Magnus Hill and The Misery of Blackbirds

Chapter 1: The Rainy Arrival

07:30 A.M. [19.05.2024]

Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA

Princess Rain stood unflinching amid the loud boos of her enemies. Her eyes gleamed with pride, for this was her moment. She was going to own the skies. She commanded her messenger, Breeze, to drag her slaves, Dark clouds, over, and turned to her beloved, Darkness, who smirked from the shadows. She signaled, and he strangled Sunshine to death. The Day wailed, melting its eyes into tears.

Thousands of feet down below, a blue Toyota was standing outside Blake Transit Center, the last stop for all the buses coming to Ann Arbor from Detroit McNamara Airport. And like every morning, behind the wheel, the taxi-driver was gulping down her favorite sleep-killer, the monster M3, when her cell phone juddered her breast pocket. She threw up, almost half of the mouth and wet her uniform.

It was a service call from her network operator. Swearing, she smacked the cell phone down on the seat aside. The jerk sent her cabby-cap askew, and her blond hair slapped about her face. Miserable, she sat waiting for her client the way she used to wait for her dad after falling off from the swing.

She'd tried her client's cell phone twice to no effect and now bone-tired from last night's trips, keeping herself from dozing off was getting more laborious— more painful now that no one had shown up even well past the pickup time. She picked up the can and tossed off the rest of her energy drink. On turning back to shove the empty can behind the gear-stick, her eyes fell on the last day's The Michigan Daily lying on the back-seat. The front page held a bearded, brown man, who was staring at her from behind bars.

She stretched, thinking some customer might have left it behind, to pick it, and once settled back in her seat, she drew the picture close to her bleary eyes. She'd seen such foreign faces before. In war documentaries. In the movie Zero Dark Thirty. She unfolded the paper. The headline read: Chapter closed: the court affirms death sentence for the death slayer.

Curiosity got the better of her; it shoved her into the report. She learned, her eyes sliding across the lines, that the reported man had already been in prison for the last twenty-one years, and to make it even worse, the governor had turned down his recent mercy petition. Her eyes picked up the pace. She further gathered that the man had been in the limelight ever since he was arrested and his popularity as Death Slayer owed to that stunt of his mysteriously coming back to life in his funeral twenty-one years ago. That a day before his funeral, the state police had found him dead in a car in the climax of the high-voltage chase they had performed to catch him. She whispered, "Since he was accused of..."

Her fingers lost the grip on the paper in fright as someone knocked on the adjacent window. She turned to see a shadow stooping halfway down to look inside. Her heart froze. She threw the paper aside and rolled down the window-glass.

'Mr. Hill?' she enquired and felt, as she did so, her body float under the pair of his electric-green eyes.

The young man outside nodded, and before she could ask him the destination, he was holding his left palm before her eyes. There on his moist skin scribbled was an address. She read and looked up at him, "Do you have luggg..." but before she could finish, "gg...age?" he was at the rear door waiting for her to open. She leaned her head outside the window and saw he had nothing but a college bag slinging from his shoulder. After she let him in, she adjusted her cabby-cab and keyed the engine to life. She drove past US appeals court standing tandem to the wine-red post-office building, to join office-goers' morning rush.

'It looks like it's going to rain,' she said, gazing at the sky and expecting some response from the back seat. Receiving none, she turned to check on the adult, who through the side window, was quietly watching the downtown buildings passing by, and looked lost, clearly unaware of her presence. She judged it unmannerly to disturb him and so returned to focus on the road.

Still, curious, she kept stealing glances of his face in the rear-view mirror. Her eyes went agape in awe of his thick jet-black hair, styled in short, messy fringes on top with low fades on the sides. Her gaze perched on his face; it caressed his flat, bushy eyebrows, his unblemished skin, and dark stubble. She marveled at how his deep, aquatic eyes bore compassion on a face sharp and shredded enough to otherwise carry a strict, military vibe. Truly Magnus!

A clap of thunder shook her out of her trance, and she found the voice on the map suggesting to her alternate routes as she had, in that stupidity of her, missed the turn on the last signal. She shot a glance at her client's reflection in the mirror with amazement that he had not objected. He did not even look bothered. He just gazed outside, holding the bag on his lap. She thought as she veered to her left into Huron street, he must be new to the town.

As she straightened out the wheels, the first few drops of rain hit the windshield, and in a wink, a showering sound, like plastic beads make while falling on a tin-roof, became audible inside. She looked again in the mirror and again found him as indifferent as before. Intrigued, she drew her glance back on the street, not wishing to lose the route again.

Huron street led them into uptown, the part that abounded with ranch-style houses and broadleaved trees. The rich, green foliage was shimmering afresh in the rainy season. Trees were flying past like a blurry dream— now lush and green, but eager to turn to orange in a few months, and scarlet in the fall. And though the young man looked to silently behold them, relish their present, he was fighting with his own past. There instead stretched, in all its torturing gloominess a nightmare, snatching away all the greenery from his eyes.

The demon first seized his throat the day he was told to abandon the only thing he loved and took pride in because that was a lie— a lie dressed in the garbs of reality and dumped in his closet ever since he could remember. And now only left for him was to wonder how one sentence could burn, in seconds, two decades of life to ashes.

Just then, while he sat glum going over each event in a loop, his cell phone buzzed. He did not know since when he was holding it in his hand, perhaps long enough to get used to its vibratory sensation. It kept humming, screaming, yet he sat apathetically like that. The call rendered in taxi-driver a curiosity to know how his voice sounded like, but to her disappointment, he did not pick up. Instead, he kept watching the countless, tortuous trickles of rainwater, coursing down the window-glass in the same way as his tears, a few days ago, had coursed down his cheeks.

Tires squelched and slid as they rolled down the lush boulevard; their wheels, now polished silver in the rain, kept picking the shades of green. The destination was now just one bend away, and rain had calmed down to a soft drizzle, too, as if in his farewell. The driver tilted her cap to cover her eyes before she stole one last glance of him. As they touched his face, ants crawled all over her skin. She shuddered. She restored her gaze on the tarmac and took a smooth turn into Charlton Avenue. By a tree, laden with creamy, white flowers, she pulled over and turned back to find him, yet again, gazing out the window. But now that she could justifiably interrupt him, she said softly, 'Sir, we've reached.'

The adult turned and stared blankly at her. He passed a ten-dollar bill, and without waiting for her to return the change, got out of the taxi. She called out, but he did not seem to listen. Surprised, she shifted the gear and drove along, though her eyes, however sleepy, stayed open, wide and curious, reading his shrinking image in the wing mirror. And in that faint glow of sunrays, now filtering fresh through the clouds, she noticed that the color of his denim jacket matched her nail paints. She mouthed the shade distilled bleu de France and smiled, and though she lost his reflection at the very next bend, she knew she'd remember him for a long time.

Back by the tree, the young man looked down at his left palm, and his heart sank. The letters had faded. His hands had never sweat like this ever before, and to his trouble, he did not quite remember the house number. He swept his eyes around, his feet turning in a full circle. He stared again down at the wiped-out letters. No wonder he'd always been chided for scribbling important things on his palm instead of noting them down safely. He tried guessing the numbers and hoped to enter the right house, though, he could always ask in the neighborhood about the man he sought, the man he had come flying thousands of miles for. 

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