The Lovebird (16 page)
“We will make our decisions regarding new membership democratically and base them on the merits of the applicants, specifically assessing their commitment to animal rights, adherence to a vegan lifestyle”—many in the audience nodded receptively—“unique skills, valuable connections to and/or knowledge of perpetrators of animal exploitation, and”—I paused, noting once more the slightly blurred beauty of Jack Dolce’s faraway face. It wasn’t that he looked sorry
about
me, or about the two of us and our failed friendship; he looked sorry
for
me, I was sure of it. Forgetting what I’d meant to say, I awkwardly added, “and, of course, we will consider every applicant’s level of physical fitness.”
A husky boy sighed and snuck out. My own composure was equally fleeting, thanks to Jack Dolce’s eyes, but I forced a smile.
What was it he had meant, I wondered, about earth, sun, moon, and stars?
“If,”
I continued, “after this info session, you remain interested in joining us, we ask that you turn in an application form tonight and, within the next week, submit a one-page essay via e-mail explaining what you can offer Operation H.E.A.R.T. Any questions?”
Suppose he had been right, Jack Dolce? And it all really was an “ineffectual exercise in folly”? What if Simon neither remembered me nor cared about any of this? What if nothing would ever make sense? And we would always be separate from the animals, divided into an “us” and a “them”? Now I
was
nervous. The strawberries of my sundress deepened in color as I grew damp.
Bumble had given me several gentle warnings before the meeting began. (“Be careful what you say. Mention no specific campaigns. Take responsibility for nothing. We don’t want to get in any trouble, after all.”) But his admonitions had been unnecessary, at least at first. The questions were all easy to answer, even in my shaky state.
“How many hours per week do you expect crew members to devote?”
“How much travel is required?”
“How much hands-on experience with animals would one need before becoming involved?”
There was one question I knew I shouldn’t answer, and didn’t: “Were you really the group that burned down Untamed a few weeks ago?”
“Next question, please.”
There was a question I probably should have avoided answering—“Do you make use of incendiary devices in any of your campaigns?”—but answered anyway, with what I’d hoped was delicacy and grace. “There is a possibility we may use such tools in the future. However, we would never put the lives of any humans or animals at risk.”
And there was yet another question I most certainly should not have answered, but did.
I answered because I was distracted by questions of my own: What was the point of earth, sun, moon, and stars? What was the
point
of such things when there were so many who needed saving? And then, as if he’d heard me pose those questions aloud and was aggrieved that I should have to ask them at all, Jack Dolce slowly made his way through the crowd toward the stairs. I saw him shaking his head as he descended.
I also answered the question I shouldn’t have because I was surprised. The person who asked it was not one of the kids in the crowd, but the man in the newsboy cap. I never suspected he had any interest in the Operation, though he had been in the vicinity of many of our meetings and had even come to the party at Jack Dolce’s flat (he had been a wallflower that night, speaking to no one, recoiling from the green snake wound around my neck, and declining a glass of wine with a quick shake of his head). He laid down his tome on U.S. presidents and raised his hand.
“I don’t mean to keep the conversation focused on, er, fire,” he said in a nervous, high-pitched voice. He fiddled with a cell phone on the table before him. I both noticed and did not notice it. “But, I’m curious about incendiary devices. If we were to use them, how would we make them?”
I had never noticed his eyes before. They were a hard, icy blue, and they contrasted with what was in all other aspects a seemingly benign and bland face. Thinking of those eyes, and of a ring of rosemary speckled with blue flowers, a blue plastic rosary bought from a little Mexican boy, and the blue hearts in a Navajo silver hair comb, I answered his question. I answered almost automatically, for it was a subject I had lately studied, always with Charlotte asleep on my back as I perused my handbooks. Every passage I had highlighted, every illustration I had circled came back with ease. The man in the newsboy cap
awkwardly repositioned his cell phone. I both saw and did not see it. He nodded, and wore a flattering expression of fascination while I spoke.
I spoke of gasoline. I spoke of plastic milk jugs. I spoke of batteries, timers, igniters, the power of one match. I spoke of fire. I even picked up a stick of chalk and started a sketch on the chalkboard before Bumble, who had been staring my way with the incredulous eyes of a lemur, stood and shushed me.
“
Thank you
, Margie,” he said, shooting a smile at our onlookers, all of whom had raised eyebrows and open, rapt mouths. “I think that about wraps things up. And thank you all for your questions, everyone. We’ll now begin taking your application forms.” He feigned a few friendly pats on my shoulder in an effort to push me down into a chair.
And then, just as I took my seat, I noticed it again: the cell phone. I saw the cell phone of the man in the newsboy cap clearly now, as if for the first time, positioned upright on the table in front of him, and it gave me a sudden sick feeling.
Yes, even though I had no notion of what was about to happen, I had a sick feeling, sick and scared, a sensation no warrioress would feel, worse than the feeling of watching Jack Dolce descend the stairs in disapproval, worse than the feeling of dozens of Dorals dangling from a downcast dad’s mouth, worse than Rasha’s red poppies—it was a feeling of doom that clung to me like the strawberries of my sweat-soaked dress, so dark now that they looked overripe, unappetizing, rotten.
BUMBLE CAUGHT UP TO ME AS I SPEEDWALKED
to my car. Jack Dolce had given me a wistful wave when I’d passed the downstairs window of Gelato Amore, and I could feel something salty brewing behind my eyelashes. “I think that went well,”
Bumble said. “You did start running off at the mouth there toward the end—what was that all about?—but all in all, it was good. Some promising people in the crowd. Let’s go have a beer at the Ould Sod.” The Ould Sod was a bar in Kensington that had an actual chunk of Irish earth mounted on one of its walls. Bumble liked to tell me the color of the oft-touched soil matched my hair. “Celtic chocolate,” he called it, not knowing how much more I loved Beirut brown. He lightly socked my shoulder. “I’ll buy.”
“I can’t,” I said. “I don’t feel right. I think I’m coming down with something.” I ducked into my station wagon and slammed the door after me. Bumble frowned, squinted into my eyes. “I’ll see you soon,” I said through the glass and steered myself home.
THE NEXT MORNING SOMEONE KNOCKED
on the door of my studio. I was sluggish from the bottle of red wine I’d imbibed the night before in an unsuccessful effort to drown my feeling of dread.
I let the knocking persist for several minutes. I tried to convince myself that Bumble or one of the others had come to discuss the applications we’d collected (none of which I had so much as given a glance) or to tell me the latest news about a chicken ranch in Escondido with a modus operandi abundant in the usual atrocities (birds driven mad by their living conditions, by the heartless hacking off of their highly sensitive beaks) or an underground sushi restaurant in the Gaslamp Quarter (hidden door, big bouncer) that was secretly selling endangered sea turtle to select patrons. But in my belly, I knew.
I rolled over with a little groan. Charlotte sat beside my head, watchful. “Oh,” I whispered to her, “oh …”
Then I heard a voice, nasal and newly familiar, on the other
side of the door. “Margie Fitzgerald,” it said. There was no question mark after “Fitzgerald.”
For five minutes, I listened in vain for the sound of retreating footsteps. Then I heard my name once more.
I stumbled to the door and opened it, wild haired.
I saw two men in suits. “Good morning,” I said.
One of the men used to be the man in the newsboy cap. “Ms. Fitzgerald,” he said. His cap was gone. “I’m Agent Fox and this is Agent Jones. We’re with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
At that moment, I had a memory. It wasn’t a remnant of a dream snaking its way through my brain, never to be seen again. It was a memory of something true. I remembered a red resin bracelet that had belonged to Rasha.
“May we come in?” Agent Fox said.
I was self-conscious about the condition of my apartment. A gang of fruit flies hovered over a pile of cherry pits in the overflowing trash can, and Charlotte had left a smattering of droppings beside the chair in which Agent Fox took a seat. He pretended not to notice, as I pretended not to be amazed that the man who had habitually sat upstairs at Gelato Amore staring into a book (by all appearances a meek man with neither a lover nor a job, a café loiterer, a gelato addict) was the very same proud personage who now, suited and badged, seemed to take up so much space in my shabby studio.
Then Agent Fox told me in polite, almost tender tones that “the Federal Bureau of Investigation” was in possession of “recent video” of me “teaching the making or use of an explosive,” which was, he added pointedly, a federal crime. I looked at Agent Fox, the very one who had baited me to “teach the making or use of an explosive” with his question, who had obtained the “recent video” with his cell phone, and he looked back at me and did not blink or shift his gaze. My cheeks grew hot with humiliation. He said
I had demonstrated that I could be a serious threat to my country as a possible domestic terrorist, one who endeavored to spur others to commit violent acts. And, finally, he said what was at once inevitable and unimaginable, what I prayed to Saint Jude, patron of the lost and desperate, would not be true: I was under arrest.
LOVEBIRD(Agapornis roseicollis)
AFTER ALLOWING ME A FEW MINUTES
to dress and set out some rabbit food, the agents drove me to the county jail, where they took my photograph (a joyless image with no rosemary crown, no green snake necklace) and my fingerprints (unfathomable hieroglyphs with all the secrets of my destiny in their swirls). I waited there while the crew arranged for my bail (I had placed my sole allotted phone call to Bumble, for I could not conceive of calling Dad). During my confinement, which I spent alone in a locked cell with a disinfectant smell that stung the insides of my nostrils, I had time to think. It was only then that I realized why I had suddenly remembered Rasha’s red resin bracelet upon opening my door to the agents: the cell phone with which Agent Fox had recorded me at Gelato Amore was not the first object I had both seen and not seen.
It had happened with the bracelet, too. When I was younger, fourteen or fifteen, I found it while poking through a drawer of miscellany (tape measures, decade-old coupons, plastic forks, pencils too short to write with but too cute to throw away) in the kitchen. I put it on, wore it on a whim to Sunday Mass, and then—it seemed—lost it. Later that afternoon, I noticed it wasn’t
on my wrist anymore but could not recall just when or where I had taken it off. I hunted all over for it and finally resorted to chanting the special prayer for lost objects the nuns had taught us in CCD: “Saint Anthony, Saint Anthony, won’t you take a look around? Something has been lost and must be found.” But this was to no avail. I lay awake in my bed all night, listening to the broken song of a nightbird who stood in the magnolia tree, worrying, wondering where the bracelet had gone.
My search continued well into Monday. My bleary eyes and the dark circles beneath them convinced Dad that I was sick and should stay home from school. As he left to show a house in the Rio de Lágrimas tract, he suggested I make myself a hot toddy with his Maker’s Mark, wrap myself mummy-style in a blanket, watch TV, and try to “sweat it out.”
Once alone, I frantically turned over and looked under absolutely everything, even in cobwebby corners where I had not trod in years, until, breathless and despondent, I threw myself belly down onto my bed and sobbed.
I could not bear it, the feeling of having lost anything of hers.
Then I turned my face and saw the bracelet sitting on my nightstand next to the white porcelain palm that held the rose-scented rosary, exactly where I’d already glanced a thousand times, where it had been seen but not seen, and, reverent in my relief, I sniffed it. It was the most radiant of relics, a vermilion icon, a piece of picked fruit, still fragrant from Rasha’s wrist—there, all along.
GENEROUS PTARMIGAN PAID TO HAVE ME SPRUNG
from the slammer. He used all that remained of the funds bequeathed to him by his aunt who had expired in the polo mishap. “You’re a bird, Margie,” he told me. “I always think of you that way. And no man—no honorable one, anyway—can abide a bird’s confinement
in a cage any more than he can a chimp’s, or a mouse’s.” Once free, I kissed him on both cheeks, and then pulled off his glasses to kiss his shut eyes, where I tasted salt, to my surprise.