Birds of Bad Omen

Tag: life

  • An Eye for Horror

    Jeremy’s security clearance was so high he wasn’t allowed to talk to himself for fear of what he might say or hear. He worked alone in a steel-reinforced cavern 300 feet under a brown plain in West Texas that not even lizards cared about, and he lived in a double-wide rooted to a spot a few yards from the rusty hatch leading to the vault.

    Jeremy was at the center of a web of sensors, smart landmines, drones, and robotic dogs with gun barrels where you’d expect the heads to be. Data streaked constantly from one component to another, but he never knew whether the network was watching for threats from the outside or whether he was the threat.

    Jeremy’s job was to sit in front of a super-secure desktop computer and learn as many of the country’s bloodiest, most damning secrets as granularly as his memory and sanity would allow. He didn’t have to do anything like write moralizing top-secret reports or figure out how to ensure these secrets remained buried. His only job was to bear them in silence. And at a certain point, his handlers would kill him and move a replacement into the double-wide.

    This is how the United States has kept going for so long.

    Sometimes, at the end of a 12-hour day, he was too drained or too distracted to push his chair away from his desk, let alone climb the ladder steps to the surface. Like the day he’d studied a digitized batch of cloudy, black-and-white photos of neat piles of human heads, of limbless torsos, of arms and of legs on a dry hilltop overlooking Havana during the Spanish-American War. Jeremy got stuck on the thought that the pyramidal orderliness of the piles looked businesslike, like the soldiers posing and smiling for the camera were waiting for a trader to come size up the merchandise. On those days he ate Cheezits and nuts from his desk, drank a couple bottles of water, and wrapped himself in a silver fire blanket to sleep in a corner.

    His nightmares didn’t stick to boundaries. They woke him up two or three times a night and often haunted him throughout the day. Once he saw a pair of fists hammering the inside of a pot of coffee in the office, like someone being drowned in a glass case filled with water. One morning he was spreading jam on a piece of toast and saw pulverized intestines where the bits of strawberry were supposed to be. He couldn’t say how many dead children he’d spent quiet time with.

    Jeremy was allowed to have a female companion with whom he could talk and masturbate through a secure video connection. Each relationship could last no more than six weeks. The CIA created a dating app just for him. It was populated with women who shared some of his personality traits and many of his likes and dislikes, and whose bodies he would find desirable. And most importantly every one of them could be trusted to stay silent on the subject of Jeremy Wayman. His handlers were always watching their conversations, even the hoarse, panting ones, so they didn’t need his companions to act as spies. But they believed the women would have done so if asked, and they were right.

    Jeanine was one of them.

    She was an electrical engineer who lived in Austin and was in the Air Force Reserves. She and Jeremy had a high compatibility score. They talked a lot at first about the Air Force Academy, which they’d both graduated from.

    Jeremy told her about the time he was called to the superintendent’s office because they’d discovered his obsession with the images of the World Trade Center attacks. They monitored cadets’ internet usage and discovered that Jeremy had downloaded thousands of photos and many hours of videos of the planes hitting the towers and people jumping and the towers collapsing. An investigation, which Jeremy was unaware of, concluded it he had more than likely seen every known video of the attack and had replayed some of them hundreds of times – the ones shot from the base of the towers or close to it. The videos of bodies splattering on the plaza between the two skyscrapers he’d pulled from the dark web. The superintendent questioned Jeremy slowly and methodically, and decided within half an hour that Jeremy wasn’t a psychopath but an emotionally disturbed, but nonviolent kid whose obsession with the attacks was probably unexplainable. He ordered Jeremy to undergo weekly counseling sessions.

    Jeanine stopped him, her tone incredulous but still a little flirtatious.

    He must have known his time online was being scrutinized. Every cadet knew that. Maybe he wanted to get caught? Whatever he was getting from looking at those images was maybe heightened by the likelihood of being found out, the thrill of not knowing which day was the one he’d be called to the superintendent’s office. Or maybe he needed to be seen being horrified in order to actually experience it.

    Was it horror?

    He didn’t know. Maybe. Probably. He was 12 when he watched the towers fall on a TV on a tall rolling stand in his homeroom class. It never felt like what he thought horror would feel like – it was quieter and bluer – but maybe that’s what it was.

    Did he know why he watched those videos? she asked. He did not. Nobody he knew died in the attack. No, the planes didn’t strike at a time of personal upheaval or loss. The only thing he could offer up was a dream he’d had weeks after the attack. He was standing on a street corner in downtown Indianapolis, his hometown, and the sky was gray like it usually was in late fall. No other people were around, and the only sound was a strong wind blowing around mirror-skinned office towers. Then a great groan erupted – the sound the South Tower made when it collapsed – and the buildings began to move sideways. They were trading places with one another. The tallest building, the Bank One tower, planted itself one block from where he’d remained standing, too terrified to move.

    Jeremy started seeking out the videos and photographs not long after having the dream.

    He and Jeanine didn’t talk for a minute or so, just stared at one another on their screens, as if they were appraising something that resisted appraisal. It was their second date. They hadn’t seen each other naked yet.

    Jeanine broke the silence. He’d shared, and now she would share. She said she was raised on a farm that grew corn and beans in western Idaho. She said she’d seen a lot of the world but none of it compared to there, and she tried to describe its beauty. She said the Cascades looked like fabric dyed blue, gray, and white that had bunched up against the wall of the sky.

    After a while, Jeanine told Jeremy a story about her father.

    He was a farm boy. On a morning in July, he was plowing in one of the back fields when a jet fighter, the likes of which he’d never seen before – with a needle nose and all silver with no Air Force markings – crashed about 300 yards away or so. The scuttlebutt later was that it was an experimental jet. The fireball was huge. Her father, who was 15, looked around but didn’t see a pilot parachuting to the ground. The Mountain Home Air Force base was just a few miles away, so most farm people in the area knew what to look for in a crash. He stopped the tractor, jumped off and ran to crash site. The jet had broken into several pieces, and each of them was on fire. A little way off, he saw a depression in the grass and smoke and a few small flames rising from it. He ran over, scared of what he was going to find. The pilot was wearing a pale blue flight suit that had flames crawling over most of it. His right arm was twisted like he was holding it in some kind of rigid salute. Most of the sleeve and the arm’s skin had already burned away and the muscles were shriveled, exposing the bones. Some of the blue fabric was fusing with his humerus. Her father tore off his shirt and started beating the flames. When his shirt caught on fire, he beat the flames with the palms of his hands. It didn’t register in the moment that the pilot wasn’t moving or making a sound. He was wearing a flight helmet with a mirror-glass visor that covered his entire face. The glass was unclouded, like the pilot had just wiped it clean. The back of his head was on a rock, so it was tilted forward, like he was watching this kid put out the flames. Her father watched himself extinguishing the fire and then pulling away, standing up and gaping in horror. That night, he came to dinner reeking of the cologne he used to attract to girls. He didn’t say anything, but then midway through he started laughing and staring wild-eyed at his mother, and he said, “It won’t come off. The smell just won’t come off.”

    Jeremy ached to touch Jeanine.

    A week later, one of the robotic dogs gunned down Jeremy as he walked from the double-wide to the hatch. The shock of knowing his day had arrived was etched on his face.

  • Panic Sets In

    The trees waved their branches back and forth like they were trying to flag down help, and their leaves shook violently. We watched their panic in the moonlight from the back porch. When a cloud passed in front of the moon, the sky was silvery in spots but mostly it was a dark, dark blue – a dead face fringed by the woods behind our house.

    You said something terrible was about to happen. And then you said something about ions. I knew it had something to do with the air’s sudden dryness and the static electricity. You always knew so much more about the world and the systems it ran on than I did.

    Dogs pawing at a dozen living room windows on the block were barking in high-pitched distress. The strays, which had a much better head for undefined but pervasive danger, had already left the neighborhood. They’d probably gathered at the creek a quarter of a mile away. They went there, pressed their bodies low to the ground, and stayed quiet when they were under general threat, like when crashing lightning storms came in. The deer and foxes were gone, too.

    The people, though, were a mystery. We went around to the front of our house and watched couples walking fast on the sidewalk to get their steps in. Others drank wine with their neighbors in driveways. Little half-globes of light, from smart watches and smartphones, illuminated each of these scenes. The retired cop across the street sat on a lawn chair looking at the sky through binoculars.

    Darkness was pushing in, but they didn’t notice. Two worlds were coming together, but they weren’t combining. The one with the dead face was about to overwhelm and atomize the other.

    I took your hand, brought it to my lips, and kissed your palm.

  • The Invisible House

    I woke up to a low metallic buzz that was interrupted every few seconds by words that I couldn’t make out.

    It was just after 5 a.m. on Valentine’s Day.

    Our two dogs, who sleep on rugs in our bedroom, were already up, yelping and pawing at the patio door. I imagined three or four men in our backyard preparing to invade the house, so contemptuous of its occupants that they didn’t bother to whisper.

    I grabbed a baseball bat that I kept in a corner in the living room for this particular catastrophe. For a long time I’d believed it was inevitable that men would break into our house, humiliate us, torture us and then kill us. I would try to fend them off with the bat, but they’d easily snatch it out of my hands. I’d watched a scene like that in a police procedural years ago with Cristina. A serial killer/meth addict played by Tim Curry murdered the husband, raped the wife, and then murdered her, all in their bedroom. And I knew that was our fate.

    I slowly opened the patio door and then stood at the top of the steps. The dogs bolted for opposite corners of the yard and then raced to the middle. Clearly nobody was in the backyard.

    I saw a halo of white light just over the top of the privacy fence, the section closest to the side street. Then more words erupted, but this time I could make them out: “Come out with your hands up.”

    I was surprised that police actually said that. Did they say it because, when they were growing up, that’s what cops on TV shows said? Or did a TV writer decades ago hear a cop say it and then used the phrase in a script and it caught on?

    I called the dogs inside, returned the bat to its corner, and went to the side street where I now realized a drama involving the police, a bullhorn, searchlights and at least one criminal was playing out.

    A black Dodge Charger was parked at a slant in the middle of the street. Its headlights were pointed at a gold F-250 truck that was half in a yard, half on the street. I couldn’t see the person in the truck’s cab. A tall, slender man with reddish-brown hair and a vest with “HSI” on the back stood to the right of the car facing the pickup, which was maybe a hundred feet away. Another car blocked the street on the other side of the truck.

    Homeland Security Investigations. The person in the truck was probably undocumented, or maybe a human trafficker.

    I remembered seeing the gold truck in the driveway of the house. Or maybe not. I didn’t know if I was editing a memory, flat-out making one up, or remembering accurately. Which made it the same muddle as many of my memories.

    The two-story house was built with tan bricks and was bigger than the others on the block. It ate up more of its lot and sat closer to the street, like it wanted to show the other houses how to be a house. A wrought-iron balcony faced the street. An old couple used to live there with their grandchildren, one of whom – a girl who was 13 or 14 – had practiced pirouettes on the balcony. The couple sold the property years ago, and I realized I’d stopped seeing the house. It displayed few signs of life. I never saw anybody doing anything on the balcony, and the blinds were always closed. When its new owners had completed the task of making the property anonymous, maybe they’d turned it into a stash house for illegal immigrants. Or maybe for drugs, cash, or guns. Or maybe all of that.

    It seemed unlikely that it was just an immigrant family living there, unlucky enough to come to the attention of Homeland Security.

    I went back inside to tell Cristina what I’d seen. The HSI agent hadn’t noticed me.

    A helicopter arrived and monotonously beat the air over the street for the next few minutes.   

    Then we heard a loud thud or a muffled explosion. We stopped talking so we could hear what came next, but there was nothing.

    Driving to work a few hours later, I saw the front door had been knocked out. Two men wearing HSI vests and a woman in a plaid shirt with no vest were chatting on lawn chairs in the driveway.

    By the time I got home from work, they’d replaced the door with a sheet of plywood and installed a Ring security camera in the middle of it. The F-250, with a big dent in the passenger side door, sat in the driveway. It was gone within a few days.

    The plywood was still standing in for a door a few months later.

    Most mornings when I walked the dogs past the house before sunrise, I looked at the Ring camera’s cool white-blue glow and wondered how distinguishable I was on the recording and who was watching me and if the person was making notes about me.

    Amazon packages of all sizes crowded the front porch most days. A black Subaru BRZ was parked in the short driveway, but I never saw its owner – or anybody for that matter.

    The garage door was usually halfway open, with an avalanche of junk spilling onto the drive. One or two small electric lamps illuminated sections of the piles. Once I noticed a naked Ken doll in the lamp light, wide-eyed like he’d been caught trying to escape.

    The downstairs blinds were drawn and the upstairs windows were covered with dingy blankets. Some mornings one of the blankets was pulled aside a little and I could see into the room, which was large and had a high ceiling. The yellowish walls, at least the parts I could see, were bare and streaked with grime.

    The house always looked like it was being cleared out and prepared for what was next, but the task was never completed. Every morning, something about the house’s appearance was different. Storm windows were gone one morning and back the next. A pile of clothes was on the ground under an open window one morning and gone the next.

    I thought maybe the house wouldn’t settle until I stopped paying attention to it, and that if I did that, it would melt back into the neighborhood, and we’d stop seeing it. And if that happened, hooded, shackled people would be delivered there in the middle of the night, tortured and some of them murdered in rooms that had been sound-proofed and covered in plastic sheeting. Their ghosts would make the neighborhood sick.

    But then I started wondering why I thought the government would turn it into a house of the dead. I realized I was mixing up books I’d read, like 1984, Darkness at Noon, and The Twilight Zone by Nona Fernandez, with movies and television shows about psychopaths and drug cartels. The idea that the house might have a clean room for murder came to me directly from Dexter, the television series about a fastidious serial killer who kills other serial killers.

    I got confused and gradually stopped paying attention to the house. And it started behaving normally. The storm windows stayed put and the piles of junks disappeared. It had a regular front door, painted dark gray. It melted back into the neighborhood.

    One morning some months after the house’s conversion, as I was bagging up dog shit in its front yard, I found a human ear in the grass, just like in Blue Velvet.

  • What the Boatman Said

    Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Over the next 45 minutes it’ll be my pleasure to tell you the story of San Antonio and its world-famous River Walk.

    But first I need to go over a few rules. One, please keep your arms and legs inside the tour barge at all times. Two, please do not throw anything, like a candy wrapper or empty soda cup, into the river.

    Please follow my directions to the tee in the unlikely event of an emergency. And don’t gesture to or otherwise address anyone on the River Walk’s beautiful limestone walkways, especially groups of drunks, unless you want to know what getting hit with a fusillade of beer bottles feels like.

    And please don’t stare at or ask about my robe and hood.

    You also need to be aware that gravity is denser on the San Antonio River and so time is slower down here than it is on the River Walk. If you left any friends or loved ones up there, once you’re reunited with them, they will talk sadly about the many long days they endured without you, and they will be that much older than you. While the new difference in your ages won’t be that much, only a few days, it will eat away at the foundation of your relationship. It has to do with the shock of becoming aware that time doesn’t insist on treating you and others the same, even those close to you.

    Finally, tipping is strongly, very strongly, encouraged.

    Now let’s get started.