A Convergence Of Birds Read Online Free PDF Page A

possession of a swing, a seat on the splintery teeter-totter.
    Weeks, months. My photographs were few and infrequently inspired. Yet every time the orphans appeared, my heart leapt in hope. A scrim would be drawn, as in a film theater, and I stared, stared—but the one I sought wasn’t among them. Until one afternoon, a hot Santa Ana wind blowing out of the Mojave Desert and my eyelashes gummed with dust, I saw, I suddenly see, the Blond Child. A girl orphan I have never seen before, yet recognize at once.
    It is she. She is the one. The one the box awaits.
    In the late summer of 1935. In the earthen-floored cellar of the bungalow on Sacramento Street, East Los Angeles. Thirty-two wooden boxes stacked neatly against the walls and in each of these boxes was a “capture”—a snapshot, a small artifact, a stuffed, lifelike little bird. To the neutral observer the works of the Box Artist would be indistinguishable from trash, but each of the boxes was, to the Box Artist, a testament to those minutes, hours, sometimes days in which the box was executed. Even the relatively uninspired boxes, and there were some of these, were triumphs of a kind; they represented, to the Box Artist, the solutions to specific problems. The box is the affliction for which only the box is the cure.
    Yet each “capture” was solitary. Each of the boxes stood apart from the others, though they were crammed together in that dank, airless space.
    The one the box awaits, at last. The Blond Child, a little girl of eight or nine, swinging on one of the swings. She is new to the orphanage; at least I have never seen her before. Already in her faded-blue uniform she resembles the others—except for the fierce radiance in her face, and the speed in her little body. How desperate, flying on the swing with its crude creaking chains and hard, splintery wooden seat; how defiant, kicking and bucking, her white-knuckled hands gripping the swing above her head and her thin arms stretched taut, like a bird’s wings partly wrenched from its body. Both her knees are scraped and bruised. Her “dirty blond” hair is curly and snarled. Her eyes are intense, staring; her dazed soul shines through her waxy-pale skin. A beautiful child, though wounded somehow, damaged. The sorrow in being born, without love.
    She is one of them, now. The orphans of the world. Waiting to be loved. Waiting to be taken—”adopted.”
    I think—I will adopt her. I will claim her!
    I will make her hurt, mangled mouth smile.
    But of course, being the Box Artist, I can only take the Blond Child’s photograph. And that only in stealth, hoping I won’t be detected.
    My heavy black box camera is gritty with dust. It’s an old camera; I am forever blowing dust off the lens, polishing it with my handkerchief. After a few minutes I become reckless and leave the protection of my automobile to squat in the dirt beside the mesh-wire fence, hoping to be hidden by tall weeds; aiming my camera with the assurance of a hunter as, oblivious of me, the Blond Child swings ever higher. Her hair is ringlets sparked with fire, her skin glints like mica, her eyes are ablaze like tiny blue jets of flame. As she swings, her skirt is bunched over her bruised knees, there’s a glimpse of white beneath, much-laundered and frayed orphan’s underwear it is, and her heels kick upward, reckless as a colt’s. The Blond Child swings carelessly off-balance, veering crooked and nearly falling from her seat as if her secret wish is to fall and crack her head on the dirty concrete. No! no! I whisper to her. Don’t injure yourself; the world will shortly enough do that for you. In the creaking swing beside the Blond Child another, quite ordinary girl is swinging, not boldly at all but in a lackluster manner; an older, slump-shouldered girl, one who has been waiting to be adopted for years and has all but given up hope. But the Blond Child is new to the orphanage. The Blond Child will never give up hope.
    I promise.