The pigeon first flew to me the same morning that a stranger found my grandfather melting into the midsummer pavement in a mirage of dementia. My mother texted me that his hospital room had sealed windows facing a brick wall and was daubed with longitudinal streaks of bird droppings. She sent a video of him. Beeping monitors immured him, and each flashed a phalanx of graphs. Digital green gridlines boxed in meandering red lines, pixelated projections of his still-beating heart and still-coursing blood – a man’s life collapsed onto a two-dimensional Cartesian coordinate plane.
I ducked into my office’s pantry to text my mother back: I had flagged the emergency to my manager, but nevertheless, he would not release me until I finished adjusting the logos on the slidedeck for his 2 o’clock. As my gaze slumped beyond the pantry’s window, striped with dried acid rain mixed with car exhaust, a pigeon stared back at me from the other side. It perched in high relief against the mirrored grid-like windows of the skyscraper across the street. Most pigeons that swarm Manhattan are monochromatically gray, often with wings fettered by two black bars. This one was a houndstooth of pigeon gray and dove white. The brown iris of its right eye ensnared me into its soot-black center – there, I faced a faceless woman, bricked in by a brown cubicle, and a panopticon of screens on which red and green numbers streamed. My mind traced how much more of the world this houndstooth pigeon would see today, while this faceless woman is immured here – my grandfather’s hospital room window would be but a quick five-minute glide across the water. But no, a distant snap of my manager’s fingers summoned me. I found myself back in my swivel chair, adjusting gridlines on a spreadsheet with glassy eyes.
The next morning, at my apartment, the pigeon found me again, after I slept overnight in a hospital recliner chair, but before I changed out of the previous day’s business casual vestment into the next one gray shift dress for another. The pigeon had homed its way to my fire escape and ensconced itself on the rusty railing. Every morning that followed, after 10 hours at the hospital and before 14 hours at work, there the mottled pigeon dozed, keeping watch. The sunlit languor in which it basked was the same that would crown my grandfather after a long day of work at the garment factory during my childhood. He would crumple on the stoop and rest his liver-spotted temple against his rusty railing, surveying the little hard-won kingdom that was his home. That memory of that grandfather of the past made me turn my gaze away from the fire escape every morning. The one time that the pigeon did manage to pull my gaze, it pulled me in for yet another glimpse of the silhouetted woman, once again as seen through a window, but this time she was quartered by the shadow of the window’s frame. Reflected in the window and in the shadow of the woman were the vertical grillwork of a fire escape and the brick wall of the building across the street.
One morning, just as I crossed the threshold of my apartment, returning after another vigil at the hospital, my mother called me to head right back: the meandering red lines of my grandfather’s hospital monitors had flattened into the horizon over which the sun had just risen. As my finger pressed the red phone button on my phone to hang up, my gaze accidentally landed on the fire escape. My eyes struggled to find focus – the pigeon was gone. Only a white smear of excrement and a phantom pocket of air marked the spot on the peeling black railing that the pigeon had warmed for weeks.
Weeks later, I found myself almost exactly halfway around the world with no return ticket. I found myself in Singapore, during the Hungry Ghost Festival – the one time a year when the gates of the afterlife open and ancestral ghosts wander among us. On every street corner were altars offering roasted suckling pigs and blood-red strawberry soda. Urns of burning incense invited ghosts to feast. I wandered into a hawker center and found myself in line at a stall famous for its prawn mee, noodles swimming in a collision of lava with ocean – the gore of blood-red prawn heads erupting into milky bone-building pork bone broth, initiating an explosion that seems to augur expansion.
My grandfather had helped me, as a toddler, to wean off my mother’s milk by giving me prawn heads to suckle. “With the blood of the prawn, our minds take on its strength too,” he had said. When he himself began to lose his mind and his teeth, he swatted away all food, except for prawn heads and broth, leaving piles of the spent carcasses in his wake.
As I waited online for prawn mee, I watched white pigeons circle and peck at crumbs at a nearby table. By the time I returned to the same table with my own bowl of sanguineous bone broth, the birds had long gone. I sat down anyway. A flock of elderly white-haired uncles asked to join me – this was their usual lunch table. My fluid Cantonese shocked them as their own grandchildren had forsaken it – this, the dying dialect of my grandfather. Their avine eyes crinkled at the edges like my grandfather’s did, and swallowed me whole like the sea.
When I resurfaced, I dove towards the infinite sky. Ever since, for weeks, months (or maybe only minutes) now, I have chased a never-ending horizon with my dove-white wings as the sea continuously unfurls in all directions below me. I now close my lacquer-black eyes, ringed with gold, to luxuriate in the sun. The glassy sea below bends and fractures into the mirrored windows of a chrome skyscraper. The windows reflect to me the feathery outline of a woman immured, but I cannot quite remember where I have seen her before.