The Burden of Significance ~ Second and Last Performance
"Do you remember the doves?"
3 AM. Tommy drunk again. The last time I'd hear his voice.
"Go to sleep, Tommy."
"But do you remember?"
"Yes."
"Good," he said. "Someone should."
I had a review due in four hours. I'd already written "overfreighted" three times in the margins. The manuscript was about doves—someone's grandmother keeping them, poisoning pigeons, the usual metaphorical weight. I should have heard what Tommy was really asking. Should have heard what he was saying under what he was saying.
Eight hours later, he was dead.
*
The manuscript arrives again four days after my mother calls about my great aunt's books. Same story. Same doves. Like the universe is stuttering. I can't review it. I can't review anything anymore. Twenty years of turning feelings into symptoms, and now I'm the one symptomatic.
Shannon calls. Twenty years she's been my editor.
"Where's the review, Ambrosia?"
"I can't."
"What do you mean you can't?"
"Tommy's dead."
"Tommy's been dead for five years."
She's right. Five years since Bertrand Thomas—who made everyone call him Tommy because Bertrand sounded like someone who'd never spill beer on a couch—drove his car into a highway median at ninety miles per hour. Blood alcohol three times the limit. No skid marks.
"I know," I tell Shannon. "But I just remembered something."
*
My great aunt kept doves in a hutch that rotted the color of old teeth. She also poisoned pigeons with strychnine breadcrumbs. When I asked her about this contradiction at seven years old, she said: "The doves are mine."
That's all. Mine.
She taught me to hold them. "Gentle but firm, or they'll die of fright in your hands."
I was terrified every time. Not of the birds. Of being the reason something died of fear.
She knew things about doves. That they feed their young with crop milk—a substance they make in their throats. Literally feeding babies with their own transformed bodies. That cities poison pigeons while celebrating doves, though they're the same bird. "The difference," she said, watching me scatter poisoned crumbs, "is who belongs to who."
The morning before she died, she let them all go.
Opened the hutch and watched them leave.
"Were they okay?" I asked my mother later. "In the wild?"
"Honey, they were never wild. But they flew anyway."
*
Here's what I'd told people about Tommy: We watched art films. We discussed Derrida. We were young intellectuals.
Here's the truth: We got shitfaced watching John Woo movies. When doves exploded in slow motion—those ridiculous white doves making violence beautiful—Tommy would stand on the couch and shout "ART!"
Once, drunk, he said: "You know Picasso drew that dove in five minutes? 1949. Peace conference. Five minutes and it became the whole world's symbol." He paused. "We can't even stop killing ourselves."
I laughed.
I fucking laughed.
*
My mother calls again about the books.
"Are you eating?"
"Mom—"
"They smell like birds. I wanted to warn you."
I start crying. Phone pressed to ear, cat rubbing my shins, three-day-old Thai food congealing on the counter. The ugly kind of tears.
"Honey? What's wrong?"
"I don't know how to review this story."
"What story?"
"Any story. All of them."
Silence.
"Your great aunt used to say the same thing about her birds. She didn't know if she kept them because she loved them or because she needed something to take care of after Uncle Harold died."
"Did it matter?"
"I don't know, honey. Does it?"
*
The manuscript mentions things I wish it didn't. Martha, the last passenger pigeon, dying in Cincinnati Zoo in 1914, weeks after World War I began. Three billion to zero. Sadako Sasaki, twelve years old, dying of radiation poisoning, folding paper cranes—the dove's cousins. Believing one thousand would save her. She made 644 before dying. Classmates folded the rest. Buried them with her.
644.
Tommy had 644 days of sobriety once.
I know because he called me every single one.
*
I poison the review. Mix criticism with confession. Send it to Shannon with the subject line: "I'm sorry."
She calls immediately. Never used my name like this:
"Ambrosia, what is this?"
"A review."
"This is a breakdown."
"Yes."
"I can't publish this."
"I know."
"Are you okay?"
Mr. Whiskers jumps into my lap. Purrs against my chest.
"I'm keeping doves," I tell Shannon.
"What?"
"Metaphorically. I'm keeping doves and poisoning pigeons and I can't explain why one and not the other."
"Do you need help?"
Yes. No. Not the kind she means.
"I need to stop reviewing."
Silence stretches.
"Okay. Send me something else. Something yours."
*
I drive to my mother's house. The books smell exactly like she warned—seeds and shit and the particular dust of creatures who beat their wings against enclosure.
One book falls open.
A drawing my great aunt made: a dove with something dark in its beak.
Not an olive branch.
The paper has aged the exact yellow of crop milk. I know because I looked it up after Tommy died, trying to understand why he'd asked about doves. Why that was his last question. The crop milk. The way doves feed their young from their own bodies. The way we give ourselves away to keep others alive.
The dark thing in the dove's beak—
I know what it is now.
It's a key.
*
Tommy's apartment key was still on my keychain the night he called. He'd given it to me during those 644 days of sobriety. "In case," he'd said. Just: "In case."
The night he called about the doves, I could have driven over. Five minutes. Could have used the key.
Instead I said: "Go to sleep."
To someone who would never wake up.
Because I had a review due.
*
The empty hutch still stands in my mother's backyard.
"We should take it down," she says.
"No."
Gray wood. Not ash but not not-ash. The color of aftermath.
My mother stands beside me. "She was trying to tell us something. Letting them go like that."
"What?"
"That keeping something and loving something aren't the same thing."
I think about Tommy's 644 days. About Sadako's 644 cranes. About the review I'll never write. About the story Shannon wants—something mine.
"Mom, what happened to the doves? After?"
"Some died. Some joined the city pigeons. Some just disappeared."
"But they flew."
"Yes. They flew."
*
For Tommy, who thought everything was art when you were drunk enough. Who gave me a key I didn't use.
For my great aunt, who knew the difference between doves and pigeons was just who belonged to you.
For Martha, last of billions.
For Sadako and her incompleteness.
For Mr. Whiskers, who only cares about the 4 PM sun.
Here's my story: I loved people who are gone. I chose work over presence. I believed in significance because insignificance meant they died for nothing. But they didn't die for nothing. They died because that's what people do. And before they died, they called at 3 AM to make sure someone would remember.
I remember.
The key is still on my keychain.
That's all. That's enough.
Isn't it?
