In a Perfect World

Bobby’s father, Paul Temple, gave Jiselle the extra generator he kept in his garage, and if Bobby wasn’t already there, he would come over during the longer outages, hook it up, fill it with gas, start it.

“Feel free to call on my son for anything you need,” Paul Temple said. “There’s nothing worse than a population of young men without enough to do. It’s the reason they launched the Crusades.”

As always, Paul Temple, the high school history teacher, seemed unable to keep himself from sharing his knowledge, and was embarrassed to have shared it. He looked away from Jiselle and scratched his sandy hair.

“Thank you,” she said.

Except for the mechanical purr under the kitchen window and the darkness of the neighbor’s house, it was as if nothing were different.

Every few days Jiselle would go over to the Schmidts’ to see how they were faring, but Brad Schmidt always waved her away.

She called her mother, who said, “Don’t worry about me, Jiselle. You’re the one with the problem.”

One morning, the first week of April, a flock of thousands of blackbirds flew out of the ravine behind the house, over the roof. The sound of them woke Jiselle, and even Sara roused herself to come onto the deck, look out. The sky was dark but shivering—all wings and fretful energy, as if the morning had been peeled back to expose its nervous system.

“Whoa, whoa!” Sam called, waving his arms over his head as if trying to stop them.

Sara said, “Holy shit.”

“Where are they going?” Jiselle wondered aloud, and the children looked from the birds to her as if they were surprised that she didn’t know.

As it turned out, they didn’t go anywhere. They flew from one end of the ravine and back again, and then they dispersed.

On the radio it was said that people in Chicago had reported the same thing. The birds went from park to park, circled, flew over the lake, and then were gone.

This incited some panic.

The birds looked healthy, but who knew what sort of secret viruses they carried, or what their circling and disappearance portended? Parents kept their children indoors and out of the parks—although flyers were posted all over the city and delivered door to door explaining that fear of birds was superstitious, not scientific.

But who was delivering these flyers, people wanted to know.

The government?

And why? To keep people from panicking or because there was something to hide?

The movie The Birds became the number one movie download of all time, and television psychologists had a hard time explaining its popularity. You would think no one would want to see a movie that so closely paralleled the fears of the time. But they did.

A week after the blackbirds, a white goose took up residence in the backyard—some escaped farm fowl, it seemed. At first, Jiselle considered shooing it away. It could be diseased. But it looked harmless and lost in the backyard. Its orange beak matched its orange feet, and it came and went from the ravine without flying, just waddling. When Jiselle and the children went out on the deck to watch it, the goose would look up and honk.

Sam wanted to make a pet of it, but whenever he stepped off the deck to try to approach it, the goose turned and headed down the slope into the ravine, disappearing in the shadows. Once or twice, Jiselle heard it outside in the middle of the night, honking right under the bedroom window as if it wanted something, but when she went to the window to look out, the goose seemed only to be wandering in awkward circles in the dark—a bright patch of reflected moonlight.

Within a few days of the blackbirds and the arrival of the goose, a small flock of swifts took up residence in the chimney, and they whirled and screamed, glistening blackly, like living ash, from the roof of the house to the leafy trees, coming and going all day long. And some finches built a nest in the oak that grew out of the deck in back. Soon there were eggs in the nest, which seemed to have been pieced together with twigs and toilet paper and also hair—Camilla’s? Golden strands of it glistened when sunlight hit the oak in the mornings.

Jiselle ignored Brad Schmidt’s advice to clear the birds out. He stood at the edge of his own yard, looking up. “They might as well be living in your house,” he said. “Whatever diseases they’ve got, you’ve got.”

But Jiselle could not bring herself to be worried about the birds. There were stories every day on the news now about celebrities who’d fled the country, entering other countries illegally. Jodie Foster was living with a long list of fellow celebrities in the Canadian wilderness. No one had seen the wife of the governor of California for months, so she was presumed to be dead of the flu. Reportedly there were hygienic bunkers built under Washington, D.C., in which the Supreme Court justices were being housed.

Closer to home, it was said that thousands of people had started an encampment at Millennium Park in Chicago to get out of the apartment buildings where there was illness and where the air was presumed to be infected, and that the Beluga whales at the Shedd Aquarium were refusing to eat. Marine biologists all over the world had been consulted, without success. Nothing could be done. A twenty-four-hour candlelight and prayer vigil was being held outside the aquarium, which had been closed to the public for weeks, for the whales, who were said also to be singing whale songs that had never been heard before. “They know what’s ahead for us,” one Chicago evangelist had told a television reporter, “and they are calling out to God.”

This theory was widely repeated, as if it were a fact, and poets and popular song writers had banded together in a movement called the Whale Prayer Project, which was dedicated to expressing in human language what the whales were trying to sing to God in their own language.

In the morning, the swifts sounded like wind chimes in the chimney, and Beatrice (the goose—Sara had named it, and the name stuck) heralded morning with a discordant squawk, and then waddled off across the yard into the ravine, disappearing in the dark foliage for the day and coming back after the sun set to walk in circles in the backyard. They never saw her fly.

In truth, they had no idea if Beatrice was female or male, but Camilla pointed out that the goose had a kind of feminine posture. She held her head high, as if proud of her neck, as if she thought it was much longer than it was. She had a habit of holding her wings away from her body an inch or two, shivering them in the sunlight. It seemed coquettish. Obviously, Beatrice couldn’t fly or she would have, but she enjoyed having wings nonetheless.

After Jiselle and Sam did some research on what geese liked to eat, they learned that the bread crumbs they’d been leaving were no good. The bread swelled up in the goose’s stomach, making her feel full without actually giving her enough nutrition to survive, so they went to the pet store and bought a sack of something that was supposed to be better: Fowl Feed Deluxe. In the morning, Sam hurried out of bed when the goose honked, ran out to the backyard, sprinkled the feed on the ground, and although the ingredients listed on the side of the bag seemed to be mostly oil and ash, Beatrice pecked happily at it before strolling back to the ravine.

On Tuesday, Mark sounded wistful. “Do you remember Paris, my love? Zurich? Copenhagen? Will we ever see places like that again?”

Indeed, those places seemed far away, impossibly remote, charming villages from another time.

It was hard to hear him over the noises of the household. Camilla and Bobby were starting up the generator again, and it made high whining noises outside the kitchen window. Sara was listening to her music in her bedroom—a man shouting obscenities over the sounds of guitars and garbage can lids being smashed together. Sam was waiting in the family room for Jiselle to get off the phone so they could go for a hike in the ravine. Mark told Jiselle not to tell the kids that she was talking to him. He said he didn’t want to hear their voices, that it only depressed him.