The Blackbird

There was no moon the night his life changed forever. There wasn’t a single light in the sky. He would remember that later, how there were no stars, how the only lights were man-made and poisonous. Star murdering lights; sentries protecting no one.

The bar closed and Hector followed the wave of people leaving, but he was alone and they went their own way while he cut through an alley, hoping to catch a cab on the next block. He was drunk, but he wasn’t numbing the pain. The pain came later and he would cradle it to his heart. There were people he knew—relatives and friends and coworkers—who drank too much for that reason. Numbness bought at wholesale prices; supply and demand. It was everywhere and Hector had more reason than some to seek it out, but he didn’t. It was wherever he looked; walking the streets, saying hello with a cracked gloss smile in the lobbies of hotels, grabbing its crotch at passersby in the subway, drinking piss from the gutters, driving its children to their first day of school, spreading its legs for strangers, praying on its knees in another flophouse, over a plate of eggs at the diner on the corner. Everyone was either drinking to turn the volume down or spiking something into their veins to change the channel. There were people he worked with who would lick the fetid bottom of a toilet bowl for a shot at redemption. Visions of dead babies rioted in their heads, followed them down dark corridors, into bed, into church, into their dreams. Not Hector; he’d just wanted a cocktail, but one had become two without him noticing and before he realized it, he was well past his usual cutoff point and halfheartedly hitting on the sexy bartender.

Everyone was numb these days and no one was numb enough. That was the great big secret that everyone in the world knew.

Hector remembered the bartender from other nights when he’d been sober, and if it was the same one, he wasn’t that sexy at all. Too many muscles, too much jawbone, head shaved to hide the fact that he was balding and it didn’t look as good on him as it did on Bruce Willis.

It was for the best. Bartender guy hadn’t approved of the pack of cigarettes Hector pulled from his pocket when he was digging for his phone, even though he hadn’t been smoking and had obeyed the big blanket rule about not smoking and returned them to his pocket. That kind of supercilious concern and scolding pretentious bullshit always made him itch to light up. Even with his eyes booze-glazed, bartender guy had lost all appeal after that. Everybody was a fucking doctor. A Surgeon General with a hard-on and a bumper-sticker slogan on the tip of their tongue.

It was all right. Hector had a lover. A lover who didn’t tell him all the time that kissing him was like licking an ashtray. A lover who knew about the dead babies and didn’t care. A sweet, pretty, gentle girl who was waiting for him at home. She was just a cab ride away.

As he walked down the alley and skirted around a slimy looking dumpster, Hector cupped his hands around a match and lit a cigarette. The smoke was still in his throat when someone grabbed him from behind by the back of his jacket and slammed him into the wall. The hard, unmovable pressure of a man’s body was pushing him into the wall, grinding his chest and his palms into the brick and mortar until crumbs of it lodged under Hector’s nails. His heart beat faster and stronger than it had ever beat before. Fear was a clawing thing in the pit of his stomach and adrenaline spiked through his blood; pure and sharp as crystal, making even his breath tremble.

“You got a wallet?” the man asked him, speaking close to his ear.

Hector nodded jerkily. The man was wound tight as a wild animal ready to spring. He imagined the fingers clenched in the back of his coat as vicious talons.

“Give me your fucking wallet, man. Give it to me. Don’t try nothing and I won’t cut you.” He tapped the thin blade of a butterfly knife against Hector’s throat below his jaw. Just to give the threat some teeth.

Hand shaking, Hector reached back for his wallet in his back pocket and his hand brushed the man, the backs of his knuckles on rough denim, on the soft worn cotton of his shirt, the hardness of his belt beneath it. The man made an angry sound in his throat like a growl and slapped his hand aside to reach into Hector’s pocket himself and yank the wallet out.

Hector jerked around then and he would never know why, but he had to move. The adrenaline was burning in his muscles, and he had to look; he wanted to see the face of his attacker. He would tell the police later that he did it for them, so he could identify the man, but he did it for himself. The desire to look was worth more than his life in that moment.

The man was clearly illuminated beneath the street lights and only a couple of steps away from Hector. He was young, strong, with swarthy skin and black hair gleaming like feathers. His jeans fit him better than his shirt, which fell almost to his knees, and there was a chain hanging from his belt loop like a dog leash. Around his neck hung a silver cross at the end of a rosary. His black eyes gleamed in the false light like the eyes of a bird; keen, dispassionate, intelligent, concerned by nothing but his own survival.

The knife flicked in the darkness, mimicking the pattern of fluttering wings in his hand, and he smiled. His voice was almost soft, almost tender as he said, “I told you not to try nothing.”

The first cut was a shallow slash across his abdomen. It slit Hector’s shirt and the front of his jacket, buttons flying, clattering down the alley toward the dumpster. Hector fell back against the wall with a yelp of surprise. Somewhere a stray cat screamed in orgasmic agony. The man, like a crow to carrion, laughed. It raised the fine hairs on Hector’s body like the petting of a hand. He backed away from him along the wall, the knife a distracting glint in his peripheral vision, eyes fastened on the face of his attacker.

“Why’d you have to go and do that?” he asked, advancing a step for every step Hector took in retreat. “Why’d you have to look at me? Don’t you know nothing? I’d have let you go on home, all’s you had to do was not try nothing. Just listen to me and not try nothing.”

Hector shook his head. His heart was in his throat and his temples like a drum. Everything was so bright, so sharp, so vivid. The man with the knife couldn’t be older than twenty, but there was an ageless depth to his gaze. His mouth laughed, but his eyes were bottomless wells.

“Don’t,” Hector said, his voice belonging to someone else. “Please don’t.”

The man with the blackbird eyes laughed at him and shook his head. Then he was moving, faster than Hector would have believed possible, and he knew that he had been playing with him before because the next slash of the knife cut open the palm of the hand he raised to defend himself. Hector snatched his hand back, pain a bolt of lightning from fingertips to shoulder, but then he forgot his hand. The knife punched two quick, deep holes in his chest and it was impossible to breathe, to think, to cry out. He felt his life in the beat of his terrified heart on the back of his tongue as he had never felt it before. For a moment, a second that seemed to stretch into eternity, the body of the man was against him, pressing his back to the wall as Hector tried to breathe around the blade of the knife in his chest. Those dreadful sharp eyes were on his face, watching him as he faded, eyes like volcanic glass, like the last thing a mouse sees before it’s swallowed and Hector was being swallowed.

Everything faded to grey at the edges like an old, worn photograph. He was sliding down the wall, then sitting on the ground, the water puddled in the crevice between the asphalt and the wall felt revoltingly warm to the touch in his hands and his heart was finally slowing. Somewhere a rustle, a shush-shush like the beating of wings. Somewhere there were stars, but not over Hector’s head. The far away blink of an orbiting satellite, the burning bright light of a streetlamp, the sick glow of a red and blue CLOSED sign. His heart was beating too slow, too loud. The need to breathe was the solid weight of someone sitting on his chest. The light was too bright. Then it wasn’t. Then it was fading. It was the faint, sickly orange glow of greasy stove lights.

Somewhere overhead he thought he heard the blackbird caw its throat-raw laughter.

Someone’s high, agonized screaming woke Hector some time later. He wanted to make it stop, ask them why, but his mouth was suddenly full of a thick tube that made him gag and fingers that tasted like antiseptic. The screaming stopped though, so that was good. Painful hands gripping his arms and his legs, holding him down, soon replaced by straps and buckles. More false, too-bright light over his head. Sea foam green walls and beeping heart monitors.

He was in a hospital.

He was alive.

He was the someone who had been screaming.

He was still screaming, but he did it silently. It echoed down the dark passageways of his mind, confined by the tube they shoved down his throat under the pretense of helping him to breathe. One collapsed lung, a doctor younger, paler and more pimple-faced than the blackbird said. He hovered over Hector with a clipboard, a black ballpoint pen clasped between the first two fingers of his right hand going tap, tap, tap. He smiled and it was so wrong that Hector wanted to spit in his face.

The young doctor injected a sedative into his IV and Hector slept. He didn’t wake up again until the cops came to ask him about the blackbird. Did he remember anything? He remembered everything. Could he describe him? In excruciating detail.

They knew who he was and they told Hector a name but Hector wasn’t listening. He didn’t want a name. He wanted to be left alone with the memory of his laughter and the gleam in his eyes and the cold, suffocating slide of steel plowing through his flesh. The tip of the knife had broken off against his sternum. The cops took it, said it was evidence, and Hector wanted to tell them they couldn’t have it, but they didn’t want to hear that. They promised they would catch him. They would keep him updated.

One of them gave Hector his card and said he could call him whenever he wanted.

Hector promised he wouldn’t need to call.

His lover was beside the bed the next time Hector woke. Her name was Christine and she was more beautiful and kind than Hector deserved. He had always known it.

Christine held his hand and wept and told him that she had called the clinic where Hector worked to tell them what had happened. That was where the flowers beside the bed had come from. Crocuses; purple and yellow and white ones. A card commanding him to “Get Well Soon.”

“What happened?” Christine asked. “You didn’t come home. I was so worried.”

Hector worked in the sort of clinic where doctors were sometimes shot for doing their job. Their fan mail was anonymous and came with the implied weight of a target on their back. Sometimes people picketed the place with signs and sandwich boards and it would be featured for thirty seconds on the local news if they were loud enough. Christine didn’t care about the dead babies, the zygotes, the bedpan swill of stem cells, but she worried when Hector came home late. He tried to imagine what that worry must have felt like when he hadn’t come home at all. She must have thought he was dead. How comforting could it have been to learn that she was nearly right, but for the wrong reasons?

He told her he had been mugged. It was the easy answer.

She sat beside him, bathing his fingers in her tears, convinced that her weeping would buy him his life. Hector could already feel his life fading back to the familiar grey, crisped old photograph edges of borderline consciousness that he inhabited at her side. He clasped her hand in return and wept with her for his loss.

They moved out of the city to a house with a view of the bay. Hector quit smoking five times before he managed to kick the habit for good. He coughed up a lot of phlegm and felt so sick that it was hardly worth it. A smoke in the middle of the day made him feel better, which was a hellish kind of paradox, but the doctors insisted that would pass if he let it so he stuck to it. He changed his diet, cut sodium and fat and refined sugars, only ate good carbohydrates, cooked everything in coconut oil and ate kale even though he hated it. He meditated and went to physical therapy and drank veggie shakes that tasted like seaweed. He sat for hours in the window seat of their new house and stared out at the bay; the waves cresting to white mountaintops, the boats full of whale watchers, the gulls fighting each other for empty potato chip bags and the chance to peck each other’s eyes out. He read books about inner peace and self-love, about getting in touch with his anima.

It felt a lot like he was trying to retrofit his wounded body with new religion.

Christine brought home a puppy from the animal shelter. It was cute, but it looked like a long-haired hamster and it barked too much. When Christine wasn’t home, Hector left it outside.

He got better. Many people credited his rapid healing to healthier living and Hector didn’t disabuse them of the notion.

He couldn’t forget the blackbird. He had a name but Hector never thought of him as the man to whom that name belonged. He was, always and forever, the blackbird. Beautiful, pitiless eyes like polished stones, hands like talons, body whipcord strong and bullwhip quick, smile so bright, voice low and soft like a cat’s purr, knife a deadly extension of his body. Hector dreamed about that knife, about that voice, those hands. The blackbird called to him in his sleep, mocked him, berated him, said, “Don’t try nothing and I won’t cut you,” and “Why’d you have to go and do that?” The knife blade parting flesh woke him up shaking and aroused to the point of orgasm, biting his lips not to scream.

On the news at night, there was war; four hundred children dead in a school in Jerusalem, North Korea constantly threatening to blow shit up, their leader strutting like a bantam rooster, terrorists beheading journalists. There was disease; Ebola and mutated influenza and antibiotic resistant bacteria and parasites that turned the human brain to gelatin and, as always, cancer in all of its myriad deadly forms. There was natural disaster; rising sea levels, avalanches, landslides, flooding, drought, storms with the potential to level entire cities. The EPA report that year said a lot of things, most of them highly technical, but the basic gist of it all was that the world was ending. Not in a hundred years, not in a thousand, not if humanity didn’t wake up and do something immediately, but ending very soon and that there had once been a point fifteen or twenty years earlier when something could have been done about it, but now it was too late. The EPA report did not make the news; Hector read about it online one day while he was Googling bird people and how long it typically took to mend a cracked sternum.

He Googled other things, too. He spent an entire day reading about American Indian and Hindu gods. Another day was devoted to words ending in –philia.

Hierophilia: sexually aroused by sacred objects.

Kleptophilia: sexually aroused by stealing.

Maieusiophilia: sexually aroused by pregnant women.

The ever popular Podophilia: sexually aroused by feet.

All very interesting, but not relevant to Hector’s interests whatsoever. The one that came closest to describing him was Chremastistophilia: sexual arousal from being robbed. Except it wasn’t the robbery he dreamed about. The robbery was incidental. It was the stage, not the act. It had changed him because he had not expected it. It had changed him because he hadn’t realized until the moment the knife pierced him how dead he was inside.

There was a word for everything else it seemed, but no one word to encapsulate that night. He could have written long, annoyingly philosophical blog entries about it, filled pages of a journal, but there was no single word to express it or to explain why he woke in the night biting his tongue, shivering, his cock heavy like a stone, fingers straying to the jagged scar on his chest where he could still feel the knife going in, coming out, going in again.

Why’d you have to go and do that? the blackbird asked in his mind. He could hear his voice saying those words to him, their exact inflection. Why’d you have to look at me? Don’t you know nothing?

“Because I had to know,” Hector whispered. “I had to see.”

Guess you did see. Like Lot’s wife, you sure did see.

Like Lot’s wife, he was crumbling day by day. If Hector could have asked Lot’s wife if it was worth it though, if that one glance back at the brimstone and fire falling from Heaven onto Sodom and Gomorrah had been worth everything, he felt certain he knew what she would have said.

Yes, she would have told him. Oh, yes.

Other days, he was filled to the brim with rage. He fantasized about kicking the blackbird’s bright smile down his laughing throat, about pissing on his face, in his obsidian eyes, of breaking each and every one of his long, talon fingers until his laughter became screams of pain, became pleas for mercy on deaf ears. Hector imagined bruising his golden skin and pushing his fingers into the purple rosettes of his pain until he wept as Christine had wept for him in the hospital. He cursed him and hated him and spit on his indelible memory.

He went to bed touching the scar on his chest like a prayer. Christine kissed it or licked it sometimes when she was astride him. Her long hair whispered over it, awakening traumatized nerve endings in the red ridges of scar tissue. Her hair was soft and golden and she was as lovely and loving as ever, but he sank his fingers into her soft hair and imagined scapular feathers in his hands the black and blue color of an oil slick, he thrust into her warm, welcoming body and remembered cold steel parting his flesh, scraping across bone, puncturing lung so that the entire world was without air and drowning. It took everything he had to make himself be gentle with her. Everything he had left to go on loving her the way she was used to.

He found the detective’s card in the pocket of his jeans the next time he wore them three months after it happened. He had said he wouldn’t call but he did. The cop’s name was Gravitas, which Hector would have thought was funny in another time, under different circumstances.

“Is there anything yet?” he asked the detective.

“Nothing,” the detective said.

He didn’t say, I’m sorry, but Hector heard it anyway in the click when he hung up the phone.

He didn’t want pity and sorries. He wanted to know the blackbird was in a cage somewhere. In handcuffs. In chains. Hector wanted to stand on the other side of bars and watch him fading before his eyes back into the shadows, into nothingness, into a scared, tired young man who’d been run ragged and was now as small again as he should be. A thief, a junkie, a kid who was not as big as Hector remembered, not as fascinating, not as powerful, just a dried up old husk of a discarded god. A desperate boy with a knife and quick reflexes. He wanted them to give him that so he could have peace. The kind of peace he couldn’t find in books.

“Nothing,” was all Detective Gravitas said. He said it again the next month when Hector called him. And the next. He always took his calls, but he always said, “Nothing.”

Eventually, Hector’s life got back to normal. He went back to work at the clinic, went back to traveling through the city on the subway, meeting Christine for lunch, having drinks with colleagues, pretending that there wasn’t a craving for something darker rooted at the apex of his soul.

He had never cared about the dead babies before, but he started to in the strangest of ways. Sometimes he would look at and consider them; tiny, unformed, pink and red and slimy and not even people yet, the round orbs that would have become skulls, the surface that would have fused in the middle to form a face, before he dumped them where they belonged with the rest of the biohazardous waste. Some were tiny and slug-like as newborn mice. Some were nothing but a handful of cells rubbing together in the ether-filled wasteland of a woman’s womb.

He wondered if they could possibly know how lucky they were to have escaped their lives.

At night on the subway, Hector looked at the faces. Passengers got on and off without making eye contact with him, but he kept looking. A young man in a dark blue shirt that was too long made his heart leap in his chest, until he turned and his eyes were blue like shallow water, his hair a color of brown that was nearly blond. Another night, a guy walked by him in the subway onto the train with the blackbird’s way of moving; beautiful, his slightest movement a testament to that beauty. The door slid closed before Hector could get aboard, but when the guy turned to look back at him through the glass, he was too dark-skinned, his hair like wool and cropped close, not the shiny waves of crow’s wings.

Hector called the detective, who said, “Nothing.”

I’d have let you go, the blackbird whispered.

“I don’t think you would have,” Hector said.

You don’t know nothing.

He knew some things. He knew a place where he could pay someone to do to him what the blackbird had done to him. It took him a year to get up the courage, to build up the desperation required to speak his desire aloud to strangers and exchange money for the expectation of abuse.

The first time was a young man with the greenest eyes Hector had ever seen. He wore ugly clothes made of leather and linen with laces in front like garments pilfered from the costumes of a theater troop. He used razorblades and left shallow bleeding marks like paper cuts and cat scratches on Hector’s chest. When Hector begged for more, for deeper wounds, he scolded him and said that the anticipation was the best part. Hector snatched his razorblade away, threw it into the dark of the room and left.

The blackbird would never have made him ask for it. Not with words. Not ever.

Hector’s craving for that violence brought him back again, to another place, another stranger who took his request and his money with an expression of boredom. Before the blackbird touched him, Hector had only had the vaguest sexual interest in men, and that had not changed. He did not want men, he wanted a man. A specific man. He asked for a young man who looked like a blackbird. They sent him a black boy no older than eighteen with an accent that suggested New York, somewhere in the Bronx. He called it playing, he asked Hector for a safe word.

Hector heard the blackbird’s cackling laughter in the echoes of dripping water.

He would not get what he needed in places like this, he realized, no matter how much he paid for it. No grit grinding into his hands, no blood in his mouth, no dirt. All the blades were clean, all silver, shining needles disinfected. Safe words and games. Hector wanted to feel his life thumping in his throat like the tiny heart of a nesting bird before he lost it. He didn’t want words or threats, but a promise. He needed to feel that promise unspoken in the humming air, in the unyielding violence of the body against him, in the blazing agony of the blade under his skin, in the grit beneath his fingernails.

Everything about this was wrong, not the least of which, the young man with his New York accent. He left without touching the black boy, without giving him a word of any kind.

Frustrated, he walked the streets. He went down alleys, searching for the place where it had happened. Seeking that certain kind of light that was like sunlight filtered through a dirty lens overgrown with scabs. His hand strayed beneath his shirt and he fingered the scar on his chest, ran his fingertips into the divot of fibrous, slick tissue, whispering to the blackbird where he lived in Hector’s mind to divulge his secret self. The scar was the kiss of Judas. Jesus, dying on the cross with the warmth of that kiss still on his cheek would have understood what drove Hector down the putrid alleys, into the rank, filth-gorged gutters. Hector had determined that he would find the blackbird even if it meant his death.

It was two months shy of two years when Detective Gravitas called and asked if he could come by. He had news.

Hector met the detective outside on the porch. The detective said, “We got him. We think he’s the guy. He’s dead.”

He said more after that about what a bad man the blackbird had been, about all the other people he had robbed and beaten and raped and killed, about the gun he drew when officers tried to arrest him, the bullet that punched a hole through his chest and ended his life. Hector, he said, was one of the lucky ones.

He said a lot more, but Hector didn’t hear most of it. He stood with the detective and stared out at the bay where the gulls were circling something dead in the water.

“Will you come down and have a look at the body?” the detective asked.

Hector blinked and tried to remember what they were talking about. The blackbird. He was dead. His body.

“Of course,” Hector said.

He went that afternoon to look at the body. There he was, stretched out on a silver table, exactly as Hector remembered him, except smaller. It was the difference between a bird on the wing and a bird lying dead in a heap on the side of the road. His stillness was loud in the cold room, his eyes closed and darkly circled like coffee stains on a tablecloth, his mouth was closed and the color of wax and berries. Like the lips of a child that has gorged itself all day on blackberries. There was a hole in his chest like the red, crusted maw of the devil. His black hair looked dull and too short, his shoulders too wide, no longer that slender, rawhide tough build, that body speaking of prolonged hunger for everything and the world, too. It was him, but it wasn’t him. His body was an empty shell, the discarded skin of a serpent, the home that crabs outgrow, the meat that worms and beetles feast on.

“Is it the guy who attacked you?” the detective asked.

Hector shook his head.

“You’re sure?” He sounded surprised.

“No. It’s not him,” Hector said. “I’m sure.”

“Well, damn,” the detective said. “All right then. I’m sorry.”

“Yes,” Hector said. He shook the detective’s hand and stole one last look at the blackbird lying there dead on the table. He would now have to hold the pictures he had in his mind forever. There was nothing else. “I’m sorry, too.”

It had started raining while Hector was in the morgue looking at the body. It fit his mood and it followed him all the way home. It felt like the end; the end of everything.

There were no gulls over the bay when he got home, no boats either, and whatever had died earlier in the day had washed ashore. The rain turned the sand treacherous and slippery as snow and ice. It filled up and overflowed the shallow impressions of his footprints, his feet sinking into it like walking on a foam-topped mattress. Tiny crabs and water fleas skipped in the puddles, chasing raindrops.

He left the lights off when he went inside the house and removed his shoes in the entryway. Then he didn’t see any reason why he shouldn’t strip off all of his clothes, so he did, an article at a time as he made his way to the living room. He lay down on his back in the center of the room with the window seat and the bay on his right and the rest of the house on his left and the carpet creeping with disembodied shadows against his back.

Why’d you have to look at me? You should know better by now.

“I don’t know,” Hector whispered. “It seemed important. It seemed like someone should.”

He touched the scar on his chest and ran his fingers along its smooth surface, worshipful and so sad that his sorrow was like the tang of a blade in his chest. A blade that moved the way moths beat their wings. In his chest close enough to his heart that a deep breath could cleave the muscle in two.

I won’t cut you, the blackbird whispered in his mind. His breath was the sigh of ashes.

“You already have,” Hector said to the empty room and patter of rain on the roof. “You’ve been doing it all along.”

The rain on the roof was the argumentative voices of a hundred lost spirits. The blackbird got lost in their chatter. Hector closed his eyes and caressed the sensitive, lines of the scars the blackbird had carved into his chest those years ago, binding them together with strings thin as floss, gossamer as cobwebs and as destructive as a sculptor’s chisel. Hector’s breath moved in and out of his body, lifting his chest like the bellows of a furnace, his blood heating, his belly molten glass, glowing hot and red and dazzling with life and lust. He framed a picture in his mind of the blackbird lying supine on the silver table, eyes closed never to open again, eyelashes long and black, a hole like a crater in his chest. Somewhere lodged in a wall or a sidewalk or a tree trunk or the door of a car there was a bullet. A bullet that was the last thing the blackbird had ever touched. Somewhere in an evidence bag sealed in a box there was the broken tip of a butterfly knife. A year away, or ten or fifteen from Hector lying naked and sweating on the floor with his fingers on the scar and the ocean talking to the rain like lovers, that basement room would flood, that box would disintegrate, that point of steel would wash away to be picked up by a janitor and tossed into a waste can. That sacred piece of metal like an arrowhead washed up on the shore of an extinct people might be the only thing left of him; a relic.

Dusk brought with it deeper shadows, the whisper of his lover’s voice asking him about his day and the tentative, tapping, caressing touch of her fingers like a blind woman reading Braille by the moles and hairs and imperfections. His hands cupped her shoulders and his mouth traced the peak of her left breast as she mapped the scar on his chest with the soft, wet point of her tongue.

“How was your day?” she whispered.

“Fine,” a voice that sounded like his voice replied. “It was good. It was okay. It was fine. I’m so glad you’re home.”

Christine made a sound in her throat that reminded Hector of her little puffball dog. Her tongue was light on his chest. It crossed back and forth and back and forth over his nipples, his scars, tracing and wishing for smooth, unblemished flesh. For a world where loving tongues are enough to erase such wounds. He stroked her hair and loved her and lied to her and told her that it was okay.

He had already started to imagine his own death. Not like a suicide or a homicide, but an act of contrition; a monument painted in blood, inscribed with a knife.

XXX

Hector is just looking for a cab home after a few drinks one night when he is attacked by the man he will forever after think of as the blackbird. He could never have imagined how that night and that single encounter will change him... A story of dangerous obsession.