“I’m sorry the purse didn’t work out. We’ll have to find something better for you this time. Perhaps we can delve a little deeper into your desires… Tell me, what was the last thing that made you really happy? Before you got the purse, I mean?”
She chewed her lower lip thoughtfully. “The man who first gave me your address, who told me to come pick out a present—sorry, a gift—as a reward for saving his life? He was eating at the restaurant where I worked, and he started choking. He wasn’t even at one of my tables, you know, but I was passing by, and I dropped the tray I was holding and put my arms around him from behind and did the Heimlich maneuver, and he coughed up the bit of bread he’d been choking on, and he told me I saved his life, and…” She shrugged. “I thought, ‘I did, didn’t I?’ That made me feel good. And giving away all my money to charity there, at the end, it was the same feeling, like I was making others happy, and that happiness somehow reflected back on me, too.”
“Ah. Helping others is a classic path to happiness. In fact, some say all altruism is inherently selfish, since doing good makes you feel good. We’re back to Aristotle again—’happiness is an act of the soul that expresses virtue.’ Come with me.” Mr. Grinde came around the counter and led her to a corner of the shop crammed with rolling garment racks, pushing several aside—they held cloaks of downy feathers, antique ivory wedding dresses, a leather jacket that appeared to have been rescued from a fiery car wreck, and other things. He found the rack he wanted—drat, the item he was after happened to be hanging next to a certain dress from Ancient Greece made of poisoned cloth, which had once killed a princess, and even wrapped in a plastic bag its lethality worried him. He picked up an olive branch from a nearby table, pushed the poison dress aside, and took down a flimsy red cape made of some cheap fabric that might have been satin but wasn’t. The cape was held closed on the hanger with a simple pair of strings at the throat, and tangled in the strings was a red domino mask that tied in back with ribbons. “Here you are. This should make you very helpful.”
She took the cape and mask, frowning. “What’s this supposed to be?”
“Try it on. If it doesn’t suit you, we’ll try something else.” He guided her toward a full-length mirror—polished brass, not glass, but highly reflective anyway.
She got the cape on around her shoulders, and he helped her tie on the mask. She gasped. “This—this—-”
“Indeed.” Mr. Grinde patted her shoulder. She looked like a young mother trying on her son’s Halloween superhero costume, but he imagined the subjective experience of wearing it was rather different. At first he thought the outfit made her look taller, but then he realized she’d merely levitated a couple of inches off the ground; that was all right. “May it bring you all the happiness you desire.” Mr. Grinde guided the young lady toward the front door and out into the world.
Some time later the bell rang again, and he looked up, and it was the same woman, this time emerging from darkness, fog swirling around after her.
“Ms. Stuart,” he said.
“Mr.—How can I not know this? What’s your name?” She wore a heavy dark coat, and her hair was damp.
“Grinde. Martin.”
“Mr. Grinde.” She placed an old paper sack, folded so often it had essentially turned into cloth, on the counter. “I’ve come to make another exchange.”
He opened the bag and peered inside. Mask, cape. “This was not to your satisfaction either, then?”
She took a deep breath. “It’s not your fault. At first, it really worked, but then, it didn’t, and…”
“Tell me about it,” he said. “This is how I learn.”
“Well,” she began.
#
First, just the feeling of wearing the cloak, it was indescribable, but she tried: total safety, physical invulnerability, the ability to fly—that last always a dream, a literally recurring dream, now made reality—and helping people, oh, yes. The thrill that first night when she walked the filthy rooftops of her city and saw a man being mugged in an alleyway where she herself had once been mugged and fortunately nothing worse. She jumped from the roof, falling light as a feather to settle in the alley, and simply plucked the mugger off his feet and threw him into a mound of garbage bags. The victim was so grateful, she saw him fall in love with her right there, his face like a window opening onto the light. She said, “Run along,” and he looked at her, reached out, didn’t quite touch her, and ran. Then she picked up the mugger and flew high, higher, higher, holding him by his ankles, dangling him upside-down in the sky, looking at the jewels of the city lights spread out below, and said, “Look. The world is bigger than you and what you want and need. Do you see that now? It’s a world full of people, real people just like you. Do you understand?”
He shouted something, terrified but affirmative, and she took him gently back to the ground, too polite to mention the smell of urine from where he’d wet himself, and deposited him in the middle of a plaza near the theater district filled with tourists and young lovers watching street performers play steel drums. They all looked at her with awe, and she waved, and flew off into the sky.
Every night was like that. She still went to work, during the day, waiting tables for the lunch crowd, but at night she was something special—the bloggers and eventually newspapers and TV stations called her the Redbird, though she’d never felt the need to name herself, or to wear any costume besides the essential, going out in t-shirts and jeans and sneakers under her cape and mask. She stopped muggers, and burglars, and rapists, and car thieves, and men who hit their girlfriends, and women who hit their children, and even admonished those who littered or left dog crap on the sidewalk or spray-painted public property, though it was only the truly dangerous ones she lifted up into the sky for a lesson in forced perspective: look. You are not the only real person on Earth. Everyone else is real too, not things for you to use.
Whether the flight made any difference in their lives, she didn’t know, but she never picked up the same criminal twice, so she let herself believe she was making more than a momentary difference, even as she knew, deep down, she was only treating symptoms, not causes. If crime was the common cold, she was a bit of tissue, a cup of hot tea, a soothing lozenge, rather than advanced anti-virals.
Then one night the mugger she carried up struggled, and pulled a knife, and tried to stab her—a stupid thing to do in the sky, and the blade glanced off her unbreakable skin anyway—it startled her, and she lost her grip, and he fell. She managed to recover her wits, swoop down, and catch him before he crashed to the ground, but she set him down on a corner without a word, flew away, and perched atop a church bell tower. After a moment she vomited over the roof’s edge, spattering the bushes below, and it was an hour before she stopped shivering.
There had been videos of her for weeks, posted on the internet, showing her various exploits in cell-phone-camera footage and occasionally higher resolutions, and she’d taken to doing her flights over more populated areas, because she liked the gasps, the shouted greetings, the spontaneous applause. But several people had filmed her dropping the man and catching him again, and the internet was full of voices saying she’d done it on purpose to terrify the man, the Redbird was toying with her victims, and while some of the commenters supported her new, more violent approach, others were disappointed, calling her a common torturer. It was all she could do not to log onto message boards under a name like RealRedbird and say, “No, it was just an accident.” But that would be worse. If the Redbird could make a mistake once, she could do it again.