The Complete Collection. William Wharton

back there in that fake bird-brain of yours, they have it all worked out, you’ll be written into some budget as a loss. If you come back, so you go to school, or take a job, or start raising canaries again; it doesn’t matter. Everything’s been arranged for. You’ll be fit in before you can think about it.

      ‘Even if you could reach down and bite your own jugular vein, they have a whole system with forms to fill out and everything; it’s just another kind of thing they expect. I don’t even know who they are except all other human beings, including us.’

      I stop. What’s the use talking about it. I only want Birdy to know he’s not alone thinking the world is shitty. Maybe if he knows I’m with him, that he’s not the only one who knows, it might help.

      ‘Look, Birdy. I’m going to have another operation on my face next week. That means I’ll have to leave here. I’ll only be staying around another day or two. If I stay any longer, they’ll probably lock me up in one of these rooms. That shit, Weiss, is getting close. I don’t know what he’ll think if he ever gets a really good look into my head.

      ‘You watch out for him, Birdy, he’s one smart son-of-a-bitch. He gets inside when you aren’t expecting it. He’s got you figured for at least one paper at the next psychiatric convention. He doesn’t want to cure you, he wants to keep you just like this. Your advantage is, he doesn’t know you’re a bird. When he figures that one out, you’re in trouble.

      ‘He’ll probably have some kind of giant bird cage made for you, with perches, feeding cups, and everything. He’ll search out that old pigeon suit of yours and have you shipped air freight at army expense to the big conference. He’ll keep you in this cage and lecture on the “bird boy”. When he’s finished with you he’ll probably sell you to a circus.

      ‘I can see it all. There’s the blare of trumpets and an elephant, all dressed in sequins, pulling a little cart. The cart is painted red and black; on top is a golden bird cage. The circus orchestra is playing “He’s Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage”, and there you are, all decked out in a bird costume, only this time it’s a canary costume. Ten thousand canaries will have been defeathered to make this costume. You’ll hop from perch to perch, do some peeping and maybe warble a few songs for the people. They’ll have a giant-sized nest and you’ll jump into it and try hatching some eggs the size of medicine balls. As a finale, a dwarf clown jumps out of one of these balls, dressed like a miniature bird, and thumps you on the head with a rubber worm. You’ll get all the birdseed you can eat.’

      I’m winding down but Birdy is definitely smiling.

      ‘You know, Birdy; your old lady actually sent all those baseballs here? Having them sent was my idea; I hope you don’t mind. I told Weiss it might help you come around. Now I don’t know what the hell to tell him. He’s liable to put those baseballs and you together and figure it out.

      ‘Think of it. She had those balls all the time. Renaldi says they’re moldy, so she must’ve had them buried. Maybe she had them buried down where we hunted for the treasure. Maybe she ran down just before us and dug them up. It’d explain the depression in the ground.’

      Birdy’s watching me. He’s giving me his ‘you must be crazy’ look. I’m beginning to believe he’s been right about that all the time. I can see them sending Birdy up to Dix in about two weeks. There I am hunkering around in the ‘altogether’, throwing shit at anybody who comes near me. He’s sitting with a garbage lid for a shield talking to me about raising pigeons and running away to Wildwood, and ice skating, all that crap.

      God, it’d be great; just to let go and stop pretending; to let it all out; holler, scream, give Tarzan yells, run up walls or punch them; to spit or piss or shit at anybody who comes near! God, that’d be good! What keeps me from doing it? I’ve been hurt enough; I could do it if I really wanted to. Nobody could blame me.

      I don’t know how long I was dreaming the dream before I began to know. It’s hard to know you’re dreaming unless you catch yourself doing it.

      I was working in one of the flight cages when it first came to me. I’d put all the birds into the breeding cages and there were already eleven nests built and over thirty eggs had been laid. There were eggs being brooded under four of the females. Everything was going beautifully.

      I’d decided that sand in the bottom of the flight cages wasn’t such a good idea. The bird shit sank into it and got smelly. Also, the seeds and shells of seeds fell into the sand and rotted. I was designing a slanted concrete floor I could hose out easily through the wire.

      So, there I was, sitting in the bottom of the cage, smoothing cement, when it came to me. I realized I’d been in this cage. Now, this shouldn’t have surprised me, except my feeling was that the cage had seemed larger, much larger. My view of the inside of the cage was different; it was the view of a bird.

      I searched my mind. The only thing I could think of was that I’d dreamed about being inside this cage and was remembering the dream. The next two days I concentrated, trying to remember the dream. I was getting more and more sure I’d dreamed it and was somehow being stopped from remembering. It’s hard to catch a dream.

      First, I set an alarm clock under my pillow so I’d wake up dreaming. I did this three nights in a row with the alarm set for different times. Each time I woke up, but by the time I shut off the alarm, the dream was gone. I’d lie there in the dark trying to make my mind go back. I’d almost make it sometimes, but then it’d slip away. I began to wonder if I wasn’t going to start making up a dream that didn’t happen.

      Then, one afternoon, I was painting the new cement floor of the flight cage with waterproof green paint, when it came back all of a sudden. I remembered being in the cage as a bird. I had to have been dreaming it. The dream came to me while I was in that open-minded non-thinking state you get into sometimes when you’re doing something easy and concentrated, like painting. At first, it was as if I were thinking it, daydreaming, then I knew I was remembering the dream. I kept painting, trying to keep it happening. I felt that if I turned my mind on to the dream too much, it’d go away.

      I could remember many nights of dreaming; it seemed to go back a long time. This could be because it was a dream. Dream time is different. In my dream, I’d been living in this flight cage with the other males. Alfonso, the bird, was here, and all his male children, along with the cinnamon, the topknot, and the crazy who kept flying into the sides of the cage. I could talk to them. I heard them speak in my mind in human language, in English, but they sounded like birds. I was a bird myself; I made sounds like a bird. I couldn’t remember in the dream how I looked. I didn’t look down at myself, but the other birds treated me as a bird, or almost like a bird.

      I ate seed, watching them eat and imitating. I was like a baby bird learning, and they all helped me. I could feel myself standing on a perch with my feet. I didn’t look down at my feet but they were bird feet, not human feet, and were wrapped around the perch.

      I flew with the other birds! The flying was wonderful. I’d flap my wings and soar from perch to perch. It wasn’t so easy. The other birds flew beside me and taught me what to do. I was learning about flying. Alfonso flew with me to the top of the cage and made me look down at the bottom. I had no fear of flying at all. I felt like a bird. I felt I couldn’t be hurt by falling. Going up was harder, took a little more effort, than going down; that was all.

      I looked through the cage to the outside. I saw the houses and knew what they were. I could see the wall and the gate and knew what they were for and what was behind them. I remembered all the spaces around that I couldn’t see. I knew all kinds of things a bird couldn’t know. I looked out at the trees in the yard and wished I were flying there.

      In my dream, in the cage, I learned to fly the way I’ve always wanted to fly.

      That night, as I’m going to sleep, I force myself not to think of anything but the dream. I go over all the details I can remember. I don’t want to think of anything else between being awake and going to sleep. I go to sleep and dream. When I wake in the morning, I remember everything. I’ve ‘caught hold’ of the dream.

      After