Malcolm’s bedroom window looked out over a small public park. The park was unremarkable: it featured the usual number of benches, a jungle gym, a goodly amount of trees, and a border of shrubs, these favored as shelter by a rotating cast of placeless immigrants who had settled on the park as their base of operations. It was unseasonably warm for December and the park was bustling; Malcolm discovered the area could be watched in the same way a television was watched. Themes emerged, moral lessons, dramas, occasional comedies, reliable oddities. Malcolm had always been a satisfied silent observer; now he devoted a good portion of his waking moments to doing just this.
In the early mornings there came the professionals, smartly outfitted men and women cutting across the park with stern expressions on their faces. By nine o’clock the immigrants were up and mingling; by ten they had evacuated the park to roam the streets of Paris, that their human needs might be met for another day. After eleven, the park would be filled with children and their nannies, mostly African women who sat in clusters to laugh and tease and argue with one another, while the children were left to scrabble about the jungle gym. By one o’clock the nannies and children would be replaced by clerks, secretaries, and shopkeepers eating their lunches, reading books, smoking cigarettes. This group was particularly nonsocial; they were taking this time just for themselves, treasuring their solitude, their tobacco, the pull of a well-told story. In the early afternoon the nannies and children would return, the children ever more shrill and wild, the nannies calmer, the accrual of the day’s fatigue rendering them duller and less joyful. The late afternoons saw all those who had crossed the park in the morning recrossing in the opposite directions. As the day wound down and the sky grew darker, the immigrants began to trickle back. At night, the park was theirs.
Days ticked by, and Malcolm saw that these routines, this schedule, had very little variation; but within its strict narrative there grew smaller stories.
Late one afternoon Malcolm watched a young woman in a black business suit enter the park and sit alone on a bench. Soon a businessman of the same age arrived and sat beside her. After a brief discussion they began kissing and petting with a passion Malcolm found indecorous, even for Paris—at a certain point the man’s hand was fully inside the woman’s blouse, for example. This went on for thirty or so minutes, at which point they stood, said their goodbyes, and left the park from separate exit points. This same event was reenacted the next day, and the next, and on like this so that their arrival and behaviors became a known piece of Malcolm’s vista. The rigidity of their timetable, and the fact of their arriving and leaving separately, led Malcolm to understand this couple was involved in an extramarital affair.
One day they arrived at the appointed hour and sat upon the appointed bench, but now their affections were replaced by a long and seemingly unhappy discussion. The man made searching, wretched gestures with his hands; the woman began to weep. The man left, the woman remained, a cigarette smoldering in her hand but never raised to her mouth. The next day she came and sat alone on the bench. The day after this, the man came alone. The day after this the bench was empty.
Malcolm found this scenario interesting at the start but ultimately dreary in its familiarity. He preferred to follow the activity of the immigrants, which was more diverse, and so harder to define and understand.
They were all men, dark haired and olive skinned, and when Malcolm passed them in the park they spoke a language unfamiliar to him. They drank jug wine and rolled their own cigarettes and on colder nights made small, scattered fires, which lent the park a festive air; but by midnight the police would come and stomp the fires out, the embers swimming up through the dark in banking zigzags. The immigrants would be shooed away but once the police left they would return, and in the smaller hours it seemed that anything might happen.
Sometimes Malcolm saw them fighting one another, but other times the men could be seen slow-dancing to music on radios, or to the thrumming of an acoustic guitar. In his adult life, Malcolm had rarely thought of what it would be like to have male friendships; and he never pined for any. But to witness this camaraderie gave him the pang of an outlying jealousy, which embarrassed him, and which he pushed away.
He awoke at nine o’clock in the morning, as was usual for him. He rose from his bed and stood at his window. The immigrants were in various states of greeting the day, but no sign yet of the nannies and their shrieking charges. Five pigeons perched in a huddle on the branch of a sycamore at the edge of the park. Malcolm was only half watching them, but now he noticed four of the pigeons were stepping away from the fifth. They walked in a shuffling, sideways bunch while the fifth stood in place, hunkered down and shivering. After a moment it wavered and became still; then, tilting forward, it fell from the branch and plummeted beak-first through the air, thirty feet or more, crashing directly onto the belly of a sleeping immigrant. The man jumped to his feet; clutching his stomach, he studied the dead bird with the purest confusion. What dread omen was this? What woeful news was the natural world sharing with him? He looked around, desirous for a witness, someone to explain the occurrence, but there was no one, and the man snatched up his blanket and hurried from the park, the bird lying stiffly in the grass.
At this moment, the phone rang. Malcolm put the receiver to his ear and asked, “What’s the opposite of a miracle?”
Frances sat upright in her bed. “How many letters?”