Open Mic Night
The sun shone full on Sam as she walked through the outskirts of town and, with bewildering ease, down the heart of the place, the sloping streets and cafes with jars of honey for sale and passers-by in country chic — pearl buttons and rhinestones, huarache and gingham. She felt pretty sure she was in the American South—the humidity and the kudzu tipped her off, the North Carolina license plates on the Range Rovers and Nissans. In the distance, mountains.
The green of the bird was the first thing she remembered, or that she woke to, or that she perceived in this new state, this end to her sleepwalking, if sleepwalking is what had been happening. The green of the bird and the red breast and gold spiky crown and long tail feathers of metallic blue-green. If it was a quetzal — it looked like a quetzal — then it was thousands of miles from home. She had to catch it, both for its own sake — creatures like that couldn’t survive in strange habitats — and for hers, since she didn’t belong here, and so she must have something to do with the bird, another out-of-place stranger, probably in trouble. How did she get here?
Sam wasn’t suffering from amnesia, at least not standard amnesia. She knew her name. She remembered a boat and the sound of waves rolling onto the sand. She could even rattle off the address where she’d been living for the past three years (Van Brunt, Red Hook). But why was she wearing the t-shirt she slept in? Why was she barefoot at the edge of the Smoky Mountains? Was she dreaming? Had everything else been a dream?
It didn’t feel like a dream.
She’d been staring a long time at the quetzal on a magnolia branch — she could remember that much, but it launched itself into the air as she approached, angling its way up a road lined with chain stores, then into the trees, emerging — Sam close behind — at the edge of the city. Now it was circling a cluster of birches on a residential street. Sam smelled frying chicken. It was too late for that chicken but if she could somehow call down that quetzal maybe it wouldn’t be too late for everyone. If she got the bird in hand, she’d find out what happened to her, how she got here, this city filled with people asleep in doorway recesses.
She was good at birdcalls — she was a birder — but there were limits. Some species of quetzal voiced a kind of neep like a lonely dog. She tried it. It did nothing. Somehow, none of the passersby seemed to notice or care that a bedraggled woman in boxers was neep neeping into the trees. They didn’t notice the quetzal either, or the thin gold thread, like a pendant chain, dangling from its right leg. This bird had belonged to someone.
neep neep
No.
woooo
What else?
wheat — wheatwheatwheat
Sam was surprised as anyone when the green bird circled low enough so that she was nearly able to seize the chain, there, it touched her fingers and she closed her hand fast enough to grab it. The bird strained against it, then turned to beat her away with its beak, but Sam was good with birds, she shushed and nodded and got her hands around the creature’s wings. She used all of her discipline for this. It kept her from thinking. People were watching now, a pigtailed teenager and her boyfriend. They stared at Sam from across the street.
The boy said, “Is that your parrot?”
“It’s not a parrot.”
“He doesn’t know shit about birds,” his girlfriend said. “He just wants to know if you need help.”
So this was a friendly city. In Brooklyn, if you saw a woman in her underwear trying to catch an exotic bird, you’d steer elsewhere. Real cities were dotted with detours to folly, gentrified or ungentrified folly. There were varieties.
The bird’s heart beat beneath Sam’s hands. It didn’t know what was happening.
“You should take that bird to Tony’s,” the girl said. She tapped a phone.
“Is it Tony’s bird?”
The girl shrugged, but she was already texting her friend on that phone.
“She says come right over.”
Tony wasn’t a person but a cantina, Tony Cola’s, on the corner of Buxton & Coxe. As soon as you walked through the wrought iron door you were confronted with a birdcage the size of Sam’s apartment. Inside rippled with life — a white cockatoo bobbing its head, a hyacinth macaw tolerating gawks from kids, a zebra-winged Hoopoe unfurling a crest like a legionnaire’s plume.
“I’m not just going to let you have him,” Sam said. But no sooner had she spoken than a tall woman in high heels rushed over cooing, “Okay! Another flying friend!”
The woman regarded the green bird with pleasure, regarded the gold chain on the bird’s foot with pleasure. “Quetzals get all the good pieces.”
There was a smaller cage in the back, in the break room, where the woman led Sam, in fact a quite small cage. Junie, this tall woman, introduced it as the time out cage. “We all flash the colors under our wings sometimes, don’t we,” Junie said. “We may not know we want a time out but we do.”
The quetzal found the perch inside with, it seemed to Sam, some wariness. Junie told Sam the names of all the birds in the entry room and said, “They’re allowed to do anything they want on open mic night. And listen, no offense but do you know where you are?”
“Huh?”
“I’m being a little rude. But you keep saying how surprised you are to see mountains and you’re not wearing real clothes. So I thought maybe you didn’t know where you were, sweetie.”
This flicked a switch for Sam, she was legitimately freaked out. She felt the shame of trouble, the shame of Now I’ve got you, my pretty. The rabbit carried off by the hawk. Nothing good could happen.
Junie went on about how she managed Tony Cola’s, how there was an open mic that evening and Sam was welcome to come. While she talked, Sam couldn’t stop staring at the phone on the table between them. It was just like the phone that girl had used in the square. And there was something about the men’s hairstyles and the women’s clothes as she walked into town, familiar but wrong.
“What is the date?”
Junie told her it was May 12th. That didn’t satisfy Sam, so Junie sighed and said “2025” like it was a question. Like, Don’t you know this? But Sam didn’t know it — she didn’t even believe it. The last date Sam remembered was September of 2012. She’d taken a canoe to the open sea. The sky had been overcast.
She needed to lie down. Junie brought Sam across the street to an apartment filled with monk parakeets. It was also filled with books.
“The parakeets are rescues. Like your quetzal friend. I don’t know. You can borrow my clothes. Lie down, read. I’ll come back before the show.”
Once the door was closed Sam cased the apartment for a phone. Why didn’t Junie have a phone? Her MacBook Pro at least looked like Sam’s from back in Red Hook. She went to the window to make sure Junie wasn’t coming back and then opened a Chrome tab — people still used Chrome! — to find herself. No missing person notice (or it too was lost). No obituary. She did locate a paper she’d co-authored on signaling pathways as part of her graduate work. The page was a little different than it used to look—some of the characters had been replaced with ⍰⍰ and uncloaked code — but the article at least was proof she hadn’t vanished completely. She wasn’t tired now. She kept looking for things that might be familiar from her old life. The Audubon society was still around, their website was slicker. Google maps confirmed she was in North Carolina. Wikipedia still existed, maybe not much had changed. Barack Obama’s entry said he’d won the ’12 election and served another term — which was happy news — but there had been developments since. The room was too still. She was breathing too quickly. She was panicking.
She pulled clothes out of June’s messy armoire and held them up and discarded them, eventually lighting on a copper colored dress that could work — it was long and loose on Sam where it would have been short and tight on Junie. The coffee shop next door didn’t have an obvious phone she could use — the barista ignored Sam — but that girl with pigtails was walking by again and let Sam borrow her cell.
“Did Junie tell you about open mic night?” the girl asked. “I’m reading tonight.”
“Hang on.”
As a kid, Sam knew all her friend’s numbers and her grandparents’ numbers and her aunts’. But since getting her first cell phone two decades back (three decades) her brain had let go of the numbers and hadn’t held onto the new ones — that’s what the phone was for. She remembered her mother’s number, which rang and rang — was her mother dead? Don’t think about it. Close your eyes. She called the land line for her Red Hook place and someone picked up, a man with an Asian accent.
“Slim’s Siam.”
Sam asked for her roommate.
“We open in 15 minutes,” said the man, “but I can take an order now.”
Her underarms were tacky with humidity. Someone came out of the flower shop with a pot of nasturtiums to give to a homeless man across the street, who appeared vaguely grateful but unsettled.
Sam cried on Junie’s balcony for half an hour. The sun was hot enough to render the shadeless place useless for anything else. She stared at the plywood trellis blocking her view of Tony Cola’s, sick to her stomach.
When she was too hot to cry she went to sleep on Junie’s bed.
:::
Open Mic Night took place in the basement, a low ceiling and a spotlight. You had to go upstairs to buy a drink. Anyone could wander in or out, but a surprising number stayed longer, spent the whole of their evening. It was respectful to the point of religiosity. You could laugh at the funny poems, but just because that’s how you respected them. “We’re down a well,” said a poet named Charles (pronounced the French way, sort of giving up on the last consonant). “We keep our hearts fresh in the well / we wake up frightened of drowning down / at the bottom of the well.” What made it fun was the house-that-jack-built rhythm, each line a fraction longer, taking a little more time to wind its way to the word well.
The world on the ground
When it’s smart
Owns a store in the cold
In the well. Eat
Bucks you lower smoked
To the well. Keep
All you hold in the well.
Hogtie your hope
To a wire on a steak dug
Deep at the edge
Of the mouth of the well.
Birds from upstairs looped through the room, one by one, twenty minutes and back to their cages on Junie’s arm. She was right about how they did what they wanted. They stole bits of food and shat occasionally in corners and perched on the mic. They made themselves part of the draw.
Junie leaned over Sam’s ear during a long poem and whispered, “I used to think the world ended west of Jersey City. Jesus Motherfucking Christ as my witness I thought there wasn’t anything in life you couldn’t find in New York.” She said this as though you couldn’t find open mics in New York City.
Junie said, “Everyone I used to know in New York moved to LA or back to their shitty town to spawn. Honest kiddo, New York is just a waiting room where they assign you LA or your hometown. Like, next please? Do you want kids? Are you rich? Okay, hometown, your mom’s waiting outside.”
This was clearly wrong. People moved everywhere from New York. They also stayed in New York and had kids and felt poor. But Sam was distracted by the woman in the green fan-print dress. She was reading a poem about desire and she read it desirously (“I touch you. / Breathe into me. / I lick your neck. / Breathe into me.”) Desire was communicable — of course it was.
Junie whispered, “They broke up two years ago. But it’s such a good poem.”
Relaxing a little, Sam swallowed another mouthful of a tangy-sweet drink Junie had given her. It was fizzy and smelled like tequila.
“What about Facebook?” Junie asked, when Sam told her about how she’d spent her afternoon. “Have you messaged anyone on there?”
“Isn’t that a little bit weird, putting all your private stuff in public?”
Junie held her eyes. “You been somewhere bad, sister. And the whole world is new.”
:::
Next morning Sam opened a Facebook account to search the names in her life. Her stepfather had passed away and her mother remarried, a sort of betrayal. She didn’t know the new guy. Another surprise — several of her NY friends had, in fact, moved to their hometowns, or the nearest cities, and started families. Age showed on the circle. A decade was fifteen extra pounds and lost sleep.
With each age-altered face, Sam’s fingers hovered over Add Friend, but she hesitated. She stared at her own face in the mirror, a little surprised by signs of time. They seemed to be the same signs of time that had surprised her in the mirror in Red Hook. There were no new lines around her eyes, no change in her skin (her skin had never been bad and it still wasn’t bad). If anything she’d lost a little weight.
There seemed to be an open mic every night at Tony Cola’s. Sam grew anxious for the evening to come on. The problems onstage weren’t her own, quite. The speakers offered themselves for inspection. The room presented itself.
Junie began the night the same way she had before, a little patter that turned into a poem of its own. “I like this,” she’d say, pointing toward a woman in a pretty skirt, making a skirt outline. Turning to a man, “I like this” about his scarf, with a gesture like she was tying it. “I like this,” it built to a rhythm. It was nearly a dance, the arm thing.
“I like that,” Sam told her once Junie sat down.
“Oh, that’s my poem. Down with the page!”
Night after night Sam took her place at the back corner table and drank one or two of those red cocktails and put off getting in touch with anyone she used to know, anyone from the lab, anyone who raised her, misinformed her, rode along on the waters of life.
A nonbinary person read a poem about their sister’s car accident that got people crying. The steering wheel had gone straight into her chest, the airbag hadn’t deployed. The poet talked about their’s mother’s face when she got the news, about how they thought of their sister all the time, wanted to call her and tell her things, but there was no one to call, about how they were going to keep it together because their sister would want her to keep it together but Jesus.
Sam didn’t cry often, so she didn’t cry now, but as she toyed with the gold thread from the quetzal’s foot — she’d taken to wearing it far a necklace — warmth disappeared from her hands, numb spreading up from her fingertips. It all made sense. This was a city of the dead. The poet who read about childhood beatings had been killed in that beating. The poet who read about the well had drowned in that well. The person who read about their sister was the dead sister. That’s why the people in Sam’s life had aged while Sam hadn’t aged. That’s why Junie wasn’t in LA or her hometown. Even the basement, an active grave.
She didn’t listen to the next few readers as fear dug a tunnel in her mind. She and Junie walked toward home under an unusually clear sky, the air still warm. Sam confessed what she’d suspected, or what she’d come to dread.
“Oh no sweetie,” Junie said, her eyes kind, her manner gentle. “No honey. If you were dead you’d be underground. Or the ocean, because it was drowning that popped you out of that world. This is like … do you know what the bardo is?”
“No.”
“Okay, well it’s not that. This is a place of leaning. There’s a reason the world you used to know lives only on a screen. What could you do in a poem with that word, with screen.”
From a chinaberry at the edge of a park, fluttering shadows poured themselves away from glinting floods.
“You can stay here as long as you like. Until you’re ready not to be here.”
As soon as she heard these words Sam knew them for the truth. It made as much sense as anything.
“The poems have something to do with it, don’t they? I’m waiting to hear the poem that tells me what’s next.”
“Mhmm.”
“Is it mine, my poem? Or, are you some kind of … Junie, how are you even aware of all this? I mean, if I’m a spirit how can you see me at all?”
Junie opened her hands. As though it couldn’t be more clear.
“Because I’m a poet.”