Birds and Water

The package looked smaller once it arrived than Mr. Shimabukuro had expected. He had expected it to tower above him, but it was not even up to his knees, and it was compacted into a space no larger than his welcome mat. One hundred fifty bottles of Suntory mineral water, shipped on order of his client, by plane from Osaka to the UPS delivery router in Pittsburgh, and then overland for a day and a half to Philadelphia, finally reaching its destination on his front stoop, where it sat now. It defied his perception to look at it.

The individual bottles shone like jewels in the midmorning sun. They perspired, still cold from the freezer truck, and the sweat that slid from them darkened the cardboard that encased the tops and bottoms of each bottle and fogged the shrink wrap around them.

Mr. Shimabukuro opened his front door and carried the small case inside, setting it down on his kitchen floor. He opened his kitchen drawer and found a scissors, then cut away the plastic and carefully lifted away the cardboard. Mr. Shimabukuro clasped his hands together with delight. Perched atop each bottle was a bird, a whole aviary of tiny plastic figurines, each one of a different species. A toucan. A lark. A sparrow. A cormorant. A loon. An emperor penguin. A Haast’s eagle. And one that drew his sight from the rest, a strange and whimsical creature, not quite bird, not quite elephant, which Mr. Shimabukuro found gaudy and wrong.

He plucked each bird from the top of its bottle, careful not to break the base as it pulled away from the adhesive keeping it in place. He set the birds on his kitchen table, arranging each by type—the birds of prey, the winter birds, the seed eaters, the aquatics. The elephant bird sat on its own at the far end of the table, where it could not taint, nor perplex the other birds.

When each bottle was birdless, Mr. Shimabukuro stood before them, bowed deeply, and said, “Hello, fine birds. Your journey has been long and fraught with peril. No doubt you are tired, no doubt hungry. I apologize that I am not a king, nor a man of great means as would befit your august body; however, I can provide you each with a perch, either with those of your kind or apart. Whichever suits your desires best, let me know. In writing would be best, as I frequently forget what is said to me. I have some business to attend to for the afternoon, but for now, please feel free to mingle amongst yourselves, or not, as you wish.”

When he was confident all the magnificent birds of the earth felt welcome in his home, Mr. Shimabukuro picked the elephant bird up from the table and, holding it in his palm, close to his face, reprimanded it.

“What in the name of god do you think you are doing, Mr. Elephant Bird?” said Mr. Shimabukuro, “You do not belong here, among the many great birds of nature. You are an abomination. I invite you to think upon your shame as you make your way to the trash heap that is your rightful home.”

With that, Mr. Shimabukuro threw the elephant bird into the trash and then shoved it down deep among the coffee grounds, the eggshells, the wads of used paper towel.

Mr. Shimabukuro replaced the cardboard over the icy-cold bottles and masked the broken shrinkwrap with Saran. He carried the package out to his car, where he laid it in his trunk, and climbed into the driver’s seat. He sat for a moment, the sunlight pouring onto him through the windshield, and felt, for the moment, expansive. He breathed in deep, thinking of the birds in his kitchen, the abomination he had disposed of, the bottles in his trunk, still cold as ice, still sweating through their cardboard and fogging their shrinkwrap. He had done well, Mr. Shimabukuro thought. This venture would lead to another, which would lead to another, and so forth. Soon he would have success, after all these years, soon he would be a man to reckon with.

He turned the key in the ignition and drove across town to the home of his client, a factory worker named Edgar, who ordered the bottles through his friend Isao, who, in turn, was engaged in an on-again off-again relationship with Daina, the daughter of Mr. Shimabukuro. Mr. Shimabukuro had not asked Isao why Edgar wanted so much water. Such questions were bad for business. He had only called the bottling plant, where he had friends, and asked them what they could sell him wholesale.

Edgar answered his door, and Mr. Shimabukuro held out the case of water to him. The package was smaller than Edgar had expected. He thought it would be delivered on a dolly, pushed around by a large man with large muscles and a bad odor. It had not occurred to him it might be presented to him by hand by an elderly Japanese man. For a moment, he was thrown.

Finally, Edgar said, “Come in, Mr. Shimabukuro,” and stepped aside to let the old man through. Edgar told Mr. Shimabukuro to set the box down anywhere he pleased, and then ran to the kitchen for a scissors.

“Would you care for some water?” Edgar joked, as he slid the scissors down along the side of the case.

Mr. Shimabukuro laughed politely and shook his head. He waited while Edgar pulled the plastic wrap free and removed the cardboard top. Edgar looked up at Mr. Shimabukuro and frowned.

“Where are the birds?” Edgar asked.

Mr. Shimabukuro started and shuffled in place for a moment.

“Birds?” he finally asked.

“Each bottle comes with a little plastic bird,” Edgar said, “It’s a promotional thing the company’s doing. They’re collectible.”

“There were no birds,” said Mr. Shimabukuro. “Only bottles of water.”

“Well, shit,” said Edgar, “I wish I’d known that before you came all the way out here. I only wanted them for the birds. My wife’s a collector.”

“No birds,” said Mr. Shimabukuro again, “just water.”

“Yeah,” said Edgar. “Well, what did we agree on?”

“Three hundred,” said Mr. Shimabukuro.

Edgar winced and ran his hand through his hair.

“Tell you what,” he said, “since there aren’t any birds, how about I give you one eighty and we call it even.”

“We agreed on three hundred,” Mr. Shimabukuro said.

“Well yeah,” said Edgar, “but I thought I was getting a bunch of birds with this. I can’t pay you three hundred bucks for a few bottles of water. I’ll give you one eighty for your effort and the shipping and everything, but that’s the highest I can go.”

Mr. Shimabukuro frowned. After shipping costs, one eighty was just barely a profit. He would have enough from this deal to replace the gas in his car, but not much more. Finally, he nodded and took Edgar’s money. He left Edgar’s home and drove across the city feeling deeply insulted.

That night, Edgar lay in bed with his wife, staring at the ceiling. The neon sign of a bar buzzed on and off in the street below. Edgar climbed out of bed and walked naked to the kitchen. The bottles still sat on their kitchen floor, ice cold refreshing, still sweating in the humid summer air. Edgar examined them briefly and considered sending them back to Osaka. The fact was, his wife had only wanted them for the birds. She collected them, the figurines, and was just shy of the complete collection. She had the toucan. The lark. The sparrow. The cormorant. The loon. The emperor penguin. The Haast’s eagle. But the one she really wanted, the one she was missing, was the Zo-Chou, a whimsical little creature that was not quite bird, not quite elephant, but was beloved and very much desired among collectors. Three hundred would have been nothing to pay, had the case come with one of them. Without, it was just a case of very expensive mineral water. Perhaps if they stretched it out, thought Edgar, it would make up for the costs.

Edgar poured himself a glass of tap water, which was tepid and full of minerals. Edgar could hear his wife, one room away, grinding her teeth, which she did when she was angry. Or upset. Or sleeping soundly. He sipped his water and stood before the window, when he heard a sound from outside. Something like a moth caught between the window pane and the blinds. Edgar reached between the Venetian slats for the latch that held the window closed and pulled it open.

Later, after the sun had risen, Edgar would try his best to explain the situation to his wife. To help her understand the tiny beak marks all over his body, the many puncture wounds leaking blood all over their kitchen floor, the hundreds of bottles of water—still cold, still sweating against their cardboard container and their shrinkwrap. For now, there was only the cool, damp rush of night air, and the sound of fluttering wings—hundreds of them, he thought—so light and distant.

Cyril Shot: Private Eyes

The glare off the salt flats was unbelievable. I’d seen the flats before, a couple of years back, and they were gorgeous then, but that was at sunset. At noon, the sun turned all those little crystals into a blinding expanse of white and the wind kicked the salt dust into the air, where it hung around as a thin haze that flavored every breath like french fries.

I adjusted my eyes to compensate for the glare, and a couple of figures snapped into focus about a hundred meters off. A man and a woman, lean like lamb jerky, and clothed in loose-fitting linens that barely covered them. Hippies. There were a lot of them living out on the flats those days, in farm communes that scraped and cultivated the crystals for sale on the mainland. I figured these two probably came from the farm that called in the report I was there to investigate.

The man held up his hand to signal a greeting.

“Hey brother,” he called out, “you from the agency?”

“Yeah,” I said, “you the one who found the ship?”

“That’s me.”

When he was close enough, he held out his hand for a shake.

“Jack Legba.”

His skin was dark tan and covered in fine white powder and his palms were rough and cracked, a side effect of living on the flats. The salt in the air literally sucks the moisture through your pores. You can die from dehydration without breaking a sweat there, and even if you live, your skin has to be extremely tough to avoid cracking. Folks who live on the flats long enough say they get used to the feeling, but I couldn’t see how.

“I’m Cyril Shot,” I said, taking his hand. “I’m with the AIEO.”

“Good to meet you, Cyrilshot,” Jack said, like the two names were one word, “This is Melanie. We run the commune together.”

“You have a last name?” I asked her.

“Nope,” she said. She smirked like she’d said something really clever. Her skin was soft-looking and pale, made paler by the thin layer of salt covering her, and it was pink from sunburn. I figured she was new to the salt flats or else she didn’t go outside much. In some of the newer compounds, they build their homes underground, and only the people directly handling the salt crop ever go to the surface.

“Sorry to call you out here this time of day,” he said, “Truth be told, I thought it would take you longer to get here than it did. I was surprised the agency was able to send you so quickly. I figured you guys would be swamped these days.”

I nodded. The Agency for the Investigation of Extrastellar Objects had been overloaded in the last few weeks with false reports. It was like this every year during the summer meteor showers. Folks would see a cluster of shooting stars and panic, figuring it was the first bombardment of another invasion. The full-time agents would get all booked up assuring citizens the aliens weren’t coming back, and the agency would start calling in freelancers like me to keep the works from gumming up.

“So where’s the ship?” I said, “I want to get away from these flats before my internals start to bake.”

“Sure, sure,” Jack said, “right this way, sir.”

He waved his palm over his shoulder, pivoting in place, and started back the way he came. We walked across the flats until I lost track of where we were and what time it was. The landscape stretched to infinity in all directions in a way that really upset my sense of perspective. I felt like I was looking at the place through a fish-eye lens and all those distant lines had started to converge on me. The heat, too, was something else. Even in the visible spectrum, I could see it rising in waves from the cracked ground. In infrared, the air around me would be a dazzling display of technicolor yellows and oranges. No wonder this area drew so many hippies, I thought. Between the salt farms and the trips they could get with a right pair of IR goggles and couple of toad cigarettes, the place was perfect for them.

I was dehydrated when we got to the ship, and cursed myself for forgetting to bring a canteen or at least a couple of oxy-hydro poppers to carry me over. I kept running my tongue back and forth over the roof of my mouth, and I swear I could hear the rasping sound every time. It was a lucky thing I had work to pay attention to, or I might have gone nuts.

When we got to the ship, Jack introduced it to me with the same flourishing gesture he had used to get me to follow him. Before I adjusted my eyes for deep-space investigation, I gave the ship a good once over in the visible spectrum. It was sunk deep into the salt, with a drag path that extended away from me maybe two miles. It was a sleek thing, shiny black and metallic with several window panels on the front. I guessed the hull was made from carbon polymers, but couldn’t be sure until I looked at it in UV. Carbon polymers burn like Christmas trees in June when you look at them in UV.

Outside of all that, my first thought was that it was smaller than I expected, a ship meant for one person. Maybe two. And the thing had wings.

“This ship is meant for a landing party,” I said.

“What makes you say that?” said Jack.

“Spaceships don’t need wings,” I said, turning to Jack. “There’s no atmosphere in space, so wings would be useless. They’d just amount to extra weight on takeoff.”

“They’ve got wings in all the films,” Melanie said.

“That’s because most people can’t wrap their minds around the idea of something flying unless it looks like an airplane,” I said.

“So they’re landing, eh?” asked Jack, “Colonizing?”

I shook my head. That would be a break in routine for the aliens. Last time they attacked us, they didn’t bother to land and send in ground troops. Why would they? If you have the technology to traverse a galaxy at speeds faster than the laws of physics allow, you know enough to fight your wars from the air. The first bombardment came a month before we even knew they were there. They just up and flung an asteroid at us from our own solar system. It seemed unlike them to jump the gun with a landing party, now that we’d had some time to repopulate.

“Mind if I smoke?” Jack said, “Will that interfere with anything you’re doing?”

“It won’t interfere,” I said, “But you should know my implants broadcast everything I see to the BATF. Anything I see, they see. Might want to keep that in mind.”

The agency liked to call us their private eyes, but I always thought that term needed to be updated. My eyes are anything but private. There was a time when an agency freelancer could get by with a good pair of spectra-goggles, but when The Human Asexual Reproduction Front detonated those x-ray bombs outside of the U.N. a couple of years back, the agency thought it a good time to upgrade their requirements. Since then, the agency doesn’t let anyone even walk through their front door unless they have a pair of full-spectrum ocular scanners implanted in their eyes. Of course, legally, all ocular scanners must be registered with the Feds and logged into the BATF mainframe at all times. When I was awake. When I was asleep. They saw what I saw, even when what I saw was my dreams.

“No worries,” Jack said, “I don’t have anything illegal. Just a little tobacco and powdered toad. We make these ourselves. Cure the rolling papers in rum.”

I nodded. Jack lit his cigarette and offered me a drag. I declined, and he passed it to Melanie while I turned back to the ship. I blinked and switched into low end of the spectrum, down past the reds into wavelengths so long you can measure them on a school ruler. This was one of my favorite wavelengths to look at. Everything in the entire world is dark at these wavelengths, but when you look at the sky, it glows from the background radiation that fills the entire universe. Anything that comes to earth from space has a similar glow to it for the first few days. The ship was invisible in this spectrum, which meant it hadn’t spent any time in deep space recently.

I flipped back into the visible spectrum for a moment. The hippies were lying on the ground with their heads on each other’s shoulders. They were passing the toad cigarette back and forth and humming in a low tone to each other.

“When did you find this ship?” I asked.

“Yesterday,” Melanie said, “It fell from the sky—whoosh—nearly burned up this place.”

“It was a sign,” Jack said, “It was a fire in a scorched land, but it brought the rain, get it?”

I sighed and leaned back against the ship. With the toad taking effect on them, Jack and Melanie would be useless for answering questions.

“There are a million of me, Cyrilshot,” Jack said, “A million of me, but how many of you. How many? Just one, but give me ten hands and I’ll let the question feel itself.”

The ship was invisible at the low end of the spectrum, so I shifted into the UV. The hull wasn’t carbon polymers. It wasn’t anything I had seen before. It was the same color as the ground around it, but it was clear and glassy under the UV, and it shone with a dull light from somewhere inside of it. For a second, I thought it might be made of ice, but then I remembered the heat around me.

Suddenly, I realized what I was looking at. It was salt. The same chemical composition as the salt around me, but the crystal structure was strange. It was like they had coaxed the molecules to rearrange themselves into the shape of a spacecraft. Then there was the light inside of it. That was at a higher spectrum. I clicked forward into the x-rays and suddenly everything went black. I was dizzy for a moment, then I felt the back my head striking against a hard surface. I smelled salt in my nose, and a minute later, blood.

“Shit, shit, shit!” I shouted. With nothing to echo against for a hundred miles in any direction, the words died in the air.

“There are a million of me, Cyrilshot. A million of me and a million of Melanie.”

“Shut the fuck up, Jack,” I said.

I shifted from spectrum to spectrum, searching for one that I could see in. The blues were completely shot, and nothing in the visible spectrum was registering. I couldn’t believe I was stupid enough to fall for it. It was the reason the agency gave me these eyes in the first place. They put a god damn x-ray bomb inside of a ship made of salt and set the damn thing off. The salt would bend the light into the UV, which would leave it harmless to anyone living on the flats, but if anyone was dumb enough to look right at the thing in the high end of the spectrum, it would short out their eyes like they had stared into the sun.

Finally, I came into the reds and I could see again. IR was useless—there was too much heat in the air to make any one object out against another—but in the bottom end, in the color that belonged only to the universe, I could see again. I was staring at the sky, and the silhouette of the ship was blocking half my view. It really was a remarkable thing, that ship. I had to hand it to them, they’d taken salt farming to a new level.

Behind my head, I heard footsteps crunching in the salt, and soon the silhouette of a man blocked out the sky.

“Don’t feel bad about this, Cyrilshot,” I heard Jack say, “there are a million of me. We’d have gotten the drop on you sooner or later. If not with this trap, then with another.”

“The BATF has all of my visual records. They’re going to know in an instant it was you who killed me.”

“It doesn’t matter. By the time they sort through the records, you’ll have served your purpose.”

“Fill me in, Jack, what purpose could this possibly serve?”

“No,” he said, his voice suddenly grave, “Sorry Cyrilshot, but no. Our plans are our own.”

I didn’t see the knife that he stabbed me with. Just a pointy shadow against the even shine of starlight. It hurt like a knife, though, that was for damn sure. I had to give them credit for the sheer inanity of their plan. The Human Asexual Reproduction Front had been fighting for years for legitimacy without any luck. When they killed me, word would reach the press that aliens have not only landed, but killed an agent from the AIEO. Earth would panic and suddenly people would demand we bring our numbers back up to where they had been before the first invasion. The HARF would step in and offer a quick solution to the problem—they might even be able to provide an army, so we don’t suffer too many losses in the air.”

“Just so you don’t feel entirely defeated,” Jack said, “I’m going to make you a promise. After we kill you, I’m going to take a tissue sample from you, and that, my friend, will be the basis of a whole new generation of Cyrilshots. Can you dig?”

I nodded. I could dig. It didn’t matter, anyway. Not anymore. I was blind and bleeding in the middle of the salt flats, miles from where anyone could have helped me. There was nothing left for me to do but lie back and enjoy the salt breeze and the dim red sky above me.