There’s a pigeon skeleton on my fire escape.
A partial pigeon skeleton.
It was one of the first things I noticed when I moved in.
It was just about mid-February. This year. Feels so long ago now even though it’s only been a couple months. I hauled my suitcases out of an Uber in front of my new building around 6pm. It was still winter, so it was already dark. The city around me felt like it had grown up a bit since I’d lived here before. Manhattan was cold but familiar.
I’d signed the lease sight unseen. Until only a few days before then, I’d been part of the touring company of The Phantom of the Opera. For two-and-a-half years I’d lived on the road. Airbnbs. Hotels. A new city and a new theater every two weeks. Everywhere and nowhere at once. I’d already decided that when the tour closed in early February I wanted to move back to Manhattan. So while I was on the road I enlisted the help of Rachael, my good friend who also very luckily happens to be a New York real estate broker. She’d found this place while I was in Toronto where Phantom was playing its final few weeks of performances.
The night I moved in, Rachael met me at the building’s front door. Together we went up to the new place. She let me ceremoniously turn my new key in the lock.
There it was. Empty. Small. Smelling like the super’s coats of fresh paint. The one-bedroom corner of the city I’d spent all my time on tour dreaming about and saving for. I walked through its kitchen/living room to the bedroom at the back of the apartment. Turned on the lights. I imagined with abandon. Where all my new plants might go. And night tables with stacks of books on them. I peered out the window. Dark. But in the darkness I could make out the rungs and bars of a fire escape. I’d always wanted one. They’re so romanticized in every account of New York City. And I think I’ve heard that it’s illegal to hang out on a fire escape (for fire-escaping safety reasons that make total sense), but my mind flashed with quick daydreams of climbing out there and reading a book in the early summer. I pressed my nose to the glass to get a shadowy idea of the surroundings. I saw, first and foremost, other buildings. Close on every side. This part of the apartment looks out on the block’s interior alleyway. All the apartment buildings backing up to each other. Areas on the ground fenced off with barbed wire. Floating trash. An abandoned handicapped toilet. A place across the way being renovated. And, out on my fire escape, something white. Bone white. A brighter blur in the darkness catching what little light it could from my bedroom window and from floodlights on the ground in the alley below.
The first thing I made out was the foot. In tact. A bird’s foot, dinosaur-like, with its three little front talons and one little rear talon curling in towards each other. And just above that, tiny tufts of wet, dirty feathers and rubbery-looking skin. The foot—the leg—was dangling freely between the metal floor-slats of the fire escape, held there by the white I’d noticed before. Bones, indeed. The bird’s breastplate. Probably picked clean and left by a cat at some point but now stuck, wedged between steel just outside my window.
That’s it. Not the whole skeleton. Only partial.
I showed Rachael. We shined phone flashlights at it, horrified and fascinated. And I figured I’d come up with a quick and not disgusting way to get rid of it. Not right then. Maybe the next day?
The dangling foot was the worst part. So clearly a limb ripped from a body. I couldn’t tell what to make of it. It felt ominous. It could be some sort of cosmic warning. The fish on the doorstep, wrapped in newspaper. The horse’s head between bed sheets. Or it could be a gift. A grotesque offering from The City. I think it was both. A welcome back of some sort. New York, the cruel and disgusting and magnetic mistress that she is, leaving me a gross housewarming present.
When I’d lived in New York before going on tour I’d struggled to feel the magic people often feel in this city. I was in my early twenties. I was just a little over a year out of college. I’d moved here to pursue a career as a performer. A singer, an actor. The move gobbled up my savings and turned my LA-screenwriter-boyfriend Simon into my long distance LA-screenwriter-boyfriend Simon. Survival jobs in retail and child care and customer service sustained me. I didn’t have a ton of friends. It was brutal.
I lived in an unbelievably small three-bedroom apartment with two guys. One a singer. One an actor. So lovely, both, but we majorly kept to ourselves. Our tiny living room sat vacant and dark, mostly. We ate meals in our respective bedrooms with the doors closed. The front door of the building was always jammed open. There was often fresh snot spit in the stairwell. But it was cheap enough. I didn’t love it.
I’d been unhappily living there for about a year and change when I got the call that I’d been cast in the Phantom tour. The idea of escaping the reality of my New York at the time was so sweet. That apartment’s lease was up a few days before my new contract started. I said goodbye for good.
So I was a little nervous about moving back. About moving into this place—the pigeon skeleton place—because my old apartment is only three blocks north. I have lots of unhappy memories in this neighborhood. Though I was coming back to the city older, readier, and full of the trying and wonderful life I’d lived on tour, the skeleton seemed foreboding. Maybe it would be as bad here now as it had been before.
As much as the skeleton spooked me, I was for some reason drawn to it. I didn’t try to move it. I would peek out the window every morning to see if it was still there. How did it die? Old age? Murder?! How did its bones end up lodged where they are? One day after a rain it looked like it had started to slip, and I wondered (and sort of worried?) about whether I might lose it.
I FaceTimed Simon from the new place. Our new place. We were moving in together. I showed him the bones. He was fascinated like I was. I don’t think to the same degree. He was in LA tying up his life there. In a few days I’d fly to the west coast to meet him and we’d drive across the country with everything we own and move it all into this new apartment. He remembered this neighborhood from times he’d visited in our bicoastal days. He’d liked it. He was excited.
Kitchen cart masterpiece.
When we finished the long west-to-east journey and finally pulled up in front of the pigeon skeleton apartment, Phantom friends, freshly back in New York themselves, helped us unload our stuff from the minivan we’d rented for the road trip. We all ate delivery Thai food on our empty living room floor. We assembled a kitchen cart together, and I made everybody sign the inside of it with a Sharpie. Behind one of the drawers. We hung curtain rods and curtains. We laughed and listened to music, and when it was done and we’d sent everybody home, Simon and I shut our front door, together. For the first time in the six or seven years we’d been dating, we were home. In a home that belonged to both of us. Neither one of us was just visiting. Neither one of us had to take the other to the airport tomorrow. And I was so road weary after years on tour. Just the thought of a set of keys that were mine was enough to make me cry. It was too big a moment to totally feel. And we were so tired from the week-long road trip that had culminated that afternoon. We slept heavy in our new bed. In our new bed. In our new apartment.
That was on a Saturday night. March 7th.
The following Wednesday was March 11th. We were scoping out a coffee shop a few blocks south. Simon was writing. I was emailing furiously, triumphantly, reaching out to all the people in New York who I couldn’t wait to see, announcing my return. My voice teacher. Old family friends. People who had sustained me during the NYC dark ages before tour. We bounced times for dinner back and forth. I registered for acting classes I was excited to take. Nearby a man was talking loudly into his phone. Words like “quarantine.” Words like “pandemic.” From what I could piece together he was talking to work, trying to figure out what the plan was if something went really wrong. People around him shot him looks. It felt irresponsible for him to say those things out loud, I remember, which is hilarious now. I was worried he would scare people. He was scaring me.
The next day, Thursday the 12th, Broadway went dark. My email chains of reunion and joy turned to exchanges about maybe one day getting together when things clear up. Then they stopped.
We started social distancing that night. With Broadway shut down it was only a matter of hours until all things Broadway-related (like auditions and classes and meetings) were cancelled. So I had no real reason to go outside. And Simon hadn’t started his New York job hunt yet, so neither did he. The coverage was turning very scary. Warning. I figured it was just easier to potentially overreact, heed the advice of articles I felt like I could trust, and stay the fuck inside. Flatten the curve. All of it.
Thursday the 12th was thirty-five days ago now. And we’ve been in here. For thirty-five days. In our new one-bedroom apartment. The apartment that we’d dreamed of, that I had dreamed of for years. We’ve left it three or four times to go to our nearby grocery store. In the early days we left a few times for walks. But people don’t keep six feet of distance like they should. Sidewalks are narrow. Parks are packed with every other New Yorker desperate for a few moments outside.
View from the floor.
I really miss outside. Besides the fire escape window in the bedroom we’ve got one other window, really. In the living room. It overlooks the garbage courtyard in the center of our building where everybody dumps their trash, closed in on all sides by other exterior walls and windows. When the sun gets high enough to make it over the tops of the buildings around us and sunlight cuts through that living room window I lie in the pools it makes on the living room floor. When it lights up the sheer, cotton curtain panels I managed to get from Bed Bath and Beyond before the whole city shut down I yell out to Simon like a kid chasing an ice cream truck: “The sun!! The sun!!” I crave the sun. I crave the breeze. I crave squinting for brightness and watching clouds move. Our place is on the second floor. We’re too close to the ground. Too far from the sky to feel like it’s actually still there.
This is New York for now. The beating heart of a pandemic. Sirens whooping past, somewhere out there, nearly constant. Though they’ve slowed some. We only had a few days to be out in it all before we closed our door. So sometimes I forget it’s out there.
When we do venture out, for a moment, to get food, we don’t see New York. We see lines taped out on the grocery store floor six feet apart. We see restaurants, all closed. We hear the eerie, boomy voice of the subway PA system coming up out of a probably empty station, announcing an oncoming train to no one. Careful people with masks and gloves. Heedless people with none. Once, on a walk, we got caught in a downpour. Our masks got wet. Our latex gloves got wet and made our fingers cold. And after a moment of old, deep-rooted metropolitan frustration at having to walk in the rain, I felt the glory of it. Of being caught in a rainstorm. At that point it had been a week and a half since I’d been outside our apartment at all. Who knows how long since I’d been rained on. My jeans were soaked. My umbrella caught and flipped in the wind, threatening to turn inside out. Sheets of water pushed and pushed their way down Amsterdam. Maybe, please, maybe clearing some of the contagion away.
I know that’s not how it works. But it was the hope I felt at that moment.
Then we went back inside. And during all the rest of the hours, the days and weeks we now spend only inside, I have to remind myself that New York is out there. I know New York is out there. I know that. Intellectually. The way you know Earth comes after Venus and before Mars in the solar system. The way you know gravity. The way you know that something about aerodynamics makes planes fly huge distances and land safely on the ground.
I have few reasons to believe New York is still out there. And I cling to them all. The news says so. Friends living in buildings with roof access post pictures that suggest the skyline. Editorial photos from journalists show Grand Central and Times Square, abandoned. Once or twice, a few weeks ago on a nice day, I heard the misguided and distant sound of a Mr. Softee truck.
And every night at 7pm people push up their windows and clap and holler and bang pot lids together for about three minutes. Beautiful, cacophonous noise. To thank the doctors and nurses and essential employees that are tired and frantic and haven’t had a moment of rest or relief for about thirty-five days.
It makes me weepy every time, that noise. It makes my mom weepy if I happen to be FaceTiming her when the ruckus starts. “That’s New York,” she’ll say. She lived here during the AIDS crisis, a performer herself, and saw the way the theater community in this city rallied. When 9/11 happened I was only a kid, and we were living an hour or two outside the city in the suburbs, but I remember it. That rallying. That commitment and devotion to symbol and to gesture.
New York is special for that. Anything to help each other remember that we are enduring together.
Proof that it’s still out there.
It’s reassuring. For now, the New York I live in is only two-ish rooms big. It may be a long time before I get to truly venture out again. And I’m not interested in rushing it. I know that, for now, whatever is beyond these two rooms is chaos. Terror. Responsibility and irresponsibility. Bravery and sickness.
Death.
Cautious life.
Whenever I video chat with someone—and it has been so many people during this new age—I show them the pigeon skeleton on the fire escape. Lots of friends and family have asked for the short tour of our new place and have had to patiently sit through me showing them a partial bird skeleton. I feel dishonest if I don’t include it.
I know it’s weird. My thing with the bones. I know it’s weird that I check on them every morning. I know it’s weird that I show them off. I know it’s weird that I’ve written an essay about them. I know it’s weird that, as the weather gets warmer and my desperation to be outside grows, I hesitate to climb onto the fire escape and find some sanitary way to get rid of them. I hesitate because I think, maybe, I’ll miss them.
At first they were my dark and disgusting New York welcome home. They’ve become a reminder, like the pots and pans and cheering, that somewhere, New York is still out there. An admittedly macabre reminder, but still. There are still pigeons. We really can’t see much from our windows here, but one day we’ll see them again. See them munch a discarded midtown pretzel cart pretzel. See them flap up and between tall buildings we know by name. See them scatter into the sky and fly again.
The other day, two live pigeons perched themselves on the fire escape while I was reading in the bedroom. Maybe they’d come to visit their fallen comrade. Pay their respects. I was so thrilled to see those pigeons. Birds—live beings—scooting and balancing and living their pigeon lives only feet from me on the other side of the glass. It felt the way I imagine it’s going to feel to introduce myself to a stranger again once this is all over.
Also, there’s a tree in the alleyway just beyond the partial pigeon skeleton. It was bare when this began. It’s full and green now. And I’m so glad I can see it from my window.