He was sitting in his big chair with his wide, circular back to his big shiny desk. He was facing a window. A big window. A beautiful window: bright, bedraped, two-story floor-to-ceiling bulletproof glass. Glass like that costs money. Big money.
He was shaped like a bean-bag. He was the president. Mister President. It felt good to be Mister President.
"...Mister President?" he heard a voice say, as if from far, far away. The president's mood soured. He had been so focused that he had forgotten anyone was even there. Whose voice was this? It annoyed him. It was nasal. Boring. Yet it persisted:
"...oh, nobody likes paperwork, do they? But only one of us has the pen! And, well, I guess it's about that time, isn't it."
The president swiveled around. The nasal man was holding a medallioned folder in his left hand with big pieces of paper and big letters on them. Ugh. The president hated signing things because that meant reading. And he hated reading things, especially when the letters were small and close together as these words often were. These words even had serifs. It all fatigued him, especially seeing as he didn't really care, understand, or care to understand practically any of this, as it was not relevant to him.
Yet despite his indifference to words, when it served him to do so, he would put on a serious face and begin to read. His eyes would tumble down the pages, catching for a moment this phrase, or that clause, which he would comment on, question, or even joke about. Although it was a matter of private debate whether the president truly understood what he was reading, the performance still pleased his audience. And had anyone asked him, the president would have insisted that everyone was, in some form or another, performing. Which made for great television.
The president slowly swiveled back to face the window.
"Not right now," said the president kindly and with a pout. For now, the rest of the show would have to wait.
The man looked at the clock. He leaned in to whisper to the president.
"...but we're about to go live, sir!"
"We're live when I say we're live. Thank you."
"...mister President, sir, it's..."
The man looked back at the clock, the same one as before. It was if he had just been dreaming. He squinted, puzzled. He was so sure that it was two o'clock that he had had the set director tell the cameramen to flip their lights on. "Five til," he had said to him. "It's one fifty-seven, actually," had replied the set director. But he turned back to the cameras, and the lights were now inexplicably off. And the hour hand that had been inching towards two was now just short of one-thirty.
He checked his watch. Same thing.
"What? I, no —" he said, confused. He turned to his aide. "What time do you have?"
The aide shrugged, unconcerned. "Half-past."
"Look," interjected the president, "we have a problem here. Can't you see?" He unswiveled himself back to the window, quiescent, ruminant, and pouty.
The man, now off-balance, shut up.
The aide took a step towards the president. From behind, the high shoulders of his chair looked like tremendous black wings. He was just a few steps from being face to face with the president, a rare opportunity even in this circle.
"What's the problem, Mister President?" he said, from behind. The president turned back around, looking him up and down, analyzing, calculating.
"And who are you?"
"Manny, sir." He shook the president's hand.
"Manny, can't you tell we have a problem?"
The president squinted at him. Someone in the background cleared their throat.
"...is this a test, sir?" asked Manny.
"That bird," said the president, pointing out the window, "it's always here. Every day it's here. It shits. It screams. And it's always in the shot. "
Manny approached the glass from behind the president.
"Can you imagine what it looks like to have a bird in the shot like that every time I'm working? This isn't the Brooklyn Zoo. People come to the White House, to witness this great nation. And then what do they see. This. Or they come to the president to sign yet another great bill, but they can't pay attention, because there are these birds flying outside like flies circling shit."
Many looked again.
"You know, sir — that's a hawk, sir. Red-tailed hawk in fact."
"A red tail hawk!" said the president, suddenly amused, "You know birds? Are you a bird expert?" A few people in the room laughed. The president said it again.
"A bird expert! Birdman!"
Now everyone laughed. A couple people blurted out "Birdman!"
"Birdman!" said the president.
"I know some, Mister President!"
"Alright, Birdman, hahaha, alright," said the president, satisfied, "Listen, I have a favor to ask you and it would make me very happy if you could do it. Very happy. We have all the worst animals outside this great White House of ours — this house, a testament to our great country — do you know enough about birds to do something about that? Frankly, I'm exhausted."
Manny thought for a moment.
"Not sure what I can do from in here," he said.
"Aren't you the bird expert?" the president said, looking out to the room. Laughter ripped through the audience again.
The newly-beknighted Director of Avian Studies looked around the room for answers. But no one said anything. They just shrugged.
"I guess I could try to shoot it. But imagine I'm a terrible shot. Never fired a gun before."
His eyes scanned the room and landed on the Secret Service. But they shook their heads, and patted their pistols.
The president wondered if these were all very stupid people. There was no higher office than the president of the United States, and he had hired all the best people, or so he supposed — and yet nothing seemed to get done around here without his personal intervention.
Meanwhile, the bird circled outside, silently.
"Is there nothing we want to do about the — what did you say it was?"
"A red-tailed hawk, sir."
"And aren't we all getting a little impatient about this hawk interrupting a very important day?"
"Yes sir," a few men in the room agreed.
To be sure, the president was getting impatient. That's the thing about being president. The president has many things to get done and very little time to do them. But getting things done is so much work, especially when there were so many people around him, like Birdman, who only knew about what names things were called and not actually how do to anything.
His eyes reluctantly tracked the bird that had recently made a home of this place, circling, cawing and shitting. He would have signed just about any piece of paper that would let him sign it into oblivion, but no one was there to produce one, probably out of laziness.
He sighed. Creakily swiveling on his chair, he felt around under his desk for a small plastic switch and flipped it. Then without a word he stood on top of his chair and grumpily climbed to the top of his desk. His soles left little dusty prints on the papers on his desk.
"Be careful, Mister President..." someone muttered.
The toggle fired off relay after relay of switches and circuits, and the entire White House floor began to rumble. Deep in the heart of the White House something was happening. Moving. Shifting.
The entire audience of the Oval Office had turned to face the hallways as they, normally dim, had begun to glow. The White House's thimble-shaped dome had fully hinged backwards, its hole letting light pour through the White House as if it were bleach.
As for the president, he suddenly looked much lighter on his feet than before. Almost weightless. In fact his heels, and then his toes, began to peel away from the desk.
Before anyone knew it, the president was floating, right there in the Oval Office, like a limp Jesus. People looked to each other for cues on how to react, but no one reacted at all, apart from the Secret Service who, out of habit, put their hands on their pistols.
The laws of physics, it turns out, made an exception. The president could fly. Up until this point, no one knew he could fly, nor did they seem particularly surprised about it.
The president floated first a little upward until he was over everyone's heads, then slowly rotated until he was belly down. His arms hung towards the floor as he floated right out of the White House through the hole in its roof. Everyone watched him float into the sky, like a balloon.
Once he was out he was truly flying, and fast. His tie was flapping in the wind behind him like the tongue of a snake.
But as fast as he went, his target was getting smaller and smaller.
It must've seen him.
The president sped up, flying, and flapping, and zipping around. But the bird, being adapted to the skies, did not lack for cunning either. It was flying in circles now, cawing noisily over the White House, diving this way and back again, nearly losing him. It was headed north — no, south. No, north again? But the president maintained his composure and squinted his eyes in the wind. There it was again, making a beeline straight for the woods. These birds aren't as dumb as they look, thought the president, but they are...
"...SLOW!"
He had snatched the bird by its neck. They were just a few feet above the ground now, on the White House lawn. The bird pitifully flapped its wings. He turned the bird's head to the side to look it directly in the eye.
"Look," he said, squeezing, "I'm not a bad guy. I love animals, I do."
The bird looked confused. Then again, birds often look confused.
"...but you're out here all day," muttered the president, perhaps as if to himself, "all day in the sky, shitting and screeching, and getting in my shot. That's my window you're in. And I'm the president. The president of the United States. I can't be the president with farm animals in my shot. It just isn't presidential."
"So," continued the president, "if you're in the shot, I can't be the president. I can't make laws. And I can't protect the people. Which is why you have to go." He began to squeeze the bird's neck, tighter. Its eyelids snapped open and its tongue popped out.
He heard a hushed voice. "The people! That's us! He's talking about us!"
The president turned around. Behind him, and five or six feet beneath him, a crowd had begun to form, and it was growing. People had been spilling outside the White House to watch the event, apparently. Cameras were trained on them. He thought he was alone. How long had they been there for?
He checked his blazer. It had come all undone. Tie off to one side, hair in a tousle. And here he was, being syndicated.
The president relaxed his grip, hesitating. He was calculating again. He looked at the crowd, at the bird, and at his bulging belly. With his free hand, he buttoned his blazer — just the top button — dusted himself off, and moved his hands through his hair and --
— the bird put its claws on his chest tried pushing off, ripping his suit. The president recoiled. His lip curled. The bird was still trying to get away. It had an annoyingly curled beak that managed to nip him a few times on the hand.
"Oh heavens!" said someone in the crowd.
"It hurting him!" said someone else.
"Do something, Mister President!" said a familiar voice. "Kill the fucking thing!"
"Rip it in half!"
The president looked at the bird for the last time. It occurred to him he had been confused about something that he now seemed to understand.
He ripped the bird in half.
"For the people," he said. With a little boredom, the president looked at the two halves of the bird — its head and body — lying separately on the ground beneath him. The corpse was still, the eyes empty, the body unpleasant, but less so than before. The president floated slowly upwards, heavily, as if pulled up by a thing string. His arms hung to his sides.
The scene sprang to life. The people were waving their arms to the president and clapping. Some were fighting over the pieces of the fowl.
One person from the crowd stood out. He waving his arms, trying to get the attention of the president, whose flaccid, tick-like body hung suspended in the air. It was Manny.
The president tried to ignore him. Birdman's servility didn't bother him — if anything, it was flattering. It was that the president hated — absolutely hated — getting his own hands dirty, and he had to, all because Birdman couldn't do the one thing ever asked of him.
For a moment, the president let his face hang in the direction of the people below him. He was blank. Empty. Tired. But the crowd took to this scrap of attention like dogs. They began to grow animated again. Some clapped. Some took out handkerchiefs and waved them.
Manny's voice somehow managed to float above the din.
"Bravo sir! Bravo-fucking-vo," he called out, feverishly, "I can't wait to see what you do next!"
The president knew what was next. There were papers to sign and pictures to take. It's a big deal how you look in pictures. He'd need time to clean up and look good. And he had to hurry, as it wouldn't be long before it would be two o'clock, and that was already for the second time today.
The president rubbed his temples. Something wasn't sitting right with him. That voice — it was starting to grate. Birdman wasn't bad, but like many of them, he was useless. And — the president was coming to realize — it felt rather unpresidential to have useless people around. He recalled the moment that he had sized him up back when they had shaken hands in the Oval Office. He had deduced a sort of brittleness about him, with his narrow shoulders and his fragile, delicate
neck.