XXThe Hiss Quarterly || Volume IV, Issue 3

RESPLENDENT QUETZAL, read the sign, Pharomachrus mocinno. Marcus continued reading in spite of his habitual embarrassment that he was the only one who ever looked at these things, these postings here for the apparent edification of a populace of one. Habitat: Cloud forests of highland Central America. Status: Extremely endangered. An ancient and cherished belief held that a Quetzal would not survive in captivity, that it would rather die than be held prisoner. So rather than killing these birds for their precious feathers, the Maya would pluck them and set the birds free to grow new plumage. Fortunately this captivity myth has since proved false and Quetzals can now be viewed in zoos throughout the world.

Marcus dubiously studied the drab greenish bird with the mangy-looking breast perched in a far corner of the twilit cage. Misnomer, he thought—it’s not resplendent at all. It was supposed to have long, beautiful tail feathers, but if it had ever had any, it didn’t now. The bedraggled creature had situated itself as far away as possible from the gaggle of gawking, noisy Homo sapiens.

"Come ooooooon," whined the Asian teen with the exposed abdomen and glitter eyeshadow, tugging on her boyfriend's arm. "Let's go see something good. This sucks."

"Yeah, really," rejoined her friend with the pink hair, tugging on the boy's other arm. The young man wore a safety pin through his right eyebrow, a silver water buffalo’s ring linking his nostrils and, cinched around alarmingly narrow hips, a belt heavy with shiny metal. The pink-haired girl laughed, a hoarse smoker’s laugh in spite of her age. "I mean, what's the big fucking deal? It's just another parrot in a cage."

Marcus, wincing, waited stiffly until they moved on, then checked his watch and saw that he, too, ought to depart. He'd been out for an hour and a half already and was feeling the effects, a weariness pouring onto him from the peripheries, blurring the edges of things. If he hurried, he might just have time to see the oryx—so delicate, so endangered—before he had to go home. Not for him the lumbering, trumpeting elephant, the massiveness of the polar bears.

Marcus looked back at the drooping avian creature. His stomach ached, ulcer-like, from the psychological pain emanating from the bird. He tried to catch its somber dark eye, to send it the mental message, I'm not with them. I understand you. I am like you, alone. Sensitive. But the bird would not look at him. It bent its head suddenly to its breast and plucked out a large beakful of feathers, then shook its head quickly, almost spasmodically. The downy bits, freed, fluttered through swirling dust motes to the metal floor, settling to join the rest of the debris there.

Marcus hated zoos on principle, abhorred seeing caged, suffering beings, but the National Zoo was close to his home and was the best zoo he’d ever seen, being leafy and restful and offering most of its animal residents generous and natural-looking enclosures. Moreover, the admission was free, which meant he could pass through the gate and walk the winding trails as often as he liked, which was very often. Sometimes the zookeepers appeared to recognize him and point amiable faces his way, but Marcus always averted his eyes.

When he entered his townhouse (after visiting the probably-soon-to-be-extinct Giant Pandas with their sad eyes, as was his habit), the first thing Marcus did was adjust the thermostat two degrees. Afterwards he made a beeline to the bathroom to relieve his painful bladder; he wouldn’t use a public restroom no matter how badly he needed to go. He then trimmed the millimeter-too-long fingernail on his right index finger that had been bothering him all the way home. His head was throbbing from the D.C. traffic. He hated this city, its gray skies and ugly subway, its blowing litter and high humidity, but a move, with all its inherent changes, was impossible to contemplate.

Marcus made a spelt-bread peanut butter sandwich, making sure to use two full tablespoons of the viscous stuff to get his full allotment of midday protein. He drank a glass of soymilk, which he'd still not gotten used to the taste of—there seemed to be some ingredient that left a bad taste on his tongue after each swallow and lingered for hours in spite of brushing his teeth twice. Though real milk, besides (he’d learned recently) causing an inflammatory reaction in his system, was infinitely worse, the thought of it squirting through a hairy, warm squeezed teat…

After cleaning the kitchen, he washed the air pollution off his face, lowered the blackout shades over his bedroom windows, disrobed, and settled down on the bed, his neck cradled by a Japanese buckwheat pillow. He adjusted his silk eyeshade, arranged his limbs as comfortably as possible, and readied himself mentally to try to nap, before he had to go out again to show a house for his two o’clock appointment. He hoped that the monkeys he could usually hear from his townhouse wouldn’t choose this next hour for their thrice-daily calling, which could carry for more than a mile.

Marcus had been the baby who'd cried when polyester seams scratched and chafed his tender skin, who'd been unable to fall asleep if people were talking in the room and unable to fall back asleep once awakened by the noise of the garbage truck in the alley. He'd been the toddler inhabiting the child-free edges of the playground, studying the changing colors of the sand he filtered carefully through his pudgy fingers, and who'd covered his head with his arms and screamed, trying to block out the rude clomping of diminutive sneakers on the abridged metal slide. He'd been the pre-pubescent who'd been dragged to the doctor by an alarmed mother when his whole body turned red and scaly and itchy, and then the object of her resentment when she'd had to buy special hypoallergenic detergents, soaps, shampoos and fabric softeners, organically grown cotton sheets. He was the teenager with the bad acne and the quietly excellent grades writing deficient poetry about nihilism and homicidal valedictorians in a tiny notebook, while keeping one wistful eye on the popular group. He was the adult whose low blood sugar forced him to carry two energy bars and a baggie full of almonds with him at all times, whose hair and scalp only felt just right from three to four hours post-shower.

When, just after his divorce, he'd been diagnosed by the kindly Alice Seams, M.S.W., as an HSP, or Highly Sensitive Person, Marcus had been partly dismayed and partly relieved to hear that what he had, the way he was, had a name. “You need to realize that being extremely sensitive can be a positive thing, Marcus,” she assured him. “In the old days, people like you would have been the most important, the advisers to the kings, the prophets of society.” He wondered, upon first learning of the diagnosis, if it would've made a difference to Melissa, or even to any of the employers who had dismissed him (in both senses of the word) when he complained about the subtle yet insidious flickering of the fluorescent light fixtures, about the non-ergonomic seating, the harsh carpet-cleaning products.

Marcus had learned to rip the itchy tags off the inside neck of his shirts, to employ a natural citrus spray in place of chemical air fresheners, to buy only organic vegetables. He threw away his carpets and vacuumed his house daily. He’d figured out that he needed to snack according to the clock and to try not to spend more than a few hours at a time in the noisy, chaotic outside world—and a thousand other things that helped to ameliorate his constant symptoms.

Melissa, his ex-wife, had refused to understand how difficult it was for him to fall asleep and stay asleep, and especially to travel, as that always meant an unknown bed. Alice Seams, M.S.W., had made progress to the extent that Marcus was now sometimes able to allow for some benefit of the doubt, and he had learned to retroactively forgive his ex-wife for the severity of her frustration with his occasional impotence. On the rare times he was called upon to recount his history, he now spoke of Melissa as having been ignorant rather than malicious about insisting on their honeymooning in Hawaii rather than, say, Florida. (Hawaii, he’d protested, meant jet lag! A long, cramped flight with indigestible meals and screaming babies! Differences in barometric pressure, foreign breezes! The pressure to try scuba diving! Seasickness in a whale-watching boat! An unknown bed.) She’d sometimes accused him of being neurotic; other times she decided he was obsessive-compulsive. Occasionally she charged him with sheer petulance.

His wife had actually taken to calling him, to his face, both before and after the useless marital counseling, Prince Petit Pois, after the fairy-tale gal who was unable to sleep because she could sense the discomfort of a single pea beneath her many layers of mattresses. The first HSP, was how Marcus thought of the legendary girl insomniac. Or at least the first famous one.

Marcus hated the nickname and tried begging his wife to stop using it. This of course backfired (hadn't Marcus learned anything in middle school?) and Melissa taunted him more than ever. Fortunately for Marcus, however, the nickname was a mouthful and it did gradually morph, though never into anything remotely palatable. From Prince Petit Pois to Prince Petit; the next stop on the moniker railway was a conversion to their own shared tongue, Prince Little; and then by association to Chicken Little, which sobriquet settled in permanently. Marcus hated Chicken Little even more than the original Prince Petit Pois and later wondered, in vain, whether he ought to have made some kind of effort to have halted the evolution of the nickname's progress, to freeze it at, say, the relatively benign Prince Petit. Only two things about the name Chicken Little ever made him feel better during the rare phone calls these days with Melissa: first, he felt a fierce kinship, still, with that legendary HSP girl who had tossed and turned all night, tormented by discomfort; and second, he'd managed to figure out how to download a ring tone for his cell phone so that whenever Melissa called, the phone clucked like an electronic chicken.

Marcus couldn’t understand why chickens seemed to bring him bad luck.

In Hawaii, his trip had been ruined by a chicken. His initial delight—Marcus, ever the animal lover—in the flocks of chickens running wild with their fluffy babies all over the island, congregating in tourist parking areas, was shot down when he spotted one slow-moving, confused-looking hen who, upon inspection, had a dart through her forehead. An ordinary metal dart with plastic wings, a saloon missile. There was no telling how long the poor creature had sported the encumbrance or whether she was in terrible pain, but the incident, the thought of the cruelty that had led to such a sight, plunged Marcus into a depression that lasted the rest of their stay in the mildewy B&B.

Nap accomplished, Marcus got up, refreshed, and put on his second pair of clean underwear for the day. He washed his face again and shaved, also for the second time that day. He put on 100%-cotton khakis, a cotton button-down, cotton socks and a naturally-dyed silk tie. He accommodated his orthotics in his most comfortable dress shoes and set off walking toward the crumbling, crummy row houses with their uncleanably high ceilings in a nearby part of Adams Morgan.

Marcus had been a real estate agent for six years. It wasn’t that he enjoyed it, but that he discovered the career by process of elimination. It was the only decent-paying job he’d ever managed to find that allowed him to mostly set his own hours and which gave him the downtimes he needed during the stress and noise of a workday. It meant he could own a place of his own, small though it was, and not have to live with a roommate and that person’s disrupting clutter and dirty dishes, his cigarette smoke, midnight phone calls to pizza joints, screeching TV and blaring rock music (Marcus, on the rare occasions that he was able to listen to music, enjoyed Bach at a low volume).

He arrived fifteen minutes ahead of schedule to have the lockbox undone and to be waiting with a strained smile when his clients pulled up. He greeted the mixed-race couple (nearly the most common demographic in Adams Morgan—sometimes it seemed as if he was the only Caucasian male around without an African-American companion) with quick handshakes and led them inside, after a quick glance at their ring fingers; knowing their marital status helped him decide which tactics to use, how delicately to bring up financing. Though he executed his duties perfectly, pointing out all the exceptional features of this property, nevertheless he could easily read the sour, disdaining expression on the woman’s face. She was dissatisfied and would convince her currently-enthusiastic husband that they needed to keep on looking. Marcus knew from experience that the man would heave a grand sigh of resignation, make a weak, doomed attempt at convincing her otherwise, and then bend to her will.

It was in foggy and cold December, his Seasonal Affective Disorder weighing intensely upon him, that Marcus first decided to check the internet to see if the growing rumors he’d been hearing about were true: that there was land in Costa Rica for investors bearing relatively minor handfuls of cash. As Marcus went about his neighborhood wearing earplugs to fend off the jazzed-up carols while he bought his groceries, visited the pharmacy for his Zoloft, and made his weekend sojourns to the video rental place, the idea of a trip to Central America began, unthinkably, to seem like a possibility. God knows he needed the money; his attempts at storing something away for retirement were becoming laughable as the market got slower and slower, and he wished more than anything that he could quit working entirely. He knew he wouldn’t be able to forever keep up this level of body maintenance, the constant attempt to hold back entropy. It took nearly all his energy already to try to keep up with it all, and he knew it would grow increasingly difficult the older he became. The chance at an early retirement won out over even his worst fears. In the meantime, the sunshine and warmer temperatures would do him good, help alleviate his SAD, as would getting away from the slow showing season and from spending another garish “Xmas” alone (he refused to think of it as Christmas, knowing that Jesus, if indeed such a person had existed, would not have wanted his name associated with the gluttonous holiday, the plastic glow-in-the-dark Santas). Maybe they also decorated Christmas trees down in Costa Rica and had glittering ornaments strung above all their main streets, but Marcus hoped it wasn’t true.

The instant after he pressed “enter,” sealing his fate on the airline website, Marcus had a panic attack. As always, it was terrifying—it felt like a heart attack, but Marcus knew it wasn’t. He took one of the few remaining Vicodins he’d been hoarding since his appendectomy several years ago. Eventually he calmed down, though he felt too sleepy to do anything the rest of the day.

Marcus began to pack a week before the departure date: the last of the Vicodins, an inflatable neck pillow, compression socks, and toothpaste and toothbrush for the flight. Three different jackets, mittens and scarves just in case, a bag of cashews to replace the inedible airplane food. Two boxes of Power Bars, his mouth guard (this was a hideous and hideously expensive piece of plastic molded to the shape of his bottom teeth; theoretically it prevented damage to his enamel—or rather, any more damage than there already was, from his life pre-mouth guard—because he ground his teeth in his sleep). He checked daily to make sure his passport and ticket were waiting on the top left-hand corner of his desk. Could he really do this? Who was he fooling? As the date grew nearer, Marcus forced himself to resist his instinct, which was to cancel the trip and try his hardest to never think of it again. Costa Rica was sure to be especially disastrous for an HSP, he felt, though when he tried to think of evidence, examples for this opinion, he couldn’t come up with anything more than the obvious: differences in climate and food, the strange bed lying in wait for his defenseless vertebrae.

The morning of the voyage he awakened groggy (he’d had trouble falling asleep last night, even after downing two Ambiens) but with a half-resolve virtually alien to him, a determination not to let the prison of his sensitivity keep him from this attempt at something new and brave. He made himself remember Alice Seams, M.S.W.’s advice to try to do positive self-talk. He mentally patted himself on the back as he called a taxi (no way could he face the morning traffic) and felt his jacket pocket yet again for his wallet and travel documents. Alice Seams, M.S.W., would be proud of him.

And he disembarked, trembling, in San José, where in the dusky night the air was balmy but the buildings sinister. The van that would take him to his first hotel, outside of the city, to Marcus’ surprise was waiting precisely where it was supposed to be.

At first Marcus was too stressed to notice much about Costa Rica and was just grateful to be away from the cold and ice storms. By the end of his second night in Arenal, he was beginning to relax enough to walk about the grounds of the high-elevation lodge, appreciating the exotic foliage and the subtle beauty of the miniature orchids which had been tied to tree limbs at eye level, the better for guests to admire them. Many of them were in bloom: cream, palest yellow, brown, and even green. Marcus was also pleased with the lodge itself—it had surpassed his hopes and deflected many of his fears. His mattress was firm and comfortable, perhaps even more so than his own at home, and the main building (guests had individual cottages) was no hovel but in fact a perfect replica of an old Swiss inn, with dark beams, an inviting fireplace kept continuously in foot-warming flames, and handsome stonework. Marcus spent six nights there, loath—even unable—to leave such wonderful accommodations, canceling his next two B&Bs until he began to suspect that the lodge owner, over toast and local-made starfruit jelly, was giving him odd looks, as if she were afraid he’d moved in permanently. After all, one really saw all there was to see in the area in just a couple of days, including the famed volcano, which steadfastly refused to perform.

The worst moment came on the fourth day, when, during the group dinner, a ritual that Marcus dreaded (though it was bearable as long as he made sure to sit alone at an end of the long, medieval-looking table to avoid claustrophobia, and as long as nobody tried to force him into too much conversation). After dinner, he always had to go immediately to his room—decorated with clogs and antique skis—and lie down in the quietude, where insect and other louder, more mysterious calls had replaced the whoosh and splat of cars driving on slush. During this fourth dinner, already halfway into the soup course—a savory squash concoction with the sudden astonishment of spices reminiscent of pumpkin pie—Heinrich and Karin came rushing in from their cabin, breathless. “You must all come to our room and see! It is something extraordinary!” Reluctantly abandoning his bowl, Marcus joined the rest of the throng—including the lodge owner—at the back of the pack. The young German couple’s lodging was the farthest from the dining room (they had requested the maximum privacy, inciting Marcus’ jealousy; it had been years since he’d been with a woman). The cottage was too small for more than four people to crowd in at once, so when Marcus heard the shrieks from the first group that had viewed the extraordinary thing, he had ample time to decide not to participate. Yet somehow he found himself continuing up to within ten feet of the cabin and waiting for the first two people, an Australian and an Italian, to reemerge with Karin and Heinrich, all of them speaking too loudly, their eyes too wide, and, most curiously, wildly gesticulating, forming an airy space between their hands as long as a shoe. The next four squeezed in, bumping hips in the narrow doorway. “What is it?” Marcus asked with trepidation at the back of the group, too softly, then repeated his question. But none of those who had already been inside would give away the secret. “Oh my god!” they squealed instead. “You have to see this for yourself!”

Against his better judgment, Marcus entered the cabin last, with a Dutch couple. The couple headed straight for the bathroom. As if they knew precisely where to look, they yanked back the shower curtain, then gasped and stumbled backward, knocking into Marcus, who had been peering between them with eyes half-closed, the way he’d watched horror movies as a child, needing to see and yet praying not to. When he did catch sight of it, there in the tub of white porcelain, he was sorry he had come, both here to the German couple’s cabin and even to Costa Rica. Very sorry. The visual memory would haunt him for weeks: shiny black and green, it was the largest spider Marcus has ever seen. It wasn’t hairy, like a tarantula, but somehow much worse in its slippery, sharp-edged exoskeleton. As he fled the cottage, shaking with fear and horror, Marcus fervently wished he could undo the past few minutes and the ill-fated need to fulfill his curiosity, his love for animals not extending to arachnids. He had nightmares that night (and had to spend more than an hour working up the courage for a quick glance inside his own washtub, too embarrassed to ask anyone else to do it for him) and for many nights thereafter.

When he came face-to-face with a poison-dart frog, it was a better experience. The proprietor at the next inn combed the low brush and leaf litter beyond the manicured grounds until she found one, then invited Marcus, who had been lying in a hammock in the shade covered in mosquito repellant, to come take a look. Marcus peered gingerly into her cupped palm and was amazed to see an incredibly tiny creature, attractively cloaked in bright red with darker legs. It was downright cute in spite its off-putting appellation. When the owner asked if he’d like to hold it—“as long as you don’t have any open cuts or sores, it should be fine”—he whispered yes, and smiled to feel how insubstantial the little thing was. It cocked its head to regard him, then delicately hopped off his hand and was gone. Marcus glowed with pride the rest of the day. He had been singled out for this experience, and he had risen to the occasion. He had no idea that the proprietor did this for all her guests.

Marcus found his guidebook and read about the poison frogs. He quickly developed a wish to see the banana-striped cousin of the one he’d held that day (called, marvelously, “Lovely Poison-dart Frog”), and the Kermit-green one with black polka dots. Then he realized that the section on tico wildlife took up a good two-thirds of the book. He grinned, shaking his head at his own foolishness. But of course! Wildlife! Why hadn’t it occurred to him before? From what he was reading, Costa Rica promised to be a wonderful place for an animal lover. There were sea turtles to watch lay their eggs, and countless hummingbirds to observe. There were geckos and iguanas, coatimundis and sloths.

This new knowledge seemed to give birth to a wealth of experiences, not all of them delightful; some, in fact, terrifying. There was the night he woke to scratching sounds coming from the exterior wall of his cabin and braced himself for whatever it was to make its appearance. He was, however, completely unprepared to see a small, pinched, humanoid face appear at his window screen and stare at him unblinking with bulging, black alien eyes. Marcus, semi-paralyzed, turned over on his bed to break eye contact and breathed in tiny gasps until the panic attack passed. He refused to turn back over for fear of again meeting the gaze of the creature (though his right hip was complaining), and was unable to fall back asleep for hours. The next morning at breakfast he described the creepy thing and was told that it most likely had been a kinkajou, an animal he’d never heard of. “Damn, you were so lucky to see one,” said another guest at the table, one of six or seven current lodgers, a burly American of perhaps fifty-five. “I’ve been hoping to see one on all nine of my visits to Costa Rica.”

Marcus was astonished. “Well, you’re welcome to the experience,” he replied softly, looking down at the column of tiny ants marching toward the honey jar, “if you don’t mind losing a night’s sleep,” and blushed with pleasure at the laughter that the remark elicited.

“It’s one of the three animals left on my Costa Rica mammal list,” the man added.

“What do you mean?”

“My life list. You know,” continued the man, noting Marcus’ blank look, “which animals I’ve seen in my life.”

“Oh.” Marcus wasn’t sure how to respond.

“You’re not a lifer?”

“Um…no, I’m not.” Marcus was growing uncomfortable with such a long conversation and knew he had only, at most, ten minutes remaining in his comfort range. He gulped down half his remaining coffee and immediately regretted it; he could tell that his scorched tongue and palate would hurt for several days.

“But the one I’m coming closest to finishing,” said the man proudly, oblivious to Marcus’ discomfort and lack of attention, “is my bird list. I’m down to one. Fucking one left. Do you know how many different birds I’ve seen in Costa Rica?! No, you don’t know! Too fucking many to count. Ha ha. If only I could see a quetzal.” He laughed disparagingly. “Right. Like that’s going to happen.”

Marcus’ ears perked up. “A quetzal? I’ve seen one.”

“You have? Jesus F. Christ, first he gets the kinkajou and now a quetzal! So? Where was it?” demanded the man eagerly.

“At the zoo. The National Zoo.”

Silence.

“Um…in D.C.”

The man frowned and shook his head, as if disappointed in a small son’s lack of erudition. “A zoo! That doesn’t count, man!” He then grinned wide, stood up, accidentally shaking the picnic table, and clapped Marcus on the shoulder. “I’ll be seeing you around, man. But it sure as hell won’t be at the zoo!” He laughed and set off across the grass for his cabin.

That evening, Marcus donned his headlamp—how excellent that he’d remembered to bring it; it had proved so useful—and opened his Costa Rica book to the chapter on birds. He learned that the quetzal is the national bird of Guatemala and adorns their flag as well as their currency, the historical precedent being that Mayans had used its tail feathers as money. It was for the quetzal that birders—“lifers,” like the man he met today—traveled thousands of miles and made obeisance to various gods to catch a glimpse of. The males’ mating plumage was said to be the most beautiful in the Western hemisphere, the flying birds looking “like green lightning.” Marcus recalled the sorry creature behind bars in the National Zoo, and the corners of his mouth turned down.

Quetzals, he read, ate mostly wild avocados. Their young were in constant danger from habitat loss (lack of nesting sites: they needed a hole in a very high tree), and from weasels, jays, and other birds. Females laid two blue eggs and both parents helped incubate them; Aztec royalty wore headdresses made from the males’ tail feathers, then released the birds alive, for them to grow more of the exceptional plumes. They were headed for extinction.

The next morning, Marcus was awakened by monkeys that sounded exactly like the ones he always heard from his townhouse in D.C. He smiled and easily fell back to sleep as soon as the triumphant hooting finished. After breakfast, he loaded up his rental car with plenty of snacks and water bottles, heading for a part of Costa Rica called Monteverde, where, the guidebook claimed, one had a chance of seeing a quetzal in its native habitat. It was, however—the book cautioned—a very small chance.

Marcus found himself that afternoon on the Skywalk in Santa Elena, a series of narrow, suspended bridges leading through a protected rainforest canopy. It was raining—drizzling, really—a constant irritating mist that made him put up the hood of his anorak, though that in turn caused him to sweat and his scalp to itch. Nevertheless, there was recompense: he certainly didn’t have to wear earplugs out here, and there were very few other people around to witness his cringing tiptoeing along the swaying bridges. Plenty of human feet have passed this way, he tried to convince himself; it must be safe.

Marcus paused in the center of one bridge, hundreds of feet above the tangled forest floor, to admire the stillness and appreciate the sun’s rays which were beginning to break through the fast-moving clouds. Hummingbirds zipped by regularly to check out his red jacket, then zoomed away disappointed, in search of more promising nectar sources. The bright color of the Gore-Tex garment had always been a decision Marcus regretted for the way it made him stand out in a crowd, but this was wonderful. He smiled as the tiny birds approached; somehow, he’d never expected them to fly this high, though that was a silly assumption, now that he thought about it. Surely they must fly even higher when they migrate.

A group of chattering Germans holding fancy binoculars passed him, one by one on the narrow, violently swinging walkway, and stopped some distance away. Marcus was terrified that the weight limit of the bridge would be breached and annoyed at the sound of voices intruding on his peace, but they soon stopped talking as they concentrated on looking around through their plastic-and-glass appendages. Marcus chewed his lip, contemplated turning back the way he had come to avoid having to pass them, close enough to rub nylon for the second time in five minutes. As he sighed, indecisive, a motion caught his eye: two of the Germans were frantically gesturing at him to approach. Their hands conveyed emergency. Marcus walked briskly toward them; perhaps he could be of help in some way? As he neared the group, one of them handed him a pair of binoculars and pointed into the impenetrable leaves, in precisely the direction Marcus had been gazing before. Marcus shrugged and focused the lenses and—there! A flash of emerald different than, yet obviously belonging to, the forest. He panned slowly: orangey head crest, white undertail, a sudden, shocking patch of blood-red. He watched it shudder, and could even make out water droplets flying from its sheen. “Quetzal,” whispered the German who had loaned Marcus this precious device. (He put the stress on the wrong syllable.) Marcus was smiling without knowing it, a beaming grin that strangers rarely saw. Silently, he handed back the binoculars with a firm nod, and the German tourist nodded back, as if some pact had been sealed. Marcus looked over and noticed that the entire group, peering intently through their magnifying lenses, bore expressions of reverence and satisfaction.

Marcus resumed gazing out at the approximate area, though he could no longer discern anything in all the wild growth before him. The forest, harboring its mysteries, seemed endless, though he knew that it was, sadly, anything but. He savored the visual memory of the quetzal; he felt bewitched, blessed, as if in all his observations of fascinating animals he’d never seen anything so vivid, so proud. So free. It bore almost no resemblance to its trapped kin that Marcus had seen months ago, in that small steel enclosure. How confining, how unjust, when your natural habitat was boundless miles in what seemed, somehow, preternaturally, to be more than just the usual three dimensions—up, down, back, forth, sideways, out, about, around—in whatever direction one might possibly might want to fly, were one a resplendent quetzal, and as far or as near in this wild space filled with more shades of green than any artist could ever conjure—including the quetzal’s own iridescence. And dripping rainbows everywhere.