The Avian Hourglass by Lindsey Drager

Luce says that my father believed we were all part of a very great fabricated reality; that we have been placed here strategically, as part of a way of knowing what kind of patterns humans will discover and what kind of patterns humans will invent. Then, as if to illustrate this point, she uses the tip of her steel-toed boot to make a circle in the soil and then she makes shapes inside the circle that look like portions of continents. She tells me that my father believed some other cognition was watching us and our fabricated reality. It would keep watching us until it learned what it needed to know, and then--then it would end things abruptly. Everything would rush toward a single point he called The Beautiful End. It would be like one of those old analogue television sets turning off. The way when you flipped the switch, the light and sound would bend until it disappeared into the vortex at the center of the screen. Then she takes her shoe and runs it over the world slowly until the soil is just a big smear.

I can't help but thinking that The Beautiful End, the old TV turning off--it sounds precisely like what happens at the center of a black hole.

In the middle of the night, someone is building giant facsimiles of the nests of birds--the birds that, sometime in the last decade, completely disappeared. Also gone are the stars, replaced by a kind of haze. The narrator of Lindsey Drager's The Avian Hourglass longs to be a radio astronomer, perhaps because radio technology offers the possibility of seeing beyond the veil of haze, to what has been lost; she's failed the entrance exam four times and the fifth is her last shot. The ten-year old triplets she cares for have never heard the birds, never seen the stars. When the narrator discovers a brick, buried in the earth, marked with the name of the planet Saturn, it's like seeing the giant bird's nest: a reminder of something that his been irrevocably lost, popping up in the strangest place.

It's possible, even necessary, to read The Avian Hourglass as a piece of climate fiction, or "cli-fi," a genre that is becoming all too familiar. The narrator's co-parent, Uri--complicatedly, the narrator birthed the triplets as the surrogate for Uri's sister, who was killed, and now they raise them together--is a playwright composing a play about Icarus. He tells her that the Greeks distinguished "the Crisis," the moment of turning and falling, from "the Catastrophe," the rock-bottom period of suffering and anguish, and that one does not necessarily have to lead into the other. What would it look like for the people of this town to reverse the Crisis, and escape the looming Catastrophe? The town's public square is dominated daily by competing protests, one YES and one NO (answers to a question nobody seems to have formulated); after the narrator's discovery of Saturn is made known, the two sides link up to search down the bricks that represent the other planets. Together, they're MAYBE--a word that signals a kind of cautious hope, as well as working together.

The narrator's aunt Luce tells her that her father, prior to his death, believed that the town is a kind of Truman Show-style fake, and that the real world lies somewhere outside of it. The discovery of the planets seems to support this theory; they are arranged at appropriate distances from the center of town, but also seem to match up with the places they are found, i.e., Neptune lies at the water treatment plan. This suggests to the narrator that the town was actually laid out over a model of the solar system. What do we do with this information? It opens up, perhaps, the possibility of a world outside this one, where the Crisis has been or can be solved, or never occurred. But it also suggests that the town itself is a symbol of an entire universe, and that the Crisis is linked to cosmological models of entropy and possibly rebirth that lie outside our own human controls.

What impressed me most about The Avian Hourglass was the number of details and images it was able to juggle and still emerge as a coherent whole. I haven't even mentioned how Luce lives in the old artisanal globe workshop of the narrator's grandfathers, and how her front yard is full of flawed globes, like a garden of other possible worlds. Or how the narrator drives a bus with no riders, and how she knows that she'll soon be replaced by self-driving technology; or how she yearns for a woman who has since left the town, and whom she refers to only as The Only Person I've Ever Loved. It reaches a great balance of the realist and the fantastic, and I was moved by the ending, which brings these elements together into a moment where collapse and rebirth, perhaps, are the same--each existing opposite the other, across the neck of the hourglass.