The WWII Collection

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

I’m winding down but Birdy is definitely smiling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After 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.