Birds, In Beirut

…There was a bird in Beirut.
In fact, there were two. And to tell this story properly, I actually need three.
Of course, there were other birds than those three, but the birds I’m talking about, they are all that are important to this story.

Two of those birds, they started out as eggs.
Of course, all three birds at some point were eggs. All birds were, in fact, eggs.
But what I mean is that two of those birds, when I met them, they were eggs.

In my sixth floor apartment in Beirut, there were two bathrooms, one with a tub, and one with a shower. They were connected by a single window sill, and each had a window, the one above the bath with a screen, and the one that looked out from inside the shower without a screen. You could open the windows by pushing them out. The screen you could open by pulling it in.

I like to take baths.


This is a story about a Genesis and Apocalypse.


…On the sill, in the little V of space between the half opened window and the screen, a bird built a nest. This nest was above my bathtub.

I didn’t have the heart to knock the nest down, though I wanted to. I had a feeling that something bad would come of this, or at least I remember it that way.

This is a story about the bad things that come when you think they might.

I took my baths beneath the nest.


…Not longer after the nest appeared, I found in it two eggs.

These birds, they were doves.

Of course, at this point, they weren’t anything yet, but a bit of mucus looking stuff and some smear of yellow. They weren’t doves, but maps of doves. They were doves coming together.

This is a story about mercy killing.

…What I thought of those eggs was that I ought to smash them.
I ought to drop them to the parking lot below.
There are good reasons to think like this.

I would preempt the suffering of the birds those eggs were trying to be.
Life, as I see it, is above all things, the potential for suffering.
(Not my life. My life is easy. But I’m not a dove in Beirut or a parakeet with its wings clipped or a chicken in a cage or a pheasant in the mouth of a fox).

And also, how would I bathe if those eggs finished up and hatched?
I don’t like to shower every day. I like to bathe.

This is a story about water.

…What I realized was that some nestbuilding egglaying bird would return to my window sill, and what she’d feel would be pain. Her eggs were gone.

What I realized was that if I’d pushed the nest off before the eggs had appeared in it, I could have stopped all of this. I could have ended this story. But I didn’t. And now it was too late. Now the mother of those eggs was emotionally and instinctually attached to the baby doves they were trying to turn into.

I couldn’t break them.

Later, I would wish that I had.

This is a story about regret.

…In Beirut, there was a family that lived on the roof of my building. Three daughters and a son. The mother, she made me food. They’d gone up there during the war and fifteen years later, they remained, in little furnished edifices, the life they’d created for themselves.

When the eggs hatched, I found them, bald and ugly, two baby birds, doves. I closed the bathroom door and left the birds alone. I begin taking showers, and I kept the shower window closed so as not to overly disturb the baby birds or their mother.

I was a father myself. I am a father. I will always be a father. God, if God created the world, if God destroyed the world, he'd still be its father.

This is a story about parenting. About being the parent of a little bird or a little boy or the planet earth.

Sometimes I’d peek.

The oldest girl, D., she came from the roof to visit me and I told her about the birds.

She wanted to see them. I felt I ought to say no. But I have a hard time saying no to girls.

This is a story about how hard it is to say no.

If you wonder about God, do you ever wonder when God started to realize that things were going sort of wrong?

…We crept down the hallway. D opened the door and went in. She was getting closer and closer to the nest, much closer than I’d been since the first time I’d come in.

I should have said, Stop, but I didn’t.

Then she was standing in the tub.

And the mother bird, she flew up then.
She saw, D, she let out a cry, she reeled, and then she was gone.

This is a story about open and closed doors.
This is a story about how you don’t know if things will come back.

…You know what they tell you. That if the bird mama smell human on its baby, it abandons the baby.

We closed the door. We worried.

Then D left and I worried alone. From the balcony, I watched for the return of the mother. From my bed, I listened for her return.

There was no return.

The following day, I was certain she had not been back.
She would not be back.

If you wonder about God, do you ever wonder if God didn’t hold finger and thumb over the world, consider crushing it as a mistake?

I went and I stood in the tub. Those little doves, they were all bone and skin spattered with a few unwarm looking feathers. They were painfully ugly.

What I thought then was that I ought to kill them.
In the day there was the heat of the sun. In the night, the cold.
And they had no mama anymore.

This is a story about hunger and thirst.

Those are the things I thought about when I went to bed at night.

…On the third day, I imagined ways one might kill a baby dove.
Drowning, perhaps.
That seemed the least messy idea.

And I kept hoping that I’d go in and they’d be dead.

But they never were.
They were crawling with bugs, over the lids of their open eyes, over the eyes themselves.
They were miserable, huddled.
I saw how it was in this world. How it has always been, how it will always be.

I understood the flood not as an act of punishment.

This is a story about regret.

…I did not drown them. I put a jar lid full of water beside the nest.
I tried to imagine they would drink from it.
I tried to imagine that if they did, that wouldn’t just prolong their suffering.

…On the fourth day, I bought food from a pet store.
I made a paste and put it on a tongue depressor. I pulled open the screen and put the tongue depressor close to the baby doves. Their bugs and their bones.

The doves, they were afraid of tongue depressor. I left it sticking into the nest. I smeared food on the sill.

This is a story about how hard it is to feed the hungry.

This is a story about how we are all ignorant.

…Days passed. They didn’t eat the food. They didn’t die. The water in the lid would evaporate and I’d refill it.

The birds were always on my mind.
I was always plotting their mercy killing.

This is a story about cowardice.

I thought about how stupid I had been, not to break those eggs.

I would go in there and stare at the birds, the bugs seeming to eat them alive, as if decay had begin before the corpses were complete, and I’d think about how much suffering my early indecision had given birth to.

This is a story about what happens when you don’t drop nests. When you don’t break eggs.

…They were getting bigger. That’s what I finally realized. Bigger and more feathers. And one day, the bugs were mostly gone.

This is not a story about miracles.

And I knew, I’d been wrong.I never saw the mother. I never heard her. But she was feeding them. Plucking bugs off of them.

This is a story about how some mothers return.


…I closed tight that door.
I would not bother them.
D would not bother them.
I would stand between them and the world if I could.

I imagined, One day, they would go away. I would throw down the nest. The story would be over.

…I like to bathe.
I missed my baths.

The shower beat down on me.

One day, I opened the door to the other bathroom a little. I looked in. The nest, it was empty.

The birds, I said to myself, the birds have gone!

But: One can’t be sure.

This is a story about that. About how one can’t be sure.

Perhaps they were just wandering up and down that long outer sill.

I went into the shower and pushed open the window there. That way, I’d be able to look down the full length of the sill and be able to tell whether the baby doves were really gone.

This is a story about accidents. About how almost everything is an accident. Your good intentions that cause bad things to happen. Your muddled intentions that result in good.
This is a story about chaos. Some people, they tell you the earth was built from it. Some people, they tell you the earth was built of it.

…I pushed open the window.
This is not just a story about opening and closing doors, but also windows.

There was a THUNK.

And everything froze.
The bird, he was knocked off the sill.
That little dove.
And what he did is he beat his wings furiously.

I saw him. He saw me.
He hovered there, beating his wings. I saw his little legs stretch toward the sill. I saw his little talons straining.

He tried very hard, but he could not reach. Nor could he stay in hover. It was probably a second. Maybe one and a half.

This is a story about how birds fall, whether you mean them to or not.

He shot down. Straight down. I watched him tumble.

… S, an urbantribal dancer, amonst other things, asked me to tell her a story about Beirut. This is that story.

If you wonder about God, do you wonder if God thinks the story of this planet is a sad or happy one?

That dove, he tumbled perfectly.

And then, before he hit the ground, he suddenly arced away from it. He begin to fly. It was graceful. He flew up and around and away.

This is a story about how birds fly, whether they mean to or not.

All of this, maybe it took three seconds. And then I turned my head. There was the other bird. Looking at me. He was to the edge of the sill. His talons, they were curled over it. He was leaning forward. He did not like the look of me. He did not like what I’d done to his brother.

And before I could pull myself away from the window and relief him of this stress, he leapt.

This is not a story about suicide. Animals don’t think like that. This is a story about mercy killing.

He hoped he could fly. In fact, he could. His flight was at first more wobbly than the flight of his brother, but he did not get nearly so close to the ground as the first. He flew almost from the moment he leapt.

…I begin to bathe again.
This is a story about water.
And food.

Thirst and starvation and bathing and floods.

This is a story about how no story is just about Beirut. Or just about birds. Or just about the story itself. This is a story about how all stories are about every story.

…You can think of it in a number of ways.
Sometimes, this story, the memory of it, it makes me smile.
Sometimes, I think about the idea that those doves have since died.
I think about the sickness of birds. I think about the heat deaths of birds. The cat pounce agony of birds. I think about the hunger of birds. The windows they fly into.

I know those doves suffered their lives.
I know they suffered their deaths.

I know they pulled suffering insects from safe haven bark. I know they ripped suffering worms from lawns.

This is a story about existence.
It cannot then be a fully happy story.

I think about who I was and who I am, if I can break the egg, about the feeling that once the nest is built, and especially once the eggs are laid, and most especially, once the doves hatch, it’s too late.

The story has already started.

This is a story about helplessness.
This is a story about intentions.

You may see this as a story in which everything worked out as if there were plan to it.

This is a story about two birds in Beirut in the late spring of 2002, their lives and their deaths. That’s all.