Heather knew there was a gold thread hidden in the city. In the months she’d lived in Bedford-Stuyvesant she’d looked behind loose bricks, under eaves, the kicked dirt of empty lots. She did all this while endeavoring to appear casual, a woman at leisure, a city stroller. As casual as a woman can look with a hyacinth macaw perched on her arm.
Bastian was the macaw, companion of Heather’s late aunt in Put-In-Bay, Ohio, where America captured six British ships in the War of 1812. Heather’s aunt left a legacy, aside from Bastian, just large enough for first, last, and security on the four-story walk-up where Heather was still unpacking. Bastian could talk, but only four specific words, the disconcerting, “Help, I’ve been kidnapped.” He didn’t know what it meant. He seemed happy.
The Macaw caught stares on Saturdays in Brooklyn Bridge Park, and thank heaven. Many gold threads have been found with the aid of magical creatures. Gold threads hummed in a way birds could hear. They sounded like poetry.
Heather was a poet, past tense. She had a box full of Ohio poems in the back of her new closet. If she hadn’t met Zachary in the park it would have stayed in her closet. But Zachary was a poet too, with curly black hair and a cashmere scarf. They got to talking about poetry over drinks at Nautilus on Clinton, where white sheets hung in the corners of the ceiling like sails billowing. Zachary recited some of his lines, unprompted. Heather leaned in when he did this—a little was okay, a little was sexy. He told her she looked like Stevie Nicks but he didn’t say which album. The doorman sold him a baggie of coke. She’d never done coke in the city, but why not go to her place and he could tell her more poetry?
They walked back across Willoughby. Bastian said his usual thing when they came inside.
Zachary said, “How long have you had a familiar?”
“We’ve known each other forever, haven’t we Bastian? My aunt was Bastian’s companion until her quietus. At which time Bastian and I teamed up to search for treasure.”
Heather ran a finger along his crest.
“He likes a crest massage. Would you care to massage my macaw?”
Zach did so, meaningfully. Heather preferred to have sex with her clothes on. Only one boy had made remarks about the stretch marks, from weight coming on and off, but one was enough. She let this Zachary put his hands in her sweater, which felt playfully forbidden, like in high school. (Since there was no high school on the island where she grew up, Heather had taken the ferry twenty minutes south to Catawba. It was there she’d first heard stories about the gold thread—the legend that finding it would guarantee luck in life, but that you had to be lucky to find it: a paradox but not really, like the way you had to be rich to make money.)
Next morning was Sunday. Zachary and Heather told Bastian they’d be back, then walked through the neighborhood for iced coffees, past the parking lot of cop cars like a jacket of bullets, past the antique store that was always closed. The sign said Conspectus above a wrought-iron flight of stairs down, but Heather called it The Mausoleum. Zach said, “Haunted furniture. Ghost settees.” Heather said, “The sideboard from the warlock’s tomb.”
Back home they broke out her old college anthology. He made fun of her for the annotations in the margins; she’d written definitions for all the hard words: quietus, calyx, auriferous. She found the Vachel Lindsay her class was assigned, the one they laughed about, because it was so racist, only it wasn’t fun to laugh about it now with Zach because the poem was far more racist than she’d remembered. They laughed about not being able to laugh.
“We should burn it,” Zach said. So they burned those pages in the sink, encouraged by the last of the coke. By the time the dousing from the faucet threw smoke and ashes around the room she felt bold enough to take off her sweater. Sex on a counter was more about the idea than the feeling. It seemed like afterward would be a nice time for Zach to leave; tomorrow was Monday. But Zach didn’t appear to have a job. He recited more of his poetry, a kind of slippery tangle where you kept sliding from one knot of language to another without any way to trace the pattern. There was something there about monster movies, something about the air off a river, neology.
“Read me one of yours,” he said, “or two. And take your shirt off again.”
Out came the crate.
“Full warning: these poems are of the substandard variety.”
Heather’s writing wasn’t adventurous like Zach’s; she didn’t write to show off. Her poems were the documentation of her unshakable sadness. She’d been a fat kid who starved herself, a religious adolescent who’d given it up in a panic to be cool. Her first boyfriend used to choke her, which was terrifying, until she came to wonder if she deserved it; until, fuck that, she didn’t deserve it; he was an asshole. She remembered how relieved she felt when the pregnancy test came back no—how she wanted to hug her mother and cry but her mother went cold. There was a connection with the woman that never happened, that might have happened if only. When she was little, Heather used to go into her mom’s doll room—her mom collected old dolls—and freeze there in doll posture, hoping her mom would open the door and see her and laugh to find the real daughter.
When she showed poems to people in the past they always thought she was using dolls as a metaphor for herself. They said it so often she started believing it. But Zach seemed to understand. He said, “Your mother was the doll and you’re real.” It was almost as good as a gold thread. She watched Zach’s body after he fell asleep that night: his pale chest, the black band of ink around his left arm, his eyebrows. Maybe they could find a thread together.
“Help, I’ve been kidnapped.”
*
Friday she followed Zach to a poetry reading in a beer garden in Greenpoint. String lights pushed the sky farther off, bound the attendees in a conspiracy. Heather and Zach sat by his friend Junie, who was tall and wore clunky heals to make herself taller. “Be careful about this guy,” Junie told her. “He’s like an eel. You need hooks and a net and other things.”
“Bastian is my lure.”
“Is Bastian your fufu dog?” Junie got halfway into a story about a fufu dog-owner devoured by her fufu dog “like a pork roast” when they were joined by a beautiful woman named Zia, who turned out to be Junie’s best friend. Zia’s laughter was as gorgeous as her hair— piles of copper fading to umber and ochre—sepia hair. It shook when Zia laughed, a hum laugh that stuttered up from her belly, floated in her throat. Zia’s eyes when she met you said I’m intrigued. Heather felt ambushed by how much she liked this woman, someone so effortless in her beauty that to give in to any jealousy would seem churlish.
“I am having such a good day,” Zia said. “And meeting you is too much.”
Junie said, “Zia’s never had a bad day.”
Zia said, “It’s true. I’m really blessed. For example, I just met a woman at the laundry, because laundry, and she was looking for a poem to use in a series on Hulu. She wanted a boat poem. It’s for a boat captain who’s really a vampire. So off I go with my pencil.”
People really did live different lives. The last time Heather had done laundry she felt the day collapse on her. It had been a Sunday and she’d walked to the laundromat past groups high-fiving, a park full of barbecue, rich kids brunching. She’d felt bunkered, marooned.
The reading started. Poets in their late twenties read from a mic on a wooden pallet. Someone named Randal read in unsettling lapels, then someone named Krystal in a denim jacket that said FAKE FUR over a tee shirt that said REAL FUR. Someone named Shawneece unfolded their poems with nervousness, buttoned and unbuttoned a cardigan too warm for the season. Later, Zia said, “I want to take Shawneece home and take care of them.” When Zachary agreed, Junie said “Shawneece is going to want to take you home, buster. Heather, kung fu Shawneece.” She did a high-yah!
Heather liked Junie, but high-yah? Fufu dog?
“I want to hear more about your macaw,” Zia said. “I’ll bet he sings.”
Zachary didn’t know Zia well. “You don’t mean you’ve literally never had a bad day? Literally?”
Heather said, “I too am curious. To answer your question, Bastian does speak, but he’s an alarmist.”
Zia laughed her laugh. “I probably have. I’ve been in this city a long time. But look at that.” She pointed behind Heather’s head. Everyone turned. Against the gold brick wall—gold because of the evening coming on—the green and pink light from a stained-glass window reflected in moving patterns as the window, loose on its hinge, moved freely in a rush of wind. The pane swarmed color on the bricks. Light was ink. Heather found paper in her bag and wrote something about light being ink. Look at this! She was writing poetry again.
At Heather’s, Junie made cocktails she called okey-dokies (grenadine, tequila, seltzer, lime). Bastian cried, “Help, I’m being kidnapped.” When Zia heard him she effervesced with laughter. She lifted her arms as though she too had wings. “Show me your pretty feathers,” she said. “Show me pretty.” Heather wasn’t sure where Zia learned to speak macaw but Bastian loved her, flapping his wings and bobbing his head. Then everyone bobbed their heads.
“Oh my god I have the perfect idea,” Junie said. “We should each write poems about Bastian. We can meet back here next week and read them.”
“Maybe brunch?” Heather said.
“Fuck brunch,” Junie said, “okey-dokies.”
They compromised on Heather would cook and Junie would bring tequila. In the week that followed, Heather didn’t just go to work and hunt for the gold thread (in shop windows, in the backseats of cabs, strung on the trees of empty parks at night), she messed around with poetry. She wrote about her suspicion that she was born already dead, but that she could thwart cruel fate if she could con enough people into thinking she’d been alive all along. And she wrote about Bastian.
As promised, they gathered on Sunday. Zach read some light surrealism with taxonomic descriptions of feathers. Zia read an inspiring thing about how soldiers were drone bombing civilians at weddings, and whales were being harpooned in their eyeballs, but also about how Bastian was a token of life’s unbroken urge upward, indomitable even against the ceiling fan of reality, “I climb with the bird, wings out, happy, my throat full of all the words I know.”
Heather read:
Margaret Quick of Put-in-Bay
Lies under a stone
Now you, pure feathered creature
Are my own
We’re joined at every feather
Every bone
Though you’re the one who flies I’ll never
Fly alone.
Junie read last:
Bird flu is the raw love of beaks that makes you sick with grace
Bird flu is the button in my heart that opens my throat to bitching trill
Bird flu is fucking in the shadow of kidnappers, serenaded by the rattle of
stones in your gizzard. Honey,
bird flu is my birdboned ass on your perch while you cage me in fluttery
flames.
They bobbed heads with Bastian goodbye and spilled into the late afternoon, destined for Nautilus. Here’s how good the afternoon was: The Mausoleum was open. It turned out to be an old-school place filled with incunabula. Heather bought a set of Russian finger puppets. Zia bought 50s-era sewing kit for kids called Doll Clinic. When Zia and Junie went to the bathroom Zach turned bitter. “No one said anything good about my poem.”
Heather said, “You’re too smart for us.”
Zach said, “Zia’s stuck up. Can you believe that shit about the whale eyeballs? Just because it’s intense she feels like she has to say it.”
Eighteen hours later, Heather’s alarm made old-fashioned phone sounds. She rose beside a lightly snoring Zach (he’d hoarded the blankets in the night, which somehow failed to prevent his sleeping boner from poking out of the side of the bed like the kind of lever you use to adjust the height of an office chair) and groped her way toward the beeping coffee machine. Cream and sugar, WFUV FM.
Then the coming awareness of a breeze in the room. A chill on her skin. There wouldn’t be such a breeze unless the window was open, which was fine—Zach might have gotten up for a cigarette and forgotten to close it—but Zach didn’t know to cage Bastian or tie the lace around his foot to keep him from flying—
Panic rushed her system. She called “Bastian!” and “Zach!” with rising alarm. The window was open, his cage was open, but he could still be somewhere. She checked the shower, checked the closet. Zach was up by then getting coffee for himself.
“He’s gone! Zach put some pants on, we have to find him.”
Zach’s spoon of sugar was halfway to his mug, so he just let it fall in. “Give me a minute to wake up. And listen, later, I want to talk to you about me and Junie.”
“Zach!” Heather felt her breathing jagged. “Shut up about whatever, just please. You can’t help me for a second now?”
Zach seemed harried as he gathered his clothes. He said, “We’re on a break, but we had a long talk last night after you fell asleep—”
He’d let her fucking best friend out of the window and now he was talking bullshit. He didn’t even have any pants on. Heather grabbed her keys. Bastian wasn’t on the steps, or the alley, or the fire escapes of Gates Ave. She felt like she hadn’t just lost Bastian but all her life, the meaning, the sound of her aunt’s cigarette cough, and the smell of the spume off Lake Eerie. She was a crazy woman in jeans and a halter top on the loud street of a strange city. People die in strange cities, of strange causes.
The cars on Washington Street had undersides, where she looked for him, and she also looked up in linden leaves. The whole search was a taunt, a cruel parody of her search for the gold thread. It was revenge from god for ceasing to profess her belief. It was what she deserved. She was just another victim, surrounded by tall buildings where anything could hide laughing.
“Help, I’ve been kidnapped!” She wasn’t hallucinating—that was Bastian’s real voice. Turning, she caught sight of the bird on Junie’s arm. Junie had an iced coffee in her other hand, standing there on the corner with a couple of old guys. It was like she was giving Bastian to them. Was she selling him?
“This bird can’t stop talking about you!” Junie said when she saw Heather. “Speaking of animals, where’s your frog prince?”
“What the fuck are you doing? Are you letting strangers touch my bird?”
“Aw no way,” one of the men said. “It’s not like that. It’s not like that.”
“You’re the poet,” the other guy said. “I knew it when I saw you. She said she had to get you your bird back or you’d—.”
But he didn’t finish his sentence because Bastian was aloft, having fluttered up from Junie’s arm and angled himself across Malcolm X Boulevard, toward Clinton Hill.
“We got him,” one of the older guys said. They sprang into action as Bastian rolled on the air, all four of them shouting, reaching up, Heather standing in one place to keep sight of her friend, which way he’d tilt and turn.
The men—Heather never learned their names—had keen eyes. Heather panicked each time she thought he’d veered out of sight, but one of Junie’s friends would bellow certainty about where he’d gone and they’d double back to find him around the Atlantic Armory, or circling the playground of an elementary school, kids cheering, trilling. They finally cornered Bastian two blocks from Heather’s place—they’d wound up doubling back. Bastian permitted himself to be apprehended on a bicycle seat.
“Aren’t you a venturesome creature.” Heather willed her voice to sound friendly rather than desperate. “Let’s get you inside for a rest after this tumultuous morning.”
One of the men set his foot on the urn of a honeysuckle to untie his shoelace. He held it out to Heather at the end of a small hand. “You get this back to me tomorrow or Wednesday. I’m at Brix coffee every morning, eight to nine.”
Bastian’s eyes were exclusively playful. He might be sad or hostile, but because of the way our brains read our own faces onto nature Bastian could only be puckish, a purple devil. He lifted a foot toward Heather’s hand—he knew the procedure—and she tied the lace around it.
Exhausted from running—all those okey-dokies took their toll—Heather thanked the older men and climbed the stairs to her place, where Zach had already cleared out. She pet Bastian and soothed him and soothed herself until dark, when Zia buzzed.
An electronic whisper: “Can I come up? I have a secret.”
Zia could throw on a track suit and pull her lush hair into a twist and be beautiful.
Heather offered an okey-dokey but Zia showed off a thermos.
“I found the thread,” she said.
“Which thread?”
Zia didn’t need to answer with words; she just slowly spread her smile.
“Shut up!” How could the search be over so quickly? What could Heather have done instead of fail? And how had the prize gone to someone like Zia—and in all the teeming and soar of a place like New York?
“It was in that box. The doll kit. From The Mausoleum. It was right there when I opened the lid and I was like duh, of course I’d find it when I wasn’t looking.”
Heather had run her fingers along that box. She’d almost thought of sending it back home to her mother, not as a suggestion her mother’s dolls needed mending, just a token.
“Well where is it? Can I see it?” She tried to keep her smile up. It was one of the hardest things she’d ever done.
“It’s just…” Zia said, “We’ve all heard that it hums, right, and whatever, who believes that, but it really does. I heard it humming through the box. It really, really does sound like poetry.”
Heather wasn’t made for magic. At the same time a weight was lifted a weight fell.
Zia’s laugh burst forth warm.
“I hid it. Because it would ruin the game if I kept it. I hid it deep in the city. Somewhere I’ll never tell anyone. It’s there now, waiting.”
A few weeks later, on the day before the movers arrived to drive her belongings across the country, Heather distracted herself with a Hulu show about time-traveling vampires. Only twenty minutes in did she realize this was the episode Zia had talked about, the one that had promised to use her poem in some nautical affair. Heather recognized the poem as soon as the character spoke it because it had been the one about Bastian (“I rise in the hyacinth night.”)
The sea captain wasn’t a captain but a master commandant, Oliver Perry. The poem appeared when his vampire teeth extended, evidence of dread magic he surreptitiously employed to exsanguinate the British in the Battle of Lake Eerie, before docking his ship, the Detroit, at a berth of the waters off Put-in-Bay, Ohio.