The Book of Dead Birds Read online

  “I’m here to help the birds?” I swallow the sweet acid that wants to rise up my throat again.

  “You with Fish and Game?” the woman asks.

  I shake my head.

  “Fish and Wildlife?”

  I shake my head again.

  “Bureau of Land Management?”

  “No…”

  “The prison?”

  “No!” I shake my head more emphatically.

  “We’re getting people from all over.” The woman spreads her thick arms out to encompass them all. “Where’d you say you were from?”

  “San Diego.” I cough out the words.

  “Oh, so you’re from Sea World, then!” The woman’s wrinkled face brightens. “I heard they were coming down to get some of the pelicans. I just love Sea World…took my friend’s grandkids there not a month ago. Shamu had some kind of infection. Kids were mighty disappointed—show was canceled. How’s he doing now?”

  “I don’t know…”

  “Oh, of course not—you work with birds, not whales. Those flamingos you got are something else, aren’t they?”

  “Actually…”

  “Can you imagine sleeping on one foot like that? I don’t know how they keep their balance.”

  I shrug. I feel off balance on two feet.

  “My friend’s granddaughter wants to dye her hair like a flamingo…you think they dye those birds? Some looked pinker than others.”

  “Maybe…”

  “And those penguins—aren’t they darling? Like little Charlie Chaplins…” The woman starts to waddle around in imitation behind her desk.

  “I’m not from Sea World,” I finally blurt out.

  The woman stops her penguin walk. She looks crestfallen, as if I had deliberately misled her. Her gaze turns suspicious again.

  “I’m here on my own,” I tell her. “I figured they’d need more volunteers…”

  The woman takes a moment to compose herself. “You want to speak to Darryl Sternberg over at the hospital.” Her voice is suddenly businesslike, her face flushed.

  “And where would that be?” I ask.

  “Just beyond the dock we got out back, and up the beach a ways.” She busies herself again with her map straightening.

  “Thank you.” I dig into my pocket, hand a dollar to the woman, then take a map from the front of the display. The woman nods curtly before the whole display stand tumbles over again. I start to help her pick up the maps.

  “You better go see Darryl before it gets too hot,” she says. “It got up to one-twenty yesterday. He’s gonna be cranky.”

  “Thank you,” I tell her. “I’m sorry about this…”

  The woman nods and slaps the maps together as I take a sip from a water fountain to soothe my aching throat before I walk back out into the blast of heat outside.

  A temporary structure is set up a few hundred yards ahead on the barnacled shore—chain-link walls covered with UV-protectant fabric. The air gets heavier, thick with the scent of something gone wrong, as I get closer. My stomach twists tighter.

  Through the opening between two of the chain-link panels, I can see at least fifty people inside. Some tend pelicans in a child’s wading pool, others unload trash bags full of dead birds. Some weigh the birds, catalog them, slit their bellies open, put hearts and livers into clear sandwich bags. In a small red tin structure adjacent to the enclosure, two men throw bodies into an incinerator that sends more heat into the sweltering air. A pile of dead birds taller than me stands in the corner. The stench is unbearable. I fan myself with the folded map.

  “Can I help you?” A harried-looking man comes up to me.

  “I’m looking for the hospital.”

  “You found it,” he replies, then races off to the plastic pool full of birds, syringes of some kind spilling out of his vest pockets.

  “This is the hospital?” I ask another man who is hefting a dead pelican onto a scale.

  “You were expecting private beds?” he asks as he records the weight, then throws the bird in a pile.

  “Running water, maybe.” I look around. No sink, no fans. Dirt floor. Flies everywhere.

  The man laughs and points to a long hose that snakes across the ground.

  “Could you please tell me where I could find Darryl?”

  “He’s over there.” He points to the man by the wading pool, the man I had first talked to.

  “Thank you.” I try not to breathe. My voice sounds the way I’ve heard people speak after they’ve inhaled pot, all tight in the throat.

  I walk over to the pool. A woman holds a pelican’s floppy neck while Darryl squirts something from one of the syringes through a tube into its beak.

  “Excuse me.” I tentatively tap his shoulder.

  He snaps his head around. Part of the liquid from the syringe squirts out, splashes against my jeans.

  “Dammit!” he shouts.

  “I’m sorry…”

  “That syringe was measured out perfectly,” he says. “This bird only got about sixty milliliters of electrolytes, thanks to you. Those forty milliliters on your calf aren’t going to do you any good, are they?”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Ava. Ava Sing Lo. I’m here to help the birds.”

  “Well, then.” He hands me a wet cloth. It is blessedly cool in my palm. He gestures to a pelican sitting at the edge of the pool, its neck draped languidly over the edge. “Wipe out this bird’s eyes. I need to get more solution.” He storms off.

  I tuck my map into my pocket. “What do I do?” I ask the woman, stroking a pelican’s head. The woman’s light-brown hair is starting to come out of its hasty ponytail. Sweat streams down her forehead, trickles behind her glasses, down her freckled nose, over her chapped lips.

  “Just wipe its eyes with the cloth,” she says. “They fall down and can’t hold up their heads, poor things. Their eyes get all full of mud and salt and crap before we can get to them…”

  I swallow and walk to the other side of the blue plastic pool, which I now realize has circus animals printed all over it, almost mockingly festive. I kneel down beside the bird. Its eyes are so caked, I’m sure it can’t see a thing. I tentatively raise the cloth to the pelican’s head. I can feel the bird startle a bit, but it is too weak to do much. I gently touch the cloth against its covered eye. The bird flinches, shudders. A wing brushes lightly against my arm, sends a shiver down my spine. I wipe at the hardened crud, then run some water from the hose over the cloth so that I can loosen it some more. Eventually the dirt smears off. The pelican’s eye looks right into mine. My heart starts to pound.

  “It’s okay,” I tell the bird, then move over to the other side. The bird relaxes a bit as I wipe at the other eye. Once that one emerges from the layers of mud and salt, though, it is glassy, vacant. It takes me a moment to realize the pelican is dead.

  “Oh, no,” I whisper.

  “We lose a lot of them,” the woman says, raising her arm as if to signal someone.

  “I have sort of a history of killing birds,” I tell her.

  The woman doesn’t say anything, but I can feel her recoil.

  A man in an olive-drab jumpsuit comes up to the pool and whisks the bird away without a word.

  “How can you stand this?” I ask the woman.

  “It doesn’t get any easier,” the woman admits. “Believe me.”

  “Are you a volunteer?”

  “No, I’m with a wildlife refuge in Colorado. They shipped a few of us out here to help with the effort. I’m supposed to be here another two weeks, but frankly, I’m not sure I can hang on that long.”

  I wonder how long I can stand it myself. It would be so easy to just walk away. I know I can’t, though, not yet.

  “How many birds have been affected so far?”

  “Over three thousand already—a few hundred brown pelicans among them. They’re endangered, you know. It’s kind of ironic, really—earlier this year, the browns were
getting close to getting off the list, but now with this outbreak, it’s possible we’ll have to add the western whites to the list now, too.”

  I look around. The pile of dead birds is almost too awful to comprehend, big enough to fill the pages of several scrapbooks.

  “I’m Abby, by the way,” the woman extends her hand. “Abby Westin.”

  “Ava Sing Lo.”

  Abby’s fingers are waterlogged and wrinkled against the back of my hand.

  “Where are you staying?” Abby asks.

  “I’m not sure. This whole thing was sort of a split-second decision. I figured I would find something once I got here.”

  “There aren’t any hotels nearby,” Abby says. “Not anymore, at least.”

  “I saw the one off Desert Beach Drive. It’s like a ghost town over there.”

  “It’s like a ghost town everywhere,” says Abby. “If you want, you can bunk with me. They’ve set up big army tents for all the people who’ve traveled here to help.”

  “I’m just a volunteer.”

  “I’m sure you could stay with me,” says Abby. “There’s an empty cot. The gal who was sharing the place couldn’t deal with all this. I was this close to leaving with her.”

  “No time for chitchat, girls.” Darryl reappears. “We have to tube these birds. The van from the Pacific Wildlife Center is going to be here any moment to bring them to Laguna Niguel.”

  “What do they do with them there?” I ask.

  “Rehabilitate them some more,” he says, as he sticks a tube into a pelican’s beak. The pelican is weak, but it has enough gumption to give him a bit of a struggle. “More electrolytes, then a multi milk solution—half milk, half water—eventually fish. When they’re strong enough, up and preening, they get released.” He hands Abby a tubed syringe. I watch her feed it to a pelican easily, like she has done it hundreds of times. She probably has.

  “Darryl,” asks Abby. “Would it be possible for Ava to bunk with me? She’s not with the refuge—she’s here as a volunteer—but she needs a place to stay.”

  “Don’t see why not.” Darryl tubes another bird. “We appreciate your help—it’s the least we could do in return—not that the accommodations are all that spectacular.”

  “That’s fine,” I tell him. “Thank you.”

  “Welcome aboard.” Darryl tosses me a syringe.

  An hour later, after I struggle, and fail, to tube several birds, Abby tells me about a weekly boat tour for new volunteers and refuge workers. If I hurry, she says, I can make it. I have a feeling she just wants to get rid of me, but Darryl says it’s a good opportunity to get a sense of the sea’s expanse, its history, its flora and fauna. I stumble to the dock, where I am shuttled onto a boat with about ten other shell-shocked people. They sit like zombies, silently facing each other on the two benches that stretch the length of the boat. My arms feel raked by resistant pelican beaks; my biceps sting, but I can’t find any scratches when I examine my skin.

  A perky woman in a tan uniform hops on board and starts up the motor. As the pontoon pulls out onto the sea, she launches into her regular tour spiel like she has a boat full of eager vacationers, not a group of death-stunned workers.

  “The Salton Sea,” she says grandly, “was created by mistake! In 1905, water diversion dikes along the Colorado River collapsed, and water flooded into the ancient Salton Basin for almost two years, leaving behind the largest inland lake in California! Today the lake is about thirty-five miles long and fifteen miles wide and straddles two counties! It boasts one of the best fisheries you could ever find!”

  She rattles off the varieties of fish in the sea as if they’re all swimming happily in the depths, ready to be snared by some lucky wrangler’s hook. As if they’re not bloated and wasted by botulism, clotting the surface of the water.

  When she mentions that the tilapia originally came from Africa, the whole crowd in the boat mutely swivels around to face me, as if I’m responsible for the slew of fish myself. I look down, my face hot. Brownish water seeps up through some little grommeted holes on the floor of the boat and slides over to my feet. I tense my toes inside my shoes. When the woman says that tilapia are mouth brooders, that their babies swim into their parents’ mouths for protection, I can feel everyone stare at my lips.

  I don’t hear much else until the woman mentions gulf croakers. The fish actually croak when they die, the woman says, as the pontoon journeys toward the center of the sea; they make a frog-like croaking sound. When they’re alive, they make a sound like a drum. It’s because of their modified air bladders. The woman sounds a bit embarrassed by this last word.

  I try to listen for the fish drum, fish croak, but all I can hear is the motor of the boat. I never knew fish could make sounds. I’ll try to record some later for my MIDI, maybe mix them with Kane’s voice. With all the dead fish floating around, I’ll probably have a better chance hearing them croak than I will hearing them drum, although I would much prefer something percussive. My hands feel restless for the skin of my chang’go. I thrum my fingers against the edge of the boat until someone shoots me a dirty look.

  I started drumming on my first birthday. I can’t remember the actual event, but I remember my mother’s telling of it.

  In Korea it’s traditional to have a huge first birthday feast, during which objects are set before the child—coins, a calligraphy brush, a dancer’s fan. The first object the child reaches for supposedly determines his or her life’s path.

  That day, so the story goes, my mother brought me to McDonald’s. She set a few things on the table—some pennies, a shell, a small doll, a comb—but I reached for the chopsticks my mother had brought from home. She had been using them to eat her french fries, dangling each strip of potato in front of her mouth like a worm before she bit it away from the pinch of wood. I grabbed the sticks right out of her hand and banged and banged them against the yellow Formica.

  Table drum, floor drum, chair drum, bed drum, knee drum, eardrum, heart drum, ba dum, ba dum, the whole world became a drum for me that day. When I was three, I got my first real drum—a feathered tom-tom my mother bought at a dime store. When I was six, she found a used set of bongos at a garage sale. Then, when I turned eleven, my mother gave me the chang’go, the drum that quickly became my home, my heart. That night was the first night she sang the pansori to me, the first night she began to let her story spill. Sometimes I think my whole life has been a silence punctuated by drum beats and MIDI samples and tae kwon do grunts. In between, I feel blank as the desert sky. Only sound can pull me into sharp relief.

  A loud motor, like wire brushes on cymbals, whirs into earshot. I look up as an airboat speeds by, its floor heaped with pelicans, a man in an orange jumpsuit standing above them. The sight of the birds is sickening, but the huge caged fan mounted on the back of the boat sends a welcome blast of slightly cooler air across my face as it passes. Out in the water, the air is not quite so stifling, the stink not quite so lethal, but it is still hotter and smellier than anything I’ll ever be used to. I’m grateful to at least have some space around my head, some open sky, after being walled in at the bird hospital for the last hour. The mountains that ring the sea are too far away to feel like walls.

  The woman points out the line that cuts across the hills like a belt. A waterline, she says, from an ancient sea. This basin has been filled many times, with both salt-and freshwater. Freshwater snail shells can still be found up there.

  The pontoon passes the top of a telephone pole that juts out of the water like a thick finger. The water level, the woman explains, keeps rising because of agricultural runoff from nearby farms. The sea won’t reach those watermarks up in the hills anytime soon, but it does sometimes rise enough to cause problems. Several resort areas were inundated in the seventies. Whole buildings are now underwater.

  “The Salton Sea has no outlet!” she explains to her catatonic audience.

  The phrase sounds incredibly foreboding, even though I know the sea could be jus
t the outlet I’ve been looking for. The boat passes some dead treetops pushing up through the wet surface. The branches are covered with birds. Living birds. Common cormorants, says the woman.

  These birds are diving birds, she says, great fishers, but they’re clumsy on the ground. They jump off trees to fly so that they won’t have to run. See their legs, way back on their bodies, like they’re coming out of their rumps? They’d tip over if they tried to run. In the Orient, the woman continues, people keep these birds as pets.

  I expect everyone to turn and look at me again, but no one does. I am amazed they can’t see my mother shining through my skin. My whole body feels like a watermark, a dark salty line left behind by the unknown soldier who fathered me. Only my eyes, my cheekbones, carry traces of my mother, like snail shells left behind, fragile memories of freshwater.

  That night, I leave the heat of the canvas tent I share with Abby in search of a phone. I follow a narrow trail, cut through some pungent-smelling brush, silvery in the beam of my flashlight. The trail ends at a wall of dirt, chest-high. When I walk up to it, I am startled to find water on the other side, mushrooming dark over the lip of earth. If the dirt barrier were to crumble, the sea would come pouring out, knocking me over. I turn and run back down the path, branches scratching at my clothes.

  As I pass back through the encampment, I catch sight of the ranger station and find my way to the pay phone. From here, the sea looks flat, nonthreatening. I watch the water shimmer in the moonlight and let my breath return to normal as the answering machine clicks on in San Diego. My own generic “please leave a message” recording is gone, replaced by a squawk, then Kane’s voice crowing, “Yoboseyo?”

  I can’t remember Kane ever saying the special phone hello before; I certainly can’t remember recording it. Either my mother impersonated his voice on the tape or she bought another parrot. Both possibilities make me feel strange. So does the fact that my mother changed the message so quickly after I left.

  “Omma?” I ask after the beep. “Are you home?” I picture my voice trailing out into the living room. “Hello? Are you there?”