The Bird Cage by Kate Wilhelm Page A

juxtaposition of an ephemeral flicker in time and the mute eloquent endurance of millennia.
    In the evenings she studied Italian, wrote her daily report, and downloaded her pictures onto her computer, deleted many, manipulated others, enhanced some, and put the saved images on a CD, to be sent to her sister eventually.
    That evening, the last day of May, she gazed at her latest pictures of Neptune’s Fountain in Piazza Navona. It was her favorite so far and she had visited it several times. Neptune doing battle with an octopus and nymphs mounted on horses rising from the fountain basin. Neptune was as muscular as a body builder. All the male statues were, and the females were all lissome, willowy, with not a muscle or bone in sight. The steeds looked wild and beautiful. But something was wrong.
    She looked for previous pictures she had taken of the fountain, then printed the versions to compare them, find the cause for her unease. It came as a mild surprise to see that she had been to that one fountain four different times. The pictures were dated, and the first one had been taken April eleventh, one in early May, one mid May, and the most recent on the last day of May.
    After putting them in chronological order to examine them, she gasped, and stood up so quickly, so urgently that she knocked her chair over. Steadying herself with a hand on the table, she closed her eyes hard, rubbed them, and without looking again at the pictures yet, she backed away from the table, and only then opened her eyes and crossed the few feet to her tiny kitchen for a glass of water.
    All the pictures were different. “It’s started,” she said under her breath.
    Distorted images, one of the doctors had said. Illusions.
    She had entered the next phase, she thought dully, and forced herself to return to the table, to study the set of pictures, seeking to learn when the new phase had started without her noticing.
    Some of the views were from different places around the fountain, single shots, but the four she singled out had all been taken from the same location. She had been seated on the same bench for each of the four. The changes were subtle, but unmistakable. They presented a sequence in time. First the nymph’s head was turned away slightly, her hair streaming behind her; the horse’s head was lowered, and towering over them Neptune was straining in a struggle with the octopus that had one arm wrapped around the god’s leg. Next the nymph’s head was turned more to the front, and the horse had lifted its head. The octopus was lower down on Neptune’s leg.
    They were not illusions, she realized, but full blown hallucinations. She was telling herself a story and providing graphic images to illustrate it. In the last picture the nymph had finished turning her head, and was smiling up at Neptune, and he was done with his mock battle, and now was looking down on the nymph, his hand extended toward her. Even the horse was looking at him in that picture.
    Slowly, moving with care, she gathered all the printouts and slipped them into an envelope. Hallucinations, the final phase?
    A church bell tolled the hour of eight, her daily signal to leave the apartment, drop in at a news stand to buy a newspaper, go to dinner at a neighborhood trattoria. She stifled a giggle as she wondered if she would hear Pan’s pipes, see his mad dance.
    She walked the block to the news stand, purchased her newspaper, and on impulse asked for a picture of the Fontana di Netunno en Piazza Navona. The shop keeper smiled at her Italian baby talk and answered in English, as he always did.
    “Neptune’s Fountain, poster size? Postage?”
    She didn’t know how to say about eight by ten, and held up her hands to indicate the size.
    He found one in a stack of glossy prints and as she counted out money, he said, “You should visit it at dawn, the first light of the sun. Some say that’s the time of magic.”
    “Gracie,” she said and he answered that she was