FRANK ROBERTS
Imagine a boy locked in a room for seventeen years. He has no language for thought, only a few concepts expressed in sounds. He has never seen himself in a mirror to know what he really looks like. He has only been able to compare himself with his two gaolers, a man and a woman. The boy’s hair was as long as the woman’s, but they were shaped differently. The man, whose shape was at least similar to the boy’s, had short hair. These were the only two people he had ever known and he was different to both of them.
Of the earlier years he could remember little. He was smaller, but grew, whereas the man and woman had not changed. Nor had the floor, the ceiling, or three of the walls. Once, one wall had a square space in it which used to let in light; a separate world in which both the sun and moon used to appear, falling slowly; and in which he used to see birds and aeroplanes moving swiftly. At that time he used to associate the man with light that came through the window and also the door when he brought containers of food and water.
The boy associated the woman with darkness that had filled the room when she opened the door, brought in new food and drink, and took the old containers away. She even wore things that glittered like the stars, or like the sharp points in her eyes when she looked at him. Both the man and the woman hated the boy, and he feared them. When they came in he used to crouch in a corner and be quiet. In all the years they had made only a few of their sounds at him. Twice he had tried to mimic these, and twice had suffered for it.
Although he would never know it, his mimicry had been perfect.
He had taken “God” from the man’s sounds, and had been kicked in the stomach. “Curse” was the sound he had taken from the woman, who had knocked him down with her fist. That was the end of his speaking.
He spent years standing below the window, looking up at the blue sky and the crossing of birds and planes. The birds were all similar in shape, but different in size, speed, and ways of flight. Some flapped, some swooped and soared. All of them could stop suddenly, or change direction immediately. Sometimes many of them crossed the world of light together, and these too could change direction as one. They were marvels, the birds. How he wished he was one of them.
The aeroplanes were as unlike the birds as he was. They moved on steady wings, but did not swoop or soar. They seemed able to grow bigger or smaller if they stayed in the window world any length of time, but most of them flew straight across it. The boy felt no kinship for the aeroplanes. They did not seem as alive and free of will as the birds did.
Nor did he like the sounds of the planes as he liked the softer cries and whistles of the birds. He began to mimic those, quietly, and there was no reprisal. The birds did not attack him, but seemed to ignore him. Only sometimes did it seem possible they heard him, flew closer to his window, and replied to his calls, making their sounds of happiness and freedom, or of warning and alarm. After a long time he learned to make the sound that meant a storm was coming, to take the birds away and hide the planes and blow strange scents into the room.
When he was sure that he could mimic this sound exactly he tried it on the birds, saw the alarm it caused, the flutterings and swoopings, heard it repeated, and denied. Then he knew that at last he had communicated with other living things, and was joyful. But he soon found that the birds began to tire of his alarms, and fly away from them. So he mimicked the sounds for happiness and clear, fine, beautiful day, and longed more than ever to be one of the birds in the world outside.
He had grown up to the lower edge of the window and could see a little more of that other world, and more yet if he stood on his toes, and still more when he jumped up and down on the balls of his feet, seeing the roofs of houses and the tops of the trees to which the birds flew down, and from which came the glorious bird sound choruses at first light. These used to awaken him, when he would jump happily by his window, calling to the birds that dawn was coming, and hearing their answers, singly, then in numbers.
And one morning he saw two other creatures like his gaolers, framed in an opening under a roof, and pointing upward. And the next time the man came he opened the door, carried in the food and water, and then brought in a lantern, boards, wire, a bag of cement, and locked the door behind him and began to close up the window space, close out the other world of light, aeroplanes, birds, roofs and treetops.
When the boy finally realised what had happened, when he woke next time and could not see out, and had only blackness with him in the room, he did not cry or whimper, nor give way to despair. He sat on the floor and waited for the woman to come. Finally she trod the stairs, turned the key, opened the door, and then screamed as he rushed at her and knocked her down.
But as she fell she took him with her, with her arms around his neck and her fingernails in his flesh, holding him fiercely, screaming desperately, frightening out the anger, letting fear in to overcome him. He was limp and sobbing when the man lifted him from the woman, holding him by the hair with one hand, and struck him with the other until he was unconscious.
That was the end of one phase of his life.
From then on he lived entirely alone in the darkness of his room, and the light within his mind, in which the wild free birds flew mute. His gaolers no longer entered the room. They had opened a small space at the bottom of the door, and pushed his food and drink in twice a day. And each time he would hurl himself against the door, making the storm’s coming sound. Now he hated them, and they feared him.
He was alone, but not lonely. There was plenty to do. First he had to explore his body, see how it was made and consider what it might be made to do. He found a fuzz of soft hair under his arms, and later on his arms, and the idea came to him that he might be growing feathers. But the growth was desperately slow. Each waking time he felt for it on his skin. Gradually, there was a little on his face, a little on his legs, some more on and under his arms. He was convinced. It was going to happen, however slowly.
It was easy for him to remember the birds in flight, how they used their wings, and what these looked like, how they spread out from the body. He extended his arms, curved them, felt all around them, and realised how much they would have to grow, that something must grow between his arms and his body to make flight possible.
He knew it would be done, and that there was one thing he had to do to be ready for it. When he could fly he must have the space in the wall, the window space, opened to fly through. He tried to locate where it had been, at first groping around the walls and floor, disoriented in the blackness until one of his gaolers came up and pushed food under the door. Then he set his back to the door and crawled straight ahead until he bumped into a wall. Above him the window should be. Running his hand over the wall surface he found two different textures. Not reason but something, will perhaps, told him to scratch away where they joined. He began scratching with his fingernails but this soon made his fingertips too raw and painful.
He had to stop, and pass into the mental world of light and air in which the birds flew, the planes moved, and there were roofs and treetops below. And from there, easily into sleep. At no time did he think of using the enamelled steel food and drink containers as scrapers. His mind could have conceived no use for them other than as containers. So when he woke again he felt along his broken fingernails and found the thumbnails again hard and effective.
So from then on he scraped at the concrete each day until the thumbnails were worn down, and let them grow during the night to be used again next time. In this way, over months becoming years in which he grew taller, tall enough to reach almost to the top edge of the concrete around the window, he scratched through to the wire and the boards. Each day, week, month; each timeless, uncounted division of time; each forever, he worked for as long as he could on the window, and then would stop, and begin to work on the other part of his project.
The growth of hair had not followed his expectations; but he had found that he could enlarge the muscles in his back so that they extended towards his arms under the shoulders. He could even make them move slightly, awkwardly, so that the motion would approximate flapping. And, as forever continued to expand towards forever, he began to gain control of this flapping, doing it more quickly and yet, he sensed, still too slowly.
He began to try to co-ordinate the movement, both with the muscles flapping, and spread but steady, with the act of running a little for a take-off. The room was not big enough for this to be effective. He tried running in circles, and eventually got legs and back muscles and arms moving together. Then he managed to run a little way up one wall and stay there briefly before he dropped on his back.
As he was teaching himself to fly, and scraping at the window, the birds were more vividly in his mind, the picture growing bigger, until it seemed they were there, around him, and he could reach out and touch them. He heard and practised their sounds, and added calls to bis flight practice. He remembered how the sun and the moon looked, clear blue sunny sky, and the sky with stars; how clouds moved into the space, gathering or scattering, presumably some other kinds of creatures with a life of their own.
He could foresee in his mind how it would be when finally he broke out the window and saw light and free space again, with the birds moving happily about, calling that it was a beautiful warm clear day. He would fly out among them calling happiness, or perhaps if he wanted to startle them, storm’s coming—no, not that, but just happiness, fine clear blue warm happiness.
He remembered jumping up and down at the window just before it was taken away, remembered the roofs and the tops of the trees and the two creatures who resembled his gaolers, pointing up at something.
He would soon find out because he was through the concrete to the chicken wire all the way down one side of the window, and from this open edge the concrete was coming away in pieces. He was almost through to the wire on the other side and at the bottom. He scraped, and more pieces came away, until at last he was able to grasp the wire and pull it away.
That left only the boards, nailed to the window frame. He flexed his arm muscles and pounded the boards until the whole of his hands were aching and swollen, but the boards were broken in places. He saw slivers of light, imagined he could hear his friends out there, and called to them. He tore the boards away, broke out the glass and leaned out, realising how much taller he was than the boy who had stood there last.
The light blinded him. It hurt terribly. He had to retreat from it, and it came in after him, driving him into a corner, forcing him to lift his hands to his eyes.
He stayed crouched in the corner until the light became less forceful. And as it grew weaker, he grew stronger, encouraged by the voices of the birds. At last he was able to bear the light by keeping his eyelids almost closed. His hands were very painful but his arm and back muscles were in control. He rose and faced the window, and began his run, across the littered floor, up to the ledge, napping and off into the air, calling happiness, beautiful fine warm day—and falling, falling and screaming and falling to what was below the roofs and the tops of the trees.
The birds in the air scattered in great alarm as his body fell and struck the pavement of Butcher St. A young man and his girl heard the screams, saw the fall, and ran towards the broken body on the roadway.
“He’s naked,” the girl said. “And look at all that hair. Where on earth did he come from?”
“Never mind that,” the man said. “Just look at this.” He was pointing to the arms still spread as though in flight. “Look. Pin feathers.” And he leaned down to touch one, and then grasped it and pulled it out of the shameful flesh.