’t think he knew.
“Can you get up?” I asked.
“Why?”
“Because it’s time to leave.”
“Oh.”
He didn’t move, though, until I bent and took his shoulder and told him to stand. Then he did, docile and bewildered.
“I think I’m lost,” he said. “Do . . . we . . . know each other?” He spoke in little bursts that suggested he was having trouble finding the right words.
“No,” I said firmly. “Come on.”
I steered him down the hall and to the front door.
I thought I had absorbed all the shocks the night had to offer, but there was one more waiting. We got as far as the front step, and then I caught in place.
The yard and the street were littered with dead birds. Sparrows, I think. There had to be almost a thousand of them, stiff little black rags of feathers and claws and BB-pellet eyes. And the grass was full of fine, glassy pebbles. They crunched underfoot as I walked down the steps. Hail. I sank to one knee—my legs were weak—and looked at one of the dead birds. I poked it with a nervous finger and discovered that it was flash-frozen, as stiff and cold and hard as if it had just been pulled out of an icebox. I rose again and looked down the street. The feathered dead went on and on, for as far as the eye could see.
The Phoenician rocked on his heels, brainlessly surveying the carnage. Shelly stood behind him, just inside the open front door, a far more serene expression on her face.
“Where’d you park your car?” I asked him.
“Park?” he said. His hand had dropped to the front of his trousers. “I’m wet.” He didn’t say it like it bothered him.
The thunderheads had blown off to the east, coming apart into mountainous islands. The sky to the west was a bright burning gold, darkening to a deep red along the horizon—a hideous shade, the color of the human heart. It was a hideous hour.
I left him in the yard and went looking for his car. Are you surprised by that? That I left the Phoenician alone in the yard with Shelly Beukes, just walked away from the both of them? It never crossed my mind to worry. By then I understood the stunning effect of exposure to the Solarid multiplied, each time the camera went off. After zapping him more than fifty times, I had just about lobotomized him—temporarily anyway. Even now a part of me thinks I did enough damage inside his head to leave him permanently impaired.
Certainly Shelly never recovered. You knew that, didn’t you? If you were hoping somehow that that kind, brave old woman was going to get it all back in the end, then this story is going to disappoint you. Not one of those birds got up and flew away, and not a bit of what she lost was ever returned to her.
Almost as soon as I was walking up the street, I began to cry. Not out-and-out racking sobs—just a weak, miserable trickle of tears and a hitching of breath. At first I tried not to step on any of the dead birds, but after a couple hundred feet I gave up. There were too many of them. They made muffled snapping sounds underfoot.
The temperature had dropped while I was inside, but it had started climbing again, and when I found the Phoenician’s Caddy, steam was rising from the wet blacktop surrounding it. He hadn’t parked far away, just along the curb around the corner, where the development hadn’t really developed yet. There were ranch houses along one side of the road, pretty spread out, but a dense wall of forest and scrub brush on the other. A good place to leave a car for a while if you didn’t want anyone to notice.
When I returned to the Beukeses’ house, the Phoenician had sat down on the curb. He was holding a dead bird by one scaly leg and inspecting it closely. Shelly had found a broom and was futilely sweeping the lawn, trying to collect up the little corpses.
“Come on,” I said to him. “Let’s go.”
The Phoenician put the dead bird in his shirt pocket and obediently stood.
I walked him down the path, up the street, and around the corner. I didn’t notice Shelly following us with her broom until we were almost to the Phoenician’s big Caddy.
I opened the car door, and after a moment of staring blankly into the front seat the Phoenician slid behind the wheel. He looked at me hopefully, waiting for me to tell him what to do next.