Seize the Night

more dogs as smart as Orson might have been created, I’ve yet to encounter another. Sasha, Bobby, and I love him, but we are too little comfort, because we can never truly share his point of view, his experience. Because he is, at least for now, a singularity, Orson lives with a profound loneliness that I can perceive but never fully comprehend, loneliness that is with him even when he is among his friends.

Maybe his basic doggie nature explains why he doesn’t share the monkeys’ hatred and rage. I think dogs were put in this world to remind humanity that love, loyalty, devotion, courage, patience, and good humor are the qualities that, with honesty, are the essence of admirable character and the very definition of a life well lived.

In good Orson I see the hopeful side of my mother’s work, the real potential of science to bring light into an often dark world, to lift us up, to stir the spirit and to remind us that the universe is a place of wonder and infinite potential.

She did, in fact, hope to accomplish great things. She aligned herself with a biological-weapons project solely because this was the only way to obtain the high level of funding needed to realize her design for a gene-splicing retrovirus, which she believed could be used to cure many illnesses and inherited disorders — not least of all, my XP.

You see, my mom didn’t destroy the world without good reason. She did it trying to help me. Because of me, all of nature is now poised on the brink. Maternal love became the wellspring of ultimate terror.

So…you want to talk about your conflicted feelings for your mother?

Orson and I are her sons. I am the fruit of her heart and womb. Orson is the fruit of her mind, but she created him as surely as she created me. We are brothers. Not just figuratively. We are bound not by blood but by our mother’s passions, and in that sense we share one heart.

If anything were to happen to Orson, a part of me would die — the purer part, the better part — and die forever.

“Gotta find him,” I repeated.

“Faith, bro,” Bobby said.

He reached for the key in the ignition, but before he could switch on the engine, a sound arose, louder than the soft million-tongue flutter of leaves in the breeze, swelling by the second.

Bobby put one hand on the Smith & Wesson in his lap.

I didn’t draw my pistol because I knew what I was hearing. The beating of wings. Many wings.

Like wind-torn shingles from Heaven’s roof, the voiceless flock came out of the night, tumbling down in a clatter and whirl of wings more than half a block away, then flying parallel to the pavement, following the street, streaking in our direction. The hundred birds I’d seen earlier were surely part of this apparition, but another hundred had joined them, perhaps two hundred.

Bobby decided against the revolver and snatched the shotgun from between the seats.

“Ice it down,” I told him.

He gave me an odd look. Usually, he’s the one advising me to stay cool.

Seventeen years of friendship ensure that he takes me seriously, but he chambered a round in the shotgun nevertheless.

Spread the width of the street, the flock swept over us, no more than six feet above our heads. I had the sense that they were flying with astonishing precision, arranged in formations so orderly as to be uncanny. An aerial view of the entire swarm might reveal patterns intriguing because of their unnatural degree of complex order — but also disturbing because they would seem simultaneously meaningful and indecipherable.

Bobby ducked, but I gazed up into the dark churning cloud of wings and feathered breasts, trying to determine if there were species other than nighthawks in these multitudes. The poor light and the blur of movement made it difficult to conduct even a cursory census.

By the time the last of the enormous flock soared past, not a single bird had dived at us or shrieked. Their passing had such an otherworldly quality that I almost felt as though I had been hallucinating, but a sprinkling of feathers in the Jeep and along the blacktop confirmed the reality of the experience.

Even as the last small bits of fluffy down descended on the breeze, Bobby threw open the driver’s door and scrambled from the Jeep. He was still gripping the shotgun when he turned to stare after the departing flock, although he was holding the weapon in one hand now, muzzle pointed at the pavement, with no intention of using it.

I got out of the Jeep, too, and watched as the birds swooped up from the end of the street, arcing high across a sea of stars, disappearing into the blackness between those distant suns.

“Totally awesome,” Bobby said.

“Yeah.”

“But…”

“Yeah.”

“Feels a little sharky, too.”

I knew what he meant. This time the birds radiated more than the sorrow that I had felt before. Although the flock’s choreography had been breathtaking, even exhilarating, and although their amazing conspiracy of silence seemed to express and to inspire an odd sort of reverence, something dangerous lay under their performance, the same way that a sun-spangled blue sea could look so totally sacred even while great whites churned in a feeding frenzy just under the surface. This felt a little sharky.

Although the nighthawks had climbed out of sight, Bobby and I stood staring at the constellation into which they had vanished, as if we were in full-on early Spielberg, waiting for the mother ship to appear and bathe us in white light only slightly less intense than God sheds.

“Saw it before,” I told him.

“Bogus.”

“True.”

“Insane.”

“Maximum.”

“When?”

“On my way here,” I said. “Just the other side of the park. But the flock was smaller.”

“What’re they doing?”

“I don’t know. But here they come again.”

“I don’t hear them.”

“Me neither. Or see’em. But they’re coming.”

He hesitated, then slowly nodded and said, “Yeah,” when he felt it, too.

Stars over stars under stars. A larger light that might have been Venus. One, two, three closely grouped flares as small meteors hit the atmosphere and were incinerated. A small winking red dot moving east to west, perhaps an airliner sailing along the interface between our sea of air and the airless sea between worlds.

I was almost prepared to question my instinct, when, at last, the flock returned from the same part of the sky into which it had risen out of sight. Incredibly, the birds swept down into the street and past us in a helix, corkscrewing along Commissary Way, boring through the night in a whirr of wings.

This exhibition, this incredible stunt, was so thrilling that inevitably it inspired wonder, and in wonder is the seed of joy. I felt my heart lift at this amazing sight, but my exhilaration was constrained by the continuing perception of a wrongness in the birds’ behavior that was separate from the charming novelty of it.

Bobby must have felt the same way, because he couldn’t sustain the brief laugh of delight with which he first greeted the sight of the spiraling flock. His smile dried out as his laugh withered, and he turned to stare after the departing nighthawks with a cracking expression that was becoming less grin than grimace.

Two blocks away, the birds twisted up into the sky, like the withdrawing funnel of a fading tornado.

Their aerobatics had required strenuous effort; the beating of their wings had been so furious that even as the drum-like pounding diminished, I could feel the reverberations of it in my ears, in my heart, in my bones.

The birds soared out of sight once more, leaving us with just the whisper of the onshore breeze.

“It’s not over,” Bobby said.

“No.”

Quicker than before, the birds returned. They didn’t reappear from the point at which they had vanished;