by Hope Vanderberg

The dodo bird went extinct because it could not fly away. It wasn't always like this. Once the dodo knew how to fly; we know this because it must have flown to its island in the Indian Ocean long before the Dutch sailors ever showed up. There it made its home and, untouched by predators, grew fat on fallen fruit. Until finally its wings shrunk, and its body grew heavy, and it wandered the island looking like an overgrown chick. And it forgot how to fly. So that when the Dutch arrived with their clubs, the dodo had nowhere to go. Evolution hadn't counted on human bloodlust. And so on the bare-glaring rock of the island Mauritius, each bird was clubbed to death, and the dodo was exterminated in an evolutionary millisecond, an eyeblink of 170 years. Centuries later, evolution hasn't stopped. Clubs have turned into more subtle weapons, and human battlegrounds have been modified and expanded -- concrete and steel. And those who cannot fly haven't got a chance.

When I read about it in the paper the whole thing depressed me even more, and I hoped he couldn't see it wherever he was -- the article filling up a narrow space between two columns in the metro section, describing him briefly and inaccurately as a "13 year-old daredevil," lopping two years off a life already cut short at 15.

Omar hung around with a crowd at school that I witnessed more than participated in. It was a group of kids I stuck close to until I found my niche in high school, and eventually I would share little more with them than the subway ride home from school. I was already beginning to withdraw from them when it happened; I know this because I remember how awkward I felt at the funeral, like I had no right to intrude on their grief. It was around the time I was busy sewing patches to my jacket, marching for the homeless, and turning anemic as a veal calf, and the last time I remember talking to Omar was a distracted moment after school on the way to the subway. He tugged at one of the woven dolls strapped onto my jacket with yarn, and asked if I was "into bondage or something." Before I could gather up my self-righteousness and explain the symbolism of it all, he ran ahead -- looking himself much like a recently unshackled rag doll, flopping limbs in every direction. I don't remember much about his face, he was always moving too damn fast. In fact, the only time I saw him still was in the coffin, and that image of his face was burnt into my memory, a waxy, pieced together face that wore an expression clearly arranged by a stranger -- he never looked like that in life, that much I knew. Mainly I remember his arms -- too long for his small, skinny body, flailing around him everywhere he went.

The first time Omar got high all he did was run around outside school, entranced by the gulls. There were these sea gulls that would come in from the ocean, beguiled by the trash heaps that beckoned like sirens all over the Bronx. The birds would circle overhead, perhaps expecting a fish to jump out of that black sea of concrete. They would dive and scold, and then cling miserably to the edges of garbage cans, staring sideways in apparent disbelief at the water turned to stone. But Omar's vision was focused upward, he didn't even look where he was going. He just kept running around like a little kid, running around in widening circles with his too-long arms spread out, yelling to the birds overhead, yelling to us, "I can fly! I can fly"! He really believed it too, you could tell by the joy in his voice, the freedom of his sea gull dance.

And maybe we all have that delusion sometime in our lives -- some archetypal fantasy of wings. But for most people I know it was discarded long ago, back when we were small enough to fit into the playground swings with the safety bar, swinging metallic into the sun, closing our eyes to the glare off the steel. It was the closest thing we had to flight, and yet not even the gulls fooled us -- we all knew there was a ceiling to that city, that we would never escape through the sky. So I'm not sure what gave Omar that kind of hope at 15. Maybe it was the pot, maybe it was just the sea gulls in the Bronx, that they could live off garbage and still take wing -- maybe Omar thought if they could do that, then surely he too could learn to fly. But the only thing that flew was his hope, not up, but away. He began to tell his friends, with the detached certainty of a mystic, that he would not make it to the age of 20.

A typical afternoon took us from school to the D train, virtually empty at 3 o'clock until we invaded in packs, much to the dismay of late lunch-takers who had hoped for a quiet ride back to work. It was customary for everyone to make their way to the last car in the train, perhaps to avoid the cop who would periodically break up our candywrapper throwing, pole-swinging festivities to growl at us, "Ey! No grab-assing on the train"! To this day I really don't know what "grab-assing" is, but Omar was always certain to be the most grab-assing of everyone. On this particular day he had decided to try out a new trick, and he explained it to whoever was listening. I remember that I was engrossed in some other conversation, and I barely noticed Omar out of the corner of my eye, talking and gesturing excitedly, his arms jerking about in the strobe light flashes streaming in from the tunnels.

It was several stops before anyone realized he was gone. At first we just figured that he had wandered through the train to another car, but we searched through and found no sign of him -- the whole subway seemed so quiet, except for an empty bottle here and there, rolling back and forth across the aisle, in rhythm with the train. We all stood there, confused but not quite worried, until this guy -- some heavy-metal boy whose name I've forgotten, the type who was always drawing heavily armed robotic figures in the margins of textbooks, looked up and spoke. "He was talkin' some crazy shit about goin' between the cars -- ya' know, where ya' stand between 'em, and then he was gonna swing around to one of the windows an' wave from the outside -- like while the train was movin' he was just gonna look in and wave, ya' know to freak people out like he was just some face suspended there in the window in the middle of a fuckin' tunnel." We waited for him to continue, but he just sat there glassy-eyed, and we all started in at once, asking him what had happened after that. He shrugged off each question in a stoner daze, not quite comprehending our concern, each of us getting increasingly frustrated with him until everyone was frantic and yelling and "I heard a scream," Gladys said quietly, above all our voices. Everyone looked at her to see if she was kidding, and then it got quiet while we each imagined the worst in our heads. Someone pulled the emergency stop cord, and somewhere on that train, people were pissed and impatient to get going.

So it turned out that Omar had proceeded with his stunt that no one had watched, had hit his head on a signpost in the tunnel and been thrown from the train, just before Tremont Avenue. His parents refused to identify the body, and in the end it was Gladys who had to do it. It was sort of fitting, as she was the mother-figure of that crowd, a heavy-set girl from Astoria, with spidery ropes of black eyeliner and fishnet stockings. Gladys had this high-heeled arm swinging walk -- like a prostitute whose kid's in trouble at school, this I'm gonna-get-to-the-bottom-of-this way of walking, eyes directed straight ahead, ignoring the stares she always got (the stares a hooker storming into a principal's office might have evoked). That was how I wanted to imagine her swinging through the doors of the morgue. But I knew in reality that all her punkrock toughness must have fallen away the minute she revolved through the door. Inside the building she became no more and no less than a 15-year-old girl thrown into the part of a mother who had outlived her child, being asked to assure the authorities that this broken body was who he was before his head cracked open and his brain, his brain that had achieved the highest score in the city on the high school entrance exams, turned to ashes on the third rail.

I used to wonder if it was over in that split second, or if he lay there with his head split and spilling on the tracks in the iodine light of the tunnel, knowing he would never be found in time; not hoping -- not even hoping. The newspaper all but said it was suicide, but I don't believe it. If Omar had killed himself I know how he would have done it, and it sure as hell wouldn't have been with his face shredded among the rats and roaches underneath the ground like that. He would have gone to the highest place he could have found, maybe to the top floor of one of the housing projects in the Bronx, high enough to look down on all the garbage that the gulls love so much, those mountains of refuse that make them forget the ocean. And he would have flown.