Unknown World

The damn owl drew me into the whole mess. The second mess, I mean, the one ten years later. The one with Aria. Who knows how things would have turned out if I had missed that one on the NFT exchange, but lately everything seems to be nothing more than an endless web of possibilities expanding infinitely into the ether, before collapsing into the most troublesome and irritating realities.

At that point, around the early autumn of 2021, I was staying in Evanston, just uptown from Chicago, working a temporary gig at Northwestern’s library and building my crypto portfolio with whatever was left from my meager paychecks after housing and food costs.

By then it was midafternoon, still warm enough for an outdoor table at my preferred coffeehouse, sitting upwind of the Chicago cityscape visible in the distance, and the shimmering crystals and rubies of afternoon sunlight reflected in the waters of Lake Michigan. I was sipping my usual drink—iced mocha with almond milk—and browsing the available NFTs on my preferred exchange. My portfolio by that point has potential, though I was still a bit short of the necessary minimum to buy a space at Cryptoland. So, I spent that afternoon as I did so many—looking through my blockchain space through countless pictures and digital drawings, trying to gauge the best potential investment using whatever vague intuition could lead me there.

Engaged as I was, I admit that I almost passed by the owl completely. I think I had scrolled the image out of frame without thinking, before some vague, half-remembered inkling of a thought of recognition suddenly pinpricked my psyche into pausing my scrolling, leaving my iced mocha suspended halfway to my mouth.

I scrolled back up. There, one spot from the left, buried among dozens of other aspiring NFT investments, was a picture of a barn owl. It was perched on a small stick, set against a dark blue and star-emblazoned night sky, staring at the viewer with large, mysterious eyes. The coloration and contours of the lines were drawn together in a strange and unique artistic style, almost a blend of pre-Raphaelite coloration and proto-Cubist geometry (reminding me at the same time that I did in fact have an understanding of what these terms even meant, a gift from a past life and a past self).

But the wing triggered my memory more than anything. The bird’s left wing, jutting out from its body in an awkward angle, suspended in a kind of half-shrug, half-exultation of a merciful or terrible divine providence. A broken wing that could only fly in dimensions unseen by the human eye.

“Barney,” I said out loud to the mostly empty patio of the coffeehouse. Then, in a whisper: “Cassie?”

I checked the artists’ username. Trojanlament, it read.

“There’s a classical theme here,” a female voice spoke in my memories. “But I keep getting condom jokes.”

I spent the better part of an hour debating whether or not I should send the artist a message, even a vague, inquisitive one. The risk was rather low, as far as I could. If it was just a major coincidence, then whoever this artist was would either ignore my message completely, or, at most, shoot me back an extremely short message denying that they were the person I thought they might be. No harm there, right? But, something about the prospect choked my throat with a strange surge of nerves and anxiety, and I ended up staring into my computer screen, the message tab open, looking at a blank space with nothing written on it.

Ultimately, only the imminent closing of the coffeehouse forced my hand. I gulped down the last of my iced mocha, and took advantage of the urgency of my suddenly-full bladder to shock me out of my impasse. With a deep, controlled breath, I finally brought my hands to the keyboard and wrote.

Hi, sorry to bother you! This may be a completely stupid message, but I was just wondering if this owl you’ve drawn here is based on a real owl? One named Barney? That you fostered from a wildlife rehab organization after it broke its wing in some powerlines? And if your name is Cassandra (Cassie?)

If not, again, sorry to bother you! Feel free to ignore this.

Have a great day!

I shut my laptop with a brief collapse into shame, the kind one tends to feel after finishing unsatisfactory sex.

“God, you’re a fucking idiot,” I whispered to myself.

Without allowing myself any further thoughts on the matter, I managed to slip into the bathroom to relieve my bladder before it was locked up, and then made my way back the several blocks to my long-term Airbnb. By the time I got back to my attic room it was already dark, and the cold air from up north was already beginning to descent and stir away whatever residual summer warmth had been in the air earlier that day. By that point, my embarrassment at the whole messaging episode had more or less abated, and I was left with an unsettled but innocuous void where a healthy emotion would normally go. Tired, I decided to take a bath and watch the remnants of the Cubs game as background noise, despite my little interest or knowledge of the sport. It wasn’t until later that I finally opened my laptop back up again and checked my NFT account. Having put the whole thing into the back of my mind, I was somewhat unprepared for the sudden appearance of a notification on my account that informed me of a new message in my inbox. My mouth and esophagus twisted, as if to steal myself from the oncoming embarrassment. I clicked open my inbox, expecting (or hoping) for simple denial of any of the questions I asked, and, if the universe smiled on me, a tone that was more good-natured than anything else. I was decidedly not prepared for the first line in the response message.

Are you Waldo?

This would have been enough of a gut punch, once the initial numb shock was able to subside into comprehension. Images flashed into my mind, back to 2011, myself standing on the side of the road, next to a female form, adorned in whatever bizarre or evocative costume she had designed for us.

“It’s called ‘Streetview,” her voice echoed in my memories. “New thing from Google. They’re sending their cars around here to take pictures of the streets. They want to take pictures of every street in the world, eventually.”

Then, from deeper memories, my own voice replied: “And you want to photobomb them?”

“In so many words.”

“But why?”

“Because…”

But, before that half-remembered conversation continued, I couldn’t help but notice the next lines. Though, I wouldn’t have been able to brace myself for them even if I tried.

I’m Cassie’s sister, the message read.

And,

Cassie’s dead.

Three days later I was outside of Port Clinton, Ohio. My shitty Mazda had managed to make the trip without incident, and I was trying to navigate the mazes of resort communities dotting the southern shores of Lake Erie just south of Catawba and the Lake Erie Iles. In our message exchange, Ariadne had asked to meet at the café of the Rocky Point Winery in somewhere called Marblehead, which it turned out was a rather straight-line drive east from Port Clinton along the lakeshore. I still managed to be late, though.

Ariadne wasn’t difficult to pick out, even if I had never seen her before. Her face bore enough of the characteristics of her older sister that she would always emerge from the background scenery like one of those magic eye images. But I had also spent a good deal of time watching her videos, so even without the familial resemblance, I would have recognized her. Ariadne was, as far as I could tell, professionally engaged as a full-time “influencer” on Twitch, putting out countless streams of makeup tutorials. In this trade, she had a definite skill, at least going by the dozen or so videos of hers that I had watched. Sitting in front of her webcam, she had been able to transform herself into an Egyptian Pharoah-ess, a ‘20s flapper girl, a Russian princess, a mythical elfin being.

Images of her older sister from our college days forced themselves across my psyche as I watched, though through sheer force of will I allowed them to go no further.

She was sitting at the winery’s outdoor patio when I arrived, perched on a small wicker table, a glass of some kind of red wine in one hand and browsing through her phone with the other. Despite being in her early twenties, she radiated a kind of stoic agelessness that grated against the pleasant ephemerality of the surrounding garden patio. She wore large sunglasses that reflected the afternoon sunlight beaming in from the lake, and in her hair was some kind of shimmering crystalline glitter. I approached slowly and modestly.

“Hi? Uh, hi there?”

She looked up with little expression. I tried to smile.

“Ariadne?” I asked.

She returned my smile with her lips, though with her sunglasses in the way I couldn’t see what her eyes were doing.

“Waldo?” she said.

I nodded. “That’s me.” I didn’t know if I should try to shake her hand, but hers remained where they had been, so mine stayed at my side.

“You can call me Aria,” she said. “That’s what everyone does. After a lifetime of hearing Ari-aid I kind of prefer that.”

“Aria,” I said through my awkward smile.

“You can have a seat,” she said. She took a sip of her wine, the only movement she had made with her body since I had arrived. I continued to stand awkwardly for a few seconds, before finally pulling back the second chair at the table and sitting down across from her, feeling the sudden burn of sunlight at my back and looking into the bleak dark blue of the oncoming night in the southeast.

“You want some wine?” she asked. She pushed the menu in my direction.

“I don’t know much about wine,” I said. “Have any recommendations?”

She tilted her glass in my direction. “This is the Pinot Noir,” she said. “It’s okay, from what I can tell, though the server also recommended the Sauvignon Blanc, if you’re into something white.”

“I admit all these French words go right through my brain,” I said. “I’ll just see what the server recommends.”

She shrugged and took another sip from her glass.

I cleared my throat. “So, I wanted to thank you for seeing me here,” I said.

She cast an eyeless smile in my direction. “Thank you. Driving all the way here from Chicago.”

“Wasn’t much of a drive, to be honest,” I said. “Mostly just I-90.”

She nodded again and said nothing. The awkwardness began to seep into my brain, and I struggled for something meaningful to say.

“So, I, uh, did want to say how sorry I am, about Cassandra.”

“Cassie,” Aria said. Her voice was low and blunt, with a tinge of some kind of deep emotion that danced around the tip of her tongue but never quite revealed itself.

“Yes,” I managed. “Cassie. She did prefer that, I remember.”

Aria said nothing. I twisted my lips into what must have been a strange contortion, hoping that her view of my face was distorted by her sunglasses and the bright afternoon sunlight framing me from behind.

“Cassandra, Ariadne,” I said. “Your parents must have really been into Greek mythology.”

Even through her sunglasses I could tell that she rolled her eyes. “Oh God, don’t get me started,” she said. “But, rather than talk away what’s left of our daylight on dumb bullshit, we could maybe discuss the whole reason you came here?”

She looked down at her phone, not at me, and for a brief second I wasn’t even sure if she was addressing me at all.

“Oh…oh, yes, we can do that.”

“Cassie’s body is at the county coroner’s office in Port Clinton. I already gave a positive ID, so you don’t have to worry about that.”

A sudden surge of about three separate emotions erupted in my thoughts. “..yes…I’m very sorry you had to do that.”

She looked up, and for the first time I got the sense that she was looking right at me.

“Let me just say that Cassie and I weren’t particularly close. For most of our lives, of course, since she was nine years older than me. But, as adults, we drifted apart even further. So, like, don’t feel the need to smother every sentence with some attempt at condolences.”

I honestly had no idea what expression my face was making within its halo of sunlight.

“But,” Aria continued. “Most of her stuff is still being held on Put-in-Bay. The island, that is. That’s where she died. We’ll have to take the ferry there if you want to claim any of it.”

“Yes, about that,” I managed. “I kind of wanted to ask you a few things about all that. Stuff that wasn’t…uh…quite clear from our message exchange on OpenSea.”

She looked up from her phone again. “OpenSea?”

“The NFT marketplace? Where we exchanged all the messages?”

“Oh, yes,” she muttered. “I don’t really understand any of that. Cassie just sent me her login info before she died, and she had posted tons of stuff there, so I figured it was important. I don’t even really know what an NFT is.”

“Non-fungible Token,” I said. “It’s essentially a security established via blockchain, similar to cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, but distinct in that…”

She waved her hand from across the table. “Not to be rude, but I doubt I’d understand even if you explained it to me.”

I nodded. “…well…”

“All I know is that I keep getting these crypt-bros trying to pay me on my Twitch stream with NFTs, and bitcoin, and all sorts of stuff like that. I used to have an OnlyFans page, in case you haven’t come across it already, and it was even worse there. I always assumed it was some form of scam.” She took another slow sip of her wine. “No offense.”

“No worries!” I tried to say as cheerfully as possible.

“Are you a crypt-bro?” she asked. Her voice was aggressively casual, with no discernable trace of either condescension or apology, merely the dim uptick in the tone of a casual question.

“What’s that?”

“Or, crypto-bro. Crypto-aficionado. Whatever the term is. I mean, you’re into cryptocurrency and the like?”

I nodded, attempting as confident a smile as I could, though I still was not sure how much of my face she could see. “Yes, I’ve found it a terrific alternative to the inherent corruption and flimsiness of national currencies. You see…”

I stopped. Her expression and body language suggested that none of this would get through to her. She took another sip of wine and smiled in my direction.

“You did tell me you were buying an island with crypto?” she asked.

I nodded. “Oh yes! Well, it’s not an entire island for myself. But it is an exciting venture for a number of us who have invested in NFTs. The speculators are buying an island in the South Pacific, from Fiji…allowing people to purchase a share of the island property with NFTs. It’s like buying a share of citizenship for a new country, independent of existing governmental structures. The goal is being able to achieve personal sovereignty using legal cryptocurrency unburdened by flimsy government-backed currency.”

“That sounds very libertarian,” she said.

“It is! That’s why I like it.”

“Uh-huh.” She took another sip of her wine. “Let me ask you this? What’s the age of consent on this island?”

I felt my face fall into what must have been a dumbfounded expression. “Uh, what’s that?”

“It just seems to me that whenever there’s this idea of establishing some kind of ‘libertarian utopia,’ someone ends up asking what the age of consent should be, that starts a huge fight, and the whole thing ends up self-destructing before anything gets done.”

“Oh, well..” I managed. “That, uh, hasn’t come up yet…”

She flashed me a smile I couldn’t read. “Well, I’m sure everything will work out on your end.”

The tension in my mind began to cry out for something to relieve it. “So, was anyone going to take my wine order?” I asked.

“I’ll keep an eye out for the waiter,” she said, sounding like she was not. “But, instead of talking politics and cryptocurrencies all afternoon, we probably should discuss the reason you’re here. Like I said, Cassie’s stuff is still being held on Put-In-Bay—that’s the island, remember? I brought you here specifically because I didn’t know what to do about the owl.”

“Oh, yes,” I said. “You had mentioned in your message. Did she do a larger, canvas painting of the owl?”

“Painting?” Aria asked. “No, I mean there’s an actual owl there. Alive. In a cage.”

I managed to choke on nothing but the air already in my throat. “What? You mean Barney?”

“Is that what its name is?”

“Yes, I mean, that was its name. But she’s still alive?”

Aria shrugged. “All I know is that police there told me they found a barn owl in a cage among Cassie’s belongings, and if I wanted it. I don’t really, but thought you might. And, being something of an animal lover, at least in theory, I didn’t know what would happen to it if you didn’t pick it up, and…oh, god! Barney the barn owl? I just got that!”

I managed a mild chuckle. “Well, when we were together in college, I had originally wanted to name it Owl-iver, but Cassie vetoed that.”

Aria cringed, but said nothing.

“But, it ended up laying eggs, so I assume it’s actually female. The name Barney stuck, though.”

“That scans,” she said.

“It wasn’t a pet,” I said. “She got it from some wildlife rehab…”

“Broke its wing on some powerlines,” she cut in. “Yeah, I think you told me. The officer I spoke to did tell me that one of its wings is kind of fucked up.”

I nodded, then leaned in closer to the table. “Can I ask a question, though?” I asked.

She sipped the last mouthful of wine from her glass and nodded.

“How did you know that she and I kept the owl when we were dating in college? That was like nine years ago.”

“She told us that you and her were engaged,” Aria said.

“What?” I sputtered.

“It’s what she told us,” Aria said. “Though, as you can guess, she wasn’t exactly telling the truth. Running off to marry her college boyfriend was a better story than the shit she actually got into.”

“Oh, yes,” I said. The sun seemed to fall into a dimmer color behind me, though that was probably just the time of day. “That makes sense.”

“She did tell us about the owl,” Aria said. “I thought it was another lie, but in this case she turned out to be telling the truth. I don’t know what else was true, though.”

I had about a dozen or so thoughts that needed to be expressed at once, but before I could say anything else, the waiter finally made his way to our table to ask about my wine preferences.

“The, uh, cabaret…something or other…or, uh…oh, fuck it. Just bring me whatever has the most alcohol.”

Aria and I barely spoke during the entire ferry ride to the island the next morning. The bright, clear skies of the previous afternoon had given way to a gray overcast cloud cover and a dense, chilly fog that seeped around the unquiet waters of Lake Erie. After the ferry took off the from dock, she retreated to the seats on the upper deck, while I stayed behind the wheel of my shitty Mazda, letting the gentle rolling of the boat on the waves of the lake lull me into some simulation of sleep. I had my phone out, and spent the better part of twenty minutes scrolling through my oldest photo reels, the ones I had long ago forgotten about, or assumed I had deleted.

One caught my eye. Standing in the blue light were two figures, side by side on a sidewalk, in front of a ‘50s-style diner. In the window was an advertisement for a pumpkin pie on sale, with the respective image sketched onto the glass in marker. The two figures, male and female, stand with their hands at their sides, shoulder to shoulder, looking out at the camera. Both of their faces were masked with a jack-o-lanterns placed over their heads. His was carved in a crude snarl with uneven jowl lines. Hers was much neater, with clear triangular eyes and a mouth lifting up in a symmetrical smile. Mysteries against a broken landscape, hints of secret forces still operating in undiscovered countries to which our psyches have become blind. Floating in the ether, threaded across the universe, fragments of promises that the world will always be deeper than our understanding of it.

“We should have been holding hands,” I say to no one.

“We hold hands in too many of these,” Cassie’s voice whispers from some other world. “It gets old after a while.”

I continued to flip through the oldest pictures in that file, dated, I soon realized, to back in college, almost ten years ago. They were the pictures that Cassie and I had managed to get picked up on Streetview, as well as a few outtakes we had taken ourselves. The outlandish costumes hidden among the most desolate and wayward places. We stood together, here dressed as Greek deities, here as Renaissance lords, here nude save for pastoral colors we’d painted onto our skin. Sending whatever traces of weirdness and warmth into the ether, flying against the pixilated grey sky like balloons ascending from the dreary, hidden eyes of basement windows in a silent suburban haze.

I got lost in the whitewater currents of memory, until the ferry’s horn shook me awake, and I jumped up to see that we were almost at the dock on the island. At that same instant Aria appeared and made her way into the passenger seat of the car.

“What are you looking at?” she asked.

“Oh, nothing,” I muttered. I shoved my phone into my pocket and fumbled to pull out my car keys.

“Were those pics of you and Cassie?” she asked.

“Oh,” I said. I couldn’t locate any useful lies in the murk of the foggy morning. “Yes. Just some old ones, from college.”

“Were those the ones that you and her did on Streetview?”

I nodded, trying to look more interested in my car keys than a conversation. “Just a few. They were kind of silly, looking back at it.”

“I remember finding a few of them, here and there,” she said.

“Oh?” what all I could think to say.

“There was a Buzzfeed list once, I think it was ‘Strangest Things Found on Google Streetview,’ or something like that. You guys were at least two of them. I think there was one with a pumpkin costume?”

“Oh, yeah, I remember that one.” I couldn’t help but smile.

“I think I found one myself,” she said in a soft voice. “Organically, I mean. It was in New Hampshire, or something. A road in the woods. You were, like, forest nymphs?”

“Or something,” I said.

Before the conversation could continue the car in front of us shuddered to life and pulled off onto the dock of the island. I hit the ignition and followed, and the two of us sat in silence for a time, broken only by Aria’s vague directions to her late sister’s cottage.

The cottage was quite small, only one story and one bedroom. It was painted a soft blue-green, merging with the surrounding pine trees, and the ripples of the lake water just visible a few yards past its back door. That corner of the island was blanketed in silence and solitude, the bustle of the nearby town, and only the occasional sounds of passing boats heading to and from the marina half a kilometer away breaking through the din from time to time.

“I talked to the landlord,” Aria said. “He told me that he’d been feeding the owl, though I don’t know what.”

“If I recall, Barney’ll eat most of whatever you put in front of her.” I took a few steps towards the cottage. “Wait, how are we going to get in?”

“I have a key,” Aria said.

“Oh,” I said. “Wait, how’d you get that?”

She was already making her way to the front door. “Cassie sent it to me,” she said.

I stood there by the car, watching Aria descend the small pathway leading to the front door of the cottage where her older sister—and my once girlfriend—had spent her last, lonely, tragic days. Some rotten and irredeemable taste had bubbled up to my mouth from a deep pit in my stomach, conjured by an unspoken question that I hadn’t allowed myself to articulate this entire time.

“So, uh, Aria?” I asked. My voice carried through the soft wind down through the foggy corridor of pine trees, all the way to Aria’s form in the doorway of the cottage.

“What?” she said. She had opened the door and was standing in the darkness of the vestibule, her hands suspended in their search for the light switch as they awaited my question. I swallowed.

“I…probably should have asked you this before, but…uh…there’s no easy way to phrase this, but…how exactly did Cassie die?”

If Aria had any emotional reaction to this question, it didn’t make its way to her face.

“According to the person I spoke to at the coroner’s office, it was an overdose.”

“Oh,” I said. This was the least surprising answer she could have given me, but pain welled up in my stomach all the same.

“They said they found heroin, fentanyl, Xanax, and the like in her system. Bags of it in the cottage, too.”

“Yeah,” I managed. “I knew she had problems there.”

“It wasn’t your fault,” she said. For her tone, she could have been remarking on the weather. She found the light switch and disappeared into the hollow light of the main living room of the cottage. I followed her.

We found Barney in her cage in the single, small bedroom. Despite the years that had passed, she looked exactly as I remember her. Brown and white feathers descending in a thick frame, tufts of small, fluffy feathers encircling a wide, heart-shaped face that orbited around two wide, mysterious, primeval eyes. Eyes that met mine through the bars of her cage, looking at me with what seemed like clear recognition, but no surprise. As if her primal, mythical avian sense had known, all along, that our paths should intersect once again at this exact point in time on this small island.

“Hi,” I managed to say. She ruffled her feathers in response. Her broken wing jutted out at a crude angle, as it always had. Exactly as Cassie had drawn it.

“Can I ask a question?” Aria said from behind me. I turned around. She was sitting on the small single mattress, adorned with stained but no sheets or blankets.

“Sure.”

“Why did you message Cassie?” She asked. “On the NFT site. Why did you try to contact her again after all these years?”

I looked down at the floor. “I kind of thought I could take her with me.”

“To your little island?”

“Yes.”

“Is that what you were searching for in those pictures of yours, you and her, from all those years ago?” I saw, in the soft light of the foggy morning, that tears we silently streaming down her face. But her voice remained steady and distant.

"I just followed her,” I said.

Aria nodded and looked down at the floor. “Do you think she found it?”

I said nothing. After a while the sun appeared outside, but the interior of the cabin remained painted in a shade of permanent twilight. After a time I didn’t count, I went over and sat down next to Aria on the bed. Across from us, the owl watched with eyes that, as always, saw more than they gave away.

As evening set in, the two of us stood at the side of the empty road in front of Cassie’s cottage. Our faces bore the shimmering sparkles that Aria has painted there, and our eyes cast forward into the darkening mist and shadows of the island forest. Barney perched on my shoulder, her brown wing flapping in smooth patterns against the air, recalling in its muscle and blood some distant memory of flight as she hooed into the surrounding evening. And as the sun descended behind us, Aria took my hand in hers, and we stood together in silence, waiting for invisible eyes to pass by, pick us up and carry us, through shadow and fog and broken wings, beyond the trees and stars and the veil of night into whatever world lay beyond.