Читать книгу The Complete Collection - William Wharton, Уильям Уортон - Страница 25

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 breakfast, I go to feed and take care of the birds. It’s a school day so I do everything in a hurry. There are eight new eggs. I take them out of the nests and put eggs into three other nests. There are ten birds now sitting eggs. The first eggs should start hatching in another week. I look into the flight cage where I fly at night. I wish I could be in the dream, flying there, instead of outside, getting ready for school.

All day I wait to get back to my birds, even more, to get back into the dream. The day at school is more like a dream than the dream. I’m turned upside down. The realest thing is the dream and the next real thing is watching my birds. Going to school, writing English papers, doing geometry, studying Biology or talking to people isn’t real at all. The things that are happening in the days of my life are now the way the dream used to be. I know they’re happening, but I don’t care enough to remember.

The days and nights go on. Babies begin hatching in the nests. More eggs are laid. Every pair is well on the way. There is an average of better than four eggs per nest. All the birds look healthy.

Because I talk to them in my dreams, I feel very close to the birds, especially the males; because I’m still flying in the male cage. I wonder what will happen when the dream catches up with the day and I’m left alone in the flight cage. Or maybe I’ll be with a female in one of the breeding cages, except there’re no extra females. I don’t have any control of the dream; I can only wait and see what happens.

In the day I try talking to the males, the ones I talk to in my dreams, especially Alfonso; but they ignore me. They don’t recognize me at all, except as Birdy, the boy. It makes me feel rejected, alone. I spend my days watching different birds with binoculars because it gets me close, blocks out everything else; the birds fill my whole vision. They’re the way they are in my dreams, real my size. I feel physically close to them and they’re not just little feathered animals. I’m getting to hate taking my eyes from the binoculars and looking at myself and everything around me. My hands, my feet, are grotesque. I’m becoming a stranger in myself, in my own cages, with my own birds.

I stop doing the flying exercise. If I can fly in my dreams, I don’t need to fly in the real world. I’m ready to accept the fact that there’s most likely no way I can actually get myself off the ground, anyway. I could probably manage an extended glide, but I wouldn’t fly. I’m also finding it isn’t so much the flying I want, not as a boy flapping heavy wings; I want to be a bird. In my dreams I am a bird and that’s all that matters.

I’m making egg food three times a day. I’m using almost a dozen eggs a day now. There are young in all the nests. It isn’t nearly as much fun having so many birds. When you get too far away from anything and there’s too much of it, the outside is all you see and it becomes work like anything else. It’s also hard for me to handle the birds. I feel like an awkward giant; the bird is only a bit of feathers beating and struggling in my hand. It takes the wonderful part away.

Then, I have something new happen in the dream. I’m in the flight cage as usual; the other males are still with me. I’m flying up and over a perch without landing on it. It’s a trick Alfonso has been teaching me. Alfonso watches for a while, then suggests we go down and have a few seeds. I fly down with him and land on the perch by the seed cup. It’s late afternoon and there’s sun on the new aviary floor. I look out of the cage into the part of the aviary with the breeding cages.

I see myself sitting on a chair with the binoculars! I can’t see my face, only my jacket and my legs with the pants I’d been wearing that day. I fly over to the wire and look carefully. I peep to myself but I don’t turn around. I can look at myself all I want. It’s me. I’m even wearing my red woolen cap. I can see my own hand over the edge of the chair steadying the binoculars. It’s like looking at myself dead. Me, out there, doesn’t seem to know about me in the cage, hanging on the wire. I’m afraid to look down to see if I have a bird body; I’m afraid I’ll end the dream. How can I see myself in two places at once? That’s too much even for a dream.

If I’m out there, gigantic, looking through binoculars, then where am I really, what am I? I don’t look down. I fly over to Alfonso.

‘Al, who’s that outside the cage?’

Alfonso casually looks through the wire of the flight cage. He cracks another seed and swallows it.

‘He’s the one who keeps us here, he feeds us, he moves us. He brought me here once. He brought Birdie here, too. Everybody knows about him.’

‘Yes, but what is he?’

I want to find out what Alfonso knows. I want to know how much Alfonso is only me in the dream.

‘I don’t know. It’s better not to ask. He’s just there. Without him there would be nothing.’

I fly up again to the perch. In my dream, Alfonso doesn’t know, only I know. I’m confused and this time I’m not sure I’m dreaming. The dream is changing. It’s the first time I’m two separate beings. Time is catching up with the dream, too.

When I wake up, I stay in bed a long time; it’s Saturday. I have to clean all the breeding cages. I have to put in new feed, clean water troughs, make egg food, wash out all the egg cups. Do the birds ever think about where the food comes from? None of these seeds would grow within hundreds of miles of here. It’s all so artificial, make-believe. Their lives go on because I want them to.

Probably our world is the same. At breakfast I put butter on my toast. I don’t know how to make either butter or bread. I don’t know how to raise a cow or milk it. I don’t know how to plant wheat, harvest it, remove the grain, mill it, bake it. The Little Red Hen has it all over me.

– Who wins? What’s winning? The sure way to lose is to have to win.

One thing I know. You sure as hell can’t pin life.

I’m getting so the dream holds together. It stops for the days but I can’t remember that it stops. Another thing is I can’t remember the beginning of what I’m calling the dream no matter how hard I try. In my dream, I’m convinced I’ve always been there, and the dream has no beginning.

When I go out to the aviary, I do not feel strange. I know I exist as me in this aviary in the dream. I know I have my things to do and the birds expect me to do them. I’m Birdy, the boy, who makes it all possible. Without me there would be nothing. I belong here; I’m part.

I sit watching the birds and thinking. One side of me wants to know and another side wants to let it all just happen. I get a pencil and a piece of paper. I write myself a message and put it on the floor of the aviary. How much of what happens in the daytime has anything to do with the dream? Can I reach myself this way?

That night I’m alone in the aviary. It is as empty as it is in the day. The dream has caught up. I can hear the males in the breeding cages just as they are in the real world. I go down to eat some of the egg food and some dandelion leaves. The paper with the note is on the floor.

‘Birdy is a bird is a Birdie.’

That’s what I’d written. I fly to a top perch. I feel terribly cut off; I’m even cut off from the other birds. I peep and call out to them but they do not answer. I call for Alfonso. Nothing! I’m alone but I can fly.

I practice flying and trying to feel exactly what it’s like. I had the wrong idea when I built my models. Flying isn’t like swimming. It isn’t all pushing down, catching air under the wings and pushing against it. There’s a feeling of being lifted from the top, of moving up into an emptiness. Also, my flight feathers twist and pull on the air, pulling back, so I go forward. There was nothing in my models to keep me going forward. Reaching ahead with the wings and pulling back isn’t enough. The flight feathers work like the propeller of an airplane.

I get the courage to look down. I am a bird. I look exactly like a canary. I look like Birdie. I fly all over the cage; I try to watch myself fly. It’s a marvelous feeling, more wonderful than I could possibly have expected. I look outside and wish again I could fly free. There are so many places I’d like to fly. It’s so natural to fly and so unnatural not having anyplace to fly to.

The next day, I think more about my message. It actually didn’t prove anything because I already knew what was written. I went into the dream with it in my head and so I was seeing something I already knew.

When I finish feeding and checking nests, I take five pieces of paper and write five different messages. I turn them upside down and shuffle them completely. I take one at random and put it on the bottom of the flight cage, face up, without looking at it. I also put some seed, egg food, and water in the empty cage. This doesn’t make sense because there was always something to eat when the other males were there, even though the cage’d been empty for two weeks and I hadn’t been putting in any food. But now, the dream is caught up and I don’t want to take any chance of starving myself to death. I suspect there’s the possibility I could get caught in the dream for several days, even in one night.

In my dream that night, I’m alone again. There’s the piece of paper on the floor. I fly down to read it. All five messages are on the one sheet of paper. I go over to eat some egg food and drink a drop of water. I look at the paper again. This time there’s nothing on it.

I’m beginning to know what I’m doing. I’m at the edge of where you have things happen to you or you make them happen. The dream is mine and it’s as real as anything but it’s mostly a matter of what I want. Usually I don’t know what I want, so it’s hard to control the dream. Also, things that happen outside the dream come into the dream on their own. I can’t make anything happen in the dream without something like it happening in the daytime world. I still don’t understand but I’m not frightened.

After that, I get so I can talk to the other birds in the breeding cages. I’ve never talked to them from the big aviary flight cage before, or looked at them from there, so I have to wish it on purpose for it to happen. I know the birds, I know where they are and I’ve talked to them before. I put these things together to make it happen.

I talk to Alfonso first and then to Birdie. It’s good talking to her. I know her so well but we’ve never been able to speak to each other. She’s very excited about her new babies and she’s glad I’m in the dream. She doesn’t call it ‘in the dream’, she says ‘with us’. I talk to almost all the other birds. By looking through the binoculars I know what each cage looks like from the inside and which bird is in which cage. I know who I’m talking to without seeing them. I don’t feel so alone.

Another way I’m not like a bird is I look at things with both eyes, straight on. I can’t get myself to see the way a bird does. In every way, when I don’t look down at myself, I feel like me, Birdy, the boy.

In the morning, before I leave for school, I go out to put in new egg food and generally check around. I look at the note on the floor and it’s still there, but just one message. The egg food is untouched. All day long in school, I think about it. I dream the things I know. That’s why I’m Birdie; I know Birdie best. I wonder if I’m a female. Birdie’s a female but I was in the male cage. I’d like to find out which I am. I don’t want to make myself one or the other, I only want to know.

– Sex, age, races, all that bullshit keeps everybody apart. Competition gets to be the only link we’ve got. But, if you’ve got to ‘beat’ somebody then you’re more alone.

Games are something we’ve made up to help us forget we’ve forgotten how to play. Playing is doing something for itself; Birdy and I played a lot.

Birdy really smiled at me there, a true vintage ‘It doesn’t matter’ smile. He could be putting this whole thing on. That’s OK, too.

I’ll try singing in my dream tonight; that should settle it for me. In Plane Geometry that afternoon, I get into an argument with Mr Shull, the teacher, about parallel lines. I say they have to meet. I’m beginning to think everything comes together somewhere.

In the dream, I sing. I can never remember singing as a boy, but singing as a bird is completely different from anything I’ve ever known. It isn’t what I expected at all. I sound like a roller canary singing, but the words I’m hearing are in English and sound almost like poetry. I’m hearing myself simultaneously as bird and as boy speaking words. I’m singing the thoughts I’ve had about flying combined with the feeling I’m having as a bird.

One of the first songs I sing sounds like this: There is nothing of fright when one flies free. There’s only the taste of air and touching nowhere. I see the earth below and it’s down the way the sky is up when you look from the ground. Everything is out or away and the play of gravity is like sand.

Now, I know I’m not Birdie completely. I can hear Birdie from the breeding cage. She wants me to sing more but the singing is still hard for me. Alfonso starts singing to Birdie. I can understand his whole song for the first time. He sings this: Come fly with me; dry thistles sliding through a crystal sky, you and I. Below, mountains hump and clouds hover while cows slumber seven stomachs deep in clover. We glide together in twisting currents of air, caring for nothing. We are each other and we take wing to find fertile fields and silent beaches.

I listen and know Alfonso couldn’t sing that song. A bird can know nothing about cows’ stomachs. I’ve just learned about them in biology class. Alfonso has never flown over mountains or clouds; these are my ideas. Alfonso is singing and I’m hearing his song with my mind, in my dream. Can Alfonso really talk, or is it all just me? I can’t believe that. Alfonso’s taught me things about flying I could not know myself. I can’t put this together in my dream. During this night, I know I’m dreaming all during the dream.

There’s one thing I’m sure of. Singing is like flying. When I sing, I close my eyes and see myself flying through and over trees. I’m sure that’s why canaries sing. They were put in cages because they sang and now they sing because they’re in cages.

Canaries have been in cages for over four hundred years. A canary generation, the time from birth till breeding, is less than a year. A human generation is about twenty years. Therefore, birds have been in cages for a time that for humans would be eight thousand years. In fact, canaries and humans have been in cages the same number of generations.

I begin to wonder what men do that’s the same as canary singing. It’s probably thinking. We built this cage, civilization, because we could think and now we have to think because we’re caught in our cage. I’m sure there’s a real world still there if I can only get out of the cage. But, would my canaries sing as much if they could live in the open and fly freely? I don’t know. I hope some day to find out.

The breeding cages are going at a great rate. I already have birds out of the nest. Soon, I’m going to have some ready to put in the flight cages. I don’t know whether to put them in the cage where I am in my dream or in the other one. I’m still trying to decide this when I start dreaming of Perta.

When I say dreaming, I don’t mean I’m dreaming of Perta the way I’m dreaming the rest of the dream. I’m dreaming of Perta in my dream. I’m sleeping in my dream on one foot as a bird and I’m dreaming of Perta.

Perta is smaller than most female canaries. She has a light green head blushing back to a lighter yellow-green on her breast, then darker green on her back. Her wings vary from layer to layer of her feathers. This gives a variegated surface like a blue check pigeon, only in shades of green. She has white bars on the outside of her wings because her last two flight feathers on each wing are white. Her shape is roundish and she flies with small movements, fast flapping but great grace and speed. She has markings over her eyes almost like eyebrows. Her beak and legs aren’t as dark as Alfonso, nor as light pink as Birdie.

In my dream, I’m sleeping on the top perch of the aviary and dreaming. I’m lonely and tired; I’m sleepy and sleeping in my own dream. I know this much. It’s several nights before I realize I’m dream-dreaming Perta.

In the dream-dream, I’m alone in the flight cage and look down to see someone at the food dish. I know immediately it’s a female. She either doesn’t know I’m up on the top perch or she’s ignoring me. I stay still, watching her, enjoying her movements. I watch her closely the way I watch the birds with my binoculars as a boy.

Her flying is not exceptional in terms of power or thrust but she’s very light in the air. I feel she loves flying and flies for pleasure. I watch her practice different landings and banking maneuvers. She integrates the movement of her tail, the tilting of her wings and the shifting of her body as if she’s dancing in the air. I’m falling in love with her in the dream the way I fell in love with Birdie, but it’s so much more real.

In my dream, I sing to her the songs I know and some I didn’t know I knew. When I wake in my bed, I can’t remember the songs I’ve sung. It’s too far inside. As a boy, I decide to put some water in the flight cage so Perta can bathe. I want it to be something special. When my mother isn’t in the kitchen, I take the cut glass butter dish she got when her mother died. We never use it except for company so I’m sure she won’t notice if it’s missing one night. I put the dish in the bottom of the cage that afternoon after I’ve fed all the birds.

I move two nests of young birds into the other flight cage; they’re eating egg food and starting to crack seed. I’m saving the male flight cage for Perta and myself. I call her Perta because that’s the closest word I can think of for the sound I know her by.

So, now I’m getting into the dream, and in the dream I’m forcing myself to sleep again so I can dream.

Perta comes in the dream-dream. The water is on the floor, in the late afternoon sunlight, just as it was when I left it that afternoon. The light is going through the cut glass and making rainbows on the floor and on the back wall. I wait patiently, on my perch in the upper, darker part of the aviary. I know I’m making it happen, I’m controlling the dream in the dream but I also know I have feelings and knowings beyond myself, that I can’t know what will happen. I’m into the furthest back parts of my mind.

Perta hops onto the side of the dish and puts her beak into the clear, cold water. She lets it roll back down her throat, tipping her head back and thrusting her breast forward, stretching upward on her thin legs. She does this again. I watch. Then, she pushes her face into the water and splashes back under her wings. She flaps her wings to capture the cold water under the warmest parts of her wings, inside where the down of softest feathers is. She does this two or three times before she lightly springs into the water, arches her back, tilts her head and starts throwing the clean water onto the feathers between her wings on her back.

I can see all this with unnatural clarity. It’s as if I’m beside her. I see each drop remain intact and roll off the soft feathers. I can slow down the rapid movements of her bath and see them happen slowly, unfolding with infinite grace.

Then, I start to sing. I’m singing, and I’ve made no conscious decision to do this. Perta has flown onto a perch and is preening herself. She doesn’t seem to hear me. I’m excited. I feel hot blood rushing through me. All my muscles are contracted and my wings are lifted in tension. I’ve pulled myself tall on my legs and I’m rocking back and forth with my song; dancing to my own rhythm, aiming all of me toward Perta. I feel a sense of haste, of need, of desire for completion. Perta continues her preening.

I fly down next to her. I land beside her on the perch and increase the strength and desire of my song. Perta pays no attention. She doesn’t turn her head or move. I edge toward her. She doesn’t move away. I’m prepared to have her fly from me; I want to chase her, to sing to her in flight. I come closer. She reaches back with her beak and pulls out, straightens the feathers on her back. There’s only one thing to do; I feel it inside myself. I fly over Perta and lower myself onto her. I’m turgid with passion.

There’s nothing! I come down on the place where Perta was and there’s nothing at all. I’m alone! I find myself falling, not from the perch but from the dreams. I fall out of my dream-dream into my dream; know myself for a second, alone, asleep on the top perch, then I fall again out of the dream and into my bed in my room.

I wake up. It’s the first time I’ve had a wet dream. I’ve kept hearing about wet dreams but never had one. I go into the bathroom and wash myself off. I bring back the washcloth and wipe up the sheets.

I lie back and feel as if I’ve fallen from a far place. I’m terribly alone again.

That weekend I go looking for her. I know she has to be somewhere. I must’ve seen her and not known it. I couldn’t make her up completely. Instinctively, I go to Mr Lincoln’s first. His cages are in full breeding. He shows me his new young birds. He has two very dark ones. He tells me he thinks he’ll have his pure black canary in only about ten more years if he keeps going at the rate he’s going. He’s worked out a chart on a curving graph. He says the getting darker tapers off as you get closer. The difference looks less and you’re always having regressions. He calculates he’s ninety percent of the way; it’s going to take ten more years to get to 99.96 percent black. He points to himself and says, ‘I ain’t even ninety percent black myself, not by a long shot.’

I ask him if he has any females he’s not using. I want to see if she’s there. She isn’t in any of the breeding cages. I knew she wouldn’t be. He points to the cover over his flight cage on the left. He says he keeps it covered because these free females will flirt with the males in the breeding cages and those males’ll sing back, and sometimes a female on a nest will get so mad, she’ll abandon the nest. I’d never thought about that. He tells me he’s going to sell off these females; most of them are sterile, or lay an egg or two per nest, and none of them are important on his breeding charts.

I look into the cage and there are about ten females. I see her right away. It’s Perta exactly. Some part of me, the bird part, remembered her. I’m in love with her as a boy. I fell in love with her in my dream as a bird but it’s come through to my life as a boy. I have to have her; I turn to Mr Lincoln and point her out. It seems so strange to see her as a bird when I’m a boy; I feel as if I’m spying on her. It’s as if I’m looking through a keyhole and seeing something I’m not supposed to see.

‘You mean that one there?’

He’s pointing. I nod.

‘She’s not going to do you much good. I’ve had her for two years now and she hasn’t had a fertile egg yet. I’ve tried three different males on her. The last one was the most ruttinest buck of a bird you can imagine. She just has a regular four clear eggs every time. I’m sure she’s been bred, but there’s something wrong with her.’

Mr Lincoln watches her with me. She’s moving sideways, back and forth on the perch. She’s seeing me. I know it.

‘I don’t know anybody I hate enough to sell her off to. I should wring her neck but she’s such a pretty little thing I can’t get myself to do it. Still, there’s no good in a female who won’t give off a fertile egg. I’m sure she’d make a great little mother, too. You should see the fine nest she builds; and she sits it tight and brave as you could like, all for nothing.’

‘I want to buy her.’

I get it out. I’m watching her and I know she’s watching me. She never looked at me in the dream-dream. Would she look at me now?

‘I won’t sell her. I’ll give her to you. Save me having to wring her neck. All she does is eat seed.’

I really don’t want to buy her. I’m glad Mr Lincoln is giving her to me. It’s as if he’s her father and he’s giving me permission to marry his daughter. I can’t say anything so I put out my hand to shake with Mr Lincoln. He doesn’t know what to do for a minute but then he sees I’m serious. He reaches out and takes my hand in both his. He looks into my eyes. My eyes are filling with water, not that I’m about to cry, I’m excited and happy.

‘Are you all right, boy? Have you been sick or something?’

I shake my head. I don’t want to talk. When you’ve been a bird, talking seems crude as grunting. Mr Lincoln knows somehow, turns away and goes into the flight cage. He has no trouble catching her; he just goes over and picks her off the perch. She wants to be caught. I know that. He takes her out in his hand, turns her upside down and blows away the feathers around her vent.

‘See? She’s right ready. You’d think she’d be a perfect breeder.’

I close my eyes and don’t look. Mr Lincoln doesn’t notice. He turns Perta around and rubs his fingers over the top of her head.

‘See? She has little eyebrow markings over each eye, almost like human eyebrows. I never seen that on a bird before.’

I nod my head. He hands her to me. I feel her heart beating against my hand. Mr Lincoln goes to get a small carrying box for me but I say I’ll carry her in my hand. I have a terrible advantage.

I’d come over through the park instead of on my bike. I try to thank Mr Lincoln but I really only want to get away, take Perta back with me.

I put her in the flight cage and watch her all the rest of the day through my binoculars. It’s exactly like the dream-dream. This is the first time something that started in the dream is happening afterward in my boy life.

When I look into the breeding cages and clean the floors I feel part of the other birds. I’m not alone even when I’m only a boy; I have my female, too. She’s with me in my boy life and in the dream-dream, too. I’m hoping she’ll be in the real dream tonight. I’m even more excited about it than flying.

That night in the dream I don’t sleep. I’m up on the highest perch and I see her on the bottom of the cage eating seed just as she was the first time in the dream-dream. I know enough to know I’m dreaming and to know why she’s there, but those ideas are only like dreams themselves. She’s most real here in my dream.

I watch her for a while. The butter dish is filled with water, and she takes a bath just as she did in the dream-dream. I’d forgotten to put the dish in the cage before I went to sleep; this is how the dream can have its own life. The dream me knows what I want more than I do myself.

I watch her bathe as I did before. Till now, she still hasn’t seen me in the top of the cage. I sing to her. I sing:

How is it I know you, strange one?

In what untrammeled sky did we fly?

Perhaps I was the air and you

the bird. Did you fly through me?

Why are we not mated? Give me

a sign; will you be mine?

Do you see me, feel my desire?

Or are you already tired of my song?

When I’m finished, I fly down to her. She sees me. She hears me. The wall between us is gone.

‘Hello. I didn’t know there was another bird in this cage. I thought I was alone. Have you been here long?’

I don’t want to lie to her but I also want her to think of me only as a bird. I answer.

‘Yes, I’ve been here all the time.’

‘I like your song. You sing very well. Do you have a female?’

‘No. I am alone.’

‘Were you serious in your song? Did you sing what you mean? Or were you only singing?’

‘I was serious. I sang what I mean.’

‘I have no male now. I have had no babies. I have had many eggs but no babies. I would like to be your female, but you should know this.’

‘Yes. I would like that.’

‘Do you understand?’

I cannot answer her. I’ve never talked to anyone who spoke and thought so directly. Her ideas, her ways, are clear and straight as clean water. There is a natural flow between us that I’ve never known. I feel myself going out into her and she coming into me. I start to sing:

I bring unweathered seeds of joy,

an endless coming together. Let

us fly. Our time grows from

yesterday’s tomorrows; we glide

gently to our private past.

Let us fly.

‘That was lovely, even stronger than the first song. You have thoughts in your songs I’ve not heard before. It is as if you are more than a bird, have seen beyond the cage.’

‘Thank you. But if you are a bird, there is nothing more or beyond. Let us fly together.’

We fly over all the cage that night. I show her things Alfonso taught me and she shows me how to do her quick turns and slow graceful hovering landings. She has a fine way of using the air as a hold and not sliding on it. It’s like treading water. She teaches me how to do it without thrashing or fighting the air.

The next night when I dream, it is early afternoon. It is earlier in the day than it’s ever been before in the dream. The bath water is there and it’s fresh. I did remember to put it in this time.

Perta is there. She is waiting and welcomes me by flying up before I fly down to her. She looks me in the eyes, straight on, very unbirdlike. As I remember this, she shifts her head and looks at me, bird-style. We shift our heads back and forth, looking into each other; my left to her left, right to right, my left to her right, her left to my right. I don’t remember birds doing this. Then, she flies to the perch below.

‘Come, Birdy, let us bathe together.’

I didn’t tell her my name.

I follow her down, wondering how she knows my name; it makes a big hole in the dream. I don’t understand. Is the Perta here totally separated from the Perta in the flight cage? Do I completely make her up? Does she know my name because I know it? I fly down with her to the water. She is standing on the lip of the dish waiting. I stand beside her. She dips her bill into the water and throws some onto me. I’ve never taken a bath as a bird. I don’t quite know how to go about it. I dip my bill into the water and throw some onto Perta. I’m awkward. Perta looks at me intently. She throws water on me again. I throw some water on her. I’m better the second time. I have a terrible fear Perta will discover I’m not a bird, that I’m the boy and she’ll become frightened of me. This guilt, this fear, is coming between us. Perta feels it. She looks at me, then lowers herself into the water. The sunshine is again broken into pieces of colored light. I’m bathing in the light as she throws beads of water around me. Then, I’m in the bath myself, fluttering, losing myself in the light, in the water, in Perta. It is like floating in music. I want to sing but I wait. I follow everything Perta does. We dance to our own music. I do not need to sing. I realize then that, as all male canaries sing, Perta dances, probably all female canaries dance. It is something you cannot know unless you are a bird; female canaries dance.

When we are completely wet, when the bath is finished, we fly together over all the cage. Our feathers are wet and we are heavy. We fly in the air with the same feeling a boy knows when he swims in the water. We go slowly. We must struggle for space, for distance. We shake the water from our feathers, sprinkle each other. I’m still following Perta, watching her move. It continues as dance, a dance in slow movements, but a dance. Perta watches me watch her. From her eyes, I can see the questioning. Perhaps birds never watch each other the way I’m watching her. I’m watching her because of the pleasure it gives me, also to learn how to take a bath as a bird.

When, at last, we are dry, we sit on a perch beside each other and preen our feathers. It is a wonderful feeling to pull the slightly wet feather through my beak, feeling the individual branchings and lining them up. It is like carefully combing wet hair, but a thousand times more satisfying. There is a right way, no other, for feathers to be. When they are that way it gives a feeling of being finished, of having things done correctly. I want very much to do a most unbirdlike thing; to preen Perta’s feathers. I’ve never seen birds do this. Except for feeding, singing, peep-peep-peeping, and fucking, birds show no other signs of affection I’ve ever seen. I want to caress Perta the way a boy would caress a girl, but I have only my beak and my feet. It would seem so natural to take one of her feathers into my mouth and straighten it with the tender edges of my beak. This is a place where the bird and the boy are different. I decide to ask her about my name.

‘Perta, how did you know my name?’

She looks at me, surprised. She stops preening.

‘I do not know your name. You have not told me.’

‘But when you invited me to bathe, you called me Birdy.’

‘Yes. But Birdy isn’t a name.’

‘What is it then?’

‘It’s Birdy; what you call a bird when you don’t know his name. Birdy is anybird. Every bird knows that.’

How can I explain I didn’t know it? How does all this fit in the dream? This is one of the nights I know all the time that I’m dreaming. It’s one of the last nights like that. Perta looks at me.

‘How did you know my name? I did not tell you.’

Perta in the dream-dream had a name and it was Perta. She did not tell me; I made it up. How could I know her name? I have to lie again.

‘You told me the first night when we were flying.’

Perta ruffles her feathers and takes half a minute before answering.

‘No. I did not tell you. Why do you lie to me? There is no reason for us to lie to each other. Each time we cannot be true, it is something between us. There must be truth or there is nothing.’

‘I do not know what is true, Perta. I know your name by ways I cannot tell you about. That is not a lie.’

‘It is not the truth either. When one knows and one does not tell, that is not truth.’

Perta flies down and eats some seed. I fly down beside her. We eat together for a while. I am very much in love with her. It is so strange to find such a hard stone of purity in so much softness. It is like the pit in the center of a peach.

During the days, I can think of nothing but Perta. It is spring and I’m in my junior year in high school. Everybody’s all excited about the Junior Prom. My mother asks me who I’m taking. I’m not taking anybody. The girls at the school all look like overgrown, awkward cows to me. They move as if their feet grow right into the ground. My eyes are tuned to the fine, delicate movements of birds.

Al is taking one of the cheerleaders. He has his letters in football and wrestling. He’ll probably take another letter in track for throwing the discus. These are all varsity letters. He’s going to be the only junior three-letter man in the school.

Al practices with the discus out in center field just over our fence. I go out sometimes and throw the discus back to him. It’s one thing I can do as a boy which isn’t completely boring and doesn’t have to do with my birds. Making a discus go a long way is as much a matter of getting it off at the right angle to catch the air under it, with the least air resistance, as it is strength. Throwing it back to Al, I keep experimenting and once in a while I throw it farther than Al does himself. Of course, I have a strange strength advantage. I’m unnaturally strong in the deltoids, triceps, and latissimus dorsii muscles from all the wing-flapping.

Now, Al wants me to go out for track and throw the discus. He keeps measuring my distances. I like throwing the discus but I don’t get anywhere. I think people lose the real fun in things by measuring, scoring, wanting to win.

Al keeps bugging me to take some girl or another to the prom. Through his girlfriend, the cheerleader, he knows about twenty girls who want to go to the prom but have nobody stupid enough to take them. My mother is getting absolutely hysterical. It’s some kind of personal insult to her that I don’t want to go out and rent a tux for five dollars, buy an orchid for a dollar and a half to pin on some girl I hardly know, and pay two dollars for prom tickets. I hate to dance and the whole thing’d be a waste of time for everybody.

It’s three days before the prom and I think I’m home free when Al comes over to our house one evening. I’ve finished with the birds and I’m looking forward to the dream that night. Perta and I are getting very close and I miss her terribly during the day. Al tells me, right in front of my mother, how he knows a girl named Doris Robinson who asked him to ask me if I’d take her to the prom. She has the tickets and will buy her own corsage. She drives and can get her father’s car. All I have to do is rent the tux.

Jesus, I could kill Al! My mother starts all over again about how there’s only one Junior Prom in your life and how if she’d had the chance to go to high school she would have considered it a high point in her life and how I don’t appreciate how lucky I am. My father reaches in his pocket and pulls out five dollars. He says I can have it to rent the tux. I’m cornered, what can I do? I say I’ll go. I know I’m feeling guilty about Perta. I want to tell her. I want her to know this is happening to me and how I don’t want it to. I can feel another whole non-truth area opening between us.

The night of the prom comes at the worst time, right in the middle of things. Perta has asked me if I want to start a nest. She’s been flitting her wings when we’ve been together, so I’m not surprised. Perta in the day has been flitting her wings, too. This is a big decision for me and I want time to think it out. Instead, I have to go through all this Junior Prom thing.

Al takes me to the tux place and tries to talk up Doris to me. He talks about what great legs she has. I’ve tried watching girls’ legs to find out what the excitement is about, but they all look the same to me. One has a bit more flesh here or there, one has more wrinkly knees than another, or the ankle bones stick out more or less, but, so what?

And women’s asses. They’re just flesh around an asshole like everybody else. It’s only an overdevelopment of the gluteus maximus, to make it possible for people to walk on two legs, and sit down. To me, anything sitting down is ugly. A bird usually stands when it isn’t flying. It never sits except to hatch eggs. That’s beauty.

Then, tits. What a dumb development for feeding babies. Women have to carry them around all their lives, flopping, getting in the way, right under their noses, and they’re only used for about two or three years at the most. I’ve watched lots of tits and Al has tried to show me the difference between good tits and poor tits. It’s mostly a difference in volume and pointedness. Looking in the National Geographics, I can see they’re not much different from what a goat or a cow has; just a bit more inconvenient.

All the way back from the tux rental place, Al is raving on. He knows I can ‘make’ this girl. He means he thinks she’ll let me fuck her. He knows two guys who ‘had’ her. That’s supposed to be exciting. I know Doris Robinson. She’s an ordinary girl with regular legs, regular ass and slightly more than regular tits. Doris doesn’t look as if she could ever fly under any conditions. She’s a small to medium size reddish-colored cinnamon with freckles. My mother would like to see me going to the Junior Prom with a girl who looks like Doris. Al wants to see me go to the Prom with Doris. Al wants me to get fucked. I don’t know what my mother wants.

Dressed up in the tux, I look like one of Mr Lincoln’s black birds. I feel like a freak taking the bus to where Doris lives. Thank God, I’m not carrying any crappy orchid. All evening long I’m going to have to dance with an orchid under my nose. Orchids smell like death to me. There’s a moldy, mushroomy, damp smell like an old coffin; and on top, there’s a soft perfumy smell. Together, it’s the smell of an embalmed corpse.

I think I’m going to have that orchid under my nose all night, but that’s not the way it turns out. When I get to Doris’s address, it’s a big single house in the fancy part of Girard Hill. I walk up the driveway and knock. Her mother opens the door. I introduce myself and she lets me in. Who the hell else was she expecting to walk up the driveway in a penguin costume? Mrs Robinson is all dressed up and wearing so much perfume I think for a minute she’s the one I’m dragging to the prom.

‘Doris will be right down. Won’t you sit over here, please?’

She practically pushes me into a chair just inside the living room at the bottom of the stairs and then leaves the room. I’ve been ushered into my seat for the grand entrance. I wait. I start thinking of Perta. I’d love to tell her about all this. It’s too bad this is so far from anything she knows. She’d never understand. Even if she could understand, she wouldn’t believe it.

Then Doris comes down the stairs. It’s Gone With the Wind again. She comes down three steps, then pauses when she sees me. She looks at the chair where I’m sitting, smiles an Olivia de Havilland-Melanie smile, then comes down the rest of the stairs quickly, without bouncing, like she’s on a sliding board. I get up.

She’s twisting her hips back and forth to make the dress stand out. It makes a stiff crackling pigeon noise. Then her mother comes back into the room. She’s carrying the box with the orchid in it. She tells me it’s been in the refrigerator to keep it fresh. That’s as good a place as any for something that smells dead. I begin to realize they probably bought this house for that staircase so Doris could come sliding down it on occasion.

The mother is holding up the orchid for me to admire. It’s big as a pigeon and shaped like a pigeon, too, a pigeon taking a dust bath. She hands me the flower and a long pin. They’re both ice cold. I’m supposed to pin this flower on Doris.

Right here I notice there’s no place under my nose to pin this thing. That is, if I’m not going to pin it through bare, raw, freckled flesh.

I stand there, holding the pin in one hand and the flower in the other. I could stick it right through what looks like it might be one of her nipples but what I think is a piece of rubber. Doris has big tits but in this dress they bulge out past her elbows. There’s such a space between them, I know if I get the right angle I can see through to the floor.

Apparently, pinning is one detail they hadn’t worked out. The mother starts giggling. Doris turns a sort of salmon color and the freckles get darker. The mother moves in and pins the flower on her waist. Now it looks as if she has a monster vine creeping up on her from behind. I wonder where I’m supposed to put my hand when we dance.

Now, the father comes in. He’s a pale, tired-looking man. He puts a silk cape over Doris’s shoulders and gives her the keys to the car. He also gives all kinds of advice about locking, turning off the lights and not going over thirty-five. He kisses her on the cheek. Her mother kisses her on the cheek, too. The father turns around and shakes my hand.

‘Have a good time, son; but be sure to have her in by two o’clock.’

Son! Holy mackerel, they’ve got me married to her already. The dance is over at twelve-thirty. What am I supposed to do with her till two o’clock? What will Perta think if I don’t come into the dream? This whole business is getting to be more of a catastrophe every minute.

At the dance, I have to move the flower from her waist to her wrist. She wants it on her left wrist so I tie it to her wristwatch with a rubber band I have in my pocket. It sits on top of her wrist so she looks as if she’s going falconing. The hand is perched on top of my shoulders while we’re dancing so the damned orchid keeps tickling the back of my neck and ears. It sends chills up and down my spine. This way I can smell it without seeing it. I keep being reminded of the rotten horse meat smell at the place Joe Sagessa took us.

This smell combined with all the sweating bodies around us and the sound of the music brings me to the very edge of what I can bear. To take my mind off it, I keep trying to think forward to the dream when I get home to my bed. Doris is saying things to me about the music or asking where I live. She knows my father works here as a janitor but she doesn’t say anything about that.

I see my father twice. He’s acting as a sort of bouncer-janitor combined. He keeps track of those who go into the boys’ toilets. His job is to slow down the drinking and help clean up the vomit if anybody gets sick. He gets five extra dollars for the night; just enough to pay for my stupid tux. I wouldn’t go through another night like this for fifty dollars.

I see Al swinging and dancing around with his cheerleader. He isn’t much of a dancer, but she’s one of those girls who could dance with a buffalo and make it look graceful. Al dances one-two-three at the same beat to any music. He doesn’t even listen to it. With the tux on, he looks like a gangster in a movie. He’s wearing a white carnation but still he could be Brian Donlevy playing Heliotrope Harry.

Doris asks me about the birds. That’s something I don’t want to talk about. If I really thought she was interested I’d tell her. I’d stop the stupid dancing, sit down and tell her about it. I look to check; but all she’s doing is making dance conversation. Sometimes it seems humans can only play games; all kinds of complicated games. Going to the Junior Prom is another game with a whole set of rules. Talking while you’re dancing is one of the rules.

I don’t have a watch and I can’t see Doris’s with the big orchid draped all over it, but there are clocks at each end of the gym. They have wire mesh over the face to keep them from getting broken by stray basketballs, but you can still read the time if you get the right angle. The time is crawling by. I’m pooped. It’s past eleven o’clock and I’m usually in bed by ten for the dream. My arm is tired from holding up Doris’s arm. I try letting my arm down sometimes, taking the weight off my shoulder muscle, but she doesn’t pick up the load at all, just lets both arms drop. Finally, when I can’t keep them up any longer, we leave the arms down and she snuggles in closer to me with her head tucked under my chin. Now I’ve got her hair tickling my nose, while the flower is tickling me on the back of the neck. Both my hands are occupied. Besides that, Doris’s big tits are pressed against me, they’re about the consistency of blown-up inner tubes. From all my flapping exercises, my sternum has a tendency to stick out more than most people’s, so her tits fit on both sides of it. We make a beautiful couple. We fit together like tongue-in-groove flooring.

At last it’s over. I take Doris over to get her cape; we go outside. Everybody’s slamming car doors in the dark and laughing. I help her into her side of the car. She asks me if I want to drive. That’s wild. Nobody drives in our family; we’ve never had a car; never will. My father won’t even ride in an automobile.

When I tell her ‘no’, she sticks the key into the ignition and turns it on. The car’s a Buick, the last model they made before the war. The motor is eight-cylinder, loaded with power, but it’s all pissed away in this car with something they call Dynaflow. This is a way you get to drive a car without knowing how to shift. My father says soon they’ll have cars you won’t have to steer. People’ll go around killing each other without knowing it.

Doris turns to me. Her face is soft as a baby bird with just the lights from the dashboard. Her cape is pulled back and she looks almost naked. She reaches over and turns on the radio. She must’ve had the dial set beforehand, maybe even called up the radio station to have the right music played. They come on with Glenn Miller’s ‘Sunrise Serenade’. It’s one piece of music I really like; it has the inside completeness of a good canary song.

‘Let’s go for a little ride out to Media.’

It doesn’t matter what I say, we’re going to Media. She’s most likely already gone out and mapped the route. I settle back to relax and let it all happen. This is probably the night I get fucked. She has to be back by two o’clock. The clock glowing green in the dark dash says quarter to one. How much can actually happen in an hour?

Doris isn’t paying too much attention to what her father said. We’re whipping around these tight curves, on roads one car wide, through the heavy green overhanging trees of Media, at about fifty. There’s a straightaway under the high stone arched railway overpass and she gets it to almost seventy. She’s so little, she’s peering up over the edge of the dash. I scrunch down and concentrate on those tiny silver shoes pushing on the accelerator and brake. I wonder what Perta’s doing. What would happen to the dream if I wind up welded into that dashboard in front of me, with an eight-cylinder engine hot in what’s left of my lap.

She has the place picked out. We swing off the macadam road and along a dirt road so small, the branches on both sides are scraping the edges of the car. She isn’t saying anything, just driving, peering up to avoid potholes. We’re following through. Doris is going to have her Junior Prom with all the trimmings. I feel like a candle on the cake that’s about to be blown out.

We cross a little stream with that monster car and the road turns into nothing but rocks. Finally, she stops, turns off the motor, pulls on the emergency and puts out the lights. She turns the ignition so the dash and radio stay on. This car has everything. It gets about nine miles to the gallon but they have a Bration sticker, so what the hell.

At first, she sits there holding onto the wheel of the car, like a kid pretending to drive while the car’s sitting in a driveway. I unscrunch myself and sit up. I turn toward her and pull my inside leg bent up on the seat. Anything can happen. I know it’s going to be embarrassing.

Doris climbs up onto her knees. In the darkness I see she’s left her shoes down there by the accelerator. She holds out her wrist with the orchid on it for me to take off.

‘I’d like to keep it as a souvenir.’

She says this as I try to untwist the rubber band in the dark. She’s wiggling the end of her hand at the wrist like a snake. When I get it off, she takes it from me and puts it on the shelf over the dash. In the dark with the magnified reflection from the curved windshield, it’s frightening. The whole car is filled with the smell.

I’m expecting we’re going to have one of those great conversations which start with ‘Don’t you like me?’ or ‘Why is it you don’t like me?’ I’ve already had several of those. There’s practically no answer you can give that isn’t either insulting or a lie. I’m all ready to lie for the illusion of the great Junior Prom but I don’t have to. Doris starts humming to the music and somehow she’s leaning on me, rocking back and forth as if we’re dancing; dancing in a Buick Dynaflow! I put my arms around her and try to keep up my end. Maybe if I fuck Doris it’ll help the dream with Perta. The dream is made out of things I know.

Doris lifts her face and we start kissing. We get to kissing along and I’m having a hard time keeping my nose out of the way. Then, she starts opening her lips so I open mine too. I’m doing my best. Next, she’s breathing into my mouth and sucking in! I feel the air being pulled in through my nostrils! Holy God! Is this kissing or is good old Doris Robinson some kind of vampire who gets you by stealing your breath. I’m thinking this when, suddenly, she sticks her whole tongue into my mouth! It’s like sucking a bubble gum wad in. I can’t breathe at all except through my nose. And, I can’t believe it; I’m getting a hard-on! All this crazy stuff and it goes straight to the old dong. I try to cross my legs, to hide it, maybe to crank it down, but there’s no fooling Doris. She’s shoving her stomach right into it! She moans and pushes her tongue in deeper. She takes her arms from around me and I think maybe we’ve done our share for the Prom and it’s all over, but she’s pulling down the top of that dress and those tits pop out. They stick more to the outside now that they’re loose. They look better than the ones in the National Geographic.

She leans back and I stare at them. There aren’t any freckles on them, at least not by the dash light.

It’s then I know I could do it. I not only could, I want to do it. I want to fuck Doris. At the same time, I start thinking of Perta. I want to do it the first time with Perta. I want to do it the first time with my wife, not with Doris. Doris could never be a wife to me, all I’d be doing is fucking Doris’s tits, her tongue, her cunt.

Doris keeps trying but I’m finished. I go on kissing her and I hold her tits in my hands, and stroke them a bit. Doris breathes hard and cries but we don’t say anything. At last, she sits up, and tucks the tits back into her dress. It’s getting on to two o’clock. We’ve been kissing away for almost an hour.

We have one hell of a time turning that car around. I get out to direct her. There’s no room, and Doris isn’t much good at backing up. We get stuck twice before we get out. We drive up her driveway at two-thirty. Was that pale, gray man going to shoot me for almost fucking his daughter and keeping her out late? The car is probably all scratched up from brambles and branches, too.

We kiss an ordinary non-vampire good-night kiss before we get out of the car. Doris asks ‘if she’ll see me again’. I say, ‘Sure. I’ll see you at school.’ I see her every day there. We’re in the same geometry class.

She has a key and lets herself in. Her mother is still up and says she’ll drive me home. All the streetcars and buses are shut down. I tell her I don’t live far and I’ll walk home. She doesn’t insist too much. She wants to get all the details from Doris. I wonder how much Doris tells her. You never know with rich people like that.

I’m glad to have the four-mile walk. It gives me time to think. I hope I didn’t hurt Doris’s feelings, but I’m glad I didn’t fuck her. I want to get into my dream with Perta. I sneak up the back stairs without waking anybody. It’s four o’clock when I last look at the clock by my bed.

When I come into the dream, it’s late. The sun is setting. Perta is flying from one of the two middle perches to the other. I watch her a minute, then fly down to her.

‘I’ve been looking for you, Birdy. Where have you been? How is it you are here sometimes and sometimes you are not? I do not understand. Do you go outside the cage? Do you fly alone out there? Aren’t you afraid? Couldn’t you take me with you?’

‘No, Perta. I do not fly out there.’

I can’t answer the rest of her questions. She looks so beautiful to me. She’s against the light so I see the lovely curve of her breast and back. Inside myself, I can feel the restlessness arising.

I approach and Perta squats on the perch and starts peep-peep-peeping to me. Her wings are fluttering in expectation. It’s time for me to feed her. I’m the same as Alfonso; I can’t do it. I want to, but I can’t bring food up into my mouth. I’ve always hated to vomit. The boy is getting in the way of the bird.

Perta stays there, patiently waiting to be fed. I try once more and it comes. The bird gains control and it’s as easy as flying or singing. I give her food and Perta is happy. She peep-peep-peeps some more. I give her more food. I sing and approach her. She squats down further. I’m not ready yet. I feed her again. Partly it’s wanting to make it last as long as possible. Perta doesn’t say anything and we fly together all the night long. I sing and feed her till the morning when I wake up.

The next day, I’m tired from being out so late. My mother keeps asking questions but I don’t tell her much. I’m cleaning the cages when Al comes over. I’ve put twelve more young birds in the other flight cage. I still haven’t lost any of the young ones. The breeding cages are in full swing. With the sound of babies hollering to be fed, and the males singing, it makes quite a racket. Perta is flying back and forth alone in the flight cage.

Al starts pumping me about how it was with Doris. I tell him I didn’t fuck her, but he won’t believe me. He says Doris is one of the hottest firecrackers in the whole school; she’d fuck a horse if she could get it to stand still. I tell him I believe it but she didn’t fuck me.

My father testifies to my mother that I danced every dance. My mother wants to know where we went after the dance. I tell her we went to Don’s in Yeadon; that’s a milk-shake bar, the kind of place my mother would like me to go after a dance. I tell her I had a good time. My mother goes over the tux and brushes it off. I pulled all the leaves and stickers out of it before I went to bed. She’d really flip if she found jit smeared along the inside of the pants.

Al looks the birds over but he doesn’t have much interest in canaries. What he does understand is that I’ve got a regular bird factory going. He asks me about feed costs and how many birds per nest and works out how much money I can make.

‘Jesus, Birdy, you’re going to be a fucking millionaire! King of the Canaries. You’ll be voted most likely to suck seed.’

Al thinks that’s funny. He manages to get it in the year-book under my picture. There’s nothing else there; no clubs, no honor rolls, no sports, no offices. It just says ‘Nickname Birdy’. ‘Voted most likely to suck seed.’

Al notices Perta flying all alone in the flight cage and asks about her. He wonders why I don’t put some of the young birds in there. I tell him she’s a special pet of mine. She’s a spare female.

‘Don’t tell me she’s like the pigeon witch we used to have.’

I tell him, ‘Yeah, she’s something like that, only she doesn’t bring back any fancy birds.’

‘Does she eat out of your mouth the way the freaky witch did?’

For a minute I have the feeling Al can see into the dream. If anybody could, it would be Al. Then I remember. I laugh and tell him that canaries are harder to train than pigeons.

We go out and throw the discus for a while, then Al goes home. I go to the aviary and watch Perta with my binoculars. I’m trying to decide how to tell her what I am. I’m trying to decide what I am, too.

That night, in the dream, I know I must tell Perta about myself. As boy, I’ve decided this and it’s come through to me as Birdy in the dream.

First, Perta and I fly together in a new dance. In the dance, we fly over each other, then drop on the other side, so the first flies over the one who has dropped. It’s beautiful, but hard to do in the small space of the cage. It would be so terrific if we could fly free.

When we’re finished, she squats and peep-peep-peeps to me and I feed her easily. It is time to mate with her and she’s waiting. I know the beginning egg is inside her waiting for my seed. I want to put my seed into her, to know it is buried warmly in her egg.

‘Birdy, what are you afraid of? Do you want to have a nest with me? I feel we could have such wonderful babies, that we would be together in them, that for the first time, my eggs would be filled with life; with our life. Why are you afraid?’

I look at her. I love her so. What she is saying is what I’ve been thinking, dreaming, singing. It is more than flying.

‘Perta, there are things I must tell you first.’

‘Do you have another female, another nest, somewhere?’

‘No. Nothing so simple as that, Perta.’

‘That is not so simple.’

‘Listen carefully, Perta. Listen to the way I tell this as much as to what I tell. I want you to know I speak the truth. I want you to know what I am, so we can truly be together.’

‘Say it, Birdy. Tell me.’

‘Perta, all this we have together is not real.’

Perta shifts from her left to her right eye but remains quiet.

‘In reality, I am the boy out there.’

I point to myself as boy in the aviary. I’m out there filling feed dishes, changing water.

‘This, here, that we have together, is just a dream. I dreamed you in my dream. I wanted you to be, so I dreamed you.’

I wait. Perta says nothing. She shifts eyes twice more; flips her wings once. Can she possibly understand?

‘Perta, I went out, as boy, in the real world and you were given to me. I carried you here to the cage.’

I wait for some sign that she is with me, that she understands. If I only understood it better myself, I could explain it better. Perta looks at me closely.

‘Go on, Birdy. I’m listening.’

‘You see, Perta, we are here together because of two things, the dream I dreamed in my dream and then the bird I carried back with me, who flies alone here in the cage during the day. You are the bird in my dream-dream and you are the bird I love as a boy but cannot know. You are here in the dream between those two. I am here in my dream because I want to be here. I want to be with you and so it is so.’

I stop. I can’t understand what I’m saying myself. I’m too much of a bird to understand. My boy brain makes up the ideas, the words, but my bird brain can’t understand them. I’m seeing Perta not as a bird but as another creature like myself with whom I’m in love. What I’m saying sounds like crazy talk. How can I expect Perta to understand, to believe, when I cannot do so myself? I stop.

‘Go on, Birdy. Tell me more.’

‘That’s the most of it, Perta. As a boy out there, in reality, when the dream is over, I own all the birds. I bought Birdie, Alfonso. I raised all of them in my bedroom in another place. I built this cage where we fly now. I go places when I am a boy that you cannot see from here. I live with other beings like myself, as a boy. I am but a young creature in that world, not capable of taking care of myself. I have a mother and father with whom I live. My house is out there, out of the cage. If I do not come here, take care, feed all the birds, this whole life would stop, it would all end. Do you understand?’

‘Of course not, Birdy. You know I cannot. I am a bird; those things mean nothing to me.’

‘But do you believe me, Perta? Do you think I lie when I tell all this?’

‘No, Birdy. You are telling me your truth.’

‘Can’t it be your truth, too, Perta? I want it to be your truth. I want you to know me truly.’

Perta looks at me straight on, very unbirdlike.

‘No, Birdy. I am a bird. Your truth cannot be mine.’

I don’t know why I want her to know. Is it because I think that if she knows, believes, then the dream will be more real. But how can a dream be more real? It is like making a zero more zero by writing zero ten thousand times in a line. It is still zero.

‘Perta, do you realize that what I am saying is that you do not exist at all; that you are only a part of my dream?’

‘What is a dream, Birdy?’

I’m stopped. I hadn’t thought of that. If birds do not dream, there’s no way. Still, this is my dream. I can have birds dream or not in my dream, as I want. I can make it to fit my dream.

‘Perta, when you sleep, do you not have thoughts, images, visions, feelings that are not true, that come from inside you, that you only imagine?’

‘No. When I sleep I am giving myself strength. I give myself force to fly, to have babies. It is the great unbeing. It is when we build our feathers, harden our beaks, unbecome.’

This is beyond me. I cannot make birds dream, even in my own dream. I know then that the boy does not really want Perta to know. I must live my bird life as a bird only. I must surrender myself. It is a relief, a wonderful feeling to know this.

A great peace comes into me. I feel my strength as a bird spreading through me. The blood is circulated in warmth out to the tips of my feathers, to the ends of my toenails.

Perta is watching me. She is telling me that I am a bird; that I am to forget all this nonsense of the boy. She wants me as her mate. These things I have been telling her are only the ravings of a maniac, a fever. It is clear to her I am a bird. If I can see myself with her eyes, then I am a bird in her world. I let go. I settle deeply into the life I’ve always wanted. I become, rebecome, a bird in this world of the dream.

I start to sing. Perta is alive to me. There is a transfer of feeling, knowing, one to the other from us that I have never known, never dreamed of dreaming. Perta starts to fly in a complex dance. I fly after her, singing. She flies, dances to my song and I sing, dance, to her dance. It’s not a chase but mutual following. We speak in language beyond words. Our every movement magnifies the tension of our merging identity. Then, Perta stops, waits for me. I approach, in deepest passion, maximum awareness, to her. She waits, cups herself to receive me. I hover, then lower myself into her. My penetration is engulfed by her whole being. For just that moment I am not alone, not separate. I pass through the illusion of identity into a depth of shared reality.

When I wake that morning, I’ve done it again. I’m covered with jit, my sheets, my pajamas. I wash everything so my mother won’t find out. I’ve got to do something.

I go down to Cobb’s Creek with a long stick. They’re floating by in that creek all the time. There must be toilets flushing into the creek, there just couldn’t be that many lovers along the banks. I get one in good shape, wash it out in the creek first, then take it home and wash it again. I turn it inside out. I slip it on and when it’s on, I can hardly feel it. After that, I sleep with that condom on. I fill it almost every night during those first mad weeks when Perta and I are so deeply involved with each other, when all the dreams are devoted to passionate flight, singing, dancing, and overwhelming culminations.

Now, I’m separating the dream from the day better. Especially in the dream, I hardly remember that I am a boy. I am almost completely bird. As boy I’ve wired a nest into the cage with Perta the daytime bird. In the night, Perta and I are building our nest. Strangely enough, Perta, alone, in the days shows interest in the nest also. I give her burlap and she starts building. This isn’t uncommon. Sometimes a female without a male will build a nest during the nesting season.

In the dream it is such fun building the nest. Perta does most of the work and she’s a fine engineer. It’s a combination of weaving or knitting and construction work. Mostly I’m bringing up materials. Perta is meticulous and ingenious with her nest building. I admire it even more as bird than I did as a boy.

Every day when I go out to feed and take care of the birds, I check on the nest Perta is building in the flight cage. It’s exactly like the nest Perta is building in the dream, except the dream nest seems to be slightly more advanced than the nest in the cage. Could the dream be getting ahead of real life? I’m beginning to think I don’t know what’s real anymore.

When the nest is finished, Perta tells me she thinks she is going to lay the egg that night. For me as boy, the dream nights are the day. In the real day the thinking of the dream dominates me. I’m thinking all the time of our egg to come. It’s hard for me to realize that Perta the bird is asleep while I’m dreaming, and Perta the dream is awake while Perta sleeps. Are they dreams to each other? Is Perta right? Do birds not dream? Don’t they ever dream themselves out of the cage?

That night the egg is laid. I sit beside Perta. She tells me she can feel the egg becoming inside her, how the shell is hardening and starting to move out into the world.

She asks me to sing to her so the egg will come more easily. I begin to sing softly, absently, not knowing what my song will be. I sing about how we are there, together, living as one, in life just begun. Being the father of an egg is so far from what being a boy is.

The sky is just lighting in the morning when Perta tells me the egg has come into the nest. She lifts herself carefully so I can see. It is beautiful. She leaves the nest and I lower myself slowly over it. The warmth of Perta’s body comes from the egg, from the nest, through my feathers to my breast. I hold myself still and this warmth goes through me. I try to feel what Perta has felt, is feeling. Perta leans over the nest and feeds me. Then she squats beside the nest and cups herself to receive me.

Both Perta in the dream and Perta in the cage lay four eggs. Perta’s eggs in the cage are as lovely as ours. I leave the eggs in the nest with Perta the bird. I don’t want to take any chance that the eggs in my dream will turn into marbles and also I know that Perta the bird’s eggs must be sterile. If I know they must be sterile, there is no reason to take them out.

I worry, as boy, that the eggs in the dream will be sterile, too. In the dream I don’t worry about this at all. I ask Perta why she has had only sterile eggs before and she tells me she was never properly fertilized. This is what I want to believe.

Mostly, I want our eggs to be fertile. I wish it as hard as I can. With my binoculars, I watch the birds in the breeding cages as the eggs are hatched. I get it deeply printed into my mind. I want to know exactly what to do as a bird. I want to power my babies into this life.

The other flight cage is getting filled with young birds. From the warbling going on all the time, it seems there’s a good proportion of males.

I watch poor Perta in her cage with her sterile eggs. It doesn’t seem fair for her to do all that sitting for nothing. When she’s been sitting on them for seven days, half way through the brooding period, I take them out one at a time and hold them up to a light. They’re all sterile.

I decide to do something about it. There are three hens who have nests due to hatch within a day or two of Perta’s. One has five eggs and the others have four each. I take two eggs from the nest of five and one from each of the others. Three birds in a nest is a good number, not too crowded, and the young have a better chance of survival.

I give these four eggs to Perta as substitutes for the sterile ones. I feel much better. I’m sure Perta will be a good mother. Two of the eggs came from Birdie and Alfonso. I don’t think Birdie minded my taking them. Perta doesn’t seem to notice the substitution and accepts the new eggs without trouble. I check each egg before I put it in the nest with her and they’re all fertile. I use a small hand flashlight to check the eggs. A fertile egg of seven days has opacity and small red veins running through it.

In the dream I look into the nest of our eggs but there is no change I can see. Changing Perta’s eggs in the cage has not changed our eggs. I’m hoping it will give our eggs a better chance to be fertile. I’m feeling a strong desire to be a father. I want to be able to feed my own babies. I of ten feed Perta on the nest and sing to her. Being a father, knowing I’m there in the new babies, will be more proof that I am. I feel that I’ll be more, not only as bird but as boy. Knowing he’s a father is one of the only proofs a male has that he is.

On the night when the babies are to hatch, when Perta tells me she can feel the babies moving in the shell, I sit on the eggs while she takes a bath to help the babies by softening the shell. I feel them moving. I can feel movement in each egg. They will all hatch in the morning. I know it. When Perta comes back to the nest, I sing her this song. I’m sure the babies are mature enough to hear me now. The shell of the egg is so thin.

Become now,

Tap through the shell

Of being and taste the

Soft air of your beginning

This is yours, the safe

Surrounding blanket

Of new life.

The day the birds are to hatch is a school day. I play hooky for the first time in my life. I know they’re bound to catch me. I usually eat lunch with my father down in the boiler room; he’ll know I’m not there. I don’t care. I can’t hang around the aviary or my mother would catch me. Instead, I go down to the woods and climb a favorite tree, not far from where we had the pigeon loft. I wedge myself into a fork near the top, high over the bank of a hill.

I spend the day up there. I can’t keep myself from thinking about my babies trying to hatch from the eggs. I can feel their struggle. I lie back on the length of the branch and try to put myself into the dream. I can’t do it. I know also, in my deepest part, it would be dangerous to enter the dream in the daytime. I’m not sure what would happen, whether it would break the dream or I would not be able to come out and back to life as a boy, but I know it would be dangerous to do.

While I’m up in the tree, I think of myself trying to teach my babies to fly. I look down from the tree and wish I could fly here and have them fly with me in the open. It’s that day in the tree when I decide how to do it. I make all the plans and I’m so full of them, I hardly pay attention when my father and mother holler at me during dinner about cutting school. They keep wanting to know where I was. I tell them I was up in a tree but they won’t believe me. I don’t know where it is they wanted me to be.

After my parents finally settle down, I go out to the cage and listen, but none of Perta’s birds have hatched. I wonder if the birds in the dream will hatch if hers haven’t. It’s hard to tell which is in front anymore, the dream or real life. I go to sleep not knowing what will be.

When I arrive in the dream, Perta is excited. She tells me one of the babies is cutting the shell with its beak. She stands high on her legs so I can look in. One of the eggs is opening. Perta reaches in and carefully pulls off part of a loose shell with her beak. We can see a dark eye and moistened head. I’m nervous but Perta is serene and happy. I do some of my best flying around the cage to calm myself.

Within two hours, all the babies are hatched. I help Perta take the shells out of the nest. I can see that two of the young ones are dark and two of them are light. Perta tells me there are two males and two females. Both the males are dark and the females are light. I’m a father! Perta lets me feed them and it’s such a wonderful feeling to put the small bits of food into their mouths. The little cries of demand and delight are a special bird song.

The next morning before breakfast, when I go out to the aviary, I check Perta. She has eggshells under her nest. I put some egg food in the bottom of the cage and she comes down immediately. I look and there are four little babies, two light and two dark, the same. When I go out she flies up and starts feeding. I wish I could help her, too. I feel I’m using her, having her live without a male. I’m afraid to put a male in with her because of the dream. I might be jealous, too.

During the days, I do everything I’m supposed to. I go to school, do my work, help at home and do some designing on my bird models. I’m trying to use things I’ve learned as a bird to improve the models. It also helps the days go by. It’s not so much I want to fly or make a model I can fly; I’m only trying to bring some of the dream into my life.

During the course of the breeding season, Perta and I have three nests. For each nest we have, I take eggs from other nests and give them to Perta in the daytime cage. I’m afraid not to. We have twelve babies but one of them, a young male, dies. Perta says she could tell from the first that it wasn’t meant to live or fly, there was nothing of the sky in its eyes. In my dreams, birds have a kind of knowing humans don’t. I don’t know why this is. I’m only human, so I suffer very much at the loss of this young one. It is five weeks old when it dies. In bird time, it was in Scheen.

Birds don’t have any kind of time except in relation to themselves. The movement of the sun or the earth doesn’t mean much to them. They have two kinds of time. First, they have the time which is one year or breeding period. It begins with Ohnme. This is the period after the molt and before breeding. Then, there is Sachen, the time of courtship, till the first egg is laid. Kharst is the fourteen days of sitting on the eggs. The next time is from when the young hatch till they leave the nest; this is Flangst. After this is Scheen, which is until the young can crack seed on their own and live without their parents. It is in Scheen when our son dies. Then, there is the first molt period of young birds; this is called Smoor. The molt time for older birds is called Smoorer. After Smoorer the adult birds go into Ohnme again. So, the bird year has six different periods. The longest is Ohnme and the shortest is Kharst. Kharst, Flangst, and Scheen are repeated three times in the typical bird year.

The other kind of time birds have is related to the individual bird and not so much to the mating-molting season. The whole first year before breeding is called Tangen. The years of breeding are called Pleen and the last days before death are called Echen. Sometimes in old age or illness a bird goes into Echen. It is a time when a bird does not want to fly or eat. The birds have no word for death. As far as I can tell, Echen includes our idea of being dead. When Perta told me our son had gone into Echen, I went down to help him; he was not dead yet but there was nothing I could do. He was in Echen. When he finally died I told Perta and she only said:

‘Yes, he is in Echen.’

The strange thing is that on the same day our son dies, one of the young birds in Perta’s nest in the cage also dies. It has the same markings as our son. I take it from the bottom of the cage and in the dream our son’s body disappears. I tell Perta this but she doesn’t want to listen. She never talks of him again. When I try to speak of him, of his death, of my sadness, she only gives the same response: ‘Yes. He is in Echen.’

All these words are the closest I can come to what I’m hearing in canary. I have no way to know if they are bird ideas or Birdy ideas. In my dreams I’ve begun to hear the bird sounds as words like these, although to my ear, as a bird, they sound like bird sounds. I don’t know how this is happening. No bird word sounds in itself like any English word, but the birds sound to me as if they’re talking English. I’m converting the sounds as I’m hearing them and I’m only hearing my own conversions.

At the end of the breeding season, Perta and I have eleven wonderful children. There are seven females and four males. The remarkable thing is that the young in Perta’s cage have the same markings as my children in the dream, and as far as I can tell, they are also the same sex. I can understand that I might have structured the birds in my dream to resemble the birds in Perta’s cage, but I knew the sex of Perta’s daytime young before I could know them in reality. Perta in the dream told me. This is something I can’t put together.

I try talking to Perta, the bird in the cage, in sounds I remember from the dream but she doesn’t respond. However, if I peep or queep in the ways I used to do with Birdie, she’ll peep or queep back enthusiastically. She wants me to stay as a boy. My dream has nothing to do with her reality. Still, her babies are the same as mine in the dream. I’m getting so I can’t tell which reality is making the other. It must be that I’m tailoring the dream in some way to the things that happen, but sometimes it seems the other way around. It’s easy to fool yourself.

The other flight cage is so full I have to do something. I’ve gotten three nests from almost every breeding couple. I need to separate the young males from the females and take the breeding birds apart. The season is over and the adult birds will be going into the molt soon. I need more space.

To solve this, I divide off a part of the male cage for my project. I build in a new floor about one third down from the top of the aviary. Above this I put Perta and her young. The bottom part I use for the adult and young males. There are eighty-five young males and eighty-two young females. Now I’ll feed them and give them tonic to get through the molt and ready for the market. I hate to think about selling them, especially the children of Birdie and Alfonso. Still, making money is the excuse I have for keeping my birds. It’s the way I can hold onto the world which makes my dream possible.

The reason I build off the special cage is so I can live privately with Perta and my children in the dream. The very night the partition is finished, it’s that way in the dream. We don’t have as much space to fly, but this will be all right after I get my plan going.

My plan is to work out a way for free flying with my family. It is the idea I developed up in the tree.

In the dream, I’m happy as husband and father. I spend wonderful hours teaching my children to fly, to crack seed, to eat. We bathe together and I teach the young males to sing. We start with simple songs about flying, without any difficult parts, and move on to harder songs. One of the children’s songs is:

Down is up.

Up is sky.

Sing a song

Don’t ask why.

Another is:

Touch the air

Hold it tight.

Stroke the wind

Ride the light.

When I sell the young birds, I sell off three of my breeding females and one of my breeding males. I replace them with some of the best of the new young birds. I replace the three females because they aren’t good breeders. One only laid two eggs each nest and raised a total of five birds. Another laid eggs but consistently pulled the nest apart scattering the eggs on the floor. The third abandoned each of her nests when the babies were less than a week old. I saved the babies by distributing them to other nests, but she has to go. The male I sell because he’s developed the habit of egg-eating.

All of these young birds are even better fliers than their parents. It’s a pleasure to watch them. The rustling sound of their wings is musical. Because they fly so much and so well, they are all trim and longer-legged than ordinary canaries. I wish I could have Mr Lincoln come see my aviary and birds. I think about it of ten but I could never explain it to my parents. I wish people could be more like canaries.

During the day, I spend hours watching the birds fly. The more I watch, the stronger, truer, my dreams are. I’m getting so much inside the bird world, my dream seems completely independent of the day. I don’t even know what I know anymore. I can’t know all the time why things are in the dreams or how they’re going to be. The dreams have gotten so complicated they’re at least as real as the day.

I don’t do any flying experiments with the birds. I know all of them too well from my dreams. I’m not really that interested in flying anymore; at least not as a boy. It’s better to watch a bird fly naturally than to watch one with weights or with feathers missing. Flying is something practically impossible to take apart. You have to learn it all at once; it can’t be seen in pieces.

The price of birds does go up and I sell my birds to a wholesaler from Philadelphia for even more than I thought I would. At the end of the year there’s over a thousand dollars profit. My mother can’t believe it and wants me to pay board. She says I live in the house and I’m making almost as much money as my father so I ought to pay. I don’t care. I’m not keeping canaries for the money. My father says no; he’s going to put the money in the bank for my college education. It doesn’t mean anything to me. I’m not going to college anyway. I only want to raise my birds and fly with them at night. I can do that anywhere; I don’t have to go to college for that.

The thing I’m more worried about is getting drafted when I’m eighteen. There’s nothing I can do about this. The army isn’t going to let me keep canaries, that’s for sure. I wonder if the dream would continue then if I didn’t have any birds to watch. The army will probably take one look at me with my pointed chest and mark me off as 4-F anyway. I hope so.

My father is great about my birdkeeping. He’s proud of the canaries and begins to talk about them, and the money I’m making, to the people at school. Everybody there knows I’m crazy with birds but they didn’t know about the money-making part.

I demonstrate one of my ornithopters in physics class and they put it in a glass case in the hall. This kind of clinches it for me as Birdy the bird freak; ‘most likely to suck seed’. I don’t care much; I’m happy doing what I have to do. Sometimes I wish I could tell Al about my dream. I know he wouldn’t understand; he’s so real. He’d just think I’d finally flipped and that was it. Also, I’m afraid the dream might stop if I tell somebody else about it.

During that winter I spend hours training Perta’s young birds in the cage. In the night I play and fly with my own children and then in the day I play with them as a boy. The personalities of the two sets of birds are exactly the same, so it’s easy for me to train Perta’s birds. I know them as my own children.

I train all of her birds and Perta, too, to come when I whistle. This whistle is the closest sound I make as a boy to the bird sound for food. I go over it with them thousands of times. I give the signal and they fly directly to my finger to be fed. They eat from my finger or my lips or out of my hand. In the end, none of them has any more fear of me than Birdie had. They are really my children, even during the day.

I’m in my senior year in high school now. I ride my bike to school rather than take the school bus. I stay mostly apart. Al and I see each other some but he’s all involved in sports. He’s trying that winter to win the District Championship in wrestling. He does it and then goes on to be State Champion at a hundred sixty-five pounds. I’m at the districts to watch, but there’s no way for me to get to Harrisburg for the State finals. He wins the finals with a first-period pin.

It’s on a warm day in the end of February when I decide to make the big test. I choose a little female who is the closest to me. She’s exactly like one of my daughters from our last nest. I take her out of the aviary on my finger. When we get outside, I check the sky for hawks and the yard for cats. It’s all clear. I throw her up in the air from my finger the way I’ve done it in the aviary. I’ve been practicing with the birds in the center part where the breeding cages are. The door to their flight cage opens onto this part. I throw her up into the sky the way you would a pigeon or a falconing hawk.

First she flies up and lands on the roof of the garage. Her flight, which looked so competent in the cage, seems awkward here in the open air. She hops along the edge and peeps down at me. She looks so small against the sky, so yellow and vulnerable in the immensity of blue. I give my whistle and hold out my finger. She flies immediately back down to me and takes a bit of treat food from my lips. I stroke her on the head. She fluffs her feathers and peeps. It’s a peep lost in the air. She’s a beautiful lemon yellow, yellower than Birdie. She looks so pure and clean in the winter sunshine.

I throw her up in the air again and this time she stretches her wings and flies across our yard onto our porch roof where the pigeons used to roost. I almost swallow my heart. She’s so beautiful flying, but so far away. My mouth gets dry and I have a hard time whistling but I manage. She flies straight back to me and makes a cocky, wing-down, no-flutter landing on my finger.

Over the next days, I practice with the rest of Perta’s young ones. I throw them up one at a time and they all fly back to me. It’s much more fun than pigeons. It’s better than trying to fly model airplanes. I know these birds are flying for me.

I wait every night but I still don’t fly outside the cage myself. This I can’t understand. My own children have started flying outside in the dream. I can see them flying but I’m caught in the cage.

After a week, I try throwing up two birds together. I’m worried they might not pay attention to my whistle, but it’s fine. They come directly to me. I leave them flying for longer and longer periods before I whistle them back. One pair I leave out flying for fifteen minutes. Once I even go over and sit on the porch steps to watch them instead of standing in front of the aviary. They both come in when I whistle; no trouble. Still, I’m not flying myself; I’m confined to the cage.

In my dream, I look more and more outside the cage and want to fly there. I talk to my children and they tell me it is a completely different thing. It’s not just flying to get food, or from one perch to another, but flying for the flying itself, flying free of everything.

One day one of the young males sings from the tree hanging over our house. Hearing that beautiful song in the free air is a wonderful thing. The singing has all of space in it ringing out to the open sky.

Next I throw all the birds up at the same time. With a rush of wings, they take off in every direction. Most of them fly back to places they’ve been before. It’s lovely to see sparkles of yellow and green on the roof and in the trees. The trees are coming on with new leaves. One yellow male is singing up on the chimney of the house. The yellow against the blue sky is sharp and clear.

I’m concerned about how far they will fly. If they fly too far they couldn’t hear my whistle. Canaries don’t have homing instincts or capacities like pigeons. In fact, for free flying, canaries don’t have many skills left at all.

After five minutes, I whistle and seven of the twelve come right down to me. They come swooping in and land on my fingers, my hands, my arms. I walk into the aviary with them hanging onto me, give each some treat food, and put them in the cage. When I go out, the other five have flown to the top of the aviary. When I whistle again, they come down and jump on my fingers. It’s all gone well. I wonder what would happen if a cat or a hawk dispersed them. Would they still remember to come when I whistle or would they panic? I’m sure I’ll fly free in my dream that night, but it isn’t so. Even with all of them flying, I still don’t fly outside the aviary.

As spring arrives, I take the birds out every day. They come to know and expect what’s going to happen. The other birds, the ones I’m saving for breeding, don’t seem to know what’s going on. In my dream I tend not to communicate with them; probably I’m feeling guilty.

My fliers come to the door when I open it and jump onto my finger even before I whistle. I walk out of the aviary with them on my arms and shoulders and stand there in the open. I don’t want them to fly till I toss them up in the air. If one takes off by itself, I whistle it back. Soon they all know this rule. It’s like the starting of a track meet with false starts. The birds are between the pleasure of flying and the safety of what they know.

After a month, I can leave all twelve of them, including Perta, out flying free for as long as an hour. The yard is their territory and nobody flies too far away. Once in a while, one will swoop over the fence out into the outfield of the baseball field, but there’s no trees to land on so they return. One bird ventures downhill toward the burnt-out Cosgrove barn but comes right back. They’re all learning the details of the territory and the landmarks for the aviary. I’m getting convinced you can train canaries to live in the open, like pigeons, and have an open aviary. I’m still not flying free in my dream and I’m beginning to know what’s wrong. I’m getting in my own way.

All the free flying, so far, has depended on me, Birdy, the boy. I’m the one who takes the birds out on my finger to fly. However, in my dream, it’s impossible to contact myself as boy. I can see myself, but I can’t get my attention and so I don’t exist. Therefore, there’s no way for me to be whistled to or be taken out. In my dream there’s no other way to get out of the aviary. I can’t just wish myself out; it isn’t enough.

I work out a new idea. I design a pigeon-type outside door entry to the cage. I do this with thin wires hanging freely from the top of an outside opening, overlapping the inside of the cage. I build a landing board just outside the opening. This way a bird can land on the board outside and go into the aviary by pushing aside the wires. He then can’t go outside again because the dangling wires will have fallen back into place. The question is, can I train my birds to use this kind of an entrance?

When I get it finished I take the birds out of the aviary the same as usual, throwing them up to fly. When I want them back in the aviary, I stick my hand through their cage and out the opening so it rests on the landing board. I whistle. One at a time the birds come and land on my finger. I pull them through the door into the cage. When they’re inside I give them treat food. I do this several times.

Next, instead of taking them out the usual door and carrying them on my fingers, I pull back the dangling wires so the opening is free, then stand outside the aviary where they can see me, put my finger on the landing board, and whistle. They quickly learn to fly out the door onto my finger. As they come out I give each of them a toss into the air. We practice this several times until it’s automatic. After that I can stand outside the door, whistle, and they come out. It isn’t long before they come out when I pull aside the wires on the door. They can now go outside of the cage to fly on their own whenever I make it possible by clearing the opening.

I regularly reinforce their coming to me with the whistle and then throwing them up again. I try changing the whistle for each bird, so I’ll have a way to call in a particular bird, but they’re spoiled with the one whistle. You can’t ask too much of a canary. Once, I cut one of the dead birds open in biology class and saw how little the brain is; in fact, the eyes of a canary weigh more than its brain. I can’t ask them to learn too many complicated things.

It takes a long time for the birds to get used to flying into the aviary on their own. First, I put treat food inside the door and whistle them in. I also put them on the landing board, but they don’t want to push aside the wires. I think canaries are more sensitive to touch than pigeons. I begin leaving the wires pulled back and then they go in for the treat food. Finally, one at a time, they get the courage to push aside the wires to go in on their own. It’s done. They can practically live the life of a free-flying pigeon. They’ve become amazingly quick and agile fliers so that, even after three hundred generations living in cages, I’m not much worried about cats or hawks.

In my dream one night, I look up and see the opening; the wires are pulled back. I fly onto the edge of the opening and hop out onto the landing platform. The dream of my dream is coming true. I’m going to fly free.

I fly up onto the top of the aviary. I hop along the roof edge, look down at the ground, then across the yard to the roof of our house. It’s a beautiful day, the spring leaves are open, there are huge, soft, white clouds drifting in the sky. I spring. I loopswing through the air, feeling the fullness of the wind in the pits of my wings. I look down and the yard gets smaller. I circle once, then land on the rain gutter. The world is bigger and smaller at the same time. Bigger because I can see farther, and smaller because I’m looking down on it and know it’s mine, more than ever before.

I fly from the roof almost straight up; straight as I can, not flying to anywhere, just feeling the sky. Then, I fold my wings and let myself drop until my feathers begin to flutter in the wind. I open my wings, catch myself, and fly straight up again, stalling, looping a long lingering loop. I look down.

Below is my yard, all in one piece. I can see all of it without turning my head. I can see the whole baseball field and out along Church Lane to the cemetery. I’m directly over the tree in the corner of our yard. I come down in slow circles looking for a branch on which to land. I find one just on the yard side of the top of the tree. I land and fluff out my feathers. I feel all together. I feel like me to the very tips of myself.

I look over to the aviary. Perta is coming out, standing on the landing board. On top of the aviary are two of my sons and one of my daughters. I think of peeping to tell them where I am but decide to sing. I start to sing in the sunshine and my song goes out into the blue air. I have a sense of drifting into the sky with my notes. I feel I’m a part of everything my song touches. While I’m singing, Perta flies up, and joins me on the branch. She feels what I’m feeling and asks me to feed her. I feed her and sing some more, then feed her again. I fly up over her and in. It’s more than it ever was before. I spring away and fly small circles over Perta. I sing while I’m flying. I’m forgetting I’m Birdy; I’m a real bird and it isn’t a dream.

I fly all through the night and can go everywhere my birds have gone in the day. There are other places I want to fly to, like over the gas tank or to the mill pond, or down where we used to have the pigeon coop in the tree, but I can’t do it.

In the days, I think about flying all the time. It’s all so real in the dream that the things I do in the day are harder and harder to believe.

It’s time to start breeding for the new year. I clean out all the cages and get them in shape. I’ve already decided who the breeding pairs will be and I’ve been giving them egg food and dandelion to get them in breeding condition. When I put the breeding birds in the cage, I’ll take out the dividing floor and use the whole flight cage for my family.

Early in April, I put the breeding pairs together. In the dream that night, Perta and I fly to the edges of the places we can go. We chase each other in the air and sometimes brush wings as we come close. I’m tempted to turn over in the air like a tumbler pigeon, but a canary can’t do that.

Perta says she doesn’t want to build our nest in the aviary; she wants to build it in the tree. It’s my dream so I thought this up, but I’m surprised in the dream. If Perta builds her nest in the tree in the dream, will it be there in the daytime, too?

The next day I’m busy feeding and watering the birds in the breeding cages and watching to see how the mating is proceeding. More than half the pairs have mated before, so they should get started quickly enough.

I’ve already opened the door to my flying family and they’re out flying in the open. After I’m finished with the breeding cages, and before I go in for dinner, I whistle for them to come back into the cage. Everybody comes in but Perta. I’d trained her later than the others so I whistle again. She comes to the landing board and when I put out my finger she comes onto it. She has something in her mouth; it’s a piece of dry grass.

That night, Perta and I search all over the tree for a right meeting of branches where we can build our nest. I think about climbing the tree in the day and putting a nest holder up there for us, but decide against it.

The next afternoon, Perta doesn’t come when I call. I know she’s building a nest outside somewhere. This is another thing that began in the dream and now is happening in the day. I put some seed and water on the roof of the aviary where she’ll be safe from cats, and hope for the best.

Perta and I spend many hours building the nest. It’s much harder without a container and without shredded burlap. We gather pieces of dried grass and bits of wood from every direction. There’s an old straw chair in the garage my father made years ago, before I was born. We tear out pieces and shred it to line the nest. It’s a beautiful construction. I can only do what Perta tells me and her instincts are coming on strong. We get it finished two days before the first egg comes.

It’s a terrific nest. I fly to different branches so I can look down on it. The place we chose can’t be seen from the air, or from the ground either. No hawk or cat would ever even know it’s there. Perta lays her usual four eggs and she’s very happy. I sing to her from different parts of the tree and go down to the seed and water on top of the aviary to get food for her.

In the daytime I find immediately where Perta has built her nest. It’s exactly where we’ve built our nest in the dream. Perta could have fertile eggs this time, fertilized by one of the young from her last year’s nest. I hope Perta’s eggs will be fertile. Some of the other fliers are beginning to build nests, too. Most of them, like pigeons, are building in the security of the flight cage. One, like Perta, is building outside. It’s the little yellow one, the one I first took out. She’s building in the tree overhanging the roof of our house. Because of cats, this worries me. I don’t know whether I should try to move the nest or not. I decide to leave it alone and hope for the best.

– I’ve got to learn to live with myself the way I am. The trouble is there are whole parts of me I don’t know. All my life, I’ve been building a personal picture of myself like body building in Strength and Health. Only I didn’t build from the inside, I built from the outside, to protect myself against things.

Now, a big part of this crazy structure is torn apart. I have to start all over, looking inside to find what’s really there. I don’t know if I can do it. I’ll probably wind up putting together the old Al with some pieces missing and plaster it over somehow.

I’ve got to learn how to live with fear. It’s built in and there’s no sense fighting it. Without fear we wouldn’t be successful animals. Fear’s nothing to be ashamed of. Just like play or pain it’s natural and necessary. I’ve got to live with this.

In the dream, all four of Perta’s eggs hatch. There are three darks and one yellow. Perta says the yellow one is female and the darks male. I still can’t tell; I’ll probably never make it as a bird. In the daytime, up in the tree, Perta’s eggs hatch; so she wasn’t sterile after all. It makes me feel better about my Perta.

The birds in the breeding cages are going at it like mad. There are eight nests of five. As they’re ready to leave the breeding cages, I’ll put them all in the female cage so the male flight cage can be kept for the fliers. The fliers have begun to fill their cage with young ones too. The nests are built with materials they’ve scavenged from outside. They’re in and out of the aviary all day like pigeons. I leave the wire gate open for them. The opening’s too small and the landing platform too high and too narrow for a cat to get in.

I’m not sure what I’ll do when their babies begin to fly around the flight cage. The problem is whether to leave the outside entrance open or not. These young birds won’t have been trained to come to me when I whistle or to come back to the aviary at all. Would the parents teach them? Would they realize that the only food for them is in the cage? I decide to take the chance and leave the cage open. As long as they’re being fed by the parents, they’ll come back to the cage. That way they’ll get the habit. When they’ve started cracking seed for themselves will be the time when I’ll know if it’s all possible. Can they be free and still be part of the aviary community?

In my dream, life is really a dream. I fly and sing and help feed the babies. Then when they come out of the nest, I teach them to fly. Teaching them to fly in the open air is almost as much fun as flying itself. Teaching flying is always the best part of flight dreams. Perta is happy and is already sitting on a new nest of babies. They’re a week old. I fly with the first nest to all my favorite places. Some of my children from last year fly with us, especially the males who aren’t tied down to the nest. These birds are something between brothers and uncles to the new ones, and help with the teaching. Being a father and grandfather at the same time is a tremendous experience. I feel like a brother to my own children. It’s too bad people are so old when they get to be grandparents.

The other female who built outside the cage in the daytime hatches her birds, too. I think there are three of them. I can’t see the nest where Perta has built very well because it’s so high. I wouldn’t know her birds are hatched except I hear them peeping to be fed. In my dream, there is no other bird besides Perta and myself who builds outside the cage.

The way my canaries have adapted to natural life is almost proof that a canary keeps many of its natural skills even after centuries of being in cages and generations of interbreeding with other types of birds. I feel that if my canaries could find proper food, they would probably survive alone, without me.

The birds from the nest built in the tree over the roof are just getting up onto the edge of the nest and tottering when one day I notice a beat-up tomcat sitting on the porch roof and staring up at them. I’m not sure he can jump from the porch roof to the roof of the house, but I throw some stones at him till he goes away. It’ll really be dangerous when those young ones are starting to fly and flutter to the ground. I can’t think of any way to keep that cat out of the yard.

The female flight cage has sixty-two young birds in it already and the new nests are filling. It looks like even more birds than the year before, and that’s not counting the babies of my fliers. The feed bills are enormous, but I have enough money. I just tell my father how much I need and he gives it to me.

Those babies of the fliers are flying in and out of the aviary on their own. There doesn’t seem to be any trouble. They all come into the aviary to eat and roost at night. The mothers are generally onto second nests but the males fly with the young. Some of the young males have already started with their burbling, warbling songs. The father males still come when I whistle but the young don’t pay any attention to me at all. It’s marvelous that they’re so free; practically no strings tying them to the cage. Most of the females don’t go out much because they’re busy with the nests. I can still whistle down the one female who built her nest in the tree over the house. She’ll come for a brief minute and eat from my finger, but then fly back to her nest. It’s good to see how conscientious the birds are with their babies.

The young ones are very much like wild birds. They’ve never known what it is to be closed in a cage. They fly farther from the yard than the others; they also tend to flock more than the parent birds. The parents don’t seem to have any instinct for flocking left, whereas these young ones flock almost like pigeons. They’re much more easily frightened and will spook up in a flock to the tops of the trees.

All the birds have started eating the food I leave outside for Perta and the other young female. I decide to move that food inside. The only power I have left to bring them into the cages at night now is the food. After my evening feeding of the breeding cages I drop the wires of the outside door so when the birds come in to eat they can’t go out again. This way I can keep some count of them. As far as I can tell, there are already about twenty flier babies. The rate of reproduction is nothing like those in the breeding cages. There are more losses all along. For one thing, I don’t take out the eggs as they’re hatched. This means none of the nests have more than three or four birds.

I don’t like it when the young fliers treat me as any other enemy. They’re almost like my own grandchildren, but they don’t recognize me. My dream is built on them but they are completely separate from it; they’re practically wild birds.

– I probably built myself mostly to ‘beat’ my father; not just ‘beat him up’, but to be better at being what I thought he was. So, I became like him. We become like the people with whom we compete. It’s like cannibals eating part of an enemy warrior to absorb his courage. Crazy stuff!

Then it happens. I’ve just come out to the morning feeding when I look up at the nest in the tree over the house. There’s that cat on the roof and he has one of the young birds in his mouth. He’s reaching out to knock down another of the young birds roosting on a branch just below the nest. The mother bird is frantic. She’s flying at the cat and the cat swings at her. I don’t see the other young one.

I pick up stones and start throwing them. I yell, but he ducks and keeps pawing at the branch, or, when the mother bird comes near enough, bats at her.

I whistle for the mother to come to me and she flies down to my finger but jumps away again before I can catch her. She flies back up to the tree. I run into the garage and get out the ladder. My father comes out. He helps me put the ladder so I can climb onto the porch roof. My mother comes out. She’s worried I’ll fall and that my father will be late for work.

I climb up onto the roof. The cat is holding his ground but backs off a little when I stand and start reaching out for him. Now I’m up there, the mother bird is even braver in her attack on the cat. He still holds the body of the young bird in his mouth. The young one he’s been trying to reach has backed up the branch toward the nest where the other baby is looking over the side.

I’m just scrambling onto the roof when the cat knocks down the mother bird with a swing of one paw. I jump to get there ahead of the cat but he gets her first. He drops the young bird and grabs her with his teeth before I can do anything. I catch hold of the cat by the front leg. He scratches at me while I shift my hold and get him around the neck. I pry open his mouth to get out the mother bird. It’s too late. She’s dead. I pick up the little dead baby bird. I’ve let go of the cat and it slinks back across the roof, then drops to the porch roof. My father is standing with a stick by the rain barrel. The cat leaps off the roof and past him. He swings at it with the stick but doesn’t hit it.

I climb down and inspect the two birds. Both their spines are broken at the neck. A cat knows what it’s doing when it comes to killing a bird.

Before we take down the ladder, I go up and get the two baby birds out of the nest. It isn’t hard to catch them, they can’t fly. I take them into the fliers’ cage with the other young ones. Maybe one of the males will adopt them. I stuff them with food before I go to school and hope for the best.

When I come home, they seem all right and I give them another feeding. I’m sure somebody is feeding them. The fathers can’t remember all the birds, and one of them is father to these birds anyway.

That night in the dream, I’m afraid for what will happen, but everything goes all right. Perta’s nest is fine and there’s no sign of a cat. The nest we have is too high up in the tree for a cat to see. I talk to Perta and try to tell her about the danger of cats, but she’s never seen one and can’t know what I mean. I almost want to move our nest back into the cage. I wonder what would happen if I climbed up into the tree in the daytime as boy and moved the nest. Would Perta abandon it in the dream? Would it stay in the same place? It’s too big a risk. I feel confident that if I’m careful nothing will happen. The dream doesn’t have everything happen that happens in the day. The nest of the little yellow bird isn’t even in my dream.

It’s a week later and I’m feeling it’s all going to pass over, when, in the dream, I see the same cat climbing our tree. I’m perched just above and behind our nest where Perta is sitting. That day our babies have started standing on the edge of the nest. It’s what had to come about. The babies were too young before; now they’re old enough. It can happen.

Perta still hasn’t seen the cat. Our first nest of babies for this year, all four of them, are off flying with their older brothers down where we used to have the pigeon coop in the tree. There’s nothing I can think to do. I wait and watch the cat. I see him very clearly. He has one ear partly torn off, a ragged dogear of a cat’s ear. I can see all the details of this cat. I didn’t know I’d seen him so well. I was so busy thinking and doing things I didn’t notice myself seeing the cat.

What I must do is break the dream. I have to wake up. I need to become Birdy the boy and somehow work it out with this cat in daytime life. I can’t. I can’t make myself move out of the dream. I’m on the wrong side of the door; the key is in the other side. It’s like when you wake up and you’re not sure you can move your body and you’re afraid to try. I can’t make myself try. The bird in me is too strong. The bird doesn’t know it can make it all stop by going away. The bird is too afraid of the cat to get any distance. The bird has to stay and protect Perta and the babies. It won’t believe the other thing, the other existence. Yet the boy knows a canary cannot fight a cat.

I give in. I wait and watch as the cat scratches his way up the tree. Everything of my body wants to fly away. My bird-boy brain has to stay. I try to think out how the dream will happen. Must Perta be killed? If she sees the cat, will she fly at him or fly away?

I hop down to the nest.

‘Look, Perta, why don’t you take a little fly for yourself. I’ll sit the nest.’

Perta looks at me. She’s tired but she doesn’t want to leave. She senses my fear; it’s impossible to lie to her. I’m thinking maybe if she’s out of the dream I can wake up. I say again that I want her to take a rest; I want a chance to be with the young ones alone.

Perta knows something is peculiar, but she eases herself off the nest. The young ones are disturbed and make feed-me noises. I get on the nest and they settle down.

‘Go on, Perta. Take a fly. The young ones are in the woods. Go see what they’re doing. They’re flying around by the ruined house in the tree. You know where that is. It’ll do you good.’

Perta looks at me once more, then flies off. She doesn’t see the cat. She isn’t looking for it. The cat is pressed against the trunk of the tree. He’s already half way up. I’m sure he heard the babies peeping, but that doesn’t matter now. At least Perta is away. Now if I can only control the dream; stop it from happening. I try once more to concentrate, stop the dream, but I’m still too much inside it. I tell all the babies to stay down deep in the nest. It’s a hot day; the nest is tight and smelly. They don’t want to. It’s almost time for them to fly out; they want to sit or stand on the edge of the nest, stretch their wings. I make them stay down.

Now, I leave the nest myself. I fly to a higher part of the tree. The cat doesn’t see me. He’s concentrating in that maniac cat way on the nest. He’s already tasting the feathers and blood.

My only chance is to scare him somehow or hurt him. I think of getting my father to help me but my father is never in the dream. I think of trying to get myself to help. I can see me in the aviary across the yard, but that’s impossible too. I never pay any attention to myself as bird. I must do it alone. The only chance is to hurt the cat. I must somehow get to his eyes by diving down directly from above without making noise.

The cat has climbed higher into the tree: I fly out and hover in the air. I’m afraid. The bird in me is panicked by the cat. I think if I fly into my bedroom to a place I haven’t been as a bird, a place where I am as boy, that the dream might end. I know there isn’t enough time for that.

I start my dive. I dive between the branches and come fast down onto the cat’s head. I drive my beak straight toward his eye. The eye, yellow-green, black-slitted, concentrated on my babies. Then, I’m falling, my wings won’t work; I have no breath; I hurt. The cat has swept me out of the air with a quick stroke of his paw. I hit the ground and cannot move. My eyes are open, but I’m paralyzed. I’m lying on my side and looking up into the tree. I close my eyes again and try to make the dream stop. I open my eyes; I’m still there on the ground. The cat is looking down at me from the tree. Now he’s distracted from the nest.

I struggle to get my legs under me but nothing moves. The cat is turning his head over his shoulder and back down the tree. He scrambles and slips, then jumps the final few feet from the tree to the ground. I’m still there. The cat stands still watching me. I don’t move; I can’t. The cat is crouched ready to pounce. I look into his eyes, I try to make him see the boy in me, not just the bird. The slits in his eyes are opening and closing. His eyes are crossed in concentration. He is rocking his head slowly back and forth in anticipation. I try to hold him, stop him with my eyes. I try again to break the dream. I feel I can do it if I close my eyes. I know if I close my eyes the cat will pounce. I close my eyes and then, as before the dream ends, I hear a sound and the cat screams.

I wake in bed shaking and sweating. My heart is pounding. I can scarcely walk to the bathroom for a drink of water. One side of my body is numb and sore. I look in the mirror but there’s nothing, no redness, no cut. I’m pale and my hair is matted with sweat.

I go back to my bedroom and get out another pair of pajamas. I hang the first pair over the radiator to dry. I’m so sore I can hardly get them on. I fall back into bed and stare at the ceiling. I don’t know if I should go to sleep again. I’m tired but I’m afraid of the dream. Is it still possible to sleep without dreaming? If I dream again, what will be happening? I make my mind go over what’s happening in the dream; try to make it come out right.

The cat was screaming. Why? Was it just the scream before he pounced on me and began ripping me to pieces? If I go into the dream, will I be dead? If I’m dead in the dream, will the dream be ended? If I’m dead in the dream, will I die as a boy?

I feel I’m almost dead lying in bed. I know I could die very easily. It’s only a matter of not trying. I can’t stop myself and I go to sleep.

I come into the dream with my eyes closed. I’m still there, not dead. I open my eyes and the cat is leaping and jumping in a circle. He’s screaming and there’s blood. One eye is closed and leaking fluid. The cat runs off with a final yowling scream. I look, and on the ground beside me is Perta!

– Jesus! Now Birdy’s crying. What the hell can be the matter? What’s he crying about? Maybe everything. If he can cry, let him. It’s not so easy to do even when you want to.

I close my eyes again. I want to end the dream. I must end it. The babies are alone; Perta is dead. I know she is dead not only from the way she is lying but because it is still my dream. I close my eyes and concentrate on ending the dream. Finally, it slides from under me, the dream stops and I stay asleep. I know that sleeping without dreaming is being dead.

When I awake in the morning I can’t move. I’m surprised to find myself alive. I don’t want to cry out, I don’t want to move. My mind has lost control of my body. I feel totally separate. I watch as my mother comes in, talks to me, gets mad, then looks at me, shouts at me, and runs out of the room. I feel in another place.

I’m watching all the things as if I’m watching the birds through binoculars. I watch the doctor. I watch them taking me to the hospital. I open or close my eyes according to how much I want to see. I feel that I’ll never sleep again, never dream again, never move again. I don’t care too much. All I can do is watch; I’m enjoying watching. They lift my legs in the air. They lift my arms. They ask me questions. I don’t answer. I don’t want to answer. I’m not sure I can answer. Even my voice isn’t mine anymore. I’m between me and something else. Then I do sleep. It is the same kind of dead sleep.

It’s as if there is no tie between before I go into that sleep and when I wake up. I wake up in the hospital. I’m hungry. I eat and I can move. I’m back with people. Perhaps the dream is gone forever. I don’t know how I feel about this. I’m like a small child; all there is, is me, feeding me, looking at things around, smelling things, tasting things, hearing things. I move my hand and watch it. It is all new.

Three days later, they take me out of the hospital and I go home. I stay another week in my bed just enjoying being me. My father says he’s taking care of the birds. He tells me how many new birds he’s put into the breeding cages and what nests have been laid with how many eggs. I don’t care. All that is finished. I’m frightened; I don’t want to go back. He asks me what I’m going to do about the free-flying birds. He wants to lock them in the cage. He says he’s counted at least fifteen young males singing in the trees and there’re probably twice that many. That’s more than three hundred dollars flying around in the trees. I don’t want to talk about it.

It’s the third day after I’ve started school when it starts again. I have all kinds of final examinations coming up and I can’t get myself to study for them. I’m enjoying riding my bicycle and watching people. I’ve never looked at people much before. They’re as interesting as birds if you really look. I go to a track meet and I’m all caught up watching people run, jump, throw things. Al wins the discus with a throw of a hundred and seventy-two feet. I have my binoculars with me and I can see all that’s happening with close eyes.

It might be the watching with the binoculars that brings it back. In my sleep that night, I wake in the dream. I’m still on the ground under the tree. I get onto my feet. I stretch my wings. I hop over to Perta. She is dead. Her neck is broken the way the little yellow female’s was; there’s nothing I can do. I do not know I’m in the dream. I am completely bird. I have no arms with which to lift her from the ground. Still, I’m not bird enough to accept Echen and leave her there. I want to move her, to take her to some place where the cat won’t be able to eat her. I look around; the cat is not in the yard. I can’t leave Perta on the ground like that. I fly up into the tree to see our babies. They’re scrunched down in the nest, frightened. I feed them and tell them I’ll be back. I’m feeling stretched out. I’m confused about time. I fly back to Perta.

Then I see me coming out of the aviary. I’m walking across the yard toward me. I stand there on the ground as bird and wait. I know there is a new hole in the dream. I can feel the mixing of the waves of two places, like an undertow. Two places are pulling at once.

I do not see me. This is as usual. Then I lean down and pick up Perta. There is great unhappiness on my face. It is the unhappiness of a boy; birds’ faces show nothing. I pick up Perta and walk back towards the aviary. I fly painfully after me to the edge of the aviary roof. I watch myself come back out again with a small spoon and a matchbox. It’s one of the kitchen matchboxes in which I keep the eggs. I put Perta carefully into the box and close it. I dig a hole in the back of the aviary beside the wall and bury the box. I go back into the aviary.

I hop from the top of the aviary and stand by Perta’s grave. I’m glad she’s safe from the cat. I know I must go to my babies but I don’t want to leave Perta.

Then I see myself come out of the aviary again. I have a popsicle stick with me. I push the stick into the ground over the space where the matchbox is buried. I hop close and read the writing.

MY WIFE, PERTA.

I wake up.

That next day at school I know all the things that have to happen. I’m not too frightened by the strange way the real world has to follow the dream. I’m sorry for Perta and I think of locking her into the flight cage but then her baby birds would starve. I could put those babies under other birds but this whole thing is something that has to happen. If it doesn’t happen as it must, then my Perta will never be really dead, I can never be free as a boy again.

After school I’m working in the aviary when I hear the cat scream. I walk across the yard and over under the tree. She’s there exactly in the spot where I look for her. I look, but know I cannot see myself. I pick Perta up and her neck is broken. There is no other mark on her body.

I carry her across the yard to the aviary and do the things I’m supposed to do. I’m feeling very calm inside myself. More than ever I feel that I am together. As boy I’m doing exactly what must be. I almost feel myself fitting into the space I occupied in the dream. I put Perta in the box and go out to the place beside the wall. There’s a slight depression in the ground. I dig the hole half-looking, expecting a matchbox to be there. Al will never know about the treasure we didn’t find. In some way it was there, there, in the power of our dream.

There’s no matchbox and I put my matchbox with Perta into the hole. I cover it over and look for myself up on top of the aviary. I’m not there. I go back into the aviary and take the popsicle stick I use for scraping out the corners of the cages. I clean it off and print the message on it with a dark pencil. I go out and push it into the ground over the grave. There are no bird tracks. I wake up.

During the day I can’t keep my thoughts from the dream. My throat hurts because I’m not crying when I should. We’re having final exams so no one notices me much.

That night I’m still standing by Perta’s grave. The dream has become more like a dream. Things don’t happen the way they used to. I don’t see any of the other birds. When I fly, I fly in slow motion. It’s like a dream.

I fly up to the babies and feed them. I tell them their mother won’t be coming back but I will take care of them. I spend all that day and night sitting on the edge of the nest, feeding them when they’re hungry and remembering Perta. I know they will not remember her. To them, she’s in Echen and that’s all there is to it. It’s not worth thinking about; it doesn’t matter.

In my dream, over the next weeks, I bring the young birds up till they can fly from the nest and join the others. They are free, they can fly where they want to. My babies are completely bird. I do not show them where Perta is buried, it would mean nothing. I’m getting more and more boy in my dream, the bird in me is fading. The dream is becoming less and less real.

As boy, I’m not as interested in the breeding of birds either. I’m seeing them for what they are, canaries. Everything in the aviary seems so automatic. The young birds all look alike. I can’t tell them from last year’s birds anymore. I can feel it all coming to an end. Something is finished.

I build a feeding platform on top of the aviary. I build a roof over it to keep off the rain. I build perches for the feeders so the flying birds can feed up high away from cats. When it’s done, I let all the birds out of the new flying cage. Some few females are still sitting on nests, so I allow them to stay in the cage.

When the last nest is finished, I put the floor back in the cage to separate the upper part from the lower. I begin to select out the singing males from the female flight cage, and put them in the lower cage. As the breeding birds finish up their third nests, I move them into the flight cages, too. Birdie is tired but as friendly as ever and I take her out for a free flight. I take Alfonso out too and it’s the first free flying for him. His flight is weak from the long time in a small cage but he quickly finds his wings and takes long flights to the tree and the house. I’m not sure he’ll come back to the cage but he does. I decide to leave Alfonso and Birdie out with the free fliers. They deserve it.

The free fliers are now totally out of the cages. They sleep in the tree or on the house. I leave the cage door open but they don’t come in. There are about sixty birds out flying free. It makes me proud to see them. I feel I’ve helped put them back in the air where they belong. I wonder if they’ll stay close to the house now when they don’t sleep in the cages. At the end of summer will be the time for northern hemisphere finches to migrate. What will these birds do? Will this instinct take them off and in which direction? Will Birdie and Alfonso leave and fly with them? How far can a finch fly without eating? There’s no way I can think of for them to get to Africa, their original habitat. Will they learn to live on the grains and fruits our finches live on here? Will they interbreed with other finches or stay apart? It doesn’t matter. It’s so great to see them flying free.

There are over two hundred birds in the flight cages. More than half are males. The price of birds is astronomical. I’ll be glad when the birds are old enough to sell. I don’t want to keep birds in cages anymore. I’d really like to set all of them free but these young birds without free flight experience could never make it. Also, my father is very happy thinking of the money we will get when we sell them. He’s kept my mother off my back, so I can’t let him down. He’d like to get all the free fliers into the cage and sell them, too. He keeps listening to them and has all the males identified. He’s up to thirty-five males.

I’m dreaming again, but in my dreams I’m always alone. I see the other birds flying but I stay away. I fly all the night alone. I fly to every place I’ve ever been. I fly over the roof tops and trees or sometimes high in the sky. It seems so easy and I’m more me, not so much a bird. It’s me, a boy, flying. I’m flapping my arms like wings and it’s easy. It’s just knowing I can do it that makes me fly. In my dreams I’m always wanting someone else so I can show them how to do it. It would be such fun to teach Al or my father how to fly. When you can do it, it seems so incredibly easy.

The wholesale man comes and buys all the birds. We get nine dollars apiece for the males and three dollars for the females. The total check is for over fifteen hundred dollars. My father doesn’t understand why I’m selling the breeding birds, too. He still wants to trap the flying birds and sell them, but I put him off. They are my birds. I let him think I’m going to use them for breeding the next year.

It’s quiet in the aviary now. I clean it all up and cover the breeding cages with newspapers. At night, in my dream, I begin to sense a strange restlessness in myself. Even when I’m flying, I’m thinking of something else and I don’t know what it is. Then I know. I’m feeling the urge to flock and migrate. Is it in the other birds or is it only me? Is it in the dream birds, too?

Daytimes I watch the birds and I’m sure they’re preparing to leave. There is much flocking and random flight. They have increased their eating and fly further distances from the yard. Sometimes there will be no birds at all in the yard for as long as two or three hours.

My mother is starting to complain about the bird shit on things and the noise. The noise she’s talking about is the singing. My father says they’re all going to freeze in the winter cold. He says it’d be cruel to leave them out, and we have to get them back into the flight cages. Most of them have never lived in a cage.

He opens up the door to the flight cage and moves the feeders inside. The birds start coming into the flight cage to eat, then they come in to sleep at night. A few of them, like Alfonso, still sleep out in the tree, but most times they all come in. I know the time is coming when my father will close the door and lock them in.

In my dream I go to the birds. I tell them it is time to leave. I tell them if they go into the cage to sleep they will be closed in the cage and put into small cages. At first, they do not understand me, then they do not believe me. Alfonso speaks; he says he knows what I say is true, that I have never lied to the birds. It is time to leave. He says he knows how to go, that it is a long flight and some will die, but he is going, so is Birdie, and they are leaving in the early morning. I listen and I’m sad. The birds are excited.

At dawn, all are ready; we go up in a single movement. Alfonso is at the head of the flock. We fly straight south, over the top of the gas tank, over Landsdowne, down over Chester and I am with them. I’m wondering what is happening with my life. Will I ever wake up in my own bed again?

Then, somehow I am not with them. I am in the sky, flying, watching them go. I cannot keep up; they are leaving me. I see myself as bird, with them, flying, up behind Alfonso and Birdie. I know I will be with them wherever they go. I watch from my place in the sky as they, we, become small spots getting smaller until there is only sky. I find myself getting heavier, falling, gliding down to the earth only a little slower than I fell off the gas tank. I flap my arms as I fall and I just manage to get back into my sleep under the empty sky.

In the morning there are no birds. My father is angry. I feel very lonesome. We wait all day for the birds to come back. It is Saturday and I spend the day watching the sky, trying to keep it empty.

The next day I go out and take apart the aviary. I store the wood behind the garage. I do it quietly so no one will know what I’m doing. Things come apart much easier than they go together. The aviary is down and gone when I go inside to bed.

That night I do not dream.

The days pass slowly. I feel terribly alone. I’m worried about telling my father I’m not going to college. I’m also worried about being drafted. All this works itself out; it’s decided for me.

In September, I get a letter from the army saying I’ve been selected to study engineering with the ASTP, the Army Specialized Training Program. They’ve assigned me to the University of Florida in Gainsville. I’d taken the test for the ASTP at school in February and forgotten about it completely.

It seems like the perfect solution. I can get away from everything and it’s something I can live with. They tell us we’re being trained as engineers to help with the rebuilding of Europe and Japan after the war. My parents are happy, they think I’m going to be an officer, and that impresses them.

I enlist at the end of the month. I’m sent to Florida for a semester, then they dissolve the ASTP. I’m sent to Fort Benning for basic training, then to the South Pacific as an infantry replacement.

I think of ten about the birds, about Perta, and my children, but I don’t dream about them.