The Avian Hourglass

Luce once explained that her fathers taught her to compose a globe like this: first, you craft two half spheres and then you cut these thin strips of map to fit over it. You can’t just make an orb and then wrap it in a single atlas—the shapes will disagree. What you have to do is form these sort of crescent-moon-shaped bands of map—thick at the middle, then tapered so they thin at the top and bottom—and glue them on, one at a time, until the bottom of the sphere is covered. Then you do the top half, and only finally fit them together to make the world whole.

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We were sitting in the bed of her truck. Aunt Luce took a long drag on her cigarette, ashed over the side, ran her hand over her crew cut as she told me about how her fathers—my grandfathers—were deeply, madly in love, and globemaking is what brought them together, like the southern and northern hemispheres. Of course, I already knew that. Luce caught me rolling my eyes. She asked if I was listening to her—had I heard her, the way she meant me to?

“What I am saying is this,” she said, looking up into the sky. “You don’t just apply the map to the territory. You have to build the world, construct the terrain of the earth, one thin ribbon at a time.”

*

Six months after the birds disappear, I discover Saturn. Saturn is a small cement block I come upon on a long walk down a gravel road that used to lead out of town. Now the road leads nowhere, stops at a dead end in a field. Before I find Saturn, I am walking and breathing and reflecting on the way it seems The Crisis is coming to a tipping point, and things could either get much better or things could get much worse, and whichever way it goes, it will go that way soon. I have faced the dead end of this road many nights, but on this night, I feel something growing from something else, one event causing another. I am thinking of the eclipse that we just witnessed, our town set firmly in the path of totality.

I have failed the test again. The test being the first step in pursuing the life I want, which is the life of a radio astronomer. I have failed the test four times and that means I have one last and final chance—one single opportunity—to pass the test and get on with my dream.

It is all of this—the eclipse, The Crisis, my failures—that whisper in my ear to keep going when I reach the end of the road. The road leads nowhere, but in that moment, for the first time ever, I step beyond its end.

Since the eclipse, the blood inside me aches. There’s a dread I can’t shake. Our town saw the entire sun covered by the moon, and the world went dark for a second and then when the world reappeared, the dread entered me, traveled straight through my veins to my heart where it has been lodged firmly ever since.

The degree of the dread is substantial. I am lost as to when it will leave.

I walk five, twelve steps into the field, into the phantom, spectral road-that-once-was. I imagine that I am a baby bird, and while I have been expelled from my mother, it’s up to me to choose the time to break out of my shell. It is then I see something on the ground. I crouch down and pull the tall grass away and it is a cement block, once painted bright blue but now faded and aged from time and weather. At first I think it is a gravestone, but I can see the impression of Saturn, the ringed planet, and I can see the word Saturn set in the cement. It is a marker, sure as rain, but not for someone gone. I think the font is really beautiful and because I have just given life to the dead end of the road, I go back to a time in the long past, possibly before I was born, when the road led somewhere, when this block was new and fresh and someone chose this spot—this very precise location—to place Saturn. Perhaps it was one person or more than that. Perhaps it was many people. Saturn, I say aloud, and finger the rings around the planet and pull out my pocketknife and cut away small pieces of Earth that have grown over Saturn’s edges.

It occurs to me that I’ve never discovered anything. I’m not a discoverer. I’m a bus driver who is about to lose her job to automation. I’m the legal guardian of a set of triplets. I’m the one who occupies the north side of the duplex I share with Uri. I am not many things, but in the middle of The Crisis, many things that once weren’t now are.

It is dusk and I have found Saturn, and on my way home I recite some of the lines of Uri’s play.

*

Luce tells me that the etymology of the word crisis comes from the Late Middle English for turning or decisive point and the Greek for decision, often in relation to disease.

I will pass the test this time, I tell myself. I will pass the test and I will do the thing that I was born to do, which is be a radio astronomer. I put toe to heel as I walk home from Saturn and begin studying yet again. In my mind, I review Einstein’s field equations. Maxwell– Heaviside equations. Thomson scattering. Fusion power. Guiding centers. The first fifty decimal digits of pi.

*

When I arrive home, I knock on Uri’s side of the duplex and the door opens and the triplets hug my legs and the five of us—the triplets and Uri and I—eat our dinner on the porch because the evening is beautiful. As he is cutting up the broccoli for the triplets and negotiating how many bites they still need to take, I decide to tell him I’ve failed the test a fourth time. He looks at me with a face that says he’s sorry, but I tell him the previous tests were just practice. It’s the next one that I’ll pass.

The triplets want to visit one of the giant nests before bed, and because the American robin’s is closest to our duplex, we go there. No one knows who is putting the nests up but everyone knows why. Since the birds disappeared, we find ourselves mourning in large and small ways. At the nest, Uri lifts each triplet inside and I touch the outside and he tells me that his problem is the end. Last year, when there were still birds, Uri was asked by the local arts council to write a play about the paradox of The Crisis. He was thrilled and elated, then immediately uneasy and overwhelmed. It took me a while to learn this is simply how artists behave. Most of the play is written, has been for a long while, except the end. It’s the end he can’t decide on. He says that a play is a living thing and to end a living thing is a great responsibility. When he says this, I nod, but inside me I hold firm to the knowledge that I do not understand.

The triplets are humming as they lie in the nest. They wiggle their bodies so all three of them can lie down and they look to me like a human tessellation. Their humming is jarring—the triplets are not in tune—and therefore their song is a bit eerie. But all at once their discord locks into order and I realize someone must have taught them how to sing a round.

We take the long way home right through the center of town. When we pass the sundial, we all do a loop around it for good luck. This is customary, one of our tiny town’s oldest traditions. But the triplets are acting strange this evening—in truth, their mood has been ever stranger since the eclipse—and they keep making circles around the sundial, until finally Uri grabs two and I grab the last one and we start toward home. I run definitions in my head: the difference between a quark and a lepton. The SI unit of viscosity.

When they are in bed, the triplets beg me to read their favorite retelling of Girl in Glass Vessel. But since the birds disappeared, Uri and I have mutually decided they do not need to hear this or any version of Girl in Glass Vessel, a story about a woman who lives in a world without birds. That story was once fable and now—because of The Crisis—it is fact, and Uri and I don’t know yet how to navigate a conversation about a world in which the line between what is real and what is artificial doesn’t exist anymore.

Instead, I read them their favorite version of Chicken Little, put on my old cassette tape of the sounds of outer space, shut their door, and listen to them murmur to each other as they fall asleep. In my bedroom, I glance at my piles of astronomy and physics books, my notepads and charts, my dry erase board. I need to study, but instead I decide to look out the window with my third-hand telescope to try to see if I can make out even a single star. Of course, the light and air pollution is too great so all I see is the delicate curving patterns of the smog.

Uri says that the most magical element of theater is the way that the audience is convinced to suspend their disbelief. It’s something sublime that theater can do this, he says, that theater can will the spectators into permitting the stage to become this portal of access to the private worlds of the characters before them.

That is what I’m thinking when I look into the sky without stars. The Crisis is here and very soon I will no longer drive the bus because the bus will drive itself. I have one more chance—one last chance to pass this test. I have one more shot to begin the journey toward being the person I am not yet, but will eventually become.

There are no more visible stars. I point my telescope toward the area of the sky where Polaris would be this time of year, if we could see it.

Saturn lives just beyond the road that leads nowhere, I think, adjusting the scope, and I guess in that regard it doesn’t lead nowhere anymore.

__________________________________

From The Avian Hourglass by Lindsay Drager. Used with permission of the publisher, Dzanc Books. Copyright © 2024 by Lindsay Drager.