“I write about death for a living,” Sean Flynn explains in the opening chapter of his new book, Why Peacocks? An Unlikely Search for Meaning in the World’s Most Magnificent Bird. “More specifically, I write about events, crimes and disasters and such, in which people have recently become dead. Magazine stories, mostly, long narratives about awful things that, over three decades and six continents, have involved many hundreds of dead people. I have no idea how many because I’ve never had the inclination to trudge back through the years and count them all.”
Most of those stories, for the past 18 years, have been in the pages of this magazine, for which Flynn has been a correspondent since 2003. He won a National Magazine Award for a story involving six deaths, and was a finalist twice more for stories that, between them, accounted for another six dead people. And he did do a partial count: Between the autumn of 2007, when his youngest son was born, and the spring of 2017, he wrote pieces for GQ that involved a total of 498 deaths.
Writing about all those deaths is not remotely the same as suffering or grieving. But their effects are cumulative. They carry a weight that, eventually, needs a counterweight. Like, say, the trio of peacocks Flynn and his wife, Louise, adopted.
Mr. Pickle was spreading his feathers at least twice a day, and more often three times. Considering I wasn’t his primary audience, I assumed he was displaying more frequently, and I happened to catch sight of it on occasion. The average peacock spends about 7% of his day with his train erect, which works out to just over four minutes of every waking hour. Mr. Pickle appeared to be skewing the curve.
Carl tried to display. He’d raise the scruffy duster on his behind and wiggle, shuffling his feet in a small, aggressive circle. But the gap between the two peacocks was narrowing rapidly through attrition: Mr. Pickle had been shedding train feathers almost since Independence Day. I found one or two loose in the pen one day, then five or six by the end of the week. By the time the boys went back to school, the coverts were dropping in clumps and his actual tail, short and drab, poked out like a poorly designed prosthetic. At the end of August, it seemed that the only useful purpose of a peacock was to supply iridescent stems that could be gathered into mason jars and vases to give to friends’ kids and our kids’ friends.
Peacocks are not especially interactive—ours did not like to be touched, let alone handled—and significantly less so than chickens, a behavioral disappointment the boys caught on to quickly. The novelty had worn off before the end of summer for everyone but me.
In fairness, the main reason Calvin and Emmet got bored with the peacocks was the puppy, a pug we named Tater because a pug puppy is the approximate size, shape, and color of a Yukon Gold. Unlike the chickens and the peacocks, Tater was thoroughly planned. Almost a year earlier, Louise had researched dog breeds, looking for one that was small but sturdy, accepting of grabby child hands, and possessing the temperament to endure being put on a skateboard or a trampoline or inside a dark pillow fort. In the spring, before the chickens, she hunted for a breeder until she found a hobbyist who kept meticulous records going back decades, so she wouldn’t inadvertently mate cousins and siblings and end up with puppies wriggling out of a cripplingly shallow gene pool. That Tater would be whelped in June by a pug named Louise was a pleasant coincidence.
Tater became my companion on the morning rounds. He’d do his business, and then we’d release the chickens before visiting the peacocks. He tried to play with the chickens, but they scattered until they realized, about a week in, that there wasn’t the remotest chance Tater was capable of catching, killing, and eating them. I’d set up my camp chair outside the garbage coop, Tater would nap beneath the seat, and the chickens would scratch in the dirt near my feet while I answered emails and made calls. During breaks, I tried to teach Tater to fetch, but any stick big enough to throw was big enough for him to trip over.
One morning when Louise was working from home, she came out to find me, but stopped before she got to the edge of the driveway. Maybe it was that I hadn’t shaved in a while, or that I was wearing one of my summer hobo outfits, as she liked to call my comfortable clothing, or that I was in the mildewed chair that she had tried several times to throw away. Whatever the reason, she watched for only a moment or two, then went back inside. Later, she told me that out of all of us—the denuded peacocks, the industrious chickens, the dozing pug, and me, with my intermittent jabbering at the six of them—the dog was the least ridiculous creature in the yard. She said it as neither an insult nor a joke, but as a reasonable observation, and one with which I could not in good conscience disagree. I was becoming a ridiculous figure, at least in the confines of my pretend farm, with the organic garden and semi-exotic pets. It was almost intentional, and would have been if only I’d admitted it out loud: I was creating, or trying to create, a home life as far removed as possible from the things I wrote about.
I’d begun trenching a gulf between work and home years earlier, when I realized the two were no longer properly siloed. Calvin was in second grade then, and he told me one night that a kid in his class was going to have him killed. Why he wanted Calvin killed wasn’t entirely clear, but how it would happen was explained in detail: The boy said his father was going to come to school with a gun and shoot him.
Calvin told me this when he was already in bed, after we’d read The Lorax again but before I’d turned out the light. He was nonchalant about it, as if getting whacked by a parent were just an inconvenient possibility with which second-graders had to reckon. “He might tell his dad not to do it,” Calvin said. “But he said if we hear any screaming from the bathroom, that’s gonna be his dad giving Toby a beatdown.”
“Toby?” That was a kid Calvin knew. “How’d he get dragged into this?”
“I dunno.”
I waited to see if he had anything else to say, but he was quiet. “You know that won’t happen, right?”
Calvin shrugged. Why would he know that? He’d been drilled for the day a homicidal loon would shoot up his school. He’d practiced for it too, knew where in the classroom he was supposed to curl up until the shooting was over. It’s a wonder he got out of bed in the morning, really.
I tried again. “Well, dads don’t do that. I promise you. I know it sounds scary, but grown men don’t go around shooting kids—”
“What about that man in Norway?” he said. The words came out fast, and the last syllables got tangled in the choke of a sob. Then he burst into tears, a great sudden deluge spilling out, as if a retaining wall in his tear ducts had collapsed.
I was startled by the ferocity. I pulled him close, a reflex, and felt him heaving against my chest. Shit. He wasn’t supposed to know about the man in Norway. I’d always been vague with the boys about work, and for this exact reason. They knew I went places to write about things that had happened, and that some of those things were sad, and that sometimes people had even died. They would ask questions, and Louise and I never technically lied. But we left out a lot of details and deflected, we thought, masterfully.
Calvin began to calm down, his breathing slowing. He kept his head pressed against me. Norway had been months ago. I’d brought him a hockey jersey from Oslo, but I had no idea what I’d told him about the rest of that trip. He must have picked up snippets, overheard Louise and me talking through the story, plotting structure and pacing and tone. The man in Norway killed 77 people: Eight died in a bombing in Oslo, 67 were shot at a youth camp on an island in a lake west of the city, and two died trying to get away, one by drowning and the other after falling off a cliff. I was in Norway about a year after the fact, during the man’s trial, reporting what turned out to be an unusually long magazine story. I spent a lot of time with people who’d been on the island, who’d been wounded, who’d pulled panicked kids out of the lake. A police officer remembered being in a boat hours after it was over, hearing chirps and trills and snippets of pop songs from the cell phones that parents were calling and that no one was answering. They were scattered all across the island, he said, blinking like fireflies. A man named Freddy told me, over several hours at a sidewalk café, how one of his daughters had called him from the island. She didn’t say anything, just screamed for two minutes and seven seconds until the line went dead because the man shot her in the left side of the head and the bullet came out the right side and destroyed her phone. Freddy figured that out by studying photos from the place where his daughter was murdered.
Calvin was seven years old. I definitely didn’t tell him that.
“What do you mean?” I said. “What about the man in Norway?”
“He killed all those kids.”
Oh, hell, did I tell him the number? No, I wouldn’t have done that. Probably not. Would it matter? Anything in the double digits sounds like a statistic, doesn’t it?
How long had that monster been under the bed?
I leaned back enough that he could see my face. “Yes, he did,” I said. “He’s a really, really bad guy.”
Honesty seemed like a good approach. Acknowledge my son’s fears. I was scrambling for the next line. What words make mass murder not scary? “There was only one of him,” I said. “Do you know how many people there are in Norway?”
He shook his head.
Dammit. I didn’t, either. “A lot. Millions.” I was improvising. “After that one man—the one bad man—did that, thousands of those other people put flowers all over the city, giant mounds of flowers everywhere, because they were so sad and mad. There was that one bad guy, but everyone else tried to take care of each other.”
“Okay?”
I guessed he was thinking the same thing I was thinking, which was: So what? The goodwill of the average Norwegian was useless in a North Carolina elementary school. Also, the dead people were still dead.
“What I mean is, there are very, very few bad guys in the world,” I said. “And bad things happen, but very, very rarely. That’s why I write about them, because they’re so unusual.”
He looked skeptical. His eyes were still moist.
“The man in Norway has nothing to do with your school,” I said. “And this kid’s father isn’t one of the bad guys. Promise. Okay?”
Calvin nodded weakly.
He rolled on his side. His eyes were still open when I switched off the light. I stayed on the edge of the bed in the dark until he fell asleep, watching him and wondering what other terrible things I’d left in the shadows.
Louise and I were more diligent after that, always aware that one of the boys might be within earshot. We would preemptively explain what I was working on in slightly more detail, especially if it involved an event they might see on the news or hear about from their friends, but we dulled the sharp points, softened the focus. We would ask if they had any questions, but they rarely did. For the most part, my work to them was something that happened in faraway places. They did not need to know how much of it went on in my head.
In the weeks before we got the peacocks, I was writing about a dead soldier and his family. That task was not appreciably different from dozens of other projects, except I was having a terrible time of it, writing and deleting for days. Killing the soldier on the page wasn’t difficult, though things I had learned about him, from when he was a boy, reminded me of Calvin. Tiny details, quirks and mannerisms and such, but those are the ones that resonate; the soldier was familiar to me in ways that none of the other dead had been. And so I was dreading the paragraphs that had to come next. Unlike death, grief is extremely hard to write. It has no boundaries or shape, nothing physical to anchor the words. The temptation is to force it into view with adjectives and platitudes, and the danger is in slipping across the filament between moving and maudlin. Getting it right requires an intimacy that can’t help but feel invasive, and it has to be right because it is so intimate.
Until the soldier, I had been able to stand outside of other people’s grief. I could study it from a safe distance, close enough to see the details and feel the edges, but still at a remove, as if from behind a sterile membrane. But because I could see my own child in the soldier, the barrier dissolved. Writing that father’s grief, I finally figured out, was more visceral experience than intellectual exercise.
I discussed this at length with Comet and Snowball, the chickens. I worked in the yard with them in the late spring, before the pecans had leafed out, moving my mildewed camp chair every so often to keep the sun off my screen and basal cells from sprouting on my pink Irish skin. The ladies would cock their heads while I read them sentences and paragraphs, staring at me with one orange eye each, not really listening, of course, but putting on a pretty good show of it. They looked like they were paying attention. When I got completely stuck, which was often, I sat in the grass and fed them blueberries. After a few days of this, I taught them to jump for treats. I was astonished that a chicken had a 14-inch vertical.
The peacocks, within a couple of weeks of their arrival, had replaced Comet and Snowball as an audience for my more serious work conversations. They had the advantage of being physical captives, unable to wander away if they grew tired of me droning on, as the chickens occasionally did.
“If we start with the dead lawyer,” I said to the peacocks one afternoon, “that’s kind of backing into it, right?”
Ethel tipped her head to one side but did not betray an opinion.
“The airport scene with the live lawyer makes much more sense, I think. I mean, she’s the one in the middle of all this.”
Carl and Mr. Pickle stood a safe distance behind Ethel, shy slackers in the back of the lecture hall. They were excellent collaborators, never interrupting or criticizing, patiently listening to me sort out my thoughts, which was easier to do if I heard them out loud. Tater was much too excitable for such matters, and I felt less silly talking to a trio of large birds than to myself. Plus, the boys might be close enough to hear me if I were to walk around muttering disjointed fragments about dead lawyers and airports.
All three peacocks watched me intently, as if expecting to hear something profound. They were actually expecting blueberries. Whenever I sat down inside the coop—I’d put a cinder block in there after the first bale of hay was scattered—they understood that I would produce blueberries or tomatoes or blackberries, whatever was abundant in the garden or cheap at the grocery. Yet they were still skittish enough to wait for treats, not cluck and hop and grab at my fingers like the chickens. It was easy enough to reframe their timidity as interest.
There was a limit to their patience, though. I rambled on for five minutes, maybe six, which is a very long time when you’re rambling, but not so long at all when you’re trying to piece together a month of reporting. Carl got bored and looked out at the yard. Ethel took a single step toward me and stopped, a mildly insistent move, a soft demand for a blueberry.
“All right, then,” I said. “We’re all agreed: Start in the airport, then circle back to the dead lawyer in the next section. Good?”
Ethel blinked.
“Yes, good.” I pulled a blueberry out of the carton and balanced it at the tips of my fingers. Ethel watched it carefully, waiting. She knew I’d let it roll off into the straw soon enough.
None of them would eat out of my hand, though, which was slowing down my plan to release them into the yard. I was still hoping Burkett was wrong, that my peacocks were the exception to the fly-away rule. I’d read about peacocks staying on farms and in neighborhoods for generations. Martha Stewart allowed a couple of her big males to wander her property, and they hadn’t escaped. Granted, she was working with 152 more acres than me. But my three supposedly were an established social clique—I was aware that I was being selective in the absurdities I chose to believe—so I thought there was a fair chance they might stick around.
Sean Flynn is a GQ correspondent.
This article was adapted from Why Peacocks?: An Unlikely Search for Meaning in the World’s Most Magnificent Bird by Sean Flynn. Copyright © 2021 by Sean Flynn. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.