Bird Country

Colombia has a population of 45 million people, and is the fourth largest economy in Latin America. Colombia, or the land region of Colombia, has been known variously over the years as the Viceroyalty of New Granada, Gran Colombia, the Republic of New Granada, the Grenadine Confederation, and the United States of Colombia. Modern-day Colombia as we know it today is called the Republic of Colombia, declared in 1886. Most Colombians speak Spanish, but there have been up to 101 languages recorded in the Ethnologue database, of which 80 are still spoken today. The people of Colombia are of mixed African and European ancestry. The indigenous people of the land, the Red Indian, comprise only 1% of the population.

The flora and fauna of Colombia comprises some of the rarest species of plants and animals in the world. Desert, rainforest, deciduous, and plains support 45 000 species of plants, ranging from the Cedar, the Walnut, to the Oak. The animals of Colombia: Anteaters, Monkeys, Pigs, Tapirs, Pumas, Otters, and Bears. In Colombia, variety is the spice of life.

“This is your Captain speaking…”

SQ 22 was half-full, and mostly comfortable. The take-off smell of jet fuel had dissipated long ago, replaced by the odourless silica vapour of canned oxygen. The economy class cabin was filled with a wide variety of people. There were kids trying to sleep, worried businessmen, wistful grandmothers, pregnant women, hustled fathers, carefree teenagers, college students with backpacks below the seat, and a variety of flight attendants, gay, straight and women, gliding up and down the ailes, smiling with efficiency. The seats were beginning to get uncomfortable, and the passengers, sleeping and awake, shifted restlessly on rigid upholstery, kicking arhythmically the seats in front of them. Smarter passengers made pilgramages to empty rows where they could stretch out across two or more seats, making do with half a metre’s worth of width and rudimentary pillows and blankets, refugee camp style.

Jennifer Khoo, lead stewardess, glided down the cabin to the back of the flight with infinite poise and grace, professional and smart, handsome and spectacular, silent and farting, as the passengers attended to the Captain’s soothing voice.

“…if you look out the window, you will see Peacock Island. A singular feature of the Pacific; an island inhabited wholly by peacocks.”

At this height, you wouldn’t be able to see any peacocks, or any island, in any detail. Furthermore, the clouds were obscuring any view of the ground. So no one would have been able to see the peacocks or the island even if they tried. However, people on the left side of the plane, and those on the right, looked out the windows and strained at the blinding whiteness of sun-drenched clouds stretching off into the horizon and flaring at the plexiglass windows. Those in the centre of the plane rolled their eyes and tried to sleep, read, or work. Everyone assumed Peacock Island was visible from the other side of the plane.

“I bet you there’s no Peacock Island,” said the man wearing a flannel shirt, slacks, black rimmed glasses, and intentionally messy hair. His name is Kenneth. He prides himself on being trendy, plugged in, and world-weary. Walking out into the world, seeing other people going about their lives in routine ways completely unlike his own depresses him to no end. And so he ensconses himself in a womb-like room, reading books about the history of the end of the world, and venturing out for the occasional lecture, kebab or conference. Kenneth likes to talk about suicide. In fact, he once tried it with a bottle of pills and wine, but he was found by his mother and taken to the hospital. Pale to the point of sickness, the man took a deep breath of canned air and started to lecture to the closest person he could find. There was no man on Earth who could stop him.

“The colours of the peacock’s feathers might lead one to believe in an upper being, separated from us but at once an integral part of our culture, our physiognomy. Beliefs and systems connected by psychology and anthropology pointing towards an omniscient thousand-eyed deity looking down upon us all, filtered through the feathers of the ostentatious display of avian masculinity. If you see my point, that this kind of abstract relationship, attractive to the human desire for hope and wishfulness, is at the same time repulsive and beautiful.”

Leroy, aged 6, feet tapping on the floor, ignored him and looked out the window. He saw neither clouds, nor sea, nor islands, nor peacocks. He saw a tropical vista, complete with pterodactyls, anacondas, caterpillars, rainforests, orchids, elephants, leeches, pigs, chickens, and hippos. Bugs scuttled on the forest floor, hiding in between blades of grass and under decaying leaves. Snails and frogs frolicked in the vegetation. Birds of all shapes and sizes picked amongst the animals. And lizards scrambled up damp tree trunks, looking up to the yellow-green light from the canopy. It was a riot of movement, with lemurs screaming, panthers slinking, sloths yawning, stingrays whirling, punctuated by gusts of air bubbles rising and popping from the quicksand below, sending leaves and petals bursting forth like spore clouds from urchin colonies.

Meanwhile, 50 000 feet up in the sky, a 30-year old, chronically depressed flight attendant, attempted to guess at the digestive system of birds. She wondered how it would differ from the human digestive system, and then continued on attempt to recall her primary school science classes and secondary school biology classes. This tiny seed of curiosity would soon grow to become a determination to learn.

In a few months time, Jennifer would resign from her job as flight attendant and enrol in a Bachelor’s Course in Science, with a view to progress into Zoology. In time, she will become an expert on Ornithology and gain fame as a strident activist passionate about the preservation of the habitat of an as-yet undiscovered species of cockatoo in the Brazilian Congo.

But now, she stocked up the food trolley with neatly compartmentalised trays of food. There was the choice of Braised Ginger Chicken and Steamed Fish. Both served with vegetables and rice. Also along for the trolley ride of gastronomy was a tiny ball of bread, salad and cheesecake. Jennifer stared down the aisle, daring passengers to leave for the toilet. It always happens; someone, upon seeing the trolley of food rolling down the aisle, pushed by a slim, well dressed girl and a fabulous man, thinks immediately about the things that he, she, or it, will not be able to do when a barrier of food slowly moves towards them, and then makes the choice to accomplish it. And Jennifer will have to find a way to acquiesce, trained to keep her curses unknown to all around her.

Efficient to a T, Jennifer proceeded down the aisle, robotically greeting, smiling, serving, and placating passengers, even the ones wanting to go to the toilet. Smiling, she served Kenneth the intellectual, who ordered the fish, because he feels that eating chicken is unethical. She also served Leroy, bored and distracted, and wondered what he was thinking about. She wondered where the boy’s parents were. And she wondered why he was sitting next to Kenneth.

“My friend,” said Kenneth, sniffing, “there are a great many things in Life that one should be aware of. I can only impart a few nuggets of wisdom onto you.”

He took a petite slice of fish and placed it delicately in his mouth, visibly grimacing as the food entered his mouth and he began chewing, as the gravy he carefully tried to keep within his mouth dribbled down his perfect lawn-trimmed stubble.

“Eating food is imperative but not important. And one should always think about the animal one eats. Did you know that chickens are practically tortured before being made into the dry breast meat you see before you? What about chicken nuggets? Free range chickens? They’re not running around a meadow eating corn. They’re eating corn out of plastic packets in tiny little cages that allow them to hop a little bit, as opposed to being completely immobile as the non-free-range chickens.”

“I do think vegans are a little bit annoying. They keep talking. They don’t shut up. Going on and on about the ideals of veganism and how it’s all so different from vegetrianism. Everything comes from animals. No? It’s the coalition of the high and mighty and the idiotic. Welcome to the real world assholes!”

In the cockpit, the pilots talked about geopolitical issues. Surrounded by clear blue sky, they discussed nuclear proliferation, anti-nuclear power, relations between China and America, and the rise of the corporation. Feeling like victims of the system of global conglomerates, yet somehow feeding off it. They wondered, if it were possible to trace the number of deaths in Bolivia to the number of plane engines made, much like how carbon credits, by some arbitrary process, account for the number of miles flown in an aeroplane, from the Bermuda Triangle to the Bolivian Rainforest, and how it connects the quantity of trees re-planted to sustain life again.

For they had no knowledge of the intricate web of life teeming on Peacock Island, the alligators chewing on peanut butter, bats snoozing underneath football-field sized leaves, lions zooming from zebra to zebra, clamouring for food and water, as they jumped and swam across the islands of a brilliant glowing delta, decorated as technicoloured eyes blinking at the afternoon sun.

And as the engines hummed and the cabin lights dimmed. As the windows, one by one, shut their eyes to the sky, the pilots in the cockpit set upon a new conversation topic; the possibility of birds flying into engines. They remembered their initial jokes of pelicans flying into engines, bird in one end, fish puree out the other. The poor bird, having already achieved flight, and ascending above asphalt and grass and trees and fruits and panthers, to be sucked into a roaring black hole which chops them up and melts them and confuses their internal organs, and their food, with exhaust, shot out on the other side as just another red blooded cloud.

Kenneth used to believe in a fair and just world. Where hard work pays off and crime does not pay. Where his parents were perfect and people were naturally nice. Where he had a childhood sweetheart who would become his girlfriend and, eventually, wife. He believed in good times, happy times, with friends and family. When he looked forward to celebrating his birthday with a party, and everyone would come and drink and be merry, and all-around enjoy themselves. When cancer only happened to strangers. He thought of holidays by the beach, beers in the evening, crystal clear water and MSG-free potato chips. When having what you wanted meant having what you need, and having what you need only meant you would eventually get what you wanted, ridicule-free. A world without social engineering, racism, burning bridges nor public humiliation.

But all Kenneth sees now is tragedy clothed in dollar-signed wallpaper. He sees his life draining from him every morning when he looks up at his ceiling, as he eats his breakfast, shits, pees, sips his coffee and leaves his home, to begin another day of lecturing to teenagers about Ancient Greek history, bringing linguistics, historical medicine, geography, wolves, and mountain climbing into the conversation. And slowly, but surely, he inserts a level of worldiness and pragmatism into his lectures, with the intention of preparing his students for a world of failure, cruelty and well-meaning mindlessness.

And Jennifer munched on a piece of cheese on a dry biscuit, counting the spots on a galley locker, as her watch ticked away towards the last hour of the flight when she would announce, in a calm, well paced, voice, to the passengers to fasten their seatbelts, close their laptops and switch off their iPods. Boredom, she thinks, is like a seagull flying behind an endless silk curtain, flower motifs repeating endlessly across time and space, and meanwhile the fish are getting away. Jennifer spins on her heel, walks to the intercom, and speaks:

“Ladies and Gentlemen, we are beginning our descent into Peacock Island, please fasten your orange juice, relax your seatbelts and stow away your troubled shoes.”

The hum of the engines changes in tone, and inertia ensconses its grip on the passengers of the plane, as they begin to wonder, as they begin to ask, weren’t they meant to be touching down in Colombia?

An old man, nervous about landings, tosses a Viagra pill down his throat on accident. His wife fidgets nervously with her wedding ring, closes her eyes, and dreams about a crumbling factory in Birmingham, 1973. Their grandson, a bulbous child of five, begins to cry, starting off a chain reaction of other fat children crying, as their parents attempt to employ toolboxes worth of tactics to placate them: from cooing, to back-scratching, to rocking slowly, to grinning manically.

And as the choir of babies screams populated the air, the lights in the cabin brighten, as Jennifer and company glide down the ailes distributing hot towels and collecting headphones, reminding the passengers in soft, trained, tones to return their seats to their original position.

Leroy propped his seat back up, and, already an experienced traveller, began to swallow as the cabin pressure increased with the descent of the plane. For the first time in hours, he turned to look at Kenneth, murmuring to himself as he buried his head in a non-fiction semi-scientific text: The Mating Lives of Pigeons by Sir Humptington Salaad.

A text with little connection to the real world, where he could pretend the only evidence of humans was in the objective observation of bird life. He examined closely a line-drawing of a pigeon; dull, lifeless eyes, strokes representing feathers, and feet like structured mating earthworms. He lost himself in the contours of its beak, and found himself recalling the in-flight safety video of the vessel.

It began with a yellow screen, with the majestic strings of the London Symphony Orchestra in the background. In faded a tracking shot of the passenger cabin from the fore to the aft in the point of view of a mouse, which climbed up the galley wall to spin round as a Computer Generated, unnaturally voluptuous cabin crew member, rumoured by the pilots to be modelled on the wife of the Head of Air Traffic Control of Heathrow Airport, mouthing instructions and the possible consequences of not following said instructions. Subtitles in Swahili, English, and Flemish appeared below her breasts. Ravel’s String Quartet in F major: II. Assez vif. Très rythmé played in the background. In a postmodern twist, a second parallel safety flight video appeared behind the CGI woman, showing real world footage of aviation disasters as well as penguins dutifully waddling into an aeroplane, strapping themselves properly into customised penguin-seats, pulling on oxygen masks to offer to their baby penguins first, and inflating life jackets before diving into Antarctic waters, blowing whistles and flashing lights to attract attention.

It was utterly preposterous.

Kenneth was inspired by his vision. He turned excitedly to Leroy to share his knowledge, but his glasses fell off with the swift left-ward motion of his head and the sudden upward motion of the aeroplane as it encountered an air pocket.

An old man with a viagra-spawned erection wondered why he was having an erection, the blood in his penis taking advantage of the momentum to further engorge his wrinkled member, shocked daughter looking on, comatose wife asleep.

A flight attendant, fighting an onset of depression by gorging on jelly, suddenly dropped her spoonful of jelly onto the floor, prompting the jelly to bounce jovially onto the carpet. She wept.

A 6 six year old boy imagined a flock of storks, each carrying a package of joy, flying beneath a blazing sun, from the West to the East, chattering to themselves in low pitched cackles. Shadows gliding across choppy waters.

“Apologies for that, we encountered an unexpected air pocket. We are proceeding on our descent to Colombia.”

Kenneth was about to talk about surrealism, and its emergence from Dada. He would wax lyrical about the death of rationality, and the liberation of imagination from the bourgeois cage of the logical. He would namedrop Breton, Chirico, Oppenheim, and, of course, Dali, with detailed descriptions of their particular brand of art and its relationship to the overall movement of a general irreverence towards reason and logic. It is the importance of the mind, the non-suppression of the consciousness, that gives surrealism its power and effect. He would discuss its legacy in present day artforms, from visual art to text, to music, to films. Characters undergo hallucinations, the real becomes the unreal, the line between reality and emotion becomes blurred as psychology violently, or non-violently, manhandles its way into the frame.  He would lament the corruption of the form into impure mediums, a once-pure art movement used as commercialism for selling shampoos, soaps, computers, sweets and so on. And then he would lament about the loss of freedom, and the artificial freedom we’ve been given that is merely well-hidden imperialism from multi-national empires, selling shampoos, soaps, tea, phones, beer, computers, created by slave labour in third world countries.

But as he found his glasses, he caught a flash of a pelican gliding out of sight from the porthole. White feathers and gigantic orange beak, backed by a sun-dappled sea. The pelican, in a majestic swoop of its wings glided upwards, out of the tiny frame of the porthole, barely registering in the flightpath of the aeroplane. Kenneth, a little shocked, a little tired, and a little blind, then looked at Leroy, or, to be exact, the back of Leroy’s head, with his wiry black hair so hopeful and familiar. He bit his tongue and put on his glasses, staring ahead at the seat before him, waiting wearily for the landing of SQ22.

On the tarmac of the runway of the airport of the Colombian Empire, a lone peacock emerged from the vegetation. It straddled the edge of the tarmac for a few minutes. It was a little traumatised; it had had a bad morning, when its mate was mistaken for an alligator and was shot dead by a .34 calibre rifle. The peacock wandered into the centre of the tarmac, its tiny feet clicking on searing stone. Heat waves danced upwards from the ground and distorted the image of the bird, giving it the impression of a strange blue flame emerging from the ground.

As the roar of the Rolls-Royce Trent 800 engines shot out from the sky, with the plane descending rapidly onto the runway, the peacock, oblivious to the sound, slowly turned about and faced the behemoth bearing down upon it. It opened its wings and displayed an achingly beautiful collage of electric blue, violet, green, yellow and black feathers, resembling a canvas of a thousand mystical eyes greeting the pilots as the plane’s front wheel narrowly missed it and slammed onto the runway. The tyres screeched, the engines blasted, as the surrounding vegetation bent and broke with the force of the plane’s momentum. Traces of jet fuel filled the air as it billowed about from the force of the engines, while the peacock stood unruffled. It was completely untouched by tyre, smoke, heat, and air. Its feathers, feet, head and beak were intact and unharmed. The peacock, its display finished, strode off the tarmac and disappeared into the vegetation of the Colombian Metropolitan Airport.

“So, what exactly is the lesson here?” said the Captain.

A peacock, living a newly solitary existence, walks onto a runway, directly onto the path of a landing plane. For a normal man, this spells deafness and insanity, if lucky. Most people will be blown off from the tarmac, lifted into the air and brutally tossed into the surrounding shrubs. But the peacock stood impervious, untouched, effortlessly imperious. A monument to life. Then, it is said, and can be said now, before, and evermore: that our Father, our God, our Saviour, is once and always for all time, truly a loving and merciful Lord.