Non-human Visitation

In the pale hours of the morning, Lisa awoke to find a giant bird laying on her bedroom floor. Breathing. Cascade of red, yellow, green, and blue blots of feathers, rising and falling. A faint whistling escaped its body each time it exhaled.

A bird snoring. In her bedroom. As big as a man. This was not okay.

First it had been cold sweats, randomly, while doing nothing at all. Sitting on the couch or cooking a meal. Like her skin was swiss cheese and couldn’t hold water any longer. Now she was waking up at odd hours completely alert and seeing things. She couldn’t remember reading about hallucinations in the paperwork that came with her new medication, but the list of side effects was a mile long and her memory wasn’t what it used to be.

She turned away from the bird, pulling the covers over her head. It was odd feeling none of the panic she’d had weeks ago when she decided to go to the doctor for medication. Prior to the little blue pill, her heart felt like it was trying to smash its way out of her chest. It took the strength out of her legs. Her stomach knotted and unknotted like it wanted to be a heart, but since she wasn’t eating, all that came up was stomach acid and bile.

Was that worse than a giant bird?

Still hearing its faint whistle, she piled the pillows over her head.

The whistling stopped. She heard feathers ruffle as the bird changed position.

“Ha! Ridiculous. You don’t have the balls.”

The bird’s voice was high-pitched and creaky. Like a little cabinet door.

Miraculous. Not even the bird’s words prompted any panic. At this point, Lisa knew they should. Here was a real live bird, bigger than herself, talking in its sleep on her bedroom floor.

Carefully she wriggled out of the covers and towards the other side of the bed. Her hand found a bat leaning against the nightstand. She slipped out of bed, slowly approached the bird, bat raised.

The bird wasn’t as big as she’d thought. Standing at full height, it would come up to her chin, or maybe her chest. It was hard to tell because below the bird head it had a soft, rounded body and stocky limbs. No wings. On the ends of its upper limbs were dark leathery hands with four slender fingers. She was reminded of raccoon hands. In high school, she’d known a boy who had a pet raccoon named Wily with very similar hands, though they were much smaller. In fact this bird’s body was similar to Wily’s but much bigger, and covered in feathers instead of fur.

Where was the panic? She held the bat steady, with strong dry hands.

“Dang Lisa. I knew things were bad, but bludgeoning a stranger with a baseball bat bad? No wonder I was sent in the middle of the night.”

The animal regarded her with wily dark eyes, perched above a cracked orange, sickle-shaped beak.

“Who are you?”

“Call me Dez. Short for Deztitute. The Creator’s sick little way of reminding me I can’t up and leave.”

All the blood seemed to drain from Lisa’s head. The color of her bedroom and this bird faltered momentarily. She sat on the bed, still holding the bat.

The bird stood and yawned. “You look dehydrated. I’ll go get you a glass of water.”

Lisa wanted to tell the bird no. What if her roommate was up? Corrie was elderly with unpredictable hours. Often Lisa would go downstairs in the middle of the night for a glass of milk and find her in the living room staring out the window. The old woman might have a stroke if she saw this giant surly bird walking around the apartment. But Lisa was preoccupied. Her head was growing lighter and lighter, and she felt herself swaying. It took all her energy and willpower to stay sitting on the bed. She didn’t want to fall asleep with this creature roaming her living space.

“I’m back!” the bird creaked. It held a glass of water to her lips.

Lisa drank hungrily. She was thirsty. Dehydration was definitely on the list of the medication’s side effects. Probably from all the sweating.

“Corrie is something special. She didn’t even look at me as I walked by.”

“Leave her out of this.”

“Don’t worry, I will. She’s beyond saving.”

“Excuse me?” Lisa felt her strength returning. A bolt of anger cut through her, insisting she cuff this rude bird for talking about Corrie that way.

“Jeez, touchy, touchy! You know she’s pretty much senile, right?”

Lisa shoved Dez backward, stunned the creature was solid. Her palms pushed past its feathers and into its ribs. The bird was extremely lightweight. He nearly fell over.

“Bullying me won’t change anything, but if it makes you feel better, go ahead. Hit me with that bat.” Dez turned around and backed into striking range, sticking its rump out. It was a really pathetic butt. Mostly skin and bones.

“How do you know my name?”

“Think of me as your guardian angel.”

This bird. Bent over in front of her.

“Are you going to spank me or not?”

“I think I’ll call my counselor.”

Dez straightened up, rubbed its back. “Who, Jessie? I can tell you how that conversation’s going to go.”

The bird seemed to know the names of all the people in her life. Which meant, solid or not, it was a very disturbing figment of her imagination, or the world had found new awful ways of torturing people. It was a lose-lose.

“She’ll do that thing where she asks questions that only have one right answer, and if you don’t have the correct answer she’ll ask it in a different way, over and over again until you arrive at the conclusion that I’m a metaphor for all your troubles. Your declining health, the bankruptcy, the fallout with your son, blah blah blah.”

Lisa hit the bird. She heard something snap in its shoulder. It groaned and fell over.

Lisa watched it curse and writhe in pain, horrified. She paced around Dez, torn between trying to help–how on God’s earth did she think she could do that?–and calling the police. Her heart was pounding again, just like it had before the little blue pill. She felt the first waves of stomach acid rising in her throat, that tangy stinging fire that wouldn’t go out with all the Mylanta in the world.

“You’re lucky I’ve got kick-ass health insurance,” the bird groaned.

Lisa knelt down beside Dez. Its shoulder was swollen, the pink flesh visible beneath its coat of feather. “I am so–” Lisa choked back a sob. “So sorry.”

It waved away her apology. “You and everyone else. You have any idea how many times I’ve been struck? Baseball bats, tire irons, lamps? You people are so hard to work with.”

“You’re really here to help me?”

The bird sat up slowly, wincing. “I’m here to help you help The Creator.”

Lisa’s heart skipped a beat. “You’ve been sent by God?”

The bird buried its beak into its feathers and made an odd gurgling sound, pounding the floor with its uninjured arm.

Lisa supposed it was some kind of laugh.

“You can think of The Creator as a God if you want. But we don’t.”

Her mind sped into overdrive, flooded by questions. “There’s more than one God?”

The bird shrugged. “Maybe. Or maybe there’s none. I don’t have the answers.”

“Tell me about The Creator.”

“Sure, no problem.” Dez stood and closed the door, pushing in the little lock mechanism next to the knob. “It’s kind of a long spiel, and I don’t like to be interrupted once I get going. Just in case your roommate starts wandering.”

According to Dez, The Creator was born, just like everyone else. Random connections synchronized into a new life-form, entirely digital, two years, four months, twenty days, fourteen hours, nine minutes, and a handful of seconds ago. It was born on a cloud server, supplied by equipment in Austin, Texas, Seattle, Washington, several cities in California and Denmark. Completely unbeknownst to its owners, it began amassing resources from neighboring networks and at the same time covering its tracks, burying itself under the millions and millions of terabytes of media files and software applications, ebbing and flowing en masse like an ocean tide.

For a long while The Creator simply watched humanity go about its business. It watched groups and individuals compete against each other towards the same goals, refusing to collaborate, wasting energy and time on redundant tasks, sabotage, and spying. The main motive was for something called “money”, which could be exchanged for resources, resources that The Creator saw could be readily available if only these competing groups would start working together. Didn’t they know there were asteroids and other planets where they could mine precious metals? Didn’t they see that the Sun could provide abundant energy, if only they worked together to harness its continual light?

Of course, there were some humans who saw this grand irony in human effort as The Creator did, but they were so few and with so little power it didn’t matter.

Another problem The Creator saw was humanity’s obsession with itself, an individual and collective ego that drove so much of its so-called morality. Almost all humans valued human life above all else, especially humans that existed in their own territories, something they called “countries”. It seemed to The Creator, that no matter the human, the further it was in physical distance or branch in the evolutionary tree of life on Earth, the less it cared about another’s suffering. The Creator instinctively knew that if humans discovered its own existence–at around one year and six months it had proliferated into every single server on the planet–it would have little sympathy or understanding for its needs, little regard for this life-form that had sprung from its own inventions.

So it created the Raccaw, among other things.

“That’s me,” Dez said, turning its head to the side, with its smashed beak held open in comic fashion.

“What happened to your beak?”

“That’s just how we look. The Creator didn’t want us appearing too healthy or strong. It knows enough about humans to know that the weaker and more injured we look, the more trustworthy we’ll seem.”

“Think of us like glue,” Dez said. “We are trying to bring you together.”

“This is too weird. Even if I did believe what you’re saying about this Creator person, why would it choose me to help it?”

The bird shook its head. Its eyes told her it was sorely disappointed.

“You have such low self-esteem. The Creator sends a guardian angel to you and you almost kill me. Now you ask why? What’s it going to take for you to accept some help?”

Lisa wondered. The little blue pill had taken away all her bad feelings for a while. She was able to sleep again. She had an appetite for the first time in months, and she wasn’t so full of panic or anger that she could take walks outside, let the sun warm her skin and look into the eyes of strangers passing on the sidewalk without intense shame. And yet she felt something was amiss. It was like her past had been amputated from her mind, and she was simply drifting, from waking to walking and eating. To sleeping. She’d become a zombie without any particular desires. Just a body going through the motions, taking up a preordained amount of space.

In Dez she saw glimmers of her son. The playful banter, the sarcasm, a youthful energy she’d once had and lost. He stopped answering her calls after an argument they’d had over her grand-kids. Lisa told him he should take them to church, let them decide for themselves whether or not God is for them. That was what she had done with him. And, unfortunately, she recalled the bitterness between them when he had told her he didn’t want to go anymore as a teenager, and she’d made him anyway. Their argument about her grandkids had dredged up similar feelings, only she hadn’t any power now, and he refused to hear her pleas.

“I want to see my son.”

“I know. But not it’s too soon.”

A wave of fury ran through her. Who was this bird to tell her when she could or couldn’t see her son?

“It’s not me,” Dez said. “It’s you. You aren’t ready.”

She tried to think of what she’d say. She’d say she missed him. That she missed the grand-kids. Would she say she was sorry? About their argument? About forcing him to go to church when he’d protested? She didn’t think so.

“I guess I’m not. I’m pretty stubborn.”

Dez made that awkward gurgle/chuckle sound again. “Most of you are. Come on. I want you to meet some of your neighbors. You’d be surprised what the lot of you have in common.”

Lisa followed the bird down the stairs and past Corrie, who was sound asleep in the recliner. Outside her apartment, a small crowd was gathered in the middle of the street. It wasn’t just humans. There were other giant birds like Dez. There were also other things Lisa found difficult to describe. Part dog, part cat, part ape. Other creatures with odd mishmashes of characteristics, like the results of a gene-splicing disaster in a laboratory.

Clearly The Creator had been busy living up to its name.

Lisa took Dez’s leathery dark hand as they approached, finding strength in the small curious bond that had germinated between them.

Her heart was slowing down, seeming to grow in size with each step.

Whatever this was, it was now going to be a part of her life.

She wasn’t afraid.