The one-room flat in Podil is iced over from the floor up. The window is shattered from something heavy thrown through it.
A snowdrift has begun to accumulate. White powder sifts across the bare wooden floorboards. The walls are frosted. The air is a chill.
Then there’s the bed or what used to be one. Its frame is cracked and splintered: both the headboard, as if kicked in by a horse, and the box, like it was jumped on by an angry ape.
And finally, there is a man squatting amongst the rubble in a pair of light-blue boxer shorts and ankle-high black socks. A hat shades his face from the late morning light, dim as it is this time of the year, the winter solstice still in charge in heaven, the light of a new year yet a dim hope.
It would appear that he is praying, in that his head is lowered and his hands are clasped in front of him. But no one prays like that – neither Hindu nor Mohammedan, Christian or Jew.
There’s no humility in his pose or what can be seen of his face. The mouth moves a little but in the short, jerky, barely perceptible movements of a man trying to hold in his demons, not purge them from his soul.
Presently, what’s left of the window smashes in, and the shards crash down around the man like icicles… not the wet ones that slip from rooftops as spring sprouts from the dead of winter. No.
These are like icy stalactites driven into an earth turned upside down. As if Dirk Dickerson and his living quarters had been snatched into the jaws of Hades, where these teeth of a cave are now tearing apart the last bits of life in them, their earthly remains, gulping them down into a bottomless pit to be decomposed and finally spit out as part of a filthy stinking excrement to lie foul and putrid for ages.
A dark-winged beast flies into the flat and alights on a deep gash made into the flat’s wall cabinet. The bird’s three-toed claws leave tracks among the frosty sawdust.
It’s a rook with a long sharp beak and the small eyes of an overworked accountant.
And Dickerson hears him say:
“Get up, you ape!”
But Dickerson doesn’t move. There’s just the sense, a slight tensing of the man’s shoulders and neck, that’s he’s heard the dark bird’s command, but is playing dead in the hopes that his tormentor will just fly away.
“Get up, or I’ll peck in your skull where you sit,” caws the rook.
Dickerson stirs once more, the muscles of his back stretching up and over his already hunched shoulders, his clasped hands are uplifted an inch or two closer to his chin, as if in steeling himself for the assault.
“Are you my slave?” shouts the bird. “Why are you sitting like that? I don’t accept prayers. And if I did, I wouldn’t hear them from you – ape!”
Now Dickerson’s forehead tilts back as if he’s about to look at his tormentor. But he doesn’t. It’s too cold to straighten up, it’s too painful to stand. And there’s no way that he’s gonna look that thing in the eyes.
It’s his jailer, the vicious brat that teased him to tears in school, the first boss that ever fired him – and there was certainly more than one – who didn’t just send him packing, but dressed him down from behind a desk in the most humiliating of terms, explaining his every fault and shortcoming like a pedagogue or scientist, an evaluator, that homeroom teacher that saw right through his pathetic family circumstances but couldn’t have given a shit.
This black, nasty winged thing was Dickerson’s impersonal accountant, the landlord come to check how much damage had been done to his property where Dickerson was living. After would follow the bailiff, the bulls, the judge and, again, the jailer, taking Dirk back to where he’d started in life, and now death, not the death of a salesman or even a detective, but of a middle-aged man in baby-blue boxer shorts and ankle-length black socks, squatting in the cold awaiting judgement.
The rook extends its wings that begin to flutter, then flap, lifting its black feathers and beady green eyes over the wall cabinet but not into flight. Instead, it just hovers in the icy air, kicking up a cold indifferent draft over Dickerson’s head.
“Get up you ape! On to your feet! Caw, caw, caw.”
Dickerson starts to cry, which is to say that tears well up in his eyes. He can’t help it. He genuinely feels sad, sorry for himself and his life and everyone who had trusted and maybe even loved him. And now this fucking bird was making him remember them all, face after face flashing before his mind’s eye.
The bird’s wings swing incessantly, forcefully, implacably. He can feel the feathers pulsating in the cold, which gets colder, stinging then numbing his bare flesh; the billowing and whir of a great helicopter overhead or giant fan at the end of a long dark tunnel he’s in.
“Get the hell out of here, you filthy beast,” the man finally cries, clapping pale hands to head like a mental patient.
But now the bird’s in his face, still flapping its wings, floating in the space in front of him.
The cold is so much, that it seems to Dickerson that his eyes have frozen over, that his mouth is a crack over an icy river…
“Fly away! Up, out and across the blocks of shabby flats that dot Podil, the seamstress’s shop and the shoemaker’s, too. The synagogue, English school, café and bar… to the convenience store and its heathen proprietor, Harry Christian, his shelves of Red Man Tobacco, his rack of color glossy porn – Delhi Delights and Detective Jack Step loafing in the off hours, indulging in life’s perversions in the dark corners of a small market where other things are sold as well.
Filed by John Smith, Detective First Class, in report from Sunday, January 28, 2018