She has a dream about a bird.
She comes across a dead bird splayed out on a concrete step. Its wings, strangely, are fully spread out, as if someone had come upon the corpse earlier and decided to arrange the body so that it would look more dead. Or, perhaps, it had been run over by a car. As the wheels of the car had run over the bird’s body, they had pressed and spread it outwards against the asphalt, like rolling pins.
The bird, however, isn’t on the asphalt. As a matter of fact, it isn’t even close to a road. It’s on a step, in a plaza. Well, it may be more of a square. In any case, there aren’t any cars here.
That the bird’s corpse has assumed this position raises many questions. For example: who put this bird here? She imagines someone carefully picking up the bird and moving it to this spot, carefully extending its wings. She shudders. Had they been hoping that she would find it?
She takes a picture of the bird with her phone. Dissatisfied, she takes another, then several more. She tries again, now in black and white. She remembers that she has a proper camera on her, a mirrorless digital camera. She plays with the settings a little, snaps a couple pictures.
It’s hard to get the angle right, with the steps. This raises more questions. Ethical questions. Is there something dishonest, for instance, in her indecision about how much of the frame should be given to the step above the one the bird is on? Why is it so difficult for her to decide how that step should appear in the shot? She can’t even remember, now, how exactly it had appeared to her when she’d first noticed it. Should that first impression be the reference point for how she captures the image of the bird? Has the opportunity been lost?
She takes some time to re-approach the bird from various directions. She rehearses casually ascending the steps, pretending to suddenly notice the bird at different points in her trajectory. She repeats the exercise, but now she descends the steps. Each time she passes the bird, she tries to retain the composition of the bird’s appearance in her mind, to serve as a reference point for the one that she will, soon enough, capture with her camera.
She has two lenses available to her. Like most smartphones, the one on her phone has a very wide angle. It’s easier to take in-focus shots that way. The lens she has on her mirrorless is 27mm, which given the camera’s cropped APS-C sensors is a “perfect-normal” focal length, equivalent to around 41mm on a full-frame camera. People like to say that what such a lens captures is very close to what the human eye sees. She’s never quite understood what people meant when they said that. It seems obvious to her that she sees more than this lens captures. But then again, she has two eyes. This is the lens to use, she thinks.
With either lens, it is impossible to capture an image of the bird’s full body without making a decision about the angle of the step. This feels important. The step is the anchor point of the image, perhaps even more so than the bird itself. It determines her trajectory and, in turn, the angle from which she perceives the bird in the first place. It grounds the image.
She takes another picture of the bird. This will have to do, she thinks. As she walks away from the bird, she wonders whether the picture is in fact to her satisfaction. She also wonders whether her meticulousness and indecision with respect to getting the right shot of this dead bird has made her no better than whoever had put the bird there in the first place.
When she wakes up, she describes her dream to her lover. She leaves out many of the details though. She says something like:
“I had a dream about a dead bird. It was on a step. I was trying to take a good picture of it.”
Her lover laughs, and doesn’t seem to have anything to say about it. She decides it isn’t very important. She doesn’t think about the dream very much after that. She remembers it, though, when she’s in therapy a few days later. She begins to wonder about the origins of the dream, and what it says about her. She’d been so focused, in the dream, on the question of who had put the bird there, but perhaps she had moved too quickly past the question of how it had died. Had somebody killed the bird?
Her logic, in the dream, had been procedural. If you are reconstructing something you are looking backwards in time. In a sense, the question of how the bird had arrived in that position, in that place, preceded the question of its death. The question is an important one, she reasons, because it is at once a question about whether the bird had been killed.
There is something about this logic which disturbs her. She wonders what it says about her that she would be thinking like this, in her dream. Once again, the question arises: was there something sinister in her orientation towards this bird? Was there something “off” about her focus on questions surrounding the transport and manipulation of its corpse? Why had she been so invested in getting the perfect image of it? Her curiosity about its dead body, it seems, had exceeded her curiosity about its death. Isn’t there something a bit perverse about that? Isn’t that a bit necrophilic? Had she killed the bird?
Her therapist stares at her blankly.
She has the feeling, sometimes, that there is something evil within her. It spreads outward from her. It kills the vibes. Sometimes, for a moment, it can even make others evil. It activates something within them that they don’t like to see. Sometimes, though, it’s unclear to her whether that “something” had already been there, inside them all along, or if the evil something within in her planted it there. This, of course, raises the question of who’d put the evil something in her. She doesn’t know how to answer these questions. She does, however, spend many hours trying to parse them, or pose them. She wonders if there’s something a bit necrophilic about that, too.
She remembers a funny word, “extimacy.” She’s not sure how helpful it is to simply throw words at these feelings, however. Maybe it pulls her away from them in a way that isn’t useful. Her head starts to hurt, and she begins to feel tired.
She decides that from the dream she should begin to look backwards.
The night – eight hours or so – before she’d had the dream about the bird she’d been cooking dinner with her lover. Because she hadn’t eaten all day and because she had, moreover, spent the previous hour or so making love, she was quite tired.
She fumbles some of the steps, and curses at herself. She calls herself an idiot under her breath. She begins to feel faint. She has to sit down and drink some water. Her lover, chopping vegetables, begins to cry. When they finish cooking dinner, she asks her lover why she’d been crying, and she apologizes for fumbling in the kitchen.
“I scared myself.”
“You scared yourself?”
“Because of what I imagined.”
“What did you imagine?”
Her lover starts to cry again. She begins to suspect that she already knows the answer to this question.
“I imagined sticking my knife into you.”
Thirteen hours after she has the dream about the bird, she meets a stranger at a bar. They have a drink together. She says that she finds the stranger attractive. The stranger asks her if she’s almost done with her drink.
Twenty-five minutes later, in her room, she has sex with the stranger. The stranger has an enormous penis, which she feels like is going to tear her apart. This relaxes her. She lets the penis pass through her freely and, for a moment, she feels wonderful. As it moves through her body, she feels as though the penis is displacing all of her body parts. She feels as though it could scatter her like ashes over all the surfaces of her tiny room. But then the stranger lets out a groan, pulls the enormous penis out of her, and asks her one more question.
“Do you have a trash can in here?”
She blinks.
“I do, yes.”
She lies back on the bed. She notices that her legs are twitching and that her arms are spread out wide. She wonders how they got like that. She notices, too, that there is a tattoo of a bird on the stranger’s arm.