The boy nodded, then suddenly, vigorously poked the body with the shovel. The breast feathers depressed with a rubbery, sickening movement. “Will I die like that?” he asked in a near‑whisper. “I mean, somebody’ll find me on a beach or a sidewalk somewhere, and think I was just sleeping, ’till they poke me and I don’t wake up? I mean, just like that, like something broke?”
Something caught in Daniel’s breath then. Like a failing bird’s wing desperate for some small wind. “Well, we don’t know if that’s what happened to this bird. Maybe he was having a good time, doing tricks in the air, racing another bird. Birds don’t last long, you know—they die pretty quickly.”
“Yeah.” It sounded like relief. It made Daniel slightly nervous. “Maybe he won’t be so lonely now.”
“Why do you think he was lonely?”
The boy shrugged. “I don’t know. All birds are, I guess.”
He was smiling now. “Least maybe he was being excited when he died. He was… mad or something.”
“I think you may be right.”
Again, he looked so primitive, with his ragged shorts and face set over a problem he couldn’t begin to understand. Maybe the boy would have known if the bird had been lonely. And maybe children did share a certain kind of loneliness with the first humans—it wasn’t all that long ago that they had been a part of a wholeness that included everything in their universe. But then you’re born, and your eyes open onto yourself for the first time and see that you are separate and alone. But you want to go back to that all-encompassing love, and gather up the parts of you for a return trip to paradise.
But there was no turning back the clock. And that made you angry, made you want to tear the whole world—your house, your crib—apart. The child would always be that naive, painful part of you still aware of your first separation, when the shadow of violence slipped out. And that would make anybody furious.
It made you mad that the child was so naive, that he could not see the danger, and could not see the danger from you, your hands, your fists. Sometimes you wanted to kill that part that refused to grow up.
“Maybe I wouldn’t mind dying so much, you know, mister? How would you know?”
Daniel grabbed his shoulder. “Don’t say that-you have no idea what you’re talking about.” The boy looked disdainfully at the hand on his shoulder. Daniel pulled away and sat down on the roof facing the boy. “Where are your parents?”
“Dead, maybe. I don’t know. Maybe I’m the one—I fell asleep one night and then I was here. And now I have to pretend to be other kids I’m not.”
“Anybody to take care of you?”
“They’ve all gone away. What’s it like, mister, being dead? Are we in Heaven, or are we in Hell? Are we like gods, or are we like monsters?”
Daniel bit his lip. “I don’t know. What do you think it would be like to be dead? Do you think it would be like this? Because I’m afraid you’d be wrong. You just wouldn’t be—at least that’s what I believe.”
“I don’t know for sure, but maybe it might be kinda exciting. It ain’t that easy to die, is it?”
“Usually not.”
“Then you gotta be doing things that are risky, things you shouldn’t do.”
“Well, not always.”
“And so maybe you’re doing exciting things when you die, maybe the most exciting stuff you ever done, mister.”
Daniel stared at the boy in exasperation. “What’s your name?”
The boy grinned. “I don’t know. I guess I lost it coming here. You can call me anything you like.”
From Gordon’s first days Daniel and Elena had had definite ideas about their son’s education and their obligation to instill certain values in him. To that end there were no toy guns in their house, no tanks or other combat equipment, no toy weapons of any kind. Gordon’s television viewing was carefully supervised, and programs with heavily violent content weren’t permitted him, including most Saturday-morning cartoons. Comic books and magazines were similarly scrutinized before Gordon was allowed to have them. This program started when Gordon was two years old. Daniel and Elena were determined that he have a repertoire of better solutions to his everyday problems than the aggressive ones his parents had grown up with. He’d be a better kind of person.
It wasn’t long before it appeared that Gordon had an even greater fascination with weaponry than the average kid. His playtime fantasies were dark and violent, full of monsters and colorful deaths. Children, Daniel concluded, were a mystery.
Children were human beings, but they weren’t “like us”—they weren’t adults. And few adults treated kids as if they were fully human. They treated them like animated dolls, robots, pets. The adults used unnatural tones and vocabulary. They referred to them as “cute,” or “noisy.” Parents were amused by the walks and dances that mimicked the human, but certainly didn’t duplicate it with much accuracy.
Children lulled you, made you think of them as small cuddly humanoids, but something would change, and the child would suddenly speak to you in an anguished, strangely human voice, and you felt ashamed.
Daniel vividly remembered one night becoming aware of soft moans from Gordon’s bedroom, interrupted by wet coughs and hiccups. He went into the bedroom and a wail from under the comforter made him turn on the light.
“Gordie…” He pulled the wet and trembling child from the tangled mass of bedclothes and embraced him fiercely, wiping awkwardly at the damp face with a corner of the sheet. “It’s okay, love. Daddy’s here… nothing to be afraid of. Nothing wrong here.”
“…bad dream…” Gordon gasped out between sobs.
“Oh, but it’s gone now. The dream can’t get you now, sweetie. Daddy won’t let that happen.”
Gordon gazed at him sleepily. “They were trying to get me.”
“Who?”
“The man and the woman. We were in the bathroom and they held knives to my belly and all the skin started coming off me and… they didn’t have no faces, and I was bleeding too much. I started yelling but that came out blood, too, all big and bubbly.”
Daniel held onto his son. After a while Gordon fell asleep. Daniel gently slipped him under the covers and kissed him, and as an afterthought tucked Flat Duck under his arm. Then he returned to his chair in the living room, where he brooded for hours.
He’d never thought of children having nightmares that bad, and over the next few months discovered that Gordon had a variety of them. Suddenly his son seemed a tiny container of horrors. Small cuddly humanoids should never have such dreams, nor should robots, nor dolls. Was it his fault, Gordon picking up Daniel’s own anxieties? But the source of Gordon’s fears remained a mystery.
After they had been told of Gordon’s heart condition Daniel thought he had at least a reason for the mysterious dreams and fears. This small thinking machine had created a compelling image or two to explain its hidden defect to its human masters.
Each night Daniel went into his son’s room, allowing the light from the living room to illuminate the bed in the corner. Each night he would walk over to the bed and stand a moment, watching carefully to make sure that the small chest was rising and falling as it should. Then he’d lean over and hold his son awkwardly through the covers, repressing the urge to climb up onto the bed and sleep with him.