Eleanor Lerman

Sometimes, a customer would come to the warehouse where Janet worked to buy some needed replacement part. They would ring the bell, and whoever happened to be closest to the front door of the warehouse would provide service. This time, it happened to be Janet.

When she walked to the front of the warehouse, she saw a short, dark-haired man wearing a polo shirt and brown slacks. He looked a little chubby, but other than that, completely innocuous and gentle mannered. When he spoke, it was with a slight Spanish accent.

“I’d like to buy a tuning fork,” he said.

Janet asked him to wait, walked to the back of the warehouse and rummaged around in a bin, until she found a box of tuning forks, something they were not often asked for and did not, generally, supply with the kits. She brought it back to him and he paid her. She still remembers the price: two dollars.

“Thank you so much,” he said gravely, as if she had just given him a long-sought-for object that he was grateful to have found.

And then he turned, opened the door, and walked out into the morning. After that, he would show up every couple of weeks to buy another tuning fork. If someone else appeared at the counter, he would ask for Janet. He would tell her that whatever tuning fork he’d bought last time wasn’t “right,” and so he needed another. Janet offered to take back the old ones, even though she knew that they were all exactly the same but he said no, he would just keep trying them out until he found the one he needed. Then, after a while, he stopped coming and Janet forgot about him.

Until one day in the early spring when she had an overwhelming urge to have a taco for lunch; the craving had been with her from the moment she’d awakened that morning. So at lunchtime, she went outside and walked a few blocks to where she knew there was always a truck parked on a side street that sold cheap, hot Mexican dishes to the immigrant workers from the recycling plant. She ordered her taco, turned around, and there he was.

He was also buying lunch and invited her to join him; there was a small park nearby—an unexpected half-block of greenery amid the otherwise unrelieved brick and concrete of the surrounding neighborhood—and they sat together on a bench. He finally introduced himself, saying his name was Georgie, and she said that she was Janet Harris. Georgie told her that he was a professor of anthropology and that he rented an office in one of the buildings near the harpsichord warehouse where he did some of his research and writing. It was a good place, he said, because it was inexpensive and “away from everybody.” Later, she found out that some of this was true—he did, for example, once have an office nearby where he had done some of the work on his thesis and when he had taught, anthropology had been his subject—but all that was in the past when she met him. So had he sought her out? Had he been led to her? Later, when she might have asked him questions like that, he would have told her they were ridiculous: they were human questions and applied only to this world, to this plane of existence which of course, was limited and dull and clouded with confusion. He would have patted her on the head. He would have laughed.

That day, he seemed different from the quiet, even scholarly person who had been coming into the warehouse—he was suddenly telling her silly jokes, acting almost mischievous. She wondered, fleetingly, if he had some sort of designs on her, but she didn’t think so; she couldn’t exactly have said why but she just didn’t get that vibe from him; he was being friendly, not flirtatious, and she thought she was streetwise enough to know the difference. Besides, she thought he was a lot older than she was, though that turned out not to be completely true either: depending on which information you believed, which “discovered” birth certificate that was later turned up by those interested in debunking his teachings, Georgie was probably somewhere in his late thirties when they met.

After they’d eaten their lunch, he walked her back to the warehouse and came in with her to buy yet another tuning fork. “Look hard this time,” he said to her. “It’s up to you to find what I need.” The next day, he came back—the first time he’d ever visited Guttenberg Harpsichords two days in a row—and told her that he was ecstatic: she had finally found him the “right” tuning fork.

Since it was lunchtime, he suggested that they go back to the food cart, buy something to eat and go sit in the park again. Which they did, arranging themselves on a bench and enjoying the mild weather. There was one odd thing, though, that Janet noticed as they ate: the trees seemed to be full of crows. Dozens of them, perched among the branches of the trees in a place where she hardly even remembered seeing pigeons around.

After a while, Georgie reached into his pocket and took out the tuning fork—it was the last one she had sold him, he told her, the “right one”—and held it in front of him.

“Listen,” he said. “And watch.” And then he struck the fork on the side of the bench. As it vibrated, it emitted the sound of “A,” the international concert pitch that is the standard tuning note of orchestras. Almost immediately, all the crows began to make noise; it was as if they heard the sound and were responding to it.

“Did you know,” Georgie said, “that most birds’ hearing is in the same frequency range as humans? So they hear the tuning fork in the same way that we do.”

Which may certainly have been true, but Georgie was causing quite a scene with his impromptu bird concert. The crows kept on making noise—to Janet, it sounded like they were barking—and the workers crowded around the food cart seemed disturbed by the commotion. They were chattering away in Spanish and pointing at the birds and at Georgie.

“Those men,” Georgie said about the men at the food cart, “They don’t like that I’m doing this.” But that didn’t seem to bother him in the least, because he then struck the fork against the bench again, causing the crows’ barking to become even louder. And then they began hopping from branch to branch—all of them, it seemed—jumping over each other, shaking the trees as they flapped their wings and pushed each other around, creating a frenzied tangle of movement and increasingly loud noise that whirled overhead.

It was, Janet thought, a bizarre spectacle—but just as a few of the men started walk towards them (with the intent, she thought, of maybe manhandling Georgie a little if he didn’t stop his game with the tuning fork, since the crazed crows were clearly ruining the workers’ lunch hour), it suddenly stopped. All at once, as if they’d heard some other sound, some secret signal, the birds stopped barking, stopped jumping around and, as if they were one entity, one single, connected bird mind with one intent, took wing and, all together, flew away.

That is, almost all of them. One remained. One single, large, sleek black crow remained perched on a high branch, where he sat motionless and apparently unaffected by either the disturbance or the departure of the roiling mob of birds that were now completely gone from sight.

“Do you see that?” Georgie said to Janet, pointing to the one remaining crow as the men who had been walking in their direction now drifted away.

“Sure,” Janet said. “So?”

“So this is a lesson. The tuning fork, the sound it made, was a distraction—and it worked, yes? It captured the attention of all the birds and got them all worked up. It made them crazy. But one didn’t pay attention. One knew enough not to think that what was going on around him mattered in the slightest. And it doesn’t. There are other things.”

“Like what?” Janet asked.

Georgie’s answer was a deep laugh. “Ha!” he said.“You sound like me.”
Janet looked up at the trees, their branches just beginning to bud, and at the one huge black bird—were crows really that big?—that remained perched above them. It seemed, she thought, to be watching them. “I don’t understand,” she said. “What did you do all this for?”

“For you,” Georgie told her. And then he tapped her on the head, a hard tap that she felt for the rest of the day, as if he had made her skull rattle. “Janet Planet,” he said. “I did this for you.”