Tuesday, March 5, 2019

Mr. Bird

I’ve been focusing on other projects recently, so this is another “week off” sort of post. Many of the people who read this blog on the regular have probably seen this one already, but it’s also one of the ones I’ve been consistently happy with, so hopefully that balances out.

It also means I finally have to pick a title for it, so here you go: Mr. Bird


Bartleby Bird -- because what else could you call a person like him? -- when not inside his own house located just before the left turn into the cul-de-sac where everybody else in my minuscule social circle lived, could often be found lounging on other people’s porches. On sunnier days he generally went over to the Johnson’s house, as their definition of a porch was three lawn chairs and a hammock placed in an almost random fashion around their front lawn. Sometimes he could be spotted on the Trout’s porch, calmly gazing at their garden, maybe walking around and picking out a weed or two. On rainier days, or even just the more overcast ones, Bartleby would hide out in my porch with its one hundred and forty square feet of enclosed space and one of those rocking chairs that hangs from the ceiling.

Today was one of the rainier days.

I want to make something clear, though: Bartleby wasn’t a stalker. He wasn’t the sort of creep that had to go door to door telling everyone in a set radius just how many laws he had broken or offenses he had committed. As far as I knew, he just liked other people’s porches.

But anyways, like I said, today was a really rainy day. It started raining at around eight in the morning and didn’t stop raining until five or six in the evening. Bartleby got to my porch at nine and was already drenched. I watched him through my front window while eating breakfast as he went through his familiar routine of closing all the screen windows so that whatever water did get past the wire grates would run straight into a glass panel.

I had only ever talked to Mister Bird once. It wasn’t too long ago; I was in the process of buying the house and was going over the last-minute documents involved. I had just signed a form saying that yes, I agreed an inspector would find trace amounts of asbestos in the walls or basement or ceiling of a very old house, but I wasn’t going to do anything about it, when it started to hail. Almost immediately, Bartleby was on the porch, and had already shut and locked all of its windows.

It’s a little embarrassing to say, but I kind of freaked out. “Who’s that?” I had said to the then-owner of the house.

“Aw, that’s just Bartleby,” the guy had said. “He lives just up the road, in the big house with the giant bird over the doorway. You’ll get used to him.” When I didn’t look away, he continued, “Hey, sorry. I thought you had asked the realtor about the neighbors already. If he’s a dealbreaker for you…”

“What’s he, ah, ‘prefer’ doing?”

“Eh?”

I’d walked over to a window by the front door and tapped on it to get Bartleby’s attention.

“Hey,” I’d said when he looked over. “You know who you’re named after, right?”

I still remember that face he’d made. It was this resigned look, like that was the hundredth time someone had asked him that. Then he stood up, walked over to the porch door, and ran through the summer hail out of the cul-de-sac.

I had felt like an idiot for a whole week after that. I was almost relieved when he came back a week later when the rains began again.

All this isn’t to say that I haven’t heard the man speak, though. In one of the houses in our little cul-de-sac is this sweet old woman named Miss Trantor. She’s an old maid, and as such gets lonely a lot, so every so often she’ll hold a house party. Everyone’s invited and, either out of sympathy or out of tradition, everyone comes. Bartleby included. On these occasions, he’ll be just as social as the rest of us, moving between conversations with the Trouts and the Johnsons and the Palmers with ease. He’s got a completely bald head, so he’s easy to spot as he weaves from group to group. Like I said, though, he’s never spoken with me. I say I’ve heard the man speak because at one party about a month after I had moved in, while as I was explaining to Miss Trantor just how writers like me could survive with “only” a thousand dedicated fans, I heard this deep, exasperated voice say, “I don’t care what you think, Amelia, I just know what I believe.”

The voice was loud enough to cut through the whole crowd, who responded in turn by turning and staring at its source. Bartleby, to his credit, had maintained his composure as he left the party; I only saw him break into a sprint once he was outside the property line. He still shows up at Miss Trantor’s parties, but now he avoids Missus Palmer almost as religiously as me.

Missus Palmer won’t tell me what she’d said to him. She says she isn’t sure. To be honest, I’m not sure what I did to draw his indifference, but he still uses my porch and not hers, so I guess that’s something.

Like I said, I’m a writer. I’m fortunate enough to have those thousand fans I’d mentioned to Miss Trantor, which was how I was able to afford the house in the first place. I like this house a lot, especially the living room just inside the front door that, when I need it to be, also serves as a cozy study where I can work.

Working from home requires a pretty strict schedule, I’ve found. I like to take my writing in sections of three hours, with breaks in between for meals and a little bit of rest and relaxation. I have already mentioned how I spent today’s breakfast: watching Bartleby Bird through my window, a bowl of cereal in one hand and a spoon in the other. After my three hours of writing, I got up to stretch and looked out the window. Bartleby was still there on my porch, swinging back and forth on the chair.

I sat by my front window again while eating my lunch. I glanced out occasionally, though Bartleby never glanced back at me. Again, I want to stress that he wasn’t a creepy guy. He just had a little bit of eccentricity to him, and really, doesn’t everybody? I kind of felt bad for him, I hadn’t seen or heard him leave while I was writing, and I hadn’t seen him bring any food with him. He must have eaten, right? That’s what I was thinking anyways. But no, he just stared out the window.

I thought about making Bartleby lunch, maybe even just making him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I’d imagined going through the front door, plate in hand, and saying, “Here you go, Bartleby. Thanks for the company.” And then he would say, “No, thank you for the porch,” and we’d continue our conversation from there.

But I didn’t. Of course I didn’t. I wouldn’t be writing this now, of all times, if I had instead spent my afternoon with Mister Bird. The worst part is I don’t even know why I didn’t. I can’t even think of a reason. I just sat in my living room and wrote.

Now, as much as I said I liked structure -- that I needed structure -- to keep any sort of reasonable writing pace, that doesn’t mean I don’t like the occasional irregular rhythm. I love rain, for example. Specifically, I love the sound of rain as it beats down on my roof. I love the staccato of each individual raindrop and I love the accents as one lands on the roof right above my head. I love the brief flashes of lightning, and I love counting the seconds between the flash and the inevitable roar of thunder. I don’t know what Bartleby likes about the rain besides my porch, or even if he likes the rain at all. He does like to stare at it, though I imagine there’s not much else to do out there besides that.

Well, besides swinging, at least. Bartleby did swing back and forth at a rhythm counter to everything else going on around him. Not that that was difficult, given the chaotic nature of the weather, but I thought it was impressive that he was able to keep the beat steady against the rain’s pitter-pattering broken rhythm. I even thought about finding an online metronome to compare.

Of course, I had to keep these sorts of thoughts in the back of my mind. I had writing to do. No matter how tenacious the underlying idea was, work came first.

I did end up finding a metronome, though. He was swinging at about fifty beats a minute.

Bartleby does have a job. That’s something I’m certain of. Just because I don’t know what it is doesn’t mean I don’t know that he has one. Obviously he can afford his house just as I can (and it does look like as good a house as mine), and I do hear his car leave and come back on a regular schedule. His car is old, and doesn’t have a muffler, but I’m not really one to talk in terms of car quality either. The point is, he doesn’t always spend all his time on porches.

Sorry, that was probably out of place in the context of this piece, but it’s something I only kind of thought about then (again, I had work to do), so I guess the thinking has to be here after he’s left. Bartleby Bird has a job. I said that already. So then, why was he on my porch?

I finished working for the day at around four thirty, and I retreated into my kitchen to make an early dinner. I heated up some soup. It took about four minutes. I didn’t do much in my kitchen besides that; I mostly just stared at my timer as it ticked down. Its bell didn’t even really break me out of my trance as much as trigger my reflex to remove the heat from my stove.

I didn’t notice that Bartleby had stopped swinging when I reentered my living room until I checked outside to my porch window, where I saw him pacing around the porch again. He traced the entire one hundred and forty square feet of my porch with his steps, then turned around and did the same thing in the opposite direction. At one point he stopped in front of my door. I watched him as he reached down and pushed the doorbell. He apparently didn’t know that my doorbell was broken. It had been broken since before I moved in.

He looked over at the window and saw me looking back at him. I almost looked away, but I didn’t. This was the first time I’d really seen his eyes. They were a dark brown, like a chocolate bar. It was hard to see the pupils in the middle. His eyes didn’t shake when he wasn’t blinking; his sight was a single focused line.

And then he left. He broke my gaze, turned on his heel, and walked right out my porch door back into the rain.
T
he rain stopped an hour later and I stopped writing -- well, writing for work -- just a few minutes after that. If you asked me why I’m writing this now -- and for reference, it just turned eight o’clock -- I’m not sure I could really tell you. I was doing dishes after I finished my soup and I just felt this sort of, I don’t know, emptiness that I couldn’t really shake. The only way I could think of to remedy the situation was to talk about it, but the one person I had had access to all day had just left. So here I am, writing about it. Maybe I’ll go to Bartleby’s house tomorrow. I think I could do with a proper introduction.

𝚫𝚫𝚫
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I went to his house. I mean, of course I went to his house; I said I would. It didn’t look any different up close than it looked when I drove past it on the occasional errand run. It was similar to mine in most respects except this one didn’t have much of a porch. If you didn’t count the awning over the front door, then it didn’t have any porch at all.

His front door was old, the kind of custom-shaped door that couldn’t be replaced easily. Its corners rounded at the top, which then curved back to meet in the center like the door was an oversized raindrop. In the center of the door was a head-sized window separated into quarters by its crossbars.

Beyond the window was darkness. There were no signs of activity.

I knocked on the door. I gave it three good, heavy knocks. As if in response, I heard Bartleby’s car come down the road, his unmuffled car louder than ever. I turned and watched as his car turned into his driveway and continued to his garage behind the house.

Part of me wanted to follow him. I wanted to look, to see how he interacted with the place he called his home. But the other part of me was terrified to leave whatever sanctuary Bartleby’s excuse of a porch could provide. There was a wood carving of a bird above the door, a cardinal, like that owner had said so many months ago, and as I stood there terrified of the consequences should I choose either direction, it gave me some amount of comfort.

My curiosity got the better of me, though. Looking back now, I think I had the same mix of emotions that compelled me to visit his house in the first place, and I wasn’t going to return home unsatisfied. I left the porch, cut through Bartleby’s front lawn, and followed his driveway not unlike a child following a stream to the river, that is to say, keeping to one side and taking in my surroundings. To extend the metaphor even further, that child and I even had the same motivations. Both of us wanted to find the source.

I had no such luck getting a glimpse of Bartleby entering his house. I had hoped that maybe he was the sort of person who lingered in his car for a few moments after arriving, whether that be to respond to an important message on his phone or follow a radio story to its conclusion. But no, it seemed that he was more patient than I tended to be, willing to take those last few steps into the confines of his house before doing anything else.

On the way back to the front door, I took a closer look at Bartleby’s house. The windows on the side were dark, darker even than what I could see through the window on the front door, save for one window near the front corner of the house, through which I could see it was illuminated by a two-bulb lamp. The only other glimpse I managed inside the house then was of the walls, which were painted in light cream colors, the neutral, low maintenance kind of colors made especially popular by interior designers.

The front of Bartleby Bird’s house had not changed at all since I had left it, and I cut through the front lawn again as I returned to my place on the porch. I expected Bartleby had seen me; I never tried to be particularly invisible, so either as he was pulling into his driveway or as I wandered around the outside of his property he must have seen me. I expected that he, at the very least, would open his door to me and ask me what I was doing snooping around. This didn’t happen though, and for that, I admit I was a little disappointed.

Then I saw him.

I was going to knock on his door again, but as I raised my hand I saw that the light from his two-bulb lamp reached its way to his foyer, just past which was a set of stairs leading to the upper part of his house. And sitting on those steps, looking right at me, was Bartleby Bird.

He wasn’t angry, he wasn’t scared, he wasn’t surprised, in fact he didn’t seem to have any emotion at all. If I did have to assign an emotion to the face I saw through his window, it would be a twinge of disappointment. When he saw that I had noticed him, he stood up, turned around, and went upstairs.

I didn’t bother knocking. I followed his walkway to the street, the street to the cul-de-sac, and went around the cul-de-sac to my house, where I sat down in front of my typewriter and stared at it for at least half an hour before finally recounting this experience to these pages and nobody else.

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