They say astronauts, upon viewing Earth from space, experience the “overview effect”—a sublime sensation induced by the perception of Earth as a unified whole, an undivided system without borders. From the distanced vantage point, borders are rendered utterly absurd.
Try explaining borders to a bird. They travel without papers because the sky has no sovereign; they carry lost souls to the afterlife, brazenly crossing the most securitized of all borders. They are residents of everywhere, of nowhere, hollow-boned creatures opportunistically riding wind currents, in flocks that render visible rising columns of air.
*
At dusk, years after the infamous congress, when the regal tricolored heron vanished from the pond, the black-crowned night heron became the guardian of the swamp. Nycticorax nycticorax—“night raven” in ancient Greek—was a species found on every continent except Antarctica and Australia, whose sole citizenship was The Night.
Perched on the edge of the water, on the concrete embankment, the Nycticorax stood stock-still, seemingly hunched, staring at me with one red-ringed eye. Perhaps because it bore an uncanny resemblance to the eponymous heron in the Hayao Miyazaki film The Boy and the Heron (except for the neck—its neck was stout), I silently asked the Nycticorax where he planned to take me.
“The door…”
Yes, the pond was a door, one that opened only at the crepuscular hour.
“In it you will see…the death of your mother.”
“What?”
“Just kidding—this isn’t a Miyazaki film, you fool!”
The Nycticorax was trolling me.
“Are you the simorgh I’ve been looking for…all this time?”
“Pssh—enough with this cryptid hogwash! Did you really believe you would find answers to your metaphysical questions in a Florida marsh?”
“Should I consider you then…a bird of ill-omen?”
The Nycticorax looked heavenward, opened its beak, and began gagging…croaking, gutturally. Then it turned to me and vomited up a half-digested fish, which it thrust toward my feet. Never had I smelled anything so foul.
“Nobody understands me. When I crossed into this realm, the misnomer became my name.”
“And your eyes?”
“The story of my eyes? When I was a juvenile, they were yellow. My red eyes reflect light, enabling me to see at night, whereas you see only gradations of shadow.”
The Nycticorax continued to gaze at me through a single vampiric eye.
By then, it was night.
“Make me a citizen of the nuktos!” I cried to the air.
The Nycticorax began to disappear. In its place there was only the red-ringed eye, resting like a marble on the pavement.
The eye began to swell until it was the diameter of a sewer lid. The red ring began to turn, cutting a hole in the fabric of reality like a cosmic can-opener. As it inched clockwise, a seam of red light grew until the circle was complete and the fragment of Florida that had been hole-punched fell soundlessly into the pond.
The portal opened.
I jumped into it. And that is how I became a citizen of The Night.
The whole congregation judges him, the new guy. They say he’s cocky—hardy har the irony, of course, being that he, like everyone else here, lacks external genitalia—and they have a million more complaints about him, too, starting with each and every feather on his body. Count them up, and maybe it’s not a full million, but who has the patience to go counting feathers?
Birds, unlike humans, are not racist, but that doesn’t delete discrimination.
Birds, unlike humans, don’t vote, but they like to keep up with the current.
Like when the new guy first appeared, the reddish egret asked if he was heading to a tea party.
And when the new guy next appeared, a black-bellied plover made a joke about his being the wrong wing. The waders gave him a polite chuckle, just as a gesture of solidarity. They got the joke, they did; it just wasn’t funny. He’s funnier when he’s got on his non-breeding suit, but it’s early July: his belly is inky and his humor falls shorter and shorter with every try.
And when the new guy next appeared, a curlew pointed to the coat room, wouldn’t want to muddy his patriotism. This made the flock erupt, laughing so hard they were gulping.
Still, the new guy keeps appearing. He knows how this goes. It’s not like he fledged yesterday. Shore birds are snide—they’re assholes, really—but this mockery will abate. Surely, it will; it must. This won’t go on forever, right?
One morning, while the new guy is off finding breakfast, the birds call emergency congress. Mostly, it’s petty shit, nothing that would merit punishment, much less banishment, which is the tacit goal. They’ve been strategizing for more than an hour, and the tide pushes deeper into the mud. Grumpiness increases with hunger; dawn has broken to morning, and the breakfast buffet is digging down and down. Their beaks feel parched, aching to thrust into the cool wet sand.
At last, a solitary sandpiper peeps, “Enough, enough. Not a single bird has offered a single reasonable reason, and without just cause, we cannot ask him to—”
Before, the congress had been respectful, reasonable, at least towards one another, but now, suddenly, before the little sandpiper could finish his sentence with all its implications, all the birds squawk at once. It’s an unbearable sound, worse even than a cotillion of terns, a highness of royals in formation. Now, everyone has an idea, and every idea is more desperate than the last. Accusations are thrown about, lies and fairy tales and tales taller than the tallest snowy.
In the midst of all the raucous, the tricolored heron returns, lands right in the middle of the pandemonium—and before his wings can fold back into place, everything stops: the birds, the squabbling, all the fun and games. All the birds turn and stare. The tricolored cranes his neck, looks every shorebird present in the eye. His blinks feel heavy and deep, the nictating membrane slides horizontal and back, but it’s useless. One fat teardrop hits the brackish water, and every bird could hear it burst. And then another one falls. But before a third can pop, the tricolored opens his rufous wings, and the congress of birds watches the white strip of his belly fly east. The sunlight emphasizes first slate, then rust, first cornflower, then ruby: what a marvelous show!
That night, the sky alights with booming rage. The tricolored never returns, but every year on the anniversary of their unkindness, exuberant red, white, and blue siege the air—bursting, hot, a lamentation.
