Then I put on my favorite T-shirt and sweatpants and set the skull on the TV in my bedroom. I lay on the bed and stared at that crushed face.
I wanted to be haunted. But that skull did not speak to me. I wanted that skull to be more than a dead man’s skull. I wanted it to be a hive abandoned by its wasps, or a shell left behind by its insect, or a husk peeled from its vegetable, or a planet knocked free of its orbit, or the universe collapsing around me.
But the skull was only the reminder that I had killed a man. It was proof that I had lived and would die without magnificence. God, I wanted to be forgiven, but an apology offered to a dead man is only a selfish apology to yourself.
EMIGRATION
The hummingbirds swarmed my garden, randomly at first, but then hovered and formed themselves into midair letters. It took seventeen hummingbirds to make an “A” and twenty-eight to make a “W.” In this way, feather by feather, letter by letter, the hummingbirds spelled my mother’s full name.
I hadn’t called her for at least a month, so it was obvious these birds had come to remind me of family duties.
“Hello, Mother,” I said.
“Who is this?” she asked. “The voice is so familiar, but I can’t quite place it.”
“It’s me,” I said.
“I’m sorry. Who is this again?”
“It’s your son.”
“Which son?” she asked.
“The distant one,” I said.
“It took you long enough,” she said. “I sent those hummingbirds last Friday.”
“They flew in maybe fifteen minutes ago.”
“Damn hummingbirds,” she said. “How can animals that quick always be so late?”
“You could have just used the phone.”
“And you would have let it go to voice mail. Like you always do.”
“Okay, okay,” I said. “You’ve got my full attention now. What’s up?”
“You promised you’d send my granddaughters’ school photos.”
“Oh, shit, Mom, I forgot again. I’ll mail them out today.”
“You said that the last time.”
“I know, I know,” I said. “It would be so much easier if you got a computer. Then I could e-mail them to you.”
“Ah, I don’t need anything fancy like that,” she said. “And I don’t understand how they work anyway.”
“I’ll head to the post office right after I hang up. I’ll overnight the photos.”
“They better be here,” she said. “Or I’m going to send the hornets. And you know how mean and disciplined they are.”
“And what are you going to make them spell for me?”
“They’re just going to swarm your house and spell the word ‘guilt’ everywhere. Those hornets are going to be like miniature Catholic priests. And they’re going to sting, sting, sting.”
I laughed; she laughed. I mailed the photos twenty minutes after I got off the phone with her. But she still sent a few dozen hornets. They didn’t arrive angry. Instead, they settled on my shoulders and murmured something that I couldn’t quite hear.
So, yes, as you might imagine, I am jealous of my mother’s magic. And I am jealous of my three daughters. They can make the tallest pine trees lean close, pick them up with their branches, and lift them high into the city sky.
As the years have passed, my daughters have spent more and more time up among the highest branches. They are soon going to leave me as I long ago left my mother. But I fled my family on foot. My daughters will be carried by trees back to my reservation to live with my mother, their grandmother. And our people will celebrate. The trees that transported my daughters will happily accept flame. And they will burn. And their smoke will rise into the dark and spell words from the tribal language that I never learned to speak.
THE SEARCH ENGINE
On Wednesday afternoon in the student union café, Corliss looked up from her American history textbook and watched a young man and younger woman walk in together and sit two tables away. The student union wasn’t crowded, so Corliss clearly heard the young couple’s conversation. He offered her coffee from his thermos, but she declined. Hurt by her rejection, or feigning pain — he always carried two cups because well, you never know, do you? — he poured himself one, sipped and sighed with theatrical pleasure, and monologued. The young woman slumped in her seat and listened. He told her where he was from and where he wanted to go after college, and how much he liked these books and those teachers but hated those movies and these classes, and it was all part of an ordinary man’s list-making attempts to seduce an ordinary woman. Blonde, blue-eyed, pretty, and thin, she hid her incipient bulimia beneath a bulky wool sweater. Corliss wanted to buy the skeletal woman a sandwich, ten sandwiches, and a big bowl of vanilla ice cream. Eat, young woman, eat, Corliss thought, and you will be redeemed! The young woman set her backpack on the table and crossed her arms over her chest, but the young man didn’t seem to notice or care about the defensive meaning of her body language. He talked and talked and gestured passionately with long-fingered hands. A former lover, an older woman, had probably told him his hands were artistic, so he assumed all women would be similarly charmed. He wore his long blond hair pulled back into a ponytail and a flowered blue shirt that was really a blouse; he was narcissistic, androgynous, lovely, and yes, charming. Corliss thought she might sleep with him if he took her home to a clean apartment, but she decided to hate him instead. She knew she judged people based on their surface appearances, but Lord Byron said only shallow people don’t judge by surfaces. So Corliss thought of herself as Byronesque as she eavesdropped on the young couple. She hoped one of these ordinary people might say something interesting and original. She believed in the endless nature of human possibility. She would be delighted if these two messy humans transcended their stereotypes and revealed themselves as mortal angels.
“Well, you know,” the young man said to the young woman, “it was Auden who wrote that no poem ever saved a Jew from the ovens.”
“Oh,” the young woman said. She didn’t know why he’d abruptly paraphrased Auden. She wasn’t sure who this Auden person was, or why his opinions about poetry should matter to her, or why poetry itself was so important. She knew this coffee-drinking guy wanted to have sex with her, and she was considering it, but he wasn’t improving his chances by making her feel stupid.
Corliss was confused by the poetic non sequitur as well. She thought he might be trying to prove how many books he’d skimmed. Maybe he deserved her contempt, but Corliss realized that very few young men read poetry at Washington State University. And how many of those boys quoted, or misquoted, the poems they’d read? Twenty, ten, less than five? This longhaired guy enjoyed a monopoly on the poetry-quoting market in the southeastern corner of Washington, and he knew it. Corliss had read a few poems by W. H. Auden but couldn’t remember any of them other than the elegy recited in that Hugh Grant romantic comedy. She figured the young man had memorized the first stanzas of thirty-three love poems and used them like propaganda to win the hearts and minds of young women. He’d probably tattooed the opening lines of Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” on his chest: “Had we but world enough, and time, / This coyness, Lady, were no crime.” Corliss wondered if Shakespeare wrote his plays and sonnets only because he was trying to get laid. Which poet or poem has been quoted most often in the effort to get laid? Most important, which poet or poem has been quoted most successfully in the effort to get laid? Corliss needed to know the serious answers to her silly questions. Or vice versa. So she gathered her books and papers and approached the couple.