I pushed the inner door wider. It gave with a great, grinding shriek. I had a feeling that it had been left unoiled so that anyone entering unannounced would be given away by rusty hinges.
A moth tapped at a dead lightbulb in the upper hall.
“… up here....”
I stepped up toward twilight at noon, past mirrors that were turned to the wall. No glass could see me coming. No glass would see me go....
“… yes?” A whisper.
I hesitated by the door at the top of the stairs. Perhaps I expected to look in and find a giant canary, stretched out on a carpet of dust, songless, capable only of heart murmurs for talk.
I stepped in.
I heard a gasp.
In the middle of an empty room stood a bed on which, eyes shut, mouth faintly breathing, lay an old woman.
Archaeopteryx, I thought.
I did. I really did.
I had seen such bones in a museum, the fragile reptilian wings of that lost and extinct bird, the shape of it touched on sandstone in etchings that might have been made by some Egyptian priest.
This bed, and its contents, was like the silt of a river that runs shallow. Traced now in its quiet flow was a jackstraw litter of chaff and thin skeleton.
She lay flat and strewn out so delicately I could not believe it was a living creature, but only a fossil undisturbed by eternity’s tread.
“Yes?” The tiny yellowed head just above the coverlet opened its eyes. Tiny shards of light blinked at me.
“Canaries?” I heard myself say. “The sign in your window? The birds?”
“Oh,” the old woman sighed. “… Dear.”
She had forgotten. Perhaps she hadn’t been downstairs in years. And I was the first, perhaps, to come upstairs in a thousand days.
“Oh,” she whispered, “that was long ago. Canaries. Yes. I had some lovely ones.
“1920,” again in the whisper. “1930—1931—.” Her voice faded. The years stopped there.
Just the other morn. Just the other noon.
“They used to sing, my lands, how they sang. But no one ever came to buy. Why? I never sold one.”
I glanced around. There was a birdcage in the far north corner of the room, and two more half-hidden in a closet.
“Sorry,” she murmured. “I must have forgotten to take that sign out of my window....”
I moved toward the cages. My hunch was right.
At the bottom of the first cage I saw papyrus from the Los Angeles Times, December 25, 1926.
HIROHITO ASCENDS THRONE
The young monarch, twenty-seven,
this afternoon …
I moved to the next cage and blinked. Memories of high school days flooded me with their fears.
ADDIS ABABA BOMBED
Mussolini claims triumph.
Haile Selassie protests....
I shut my eyes and turned from that lost year. That long ago the feathers had stopped rustling and the warblers had ceased. I stood by the bed and the withered discard there. I heard myself say:
“You ever listen Sunday mornings to the ‘Rocky Mountain Canary-Seed Hour’—?”
“With an organist that played and a studioful of canaries that sang along!” the old woman cried with a delight that rejuvenated her flesh and reared her head. Her eyes flickered like broken glass. “‘When It’s Springtime in the Rockies’!”
“‘Sweet Sue.’ ‘My Blue Heaven,’” I said.
“Oh, weren’t the birds fine!?”
“Fine.” I had been nine then and tried to figure how in hell the birds could follow the music so well. “I once told my mom the birdcages must have been lined with dime-store songsheets.”
“You sound like a sensitive child.” The old woman’s head sank, exhausted, and she shut her eyes. “They don’t make them that way any more.”
They never did, I thought.
“But,” she whispered, “you didn’t really come see me about the canaries—?”
“No,” I admitted. “It’s about that old man who rents from you—”
“He’s dead.”
Before I could speak, she went on, calmly, “I haven’t heard him in the downstairs kitchen since early yesterday. Last night, the silence told me. When you opened the door down there just now, I knew it was someone come to tell me all that’s bad.”
I’m sorry.
“Don’t be. I never saw him save at Christmas. The lady next door takes care of me, comes and rearranges me twice a day, and puts out the food. So he’s gone, is he? Did you know him well? Will there be a funeral? There’s fifty cents there on the bureau. Buy him a little bouquet.”
There was no money on the bureau. There was no bureau. I pretended that there was and pocketed some nonexistent money.
“You just come back in six months,” she whispered. “I’ll be well again. And the canaries will be on sale, and … you keep looking at the door! Must you go?”
“Yes’m,” I said, guiltily. “May I suggest—your front door’s unlocked.”
“Why, what in the world would anyone want with an old thing like me?” She lifted her head a final time.
Her eyes flashed. Her face ached with something beating behind the flesh to pull free.
“No one’ll ever come into this house, up those stairs,” she cried.
Her voice faded like a radio station beyond the hills. She was slowly tuning herself out as her eyelids lowered.
My God, I thought, she wants someone to come up and do her a dreadful favor!
Not me! I thought.
Her eyes sprang wide. Had I said it aloud?
“No,” she said, looking deep into my face. “You’re not him.”
“Who?”
“The one who stands outside my door. Every night.” She sighed. “But he never comes in. Why doesn’t he?”
She stopped like a clock. She still breathed, but she was waiting for me to go away.
I glanced over my shoulder.
The wind moved dust in the doorway like a mist, like someone waiting. The thing, the man, whatever, who came every night and stood in the hall.
I was in the way.
“Goodbye,” I said.
Silence.
I should have stayed, had tea, dinner, breakfast with her. But you can’t protect all of the people in all of the places all of the time, can you?
I waited at the door.
Goodbye.
Did she moan this in her old sleep? I only knew that her breath pushed me away.
Going downstairs I realized I still didn’t know the name of the old man who had drowned in a lion cage with a handful of train ticket confetti uncelebrated in each pocket.
I found his room. But that didn’t help.
His name wouldn’t be there, any more than he was.
Things