A Pigeon's Predicament (part 1)

Gerald tapped the butt of his fork against the already dented, uneven, sidewalk metal table. He followed a precise, premeditated rhythm, but the table still wobbled. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hairy, pudgy, non-fork-holding hand and worried that the table leg clanging against the sidewalk would sabotage his message.

“Ger, that's not going to make your pancakes get here any sooner,” the platinum-haired waitress sang. Or so she sang in Gerald's mind's eye – she actually spoke in a monotone as she held the coffee pot not quite directly above his left thigh.

For his part, Gerald smiled apologetically because he didn't know how to tell Cheryl that she was interrupting his conversation with a pigeon. And that was her name, Cheryl, not because she wore a name tag but because he had finally screwed up the courage to ask her it five weeks ago.

And the pigeon, that big-breasted black bird had appeared exactly two weeks ago.

Gerald knew all this and more, since making sense of details was what he did. Thus, this big, soft man would've noticed if the black pigeon had tapped another talon or ruffled a feather. The bird, however, remained motionless, head cocked and beady, orange eye intent on Gerald, the semi-astute human who still held his fork suspended mid-letter. The man squirmed, set the fork down, and searched his pockets while the woman poured more brown liquid in his cup.

“Cheryl, you got a pen I can borrow?”

“What do you want my pen for?”

“I need to write my last will and testament.” Cheryl's eyes widened slightly at his remark. Gerald noticed, blushed, and made little consoling noises in his throat.

“Just take it and don't put it in your mouth.” She grimaced, and Gerald tried not to wince when her fingers failed to brush his in the passing of the pen. He looked back at the pigeon, which was starting to shuffle on its side rail in impatience, as Cheryl with her loose grip on the coffee pot moved off to threaten the future generations of other customers.

Gerald had already noticed the obligatory adornment for diner tables everywhere, a fat stack of napkins. He didn't know why he hadn't thought of this before, but if the pigeon could communicate through talon taps, then it wouldn't be a stretch to assume it could read as well. After scribbling on the napkin, he held it up for the pigeon to see.

(Why should I help you?)

The pigeon raised a talon and considered. The last time the pigeon had done this was when it had first met Gerald and had crapped on his hand.

Don't misunderstand; the pigeon had pooped with intention. It had noticed the man noticing it and had spent a full minute clanking out a greeting, managing to include its backstory and its predicament without coming across as too desperate. This was lost on Gerald when Cheryl, not to mention his pancakes the size of dinner plates, arrived mid-greeting.

“Thanks, Cher.” He began to pour syrup and carve out a pancake crater, since slicing and dicing were for amateurs. Cheryl didn't move from the table.

“What did you call me?”

“I guess I called you Cher, since you're always calling me Ger, get it, right?”

“And what did I say my name was when you asked?”

“Uh, you said it was Cheryl.”

“Yeah, let's just leave it at that.” And so the woman left the man hurt and confused and totally stole the pigeon's thunder.

Gerald couldn't know that Cheryl thought their names already sounded too similar, which is why she stuck with calling him Ger. That endearing tub of lard, who left the embarrassingly generous tips, was obviously infatuated with her for some reason. She didn't want to give him the wrong idea, especially since she wasn't planning on sticking around for much longer.

As an outside observer, the pigeon may have seen the signs or her early demise, but its hopes of salvation were set on Gerald, so it had pooped on his hand to help him pay attention.

When Gerald glanced down at the path of skin between forefinger and thumb, his first thought was that perhaps a glob of partially melted butter had leaped form his pancake crater onto his hand. He shifted his gaze to the pigeon that, despite its zero degree turn radius, was still rotating to face him once more.

The soft, pancake-consuming man contemplated violence while gumming up napkins with his soiled hand. He decide to lightly rap the pigeon on its foot with his fork, especially since the bird was still waiting there and might strike again. The pigeon raised its targeted food when he tried to smack a talon with a fork tong. Gerald tried the other foot with the same result.

Yes, the human was getting it. The pigeon shuffled to the side to give the fat man room to beat out the rest of his message. Imagine its surprise when the man smacked its foot instead. The pigeon was at a loss for taps, so it stood and considered.

Gerald pumped his fist victoriously, until he noticed a couple and their small child at a nearby patio table looking at him, not eating – and the pigeon too – it hadn't flown away. He attempted to avoid the stares by drowning himself in a syrupy abyss.

The pigeon revised its message, adding a (please, please, please) at both the start and finish. The man didn't lift his head from his plate, and the pigeon didn't have any more conversation starters, since its stomach was empty.

Add a week minus some minutes - Gerald spotted two discrepancies between a towering precedent and current legal proceedings that saved the law firm, where he worked as a paralegal, a case; Cheryl managed to survive another week and found that she could achieve medium-grade hallucinations if she consumed enough Red Bull with her Ambien and vodka; and the pigeon ate and pooped and avoided other pigeons, since they weren't really his type.

Thus, all made it back to the diner at their appointed times. The pigeon switched tact; it didn't poop, and it waited until the man had finished shoveling food into his mouth and the woman, who made the man do strange things with his face, had left her piece of paper.

Gerald had forgotten about the tap dancing pigeon until it resumed its side rail scraping and clanking. He noticed that the pigeon was following a rhythm halfway through its first repeat. Without really trying, he managed to replicate this pattern by tapping and sliding his fork on the table by the time the pigeon had repeated itself for the third time.

The pigeon was puzzled but pleased when the man chimed in with his fork – not only that, but the man also seemed to have the same problem – no, it wouldn't be possible for not-a-pigeon to face the same trouble. Yes, the man was repeating what had been said to him in the manner of one who does not yet know a language but tries to communicate nonetheless. The pigeon tapped out a follow-up message and was equal parts frustrated and hopeful when the man repeated this as well.

Gerald was also puzzled but not overly curious – curiosity was a blinder, favoring certain details over others. It was best to mull this one over at his leisure, since, in his experience, the supporting details would fall into place at their own leisure too. When he retreated from his table, the pigeon watched longingly. It would have followed, but it had never gotten comfortable with the idea of flying. Instead, it stayed put and observed the woman – her lips curved slightly and she wiped at her eye when she picked up the same white paper she'd left before as well as a stack of green papers that the man had left on top. The woman ruffled the very fine feathers that grew only on her head, which the pigeon knew was a universal sign of pleasure.

* * *

(Why should I help you?) The man set down his fork and revealed the words, and the pigeon was able to read them, although it wasn't sure why. The pigeon's clank-and-scrape response along the side rail amounted to this:

(I can help with the woman)

Gerald almost asked what woman before realizing that would be a pointless question. There weren't many women in his life – his Mom, of course, but that didn't really count. He had french kissed a girl with braces at camp, the summer before high school. Then there had been the girl at community college, the one with the eye-twitch thing – Gerald had thought that she'd been winking at him. She'd been sweet, but it had been an availability and proximity arrangement that tapered off after graduation. Thus, the pigeon was obviously referring to Cheryl, that pancake angel who had taken the time to think up a flashy nickname for him.

Gerald worried about taking dating advice from a bird, but he reasoned that this was probably a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Plus, the excitement of discovery from the previous Saturday evening still burned within him.

The details had fallen into place during some late-night manga reading with the TV on in the background. The sound of dots and dashes had interrupted his train of thought. It came from one of those paid programming commercials that bordered on soft-core porn. A buxom blonde with 1920's style curls who wore oversized, adorable glasses was operating a telegraph. The subtitles below, which supposedly corresponded to the dots and dashes, said that she was desperately searching for nice guys to talk with, since most of them were too intimidated by her good looks to strike up a conversation. That was just the first segment of the lengthy commercial – the girls, while all still beautiful, changed as the technology, the modes of communication, improved. The message remained the same; there was a surplus of beautiful women out there, all waiting to to talk with average guys. One could help these lonely girls out by subscribing to a website where personal profiles and phone numbers galore could be found.

Gerald wouldn't know where to start with such a service – but dots and dashes, clanks and scrapes! Did the pigeon that had pooped on him know Morse code? He spent a sleepless night learning the code and confirmed that the pigeon did indeed know it within fifteen minutes of sitting down at his usual diner patio table the next day.

After some decoding, he came to the conclusion that the pigeons' predicament was this: a few blocks from the diner, there was a fountain with coins scattered along its bottom. There was a particular coin that the pigeon wanted very much. Being a pigeon, it did not have the ability to go underwater, no matter how shallow, and retrieve this coin. That's where Gerald, with his big hands and opposable thumbs came in.

Gerald used another napkin to ask the pigeon why it wanted this one coin so much. The pigeon either didn't understand the question or was being evasive, since its clank-and-scrape answer amounted to “because.”

Cheryl noted that Gerald seemed a little distracted this Sunday. His attention was still mostly on her, but he kept periodically staring off at a space over the sidewalk and not trying to talk to her as much – this somehow made him less awkward. Had he met someone? That'd be a good thing, right? He'd probably stop sitting at her table every Sunday and doing that dumb thing with his hand, where he wiped it across his forehead even though there was never any sweat – and then no one would be around to notice when she finally worked up the nerve to get gone.

“You sure you finished with that, Ger?” she asked as she laid down the check. His syrupy crater had failed to make it to the outer rings of pancake dough for once.

“What? Oh yeah, I guess so. Thanks, Cher – Cheryl. Have a beautiful Sunday.”

What did that even mean to have a beautiful day? And why did that sloppy pancake slob make her wish that she knew what it meant? Cheryl tried not to watch from inside the diner as he left her table and took short, halting steps down the sidewalk.

Gerald had offered to the carry the pigeon to the fountain, but it had fluttered down from the side rail when he'd extended his palm. He now trailed slightly behind the bird as it shuffled down the sidewalk.

The fountain that the bird had mentioned wasn't mystical, no legendary creatures spouting water; it was a run-of-the-mill, shallow basin with a single, gushing stream in the middle and located in the outside courtyard of a shopping outlet, where people, mostly families, whiled away their Sunday early afternoon by looking for affordable clothes to wear to affordable places.

The black pigeon hop-fluttered onto the fountain's rim as Gerald scanned the waters. He spotted the coin beyond wished-upon nickels and dimes near the fountain's center. The coin was bronze, ridged and irregular like a poorly flipped pancake; it was too far to reach, so he hesitated while the pigeon stared him down. He felt in his pockets for answers and grasped the pen he had accidentally stolen from Cheryl and quickly tossed it into the fountain next to the bronze coin.

“My pen. My pen dropped in the fountain,” he said a little too loudly to everyone and to no one in particular. A few passerby glanced at him momentarily as he waded into the fountain. Gerald was in and out of the water in twenty seconds flat, having slipped the the coin into a pocket and holding Cheryl's pen at eye level as a token of sanity.

He wasn't sure how to give the coin to the bird (put it in its beak perhaps?), but the pigeon was already on the move once more. He followed it to a loading dock behind a Forever 21 store, and decide to just set the coin at the pigeon's feet.

This seemed to work, since the bird tottered toward the coin and placed a talon upon it. The coin may have glowed, or it could have been an effect of the Sunday sun. Gerald took a step back and so did the pigeon.

Beady, orange eyes regarded him before being lost in a burst of black feathers. He gasped, a gasp that kept coming as he watched the feathers spiral in slow motion away from where the bird had once stood, fluffy shrapnel from a silent explosion. The gasp went beyond any reasonable lung capacity and became a surrounding suction that terminated into a wet pop as everything but the feathers lost focus.

* * *

History's Greatest Blunder

“Don’t touch that! Are you mad?” Mrs. Marcus raised a hand before restraining herself and smoothing her dress instead. “OK, there will be a lesson change today, because your classmate Julian is a – go sit in the corner and not another word. The rest of you turn to page 118 in your textbooks to one of history’s greatest blunders. Now, let me tell you about a natural born leader. A man among men, Caesar knew exactly when to pull out in battle; sadly, the same cannot be said for matters of love. That is how mistakes are made. Julian, you need to understand this.” She paused to look at the small, smirking boy now seated in the classroom's corner before deciding to abandon quotation marks altogether:

If you squint your eyes just right and tilt your head at the perfect angle, then you might be able to catch a glimpse of that time. I’m talking about a time when everybody gathered in arenas to watch their favorite reality TV, and God had multiple personalities that were all disturbingly human. But the end-all-start-all for the people of Rome was the marketplace. No one had heard of anything like a warranty back then; you got what you saw, and if you had a bad eye, then you were bound to fall on your face from time to time.

An old man, who wasn't really that old and possessed no eyes at all, had gathered a crowd along one of the market avenues. He asked members of the audience to hold up any number of fingers and would then recite those numbers automatically. The old man's secret was a dwarf planted in the crowd. The dwarf made barely audible clicks with his tongue that corresponded to upraised fingers. These clicks traveled between the waists of the audience and right into the ears of the kneeling, sightless man. Once he had the crowd in a receptive thrall, he gathered their disjoint minds into a story. His particular story on that particular day was this:

There was once a young boy who was foolish enough to think himself clever in the marketplace. He possessed a golden medallion that his father, a poor soldier long gone on a distant conquest, had left in his care. The boy knew that the medallion was valuable, so he'd drop it near the girls running errands. He'd scramble along the stalls on his hands and knees, hoping to catch a glimpse up their robes. Whenever he was accused of peeping, he'd spring up with the golden medallion in hand and say that he'd been looking for the only thing that he had to remember his poor father by. One dusty day, the boy lost the medallion amidst the feet and dirt and came up empty-handed when a girl accused him of staring. He dropped back down to the ground, actually looking for the medallion for the first time. The girl screamed and kicked him; other girls joined in when he refused to stop his search. The battered boy finally fled the marketplace and returned home to find his recently returned father, who beat him to within an inch of his life for losing the medallion.

At the story’s end, Caesar, who was actually in the crowd with most of his features shrouded by a brown cloak, chuckled. He shared a secret smile with the mother of one of his most trusted if slightly clingy senators. The older, elegant woman giggled when Caesar's hand ventured below her waist. He gave a squeeze to celebrate one of their infrequent escapes to the marketplace.

Marcus, the senator son, was actually one aisle over. The senator was there on one of his frequent trips to the marketplace to feed his intense love for Egyptian pottery. He clutched a medium vase saturated with blue desert flowers and stared at his mother standing very close to the man with the unmistakably regal nose and chin, the same man who had said he thought of him as a son. Seeing Caesar's hand on his mother’s rump, Marcus finally formulated a wish that would never come true. And that's how Caesar lost his life in the marketplace – the senators' daggers that later drank the blood of Julian, excuse me, Julius were a mere formality.

Mrs. Marcus finished the last sentence and smiled when Julian's bottom lip began to quiver. “And that is why you never touch an older woman unless you can take the consequences.”

The Cheapest Cigarettes

Half a pack of the cheapest cigarettes ever made and a worn leather manuscript - those are the contents of a dead man’s jeans. Gary found him wrapped around a cactus in the desert. He doesn’t know how long it takes the elements out here to strip away a man’s flesh, but the raggedy jeans and sun-bleached bones are there just the same - and those skeletal arms, still draped over the cactus as if survival could come by simply finding the only green for miles and staying put.

Gary had been in the wrong place at the right time.

The wrong place was his apartment beside the train tracks. The kitchen window above the sink with no disposal was always open because air conditioners were out of the question after a poorly supported one had fallen from a third story window and crushed his only friend (a dog) when Gary was ten. Noisy fans helped stifle the Chicago summer heat somewhat, but the truer breeze came from the passing Red Line trains.

The right time was 10:23 on a Monday morning as he stood next to the sink window for that incoming breeze. The roaring respite rapidly receded into the tiled kitchen floor, dancing specks of black, and grogginess. Gary staggered to the sink, put his head under the tap, let the water run. The source of his pain, an onyx cat carved from wood, waited for him at sink's bottom.
Had it come from the El train? The question left Gary's mind when his eyes collided with the statue's green-eyed, pupiless gaze, green out of place on a pure black body. The cat was on its back, although it looked designed to sit upright on its hind legs. Gary leaned further into the sink basin to inspect the green gaze, bracing himself with a palm over the drain before his mind slipped away.

When it returned, his bowels felt watery as if he had almost fallen off a high ledge and then regained his balance at the last moment. Actually, his denim pants were wet, and the statue now floated with face turned away along the rim of the overflowing sink. Trembling and late for his sales call shift, Gary picked up the cat and hurled it out the window.

After an soul-crushing day of cold calling, he flopped down on his floor mattress only to get a rude jab. There was surely an explanation for the statue's reappearance under his sheets, but Gary avoided both this and the statue's green gaze as he took it outside to the rickety wooden porch and placed it on his neighbor’s doorstep. The nameless neighbor already owned about eighty live cats, and she was probably too senile to notice the difference.

Only somehow the cat was sitting in the shower the next morning. Gary bagged and trashed the silent nuisance, but it was waiting for him at the foot of his mattress after his call shift. As the week wore on, he went from absentmindedly avoiding an annoyance to frantically trying to rid himself of his kitchen window curse, yet Gary could never quite bring himself to attempt destroying the statue – thoughts of shattering that green-eyed gaze brought about a queasy tingling in this throat.

By the end of the week, he had resigned himself to its existence, and that cat behaved to the extent that it stayed perched on the kitchen sink facing the window where he'd last left it. That’s when the men in sunglasses started showing up.
Sunglasses were by no means a rare fashion statement in the Chicago summer brilliance, but Gary did notice a certain type of standard-issue shades start to cluster about him – first in crowded El cars on the Friday ride to the office and then along the alleyways outside his apartment. The men wearing them didn't go around in dark suits – nothing as obvious as that – but their perfect, relaxed postures hinted at polite, indifferent violence.

On Saturday morning, Gary first thought that the cat had finally moved from its sink perch to the front door, but the stench said otherwise. The dead, mostly black cat was also positioned on its hind legs, but its eyes were mercifully closed. “Deliver The Cat” was the message written in painstakingly neat handwriting and pinned to the deceased feline's limp, front paw.

As he hurriedly threw the cat body under the train tracks and put some newspapers over the blood, Gary knew that this had to be the fault of that damn statue. He went to the sink to conquer it, confront it, and make it see eye to eye... and spaced out again. A vibration in his skull brought him back to reality – no, not a vibration but a persistent, steady knocking. Clutching the statue with the face pressed to his chest, he rose and opened the door.

“It's Sunday. Why haven't you delivered the cat?” The man in standard-issue shades didn't really wait for an answer before leveling a standard-issue pistol at Gary's forehead. Gary's shrug froze into a cringe as he resisted the urge to look cross-eyed at where the gun was pointing.
“How is it Sunday?” The man didn't bother answering the question, and Gary noticed that his features were undistinguished to the point of being boring, the sort of face designed to slip from memory.

“Dwight Fiddlegree, Casa Colina, Las Vegas. Leave now.”

“Who – what – why me? Take the damn thing. I don't know how it got here.” Gary rotated the stiff cat from his chest and held it at arm's length toward the man like an unwanted child. He looked away when he saw the green reflected on the shades.

The man in shades remained motionless as if struggling with a difficult decision. His gun arm hadn't moved, and he didn’t reach out to take the cat. Gary didn't know what to say, so he tried to remain motionless as well, but his arm holding the statue began to tremble. Minutes ticked by – Gary wondered at the sick game until his arm dropped under the weight of the statue. The man with the gun stumbled and bent backwards at the waist, an awkward limbo move.

The neighbor’s door opened a crack, and a swarm of cats came running out. Gary, still holding the statue had to spin to keep from falling down the stairs, and the man cartwheeled off the second story rail. His shades had survived the fall, but the man's neck was at an odd angle. Gary stopped looking when the man's presumably lifeless head jerked slightly, still trying to maintain eye contact with the statue.

He ran into the apartment and grabbed his car keys along with a crusty sock to slip over the cat's head.

The drive was a blur, heading West and checking for standard-issue shades in the rear view mirror until the car sputtered and died 47 miles outside of Vegas. Who was this Dwight Fiddlegree – a drug baron, a government suit, a business man? And what if the cat wouldn't leave when Gary tried to deliver it to him? Gary stared at the sock-covered cat strapped into the passenger seat before sighing, removing the sock, and letting go.
Now, these questions and past events are of no consequence to a useless skeleton with no water. Gary can't imagine why he was he was led here, but he guesses that the cactus needles now embedded in his left forearm may have had something to do with breaking the green-eyed trance. As for the contents of the dead man's jeans, the cheapest cigarettes ever made are useless without fire, which leaves the worn leather manuscript.

He unfurls the manuscript and groans at the two green ovals that take up the top half of the page. Below is madness: shaky theories, scrambled equations, disjoint musings, and scrawled coordinates. Gary, who was in the wrong place at the right time, bears witness to one who was in the right place at the wrong time.

Or maybe he’s right on time. Gary places the statue between the bony arms and the cactus. Dwight and any other green-seekers be damned. Anyone craving that gaze can share the reward with the unknown traveler.

And maybe Gary will learn to tolerate air conditioners, maybe he'll make it back to Chicago, and maybe he’ll find someone with matches along the way so he can smoke one of the cheapest cigarettes ever made.

Land of Left Socks

For $1.25, you can go to a happier place. It took me $11.25 and a full Sunday to figure this out, but I suppose the price of passage depends on the cost of your laundromat. Or if you own a functioning dryer at home, your trip is free.

I won't tell you about the tedious trial and error that led to my discovery – how I eliminated washing machines from the equation or how I fiddled with the dryer settings and weight distributions for the optimal number of disappearing left socks.

I will tell you about how losing left socks used to be the bane of my existence. Sure, you can try to make do with two right socks, but that will eventually leave you unbalanced. Oh, and if you can't tell the difference between right and left socks, then you're probably beyond my help.

What you'll need if you visit my laundromat: 5 quarters, 10 clothespins, 10 pairs matched socks, and the willingness to follow a few simple steps.

Step 1) Use clothespins to keep matched socks together

Step 2) Place sock-clothespin combinations into dryer

Step 3) Put dryer on permanent press setting

Step 4) Insert quarters and wait for cycle completion

Step 5) Remove load from dryer, and proceed to Step 7 if you find any unpaired right socks

Step 6) If no unpaired right socks dangling from clothespins, then repeat steps 2-4

Step 7) Place one right unpaired sock on right foot

Step 8) Walk around one-socked until you feel changed (do not wear shoes)

And that's what I did that first Sunday afternoon. I one-socked it about until change came, and I looked down to see that the missing left sock of the pair had somehow reappeared on my naked foot. Looking back up, I realized that my surroundings had changed as well – not drastically so but enough to tell the difference.

The differences between the land of left socks and our own world can be subtle, but they count. The dogs there are friendlier, and the food has this extra spice to it. The sunsets are slightly more majestic, and people don't make a big deal if you feel like walking around in just a pair of socks. Just last Sunday, I was ordering a sandwich from a deli and forgot my wallet. The lady behind me offered to pay, but the cashier said that I could just pay the store back when I came in next.

As you might imagine, I'm usually reluctant to travel back to our world. All the same, I find a laundromat (the laundromats over there are cleaner by the way) and basically repeat the same steps listed above, the only key difference being that the right socks vanish instead. When I feel the change with the reappearing right sock, it's always accompanied by a sense of loss.

That's why, this Sunday in the land of left socks, I have decided to trade in my socks for a pair of sandals. If you're in my laundromat and reading this letter, then maybe we'll cross paths soon.