The Grieving Owl
I was flying past a house the other evening, and because the lights were off and there were no curtains on the ground-floor windows, I stopped to take a peek inside—which I do sometimes, just to see how people decorate. This particular place was made of stone, not old, just made to look old, with a reproduction carriage lamp in the front yard and one of those roofs that appear to be slate but are actually made of recycled rubber. From the outside it screamed Wagon Wheel Coffee Table, but it turns out they had some pretty nice furniture, at least in the living room. A lot of painted pine—English, from the looks of it.
From there I peered into what’s called the den. That’s a room where people go to be themselves—or at least some idea of themselves. You see a lot of boats in dens, but in this one the theme was owls. Not real ones—I don’t think I could have handled that—but representations, both flat and three-dimensional: Screech-owl andirons, a candle in the likeness of a white barn owl. Above the mantel was a rather clumsy painting of a snowy owl hovering above a cross-eyed ferret, and on the desk, a small figurine of a great horned owl. Take away its glasses and the mortarboard cocked just so on his head, and it was me. Or perhaps I’m being too egotistical. It wasn’t just me. It was my mother, my brother, my sister and cousins. Everyone, basically, who I’m trying to get away from.
It’s not just that they’re stupid, my family—that, I could forgive. It’s that they’re actively against knowledge—opposed to it the way that cats, say, are opposed to swimming, or turtles have taken a stand against mountain climbing. All they talk about is food, food, food, which can be interesting but usually isn’t.
There are, of course, exceptions. I once had a fascinating conversation with a seagull who was quite the authority on the subject of the French-fried potato. I always thought they were all the same, but not so apparently. To hear her tell it, the taste varies according to what sort of oil is used.
I said, “What sort?” Who knew there was more than one kind of oil! Then there’s the question of texture, with crisp on one end and soggy on the other. The type of potato makes a difference as well, as does its age and exposure to the elements.
Following our talk, I went on a restaurant jag. Every night I’d pick a new one and look through the windows into their kitchens. What I saw, aside from the ovens and so forth, were a lot of mice. This kept me going back to restaurants and led to an encounter, the night before last, in the parking lot of a steak house. There I came upon a rat making his way toward the back door. “Not so fast, friend,” I said.
One of the things an owl learns early is never engage with the prey. It’s good advice if you want to eat and continue to feel good about yourself. Catch the thing and kill it immediately, and you can believe that it wanted to die, that the life it led—this mean little exercise in scratching the earth or collecting seeds from pods—was not a real life but just some pale imitation of it. The drawback is that you learn nothing new.
So this rat, it was as if he were following a script. “I just swallowed some poison,” he claimed. “Eat me, and you’re destined to die as well.”
It’s embarrassing to hear such lies, to think they think you’re dumb enough to believe them.
“Oh please,” I said.
The rat moved to plan B. “I have children, babies, and they’re counting on me to feed them.”
I said to the guy, “Listen. There’s not a male rat in the history of the world who’s given his child so much as a cigarette butt, and don’t try to tell me otherwise. In fact,” I went on, “from what I hear, any baby of yours has a better chance of being eaten by you than fed by you.”
“True enough,” the rat admitted. His body relaxed beneath my talons, and I felt his hope leak onto the asphalt, as surely as if it were blood or urine.
“I’ll make you a deal,” I said. “Teach me something new, and I’ll let you go.”
“This is a joke, right?” the rat said.
“No,” I told him. “I mean it. You tell me something, and if I find it interesting, I’ll release you.” This was how I’d learned about dens and English furniture, about roof tiles and vegetable oil and reproduction carriage lamps.
“All right,” said the rat, and he paused, thinking. “Did you know that all this restaurant’s shrimp are frozen?”
“No, I didn’t, but that’s not really good enough,” I told him. “Nothing that goes on in a steak house would surprise me, especially if it’s a chain. You need to think farther afield.”
“Okay,” he said, and he told me about the time he tried to have sex with his mother.
“How is that supposed to help me be a more well-rounded individual?” I asked. “Don’t you know anything important?”
Then he told me that there’s a certain kind of leech that can only live in the anus of a hippopotamus.
“Get out of town,” I said.
“No, honest,” he swore. “I had an uncle who lived at the zoo, and he heard it firsthand from the hippo herself.”
It was one of those things so far-fetched it simply had to be true. “All right,” I said, and I lifted my foot off his back. “You are free to go.”
The rat took off across the parking lot, and just as he reached the restaurant’s back door, my pill of a brother swooped down and carried him away. It seemed he had been following me, just as, a week earlier, I’d been trailed by my older sister, who ate the kitten I had just interrogated, the one who taught me the difference between regular yarn and angora, which is reportedly just that much softer.
“Who’s the smart one now?” my brother hooted as he flew off over the steak house. I might have given chase, but the rat was already dead—done in, surely, by my brother’s talons the second he snatched him up. This has become a game for certain members of my family. Rather than hunt their own prey, they trail behind me and eat whoever it was I’d just been talking to. “It saves me time,” my sister explained after last week’s kitten episode.
With the few hours she saved, I imagine she sat on a branch and blinked, not a thought in her empty head.
After my brother took off with the rat, I flew to a telephone pole on the far end of the parking lot. A leech that lives in the anus of a hippopotamus. Talk about a closed society! What must it be like to live like that, your family within spitting distance your entire life?
My next stop was the city zoo. I’ve heard there are some that house the animals in actual landscapes, fields and jungles and the like. Ours, I discovered, is more old-fashioned, geared toward the viewer rather than the viewed. The panther’s cage is about the size of an eighteen-wheel truck. Our lions have it a little better, but then there are two of them. I don’t know how much territory a hippo might require in the wild, but here at the zoo her pen is on the small side, not even as big as a volleyball court. There’s a pool for her to submerge herself in, and the ground around it is paved in cement. A sign in front of her display reads, LOIS, but that, she explained, was just her slave name. “I don’t go by anything, not now, not ever,” she told me. “It’s just not the hippo way.”
What struck me right off was her warmth and accessibility. You expect this with miniature goats, but hippos, I’d heard, were notoriously grumpy.
“Oh, I have my moments,” this one said, and she started talking about her teeth. They looked like pegs hammered at random into her gums, and it seemed that one of them had been giving her trouble—which is not to make her sound like a complainer, far from it. “It’s not all bad, living in the zoo,” she told me. “True, I don’t have much space, but at least it’s all mine. For a while last year they brought in a male, trucked him over from some wildlife center in the hopes we’d get it on and have a baby, but the pregnancy didn’t happen, which was fine by me. It’s not that I don’t want kids, I just don’t want them now, if you get what I’m saying?”
“Sure.”
“So anyway, how about you?”
I told her that great horned owls hook up for life, a rarity in the bird world. My mate passed away before our first clutch of eggs could hatch, but I learned a while ago that it’s best to keep this to myself. “A mood killer” is what the seagull diplomatically called it. And it’s true. Someone tells you his mate died, was struck by an ambulance, no less, and of course it casts a pall. That’s why I didn’t mention it to the hippo—I wanted to spare her the awkwardness.
What else did we talk about the night we first met? I remember she asked what the land surrounding the zoo was like. She thought it was all trees and winding paths; little wooden huts selling balloons and cotton candy—that everything looked like what she saw from the bars of her pen. The hippo didn’t know about muffler shops and office-supply superstores, about restaurants and motels and apartment complexes with pools lit by underwater lamps.
What does the world look like? “Well,” I told her, “that’s going to take a while.”
“That’s what I was hoping,” she said.
On my way home that night, I picked up a rabbit. It was on the small side, and no sooner had I started eating than my mother appeared. “I’ll wait until you’re finished,” she said in that particular way that means What kind of son can’t offer his mother so much as an appendage? Sighing, I ripped off an ear and passed it over.
“You shouldn’t have,” she said. Then, her mouth full, she brought up one of my cousins who’s single and will soon reach breeding age. Despite my opposition, my mother is determined to find me a new mate. “There’s been talk,” she keeps saying. But what talk? From who?
My former mate had been dead for all of three days when my mother set me up with the daughter of one of her neighbors. We met at dawn, in a big oak overlooking a pasture. Below us on the grass, a white calf took her mother’s teat in her mouth, and my date shouted, “Faggot!”
“I think the word you’re looking for is ‘lesbian,’ ” I said. “Though even that wouldn’t make sense. What they’re doing isn’t sexual—it’s called nursing. It’s the way mammals feed their young.”
She said, “Yeah, faggot mammals.”
When I told this to my mother, she looked at the bloody rabbit I was holding and said only “What about the other ear?” Then she swore that this new female, my cousin, was different. “I told her you’d meet her tomorrow night, on top of the cross in front of God Saint Christ Jesus Lord.” This is her name for the Catholic church, which is actually—I’ve told her a thousand times—called Saint Timothy’s. Not that it mattered in this case. At eleven o’clock the following evening, I was back at the zoo, talking to the hippo.
We started that night by discussing the pigeons and sparrows who come in the day and defecate on the concrete surrounding her pool. “Disgusting,” she said. “If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a goddamn bir—” She caught herself. “Bir… thday.”
“You can’t stand birthdays?”
“It’s the fuss,” she said. “I mean, who needs it?”
“Listen,” I told her, “don’t worry about hurting my feelings. With one or two exceptions, I’m not much for birds either.” Then I told her about the seagull I’d met, the one who taught me about French-fried potatoes. “A while after her I ran into a rat, who said, and correct me if I’m wrong, that there’s a certain type of leech that can only live in your, uh, rectum.”
“I don’t know if that’s the only place they can live, but I know I’ve had them back there for a good nine months,” the hippo said. “Little sons of bitches is what they are. I think I picked them up from that two-bit Romeo they sent from the wildlife center.”
“Do they hurt?”
“Not so much,” she said. “It’s more the principle, if you know what I mean. The idea that they can just live inside me, rent free, like they own the place.” She looked behind her as far as she could. “Then too, they’re loud.”
“Not the exact words,” she said. “It’s more of a constant, low-level murmur. It’s even more noticeable when I’m under water.”
“What do you think they talk about?” I asked.
“Oh, regular asshole things,” the hippo said. “I don’t mean things about my asshole but the sorts of things that low-life assholes are interested in—incest, maybe, or cards.”
“Cards?”
She nodded her massive head. “The men who clean my pen like to play them on their breaks. Sometimes they sit on the bench beside the snack hut, and I watch.”
Off in the distance, the panther screamed. Then I heard a police siren. “If you wanted, I could maybe listen to what they’re saying,” I offered.
“I don’t know that I want to give them that much importance,” the hippo said.
“Fair enough,” I told her, and I tried to tamp down my disappointment. How can you not want to know what your parasites are talking about? I wondered.
“What if what they’re saying is cruel?” she continued. “It’s bad enough having them in there, but if they’re literally making fun of me behind my back, it would be too much to bear.”
“It’s equally possible they could be trying to thank you,” I said. “I mean, just because they’re leeches doesn’t mean they’re ungrateful.”
“Isn’t that sort of exactly what it means?” she asked.
I had just conceded her point when her curiosity got the better of her and she agreed to take me up on my offer. “If what they’re saying is awful, though, I don’t want to know the specifics.”
There was a short concrete platform near the front of her pen, and at her suggestion I stood upon it while she backed up. This brought her bottom level with my head, which I then cocked and brought as close as I could to her anus. “Raise your tail,” I said.
The hippo did, and I heard what sounded at first like a rabble, many voices talking over one another. Then I realized that they weren’t talking.
“Let me get this straight,” the hippo said when I explained what was going on. “Leeches are singing inside my asshole.”
“To the best of my knowledge, yes,” I told her.
“It’s so much fun in there that they’ve broken into song?”
“It could just be the way they communicate,” I offered. “Maybe this is what they do when they’re sad or angry.” It didn’t sound much like a dirge, though. More like a German drinking number.
“I want them out and I want them out now,” the hippo said, her voice so forceful the platform trembled.
“Look,” I told her, “there’s obviously nothing we can do right this minute, so let’s both sleep on it and see how things look tomorrow night.”
On my way home that evening, I swooped low over a suburban driveway and caught what turned out to be a gerbil. Funny-looking thing—slight, with a brushlike tail and a scrap of red fabric around her midsection. I had planned to grab a quick bite and go home to bed, but something this potentially interesting—it would be a shame to just kill it.
“Hold on, friend,” I said, and after her brief and pointless struggle, I learned that she was an escaped pet. An only child had kept her prisoner in her bedroom and was attempting to dress her in a doll-size bikini when the gerbil bit the girl on the hand and made a run for it. “For a few hours I hid beneath the refrigerator,” she told me. “That seemed too obvious, though, so I moved into a copper pipe in back of the hot water heater, the old disconnected one they keep in their mudroom, the slobs.”
It was so much new information: A mudroom! A bikini! A hot water heater! “How big was the pipe?” I asked.
The gerbil told me it was narrower than she was. “Not a problem for tunnel dwellers such as myself,” she said. “Truth be told, I like a tight fit.” She glared at the bikini top, then added, “Within reason.”
Just as I realized the gerbil’s potential value, I heard a beating of wings and turned to see my sister standing behind me. A moment later my brother landed. “What have we got here?” he asked.
“Looks like a mouse with a messed-up tail,” said my sister. “Or a little squirrel, maybe, that was rained on.”
“Actually, I’m a gerbil,” the gerbil said. I wasn’t expecting her to join the conversation, but hearing her voice—so full of pride and sass—made me feel right about sparing her. “If you’ve never come upon one of me before, it’s because I’m not native to this area. I’m”—and she said the greatest thing—“invasive.”
My brother moved a step closer to my sister and asked if that was another word for “dressed up.”
“I’m pretty sure. Yeah,” she answered.
The gerbil looked from one of them to the other. Then she turned to me. “Wow, these two are stupid,” she said. “No dumber than hamsters, I’ll grant them that, but you hear about owls and automatically think ‘brainy.’ ”
“That’s just a myth,” I told her, and then, before my dumbfounded brother and sister, I lifted the gerbil in my right talon and took off. Figuring my family would probably come looking for us, I flew past my home and headed to a henhouse on an abandoned farm out near the reform school. There I helped the gerbil remove her bikini top and watched as she hunkered down, exhausted, in a pile of hay. It would have been easy for her to run away, but I hoped she would stay put. More than hoped actually. I meant to say something to this effect, but then I must have dropped off.
It wasn’t much later that I awoke—the story of my life since my mate passed away. I get tired, wiped out, even, but can’t seem to sleep more than a few hours at a stretch. It’s such a weird time to be awake—noon. Spooky, really. There have been a few occasions when, tired of just standing there and hoping to fall back to sleep, I got up and flew around.
The dining options were definitely interesting—lapdogs, ducklings, I even saw an iguana sunning himself on top of a Styrofoam cooler. But there was also a lot of traffic and noise.
I never liked the world I saw during the day. Then I started hating the one I saw at night and wondered, What’s left? What changed things, albeit slowly, was learning. It’s like there’s a hole where my life used to be, and I’m filling it with information—about potatoes. About hot water heaters. Anything will do. These leeches, though. For the first time in memory, I was unable to sleep not because I was anxious but because I was excited. To live in a damp crowded asshole and sing—if these guys don’t know the secret to living, I don’t know who does.
The gerbil awoke just after sunset and busied herself hunting crickets. After that I took her to a bird feeder, where she put away a few dozen sunflower seeds. Then she wiped her mouth and turned to me, saying, “Okay, Owl, what’s the plan?”
A short while later we were at the zoo, where I introduced her to the hippopotamus. The two hit it off immediately, and within minutes the gerbil was all caught up vis-à-vis the anal parasites. “Fascinating!” she said. “And you’re telling me they sing?”
“I want them out,” repeated the hippo, and with no hesitation the gerbil offered to go in after them. “Why not?” she said. “I’ve been in tighter places—no offense—and if I can’t convince them to leave, I can at least find out what their story is.”
“You would do that for me?” the hippo asked.
The gerbil answered that she’d just spent eighteen months living in a cage. “When I finally escaped, I told myself that from here on out, I was going to make some changes: try new food, visit exotic places, live a little!”
I couldn’t believe what a good sport she was. I’d have wanted time to mentally prepare, but not her. The only suggestion she made was that we lube her up a little. “Just to give me a bit more mobility.”
“You think?” the hippo said. “But what about your fur?”
And the gerbil laughed, saying, “This old thing?”
There was a carousel near the entrance to the zoo. The gears were coated in heavy grease, and after the gerbil had rubbed against them, I returned her to the pen, where we positioned ourselves on the concrete platform. The hippo backed up under my direction, and though it took quite a bit of maneuvering, we eventually got her rectum even with the gerbil. She was just about to crawl in when I felt myself being watched, and looked up to see four pairs of eyes, perfectly round and glinting from a tree beside the snack hut. My mother was there, my brother and sister, and joining them was, I’m willing to guess, the cousin I’d stood up last night. Then an elderly uncle arrived. Then an aunt.
I used to think that there were great horned owls and not-so-great horned owls. I’d put my former mate and myself in the first category, and from that lofty vantage point, we’d looked down upon my family. Now they were looking down on me: A son. A brother. A cousin, a nephew, a half-baked know-it-all standing beside a grease-blackened gerbil at the gaping back door of a hippopotamus. Even discounting the singing leeches, it really was stunning: this trio of newfound friends, so far-fetched we simply had to be true.