BIRD/MAN

from: Memoirs Of An Imbecile

c 1979 Tristan Winter

He fell from the shattering glimmer of some nest of consciousness; a pure absence of fortune had nurtured him for eons, alternately gently or forcefully sticking crumbs down his gullet, to be absorbed into the membranes of his convulsive being.

He had long ago ceased to suffer. His timeless frame, ravaged by horrors unknown to the rest of us, splintered by colors and temporal patterns, pillaging the wilds of his once young pastureland on their savage march -that twenty-five year old carcass with the manual dexterity of a two-hundred year old sage, and the social grace of a freshly aborted fetus, rapidly took precedence in the imaginations of the townsfolk.

Nobody knew where he came from. No one could say how he transubstantiated his fragile pod from one end of town to the other. Occasionally, if one was attuned to the right visual waves, one could see him gliding along the road, slowly hydroplaning up the mountain, where, it was popularly assumed, he then evaporated into the undulations of the Valley, only to reappear the next morning before our unbelieving eyes. Cars and egos being equal in the sight of our society, he was offered neither friendship nor transportative assistance, so he relied on other, more mysterious means of travel.

He appeared before us one morning, practically crowned with thorns, to announce his unattainable martyrdom, in the only place humble enough to appear in; the tender simplicity of the villagers left no room for other assembly. A few of us –those anointed by default- were working to serve others. Those innocent others were employed in abusing the service and providing unwitting diversion for the whole. As a communal experiment, I had been plucked from the loafers and set to manning the front counter with my blend of exasperation and charm. The sun was bursting like laughter over the little town, acacias and buttercups chimed in chorus while, beyond our reach, but filling our every breath with indiscernible gasps of seasonal ecstasy, the woods scintillated like an ocean of silver and auburn-flavored olive, tingling with individual fingers while the mass poured over the hills. The quicksilver reflection of the one narrow street, the unbearable majesty of the cobalt sky, silently thundering with immense cotton kettledrums of unaligned clouds, blinding to look at in their brilliant white solitude, all announced that the morose winter was limping away. And on just such a day he appeared in our bakery.

One could smell him days before he could actually be assimilated by the cones and rods of the human retina, but when his visual presence was registered by those astonished little tinkertoys of physiological theory, the result was incomprehensible. His head was an impenetrable mass of matted hair. One could, if the necessary courage was mustered, find in that coagulation, anything from tree limbs to fallen stars. The rest of it was sanctuary for the insect kingdom. Either below that or in collusion with it, one could vaguely ascribe the contours of a beard, the most distinguishing feature of which was a pair of foot-long appendices, unequal in length, and not unlike the pine-cone pendulums of a cuckoo clock, which hung desperately from his chin and swayed gently when he shuffled along the floor. His emaciated skeleton was hilariously draped in a pair of shit-encrusted overalls, torn and tattered beyond recognition were it not for the single shoulder strap stretched across his torso. Beneath that hung the remains of what was once a striped pullover, and to his credit and humility, the fact that it had but one arm did not annoy him in the least. Under his left arm he carried an even filthier shirt, although I never saw him make use of it. Whether he wore shoes or not was impossible to tell.

The most revealing aspect of his character, however, was the set of eyeglasses which protruded from his hirsute face. Set in the rounds of delicate gold filigree frames were a pair of hopelessly shattered lenses. The topography of the cracks and fissure was too mad to trace.; the roads all seemed to lead in to other roads, converging at some further point with ten or twenty others, and finally leading back into themselves. It was perhaps these glasses which accounted for his peculiar serpentine pattern of walking, or the quizzical expression of rapture and cosmologic contemplation which, if one searched enough, one could always find in his pastel red and blue eyes.

His olfactory properties were devastating. The others fled when he finally arrived at the counter. I nearly lost consciousness for a moment but, cornered a lungful of fresh kitchen air and held my ground. After having assessed, from the top right-hand corner of his querulously cocked head, the methods and customs of our native community service, he approached the counter to place his order, quaking all the way. His charisma, at this proximity, was implosive. He screwed his head sideways, stared off into the most obscure corner of the building –not really behind me, but beyond the garbage and brambles of the back yard and the little church on the last hill of the town- and said something without moving his mouth.

I was stunned. For nearly a minute we both remained silent. He then trembled in humiliation and repeated his request in the same vibrating, piccolo voice, which seemed to come from the innermost depths of his shriveled canals. We were both in despair. All eyes were upon us, challenging my accommodating ingenuity as much as his fragmented sense of social belonging. He started quaking with a frightening intensity, while my facial muscles were assuming the intractability of the rictus sardonicus. All sound ceased to exist save the echo of his rusted little squeak of appeal. The sun began to melt the front windows in that momentary diaspora of our bakery’s normal hilarity. Panicked, I slid open the glass pastry case and began reaching for various items, watching him all the while and deftly avoiding any contact with the sweets, until, at the end of my rippling charade, I detected the correct tiny sparkle of concurrence in his bewildered features.

“Cookie!” I shouted. “He wanted a cookie!”

The entire place exploded with joy. The bird/man shuffled his feet and swung his beard-pendulums in proud and airborne gratitude while I clapped my hands and danced with my co-workers.

“He said ’cookie’,” I laughed, and we all hugged each other in celebration.