The Last Rites of a Sparrow-Bird

Three days after I get hit by a car, a friend of mine asks me to help her move.

She picks me up three hours late, after being called in to work her second job. We go back and forth from her old house about a dozen times, trading her car for a truck, going to her boyfriend’s current place and back, and retrieving forgotten objects from her glove compartment so we can make the hour and a half round trip to her boyfriend's parents' house to pick up a couch. In the midst of this, we meet up with her room mate who she isn't dating, who helps us haul in a mattress, and eventually we're on our way.

The drive there is filled with a discussion on the boy who my friend and her boyfriend have been living with, a co-worker of mine.

“I feel bad for him,” she says. “He's hopeless. He's almost 21 and he's still living with his parents. He makes excuses when he leaves his dishes in the sink, every single time. He believes he's a wizard, you know. That he can change the temperature in the room and shit like that.”

“Does he have his GED?” her room mate asks.

“No. He's using the college money his grandmother saved for him to move out to Illinois. He says it's his, and he can do what he wants with it.”

“You have to wonder if someone like him will ever come to their senses,” I muse.

She says, “He won't. He's fucked, and he's going to stay fucked. There's this threshold, and once you cross it, you're stuck. He's always going to be fucked.”

And I, in all my capacity for seeing the best in people, have to wonder if she's right. If there are people who can just be written off as lost causes. Or if there's always at least one more chance if they look for it hard enough.

- - -

We make it out to the suburbs of the suburbs, where eight miles means “close” and there's practically farm land in between the townhouse complexes, and as we pull into the driveway, it's after midnight. The streetlights are a disturbing shade of orange-yellow, refracting light onto the slim evergreen bushes that stand like guards between houses with straight-line yards and, believe it or not, honest to goodness white picket fences. If you can even call them fences—most of them are twenty pickets across, if that.

Every single window in this cul-de-sac is dark, and I repress a shudder as I hop down from the truck that's only partially because if the pain in my knee. Everything around me is whispering flat and fake and dead. Or maybe it's only dead end; the mutterings of premonition are sometimes hard to catch.

“If I ever end up in a place like this,” I say. “I'll go crazy. I mean, I can't do it. I couldn't handle it.”

My comment slides through the darkness unnoticed, and I let it, opting to help haul the worn-out green couch out of the garage and onto the truck bed.

When we finally get it strapped down, using a combination of trial and error and knots the most inexperienced Boy Scout would laugh at, all of us are more frustrated and less awake than before. Our drive back into our town is quieter than the drive there, but we still manage to strike up some conversation about a friend who's self-destructing. The boy who'll be living with my friend mentions trying to make plans. “She'll probably blow me off,” he says.

“That's all she ever does,” I agree.

“She's scaring me,” my friend says. “She won't talk to us, and she's all over the internet, talking with strangers.”

“She can do what she wants,” I say, partly in defense and partly out of exasperation. “In the end, she's going to leave and do what she wants. And we won't matter. And there's nothing we can do about it.”

And they agree with me, because what else is there to say? People reach a point where nothing matters other than the decline they've found themselves in, and no amount of wishing for them back will ever be able to reach down and help them up.

I learned that the hard way.

- - -

We swing by Wal-Mart at two in the morning, on the way home. Directive: obtain a shower curtain. We're all exhausted, the kind of exhausted that makes everything seem impossible, and everyone else's head seem like prime material to bite off.

It takes half an hour and a lot of strange looks from the staff, but we finally complete the laughable mission, tossing a shower curtain, two packages of Ramen, some toilet paper, and something else that was important when we got it, but which I've already forgotten.

We get the couch inside their apartment with a little help from a nocturnal neighbor, outside for a late-night smoke, and drop the not-boyfriend room mate off to make food and maybe catch a couple hours of sleep. It's almost three, and he works at six o'clock.

I ride along with my friend to drop off the ever-helpful truck and retrieve her own car, and make one more trip to her boyfriend's place, the one with the wizard room mate, to pick up a few more things. We chit-chat a little, mentioning my impending trip up to college, and somehow my father gets brought up in all of it.

“What's up with your dad?” she asks me. “He used to be cool, didn't he? He seems... off.”

“It's all his ex's fault.”

“The one who lied about having cancer? The alcoholic?”

“Yeah. He never liked people. But now he just... he hates them, and he hates the world, and everything.” And himself, I think. Can't forget that. Most of all, he hates himself.

And suddenly, that's my worst fear, driving through empty roads at three in the morning: that I will end up like my father, fifty-five and alone and angry, and not even willing to admit to myself that I am one broken son of a bitch.

- - -

When we get to the wanna-be wizard's house, I'm already half-crying. I'm tired and it's late and I'm having some sort of existential crisis, and part of me wants to ask her to just take me home, regardless of the kind of fit my mother would throw if I came through the front door at four a.m. The bruises on my knees from my bike-meets-car incident are throbbing and turning more colors than a Catskill sunset, and I just want to sleep.

As soon as we pull into the driveway, though, plans change. I miss what's going on at first, but when things that I'm seeing start making sense, I realize that my friend is kneeling on the concrete, trying to catch a flailing bird. I'm just staring stupidly, trying to figure out what happened. Did we hit it with the car? Did one of the wizard-boy's cats get it?

It turns out it was probably neither. There's no blood, but the bird's got its neck held at on odd angle. At first we say, in quiet, shaking voices, that maybe it flew into something and broke its neck. Later, we think maybe it's a seizure. Maybe a stroke. We stand there, staring at the small, brown thing cradled against her chest. I have a momentary flash of memory—the same friend coming to school with a baby bunny tucked into the front of her shirt, bleeding and blind in one eye because her dog attacked it. She brought it in hoping one of the science teachers could help it.

We can see this bird's heart beating, hard, as she examines it from every angle she can think of, looking for the cause of its distress. She tries setting it back down; her reasoning, muttered mostly for her own benefit, is that maybe it hit something and was in shock. As soon as the bird is out of her hands, though, it's rolling around and chirping and flailing, getting its feathers bent and tangling its talons in its wings.

She picks it back up, and she's talking to it, as if it's one of her dogs, an animal that knows her and understands that she's only trying to help.

“I'm sorry, I'm sorry! I'm trying to help you, shh, it's okay. No, no, hold still, please, it's okay!”

I look down and see that the bird has its two feet reached out, grabbing her finger, the way the hands of a pre-mature baby will reach up and grab a nurse's gloved finger. Wizard boy and I sit there, watching her, helpless. Finally I see her face change, and I know she's made up her mind to take the only option we have other than setting the poor thing down and turning our backs. Her hands move, one gripping the body tightly, the other covering the nostrils and holding its beak shut.

It takes maybe five minutes for the bird to die, and the whole time, we watch it—watch the way its breathing speeds up, slows down, then stops; the way the little thrumming heartbeat tries to break through the feathers, only to give up and stop. I'm sitting on the pavement with my friend, gripping her knee, knowing that my efforts to make her feel better mean nothing. There is a life in her hands—a small, hot, injured life—and she has commandeered it, gripped it and changed its direction, albeit for a good enough reason. I can practically see the thought pulsing like bloody neon in her head.

I'm killing it. I'm killing it. I'm killing it.

When the bird is finally gone, I know that she had the same memory as I did earlier, of the wounded bunny. “Why do animals always die in my hands?” she asks.

“Because you always pick them up,” I tell her. And there is a metaphor here, but I can only see the edge of it as we trudge, wordlessly, to grab the few remaining things from her boyfriend's room.

While we're driving home in silence, I notice that my nails, long and painted as of a few hours ago, are thin and shredded, gnawed into shortness by anxiety and exhaustion. They remind me of the feathers on the wings of the bird, bend and cracked and torn from its flailing against the cement.

As I stick the remainder of one of them between my teeth to try and even it out, I realize that this entire night has been some sort of karmic lesson on lost chances and dead-end streets, withered dreams and hopes so high they're unreachable. Broken people, broken necks. Things too lost or wrecked to salvage.

And I wonder if the Universe is trying to remind me... or warn me.

Warn me that I'm destined to become one more hopeless, damaged soul who has no way out, and who will live their days unable to escape. Unable, in fact, even to remember what it felt like to be whole.

To be happy.