On Monday night I took the bus to the pet store and bought the bird some food. At the register the lady asked, “What kind of bird do you have?” I said, “Even more important—what kind of owner does the bird have? Evil. An evil one,” then walked off with the food and my receipt. Sammy thinks I made that cashier’s day by saying something weird back to her. He still remembers the guy from eight years ago who responded to Sammy’s have-a-nice-day with, “Right. And you tell Antonio that if I see him again I’ll cut his throat.” Sammy says sometimes he just lies in bed and wonders what Antonio did. A few times I’ve noticed Sammy staring off into space. I'll ask, “Antonio?” and Sammy whispers, “Antonio.”
The bird has not made much of a racket, but I do blame it for my disrupted sleep patterns. I’ve been sleeping on my couch just to be nearer to it. If it starts to squawk I want to be close to heave an item at its cage. It hasn’t made much noise so far, but it’s upsetting my dreams. For the past two nights I have dreamed about my father’s funeral. There are only a few people there and I don’t recognize any of them besides my uncle. My mother isn’t there. There isn’t a priest— just a funeral director, and he says that the deceased’s son has prepared some music for the service. He hits a button and the songs of birds begin to play. It goes on for ten minutes, and I hear one of the people I don’t recognize say, “How long is this going to go?” I am only ten, so it really scares them when I scream in response, “If you don’t like it then get out! Go on!” When I found my father in his bed, real peaceful like he said some day he’d be, I grabbed the tape recorder and ran knee-deep into the marsh behind the house. I recorded the birds for hours.
All that really happened at my father’s funeral, and that’s exactly how it happened in my dream, too. But in the dream, all the bird songs finish and sitting next to me is Julia Albert with that lovebird on her shoulder. I tell her she isn’t supposed to be here, and she says she is. Then she tells me to hold still and tries to pull off my face.
I’ve had that dream two nights in a row, and I blame the bird. I never dream about my father’s funeral, just like I never dream about Rachel. I don’t need to dream about them. They’re always right there. When I told Boyce about the dreams, he said maybe it’s because the bird doesn’t have a name. I told him it was more likely that birds make me think of my father. He said if that's all it was then I’d have the dream all the time.
Perhaps, but Boyce's dream interpretation skills are decidedly poor. Once he dreamed that he was Abraham Lincoln and I was sitting next to him at Ford's Theater. John Wilkes Booth walked into the box and, apparently, I saw him right before he was going to shoot. Rather than warning A-boyce-aham Lincoln I just fell down and cried. I tried to interpret the dream for him as it relates to grief and the ceaseless march of time but he just kept laughing and saying, "Thanks for the help, friend." Nevertheless, I told him that if the lovebird's anonymity was causing the dream, then he needed to help me out and name the bird. He said this was more of a Sammy thing, and we got him on the phone. “Name the bird,” I said.
Sammy didn’t miss a beat. “Antonio.”
