A self-portrait of Rembrandt, a hand-colored print of a courtesan as the immortal Tekkai, and a wooden meditation chair stood in the Central Park Loch. They were each alone, still a few yards apart, and here to admire Flaco, the recently escaped eurasian eagle-owl.
The painter’s likeness, looking left and right for an audience, decided to test the courtesan’s interest in being alone together. “He proved them all wrong,” she said of the beautiful raptor. “He’s surviving fine in the wild.”
The courtesan, whether by habit of politeness or real interest, seemed game: “The first few days, I was worried.” Moving their cane in time with their good, right leg, they approached a more intimate distance. “But now, I know it was worth the risk. Once he made it a week, it was clear. Now it’s been two months—who wouldn’t trade safety for eight weeks of flight?” They looked up to the forked branch of the oak and squinted to see Flaco, who was glorious even from this distance, puffing up his white chest feathers and preparing to hoot. The sunlight summoned all its matter to breach the leaves and get to that proud torso. “Bubo bubo,” they went on, to the others’ confusion. “His Latin name,” they tried to explain, “or rather, the name of his species. Le Grand-duc d’Europe, in French.”
The Rembrandt smiled, agreeing. “I paid a high price for my freedom. I’d do it again.”
The chair scooted itself nearer, seeking information. “He escaped? From where? And what do the French have to do with it?”
All around, a chorus of birders and joggers and the laity, those self-appointed experts on their surroundings, grew excited. They stood ready to fill in gaps in any story, having spent the afternoon testing sentences that would impress upon the less-interested onlookers exactly why everyone was gathered to see this bird of prey—so high up in the tree that, without the assistance of pointing strangers and inventions in cell phones’ ability to zoom, “seeing” would be, for the uninitiated, a matter of faith—but were interrupted, constantly, by worse story-tellers, interlopers who did not know what order of events had turned this into a site of pilgrimage.
The chair’s inquiry afforded a new chance for them to narrate:
—He lived for twelve years in a cage at the Central Park Zoo
—Why is everyone standing around? What are you looking at?
—And he escaped!
—He just celebrated his 13th birthday, but his first as a free owl
—How did he get out?
—A vandal cut open his cage
—It’s that Asian owl
—Is there something in the trees?
—It has happened at a number of zoos, actually. Risky—not all animals have fared so well as Flaco
As the trio gathered closer, having chosen each other, or been chosen by the strongest among them, for a more private conspiracy, these voices faded for them. “I come here all the time,” said the chair, “And I know the local birds. But somehow, I did not hear about this escape. A eurasian eagle-owl . . . that’s a lifer, for me.”
I have called them self-portrait, print, and chair, for my own pleasure, but they took each other for white women, and they called themselves, respectively, Rebecca, Apollo, and Lilian, though I didn’t know this yet, as they had not introduced themselves. To do so would have implied an expectation that the acquaintance would carry on long enough to produce a need to refer to each other in the third person, a commitment only Rebecca was prepared to make, and only if someone else proposed it.
I like to find a few people to follow around the park until I feel I have a sense of their personalities, and these would do. I got the idea from the artist Sophie Calle, who claimed that her practice of following strangers around Paris in 1979 helped her become reacquainted with the city after she’d been away too long. I make the game my own, though, by wandering over to the Met and finding a work that reminds me of the day’s subject. If I have time, I write it up.
Dissatisfied that no one had invited her to finish the monologue she had set up, Rebecca tried again. “A great deal of money, I mean.”
The other two looked to the left, by rotating their heads to the right, and then all the way around. Realizing they did not need or want additional information from her, though, they returned their gazes to Flaco, unmoved.
“For my freedom?”
—I don’t see it
—Yeah, the emperor tamarin monkeys in Texas. They made it 20 miles out, but they were found starving in an abandoned house
—And they didn’t catch him?
—He’s here, isn’t he?
—I meant the vandal . . .
—The rodenticide is going to get him, like it did Barry
My first choice for the day’s object had been this gentleman asking about whoever had cut Flaco’s wire enclosure. I noticed him on my walk toward the Loch, taken by his vibrant green overcoat, a Harris Tweed that reminded me of the long-eared owls I’ve seen in the Outer Hebrides. A face you don’t see often enough, these days, and I looked forward to finding some echo of it in the American wing. I liked the jacket so much, though, that, as I caught up to him on the path, where he’d stopped to admire a cardinal, I said so aloud, forgetting how easily put off straight men are by compliments.
—Here, borrow my binoculars
—He’s the only one of his kind in the country. That must be lonely
—They tried to. That first day, where he was terrified, outside the Plaza
—One could choose a worse hotel
—In North America!
—They should fly in another eagle owl, so he’ll have a mate
—They have them in Europe, too
—I just saw him vomit up a pellet
—He could get together with Geraldine
—Why does he hoot?
—Geraldine?
—Someone cut open his cage with a knife
—That’s the resident Great Horned, but she lives in a different part of the park
—They say he hoots more as he grows more confident. Let me find how this birder phrased it. It was incredible
—He has a wingspan of six feet
—The hawks have been harassing him
—They swallow the rat whole, and then all the indigestible parts, the bones and the fur, get spat back out as pellets
—I found it: “In the initial weeks after his escape, the volume, duration and frequency of his hooting increased as his confidence seemed to increase.”
—He is unbothered
—He is hooting to say that this is his territory
—We all long to be free
—And the bluejays
—That man will let you look through his camera, if you want to see him up close
—He’s been at this tree for the past few weeks
—He’s awake again! See his feathers shaking while he cleans his talons?
Apollo, who appeared to be growing a blond mustache to match their silver crown, bargained with a more sympathetic nod. “I’m sure you paid a price, too,” Rebecca told them, meaning that they looked gay. “Did you grow up in the city?”
To answer Rebecca’s question, Apollo left their body, exhaling their spirit, in the manner ascribed to Tekkai, so that it could stand on the other side of the ravine, where there were fewer voices and, now that he had turned, a better view of Flaco’s face. The body stayed in place, though, and carried on the conversation. It gave what they had been asked for, a story of growing up in the midwest, feeling a great need to leave, moving to The City. Their spirit, remembering that, footless, it was also without injury, took the chance to sprint up the hill and over the wet rocks, where, in their previous, corporeal journey, they had had to move so cautiously.
Left behind, Apollo’s body found that older women in New York were eager to hear, upon learning a girl had grown up in one of those places whose name evokes, in the minds of the Upper West Side, rivers polluted by industry, neighborhoods razed equally by meth as they were by tornados (replaced with oxy by now, Apollo supposed), pedophile pastors screaming about homosexuality, empty strip malls, aisles of vodka at Walmart roped off by Sunday’s blue laws, that people still fled such places for Manhattan.
“And you got out,” Rebecca said, triumphantly, by which she meant, “Amen.”
Apollo’s body turned to Lilian, passing the torch. “Did you grow up here?”
Lilian, beautiful in her blue bucket hat, dressed entirely in cotton, binoculars, though hanging from a string, kept in hand, as if she had not yet decided to chose this conversation over silent focus on the bird, gave her own story: the Pacific Northwest, evangelical parents, a bristling against stricture thirty years before Apollo’s, which led her to New York, where, “in a ridiculous pair of heels,” she said, smiling at Apollo, who, she supposed, had once worn outfits that would now be similarly unimaginable, “I got on a plane to Paris, and stayed in Europe for years.”
“Do you go back?” Rebecca wanted to know, meaning not Europe but Oregon, Indiana, Christianity, pumps, little dresses, men, the high school football field. She was an evangelist herself, but for this going back, rather than for Christ.
A dedicated self-portraitist all her life, Rebecca welcomed the opportunity to compare the lines on her cheeks at 18, upon refusing to choose a college or a husband like her peers, to those on the same cheeks at 38, when she would have been narrating to an ex-boyfriend details of her most recent sojourn in the Alps, to the lines at 58, forming the appropriate shapes to indicate pity for a shriveled former friend, who had lost her daughter, to the valleys of 63 that, though deeper now, certainly, marked her out as the less-marked by time’s insults. “I love high school reunions,” she said, letting the angle of the evening sun highlight her forehead, no longer in the shadow of the oversized beret that crowned her gray curls. “I look better than everyone.”
She fingered the chain on her neck, offering Lilian a look that was meant to invite her to share this ultimately inclusive title. “And the boys who overlooked me when I was young—they look twice, now.” Rebecca’s happiness in these sentences made them true. No one looked better, all husbands wanted her, and everyone regretted having not noticed these facts sooner. These three were as alike in beauty as they were in their habit of tracking down the whereabouts of internet-famous Strigidae, an attractiveness measured by a rubric that, though far enough from whatever norm that it did not require youth, thinness, style, or sensuality, was easily understood.
But the spell only lasted so long as she kept speaking. When Lilian and Apollo demurred, uncertain their faces had survived the decades quite as well, Rebecca’s own eyelids sagged; her lobes showed the stretching of former hoops; her chin briefly puckered, like cellulite on thighs; disappointment made the nose bulbous, insecure. At any moment, though, she could regain her dignity by representing it.
Lilian did go back, yes, and wished she had sooner. But not for the sake of finding out how she compared to her classmates, no. It was the sense, remarkable—even moving—that these people, including those who had taken the roles, in childhood, of torturer, or of judge, of characters in the kind of temporarily constrained cruel dramas at which teens excel, of church mates or fellow long-distance runners, were now simply other old people.
“When we were young,” she said, stiffly relaxed, “these divides felt so big. Our differences of faith, say, or this longing I had, to get out.” She positioned her body away from her interlocutors, instead facing the bark of the nearest elm.
Apollo saw the scene she described as a trompe l’oeil: within the impression of panes, created by the bark’s cracks, they could see Lilian in the austere hall of some country club, struggling not to judge, folding others’ hands between her own, remembering the names of their mothers. “I went last year. The pandemic made me curious about everyone’s lives. And this time, so many of them had died.” In an intricate panel of Apollo’s arboreal imagination, they now strolled alongside Lilian, taking her arm, forgiving her for sentences about the insignificance of political differences, helping her up the stairs of a stage, to an accept a playful award, “Latest Bloomer,” an uptight apology for the past. “It felt miraculous to see,” she said, repeating herself, “In one room, just those of us who happened to have survived aging.”
Up the tree’s fork, Apollo watched her driving a rented Subaru Forester to look, without getting out, at the porch where, with a girl from the Youth Revival center, she had gotten to second base. Back on the ground, though, Lilian was apologizing for every pleasure.
“In my 30s, I found Buddhism, which made more sense for me,” she said, shyly. “I found peace in rejecting the pursuit of ever-increasing accumulation of material pleasures, for one. But now I worry that I’ve replaced them with immaterial pleasures. There’s a selfishness to this, too: eager, in one day, to read a novel, to see what’s on at Film Forum, to come visit an owl. A day does not need so many ‘experiences.’ Yet I’m tempted.”
Apollo did not go back, no. They had not kept in touch with their friends from high school, and they regretted it, though they regretted their own use of the word ‘regret’ more. When they were eighteen, they said—summoning their consciousness back to the bed where they sat, so to speak, drinking tea willingly, though without enthusiasm, with the afternoon’s visitors, returning to themself, briefly earnest—they had thought they would leave behind an ignorant place for something better. “Sure, my friends were brilliant.” Keeping their eyes on Lilian, whose confession had moved them, they carried on. “There was Lindsay, who taught herself ancient Greek from public library books. Stacy, who wrote dozens of scripts, episodes of our lives, as if we were not 12, but the protagonists of the likes of Designing Women or Golden Girls, whatever she had recorded on VHS.” Apollo’s voice became anxious as it itemized. “Scott survived without his parents’ help, hiding that fact from the school, working nights at the plastics factory.” Their anxiety became silently hysterical, as they heard themself reducing the people they once loved, though with no effort to keep knowing, to generic summaries, enforced portraits of class. Trying to avoid this trap, they chose to instead blur the town, muttering inanely about there being nothing to do but chainsmoke at Denny’s. “What I mean is that, in the city, I expected to find some place better, more intellectual, more interested in art. Instead, I found NYU freshmen.”
This was a punchline for the wrong audience. Each woman rejected this statement by the means available to her: Lilian pretended no words had been spoken, whereas Rebecca demanded a correction. “It can’t have been all bad.”
Apollo talked about that, too, offering a respectable, oral CV. Rebecca lamented her own childhood bullies, who had disliked the consequences wealth had on her personality. Lilian grew quiet, embarrassed by any talk of means.
“In Spanish,” Rebecca said, “His name means ‘skinny.’ But he’s so rotund.”
“Is it a joke?” Lilian asked, “Or has he put on weight since he got out?”
“One of my students asked me that,” Apollo said, “But another asked if he was named after A$AP Rocky, Lord Pretty Flaco.” Lilian wanted to know if that was a reference to Guthrie’s ‘Pretty Boy Floyd, the Outlaw,’ while Rebecca wondered where they taught, with what credentials, if the kids today could write, if Apollo feared being canceled by mobs of oversensitive teens.
Apollo, eyeing Lilian’s prosthetic, asked if she had seen Flaco fly.
“You know, I’ve been coming here with my binoculars for a few years, and it’s funny how you pick up the vocabulary. Birders ask each other that question. We say, ‘Are you staying for flyout.’ For owls, that means when they begin their hunt for the night.”
Apollo liked this. “Well. Are you? Staying for flyout?”
“Oh no—I must be heading back. You?”
“I wasn’t planning on it, but now dusk is so close.”
“Though it’s raining.”
“I should get home myself, but it was a pleasure talking to you ladies. I’m Rebecca, by the way.”
“I’m Lilian,” Lilian said, shaking everyone’s hand.
“I’m Artemis,” Apollo said. “Thanks for taking the time to chat.” They walked a respectful dozen yards from the owl scene before reconnecting their earbuds to their phone, and they set off, not looking back, wishing they had let the others go first, to take one last look at Flaco. Apollo wanted to catch the final Saturday hours at the Met, so they headed east, through the North Meadow.
That’s where I found them, anyway, sitting in the mud, with the most beautiful dog I’ve seen in my life, his paws up on their shoulders, licking their face. It was half husky, half pomeranian, and while I believe, morally, we should strive either to avoid any preference of ‘type’ in animals, or, if that’s asking too much, at least to avoid tying our preferences to the consequences of breeders’ choices, I have to admit that this is the cutest possible combination. Little and big, double-dappled—his own spots echoed by the pattern of sunset light passing through new spring growth—long hair, ears the exact size of one’s palm, when set to the good purpose of cupping them. And he had absolutely flattened this kind-hearted, middle-aged queer who was too busy laughing to right themselves.
Around Apollo, small congregations formed. At first, I thought it was a medieval tapestry, but this scene was fully pictorial, suggesting a move into the renaissance. And as I grew closer, they split into fragments, each becoming more like themselves. A group of teenagers—now staring, with intense rejection, at a camera’s lens—elected a girl, emboldened by her desire for a dog, to represent them, and coordinated phone calls to everyone’s parents, hoping to find one who might permit fostering until another broke their father’s will. A few runners, each a horse painted by Leonora Carrington, having arrived separately, now formed a cohort based on their shared uniform. They collaborated on trotting out toward the main path, looking for park employees to flag down. A gorgeous man in a double-breasted suit, a Walker Evans subject, quietly arrived with a bag of kibble, having been, it became clear, one of the first on the scene. And, coming up just behind me, a pair of park rangers.
—We found him running around in the bramble
—Who would leave such an angel?
—Has anyone fed him?
—We find about five of them a month now, since 2020
—Does he have tags?
—He’s such a good boy
—I see you have fed him. What a smelly shit
—What do you think his name is?
—The ACC lets the ranger name them, but you’ve spent more time with him. What do you say?
—My friend lives in Jersey with a big yard. I’m trying to convince him to ask his dad
—We need good pictures of him, for the ad
—He looks well cared for
—Poor baby. His stomach must hurt
—Is the ACC a kill shelter?
—How long have you been here? Are you sure his owner isn’t coming back?
—Don’t cede your right! Look into his eyes, and tell us what name you see
—These monsters are adopting dogs they can’t afford
—There are no kill shelters in NYC
—I was thinking “Bartholomew, but . . .”
—Yes there are! Let me look it up to be sure
—It must be sad, though, to realize that you cannot keep a pet you love
—Either way, he’ll be adopted so quickly
—They could at least drop him off at a shelter
—YES, Bartholomew
—It might be humiliating, though
—Mew. Is that your name? Are you Bartholomew? Are you our best friend?
—It looks like they mostly “avoid euthanization for non-adoption”
—That sounds like a euphemism
—Bartholomew! You are the best boy I have ever met.
“I’m Apollo,” Apollo said, as I offered them a hand, and then my arm, as we pulled back from the crowd. The creature, whom the ACC would later falsely call Jinkies—a discovery Apollo and I would make, unhappily, in their bed the next morning—appeared to be in good hands. “Didn’t I see you back there, by Flaco?”
Surprised they had noticed me, I admitted that, against my will, I had eavesdropped.
“First, I celebrate an owl’s freedom from captivity,” they said. “And now I abet the recapture of a dog who was happily nosing about in the woods.” Their chuckle betrayed their self-satisfaction. “I suppose I don’t know what freedom is.”
This was infuriating. “Are you kidding me?” I tried to keep it together, but I had hoped that, among the trio, Apollo at least understood what Flaco’s release meant. “You’re all out of your mind.”
Affronted, they tried to reclaim their arm—“Who’s all?”—but I held it firmly in my elbow’s crook, patting it gently with the other arm’s palm. “Calm down. I’m mad, but it will pass.”
“But what about?”
“You think the question of freedom is merely cage or no cage. And you’re not wrong, to the extent that a cage is often a great evil. But Flaco, Bartholomew, you, and me, we share a longing, and it’s not about the length of our leads, or who holds them.”
“What do we long for?” We were facing each other, now. Apollo searched my face for the story.
“I couldn’t believe people thought that the poor, addled man who let those monkeys nearly freeze to death in Texas did so with the same motivations as whoever cut open Flaco’s cage.”
“I hadn’t thought about who let him free, actually. I suppose it was the Animal Liberation Front?”
“It need not be a radical, really. Eurasian eagle owls, after all, are known to live in urban parks! Anyone who has been to Helsinki and seen them soaring would find his enclosure in a closet-sized cage, in the middle of a perfectly good habitant, intolerable.”
“You cannot be mad at me for not having seen the owls of Helsinki, now.”
“That’s not the issue—it’s your talking about ‘freedom’ like you’re a Freshman in college, and you’ve chosen a theme. You notice that the owl, who can now fly anywhere he wants, chooses not just the Loch, not just the area near the ravine, not just that tall oak, not even just the easternmost segment of foliage, but the exact same few feet of branch to sit on, every day?”
“Well, this was my first time coming to see him. I didn’t notice that, no.”
“Fair enough. You should learn to look more closely.” I liked that this made them blush. “What I mean is that he wants the liberty of his own place.”
They were unmoved and teasing—“And who is developing their thesis statement now?”—but when I tried to object, their kiss got in my way. The first contact was certain but short, still searching, their hand, moving through my hair, going limp before it gripped, letting the thumb’s end graze the hairline, down my throat, resting there on the lump that rose as I prepared to speak. I wanted to confess, to tell them how easy it was to let Flaco go, how proud I had been to see him in the news, but again, their kiss interrupted. I followed them home.