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Smoke rolls in beneath an anamorphic letterboxing. It’s foggy as shit. You can barely see the water.
In thinner pockets, moonglade. The obsidian glaze of the ocean’s calm, barely undulating surface fades in every direction into an uncanny gray.
The controls rumble; you realize: you can look around.
Impossible to tell if you’re moving — if you’re somewhere in the dead of night, or on the cusp of matinal.
A yellow glow reflecting in the water: the slow-rippling symbol of some controller mapping, beseeching you to try it.
You try it. Tap.
A voice accompanies the sea.
On this recording you will hear an orchestra of singing birds.
Every sound in this musical composition: every note, chord, background, solo…
Every sound and every combination of sounds, was emitted originally from the throats of birds.
If at certain moments they seem a little off pitch, it’s because the bird you’re hearing that moment sings a little off pitch.
But keep in mind as you listen, that nothing has been added.
If you think you hear something that sounds like a particular musical instrument or a human voice — or anything else other than bird calls: you’re wrong.
It’s bird songs — and nothing but bird songs — that you’re about to hear.
Intro music creeps. You leave behind a tiny wake.
You tap again; the wake stops; the water resolves. The nearest sheet of haze just hangs there, waiting.
Hmm.
Nothing but the looping fog and sea. You tap again: through a layer of mist—
Harmonizing voices lacquer the air.
The fog coughs up a thing; a small and shaggy mass is floating closer:
Bedraggled; bloated.
It hits a pocket of light: it’s a pigeon — the most iridescent pigeon you’ve ever seen. What causes that? You’re not an ornithologist. You tap. You look it up online.
A tilted lattice-work of tiny threads. You tap again.
You bop it; your hands feel a haptic buzz: as its tenuous grip on the waterline is suddenly released — as it sinks — punctuated by a murmur of tiny bubbles…
The water glints. The fog ejects another bundle and backs off…
This one’s bigger. Monophonic texture intensifies.
A peacock (also dead); way out here? A white one — flotsam: drifting closer, its legs contorted like pressed flowers — skimming the water, leaving a tiny wake as it drifts past, out of reach.
If you stare long enough it also sinks: 4,000 meters to the bottom.The fog is a dead bird spawner.
For you that’s velocity context: mile markers of dead floating birds, suggesting an ambling trajectory.
So many different dead birds.
Unfortunately for you: you have zero ORNITHOLOGY. You only know basic shit.
You come upon a garbled bunch of them, pooling together like a mat of plastic debris.
Something agitates the fog — the mirrored water shivers, feathers ruffle—
One of them — a loner silhouette— is definitely alive — up ahead — unbothered and preening mechanically, spot-lit by a wide moon shaft.
It looks like a duck.
It stops chewing on itself — perhaps it saw you — reversing its neck and targeting your direction.
A sudden SPLASH scares the shit out you.
The thing was black — it’s wings were all the way tucked back — the duck fucked off with a grating honk, whirling the fogbank with its evasive flapping.
Your nerves settle with the froth. The ripples rock you up and down. The music warbles.
The bird resurfaces, choking down a sinking carcass — acting like it doesn’t see you — before taking off into the enveloping mist behind you.
Would ORNITHOLOGY have been useful just then?
You try and imagine — as you push forward, surrounded by clumps of unique dead birds — how your current situation might be different through even a dilettante’s eyes: knowing all their names — little facts about them…
Would it have optimized my experience? It’s hard to imagine — you’re distracted anyway by the little vortices of smoke peeling off the dissipating fog wall, deadening that palpable din on the other side, seething behind that curtain of vapor that parts like you’re stepping through an invisible proscenium — unmuffling the unbearable screeching — swarming above a shattered house, ravaged and looming up ahead like the tiniest island — cleaved down the middle, the feeling is: by a cataclysmic storm.
Birds in the shadows — in heavy shafts of light — tarping the lawn — parked in the shallows like boats in a harbor — distinguishing themselves from the dead by just blinking now and again.
Above the island, repelling the fog like a forcefield of shrill emergent flapping: thousands of hysterical birds — desperate to land — swooping down in aborted attempts at jockeying for a plot of sanctuary — or just plummeting from exhaustion or maybe death: their thuds and splashes, muted by the grim cacophony above. The music now: outclassed by the oldest song in the book.
You push through the shallows. The living barely part for you — shivering: half-dead, shifting just enough for you to catch a glimpse of that artificial turf, half-sunk, poking up through the waterline in tufts, its bright green nylon blades, combing the soughing wavelets in and out, shrouded moments later by another squatting bird.
On-rails vibes are peaking: embellished slightly by the house’s split façade —the way the foyer’s bent — how you pass through that fissure like the grotto of a ride: along a lazy river flowing through the middle of that ruined home, unveiling it like the cross-section of an unfolded dollhouse.
Evidence of a fire here — the feeling is: the storm cut it off early.
You tap to take it all in. You look around.
A tree-like pattern branded along a back wall; the coffered ceiling, shattered and gaping — its thick beams — framing elements of the room upstairs, and that miserable swarm overhead — masked by a bird-thatched roof, enough intact.
It occludes that insufferable shrieking — mostly — burying it in the mood music.
Birds on the landing — on every chair & table & counter & desk & lamp-shade & so on. Everything has surface potential if you’re small enough.
A few penguins huddled on a singed and shit-covered loveseat; the other cushion, hidden by an indiscernible mass of long-legged birds.
You’re just not properly trained. Best you can say is this: it’s is a jarring tableau of sometimes unremarkable but often very cool-looking mostly alive birds — like, you know what a penguin is: but those are Adélie Penguins. You know the word albatross: but you can’t pick it out in the swarm above. You’d fumble the pronunciation of antpitta, you’ve probably never seen an arctic tern and you can’t tell a barbet from a bee-eater. If you saw a bittern — or a blue petrel — you probably wouldn’t know. You spot a turkey: ya, a brush turkey. There’s a budgerigar beside a bustard on a dead cassowary, by some chinstrap penguins. There are cockatoos; condors; coots and cranes; crows & cuckoos & doves & drakes; egrets, falcons, fieldfares, finches; flamingos, flowerpeckers, francolins — geese, gentoo penguins — goshawks, grebes; ground parrots, grouse, guillemots, guinea fowl; harriers, herons, hoopoes, hornbills; an ibis; a jacamar; a jay — there’s a king penguin and a kingfisher; kites and kiwis; lapwings, larks, lorikeets; lovebirds, lyrebirds — macaws, magpies, martins, moorhens — nightingales, nightjars, nuthatches; there are orioles, ospreys, parakeets, parrotlets, parrots, pelicans, pheasants; there’s a pipit, a plover; a popinjay and a pratincole; puffins and pygmy parrots and quails; rail birds & ravens & red-throated loons; robins, rooks, a Ross's gull; sandpipers & secretary birds & shrikes & skuas; snipes and snow buntings; snow geese; snow petrels, snowy owls and sheathbills; sparrows, spoonbills; a starling, a stork; sunbirds, swallows, swans, swifts; tanagers, thrushes, tits, a tinamous, a toucans; a tree creeper, a trogon; a vulture, some warblers, some water rails; some weavers and a woodcock; a woodpecker and a wren —but anyways it’s a moot point because your ORNITHOLOGY stat is currently zero.
So how should you describe the ruined house then?
Not the hallucinated average of a million architectural magazine covers — but simply: if you had to live here — well — it could probably be much worse. There is a word though, that encapsulates the spirit of this place: McMansion — not a big one. But one that was definitely comfortable, and sleek — with an understated tech inlaid in virtually every storm-gashed wall — plumbed with neat looms of glassy cabling, networked veins of something, clearly.
You tap your way through the kitchen — pausing and unpausing to glean a better sense of the décor — the strewn about gadgetry: too wrecked or too covered in shit or feathers to really parse —either, because you have no frame of reference — or because you can’t be sure the thing that looks like a coffee maker actually makes coffee.
You exit the house through a storm-punched egress in its back. It opens out like a delta onto the bird-lined shallows of the backyard: the unbroken multitude of birds extending out into the mist, in the full volume of the raging swarm above.
The noise: fucking sucks.
So you press on like the bow of an icebreaker, rolling the dead over as the living scoot.
You wade past a sapling — snapped in half — then a slightly larger ornamental tree: it’s canopy, overburdened by the tenements of little birds. Two large eagles (maybe hawks) — perch: uncontested along a stone sarcophagus. You stop and watch.
They don’t even look at you. You wonder what their deal is.
You wonder again: whether the success of this immersive experience scales with bird knowledge. If there are nuances here, you want in. You imagine yourself: stroking your chin and smirking, chuckling mildly as you nod along, reading between these lines, unlocking its hidden revelations, encoded in the stuff only a talented ornithologist would ever pick up on — letting the subtext color your—
Birds scatter radially from the sudden impact of a fallen bird right next to you.
Its rapid breathing and limp wings, surrounded by a fleeting moat of artificial grass, half-sunken and converged upon almost immediately by the redistribution of this shifting crowd packaged tightly along the meniscus of the oceanic pole of inaccessibility.
The water’s deep again. You turn around and take a final look at that ravaged domicile as you pull away — the raucous tempest overhead, roiling like an armillary sphere if each axis were driven by its own servo, manifesting a sort of trick of the eye called POV (persistence of vision).
The measure of birds is that they’re thinning out now — rendering more of the water, a little choppier now; the light, a little more scattered by the haze.
There’s still the odd dead bird — but most succumb to the changing swell, swallowed whole as once again, the most noticeable thing is the sound of open ocean and the shrieking, fading away with the mood music.
You pass beneath a cornice of fog, into a visionless full-frame gray that consumes even the letterboxing of the screen.
But as you hang in the totalizing repetition of the sea, in the absence of that parliament of birds — in the half-life of their shrieking — the feeling is: tinnitus, like a watermark across the track, drowning out the ocean like a halo of silence.
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