| Psychopomp |
I awoke at dawn this morning to the sound of crows cawing outside my window. First one, then, from the sound of it, a group of them. I rolled over, and in my half-sleep I thought how strange it was to be hearing them in the middle of the city, to hear cawing from my bed so far from the tree-lined suburbs. My groggy brain muttered “grim portent,” then shut itself off to further thought, and I buried my face between the pillows. And swore at how loud they were.
I fell asleep again though. I know, because I dreamed. It was the end of the world. We had all fired off our bombs at one another, I guess, and the cities were now smoking wrecks, jumbled piles of steel and asphalt and broken concrete. Shattered glass. Dogs roamed the streets in packs, and crows flapped blackly from corpse to corpse, picking out eyeballs and bits of skin, and perching in long, somber rows along the edges of over-turned subway cars.
I woke up as my teeth started falling out, like rain, because of the radiation.
I went to my kitchen to make a bowl of cereal, and glanced out the window, at the fire escape. Perched there on the railing was a single, solitary crow. Quiet now, and alone, but very much there, and seemingly peering in through the glass. I smiled to myself, and whispered “nevermore” as I reached for the milk. The bird bobbed his head, and I realized he must not have been looking at me, but at his own reflection in the window.
Only this, and nothing more.
As I left the building and headed down the street, I heard him. Just two notes, a quick, throaty awk awk, then flapping, then the city’s usual gentle roar. Other than mild curiosity, I thought nothing of it. Why would I? I had other, more pressing things upon my mind. The usual swirl of laundry lists and arbitrary observations and rampant neurosis that accompanies my morning walk. Like how, speaking of minds, one of the most common causes of death among younger people –before the advent of drunk driving and gang violence– was brain aneurysms. And how usually they come as a complete surprise and just strike a person down, like a lightning bolt. Without so much as a warning. Without so much as a harbinger.
Not to put too fine a point on it.
It followed me. The bird. At first, I thought I was letting myself get carried away. I saw a crow on the signpost when I turned the corner. Three blocks later, another on top of the bus stop shelter. As I made my usual shortcut through the park, a crow, or the crow, alit on the granite edge of the empty fountain, just ten feet away, and watched me as I walked by. Stared at me with eyes like onyx, tilting her head sideways to follow my movement. So close I could see her throat pulse as she breathed. All the way to work, I thought I was going crazy. A crow on a building ledge, on a rain gutter, on a streetlight, on the topmost rail of a wrought-iron fence. Sometimes, practically on my shoulder.
At work, in the sane confines of my cubicle, I laughed at myself. Remembered how when I was a younger, more foolish man, and I thought the only people who had got religion right were Indians and Vikings, I would have believed this crow to be my spirit guide. Sort of cliché, though, and convenient, I thought. I winced at myself, and shook my head, and as work piled up, forgot all about it, or them, or whatever.
I left work frustrated and angry, as usual, and didn’t take note of any detail of my surroundings until halfway home, cutting once more through the park. There, twenty crows were waiting for me in silence. At least twenty. Maybe thirty. On my arrival, most of them rose up in a fluttering black mass and flitted about in the branches of the trees, never really settling. A few watched me from the ground or the backs of benches. As I followed the path through their midst, they hopped away from me, but without startling or taking flight, and always staring. Unbreakingly. One in the trees called down to me, like a warning, or more like an indictment. Ac-cuse, ac-cuse. And one, one detached itself from its brothers, and followed me home.
Murder. A group of crows is called a murder.
He or she is sitting on the railing of the fire escape right now, looking in, even though all my lights are off. Maybe two or three of the flock have joined it. I’m not a fool. I know this is not my imagination, and that I’m only barely losing my mind. Just as I know these birds have not come to offer spiritual advice, or to reveal my true nature, or to show me The Way. The guidance they offer is more firm in nature, the path more specific. Not teachers, these birds. Constables. Dark, unforgiving escorts. They are waiting, because they know. I think, maybe, because of the odd winter we’ve been having, they’re just a little off. Arrived a day early.
Tonight, I will go to sleep. And I will be awoken, not at dawn this time, but in the cold small hours of the night. And finally, one of them will speak, not in quaint one-word rasps, like an idiot parrot, but in a calm deep voice, thick and old:
“I’ll give you a head start.”
And I will bolt from my bed and try to run, but my legs will crumple underneath me, and a cold wedge of pain will pierce briefly through the folds of my brain, like ice, like a beak, and then like nothing.
A final sharp severing.
And like a worm, or a plucked eyeball, they will carry whatever is left of my soul, wriggling, to whatever awaits beyond.