"Owl" & "Whale" by Esmé Kaplan-Kinsey

Owl

In my twenty-first summer, I learned how to be nocturnal. Once I realized I prefer the dark, it was simply a matter of reorganizing my time. I got a job as a night shift security guard on a college campus and started going to bed right as my apartment yellowed into morning. I ate Chinese takeout for breakfast and IHOP waffles before I fell asleep. It was hard to be friends with anyone, but at the time I wasn’t worried about that. I was a freshly minted grown-up, and everything in my life felt suitably upside-down. The chosen weirdness of that summer made the far more frightening chaos of simply existing easier to stomach.

The job at the college was boring. The campus was in the most affluent corner of town and didn’t need half the security guards it hired. My duty was not so much safety as to keep up appearances of safety—if an alumni donor were to enter campus at any hour of the day or night, my job was to make sure they wouldn’t reconsider their donation. I wandered in a lot of slow, menacing circles. I picked up lots of trash using those little metal tongs. Sometimes I’d find a half-empty pack of cigarettes or a nice new lighter. 

Mostly, I just walked and listened to the dark.

There were a few weeks I was seeing a girl at the college, a cute redhead I’d swiped right on because her bio said bet I can outsmoke you and I like a challenge. She’d meet me midshift, like one or two a.m., and we’d get high behind the physics building, and she’d rant to me about posthumanism and dystopia and economy collapse and I’d say it sure turns me on when you talk like that and we’d fuck against the cold cement wall and then right away she’d stumble off to bed and I’d stand in the solid darkness, listen to everything invisible and alive surrounding me, then shrug it off, zip up my pants, get back to the job. It didn’t last. Turned out she was a bit crazy. When I broke it off, she tagged the side of my golf cart with a lopsided owl and the words hoot hoot motherfucker. I’m still trying to figure out what that means. Not that I think about it anymore, really, not her or the job or even that whole summer. But when I do remember, I wonder.

There was one night that comes back to me still. Or morning really, those first strains of light meaning it was almost time for me to clock out and head off to bed. On my final lap of campus, I spotted a homeless man staring into a hole in a tree. I thought he must be drugged up on something, a substance that animated the unmoving, conversing with what he took to be the tree’s open mouth.

Then the man turned around. I remembered abruptly that I was wearing my deliberately intimidating black security guard uniform, that by all the rules of my job I should eject this outsider from campus. All summer, I’d never actually been confronted with a situation in which I was expected to do any guarding. I didn’t want to now. He was just a guy, a down-on-his-luck guy. 

I waited for him to become frightened by my imposing appearance. I waited for him to run from my obvious institutional power so I wouldn’t have to assert it. 

Instead, the man pointed into the hole in the tree.

Hey kid, he said, check this shit out. 

I approached, a bit cautious, and saw movement in the opening. Inside the tree was a nest of baby birds.

 I said, would you look at that? 

And the man said yes, yes I would. 

We smiled at each other, and he was the one without teeth, but my mouth felt hollow and empty of something important.

In the half-light, we watched the babies move over and around each other, making tiny bird murmurs. Their speech felt very nearly comprehensible. We stood there for a long time, trying to understand.

Then there was a whir of great wings and the owl mother alighted above us. She was huge and flat-faced and angry and her claws were sharp and we gave her plenty of space, backed up from her nest and stood at a respectful distance. Her world wasn’t one in which we belonged, but I think, in that moment, we both wanted to. 

The sun came up for real then, forest shot through with perpendicular golden light. The owl went flurrying into her hole. Together, the homeless man and I turned, like we’d been summoned by the dawning back to our human lives, and walked away. I gave him four dollar bills and the half joint I had in my pocket. Then I drove home and slept until the sun went down.

That week, I got fired from my job because another security guard had watched me watch owls with a homeless man rather than telling him to get lost. He followed the man afterwards, told him to get lost, and reported me. I didn’t care. I wanted to work somewhere I didn’t have to fuck people over. I sent my resume out in great paper flurries, worked one bad job, then another, then two at once, realized everyone was fucking each other over all the time, kept at it anyway. Hell, I’m still here. I’m still working, a desk job now, something that doesn’t keep me up all night and gets the bills paid and at least keeps the damage I do at a manageable distance so I don’t have to think too hard about it.

Some nights, though, the insomniac of that summer still comes out in me, a nightbird which spreads its wings when the sun goes down and urges me out of my house. I walk again, in the silvered moonlit blackness, listening for living things. I think if I throw myself out into the night, again and again, I might begin to see a way forward through the dark.

“What is the difference between a cathedral and

a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello?

We spy on whales and on interstellar radio

objects; we starve ourselves and pray till we're

blue.” 

—Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk:

Expeditions and Encounters

Whale

If you are a child, you might find the world a perfectly comprehensible place. 

Let’s say you are, because otherwise the suggestion is ludicrous. 

Let’s say you are six years old, your shirt is sticky with strawberry ice cream and your parents have taken you to the natural history museum in order to demonstrate that you are not the only creature that has ever lived. Say you fall asleep in the car on the way there, and dream of a universe which exhales neon all over you. Say you are disappointed to wake up.

You know what,  your parents probably don’t figure into this. Your parents know of the multiplicity of the natural world and don’t care much about it. They probably don’t think it is worth explaining to you, at your young and tender age. 

It is much more likely you will have to figure this out for yourself.

So let’s say you are six years old (but let’s leave out the ice cream, it’s too sticky), and say you go on a toddle down the street and happen to find your way into a natural history museum (say you have five dollars in your pocket from selling lemonade, or however it is that children earn their incomes). So you get to the ticket stand, your head rising just barely to the counter. You put your small hands on the plastic surface streaked gray to look like stone, and you look up into the tired eyes of the ticket-taker. 

Say you say, I would like to learn about all the living things who have ever lived. How much does that cost?

Say the woman behind the counter looks down at you over half-moon glasses and wonders who has lost their child. But say she is a good sort of human who has devoted her life to helping others find meaning in a dying world. So when you come dawdling into the museum in search of knowledge, something so simple, say she feels a stirring of camaraderie between herself and you, six years old, trying to make sense of your place in the order of things. So she comes out from behind the counter and takes your small hand in hers. 

She says to you, we’ll start small and get bigger. How does that sound to you?

Say you agree this sounds wonderful. It is your most tried and true strategy, to begin at the roots, closest to your eye level, and work your way up.

So say the ticket-taker brings you first to the entomology wing, where opalescent beetles and fuzzy green moths and great long-legged spiders are pinned to slices of clean white paper. The invertebrates, says the ticket taker. The spineless ones. The phylum which has dominated the earth, although you won’t catch many people saying it. 

Say you imagine yourself without bones, just a skin-bag of life-juice skittering across the ground in search of sustenance. So this is how most of the world lives, you think. You wish for a million billion creepy-crawly legs. You wish for an exoskeleton, jewel-bright and impenetrable.

Then you are on to the fish, fins flashing phosphorescence through the dark of the water. Here is where the bones begin, says the ticket-taker. Next are the terrariums, scaly loops of snakes and beaded lizards lazing in the warmth of false suns. And from there, say you walk to the hall of taxidermy, where a thousand birds fly through painted skies above fields of frozen megafauna, trapped in crystallized time, like amber, all feeling drained from their clear glass eyes as their bodies live out forever their most characteristic movements, one paw caught poised in midair, a tail swiping away a long-dead fly, all those heavy hooves which will never hit the ground.

And then you have reached the final hall, the hall of the whale, where the great creature’s skeleton swims suspended from the ribbed vaults of the museum ceiling, and you look up through its long-fingered phantom fins to its vertebrae, fit together, the world’s puzzle solved and hung on iron wires, a kind of art enough to shift the bedrock of history, enough to make you think there must be some maker out there with a scalpel and opposable thumbs, or else one able to enact the simple magic of everything which calls itself different but arises from the same cosmic soup, even you, even the whale, its great beaked skull, its mouth which could inhale you like plankton and spit you out all fluorescent-glowing, its empty-socket eyes which watch you way down there, tiny feet on the museum floor, a brand new life form, a cosmic speck, yes, which is beginning to understand its place in the universe.