The Complete Collection. William Wharton

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ heavyweight all the time, now. He must be a hundred eighty, at least. He looks like the invisible man from the movie with all the bandages over the bottom of his face. He has the same eyes, deep, dangerous, but softer, worried-looking. You feel he’ll jump away if you make a fast move.

      ‘OK, Al, so here we are. Birdboy meets Superboy. How’re we going to work our way out of this one? Can we possibly kid ourselves into thinking all this makes sense, has some reason?’

      Birdy laughs quietly and settles into a squat in front of the bars. This is his normal squat, the way he used to squat in the pigeon coop or watch pigeons in the street. He’s squatting flat-footed with his arms out over his knees, straight out, with the palms up. He cocks his head to the side while he listens. There’s still a lot of bird there.

      I watch Al. He’s having a hard time deciding whether to talk to me as a patient, the loon in the loony bin, or to me, as myself, Birdy.

      ‘OK, Birdy, so what do we do? I’m stuck. I can’t seem to make myself different and I can never go back to fooling myself the old ways. I know it; I’m finished. The old Al isn’t there anymore!’

      ‘You don’t really know that, Al. You just want to think you know it. It’s the easy way, quiet, bloodless, deathless suicide. I’ll tell you, Al, I’ve been thinking. Maybe crazy people are the ones who see things clear but work out a way to live with it.’

      Birdy takes a long staggering breath. He talks slowly, not much like Birdy; Birdy always talked five miles a minute.

      ‘Look, Al, you and I had a going concern. We could take almost anything that happened and turn it into a personal adventure, like comic book characters. Birdboy and Superboy playing at life. We just Halliburtonized our way through everything. Nothing could really touch us. That’s something special, you know. We were so good at playing we didn’t need to make up games. We were the game.’

      ‘OK, great, so now we’ve been shot down.’

      ‘It’s not that bad, Al. We’re still here. I know I can’t fly and I don’t even want to anymore. You know you can’t chew nails and spit tacks; but so what. We can still go on trying to put things together, shifting, arranging, so things come out right.’

      ‘What’s that mean, Birdy? You going back to squatting there in your cage, letting people feed you and I go back to leg pressing a thousand pounds and running around catching people so I can hold their shoulders to the ground for three seconds? I don’t see it.’

      ‘Listen, Al. I think what I’m trying to say is, we really are loons. We’re crazy because we can’t accept the idea that things happen for no reason at all and that it doesn’t mean anything. We can’t see life as just a row of hurdles we have to get over somehow. It looks to me as if everybody who isn’t crazy, just keeps hacking away to get through. They live it out day by day because each day is there and then when they run out of days they close their eyes and call themselves dead.’

      Al looks straight into my eyes. He’s still not sure if I’m talking sense. I think I am, but I’ve been wrong so of ten lately. I can’t hold back a smile.

      ‘Aw, come on, Birdy. Let me tell you something first. You’re going to have one hell of a time just getting out of this place. Your psychiatrist, that fat slob Weiss, has you pegged for a once-in-a-lifetime case. He’s never going to let you go.’

      ‘He’s OK, Al. He brought you down here and I’m fine now. You’ve got to admit he did the right thing. I’m not a bird and when I decide to get out of here, I’ll go. I’m not ready yet, but when I decide to leave, I’ll go. I just need more time to put it together, to figure out what I can do so my life will be some fun and I can stay alive.’

      ‘You don’t seem to get it, Birdy. You’re locked in here. You can’t walk out just like that.’

      ‘I’m not worried, Al. I’ll get out. That’s not the problem.’

      ‘OK, Birdy, OK. Then we con Weiss into giving you walking papers. You get a pension and live a life of luxury with nobody on your ass. How’s that?’

      ‘It’s not enough, Al. That’s just hurdling, getting through, leaning back. We can do better than that.’

      ‘But you have no idea, Birdy. This place is a regular prison. First, there’s these two doors; we can manage that, OK; but then there’s the door to the ward. I think Renaldi’d help us there. But there’s a fifteen-foot wall all around this place with guards at the gate. If you think you can fly over that, then you’re still a loon.’

      I stare at him. I don’t want to hurt Birdy, but I’ve got to know.

      ‘Tell me, Birdy. What the hell happened to you? How’d you wind up here anyway?’

      Al’s embarrassed asking. I know I have to tell him something.

      ‘Well, Al, it’s like everything else, it just happened. Would you believe I got hit going into Waiheke Island off New Guinea? I think it was one of those little Japanese twenty-five-caliber machine guns.

      ‘I come to in a hot tent with the sun making everything yellow. I’m connected up with tubes and pipes. I’m on my back and can’t move. There are long rows of cots and hanging bottles of blood and water. I pass out.

      ‘I wake up again and there’s a lot of noise. People run past the cot; I hear rifle fire. It’s either morning or evening. There’s a noise at the far end of the tent. It’s a Japanese soldier cutting through with a bayonet. He goes down the line of cots. There’s no screaming, only the thump of his rifle and the tear of the cot when his bayonet stabs through each time.

      ‘I rip off the tubes, crawl under the edge of the tent, and start to run. Then, begin to fly. I fly past the Japanese, over the tent, and into the jungle. I look back and see the tent on the edge of the sand and the water glistening. The next thing I’m here listening to you talk about pigeons.

      ‘Would you believe that, Al? It’s what I remember.’

      ‘Shit, Birdy. That’s crazy! Nobody can fly! What do you think really happened?’

      ‘That’s what happened, Al.’

      ‘Jesus!’

      Al’s backing off again. I didn’t want to lie to him, but now he’s worried.

      ‘All right, Al. So everything is crazy. Maybe without knowing it, I’m making up the whole flying part; but here we are now, let’s find some endings we can live with. Let’s get the old combination going.’ We sit quiet for several minutes. It’s so wild I’m afraid to bring it up, especially after the ‘flying story’ he just told me. Birdy’s liable to wind up squatting in the middle of the room again. But, I can’t help myself; I’ve got to tell him. ‘I got an idea in sort of a dream, Birdy. It was a terrific dream after the other ones. I woke myself up laughing out loud.

      ‘You know, Birdy, I asked Weiss to ship all those baseballs down here, the ones your old lady used to steal.’

      ‘Yeah. I remember. You told me.’

      ‘I didn’t know you heard.’

      I can’t believe my mother kept those balls all these years. There’s no end to the absurd things СКАЧАТЬ