The Baby Swan

ALLEN PARK, MICHIGAN
Fall 1964

Long ago, from a time of creased and mildewed memories, this is the story I told myself.

I lay on my back on the narrow pad of the crib, a toddler, a pre-schooler, legs grown too long to fit any other way except propped up against the footboard where my toes could twirl the pastel wooden balls on the top, designed to amuse babies. Because my younger brother would be cranky if he got too tired, I was supposed to be napping as well; because I was the oldest, it was my responsibility to set the example in all things. If he needed to sleep, I needed to be tired, although I wasn’t. I could hear him, breathing loudly, sprawled out asleep in his room on his full-sized bed while I lay awake and cramped and forbidden to move or make a sound until he woke up on his own. All I could do was tell myself stories, silently, staring at the ceiling.

My left arm, held above me, fingers pursed together, hand pointed down, as if I was making a shadow picture on the wall of a swan, was in fact, a baby swan. The baby swan swam all day, content and curious, looking at everything, wondering about everything, happy to be beautiful in a beautiful world. Then my right arm, the mother swan would swim over.

Peck, peck, peck! The mother swan would peck the baby’s head, until the baby dropped its neck down into the water to hide. Peck, peck, peck, the mother would be there waiting when the baby’s head came up. Over and over until, exhausted, the baby would lie still, barely swimming, unable to get away while the fingers making up its beak would be separated and twisted by the beak of the mother swan. When the baby was tattered and bruised and utterly defeated, the mother would swim away. Over her shoulder, as she left, she would say “once there was an ugly duckling who became a swan, but you are not a swan, and now you are too ugly to even be a duckling.”

The baby could not move, could not even cry or make a sound because its beak was broken, although it kept swimming forlornly in a circle, knowing it could never be called a swan again, knowing it was unfit even for ducks. Sometime later, a father swan would come swimming by and see the baby twisted and torn, nearly sinking in the water. He would try to help, poking and prodding with his rough beak, trying to unsnarl the baby’s wrecked and tangled one. But it was permanently bent, it could never be put right again. Impatient with his lack of progress, he too would swim away saying “you look a little better now so maybe the ducks will take you after all, but I don’t know where they live.”

And the little swimming bird was left to paddle in circles on its own forever more.

Blue X's And Green Stars

NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA
October 2005

The windows across the street from where I stayed in New Orleans were marked with blue x’s. Most of the windows were covered in elaborate spiderweb creations of blue painters tape to the point that most of the view inside was obscured. But one set of windows had the tiniest of x’s, two strips of tape maybe 6 inches long criss-crossing in the center of the pane. There was something about those blue x’s, something mysterious, either ridiculously clueless or fiercely defiant, that was fascinating. Did the owner of those windows really believe that a small cross of tape could keep the windows from shattering inwards, that a bit of tape could turn away Katrina’s furious winds? Was the owner someone like me, from another part of the country originally, knowing vaguely that windows should be taped before the storm made landfall but not understanding exactly why or how to do it? Or did the owner simply run out of time and tape, made a decision to leave quickly taking whatever was valuable and could be carried, leaving behind only the smallest gesture aimed at protecting what was left behind? And who ultimately made the wisest choice, now that the storm had passed, leaving the heavily taped and the barely taped windows equally intact? Do the owners of the bluest windows, evacuated to who-knows-where, now regret the time they spent taping in the few hours left before the storm? The questions float in the air, like the possessions of other people floated in the water, untraceable, but I know the explanation I like best: that it was some sort of sad brave foolishness that created the small x’s, a foot of tape on a fragile piece of glass all the protection that was wanted or needed against a monstrous storm.

Most buildings in New Orleans are not marked by tape on windows but by blaze orange x’s spray-painted on their doors and walls and, in downtown, on the sidewalks in front of them. Newspapers and tv broadcasters attempt to decipher their strange coding, as if the whole city has been engaged in a version of tic-tac-toe, and the rest of the country is invited to play along at home. And so most everyone knows that a zero scrawled at the bottom of the x is a good thing: death passed over this building even if the floodwaters did not. The vast majority of buildings and houses are marked with a zero, no one dead here, and driving the streets, it is a weird relief to know that all these abandoned places are truly abandoned, the people who belonged to them more or less safely tumbled into a different refuge in a different place.

Still to be honest, I was hoping to find just one house where a body had been found. It is impossible, in the vast wasteland that is New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, to ignore the fact that people, many people, died here. Their presence lingers even as their unfound bodies decay where they lie. And the same compulsion that used to lure visitors to tour the ancient above-ground cemeteries fuels the fascination for seeing the homes-turned-crypts. There is an awful surreal wrongness about a city which buries its dead in elaborate house-like graves, high enough that water will not seep in, but allows the living to build simple homes below the level of the sea. And so I want to see where the dead live, where the living died, in the huge hollow grave behind the levees. I drive through drowned deserted neighborhoods, grateful to never be confronted by anything other than a zero in an orange x, and yet feeling as unmoored and turned over as the boats that have come to rest upon the rooftops.

One night in the French Quarter, just before curfew, I pass a rickety table set up in the darkness of a vacant sidewalk. It has the appearance of an information booth and indeed a sign indicates that information is available, but what is spread out on the table is hard to determine in the murky light. The couple of people standing behind the table are also hard to see, but they give the impression of being individuals usually labeled politely as “characters”. One of the men speaks to me with the earnestness of a child selling lemonade. “Did you get your free star?” he asks, and when I tell him no, I didn’t, he insists I need to take one: “Get one before they are gone!” He points to a sheet of small foil stars, the kind that teachers stick on papers as rewards and invites me to take one. “What do I do with a free star?” I ask, and his eyes, even in the dark, appear to light up. “Oh!” he tells me, “stick it anywhere you want!” I select a green one and press it to the nail on my left index finger. “And what does a free star get me?” “Anything you want in New Orleans, any place you want to go, is free for you, because you have a free star!” is the answer.

I think a lot about this, then and even now, how everything in New Orleans seemed to be marked: the houses, the windows, the sidewalks, how I marked myself with the star. Even the smelly thrown-away refrigerators that stood along every curb in the Quarter, and every stinking portable toilet I used was, carefully and consistently marked “voo doo”. And yet for all the marking, there is something unknowable that permeates the place, something inverse, that I can’t quite comprehend. It’s a place where the dead reside in neighborhoods that the living have fled, and the police spray their own form of graffiti onto the walls. Where personal possessions are strewn about the streets, unclaimed, the people who once owned them having lost everything. Where despair is counted one by one in the orange numbers in the bottom quadrant of thousands of painted grids, and absurd hope still holds on in small blue x’s and shiny green stars.