MOCKINGBIRD by Patrick Roesle

Your knowledge has never advanced. It can only mutate and diverge. Like life itself.

MOCKINGBIRD

I was twenty-four when I first heard the mockingbird.

It doesn’t matter who I am. I’ll be the first to admit I’m mediocre. I grew up in the northern suburbs of New Jersey was an unremarkable student at the local public school. In the early 2000s I attended a mid-tier college where I studied the humanities because I didn’t know what else to do with myself. I earned no honors and I doubt any of my professors remember me. Afterwards I moved back in with my father. I commuted by train to an internship with a publishing company in Brooklyn three days a week, and put in hours at Starbucks during the other four. Five months later, the internship amounted to nothing but some free copies of a magazine and the dubious promise of a letter of recommendation from a mercurial editor who never got my name right. After that I took a position as an inside sales rep at an office in Newark. It didn’t work out.

Throughout the summer of 2007, I aggressively circulated my resume, hoping to avert what I feared would be my inexorable return to Starbucks. For the sake of getting out of the house, I did some volunteer work: helping out at senior care centers, picking up trash and spreading mulch at county parks, and delivering groceries to the homebound and terminally ill.

One morning at the beginning of September, I visited Paterson to lend my hand to a food pantry. There were four of us: myself, another volunteer, and two thirty-something coordinators on the nonprofit’s payroll. The coordinators parked their two 4x4 vans in a gated but empty parking lot between a dilapidated church and a payday loan business, and the group of us set up a row of canopy tents and folding tables, and laid out the donated food by category: fresh produce, canned goods, bread and cereal, and confectionaries. Once the gate was rolled back and the open-air pantry was open for business, the second volunteer and I were responsible for fetching donated food from the vans to fill vacancies on the tables, while the coordinators checked vouchers at the entrance and kept an eye on the crowd.

Our visitors lined up on the sidewalk with their used grocery bags, Jansport backpacks, and empty baby strollers. Safe to say over a hundred people showed up during the three hours we were in business. Maybe more than two hundred. I remember gregarious middle-aged white women reeking of cigarettes beelining toward the cupcakes, rednecks with prison tattoos scrutinizing the backs of cereal boxes, and an elderly Chinese couple, unconversant in English, who amicably returned their excess honeydew melons and canned tuna after one of the coordinators conveyed to them the terms of the voucher through pointing and pantomime. A potbellied black man with gaunt arms who wore a cap that read VIETNAM VETERAN asked me if we had any yellow apples. I made eye contact with a diffident child clinging to his mother’s skirt while she stroked his hair and carried on with another young woman in effervescent Spanish. A woman from Haiti gave me a rundown of the dishes she could make with a can of palm hearts. I took a walk to the van at the request of a weather-beaten man who was surely several years younger than he looked, and who thanked me profusely when I returned with our last loaf of sourdough. His cap read OPERATION ENDURING FREEDOM VETERAN.

It was my first experience working with the “needy,” as the representatives from the nonprofit conscientiously called them. Karl Marx and Ebenezer Scrooge would have referred to them as “surplus population.” My father called them “the hungry” or “moochers,” depending on whether he’d gone to church more recently than he’d listened to AM radio. But whatever anyone prefers they be called, here they were: struggling to get by, gathered by currents of accident and exigency in a blighted town from which industry and commerce had absconded like deadbeat parents. Lining up on a ninety-degree day for free bags of recently expired Wonder Bread and superficially marred produce the supermarkets would rather toss out than display for sale.

During my brief conversations with them, I found almost all of them decent, reasonable people— reasonable enough anyway, certainly no less than the housewives, consultants, and grad students to whom I served lattes when I worked at Starbucks, and they were certainly a more gracious lot. I’d like to say that at the age of twenty-four I possessed the maturity and astuteness to recognize a lesson in the insufficiency of good intentions and good sense as a guarantee against falling between the cracks—but that would be dishonest. I still took for granted the winsome partiality or indifference of the invisible powers that would spare me from becoming a bleak, anonymous statistic. Call it the confidence of the mediocre white man, if you must.

The other volunteer was a tall, orange-haired girl about my own age. Her name was Katie, and she told me she’d worked at food pantries and kitchens since high school. She told me a lot about herself, and about a lot of other things besides. Evidently she knew a little bit of everything, and ingenuously blurted out what she knew. The Chinese couple who took more than they were supposed to, Katie informed me, spoke Cantonese instead of Mandarin, which meant they came from southern China, maybe Hong Kong. She couldn’t speak much Chinese herself, but was fluent in Spanish, and told me that the young mother with the wide-eyed child at her knee was from Nicaragua. Then she rattled off some factoids about Nicaragua’s ecology and history. She identified the gauzy clouds in the sky as cirrostratus, and said they might forecast some much-needed rain. She explained to me how broccoli and asparagus grow, and informed me that the green parts of potatoes are poisonous.

At one point she gave me a nudge and said “listen.”

I tilted an ear toward the people milling about the tables. A baby was making babynoises. Women were commiserating. An elderly man expounded the virtues of a pescatarian diet to his neighbor. I assumed Katie wanted me to listen in on an argument or a salacious conversation, but I wasn’t hearing it.

“What are they saying?” I asked.

“No—I mean the bird.”

“The bird?”

Behind the chain-link fence at the parking lot’s rear, dozens of gray and brown flickering things cheeped in a thin strip of undeveloped land rank with weeds and woody vines clinging to emaciated trees. They pecked at the gravelly dirt, hopped over rusty debris and half-buried beer cans, and perched on the pokeweed and reddening sumac. There was another bird too, higher up, farther in, and hidden from view, making different sounds. Though I’d heard it intermittently for almost an hour by then, I hadn’t really listened until Katie pointed it out. Its varied and voluble calls seemed possessed of a deliberateness which the sparrows’ gregarious, dissonant chatter lacked.

“What kind of bird do you think that is?” she asked me.

“It’s a mockingbird,” I answered, glad for an opportunity to tell Katie something she didn’t know.

“Really?”

“Yeah—a mockingbird.”

The first time had been a guess. When I heard myself repeat mockingbird, I was certain it was correct.

I don’t know how I knew. I’d never seen or knowingly heard a mockingbird before, nor had I ever given much thought to what one might look or sound like. Songs and books I’d been made to sing and read in primary school had given me a name, wholly detached from any actual entities in the world, and now its living referent unaccountably drew it out of me.

Katie took my word for it. A few minutes later, she began singing “Listen to the Mockingbird” while she carried a box from the van and spread bags of carrots and bell peppers out on the table. The girl could carry a tune. I joined in—quietly, because I’ve always been a lousy singer. Two or three of our visitors sang along while they inspected our bruised tomatoes and canned soups.

The mockingbird continued long after we stopped. I’d never paid much attention to birds until then. Because they were said to sing, song was the sense I made of their sounds whenever I idly overheard them. A character in Harper Lee’s novel said that all the mockingbird ever does is sing its heart out for people; I believed it now, I felt it to be so. The mockingbird was singing, singing its heart out for all of us in Paterson that day, blessing us with his voice like an uncynical and gregarious street musician who only wants to brighten the mood about the neighborhood.

We packed it in at 3:00. The coordinators told us we needn’t be especially careful about loading the leftover breads and produce back into the vans, since everything but the canned goods was bound for a dumpster. One of them made an off-handed remark to me about how there were always leftover vegetables, but the confectionaries were always picked clean.

The mockingbird sang on while we collapsed the tents and folded up the tables. Katie was singing too—old camp tunes like “Down by the Riverside,” “Kookaburra,” and “Do Your Ears Hang Low.” At brief intervals I imagined her songs intersecting with the bird’s. I asked the coordinators if the nonprofit had any openings for paid positions. The answer was no, and I remember getting the sense one of them might have been suppressing a laugh.

When we all said our goodbyes and parted ways, the mockingbird was still singing, concealed wherever he was in the pokeweed and sumac of his ramshackle city.

I drove home humming to myself about sweet Hallie and the mockingbird singing over her grave.

Two years into the recession, I was accepted into an online graduate program hosted by a university in Boulder, Colorado. I still lived with my father in Jersey. Tuesday through Friday, from eight to four, I followed up on sales leads, scheduled service visits, and entered data for a small business in Roxbury that sold and repaired boilers and water heaters. I spent a lot of time looking out the office’s back window at the colorful little birds flitting in the row of dogwoods behind the tall wooden fence.

The program required me to visit Boulder and participate in a three-week intensive each June. My boss wasn’t thrilled about me stepping out for nearly a month, but he had a college-aged daughter who’d be on summer break and could fill in while I was gone. My long-term plan was to earn my master’s and seek new prospects before she got her art degree from the University of Delaware and moved back home, whereupon her father would probably give her my job for good.

During the final week of the summer sessions in Boulder, each graduate student had to deliver a half-hour presentation in front of everyone: our classmates, the faculty, the guest lecturers and instructors, and the sojourners taking creative writing workshops. On the second of the three trips to Colorado that stood between me and an MA in English, I gave a talk titled “Missing the Forest and the Trees: Toward Lucidity in Ecological Discourse” on a Thursday afternoon.

It wasn’t my first idea for a topic. Plan A had been an examination of Wallace Stevens’ “The Idea of Order at Key West.” I spent most of Saturday and Sunday mining lit crit journals, drafting outlines, and rereading the poem forwards and backwards. Then, during the round of presentations on Wednesday morning, a speaker giving a talk on the replication of hegemony through the literary canon mentioned that Stevens once referred to Gwendolyn Brooks by a racial slur. It was the first I’d heard of it—and it meant I had to ashcan my notes and start from scratch the day before I was due at the podium. Stevens was damaged goods.

I was in such a panic that I bought some Adderall from a classmate to help me pull an all-nighter. While I pondered a new topic, I found I still had Stevens’ poem on my mind—But it was she and not the sea we heard—and decided to slap together a lecture about the filtering of our understanding of nature through culture, metaphor, and anthropomorphism. With grossly inflated confidence, I wrote at a manic pace, making it all up as I went along, promiscuously citing sources I’d barely skimmed.

It wasn’t until I reviewed my notes during a tedious guest lecture the next morning that I realized just how far off the rails my script went. It ended with the admonition that literature should strictly treat human affairs—because people are all that people can be asked to sympathetically understand—and ecological discourse should dispense with rhapsodizing and be given over to professionals qualified to collect and examine scientific data.

It had all seemed so glaringly logical the night before.

Our talks were graded on a pass/fail basis. Showing up at the lecture hall on time and speaking coherently on a consistent theme for twenty-five minutes were the sole criteria for clearing the bar. But the success of a talk was informally gauged during the Q&A period that followed. If only a few students lined up behind one of the two microphone stands in the aisles, that was usually an indicator that you did okay. When a faculty member or guest lecturer got in line, they usually just pitched a softball question or vouchsafed some mild praise—but their deigning to engage with you in that setting was practically a laurel wreath. If it came from one of the maybe three or four notables whose names were recognized by even a handful of people outside the academy, you could consider its leaves gilded. But five or more students lining up at the mics typically meant that you’d blundered and they smelled blood.

To my relief, none of the faculty had any words for me after I finished speaking. It was the end of a busy day, and even if my position was indefensible, it wasn’t so offensive as to merit the effort of a harsh critique. Like me, they spent most of their time indoors.

But two students rose from their seats and approached the mic stands, and both were on the attack. I won’t divulge their names, but both have verified Twitter accounts. One has had pieces published in The Baffler and Public Affairs this year, and the other has been busy promoting her second novel. Both were intelligent, fiercely opinionated, and spoke with a conviction of which it was frankly unnerving to be on the receiving end.

The first to speak told me he regretted my choosing not to speak of the genocide of the Native Americans and other aboriginal peoples by the same European cultures responsible for developing the “objective” doctrines of Western science that I seemed to be espousing, and which led to the treatment of plants, animals, and land as mere resources to be exploited by capitalism. Moreover, he shared Jean Baudrillard and Bruno Latour’s skepticism of scientific discourse as the discloser of concrete “fact” rather than a disguised language for justifying and reifying power structures. His points about hegemonic discourse and the delegitimization of non-Western viewpoints of nature were emphatically reiterated by his associate, who specifically took issue with several terms buttressing my analysis (I remember her calling out “wilderness,” “primitive,” and “animism” in particular), which represented, she said, the conceptual edifice of colonialism’s white methodology, adding that it was only to be expected that a straight white male should deny nature her subjectivity.

I fended them off as best I could, careful not to provoke them any further. They were more eager to attack my half-baked ideas than I was to defend them, and I was so tired.

When I returned to my seat, my phone notified me of a Facebook message from Katie. Earlier in the day I’d sent her the text of my speech, curious to know how someone outside the academy might receive it. In her reply she said she wasn’t sure how she felt about it, and admitted having a hard time understanding how the conclusion followed from the body of the argument.

She and her husband were living in El Salvador and working for a Christian nonprofit. Judging from her updates and photos, they were very happy.

The next and final speaker was Joshua, a broad-shouldered but gawky man who wore black sweaters in June and had a meticulously groomed beard that confounded any estimation of his age. Joshua was generally maligned as an abrasive snot, and though I was never especially fond of him, I’d spoken to him enough times to discern that he was much less pretentious than stodgy and earnest. The talk he gave that afternoon was a critique of critiques, leveled against the French theorists and their American epigones upon whom the academy relied (and perhaps still relies, as far as I know) in wringing meaning from texts. He alleged philosophical points of contact between Nazi ideology and Foucault, and elaborated an argument that if we’re only so many marionettes moved about and spoken through by systems of domination, resistance to those systems must conceal a would-be despotism waiting to take control if and when the barriers to its ascendance are dismantled. As he pontificated about a return to Kantian ethics, I couldn’t decide whether he was astonishingly brave, oblivious to whom he was speaking, or simply held his audience in contempt.

After he finished, nearly a dozen people—including a couple of faculty members— queued up at the microphones to let him have it. Joshua stood calmly at the lectern, listening to his peers and teachers denounce him as a reactionary, and answered each of them with a nod and a mild “thank you.”

I didn’t stick around for his auto-da-fé. After rallying for my own speech, I was spent. I felt sick and needed to lie down. On the pretense of having to use the bathroom, I slipped out of the auditorium and headed for the exit.

Not for the first time, I wondered if I really belonged here. I knew as well as anyone else who the best students in the program were—the five or six of them who seemed destined to become popular intellectuals you’d hear being interviewed on NPR and written about in The New York Review of Books someday. Beneath them were the ten or eleven students with the diligence, talent, and knack for resume-building to become career academics or professional writers at least. And then there was everyone else: the fifteen or so who’d get accredited if they stuck with the program, but would in all probability end up right back where they were before, ringing people up at Trader Joe’s, working the admissions desk at a museum, and hustling for small-potatoes copywriting gigs, and steaming lattes. This was the group to which I belonged.

Whenever I doubted myself back at home, I could count on my father’s encouragement to help me push through. Even though I told him his notions regarding the number of doors a master’s degree was guaranteed to unlock were a bit outdated, he insisted I deserved entry into any of them more than I belonged in a dinky water heater shop. He was the first person in his family to earn a college degree, and was beside himself to imagine his only child would be the first to get a master’s. I didn’t want to disappoint him.

The amplified polemics against Joshua followed me through the corridor. The exit doors were propped open. The closer I approached them, the more clearly I perceived something that had been in my ear all along, underlying my own speech as I recited cherrypicked facts and facile aphorisms into the lectern mic, and tincturing the notes of Joshua’s measured oration and his censurers’ invectives with a subtle basso continuo.

I stood on the concrete steps outside and listened to the mockingbird.

cheeli-chilee, cheeli-chilee, cheeli-cheeli-chee… hee he hee…hee he hee…hee he…

pli-twini, pli-twini, pli-twini …

yii-yit-yit, yii-yit-yit…yit yii-yit-yit, yii-yit-yit…yii-yit…yit-yit… churli-chee-tcht-chii, churli-chee-tcht-chii, chrr chrr chrr…

eem-lili…eem-lili…eem-lili…

It was the first time I’d heard his song since that afternoon in Paterson.

Song. The word now struck me as malapropos. Maybe it was because I’d spent the last ninety minutes in a lecture hall, but my fatigued ear ascribed to the bird’s cries a rhythm that was less musical than prosaic. Dissertational, even.

I followed his voice toward a luxuriant mulberry tree that cast its shade over the picnic tables where people congregated to smoke and socialize before and after workshops. I’d never bothered to google “mockingbird” and see what one looked like. But now my interested was renewed, and the bird didn’t have a fenced-off lot to hide in this time.

My classmate Colleen was already sitting at a table, smoking a cigarette by herself. I’d noticed her sneaking out while Joshua was winding down his presentation, but hadn’t hoped to find her here. For the moment, the mockingbird could wait. Getting some rest after an all-nighter and a tough day could wait, too.

Colleen told me she didn’t agree with anything Joshua said, but had no appetite for what she knew was coming next. For that matter, she objected to most of my speech too, but was willing to forgive me after I explained the circumstances of its composition.

“I don’t think I agree with most of it, either,” I admitted.

She offered me a cigarette. She was my age, and had prepossessing blue eyes and a mysterious little scar on her clavicle. Everyone in the program liked and respected Colleen. She was a valuable contributor to any discussion she was involved in, and her writing was tight and insightful. From the start I found her disinterest in posturing and competition refreshing.

Back in the lecture hall, Joshua was still getting taken apart. At this point, few people were directly responding to his speech. Now they approached the mics to dialogue with one another, speaking to and agreeing with prior critics’ assessments, or simply to take advantage of the opportunity to make some tangentially related point before an energized and receptive audience. The open windows conveyed their voices outside, but I could only parse the occasional phrase.

Meanwhile, the mockingbird rattled on with the paced regularity of a metronome. During a pause in my conversation with Colleen, I heard him repeat precisely the passage he’d articulated when I stepped outside.

colo-nial, colo-nial, ide-olo-gy… der ri da…der ri da…der ri…

em-pire, em-pire, empire…

di-ffer-ance, di-ffer-ance…aes the-ti-cized, re-fer-rents…mé-con…nais-sance…

heter-o-no-mous, heter-o-no-mous, codes codes codes…

dom-inant…car-ceral…met-aphors…

“…should challenge the dominant carceral metaphors of white heteronormative dysconsciousness…” someone in the lecture hall was saying.

For a moment, both voices stirring the air, human speech and bird-noise alike, became completely divested of their content. Anthropoid barking and avian yattering. Without meaning, what was left? Pitch, tone, timbre—and raw function. Sounds for staking out territory. For threatening and driving off rivals. For demonstrating one’s fitness, for advertising oneself as a resource…

Obviously the thirty-four sleepless hours were taking their toll. I shut and opened my eyes, and the distinction between human language and bird-noise was restored.

Coleen pointed up. “There it is.”

I craned my neck. Perched on a limb directly above the table, a svelte bird, light-gray overall, flicked his long tail. For such a demonstrative creature, he looked rather drab. Mediocre, even. A generic, abstracted picture of bird.

He ceased discoursing and grasped a ripe mulberry in his black beak.

“It’s a mockingbird,” Colleen told me. “A mimic. Pretty much everything you’re hearing is something it picked up from another bird.”

“…tend to the scars from what Judith Butler calls the violence of language…” somebody spoke in the lecture hall.

“You don’t say,” I answered Colleen.

“Sometimes they learn other sounds, too,” she said. “Bell chimes and cellphones and whatnot. Back at home there was one that imitated a lawnmower.”

“Are you interested in birds?” I asked.

“Sure. I like to go birdwatching whenever I get a chance.” She stubbed out her cigarette on the table’s underside.

Borne on white-flashing wings, the mockingbird took flight and disappeared around the brick exterior of an administrative building.

“How long are you in town for?” I asked Colleen, and invited her to take a walk with me

through Chautauqua Park during the weekend and teach me more about birds before I flew back to Jersey on Sunday afternoon.

“Why wait till the weekend?” she asked.

Our visit to Chautauqua and subsequent trip to an Arapahoe Avenue bar went better than I could have hoped. Nevertheless—that night I made up my mind not to enroll for the fall semester.

I was thirty-one years old and living in a suburb of Washington, DC. We had a month-to-month lease on a studio apartment in the attic of a sprawling Victorian-style house, deviant and monstrous on an avenue of vinyl-sided boxes. I paid my share of the rent with the wage I received stocking shelves at a supermarket down the road. Colleen paid hers with the salary she earned teaching creative writing at a community college. I planned to be gone by the first of August. Colleen had packed up and left in June. It was too big an apartment in too nice a neighborhood and too close to too many cute brunch spots, dog parks, and upscale yoga studios for a supermarket employee to afford on his own, even if he didn’t have student loans and a car to pay off.

Having come down with an unseasonable case of the flu, I called out of work for the third night in a row.

It was the hottest week of the summer. The afternoon temperature was consistently in the upper nineties, and the nights were only cool by comparison. By horrible coincidence, the old mansion’s retrofitted central air unit broke down the day after the heat wave rolled in. The landlord’s handyman came to examine it, and left without making any repairs because he didn’t

have the right parts in his truck. He said he’d be back tomorrow, no later than 4:00 PM.

At one in the morning, I woke with a fever of 102° F.

When I peeled off my clothes, the hair on my arms stood erect and my teeth chattered, but I was still burning. Twisting and shivering in my unbearable skin, I craved Colleen, and I hated Colleen, and tortured myself with the observation that it had pretty much never been the case that any ex of mine ended up being worse off after leaving me.

My father told me I was too good for her, and I suppose he meant it. I was more inclined to believe those friends of Colleen’s who’d whispered in her ear that I was holding her back. She had a graduate degree, was fluent in French, and wanted to live abroad—a goal much more easily accomplished without the encumbrance of a monolingual partner with no sought-after skills or credentials. She knew she could do better than me, and resented me for it. I knew it too, and I so I resented her. Soon neither of us remembered what she ever saw in me to begin with.

I mopped the sweat from my forehead with a washcloth. My housemates tossed and snored in their own sweltering rooms below. In a darkness that had never been deeper than partial, the translucent circles traced by the blade of a pair of whirring floor fans aimed at the bed looked like caged mirages. The window blinds were cryptic moons with willow-frond adumbrations marring their fluted silver faces. And somewhere out in the sodium-vapor twilight, the mockingbird squawked his gibberish unto the world, too noisy and too pertinacious to ignore.

The fans weren’t nearly loud enough to drown him out. I had neither a television nor a radio to switch on. A pair of earbuds sat on the nightstand, but my phone had slipped from my fingers and landed in a mop bucket during my last shift, and its replacement was a day late in arriving. My relatively new laptop had no music saved on the hard drive, and god help me, the internet was down and the landlord kept the router in his cordoned-off rooms on the ground floor. Nothing was working the way it was supposed to and a wild animal was shouting outside my window like a living car alarm in the middle of the asphyxiating night.

Shutting the windows availed nothing. The bird was too near and his cries were too loud.

After twenty unventilated minutes, the air in the room seemed to congeal like soup skin. I feared I’d suffocate in my sleep, if ever I fell asleep. Reopening the windows with a fresh headache, I leaned out and croaked at the mockingbird as fiercely as my sore throat permitted. Stop it. Please stop. I’m sick and nothing’s working. Bird, shut up. For god’s sake, shut up!

A coughing fit brought me to my knees. The mockingbird raved on.

I unwrapped two cough drops and flopped miserably onto the sodden sponge of a mattress, thinking deliriously of Luigi Russolo and CS Lewis’s Screwtape. An intoxicating orchestra of noises. We will make the whole universe a noise.

I had Colleen to thank for teaching me to recognize the calls the mockingbird mimicked in his droning medley. The cheerily-cheerily-cheerily of the Carolina wren. The tufted titmouse’s peter-peter-peter. The cardinal’s chuk-chuk-chuk-chuk. He caricatured the robin’s aubade, the house finch’s agitated polemic, and the soft, seldom-noticed trill of an unprovoked blue jay, mechanically rattling off their native phrases like an actor sounding out lines in an unfamiliar language.

It was intolerable. After taking an unmeasured swig of Dayquil, I changed into a dry T-shirt and a pair of Colleen’s sweatpants that had somehow found their way into my dresser and stayed behind. They still smelled like her. Hearing the mockingbird’s voice with Colleen’s scent in my nostrils, I saw her blue eyes in Boulder and tasted Marlboros and mulberry. That son of a bitch— this was all a sick joke to him.

The air outdoors was agreeable. I scooped a stone out of a weedy garden bed and followed the mockingbird’s jabbering to the ancient weeping willow in the front yard. When I spotted him perched on a bough, I hurled the rock with all the strength I could muster—which wasn’t much.

Though he’d been in no danger of being struck, the mockingbird leapt with aplomb to a higher branch and issued a sharp, asperous whistle, too impersonal to be a taunt. Without skipping a second beat, he resumed his lunatic incantation from where he’d left off.

I had nothing left. Sweating profusely and trembling under the blanket draped over my shoulders, I dragged myself to the house’s covered wrap-around porch and slumped into a fraying wicker chair that creaked in protest at the minutest shifting of my weight. My ears were ringing and my eyeballs throbbed against their sockets. I began to doubt I’d live through the night.

The mockingbird continued making his monstrous racket. I tried shouting at him, and then would have settled for speaking to him when I found I could barely raise my voice above a whisper.

To my hoarse pleas and imprecations, the mockingbird replied with the signature verses of blackbirds, cowbirds, and song sparrows. He barked like a dog. He churred like a cicada and yowled like a raccoon. He imitated police sirens, gas station bells, and the Westminster Quarters. He spat out the iPhone’s default ringtone and the theme to All Things Considered. Clattering cash drawers and sidewalk café silverware. Laundromat clothes dryers. Coarsely tintinnabulating glass bottles emptied into the jaws of a garbage truck. Miley Cyrus and Carly Rae Jepsen hooks. Ice cream truck jingles. The rush of the metro train. Singing his volucrine heart out, chanting the city’s multitudes like a demented Walt Whitman, mythologizing the sibilant summer night in metropolis through an unabstracted language antedating intellect. The sense fell from my own words—febrile murmuring objections became herky-jerky nonsense onomatopoeizing the tinny droning in my ear, the crackling whine with which the wicker chair answered my every aching contortion, and the mockingbird’s interminable report of the world he knew.

I don’t know exactly how much time passed before I finally dozed off, or before I realized that the mockingbird had either flown away or fallen silent, leaving me listening and talking only to myself—though the voice I heard was still the mockingbird’s.

The next morning, a roommate leaving for work found me in the wicker chair, drenched in perspiration, my fever broken.

“What are you doing out here?” she asked.

I told her I had no idea.

In the turbulent hiss of rush-hour traffic on the avenue, echoes of the mockingbird’s chant addressed themselves to me.

They’ve never stopped.

August, 2020—Adesh’s bicycle is practically an antique, made of a dense aluminum alloy and too heavy to carry farther than a block at a time. The rear wheel grates against the fender and resists turning. Pushing it is like driving a plow.

I’ve taken it about a mile and a half already. The sun blazes through the hazy air as though from behind a greenhouse roof, opening every pore I’m aware of having.

Wild plantains spread their leaves and lewdly thrust their erect stalks from cracks in the concrete. Chicory blooms in the rough soil at the sidewalk’s margins. In the weedy grass of an undeveloped block the locals use as a dog park, a bulging pit bull with lurid, lustrous testicles pisses on a chunky heap of long-dried cement resembling the Elephant Foot at Chernobyl. When he notices me passing by, he strains his leash to bark at me through the split-rail fence. His owner speaks nonchalantly into her phone through a Harry Potter mask, but holds on tight.

The mockingbird observes the ruckus from a ginkgo tree. The pink thread of a birthday balloon dangles from his beak.

Lately I’ve got more time on my hands than I know what to do with. I was basically evicted in February. Our landlord wanted to give the house to her son and his newlywed wife, so she told us she wasn’t renewing our lease on the grounds that she’d found and collected the remains of my roommates’ joints in the backyard. The law was on her side. We hadn’t the time or money to fight her, and were given two weeks to clear out.

I put most of my things in storage. The place charges $90 a month, but selling my car last year gave me some savings I could tap into. Adesh, an old friend from college with whom I reconnected a couple years ago, let me sleep on his couch until I found somewhere else to live. I promised him and his wife Marissa that I’d be out of their hair in less than a month.

Then came the coronavirus.

I was put on furlough during the last week of March. With the campus shuttered, there hasn’t been much need for me at the university’s loading dock. I applied for and got an EBT card, but still haven’t seen any unemployment checks. Before the end of June, I was officially laid off.

The scores of résumés I’ve sent and the applications I’ve filled out resulted in maybe a dozen Zoom interviews, but I’ve received no offers so far. No landlord I’ve spoken to has any interest in offering a lease to someone without a job. The “looking for roommate” posts in the local Facebook groups have generally been submitted by twenty-somethings over in West Philly; after eight viewings of as many vacancies, I’m convinced they’re looking for people closer to their own age.

Adesh and Marissa are both working from home now. I help out with the housework whenever and however I can, and contribute to rent payments to the extent that I’m able—I’ll need money in the bank to pay the first and last and the security deposit when I find a new place—but I’m not certain how much longer my hosts will be willing to tolerate this arrangement. They still assure me I’m not in the way, but I’ve stopped believing them. On weekdays when they’re earning their salaries in their bedrooms, at the kitchen table, or in one of the living room chairs, I catch them glancing my way—or avoiding looking at me—and I know what’s on their minds is the space I’m occupying. I’m surplus population. I’ve overheard Marissa talking to Adesh about the lease, the landlord, and what might happen if they’re found violating the agreement by housing an unsigned tenant.

I’ve got nowhere else to go. Dad sold the house in Jersey and moved to a retirement community in Florida. Thanks to the pandemic, I can’t even visit him.

The rear wheel on Adesh’s bicycle got bent out shape or misaligned when it fell down the front steps yesterday evening. He’s registered to participate in a charity ride tomorrow morning, so he needs it fixed posthaste. He’s stuck in back-to-back Zoom meetings pretty much all day, while I’ve already applied to four jobs since getting up this morning. Taking care of his bike is the least I can do to thank him for his patience with me. I told him I’d cover the cost of repairs, and I can only hope it doesn’t come out to much.

When I knock on the door at the bike shop on Girard Avenue, a man my age with blackpainted nails and a kindly demeanor informs me he’s only selling bikes right now. I’ll have to go elsewhere for repairs, and he recommends the shop’s sister location on Fairmount—about a mile to the south. At least it’ll be mostly downhill.

I push Adesh’s bike past a derelict smokestack rising into the smog like a tentpole. People in masks hurry home with Whole Foods bags, audibly grumbling about having to walk around me. Butterflies and bumblebees browse the sunflowers, daylilies, and hydrangea behind the slatted metal fence of a gated and locked community garden. Vintage Strawberry Shortcake figures and a porcelain Smurf stare out at the world through the begrimed windowpane of a little antique shop that will never reopen. Young men play dice in a narrow side street redolent of cannabis and barbeque. A dozen adolescents on dirt bikes roar down a two-way street, swerving precariously around cars and delivery vans. Goldfinches pluck seeds from feeders on a lane of raised flowerbeds, gracefully aged sycamores, and covered porches made for Instagram, where strings of globed lightbulbs hang across the street, the asphalt is empty of plastic rubbish, and nobody behind the HATE HAS NO HOME HERE and BIDEN 2020 signs in the windows was ever in any danger of getting laid off. The metal bars and barrier meshes shielding a decrepit Baptist church from vandals won’t protect it from the paper mulberry saplings consolidating their roots in its cornices and steeple.

I glance up at a passing helicopter and spot the mockingbird bobbing his tail on a—what? What’s the word?

A projection with a window—an oriel, I think.

I got into the habit of taking long walks to minimize my presence at the house during the day, and then browsing technical glossaries at night so I know what to call the things I see while

I’m out. Because, think—how many of the city’s proper names are foreign words to us?

Catenary. Pilaster. Transom. Soffit. Quoins. Lintel. One would think an environment engineered and built by human beings for human use and habitation would need no demystification—but however we deepen our acquaintance with a city, any city, an irrefragable foreignness confronts us through its numbered and named streets, and from the structures betwixt and bestriding them. We can be acculturated to the metropolis, but never naturalized. The urban landscape will always be as exogenous to us as that of any forest or savannah. In this respect, the sparrows, chimney swifts, and wasps that construct their nests in the cornices and architraves differ from us in that they make no distinctions between the built and the natural in terms of origin, ownership, or purpose. They avail themselves of these things as they are, and however they can.

I’m afraid Adesh and Marissa find me quite eccentric. It probably isn’t helping my situation.

It’s so hot. I feel feverish. Ever summer is going to be hotter than the last now, forever.

I arrive at the bike shop on Fairmount just as a young woman with an Adventure Time face mask is locking up. Someone who works there just tested positive for covid, she tells me. The shop is closing and they’re all going home and not coming out for two weeks.

According to Google, there’s another bike shop open for business and offering repair services another 1.3 miles to the southeast.

The helicopter I saw earlier inscribes a noisy orbit over a police precinct where a mass of some hundred demonstrators are gathered in the street, blocking off traffic. I don’t know whether they’re still protesting George Floyd’s death, the police in general, or if there’s been some new outrage I don’t know about yet. But the most direct route to the bike shop is through them, and at this point I’d rather not heave Adesh’s bicycle even a block farther than I have to.

The protestors on the sidewalk across from the station are less densely clustered than their cohort on the street. I’m able to weave myself and the bike between them without much fuss. A woman standing at the tumultuous mass’s nucleus issues a crackling and booming statement through a portable amplifier. Some people answer her proclamations with cheers and cries of affirmation. The rest of the crowd shouts over her, while the phalanx’s opposite wings raise competing chants. All in all, the agitators are impressively disciplined: none of them come any nearer to the precinct than the edge of the curb, and nobody brandishes weapons or lobs projectiles. Though the rows of police posted on the sidewalk and front steps nevertheless seem rather ill at ease.

I pass near enough to the amplifier to make out in the speech of the demonstration’s nominal spokesperson a few of activism and academicism’s evergreen shibboleths: white capitalism, structures of inequity, neighborhood decolonization, and so on. Boulder and grad school are long enough gone that I can feel a tinge of nostalgia.

I’m almost through when I come across a group of three young men in black sweatshirts accosting a cop on the sidewalk. The officer they’re questioning and denouncing is black; like most of the demonstrators, the young men are white. The cop sticks his thumbs in his belt loops and glumly abides his inquisitors as they take him to task.

Maybe it’s really nothing more than its awkward optics (no good cops in a racist system, as the chant goes), but the scene doesn’t sit well with me. I hear myself speaking as I push the bicycle past them.

One of the three young men shouts after me. “How do them boots taste?”

They sling taunts and indictments until I’m halfway down the block, and then lose interest. I’m thankful they don’t follow me. I’m not here to fight. I just want to get my friend’s

bike fixed.

On the Ben Franklin Parkway, the flicker of white-streaked wings alerts me to the mockingbird’s presence. Unnoticed by the motorists idling in their cars and the pedestrians poking at their phones, the mockingbird alights on a traffic signal. He presides quietly over the avenue, attending to the city’s rude clockwork and letting it engrave the possibility of new songs upon his organism.

More helicopters to the east. There must be another crowd at City Hall.

It’s a slow day at the bike shop. A man in cutoff jeans tells me he can have the wheel repaired in about forty-five minutes. I don’t believe the distance he keeps from me is entirely out of caution against transmission. The stains under my armpits have seeped down my shirt to my lower ribs. I smell terrible.

I go around the corner and have a late lunch at a café with sidewalk seating. It costs more than I’d like to spend, but the other options in this part of town aren’t any cheaper.

Spotted lanternflies crawl up the stucco and land at my feet, flaring their red and white wings. I’m tired of stepping on them. Like the coronavirus, they’re here to stay.

A man in ragged clothes pushing a wire cart stuffed with plastic bags plods from table to table, asking for money. I offer him the second half of my chicken salad sandwich, but he isn’t interested. I give him the three quarters in my pocket.

Parts and labor come out to ninety dollars. It’s worth it when I adjust the seat and peel down the street. I feel like I’m flying. The sweltering still air becomes a generous breeze upon my face, and every dollar spent, every bead of sweat I shed getting here becomes worth it.

Instead of heading straight back, I take Adesh’s bike on a detour toward the art museum.

After securing the bicycle to a signpost with Adesh’s U-lock, I saunter toward the riverbank to sit in the shade and just be still for a while. The sun shines in a limpid blue sky. The air is palpably less heavy than it was earlier. Better and better.

I open Facebook to check the usual apartment-hunting groups, but get lost in my personal feed. Katie posted a photo of her daughters; they’re all living in Mexico now. Colleen and I unblocked each other a while back, but leaving a comment congratulating her and her husband on buying a house in Nice would still be awkward for us both. Adesh and Marissa post memes while they earn their paychecks at home. I scroll past a couple of people from Boulder who I’d expected to see on the New York Times bestseller list by now. One teaches English at a private high school and the other has some amorphous administrative position at a nonprofit in Austin.

I pocket my phone. Letting myself get absorbed in it would be a waste of a summer afternoon. There aren’t many left.

I lie on my back with my hands behind my head, and shut my eyes.

Raucous geese quarrel in the muck below the embarkment. A freight train whines and clatters across the river; above the tracks purrs the obstreperous highway. An ambulance siren howls on the Parkway. Whistling and thrumming like little modems, barn swallows dart over the water and across the lawn. People younger and more beautiful than most of us will ever be sit on blankets and drink wine, carefree and maskless, scattering their laughter into the air like dandelion seeds. The first wind I’ve felt today brushes the treetops, and their leaves assert their whispering not-voices against the pervasive thumping of far-off helicopter blades. Meadow katydids click in the goldenrod. A labile canticle of mechanism and unruly life, bodies and engines and infinite wheels, teeth in teeth, turning, murmuring…

I awaken to a cop shining a flashlight in my face. He’s got a ruddy cheeks and a bulldog’s jaw—which I can see because he isn’t wearing a mask.

No, I tell him, I’m not drunk, I’m not on drugs, and I’m not a vagrant. I only dozed off. Yes—for four hours. I didn’t get much sleep last night. He holds the flashlight on my eyes and dresses me down, informing me how grateful I ought to be that he found me before any of the junkies from the homeless encampment over on the baseball field wandered out from their tents to roll me over.

When he gets bored of listening to himself, he lets me go.

Returning to the footpath where I locked Adesh’s bicycle, I find the front wheel missing.

Nuts unscrewed, carried off. What possessed me to think I didn’t need to bring a cable?

I’ve missed a text message from Adesh, asking when I’ll be back and if his bike got fixed. I wonder if his words—be back as opposed to be home—were selected deliberately. I’m too embarrassed to send a reply. He’ll find out soon enough.

Home or not, it’s where I’m headed. I stand the bike on its new rear wheel and try to push it forward without torquing it over.

Trudging uphill with Adesh’s heavy, ungainly one-wheeled bicycle is slow going. At this rate, I’ll be out here another hour. I should probably find a moment to stop and text Adesh.

I turn north at the old penitentiary, where Quaker wardens pioneered techniques of solitary confinement. They believed they were granting prisoners a mercy, providing them the time and silence to commune with God and sort out their consciences. The looming granite edifice is a museum now, a monument to the discrepancy between intention and outcome in human affairs. I glance at the bereft fork of my friend’s bicycle and can only laugh.

Secretive nighthawks chirrup on bitumen rooftops. A solitary rhymer freestyles down the sidewalk. Sparring cats shriek in a shadowed alley of garage doors. Perched in an oak tree, the mockingbird chirrups like a nighthawk, rhymes like a freestyler, shrieks like a cat. The augur and the augury both, as ever he was to me.

You again, I tell him.

I will not utter to anyone else the question I ask of him, and of which I have no expectation of an answer.

With a jerk of his neck, the mockingbird sets his inexpressive black eyes upon me. He begins afresh, emitting a mantric drone unlike anything I’ve heard him utter before.

His song is the indifferent locus of the city’s total life. The eddies propagate across space, touching and impalpably changing all they meet. They rebound to the mockingbird, not diminished, but inexplicably magnified, converging on and coming down us both, the him and I, encoded with and distorted by the vicissitudes in which each sounding body participates.

Louder. Louder. My skin vibrates.

Every refracted echo brings itself separately to bear on the mockingbird’s discerning ear. He repeats them as he hears them until I can no longer distinguish vocalization from reverberation. The manifold of the insomniac landscape’s noise is subsumed and amalgamated with the mockingbird’s song, made homophonous within it. The chant becomes a roiling fugue, devoid of mind, defying understanding—not beyond understanding, but beneath it, speaking to understanding’s inaccessible and irrational substratum.

My ears pop.

A chant of many voices, containing and extrapolating more of the city’s fathomless anatomy with every round. It radiates outwards, tunneling through brick and wood and flesh and metal and glass and air, and it returning in convective gyres, expanding, pulling more of the world into the mockingbird’s anthem, cohering with an intricacy that the groping fat fingers of thought cannot unravel.

My grip on the handlebars and seat involuntarily loosens. Perfectly and impossibly balanced, the bicycle rolls backward down the sidewalk like a riderless unicycle, leaping off the curb and colliding with an SUV plowing through the stop sign. The impact sends it skidding across the street, gears clattering loose and frame mangled. The woman in the driver’s seat rolls down her window to yell at me, but her shouts are the whirring of an engine, and the whirring is the gibberish of starlings and phragmites susurrating in the breeze, and it’s acorns striking the roofs of parked cars and it’s helicopter blades pumping in the air and the acrimonious hurling of dinner plates and pigeons in the awnings and it’s the fixed percussive beat of freight train and it’s the groaning of invisible turbines pushing the current through the wires to light up the streetlamps buzzing with the beating of mothwings and the stridulations of katydids and a million crickets.

Is my nose bleeding?

It is no longer the mockingbird’s voice, but the resonant frequencies of the city itself—of the rivers and gardens and derelict factories and condominiums and churches and halal carts and overpasses, exponentially reinforced, hammering into my skull. The mockingbird speaks as the city, as its chitin and concrete, its cogs and girders, its roots and soil and sewage and hawthorns, every parking meter and house centipede and plastic bag shivering on razor wire, all the mosses and mushrooms and diesel engines and consultants and drug addicts and chimney swifts and paulownias and sooty balustrades and beehives and drain pipes and nursing rat pups and the whole gamut of named entities and an infinity of nameless events that are besides.

I hear the staccato drumming of footfalls, the endless drawl of tires on pavement, bells and jackhammers, subwoofers, spigots, and the babel of human speech. From out of the whirlwind, a voice: Do you believe this belongs to you? You imagine this is a creature born of your intelligence, domesticated by the sticks and shocks of methodology, answering to and evolving at the pace of your advancing knowledge?

The mockingbird laughs: Your knowledge has never advanced. It can only mutate and

diverge. Like life itself.

I’m on my back now. The sharp crunch of glass cracking when my phone slipped from my pocket—now Adesh addresses me in a voice message, demanding to know where the fuck I took his bike.

The chant discloses the throbbing joy of neoteric life pushing up against the city from below and watching from the interstices, waiting for its time. Waiting for the rivers to heave over their embankments, the cracks in the asphalt to go unmended, the ecstatic wood to split brick and warp steel, and the cables, fences, and rebar to corrode and crumble in the soft, irresistible grip of morning glory in the blistering heat of autumns to come. When the wraiths of our foolishness and the insubstantial mist of our lost ideas trail like a dissipating odor those who will survive us to inherit the remains of what we’re compelled to make, to abide in, and what in sustaining and starving us remakes us and reconfigures our compulsions. We were never in control.

The voices subside. The echoes recede.

I wipe the blood from my lips and chin, and collect my phone before standing up.

Adesh’s bike lies in the middle of the street, beyond repair. I’m not sure how it happened.

The gray bird in the tree hops to a higher branch and stares into the distance.

I don’t know if I can go back now. If nothing else, I can afford to push my luck.

The second question I ask is more modest than the first, but no less urgent.

What am I to do, the mockingbird speaks in unison with me.

I can’t surprise him.

The laughter that answers mine is the whinny of a robin, rhapsodic and ancient. Before I can say anything else, the mockingbird takes wing and disappears into a night sky flecked with sparse, ineffable stars.