Megan Bergman - Birds of a Lesser Paradise - Stories

They do not chatter, or brachiate, or reach for a piece of dried fruit. They only mutter, shift, and resettle.

I’m afraid of interfering, of tipping them toward death. They know best. They must know best.

It feels like lucid dreaming, walking in the snow, an endangered aye-aye in my overcoat. It’s like a false start to the morning, the dream you are only one foot out of, a simulation. The kind when you open your mouth but can’t talk, when you reach out but can’t move.

Please, I’d said to Ryan a few weeks earlier. You’ve got to talk some sense into Leslie.

It’s a stage, he’d said. The more we try to intervene, the more we’ll push her away.

I’ve tried to tell her it’s not true, I said. She doesn’t believe me. She thinks we’re all going to die. Soon.

Ryan was quiet.

What’s she going to do when it doesn’t come true? I said. When the world is still spinning? What will she have then?

This, Ryan said, is a case of too little too late.

At five in the morning the director of the Lemur Center arrives. She follows my footsteps in the snow to the aye-aye house.

Get out, she says.

Her clothes don’t match and her hair isn’t brushed and I can tell that these animals are everything to her.

Are the lemurs okay?

I don’t know, she says.

She turns her back to me. She’s shaking. I can feel her hurt and anger and I knew it was coming all night. Here it is. All for me.

I’m sorry I didn’t call, I say.

I deserve every bit of her rage. And maybe I want it. Maybe I want to wear her scorn, bear its weight, feel its teeth.

I’m as bad as you think, I want to say. Worse, maybe.

She flips the light switch; the power is back on. My eyes sting. She stomps out of the aye-aye house.

Faye is stiff with sleep and cold. I stuff her into my overcoat and begin the walk home.

I tell myself: This is not a big deal.

The early sun is already melting the snow and the trail home is dark and muddy. I cradle Faye with one arm. Her nails dig into my skin and her tail hangs out from beneath my coat. If we pass anyone, they will think I am holding a cat, or perhaps a raccoon.

I reach my apartment complex and notice the power is back on; I can see my downstairs neighbor’s television through the window. He’s watching Turner Classic Movies — overacted movies in muted colors. Like me, I think, he’s still holding out hope that the best days aren’t gone, that the best times weren’t the years when Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were together in Technicolor bliss.

I trudge up one flight of stairs. I’m tired. It’s as if I have a morning hangover; the sun is too bright, the day too fast for my eyes.

People are walking dogs, brushing off cars, returning to normalcy.

What is it about an unseasonably warm day that makes me think of my childhood? I can smell the bread and taste the chicken casserole and poached pears my mother used to make. I can feel grass underneath my thighs. I can picture my father sitting in his car alone, parked in the driveway, rereading his movie script, the paper stacked against his steering wheel. I can picture Leslie playing in the sandbox, turning to me for a hug before she knew how to hold a grudge.

I can always tell when I’ve done something wrong. It’s a feeling I’ve known every day of my life.

I know I’ll pour myself a drink when I walk inside. I don’t want to do it, but I will. I have a half pint of bourbon in a box in the back of my closet that I can finish off neatly. It’s the perfect amount. And if I’m going to do it, I might as well enjoy it. Maybe I won’t drink in the bathroom, which I do sometimes even now, living alone. Maybe I’ll sit Faye on the ottoman, give the drink the glass it deserves, a cut-crystal highball. Ice.

But I don’t drink. I enter my apartment and make a nest for Faye in my walk-in closet and return to my book about yearling moose. I promise myself that I’ll travel to Maine in the spring, find the yearlings, show them how to keep clear of the road, remind them of water holes nearby.

Every five minutes I crack open the closet door to look at Faye, who is sleeping. I fill a ramekin with dried cranberries and half of an old banana and place it next to her. I turn up the thermostat.

When I return to the living room, I’m conscious of Faye’s absence, the loss of her warmth against my body. It reminds me that she will not live forever.

I make myself some tea and wait for the phone call, or the knock on my door. They will notice she is gone. Maybe I have a night, or a few hours.

I want to call Leslie again. I want to call her and tell her about the night I saved an aye-aye, slept with a death angel pressed against my warm breast. I want to call her and tell her I’m sorry, that I understand, that the world will not end. I want to call her and tell her that she will be safe from everything, that it’s not too late to be Stephanie Seymour, that she’s too good for the life she has now. I want to exaggerate, extol, explain, atone. I want to tell her about the endangered prosimian in my closet. I want to call and tell her I love her; I want to tell her another story she won’t believe.

Pay no attention to the soot on the buttercrunch, I told my new assistant.

We were looking at a row of lettuces in Mac’s Urban Garden. You wash those, right? she asked.

I didn’t tell her how often I’d caught the homeless harvesting team urinating near the zucchinis. Saint Charles with his cowboy hat and soiled cargo pants. Tiny Hanson with her high-heeled boots and cut-up snowsuit. The Neil Diamond look-alike in his black trench coat.

Sam didn’t know it, but I had plans for her. I wanted her to take over the garden.

Produce to the people! she’d said in her phone interview, and I was sold.

Now Sam knelt in front of the budding kale and Swiss chard in her expensive windbreaker. Her luxury hybrid was poorly parked outside the garden entrance. Bangs hung in front of her eyes. A half hour into her tutorial and she was already clutching her back.

Two types of people came to Mac’s — those who were hungry, and those who wanted to feel good about themselves. But I’d learned feeling good about yourself could be hard work, backbreaking even.

That’s tatsoi, I said to Sam, pointing to the plants with delicate spoonlike leaves next to the kale. Good with mustard, so tell the boys and girls that free packets of mustard from McDonald’s work just fine if they need to stretch a meal.

I’m late for a therapy appointment, I said. Think you can do some weeding for an hour until I’m back?

Sam shrugged. She seemed unsure about the new job.

I was one month into the worst guilt of my life, and after I explained to Sam the danger of cabbage loopers and flea beetles, I went to my car. I cranked the ignition and began to cry.

My dog, Zydo, sat next to me in the passenger seat. I rolled down his window, and he thrust his head out and wagged his tail, as if I had never done him wrong.

I didn’t deserve Zydo. In fact, I didn’t know anyone good enough for a dog like him. Loyal to the point of self-destruction.

Mac and I had a boat — the Excitecat 810. On weekends we left the community garden to volunteers and drove to Beaufort, where we anchored and partied with friends. Zydo always came along. A lab mix, he loved the water. He’d pace the length of the boat and bark at passing crafts. His shaggy blond ears crimped in the humidity. His nails scratched the deck when he walked.

Mornings on the boat, I’d make instant coffee, Zydo at my feet. We’d climb quietly onto the deck, careful not to wake Mac, and listen to the birds. Zydo would sun himself with his chin on my legs until Mac was awake, and then we’d motor over to Shackleford Banks to let Zydo kick sand and chase gulls. Once, we saw two deer swimming past the boat toward land; Zydo had quivered with excitement but stayed by my side, obedient.