“Then it’ll literally just be me and Karim,” Mr. Schrub said. “Or is it ‘Karim and I’?” he asked his wife, and pinched her waist. The proper grammar was in fact “Karim and I,” and in addition to “me and Karim” being incorrect, it is considered impolite to state “me and [other person]” instead of “[other person] and me,” but I remained quiet.
Irma provided me with hiking clothing and sneakers, and after I changed Mr. Schrub and I went outside to the driveway, where a dark green sport utility vehicle was already parked. Mr. Schrub drove and I sat next to him, and because we were so high off the ground in the car, it felt as if he were the pilot of a plane and I were his copilot.
The Audubon Center had multiple walking trails, and we took one that Mr. Schrub said was his preferred route. Of course I had been in Central Park many times, but there you are always seeing people and it doesn’t feel like you are truly solitary in nature. We saw very few others, and the only sounds I heard were birds and the wind on the leaves colored like fire and the branches breaking under our feet. Mr. Schrub didn’t talk frequently except to identify the names of the trees I didn’t know, such as American sycamore, and plants with original names, such as honey-bells and eastern skunk cabbage.
We arrived at an open field, and Mr. Schrub handed me a pair of binoculars he had brought. “This is one of the best sites in the country to spot hawks,” he said as he looked through his own pair. He pointed to a tree a few hundred meters away. “Look! That’s a red-shouldered. They’re rare, now.” He exhaled loudly and said, “Moronic hunters.”
It took me longer to find it, because I wasn’t acclimated to searching for birds in trees. The hawk had red and brown horizontal stripes over its chest and shoulder and black and white on its wings and tail. Mr. Schrub told me facts about the bird, e.g., it locates prey from a tree branch, then dives quickly and retrieves its target and eats it on the branch again, and facts about hawks in general, e.g., their eyes are eight times more powerful than a human’s. “Gorgeous creature, isn’t he? You have to be a robot if that doesn’t bowl you over,” he said.
Maybe this was why Mr. Schrub gave his company the logo of a hawk, which was something I had always wondered and had never read about.
Then the hawk flew off its branch and zoomed down to the field. I couldn’t track it with the binoculars because it was too fast, so I observed with my eyes. It plummeted to the ground and fluctuated its wings but without flying. “Use the binoculars again, and look at its talons,” Mr. Schrub told me.
The hawk’s talons contained a gray object. “What is that?” I asked.
“Lunch,” Mr. Schrub said. “And dinner. Squirrel.”
The hawk made noises that sounded like “kee yar,” and Mr. Schrub joked that it was trying to call my country’s name.
Through my binoculars I saw the hawk rip into the squirrel’s body with its claws and beak. “Watch him go. It’ll devour the whole thing right now,” Mr. Schrub said.
I turned my eyes to Mr. Schrub, who was smiling as he watched. I reviewed through the binoculars. The hawk was now eating the squirrel, whose fur was bloody. I shifted the binoculars slightly to the left so it would appear I was still observing it, but instead I focused on an area of grass.
“He’s hardly going to be able to fly after this,” said Mr. Schrub. “See how engorged his chest is?”
I said yes. After five minutes, Mr. Schrub said we should go back into the trail and watch more birds. They weren’t hawks, and none of them hunted animals, so I was able to magnify them.
As Mr. Schrub watched a downy woodpecker through his binoculars, he said, “I could never seem to get Jeromy or Wilson too interested in birding.”
“It can be difficult to make someone else interested in what you are interested in,” I said. “They have to have some initial interest independent of you.”
“Maybe so,” he said, and he put down the binoculars. “But you’d like to think a father and his sons would have some intersection. As far as I can tell, the only thing that drives them is having a good time.”
“If you drew a Venn diagram of my interests and my father’s interests, the intersection would also be minimal,” I said.
“Well, you don’t choose your parents. And, despite your best efforts, you don’t really choose your kids, either.” The woodpecker began contacting the tree with his beak. “Take a closer look,” he said, and he put his arm around my shoulders as I used the binoculars. I was glad the binoculars covered my face and Mr. Schrub was focused on the woodpecker, because my smile was possibly the broadest it has ever been.
When we returned to the house Mr. Schrub said he had to do some work in his study. Sounds ejected from the living room, where his sons were playing a video game and yelling. “I’m afraid that doesn’t sound too enticing?” he asked.
I said, “No, I would like to try to get to know them more.”
He looked pleased. “Thanks, Karim,” he said.
Although I’m a skilled computer worker and have optimal hand-eye coordination from racquetball, I’m poor at video games, as we were never allowed to have them, and the solitary way to become adept at any system is by practice. In addition, certain personality types excel at video games, and mine isn’t one of them.
It was a shooting game, and the television was bisected so Jeromy and Wilson could each see out of the eyes of his own character as they hunted each other. “My hunger for human flesh is insatiable,” Wilson said as his character ran through a dark tunnel. “My thirst for blood, unquenchable.”
“Bring it on, fat boy,” Jeromy said. “How were the birds, Karim?”
“It was educational and interesting,” I said. “I have not been in a true forest before, and I have never seen a hawk in person.”
“He does love those fucking hawks,” Wilson said, and I observed his eyes rapidly shift to Jeromy’s side of the television and then return.
“Yeah,” Jeromy said, and his face and voice looked and sounded like he was going to cry. “More than he loves his own family.”
Wilson crashed Jeromy with his elbow, and they both laughed. “Come on, play, you ADD-riddled piece of shit,” he said.
Wilson soon shot Jeromy and his character exploded and fell and blood leaked out of his body. “Defeated,” Wilson said. “Conquered, subjugated, dominated, enslaved, made my bitch.”
“You cheat. You always look at my guy’s POV.”
“I’m trying to understand your point of view better — to empathize with you,” Wilson said. “Karim, you want to try?”
I said yes. “I’ll coach him,” Jeromy said. “Let’s beat this arrogant spoiled brat.”
Jeromy instructed me on how to operate the controller, and soon I became efficient. Wilson’s character and my character were both in the same maze, and because it was a newly created maze, Wilson didn’t have a special advantage over me in finding weapons and power bonuses. In fact, because my spatial intelligence is robust, I quickly deciphered where these things were in the maze, and I could tell he was having difficulty because he was cursing to himself.
Then I saw Wilson’s character far ahead with his back to me, but because I knew he cheated and would rotate if he saw that I was observing him on my side of the television, I rotated my character 180 degrees and ran in reverse so that Wilson didn’t know I was near him.
Then, when I knew I was very close to him, I turned around again, and Wilson’s character’s back was directly in my targeting cross. Jeromy contacted my shoulder lightly with his hand to signal me to shoot.
But I didn’t.
Wilson’s character quickly rotated and shot me. My side of the television turned red like closed eyelids after looking at the sun.