Another bird. A bright island parrot.
Take the gloaming shades of an African Grey. Let them be coloured vivid by Fernández the painter. From the indistinct shoals of stone to the shocking bright of the jungle. Green. Red. Blue. Take the atoms of the world and pack them closer together to make such colour.
I landed on a branch nearby.
How should I speak?
What is the green language of the birds? The pigeon’s pidgin, the avian lingua franca, the conference call of the birds.
The parrot on the near branch said nothing. It lowered its head. It fanned its tail. There was deep cooing that I felt in the mortal worm of my innards. It cocked its blue-green head, exposing the hibiscus crimson of its throat.
I knew nothing.
This parrot.
Male.
Female.
Without category.
I could read the language of its colours. The riotous map of its markings. Its illegible scent.
There was a feeling of avalanche as if a great river were moving through me. As if my brain were regurgitating itself. As if a thousand thousand courtship rituals were jangling through the interstellar dulcimer flash of our wings.
I was a pirate. A lovebird. A great ship. A cannon.
The bird preened my neck and chest. My lower body span like a pinwheel.
My vent would soon explode. We rubbed beaks.
I leapt upon the parrot.
It shrieked and hissed.
We pressed our vents together. I rubbed. Azoy, I hissed. I shtupped. I shtupped. I shtupped.
Ach.
Ach.
Ach.
Oy.
Oy.
Oy.
Oy.
Oy.
Nu.
And then it was over.
I looked around. I had lost my mind. There in the shaking green leaves of the rainforest, my body mutinied and I had shtupped this parrot.
I had seen no other for many years.
He and I—for soon I would discover that he was indeed a he—had made the bird with two backs, one both grey and multi-coloured, and with wings enough for both joy and regret.
Am I, too, converso, hidden, changed? A rewritten book, a new calligraphy of desire with a few blotchy wet-spots and a misspelling or two?
I remember an old saying: “Man comes from the dust and in the dust he will end—and in the meantime it is good to drink vodka.”
I wished there were some schnapps then. Some hooch to clarify things by addling me tseshtrudelt.
So. An explorer arrives on a desert island. It’s uninhabited except for one old rabbi. Long white beard, rags for clothes, coconut-shell shoes, a ragged prayerbook tucked under his skinny parsnip arm. His skin is cooked dry as the prayerbook’s cover. Reb Hershel lives by the shore in a lean-to of branches, leaves, bones and feathers. But, at each end of his island, there is a fine building. Each of these two synagogues is tall, smooth and well made, with a Magen David—a Jewish star—of little blue stones set into its chiselled hardwood dome.
“Tell me, Rabbi,” the explorer asks. “There’s only one of you. Why have you built two shuls?”
“Feh,” the rabbi spits, then points at one of the synagogues. “That one I don’t go to.”
I thought to myself, “Is that how it’s supposed to work with the sexes?”
Ach. But how could I have known? Emes. With a shvants that’s tucked away inside, it’s hard to tell, especially when the feathers are foreign.
So. Nu. We have no penis. It’s in the mind and is mighty as a schooner. A Flying Dutchman, it glimmers with the iridescence of a comet riding the sky, and, takeh, is powerful and invisible as God.
The island parrot turned toward me. He tilted his head, gazed into my left eye with his right. I could see the delicate transparent third eyelid closing then opening again, the corona of tiny feathers around the eye.
Did he know?
The stutter and aphasia of our pheromones. The inscrutable whisper of our plumage. We could not speak, except in the language of shtup and gesture, and this served only to make communication more farblondzhet confused.
He bobbed his head a few times and then lifted off into the air. I watched as he rose about the treetops, the fluorescence of his great coloured wings bright against the blue sky.
I was hungry and felt like a nosh.
Nu? We had not yet learned of cigarettes.
The jungle was a fruit-bowl Eden. Below me, flesh, zaftik and luscious, hung invitingly from branches, unfamiliar fruits on strange and unfamiliar trees. Even their shadows were of a different shade. Several fruits had fallen and split open, spilling black seeds from their yellow-green skin onto the jungle floor. Insects crawled over their soft orange insides. A sweet odour between ripeness and rankness.
I ate and sweet juice dribbled from my beak. This new world had baptized me from both ends.
Chapter Three