After that, she didn’t take criminals into the sky anymore. She did make other mistakes: Breaking up a fight, stopping a woman from kicking a man, only to realize she’d been defending herself against the man, who’d tried to steal her purse. Flying too high near an airport and being pursued by police helicopters and later military jets. Stopping a drug deal that turned out to be a police sting operation, and getting tasered. The electricity had no effect on her, and neither did the pepper spray, but it was clear the police wanted her captured—that she was a dangerous criminal in their eyes.
Still, even with the setbacks, even with dark grays slithering into her comfortable black-and-white world, she might have kept on doing it, kept on helping people, kept on flying, except for two things.
First: One day in her “real life”—what she thought of truthfully as her false life, her secret identity—while waiting tables she saw a couple, a middle-aged-man and his younger companion, having a fight. When he got up to leave in a huff the pretty woman came after him and grabbed his arm, and he shoved her, knocking her into a table.
Forgetting where she was, forgetting she was only Eunie Stuart and not the Redbird just then, she grabbed the man from behind and attempted to throw him toward the door. Without her cape and mask she had no special strength, and he outweighed her by a factor of two, so he didn’t budge. She was fired for attacking a customer, and he said he might press charges. She realized then that this was her real life, and the cape was her false life, that and strength you only had because of something you’d bought wasn’t real strength at all.
And second: A ten-year-old boy put on a red cape and red mask and jumped off the roof of his suburban home and hit his head on the brick border around a flower bed on the ground and suffered severe head trauma. The whole thing was captured on video: he’d set up the family camera to record his first flight. The news showed part of it, alongside footage of the Redbird in the sky. Over and over.
“So here I am.” She shoved the bag at him. “Take it back.”
“I’m so sorry. There may be something here, a way to help the boy…”
“He died.” Her voice bitter as the scent of cyanide. “Do you have anything here that can raise the dead?”
He had to think about it. “Nothing you’d want to use, no. Nothing that works very well.”
She shrugged. “It was over a year ago. I’m… I won’t say I’m over it… but I’ve got some distance, now. It hurts like an old injury. I think I’m ready to try again. God knows happiness seems farther away than it ever has before. I’ve been reading. About happiness, and things that make people happy.” She shook her head. “From neuroscience to practical advice. Sing in the morning. Enumerate your blessings every night. Write thank-you notes to everyone and everything. Have good genes—they think fifty percent of personal happiness is genetic. Take anti-depressants. Clean out your closets. Volunteer at a soup kitchen. Be born in a first-world country. Be happily married. Have more sex. Eat chocolate. Believe in God. I tried all the little things. There were some good moments, but I always slump back to my baseline, and honestly, after my time as the Redbird, that baseline is even lower than before.”
He coughed. “I confess, your request intrigued me, and I’ve been looking through my books as well—I have many books—and I wish I’d done it earlier. We could have saved some time. Money can buy happiness, but only to a certain modest extent. Beyond a certain threshold of comfort and security, more money doesn’t make people any happier. Having children doesn’t make people happier, either, oddly enough, quite the opposite. I was going to suggest you consider motherhood or adoption, that seemed obvious since everyone says children are a joy, but they simply aren’t. Children do seem to cause transcendent highs that are more memorable than the more consistent negative feelings, but the little darlings are a terrible drag on what you’d call the baseline level. Being surrounded by friends and family is supposed to be immensely helpful—but I have nothing here that can give you those.”
She nodded. “I know. I know all that. And everyone agrees constant happiness isn’t possible anyway, there’s no such thing as constant joy, I understand that. Happiness at its best would be a sort of, I don’t know, dynamic equilibrium, with ups and downs, sure, but the baseline should be pretty damned good, that’s all I want. I can live with highs and lows, there’s no avoiding them, but—”
“Well,” he said. “I wouldn’t say that.”
“Say what?”
“That you can’t avoid the highs and lows, and exist in a state of constant happiness. You can, of course.”
“How?”
He shrugged. “Become a lotus eater. From The Odyssey, you know, Odysseus finds an island full of people who only eat flowers… no? Let’s see, I used to know a bit of it by heart, my own translation, so forgive any awkwardness: ‘My crewmen went among the lotus-eaters, who did them no harm, but bid them eat of the lotus, which was so delicious that all who tasted it gave up all thoughts of home, and would not even return to tell the others on the ship, but instead sat eating of the lotus, and were content.’ Perfect happiness. Odysseus saw it as a drug, you know, horribly addictive, but in my studies the lotus isn’t like that, nothing like heroin or cocaine. You can choose to eat it, or not, but if you do…” He spread out his hands. “Happiness. I didn’t think of it before because it didn’t seem right for you, too passive, but…”
“It’s hard to imagine how I’d accidentally kill anyone by eating flowers,” she said. “Let’s give it a try.”
“I keep it here.” He had a small porcelain pot on the counter, and inside it, a small plant of a delicate green with a single pure white flower on top, with half a dozen petals. “I keep it nearby. Not to eat—I wouldn’t be much good to my customers, I don’t think, if I ate the lotus—but the scent is lovely, too.”
“So I just…eat the petals?”
“One at a time,” Mr. Grinde admonished. “Too many and you’ll simply sleep, I think.”
“Sleep is good for hiding from misery, but I think it would be an obstacle to real happiness.”
“Quite,” he said, and bid her good day.
It didn’t take her long to return. He’d barely filled two pages of his inventory ledger before the bell over the door rang again. This time, the bleating of goats wafted in after her, and he saw a slice of green hillsides sparsely dotted with scraggly trees. She had a little cardboard cake box, which, he was sure, held the lotus flower in its pot. Ms. Stuart handed him the plant without a word.
“Always a pleasure to see you,” he said, and it was. His loneliness had been such a fundamental part of his existence that he’d never noticed it until her repeat arrivals had dispelled it. He’d secretly hoped she’d return, for the conversation alone. There were a few things in the shop that could talk—magic mirrors, at least one sword, a brass-and-clockwork head—but they were variously flatterers, psychotics, and outrageous liars, and he’d stopped talking to them years before he’d stopped talking to himself. “Though I regret what your arrival signifies. Before we move on the issue of an exchange, if I may ask… How do you keep finding your way back here? I’ve seldom had exchanges before, and I think you’re the only person to ever pass through that door more than twice. That is no reflection on you—the failure is mine for not understanding your needs properly—but I’m curious. I know how you found my shop the first time, you were given the address by a man who, hmm, had store credit he could pass on, you might say—a man who once brought me something I chose to add to my inventory. But you’ve made it back twice since, without directions. How?”