Birdy

crouching on the floor, not paying any attention to me.
    ‘Hell, you’re not even listening now. We’re both impossibly screwed-up, Birdy. I think maybe we put off growing up a little too long.’
    I stop talking. What’s the use? What’s the use of anything? Nobody really talks to anybody else anyway, even if they aren’t crazy. Everybody’s only strutting around, pecking and picking.
    I close my eyes, put my elbows on my knees, and lean forward with my head in my hands. I still can’t put any pressure on the left side. I figure this is the last time I’ll see Birdy. I can’t take it anymore myself. Old Weiss’s going to figure it out and lock me in one of these bins soon.
    I open my eyes and Birdy’s standing up against the bars. He has a big grin on his face and he’s looking straight at me; his eyes aren’t even wiggling.
    ‘Well, Al, you’re just as full of shit as ever.’

‘Holy Christ! Is that you, Birdy?!! Are you there?’
    I can’t believe it! He’s leaning against the bars, his face sticking through. He’s so thin he could turn sidewise and walk on out of the place. While he was squatting or sitting, you couldn’t tell how thin he really is. He’s taller, too. He was always a runt but now he’s taller than I am. I stand up and go close.
    ‘It’s really you, Birdy. You’re OK?’
    ‘Well, Al, I’m not OK, but it’s me.’
    It’s Birdy all right, but he sounds different.
    ‘How about all the bird shit, then? Don’t tell me you’ve been pretending all this time. If you’ve been sitting there listening and laughing, I’ll kill you barehanded!’
    ‘That’s right, Al. I was pretending. I pretended I was a bird; now I’m pretending I’m me. I figured it out while you were talking. I think I’m me now. That’s not completely true either. I don’t know who I am, but I’m not a bird.’
    ‘Holy shit! I can’t believe it. You mean you remember everything; you’re not a loon anymore?’
    ‘I’m not so sure about that either, Al.’
     
    Al’s heavier. He’d have to wrestle 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 therein your cage, letting people feed you and I go back to leg pressing a thousand pounds and