—for Rory Cooney

It’s July 23, 4:17 p.m., and I’m box-breathing like my life depends on it.

My forehead is pressed against the door of the meeting room of the Ela Area Public Library, Lake Zurich branch. That’s where we usually hold our twice-a-month meeting for the AzureFang Ornithological Society. Usually those AFOS meetings are reserved for debating bylaws and hammering out the logistics for our outings. But we’ve had to call a special session for today to figure out how to get rid of Julio’s body.

From the muffled voices I can make out through the door, I can tell the other Fangers (that’s what we call ourselves) have started the meeting without me. I’m late; I really should just open the door and join this extremely important meeting; I can’t. I’m a little busy right now trying to keep my mind from collapsing.

Ever since Julio died yesterday, I’ve been having intrusive thoughts. Not in the pop-psych sense: it’s Julio, literally Julio—his ghost, his avatar, his godhead, whatever—who’s been hacking my Delphis ex post life-o.

It’s hard to describe the nature of his attack. It’s like a DDOS that’s burying my ego under a flood of live feeds. My mind palace has become a wall of television screens, each one fed by a different camera that is surreptitiously mounted in a nature preserve to record wildlife living their quotidian lives.

Which might sound blissful to some? Including me? I’ve spent thousands of hours watching feeds just like these, chin in hand, elbow on desk, taking solace from bird-cams whenever my miserable life got extra miserable.

Except it’s thirty thousand feeds now, playing at the same time in my head. No off switch. Somewhere among those countless screens is my thinking-therefore-I’m-aming self, but it’s increasingly impossible to find.

The only solution is to give up searching for myself within myself and open my eyes. I let ontology flood into my artificial retinas and convince me, for a while at least, that there is more to life than losing my ego in a mash-up of thirty thousand bird’s-eye views.

It’s not very much ontology right now, mind you. It’s just a blurry, too-close-up view of a too-close meeting-room door.

But it’s enough. I unstick my face from the door and release the breath I’d been holding. Then, just like my therapist taught me: breathe in, hold four, breathe out, hold four. And for a little added insurance, I imagine my dead mother saying, One doesn’t scream in libraries, does one, Isa?

Social niceties plus neuroses equals composure. I smooth my hair and eyebrows, suck in one more breath, and march into the meeting room.

---

As I enter the meeting room, the first thing I notice is the feast. Wine necks rise out of ice buckets; six electric buffet servers brim over with canapés; tapas in iron skillets swim in heavily reduced sauces; and cake slices, each decorated so exquisitely, they more recall ball gowns than food, are slowly being spun on a motorized three-tiered server.

I fucking swear, rich people can’t even dispose of a body without a buffet. Of course everyone hates us.

Presiding over this bounty is Linda Miguélez. She’s AFOS’s president. She’s also the foodiest foodie who ever fooded. As she declaims tonight’s bill of fare, the other four members—Lilias MacMillan, Connie D’Antonio, her husband Gary “Gray” Taggart, and Jason Robertson—dutifully listen on, “oohing” and “ahhing” at all the right moments, occasionally glancing at the menu cards they’re holding.

Let me repeat: there are menu cards. At an AFOS meeting. Before tonight, instead of menu cards, we’d just have to look at the food with our Delphis, and chatty, gourmand-worthy descriptions would HUD into our fields of vision. These would be lovingly written not by an LLM, but by Laura Samson, Linda’s private chef, and transmitted directly into our eyes by the power of Clarke’s Third Law. Those descriptions would be complemented by ones provided by my Delphis’ onboard AI, Pythia. From Pythia, I’d get caloric estimates, which I’d ignore, and conversation starters, which I’d use constantly: “Do I spy with my little eye some flecks of star anise in the profiteroles?” or “How were you able to source Australian finger limes this time of year?”

But not tonight. After Julio violated our minds, I’ve kept my Delphis’ many features and augmentations locked down as much as possible. I can’t shut them down completely, of course. What am I supposed to do, go blind? Still, every feature I enable is an invitation to lose myself to the unstoppable flood of countless bird’s-eye views of the world. My sense of sight is running in safety mode, and it will be until I can surgery these fucking things out of my head or die trying.

Every other Fanger is in safety mode, too. Now when we look at food, all we see is food.

A wave of sickness nearly unstomachs me where I stand. Because that’s it. It’s really over. Our beautiful, Emersonian experiment. Our techno-secular liturgy. It was just yesterday that we were jumping into each others’ eyes and experiencing the closest thing to transcendence humanity has ever known.

I mean this literally. Our Delphis allowed us Fangers to see through the Delphis in other peoples’ heads, courtesy of a Bluetooth technology so next-gen, industry doesn’t have a commercial name for it yet (which is why we started calling it “AzureFang”). The ostensible reason for doing so was to better spot the goldfinches and swallows and seasonal vireos, each of them kikirikooing their little hearts out high up in the canopies. There is nothing worse in bird-watching than when someone sees a bird you can’t spot. The impulse is to accuse them of stringing, but the fact of the matter is sometimes you just don’t see the little fuckers. So there you are, standing there lonely as a cloud in the middle of the forest, squinting, straining, failing.

Thanks to our cybernetic eyes, we Fangers never had to miss a mega in the wild again. We could AzureFang into the eyes of whoever had locked onto that elusive flicker or grackle and see what they saw, enjoy it together: one vision with several minds partaking of it. Like a bunch of kids watching the same TV.

You might be thinking, “Okay, Isa, but people would literally replace their natural eyes with Delphis just to spot birds? Really?”

To which I’d say: 1) If you have to ask that question, you’ve obviously never met a twitcher in the wild before; 2) Birding’s great, but have you ever tried astral travel?

I’m not exaggerating. The longer you spent watching the world through someone else’s Delphis, the more it felt like you had vacated your body and taken refuge in someone else’s. We were giving one another a gift as impossible as it was necessary: liberation from the oubliettes of our own minds.

That liberation from myself saved my life. Continually. Every single day.

Now? All gone. I’ll nevermore see the world through another’s eyes. I’m stuck inside myself for the rest of my life. And I’ve hated it here for a long, long time.

No matter what else happens tonight, tonight AFOS dies.

---

I’ve been spotted. “Isabel!” Linda exclaims.

I smile and look around. In every face I see relief and trepidation. We were all worried one of us would turn coat, and I guess my being seventeen minutes late to the meeting didn’t help their anxiety.

“Sorry I’m late,” I say.

“Glad you could make it,” Lilias MacMillan says.

“We all are,” says Connie. But she’s sans sarcasm.

I smile at Connie and talk to Linda. “Mmm, everything smells delicious. What are we having?”

Linda hooks her arm in mine and leads me to the others with the energy of an aunt playing hostess at Christmas. It’s hugs all around, even with Lilias. We’re grieving and afraid, all victims of the same unprecedented cyber-assault. This inflicts on us a certain born-in-the-bunkers camaraderie, an exclusive permission to reach into each others’ wounds and say, “I know your pain.” After all, no one in the history of the world has attacked other people’s minds the way Julio has. We are uniquely violated.

Then Linda hands me a menu—I take it in two fingers, the same way I’d handle someone else’s tissue—and then restarts her spiel about the menu.

It’s soothing, in its way. Like a death row inmate discussing last meal options.

---

Linda is an excellent AFOS president: sure of her lines, even when no one is (mentally) there.

She’s seen to everything: getting the room on short notice, arranging the feast, even the seating arrangement. On the left side of the meeting room, opposite the buffet, Linda has arranged seven chairs in a semicircle around the podium. We process over to them, laden with heaped plates and wine.

There are only six Fangers left, now that Julio’s gone, so I’m curious about the seventh chair. I see as I walk by that Linda has taped a picture of Julio to it. It’s a close-up of him in circus makeup, from his days with Clowns Without Borders. He’s making a goofy face, tongue out, eyebrows as superciliously silly as he can make them. The coup de grâce, of course, is the way Julio makes his cybereyes point away from each other, northwest and southeast.

He never failed to get a laugh with that stunt, even from us fellow Fangers. We could do the same thing with our Delphis, of course. But none of us had Julio’s gift for clowning.

Jason, whenever we’re birding or walking anywhere, is always back of the line. He’s the last of us to notice Julio’s picture. Once he does, he sets his food and drink on the chair, grabs the picture, and rips it up. Tosses the pieces in the air and, as they flutter to the floor, holds out his hands, as if he’s trying to collect snowflakes.

Linda gasps but catches herself and purposefully turns her attention to her meeting notes. Lilias smirks. Gray and Connie look on dispassionately, like the statues that surround a human-sacrifice chamber.

I almost say something. But I’m not sure what to say. I mean, I get where Jason is coming from; Julio wrecked us all. But in my heart, I have trouble believing that this beautiful old man would harm anyone, much less his Fanger comrades-in-birding. He literally saved me from my own brain. He deserves a fair shake from us at least.

Jason’s disrespect awakens in me the first hint of rancor. But I’m still feeling my way through the evening’s vertiginous vibes. I say nothing.

Linda takes her place at the podium and gives us a searchlight smile. “Good evening, everyone,” she says. “I call this meeting to order.”

Out of habit, I reach to get my tablet from my bag, since I’m AFOS’s secretary, responsible for the minutes. But then I remember that we left cell phones and tablets at home. We don’t need anyone knowing where we are tonight, much less what we are going to talk about. I sit back and pop a stuffed mushroom in my mouth and try to look casual.

“Before we get to any other business,” Linda asks, “are there any motions anyone would like to make?” She looks directly at Connie. Connie raises her hand.

Connie, who has modeled her look after the berouged, still-got-it doyennes of morning television, pulls out a piece of paper. Her hands are shaking. As she prepares to read, I can tell by her squinting and jaw-clenching that she’s manually adjusting the focus of her Delphis. She’s turned off even more of her cybereyes’ automatic controls than I have.

Finally, she reads from the paper. “I move that we suspend normal business and start immediately with the matter of what to do about Julio.”

So officious, even at a time like this. I suppose it brings Linda comfort, but it’s almost too much to bear. “We have a motion on the floor,” she says. “Discussion?”

“I call the question,” says Jason.

“Second,” says Lilias.

Linda asks: “All in favor?” Of course, unanimous acclaim. “The motion carries. We move immediately to discussion. The floor is open. Ah, thank you, Lilias; I was afraid no one would want to go first. The chair recognizes Lilias MacMillan.”

“There’s nothing to discuss,” Lilias says. “We gouge out that son of a bitch’s eyes and dump the body.”

“Jesus fucking Christ, Lilias,” I hear myself saying. “The body? That’s Julio’s body. Can’t you pretend you’re a human being for one night?”

Honestly, I should have said something to Jason. Now I was taking out my weakness on Lilias.

Not that Lilias didn’t deserve it. Brusque, belligerent, and botoxedly serene, Lilias had won a few too many court cases before she retired than was good for her. She’s unaccustomed to having anyone contradict her, so my outburst had managed the impossible: to shut her up, if even for a single second.

But the next second, she responds, with all the sangfroid of Cardinal Richelieu: “You’re out of order, Isa.”

Linda raps her knuckles on the podium, a gentler kind of gavel. “Let’s all be extra kind to each other, yes? It’s a tough night for everyone. The chair recognizes Gray Taggart.”

Gray stands up. He’s more than a hundred years too late to be a flower child, but that doesn’t stop him from trying: a voice made for folk songs, a shirt he tie-dyed himself, sandals time-warped from the twentieth century. He’s that breed of multimillionaire who thinks hippie morals and twelve-sports-car garages are perfectly compatible.

“The thing that separates us from the animals is human decency,” Gray says. “Even war criminals have their bodies returned to their families.”

“Point of information,” Lilias says. Linda recognizes her with her chin. “Does Mr. Taggart believe that human decency should stop us from recovering Julio’s Delphis? Has he forgotten that Julio may have downloaded incriminating evidence about us in his last moments?”

“Oh, no,” says Gray. “We have to get the eyes. I just think we should be as respectful as possible.”

“Could Mr. Taggart describe what carving cybernetic eyes out of a dead man’s face ‘respectfully’ looks like? I’m having trouble picturing it.”

“I mean . . . ” He trails off. By the time he trails on again, all conviction has left his voice: “It’s how you do it. We should try to be respectful. That’s all I’m saying.” He deflates back into his chair. Connie puts a hand on his knee.

Linda recognizes Jason. At fifty-one, he’s the youngest of us. He’s the sort of rich who, no matter how many businesses he bankrupts, never seems to get any less rich. These days he practically lives at Delphi HQ, so that he can constantly get the hardware and software releases the second they’re ready. Tonight, Jason’s sporting a beta eye color—a blue reminiscent of Siberian huskies, with no sclera and pinprick pupils.

“Look,” he says, “if we take out Julio’s eyes and dump his body, and then the police find his body, they’ll be an investigation for sure. But if we call the police first, and then—” he rubs his thumb against his fingers, making the universal gesture for money—“our Julio problem goes away.”

Linda sighs. “I recognize myself. You want to give Julio’s eyes over to the police? Your contacts at the precinct are so ironclad that you’re sure they won’t just download everything that Julio has stored in his Delphis? Including every incriminating thing he might have downloaded from all of us?”

“Yeah,” Jason says because he’s never in his life admitted he was wrong. But in this case, his sullen body language does it for him.

We sit in silence for several seconds before Connie offers, “We should just leave Julio where he is.”

“We need his eyes,” Gray says, touching Connie’s arm.

Lilias, who stopped believing in love a long time ago, says, “You’re out of order, Connie and Gray. Why can’t anybody follow the fucking rules?”

“Come on, Lilias,” Linda says. Then, to Connie: “The chair recognizes Connie.”

Connie speaks with her eyes cast down, hands on her knees. She’s a surgeon by training, but when her hands started shaking too much, she turned to telehealth. Every once in a while, I see the happy person she was in her youth. But mostly I see someone for whom the pantomime of better days is all that’s left. “A marsh will just eat up a body,” she says. “The water and the wildlife will dismantle a corpse in a matter of weeks, if not days.”

“Point of information,” Lilias says to Linda. Linda reluctantly nods recognition. Turning back to Connie, Lilias says, with what I am sure she thinks is restraint, “The eyes are waterproof.”

Connie replies, “Nothing’s that waterproof.” Her voice begins to shake. “If we leave Julio alone, nature will take care of him and his eyes, and we won’t be committing a crime. Don’t any of you care about doing the right thing?”

“Oh, now we’re worried about doing the right thing?” I ask. “Maybe if we’d cared about doing the right thing before fucking tonight, we wouldn’t be discussing the best ways to violate a corpse.”

I made bank in my twenties as an influencer. Hot takes are kind of my thing.

That hot take thoroughly puts an end to the giving-a-shit-about-Robert’s-Rules portion of the meeting. Jason’s explodes: “Shut the fuck up, Isa. You’re the one who literally rolled him into the water.”

“I regret that,” I reply. “But after Julio . . . ” I don’t know how to describe what Julio did to us, so an ellipsis will have to do. “I panicked. None of us were thinking straight.”

“Of course we aren’t thinking straight!” Lilias shouts. “Now we all have The Infinite Bird Show playing twenty-four hours a day in our heads! Getting the eyes is our only chance of getting him out.”

“It’s not,” says Gray. “Finding out what Julio downloaded about us and getting him out of our heads are two different problems. Right now, erasing Julio’s Delphis is our priority. That’s the only way we can be sure no one gets any blackmail material on us. Let’s focus on that.”

“I don’t want to focus on any of this,” Connie says, almost crying. “Why is this happening? I just loved birding.”

Linda tries to do damage control. “Look, everyone. A lot would have to go wrong for us to have anything to worry about. We don’t know Julio downloaded anything about us at all. We only know he uploaded . . . ” She struggles for words. “That he uploaded bird-sight into us. So yes, for a brief window of time, he had access to our Delphis when he shouldn’t have.”

“The fuck did he get access?!” Jason interrupts. “It should’ve been impossible.”

“He’s been communicating with birds since the day I met him,” I say. “You all have seen him do it.”

“What the fuck does that have to do with anything?” Lilias shouts.

I launch myself out of my chair, get in her face. “Oh, nothing at all, Lilias—except that, objectively, it’s the most impossible thing any of us have ever witnessed in our pathetic little lives. The birds do his fucking bidding, you koala-brained addlepate. Did you happen to notice on your drive here that there are thousands of birds in the sky? From all over the place? That don’t belong? It’s a regular fucking Patagonia picnic table out there! How long do you think before Crabtree is flooded with twitchers checking off every fucking bird on their bucket lists?”

Lilias is up and in my face. “Julio’s dead! You think he’s controlling birds from beyond the grave, genius?”

“I know he is. I don’t know how, and I don’t know why, but Julio has not left the building. The birds are the proof. He’s called them for some reason. And if he’s still here, he can attack us again. You, especially. He’ll turn you into his thrall faster than you can say, ‘Pick up my dry cleaning, Renfield.’”

There’s no way Lilias got the reference, but she goes to hit me anyway. I catch her wrist, squeeze. Funny how good even artificial eyes are at expressing fear.

“Sit!” Linda yells. “Both of you!”

Linda’s not quite mommy: more like the big sister left to babysit the hellions. But I let go of Lilias’ wrist anyway. After one last glare, we return to our chairs.

With performative patience, Linda continues. “Julio uploaded bird-sight into us and then immediately died. It seems unlikely he would have had the time to download anything about us. And even if he did, who knows what he could have gotten from among the petabytes of memories in your minds? We’re just scared because he could have gotten something compromising. Statistically, he almost certainly didn’t. Connie is probably right. If we leave the body alone, nature will solve this problem for us.”

“Do you want to risk it?” Gray asks.

It’s a genuine question. Too many years as a CEO have turned him in retirement into his opposite: a man who likes to follow orders.

“I don’t,” says Jason. “I saw all the birds on the way here, even if Lilias didn’t. We’ve got to settle this.”

For the first time tonight, Linda looks tired. “Yeah. I guess we do.”

“We gouge out the cybereyes, and we let the fucking swamp feast on his bones,” Lilias, triumphant, says. “If you had just listened to me from the start, this could have been a very short meeting.”

I hate to admit it, but the koala-brained addlepate is right.

---

We wait until 2 a.m. to drive to the Crabtree Nature Center in a junker SUV Jason had purchased.

“Untraceable,” he assures us.

Jason is about as reliable as LLM stock tips, but I get in the SUV anyway. Not a lot of choices right now.

I spend the entire trip the way I’ve spent the last umpteen hours: constantly having to override my Delphis’ urge to blink. There’s no way to permanently disable blinking; Delphis, like real eyes, require concentration—defiance—to keep them open. This was touted as a feature when I bought them. But now, a single blink will expose me to a 30-fps supercut of bird-cams that will threaten my ability to open my eyes again.

So no, I won’t be blinking, thanks anyway.

That’s the threat from within, and it’s dire. But the threat from without is even worse.

I wasn’t exaggerating about the birds. Looking out the car window now, I see “thousands” was underselling it. The sky has been rendered starless by all the birds in flight. And sight is accompanied by sound: caw and squawk and screech and whistle, a pandemonium of birdsong being sung by, more or less, every kind of bird in the world.

And they’re all flying in the same direction. They’re headed where we’re headed. To Crabtree. To Julio.

We arrive, park. For a while, we’re too scared to move. We sit with our seatbelts on, looking straight forward, hoping the birdcall will stop on its own.

Of course it doesn’t. Eventually, Jason opens his door. The moment he does, a shock wave of sound courses through us.

It’s so much louder here! It’s the most brain-erasing cacophony I’ve ever heard.

Covering our ears, we pile out of the SUV, stay close to it. So many of these calls make no sense for this location and time of year: the female canvasback making rutting croaks; the clucking, mocking laugh of the common gallinule; the “water-belcher” call of the American bittern, even though we are well past their mating season. And I know for a fact that that resounding, didgeridoo-like bellow I’m hearing is that of the capuchinbird because hearing it for the first time, on a birding safari in the Amazon jungle three years ago, was one of the high points of my bird-watching career.

Capuchinbirds, obviously, are not native to the greater Chicagoland area. This is all too weird, too frightening, too much. We stand in the dark and the noise, not daring to look at one another, baffled and leaderless and defeated. Mosquitoes, sensing our stupefaction, feast on our blood.

Who knows how long we might have stood there, letting the little fuckers suck us drier than Trisolarans, if Julio hadn’t come to fetch us.

A bird flies toward us. At first, it’s just a coasting, liquidy inkblot against the vellum of the eigengrau night. (We don’t have bins or scopes or cameras with us, since we’d thought our Delphis had evolved us past such primitive tools. More fool us.) The bird grows surprisingly large as it approaches; I’d estimate its wingspan to be a meter or more when it lands ten meters from us. Some sort of parrot?

Yes. As it wobbles toward us, color emerges. One color, mostly: blue.

It’s a hyacinth macaw. They’re usually native to South America, sometimes kept as pets in the States. They’re tool-users; they hold sticks or straw in their talons to help steady the slippery nuts in their grip as they beak them open. They are beautiful, complicated birds that can live to be eighty.

Julio had one. Maybe even this one? His was male, but it’s hard to tell the difference.

This one walks to within a meter of us and cocks its head to look at us each in turn.

“Evil,” says Lilias.

It’s such a stupid thing to say I burst out laughing. But this isn’t the time for laughter, apparently. No one joins me. Everyone stares.

Gray looks at Lilias and asks, “Should we leave?”

Jason, looking at the bird, says, “We need the eyes,” but he clearly could be convinced otherwise.

Linda is stoic. Or maybe, like a death row inmate, she’s simply resigned. “We need the eyes,” she repeats.

“The ‘eyes’ have it!” the macaw screeches. Then, in the mechanical ways of talking birds, it laughs at its own pun.

We need a word for a punch line that evokes nausea instead of humor. We all stagger.

“That’s it,” Gray says, making for the SUV. “I’m leaving. If you’re coming with me, you’d better be in the car by the time I put it into gear.”

I’m sure he would have done exactly what he’d said, too. Except my hand manacles his wrist.

He looks at my hand for several seconds before looking up at me. And then his face contorts into the most convincing mask of fear I’ve ever seen outside of the cinema. “He’s got you,” Gray whispers. Turning to everyone, he says, “Julio’s got Isa!”

I roll my eyes and say, “You are a dumbass, Gray. If Julio had me, he’d have all of us. Whatever I got, you got too, buddy.”

He gives me a look harder than I thought his face capable of. “Some of us are more vulnerable to psychological attacks.”

I laugh again, which I am sure looks to the others like I’m growing more unhinged. “Oh my God. Sorry. Ha ha! It’s just how earnest your face is. Here you are, thinking you’re mentally stronger than me, when you’re shitting your pants over a hyacinth macaw. Are you scared of the itty-bird bird? You’re such a child.” I look at everyone. “We’re all such fucking children. Well, come on, little ones. It’s time to go. Daddy’s calling.”

I start pulling Gray over to the bird. He resists. “Oh, come on, Gray. I need a big strong man to protect me from the beak that bites, the claws that catch.”

He looks helplessly at Connie but lets me haul him over to the macaw—who, for its part, looks as amused as the expressionless face of a macaw can.

I kneel in front of the bird and make Gray kneel with me. (He’s surprisingly compliant now. I wonder if Gray’s one of those CEOs I’ve read about, who spends tens of thousands of dollars on dominatrixes. Oh, how I hope Connie spanks him.)

To the macaw, I make pishing noises and play out my hunch. “Julio! Hi sweetie! Hi there! Do you have a message for us?”

At first, the bird merely scrutinizes me.

“That’s not Julio,” Jason says. As his anger grows, so does his confidence. “You dumb bitch! How can a bird be a person?”

I don’t even look at Jason; I’ll deal with him in a second. To the bird I say, in my best high school Spanish, “Hey Julio! ¡Te has convertido en un pájarito muy hermoso! ¡Ven aquí, mi amigito! ¡Habla con nosotros!”

Julio and I sometimes used Spanish to talk shit about the other Fangers. The macaw clears its eye with its nictitating membrane and refastens its gaze upon me. Then it waddles over to me, its stare never wavering before it says, “Mere anarchy,” and whistles.

Hunch verified. My smile tastes like myrrh. “The best lack all conviction,” I reply. “Hi, Julio.”

The bird flaps and struts. “Welcome to the pleasure dome!” it—no, he—says, repeats twice more. Then he about-faces and waddles toward the preserve entrance. When he turns his head and sees we aren’t following, he adds, “Come on, come on. Slouch with me, people. Bethlehem’s this way.”

“You did it,” Linda says. “With those quotes. You . . . set it in motion? Like a sleeper agent or something? What did you do?”

“She knew the password!” Lilias says.

Maybe it’s because of all the British mysteries I watch, but this line sounds especially campy to me. It almost sets me off tittering again. But luckily Lilias has a face that squelches joy and humor. I am just able to contain myself before I reply: “It wasn’t a password. It was a conversation. Read a book sometime and you, too, shall learn the secrets of communicating with people who’ve finished middle school.”

I rise from my squat and drop Gray’s wrist so that I can walk over to Jason and slap him.

“Call me a bitch again,” I say.

“What the fuck, Isa?” he asks, holding his cheek. Such a victim.

Behind me, I can feel Linda moving in to separate us, restore the peace. But I don’t want the peace restored. Before she speaks, I walk back to Gray, re-grab his arm, and start following the macaw. Gray follows me like a toddler who, in the face of danger, grows weirdly obedient.

“Hey, wait!” Connie says, catching up.

“Come on,” I can hear Linda saying, presumably to Jason and Lilias. I don’t look behind me, so I can only catch the merest scrapes of whatever whispered debate they are having. Also, I don’t care. All I care about is that, a few seconds later, they fall in line behind Connie and Gray and me.

One last time, the members of AFOS venture together into the preserve.

---

Thoreau would have despised Crabtree. It is meticulously maintained, mapped, and signposted at every juncture. One never gets the sense of being absorbed by nature here, of being transported to a land rude and unmastered, where discovery is still possible. Kids barely need supervision here. And really, how natural can a place be if the children are safe?

The macaw leads us from the parking lot to the paved path at the entrance to the preserve. As we follow him, more birds materialize out of the smoky darkness—big and small, drab and colorful, seabirds and tree birds, native and invasive: and, yes, that is a goddamned fully grown male cassowary standing in the center of the path, complete with a single stegosaurus-plate sticking out of the top of his head.

The macaw pauses in front of the cassowary, looks at him. The cassowary dips his head, bringing his eye to within two inches of the macaw’s. Time stops. When it starts again, the cassowary raises his head to the moon and eructates. Then he runs up the path like some mismade automaton.

I look up and see the sky, now even thicker with birds. They’re converging, forming a kind of whirlpool in the sky that swirls down to a spot ahead of us. Well, no need to be coy: to the spot—the covered wooden landing by Lake Crabtree where, yesterday, I had rolled Julio’s corpse into the water.

The macaw starts following the path toward the landing. “Keep up,” I say and follow the bird. The others obey me.

As we walk, we are forced to pick our way through a gauntlet of other birds. They hold their ground without a trace of fear of us. And as we pass them, they call. Some of it’s song, but most of it’s screaming. We humans take turns being startled by their squawks.

Linda, walking quickly, catches up with me. I look at her, and she looks at me. And then she puts her hand in mine and faces intrepidly forward.

I squeeze back, glad. We’ve never before been the sort of friends who would hold hands. But neither of us has ever walked through an omen, either.

She risks a glance at me. “You okay, Isa? We’re worried about you.”

I feel a sudden, strange affection for Linda. There’s a disinterested part of me that’s watching with scientific curiosity how all of my emotions are intensifying. I feel love for Linda; annoyance at the rest of them, even innocent Connie; fear of the birds; an Oz-like bemusement toward Julio; and for myself? A perverse desire to jump ahead and read the last page of the novel, to find out if I live or die.

That makes me smile. I’m kind of okay with either ending.

I remember that Linda is awaiting a response from me. Instead, I give her a non sequitur: “I don’t think Julio wants to hurt us.”

Linda’s working hard to speak to me calmly. “What does he want, then, Isa?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

And then an idea occurs to me. Or maybe Julio occurs the idea for me.

“Maybe there’s a way to find out,” I say. And then, as hard as I can, I shut my eyes.

---

Yesterday, about twelve hours before our emergency meeting, the members of AFOS had convened at Crabtree at 4 a.m. for our usual meetup. We liked the early morning because we enjoyed sharing a sunrise with the birds and because we despised sharing it with humans.

It wasn’t just snobbery (though it was also snobbery). We needed to ensure our safety. Letting people share your eyes via Bluetooth carries all sorts of perils, the scariest being hackers. Cybervision has made the saying “the eyes are the windows to the soul” not just a poetic description, but a genuine security risk. Anyone who bypassed our Delphis’ firewalls could, in theory, plant images and thoughts directly into our minds. Or worse, just start erasing engrams.

Birding at 4 a.m. was a logical precaution against our eyes being hacked. But on a practical level, birding with Delphis gave us a far more profound gift. It let us exit from our body-bound existences and have a neighborly little visit inside one of our fellow Fangers’ minds.

There is no drug like it. I felt exhumed from my depression-interred mind, standing before the open grave that was my ego, breathing fresh air in greedy draughts and looking around at the big, big world like a newborn. Instead of seeing “birds,” I saw birds—individual, de-named, bizarre, bewildering birds. Vibrantly nounless, freed from Adam’s benighted charge to name the plants and animals.

In that moment, I, too, became a nameless, thinking thing. And I was happy.

So were the other Fangers. Our minds as intertwined as sibling dryads—all of us rooted to the same rhizome—we helped one another shed the hundred-million prejudices out of which we had built our egos. When I looked through Linda’s eyes, for instance, I tasted what it felt like to love yourself. When I looked through Lilias’ eyes, I knew the feral pleasure of surety, sharpness, confidence, decision. When I looked through Gray’s eyes, I sampled the delicious unburdening that happens when you surrender to life. When I looked through Connie’s eyes, I could feel her using me like a battery to grow steadier, more self-assured, which in turn watered the dry roots of my altruism. When I looked through Jason’s eyes, I descended past the trappings of his black pill adulthood and, upon reaching his soul, played chase with a boy who leaked zeal from every pore, who was good at school and sports and most things, and who loved biology and animals and especially—and so wonderfully against type—birds.

But seeing through Julio’s eyes was best of all. When I was in Julio, I learned how to behold with love the entire panoply of existence, with an ardor that made no requirements of the beheld.

It was just Julio and me, the first time I went birding with Delphi-enhanced vision. He liked to be the person who guided new AFOS members when they tried birding with cybereyes for the first time. “Even the great Dante needed a Virgil,” he told me all those years ago, as we headed into a springtime, lunchtime Crabtree.

“Are you implying that I’m about to go through hell?” I joked back.

His was a philosophical smile. “That depends. Would you consider having your mind shattered a bad thing?”

“Brother, if you broke my mind, I’d ask you how much I owed you for the repairs.” Yes, another joke. It’s a way to get by.

After he laughed, he said, “You’re funny. But cybereyes, you will find, are the opposite of irony. Which is a good thing. Nothing ruins sight more than irony.”

We walked deep into Crabtree, to places I now know few people ever reach. A dirt path led to a palisade of tall swamp grasses and cattails. Trees in full verdancy swayed in the distance; stagnant water stood on either side of us. It smelled like the birth of life, decay commingled with green leaf volatiles. It was the perfect place to see the world anew.

Julio turned to face me, then sat on the path in a half lotus. I shrugged and imitated him.

We sat a while breathing. Lovely. I’d forgotten how good nature was for me. My urge was to close my eyes and meditate, but Julio said, “Keep them open. Keep them more open than you ever have before.”

I did. My Delphis already let me see better than human eyes ever could: crisper, zoomable, and instead of peripheral vision, just more vision at the peripheries. But I knew what he meant. He wanted me to drive all the intention of my being into seeing, like Tiffany Aching opening her eyes, then opening them again. That was exactly what he was doing. His face grew intense and hyper-interested, like a cat’s when it’s about to pounce. The line of sight between us became almost visible, like the love-line between the boy and his cow in I and the Village.

“Come to me, Isa,” he said.

And somehow, I understood what he wanted me to do, and somehow, I knew how to do it. I left myself behind. An instant later, I was no longer looking at Julio. Through Julio, I was looking at myself.

I looked old. I looked like a sentient rutabaga. I was dressed like a caricature of a bird-watcher. I looked ridiculous.

“No you don’t,” Julio said. He’d read my thoughts. He’d read my thoughts.

And when he answered, his mouth didn’t move; his words manifested themselves in me with more precision and conviction than ever a word could render. “You look like life’s latest miracle.”

Maybe “You look like life’s latest miracle” sounds corny to you. If so, you are sarcastic and broken. If, when you’re alone and have no one to perform for, you’re wondering how you might save your miserable life, I suggest you get yourself a pair of Delphis.

Worked for me. In that moment, when I entered Julio’s eyesight, I became miraculous to myself, and my life was saved. I dwelt within his vision with all the repose of off-duty genies reclining in their lamps. And he, like a good tour guide showing me around, spotted birds for us to enjoy together: a sparrow, a tanager, a kestrel, a golden-crowned kinglet, plenty of red-winged blackbirds, infinite robins, and sunning its wings on a log in the dank water, a common merganser.

So misnamed! How recherché and lucky, in a universe of relentless entropy, to behold a common merganser!

But then something happened that was less common still. The common merganser—a red-beaked female with a spiky hairdo—had been sunning her wings on a log to Julio’s right, fifty-four meters from us (so Julio’s Delphis told us via its HUD). When we looked at her, she turned to look at us. Half a minute passed; then, she flew over to us, landing half a meter from Julio’s right knee. There, she tucked down on the path and made herself comfortable, never breaking her gaze from Julio’s.

“Did you just call that bird to us?” I manifested within Julio.

“I guess I did.”

“How?!”

He laughed his healing, avuncular, Clowns-Without-Borders laugh. “I don’t know. I’m helping Delphi study it. But all we have are wild hypotheses. We know electromagnetic fields are terrible for wildlife. It affects birds’ ability to migrate, find mates, make nests—everything. And these Delphis generate massive EMFs. Maybe there’s something there.”

He didn’t sound convinced, and my low-residency MFA in creative nonfiction did little to prepare me to answer questions about electromagnetism. But here’s what I do know: Julio had looked at the common merganser with a simple, perfect love. I could feel the affection with which he contemplated her, both filial and reverential. And she felt it, too, and responded, for she flew over and nestled close to us. The whole time we sat together, she gazed with depthless love into Julio’s better-than-human eyes.

---

When I open my eyes again, I am lying on the wooden boards of the landing where the hyacinth macaw had been leading us. I guess we got here?

Above me, the faces of the other Fangers loom. Linda’s looms closest; she is kneeling beside me, rubbing bottled water onto my cheeks and repeating my name.

I rise to my elbows with a moan. As I rise, I note that there must be five hundred different kinds of birds here in the landing with us, on the floor, in the glassless windowsills, perched on the outdoor binoculars, in the ceiling rafters—everywhere. And among them is the hyacinth macaw, right by my head. He gives me a little bow when I focus on him but makes no sound. In fact, all the birds have gone silent. They’re just watching us now.

“How long was I out?” I ask.

Linda sighs, relieved. “Welcome back, Isa. We had to carry you here.”

“Looks like Julio got you again,” Gray says.

Gray is implying, once again, that I am weaker of mind than the rest of them. He usually isn’t this much of a dick. I look at him. Something about him has hardened. Hmm.

I rise to my feet, refusing Linda’s help as I do. “I’m fine,” I say. The hyacinth macaw flies onto my shoulder. I scratch his throat—he leans into my nails and closes his eyes—and say to everyone, “Better than fine. I get it now. I get what Julio’s trying to do.”

“Did you talk to Julio?” asks Connie. She hasn’t hardened.

“Of course she did,” Lilias says. “They’re in cahoots.”

Clearly, they’ve been having conversations while I was away. “No, Lilias. All I did was remember the first time Julio took me birding. How he was able to talk to birds, even back then.”

“Yeah,” Connie says. “He really was a bird whisperer.”

“That’s why it was so great to bird with him,” Jason adds, with unexpected vulnerability. “They would just come flock around him. They just liked him, I guess.”

I feel myself gentling toward Jason. Toward all of them. Funny how removing confusion is a gateway back to patience. “No, Jason. He used his Delphis to talk to them. Remember how many birds were already here at Crabtree yesterday? How we were all shocked at the variety and number of them? He called them to him. And they came. They’ve been coming ever since.”

“But we don’t know . . . ” Linda says but stumbles to a halt.

She’s my best chance at reaching someone. “Linda, remember the last thing he said to us yesterday?”

Linda turns her eyes away from me. I know I’m going too fast, but we don’t have much time. Still, I spare a moment of silence, hoping at least a few of them can catch up.

Gray is always the first to break an awkward silence. “He said his cancer was inoperable.”

I don’t know if he’s being obtuse on purpose. It feels a little like they’re all being obtuse on purpose. The strange and distant way they stare at me is making me feel like a wicker man’s fool.

“No, Gray,” I say. “The last thing Julio said. He told us about his cancer almost right away. Then he talked about how much communing with birds has meant to him. How the Delphis had allowed him to find peace: first through his eyes, then through our eyes. And then, finally, he said his last words: ‘I won’t live long enough to prove any of this. But I need people to know what I can do. So I’m going to show you. I am going to show you the most miraculous thing. And then, it’s up to you to share it with the world.’

“And then, he entered our minds, but all of us, at once! Remember? That was miracle number one: he split himself and entered all of our visions at the same time. And then he just kept on splitting. And he took our minds with him to show us where he was going. We got to watch, with the vision of a thousand birds, as Julio left his body and entered theirs. And that’s where he is now.” I gesture to the menagerie all around us, listening to me with uncanny attention. “Here. In them. Among us.”

It’s a long quiet that follows. And when Lilias speaks next, she doesn’t include me in the conversation. “Isa’s cracked. There’s no saving her now. Let’s do what we came to do. Then we can figure out what to do with her.”

“Agreed,” Jason says.

“Not agreed,” Linda says. She takes my hand in hers. “We’re not ‘doing anything’ with Isa, except helping her.”

“Don’t tell me you’re cracking too, Linda,” Gray says. “Let’s just get Julio’s eyes. That’s mission number one. Then we can talk about all this other shit.”

“You won’t find him,” I say. “The birds moved his body.”

At this point, I’m enjoying stunning them. They’re just children, mean and ignorant, viciously selfish, capable of anything. I don’t hate them for it. I mean, I had been a child, too, up until an hour ago. Now, I just want to help them to mature. Just as Julio had wanted for all of us.

Linda, confounded, lets go of my hand and stares deeply into my eyes. I bat them at her. “Isa,” she says. “You have your Delphis turned on.”

“All features go,” I say. “I’m trusting Julio. I can still connect to his Delphis. His body is deep in the marsh now. We can’t reach it. Not without a boat.”

“Fuck!” Jason says.

“What, now you believe this crazy bitch?” Lilias says. “She’s full of shit, Jason!”

I take a few menacing steps toward Lilias. She falls to the ground almost immediately and tries to crab-walk away from me. “Help!” she yells. “She’s crazy! She’s going to kill us!”

“You called me a bitch,” I tell her, “which means I owe you a slap. That’s only fair to Jason. But I’m not going to kill anybody.” I turn back to Linda. “Look, I think I can get Julio’s eyes for us. Everyone still wants Julio’s eyes, right? I’ll get them. If you can all stop treating me like I’m going to eat you.”

Linda’s face is weighing options, then comes to a decision. She’s very still when she speaks, only moving her mouth. “Yes. Let’s do what we came here to do.”

So we go. Or try to: the birds are in our way, make it hard to leave the landing. I use my Delphis to manifest to the birds that we would be grateful for a path out. It surprises me a little that I know how, but in hindsight, it surprises me that it has taken me this long. Julio had been training all of us for years.

With a startling explosion of wings, matched by the startled yelps of the other Fangers, the birds clear a way for us.

“C’mon,” I say to the remaining members of AFOS. I lead them out of the landing, the macaw perched on my shoulder.

I immediately turn off the path and make for Lake Crabtree through the untamed brush. Well, it’s a little tamed now, since there’s a path of flattened grass that we had made yesterday, hauling Julio’s body over to the water.

“If only we’d thought to take the eyes yesterday,” Gray says.

“No one was making good decisions yesterday,” Lilias answers. And then she adds, as if I can’t hear her: “We can make better ones today.”

It’s a bright pre-morning: big moon, scintillating summer planets in the sky, the last of the stars now visible, since the birds had decided to surround us. We walk to the edge of the water and scan near and far. No sign of Julio.

The others search for him, especially Lilias. I let them frustrate themselves to exhaustion.

Once they’re satisfied, I say, looking at Lilias, “Shall I retrieve Julio’s eyes now? If you had just listened to me from the start, this could have been a very short meeting.”

“Please, Isa,” Linda says. “No more jokes. No more delays.”

“Of course.” I turn to the macaw on my shoulder and ask him, “¿Quieres ayudarme?”

“The worst are full of passionate intensity,” is his reply. Which is a yes. But it’s also a warning. For me. About them.

The macaw then takes to the air and, a second later, he is leading an enormous, multispecies flock through the air. They are a miracle of color and wing. It’s such a comfort to watch them.

They fly over the pond and, after some circling, disappear into an island in the water that’s made of sedges and mallows.

They’re gone a while. The other Fangers are eager to know what they’re doing. I tell them to close their eyes and turn on their Delphis’ features, and they’ll be able to see through the birds’ eyes as much as I can. But none of them are very keen on trying that.

As the pre-morning gives way to a dewy sunrise, we see a tidal wave of birds rise from the sedge island and head for us, led once more by the hyacinth macaw.

The macaw lands on my shoulder again, and his uncountable avian retinue lands all among us. In his beak are two cybernetic eyes, hanging from two metallic optic nerves. I hold out my hand; he deposits them there.

“See?” I say to everyone. I’m wearing the most genuine smile I’ve sported in decades. “Julio has given us a miracle. All we have to do is—”

I don’t get to finish that sentence because Jason is coming at me with a log. He’s rushing at me from behind, I guess thinking it will be too late by the time I realize he has bashed in my skull.

But I am looking at the world through the eyes of many birds now, and I see all. It’s true I don’t have much time to react. Luckily, forcing his Delphis on—just like Julio had done to us—is the effort of a millisecond.

He falls to his knees immediately. He presses his palms to his temples, howls. Clawing at his eyes does not damage them, of course. But that doesn’t stop him from trying.

“Stop it!” Linda yells at me. “You’re killing him!”

“On the contrary,” I say. “I’m saving him. I’m opening his eyes.”

That’s all Lilias needs to hear. “Run!” she yells.

She doesn’t wait for the others, but Gray obeys her almost immediately, dragging Connie with him. “Wait!” Connie yells, but that’s all the resistance she puts up.

Linda looks hard at me for some seconds. “I will come back for you,” she says finally. “I will come back with help.” Then she gathers up Jason, who is as limp as a fallen Oedipus in her arms, and together they stumble away.

I let my attention drift over to the macaw. Then into the macaw. I am looking at him and also looking at myself through his eyes at the same time.

“It isn’t easy, splitting my vision this way,” I manifest to Julio. He’s here with me in the hyacinth macaw, faintly, like a sip of weak rose tea.

“That’s the human in you getting in the way,” Julio manifests back. “You can’t think straight when you’re human. Or rather, you think too straight. Just put your trust in birds. Just spread. As widely as you can.”

He hasn’t been wrong yet. I extend myself through my Delphis and into the imaginations of every nearby bird.

It takes a moment to get used to seeing the world through hundreds of vantages at once. There will be no reconciliation in this way of seeing, no summative gestalt. But once I stop trying to tame all of these viewpoints with my sense of self—once I just sit back and watch—I find I can focus.

And, even better, I can unfocus. It’s nice, simply to live inside all of this life. To join the wordless, vibrant thrum of inhuman nature.

From all of these birds’-eye views, I watch myself walk into the marsh and drown.