Parakeet

Alexandrine Parakeet and Red-breasted Parakeet, Anselmus Boëtius de Boodt, 1596 - 1610

Danny lives in a three-bedroom standalone in Coney Island. Heavy weather and the ocean’s nearness give the house a terrarium feel. When I arrive for our final interview, he is red-eyed from sleeplessness but for once in pleasant spirits. He scuttles ashtrays from the coffee table to make room for my glass of water. Sits on the couch while I sit on the recliner. After a few clarifying questions, I will be finished with him forever. I want to leave and think about birds.

Danny worked as a big-rig driver for a company that produces the cheap dessert products popular in six-year-olds’ lunch boxes. He was refilling at a truck stop when the apparatus holding the hose cracked. Industrial hoses weigh a ton. This one fell onto his head and pinned him on the pavement, shattering his pelvis against the plinth.

In the diorama I’ve built of his life, a wife with box-blond hair, a young son in a karate uniform, and a dog named R2-D2 stand in a kitchen covered in Post-it notes. Like many of my clients, Danny uses these strips of paper as surrogates for the parts of his brain clear-cut by that hose. Over the course of several months, I’ve interviewed his family, doctors, fellow truckers, grade school teachers. I’ve plotted their anecdotes on a careful timeline I will present in court, chronologically to elicit more sympathy and a bigger settlement. I will ask the jury to imagine young Danny posed against lockers, popping an orange against his biceps. Studying for his trucker exams at night. I map pain to show what medical charts can’t—how he can no longer coach his son’s karate class, volunteer at church, pet his dog.

Danny flicks an ashless cigarette and bounces in place on the couch, occasionally checking the door leading