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Aquatic Wood Wagtail
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Male 1. Female 2.
Two birds on a stalk of Indian turnip. She peers back into the envelope for a note, an explanation,
but finds none.
The day she bought that book for Fredde: the bookseller took so long to wrap it. She did not
understand its attraction but knew that her son would love it.
The doctors claim Frederick retains no memories, that his brain maintains only basic functions,
but there are moments when she wonders. She flattens out the creases as well as she can and drags
the floor lamp closer and places the print before her son. He tilts his head and she tries to convince
herself he is studying it. But his eyes are gray and chambered and shallow, and after a moment he
returns to his spirals.
When she has finished the dishes, she leads Frederick out onto the elevated patio, as is their
routine, where he sits with his bib still around his neck, staring into oblivion. She’ll try him again
on the bird print tomorrow.
It’s fall, and starlings fly in great pulsing swarms above the city. Sometimes she thinks he perks
up when he sees them, hears all those wings rushing and rushing and rushing.
As she sits, looking out through the line of trees into the great empty parking lot, a dark shape
sweeps through the nimbus of a streetlamp. It disappears and then reemerges, and suddenly and
silently it lands on the deck railing not six feet away.
It’s an owl. As big as a child. It swivels its neck and blinks its yellow eyes and in her head
roars a single thought:
You’ve come for me.
Frederick sits up straight.
The owl hears something. It holds there, listening as hard as she has ever seen anything listen.
Frederick stares and stares.
Then it goes: three audible wing beats and the darkness swallows it.
“You saw it?” she whispers. “Did you see it, Fredde?”
He keeps his gaze turned toward the shadows. But there are only the plastic bags rustling in the
branches above them and the dozens of spheres of artificial light glowing in the parking lot beyond.
“Mutti?” says Frederick. “Mutti?”
“I’m here, Fredde.”
She puts her hand on his knee. His fingers lock around the arms of the chair. His whole body
becomes rigid. Veins stand out in his neck.
“Frederick? What is it?”
He looks at her. His eyes do not blink. “What are we doing, Mutti?”
“Oh, Fredde. We’re just sitting. We’re just sitting and looking out at the night.”
Thirteen
2014
S
he lives to see the century turn. She lives still.
It’s a Saturday morning in early March, and her grandson Michel collects her from her flat and
walks her through the Jardin des Plantes. Frost glimmers in the air, and Marie-Laure shuffles along
with the ball of her cane out in front and her thin hair blown to one side and the leafless canopies
of the trees drifting overhead as she imagines schools of Portuguese men-of-war drift, trailing their
long tentacles behind them.
Skim ice has formed atop puddles in the gravel paths. Whenever she finds some with her cane,
she stops and bends and tries to lift the thin plate without breaking it. As though raising a lens to
her eye. Then she sets it carefully back down.
The boy is patient, taking her elbow only when she seems to need it.
They make for the hedge maze in the northwest corner of the gardens. The path they’re on begins
to ascend, twisting steadily to the left. Climb, pause, catch your breath. Climb again. When they
reach the old steel gazebo at the very top, he leads her to its narrow bench and they sit.
No one else here: too cold or too early or both. She listens to the wind sift through the filigree of
the crown of the gazebo, and the walls of the maze hold steady around them, Paris murmuring
below, the drowsy purr of a Saturday morning.
“You’ll be twelve next Saturday, won’t you, Michel?”
“Finally.”
“You are in a hurry to be twelve?”
“Mother says I can drive the moped when I am twelve.”
“Ah.” Marie-Laure laughs. “The moped.”
Beneath her fingernails, the frost makes billions of tiny diadems and coronas on the slats of the
bench, a lattice of dumbfounding complexity.
Michel presses against her side and becomes very quiet. Only his hands are moving. Little
clicks rising, buttons being pressed.
“What are you playing?”
“Warlords.”
“You play against your computer?”
“Against Jacques.”
“Where is Jacques?”
The boy’s attention stays on the game. It does not matter where Jacques is: Jacques is inside the
game. She sits and her cane flexes against the gravel and the boy clicks his buttons in spasmodic
flurries. After a while he exclaims, “Ah!” and the game makes several resolving chirps.
“You’re all right?”
“He has killed me.” Awareness returns to Michel’s voice; he is looking up again. “Jacques, I
mean. I am dead.”
“In the game?”
“Yes. But I can always begin again.”
Below them the wind washes frost from the trees. She concentrates on feeling the sun touch the
backs of her hands. On the warmth of her grandson beside her.
“Mamie? Was there something you wanted for your twelfth birthday?”
“There was. A book by Jules Verne.”
“The same one Maman read to me? Did you get it?”
“I did. In a way.”
“There were lots of complicated fish names in that book.”
She laughs. “And corals and mollusks, too.”
“Especially mollusks. It’s a beautiful morning, Mamie, isn’t it?”
“Very beautiful.”
People walk the paths of the gardens below, and the wind sings anthems in the hedges, and the
big old cedars at the entrance to the maze creak. Marie-Laure imagines the electromagnetic waves
traveling into and out of Michel’s machine, bending around them, just as Etienne used to describe,
except now a thousand times more crisscross the air than when he lived—maybe a million times
more. Torrents of text conversations, tides of cell conversations, of television programs, of e-mail,
vast networks of fiber and wire interlaced above and beneath the city, passing through buildings,
arcing between transmitters in Metro tunnels, between antennas atop buildings, from lampposts
with cellular transmitters in them, commercials for Carrefour and Evian and prebaked toaster
pastries flashing into space and back to earth again,
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