A one-sided relationship

My boss brought her parrot to work the other day and let it clamber around on her shoulders while she sat at her desk and designed pages. Charlie was a good-sized blue and green tropical bird, with serious talons and flat black eyes like greased ball bearings that had a disconcerting tendency to follow me around the office like a Da Vinci painting. Actually, in a personality contest, I think I'd give the painting the edge.
Every few minutes, something would happen to arouse Charlie's concern. He'd begin clucking nervously in the back of his birdy throat and start sidestepping back and forth along my boss' back while flexing his beak open and closed. He'd start fiddling with my boss' hair, pleading with her for reassurance, but busy as she was, none was forthcoming, which would lead Charlie to suspect that perhaps she was out to get him as well.
After a few minutes, someone would reach for a stapler or stand up to use the bathroom, suddenly confirming Charlie's worst fears and causing all hell to break loose near the front of the editorial department. Charlie would start shrieking "Hello? Hello?" and "Num-nums!" at the top of his range while beating my boss about the ears with both wings, only to realize as though for the first time in his 30 years of life that they had been clipped when he was a hatchling. This only unsettled him further, and he could only be calmed down by everyone holding very still and avoiding eye contact while my boss soothed him. Then the air conditioner would kick on or someone elsewhere in the building would slam a door and the horror show would begin anew. After the third iteration, I was amazed that his tiny heart could bear the strain.
I've never understood the bird thing. I don't know what the owners get out of it. I know people who've fed, housed, trained and loved their birds for decades and the ungrateful little bastards still draw blood twice a month. When I leap back and ask what went wrong, the bird mommies and daddies shake their heads and say, "Nothing. He just does that sometimes." Imagine if a person had a dog that suffered unexplained bouts of homicidal rage every few weeks. After the second time, it would be off to the pound. But just because domestic birds don't have the capacity to kill people, folks overlook the fact that they still give it a try all the time. You know another pint-sized maniac whom everyone underestimated because of his flamboyant coloring and odd coiffure? Napoleon. If domestic birds weren't so astonishingly stupid, I'd almost be expecting a Hitchcock-style revolution.
Unlike most people, I didn't find "The Birds" to be a chilling, believable film about nature finally turning on man after years of subversion and abuse. I thought it was pure goofy fantasy. See, I can totally buy wild animals deciding they're sick of our nonsense and trying to take humans down a peg -- we've had that coming for years. My problem was that the pet birds in the movie seem to realize there's a jailbreak on and quickly join the battle against people. Any domestic bird I've ever seen would have just said "Pretty bird!" and flown into the wall as soon as something unexpected happened, which would totally ruin the wild raptors' carefully laid plans.
To be honest, I consider pet birds to be about as lovable as Venus flytraps or tarantulas. Yeah, they'll eat if you put food in their range, and on some level they probably enjoy it. But the rest of the time they just hang out in their absurdly expensive enclosures and make me nervous. The only reason they don't attack their owners all the time is that they're dimly aware that the owners provide food and water. But their attention span is only about 10 seconds long, so sometimes they forget and start biting anyway.
As far as pets are concerned, I'm far from a cynic. Sometimes I go to my parents' house with the express purpose of hanging out with the cat, and I've caught myself using baby talk with the dog far more times than I'm comfortable with. When I was little, I'd cry when my guppies died and my dad had to fish them out of the tank with a casserole spoon and dump them in the toilet. I'm pretty softhearted about animals.
But I also recognize that if I didn't see my cat for a year, there's a pretty good chance he'd forget who I was and, somehow, life would go on. The thing about, say, parrots is that they treat you like crap even when they remember who you are and you're still stuck with them for 50 years. Buying a young bird is like marrying Paris Hilton. Anybody that can make such a huge commitment to such a nasty little animal deserves equal measures of respect and pity, but he better not expect me to drop in for dinner any time soon.
•••
Where'd you go last night? I never heard you leaving. Woke up in such a fright when I could no longer feel you breathing. I could smell the rain from the storm blowing in. And I looked outside where your car should have been. Just a street light's glare on an empty street as the rain came down in a twisted sheet.