Megan Lindholm - Wizard of the Pigeons

So what I ask myself is, can you love someone if you don’t need them? And is she happy and fine all on her own, or is there someone else? Can it be she doesn’t need anyone, least of all me?“

The bus lurched into the next stop. Wizard waited nervously, but nothing came to him. Whatever comfort he was supposed to give this man was not appearing. The magic’hovered just out of his reach. He steeled himself and leaped for it blindly.

“Love and need are two separate things,” he murmured softly. “A mother does not need her children, yet she loves them. Need may even destroy love. What have you been doing with your own life while she has been finding hers again? Are you still the man she loved, the man with his own interests and life, or are you standing in the wings, waiting for her to take responsibility for your happiness? Perhaps you should find your own life and resume it, so she can approach you without fear of being consumed by you. Your terrible need for her…”

The man was rising, getting off at this stop, without waiting to hear what Wizard was saying to him. Such a thing had never happened before, and Wizard gaped after him, reeling defiled and useless. The bus lunged and roared on through its route.

He sat in silent misery. It began to get steamy inside from the cargo of warm, damp humans. The seat beside Wizard sagged with weight, and he turned to find that a slender Polynesian woman had settled in beside him. He turned away from her and stared out the window.

A manicured finger jabbed him in the ribs. “Pay attention!” she hissed. He knew that accent, but couldn’t place it. It was from the bad times. “I’ve got you cornered now, and you are going to listen. So quit playing stupid with me. It’s right in front of your nose, and you won’t see it. There is no time left for me to be subtle and let you learn at your own pace. When you are irrational, you are vulnerable. And another thing: You substitute tears for action. You want to know what is wrong with you? You found out, a long time ago, that it is much easier not to care. You pretended a distance between yourself and others until it became real. You stopped hurting when people you loved got hurt. You threw your pain away. There is a part of you that fears pain and wants to go back to that numbness. But that is where your enemy is waiting for you.

He will attack, you with yourself.“

She was rambling, he didn’t know about what, but he did know he had nothing to give her. He didn’t want to hear her secrets and her hurts. He had no balm for them. “Beg pardon?”

In a flash of self-preservation. Wizard turned an icy stare upon the little woman. “Were you addressing me?”

She did not waver. “Yes!” she hissed. Another jab of the finger. “Pay attention. You are throwing away your weapons because you think defeat would be easier. You do not wish to take responsibility for yourself. You like to fumble and limp and be helped along. Winning would change all that. So you choose to forget that you are involved in a battle. You have turned your exposed back to your enemy. When you are defeated, you will say, ‘There was never a war.’”

Politics were the last things on his mind today. He did not want to think back to that time. He spoke very softly. “You must understand. I have nothing useful to tell you. Beg pardon.

This is my stop.“ Wizard dragged at the cord over the window, standing at the same moment. He clambered over her multitude of parcels to reach me aisle. He stood swaying by the doors, until the driver could find a place to pull over.

There was no sanctuary for him today, he decided as he slogged down the pavement. The rain spattered him for two blocks, then he crossed me street and caught a southbound bus.

The early dusk of winter was already claiming the sky. He felt relieved. He could go home. One advantage to sleeping in, he told himself, was that it made the whole day shorter. Less to deal with. The bus was crowded with early commuters. He stood for several blocks and then slipped into a seat beside a young student with her lap full of textbooks. She gave him a shy look and turned to her window. Wizard breathed a sigh of relief and sagged back in the seat.

The student fidgeted next to him. She flipped open one of her books on her lap and began to study. Her lips moved as she read softly to herself. Wizard closed his eyes and let his mind blank out. It was as close as he had come to peace today.

The girl’s sub-auditory murmurings were as pleasant a sound as water running over stones. He let it be a mantra for him. floating on BK brushing sound. He began to make out words here and there. He listened carelessly.

“Only a fool is presumptuous enough to attempt to judge the relative merits of me different realities. Better to let them blend in a potpourri of life. Who can suavely deny that there are poets in our asylums and killers on our streets? We may never hear the sweetest songs because we were unwilling to accept a new scale. This reality that we treasure and call sanity may be the purest form of torment to those we try to impose it upon.”

A philosophy course. Wizard decided. The thought irritated him. He shifted slightly to put his ears out of range of her soft mutter.

Her nails dug suddenly into his wrist. “All right!” she hissed angrily. “All right. I give up on you- Go throw yourself right back into it. But I’ll give you one last gift, no a story or clue, but a question. If it was such a good deal, why did you leave it in the first place? What overbalanced your scales?”

It scared the hell out of him. He dragged free of her, leaving shreds of his skin under her fingernails. He stood up, staggering as the bus leaned into its stop. He pushed hurriedly past a fat man struggling to rise from his seat and was the first person down the steps. He fled.

The storm rallied as he emerged from the bus. From a monotonous gray pattering it became a downpour of leaden streamers. In less than a block, he was drenched. His coat dragged on his shoulders; his wet pant cuffs slapped his ankles.

Hunger was asserting itself too, harmonizing with the residue of his hangover. His pace slowed to a trudge.

Streetlamps began to blossom in the dark. They dispelled me night, but not the rain that assailed him. His hair was plastered to his skull, and the scars on his scalp ached abominably. He passed brightly lit store windows where pilgrims and turkeys vied with Christmas trees for seasonal charm. The rest of me sidewalk traffic wore raincoats or carried umbrellas.

They rushed past Wizard like lemmings, almost unaware of his passage. He watched their smooth plastic faces and tried to find some kinship with them. There was none. They were immune to misery such as his. They had homes, jobs, families, all arranged neatly in hourly slots of life. Not one of them, he told himself, was going home to a three-legged cat or a damp room haunted by a footlocker. No waitresses climbed through their windows. They would push open doors to warm apartments, to loving embraces and children playing cars on the carpet. He would climb through a dirty window into darkness and pigeons shitting down the walls. When had he made that choice?

Occidental Square was in bloom. Crews had worked all day stringing the lines of small white lightbulbs through the bare branches of the trees. Now they shone through the night, a spring of white blossoms in the November rain. Wizard turned up his face to look at them, me rain streaking down his cheeks.

For a few moments he was eased by the beauty. Then something rolled over inside him, and he saw only bare bulbs on electrical wires, artificial and silly among the wet black branches.

He made a stop at the arcade to use the restroom. He drank cold water from his cupped hands and stared at himself in the mirror. His face had crossed the fine line between gaunt and cadaverous. His eyes were swollen and baggy above his hollow cheeks. A twentieth-century Grim Reaper stared out at him.