Rebecca Makkai - Music for Wartime

His mother stands on the porch and again and again says why , till it doesn’t sound like a word at all. It’s a different why from ours. We are ready to accept this.

He had a tooth pulled in the spring of 2012. He was allergic to strawberries. He excelled at tennis. There was no food in his refrigerator. He was dead before they could interrogate him. His blog has been erased.

We plan to learn more. We plan to keep updated. We plan to look for patterns. We’ve obtained a new map, with slightly different colors.

We will repeat these facts till they sound like history. We’ll repeat them till they sound like fate.

T o Alex’s personal horror and professional embarrassment, the Cyril College alumni magazine ran an obnoxiously chipper blurb that September, in a special, blue-tinted box. She read it aloud to Malcolm on the phone:

FOWL PLAY

Assistant Professor Alex Moore has taught Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” many times since joining the English Department in 2008, but she developed an unexpected intimacy with the poem when, duck-hunting in South Australia this June, she accidentally shot and killed an actual albatross.

Moore, whose doctoral dissertation at Tufts focused on D. G. Rossetti and his muse Jane Burden Morris, took aim at what she thought was a goose.

“My students are never going to let me hear the end of this,” she says.

Because the birds are protected under Australian and international laws, Moore incurred a hefty fine — hopefully the extent of that legendary bad luck! She has no plans to hang the bird around her neck. “The wingspan was over two yards,” says the 5-foot-2 Moore. “ That would be asking for it!”

Those exclamation points killed her, the way they tacked the whole episode down as farce. And the cheery italics. None of Alex’s tired sarcasm had come through. She vowed in the future only to give quotes via e-mail, so she could control the punctuation. (“You’re my favorite control freak,” Malcolm said.) Plus there was that photo to the side, her book-jacket photo with the half smile, perfect for suggesting Pre-Raphaelite intrigue and scandal, but here verging on the smug. A month stuck dealing with the South Australian police and Parks Department; half her grant spent on the fine; her research summer wasted; and all of it snipped down by a freelance writer named Betsy into photo, irony, pretty blue box.

And as for the bad luck, it was just starting, waiting for her back home like her postal bin of unopened mail. Not the “hefty fine” kind of bad luck, but the “Your career is over” kind, the “Why aren’t you wearing your engagement ring?” kind.

“Didn’t take you for a hunter,” she heard about twenty times that first department party back in the States.

“I’m not,” she’d say, or “You don’t know who you’re dealing with here,” or “I’m really more of a gatherer.”

She ended up telling the full story, and as she talked the whole party squeezed around where she sat on the arm of the couch — even Malcolm, her fiancé, who’d seen it happen. He was sweet to listen again, and sweeter still not to chime in with his own version. Her colleagues sat on the coffee table, the bar, the floor, and sipped white wine. She told them how her half brother Piet had invited her and Malcolm to his place outside Tumby Bay for June. “He’s not Australian,” she said. “He just thinks he is.” And then once they got there, Piet, in that way of his — just masculine enough to intimidate Malcolm, just Australian enough that everything sounded like a fine, foolish adventure — convinced them to come shooting at his lake, so he wouldn’t miss the last day of duck hunting season.

“Australia is the new America,” announced Leonard, her department head. Or rather, he slurred it through his beard. The new hire nodded. Everyone else ignored him.

After Piet brought down three ducks and his dog had dragged them in, he wrapped Alex’s hands around the gun and showed her the sight line.

“What kind of gun?” someone asked.

“I don’t know. A rifle. It was wooden.”

She’d seen something barely rise above the stand of trees on the small island in the lake, and shot. If she thought anything, she thought it was a white goose. It crashed down through the trees, and Piet sent Gonzo swimming out to it. Gonzo disappeared on the island, yapping and howling and finally reappearing, sans goose, to whimper at the water’s edge.

“Christ,” Piet said, and took off his clothes — all of them — to swim out. He emerged from the trees after a long minute, full frontal glory shining wet in the sun. Malcolm slapped his entire arm across his eyes. “She’s a monster!” Piet shouted. “You’ve slain a beast!”

Thirty minutes later, Piet, half-drunk, was on the phone to his friend Reynie at the Parks Department, asking him to come out and tell them if that wasn’t the biggest fucking bird he’d ever seen. They took two double kayaks out — Piet and Reynie, then Malcolm and Alex, who still hadn’t seen her victim. It lay there, enormous, wings out, half on a bush, a red spot fading out to pink on the white feathers of the neck. Its whole body glared white, except the wings, tipped in glossy black. “It was beautiful,” she told her colleagues. “I can’t even describe it — it had to do with the light, but it was just beautiful .”

“You shouldn’t have brought me out here, Piet, Christ,” Reynie had said. He put his hand on the bird’s back, and Alex walked around to get a better look at the face, at the rounded, almost cartoonish beak. “I’ll have to write you up, and you’ll lose your license and pay a fortune. It’s a wandering bloody albatross. They’re vulnerable .”

“Vulnerable to what?” Piet was using his phone to shoot photos, moving the bush branches for a better shot.

“Extinction. Jesus Christ. Vulnerable’s a step from endangered. Piet, I don’t want to write you up, but you shouldn’t have called.”

Piet snapped a picture. “Didn’t shoot it,” he said. “ She did. Not even from here, never shot a gun. Girl’s excelled at everything she ever tried in her whole damn life.”

“Which is how I spent the next three weeks camped in Adelaide,” she told her colleagues. The ones who were out of wine took this as a cue to stretch and reload at Leonard’s bar.

“Hey, great story!” Bill Tossman clapped her on the shoulder, used that loud, cheesy voice more suited to an executive schmoozing on the squash court than a professor of modern poetry. “Wish I could stay to hear the end, but my two friends and I here are late for a wedding!”

They laughed, then all started in: You must be parched! Can I get you some water? Hey, take a load off!

“You’re going to do that all year,” Alex said. “Aren’t you.”

And yes, they did, until the real bad luck became public in November and they suddenly didn’t know what to say to her at all.