There Lived a Feathered, Flightless Man / kayla rutledge

There Lived a Feathered, Flightless Man

At the exact moment when every word he has ever written is being thrown out of a window, Herman Griffin Walforth has only one more sentence left to speak. He does not know this of course. He has been going mute for months, but it has been a process of unconscious drowning, the sort of painless, golden crystallizing that bugs slowly encased in amber experience - a warmth, and then a numbness, and then nothing. Someone could have, of course, tried to warn him. To do this, they would have had to meet Herman at the beginning of his story, long before the window, or even the house the window belongs to. They would have to go back to the very beginning.

warmth.

Like every good beginning, there was a muse. And the muse was Mia Glass. For years afterward, Herman would tell people they met on a street, or at a play, or in the middle of the squash section at the farmer’s market. Mia knew they met at a conference, one of those goal-setting, creativity-sparking, be-a-better-you affairs that are supposed to inspire but are really used by companies to pacify employees with a weekend away from their regular lives.

The end is found here, in the beginning: all Herman can remember is gold, and then Mia, like the beginning of a world, or the silence before an orchestra. Mia remembers they met in a buffet line, exchanging the sort of pleasantries common to the extremely disinterested. When Herman told her he was a writer, she told him it was wonderful. And the way the word rolled off her tongue, thick and heavy, like a smooth marble across a wooden floor, made him shiver. Words out of her mouth had life and depth, they rang and moved and hummed, and hearing her speak was like hearing a bell being struck.

So Herman didn’t tell her that he hadn’t written anything in months, to the point that his editors were pestering him and the usual royalty checks had started getting smaller and smaller. He didn’t tell her that releasing two popular books didn’t mean success, just a crushing pressure to release a third, the kind of pressure that drove him to ridiculous conferences that were supposed to ‘realign his creative self’. Instead, he ran back to his hotel room, up the two flights of creaky stairs, jiggled the lock right-left-right and burst into his room. Among the smell of stale cigarettes and carpet coated in dust, Herman ripped off a corner of the newspaper and wrote a sonnet, right over Page 12C and May 6, 1975, right over -“TROUBLE ON THE NEWPORT CLIFFS: PETTY THEFT FRIGHTENS TOURISTS”.

His fingers smudged with blue ink, Herman wrote of Mia, how she was so thin that everything she wore looked like it was meant to drape lazily across her shoulders, like throwing a sheet over a statue, how her cheekbones were high and sharp and set decidedly underneath warm, green eyes that looked as though they were supposed to belong to someone else, and when he had finished he thought the blue fingerprint-smudged scrap of paper really was wonderful, and so was he.

Mia hadn’t been altogether honest with Herman. She thought writers in theory were wonderful, but that Herman was a little scruffy, although endearingly so. She looked appealing in the thick blue ink, but in life Mia would not be immediately recognizable as the great beauty in Herman’s sonnet. She was from a line of healthy, practical women who had gone through countless New England winters, one of them her mother, who had signed Mia up for the conference out of that deep-seated desire parents have for their children to have more well-rounded lives than they did. Mia spent her days as a psychologist for wealthy people whose problems mostly stemmed from a deep nervousness and an excess of wine and time, which worried her mother. Unhealthy, Mrs. Glass called it, a life spent listening to problems rather than having your own, but Mia liked listening to problems that were easily solvable. She often felt a strange sense of disdain for her clients, proud that all the best parts of youth and possibility were still hers to have.

It is no great surprise that Herman and Mia quickly fell into that deep, purple kind of love that makes people talk about soulmates, the kind of love that humans would be better off abandoning altogether. Their courtship went by in a whirlwind of happy summer days, which Herman spent writing short stories and poems that always trailed off three-quarters of the way through. He assured his frustrated editors that he had something truly wonderful on the way and received an advance on his third novel without writing a single useable word. With the advance, he bought Mia an engagement ring and continued his cycle of brooding in coffee shops and waiting for her to finish her appointments, the sound of her laugh better than anything he could ever write. After finishing her appointments for the day, Mia would pick him up and they would eat sandwiches on park benches and watch the sun sink low over the ocean.

Mia spent those summer nights telling Herman story after story, of her childhood, just her and her mother after her father died, her college days, spent in Alabama realizing the hot, humid South wasn’t for her. She often talked until the ocean turned from blue to navy in the cool night air, and every word made Herman shiver just as it had at first. She read his first two novels, which Herman’s editors told him were most successful among women 30-40 in Southern California, and told him they were wonderful even though he knew they were

just alright.

He told her his next novel would be his greatest, and she nodded because she believed him, because he was kind and stable, because her friends told her they wished someone would write them poems. Most of all, she nodded because she didn’t want to be 40 and wealthy with a husband who played golf and a therapist who thought her problems were trivial and she didn’t want to be her mother and spend her days watching the local news and baking casserole, going to bed at 9:30 and calling her daughter for excitement and keeping her dead husband’s shirts hung neatly in the closet.

The rest of 1975 passed like this, in a row of warm, honey-like days that played themselves lazily out, one after the other. Herman woke up every day convinced that his next novel was waiting for him to write it, even though he still had no idea how it would end. He could still speak then, in the beginning. He got deeply into french press coffee and when Mia suffered from terrible insomnia, he would list out her qualities on the phone for hours, stringing together a chain of I-love-this and I-love-that, like daisies strung around her neck, until she slept.

numbness.

After the January wedding, Mia and Herman settled into an old cliffside cottage in Newport, New Hampshire so soaked with salt and sea that with every gust of wind it shuddered and shifted like a large, unbalanced wave, and for a while there was the simple happiness of cinnamon rolls in the morning and late night waltzing across the groaning oak floors. This drizzly kind of happiness soaked into Herman’s writing, and he moved from writing unfinished poems to unfinished manuscripts.

Mia made him a writing alcove with a desk she found at a garage sale and no curtains because she pricked her fingers too much trying to sew them. She spent her days listening to rich women complain about their husband’s infidelity and daydreaming about the future, about the imminent success of Herman’s upcoming novel and the vacation they could take when it was finished. Often, she let her mind wander to whatever story Herman had read her the night before. The day she set overflowing pots of flowers on every windowsill, so that from the outside the cottage looked like an oversized greenhouse, was the day that he wrote of a woman who made beauty spring out of her fingertips, whose footsteps grew flowers. When she brought him coffee, he wrote of a man who fell in love with a woman who ran a café in Amsterdam.

Around noon each day, Herman’s newest manuscript would reach the point where it seemed that finally, he had gotten it right, that this was his great Amer-

ican novel, and so every day at noon, between Mia’s morning and afternoon appointments, he and Mia took off their shoes and danced, and he lost himself in the movement of her hair and eyes and laughter, thinking that she was truly wonderful. And every night, Mia would listen to his drafts; lose herself in worlds created just for her, in pages and paragraphs that drew breath from her words and footsteps. Herman wrote more and more, until every night found Mia sitting by the fireplace, listening to him read until she dozed off and he carried her to bed.

Despite all this, an underlying uneasiness that she could not have expressed began to fill Mia’s days, a nagging frustration with spending her life caught in the webs of others’ fantasies, taking in words rather than giving them. She was needed often on the other side of town, where the beginning of New England winter left people with nothing to do but sit and worry and ask their therapist for extended hours, and she no longer had time to try to sew curtains or plant flowers. Her days were an endless cycle of running in and out of the house at least seven minutes late with coffee in hand.

This deep uneasiness soaked into the floorboards along with the sand and sea, and Herman reached a point where he couldn’t stick with a manuscript for more than a few days. He had always been erratic, but now more and more of his pages began to be thrown into stacks, never to be touched again. They piled around the house, higher and higher, as he began novels and threw them out again, for each one was a like a chipped piece of a mirror. Mia the gardener, Mia the barista, all woefully inadequate to grasp the full image of her.

That winter, Herman filled more and more of the rooms with pages, until the house’s creaking ground to a halt under the weight. He marked each day off on the calendar on the kitchen wall with a thin, inked line until one day in December when he didn’t, and then suddenly it was February and he couldn’t remember why he had ever thought it mattered. Walking through the rooms began to remind Mia of a wake, as if word after word lay in state, demanding her to bear witness and pay her respects. They had no time to watch the sun set into the sea, and she no longer woke Herman when insomnia struck, but instead snuck out of their bed to arrange the piles of damp manuscripts into new tilting, wild-looking towers and wonder if it was enough of an answer to the lump in her throat that asked her if she had words of her own to say.

The flowers on the windowsill dried up and died, and she began to leave the cottage earlier and earlier, sometimes hours before her appointments, to sit moodily in coffee shops and escape the manuscripts stacked every which way, a hundred different suffocating destinies that asked her what really made her so different from the clients whose problems she thought were so ridiculous. While she sat, she did Sudoku, or read the business section of the newspaper,

determined to take up grounded, responsible habits that made her feel more like her mother, an oddly comforting ritual.

Herman’s editors were growing tired of his promises for a third novel. He began to lose weight and no longer had time to stop at noon for a cup of coffee. The more Mia pulled away, the easier it was to convince himself he could do her justice. He began an odd quirk of opening his mouth to tell her he loved her and nothing coming out, and to compensate he took up a habit of writing it on slips of paper laid out on the kitchen counter and slipped into her purse, a thousand small promises that his new book would soon fix everything. He spent more and more time sifting through the piles of manuscripts, trying to piece them together into a story, speaking less and less, and thought all the while that he was falling deeper in love. Mia spent less and less time at home and thought more and more and worried that she didn’t know him at all.

The morning that Mia broke the mug was eerily still. As usual, Herman had risen before her, leaving behind their large white bed for a hot cup of coffee and a bowl of oatmeal. He had grandiose dreams of writing a novel about a mermaid living in a shell at the bottom of the sea and he was eager to sit down and write. By the time Mia stirred, he had written a few chapters. One sentence in particular charmed him:

Under the water, everything was enormously, overwhelmingly quiet, like the world had been dunked in syrup, and Mia floated serenely among all this, suspended in time without a care.

So when Mia awoke, Herman was in a remarkably good mood. The sentence hummed in his head, repeated over and over again, and as he imagined it, it was Mia’s clear, ringing voice that recited it quietly to him.

enormously, overwhelmingly quiet ---

Mia moved around the kitchen, going about the peaceful routines that morning brings, the clink of the sugar bowl and sloshing of the milk as her coffee brewed. As she looked out the window at the ocean, she thought of Herman, of suggesting they both take a day off to spend together and do nothing but make pancakes and watch the waves go in and out.

floated serenely --

She stared out, absent-minded and somehow saddened by the unquestioning movement of the waves on the shore. She did not hear Herman enter the kitchen. This is how love becomes mundane; Mia, so accustomed to being unseen that she has forgotten how to see at all.

dunked in syrup --

From behind, Mia’s white nightgown fell in soft waves, and she hummed softly to herself. Herman moved to put his arms around her, to inhale her smell and find peace in the silk and shampoo of her, this woman who contained within her all the words he had ever written. But as he reached to touch her, she startled, shrieking --

Under the water, everything was enormously, overwhelmingly --

dropping the hot porcelain mug of coffee

quiet, like --

and it shattered into a thousand pieces on the uneven floorboards, splattering her nightgown with coffee and turning her feet brown and bloody. Her sharp exclamations of “Ouch” and “Hot” and “Herman” were high-pitched and angry and Herman’s head hurt from the two Mia’s, the one in his head that kept quietly saying ---

the world had been dunked in syrup, and --

and the one in front of him, who was cursing and glaring at him, talking about how that had been her favorite mug and if he would have just watched where he was going ----

Mia floated --

Mia knew that she was cursing at him, but inside she felt only a strange, statuesque apathy, as though the cottage and it’s shell-like stillness were moving into her feet, turning her still as porcelain. Something in Herman felt this deathly stillness, and he moved backwards from her complaints and curses, frightened, only to knock over a stack of papers and bump into another, the world and the cottage and the kitchen were crashing down, everything falling, closing in on him, suffocating him --

And that purple kind of love turned hot and red, like metal in a fire, the kind of thing that for no reason at all, leaves both people burned. Herman and Mia would both have explained the fight thus: the mug was broken and they were angry. But really, the fight was about that stillness, that creeping sense of death that mixed in with the smell of vanilla coffee and rusty blood, and the horrible, awful dissonance of Mia’s angry voice, intermixed with the voice in Herman’s head, reading the sentence so clear and ----

‘I love you’ ‘I love you’, then where are you?” -----

Herman had a thousand things to say, but they all got stuck somewhere between his throat and tongue. He tried to say “I am a feathered, flightless man”. He tried to explain that the ability was there, locked in his bones, consuming him with the need to fly but keeping him from it. But he couldn’t say anything.

“I am here, I am here, I am here, are you listening, Herman? I am your wife and I’m not a character” ----

Herman tried to say “I am the ocean at low-tide”. He tried to explain that he could see the places on the shore, at once familiar and unfamiliar, that he knew where to go but could not hope to get there. But he couldn’t say anything.

“I thought I was going to be different than those women who sit all day and worry, whose husbands spend their days with mistresses, but I became one after all didn’t I?” ---

He tried to say “I’m sorry”.

But he couldn’t get the words out. He could only watch silently, as Mia’s face turned, hopeful to anxious to sad to disappointed to angry to hopeless, and he wondered if this was how the sun looked at the moon as it went through its phases, helpless as more and more of it disappeared, watching it waste away from the other side of the world.

And Mia, as she spoke, could only feel that speaking without being listened to was a terribly lonely thing.

“Herman, stop thinking and be here, you’re not here anymore. Do you remember the day we drove to the mountains and I was colder than I had ever been and we talked about what we wanted in life, and you told me you wanted to write and you wanted me? Do you remember, Herman? I always wondered why you put it like that. Art and Mia. Art and Mia. Always second.” But when he opened his mouth, he couldn’t say anything. And for the first time, he wondered why he could not write endings.

“What do you love about me, Herman?”

He couldn’t answer and it made him angry. She stood silhouetted against pages upon pages and pages of his words, crumpling under her feet, knocked over every time she waved her arms in anger. Wasn’t it enough for her that he had done all this?

They were both surprised at how much easier it felt to breathe when she threw the first manuscript out the window. It was the one about Mia the opera singer who fell in love with her pianist, and she rejected it in one, enormous, fluid movement, like a slap in the face. She surprised herself, it happened so quickly. The manuscript fell in waves, cascading down the cliffside, and she threw another and another and another, until she was running from room to room, tossing armfuls of paper out the large pair of windows by his desk, a bizarre, destroying freedom.

Herman simply stood still as a man in a blizzard, watching them fall, a thousand pieces of her, a thousands words for her, crashing onto the cliffs, dampening and sinking beneath the sea. When it was finished, she looked at him for a long time, her chest heaving and her hands shaking.

He said, “Thank you.”

She turned on her heel and walked out, the door shutting with a thud. The sentence hung in the air, the cottage gaping with the emptiness her presence and the papers left behind. Herman Griffin Walforth sat in his newly bare living room and knew he would not speak again. There was a warmth, and then a numbness, and then nothing left to be said. He sat down at his desk, opened his notebook to the last empty page, and scrawled out what would be the last sentence of his third novel.

The world ends in silence.

Then he turned to the first page and started to write.

art