Weary is angry. He is raging, stomping, furious. It’s a beautiful, blooming anger. It opens like a flower, or like the jawed pod, the carnivorous clamshell mouth of the Nepenthes pitcher plant. Maybe he should be furious with New Haven Providence instead of with Henry North. No! Since he opened his bedroom computer on this balmy winter night and saw the check deposited into Henry’s account, he’s raging at both of them and at everything in general. He wants to light things on fire or start an earthquake.
How was Weary able to see this deposit? None of your business. Let’s just say people should change their passwords. Let’s just say even people who are supposedly so smart are stupid, the way they keep a favorite word for years on end, the way they choose something utterly predictable (Nevermore? Please), the way they use the same password on every account from their old university email to phone companies to banks to online stores. Let’s just say that if you think he’s only been snooping in ShutR and a single Visa bill all this time (his best sources, granted), you’re kidding yourself.
What the hell is up with New Haven Providence? Police, insurance investigators—it all could have stopped there. It should have stopped—finis! Complète!—if people were doing their jobs. Weary could have folded up shop right then, went back to his quiet life among the Corvus.
Idiots! Losers in leisure suits, fat men in uniforms! He knew this would happen, too. He knew it! And nothing, nothing, makes you more furious than being proven correct. Just as he suspected when Sarah disappeared, after news reports started dwindling, after there were no more revelations of late-night fights or drunk arguments on boats, after Virginia’s relatives retreated back into their lives, after detectives made only one measly phone call to the New Caledonia Corvus Research Facility and Sanctuary to ask questions—it’s essentially over, from an official standpoint. The insurance check is written, and the police and DAs have pretty much moved on to cases they can solve and prosecute. His last hope for a legitimate solution is gone. Henry North escapes punishment! Twice! And he goes on his merry way with a fat wad of cash!
No one will care about Sarah anymore. No one’s cared about Virginia for a long time.
It’s up to Weary now.
And it’s up to Isabelle. Poor Isabelle.
It’s time, anyway. The ring, plus the passage of a few months, means Henry North has started the peck, peck, peck at Isabelle’s spirit, Weary is sure. This is what happened with Sarah as soon as commitment entered the picture, and Henry North will keep on being his insecure and narcissistic self, sure as corvid Yves will be sneaky and Little Black will be gentle and Corbie will be aggressive when thwarted.
After the ring and the wedding, the slide was swift for Sarah. Why did she stay? Why does any woman (or man, for that matter) stay? The swiftness of the slide is part of it, that’s what people don’t understand. You’re down, down, down in the pit before you know it, and the walls are high and slick and there are no toeholds. You are so small and your voice is tiny while you’re there at the bottom. No one would hear you, anyway. Something feels a little familiar about the darkness, too.
And, yes, Sarah lacked “self-esteem” certainly, that magical potion people seem to have either too much or too little of. She had to summon it and fight for it, he knows. She left home and got an education and established herself at the university. But her strength was fragile, wasn’t it? Contingent on the external, and Henry North flipped the switch hidden way down inside. He was something recognized, something that compelled her. He was a remembered voice, calling. Henry North took her love and he smothered it, broke its neck. She was old, familiar prey. He was an old, familiar predator. You succumb, that’s what you do, if you haven’t ever learned to fight.
Where is Weary now? What is he even doing, as these thoughts roil and rumble and gather steam? He is in his closet (ha) at his home on the hill. It is night. It is dark, except for the moon and the yellow light of his room blazing. Crickets and insects chirp and bleep and party. Birds sleep. The bamboo doors of Weary’s closet are flung open. You should see all the stuff in there. Clothes of various sorts, books, trinkets. Everything he acquired here in New Caledonia to fill and fill the hole of loss. He shoves all the shit he buys into that closet so he doesn’t have to face his lame desire for it. His other rooms are Zen, clean-lined and simple. Inside, outside. How things look, how things are.
He hunts, but it’s not truly necessary. He knows where the box is. As he pulls that box down, he thinks of the crows and their protective rage. Like something out of a horror movie, those birds will dive-bomb anyone near their young. It happens every year from June until July, when the fledglings leave the nest. The older crows will menace anyone near their vulnerable offspring, wage a vicious attack to the back of a person’s head. How do you prevent it, when it’s the season of fury? Wave a tennis racket, or carry an umbrella. Wear a hat; walk backward. Face them. Look at them. They will only come at you from behind.
If you harm their young, if you threaten the new, budding confidence of what is fragile in the world, well, maybe you deserve what’s coming. You deserve a surprising, vicious attack that you don’t see coming.
Weary sets the box on his bed. There are treasures inside. Each is the glass or the fishing lure or the Matchbox car or the tiny skull or the bottle cap that is a crow’s riches. Corvus will gather these private gems, and they will turn them over and over again, gazing at their beauty. They will bury these treasures, to keep them away from others. And then, sometimes, as a gift, they’ll offer them.
Weary is lucky to have Jean-Marie, who is not only an excellent lover and a superb procurer of documents, but also the petit chief of a first-rate courier service, which promises expediency and anonymity. The first package will arrive when Isabelle is alone, while Henry is away on his little trip back home, according to the ticket purchase on the Visa bill.
Weary holds the watch to his ear. It’s silly—he knows it has stopped ticking. There’s nothing he can do about that now. He just has an irrational wish to hear the sound and see the tiny hands move again. It reminds him of the history books he likes to read sometimes, stories of war and disasters, torpedoed ships and murdered leaders. He always hopes they’ll turn out differently somehow, even though, of course, they won’t. They are stories that have already happened, with the fates of the doomed determined long ago.