It was near 4 a.m. when I stumbled down the stairs to the below-street level entrance of my aging Brooklyn rooming house. I took one step inside the vestibule when I detected a movement below me and recoiled my left foot, readying it to come down hard on the rat.

But before I squashed its head, the shadowy thing stirred again and I saw flap into a street lamp’s shaft of light a small bird.

It was probably the ugliest creature I had ever seen. Its feathers scruffy like a wet pillow torn open by the ringer cycle and its face scrunched together, ending in its beak’s bright yellow frown. With a whiskey head sickening me so that I wanted to hear glass break or somebody scream, I felt my foot rise again in order to end this miserable life and leave a bloody mess that would have the superintendent’s wife vomiting come morning.

But I had paused too long and the evil had left me and instead I just nudged the animal with my toe. The bird shook some more and looked straight at me with its crowded-together eyes. I decided it was not moribund enough to do it in and went upstairs, emptied a cardboard box and scooped the bird inside as it jerked around.

I fell asleep that night with the room spinning while I waited to see which of us would die first.

The next morning I woke to a grating that scraped at my brain like a crow picking the raw sores on a mule’s hind. The whole thing came back to me as in times where one wakes up next to someone they had no intention of sleeping with. What in God’s name was I going to do with this misfit? I rose, dressed, willed myself to the deli and came back with a poppy seed bagel which the bird mocked me with by refusing to eat.

As my head cleared I began to see in this bird another day slipping away. Ivory towers, I thought, should not have mailboxes that receive telephone bills, or be places where friends or Jehovah’s Witnesses can find you. They should not be stocked with alcohol and they should not be in the flight patterns of sick birds.

I scoured the internet for an animal shelter that could part me with my keep. But The Humane Society and others wanted no part of this forlorn squeaker. And they hadn’t even seen its face.

Looking at the animal whose kind I had never before seen, I wondered, could I have found in New York City some lungfish-like relic that humanity had nearly succeeded in killing off save this last Mohican?

I dug out a Yellow Pages that had increasingly become a souvenir from another age. I found one shelter in Jersey that would consider taking in my bird – the man admonished me that they had their hands full with a pair of unruly raccoons – if I was willing to deliver the bird 50 miles away.

Missing link or not, I decided this hard-luck case wasn’t worth a border run. But I was trapped, because I couldn’t very well kill the thing in cold blood now that we had shared a night and I had bought it breakfast.

Finally, an aviary society gave me the phone number of a woman who takes injured birds into her home.

A distinguished voice with theatrical presence picked up.

I said, “Hi, I found this sort of a bird on my doorstep. It looks half dead and it’s got this funny little expression.”

“You must be an actor,” was her reply.

“A writer.”

“Very well. I’ll see you in an hour.” She gave me her address on the Upper West Side. I told her the bird didn’t fancy poppy seeds and asked if another bagel would be best but she told me to waste no time.

I boarded the subway with the cardboard box on my lap with a hole punched on each side as the voice had instructed. I could hear the bird sliding back and forth as the conductor careened through the grungy passageways, but there wasn’t even a chirp and I sat wondering if the thing would expire during our journey.

I emerged into daylight and turned a corner to meet the rows of high-rise apartment buildings lining the riverfront. I checked in with the front desk of the address I had been given and climbed in a narrow elevator in this dated tower that must have been elegant back in its day.

My finger pressed into the buzzer and I heard commotion before the door swung open to a gray-haired woman wearing a dress-length white T-shirt with moth holes and a smattering of blotch stains. She ushered me in and immediately led me to her bathroom cluttered with jury-rigged birdcages like a makeshift avian hospital during wartime. There were more coops overhanging her window outside. A pigeon with scoliosis pecked around in the bathtub, dodging a trickle of water from the faucet.

She barely exchanged cordialities before returning to force-feeding a bird exactly like mine tiny mealworms by pinching its beak between forefinger and thumb and inserting the wriggling segmented bodies down the hatch with a tweezers.

I took the time to scan her up and down. Never before had I seen a person who in her old age had retained such a comely figure. Her legs were slim, hips curved, waist narrow, shoulders sharp, breasts full and shapely. What revealed her age most were those vertical lines that grow from the lips when one has truly seen life.

I imagined at that moment being one of the many men who must have appreciated this body over time.

For most people, I thought, it happens that we barely resemble our old photographs. We finish our twenties and watch our bodies begin to settle, the heaviest parts sinking to their rightful spots, no longer gallantly propped up by defiant muscles. Then the truth is revealed. We never did attain the perfect form we had imagined for ourselves, and then we are evicted from the estates of our youth and adjust to our middle-aged bodies until the hovel in which we squat feels like home.

But she had been spared this fate.

And it wasn’t just her looks. When she gestured, she drew great invisible arabesques in the air. She had pivoted with grace beneath an invisible proscenium. She had climbed lynx-like from sink, to bathtub’s edge, to the shelf with the bird coops.

From her attire, though, I knew she didn’t care much what lookers thought anymore.

I began asking her questions about her birds — really wanting to know about her — wondering what I would have been thinking about in this situation had there not been the age difference. Was I flattering myself to believe she also had this thought?

She left her home in California as a teenager to make it in pictures and in songs, she said. With this, she swept into the living room and presented a black and white glamour shot on the wall. There was another beside it in which her younger self sat on a stoop with eye-grabbing innocence and curiosity. A sharp dressed man in a Fedora was flirting with her. Frank Sinatra.

She had been in a few films, she said. Cut a couple albums. But in the end, she diagnosed, too many people were more interested in looking at her chest than what she spoke or sang. I tried not to do the same thing.

On another wall there was a poster-sized photograph of a man in khaki safari gear beside a leopard. An ex-husband, she said.

She set a pot on the stove in order to prepare some kind of a formula. A few moments later a sharp whistle from the kettle curdled the air and sent the bathroom full of birds into a flapping frenzy. I imagined a train somewhere in America unperching a flock from a telephone wire.

Soon, she was speaking again but I was not hearing. It was as if the whistle had also sent me flying.

The day had seemed a dream, and I dreamed inside of it. From the height of a Hitchcock God, I saw an ant-sized woman, and slowly zoomed in until a voiceover thought out loud.

No divorce goes well, the thinker repeated over and over as she headed home from the meeting on that terrible afternoon when the sky looked like the frosted glass of a hospital intake. Because a marriage’s finish is not like other endings. Not a night out drinking or a song. It is a finale without joy or a chord that resolves and fades away amid wind chimes.

She walked another of Manhattan’s long East/West blocks knowing that it was about to rain hard, calloused to the eyes following her, even though they belonged to men half her age. At the corner she waded into the street and cars blew by. The vacuum of each one passing so close tugged her a little bit further into traffic.

The light changed and she crossed to where benches usually are inhabited by people blanketed in newspaper to keep warm or men smoking and making exchanges with closed fists. But the benches were empty today. For no reason she decided to sit down.

She opened her purse and removed her lipstick and reapplied it without a mirror. She noticed as she was smearing the middle of her lower lip that there was a pigeon in the middle of the pathway pacing in circles, leaned to one side. Its feathers moist and matted.

She bent down and it spiraled toward her like a drunken dervish. It missed her outreached hand. She watched it and rushed to shoo away another pigeon that swooped down and pecked its tail. She sat still when the mountainous clouds finally gushed and stayed put after darkness came and the din of the taxies’ horns melded into one long siren. Whenever she reached out the bird zagged away.

My attention returned to the woman before me while the kettle was still cooling. She removed the pot from the stove and poured the water into a dish with what looked like powdered milk. She set it next to one of those plastic syringes that nurses use to squirt red liquid Tylenol into the mouths of children who don’t like pills.

She took the cardboard box from my hands, opened it, and smiled at the little thing inside that had managed to survive its first New York subway ride. Silly you, she said to me. It wasn’t a sick bird at all, or an antediluvian hanger-on. It was a newborn wren who someday would lose its frown and be the kind of handsome songbird that people hope will come to their feeders.

She spoke gently. Like she had with the other, she pried open my wren’s beak and pushed crawlies into him firm and lovingly. She pressed the ragamuffin in her cupped hands against her midsection and it expelled the still moving worm bits. Now I understood the shirt’s collection of stains. She fed it until it kept them down. Then she dripped liquid into his mouth from the syringe.

After a few hours I left the apartment and headed back below ground on the subway, realizing that because my hands had been full with the cardboard box, I hadn’t brought a book to read. I stared out the window watching the train’s acceleration blur the lamps that hung in regular intervals in the tunnel into one long white ribbon. The scenes from the day and the night before also began to run together until they were more than frozen moments in my mind. They became like pictures inside a black wheel with slits, and as it spun faster the images of birds began to flap as one and fly toward a memory that was not mine.

As the elevator dinged at her floor, the wet woman looked down and noticed there was a puddle beneath her. She dripped a trail to her door and walked inside and circled her living room, looking around as if her apartment were unfamiliar. Though it had only become a little bigger now.

She undressed and took a shower, washed her hair, made tea and got into bed. That night she watched a million drops of refracted light explode on her black window. She lay wondering about the streets below, if they would flood, if the bird from the afternoon would wash away and get lodged in a storm drain somewhere.

When the pelting stopped after many hours she knotted her robe and slipped into a pair of tennis shoes without putting on socks. As she made her way down the street that was just beginning to catch the sun’s beams, she noticed her gait was increasing uncontrollably. She halted suddenly and prepared herself to encounter her pigeon captured by the iron teeth of a rusty drain.

But when she got to the soaking bench there was no bird. Not in the bushes. Not by a shuttered newsstand.

On the block’s corner a teenaged girl stood next to a garbage can. She was homeless and still feeling whatever she had taken the previous night. In one hand she held some food from the trash and in the other she was squeezing the lame bird who wriggled away from the offer of a soggy meal.

With tennis shoes squeaking with each step, the woman with the robe that was gathered tightly beneath her folded arms marched up to the girl and said with the surety of a British officer, “excuse me, Miss, that’s my bird.” The homeless girl was still in shock when the animal was snatched away. The sick pigeon hardly fluttered and instead pushed its beak into the robe’s terrycloth to be carried off as if by a conquering army.

When I got home I looked up the woman’s name on the internet. Risqué movie titles from the early 1960s popped up and eBay ads for “near mint condition” Playboy magazines featuring the woman who was the bird lady to me. I understood now that there was quite a lot of interest in her chest. And with ample reason, I suppose. Were those people looking for the nourishment she has given to the birds she has kept in her home all these years? Or was her body a thrilling distraction from thinking about the novel they had failed to write?

But, then, distractions get a bad rap. They can last just long enough for you to remember that there was something you forgot to do before going over the ledge. You might consider that what led you there was the biggest veering of all.

After a while, I broke from typing when I noticed a poppy seed bagel that barely had been pecked at all. A delicious distraction. And, sometimes, therein lies the story.

Bill Edwards provided assistance on the illustration.

Copyright 2008 Last Exit