room door.
I stand from my chair and Tytus Broz is surprised when he watches me pass his desk and open the glass door out to the vast lawn. The smell of the lawn. The smell of the flowers. Yellow gravel dust and pebbles cracking and scratching beneath the soles of my Dunlops when I kneel down gently beside the fallen bird.
I carefully pick it up with the four fingers of my right hand and I can feel its fragile twig bones beneath that perfect blue as I cup it in the palms of both my hands. It’s warm and soft and the size of a mouse when its wings are tucked up like this. Caitlyn has followed me out here.
‘Is it dead?’ she asks, standing over me.
‘I think it is,’ I say.
The blue on its forehead. More flashes of blue over its little ears and more on its wings, like it flew through some magic blue dust cloud. I study the bird in my hands. This lifeless flyer. It has bewitched me momentarily with its beauty.
‘What sort of bird is that?’ Caitlyn asks.
A blue bird. Are you listening, Eli?
‘Oh, what do you call them again?’ Caitlyn ponders. ‘My grandma gets them in her backyard . . . They’re her favourite bird. It’s so beautiful.’
Caitlyn kneels down, leans over the dead bird, rubs a pinkie finger over its exposed belly.
‘What are you gonna do with it?’ she asks softly.
‘I don’t know,’ I say.
Tytus Broz is now standing in the glass doorway.
‘Is it dead?’ he asks.
‘Yeah, it’s dead,’ I say.
‘Stupid bird seemed so determined to kill itself,’ he says.
Caitlyn slaps her hands.
‘Wren!’ she says. ‘I remember now! That’s a wren.’
And, with that, the dead blue wren comes back. Like it was just waiting for Caitlyn Spies to recognise it, because, like all living things – like me, me, me – it lives and dies on her breath and her attention. Back. Its peppercorn eyes open first and then I feel its feet gently scratch the skin on my palms. Its head moves, a brief rock. Groggy and stunned. The bird’s eyes turn to me and in a flash something is transferred that is beyond my understanding, beyond the universe of here, something tender, but then it’s gone and it’s replaced by the bird’s realisation that it rests in a human hand and some electromyographical signal inside its perfect construction tells its weakened wings to flap. Flap. Flap. And fly away. And we three, Eli Bell and the girl of his dreams and the man of his nightmares, watch the blue bird dart left then right as it finds its strength then loops once again because it likes to be alive. But it does not fly far. It merely flies to the far right side of this grand manicured lawn nursed by a groundsman paid in drug money. It flies over a green wood shed, some kind of tool shed maybe. The shed is open with a green John Deere tractor parked inside it. Then the bird flies further to a concrete structure I have not yet noticed. I missed it. It’s a kind of square concrete bunker hidden in a huddle of elms and covered in jasmine vines and other wild plants lining the lawn’s far right fence. A concrete box with a single white door built into its front and the jasmine vines spill over its roof and connect to the lawn so it looks like the structure has grown up from the earth. The blue bird lands on a vine hanging just above the box’s door. And there it stays, darting its small storm-blue head left and right like it’s as puzzled as much as anyone by the past five minutes of its curious existence.
Curiouser and curiouser. Curious concrete structure. I’m looking at it strangely and Tytus is looking at it strangely and then he knows I’m looking at it strangely.
I forget my right hand is hanging down with its four fingers. Conspicuously conspicuous. Tytus’s old and unreliable eyes zero in on this hand.
I stand quickly, slipping my hands into my pockets. ‘Well, I think I’ve got enough, Mr Broz,’ I say. ‘I better get back and file this thing for tomorrow’s paper.’
He has a puzzled look on his face. Off on another planet. Or maybe just off to five years ago on this planet when he instructed his Polish standover psycho mate, Iwan, to cut off my real-life forefinger from my real-life hand.
He eyeballs me suspiciously.
‘Yes,’ he says, ponderously.