He had not seen their shapes against the sun, their shapes move out of silhouette and turn from black to white as they drew near. Then now, descending, they were a density of lightness, and they enfolded him.
Bones prodded her, sharp things poking, before the pressure abruptly let up and she was lying on the ground with no one above her and none beneath. She was astounded at this and the quick silence, a silence that fell as though a wind had dropped, and there was serenity.
Afraid and relieved at once she opened her eyes in a quick painful blink and saw white above her, white with small flashes of black but almost all white. In the silence she heard calls but did not know what they were, and then the white mass above her was rising and falling everywhere. Beside her on the ground was Ben, and near them was the crowd, not on top of them anymore but standing.
She pulled herself up, feeling scraped knees faintly against the fabric of her pants and blinked at the whiteness, which was moving. The wings were longer than she had ever seen, seven feet or eight feet together, vast. Feet dangled on long black legs.
—What are they? she whispered to him finally, incredulous, tears wet on her cheeks, and wiped her nose with the back of her hand, wiped her whole face with her wet shirt to clean it. The eyes and nostrils were still stinging hard and Ben was doubled over coughing from the tear gas still. Her throat burned and the other people were coughing too, there was coughing above the silence and the strange calls.
—It can’t be, he said, standing up. —This is impossible.
She looked at him and saw him squint blinking into the sky above them.
—There aren’t that many of them in the world, I mean look, there must be thousands, tens of thousands! he said, and his tear-wet, dirty face was turned up to the white in the sky. He bent quickly and choked and coughed into his hand.
—But what? she said.
—But they are, he said to himself more than her, staring. —They have the black wing tips, see that? The dark legs … I can’t see their heads from below but it’s them. They’re huge. There’s nothing else it could be.
—Than what?
The screen was obscured by the birds, flying so low they had darkened it. Her vision blurred with new tears from the gas and she could not see whose face was on the screen anymore, whether Bradley was looking up at the whiteness above him like everyone else, the coughing and weeping crowd, standing motionless now beneath the thousands of wings and gently sloping undersides. The air was so thick that the sky was not visible and underneath the white feathered slopes of the undersides of their bodies was a darkness not like night but shadow. The wings moved slowly, so slowly she was amazed they could stay airborne, and the black legs dangled beneath their bellies like afterthoughts.
—Whooping cranes.
She turned and saw them flying past the Washington Monument so that the peak could not be seen, and over long parallel rows of trees. She kept turning in place and saw them flying over the Smithsonian castle, the Capitol, the reflecting pool, over the Grant Memorial and the Museum of Natural History, all of this in snatches, all of these behind the birds and subsumed.
—It’s a mass hallucination, whispered Ben, stunned. —The gas maybe? Some obscure neurotoxin that makes you see things? Because these birds don’t even exist anymore. Not in these numbers. They’re practically extinct.
—They must just be something else, said Ann. —Like storks or swans or something? I mean—neither of us knows anything about birds.
Deaf language and birds, she thought, of both she was sadly ignorant.
—No they’re not, said Ben. —Fermi wrote about them and I did the research. There’s nothing else they could be.
—They have black heads, sometimes you can see them, she said, as the film on her eyes cleared for a second. —See? You can catch a glimpse …
She was noticing the missile, which had a pointed black tip on its white body.
—They look like the bomb, she whispered, and pointed. —See? All white on the body, and black at the top.
—Ann? Why are you whispering?
—Everyone is, she whispered back after a few seconds, and it was true, no one was talking, only coughing and wiping the tears off their faces and blowing their noses, only recovering and staring up above and occasionally leaning in close to each other to whisper or rasp from their burning throats. —They’re so graceful, she said. —What are they doing in the city?
They came to get us, thought Ben, but he knew it was not his own thought: it was Fermi’s. Finally.
—I think they came for the scientists, he said slowly. —I think that must be why they’re here. I think they came to save them.
The birds swooped lower and lower over the stage, and at last she could make out figures there. There were the dark figures of men on the stage, but the birds swooped and flew over and covered them. When she saw a dark man uncovered, fleetingly, he was running and waving his arms, and then she heard the shots again.
—They’re shooting at them! said Ben. —The cranes!
He was straining to see past other people’s heads, people still standing in place and watching the great flock of birds above them, their faces turned upward.
—They can’t be, she said, but then another shot rang out and she saw a flash of white as a bird fell near the stage. —Who?
—The military, said Ben. —Or whoever’s up there now. It doesn’t look like Bradley’s men.
There was something on the screen again, flickering: a slight man
