Diana Abu-Jaber - Birds of Paradise

He studies the shadows fluttering over the window shutters — neighbors heading to work, as he should be doing — and marvels, with a detached, out-of-body calm, at how it’s possible to arrange for one’s wealth or destitution in a matter of moments. Every reserve, every last account would need to be emptied, every investment called in, penalties assumed; he would need an expensive line of credit and a new mortgage. Two point three million. Javier said it was possible — or did he say “likely”—that they would make double that when the units sold. He sits back at the desk, going over the numbers again, this time with the stub of a pencil on a pad of paper, as he might have done in grade school. If he makes the purchase, that will leave them a little over four grand in checking: almost exactly where they were when he was thirty-two, with a new mortgage, wife, and baby. The uncertainty returns: they could simply give Stan the money — as they had in the past. But Avis doesn’t want to: she says she doesn’t trust “that girl.” Brian suspects, though, that she actually feels anxious about their finances. With a windfall like Javier predicts, Brian reasons, she’d relax.

Brian hadn’t gone to law school hoping — as many of his colleagues had — to become wealthy. Discontent has been a gradual, almost metaphysical condition, seeping in, mineralizing his bones. The inevitability of salary comparisons, of spending one’s life gazing up at the next guy. Still, he reflects, it’s something of a relief to know one’s net worth — even if it’s about to be zero. At one point, early on, their savings and investments had mounted to nearly four million. But the debts accumulated: loans for the boat, condo, starting the wine cellar, a collection of antique botanical and zoological engravings — including a very old, expensive one from Paris, titled The Types of Unicorns . They’d gotten socked by the costs of starting and keeping his wife’s business afloat. And he had to admit, didn’t he, to some guilty relief when Felice had offered them her “deal,” and Avis came home from that meeting saying, “No more private detectives, no more monitoring.” Then, to cap it all, came the even greater costs of Stanley’s market. He feels like a shrinking engine pulling the weight of endless boxcars. Can he live long enough, he wonders, to make enough money for everyone?

The shutters in his small office — formerly Felice’s bedroom — are closed against the late-summer morning heat. Happy Birthday, baby girl, he thinks mournfully. Today, isn’t it? The 23rd. Now the parent of two adults, Brian closes his eyes and mentally catalogs the physical ailments that have descended on him over the past few years: the aching hamstring and hip, the tender inner forearm, his inability to sleep through the night without one trip after another to the bathroom, the subtle abdominal pressure that teases and torments him — seeming to play tricks, eluding his doctors, frequently appearing coincident to the midnight bathroom visits, the occasional heightening (not quite squeezing ) pressure on his chest. Is it possible to have such symptoms and still be considered “healthy”? Why does that one muscle in his back sometimes twitch? Why do his gums tingle? If you think you have it —if you constantly suspect and dread it —does that help keep you from actually getting it ? Or does dread invoke it like an angry sleeping god?

The serrated cry of tropical birds pierces his window: he imagines their beaks like scissors, like the sound of anxiety itself: the world stabbing away. He realizes that he’s been listening to a low-level warbling cry for some time. A baby’s cry — that incessant register of complaint. Every now and then the cry seems to refresh itself, surging back with renewed vigor. The pattern of crying is, he realizes, regular as a tape loop. He moves nearer the window, peering between two slats in the blinds, finally grasping that it’s the neighbor’s damned bird.

AVIS HAS YET TO ASK why he’s still home at 10 a.m. on a Wednesday. He feels like a poltergeist in the house of the living. He wears an old cotton bathrobe and walks from room to room of his not-quite-yet profoundly mortgaged home. Where is his nerve? What sort of man backs down from risk? He tries to calculate exactly how long the for sale sign has been up on the Handels’ front yard — four or five months? and he wonders if he can extrapolate from this the health of the condominium sales sector of Miami. He gazes at his own square coffee table, the Brazilian sectional couch and divan, the chestnut dining table that shimmers with polishing wax: artifacts of a previous life. Have their furnishings always seemed so cherished?

Brian calls work and tells Agathe he’s preparing for the hurricane, then he goes to the kitchen door. Avis is leaning over the counter, her strong back to him as she rolls out a circle of dough. He admires the tidy crisscross of her apron strings, her narrow waist, her movements, so elegant and precise as he looks on, tentative as the sorcerer’s apprentice. She turns, smiles, and looks at him, asks if he’s feeling okay.

He shakes his head as if sharing a joke with her. “Just going to putter around on a few projects — want to get the place stormproofed. Supposed to be a big one.”

She looks at him more closely now and he feels himself turning scarlet. They’ve ridden through several hurricanes in the past — including Andrew — with no special provisions. To his surprise, Avis nods. “Yes, that’s probably a good thing to do.”

Brian pulls on a pair of faded chinos and a soft old button-down shirt, then drives to the Home Depot in Pinecrest. It’s so jammed he has to creep behind departing customers in the parking lot to get a spot in a distant corner. People mob the aisles of the cavernous store, collecting not only hurricane necessities — batteries and flashlights and distilled water — but also seemingly random items like plastic flower arrangements and Christmas decorations — all of the shoppers moving with the same taut urgency, their faces jutting forward, nearly running their carts into one another. Brian is astonished that so many people don’t have to be at work at this time of midmorning.

He moves through the store with a sense of setting things to rights. Putting one’s house in order. Time to get serious, he repeats under his breath. He looks for help, having come without any list, but the associates in their workman’s aprons scurry through the crowds without stopping, like outnumbered riot police. Brian moves his cart forward, selecting things impressionistically: if something seems as if it might be useful, he takes it. Hammer, lightbulbs, hand-cranked radio help him to feel solid and directed, but increasingly isolated. He notices the other customers seem to move in and out of nebulous packs of family or colleagues, and everywhere, in every aisle, running currents of Spanish. He stands before bins of fasteners in graduated sizes, picks up one perfectly formed fastener — a miniature work of art in metal, its sides machined at exact right angles — and decides to buy this for Stanley.

He hurries toward one of the small mobs formed in front of a cash register. While people elbow and wave each other into the waiting crowd, Brian stands staring fixedly ahead, as if standing in a queue at a bank. He is fearful now of the thought that perhaps he isn’t considering investing purely on Stanley’s behalf, but in some small way, to impress Fernanda. He shuffles forward, his eyes glittering with preoccupation, a momentary fantasy. He imagines a pared-away existence — no difficult children, no painful history, no expensive house. He casts his gaze toward the far corner of the immense store and wonders: Where does a man in Miami run away to, anyway? Trenton? Omaha?