All the Birds in the Sky

“Oh, fuck me.” Kawashima was approaching from the nearby hardware store, plastic bag swinging from one hand. “You have got to be joking. This asshole, again?”

“Theodolphus,” Dorothea said from behind him, looking at the grimy man. She managed to make just his name into the worst insult.

“You know this guy?” Patricia said.

Kawashima ignored her and said to Theodolphus, “You are just the worst, man. You’re like a bad rash. I thought we killed you a long time ago.”

“I have been as good as dead for many years.” Theodolphus Rose drew himself up, as if he was boasting. “But I needed to warn Miss Delfine here. She was my best student, once. When she was a child, I saw a vision of her grown, as she is now. A vision of destruction. I thought she should know.”

“Let me guess,” Kawashima said. “You huffed some vapors and hallucinated. Right? Visions of the future are always bullshit, and I should know, I’m the biggest bullshit artist around. Dorothea, do you want to do the honors?”

Mr. Rose was still thrashing and yelling about his vision of madness and destruction and a hole in the world. But Dorothea came closer and whispered a story, about a man she had known. He had been a maker of netsuke,

those little carved figurines that Japanese people used as kimono clasps, but he was also a journeyman assassin, and some of his carvings had hidden death traps: little poison needles, reservoirs of toxic smoke. The deadly netsuke were always in the shape of a beautiful woman in a lewd pose, and you could give one to a person knowing he or she would wear it and die. Until one day the man became confused and put a lethal spring-loaded dart into a frog, that he had meant to put inside a courtesan. He then sold the frog to one of his favorite clients, who was sure to wear it that evening and who knew nothing of the man’s side business as an assassin. How could he warn his customer?

At this point in the story, Dorothea’s murmurs had gotten so soft that Patricia didn’t hear how the story ended. And Theodolphus was no longer in a position to listen, either, because somehow without anybody noticing he had changed from a person to a tiny wooden figurine, an inch and a half tall. Dorothea picked him up and showed him to Patricia: He was a slender woman lifting her skirt, except that the face was that of a very solemn frog.

Dorothea dropped the figurine into Patricia’s palm, then closed Patricia’s fingers around him, for safekeeping.

“I can’t believe we didn’t kill that douchebag a long time ago.” Kawashima unlocked the Lexus and got in the driver’s seat. “Seriously, such a dick.”

Dorothea nodded and rolled her eyes.

On the drive back to San Francisco, Patricia tried to ask Kawashima about the thing Theodolphus had mentioned, the Unraveling — but of course, that sort of question was the worst possible Aggrandizement.

Patricia dozed, and in her dream she tried to figure out how Dorothea’s story ended. Then the answer came to her: the netsuke

maker/assassin would have to take the frog back from his client, by force if necessary, and would sacrifice his own life in the process. The frog would have to claim someone’s life, in the end — if not the client, then the man who made it.

* * *

PATRICIA FELT ZERO closure from seeing Mr. Rose get what was coming to him. He’d seemed so pathetic, she even had to struggle to avoid feeling guilty. And she couldn’t let go of the notion that maybe Mr. Rose was telling the truth and she was doomed to become a war criminal. Kawashima kept insisting that visions of the future were worse than worthless, but then with the next breath he would tell Patricia again that her pride was dangerous. She ended up with an internal monologue that said she was a terrible, destructive person who should watch her every step.

Right after she got back from Sacramento, she had to rush to the Tenderloin to look in on Reginald, the AIDS patient she’d been assigned to as a Shanti Project volunteer. As usual, she tidied his apartment, cooked him a healthy breakfast, helped him shop. But then she paused, watching him in his unstained wooden rocking chair. And she thought, This time, I’m just going to do it. I’m going to cure him. Because why not? It would be so easy.

Except that she knew, for sure, what Kawashima and the others would say about that. You can’t just go around curing someone’s incurable disease, especially when everybody knows you were there. It would raise too many unanswerable questions. And maybe curing Reginald would be the first step toward her becoming some kind of monster, like Mr. Rose had warned.

“I hope it’s the good kind of dilemma.” Reginald broke Patricia’s reverie. “Whatever one you’re on the horns of.”