THE PEREGRINE AT THE END OF THE WORLD by Maria Mutch
Love here requires the savage offering, something wrecked by talons and a beak, it requires staking out a claim forty stories up. He brings his mate pigeons he has plucked clean, mourning doves, a duck. (They copulated, balanced on the edge of the building, even after the eggs were laid, just because.)
His fledglings were born during a stormy April and now, at the top of the city, the peregrine must teach them the hunt. His daughter paces the edge of the rooftop, furious with hunger. He baits her with a half-dead pigeon, dropping it in the chasm between the mirrored bank towers and office buildings in which they sometimes mistake themselves for enemies. On the street below: the rushing suits, some baby strollers, a tourist ruining the picture. The daughter plunges, hitting the pigeon, then circles up and back for another strike, and once more with a taloned clutch.
Her prize is limp in her grasp when she lands on a corner ledge of the building, not far from where a window cleaner is checking his rigging on a fortieth-floor platform. She doesn’t mind his presence as she is more concerned with her hectoring siblings. The window cleaner watches as she tears at the pigeon pinned under her claw. The pigeon’s eye has a dull look, as if a shade has been drawn, but he is unsure if it is truly dead or just stunned. It appears cognizant somehow that its torso is being shredded; it seems to be breathing as the peregrine’s beak wrecks at the feathers, pulling up sinews and bits that snap away like elastics. The beak pokes again and again, and he can’t stop himself from watching. The pigeon is resigned, utterly subjugated to its own dismantling. Disconcertingly cooperative. The pigeon’s head darts around between bites, giving the impression that it is about to finally object, until it gives in again, and the man realizes that he is gripping his ropes so hard that his hand begins to cramp. When he finally glances away, the beak’s mechanical jabs are still in his mind. He wonders if, when his shift is done, he should hit the pub for some beers.
Near the thirty-eighth floor of the Stedman Building, two window cleaners dangle several feet apart, without a platform, using harnesses and ropes, their buckets secured to the right of their bosun’s chairs. Thom sweeps his scrubber across the glass and returns it to his bucket to grab his squeegee in a gesture that finds him in his sleep; sometimes he dreams that his squeegee slips from his fingers and he watches as it hurtles murderously to the sidewalk. Even with the anxiety, he likes his job – the weird freedom of suspension high up, the trance-inducing art of cleaning the glass so that it bears the least trace of his sweep – even if the hazards, which at the moment include procreating falcons, are various. The window cleaners and the peregrines have hashed out a tacit understanding regarding their comings and goings, and as long as the cleaners obey the rules and allow the windows around the nest to remain grimy, everything goes smoothly.
Each winter the same two peregrines return to inspect the pea-gravel-filled nesting box, which sits in one of the Stedman’s deep window wells and is overseen by the conservation society, and hash out their plans for spring delivery. Thom has watched three seasons so far of the Apollo and Daphne story, aided by the live-streamed video of the box and an online debate about whether or not the pair would return to the same spot this year. Season one Apollo and Daphne had two chicks, who grew up and moved to the next borough; season two they had three chicks, one of which died when it fell into a space around the nesting box – after which the box was remade to prevent another occurrence – and season three is the current one, with another three offspring, named Clyde, Mercy and Persephone (he hasn’t been able to figure out the naming strategy; two of last year’s chicks were Nik and Pik). He believes that he can tell Persephone from her siblings, being convinced that she is slightly larger than the other two and sporting an unusual light-colored patch on her mantle, but the other cleaners tell him he’s dreaming. Chuck, the oldest and stoutest of the cleaners, snorted out his coffee and said, “Christ, Thom. They just some fowl. Probably not delicious neither.”
Thom dangles and sweeps, then adjusts his ropes to descend another few feet while Danny, two windows over, talks about his girlfriend. They can see into one of the offices and that two of the people get up from their desks and leave, possibly because the dangling men make them nervous. Sometimes people do that or sometimes they like to watch and will even wave, and one woman on the twentieth floor has been known to hold up short messages: hey handsome, or you missed a spot. One day last year a zaftig woman in one of the law offices flashed her breasts at them, which prompted Danny to say, “You know, I appreciate that.” He gave her a thumbs up. The wind is stronger today than the cleaners anticipated, which sends streaks of water across some of the windows they’ve already done. Thom can see one of the adult peregrines riding the thermals, effortless, searching for prey.
Danny likes to talk about his girlfriend most of all, followed by soccer, followed by some of the things they see. He keeps an unwritten list of the wonders: office shenanigans, sudden weather, even the light on the buildings in late afternoon and the strange perspective of being so high up, which neither of them ever really gets used to. He likes to bring up that guy. “You remember that guy,” he’ll say. Thom hates talking about it at the same time that he is relieved that one other person in his life knows about that guy.
Thom had been at the job for only three months when he and Danny were cleaning the 54th floor of one of the neighboring buildings, one entirely in glass and steel, ninety stories, a glimmery, slippery megalith that looks almost liquid when the cleaning is fresh and the work has been windless. There was the man on the 57th floor, just an office worker at an office party. Demonstrating, the news sites later said, the effectiveness of the windows’ strength, their impenetrability, by throwing his body against the glass. Once, and then again, bam. Laughing, maybe. See that? Nobody gets out through the windows, that’s for sure! None of which Thom or Danny could have been aware of. Then one more slam and what they saw above them and to the side was the impossible, silent opening of a five by ten foot plate of glass as it came away from its seal, the slow eeriness as it sailed out, and the man with it, into the cold, shadowy space between the buildings. The man and the glass fell as though floating, not unlike the peregrines riding the currents, as if not entirely affected by gravitational forces. The man fell, Danny would later say, as if it was okay with him – he didn’t even scream. But they both understand that the way they saw the man fall and the way the man actually fell are two different things, that what they saw was really a trick of the mind, of the hearing, the only thing they could possibly walk away with.
Thom and Danny’s boss made them take a few days off, and for a while after they got back to work nobody mentioned the man, until one day Danny made him into shorthand for the hapless. “She walked out, man. I open the door and whammo! She’s gone, her shit’s gone. She even took the fridge magnets. The magnets! That’s what a cold bitch. Literally, Thomas, I did not see that shit coming. You know? – like that guy.” He makes a gesture with his hand, drawing an arc in the air. “Whammo.”
So the birds. The magnificent peregrines. Thom is grateful when the birds are around the nest, living their lives up where the men are working. Their grace reminds him to be careful of his lines and equipment, to take nothing for granted; their savagery reminds him to toughen up.
He found out that the chicks are called eyasses, and when they hatched, he was upset, despite having seen this two times before, that members of the society, in partnership with Crystal Clean Inc. so they could use some of the cleaners’ equipment to reach the box, came to band the shaggy youngsters. Apollo and Daphne, sporting their own leg bands, made wild, furious swoops, even knocking the hardhat off one of the conservationists. But after that excitement, after the eyasses got their bands and were safely back where they belonged, the scrape was calm again. Eventually the siblings lost their shagginess and began to look more like their parents. They started making short flights, Clyde and Mercy first, watched stonily by Persephone, who followed several days later.
The peregrines are wanderers, with vast ranges, but they seem to love the Stedman; there’s a church nearby with inviting ledges and carvings around the base of the steeple where they also like to perch. He watches as Persephone glowers out – almost, he thinks, right at him – as she sits on one of St. Ignatius’ stone angels, one winged creature atop another, though the carved one makes Persephone look very small; both appear just a tiny bit monstrous.
In spite of the sometimes-ferocious, sometimes-quizzical arrangement of their faces and their status as fastest animal, the peregrines and their fragility have on occasion rattled his sleep. He would never tell Danny or the others, but sometimes he sits in the fifth pew of St. Ignatius and makes his appeals for another good year for Apollo and Daphne, in the hopes that his prayers, his old-fashioned keening, are some kind of atonement for what happened decades earlier: the peregrines’ endangerment by the DDT-induced thinness of their eggshells. Not that he is personally responsible, but he feels regret all the same. He looks again at Persephone, who seems interested in him as he dangles there; from her vantage, he appears to smooth away his image and make it reappear. The wind catches his seat and swings him out a little from the building, so he grabs his suction cups and anchors himself to the glass.
Hers is not the sort of face that would accept an apology, he thinks. His online group has reminded him numerous times when he’s gotten fired up that the replenishment programs around the country have been a story of success, redemption even, and the peregrines have adapted, replacing their craggy cliffs with office buildings and a feed of urban pigeons, sparrows, flickers, and the occasional squirrel. But he doesn’t share their optimism. The man falling out of the window and last year’s chick falling into the space beside the nest are reminders to him of the possibilities, as if dangling into a void by pulleys and ropes is not already knowledge enough.
Just that morning, his mother had texted him, yet again: please quit J, but he has no intention. Some of the guys on the team have been doing this twenty years. He has tried telling her about having a front row seat to the peregrines, to the poor sods working in the offices. He’s told her, “Ma, it’s beautiful up there.” He has tried to describe how, when he looks down, he sees tourist buses and eighteen-wheelers round corners with almost the same smooth movement as the peregrines when they ring up toward prey. He tried another tack: How many people, he asked her, get to rappel up and down the sides of buildings like comic book heroes, in various types of harnesses and platforms depending on the building, how many get to dangle far above people and their problems, or outside of them? Not many, he told her, not many.
Out of the corner of his eye, he catches movement and looks to see Persephone lift off from the stone angel. It happens suddenly the way she disappears. One moment she is there gliding through that openness, what he privately calls the blue space, and he is admiring her now-adult silhouette, the smoothly pointed wings, the way her talons are tucked away, and the next moment she curves by an office tower further down the block and disappears. Just like that, she is gone.
odysseys
The man claiming to be her husband tells the clerk at the bank that he’s looking for his wife, that he’s been looking for a long time. Paul eyes him over the counter, notes the disheveled canvas coat – expensively disarrayed and inappropriate for the current weather, with a well-pressed striped shirt underneath and open at the collar shooting up its hair sprigs and scent of perspiration. The man fiddles with the chain on the ballpoint pen while he speaks, filling the marble canyon of the old bank with his consternations, how he has been spending his days looking in cafés and shops and banks, even under the smelly slopes of bridges, feeling the cold mud in his Gucci shoes and the drooping gaze of the drug addicts as he shows them her photograph. He even warmed his hands by the lit barrel, before tossing bills to the men with plastic bags emerging from their shoes and climbing back up the knoll to the car waiting for him. He has repeated this pattern, he tells Paul, for more days than he can count, and someone told him that perhaps she is working here, perhaps Paul knows something and can tell him where he might find her, Eugenia, his wife. He says that his name is Stedman. Garth T. Stedman.
Paul screws his lips to one side while he thinks and watches the man, and Syed has finished with his customer and is leaning in slightly to hear better. Snow melts on the man’s shoulders, staining him, and his hair is a stiff wind-blown tuft that only someone crazy or genius can pull off, his signet ring snags the light pouring down from the vaulted ceiling’s iron chandeliers. Whether he is really her husband or not – and she never mentioned a partner – Paul cannot assess, but it makes no difference.
“Except that I don’t know where she is,” he says. “She worked here, then she quit, weeks ago.” It occurs to him to mention the pigeon incident, but he decides to hold that spectacle inside him – how marvelous to witness a savage like that, as if prehistory had suddenly sprung up right there in front of him – not something you see every day, and possibly not something to tell this man, who looks as though he wouldn’t understand. “I would love to help you,” says Paul, “but I haven’t heard from her. Her number doesn’t work, and she seems to have moved. Nobody knows where she is or where to send her last paycheck . . . And, by the way, she prefers Percy.” He winces a little seeing the look on the man’s face, the pouched eyes, the hollowed cheeks. But her absence is the truth – he hasn’t heard from her; of all the people he knows, she is probably the one most capable of wholly vanishing and never turning up again.
The man is unused to the negations of a bank clerk, but searching has made him tired and permanently creased, so much so that he is numb to the realization that he has found, if not his wife or the sense of her presence, then a place where someone at least knew her. He should have been ecstatic. The police have been useless, as have the investigators he has hired, and so here he is, fulfilling the adage about doing something yourself if you want it done right. Only now, the grey of a dead end. Perhaps, in some small way, he is afraid to find her, though this thought is contradicted by his efforts. He hasn’t changed his clothes in days, gone to the office, or the club. The backseat of his car is obscured by food wrappers, bottled water and a stack of clean clothes he has yet to change into. “Well, you tell her if you see her,” he says, “you tell her I came in.”
“Righto,” says Paul, and he watches as the man turns on his expensive heel, sending up the rumply edges of his coat, and heads for the door.
crumbs
He has been searching since June. Each building he enters he thinks might have contained her or someone who knows her, and every street he walks down becomes a place that could be marked by unseen traces of her, her footprints, some stray hairs, the crumbs of her favorite coffee-cake. He assumes, because it is comforting to do so, that she hasn’t left the island and he has spent countless hours in the museums, riding the trains, combing the parks, and the public library, too, walking the stacks or even resting in the protective shadow of the lions. A hundred times he has thought that she is up ahead, turning to cross near Penn or hail a cab or enter a shop, but these pieces of her – the hair, the nose, the way of walking – never become the whole. He lacks the power to make the pieces coalesce into the real thing. He has even screamed her name – because that is an alchemy that sometimes works, the bellowed summons – when he was drunk and just about to pour himself over the edge of his sister’s uptown balcony, but she didn’t materialize. For a moment he thought that she was there in the doorway, wearing her bathrobe, coming towards him – yes, coming towards him! – when it was only his sister, and the unanswered summons floated out, growing delicate until finally dusting the steaming roofs and water tanks and antennae.
Searching has filled his pockets and briefcase with photocopies of her face, until he got the idea to have the image printed on cards, 600 gsm with rounded corners, by the same company that makes his business cards and letterhead, so that he carries a deck and doles them out in a way that reminds him of hockey cards when he was a boy. I’ll give you Ken Dryden and Yvan Cournayer for Guy Lafleur, I’ll give you more money than you’ve ever dreamed of if you tell me where she is. Just like the films he watched when he had time for films. Close-up of unknown sweating face, fingers bunching up somebody’s lapels, You tell me where she is!
All he has is a note saying:
so beautiful and vicious, in a way, you know, though it is all instinct
and no other way to live but by the stoop and slam of bodies into a meal, this is
not the way to be anymore, at the top of the world, darling,
don’t you see, the end is coming as it must to save the world
but not the one you think I am I am I am,
and the paper, crisp as the day she wrote on it and which he has kept hidden from the investigators because they will think she’s insane or gone of her own volition, is folded into hard quarters and kept in his safe.
Searching has even changed the shape of his body in these last few weeks, as he has never walked so much in his life. Perhaps he has lost, along with her – the weight and presence of her – another fifteen pounds, so that his clothes, even the Thomas Pink shirts and Desmond Merrion suits, make him look smelly and adrift. She would have been delighted to see him slender, as she was always feeding him kale and Brussels sprouts and a green drink redolent of sour ponds. In those last days, she had said that she could hear the elevator, the private one that turned up in their penthouse foyer, and that it had started to sound like bowing, like a cello, and sometimes like a shrieking bird. It meant absolutely nothing to him and in the morning her side of the bed was cool and the absence already pleating there told him things were going to be different.
He resolves to keep looking, of course. It feels like a new profession. He could do it forever, perhaps, pad along the streets at all hours, crunching the winter salt under his shoes or avoiding the urine puddles in spring. He will return to the bank, again and again, until Paul becomes weary or can be bought. He will carry one of her sweaters with him, an alpaca cardigan gone pilly from his snuffles and gropings into the gray weave. He will snuffle the particles of her that swim in the net of it, as if she has been caught and held: as if.
Persephone
When it happened it was early summer and the sidewalks held the day’s heat. She felt the concrete with her hands for the first time. Transformation being a prickly subject for most, it isn’t something she is likely to mention. Her identification says Eugenia Elisabeth Stedman, but since when does one’s identification speak the truth of it? She asks to be called Persephone, or, since that has a certain unwieldiness, Percy (and truth be told she has no real affinity for Persephone, only that it does seem to speak to the vertical shift in her circumstances).
She unfolded her limbs on a quiet street not far from the Stedman and Washington Square, and found that in the first few movements she was not strong on her feet. Like a doe, she wobbled. There weren’t many people around at that hour and the ones that were ignored her. She was only a well-dressed drunk, and there were always plenty of those. When she was ready, when the amoebic slipperiness of being born or waking fell away, she planted one leather-clad foot, then the other. She pulled her shoulder blades back, wingless. It took her some time to adjust her vision as, she quickly realized, she no longer had the advantage of three images. She could, however, read the print on the crushed beer can thirty feet away and smell the roasted quail that the French restaurant had served two days before.
That was in June, and now it is December. Snow falls on the shoulders of people passing, it lands on the pavement and vanishes, more lands and sticks. She watches the crystals clump, tumble, and it is twilight and the lights of the restaurants and shops turn amber. She feels a snowflake land in her eye, no nictitating membrane to sweep the cornea. The insides of buildings still fascinate her. As a peregrine, she had watched the glass towers as night was coming; the interiors and the people living within them were merely facets of the glass, particles that caused shimmerings and refractions that had to be ignored in favor of zeroing in on prey.
She has adapted well, she thinks, considering. She stocks her refrigerator with various undressed chickens, pigeons and French hens, and she has moved on to rabbits, sometimes squirrels, and little else. She invited the man she was seeing to stay for two weeks solid – just an experiment – and he observed to his mother, “It’s like living with a coyote.” She prefers her lovers to be small in stature, and quick; also, disinclined to comment. Also, not actually residing in her apartment.
She is still unused to her body, though it has its perks. One minute she delights in it, and the next she mourns her bird-form. The force that placed her on the sidewalk seems not to work in reverse. She can mutter her prayers to whatever mechanism converted her, but she remains decidedly human. She feels this most in her chest – she misses the comparative grandeur of her sternum, for instance, which previously held the muscular base for her wings – and her bones, which no longer hold small pockets of air. But what she misses most, of course, are the wings themselves, what she sees now is their wild sprawl, and the ability to compress herself into a tight, hurtling arrow, to slice the spaces where a pigeon plods along, oblivious.
Nevertheless, the pleasures of fingers and feet and skin, scaleless legs, a soft mouth and clattery teeth, not to mention different sex organs, and breasts and everything forthwith, are considerable compensations at times.
Neither is it lost on her the ability to speak; when she lies in bed at night, she plays with pitch, alternating some of her favorite words with peregrine sounds. Splendid ih-ih-ih-ih rancour ih-ih-ih-ih-ih vegetal ihihihihi fecund. Until someone whacks an adjoining wall or bangs a broom handle on their ceiling.
Much of her prowess has come about because of her job at the bank, where she soaks up as many of the habits as possible, and blends in, she feels, almost seamlessly, with the exception of the fierce brow that her co‑worker Jen has suggested she Botox the hell out of. She has learned to ride the train beneath downtown’s vespiary, and to take her clothing to a dry cleaner near her apartment (the man behind the counter always notes the rips and tears, the unraveling skirt hems, the blood-speckled plackets). She has learned to make lentil soup, to pick up Lotto tickets, to tip the cab driver.
a meal
They invite her to a dinner party in their Chelsea apartment, the two coworkers who live together, Paul and Evan, and Sarah has insisted she come because she wants to figure her out, Syed has been wanting to ask her out and Ming wants to know if she is stealing from the bank – not because this would be offensive, but because the information seems a powerful thing to have.
When Paul and Evan introduce their shih tzu, Mischa, to her, the little dog freezes, then trembles, dribbles a shiny urine coin on the sofa cushion before finally growling into the fun-fur guts of its pink teddy.
“Well, now,” says Paul.
“She does that to everyone,” says Evan. The Persian, Mui Mui, furiously mashes the carpet with its front paws before hissing and taking off for the bedroom.
She is delighted to be making some friends and revels in the habits of belonging to which she is becoming accustomed, the handshakes and clinking of glasses and kisses in the air. She adores this last one and thinks what a peculiar thing it is. Her coworkers’ faces are so wonderfully lit by the numerous candles as they hold their wine glasses and cackle about the bank’s CEO and his mistress habit. They toast her, and Syed says, “To our newest friend,” which makes her smile. Paul is already pouring more wine for her, splashing some on the carpet when his mild cerebral palsy causes his hand to spasm, and Evan places the tray of canapés under her nose again, imploring her to take more, which she does only so that he will move along, solicit Amber and Joelle.
She considers that, in spite of all the things she has learned to do, how far she has advanced in the last couple of months, she has been unable to curb the pigeon desire that boils up and now causes her to shift on the sofa where she has a plate of pasta balanced on her knee. She marks the passing of time by the amount of wine being poured and the games they begin to play, ones involving cards or dice and lots of shrieking (it is hardest for her to tamp down the peregrine in her when she hears sounds approaching that of her family). She is sitting close to the kitchen where an open window is bringing in the winter air and on it the gamey, mossy smell of the pigeon that sits on the edge of the fire escape.
When the shrieking hits a high point and the plates have been scraped down, she edges closer to the kitchen, feigning a desire, perhaps, to fill her empty water glass. Night and the pigeon sit just beyond the window. A piece of the white curtain gets sucked under the sash and then released over and over. Snow blows in, glints on the sill. She watches the pigeon ruffling its feathers and shining in a way the others would not detect. She can feel the vibrations of the jittering heart, the stone grit mashing corn kernels and a bit of plastic in the gizzard, the mites feasting on skin. The pigeon plumbs its neck feathers with a slightly fissured beak emanating a scabrous smell, a wound three weeks old and crackling with dried blood. She catches a dribble of saliva on her chin, coughs into a paper napkin. She runs her hands under the tap and considers backing quietly out of the kitchen, grabbing her coat and racing home, perhaps picking off a squab or two in the park along the way. But their hearts are already locked together, their synaptic overlords already in talks to navigate how the stalking will play out, the pitch of her movement through the open window, the speed with which the pigeon will be snatched and to what extent it will acquiesce. Because one thing about the pigeon is that, in spite of its preoccupation with raking its breast plumage, it knows exactly who she is and that it hasn’t got a chance.
Paul, with Evan coming up behind him, and followed by Amber, Sarah and Syed, enters the kitchen and says, “We were wondering if you wanted to play Euchre,” except that only the first few words come out because Percy turns toward them with a red mouth. She clutches the pigeon in one fist and strokes her wrist across her chin to catch the blood. Tiny feathers are still in the air, waiting to land. She eyes them apologetically. Syed places his hands on Amber’s shoulders as if she’s a shield and says, “Wow.”
“Yeah, wow,” says Paul. Evan starts to giggle, which seems to catch until they all start laughing, louder and louder, and then finally Paul claps and then they all do. Percy stands there holding the bloody pigeon bundle, feeling its final wriggle, and she gives a little bow.
Ovid’s doing
Of course, the point of all this is not simply to be human. Call her a goddess, a shape shifter, a creature of metamorphosis. And then some. Say that desire caused an outrageous condition. Her suspicion is that the transforming from one form to another is instinctive, like the cicadas bursting up every seventeen years or the migration of monarchs, and that her purpose is likewise wired in.
People might assume that someone with her function would spring from a raven or a crow – as they are harbingers, symbols, and black – or even an albatross. She doesn’t know what to consider herself, other than Agent of Death. Even if she cannot seem to communicate with whatever made her a human, she knows the ugliness of her task, which makes her feel both energized and morose. So morose that sometimes she rides the elevators of the biggest buildings and goes to stand on the terraces and rooftops where snow accumulates in some of the corners. Looking out to the packed grid of buildings and lights, she contemplates the nature of existence, which she understands is an entirely human thing to do. She imagines the forest, though it is long gone, swallowed and disgorged as a city, but the people in the buildings have tried; they have planted some of the rooftops with pines and cedars and blue star junipers. Yet there are no cathedral forests, no haunted bogs where everything dies with one limb in the air. Even Central Park, held in such reverence by the humans, is no replacement. She looks to the sky, to the highest ledges and cornices to find the shapes of her mother, father and siblings. Even with the vastness of their range, she occasionally catches glimpses of them, sometimes around the familiar cliff of the Stedman or sometimes miles away in Harlem.
So she is an Agent without them. It is not so terrible a purpose to have, she supposes. She is dimly aware of other Agents in her area, one descending from an abandoned pit bull and another from a bat who flew headlong into a hanging bug-zapper and bounced off with a new designation and purpose, but she cannot say exactly how she knows this.
In fact, though she has been looking solidly since taking on her new form, she hasn’t come across a single other person like her. She knows, she feels it in her human bones, that the animals who have undergone a similar transformation are legion and spreading. She understands, too, the mechanics; it is all in the fingertips, which makes her life in the city and her job at the bank ideal. She merely has to touch someone in passing, clip a shoulder or just an elbow on the street for the connection to be made. She usually goes unnoticed and her victim continues on, but only for a while. She knows that death will come: perhaps a faulty brake system, unchewed bit of bread, virulent fever, malfunctioning wood chipper, loaded gun. She is merely the enabler.
She only wishes she knew them, the others, could exchange information with them. Get some positive affirmation for the weightiness of the task. The problem, as ever, is love. Both for the people she meets and for the peregrines. She wants to go back. She cranes her head to see the circles of her family on the bending air currents; her cellular call to the end of the world, apparently, has preceded theirs. Her mother is easier to pick out with human eyes because she’s bigger than her father. She sees, sometimes, her brother and sister, she sees the dives, the floating, the suspension as they ride wind fifty, seventy stories up. She wonders if they consider where she might have gone or if they simply think she has wandered, as they all do, if they train their spectacular vision on the slopes of buildings looking for her.
the proclaimers
When she first understood her task, she zealously touched as many humans as she could. Her co‑workers, of course, are well taken care of, and any customer to the bank who shakes her hand or grazes her fingers when she hands over currency. So far none of her coworkers has met their demise, but this is not unexpected. Humans are always going on about how in the history of time and the universe, their occupation is representationally only a blink, but she knows the truth, which is that human time is long; too long, and death comes at a stroll, even when it appears otherwise. She walks through the city streets on her lunch breaks, bumping into people, making sure her fingers make contact when a coffee cup or a cronut is given to her. She has even pretended to greet someone she thinks she knows. It appears to people that she is klutzy, overly affectionate, a close-talker. Crazy. Her expectation is that the ones about to die feel no suspicion that their death is part of something larger, like the end of all humanity. This is best, as anything else would lead to panic, and possibly, even, fighting back. What chaos there would be then. Glorious, maybe, but unhelpful to the cause.
This is all thrilling, in the beginning, the energy of it, the gist of revenge, and most especially that hallmark of extroversion: the touching. The touching! Marvelous to palpate the varieties of skins and callouses and twitching muscles, denim or wool or silk. Peregrines are so starved for this kind of thing. She grazes men in bars – what a plethora of death that is – or the nurses on a smoke-break outside the hospital, even small children, though with so many protective parents, these are the biggest challenge and since she finds it unpleasant she often leaves them for the other Agents.
In January, she makes her resolutions like everyone else, except that she resolves to find some of the others. At the end of the world, where most people are going on about their business, there is the occasional person with a sign proclaiming it. Or rather, up ahead on one of her search-expeditions, there is a single person sitting on a piece of cardboard on the icy concrete beside a drugstore. She sees that a few feet away from him is a large plastic doll with nails in its head, naked except for a decoupage of bottle labels, holding a sign that says: the end of the world. Only that, in black ink. The man is turned slightly away from the doll as if he has nothing to do with it.
“Are you one of them?” she asks him. “Do you know who I am?” He digs at the crusts of salt and ice with his hands and doesn’t look up. She can hear him humming. People bump into her arm as they rush past, but she neither notices nor relishes her kills. She stares hard at the man, at his nearly bare scalp. She has an urge to kiss his skull because it seems to her oddly beautiful, but she stops herself.
“I think that’s one of the most bizarre things anyone has ever walked up and said to me,” he says, still digging. His fingernails are bloodied. “And I’ve heard a lot of shit.”
She shoves her hands into the pockets of her overcoat, the letdown washing over her. He looks up and says, “Do you know who you are?”
“I need to find the others. I thought maybe you were one. It’s so lonely. Don’t you think?”
“Lady, I’m not sure what you want.” He wipes his hands on his pant legs and she sees that he has an expensive watch, that his nails, even if bloodied, have been manicured. “I’m just a performance artist. This is my gig, right? Other than that,” he says, “I know nothing.”
contagion
In February it happens that her extroversion begins to wear thin, and guilt, black as a scab, begins to form. She frowns more, furrowing that unplucked, obtruding brow, falls silent. Takes the wide open route across the park, the unpopulated side streets. Uses the self-checkout, the unmanned subway entrance, sits in the vacant train car. She tells people she has a cold, slides money and bank slips across the counter with the tip of a pen, and then she stops going to work at all.
In her apartment at night she watches the cable news networks, trolling for the local epidemics, shootings and storm surges that might, in an extrapolated way, be her influence. Though it won’t make any difference now, she tells her current lover via text, and with the wording she learned early on from Sarah and Joelle, It really isn’t you. It’s all me. Thx for everything. She begins to wear latex gloves every single day.
She assumes that if there are others, there must be meetings, secret ones, where they would drink rum and Cokes in paper cups, perhaps, while sitting on folding chairs, listen to others wander in and announce at the front of the room, “My name is ______ and I am an Agent of Death.” People would clap softly, maybe, or just nod. Commiseration would purr through the room like an electrical current, and between the mouthfuls of dry bagels or saltines she would learn where the others live, how they cope, if any of them has been able to change back to the thing they used to be.
On another of her search outings, she finds herself standing in front of an 8th Ave. walk‑up that purports to deal in environmental cleanup, wondering if this is where the people like her would hold meetings. Who was their leader, for instance, because surely they had one? What was the timeline, how successful were they so far, when is the date of the end times? All of these sound to her like reasonable questions. And she has suggestions to offer – why not have a website, brochures, a central telephone number for new recruits and as a means for acquiring new members? Calling cards in an attractive case. An Agents of Death listing. Although, if the potential acolytes are animals, as she was, they likely would not be perusing websites and calling phone numbers . . . But perhaps others had made a transition to the human only to discover a lack of clarity with regard to what they were supposed to be doing once they had opposable thumbs and apartment keys. Perhaps there were numerous others like herself, and perhaps they were also longing for the old world, the old form, the always being in the present moment, the thinking with feathers and talons and whiskers and fur, the embroilment in the never-ending task of the forage. It is, she knows, a whole other way of operating.
When she rattles at the doors of the business and finds them locked, she decides to keep moving, her human flesh being so much more susceptible to cold. It is coffee she wants, even though she hasn’t quite developed a taste for it. It is all another experiment, and she regards the cafés themselves and the waiting in line as pleasures; she will sip at the first inch of coffee, once she has it, reluctant to leave the line and its occupants, the mulling of the pastries and impatient shuffling, the sound of the odd coin hitting the floor.
As she waits to place her order, there are two teenage girls in front of her wearing what appear to be pajama bottoms and boots, and a middle-aged woman behind them who is packed into her sweater-set tight as a grape, her puffer coat over her arm on account of a hot flash.
Both girls have their phones out. One says to the other, “If a guy sent you a text that said, ‘I need you now,’ what would you say, do you think?”
The other girl doesn’t look up from her phone. “That’s it? He just says I need you now? Apropos of what?”
“Not apropos of anything. No context. Just: I need you now. That’s it.”
“What kind of need? Like, sexual?”
“Not sexual. Emotional.”
The girl looks up so her friend can see her rolling her eyes. “I’d say, ‘Okay, bye.’ ”
Percy has been listening intently. Sweater-set can’t help herself and unleashes a guffaw loud enough that the girls turn and look at her.
“My god, I love your generation – your hearts are the size of peas!” she shrieks, laughing into her hand. “It’s magnificent, really, how mean you all are.”
The girls smirk a little at each other. They wait for her to say something else and the woman obliges. “Well, it’s all to the good. Your generation – of which, by the way, you two are fine examples – your generation is going to be the catalyst for the biggest thing there is. The End.”
The girls look blankly at her, but Percy bristles with these last two words. Her heart starts pounding. The woman beams delight into the girls’ open stare. “You know. The apocalypse. I know they don’t teach you little twerps cursive anymore, but you do know about the End Times, yes?” She gestures with her hands and makes a sound like an explosion, except not a very good one. “Locusts, disease, whatever. But then comes the good part: we’ll get to go up to heaven with Jesus!”
The girls start choking and snickering. The woman adds, “Except for you and your kind, of course. You’ll have to stay here and pick through the splinters. You’re going to need better boots.”
The barista hands the girls their cups, which they can barely hold onto they’re laughing so hard. “Ok, well, have fun up there then,” one of them says, wiggling her fingers, and they leave the shop, leaning into each other as they stumble out.
The woman watches them go with a tight smile. She gets her coffee and Percy follows her out to the street, trailing ten feet behind, then more to be safe. She has spent the last weeks being so careful to touch no one, and yet she is quite certain that what she is doing now is stalking prey. Just two days earlier, she had listened to a recording of the philosopher Alan Watts on her headphones and he had said something extraordinary, “You never were born and you never will die.” He himself was dead, and yet there he was, right in her ears.
Her desire to interact with this woman is nearly overwhelming, as if the woman is emitting the scent of a pigeon. She stops to put on her coat and Percy stops also, pretends to rifle the book rack outside a second-hand store.
They are moving again along the snowy sidewalks, and Percy can feel the pulse of energy in her fingertips. She has wondered if death is not a description of a state or event, but a measurable thing, if it might appear wriggly and alive under a microscope. Perhaps death has hidden attributes, chemicals, operations of the subatomic that remain undiscovered; perhaps there is even a sound when her fingers make contact with a victim that, like a dog whistle, is detected only by certain creatures. She cannot help, after all, that those killing particles live inside her fingers. At any rate, perhaps the act of touching (what she calls designating) is really a version of tending, like deadheading flowers in a musty garden.
Sweater-set has picked up speed and is now half a block up ahead. Death tingles in Percy’s fingers, and she starts to pant with how badly she wants to touch. The woman stops at a chirping parked car, removes a paper from the wiper blades and rips it into pieces which she sprinkles on the meter. True to the peregrines, who often miss their strikes, Percy has allowed too much space between them and can’t close the gap fast enough. The woman is in her car and then trying to nose into traffic. There is a barrage of honking and a grey bowl of exhaust that rises and rises.
Percy takes off her gloves and just stands there, looking up. She wants to see against the top floors of an inky glassed building the shape of a peregrine gliding. She is staring upward so intently and for so long that other people feel compelled to glance skyward also, though none of them stop. They hustle forward without noticing her touch. Her telltale posture with the neck craned back and the mouth agape in wonder is only the mark of an outsider, and she is just another tourist, amazed by the spectacle of looking up.
Maria Mutch’s stories have appeared in Guernica, SmokeLong Quarterly, Juked, Necessary Fiction, and The Malahat Review. She is the author of the memoir Know the Night: A Memoir of Survival in the Small Hours (Simon & Schuster, 2014).