Packnazis

There's no sound sadder than that of an insomniac seagull squawking in the wee hours, and getting no reply. One's posted there now, on a ledge somewhere nearby, screeching his little heart out. Only the skyscrapers respond, bouncing his calls between them till they're dashed to pieces against a wall of city noise. Poor seagull--I think he takes his echo for another bird. If he doesn't give over soon, he's going to rip his vocal chords. (Failing that, someone else'll rip them out for him. Ye gads, but he's loud.)

...

...

(Time passes. On the other side of the world, an early snowdrop unearths itself. In a crappy old house just outside Canberra, a huntsman spider snuggles up with a sleeping dog. Nineteen floors below me, on Pender Street, late-night cars whizz by on their late-night business. Two floors up, somebody flushes a toilet. I sit and think about all this stuff going on, and listen to the seagull.)

...

...

...He's still at it. I wonder what he wants? Maybe he's excited about something, and can't contain himself. Maybe something good just happened to him, and he can't wait till morning to tell the world. Maybe he's found himself suddenly filled to the brim with inexplicable joy--but, probably, he's just hungry.

When I was six years old, or thereabouts, I used to try and stamp on seagulls. I don't know why. I didn't harbour any particular ill-will towards them, and, indeed, would often feed them once I'd run out of energy for chasing them. It seemed all right to try and stamp on them, because I knew I'd never really manage it. I wonder if it was like that for the Nazis, at first, talking about getting rid of all the Jewish folks. Not the higher-up Nazis, that is, but the ones who just joined the party because everyone else was doing it. Maybe they talked it up to impress their friends, to begin with. Then, once the extermination got going in earnest, they could hardly believe it was real. There must've been some sort of madness afoot, anyhow. You couldn't get a whole nation to--

--never mind. I don't want to know about that. I was thinking about seagulls, just seagulls. (I had another of those dreams last night, the ones where Hitler gets in. It must've stuck in my head more than I thought. It was more horrible than usual, because the violence seemed real, instead of the ordinary cartoonish fare you get in a dream. When I woke up from it, I decided not to go back to sleep.)

Back to seagulls. That one has moved on now. He left somewhere in the middle of last paragraph. He bawked once from a more distant building, then flapped on out of my life. (For now, any road. He'll be back. They always come back in time for the morning symphony.)

Two seagulls talking, when Vancouver was still being built:

"Ey, Bernie--look at that scaffold over there! I say! That building's going to be four storeys tall."

"At least. Hey, what say we go up there in the morning and have us a concert?"

"What, just us?"

"Oh, no. We'll get Fred--Fred's always up for a bit of a pawk--and Ernest and Bob, as well."

"Angus?"

"Naw, leave Angus out. He complains too much. I don't want him following me around all day."

"Five-thirty, then?"

"Five-thirty."

Thus it was spake, and thus it was done, and shall always be done, till the towers come tumbling down. And, though they sing for centuries, they shall never learn a single tune. (Just once, I'd like to see a row of gulls singing Vien, diletto, è in ciel la luna. Can you imagine?)

It's very quiet tonight, now that the seagull has gone. I had to put music on, so I wouldn't think I was back in Umeå. It got so quiet there, so quiet you could hear the rushing of blood through your eardrums. (The rushing of blood is a sort of cavernous sound, like standing at the bottom of an immense canyon with the wind rushing all around you. It's so quiet it's deafening. It makes the tiny sound of a twig breaking under the weight of snow resound like a kettle drum. A crow plopping into its nest lands with the weighty flump of an imploding skyscraper.) It's not quite that quiet here, but it's edging into the general vicinity, and I don't like it. I haven't even heard a police siren in hours, and East Hastings is only a street away. Odd, that. I don't remember a night like this, not here.

...

(And I sit here, my mind a complete blank, for a while--)

...

The seagull has come back (at least, I think it's the same one). His voice keeps breaking mid-cry. He sounds like a gobbling turkey. I think all these wars going on around the world are disturbing me more than I'd thought. The seagull's voice is making me think about Vancouver in ruins, cratered and dusty and well-nigh deserted. I'd still be here, of course, because, come on, where the hell else would I go?--but most other folks would've cleared out. And the seagulls, they'd have moved the morning symphony to Squamish. This guy, though, a distant descendant of the annoying Angus, wouldn't have been told about the migration. He'd still be here, all on his tod, serenading just for me.

What a ridiculous vision! Nobody would attack Vancouver. Nobody would attack Canada. We don't have anything. We don't get in the way of anything. If, in my dreams, I see the city in flames, it's because I've been reading too many violent books. I'm not bloody Cassandra*, after all.

Gloom and doom, begone! Bird on the ledge, fly away! That seagull has brought bad luck. Seeing (or hearing) just one packbawky, that's got to be an ill omen. They don't go in ones, those sorts of birds. There's something profoundly wrong about a solitary gull. He has brought a jinx to my house, for certain.

Then again, maybe he's just lonely, and I'm just tired. I have been working an awfully long time, today.

* The daughter of King Priam of Troy, cursed with a second sight no-one would believe.