Feathers - ( a short story on the alternate history of mankind involving crows and giants ) Carson Standifer

Landon jerks awake with the image so alive it burns across the darkness of his ceiling. He studies it for a full ten seconds before his spine unlocks and lets him breathe. The dream was the same dream but different … thicker, he thinks, imagining the way Dali piled paint to augment the dimensionality of his long, phantasmic limbs.

He starts to sit up and pauses at the wall of humidity in the air. No great problem in Mississippi or his native state of Florida … but this is New York City in February. His loft has no heater. He once left a gallon of milk on the refinished piece of ship salvage that serves as his coffee table for two whole days without it spoiling. This room is notoriously cold, open brick and snaking pipes, the kind of graveyard stone that drinks the winter and holds it in its mouth.

You’re getting closer, the man with brass teeth told Landon in his dream, but only here. The man pointed to his chest, which was bare and parchment white and held together by what appeared to be staples. The ape has forgotten his oldest debt, Landon. The smile so wide and crowded the expression seemed to cause pain. The ape names stars as if such things could comprehend possession. And hides what his heart knows once was and again will be: that he is not yet finished changing. And at this point in the dream Landon became aware of something moving just outside the light source guttering from the open palm of the man with brass teeth. The ancient hand itself was on fire, the ashes becoming moths that circled between them before quenching themselves in the flame.

“Hello?” Landon asks the darkness.

Nothing, of course. Just the open loft. The unfinished paintings beneath their oilcloths. He waits and breathes the hot air, in silent conference with himself. Landon is a logical person, despite being an artist. His art is evolutionary in its structure, scientific in its scope. It follows a sequenced chain. Like DNA. Nothing that occurs in nature is supernatural. To Landon every dream, spell, and anomaly uttered or experienced in the annals of self-referential consciousness is as real as mud or steel.

What he cannot settle within his heart (the heart He always points at in the dream,  Landon thinks)  is the certain quality of the air and how it reminds him of the horse stalls of his youth. A stall can keep an animal’s heat for up to twenty minutes after you pull it out to graze. That’s how the air feels now.

Like something big was standing here before he woke.

*

Landon’s father disappeared for better or worse when he was eleven, and did so without any of his clothes. Wherever he got off to, he went naked. Landon often thinks, when drunk and philosophical, that it was the perfect age for such a tragic mystery. At eleven a boy is still too innocent to do much more than worship, and too immature to assess the human failures of adults. Fathers are gods to eleven-year-old boys. And Landon’s God left him with a box. He has it here somewhere and feels an uncompromising need to see it now, to hold it, the comfortable carven weight, the smell of old wood like whale oil and smokey binnacle rooms that always makes him think of pirates and cursed treasure. 

“Guess we’re up for the night,” Landon says to Joe, the Beta fish left two years past by a graffiti artist that kicked for three days on Landon’s couch before promising to return. He walks to the fifty gallon tank and taps the glass. “You’re supposed to be my lookout.”

Joe swims back to the ceramic pirate ship and Landon pulls back. Two things occur to him simultaneously as he does: the first is his reflection; skinny, patchily bearded, with wide hollow eyes. It is the way a healthy man might look after dabbling with anorexia. The second is the tank itself. He drags a finger across the glass and hears it squeak beneath his skin.

“Are you leaking, buddy?” He asks Joe, who has expressed the fish equivalent of go fuck yourself and let me sleep. Landon checks the pump, the marble stand on which it rests, and the floor beneath it. Dry as a bone.

And it’s in this position that the muscle memory spirals like a whalebone needle along his spine. The chill is sudden and wracking and on instinct Landon clenches and protects his abdomen. He can almost feel the warm absence entering his radial vein, a great Arabian sandstorm of nothing mantling everything worth seeing, worth doing. It’s been seven months since Landon has shot heroin. Is it possible the paranoia has something to do with that?

He mumbles the serenity prayer and straightens his spine, feels scarves of warm air glide around his neck and shoulders. But is it possible, he wonders, for something that seems so real to be real? Landon imagines sharing it in an NA meeting, how creativity in some is more like encephalitis. Something hot and mealy. A tumescent growth to be lanced and drained. Creativity in some is a pathology of such psychic gravity it bridges into the physical. He thinks of the dream again, thinks of Jung, of symbols.

Is it possible the man with brass teeth is his soul, beaten, its smile deformed by minerals too large for its mouth? Are the minerals the spoils of the world? His art? His fame? And what would that make the hulking presence beyond the light?

“Addiction,” he says, nodding. “That’s your hell pig rooting for truffles, buddy. No fixes for seven months. No wonder it’s so big.”

He looks at the condensation, realizes his entire body is covered in sweat. Was it this bad when he kicked? Is he getting sick? Something in the room begins to buzz, a mechanical heart, a bee in a jar.

Landon looks at the twenty foot ceilings and his mattress on the raised platform in the corner. Physics are not his strong suit but the loft is far too many cubic feet for the thermal displacement of one body to make the windows drippy. “Right?” he asks.

The darkness doesn’t answer.

And so he pulls the box out from the much larger box in which it hides, his little secret. He slides back against the couch and drops it in his lap with the pale light of the fishtank gleaming in his eyes. He has no TV, threw it away when he got clean.

But had it been sitting where it used to, directly 12 feet from his sweating face, Landon might have seen the displacement in the air behind him, moving like a flock of mad black birds.

*

Landon grew up in the woods outside of Pensacola. New Yorkers, especially those upstate, would probably call them swamps and glades, but to the boy who was bit by three snakes by the time he was six, they were woods. A magical place. His father liked to get shit-drunk and shoot the crows from the tailgate of his pickup, but he was also wise enough in his cups to invent stories for his son while he did.

“You know what the natives thought of crows, boy? Tricksters. The lot of them. Yes, that’s true, there were Crow injuns but not anywhere near here. Their lot drank the blood of owls and ate mushrooms to talk with the dead. Not a Christian people, like us. No, you don’t have to go to church to be Christian, now dammit let me tell you a story.” He smiled, liking the boy to interrupt him with his ceaseless questions, perhaps because it kept his devil’s tongue so sharp. “Now crows are sharp critters. Smart. They hold funerals for their dead. Hell, they invent tools. That’s right. I saw a crow bend a wire to make a hook and pull a half-eaten candy bar someone shoved in the sawed off end of a chainlink fence pipe. Smart with a vengeance, these hell birds. And something that smart didn’t get that way without magic. Yes, magic. Magic is real, boy, don’t split it two ways. What do you think Christ used to raise Lazzarus in his crypt? To multiply five loaves and two fish into the mouths of five-thousand? Magic. Don’t let anyone tell you different.

"Now the crow is not wise of its own kenning. The crow is the devil’s bird. When all was dark and quiet without the mischief of man, the crow and the eagle occupied this land. The crow hunted at night, using its feathers to its advantage. The eagle with its great eyes reigned over the days. There was balance, and all was as it should be. Christ was working his magic and the injuns of these parts were building their mounds and making trade with the giants who lived here long before man. Yes, giants. How do you think cave people moved monoliths? They didn’t. They found it that way.

"The giants were a magic people. From them, we get math and science. The bible speaks of giants, though they called their fathers the nephilim. Yes, this has to do with crows, goddammit Landon, if I shouldn’t have plucked your tongue from your mouth the first time you cried. There was a war of the sky. The eagle, who was pure and true and friend to man, told the chiefs and holymen of the brooding treachery. The giants, wise as they were, favored the crows, which has something to say of wisdom in general.

"In those days the giants took to the mountains and caves. That memory lives with us still, it’s why little shits like you dream of monsters in the dark. The men lived in the fields, the low forests, and near the rivers and lakes. Sometimes a giant would eat a man or steal a baby and her mother. It was the way of things back then. But the men, with the help of the eagle, could always see what was happening in the high places of the world. Men planned and fortified themselves. Balance is a careful craft, son.

"Well the giants, who saw well in the dark and better in the day, hatched a plan to tear the eagles from the sky. They enlisted the crows who, though smaller and weaker than the eagle, were craftier by far. It wasn’t long before the holymen and chiefs sat waiting for the great eagles to bring them news from the far away places. Instead, they began to find eagle feathers covered in blood. The crows were given sight and skill beyond the natural law of things. This was done by a different type of magic. Old earth magic, a thing no mind remembers. Nameless. Timeless. The giants moved unannounced on what was then a mostly peaceful civilization.

"There was a great war, first in the sky, then across the land. It’s said the firmament rained feathers for three days straight, that the shriek and battle of the birds was as a cloud that blotted the sun. In the end, God brought a flood to end things. The giants were wiped from the earth. But their magic remains.”

Then Magnus Svensen put the Remington 870 Wingmaster to his shoulder and fired, smiling as the branch snapped and a black shape tumbled to the ground. “Dark magic lives on in the crow.”

Landon was too entranced by the story to hurt the way he usually did when his father killed. “How do you know that’s true?”

“Because, son. I dream the truth. All of us do. Though it comes to us in puzzles.”

“Like the ones …  grandpa Sven used to piece together at the coffee table?” Landon paused at the ache of loss that to his young heart felt unformed and imposing without logical definition, like death was something that could hold a vendetta and snatch you up. “Before he died.”

“No, son. A puzzle altogether stranger, like a language of its own. I was your age when I met the cipherer.” Magnus ruffled Landon’s hair. “Grandpa met him too. He ain’t dead, boy. He’s migrated on. Like an eagle.”

“Where?”

“Well, hell, if I could tell you how to get there and where it was we’d already be gone.”

“Who’s the cipherer?”

Magnus set the shotgun across his thighs and squinted up into the sky. “Now that is a question not even I can answer, drunk or sober. But I have a mind to suspect he functions as a gavel.”

*

Landon opens the box and smells it. Twenty-six years stand like great eroded doorways between then and now. The box has been in his family for… well, ever. Seven whole centuries if the drunkard Magnus is to be believed. The buzzing comes again from somewhere in the loft but he ignores it. Whenever he holds this box, logic seems to soften. He regresses into that place of mystery known only to children. It is not like other boxes. It looks as if it should sit beneath carpets of dust on the greened brass shelf of a wizard. There are shapes carved into the sides of animals for which there are no names, and if Landon were to rub his thumb along the ridges, he might feel the birth of shapes cavorting through mist, a kind of waking dream for which there is only impression and no transmission of actual fact.

The word is “Nebulous…” Which, as it happens, was the name of Landon’s first showcase in New Orleans. Four rooms of wire bent into haunting anthropomorphs that put him on page 26 of Rolling Stone and, two weeks later, had three Vice producers following him through the moldy studio he kept in the 9th Ward. That mini-documentary had gone viral and launched his career. He had money for the first time in his life, and in the dashing limelight discovered heroin and women and women who also loved heroin.

Eventually, the women became less interesting. Only so many shapes to a breast, only so many smells and angles and meals and conversations. The complexity of language, the probabilities of coupled words repeating themselves throughout history to the point of meaninglessness, drove him into a mania that sent the closest thing he had to a soulmate into exile. Tara. Her name is Tara. She lives in Newark now. With her son. His son? Biologically, yes. Emotionally, Landon knows he is a ghost in Eldon’s life.

He smells the box again and thinks of the man with brass teeth. The man he has been dreaming about for three grueling weeks in which not a single stroke of paint has been added to his masterwork. He stares at the single bronzed eagle feather within and closes the lid, clipping the hasp into place, leaving it to its secrets.

He stands up, feels worse but somehow better. Feels as if some important piece of him now lives within the box, strange as it is. When the buzzing starts again, his eye catches the screen of his phone. So that’s what he’s been hearing.

And maybe it’s the box or the memory of the crows and their trickery that has softened his usual hermeticism. He cannot know he will regret this. He has no way to take it back. The piece of him that might have fought for sovereignty is now ensconced within the darkness of Norwegian ash wood.

Landon picks up.

*

Tara stands immobile in the ICU hallway of St. Michael’s Medical Center, her red hair clotted in twists of rainwater she hasn’t bothered to comb free. Nurses mill around her, busying themselves at their stations, and there is something about her stillness, the great fixed weight of her between all that movement, that makes Landon think of the old great sinkstones from the Florida woods.

“Tara.” The fifth time he says her name she looks up. The great haunted saucers of her eyes are seeing something else. “Tara, what happened?”

Her head bobs, swimming on her neck. “He just … stopped breathing.” She doesn’t hug so much as collapse into him. It takes all his strength to keep them both upright. He cannot remember the last time he held her, the last time anyone needed him, and the rightness of the feeling, the reality of its absence, fills his stomach with a sickening weight. “He was just lying there. Lying there. I didn’t know what, I mean I tried to think, to do something. It wasn’t, I mean I couldn’t … Landon, our son!”

And there, in his heart, a spike upthrusts itself as if from the heaving earth. A cold billet of bone from some skeletal memory. His mother, crying this way, in a small Florida hospital, except she had no father to hold. She had only the nurse who tried to ring Magnus Svenson and then averted her eyes every time Landon’s mother mentioned his name, this man, this father, who could not be reached while his son lay dying from some unknown fever in the sticky pediatric ward of a backwoods infirmary.

Landon pulls her away and stares at her. “Tell me what happened.”

“Nothing. Nothing happened, Landon. I was on the phone and I heard a thump in his bedroom. Eldon plays rough. I thought he knocked something over. He didn’t answer. I ran. I knew something was wrong--I knew it.” That faraway shadow passes in her eyes and she shakes it free, seems to redirect the impulse to say something more. “He was on the ground with his mouth open. He was pointing at--”

“Mrs. Svenson?” They turn to see a youngish doctor with a patch of black stubble clinging to his neck. His eyes are careful, hide within his face like animals will hide from cages beaten by belligerent passersby. Landon thinks, this is a man who has seen bad things and maybe even been blamed for them. “Mr. Svenson? I’m Doctor Tollifson. Can we talk somewhere with more privacy?”

Tollifson leads them into a sideroom where a boy on a respirator lies immobile. No family, no flowers, cocooned by machines. Landon can’t stop staring, hardly hears Doctor Tollifson say, he’s in a coma on paper but his brain activity is online. His temperature and respiratory function is stable. His cortisol levels are normal. I can’t say I understand what’s happening to him. It’s almost like he’s dreaming. We’ve ordered more tests but…

Landon stares at the boy, at the clear plastic box with a black rubber piston pumping air into his lungs. A small mouth and scabbed nostrils taped with tubes, some primitive atmospheric suit. Two versions of Landon are fighting for control of his attention, and the old one is winning, turning down the volume of the doctor’s voice, dimming the lights until a cone of cold blue light stands above the boy on the respirator, a boy not with the black hair Landon spied upon entering this room, but with the fine blond elven hair of the Svensons.

The boy’s eyes snap open, sapient and blue and full of authority. His voice is a crowded gurgle around the breathing tubes. “A debt must be paid. The cipherer alone can collect it”

“Debt?”

“Aye. The selfsame paid by your father. And his. And the whole of your line.”

“How do I find him?”

“In sleep.”

“How the hell do you expect me to sleep?”

“There are other ways known to you.”

A hand yanks his arm and he turns to see the Doctor Tollifson and Tara staring back with alarmed disbelief. “Mr. Svenson?” Tolifson edges forward, glancing over Landon’s shoulder. “Are you talking to someone?”

The boy is the boy again, a pale sculpture kept vivid by the aspirating pump. It is the only sound in the room besides Landon’s heart, which is beating with enough force to warp the edges of his vision with its rhythm.

“Landon?” Tara this time, the tone saying more than the doctor should know, the tone a kind of question, are you still clean?

Landon can think of no way to explain it away. “Don’t worry about it. Go on, doc”

“This is a hard time for everyone. If you need anything, or need to speak about anything privately, you can page me.” Tollifson rubs his anguished eyes. “We’ll be running some more tests and should know more by this afternoon. In the meantime, he’s been moved to a room with a sleeper. You can stay with him as long as you’d like.”

Tollifson is gone by the time Landon looks back. Tara is sitting against the wall with her head between her knees. He approaches and hunkers down next to her. “You said he was pointing.”

“What?” She huffs between her tears. “He’s in a fucking coma and you’re high!”

“I’m not. Look, shut up for a second and listen to me. You said he was pointing. What was he pointing at?” He can barely hear himself speaking, keeps seeing the man with brass teeth, the wooden box, his father taking aim at the crow, the shattering blast of the shotgun and the cloud of feathers trailing towards them, rolling over the earth, against their boots. “WHAT WAS HE POINTING AT?”

The scream stops her tears. She doesn’t have the chance to think, to redirect whatever he’s seen her struggling with, and it comes in a flat monotone. “Birds. At the window. There were so many I thought I was seeing things. They barely fit on the ledge.”

“Birds?”

“Crows.” She looks at him, her eyes widening as the impression on his face settles into her. “That means something to you?”

But Landon is already running.

*

The Florida trees are twenty-three years younger. An eleven year old Landon lies seventeen miles north of here, dreaming in a hospital bed, while Magnus Svenson puts on his boots. The phone rings endlessly between the wood-paneled walls of their small house but Magnus pays it no mind. His face is grim, set with the weight of some secret errand. And though no one would believe it, the bottle of rye whiskey normally glued to his palm sits untouched on the table fifteen feet away. He is as sober as he’s been in twelve years, and the shakes that normally accompany such experiments are absent. His muscles are fluid, filled with wind, with sky.

He walks steady and true into the bedroom of his boy, where he bends to smell the softness of soap and shampoo upon the ninja turtle pillowcase. He sets the box of norwegian ash wood on the bed, with a note written in the precise instruction of the cipherer. The words fade when Magnus tries to stare at them, as they will fade into the backdrop of Landon’s mind after he reads it next weekend and takes it to the woods to burn the single sheet in a kind of waking fugue.

“Are you ready?” A voice of leaves on winter stone scrapes from the hallway behind him, but Magnus knows it is from a place much farther, much older.

“I am.” Magnus sets his jaw. “How will it go?”

“Your body will remember. Be rid of your garments, Magnus Svenson.”

So Magnus undresses, smiling with the grim defiance of a brigand in the shadow of the gallow’s tree. He walks naked into the hot white light dappled with the flight of birds and disappears into the woods, where up ahead, the trunks of trees crackle and thunder as if from the passage of a mammoth.

*

Landon locks the nurses station behind him and combs through the glass-faced cupboards. His hands are trembling. Ampules fall from the shelves and shatter beneath him. He finds what he’s looking for, then leaves without making eye contact with anyone. An old nurse watches Landon until he turns the corner. When she looks inside the nurses station,  she shuffles back to the red phone behind her counter and rips it from its cradle. “Security. Now.”

Landon turns into the stairwell. And while the sluggish security officers are jogging toward the lobby and parking garage, areas toward which any normal drug addict would be fleeing, Landon kicks open the roof entrance and ducks into the Jersey rain. Wind snaps at his jacket, his hair, uncombed, uncut. He feels nothing beyond a dull pulsing warmth a foot in all directions, a kind of birth canal contracting him something hulking, something mythic. The feeling itself is not unlike heroin.

Steam rises in columns across the city roofs, the city teeth, the woods to the east, gray mazes of steel and concrete to the west. He finds a small alcove that leads to a locked maintenance door, a six foot concrete throat. There is almost no wind here. No cold. The same humidity from his bedroom concentrates around him. He pulls the packeted syringe from his jacket pocket and tears it open, plunges it into the rubber cap of dilaudid. Clear liquid rushes into the vacuum. There is a sound as of snapping sail cloth, of laundry flung clean of its dust, a thousand tiny flappings beating hard against the wind. Landon doesn’t need a tourniquet. He is good at few things, and this is one of them.

He plunges. Tastes steel and ozone at the back of his throat. Feels the fist of its body contract, then break apart, as it slides smooth as butter down the concrete wall. He is smoke. He is floating. He is going to save his son.

*

The land is all dark, all quiet. A remote wilderness alive with distant movement that reminds Landon of the errant cracks one hears when standing on a glacier. The sky is a great gloaming above him. Ground fog marches off into stands of scrub oak and cypress, birch and ponderosa. There are trees here he has never seen. This is a place before. A place unseen.

“Landon Svenson. Your tribute awaites.”

Landon turns away from the woods and by some distortion of reality finds himself in a cave, a fire burning between him and the man with brass teeth. “Don’t be afraid, boy. There’s a trick to this.”

“And what’s that?”

The man with brass teeth smiles. Not teeth. It looks as if spiles of brass have been hammered into the jawline in crowded uneven rows. It is the mouth of a prehistoric shark. “Surrender to it before your mind can tell you it isn’t possible. You found a way to get here. That’s all that matters. Interest can be delayed until such a time as your boy makes a boy of his own.”

“You’d have him too?”

“It is the way of things.” The man with brass teeth flaps a cowboy slicker wefted of pelts and wolfskins out of his way to hunker down before the fire. His face is ancient and young. His eyes do not hold a single color, but all colors. “We’ve met before. When you were just a pup.” The man feathers his fingers. Sparks belch from the fire between them.

And all of it is there again, dropping into him. Real things. Things that happened. His mother in the hospital room, weeping as he jerked his legs, flapped his arms, a seizure of some kind to those who watched it, but an indoctrination to him, a foretelling, him seeing all of this from away and high across the street, the rooftop on which a crow barked his prophecy to the world; and in that moment, as Sven marched naked into the woods, Landon saw everything that would come to be, that had come to be, that would forever roll its wheel across his lineage, Landon seeing all of it through the eyes of a thousand birds.

Landon stiffens. Cracks his neck. Everything about him is different. He is not thin and sheepish here. His is a warrior’s blood. He remembers. He remembers.  “And if I say no?”

“You can’t. That you say anything is a gift of the pact. You won your war. We let men live. But yours and the others who resisted made clear terms for the debt. There are other worlds, Landon. Other whens. You’ve spilled your seed for eleven winters and now the levy calls. Eleven crows and you.”

Landon looks down into the flames, where he sees his father in the sky, sees the rain of blood and feathers, the violence of the wind. “And if I lose?”

“The seed is smited. My vigil ends. The great builders return to share the same terms of the debt. You’ve always won. Your line is strong but now it wavers. You are weak. Your father of drink, and you of the needle. Each generation has soured toward a reality long coming.”

The darkness behind the man with brass teeth moves. A grunt of breath like thunder, like the panting of a mastodon. The man with brass teeth plunges his hand into the flames and holds the burning stalk of his arm aloft to light scarred and rippling skin, wrapped in mammoth furs. A prognathous skull the size of an elephant stares down fifteen feet above the flaming hand. Eyes like burning amber. Landon is staring at a giant.

*

Landon gasps awake against the concrete, tries to raise himself and falls. As he looks at his corded arm, clear liquid rejects itself from the pinprick in his skin. He doubles and vomits bile onto the ground. But he is alive. He is light and hovering and vibrant. He remembers.

Landon strips his clothes and walks into the rain, the steaming skyline. He cannot feel the cold stone beneath his feet. His muscles slide and rearrange, insubstantiating into a kind of vapor. His marrow smokes until the whole of him is wind and sky and storm clouds. And at that moment the janitor opens the door to smoke a cigarette, the janitor who will spend the rest of his life telling those in quiet alcoves of the bars he frequents of the time, thirty years ago, he saw a thing impossible. A man, levitating ten feet into the air. The skin and hair and muscle unfurling into the wind like a great dandelion, evaporating the way water will smoke and bubble on a griddle. And how this man, as if in the approaching blastwall of a nuclear explosion, gave birth to the largest eagle he’d ever seen. Sure, call him a liar all you want, but he wasn’t much of a drinker then, and he’d had a good night’s rest, and besides, that wasn’t the strangest part.

The strangest part was what might have been a dozen crows. A great ball of feathers and blood fighting in the sky above Newark. The eagle losing feathers and blood and what looked like an eye, but for every injury suffered did that great golden bird tear a crow’s wings from its body. And at this point in the story the old man always pulls the wizened crow leg from his inner jacket pocket.

He twirls it in his hand and shows whoever’s listening. “I wish it ended there, boys. But it doesn’t. Now it could have been the wind. Or the the rain. There was so much blood up there it was a wonder I could make shit from shinola. You ever seen birds of prey fight? Vicious, vicious creatures. When the eagle tore this leg free, for an instant, just for one, it wasn’t just crows in the sky. It was men, larger than any I’ve ever seen. Giants, boys. Like Goliath. The one King David reckoned with smooth stone and his sling.”