A Masquerade of Humans

CHAPTER ONE

The egg is egg white, Mose thought squatting beside it, his feet splayed and his butt just inches from the warming sidewalk. He tentatively reached out a hand and extended a finger, but partially retracted it, unsure of the ramifications of touching a fallen egg. It was something he’d been unsure of his entire life. Glancing at his daughter, the lower part of his lip curled into a smile as he confronted her overpowering cuteness in that half-agonizing way that parents do with their own children.

“The egg is egg white,” he said, responding to her question. “Or just white.”

“Oh, yeeeeah,” Dolores said with so little delay it made Mose wonder how much of the meaning had been conveyed. In this instance, he didn’t bother following up. Asking the color of the egg had been almost a reflexive action on her part; she liked to have things she already knew confirmed, sometimes three or four or five times.

The inside of his left knee ached, and he shifted his weight as he remained level with his daughter’s gaze. He knew he didn’t have much time — until her next question, until Dolores was due at daycare, until his big work meeting. He blamed the latter for his insomnia the night before. Work stress knotted his stomach, gave him gas. Not the stress of getting things done, he liked losing himself in activity, but important meetings, unexpected projects, and other routine-altering upheavals. The relative lack of these distressing interruptions was part of why he liked managing Moe’s music venue. Yes, it could be chaotic, but there was an organization and predictability to it that made him feel both safe and useful. And he’d found, and been told by his boss Jaceon, that his calm and collected demeanor was the perfect tonic for the fiery, music-industry personalities they regularly dealt with. But now, to his great consternation, the position was transitioning into something new and unfamiliar to a degree yet to be determined, along with the venue, along with everything in Austin.

“Is that the nest?” Dolores asked in her delicate timbre, raising her voice far too high on the word nest as was her habit at the end of any question. Mose looked up. The change in weight distribution caused him to fall on his butt, from which he hopped up into a standing position. A bulbous mishmash of sticks, evocative of something like a shrunken beaver dam, jutted out from a wooden telephone pole rising above a pair of juvenile live oaks. So, this was the nest Bethiah had told him about. Or more accurately, wondered aloud how he hadn’t noticed before.

“You pass it every day on your walk to daycare,” she’d said during dinner the week before. “Haven’t you noticed all the parakeets?”

Now his daughter had noticed it for him.

“Yeah, that’s the nest,” he said, wiping the day’s first beads of sweat from his forehead. Earlier in October he’d worn pants outside for the first time in months, but now the forecast was humid and approaching 80 degrees all week.

“And the birds are greeeeen?”

The way she drew out the “ee”s in green befit the lime green coloring of the monk parakeets, Mose thought.

“Yeah. The birds are green, but the eggs are white.”

He stared at the dislodged egg as decision time rapidly approached. Several birds poking around the nest let out chewy cooing sounds. Dolores bent over and conveyed a hand towards the egg.

“No, no, we can’t touch it,” Mose said.

“But I want to crack it.”

He smiled in a fatherly manner, expressing both appreciation and exasperation, as he gently pulled her arm back. “We only crack eggs in the kitchen, and we buy those in the store. And those are chicken eggs. This is a parrakeet egg.”

“Oh, yeeeeah.”

Mose ran a hand over his faded blue t-shirt featuring a band named Rhinozone and looked pensively down the block.

“OK, Doles, it’s time to go to school. We’re just going to have to leave the egg for now.”

He repeated himself when Dolores didn’t respond, her focus still on the egg. Trying to avoid another Q and A session, he commenced walking down the street by himself.

“I guess I’ll just go to school and tell them you’re not coming today.”

“I am coming,” she said, trotting up the sidewalk. Once she passed him, he turned and gave the egg a final look, deciding he would revisit it on his way home.

“Oh, and Dolores, here’s your costume for the Halloween thing later today,” Mose said as they approached the gentle ramp up to the Little Stars Children’s Center a few minutes later. She took the red plastic bag with a skeleton outfit inside from him and turned to acknowledge Shannon, an instructor from her class on door duty this morning. Mose waved and called out goodbye to her back as it disappeared behind the opaque glass daycare door. He nodded at Shannon, hoping somehow to convey the silliness he felt each morning when he wished his daughter well as she unceremoniously left him at the door. Still facing the daycare, he angled to catch the morning light just right so he could observe Dolores’s silhouette through the tinted glass as she ambled down the hall to her classroom. But his reflection refused to budge, and he was forced to confront the familiar-yet-foreign figure with the growing waistline that unflatteringly rounded the tight midsection of his aging t-shirt.

“Have a good one,” he said to Shannon as he backed away, but she was already checking in another child and didn’t register his departing words.

Despite having just been rudely exposed to his increased girth, Mose’s body lightened significantly as the responsibility of kid duty lifted. He turned quickly, nearly bumping into Martine’s mother, whose name evaded him even after several introductions. Avoiding her eyes as they stood on the slightly inclined sidewalk up to the daycare, Mose waved to Martine, noticing that he was already wearing his skeleton costume.

“Oh, Are you a skeleton for Halloween?” Mose asked, his voice beaming with friendliness. “Dolores is dressing as a skeleton, too.”

Martine blinked ambivalently, his shoulders noticeably slumped under the weight of the miniature backpack he had on. He’d recently gotten a haircut, and his cropped hair appeared several shades darker than Mose remembered it. He was on the verge of saying something about how quickly the kids change in appearance, when Martine’s mom spoke.

“They must’ve read a book about skeletons or something,” Martine’s mom said. Mose caught her eye, briefly losing himself in its honey brownness. Her jet-black hair also struck him as shorter than the last time they’d run into each other but commenting on that felt perhaps inappropriate. Martine bolted forward, and with a sympathetic look his mom took off behind him towards Shannon helming the door.

“Have a good one,” Mose said, not sure his salutation would be heard for the second time in as many minutes. As Martine’s mom caught up with him and bent over to fix his backpack, she looked back and said, “You too.”

Back on the main sidewalk, Mose googled, “touching fallen bird eggs.” Apparently, it was generally OK to handle them. The mother bird wouldn’t abandon the egg due to the lingering human scent. This was good knowledge that he would do his best to remember, but upon returning to the egg, still nestled cozily in the yellowing grass, he remained uncertain of how to proceed. Already running late, he forced himself to keep walking only to halt in frustration near the end of the block and emit a long sigh. He took out his phone to text his wife. Her first class started in less than 20 minutes at 9 a.m. She might be rushing to organize her materials for the lecture, but that wasn’t really her style. More likely she was seated at her desk gathering her thoughts or catching up on the news for a few peaceful minutes amidst an otherwise hectic day.

Found a bird egg in the grass underneath a nest. What should I do? Mose texted before shoving the phone in his pocket and proceeding back up the block. His phone buzzed.

Maybe call animal services?

Duh, he thought. He texted thanks to Bethiah and wished her a good day before pulling up the number for the Austin office of Texas Parks and Wildlife. A female answered and asked how she could direct his call.

“Umm…I, um, found a bird egg by the sidewalk. I think it’s a parakeet egg. There’s a nest just up above it.”

“I’m sorry sir, unless the bird is an endangered species there’s nothing we can do about it.”

“Oh, and, the parakeets, they’re not…there’s lots of them?”

“I believe they are doing fine,” the woman said. “If you can’t place the egg in the nest, then there’s not much…”

The woman’s voice trailed off in thought momentarily, before reengaging.

“Actually, now that I think about it, birds rarely lay eggs after July or August. Are you certain the egg came from the nest?”

“Oh, yeah, I guess that makes sense.”

Mose was starting to feel like an idiot for calling. He bent over and nudged the egg with his finger. He supposed it could be a small chicken egg. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe someone dropped a chicken egg here.”

The woman chuckled.

“I’m guessing that’s the case, but we appreciate you calling anyways just to be on the safe side. Is there anything else I can help you with today?”

“Oh, no, I think I’ve wasted enough of your time,” Mose said, adding, “Have a good one.”

But the line had already gone dead.

Mose picked the egg up and palmed it delicately, his hand warming the cool shell. It seemed too round to be from a hen, but what did he know. Maybe it was even hard-boiled. Even if it was somehow a very belated parakeet egg, he couldn’t imagine the parents ferrying it back to the nest without breaking it. But parents were capable of profound acts. Just the other day he’d spent two hours in a pediatrician’s waiting room with a dead phone battery and a stomachache surrounded by crying children and a mounting sense of panic. And the week before that he’d comforted Dolores as she vomited half a pizza on him in the corner of an indiscriminate parking lot off an I-35 exit he’d never taken before.

“Hey, birds, there’s an egg down here,” he called up to the monk parakeets, but no bright colors accented the thicket of sticks and the chirps had ceased. “Alright, well, once you're done catching bugs or whatever, why don’t you come check it out. Even if it’s not yours you might find it interesting.”

A group of teenagers turned the corner and started towards him. He returned the egg to the tuft of grass and started briskly home, remembering that he had a meeting to get to. As he walked, it crossed his mind that maybe birds pushed bad eggs from their nests. Why would they continue to incubate a lost cause? The thought saddened him.

Crossing the street on her way home from Little Stars Children’s Center, Electra spotted Mose craning his neck towards a telephone pole as he displayed something in his hand. She smiled at the peculiarity of the scene. It reminded her of the type of thing her husband would do, or used to do before becoming mired in his latest inexorable funk. At least this morning he was out of bed before Martine left for school. And he’d been unusually present with them at breakfast, almost excited for the day. It could be the start of a prolonged improvement, or it could be a blip. Maybe it was a good time to remind him about her niece’s quinceañera in San Antonio next weekend. She habitually checked her phone as she walked. Two new Slack notifications. One from her boss Marcus and one from Tyler, who’d been inexplicably moved to her team and had already asked far more than his allotment of questions. She decided to wait until getting home to read the messages.

Ernest was downstairs in his basement office when Electra entered the house. Choosing not to bother him, she grabbed her Prelious badge from the shelf by the door, read her messages as she gulped down her lukewarm coffee, and exited through the garage to her red Prius. Marcus and Tyler both wanted to talk to her about the Walmart account’s Artificial Intelligence project, which had been straining her patience for months. It demanded very few of her technical skills and all of her bullshitting capability. Maybe she would reply to that recruiter looking for a senior manager with coding expertise. Unfortunately, since having a kid she’d found that the thought of changing jobs, which used to excite her, now struck her as exhausting. She couldn’t even muster the motivation to update her resume.

Upon hearing Electra lower the garage door, Ernest rose from his L-shaped desk positioned in the basement’s far corner near a row of three small awning windows. His back was already stiff. The only reason he ever went to the WeWork desk his employer Strataforge, a global software company, provided was for the ergonomic chair. He detested everything else about the place aside from the coffee, which was mediocre but always fresh and hot. The other week, he’d made the mistake of asking to borrow someone’s charger. The balding, middle-aged man had taken the question as an invitation to divulge his entire professional history. At least now Ernest had somebody to especially avoid, rather than just avoiding everyone equally by default.

Taking a lap around the sparsely furnished basement, Ernest paused to observe a sales team Employee of the Month plaque on the wall from 22 months ago. Instead of a jolt of pride for obliterating the sales targets that period, he felt ridiculous for hanging the tacky thing on the wall. He cradled his hand under his mouth, gently spat his gum into his palm, molded it into a ball with his thumb and forefinger, and placed it on top of one of the remaining silver stars ornamenting the plaque. Nine down, three to go. Electra had already given him a hard time about the “juvenile and pretty gross” fixation, though she’d cracked a smile when he responded, “My gums are covered in plaque and my plaque is covered in gum.” Then she’d added, “Wow, one of your rare exemplary dad jokes,” which had ruined the moment for him. Her good-natured comments were always rubbing him the wrong way these days.

He spun around and headed across the basement to the closet on the far wall. Gripping the doorknob, a creeping sense of unease threatened to waylay him. But he turned the handle before it could overpower him. He knew if he was going to carry out his plans for the day, he would have to keep moving. In the hour before Electra left, he’d sent enough emails to account for a full day’s work. He’d added two doctor’s appointments to the shared office calendar to explain his absence if anyone attempted to contact him urgently. He actually did have an appointment with the dermatologist for a prickly mole on his back. That would have to be rescheduled. With the closet door flung wide open, he removed the vertical foosball table whose legs he hadn’t bothered reattaching since moving in with Electra six years before, and which he’d strategically placed as a barrier to further incursion into the cluttered space. Then, reaching towards the back of the dark interior space, he extricated large trash bag from underneath a quilt his aunt had given him as a college graduation present. Removing a bulky item from the bag, a slight shiver ran down his spine as he slammed the door shut.

Carrying the item over to a low stool surrounded by Martine’s toys, Ernest pulled out his phone. Two email updates from Little Stars so far: A video of the morning song and one of reading circle. In the second one, the kids were already dressed up. He saw Martine in his skeleton costume, seated on the ground with seven other toddlers and leaning in towards the open book. Electra thought he probably needed glasses. She’d gotten her first prescription in kindergarten. He had his mom’s olive skin tone, but his hair was lighter, more like his — and his family had really good vision. In the months after Martine’s birth, he’d regularly stated he hoped Martine had more of his mom than his dad in him, while secretly thinking the opposite. Lately he’d said neither while hoping Martine was more like his mom.

The Shannons — the two instructors in Martine’s class were both black women named Shannon — would take the kids out to the Halloween fair in about half an hour, assuming they started on time at 10:30. He had to be there before they arrived, which meant leaving in ten minutes just to be safe. It was only a five-minute drive, but he didn’t want to risk any setbacks derailing the plan.

He selected “V” from his contacts and pressed the telephone icon. A male voice answered, “Yep.”

“You ready?”

“If I have to be.”

“You’d better be.”

“I’ll be here.”

“Good.”

Ernest hung up and shoved the phone into his pocket. Vincent brought out the worst in him, he decided, as other sour thoughts ran through his increasingly agitated mind, like what kind of demented father abducts his own son?