Fish in the Sky

I am a star, a twinkling star. I’m an infant on the edge of a grave and an old man in a cradle, both a fish in the sky and a bird in the sea. I’m a boy on the outside but a girl on the inside, innocent in body, guilty in soul.

Light seeps through my eyelids. I blink twice and glance at the alarm clock. It’s exactly thirteen years and twenty-four minutes since the moment I was born into this world, on that cold February morning, when a Beatles song played for Mom on the radio. She went into labor and the midwife came running into the room, arriving almost too late because she’d gotten stuck in a snowdrift on the way, and screamed, “You’re not seriously thinking of giving birth in this weather, are you?”

Mom and Dad had danced to the Beatles’ “Love Me Do” nine months earlier at some dance somewhere, and it had since become their song. Then it became my song.

I’m a year closer to being considered a grown-up, as Mom likes to put it, with a shadow of apprehension in her voice. But until then I’m just as far from being considered a grown-up as I am from being a child; I’m the missing link in the evolution of
Homo sapiens.

I sit up in my blue-striped pajamas and look around. My desk is still in its place under the window, the bookshelves by the wall, the fish tank on the chest of drawers in the corner. Everything is as it should be. Nothing has changed, and yet it’s as if everything has changed.

Then I notice a cardboard box in the middle of the floor that wasn’t there when I went to bed. It’s about thirty inches high and fifteen wide, tied with string and brown tape, battered looking, with dented corners and oil stains, as if it has been stored in a ship’s engine room for a long time. Which it obviously has. This could only be a gift from Dad that someone snuck into my room after I fell asleep. Dad’s packages don’t always arrive on the right day. Sometimes they don’t arrive at all. But he always sends me a postcard, wherever he goes. Dad works on a big freighter and sails all over the world. I get cards from Rio, Hamburg, Bremen, Cuxhaven, and places like that, and I put them all up on the wall over my bed. I know it’s not always easy for a sailor to get to a post office on time to send a card or a package. I could easily understand that. But what is more difficult to figure out is why Dad seems to be so much farther away from me when he’s ashore. But then when I think about that, I turn into a girl inside and get tears in my eyes at the thought that Dad’s gift has arrived at all, and what’s more, on the right day.

It’ll soon be a year since I last saw him. He showed up with my birthday present three weeks late and was drunk and demanded coffee. Mom scolded him like a dog for turning up in such a state and setting such a terrible example, now that he was finally making an appearance, and asked him if there was a rule against phoning from those ships, and whether he couldn’t at least have tried to call me on my birthday. He apologized profusely and said they couldn’t, it wasn’t his fault, they were at sea. Then he bent over and kissed me on both cheeks, and the stench of him was so strong I could still smell it in my hair after he had gone — a powerful mixture of Old Spice and beer, of course.

Then Mom closed the door, and he stood there in front of it, muttering something, and then staggered into the taxi that was waiting for him. That was almost a year ago.

I take my penknife out of the desk drawer and turn to face the box. It doesn’t smell only of oil but also as if it was kept in a cold hold under stacks of oranges and soap. I stick the blade of the knife into one corner and calmly slice through the cardboard.

Two coal-black eyes stare at me from the depths of the box through a mass of hay and crumpled newspaper. A sharp, curved beak looks as if it’s snatching at me. I jump to my feet, and my heart skips a beat and my knees wobble like they’re about to fall off. I take cover behind the desk, bend a little, and try to figure out what it is. I can make out two wings from behind the straw, poised for flight.

It’s a stuffed falcon with a gaping beak, beady black eyes, and sharp claws firmly clutching a piece of red volcanic rock. I kneel on the floor and cautiously stretch my sweaty hands into the straw, drag the falcon out, and place him up on the desk.

The falcon stares at me with his fiery eyes as I drop into my desk chair. This is the greatest birthday present anyone has ever given me.

And what’s more, this isn’t just any falcon, no ordinary stuffed falcon that anyone could pick up at an antique shop, covered in dust and muck. No, this is a famous falcon who’s been on TV and whose picture has appeared in the press and who’s squawked in interviews on the lunchtime news on the radio; this is Christian the Ninth in person. Well, what’s left of him.

He tumbled onto the
Orca,
the ship Dad works on, sometime last year and was named after a cook called Christian the Ninth because he was the ninth cook who had worked on the ship. The bird was exhausted and more dead than alive, but Dad nursed him back to life and fed him. And the falcon became so fond of him that no one else but Dad was allowed to go near him. When the ship pulled into harbor, the local press was waiting for them and the falcon sat on my father’s shoulder like a parrot on some fierce pirate and ate raw meat. When the time came to release him again, the bird refused to leave and flew back onto the ship and sat on the bridge. When the ship sailed back out to sea, the falcon was still on board. And when Dad came up on deck, the bird flew off the bridge and perched on his shoulder. They were inseparable. But on one trip, the bird got sick and refused to eat. By the time the ship came back to land, the falcon was in the care of his namesake, the cook, inside an icebox. And now Dad has had him stuffed to give to me as a birthday present.

Thinking about it, I realize that it could only have been Dad who’d snuck into my room with the box. Does that mean that he’s staying with Auntie Carol as he normally does when he’s ashore? Or has he maybe gone to the country, where Suzy, his new girlfriend, lives?

There is a piece of string tied around one of the falcon’s legs with a small note attached. On it is a message written with an almost inkless ballpoint pen:
To Mister Josh Stephenson. A very happy birthday. Your dad.

If I were just a tiny bit older, I’m sure I wouldn’t have these tears in my eyes. It’s the words
your dad
that bring out the girl in me and make me weak all over again. Even though I’m thirteen years old and shouldn’t be like this, I’m still not old enough to be able to pretend I don’t feel anything.

The door opens behind me, and Mom is standing there with open arms, in her pajamas and bathrobe, holding a package that I immediately guess is a book.

“You’re not seriously thinking of giving birth in this weather, are you?” she shouts, pulling me into an embrace. Then she looks at me with a scrutinizing air, as if I were a newborn in her arms and she were trying to find some family trait, some proof that I’m definitely hers and no one else’s.

“Is it really thirteen years? Imagine, thirteen years.” She sighs, all misty eyed.

It’s a constant source of puzzlement to her, how the years have flown since the day of my birth. Every birthday she repeats the words of that midwife who almost came too late to deliver me, as if it all happened only yesterday. Time seems to stand still during the other days of the year for her. Neither Christmas nor New Year’s seems to trigger this awareness of the passing of time, not even her own birthday. It’s as if the day of my birth was the only milestone in her life that really meant anything to her.

“Happy birthday, Josh, sweetie, and this is for you,” she says, holding out the package to me, stroking my hair with her palm and then my cheek with her knuckle.

I tear the wrapping away and a huge black book with a gilded cross on the cover appears. It’s a Bible. The pages are thin and rustly, and the lettering is as tiny as a flyspeck. Mom warned me that she was going to give me the Bible because the time had come for me to start reading God’s word, the story of creation and the New Testament, and to stop reading comics and those trivial juvenile books that are all about criminals and spies and are all trash. Books like that could only give you twisted ideas about life; in worst-case scenarios, they could even turn you into a criminal. And this was why I dropped out of Sunday school and didn’t want to go to the YMCA’s summer camp last year and learn how to sail a boat and play soccer and sing about Jesus like all the other good boys. Now I could have a good read of the Bible and learn everything that needed to be known about Genesis and Jesus Christ before my confirmation next year.

“God Almighty,” she says, staring at the erect falcon scowling at her from the desk. “A stuffed bird! Is he out of his mind?”

“Did he come yesterday?” I ask.

“He’s gone bananas.”

“Mom,” I say.

“Yes, he came,” she says. “At about midnight and wanted to talk to you because he was on his way to the country. It took some work to get rid of him. A stuffed bird! What next?”

“I would have wanted to see him,” I say, trying to fight back that shameful girlishness that’s quivering inside me.

“Yes, well, he’s not coming into my house drunk, that’s for sure, and he knows that perfectly well. He’ll call from the country, honey, if he can get a signal,” she adds, sitting beside me on the bed. I know what she’s going to say now. She’s going to tell me the story about my ear infection and its miraculous healing through the Bible.

“I didn’t own a Bible until I was twenty,” she says. “But I didn’t read it until long after that,” she adds, stroking my head. “That was when I had to stay up watching over you when you had that ear infection. Then I prayed that you would be OK, because you cried so hard and there was nothing I could do for you but read the Bible out loud. And then you fell asleep just like that, and the next day you were fine again. It was a miracle.”

Although I am eternally grateful to have been delivered from my ear infection through a miracle from the Bible that occurred in a remote past I can no longer remember, I can’t stop thinking that Dad came and wanted to see me.

“Yes, it was definitely a miracle,” she says distractedly, standing up to gather the straw and rolled-up newspapers on the floor. She squeezes them back into the box, muttering something about what an utterly ludicrous idea it was of his to give me a stuffed bird.