Birdy

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