[Fiction] The Birdman

By Alexandra Danila

That Sunday, the sun was glaring, intent on preparing the city for a summer of heat, although it was only April. The train station was, as always, filthy, covered in that sticky muck that seemed to attach to your skin and later needed a rough scrub in the bath. It smelled intensely of urine, of unwashed bodies, of poverty, of despair. I was wary of the homeless in the train station with their dried-up faces, gruff movements, and their frightful and sad predicament. They might ask something of me and I had nothing to give, so guilt rose up in my throat. I was guilty because I wasn’t like them, yet.

My long black trench with yellow and black engraved plastic buttons--that gave it a rather pompous quality--served as armor  and disguise. It’d been a hand-me-down, but it felt courageous to make things you haven’t chosen work for you, even when it felt like plastic to the touch, swallowed me whole, and had the lining torn at the bottom. You couldn’t see that unless you looked underneath, but I knew, and the act of knowing enlarged it, fleshed it out like an open wound. The tails of the coat were floating behind me in dramatic fashion whenever I hurried, and I always hurried, both for practical and image reasons; the image being acquired from some movie or other where the drama of the clothes makes the hero. The coat allowed me to pretend to be the main character.

When he got off the train, I recognized him immediately. Amidst the little crowd of tired travelers who seemed anxious to get out of the station, he was the only one who looked around at length and studied people’s faces, as if he had all the time in the world. He was wearing a long coat too, but much more fashionable than mine; sturdy, dark- auburn, cotton. It worked very well with his little suitcase the color of sand, his brown disorganized mound of curly hair, and the camera case on his shoulder. He looked imposing in his calm inspection. Taut skin spread over sharp, pointy features, under a generous forehead. Thick glasses sat in front of uneven eyes,  blue and unnerving. A mouth, too prominent and obscene, made a nest amid stubble. He wasn’t handsome, but seemed to inhabit himself with great ease. Each detail of his person radiated intensely, hurting my eyes. “It’s panic,” I whispered to myself. I felt inadequate, boyish and common. My instinct told me: hide!

They should’ve sent someone more like him, more hip, more self-possessed. I wondered if maybe I should just leave and say I didn’t manage to find him. These things happen. There were taxis outside, he was a grown man able to handle such a situation. But I forgot, during that second of deliberation, that they had sent him a picture of the group and pointed me out to him. Then he was beside me.

“Ah, they sent me a pirate,” he said, and I blushed, heat spreading on my cheeks and neck until my ears felt like they would melt at any moment. A wave of nausea moved in my stomach, destabilizing  me for an instant. I powered through. What else was I to do? In life, when you get thrown off the bridge, you can either accept you are falling or scream and flounder desperately and pathetically. I chose the first, I chose dignified failure, no matter what. I might be falling, but I’m for sure not flailing.

“But not a real one, more like one in the making.” I felt the amusement in his voice and saw it in the crinkles around his eyes. “That coat makes you even more delicate than you are.”

With that, all the words hid from my grasp like shy animals that need constant reassurance and flee at the tiniest sign of danger, so it took a moment, too long of a moment, before I spoke.

“We can take a taxi.”

An easy, practical thing to say, but too soft, and I struggled to make it audible, which was mortifying. I said it again, just to be sure he heard. This new inability only increased the unpleasant sensations paralyzing my limbs in the dark coat that I knew now didn’t fit and didn’t make me the hero of the story. My hands had gone cold and I was certain I wouldn't be able to move them.

“Can’t we walk, is it very far?” He wanted to know.

“Forty minutes,” I said, taking  a breath to make sure I had  enough for the rest of the sentence and continued, “if you walk slowly, maybe more.” 

“Do you walk slowly?”

“No, I’m pretty fast.” That was easier to say.

“Wonderful. I do, too. Did they give you taxi money?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s get a receipt so you can keep them, shall we? And then we walk.”

Outside the station, he went around to the taxis parked in front and talked to the drivers, one by one. I stayed behind because I was embarrassed that we were going to fake the taxi ride and because I didn’t know what else to do. At last, he stopped at one of them. They had a longer conversation. My guest’s face was animated and open, the ease with which he engaged people pushed a sharp, painful pang of envy in the vast empty space inside me, as if I had been given a shell with nothing in it and feelings had space to bounce uncontrollably off the walls.

After a few exchanges he returned with a receipt for a slightly bigger sum that I had received.

“Is this enough?”

I nodded, grateful for the money and indebted and irritated about feeling even smaller now that he did something nice for me, after being not five  minutes in my care.

We walked in silence, I, not able and not knowing how to entertain him, he, looking around. On our right there was a park bordered by ancient, enormous plane trees, on which he seemed to focus all his attention. On our left, the mound on which the railway ran was wild with young trees and shrubs and grass so green it hurt my eyes to look at it.

I felt a breeze then, delicate and fragrant, the one that resembled the sea air, the one that I stopped to enjoy with my eyes closed every time it found me, even though I couldn’t remember when I first experienced it. There was a particular quality to it, a specificity that made it very intimate, as if then, a long time ago, it’d happened only for me; I’d been the only living human present enough to sense it and remember it, a secret glimpse into another world I was missing from, but was also missing the entrance to. These were the small mercies that saved me from reality, little bubbles of the miraculous. I paid religious attention to them because they were so rare.

The sun hid behind a thin cloud, the light dimmed slightly, the street was silent. We walked ahead, he tall, I short, in our long, unbuttoned coats, and I was more at ease. I glanced up at him, and his nose in profile was long and sharp, pointed downward like a beak, but it suited him well enough amid the other disordered features. They made sense somehow. I looked away so he wouldn’t notice.

The pleasure of the moment hid for a second the knowledge that my mission was impossible. Without realizing,  I’d been  caught in a trap at that student meeting when they discussed him. Everyone was excited and throwing ideas around, where he would sleep, how he would be greeted, if a gift was in order, what kind of gift, did he drink wine or champagne (or maybe he was fond of spirits), which activities would he be invited to attend considering he won’t be able to attend everything. I was overwhelmed just listening, and I heard myself suggest he might need some time by himself, to walk, to explore without activities. They turned to me all at once like a beast of many eyes, many mouths.

“Great idea, why don’t you meet him at the train station and help him decide what he wants to do outside of the program.”

It sounded innocuous enough until they somehow decided that if I spent time with him I should ask him to speak at the exhibition. I wanted to tell them I’m the last person to convince anyone to do something they don’t want, but my protests got lost in their shrill excitement. At every meeting since, they mentioned me as the person that will make sure he finally speaks in front of an audience. Each time the air inside me compressed and morphed until it was so dense and heavy it hurt to carry around. But I couldn’t back down. I didn’t know how. And if I couldn’t do that, how was I going to make a stranger speak when no one had been able to.

When we arrived at the building where we’d rented his room for the next week, we smiled.

“It’s room twenty-three. .. Second floor, “I said, and my voice was pretty normal, a small mercy.

He looked up at the building.

“Is this more to the right or the left?” He asked jokingly.

“Err, I have no idea. The middle?” I responded  before I realized  it was a joke. Then I felt utterly embarrassed again.

“The middle is a good place to be in to begin with. Dinner later? It’d be nice to have some company.”

"Sure, if you want. Is  eight ok?” I managed, without losing my voice once during the whole sentence.

“Plenty of time for me to settle.”

Later, we went to a place I knew. I hadn’t been inside before, but it was popular on the campus. He looked around approvingly and some of the tension I’d accumulated in my neck and shoulders eased up once we sat down. He’d brought his camera and his suitcase with him. It was quite small and couldn’t have contained too much, but as odd as I found it, I didn’t have the courage to ask anything.

“So, what do you do in this city?”

“I walk.”

“Hmm, yes, you do walk, I saw today.”

“I like to walk at night, when it is quiet and the trees smell so much more intensely.”

“You know what? I feel like walking, too. We should do that if you promise to show me all the unknown places, all the details you like.”

“All of them?” I asked, startled.

“Well, at least many of them.”

Then our order came. An order he had insisted on. He had pointed to various dishes, that and that and that, also that one. It was a lot. I felt elated and terrified and I hoped I didn’t have to pay for too much of it because he seemed reckless, unhinged a bit, but his enthusiasm was so familiar, as if he knew exactly the outline of my own excesses.

“We must share,” he told me when it was all laid in front of us. “And you have to drink with me.”

“Oh, I don’t drink. I have never gotten drunk.”

He laughed, surprised.

“Why?”

“I am afraid of who I might become if I get drunk. I’m not brave enough to find out.”

“People get drunk on more than alcohol, you know.” He kept laughing. “I won’t let you get drunk then. Let’s play a game. You  taste everything and describe it to me, then I eat what sounds the best.”

I was flushed and chilled all over for an instant. Exhilaration  made me feel powdery, ready to burst into dust at any breath.

“I can try.”

“It’s a game, not a test, you know.”

“Are you sure? For me, everything’s a sort of test.”

“I won’t grade you. It’s  just for fun, I promise.” The vibration of gentleness in his voice, soft and soothing, convinced me it was true.

We were sitting at a wooden table, a bit sticky from a lot of use and not enough thorough cleaning. The place was busy; it smelled of fried food, people’s conversations were buzzing around us like a cloaking net. No, actually we’d become part of it, that’s why we were invisible We’d  merged to the noise. I was tasting more different foods than I’d had in the previous year; years would be fairer, actually. It was all greasy, but unbelievable. It  dizzied me to have  finally been dropped into living, all my senses awake, my insides unclenching, organs humming in unison, almost released from all fear. Almost.

“Have you ever taken photos?” He ambushed me then.

“No, I never had a camera,” I said with my mouth full.

“I could teach you if you want. We might as well do it since I am here for a week and we can walk and photograph things,” he said as I was putting some meat and sauce and pickled cabbage in my mouth.

“Will we have time?”

“We have nothing but time.”

“What about the activities of the festival, your exhibition?”

“We’ll see. We can make it work.”

The way he said it all made me warm again, but a different kind, a good kind, the warmth that makes your insides glow, not the kind that itches, that stings, that hurts. It was conspiratorial, and only for me. I was drunk on all the excitement of the day, the food, the attention, the plans. He’d been right; I didn’t need alcohol after all. That momentary ease drowned out the responsibility I had. I forgot again, I forgot myself a little also.

Linus Berdmehm was doing the university a favor  by coming to the exhibition. He didn’t need more exposure or any publicity stunt. Everybody thought he was probably bored. The staff of the student festival had very shyly invited him to the opening when they asked to buy prints of some of his more obscure work and he said yes, shocking everyone. He even donated the prints in question to the school for a permanent exhibition or an auction, whatever they wanted.

It was a small affair really. More educational than anything else. He wouldn’t meet any important people. None from the art world or publishing, or anything like that. Just  students, teachers, small-town folk. It’d been one of the conditions, his presence be advertised only to the students.

He was notorious for not speaking about his work or doing any lectures of any kind. Not that he couldn’t. He’d done a few talks at the beginning of his career and everyone knew that he was as good with words as he was with the camera. And then he stopped, all of a sudden and without any explanation. He had been enticed with many things, and in many ways and he always refused.

Unfortunately, there didn’t seem to be any copy of any of his talks or any recordings; anything to demonstrate that he had been this  speaker. Some people remembered and talked about it with such intensity that everyone had this strong conviction of his ability. It was the stuff of legend, and so completely unprovable.

His pictures sold at unbelievable prices to magazines and collectors, and albums were published with instant success. When you opened one of those books something unnameable struck you. The jolt could be so great to make you close the album after a few images, overwhelmed.

Then, sometime later, forgetting the ferocity of the sensation, you would open it again, in a completely different place, as if your instinct told you that you will definitely not be able to go through too many and you need to see others. Or  maybe it was because once you had the book in your hands it guided your fingers. There was something cheeky about how these heavy, glossy books that housed pictures would play with you, not letting you be organized  about exploring them. If you tried, they only led you astray. You ended up opening the thing at random anyway.

The photographs he took revealed themselves to the eye in such a way you were sure you had to see or understand something, and it was there at the corner of your eye, but when you looked closer it was gone. It seemed it’d never been there, and yet you knew, you knew its presence in a way that couldn’t be explained. It was like a missing piece, just behind the ordinary gaze; you needed a special way of seeing the particular detail that made it whole. You had to become a special person, with extraordinary understanding and sensitivity to be able to see it, so you kept trying, over and over and over because the image promised to transform you into exactly that. Seduced by the prospect, you’d try over and over.

Monday morning, he was in front of the building when I arrived and had his small suitcase and his camera. I felt him then, angular somehow, his presence a particular shape in the back of my mind, not clear yet, not defined but present, bugging me because I could not shake it off.

He gave me the camera taken out of its case and I felt burdened with responsibility. I couldn’t even imagine how expensive it was.

“If I break it, I have no money to buy you another,” I said.

“You won’t break it.”

He was so sure I believed him. Still, I cradled it on my chest, like a creature of extreme fragility, vulnerable, a small body, entirely dependent on my care. It was a terrifying and eerily familiar sensation.

He showed me how to change the aperture, the shutter speed and how to focus. I tried my hardest not to tremble, although I had an internal tremor so intense it made my body stiff and clunky in an effort to counteract it.

We walked and rode trams for hours that day, and we took pictures together.

Sometimes, he mercifully took the camera from me and snapped here and there while I carried his suitcase. This made me happy, both because I was relieved to not carry the burden, but also because someone was seeing things that I had discovered and collected in my internal city. He was not walking  the real routes on a map, but a trail of details, a lifeline of beauty and refuge that I’d built, day by day, over the course of years. I was proud of it and protective, although I knew nothing about the history of those places. It  didn’t matter if they meant something or had any value, other than the aesthetic pleasure they gave me and the meaning I imbued in them from my small life.

By the time we stopped to eat something, I was exhausted and slow, and the pressure of being on all day made me silent, more silent than I usually was. I ate some soup and refused everything else.

“I will forgive you this time,” he said, as he put the camera in the soft shell of the case. 

I walked home in a daze, unaware of how much the day had taken of me.

Later, I woke from nightmares multiple times, not sure what exactly had terrified me so, but unable to just go back to sleep immediately. The moment I closed my eyes I felt I was being enveloped again by the place harboring horrible things.

“From now on, stop looking at me, just look at them,” He  said on Tuesday, then he made a sweeping motion that included everything. 

With all that constant internal shaking it was impossible to focus on more than one thing, so I turned my back to him and did as I was told. His presence was large beside me, and because I couldn’t see him directly, and I was afraid to turn around and look, I sensed how his features became more taut, sharper. They gained a definition unnatural for a human face. Not much, not exactly visible, but they had transformed somehow. It’d been a gradual movement, slow and steady from the very moment we met, through the walking and the talking and food we'd had, until this very moment. Yet, I was not sure. How can you ever be sure of something like that? I continued to snap at buildings and trees and parked cars.

"You need people, there's nothing without people," he urged and put a palm on my back, a gesture meant to push me forward, but I didn’t move and he didn’t take his hand away immediately. There was enough time for its heat to somehow seep through my coat, into me, and create a vertigo in slow motion. Space dilated a little, his body beside me became tighter in its edges. 

I moved around to look at him changing, the way I sensed him do, and he moved with me. I didn’t dare try again. I pointed the camera and snapped every time I had the courage to. I caught hands in motion with his lens zoomed at maximum, and people in a distance, boisterous groups, the back of passers-by, shoes, the belts that held pants up, and the hem of skirts, sunglasses, and funny hats, buttons, watches, earrings, and bags, bald round heads, noses, and heads of hair, scarves of all colors.

When we were done, we sat down in a booth in a different restaurant and I was about to lower my shoulders, stuck in an unnoticeable but painful position of tension when he asked to see the pictures. I gave him the camera, unable at this point to untangle the knots that were crushing the small muscles of my back. He came closer and touched my shoulder with his as he pressed the buttons and turned the little screen toward me so I could also see.

That instant of touch merged me to him and I suddenly felt split in two through that physical connection. The wiriness of his male body invaded me, the length of his arms and fingers, the roundness of the nails, his chest so different from mine, so flat, the hardness of the collarbone and the ribcage that descended abruptly into the elasticity of his abdomen, the nebulous presence of his genitals soft and sleeping in their cloaks of skin, the shoulders, two round peaks, the scapula gliding up and down with the motion of the arms or of the wings - in his case I was not sure - the buttocks and the strong legs, too long, muscles swishing in their contraction, the toes, balancing, attached to the ground and also ready to disengage at a moment’s notice. If he’d embraced me, I wouldn’t have had such a complete knowledge of his presence. His body kept me in one place, tethered to that instant, to the materiality of it, while we were going through the photos, taking inventory of the procession of details.

The girl with the long hair had let it grow for a former lover; her body included him even when he should’ve been long gone. She had no access to him, but carried him and cared for him every week through the ritual of washing, putting a mask on, drying it gently, caressing it, in normal ways, in secret ways.

The guy with the scarf was possessed by thoughts of his colleague, his drawing was better, his manner with clients was more effective, his whole existence flowed minute to minute without glitches, without errors. It was simmering in him; he didn’t let it come out, he suffocated it with his focus on the list of things he didn’t need to buy that week. No  toilet paper, no extra pens, no cheese, no apples, no detergent, no coffee from that little place he enjoyed. Then the text message came, reminding him they can review the project whenever he is ready, the project he’d been having trouble finishing. He added one more thing to the list: he won’t get that book of essays. He doesn’t really need it. Come to think of it, he doesn't need the box of tissues. He  can use toilet paper.

The girl with the long purple socks and brown boots slept over at her friend’s house, a normal thing. As she lay in bed and listened to her friend’s breathing, she imagined putting her arms around her. It would’ve been nice to touch her that way, to be that close. She hadn’t been touched in such a long time. She longed for a human body, someone to feel warm next to. But she didn’t reach out. She just lay there creating montages of embraces and touches in her head, flickering bits of connection that grew and surrounded her like an aura.

I went home light-headed, numb, hurt, saturated with details, and needed to wash them away. I looked at my legs in the bathtub, distorted by the liquid movement. The water was light-blue, translucent, clean. The bathroom smelled of chloride, of soap and wet hair, all things that made me cry for some reason. My ribcage was growing smaller and suffocating the lungs, the heart, and whatever else was sheltered inside me. I was aroused, yet didn't feel like touching myself. That  was not the point of the arousal. I was bereft, and I was rejected, wretchedly sad, helpless, lustful. All the states in which you want badly, and I knew that none of them will go away. Like  the rings of a tree, they had grown around whatever organ was feeling them right then with such barbarity. They couldn’t be scrubbed away. The bath wasn’t going to help me, but I stayed there and cried until the water was cold and I was shivering a bit, even if not ready to get out. The ability of water to contain me allowed me to remain in a state of potential without having to become too solid, too defined, too heavy.

On Wednesday, the phone rang. The woman who let me use her landline knocked violently at my door. “Phone for you.”

I wanted to ignore her and pretend I wasn’t home, or sleeping so heavily I couldn’t hear her, but she knocked for five minutes, never stopping, never taking a break, and I had to answer and pretend I’d been in the bathroom. As I was walking down the corridor to her apartment, I felt the organizers  around me, all their disembodied heads, their demanding voices, their frowns at my failure. When I picked up the receiver, the voice was high and entered my ear like a long sharp, gritty instrument of torture. It  rang in the echoing canals, it beat violently on the eardrum, it scratched the thin skin raw.

“Why haven’t you come to the first activity? Are you taking good care of the guest? Be careful, we want him to be pleased. Bring him, convince him to speak.”

I mumbled that we almost made it, something had come up. I didn’t have a mobile to let them know. He was just getting used to the city. I can’t really pressure him to do anything. He is a grown man.

She softened her voice then.

“Yes, yes, make him happy. Encourage him to come. Do your best. The most important thing is for him to speak at the exhibition.”

I was all sweaty and exhausted by the time it ended.

When I met him that day, it was warm and bright, the air was clear and full of the fragrance of trees exploding into flower. The city was in its most open, lush, and enrapturing disposition. It seduced me and lulled me on my way to meet him, and I was soft and relaxed so that brutal awareness of him pushed itself on me stronger than before. It must’ve also been because it came with all the people that had permeated my senses the day before. He became a bit sharper, his back opening up to grow other bones, just two mounds on his back, his face a touch longer, the angles more pronounced, the bones protruding, the phantom of a beak over his features and talons on his feet.

When I tried to tell him the schedule for that day at the festival, he laughed.

“We’ll see. There’s  no hurry. Is it?”

I couldn’t tell him that there was. Too  many things were pulling at me. He was the strongest of them at that moment.

Instead, I tried not to touch him in any way that day, but he found a way to lightly brush my hand when he showed me different settings on the camera, or when he wanted me to see something he’d  put his palm on the small of my back to lightly direct me. They were tiny moments of contact, but each one an explosion of knowing, of him and his masculine, aquiline warmth, of his whole body changing relentlessly. The  people we photographed cascaded into me furiously, tumbling over each other in a frenzy, a broken dam of spilling memories, as if I were the only empty place in the entire universe and they would have vanished without pouring themselves into me.

The woman with the red jacket made me see the pears up in the tree, their perfume reaching me even as they hung there, way above my head. Their color  was just right to catch the eye. They  were full of fragrant liquid sugar that I knew would slide down the sides of my mouth and drip between my fingers. The drops will stain my white tennis shoes and my summer dress. I let it happen. I wanted to let everything happen to me.

The ten-year-old on the bike was thinking of the Persian silk tree with its soft flowers that his mother liked. She used to pick fallen flowers and inhale, as if to fill herself with them, then asked him, me, to do the same. She caressed his face, mine, with it. The strands of the flower were delicate like kitten fur on the cheek, but with a much purer, cleaner smell; honey and happiness.

The lady with a young face, grey hair, and a blue backpack showed me a bird that came to peck on the arm of a swing chair on the balcony of a house in a small village. It always came at the same hour and pecked and pecked and pecked until I woke up. Once, it even brought a companion who did not approach the chair but perched on the railing, observing  the first one intent on pecking at that same spot over and over again. It was so frustrating; it interrupted the best dreams.

Then, it was already Thursday--and only Thursday at the same time--I found myself dreading his presence and longing for it. By this time, I wanted to feel him from the outside the way another’s body is supposed to be experienced. I stopped trying to tell him anything about the festival activities. Being around the danger of his touch, seeing people through the lens--his lens--it was of no consequence anymore what that cluster of heads and voices demanded of me. Who I was and the dimension in which I spent my life dissipated. The grimy apartment, in the old block of flats whose hallways smelled of old people, a sickening putrid sweetness, fell away. The people I lived with became immaterial. I could see through them and feel nothing. They  had become irrelevant. I was being transplanted somewhere else, into someone else, and my whole existence stretched and slowed down while bursting with color  and sensation, a frenzy of explosions in slow motion that I could do nothing to save myself from. Yet, I was determined to keep my distance once again, to fight whatever it was that was happening to me.

When he saw me, he hugged me before I could react--friendly, casual--and I was inside his body instantly, and it was absorbing some energy from the outside in a way I was sure I should’ve understood but didn’t. From outside came the movement and vibration impossible to describe, aching  inside his body, now mine, and made it change. His back opened up to receive wings, the muscles felt sore, there was a prickling that touched even the bones. The  skin thickened  and acquired  an unfamiliar texture, tufts of cream, amber, and mustard down sprouting on the hardened surface of the body, the hair morphing into golden feathers whose lustrous strands shone when light moved over them. His eyes were brighter, specks of molten burnt orange, streaks of blood red melted into uncountable satiny layers of gold. All the furious permutation necessary for the transformation to happen ravished and terrified me. Its immensity and strangeness extinguished the difference between pleasure and pain. It  was intense sadness I never wanted to let go of. My only desire became to move with it endlessly, rolling over clouds of light that frothed and waved around me and through me.

My chest had been opened up forcefully and I touched it to make sure there were no holes, and in reality there weren’t, but I felt broken, cracked, something was coming out of me. Something I knew I could never get back. It was going to tear me apart, yet what could I do? I touched my chest again. It  was the place from where I was going to empty myself out in the world. I put the eye to the viewfinder and pressed the shutter. I spread through the layers of glass of the lens.

Fatigued by pain, on a hospital bed, on the sixth floor, I am waiting for a tube to be pushed down my throat. I am scared. I am trying to feel the people around me. They move, shifting the air and other particles, spreading warmth. I focus on this, the tactile energy my whole skin can perceive, that way I’m not so alone in my fear, in the body that is failing me. I need to attach myself to someone’s heat, to their vitality. The nurses are kind, but overtired and thirsty. They didn't even have time to drink water that shift. The doctor is handsome and young and relaxed, another detail to focus on. I don’t think about the procedure. It’s almost dawn. I’ve been walking the corridors of the hospital for hours, from procedure to procedure, from doctor to doctor, frustration to frustration in the face of this pain that doesn’t seem to have a cause, but it’s made me moan, implode, crumble, and wish it’ll just end me. Enough  already. The view out the huge windows of the room is breathtaking. . I’ve never seen the city that way. I’ve never seen so much sky, or a sunrise that layered and beautiful. I can't stop watching. I am afraid and elated all at once. If I weren't sick, I would’ve never seen this. I wonder if all beauty must be painful. I know I need to relax into the suffering or it’ll be so much worse. I instinctively know about surrender; it has helped me many times to survive. I look at it and it’s pink, this surrender. It’s diluted blood, sacrifice, a piece of me being cut to give to the gods of life. It’s  a sunrise. I’m instructed to lie down, and I do, not prepared for what follows but relaxing into it. Then I am holding the camera.

The turkey I managed to get from a drinking buddy is waiting on the balcony. I can’t believe a whole week’s already passed and it’s Christmas Eve. I have to go in there, get it and cut its throat. The woman wants to get it ready in time. This year we didn’t get a pig, or even half a pig, because I can’t carry it anymore and she can’t cook it. She’s been bugging me since she woke up about this damn bird. I had to get a bit loose first. I still had to bend down to the stupid mirror. I’m too tall, as the woman keeps reminding me. She doesn’t know my bones are too heavy and my body too stiff, but I never tell her. A little drink always makes me more flexible; I settle better in the day. Without drink, everything is too sharp and angular, too hard. I hit stuff, and stuff hits me. Where is that green chair, woman? Oh, never mind, I found it. Hey, bird, wanna drink a little, forget a little with me? I’m sure you have plenty to forget, all people have. You  are people, too, especially today. Look at this bird. It  likes spirits. Have some more, buddy, and I’ll have a little more. It’s going to be easier to die if you are merry. Oh, here is this woman again. Leave us alone woman, we’re having a moment. I’m preparing him. Have  patience, work on the rest of things if you must work. We’ll just sit here and have a bit more to drink, to make us fluid. Water doesn’t get hurt when you hit it, when you cut its throat. We drink and we’re more like water. Yes, yes, you like it, I know. One for me and one for you. What are you doing bird? Don’t fall asleep. I can’t kill you in your sleep. Ok, I might need a nap too. Until tomorrow, or even later. It’s Christmas soon after all, what else is there to do?

Friday morning, I woke up with the certainty I won’t be able to shake that image of transformation in him, even when I looked directly at his face. I could feel the great bird emerging and shaking its feathers, gripping my chest with its huge talons, and I had to hold on tight so it could not carry me away. I knew that was what it wanted, to lift me up, and when it landed, someplace only it knew, to point its dreadful golden eye at me, get a good look, and peck my own eyes out. The man was in there as well, his body as present as ever. So, man and bird guided me through the city.

The stream of people continued. I tried to choose them by how they looked, hoping to get some nice stories, to carry more than secrets, but everyone has secrets and sadness. Everything past is a sadness; when it’s good because we don’t have it right now, when it’s bad because we had to go through it.

I pointed the lens at a teenager and I instantly realized  I had chosen badly. Her  clothes mismatched, her hair looked as if she cut it herself, all zigzaggy at the back, and then I was in the pantry. The floor is uncovered earth. On  the left wall, the huge, dusty shelves go up to the ceiling. In the farleft corner is the ladder that climbs to the attic. I know all this and I don’t look at them. What I look at is the tiniest mouse ten centimeters  from my feet. I dart my eyes, quickly searching for something to help me trap it. Maybe if I put the handle of the broom next to me on its tail, but the chances of getting that small diameter on another small thing directly and rapidly is highly unlikely. I don’t move and the mouse doesn’t move. Then I bend down, slow, as slow as I can. The mouse is probably petrified and is stuck in place. I keep bending and I pick it up. It is so small and I don’t want to hurt it. Its tiny, tiny paws, with the smallest of pink fingers press, on the huge boulders that have captured it. It pushes itself up, trying to get out of my grip. I’m completely taken aback and I fall in love with this creature. I show it to my mother and she is horrified and makes me give it to the cat. I hesitate, but I listen, out of habit and because I don’t have time to think, to decide. I listen, but I regret it the instant I do. They are pests, but this tiny thing deserved to be let loose. I don’t know if the cat ate it or let it go, as it sometimes does. I’m afraid to find out when I can and then it’s not possible anymore. I know I’ll always live with the regret that I could have spared a life and I didn’t.

“You are getting so much better. You have true talent,” he told me. “Look at how full of emotion this image is, you gave it a story. This stranger is speaking now. That’s the trick, to give them a voice, make the viewer see more than a face. A picture must contain a life.”

“A good story is full of coincidences that are hidden well enough to seem like the randomness of real life. In our own existence we want magic, and in our stories we want only the hard ‘truth’ of reality,” he told me on Saturday, before we started our pilgrimage through the streets.

I photographed a woman of indeterminate age and I sensed the breeze between my toes and the surprise of that sensation I never knew existed or how pleasant it could be. The pale blue sky peeks  through the edge of the gazebo, the tops of trees over the grey fence speak in shushing voices. A tin bird is poised to release song at the corner of the eaves of the awning. The  screech of a real bird whose plumes were surely bright sounds in the opposite direction. The wet sounds of a cat washing itself thoroughly come from under the sun chair.

“Living is nothing but a hallucination,” he told me later while we went through the photos of the day.

On Sunday, I took him to the station, forever relieved of the burden of his expensive camera. It was over. He was so bird-like already, so alien that I was sure by the time he reached his destination there would be nothing human left in him. He would take flight when the other passengers opened the window, unaware of his change, and leave behind his small suitcase and the camera. When inspected, it would prove full of photos, a whole host of lives he was carrying around. Or maybe not. Maybe  he would walk out with his brown head of hair and move on with a life that was entirely obscure to me. The thoughts distracted me and I didn’t really see where he found a place in the carriage, I didn’t wave goodbye.

As I was leaving, I noticed from the corner of my eye the yellow suitcase, abandoned on a dirty bench opposite the track. It  was open, and there was nothing inside.