Year Zero (5 page)

Before I could ask how the Indigenous went about sequestering trees, Pugwash’s phone started vibrating so violently that it almost leapt from the table. He grabbed it and gazed at the screen. His eyes went saucer-wide, then platterwide. And then he took off at a trot, without a word.

With that, the parrot hopped right onto the back of his vacant chair, regarding me at eye level. “So who invited dat guy?” he asked, the Scottish brogue suddenly replaced with Dodgers-era Brooklynese.

Practically gagging from shock, I managed a blasé tone. “Phluttr.”

The parrot nodded.

I gestured at the table. “Your reservation, I assume?”

The parrot nodded again.

“So why meet here?”

“Where else can a guy like me connect up without stickin’ out? Apart from a pet store.” As if on cue, a forest
green parakeet flew past us, nattering about urban composting.

I nodded absently as if this was just an obvious, throw-away fact. But I was furiously analyzing the parrot’s every word. Hundreds of depositions had taught me that idle chitchat can be a great source of useful information—and I wanted to learn everything I could about this guy.

“Anyways,” the parrot continued, glancing from side to side, “I guess this is how they roll … on the richest planet in the universe.” His eyes narrowed as he made this bizarre statement, and he looked at me intently—and I realized that we were playing a similar game. He’d probably just said something that was mundane and obvious in his circles, to see if it confused or surprised me (a technique I often use myself).
If I was a nobody, I’d respond with a silly and basic question. Whereas if I was plugged in, he probably hadn’t betrayed any facts I didn’t already know. It was a no-risk way to get a sense of who he was dealing with.

“I hear it’s the best restaurant on this side of the Townshend Line,” I said, like a fellow tourist sharing a tip. Carly and Frampton had used this term, and it seemed like it would fit here.

The parrot opened his beak to say something, then clammed up. Then he did it again.
Was I getting to him?

“But why’d you drag me out tonight?” I continued, pressing him to talk before he could come up with something cunning.

“ ’Cause … I know all about the alien visitor you just had,” he said slyly. “And I’m here to tell you: you’re in danger.”

Gotcha
. He was fishing—and he blew it by saying visi
tor
, instead of visi
tors
. He didn’t even know how many beings
had visited me, much less who they actually were. But he wanted me to think he’d positively identified them as bad guys. Time to go on the offensive.

“You don’t know a
goddamn thing
about my visitor,” I said, leaning in toward him. “So why am I even talking to you? Tell me what you’re after, or this meeting’s over.”

The parrot’s eyes narrowed, and he glared at me. Then finally he snarled, “Aright!”

Excellent
, I thought. If my iPhone has taught me anything, it’s that angry birds make boo-boos.

“I’m here doin’ … asset recovery,” he continued. “For my team.”

“Of course. And how much did you guys lose?”

“More than anybody else.” The parrot hopped from the chair to the table and took a few steps toward me.
“Anybody.”

Dammit—he was right back on to his game. That sweeping superlative should tell me exactly who he was working with—so now I couldn’t ask for that information and still come off as an alien-savvy sophisticate. But he had left me a toehold by implying that lots of other groups had also lost assets.

“Hey, everyone’s down a bit these days.” I shrugged, like he should just get over it already. His short temper seemed like an asset to me, and I hoped this would inflame him further.

“But who the hell else lost a
third of the assets
in the goddamn universe?” he growled.

Bravo
. I shrugged again. “Just you guys, obviously.”

The parrot’s eyes narrowed again, as he realized he’d just given something away. Then, “Aright, Mac. Your turn to talk. What th’hell do you know about the Townshend Line?”

Absolutely nothing
, I thought. Then I remembered Carly’s odd little statement. “Just that it’s completely overrated,” I said, rolling my eyes.

The bird backed up a few steps, and almost fell off the table. “Who … who told you?” he finally managed.

I arched my eyebrows sarcastically. “A little bird.”

The parrot leapt across the table toward me, and lowered his voice. “Listen, Carter. I ain’t no goddamn
bird
. I’m a
raptor
. And I’m very, very
large
for my species. Got that? But enough about me. Who are
you
? And what are
you
doing on Earth?”

I had one last serviceable phrase to parrot back from my previous alien powwow. “Just trying to keep these crazy humans from … self-destructing,” I said, miming jokey quotation marks like Carly had.

This completely silenced him for a moment. Then he exploded. “But you can’t
do
that! That—that’s against the
rules
!”

At this, a mad fluttering broke out overhead. I looked up. The cockatoo that my guest had bitch-slapped several minutes back was dive-bombing him, along with two cohorts. “Go
green
!” it squawked.

The alien parrot launched himself like a cruise missile. He collided head-on with his lead attacker, knocking it out cold, and sending its limp body reeling into a beef chutney soufflé three tables away. Then, in a blur of avian jujitsu, he reversed direction, grabbing his second attacker’s shoulders in his talons. With a few powerful thrusts of his wings he dragged it into an aqueduct, and left it flailing in the water. The third attacker darted off in a
panic.

Kung-fu parrot rejoined me. We were getting lots of stares. “Pieces of EIGHT,” he bellowed, trying to convince
the room that he was just another three-phrase knucklehead. “Set the controls for MogadiSHU!”

“I don’t think it’s working,” I said drily, wishing I had a shaken-not-stirred martini to sip at debonairly. More and more people were looking our way, and a knot of irate parakeets was gathering overhead. This round was mine.

“Yer right,” the parrot whispered, scanning the room anxiously, and focusing on a massive bouncer who was now approaching. “And here comes the heat.” He seemed to spy an escape route. “I’ll be back,” he vowed.

“Hasta la vista,” I said, as he rocketed straight at the bouncer’s face. At the last second he pulled up toward the distant rafters, and vanished.

“That was so weird.” I looked up and saw that Pugwash was back. He was staring at his cellphone rather than the scene unfolding around us. “Check this out.” He handed me the phone.

He’d been texted a picture of two ridiculously sexy blondes. One was exposing her breasts as her friend nibbled on her ear. They were standing right outside, next to the Hogan’s Gyros sign.
PUGGY-BEAR!
the text said.
We’RE eyeing You & your friend. Come out and say hiiiii before we Leave!

Pugwash was inconsolable. “I went outside, and they weren’t there. I looked everywhere.”

I quietly admired the parrot’s technique. He wanted a few minutes alone with me, and he’d pushed Pugwash’s buttons just right.

Suddenly another commotion began in the center of the room. The alien parrot was now dive-bombing the bouncer. He pulled up a few feet short, releasing a payload of what had to be alien parrot droppings right into the poor man’s
eyes. The bouncer bellowed in disgust and staggered frantically, colliding with a small reservoir, which collapsed and unleashed a deluge onto three tables of diners. The rest of the irrigation system shuddered, springing
dozens of leaks throughout the room. Our urban biodiversity sanctuary was about to become a wetlands preserve.

“We should be elsewhere,” I said. Pugwash, still bereft over the vanished hotties, followed me mutely toward the exit.

We hit a Thai place
after Eatiary, and put away a few bottles of Singha. That, and the familiar drone of Pugwash deconstructing Pugwash made it feel like things were almost back to normal, and I gladly let dinner unfold at an especially unhurried pace. Although, of course, nothing was normal. God only knew what the aliens were up to. Indeed, only He knew if they were real. My cousin had at least seen the parrot—but my
conversation with it could have easily been the product of a freshly deranged mind. Still, I left dinner determined to enjoy the sudden normality.

With this in mind, I shut Pugwash down when he invited himself up to crush me at Scrabble after dinner. The reason wasn’t aliens, but my neighbor, Manda Shark. She’s the one who teed up that intergalactic Rickroll by naughtily changing my ringtone the night before. Midway through dinner, she had sent me a text:

Hey if you get n by … midnight? Come bvy I’ll have a fun present for you. To say thanks for the pep talk last night it really helped!

The pep talk was over a late glass of bourbon. I suggested it after I found her pacing in the basement laundry room, fretting about a big show tonight (opening a lengthy bill that would climax around midnight with the Decemberists). Manda’s something of an It Girl on the independent music scene. Her haunting, melodic songs have obtuse lyrics, and meld folklike arrangements with swish electronica. She’s gifted and respected. But since indie cred doesn’t pay
the bills, she also works as a paralegal at a midtown law firm. Our faint professional overlap is a godsend, as it gives me something completely unconnected to my puppy-dog fascination with her to discuss when we cross paths.

We live in Murray Hill—a hill-free neighborhood whose minute claim to fame stems from its being the site of the Ricardo household in
I Love Lucy
(it’s a fancy way of saying “the East Thirties”). Our apartments are in a prewar building with maybe forty units on its eight floors. It has clunking radiators, gothic-looking water towers on the roof, and an old-school elevator with a sliding steel gate. The chummy doorman gave me an unsolicited
Knicks update when I entered the lobby (they’d won, but there was a key injury to fuss over). I thanked him, and took the elevator to six—the floor that both Manda and I live on.

By then, the two of us had caught up for semi-spontaneous dinners or drinks thirteen times since she moved in (and yes, that’s an exact count). She lived just two doors down from me (another exact count). So if I timed it right (and I really did my best), we’d cross paths at least briefly maybe twice a week. In the interim, I’d develop
stockpiles of quips and pithy observations to weave into our conversations. I’d prepare little
insights that could help her in her paralegal work. I’d also listen to any albums or songs that she might have mentioned in passing, so as to be informed and opinionated if they came up again. I once even read three kitschy romance novels by one Robyn Amos, because I mistakenly thought she was Manda’s favorite author (who in fact turned out to be some Brit named Martin Amis).
¹

When I got to Manda’s door, I paused before knocking. I could faintly hear some humming, and some stop-start strumming on an acoustic guitar. She was working on a new song. I stood at the door and listened, hating the thought of interrupting. Manda had told me that she holds all the parts of a new piece in her head at once—even if she’s just playing a simple chord. If I knocked now, I feared that they’d scatter like the tiles of a detonating
Rubik’s Cube, because her songs are intricate, almost baroque. Each has multiple synthesizers and at least three guitar parts—one of which hammers out rapid arpeggios that wrap the music in ornate, almost percussive textures. Add drums, bass, and several vocal tracks, and there’s a lot going on.

After about a minute of listening I started feeling like a stalker. But I still didn’t want to interrupt her, so I shuffled
down the hall to my own apartment while pecking out a text:

I’m back! Drop by/call whenever you feel like it—I’ll be up really late!

I paused at my front door and read it over. Friendly is good, but this bordered on goofy. So I surgically replaced the exclamation points with periods. The goofiness was gone. But now it seemed almost … chilly. Didn’t it? So I reinserted the second exclamation point, leaving the first one out.
Better
. It now ended with a little crescendo of enthusiasm, but without that Ned Flanders vibe. The only problem now was grammatical fussiness. I
mean, the slash was a bit much—wasn’t it? I certainly didn’t want Manda thinking that I was some kind of dork who obsessed over punctuating texts. So I dropped the hyphen, replaced the slash with an “or,” and kept the final exclamation point. That done, I courageously hit Send and entered my apartment.

I flipped on the lights. My setup is nice enough—your basic one-bedroom that’s furnished maybe a half cut above Ikea. But it’s clearly the work of a heterosexual man who works long hours and has no design sense. A couch and a fifty-inch plasma screen dominate my small living room, predictably arrayed against opposite walls. The one hint of style comes from a gorgeous rosewood bookshelf that I splurged on when I first joined Carter, Geller & Marks. My
plan was to gradually fill it with hardbound copies of only the very best books that I read in my new life as a New Yorker—ones that truly moved me, or made me think. They’d be first editions when possible, and some would be autographed. But I’ve since been lucky to find time for maybe a half dozen books per year, and most of them are
crap. So my glorious shelves hold DVD sets from voguish TV shows like
The Wire, Fringe
, and
Breaking Bad
(which will probably be viewed as my generation’s Great Works anyway).