David Halliday

PTERODACTYLS!

A Short Story

It was never made apparent how, but allegedly the films of Nora Ephron had something to do with it.

It was October and the blue had been smudged from the sky completely, like a close-up of an old eraser from a year 7 pencil case.

Somehow the romance which Nora Ephron rashly re-instilled in the dry and wearied hearts of lovelorn forty-pluses like Richard Gere, Susan Sarandon, Meg Ryan, Julia Roberts, etc., amongst the yellows, oranges, breezes, and piles of leaves as crisp as greeting cards in a cooling NYC, substantially altered the amount of pheromones being released into the air by the New York populace. Science is getting back to us with an answer on that one.

A chain reaction was caused by this spike in pheromones and love was quite literally ‘all around’. In a place as dense and compact as Manhattan, problems started to emerge quite quickly, especially when these love-critters of scent were flawlessly filtered into every office and apartment space in town via ubiquitous low-fi AC.

The next part of the story concerns pterodactyls.

Pterodactyls, you say? The reptilian birds-before-there-were-birds; the sharp-faced, giant flying dinosaurs that every child in the world wished he or she could ride at least once? The very same. Now you’re tempted to stop paying attention because the subject matter has become:

1. Frivolous and irrelevant

2. Stupidly fantastical through the inclusion of extinct and possibly magical creatures.

There’s no real reason for you to stop here, though. At paragraph… what? Paragraph Six? You knew what you were in for when you read the title. But let’s press on! Let’s finish this! Pterodactyls are not as far-fetched as you first thought when you opened this factual account of one of the most miraculous happenings in NY history.

And this next bit is ripped verbatim from the timeless annals of Wikipedia:

Pterodactyls have existed in the flesh since Professor Ethelred P. Hammer managed to clone pterodactyl genetic material in the spring of 1999, in a lab in Chicago, Illinois. It was in fact his early inroads in the area of genetics that inspired the late writer and sage of the modern era Michael Crichton to scribble the semi-ficticious roman a clef documenting the breakthrough in prehistoric genetics, Jurassic Park.

Due to a flaw in their genetic makeup, pterodactyls found human pheromones irresistible. Again, the abundance of these was thanks to Nora Ephron and every New York socialite over forty inexplicably and quite carelessly finding ‘love’. Science help us! You might say that the pterodactyls were irreversibly and scientifically ‘in love’. This blind love led the four original pterodactyl chicks to peck Professor Ethelred P. Hammer to death in July 2009 in a fit of passion when Professor Hammer was preparing to take them to a DNA research conference-cum-trade fair in Ventura, California.

No one knew how they broke from their cages, but like every other illicit animal in NYC, mythical or otherwise, it is assumed they escaped into the labyrinthine sewer system, much like Jean Valjean from Les Miserables, or the Ninja Turtles. Needless to say, it doesn’t really matter how they escaped, unless one were trying to prevent the tragedy from occurring again, and their existence was such finely orchestrated madness, so singular, it would be human folly to attempt to impose layers of understanding here when all one really needs is the wonder of observation.

Following the escape, the pterodactyls flew about the city in a sparse flock numbering around ten. The physical girth of each bird made their numbers seem greater. They would perch for hours on top of buildings, quite motionless, and keen onlookers would momentarily lose what they were keenly trying to observe. The birds would vanish in the stone forests of Manhattan, becoming just a few more shades and patches of grey in a city of greys, their taut reptilian skin folded like sails.

They would sit and squawk until it occurred to them that unlike the gargoyles they kept company with, they were alive and they could fly. And so they flung themselves about in any direction, blind, until their sail wings carried them heavenwards, where they wheeling about the sky in great silent arcs. They scattered on different roof tops, completely without goal or purpose and blinded by a love for something they could not name or see. They were driven mad by this futile pursuit. They believed they were incomplete as pterodactyls but didn’t know how or why.

The sporadic behavior in ‘The Birds’ (as they were referred to first by The Village Voice then the Times, followed by the rest of NYC) confounded the NYPD, who were immediately ordered to cease firing their service weapons in the air as the volley of bursts was frightening office workers. And since the pterodactyls were attacking no one, the police were unsure how to respond, other than to call the zoo, resulting only in repeated awkward conversations that benefitted no one.

The pterodactyls existed as every other nook and brick and steel beam in the city existed. They were carelessly left there, they were incidental, they slowly became forgotten and ignored, abused by a careless city of individuals acting alone.

The world was a world of reactions, not purposeful decisions.

The city itself was not the result of some great master plan, but rather a mess of now forgotten ambitions. All components of the visible city had been built by ambitious men and women long dead, and left there like abandoned cars. It was a place of accident, rather than design. And so the city absorbed the pterodactyls without great fuss, simply as new additions to the skyline.

It was only when a pterodactyl interrupted Woody Allen’s clarinet performance one Monday night at the Carlyle hotel on East 76th street that things took a turn for the worse. Sitting in the audience was none other than Tommy Lee Jones, listening to Woody’s exploration of sound as he routinely did every Monday.

A brief word about Tommy Lee Jones: Actor Tommy Lee Jones loathed being disturbed from any of his few pleasures in life and had long since viewed other humans as an elusive and disappointing ‘other’ far from himself, disheartening and disgusting. They were something which once held great potential for development but had since proved a dismal failure. When Tommy Lee was a boy, his dreams varied little from those of every other child growing up in the 50s. He dreamed of hovering cars, bubble houses in the sky, lunar cities, laser ray guns, robot servants, and moving walkways. It was in this idealised future world that the young Tommy Lee Jones intended on living out most of his adult life as a sheriff or US Marshall, something really tough, on the outer fringes of space where lawlessness was rampant and the District Attorney wasn’t watching over his shoulder. He would deal with intergalactic criminals in the manner he saw fit, which was with a merciless iron fist! But as he lived through decade after dreaming decade, his future space-world never eventuated. Jones held the frailty and stupidity of the human race as directly responsible. Human disenchantment had disenchanted him and now the task fell to him to disenchant others through the art and beauty of acting.

In the midst of one of Tommy Lee Jones’s favourite reveries at the Carlyle Hotel, where he dreamed of a post apocalyptic world where he and Woody Allen were the last remaining people and all they had to survive on was his wits, hardness of character, and Woody’s clarinet music, a pterodactyl blindly and mindlessly burst through the doors of the Carlyle auditorium. Its blank bird eye was locked wide open in permanent panic, constantly surprised as all birds are surprised. Tommy Lee Jones had had enough. This bizarre tolerance by the State and City of New York had led to the crime of him being nudged from one of his few minutes of pleasure.

At the flapping and clanging of the doors, Woody Allen kept playing, never faltered. His watertight professionalism was never called into account. His eyes were closed and his fingers ran along the keys of his clarinet like over worn buttons on a remote control. He flicked through the channels of the tune expertly, ignoring the ambient noise of the interrupting pterodactyl.

The pterodactyl, hearing something enchanting and attractive in the music, (and still driven by the unnamable smell of unplaceable desire) thought the bird call of Woody Allen’s clarinet was what it had been searching for — nay, what it had been created for. This was surely the sound of its love in song, this was what had called it out from the chaos of a trillion years of non-existence.

In these beautiful notes, the long-skulled creature found its god. The giant winged reptile unleashed its most powerful screech of worship, temporarily rising above its stasis of confusion and inability to explain or rationalise anything of the world.

The tuxedoed crowd heard the screech in the key of terror.

Only in New York is the appearance of a dinosaur at a Monday night performance on East 76th street less thrilling. No one hit the fire alarm. With the addition of a dinosaur to reality, not much time is wasted with incredulity. How quickly one adapts! How quickly life changes!

‘Well, this is my life now,’ Woody Allen muttered to himself as he unhurriedly walked off stage. The presence of dinosaurs is adapted to remarkably easily.

Alone, Tommy Lee Jones sat still, his hands closeted in darkness. He had long since given up cracking his knuckles due to arthritis, but he did it once again now, cracking the thumb of his left hand. In this small action lay all the clues to the steadfastness of his metallic determination.

The crowd vanished through the exits, pressing and crushing like prairie animals stampeding to water, arms before their chests pressing and pushing those ahead, former friends who were now deadweights.

In the stage wings, Woody Allen stood before a ladder that led to the upper platforms suspended over the stage. He had a profound fear of heights but an equally profound love of ladders. It was the latter which enabled him to climb up to the lighting platform above the stage so he could see everything below.

The pterodactyl sat on the stage, scratching itself with its stupidly long beak, and looking about the auditorium-turned-cave with its big blank eyes of endless surprise. It knew nothing of where it was or what brought it there. Woody Allen saw the primeval beast as more infant than villain, more socially awkward nerd than jock, more Richie Cunningham than the Fonz. It was somehow less remarkable than all it had been made out to be. He saw it as little more than a spirited loaf of bread, like a fly, animated for a moment then forgetful of its alive-ness. What Woody Allen did not see was its love; its unyielding, uknowing and unmistakable love.

Tommy Lee Jones’s fingers worked lightly and harmoniously around the handle of a matte-black Glock 9mm he wore under his dinner jacket.

A brief word about Tommy Lee Jones’s Glock 9mm: It seems a little too convenient doesn’t it? It seems like a deus ex machina, that this might even be possible let alone probable. But next time you see Tommy Lee, look into those millennia-aged eyes of flint, those eyes of hard jungle wisdom that reach far back before time was conceptually initiated, and for a moment, dare to wonder whether he isn’t packing heat.

Woody Allen watched Tommy Lee Jones walk downstairs in a rolling gait, the exact same way he would walk to fetch a Samuel Adams from the fridge in his Upper West Side apartment.

Woody Allen had Netflix and was familiar with all Mr. Jones’s work, but never had he seen the man in any of his roles channel such cool, such fierceness, such titanium solidarity. The dwarfish figure of Jones approached the stage without hurry or hesitation. The sheen of his boots glowed under the orange stage lights. Every wrinkle on his face had a shadow.

The minds of people are rarely focused on what they are doing at any given moment. Our minds give us the ability to exist outside of our bodies at all times. With pterodactyls, life is exactly the opposite. The clarinet music of love was over, but the scent that had dominated all impulses remained. The pterodactyl felt it was more alone than it was fifteen minutes before, but the deep longing remained.

The polished wood of the stage creaked as Tommy Lee Jones stepped up. Woody Allen watched as the pterodactyl ignored its new visitor, stretching out its wings like an old French monoplane. Tommy Lee Jones, like an ancient Emperor, like a decorated general of all history’s armies, surveyed the creature with heavily lidded eyes. Woody Allen saw not an actor, but Robert E. Lee standing before the Gettysburg dawn. General Tommy Lee Jones ambled over and drew his weapon. The pterodactyl recognised the smell of his guest as being the smell of something he loved without reason, a new visitor on the stage which was now his life and universe. The pterodactyl was trapped so insufferably in the present that each moment was brand new, like a birth. The pterodactyl lifted its beak to Tommy Lee. The actor stood metres away with the Glock by his side, pointed to the floor. The pterodactyl clambered towards Tommy Lee with the claws in its wings stabbing heavily into the stage. It looked like a giant sagging capital ‘M’. Slowly it lifted its sharp muzzle and brushed it against Tommy Lee Jones’s left arm. It was then that the creature felt something akin to what we know as happiness.

The actor placed his palm up against the colossal beak, pressing the flesh of his grizzled hand against the face of the dinosaur. It felt cold; more like a sea shell. The actor held his hand there in benediction, a symbol of man’s illusory and temporal dominance over beasts. They stood like that in the glare of the lights making solemn and secret promises to one another that may never be tamed enough for language or voice.

The pterodactyl breathed in Tommy Lee Jones and worshipped him in the moment, loving him in all the completion a true love may offer.

But for some loves, the timing is all wrong.

Tommy Lee Jones closed his eyes and with a heart full of sorrow, placed the muzzle of the Glock against where he estimated the location of the brain was. Some creatures, some sad, sad creatures were only ever born for the moment of their death. Some were indeed born to endless night.

Woody Allen watched as Tommy Lee Jones stood with one hand caressing the creature’s beak, the other pressing the gun against the long head. In the stage lights and anonymous darkness of the amphitheatre, he watched as Tommy Lee Jones squeezed the trigger.

The shot was loud: sharp yet muffled; a balloon bursting in a small room. It echoed around the auditorium for a full minute.

The bird was fading; becoming less and less something, yet still gutted with love for a thing it could not name. With a beak full of pheromones sending it to ecstasy, the giant prehistoric winged beast crumpled on the stage like a collapsing set piece. Its head nuzzled the ground, deliberately sliding close to Tommy Lee Jones’s leg. Its vision faded yet it still loved Tommy Lee Jones. It loved him so hard! But for no reason it could discern. Did it need a reason to burn with the fiercest love the force of life was capable of producing? The pterodactyl’s leg joints popped as the massive body slumped against the stage. Its thoughts flipped around like a fish on the sand and were cruelly nonsensical, sapped of meaning. If they could be translated, they would loosely be read as: “crunchy, but sad”. The beast had heard the clarinet music of angels, met its god, and perished.

What more is there to be said? A pointless and bizarre love took the Pterodactyl to its pointless and bizarre end. A story that is thematically all too common.

Tommy Lee Jones and Woody Allen were in the media constantly for the following month. Without knowing what City Hall’s official stance on the issue should be, Mayor Bloomberg offered them both keys to the city. Without knowing whether it warranted the move, they accepted on the proviso that the ceremony was closed to public and press.

No one particularly felt any pride about what had ensued that autumn; no one was really sure what to feel, but there was the nagging feeling that perhaps the death of the prehistoric beast was a grand and terrible thing. Its love was never discovered, and so the sharpness of the actual tragedy was never recognised. The other nine pterodactyls did not stay long. The death of one of their number did not go unnoticed. They were spotted over the city for several days after the tragedy; and then they were simply gone. And no one knew whether it was cause for celebration or mourning, or how heartbreaking a move this was for them. Witnesses last heard the pterodactyls screeching over Long Island Sound, then they were heard no more. With the beasts gone, it was as though the residents of NYC had awoken from a dream, blearily confused, looking to one another for reference points. Then life continued, indifferent and chaotic, and no one could explain anything.

Content

David Halliday
PTERODACTYLS!
A Short Story