The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [93]
“Oh, we have to help it,” Dana sighed.
“I will,” I said, feeling her pity for the bird as pressure to prove my hard fitness for life and adulthood. I had to channel humane feeling into realistic manly action. “There were things a man had to be able to do,” I thought, likely misquoting the character from the possibly Graham Greene novel. In the book, the protagonist comes upon a wounded pigeon while walking in a London park with a woman he means to impress, and then shyly, almost embarrassed, he rapidly, manfully, mercifully twists the bird’s neck and drops it into the rubbish bin so the woman doesn’t have to see the creature suffer. He knew precisely how to protect her and end the animal’s pain.
I, on the other hand, was probably not very calm, never having done this before, as well as being overexcited at this chance to prove myself. I had never even touched a bird before this fateful moment. We walked from streetlight to streetlight, Dana repeating, “Oh, oh, the poor little thing,” and me trying to turn my back on her near a garbage can so she wouldn’t witness the simple, necessary act, although I can no longer fathom why I thought Dana would need protecting from it. I petted the bird and jogged ahead to the trash can on the corner, green and ribbed, with a black liner bag and painted with the words CITY OF LAKES. “What are you doing?” I heard her call. “There’s a …”
I hurried to do it. I twisted the little bird’s head, waiting for a quiet crack and quick, grateful immobility. Instead, it emitted a tiny squeak: I was only hurting it, perhaps merely annoying it, and in my alarm and panic that Dana would witness this secret ritual of kind men, worried that I couldn’t do what I had to do and what Dana needed me to do (whether she realized it or not), I then wrenched the bird’s head so hard that I tore its body nearly in half.
I held its head and much of a wing in one red hand. In the other clenched fist, shivering with adrenaline, was the organ-bunched breast, the other wing, the bubbling interior, the tendons and straw bones connecting the bird’s still-trussed halves. My hands and shirt were sprinkled with blood and clots of stuffing, and I looked down and watched the bird finally, but by no means instantly or gratefully, die.
I pushed it all away from me into the trash, wadded some waiting newspaper over the body, smeared my hands on my jeans, and turned to Dana, whose face reflected my severe distress.
“You looked like a serial killer,” Dana said when I recounted this story over one of Petra’s flaky, honeyed desserts.
“It was not my finest moment.”
“Tell her what I was going to say, psycho, before you freaked on that bird.”
“Yeah, it gets worse. Dana stood there looking at me. And then she said she’d been trying to tell me that there was a vet still open on Lake Street.”
“And then you burst into tears,” Dana added, finishing the old story.
“And then I burst into tears, and Dana hugged me.”
“And I got sparrow guts all over my Suburbs T-shirt.”
“Oh, my God, you two must have been so cute,” Petra said, pinching both our cheeks.
33
MY AGENT AND I made our brief, understated pitch to a roomful of people at Random House in New York, and more people were called in as we proceeded, each one signing nondisclosure documents as the price of admission. The publisher and the corporate counsel stayed in the meeting throughout.
To say the least, this was not the manner in which my previous contracts had been negotiated. My father was right: Shakespeare was holding doors for me that I could not open myself. The next ten minutes were unique in my agent’s experience. We were asked to stay in the room with water and fruit while everyone else