They say astronauts, upon viewing Earth from space, experience the “overview effect”—a sublime sensation induced by the perception of Earth as a unified whole, an undivided system without borders. From the distanced vantage point, borders are rendered utterly absurd.
Try explaining borders to a bird. They travel without papers because the sky has no sovereign; they carry lost souls to the afterlife, brazenly crossing the most securitized of all borders. They are residents of everywhere, of nowhere, hollow-boned creatures opportunistically riding wind currents, in flocks that render visible rising columns of air.
*
At dusk, years after the infamous congress, when the regal tricolored heron vanished from the pond, the black-crowned night heron became the guardian of the swamp. Nycticorax nycticorax—“night raven” in ancient Greek—was a species found on every continent except Antarctica and Australia, whose sole citizenship was The Night.
Perched on the edge of the water, on the concrete embankment, the Nycticorax stood stock-still, seemingly hunched, staring at me with one red-ringed eye. Perhaps because it bore an uncanny resemblance to the eponymous heron in the Hayao Miyazaki film The Boy and the Heron (except for the neck—its neck was stout), I silently asked the Nycticorax where he planned to take me.
“The door…”
Yes, the pond was a door, one that opened only at the crepuscular hour.
“In it you will see…the death of your mother.”
“What?”
“Just kidding—this isn’t a Miyazaki film, you fool!”
The Nycticorax was trolling me.
“Are you the simorgh I’ve been looking for…all this time?”
“Pssh—enough with this cryptid hogwash! Did you really believe you would find answers to your metaphysical questions in a Florida marsh?”
“Should I consider you then…a bird of ill-omen?”
The Nycticorax looked heavenward, opened its beak, and began gagging…croaking, gutturally. Then it turned to me and vomited up a half-digested fish, which it thrust toward my feet. Never had I smelled anything so foul.
“Nobody understands me. When I crossed into this realm, the misnomer became my name.”
“And your eyes?”
“The story of my eyes? When I was a juvenile, they were yellow. My red eyes reflect light, enabling me to see at night, whereas you see only gradations of shadow.”
The Nycticorax continued to gaze at me through a single vampiric eye.
By then, it was night.
“Make me a citizen of the nuktos!” I cried to the air.
The Nycticorax began to disappear. In its place there was only the red-ringed eye, resting like a marble on the pavement.
The eye began to swell until it was the diameter of a sewer lid. The red ring began to turn, cutting a hole in the fabric of reality like a cosmic can-opener. As it inched clockwise, a seam of red light grew until the circle was complete and the fragment of Florida that had been hole-punched fell soundlessly into the pond.
The portal opened.
I jumped into it. And that is how I became a citizen of The Night.