Bob in Paris
Copyright © 1999 by Dave Badtke
My feet throbbed from climbing Métro stairs and pacing museum floors; my mind was overwhelmed with Picasso paintings and Rodin sculptures; my stomach was flooded with Côte du Rhone and Camembert; I lay flat on my back, head supported by a pillow, while my wife slept beside me.
I turned on the TV and watched a ridiculous American show made challenging by dubbed French and then switched to a variety show hosted by a beautiful young woman when suddenly there came a tapping, as of someone gently rapping, rapping at my partially open casement window pane.
It was raining - perhaps it was just the wind. I turned off the TV and heard the rush of tires on the wet street four stories below.
Getting up, I pulled back the drapes and opened the window. I looked into the dimly lit apartment next door, so close I could almost touch it, and leaned forward on the sill to look down when I felt a flutter against my right arm.
"Attention!" – Watch out, I heard, as something dropped from the sill into the darkness below.
Startled, I jumped back from the window striking my head against the glass. "Ow!" I said as a bird flew into the room and landed on my night table.
"Alors, as-tu une case de vide?" – What, are you crazy? Bob said shaking himself violently, water spraying everywhere.
"Shhh!" I said rubbing the back of my head, pointing at my wife.
I sat down next to him pressing my cheek against his damp breast and asked him in a whisper, still rubbing my head, how he managed to find me once again.
Ignoring me, he spoke so fast, like a Frenchbird who had crashed into McDonald’s Golden Arches rather than my window, about Kansas and cosmology and the velocity of light, saying, "Je te l’avais bien dit!" – I told you so, over and over again, that I could barely understand him. I tried to grab his beak between my fingers, but he bit my finger instead, and he kept talking about the Big Bang and Kentucky and Alabama and Nebraska. He gasped for air and said that now even Cornhuskers were teaching alternatives to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution.
New Mexico, I said, to try to get him to slow down, but he kept up his tirade against the Kansas School Board until I said New Mexico again and he stopped and looked straight at me with his eyes on the sides of his head, and I told him that New Mexico had voted against teaching creationism: 14 to 1 they voted, I said.
One? he said. One voted against it? Let me at him, he said and began cackling in his wren-like way as he told me how he tried to find the board members when he got to Topeka to do his business on their heads or their cars or anything of theirs, but he couldn’t find them, so he started doing it on anyone’s head instead.
"Comment!" – What! I said in disbelief. You carpet bombed Topeka when you couldn’t find the board members who voted against evolution? How terrible, I said, as I shook my head in grief.
But what’s this about light? I asked him, and he told me that an engineer at Sandia Labs, D. Russell Humphreys, had used Einstien’s theory to argue that the intense gravity from a nearby black-hole had so slowed our time that billions of cosmos-years had passed during only a few thousand years on earth.
But that’s not right, I said.
"Bien sûr!" – Certainly! Bob said.
No, I protested, you don’t get my meaning. If a scientist were to make such a claim, it would be tested and argued and debated and examined in every possible way, and if it were true, the scientist would surely get the Nobel Prize. But if it were false, the theory surely would be thrown away.
Science is science, I said, not only because it uses the past to predict the future, which faith does as well, but because it is willing to abandon a theory when experiment shows it to be false. Faith is faith and is not subject to experimental verification, because it is not science.
"Tu as raison," – You’re right, he said, slapping my cheek with his wet wing - which I took to be a sign of affection – after which he said it was late and flew to the window.
Can’t you stay a while, I said, and dry off and have something to eat?
"C’est impossible," - That’s impossible, he said. I’ve heard stories about my brethren who guard the Tower of London, and I must find them.
You silly bird, I said. You don’t speak English and you’re not a raven. If the English don’t eat you, the Ravens will.
He spread his wings and asked the way, and I pointed toward London and whispered, "Le nord," and an echo murmured back the word, "Le nord!" Merely this, and nothing more.
- Dave Badtke is founder of the developing Carquinez Review literary journal. Find him on the web at www.CarquinezReview.com.
Contact him at:
Dave@CarquinezReview.com or Dave@Badtke.com