You Can Have Everything You Want

Louis Mercurio the V always got his way.

Most of the time, people readily gave him whatever he wanted. There was a song on the radio that said ‘you can’t always get what you want’ on repeat lately that people seemed to love, but that wasn’t the truth as far as Louis could see. If something existed that he didn’t have and wanted, all he needed to do to obtain it was leave a note for his parents or for Anna, the maid. Later that day or night, he’d have the coveted item in his possession, and he’d add it to the treasure trove of valuables and belongings that lined the mahogany shelves in his room.

Sometimes Louis just liked to sit on his silk sheets in the center of his bed and stare at all of his things. Sometimes he re-arranged them; sometimes he sent an order for whatever he was craving down to the kitchens and ate as he simply observed his collection. He had a library of comic books and every lego set ever made. He had a wide-screen television and so many video games he probably wouldn’t make it through them in his life. He had a walk-in closet that resembled a department store. Louis even had antiques from faraway lands, brought home by his father when he’d come back from one of his many travels, and these he liked best because they were unique, one-of-a-kind. He had an ivory chess set from India, a real gold chest from Germany, and an 18th century harp bought at an Italian auction. He could bring kids from his class over and watch their eyes get wide and pale with envy as he showed them his treasures.

This last activity was Louis’s favorite. Or it used to be his favorite before his parents made the decision to homeschool him. It ‘made more sense with their lifestyle’, they claimed. Louis didn’t know exactly what it was his parents did, and he didn’t particularly care either, except for when it disrupted his life like this. His father talked a lot about investing, and his mother wore an ugly white coat and studied things with long names in equally long cement buildings with high security. Like most of their friends, they loved acquiring new homes all over the world that they rarely spent time in, and this was the fatal hobby that made them decide to homeschool Louis.

Now instead of his admiring peers with their dirty hands and bad breath, in streamed a wealth of tutors who were unimpressed with his collection. They looked on his things with bored eyes that had seen it all before, as if every house they travelled to was exactly the same, down to the most basic molecules of the boy at the polished table across from them.

Just before Louis turned twelve, his parents moved into their latest acquisition, a mountainside mansion in Brazil. Louis spent the first few days wandering the vast, wood-paneled halls, investigating each and every room before he picked the best for himself. It had massive doors on one end that opened onto a balcony, and the balcony looked down onto the surrounding jungle, the explosion of greenery and perpetual wet haze that hung in the air. The sounds of the forest were strange to him at night, but eventually he got used to the sounds of the creatures shrieking below, the never-ending talking between the colorful birds he caught glimpses of now and then.

It was on the morning before his twelfth birthday that Louis began to grow bored. It was Saturday and it was raining. He stood in front of the glass-fronted doors of the balcony, looking out at the steamy world beyond, before he popped the last section of his toast, spread with soft-boiled egg, into his mouth. Then he turned and went to the intercom by his bed to ring Anna.

“What is it, Louis?” Anna asked, standing in the door to his room, her fake-blonde hair pinned up neatly behind her. Louis knew she had kids of her own somewhere; he heard her on the phone with them sometimes, saying how much she missed them. One time there were even tears in her voice, which made him feel weird. He’d never seen Anna cry before; there was certainly no room for tears in the hard blue eyes that watched him now.

“For my birthday,” he told her, “I need a pet.”

“You want a pet,” she corrected him. “Wanting is not needing.”

“Whatever.” He knew Anna didn’t like him, but that was okay since he didn’t like her much either.

“You’ve had pets,” Anna said, like he’d forgotten the colorful darting fish, the hamsters, the puppy. “You always get tired of them.”

“Not this one,” he said. “I’m going to get one of those birds.” He gestured vaguely out at the rain outside, and though there were no birds in sight, she seemed to know what he meant.

“A macaw?” Her eyebrows drew themselves up to her hairline. “Those are wild animals.”

“No,” Louis told her in an authoritative tone, his eyes challenging. “I’ve seen them on YouTube. People keep them as pets. They teach them to talk. Anyway, that’s what I want. Also, bring me some of those creme cookies I like.”

Anna’s mouth tightened as she bent to pick up his half-finished plate of breakfast. “As you wish,” she said.

--

The next day, Louis’s father presented him with a card from his mother.

“She couldn’t be here today, son,” he told Louis. “Work is crazy. But that doesn’t mean we can’t have some fun of our own.”

His father took him out to a street market. There were paintings and blown glass art, and so many kinds of food the air felt thick and delicious. But most importantly, there were the birds. He was just beginning to think Anna hadn’t told his father about his wish- it seemed like the type of thing she might do, just to spite him- when he spotted them.

“Wow, would you look at that!” his father exclaimed in a way that told Louis he knew exactly what they would find.

They were sitting on a tiered perch next to an older man, who held a couple in his hands and one on his shoulder. Their primary colored plumage caught the sun, lighting up like fire.

“They’re so beautiful,” a soft voice behind Louis said, and he turned to see a very pretty dark-haired girl around his own age. At first he thought she was speaking to him, but then an older woman next to her responded, and he realized they were together. The girl’s eyes were wide and brown and reverent as they watched the birds wistfully.

Louis looked back at his father, who was absorbed in his phone as he’d been for most of the morning, his fingers tapping away at the screen. He stepped forward. “I’ll take that one,” he said loudly to the old man, pointing to a brilliant red bird and making sure his voice carried. As the man prattled on about the birds, he fought the urge to turn around and see if she was still watching. He imagined bringing this innocent, simple girl to his room of treasures, the way her cheeks would flush and her mouth would gape when she saw the colorful bird stretching its impressive wings, the centerpiece to the dream she’d walked into.

--

When Louis got home, his father went off to take a phone call. He set the large gilded cage where he’d envisioned it, at the center of his room beside his marble fountain. The bird seemed intrigued by the sound of the water, tipping its head one way then the other, moving along its perch to the very perimeter of its enclosure. Louis stood back to admire the picture.

“Say ‘welcome to paradise’,” he ordered the bird, but it only made a deafening squawk that sounded a little like a laugh.

“We’ll work on it,” Louis said, though, with the purchase complete, he was already feeling a little disillusioned.

--

Over the next few days, the feeling only grew. At the market, he hadn’t noticed exactly how loud the birds were, but in his room the sound seemed amplified and unforgivably shrill. Often the bird would make noise at him until he spoke back to it, but even then it refused to do him the decency of learning human words. When he let the creature out, it made less noise, but the destruction it caused was even worse. It chewed at the shelves in his room with its beak and knocked over his iPad where it sat on its perch by his bed, causing the screen to crack. The bird would shit on the floor, and then, oblivious to Louis’s rage, would fly over to land on his arm and pull at his sleeve, squawking so loud he couldn’t play his video game in peace. He soon gave up on trying to teach the thing to talk; he only wanted now to make it stop.

--

“I want something to keep it quiet,” he told Anna on his third day of bird ownership. “It’s keeping me up at night.”

Anna looked over at the little golden cage by the fountain with stony eyes. “Perhaps she needs more exercise,” she said.

“If I let her out, she destroys things.”

As if the bird knew they were discussing her, she began to tilt her head back and forth and chew at the bars. Anna gave Louis a measured look he didn’t like. He knew she was waiting to hear him say he didn’t want a bird anymore, like he had with his previous pets. He wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction of being right.

“Father is bothered by the noise too,” he added, knowing Anna was less apt to stick her nose where it didn’t belong when the heads of house were concerned. “If you don’t do something about it, he’s not going to be happy.”

Anna looked for a moment like she was about to say something, then she shut her mouth, tightened her jaw in that way she had, and simply said, “I will see what I can find.”

--

The next day Louis was delivered a box of what looked like small, chewy treats with dosing information inside.

“It’s a mild sedative,” Anna told him. “An average dose should settle her down.”

Louis took the box and stood there for a moment, watching her. “Mother texted me to say you’re leaving soon,” he said. “Is that true?”

Anna blinked, skipping a beat. Then, “Yes. I found a place to work closer to home.” To my kids, he heard. He wondered how long she’d been thinking about leaving. As little as he cared for Anna, she’d been with them a long time and knew all his dislikes and preferences, of which there were many. She was fast and she was efficient.

“Who’s the new person?” he asked her. “Is she any good?”

“I’m sure she’ll be fine,” Anna told him. “I have to run an errand for your mother. Do you need anything else before I go?”

Louis shook his head, and took the box into his room. The bird- Scarlet, he called her in his head, for the feathers- opened her mouth and clicked her beak, eyeing his hands. He shook out one of the little treats and carefully fed it to her through the bars. “Selfish bitch,” he said under his breath. “I don’t see why she has to go.” He felt angry tears prick his eyes, and Scarlet, watching him eagerly now, made a loud sound like a laugh. He fed her a second dose, pushing it through the bars where it hit the floor with a hollow clack.

--

The treats worked like a charm. Scarlet no longer made the incessant sounds that kept Louis up at night, the squawking so like a voice and so foreign at once that made it impossible for him to listen to anything else in peace. Over the next week, she was a new bird. She sat in the gilded cage and preened now and then, ruffling her feathers, her eyes half-lidded. She looked more than ever like the beautiful centerpiece he’d imagined. One night, his father had a large dinner for a bunch of his business associates at the house. A couple people brought their children, and Louis had the long-awaited pleasure of hearing them ooh and ahh over his expansive room and the large, brightly colored bird at its center. “Can I hold her?” the younger children wanted to know. Louis opened the cage not knowing what to expect, but Scarlet sat placidly on each new arm or shoulder, letting herself be stroked and touched by all of them in turn. “She is very beautiful, and well-behaved,” one of his tutors noted when he came by, and Louis took the compliment, letting the man believe he was responsible for some kind of intuitive training.

The truth was, he’d had no luck with any sort of training at all. On bored afternoons he’d sit by the cage and repeat words and phrases to see if Scarlet would pick anything up, but most times she’d just sit looking at him with dull, sleepy eyes.

--

The evening of Anna’s last day, it was rainy and overcast. The air was humid as usual but there was a chill Louis wasn’t accustomed to. He stood at one of the enormous picture windows, watching her talk to her replacement, a young fresh-faced girl who smiled too much. When she finally turned to get in her car, she looked briefly back at the house. For a moment her eyes connected with his, locking. For a moment he thought he saw something like sorrow in them, before she shut the driver’s side door and disappeared into the haze at the end of the white stone driveway. Louis stared at the wall of mist for a moment before turning and going to Scarlet’s cage. She was looking directly at him, her head tilted just the slightest bit. It was a little past time for her sedatives, but when he went for the box, it was empty. Shit.

“I guess it’s nothing for tonight,” he told the bird. When he went to bed, he made a mental note to save the box to put in an order from the new maid tomorrow.

--

When Louis next woke up, his room was still the pitch dark of night. Over the past week it had been happening more and more, this waking up in the early hours, and always with this painful clenching feeling in his stomach. It both was and wasn’t physical in nature, impossible to explain. It reminded him a little of when he had to wait longer than expected for something he’d ordered, but it wasn’t quite that. It was more like when he got hungry one day when he was eight and didn’t know what he wanted to eat. No matter what he tried, the feeling couldn’t be satisfied, even though he’d sent for about a dozen different types of food. In the end, his stomach was full, but the craving was still there somehow, casting a shadow over his enjoyment.

Louis turned over in bed, resigned to waiting it out as he usually did. Eventually he’d get tired enough to sleep despite the restless ache in his chest. From Scarlet’s cage by the currently deactivated fountain, he heard a slight rustle, and then a low keening sound.

Louis sat up as the sound repeated. It was the first time he’d heard her make noise in days. It wasn’t the raucous squawking he remembered, though: instead it was soft, almost inaudible, like a conversation you have with yourself when the house is sleeping and you think you’re alone. Her voice rose in pitch, wavering before it broke off, and a moment of silence would ensue before it started up again. In the dark it made him shiver; it sounded too eerily human, like someone was in the room with him, speaking. No, not speaking.

Crying.

Louis got to his feet, switching on the light by his bed, illuminating the macaw in its cage. The sound abruptly cut off, but the bird didn’t turn to look at him. It continued to face the double doors to the balcony; outside the slightest touch of pink was just beginning to creep into the black sky. The feeling- was it hunger? Yearning?- in Louis’s chest tightened, like someone was tugging on a string attached. He went over to Scarlet’s cage and opened the door, putting out his arm for her. She didn’t move.

The air outside was frigid and made Louis breathe in in shock when he stepped out onto the balcony in his bare feet, lugging the cage behind him. Scarlet’s head swiveled as she took in the new temperature, her surroundings. For a moment, Louis just stood there in his satin pajamas, shivering. When his hands went for the door of the cage, it was moist already with dew. This time when he stuck out an arm, Scarlet stepped onto it, fanning her wings out and ruffling her feathers briefly. Louis stepped over to the edge of the balcony, and for a moment they both stood there, watching the light tinge the sky. He thought of his many possessions; he thought of the girl at the market with the pretty brown eyes; and lastly, he thought of Anna, the stern reproach in her voice when she told him, Wanting is not needing.

It was only now that he thought he might understand, that he finally gave the heaviness he felt a name.

A bird made a noise in the forest below, a streak of yellow plumage darting between trees. Scarlet went rigid, watching intently, before she turned her head to Louis. Part of him was surprised at her presence still, warm and heavy on his wrist.

“Go,” he said. “Go on.”

Scarlet made a low sound in her throat and nipped his finger lightly and for one second he actually thought she would stay, before she spread her wings and flew off, into the purple sky, down towards the tops of the trees, which were coming alive with the sound of all manner of things. He saw her re-emerge briefly, her feathers flashing red in the rising sun, and the tight feeling in his chest dissipated a little at the sight.

As Louis picked up the empty cage to bring it inside again, he was amazed at how small and pointless it looked now that it held nothing; how light in his hands it actually was.