They found my bird's body in the river, a few miles downstream from the bridge. A team of divers had pulled it up -- weren't even sure it was a bird at first, that's how bad it was, they thought it might just be a rat or a box filled with tissue paper or something, but they brought it ashore and got a good look at it and, sure enough, bird. Investigators ruled it a suicide.
---
That night I went on a first date with this girl Vanessa at some bubble tea place. That's the tea with the weird colored bubbles floating in it. I asked for tap water. She asked why I didn't get tea and I told her I didn't like it, and she said she didn't really like it either, so we left. I asked her what she did. "Who the fuck knows," she said.
---
I still remember when the call came. There was a knock at the door. Technically it wasn't a call, it was a knock at the door. It was a police officer, looking down, hat in his hand. He told me they had found my bird. My heart leapt. But then he said she had been dead for days. I fell sobbing into the door frame. The officer put his big hand on my shoulder, and told me I should get back out on the dating scene, try to move past my loss --
---
We tried to figure out what we should do. I thought, vaguely, maybe I'd be able to go home.
"Dates," she said. "What do people do on first dates?"
"We could go to a movie," I said. I didn't want to see a movie. "We could ride a ferris wheel."
"Let's go to that Duane Reade," she said, pointing to a big one on the corner. "I have to buy a pregnancy test."
---
They wouldn't let me see the body. "Our investigation isn't complete yet." The woman at the front desk stared through me with contempt. Did she know something? Did the police suspect that I had something to do with my little bird's death -- that it wasn't a suicide at all? Or did she merely blame me for whatever despair had brought my bird to such a lonely end? "I can't stay," I said, "I have a date."
---
We dashed through to the back of the store. She seemed to know, if not exactly where the pregnancy tests would be, at least the general area.
She picked up a couple boxes and compared them to each other. "Generic brand!" she said. "Should I shoplift them?" she asked.
"I don't know."
"It would be a hell of a story to tell," she said. "To whatever's in there, I mean." She frowned. "It wouldn't be that good a story."
We went up to the counter. "Two boxes of these," she said, "and a pack of batteries." I scanned the cashier's face for a reaction, but she looked dead, out on her feet.
---
The first thing I did was take a walk, to clear my head. Every tree I walked under shed dozens of tiny brown birds up into the sky.
Down the block I saw a crowd of people pour out of a church and start running towards me, furious, screaming and shaking canes and hymnals. I knew it was probably nothing to worry about, probably just the congregation's weekly jog, but I had the thought that they were coming for me, and I started to run. I stumbled trying to take the corner and I fell into a pile of trash bags.
---
We stood around outside. It was hot, too hot to loiter anywhere. We walked into a bar across the street that we had just seen a tiny man sweating through a green shirt open up. He gave us a dirty look when we walked in, like he wanted some time in the bar to himself before anyone came in to bother him. Vanessa ordered a beer, then said no, a Sprite, then winked at me. "Just in case!"
---
I lifted myself out of the trash. I had reached the end of my reserves of goodwill for my fellow man. The congregation had run past. I picked up a rock and threw it at a parked car across the street, but I missed.
---
I asked her when she wanted to take the pregnancy test. You could do it now, I said. I'd want to know right away, if it were me. She said no -- she felt alive with possibility, and she didn't want to let go of it just yet. I asked, the possibility of what?
"Willful self-destruction," she said. "The possibility that there is something I've done that has yielded consequences."
The man in the green shirt threw up into a sink behind the bar, then swayed, then fell over. We took our tips back and ran.
---
I missed the car. I struck a bird.
---
Her name was Vanessa. She had yellow feathers. She couldn't speak, but she tried, I could tell -- she wanted to speak so badly. I told her all my secrets, except for the big ones. She would curl up in bed next to me when I slept and scoot up so her little head was under my chin, and we'd keep each other warm through the long winter nights.
---
She said her friend lived in this neighborhood and offered to get me high at her place. I didn't really feel like getting high, but I said all right. I didn't really feel like doing anything but getting hit in the face with a cruise missile.
I don't remember the friend's name. Vanessa told her about the pregnancy tests she'd bought. I got the sense that the friend already knew the story up to that point, whatever it was. They started talking about having kids and names and stuff like that. The friend said she didn't want to have a kid because it would interfere with her career. I asked her what she did, and she said she lived in filth, like that was the answer.
Vanessa said that if she had a boy, she'd name it Christopher, after me. I thought that was a pretty funny joke.
"All right," she said, "enough suspense." She took the tests into the bathroom. Her friend and I didn't say a word to one another the whole time she was in there.
She came out, wiping her hands dry on her shirt. "Well?" her friend asked. "I'll never tell!" She sounded too joyful to have gotten bad news, but if I guessed what she would have considered good news I would have only been projecting.
---
We agreed to go our separate ways. People were streaming out of the subway stop. An angry-looking MTA guy in a gray jumpsuit was saying the station was closed -- the whole line was down. We tried to figure out another way to get back but she gave up and hailed a cab. She offered to get me high at her friend's place.
---
I woke up choking. I reached into my mouth and pulled out a feather. How did -- ? I ran it into the bathroom and threw it into the toilet and flushed. The water drained but the feather floated on top, and rose again, with the tide, as the bowl refilled. I flushed again but there was a rattling sound and a stream of brown water slithered up into the bowl, as if in revolt.
---
I saw Vanessa a few months later. She was deeply pregnant. I told her congratulations. She looked miserable, just, miserable. I asked if this was the pregnancy from our first date. She said, "I don't know." She spit a seed onto the sidewalk, right by my feet -- I hadn't seen before, but she'd been chewing on seeds. "I never took the test," she said. "I dumped them out and flushed them down the toilet." I asked her who the father was. She told me it was to be a virgin birth.
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