Crows, rabbits, and storks – all around my hospital bed.
I’m almost 50, but I’m in the hospital with a broken leg and I’m 14 years old, again.
I ask the crows, “what the fuck is going on?!” I’m desperate – I can’t breath, the words are dry, my skin feels like it’s on fire, but there are no flames, no smoke.
The crows are vicious. “What the fuck do you think is going on?” My leg is on fire – the whole of it. I’m sure of it. There is no way to stand up. I frantically push the nurse’s call button.
I’m back in the office. My leg is still on fire, but now, also my hands and arms. I’m almost 50, again. Someone is asking me for a status update on a project. The project is the crows. But that doesn’t make much sense, does it? I know the project isn’t the crows, but it is. Understanding dawns: the crows are electrons being pushed along a circular race track until they are exploding with photons – x-rays. The project isn’t the crows, but it’s still not clear what it is. There is still someone waiting for my answer. How long have I been sitting here? How long have they been waiting for my answer? The words in my mind are to ask if my foot will be ok because we’re at a 4th of July party and I’m about 5 or 6 and I’ve just stepped on a spent sparkler. A giant blister, like a racing stripe, goes across the width of my foot. The crows are laughing uncontrollably.
“Are you ok?” I look up and it’s my boss. He’s waiting for a status update on the project. The project is not crows. It is a program to monitor the storage and computing hardware used by the syncrotron.
Time is fluid. You can take a cup of water from downriver and bring it upriver and put it back in. Time is that river and someone is always moving bits of it back and forth, as humans are wont to do. It is often confusing, always terrifying. Always.
The crows are always at the edges of every image – everything I see. They sit there, waiting to turn the page of reality back to some other time. They are eternal, having always been and always being and always will be, they set the stage for what I can only assume is their own entertainment. They exist in all time’s frames, forwards and backwards, and they can keep track of where they are, much like they can see magnetic fields. But I can’t.
I explain I’m on to testing my solution. So far all is OK. There are a few edge cases to handle and I’d like to do better error handling in general, but overall , it’s OK. We can put it into production next week. The crows have turned the page and I’m now in the Vice Principal’s office, Mr. Elliot. I’m 12. I’m frantically trying to get back to my boss. I need them to turn the page back to now.
God damn it. I know I’m almost 50, and I can only watch Mr. Elliot betray me with lackluster enthusiasm. I shouldn’t be here. This is not now. What an asshole Mr. Elliot is. I already know what’s gong to happen. The crows are falling over themselves chortling, practically choking on their laughter. Like a dream, the camera is always changing. Looking at myself with a beautiful head of long, blonde hair, I’m filled with sadness. I miss my hair.
The crows turn the page. I’m tired of fighting it. I’ve forgotten all about the project, the status update, my boss, my desk… dejected and beaten, my father cuts at my hair while I sit on a plastic, 80’s dinning room chair, on a cedar deck, sky blue paint peeling away, blonde hair at my feet. “Cocksucker! You’ve been mollycoddled by women for too long. Not getting away with that shit on my watch!” My father’s words are barely registered – but still recorded. Defeat. The crows can’t breath with their laughter, holding their bellies and rolling around, drunk on the defeat.
While I was on the deck having chunks of my hair cut away, and sitting with seething rage in front of Mr. Elliot, my boss was making some suggestions. When the crows bring me back, I notice I’ve made some notes. They appear nonsensical – some names. I suspect I’m supposed to contact these people for some reason, but the reason wasn’t noted. The crows won’t turn the page back to when I was taking notes. There’s some admin stuff – commit the changes, get the merge request opened for next week’s Merge Meeting. OK. I can do this. But what am I supposed to ask the people I’m supposed to contact. Or should I tell them something? Fuck. Scramble for context. Fuck. The crows find this hilarious! I find it humiliating.
there must be some reckoning. Where am I?
Mother fucking crows. They were not always here… they showed up only in the last few years, maybe around 40, 41. I honestly don’t know what to do with them. Rage. Most of what i have for them is rage. Sometimes, a kind of jovial happiness. Like a family that is doing things, loudly – kids do what kids do, parents regaling them with informational how-to’s. How to deal with your girlfriend, how to handle you stupid boyfriend. Boys are always stupid. The crows are always with me… laughing, cawing, making noise that makes life seem … funny, awkward – like an unwanted Greek pledge. They are not my friends. But I’m used to them. Irritating roommates, boring lovers, the things one can “deal with”. It is Thursday, and the crows are here.
Have I ever been alive?
What is life, but a mere annoyance to the dead? I’ve spent most of my life being dead. How I dream of returning – the treasure of love – I’ve spent eons with you. I dream of us as trees, freed from the confines of language – barely primal in expression – I dream of us offering perfumes to each other, love letters in Organic Chemistry, volatile compounds.
tears upon my cheek. I will not let you see them. They are bastards. Stiller. They want to be someone else, but I am who I am… tears or no. Fuck stiller, and fuck Max Frisch. I don’t give a fuck what Dürrenmatt said. I don’t give a fuck what anyone said. I’ll kil those fucking crows as fast as I’ll kill my thirteen year old self. If only those fucking crows would die, I might cry for them.
I’ll kill everything that ever lived… I’d kill the present it were a being. Choke the life out of now, beat it to a bloody pulp. A child like myself beaten to a bloody pulp. Don’t look that up in the dictionary.
Destruction, razing, polite discombobulation in business meetings… which tram is it to the cemetery, the crematorium? I need to visit myself. The crows are laughing. If all of this is senseless, now you understand trying to brush my teeth.
Train ride home: it’s never as easy as it seems. I can’t sleep; this isn’t the D.C. Metro… this shit costs, falling asleep could be a lot of money, and time. Though, we needn’t talk about time, not now, anyways. When my Mitarbeiter rides with me, I’m nervous but here. The crows can’t do much against me putting on a show. I can do comedy, music, random acting – maybe some would call it improv – and in that occupation, the crows fail. It’s not a trap one can set and the crows fall in, put away forever…. No.
No, one must maintain a focused preoccupation – the intensity of a life and death situation – to avoid the crows making a mockery of reality. Survival – the crows understand that.
When I’m alone on the train, if it’s empty, as was during the Pandemic, I can think. As soon as there’s a few too many people – there’s no fixed number… I’ve tried to find it – the god damned crows play their games until I’m ready to choke anyone that sits next to me, perhaps even a few seats fore and aft. Like the time my buddy brought a cat over and the crows had me back somewhere else and I nearly broke his jaw because … i thought he was gonna kill it. Whatever happened in that particular now, it was really a dead golden retriever puppy in an alley on Russel Street, between McKinley Ave and Jackson Ave. Even then, the crows weaved their time tricks and instead of a dead golden retriever puppy, it was the boys in Suncrest Apartments, promising I’d never see my mother again. If you pay too close attention, you’ll get lost somewhere in 1978 and 1999, back and forth in a never ending brawl of impurity being beaten out of an impure ore.
The crows pay me no mind. Only the rabbits seem to offer solace. It’s not often, but occasionally, the rabbits offer a new, different ending to whatever the crows have decided is today’s Matinee. It’s rarely in the company of others; certainly not when my boss is asking for an update on whatever he’s interested in. It’s usually when I’m alone that the rabbits take me down their murderous, vengeful holes.
It is a simple bliss.
One can lose hours upon hours in joyful revenge: planning, their face upon realizing their sins have come to create their own hell now, the gore and decoration; swinging arms ripped from sockets like a Pollock painting on a wall. heads spiting what was within upon a canvas, a timid expression of my own righteousness.