Amy in #12

The bird keeps plucking its own feathers. Amy can’t get it to stop. She buys another canary and puts her in the cage with him and they are happy for a few days. But it doesn’t take long before they’re both exhibiting the same disturbing behaviour. Amy plays them soothing music on her stereo and moves the cage from one room of her apartment to another because she’s not able to figure out the source of their unhappiness. Eventually the canaries are living out on the third-floor balcony where there’s plenty of air and some autumn sun. The bird continues to pluck out his feathers, the female follows suit. Until she’s dead—on the bottom of the cage one morning. Amy puts on dishwashing gloves to extract the pathetic little corpse.

Amy’s not good with the small cooing noises most people use to communicate with babies or animals, so she talks to the bird, though in fact Amy knows as she’s speaking that she’s talking to herself. She moves her lips close to the bars of the cage, near the cluster of silver bells at the top, and says, “There’s a way in which this feels as if it’s supposed to be me. You’re pointing out how below the kind of general happiness I think is mine, in actuality, what I’m doing is plucking away at my own feathers as well. It’s not true. I am happy. As content as anyone, if we can admit that no-one’s really completely happy. Is that even the goal? I’m certainly not suffering. That’s my point. I’m happy enough. I don’t know why you’re not. I suppose you’re just a stupid bird that doesn’t know when he’s got it good. Is it freedom you want? Because, honestly, a canary can’t make it out there. You see any canaries cruising the air outside? Have a look. All you’ll see are magpies and pigeons. Only scavengers make it in the suburbs. What I’m saying is that it’s a world built for ordinary people, not some paradise for exotic birds to flash their feathers and chirp music at each other. I’m not sure where the Canary Islands are, somewhere in the Atlantic, I guess. I’m certain there’s an ideal little ecosystem out there for you. And yet if someone didn’t pluck your ancestor off that island, some conquistador or whatever sailing home from the New World, you wouldn’t have been hatched. There’s been a long line of birds bred by generations of people so that you could live with me, and by now you should be genetically adapted to be happy enough with your fresh seed and water, the tiny mirror and the view from my balcony. The city is lovely this time of year. Leaves falling from the trees, radiant hues of red, like flakes drifting down from a burnt-out sun. As though you have a notion of beauty, anyway. Or more importantly, a memory to recall even some basic sense of satisfaction. If you were released and had the time of your life you’d forget within a few hours and you’d be back in your cage plucking your feathers and driving me crazy with this relentless suffering. What does it fucking mean?”

The bird opens his wings with a quick shake, and settles, missing so many feathers he is no longer able to flitter from his bar to the floor of the cage. Instead he climbs around, using feet and beak to navigate the wire hemisphere of his world. Amy begins to wish David would simply die as his mate had done. She buys a cover for the cage and drapes it over him when friends come to visit. No, it’s not a secret she’s hiding. Amy has been talking about the bird plucking out its feathers for months. Her friends wish she wouldn’t mention it again. David’s barely got any feathers left and there are beads of blood now that are terrible to see on that small shivering body. None of her friends can offer Amy a solution, and clearly they don’t care. “It’s a fucking canary,” her oldest friend from primary school tells Amy. “Get rid of it.” The simplest thing in the world. A bit of rubbish you can chuck away. “I can’t actually kill him,” Amy explains. “What would I do—poison his water? Go on a holiday while he starves? Wring his neck? I’d be squashing David’s little throat. It’d be disgusting.” “You shouldn’t have given it a man’s name,” Amy is told. “I didn’t,” she says, “it was that Leonard Cohen lyric about the secret song that David sang, ‘and it pleased the Lord’.” Amy has forgotten how it goes and she admits she doesn’t listen to Leonard Cohen. A spur of the moment name because someone told Amy when she was a child that canaries were birds with the most beautiful song in the world. They used to be collected by monks, kings and queens, for monasteries and palaces. Amy’s friends hear David singing from within the covered cage. “It doesn’t sound as though it’s suffering,” they tell Amy. “That’s a pleasant noise, even if it’s not hallelujah.” They don’t ask her to lift the cover to see the naked, blood-flecked bird.