The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection

HUMMERS Lisa Mason

Laurel is having a bad morning when Jerry brings her the gift. The pain is so bad she loses her shredded wheat within an hour after breakfast, but not bad enough to numb her completely, sweep her off into that suspended, solitary state of soul-annihilation.

This really pisses her off. And she dreamed again of the great ox, the sacrifice and the pipe and drums, the awful blood.

Plus she is bleeding again, staining her clothes and bedding like a teenager who doesn’t understand her changing body. Laurel’s body is changing, too, and at this late date more mysteriously, irretrievably, than she or the doctors can understand.

What a weird shitty world this is, she’s thinking, when Jerry knocks on her door. So she lets ol’ Jere have it, and she doesn’t give a damn when his big brown eyes mist over and his womanly lips twitch.

“What the fuck is this?” she says, chucking the box he’s brought on top of the litter of death books strewn on the coffee table. The box is small, oblong, neatly wrapped in bright red, flowery paper. The box looks like a birthday present, a holiday offering, a lipsticked smile, and she hates it, she doesn’t give a damn what’s inside.

“A gift, Laurel.” He quietly goes about his business, but she can tell he’s appalled at how awful she looks.

“A gift? A gift implies tomorrow. A gift suggests hope. You’re not supposed to encourage my hope, now are you, Jerry? Kiibler-Ross, Chapter 12. It’s cruel to encourage hope, when there is no goddamn hope.”

He flinches at her anger. “Everyone needs hope. Even you, Laurel. Even now.”

“Oh, especially fucking now.”

“Want your shot?” He turns away with his so-be-a-bitch patience. What a saint this guy is, and his own lover mysteriously, irretrievably dying of AIDS.

He trots out his little black bag; actually, Jerry’s is sky blue. He’s not a doctor. She wouldn’t let him in her house if he were. Fucking doctors, with their six-figure lifestyles and their dreadful incompetence, their absurd impotence in the face of diseases they ought to have cured by now. No, the hospice authorizes homecare nurses to dispense all sorts of fun drugs to people who won’t live long enough to become dope-crazed menaces to society.

Want your shot, your hit, your high, Laurel baby? Hey, sounds like her days in Haight-Ashbury when she was a twenty-year-old old-lady painting psychedelic posters for rock bands. Day-glo pink hearts, electric-blue tears. Damn, she was cool. She tied a leather headband around her hair. She laced Greek sandals up to her knees.

“Hell, I guess so,” Laurel says.

Morphine is Dolly Dagger, Lady Dreamknife, junkie stuff. Oh, her wild days in Haight-Ashbury when they’d pop a pill because it was a pretty color. Now she is afraid of such soul-annihilation. She is afraid of Dolly Dagger.

Afraid of the dream that sometimes comes when she yields to morphine: a great ox heavy with dumb life brought before a fevered assembly. Drums and pipes and chants, crazed eyes rimmed with blue and black. A shining scythe brought down on the captive neck, bellows of rage and pain, and blood, and the great head rolling, falling, how this disgusts and terrifies her, a head wild-eyed with fear and pain and horror . . .

He preps her.

“You really should go up to San Rafael,” Jerry says. “I’m only thinking of you, it would be easier for you.”

“I want to die at home,” she says. He nods, does not want to meet her eyes. “I don’t want to be trapped in some sanitized bed in a sanitized clinic. I don’t want some nameless night nurse to find me. After so much indignity, I must finally claim my own dignity.”

“Then you’re going to have to learn how to shoot it up yourself,” Jerry says flatly. “Learn soon. Because I can’t be here every time you need it. And you’re going to need it more and more, Laurel.”

“What if the goddamn champagne-sipping doctors, what if they find a cure tomorrow, Jere, a new radiation therapy, a DNA mutation like the AIDS cure they’re working on in Europe. Something. It could happen; it could happen! Couldn’t it?”

“What if? Sure. What if could always happen. But never does.” Then he plunges her arm with the tenderness of the angels, like shooting up hard drugs is an act of grace.

Laurel sits on her deck and watches the world slide by. Mr. Oake jogs past her vista; he even has the nerve to wave. Mr. Oake must be eighty-two years old and he jogs like a cartoon in slow motion: his skinny-flabby arms swing back and forth, his skinny-bony legs pump up and down, sweat rolls into his red terry cloth headband. But he hardly gets anywhere, he practically jogs in place. He moves down East Blithedale at an absurd snail’s pace.

Laurel doesn’t wave back. Mr. Oake is useless to society. He is probably living off the public dole. He will never do anything else with his mediocre old life except jog by her deck and drive her crazy with the uselessness of it all.

Why her? Why not a useless old man nearly double her age? She is talented, she is forty-five, she has so much left to give. She has a whole life left. Why her?

She sees the Collins girl stride by, too. The girl doesn’t wave. If she sees Laurel sitting there, she doesn’t give a damn, but Laurel suspects she doesn’t notice her at all. The girl must be sixteen or seventeen, a lean little oblivious bitch oozing with hormones and hostility. She has the kind of thick, wavy, below-the-shoulder hair Laurel had before chemo stripped that from her, too.

Only forty-five. Not young; but not old, either, damn it. Until six months ago, she was doing okay. Packaging, ad agency work, shit work really, hustle hustle hustle. But she was waiting, saving up a bit, dreaming of the day she could chuck it all and do what she wanted to do. Go back to her art. Electric-blue tears were only the beginning. Why did she never go past the tears?

It is her own damn fault, her own procrastination.

They told her she had ovarian cancer.

So stupid. She’d smoked for twenty, twenty-five years. The lungs ought to be the first to go, but no. There is this stupid statistic about women who smoke. The lungs go, certainly, but these women also have a high incidence of cervical and ovarian cancer. Something about concentration of nicotine on the fingers, touching, for one purpose or another, there.

Humiliating. She’d started to bleed off and on; yes, she denied it. She’d been bleeding for two months straight and aching with the worst cramps she’d ever felt when she broke down and went to the doctors.

Fucking doctors. They couldn’t tell that her father had a blockage until a heart attack killed him while he was driving to the office on a sunny Monday morning. They couldn’t save her mother when a stroke knifed her brain. They couldn’t help her make a baby with Christopher before he bailed out of their marriage.

She has had enough grief in the last five, six years.

So she could not believe it. So she smoked; take her at seventy-five when she’s a crazy old Nevelson or an O’Keeffe stashed away in her Mill Valley chalet. A Lillian Heilman type with withered scarlet lipstick and mascaraed crow’s-feet, a full life of drinking and smoking and man-chasing behind her, and a masterpiece or two to her credit.

Would you believe there is nothing more they can do for you, and you’re only forty-five?

When her father died, she cried because she never really knew him. When her mother died, she cried because she knew her only too well. When her fetuses miscarried, she cried because she would never have the chance to know or not know them.

Her past, her present, her future; she can’t cry for them anymore. There are no tears left for Laurel.

She feels better after Jerry leaves the way lifting therapeutic pressure off a throbbing nerve calms the trauma. She’ll have to remember to tell him next time. An emotional tourniquet, ol’ Jere, that’s what you are, man. She hardly ever has something even halfway good to tell him.

Next time. Does she have the right to think about next time? Jerry comes to see her, administers her morphine like a real gentleman, plus gives her a gift, and she acts like an asshole. That’s just great. “To Laurel,” he’ll say at her funeral. He’ll be crying. “We all loved her very much, but God, she could be a bitch.”

She picks up the merry red box from the coffee table. The Egyptian Book of the Dead lies beneath it. She tears open the thick wrapping paper.

Jerry’s gift is a hummingbird feeder. A Droll Yankee. It is a pale green plastic flying saucer with bright red plastic flower decals mounted over the feeding holes, a bright red plastic circle on top, an elegant brass rod with a curved hook top. You boil three parts water to one part white granulated sugar and let cool. You pour the cooled nectar up to the metal band. You hang the feeder from a tree branch or, in Laurel’s case, with great and painful effort, you slide open your screen door, you take down the browning spider plant, you hang the feeder from the macrame planter-holder nailed to the roof over the deck.

Jerry’s gift box also contains a tiny, hand-printed book on care and maintenance of the feeder, lore on birds in general and hummingbirds in particular. Jewels of the air, the book calls them. Hummers.

Hummers? Laurel has seen hummingbirds on TV, in National Geographic videos, as illustrations on greeting cards, wrought in crystal as Christmas ornaments. Maybe once or twice for real, but only from afar. Quick magical creatures hovering around fuchsia, disappearing into the foliage before her eyes could focus. Look! What was that?

According to the book, hummingbirds are plentiful in northern California. They’re everywhere, in downtown Oakland, on San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill, in Mill Valley arbors. They’ve been around her all this time, and she’s never really seen them!

Such a simple pleasure of life, coming at this late date. Oh, to see a hummer from her deck, so close. Please!

She scans her view with new eyes. Across East Blithedale stand ancient California date palms, fragrant eucalyptus, sturdy pine trees, weeping willows, brilliant fuchsia, strange cacti with fleshy, alien fingers. That glorious northern California arbor; she’s sketched it many times. How she cursed the arbor yesterday, raged at its exuberance; damn palms would witness her death, fucking cacti would outlive her.

But now, as she waits and she watches, something strange and disturbing and wonderful happens: the fringes of the palm fronds fall away, and disembodied arms reach to the sky. The gray-barked eucalyptus turn translucent; within stand decapitated torsos of men, their purple-blue hearts beating brown blood into the branches. Green-haired maidens bow and bob among the willows, sweep elegant fingers in obeisance to the earth. Fuchsia blossoms form voluptuous lips that whisper vermilion secrets to the wind. The cacti impatiently await some signal to pull up their knobby feet and hop away.

She waits and she watches, first fears replaced by fascination, and hours tick by. The arbor darkens. But no hummer comes. The little pale green plastic flying saucer sways in the Pacific breeze, lonely and alone, like a broken promise. The tiny book says she may have to wait a month before hummingbirds will discover her feeder.

Hummers, I may not have a month. God damn you, hummers. Don’t be one more disappointment to me.

Laurel goes inside, surrenders to exhaustion. Sleep; after the hell of chemotherapy failed, she was afraid to sleep. Now more and more she welcomes it, the little brother of death.

On principle she should curse all hummingbirds. But you know what? She cannot curse them. Jewels of the air, she promises as she sinks into sleep, I will wait for you as long as I can.

This decision to wait without anger or bitterness gives her a strange sense of peace. She slides into dreams of beating wings.

Beating wings shooting rainbows off their fringes and a presence: huge calm eyes rimmed with blue and black, a fan of dark hair, breasts, a spangled body arching . . .

Laurel wakes, and a woman wearing a dress like the night sky bends over her. She always has been terrified of intruders, especially since she has become so physically helpless, and she should be terrified now, but she isn’t, though she realizes that the woman is not bending over her, she is floating. The floating woman looks at her, eye to eye, before she disappears into the ceiling.

It is four in the morning. This hour has got to be the loneliest and most profound of the twenty-four. No one in their right mind is up at four in the morning, not even the birds.

Disturbed, disoriented, she rises. She isn’t bleeding, but pain socks her in the gut the moment she stands up. A sudden wallop like nothing she’s felt before. Now she is terrified. Laurel, this is It.

But this isn’t It. She doesn’t even pass out or fall back on the bed. She stands there in the night, clutching her stomach. Morphine? She finds the kit Jerry left her. She is shaky and clumsy and rips the hell out of her arm, but she finally manages to do it. Then, repulsed but not beaten by her own cowardice, she grips the walls like a blind woman, goes into the moonlit living room, and sits down with her death books.

Laurel never thought much about death before. She never knew her grandparents; death hadn’t touched her. Oh, she philosophized about it with her freaky friends when they were twenty and smoking doo in Golden Gate Park. Initiation, man; wow, the Trip of All. She read an interview with Rod Serling that took place two months before the man died. The interviewer had asked the fantasist what he thought happened, and he said: nothing. You just go off into nothing. No Willoughby, no Owl Creek, no next reality in a dark alley with jazz in the air. Then his heart gave out at age fifty. Mr. Serling smoked twenty, twenty-five years, Laurel recalls.

Twilight Zonish speculations always appealed to her; Mr. Serling’s bleakness did not. And then her father and her mother and the children she could never have; death caught up with her.

It was sometime after her mother’s death that she began to collect Madame Blavatsky and the works of the Golden Dawn, the Theosophists, the Rosicrucians. Carl Jung, Edinger, and their various disciples of metapsychology. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross for clinical details. Out-of-the-body experiences, near-death experiences; many modern works of varying quality on these topics. And an ancient text: The Egyptian Book of the Dead.

The modern philosophers and psychologists and therapists are as enlightened and humane and cool as they can be. But they are too clinical for Laurel, too willing to concede the finiteness of human existence. She likes Fate magazine, the column, “My Proof of Survival.” The column is comprised of anecdotes from humble readers: “Dad Knocked On The Wall”; “Mama’s Last Kiss”; “Boodles Said Goodbye.” Boodles was a poodle. Laurel is amazed at how many people’s pets visit them from the grave and reassure them the soul survives. Even Boodles’s soul.

She wants to see the long tunnel, the white light. Maybe her mother will greet her there, ready with a scolding for her latest mistake. She wants details. She wants instructions, damn it.

Maybe that’s why that strange ancient text, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, is so perversely thrilling to her.

She plays the book oracle with it more than any other death book. Book oracle: you close your eyes, turn the book over and under, around and around, then flip the pages, plunge your index finger down.

This is how she finds elegant hieroglyphs and sloe-eyed god-animals, ceremonies and strictures, prescriptions and proscriptions. There is a weird ring of truth to these. As though death is just another reality. So when you emerge from the other side, you’ve got to roll up your sleeves and master it. She likes the idea; that it’s possible to master the inevitable.

Survival of the soul flies in the face of all known science. But Laurel can’t help but wonder if there could be something to the great journey. Whether the ancients could have understood life and death more completely than their confused and frightened progeny five thousand years later.

Dawn shifts through a leaden mist, and Laurel sees her first hummer.

She feels okay, not sick, not great, just compressed. Like she’s squeezed more tightly into herself; like how a trash compactor crunches down garbage. This image cracks her up; isn’t that the truth, this body such a piece of crap? She is laughing to herself when she sees a tiny presence flitting around the feeder.

It is the tiniest bird she has ever seen. It cannot be more than three inches from head to tail. In the dim morning light, she can see a glint of scarlet wreathing its throat, a gleam of green sliding down its back. Its long, slim beak dips into the hole at the center of one red plastic flower atop the feeder. She is so close she can see the tendril of its tongue extruding from the tip of its beak, lapping up the sugar water. It dips, sips, levitates and hovers, beady bird eyes casting quick glances about. It darts down and around to the next plastic flower, hovers, dips, and samples the same sugar water from a different hole. She can see the blurred upbeat of its wings simultaneously with an image of their downstroke, so that the hummer appears to be transported by four ghostly wings. The tiny tail beats furiously up and down, forming a fan of optical illusions.

She is still catching her breath when the hummer darts away, disappearing like magic into the morning mist.

She scrambles through the pile of death books, finds her tiny, hand-printed book. No, he could not have been a ruby-throated hummingbird; they live only east of the Mississippi. He must have been a male Allen’s hummingbird; the scarlet gorget, the green back, the neat fan tail. A California coastal hummer, all right.

Laurel goes out on her deck and sits, despite the chill. Mr. Oake jogs by, waves. God, he jogs at six in the morning and six in the evening? The creaky old bastard, what did he ever do to deserve . . . but she finds herself swallowing her bitterness. She doesn’t exactly return his wave, but she nods, and he nods back. A gonzo jogger at eighty-two, with twenty-twenty vision, too.

She sits there for hours, shivering in the morning mist, and no more hummers come. But she is not distressed. They will. More hummers will come.

Jerry gets all concerned about the sudden wallop of pain. Laurel realizes right away that her big mouth and her bitching have gone too far this time, and she tries to soft soap it. No big deal, Jere, she tells him; so what else do you want to hear from me? I’m fine, I’m okay, just leave me alone.

But he doesn’t leave her alone. He drags her off in an ambulance and throws her to the doctors at San Rafael Cancer Clinic.

As usual, the doctors strap her down and peer into her and intrude on her dignity. No, her bowels have not been irregular; her bowels have not been functioning at all, why the hell should they? She hardly eats.

It turns out the cancer has metastasized into her colon. She asks, does this mean I can smoke again? The poor young doctor, some kid she’s never seen before, looks at her with such pity that she laughs out loud. No, I’m not kidding, she says. I loved to smoke; can I smoke now?

And believe it or not, she forgives the poor young doctor. She forgives all the fucking doctors. Yes, she really does. What percentage of doctors will wind up with shit for guts some day? The bastards have no special guarantee, now do they? Radon gas could infiltrate your house for years, the electric blanket could tear apart your white blood cells, electromagnetic radiation from a PC could devour your mucous membranes.

Or you could smoke and drink and be merry until you’re eighty-two years old.

On the way home—Laurel demanded they let her go home—the only thing she can do to make Jerry smile is tell him about hummers.

“The Portuguese call them flower-kissers. The color at the gorget—the throat area—is due not just to actual pigmentation of the feather, but to structural color, iridescence reflecting off facets of the feather itself. Like a gemstone, Jere. Hummer homes in zoos worldwide are called jewel rooms. Isn’t that wonderful?”

“I know you don’t like the clinic, Laurel ...”

“I hate the fucking clinic. Did you know hummingbirds strip abandoned spider webs for nest material?”

“You refuse another try at surgery, refuse another try at chemo. That’s your choice. I respect your choice. But there is more they could do for you, and I’ve got to say it: you’re wrong to reject help, Laurel.”

“They eat half their weight in sugar a day. When they get excited, their heartbeat doubles to over a thousand beats per minute!”

“Laurel, please. You’re very sick. Much sicker than before. Do you know that?”

“Jerry, I know. Don’t make me say more than that, because I can’t. I’ll deal with being sicker. Okay?”

“Not okay. I worry. You’re so alone in this place.”

“I’m not alone, Jere. I’ve got hummers.”

She gets to know them.

There is the gorgeous male Allen’s hummer. His mate is plainer, but no less thrilling in her aerial acrobatics, her negotiation of the feeder, her sheer delicacy and verve. As days go by, Laurel notices she carries two jelly bean-sized eggs in her lower abdomen. This gives Laurel such irrational joy that she gets out her sketchpad and pastels and starts to draw for the first time in months.

There is an aggressive Anna’s hummer with a brilliant rosy-red head. He goes chup-chup-chup! when he sees other hummers at the feeder, the tiniest, tinny chirp she’s ever heard, but unmistakably macho, territorial. If the other hummers don’t dart away, he swoops down and chases them in frenetic loop-the-loops back to the arbor.

There is a laid-back black-chinned hummer who perches atop the brass ring from which the feeder is hung or lazily sits on the rim of the feeder itself and sups on sugar water.

The Egyptian Book of the Dead is replete with elegant hieroglyphs of birds. The solar hawk of Horns, Thoth’s sacred ibis, vultures, and buzzards signifying the terrible aspect of divine power that purifies putrefactions of the world.

Laurel shivers, riffles the strange pages. Other fragments of myth, other images: Isis, that enigmatic goddess who is the mother and the sister and the lover of God, loses her husband Osiris to a spectacularly painful death, seeks him through the world and underworld, and finds—in a peculiar twist of mythic plot—his dismembered corpse embedded inside a living tree.

The eucalyptus with their translucent trunks; whose heart beats there, sends brown blood into the branches? Whose arms reach to the sky within the fronds of palms?

And more: the ceremony of Opening the Mouth and the Eyes during which oxen or fowl were beheaded, their sacrificial blood daubed upon the mouth and eyes of the body of the deceased, signifying renewed wholeness, magical restoration. Restoration in the Land of the Dead.

But this too is shocking, reminiscent. Of what? Laurel recalls the recurring morphine dream, the great sacrifice. Her own horror; why?

Why: because the death is not the poor dumb ox’s; it’s hers. Because the sacrifice is hers. Can she accept that?

Evening: rose gold shafts of sunset, scents of eucalyptus and fireplaces. Laurel goes out on her deck, with sketchpad and pastels and a bottle of good fume blanc. Cars careen over Highway 101 from San Francisco, seeking solace in Mill Valley, if they can find solace without a fatal crash. They are like ants, all these cars, scurrying to some blind instinct of survival.

As Mr. Oake jogs his comical way up the avenue, something even more hilarious happens: the concrete turns into a ribbon of rippling silver water. But Mr. Oake doesn’t sink; no, he stands on a flatbed barge slowly forging its way upstream. From his terry cloth headband extrude scarlet serpentine heads. His jogging shorts become a gilt loincloth, his sweaty T-shirt an embroidered breastplate. Instead of his silly standing-in-place jogging, Mr. Oake floats majestically up East Blithedale. The pumping of his skinny-flabby arms mimics priestly exhortations to the setting sun.

Fear flutters up Laurel’s spine; she has been dancing with Dolly Dagger, after all. But she is an artist, isn’t she? That destiny must bring some small ecstasies, along with the agonies. Could she be tapping into an archetypal pool, the mythos within the Egyptian Book of the Dead?

All right! At once she accepts the silver waves lapping at the lip of her deck. She feverishly tries to capture Mr. Oake’s majestic journey with her pastels. All right; East Blithedale is the great river, she the maker of hieroglyphs.

But the waves grow quiet, the concrete firms, the magic flees. Or so it seems.

As she watches and sketches, a hummer zooms up to the feeder above her deck. The aggressive male Anna’s, with his flashy hood of red. She flips the page, tries to sketch him, too, when another hummer comes.

He startles her.

Chup-chup-chupl and the Anna’s spirals away. The new hummer; he is a dusky charcoal gray, strangely dark even in the evening light. She can see at once that his head is pale, round, oblong. She keeps blinking her eyes, straining to see.

This hummer doesn’t have a beak!

He hovers there, not sipping sugar water. He’s got a tiny, round, flat pale face, eyes that are not bird eyes, and wrinkles, she is quite sure she can see wrinkles around his eyes and mouth, streaks of pale gray over his crown. He looks directly at her and nods his tiny head, then darts away into the twilight arbor.

She is stunned. The archetypal pool; is she drowning in its delusions? No! She saw him, saw the hummer only too clearly, not more than two feet away from where she sits. She slaps her sketchpad shut and staggers inside.

She collapses on the couch, sinks into the exhausted sleep morphine permits. Hypnogogics: she sees the ox and the ax, his helpless head, how his rage imbues the sacrificial blood with the dumb will to survive.

And dreams of flashing red lights. She flutters, blinded, beating furiously, before them. She keeps hearing over and over the sound of sirens wailing in the night.

Jerry is red-eyed and puffy-faced. For once Laurel is the one remarking on how awful he looks.

“David died last night," Jerry says.

David is Jere’s lover of fifteen years. Two dapper gents with a spectacular townhouse in Diamond Heights, trips abroad, good taste and success, perhaps an extra-relationship affair or two like any other long-term couple. Until David, a forty-seven-year-old stockbroker, tested positive and started down that slow cruel road of no return.

“We loved each other very much,” Jerry says.

But Laurel doesn’t know how she can comfort him. In a weird way, she envies the Jerrys and Davids of the world. They got what they wanted. She and Christopher, they coupled blindly, with expectations that could not be fulfilled, and they failed.

“I bet David is pissed.” This is all she can say in a brittle voice. “I bet he and the others will be waiting to beat the crap out of the first doctor who comes over to the other side and didn’t have the balls to try the DNA mutation, FDA testing be damned.”

He looks at her with those big brown eyes, like, gee, Laurel, a bitch to the very end and fucking crazy, too. Then a deep-down look like yeah, this makes sense to him. Or maybe nothing makes sense to him anymore.

“Hey,” he says. “You know that old guy up the street from you? The one you call The Ancient Jogger?”

“Mr. Oake?”

“He died last night. Heart failure. Eighty-four years old, isn’t that something? While we’re on the Big D, thought I’d better tell you since you knew him.”

“Oh hell, I didn’t know him. God; I guessed eighty-two. Well, at least you’re holding down the fort, Jere.”

“I tested positive last week,” he says.

Laurel uncorks chenin blanc at ten in the morning. Jerry declines a cigarette; Laurel chainsmokes four. They talk about their wild youths and their almost-as-wild middle years. Is living to old age such a great idea after all? they joke.

Jerry leaves at noon. Laurel lies down on the couch. She is dizzy from the wine. Her mouth tastes like ashes. She keeps seeing a tiny, wrinkled face, eyes that are not bird eyes.

Dark, beating wings fill her dreams.

Birds throughout antiquity symbolize the human soul, Laurel reads in the tiny, hand-printed book. Playing the book oracle, she finds significant passages. The Latin aves means both bird and ancestral spirit. In the Rig-Veda, the bird of Savitri is the Higher Self that struggles for expression, seeking freedom from the cage of mundane life. Birds, like angels, are emissaries between heaven and earth. Birds are symbols of thought, imagination, aspiration, spiritual longing, the swiftness of cosmic creativity. Birds are possessors of occult secrets. Birds are givers of omens.

Laurel smokes a cigarette with great pleasure out on her deck. It is five o’clock on a Saturday night, and she’s got a bottle of cabernet sauvignon sitting next to her chair. She took morphine earlier. She’s started coughing like when she smoked three packs a day, that deep-chested hack that usually tells the average moron to quit. Laurel, she tells herself, you are not the average moron anymore, hell no, so she lights another and picks up a beautiful pastel called dusty rose.

The Collins girl strides by in her usual adolescent huff, bound for her family’s house on East Blithedale. Oh, those angry dark eyes, the pinched face that would be pretty if she didn’t scowl so much.

But instead of envying the girl’s youth and rebel vitality, Laurel decides to transform her on the sketchpad. Now goes earnest young royalty, crowned with her long and lovely hair, off to quest among the eucalyptus and date palms.

Laurel has seen twenty-five hummers today. She keeps a separate page in her sketchpad where she ticks off each sighting in groups of four short lines slashed by a fifth. Tick! Five groups of five.

This gives her focus, keeps her alert, lets her forget herself from time to time: keeping track of hummingbird sightings.

Despite the morphine and the wine and the cigarettes, she can feel a heavy dull pain in this body of hers. Not just in the gut, but all over, everywhere. She is not pissed off anymore. She is not entirely without the bitterness, no, and not entirely resigned. But she is aware of a turning away from the world. She unplugged the phone jack. She turned off the thermostat. She dumped old food, rotting alfalfa sprouts, from the refrigerator. She made her bed for the first time in months, sheets and blankets tucked in neatly at the corners, turned down at the top, as though for guests.

What a glory to sip wine and smoke and sketch just like the independent, eccentric, successful artist she once fantasized she would be one day. In a weird way, she feels this is it: she has made it. Here is Laurel, working on sketches for a major new fantasy triptych; “Princess of the Arbor,” she decides to call it. Now sits the Mill Valley artist, observing hummingbirds from her deck.

The light changes and changes again. The black-chin is sitting on his perch, the flamboyant Allen's is flitting nearby. The two commence squabbling—chup-chup-chup!—being belligerent little bastards . . .

. . . when she sights another strange dark hummer, its gorget sparkling black the way obsidian gleams. Like any hummer, it zooms up to the feeder, scaring away the others, and hovers there.

Her heart beats at the sight of the dark bird. Dusk again, although she immediately intuits that dusk has nothing to do with the hummer’s appearance.

She stares until her eyes tear; fear clouds her vision. She blinks, stares again, and this is what she sees: a tiny dark bird body hovering; the fantastic wings, the illusion of simultaneous upbeat and downbeat, a black lace fan so fast is the movement; an ebony wedge of tail bobbing like a frenetic ballast.

And a delicate, rounded, flat-sided head with a face: the face of a sulky adolescent girl. And more: the illusion of long and lovely hair spilling down around sloping bird shoulders.

So tiny. So fantastic! Charming in the way all hummers are infinitely charming.

But ominous: The sparkling black feathers, the tiny, pale face, its soft dark eyes almost wistful. No, impossible! Laurel wishes she could deny her perception like she’s denied so many other things.

The hummer disappears into the arbor from which sunset flees in shafts of dusty rose.

A long, cold shudder makes her drop the sketchpad and pastels, reach for the woolen shawl draped over the back of her chair. The heavy, dull gut-pain throbs, but she does not move. She sits on her deck, snuggles into the shawl, and smokes and drinks and smokes some more. And waits.

There is something Laurel must witness here tonight. She dozes and wakes, shivers as the fog rolls in, and dreams of a river like a shining silver ribbon.

The sirens come at last after midnight. So close and shrill and jarring that Laurel wakes up at once, painfully knocking her left knuckles against the side of the chair. The Collins house. A green and white ambulance, two squad cars. Crackle of static, the bland, doom-filled voice of police radio garbled in the night. “One five zero, one five zero; we uh have a shsh at shsh East Blithedale; uh confirmed; attempted suicide, female, seventeen years old ...”

The mother is sobbing, the father paces hopelessly, and they bring her out on a stretcher with a tube up her nose, tubes in her arm. They shove her into the ambulance, slam the doors, race off, sirens wailing.

But Laurel can tell from how the paleness of her sulky face surrenders to the paleness of the sheets that she will fly away tonight.

Becoming a bird in visionary trance is a widespread symbol of initiatory death and rebirth into eternal consciousness. Shamans and prophets in the South Pacific, Indonesia, Central Asia, the Americas, Siberia, as well as ancient Egypt, have claimed transformation into birds. Aztec priests wore ceremonial robes made entirely of hummingbird feathers. Voodoo mam’bo use the carcasses of hummingbirds to entice the presence of the mystere Simbi, the mercurial, aerial loa who conducts the souls of the dead past the crossroads of eternity. Yogis say ecstatic soul-flight is the first magical power to be developed on the path of deathlessness.

Laurel turns on the radio exactly at four in the morning. Is there any news of a young woman’s attempted suicide, is she stable, critical, DOA? But the late-breaking news is the usual thing: soldiers are invading a mud hut village somewhere; a multimillionaire actress is divorcing her gigolo husband amid much scandal; the mayor of a local municipality is caught with his hand in the public cookie jar. No one gives a fuck about a seventeen-year-old girl disturbed enough to take her life or, for that matter, a forty-seven-year-old stockbroker breaking the heart of a brown-eyed homecare nurse who loved him for fifteen years.

How can anyone care? Death is everywhere: smashed animals on the freeway, rain forests crashing down, mothers crushed beneath collapsed freeways, young men gunned down for a rock of crack or a political philosophy.

The living should care; the young should attend to the old; families should look beyond insular cares to the community; political activists should pause from selfrighteous panoramas to see their own beloveds.

Oh hell, should. Laurel does not care, either. No, she really doesn’t, and why should she? She is not among the living. The cares of the world do not concern her. She cannot protest or even remark upon the death in everyday existence. She is a yin to the yang of life. Denial, anger, bitterness, resignation; even this evolution of emotions presents itself as life-bound categories that make no sense anymore. She can feel how she is inexorably slipping into the dark.

And it’s okay. Yes. Her concerns have shifted: To the life in death. The flipside. The metaphysical balance: If death pervades life, then surely life must permeate death. Surely; beyond her fear, her horror, beyond her comprehension.

She turns off the radio, plays the book oracle, and contemplates images of birds in the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

When the questing Isis discovered her dead husband Osiris at last, he who in ceremony symbolizes all the Dead, she hovered over his body in the form of a bird, sending forth the light of everlasting life from the sheen of her feathers.

The floating woman, her eyes rimmed in blue and black; there were arcs of shimmering color sprouting from her arms and shoulders. In the moment split between dreams and wakefulness the woman was, Laurel recalls, comforting, like a blanket or firelight, heat reaching into her cold, sick bones.

But that was right before the sudden pain, the metastasis. What does your comfort signify, Lady Isis?

Most charming of the avian hieroglyphs in the Egyptian Book of the Dead is the ba\ depiction of the human soul as a delicate, human-headed bird. Plate Twenty-three of the book reads: Opened is the way of the souls (a tiny, humanheaded bird), and my soul (the tiny bird again) does see it.

Chapter Nineteen is entirely devoted to the free, unfettered flying of, and feeding of nectar to, the ba. The ba has a corporeal, yet ethereal, existence. It converses with the gods and goddesses even while the humble earthly body still exists and is charged with taking the soul to the otherworld when the body dies. The ba is depicted as a territorial, inquisitive, hungry, sometimes belligerent, always frenetic being with a luminous presence and bright beating wings.

Dawn comes with a spectacular show of rose and gold. The eucalyptus and weeping willow sway and rustle, and Laurel wakes to their ancient presence, their sturdiness, their mute witness.

A sharp pain came again in the night. She took morphine, but Dolly Dagger does less and less for her. How can she explain what this pain is like? After the visceral torment, a disengagement. This is the personal grief at last, she knows; the final irrevocable coming apart of the vessel that once was the only carrier of her consciousness. However crappy it may have been, this body is all she knows. Of all goodbyes, this is the last.

Laurel goes to the bathroom. Another morphine shot in this awful skinny arm of hers. She washes her face. She combs what is left of her hair, wraps a purple silk scarf around her skull like a turban. Next makeup; thick, black eyeliner, dusty rose blush over too-prominent cheekbones; scarlet gloss smeared liberally on withered lips, make them flower-kissers.

Laurel, she tells herself, you look outtasight, baby.

She goes out to the living room, to the coffee table, and straightens the death books littered there. But her hand strays again to the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the elegant hieroglyphs, the weird imagery.

Close eyes, flip the heft of paperbound wisdom, index finger seeking prophecy. And here: Chapter Nine, Plate Eighteen, at random and for the first time, the editor’s preface and notation:

Ah; and she smiles despite everything. Not a book of the Dead. A weird sensation rises up in her like a gulp of air turned inside out. Coming Forth Into Day: a book of Life! A book of instruction!

All the beautiful girls on Haight-Ashbury twenty years ago claimed to be Egyptian princesses in a previous lifetime. How she remembers their sandalwood incense and their sloe-eyes and their young breasts naked under Egyptian cotton. But Laurel knows better now. Who would want to return to this world of shadows after coming forth into day?

She takes her sketchpad, the pastels, her cigarettes, the last of the good cabernet out on her deck. She slides the glass door shut behind her and sits. The little pale green plastic flying saucer with the bright red plastic flower decals sways gently in the Pacific breeze.

She doesn’t wait long before her dependable Allen’s hummer comes. What a hungry guy he is, visiting her morning ’til night. Wouldn’t she love a guy like that, couldn’t stay away from her all day long?

Then a Calliope comes, candy-cane striped gorget, gleaming gold-green back, cinnamon belly. A Calliope, she’s never seen a Calliope before!

And a Costa’s, with his violet-purple crown and his dark leaf-green feathers, and a Lucifer, with his violet-red gorget and his distinctive forked emerald tail.

The air all around her is filled with flitting, winged jewels.

Her lazy little black-chinned hummer perches and sips for a while, but then a tiny, tinny belligerent chup-chup-chup! pierces the morning blaze, and the black-chin and the Lucifer spiral away.

She sees a magnificent hummer.

Hovering over her. A tiny, exquisite golden body, levitating on gleaming fans of silver and vermilion and chrysolite, chupping excitedly. And looking down at her, a pale, round, flat face. A sad and lovely face.

Of course she knows that face, has rendered it in countless self-portraits, idealized it, corrupted it, broken it into planes and angles, rendered it fantastic with electric-blue tears sliding from the eyes. She’s always been proud of the eyes. Not so proud of the mouth that has uttered meanness and nasty words, but she cannot do anything about that now.

The hummer darts away.

There is a sort of click, a huge compression in her chest, and she screams, the pain is terrifying, and she screams again, eyes wide open, every nerve snapping, and then she swoons.

There is a clanging noise that almost disturbs her from the task at hand. Go away, go away. If that’s Jerry banging at her front door, he’ll have to let himself in.

She looks down and sees the body crumpled there, so much baggage that must be left behind. The grief passes quickly now.

She soars up into the turquoise sky. The sun is dazzling. Bright beating wings take her.