I only happen to meet the stranger because it is spring, and on sunny mornings Madge rolls me out onto the terrace and parks my wheelchair so I face the ledge upon which the pigeons like to poop. There are sharp iron spikes embedded along the top of the ledge to prevent them from landing but, like so many other devices, they fail in their expected function. For example, an urgent sensation between my useless legs (my “logs”, I like to call them) warns of yet another bout with urinary incontinence. I should cry out to Madge for my basin, but instead I allow myself to be mesmerized by the pigeons bobbing and ducking and splattering another layer of guano on the ledge and the tiled floor of the terrace itself. I think these pigeons are unbelievably ugly. They have rheumy eye, pitted beaks, and filthy feathers I remember to be in shades of dirt and rust and curdled cream. I am filled with revulsion.

Four years ago, I was not a hater of pigeons. My parents had not yet succumbed to a shared paranoiac hysteria where my father raved about being stalked by the KGB and my mother refused to leave the windowless environs of her walk-in closet. My handsome husband still lived here. I had friends who did not invent elaborate excuses to avoid visiting me. This great city did not seem as drained of color as an old photograph, and the sky had not yet turned as white as an ironed sheet. I did not have the physically impossible but growing desire to launch myself out of this wheelchair, over the ledge, over the spikes, and down, down into the concrete sidewalk of 78th Street. I had –

“Elise?”

Madge, my full-time companion and nurse, is calling me from the tall French doors that open onto the terrace. “David is on the telephone. He wishes to speak with you urgently.”

Three months ago, David moved out and started divorce proceedings. I can’t blame him. It was all my fault, you see. I drank far too much champagne at our New Years’ party and, pirouetting madly in my too-long Halston, spinning and spinning, laughing and careening away from the restraining arms of my husband and the white faces of our mortified, astonished guests, I caught my stiletto heel in the hem of the dress at the top edge of the grand marble staircase. I teetered for a moment on one leg, heron-like, gawping with surprise and horror, my arms flapping witlessly, then toppled forward and down that vast, snowy, rock-hard incline of cruelly uncarpeted steps. The fall cracked my spine, clove my skull, and shattered every bone in my face.

“Do you think you can manage the chair by yourself this time?”

I’m leery of testing my motor coordination. The damage to my vertebrae occurred at a point well below my shoulder blades, so I’m supposed to be able to use my arms to wheel myself around in this horrible contraption. However, my arms have recently succumbed to a spastic paralysis – they go into dreadful fits whenever I try to move them, jerking and twitching and flopping about. The doctors say it might be a delayed consequence of the injuries to my head. I myself have no theories. What I do know, however, is that because of this development I am now, for all practical purposes, a quadriplegic.

“Elise, Are you listening? David says it’s extremely important that he speak with you.”

I can’t bear to hear David’s voice and its burden of guilt and pity. He calls and calls, wanting to talk about our divorce (which I have not yet agreed to), and around the inescapable fact that, despite his sticking with me much longer than anybody expected, he doesn’t love me anymore and will never sleep with me again. So now it is Madge who tucks me in night after lonely night, plumping and placing the creamy, goose-down pillows between my ankles and knees to buffer the points of contact and compression that could lead to bedsores. Wretched with desire, I wait for her to turn off the lights before I employ my vivid imagination to conjure David up. And it always works: he steps out of the shadows, tall as a pillar and insubstantial as the gloom, half demon and half angel. He slips between the Egyptian cotton sheets, and –

“ – says next time it’ll be his solicitor ringing.”

Six month I spent, in a seemingly irreversible coma, after the accident at the party. Eight months more in an intensive care unit after I woke up, with nurses and doctors pricking me and operating on me and speaking to each other as if I weren’t in the room (“she’s only twenty-six, you know,” and “fortunately the spinal cord was not entirely severed ,” and “she’s lucky she doesn’t lose all of her sight with that massive cranial hematoma.”) Two years of painkilling drugs and rehabilitative therapies and operations to try and reconstruct my face. Fifteen irritated tap tap tap tap taps – Madge’s slippers slapping on the terracotta tiles. The angry, electronic buzz of her presence behind my wheelchair.

“Why won’t you bloody answer me!”

Madge is originally from Shropshire. My fashionable parents could not imagine raising their only child without the assistance of an authentic English nanny. Later, after I grew up and went to boarding school, she became our housekeeper and a de facto member of our family. These days I wonder how many times she may have wished me dead. It can’t be easy for her, knowing that she will spend the rest of her life tending to a sullen owl like me. There are precious few places for an elderly and largely unskilled woman to go, especially one who’s spent the last three decades becoming accustomed to luxury in a three-storey penthouse at the summit of one of the best buildings on Park Avenue. But according to my will, if anything happen to me, Madge gets everything: the money, the apartment, our house in Southampton, and my parents’ famous collection of decorative arts from Imperial Russia. An she is absolutely welcome to all of it, in case you were wondering.

“I’m sorry to tell you this, darling, but since you won’t come to the phone … well, David says he’s met someone else.”

A pause.

“Elise?”

I cannot reply.

“BLOODY BIRDS!”

Madge’s outburst seems to upset the flock of pigeons, which take off en masse and suddenly -- unnaturally – swerve directly into our faces. I cry out as we are inundated by a frenzy of superheated bodies and violently flapping wings. We hear the panicked beating of a hundred tiny hearts. The stench of them, a sour fustiness, goes up our nostrils. They peck and scrabble at our clothes with their diseased beaks and ragged claws. But they are not really interested in us – the entire flock swings up into the sky, and I see the true cause of their distress.

There is a stranger perched on the farthest corner of the ledge. It’s slightly larger than a pigeon should be, and its feathers are blacker than anthracite. Everything about it is black. It stares at me for a long moment, then extends its wings and flies away. I follow its path with my eyes, as far as I can see, as he soars over the ashen buildings and roofs, the squat towers and television antennae, until he vanishes into that colorless horizon.

"Oh, dear," says Madge. "You've had a little accident."

I glance down at my legs. A stain is spreading through the silk of my Chinese dressing gown. The smell of urine floats up to my nose. After a hot bath, a hot lunch, and a short nap, Madge strips me down to my brassiere and underpants for a noon session with my masseuse, who arrives with a duffel bag, a portable music player, and a special table.
Together, she and Madge seize my arms and legs and hoist me up and onto the table. Then Madge leaves us alone to watch the early edition of the news and to give us a bit of privacy.

The masseuse closes the door to the bedroom. Averting her eyes from my shipwreck of a face, she chats about the weather as she warms flower and nut oils with her hands. She lights scented candles. She plays tapes of Indian sitar music. Then she assaults me. She pounds me and pummels me, she kneads her bony knuckles deep into my nerveless flesh, searching for atrophied muscles and hard knots and tangled ganglia. She bends my flaccid limbs and rubs the soft skin of my inner thighs. Yet I feel nothing, nothing. It pains me that not even the ministrations of an attractive person can excite the slightest response in my body. (I suppose I've gone entirely numb as well as color-blind.) But when she digs her thumbs into that sensitive space between my shoulder blades my arms begin to thrash, and my hands, like wings, beat their familiar tattoo against the air. I cannot stop or control them at all. The masseuse sighs with frustration. She is being paid to make me "better," and this is a definite setback.

A visit to Central Park kills the rest of the day. Madge dresses me up again and heaves me back into the wheelchair. She prepares a bag. We proceed down the hall to the private elevator that will take us thirty floors to the street below. We pass a side table, upon which rests one of the crown jewels of the collection, a nineteenth-century presentation
cup my parents acquired in Kishinev, near the Romanian border, during their last tour of the Soviet Union. As my mother told the story, she and my father slipped their official "minder" to go poking around an off-limits corner of the town when they stumbled upon a shop hawking bric-a-brac, fake and real, from the pre-Communist era. Mummy saw and immediately fell in love with the cup and used her guide-book Romanian to inform the proprietors of the shop, an elderly couple with a nervous air, that she wished to buy it: "How much, I pay American dollars." No, no, madame, not for sale. "One hundred." No. "Five hundred, OK?" No, we cannot sell it. "Did you understand that, Horace? They refused five hundred dollars." She tried again. "One thousand." No. Frustrated, my mother lapsed into her native German and shouted, "I will have this thing."

Suddenly, the cup was seized and shoved it into my mother's hands. She and my father were rudely pushed out the door. Unceremoniously and inexplicably expelled into the cobblestone street, my parents looked back at the shop with bewildered indignation. The aged proprietor and his wife had locked the door and were standing in the window, blinking and crossing themselves. All of their subsequent efforts to pay for the presentation cup were utterly rebuffed.
"I suppose it was my German that did it,” Mummy would say. "The poor things were probably utterly traumatized by the Nazi invasion. Horace claims I simply frightened them into giving it to me.”

The cup is of intricately carved lapis lazuli. Resplendent upon its dark-blue breast is a great raven of black-lacquered bronze with wings outspread and the golden coronet of a count upon its head. Its extended talons grasp an enameled rose and a cross. Extensive research later conducted by my mother revealed the raven to be the symbol of an extinct
armigerous family descended from the Wallachian nobility. Mummy was disappointed and perplexed, having somehow mistaken the raven for the eagle of the Romanovs.

As Madge wheels me west on 78th Street I register the varied reactions of passersby to my Frankenstein visage: disgust, pity, confusion. No matter how carefully I am made up, or how well I am dressed, or how exquisitely coiffed my ankle-length hair, my face remains a cracked egg whose shards have been welded back together into the barest semblance of humanity. When we reach the Park Madge picks out a leafy tree and installs us beneath its shade. She unpacks a blanket, spreads it out, sits on it, and begins to drink from a silver flask. She becomes engrossed in a late-afternoon baseball game. My attention is fixed enviously on the other people in the park. The fact is, I harbor a
ravening jealousy of anyone and anything that can move under its own power. I am jealous of the lovers strolling hand in hand, of pregnant women waddling by, of the young baseball players sprinting weightlessly from base to base to base. I am jealous even of the overexcited Labrador bounding into the diamond after a far-flung stick. But I
especially resent birds. I begrudge them their air-filled bones and their effortless ability to defy the unspeakable tug of gravity, swooping and gliding in the ether while I, I languish chair-bound below, the lower half of me already in the grave and the rest following suit, my own body conspiring against me to bind me forever to the hateful earth, to ashes and ashes and dust to dust. I'm flooded by a familiar bitterness that soon turns to utter despair, and I think, I can't. I
can't go on like this, like a living corpse. I just can't, I can't, can't, can't.

On the way home, I surprise myself and Madge by asking her to scatter food -- "crumbled toast, biscuits, cake, something" -- for the pigeons in the morning. She bends down to the wheelchair so her unhappy face is directly in front of mine. Her breath smells like gin. Her expression is that of a bad-tempered ostrich. Her wrinkled lips twist in a moue of distaste, but before she can open her mouth and complain, I silence her with a level gaze. She must still do what I say. I am still alive.

The next morning I look up at the sky and wonder if this damned color blindness is finally receding. Today the heavens, for the first time in four years, are the sort of luminous, pellucid gray-blue that reveals how deep the atmosphere really is. Flocks of birds pass over my head and dive into the valleys between the buildings. Alas, none of them are
black, and none of them seem even remotely inclined to investigate the terrace. I feel silly, like an out-of-season duck hunter waiting in vain behind a screen of reeds. Despair and disappointment begin to gnaw at my stomach. The desire to hurl myself off the ledge blossoms until, amazingly, a black dot materializes above the northern horizon. The dot
gets bigger and bigger until it resolves into a dark, flapping shape. It's him! It's the stranger. I'm happy and relieved. I'm aware of a terrible, thrilling excitement.

He stalks slowly through the scattered crumbs, evaluating every piece until he finds one with a bit of butter-shine or icing on it, and picks it up with a beak like carved ebony. Then he swallows, cocks his head, and looks at me again in a thoughtful manner. I keep absolutely still, my arms rigid at my sides, as if he were a basilisk and his gaze had turned me to stone. He studies me with ruby eyes, probably wondering if I am dangerous, if I am capable of lunging out of this wheelchair and making a grab for him. Then he tilts his handsome head. As in other pigeons, there is a belt of iridescence around his neck that flirts with the light. He puffs his chest out the way a male pigeon will before he attempts to pin a female, fluttering, to some narrow windowsill.

He comes closer.

The wind rises, ruffling his many layers of glossy black feathers. They look as soft and shiny as sable. I'm imagining what it must be like to stroke them when, suddenly, he unfurls his wings, catches the wind, and flies to the arm of the wheelchair! This maneuver is very aggressive and totally without warning -- is he dangerous? Is he rabid? Does he
think I am dead and can peck my eyes out?

His claws alarm me. Where the other birds have three long talons and a shorter one up in the back, he has four of similar length and a smaller, opposable talon much like a human thumb. Tightening his hand-like grip on the armrest, he leans forward, halving the distance between us. We regard each other warily. He slowly opens his beak.

(To caw? To coo? To shriek? To speak?)

My chapped lips crack apart to release a scream.

I hope Madge is near enough to hear me and come running -- when he seems to sense my panic and steps back. He snaps the beak shut. He begins to nod his head. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. These movements mesmerize me. The iridescent ribbon around his neck explodes into a hypnotic array of rainbow colors such I haven't seen in years. Blues, they mostly are: peacock, indigo, aquamarine, cerulean, azure, turquoise, lapis lazuli. These jewel-like tones have a soothing, instantly calming effect; I'm so distracted by this dazzling spectacle that I forget all about my initial revulsion, my instinctive misgivings, that I don't even hear Madge announcing that lunch is ready until her angry footsteps and the escalating irritation in her voice drive the bird away.

But he returns to visit me each morning on the terrace. To my surprise and delight, he's abandoned the armrest of the wheelchair for the padded satin of my right shoulder. He perches up there, no heavier than a fat sparrow despite his size, holding onto me with those peculiar feet, and I experience a half-remembered but most extraordinary sensation -- it is tentative at first, lighter than a cobweb settling on the fine hairs on the back of my neck. Then it travels inward from my shoulder, along the length of my cracked collarbones, gaining in sweetness, heaviness, and electricity, until my bones seem filled with honey, and my skin hums like a high-tension wire. At last it pours goldenly down my spine, a
cataract of pure desire, and pools in the waiting cradle of my pelvis. I'm so overwhelmed by feeling anything at all -- let alone something this heavenly -- that a half-hour on the terrace turns into one hour, two hours, three.

"Carou-coo," he croons into my ear. He gently plucks the so-long strands of hair away from my face and smoothes them behind my ears, just the way my father did when I was a little girl. I turn my head to rest my cheek on a warm, powerful chest that is like an eagle's. His soft feathers smell of musk-rose and summer rain.

"Carou-coo-coo." There is both peace and ecstasy in his presence. It is rapture to be with him.

"It isn't natural!" The morning sun strikes the black-and-white tiles on the kitchen floor. Madge's hand whips out and cracks me across the cheek. I try to reach up to my face with my own hand to soothe the stinging, but all that does
is set my spastic arms off again, and Madge has to hold them both down so she can lean forward and shout directly into my face without worrying that I’ll somehow manage to slap her one myself.

"What do you think you’re doing, you wicked, wicked girl!" Her upper lip quivers. She covers her hand with her sleeve before she hits me again. My head rocks back with the impact, and I notice little silver comets zooming around at the edges of my vision. I’m speechless. Does Madge even realize that she’s attacked a helpless cripple? Does she even realize that she has attacked me? There is no emotion whatsoever in her wide-open, lashless eyes.

"Every day now with that infernal thing! My dear girl, don’t you know about the diseases they can give you? Or are you deliberately trying my patience? First your mum and da, now you. Trying to see how much I'll put up with?"

I’m in a dreadful shock, but I think, quite coldly, quite calmly. Madge is pissed off. Since the stranger came to me I don't pay more than the slightest attention to her. For example, now I refuse to "discuss" the news on television with her. I don't care to be subjected to her nasty interminable soliloquies about how America is going to Hell with draft-
dodging hippies, bra-burning women's-libbers, and insolent coloreds. I would rather think about the bird. I am obsessed with the stranger. My thoughts orbit around him every moment I am awake. No wonder she is
filled with jealousy and hatred.

"They're wild animals," she adds, "just like the rats in the park." She says that in an almost conversational tone. Then she steps back, turns around, and grins at the window overlooking the terrace. The corners of her mouth fall back down into the bitter jowls below her jaw.

It's him! My rogue pigeon. My stranger. He's come at his usual time, approaching the apartment building and our aerie. I see him bracing his big wings against the onrush of air to slow his speed and control the angle of his descent, as majestic and graceful as a condor. But before I can beg her to stop, Madge has flung open the French doors and is
marching purposefully across the terrace. A lozenge-shaped object -- the stiff case she keeps her reading glasses in -- flies out of her hand and strikes the stranger in mid-air. He falters. He howls like a wolverine. The case clatters against the terracotta tiles. It has clipped him on one wing, costing him his balance. He can't right himself. Madge has managed to wound him. He drops, plummeting toward the spiked railing -- splinters of panic pierce my heart -- and he
misses the spikes by mere inches -- and disappears on the other side of the ledge. I can't see him anymore. I scream. My arms start to flap and flail. I gibber. Is he dead? Is Madge a murderer? Is my lover smashed to pieces on the street below?

Madge looks over the ledge to make sure he is gone, then returns to me with a regretful expression on her face.

"Poor thing," she says.

"It wasn't a good idea to feed it. It's your fault. You only encouraged it to come back."

I spend the rest of the day in my bedroom because Madge believes I could do with a long rest after our "row". For a torturous time I lie there, prone on my back, helpless as a flipped-over turtle, weeping into the dove-colored pillows over the loss of the stranger, and also thinking how profoundly and fatally I have misjudged Madge, this doting, devoted person who has raised me from infancy. She has never, ever laid a hand on me. until today. A doorway opens inside my racing mind, letting in a cool breeze of fear. I'm swept to the razor edge of panic. Because I am trapped. In this dying body, of course, but also in this apartment. with a madwoman.

Tap tap

I seem to have dozed off. What time is it? I lift my head. The air in my bedroom is darkening, as if a cloud had passed before the sun. Or is it dusk already? The sun must be sinking behind the skyscrapers.

tap tap

What is that? I crane my head in the direction of the sound. A whorl of hair falls away from my tear-sticky cheek.

tap tap

There is a balcony outside one of the bedroom windows, all of which face east. It's a mingy balcony just wide enough for a couple of boxes of flowers. The stranger is out there, perched on a wrought-iron railing gently shaped to mimic a curtain of vines. He is rapping on the glass with his hard, black beak.

tap tap

I'm in an ecstasy of relief, tears are streaming down my face again, and I wish for the millionth time that I could move these two frozen useless legs of mine. Or could at least get enough momentum going, rocking back and forth, to roll my body onto its side, so I could gaze easily out the window at my beloved, who has cheated death to return to me.
The stranger preens and stretches upon the railing. What a tremendous wingspan he has now.

tap tap

My arms are trembling with excitement. If I could only drag myself to that window and struggle to lift the sash! I could let him in. Oh, how eagerly I would clasp my hands around his neck and cleave my ruined body against the heated muscles of his back, and let him take me wherever he would.

I wonder where we will go ...

tap

... when Madge puts me onto the terrace again and leaves me there. When he will finally be able to carry me off. Until that blessed morning I cannot wait to quit this bed, this body, this room ... and even you, dear listener, for I may not be able to take you where I am going. The words to describe it will fail me.

Beyond the windowpane the stranger croons, nodding his head, agreeing with my passionate thoughts of escape. Then he prepares for flight, spreading his mighty wings. The sable feathers trap the keening wind, and it takes him from me. He wheels away from the building, away from the sun, heading east, toward the gathering indigo dusk. He travels
father and farther, until he diminishes to the smallest black speck. Like a bullet gone wide he vanishes into the blue, into that nameless blue so beautiful I know it cannot exist on earth, but only in the sky.