The View from the Seventh Layer

A Fable Ending in the Sound of a Thousand Parakeets Once there was a city where everyone had the gift of song. Gardeners sang as they clipped their flowers. Husbands and wives sang each other to sleep at night. Groups of children waiting for the school bell to ring raced through the verses of the latest pop songs to get to the pure spun sugar of the choruses. Old friends who had not seen one another in many years met at wakes and retirement parties to sing the melodies they remembered from the days when they believed there was nothing else in the world that would ever grip their spirits so and take them out of their bodies. Life was carried along on a thousand little currents of music, and it was not unusual to hear a tune drifting out from behind the closed door of an office as you passed, or even from the small back room of the art museum, which was almost but never quite empty. The people of the city did not always sing with great skill, but they sang clearly and with a simplicity of feeling that made their voices beautiful to hear. And because they loved what they sang, no matter how painful or melancholy, a note of indomitable happiness ran through their voices like a fine silver thread. In this city there lived a mute, the only person who was unable to lend his voice to the great chorus of song that filled the air. The mute had spent his entire life in the city, and everyone from the members of the school board to the stock boys at the grocery store knew who he was. In some communities there is a man who sells whistles by the courthouse or paper kites down by the river. In others there is a woman who decorates her home with multicolored lights and streamers every holiday. Usually these people are no more than small figures at the periphery of everyone's attention, but when they die, it can be more surprising than the death of a prominent leader or a renowned artist, because no one has ever regarded them carefully enough to consider what their absence might mean. The mute was of that age where his hair had turned white and his shoes no longer seemed to fit him properly. Some of his neighbors believed he was deafan understandable mistake. He was not deaf, though, only mute, and from time to time he liked to sit in a chair on his front porch and listen to the people around him chatting with one another as they took their afternoon walks. They would say things like "I'm telling you, buddy, the second my pension kicks in, it's off to the tropics for me." And "Peter asked me out for dinner tonight, dear thing. I think he's finally going to pop the question." And "That's the deaf man, Sarah. He can't hear you, but that's no reason you can't be friends with him. Why don't you go wave hello?" It comforted him to listen to these conversations. He had never married or fathered children, and behind the door of his house, there was only the quiet tapping of his footsteps and the endless chirping and fluttering of the parakeets. The mute had gotten his first pair of birds when he was still a young man, purchasing them from a pet vendor he met in the city park. One morning he had seen them preening and tilting their heads in the sunlight, and that was all it took. The color of their feathers seemed to call out to him: the jewel-like greens and yellows of their wings, the shaded blue around their necks, but most of all the lovely soft purple above their beaks. It was not until he released the parakeets into his living room and watched them hop from the back of the chair onto the curtain rod, and from the curtain rod onto the shelf beside the mirror, that he felt something slipping loose inside him and realized how much he had needed their companionship. One of the parakeets turned out to be a male, and the other a female, and soon he hadBrockmeier, Kevin is the author of 'The View from the Seventh Layer', published 2008 under ISBN 9780375425301 and ISBN 0375425306.