I’ll Fly Away

Krieger was blocked. Finished. He was sick with it—oh, shit!—the film was tanking even before it was written. He sat like a vulture, hands poised, clawed, hanging over his keyboard. The emptiness in his head kept vibrating with a soft, endless gong. Nothing was coming. Not a scene, not a word, not even a bad idea. Soon, the studio would call and his lies would crawl out like sandy crabs, his strained voice going on about phony progress. And after that? He knew what was coming, the polite words of his firing: “I’m afraid we’re switching gears. We’re going with someone else.” Krieger didn’t know how but he knew why. Someone or something had to be blamed: it was her. He’d been warned. It was his new wife.

OK, he told himself, not her, not Dylan, not the actual woman. She was fine, great, he was in love, never more so. No, it was the act. It was the cliché of “tying the knot.” The knot was literal now, strangling him. The whole idea—marriage—had tremors of a terrible sleepwalking normalcy.

He told this to Dylan. She said, “What are you talking about? We can have any kind of marriage we want.” Krieger was certain he could hear her thinking, she was going to have to teach him a few things.

They’d known each other a year, lived together six months, been married two days. The block set in just before the “I do’s.” The night before, his agent had called with what he said was “good news, no, great news.” His first major sale. The rest of the evening, the waking hours, it was all celebration: edibles, wine, whatever they could find to eat and drink. Stoned and exuberant, it was Krieger who made the move: “We’re going to city hall tomorrow.” He’d never been so happy. “In a couple of months, I’ll hand in the script, we’ll have money, and I’ll take you on a honeymoon that you’ll brag about to your second husband.”

But that night, the bedroom seemed to tilt, the bed seemed smaller. Dylan’s quiet breathing seemed to be the omen of an ambush. This was a mistake. Too much happiness, that was the sure path to disaster. His friends—and his father—they’d all predicted he’d get to the edge and flame out with the first rattle of any success. He was a big one for shooting himself in the foot, they said. They joked: You’ll have to think of someone other than yourself. Also? He was too young—though 30 didn’t seem so young. They told him he was driving a blade into his prime work years. Don’t, they said, you should wait. But Dylan couldn’t wait and Krieger didn’t want to lose her. At 25, Dylan’s dance career was too quickly stepping towards choreography and teaching, and she was starting to talk about kids.

Sleep was impossible. It was 3 a.m. when Krieger got to his feet. In the darkened living room, he opened his laptop and the light from the empty page was like a test for atomic weapons. He sat there, frozen. It was 3 a.m., 4 a.m., 5… He was through, finished, kaput. When he tried to reach that undefinable zone of images and memories, words and music, there was nothing but that grinding, long, low sound. So, even his failure lacked drama. No Valkyries or dancing skeletons. He was destined to flame out in a minor key. Tinnitus or an ear infection.

He thought he might cry. A few hours later, at city hall, he was married.

 This was how they got the parakeet.

Two days after the ceremony, Dylan’s friend Tracey dropped by swinging some bulky, nearly square, strange object beside her, something boxy and covered over by a cloth. A wedding gift. Tracey (her articles for Artforum were indecipherable to Krieger) set the object on their dining room table and said, “I love you guys. It’s so amazing that you two found each other. I wanted to get you something, like, not the usual.”

She whipped away the cloth. It was like doing stage magic. Underneath was revealed a large birdcage, and in the cage, small, feathered, alive… a parakeet.

The instant the cloth was removed, the bird began to sing. A lilt, a chirp. It was saying something, Krieger was positive of that, but was it complaining? Or calling for help? He couldn’t tell which. He was horrified. He wanted to tell Tracey to get the hell out. “And take your bird.” Already, along with the blankness in his murky creative zone, his ordinary physical movements had taken on the style of a deeply uptight man desperately trying to appear relaxed.

Three hours after Tracey left (in a hail of false smiles and forced thanks-yous) Krieger was still on his feet, staring at the bird. It was quiet now, breathing quickly, sometimes putting its beak into its wings.

“I don’t know what she was thinking,” Dylan said. 

“The bird?”

“Tracey.” For the seventh time, Dylan said, “We can’t take care of the poor thing.”

Dylan was tapping at her phone for research. She’d been that way since her friend walked out the door. Krieger finally hustled over to the apartment window, took a deep breath, and stared out at the city. “OK,” he said, “OK.” And he pushed the window up, wide open. They were on the 17^th floor. New York at night was a postcard of lights.

“We have to let it out,” he said. “It’s not right to keep a bird in a cage. In an apartment. In the city.”

“She’ll die out there,” Dylan kept reading her screen.

“It’s a she?”

Dylan nodded, read some more, said she seemed to be a she. The parakeet was yellow with darker highlights and black stripes. “I think she’s afraid,” Dylan said. “Look at how fast she’s breathing.” Dylan went to the kitchen and came back with a glass of water. She filled the little bowl that was attached to the bars but the bird sidled away from her, dancing in funny little sideways steps along the perch to the other side of the cage.

“Don’t get attached to her,” Krieger pointed towards the open window. “Open the cage door.”

Dylan shrugged, made a face at him that meant trouble was near.

“C’mon,” he said. “Open the cage door.”

“I won’t,” she said. “Wait ‘til morning. We’ll take her to the pet store. We’ll give her away.”

“To who? You can’t just give a bird away. Open the cage door. Please.”

Krieger repeated that and then went silent. For a moment there was no sound, but then there was a soft clanking, a shaking of metal, because the parakeet had begun climbing with its claw feet and beak, going along the cage bars, getting its beak into the cage door latch and moving it up. The barred door opened. The bird climbed out of the cage, free, toed its way up on the bars up the side, and poised motionless on top.

“Holy shit,” Krieger said. “Did you see that? She did what I said.”

“How do you know she speaks English?” Dylan said. “It’s a coincidence.”

He moved slowly closer to the bird. She backed away. But when he moved still closer, the parakeet held its ground and Krieger reached slowly towards her beak. The bird bit him. It was a swift move but not painful, and Krieger let her hang onto his index finger, moving it gently back and forth. He stared into the bird’s tiny eye, which watched him, as if waiting for trouble.

“She has eyelashes,” Krieger said. “Like a real eye.”

Dylan let out a breath that he knew meant: I’ve married an idiot. “I’m going to bed,” she said. “I’ve got work early. You’ve got a new friend? You deal with her.”

The parakeet’s small dark eyes watched Dylan leave, Krieger was sure of it. When Dylan closed the bedroom door, the bird made a small, chirping sound. And took off. A sudden burst of wing movement. The overused phrase “a beating of wings” rolled in his head and he thought that’s the kind of banal crap that comes to you when you’re blocked. Even so, the bird, the air, the sound—they were all suddenly fused, becoming one, quick, thrumming peek into eternity. He shook off the thought. But he was surprised at the bird and at himself, and he stepped back. “Amazing,” he said. Then: fuck these thoughts, I don’t need that. What he needed was for the screenplay to appear on the page, something to come after FADE IN. But he couldn’t work. And now his attention was in the thrall of this bird. 

The parakeet started to cut through the air of the apartment, settling on top of an open closet door, on a bookshelf, on a lamp. Each landing was perfectly balanced. Each movement superbly coordinated. Her floating cadence in space, the wing sound, the way her small, feathered body carried its weight, all of it happening inside this box-like room 17 stories above the concrete—it was all completely out of place, as if hail was suddenly falling inside the room. After each landing, the parakeet would shake its head at Krieger and stare at him, like it was waiting for something. Finally, it flew towards the open window.

“Goodbye little bird,” Krieger thought he was probably speaking more to himself. She was a symbol. That’s it. She represented his career. He paused, thought nothing, then thought that once again, he was coming up with the tripe you get when everything’s shut down.

“Go,” Krieger said. “Go out. It’s a great city. You’ll have a great time.”

He closed his eyes, imagining the bird taking itself though the open window and flying out into the impossible, vast, steel-and-concrete planet of the city’s skyline. For a moment, he was nearly overcome by sadness, but then caught himself and opened his eyes.

The bird hung fluttering in the air in front of the open window. Krieger was suddenly in awe. Moments before this action had been so common, you saw it all the time: bird flight. Now? Amazing. The parakeet changed course and then flew away from the open window and over to the closed window beside it. She perched there on the top rail. Again, she stared at Krieger and made small musical sounds, moving her head and puffing her little chest. Krieger, watching her, was hit with this horrible realization: she could fly, he couldn’t. Sure, in dreams maybe, in roaring, multi-million dollar machines. In imagination. But this little yellow thing that belonged with a flock in the Outback and was now in a New York City apartment, she was doing something natural and incredible. Krieger—blocked, failed, stymied—would never be able to do the same.

“Leave,” Krieger said.

The bird shuddered slightly, took a few steps along the rail, and he saw that she’d shit on the window rail in small droplets.

“What kind of answer is that?” he said to her, thinking that it was a ridiculous conversation. But the window was still open. “The city beckons, my nameless little friend.” The bird only turned its eye toward the open window and didn’t move. Krieger, for some reason, realized that her eyes were constructed to easily, accurately see from that height. A few moments of that and Krieger was certain the bird was cocking its head again, and again staring at him, sizing him up.

He said, “You’re making me nervous,” and motioned with his head. “You shouldn’t be locked up here.”

He heard the bedroom door open behind him. “You’re still at it? Put her back in the cage and come to bed,” Dylan said.

“Yeah. In a minute.” He listened as the door closed, knew he was alone again.

The parakeet was still staring at him. When Dylan disappeared back to the bedroom, the bird took off once more, this time flying on a path that took her through the standard, too-small, New York apartment kitchen, coming out the other side, circling around and landing once again on the window rail.

Without knowing exactly why, Krieger said, “I’ll get you some food.”

In the kitchen, he looked for something that a bird might eat. He opened the refrigerator. There, in a clear plastic container, were the leftovers from the rotisserie chicken that he and Dylan had enjoyed earlier. Charred skin hung off of broken bones. Torn meat lay there like war dead. Krieger said to himself, “Oh my God,” and threw a look toward the parakeet before saying, “I’m sorry.”

He grabbed the chicken container, opened it, and chokingly scraped it in the trash. After that, he stood in the kitchen and thought, “I’m losing my mind. I’m talking to a bird. And I’ve thrown away tomorrow’s lunch.”

It didn’t matter. He was being driven on, he could feel it. He found a small container of health mix, separated some of the seeds, and poured them into a plate. He set this out on the dining room table and sat down, staring at it.

The flurry sound of wings was something he understood, whatever that meant. The bird was now walking on the plate, pecking at the seeds. He studied how her beak dexterously peeled some of them, dropping the chaff, and how she never took her eye off him. After eating, she was gone once more, this time landing on a tall, clear, decorative vase that was set on a small shelf.

“It’s not polite to eat and fly,” Krieger said. “But that’s OK. You see the open window?” He took a step towards her. 

She balanced there on the thin glass edge of the vase, moving her head twice more, once again toward the open window and again toward Krieger. Then, in what seemed an impossibly strange motion, she did a few small claw steps along the rim of the vase. And tumbled backwards, head first, inside.

For a moment, Krieger wasn’t sure what had happened. The bird was stuck, hanging upside down and motionless. He could see it through the clear glass, breathing but calm, not fighting the situation. Krieger, watching her, felt he was witnessing some kind of bird-Samurai action, no fear, no panic. He wished he could say the same for himself. And he was certain, absolutely certain, as if the bird had spoken to him, that she’d taken this strange dive on purpose.  

Krieger, not knowing why, walked to the open window and shut it. The bird would just die if he left it there. It would die uncomplaining, actually brave, a part of the great, connected, indescribable, seen and unseen web of…

“Stop, please, stop,” Krieger was talking to himself, “you’ve got to get a grip.” 

He wasn’t sure how he made it to the vase. “What are you doing?” His voice was quiet but he expected an answer from the bird. An explanation. Still, he suddenly knew what had to be done, it was like a story he’d read where a man, unthinking, beyond his strength, lifts up the end of a car to free a trapped child. He reached into the vase and with his hand like a scoop, he gingerly, almost timidly, lifted the bird out and held it gently in his palm.

It rested there, staring up at him.

He stared back, down into the bird’s tiny eye, watching her chest and heart move as if the two them were no different in breath and blood. He was careful not to hold the little feathered body too tightly.

“Aw, hey, enough,” this was Dylan. She was behind him at the bedroom entrance. Krieger turned to say, “I don’t know why, but I have to…” and without waiting for an answer, Dylan went back inside and loudly shut the door. 

Krieger turned back to the bird resting in his palm. He saw her beak move. She was nodding at him, no one could tell him different.

“I’m with you,” Krieger said.

Slowly, he opened his hand, and the bird moved so quickly that Krieger stood stunned. She went first to his chest, throwing herself against him, to the area of his shirt just over his heart. Then she climbed up, beak and claw, until she sat on his shoulder. Krieger stood very still, feeling the bird take her small bird steps across his trapezius muscle towards his head, and soon, her beak was tickling inside his ear. He shivered slightly.

“Yeah?” he said. “Let’s see.” He wasn’t sure why.

He sat down by his laptop and opened it to the empty page. The bird’s beak was still moving in his ear; she was making small chirping sounds. He considered the rhythms and said, “Yeah, yeah, OK, that’s not bad.”

He began to type.

“That’s good,” Krieger said. “Do the scene like… oh, oh, OK, I see what you’re saying,” the scene began appearing on the page like somebody else was writing it. Krieger laughed. “Very funny,” he said, “I like that…”

When the bedroom door opened and Dylan stood there in the shadows, Krieger didn’t hear her when she said something like, “I’m not seeing this,” or “I can’t believe this,” or “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Krieger didn’t hear any of it. He felt the beak moving in his ear and he said, “That is just great, what if we change it just a little to this…” and he typed another line. The bird’s beak was moving. “Good,” Krieger said, “glad you like it.”

To Dylan, without looking back, he said, “Not now. We’re working.”

And he was blocked to anything else Dylan said, even the clatter when she slammed the door. He only felt the bird shuffle a little on his shoulder so that when he turned his head he could kiss her, before the beak went back to his ear, and his hands, at last, returned to flying along the keyboard, forming words and images.