Prelude to a flight – by Joel Keith
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY
For years Becka had awaited her life, as if it were a friend late to a bar for whom she had already saved a seat. Do you really need this spot? inquired the glances of strangers. We could use it. Obstinately she clung on. Sometimes a girlfriend would call to complain about the bequiffed men they would soon marry and become mothers to, or about the houses they had been bought by their parents who worked well-paying jobs cleaning blood from household items and the machinery of state, and Becka would nod along, a sensed but unprovable consolation, like God. At other times she fucked Stewart. At night she drank Campari or a Peroni Red and fell asleep with the candles lit.
Such acts of tasteful wastefulness came part and parcel with her line of work. Each day she clocked in behind the reception desk at the Department of Symbolism. What were her duties? Scheduling appointments for the monologuing elderly, keeping the water coolers filled with glacier runoff and the History channel playing on mute. Mostly she was there to greet the people who came in each day carrying various items—heirlooms, plants, flags, children’s toys, children, unconscious ex-lovers, their own limbs and orifices underlined in sharpie, caged birds (there was a form for birds, a form for cages, or a form to process bird and cage together)—to be analysed by a team of state scholars and assigned poetic significance. It was a dull government job, not what Becka had imagined for herself, but she kept it for the security, as well as for the smell the rooms had of power, not unlike celebrity, which clung to her like fryer oil, inclining strangers to deference.
Today had been quiet. Thursday. It was just after two. One old man waited in the lobby, jiggling a toddler on his knee.
‘I’m hoping he symbolises hope for the future,’ the man said, ‘but my guess is he’s more of a morbid joke.’
‘Ma ma,’ said the toddler, jiggling.
The phone rang. Becka answered it.
‘Hello. I’d like to book an appointment for my pigeon, Vanessa. Will she represent the beauty to be found in mundane things, if we only care to look?’
She tucked the phone between her shoulder and ear. ‘I’m sorry, I’m not quite able to say. That’s not up to me, sorry. But I can book you and Vanessa in for next week and we can see.’
‘She makes a great image for it, you see. Her feathers, they look grey at a distance, but when you really look at them there’s all sorts of colours in them, see, and shades of colours, not to mention overall beauty of form.’
‘I’m sure you’re right,’ Becka said. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’ She opened a folder titled ‘Categories’, then one titled ‘Birds’. ‘Would this Friday suit? At, say, twelve o’clock?’
‘Friday’s fine.’
She entered Friday, then asked for a name, which the caller gave. Typing with one hand while with the other she squeezed, released, squeezed an empty paper cup so that it became lined with many faults, a new fault with each squeeze, along which it could be made to form various shapes, now a square, now a Star of David, now, shit, she missed a letter, hit backspace. Finished, she pressed enter, then looked up at the screen.
‘Birds’ was gone.
‘Thank you,’ she said, and hung up. She hit Ctrl+Z; no luck. She hit refresh. It was not there.
She had not backspaced a letter. She had deleted ‘Birds’.
‘What is to be done?’ cried Samit, her boss. A meeting had been called in his office. The Department’s offices were halfway belowground and Samit’s, being the fanciest, overlooked the most expensive shoes. ‘What meaning is left for birds?’
‘Birds still mean plenty,’ Hannah reassured him. ‘They still possess all their inherent power as an image, or images. We have simply lost our precedent for dealing with them.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ said Becka. ‘I didn’t think they would be so easy to get rid of. Permanently, I mean.’
‘It was an honest mistake,’ consoled Samit, near tears.
‘Human nature,’ offered Hannah. ‘Nothing to crow about.’ Hannah had had a hard few years. She had tried to be a writer and failed, and then her mother died, and then her father last June, and then she was engaged, and then she wasn’t, and now she dressed mostly in green and made lots of small, exhausting jokes, after each of which she smiled, or tried to smile, but winced, giving Becka the impression of someone trying to cauterise a wound in their own chest with lots of individual matches, one at a time.
‘Anyway, all’s not lost,’ proclaimed Rachel, who was also there but had thus far been silent. ‘We still have parts of birds.’ She turned her laptop to face them. ‘The wings of the dove, for instance, and the partridge’s eye, which was not born when the bird was, but is coeval with the sky it reflects. They were classified by part, not by bird, and so escaped deletion.’
Samit contemplated this hopefully. ‘So a crow’s, say, wing, can still symbolise something, even if the crow considered as a whole cannot?’
‘Yes.’
Hannah thought. ‘What about birds of a feather?’
‘Still good,’ said Rachel. ‘They’re under “Feathers”.’
On the conversation went, through ‘Hearts’, ‘Claws’, ‘Beaks’, ‘Feet’ (these were no different from claws), ‘Tails’, ‘Livers’, ‘Spleens’.
Becka sighed. Tonight, she thought, I will fuck Stewart.
Becka was fucking Stewart, while at the same time Stewart was fucking Becka. Becka sucked Stewart’s breast like air through a straw while he jerked her off.
‘I am worried at how far our free relabellings and wilful reinterpretations of our mutual bodies going against the grain of history have stranded us from traditional psychoanalytic frameworks,’ Stewart gasped between strokes.
Becka split briefly from his tit. ‘Quiet,’ she said, ‘I can’t cum while history watches.’
‘I am only saying there is a tradition to how this sort of thing is made sense of with which we have broken, and now I am unsure as to what traumas to affix to which appendages, or which slurs and words of praise to cry out in fits of pleasure.’
‘For God’s sake hold your tongue and let me love,” Becka said, batted by the swinging tit. ‘If we render speech unforeseeable, is this not an apprenticeship to freedom?’
Afterwards, Becka lit a cigarette while Stewart took a puff of Ventolin.
‘I love you but you’re killing me,’ observed Stewart.
Becka coughed.
The evening birds chirped sweetly meaning nothing.
In the morning they had coffee on Stewart’s balcony. Becka watched the birds in the street below. Without a poetic lineage they seemed lighter somehow, as if tradition had made their feathers wet.
‘For so long birds have represented freedom,’ Stewart mused. ‘Now they have been freed even from that, from the work of representation. They are, in a sense, doubly free.’
‘Hush,’ said Becka. ‘You know I’m starting to think the whole thing’s futile. After all, just now, in remarking how their meaning has changed, you have made them mean precisely the thing they always did.’
‘Perhaps,’ Stewart conceded. ‘But differently.’ He nodded toward the birds, which were darting like eyes in shy love. ‘They at least seem to like it.’
It was true, Becka had to admit. They did seem freer.
‘Shame their world’s about to end,’ he sighed.
It was true. Time travel had been invented in 1950s and the powers that be, frustrated by what they saw of websites, had scheduled the end of the world for tomorrow. Becka kicked herself; she had forgotten to put it in the Outlook calendar.
Her fondness for Stewart, compressed to fit what little time was left, coupled with the heat of her desire, crystallised into a feeling that, if it was not love, had at least the brilliance of it.
‘Stewart –’
Her phone rang.
‘I don’t know what Ricky and I were thinking,’ said Ashley, ‘planning our wedding for next week with the apocalypse tomorrow, I guess if I had to say I probably just figured our love would keep us suspended in some sort of eternal present, I mean it would transcend it somehow, tragedy I mean, which is to say time, tragedy being a condition arising from time, and not to mention we’ve booked all these doves and a dove handler which all now have absolutely no significance, I mean you wouldn’t set a bunch of chickens loose at a wedding, not without a really great love of chickens, which I don’t have, and frankly now that it has so conclusively lost its war with time I’m not sure I put so much stock in it, love I mean, which raises the question why even have a wedding? Not that there’ll be a wedding, I suppose. Oh, who am I kidding, he never would’ve wanted me in the first place if it weren’t for my father’s crude oil fortune and the necklace I made him of my teeth the first night we made love. Sorry, let me adjust my dentures.’
‘I’ll call you back,’ Becka said, and hung up. She lit a candle, though they were in broad daylight.
Stewart stepped from the balcony and, flapping, flew swiftly away.
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Image: Sunguk Kim - Unsplash
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