BIRD was sitting on the stairs in front of the intensive care ward, gripping his thighs with grimy hands in a battle with the fatigue that had been hounding him since his tears had dried, when the one-eyed doctor emerged from the ward looking thwarted. Bird stood up and the doctor said: “This hospital is so goddamned bureaucratic, not even the nurses will listen to a word you say.” A startling change had come over the man since their ride together in the ambulance: his voice was troubled. “I have a letter of introduction from our Director to a professor of medicine here—they’re distant relatives!—and I can’t even find out where he is!”
Now Bird understood the doctor’s sudden dejection. Here in this ward everyone was treated like an infant: the young man with the glass eye had begun to doubt his own dignity.
“And the baby?” Bird said, surprised at the commiseration in his voice.
“The baby? Oh yes, we’ll know just where we stand when the brain surgeon has finished his examination. If the infant lasts that long. If he doesn’t last, the autopsy will tell the full story. I doubt that the infant can hold out for more than a day—you might drop in here around three tomorrow afternoon. But let me warn you: this hospital is really bureaucratic—even the nurses!”
As though he were determined to accept no more questions from Bird, the doctor rolled both his eyes toward the ceiling, good and glass alike, and walked away. Bird followed him like a washerwoman, holding the baby’s empty basket against his side. At the passageway that led to the main wing, they were joined by the ambulance driver and the anesthetist. These firemen seemed to notice right away that the doctor’s earlier joviality had deserted him. Not that they retained any dazzle themselves: while they had been racing their ambulance through the heart of the city as though it were a truck careening across an open field, shrilling the siren pretentiously and jumping traffic lights that bound the law-abiding citizen, a certain dignity had swelled their stoic uniforms. But now even that was gone. From the back, Bird noticed, the two firemen were alike as identical twins. No longer young, they were of medium height and build and both were balding in the same way.
“You need oxygen on the first job of the day, you need it all day long,” one said with feeling.
“Yes, you’ve always said that,” the other as feelingly replied.
This little exchange the one-eyed doctor ignored. Bird, though not much moved, understood that the men were nourishing each other’s gloom, but when he turned to the fireman in charge of oxygen and nodded sympathetically, the man stiffened as though he had been asked a question, and with a nervous, grunted “huh?” forced Bird to speak. Disconcerted, Bird said: “I was wondering about the ambulance—can you use your siren to run traffic lights on the way back, too?”
“On the way back?” Like the fire department’s most talented singing twins, the firemen repeated the question in unison, exchanged a look, their faces flushing drunkenly, and snorted a laugh which dilated the wings of their noses. Bird was both angry at the silliness of his question and at the firemen’s response. And his anger was connected by a slender pipe to a tank of huge, dark rage compressed inside him. A rage he had no way of releasing had been building inside him under increasing pressure since dawn.
But the firemen seemed to wither now, as if they regretted having laughed imprudently at an unfortunate young father; their obvious distress closed a valve in the tapline to Bird’s fury. He even felt a twinge of remorse. Who had asked that silly, anticlimactic question in the first place? And hadn’t the question seeped from a fault which had opened in his own brain, pickled in the vinegar of his grief and lack of sleep?
Bird looked into the baby’s hamper under his arm. Now it was like an empty hole which had been dug unnecessarily. Only a folded blanket remained in the hamper, and some absorbent cotton and a roll of gauze. The blood on the cotton and the gauze, though still a vivid red, already failed to evoke an image of the baby lying there with its head in bandages, inhaling oxygen a little at a time from the rubber tubes inside its nose. Bird couldn’t even recall accurately the grotesqueness of the baby’s head, or the shimmering membrane of fat that gloved its fiery skin. Even now, the baby was receding from him at full speed. Bird felt a mixture of guilty relief and bottomless fear. He thought: Soon I’ll forget all about the baby, a life that appeared out of infinite darkness, hovered for nine months in a fetal state, tasted a few hours of cruel discomfort, and descended once again into darkness, final and infinite. I wouldn’t be surprised if I forgot about the baby right away. And when it’s time for me to die I may remember, and, remembering, if the agony and fear of death increase for me, I will have fulfilled a small part of my obligation as a father.
Bird and the others reached the front entrance of the main wing. The firemen ran for the parking lot. Since theirs was a profession that involved them in emergencies all the time, running around breathlessly must have represented the normal attitude toward life. Off they dashed across the glistening concrete square, arms flailing, as if a hungry devil were snapping at their behinds. Meanwhile, the one-eyed doctor telephoned his hospital from a phone booth and asked for the Director. He explained the situation in a very few words: almost no new developments to report. Bird’s mother-in-law came to the phone: “It’s your wife’s mother,” said the doctor, turning. “Do you want to speak?”
Hell no! Bird wanted to shout. Since those frequent telephone conversations the night before, the sound of his mother-in-law’s voice reaching him over the telephone line, like the helpless droning of a mosquito, had hounded Bird like an obsession. Bird set the baby’s basket on the concrete floor and took the receiver glumly.
“The brain specialist hasn’t made his examination yet. I have to come back tomorrow afternoon.”
“But what’s the point of it all; I mean, what can you hope to accomplish?” Bird’s mother-in-law cross-examined him in the tone of voice he had hoped most to be spared, as if she held him directly responsible.
“The point is that the baby happens to be alive at the moment,” Bird said, and waited with a premonition of disgust for the woman to speak again. But she was silent; from the other end of the line came only a faint sound of troubled breathing.
“I’ll be right over and explain,” Bird said, and he started to hang up.
“Hello? Please don’t come back here,” his mother-in-law added hurriedly. “That child thinks you’ve taken the baby to a heart clinic. If you come now she’ll be suspicious. It would be more natural if you came in a day or so, when she’s calmer, and said that the baby had died of a weak heart. You can always get in touch with me by telephone.”
Bird agreed. “I’ll go right over to the college and explain what’s happened,” he was saying, when he heard the hard click of the connection being broken arbitrarily at the other end of the line. So his own voice had filled the listener with disgust, too. Bird put the receiver back and picked up the baby’s basket. The one-eyed doctor was already in the ambulance. Bird, instead of climbing in after him, set the basket on the canvas stretcher.
“Thanks for everything. I think I’ll go alone.”
“You’re going home alone?” the doctor said.
“Yes,” Bird replied, meaning “I’m going out alone.” He had to report the circumstances of the birth to his father-in-law, but after that he would have some free time. And a visit to the professor, compared to returning to his wife and mother-in-law, held a promise of pure therapy.
The doctor closed the door from the inside and the ambulance moved away silently, observing the speed limit, like a former monster now powerless and deprived of voice. Through the same window from which, an hour earlier, weeping, he had gazed at pedestrians in the street, Bird saw the doctor and one of the firemen lurch forward toward the driver. He knew they were going to gossip about him and his baby, and it didn’t bother him. From the telephone conversation with the old woman had come an unexpected furlough, time to himself to be spent alone and as he liked—the thought pumped strong, fresh blood into his head.
Bird started across the hospital square, wide and long as a soccer field. Halfway, he turned around and looked up at the building where he had just abandoned his first child, a baby on the brink of death. A gigantic building, with an overbearing presence, like a fort. Glistening in the sunlight of early summer, it made the baby who was faintly screaming in one of its obscure corners seem meaner than a grain of sand.
What if I do come back tomorrow, I might get lost in the labyrinth of this modern fort and wander in bewilderment; I might never find my dying or maybe already dead baby. The notion carried Bird one step away from his misfortune. He strode through the front gate and hurried down the street.
Forenoon: the most exhilarating hour of an early summer day. And a breeze that recalled elementary school excursions quickened the worms of tingling pleasure on Bird’s cheeks and earlobes, flushed from lack of sleep. The nerve cells in his skin, the farther they were from conscious restraint, the more thirstily they drank the sweetness of the season and the hour. Soon a sense of liberation rose to the surface of his consciousness.
Before I go to see my father-in-law, I’ll wash up and get a shave! Bird marched into the first barbershop he found. And the middle-aged barber led him to a chair as though he were an ordinary customer. The barber had not discerned any indications of misfortune. Bird, by transforming himself into the person the barber perceived, was able to escape his sadness and his apprehension. He closed his eyes. A hot, heavy towel that smelled of disinfectant steamed his cheeks and jaw. Years ago, he had seen a comic skit about a barbershop: the barber’s young apprentice has a hellishly hot towel, too hot to cool in his hands or even hold, so he slaps it down as it is on the customer’s face. Ever since, Bird laughed whenever his face was covered with a towel. He could feel himself smiling even now. That was going too far! Bird shuddered, shattering the smile, and began thinking about the baby. In the smile on his face, he had discovered proof of his own guilt.
The death of a vegetable baby—Bird examined his son’s calamity from the angle that stabbed deepest. The death of a vegetable baby with only vegetable functions was not accompanied by suffering. Fine, but what did death mean to a baby like that? Or, for that matter, life? The bud of an existence appeared on a plain of nothingness that stretched for zillions of years and there it grew for nine months. Of course, there was no consciousness in a fetus, it simply curled in a ball and existed, filling utterly a warm, dark, mucous world. Then, perilously, into the external world. It was cold there, and hard, scratchy, dry and fiercely bright. The outside world was not so confined that the baby could fill it by himself: he must live with countless strangers. But, for a baby like a vegetable, that stay in the external world would be nothing more than a few hours of occult suffering he couldn’t account for. Then the suffocating instant, and once again, on that plain of nothingness zillions of years long, the fine sand of nothingness itself. What if there was a last judgment! Under what category of the Dead could you subpoena, prosecute, and sentence a baby with only vegetable functions who died no sooner than he was born? Only a few hours on this earth, and spent in crying, tongue fluttering in his stretched, pearly-red mouth, wouldn’t any judge consider that insufficient evidence? Insufficient fucking evidence! Bird gasped in fear that had deepened until now it was profound. I might be called as a witness and I wouldn’t be able to identify my own son unless I got a clue from the lump on his head. Bird felt a sharp pain in his upper lip.
“Sit still, please! I nicked you,” the barber hissed, resting his razor on the bridge of Bird’s nose and peering into his face. Bird touched his upper lip with the tip of his finger. He stared at the blood, and he felt a pang of nausea. Bird’s blood was type A and so was his wife’s. The quart of blood circulating in the body of his dying baby was probably type A, too. Bird put his hand back under the linen and closed his eyes again. The barber slowly, hesitatingly shaved around the cut on his upper lip, then scythed his cheeks and jaw with rough haste, as if to retrieve lost time.
“You’ll want a shampoo?”
“No, that’s all right.”
“There’s lots of dirt and grass in your hair,” the barber objected.
“I know, I fell down last night.” Stepping out of the barber chair, Bird glanced at his face in a mirror that glistened like a noon beach. His hair was definitely matted, crackly as dry straw, but his face from his high cheekbones to his jaw was as bright and as fresh a pink as the belly of a rainbow trout. If only a strong light were shining in those glue-colored eyes, if the taut eyelids were relaxed and the thin lips weren’t twitching, this would be a conspicuously younger and livelier Bird than the portrait reflected in the store window last night.
Stopping at a barbershop had been a good idea: Bird was satisfied. If nothing else, he had introduced one positive element to a psychological balance which had been tipped to negative since dawn. A glance at the blood that had dried under his nose like a triangular mole, and Bird left the barbershop. By the time he got to the college, the glow the razor had left on his cheeks would probably have faded. But he would have scraped away with his nail the mole of dried blood by then: no danger of impressing his father-in-law as a sad and ludicrous hangdog. Searching the street for a bus stop, Bird remembered the extra money he was carrying in his pocket and hailed a passing cab.
Bird stepped out of the cab into a crowd of students swarming through the main gate on their way to lunch: five minutes past twelve. On the campus, he stopped a big fellow and asked directions to the English department. Surprisingly, the student beamed a smile and singsonged, nostalgically, “It’s certainly been a long time, sensei!” Bird was horrified. “I was in your class at the cram-school. None of the government schools worked out, so I had my old man donate some money here and got in, you know, through the back door.”
“So you’re a student here now,” Bird said with relief, remembering who the student was. Though not unhandsome, the boy had saucer eyes and a bulbous nose that recalled the illustrations of German peasants in Grimm’s Fairy Tales.
“It sounds as if cram-school wasn’t much help to you,” Bird said.
“Not at all, sensei! Study is never a waste. You may not remember a single thing but, you know, study is study!”
Bird suspected he was being ridiculed and he glowered at the boy. But the student was trying with his whole large body to demonstrate his good will. Even in a class of one hundred, Bird vividly recalled, this one had been a conspicuous dullard. And precisely for that reason he was able to report simply and jovially to Bird that he had entered a second-rate private college through the back door, and to express gratitude for classes that had availed him nothing. Any of the ninety-nine other students would have tried to avoid their cram-school instructor.
“With our tuition as high as it is, it’s a relief to hear you say that.”
“Oh, it was worth every penny. Will you be teaching here from now on?”
Bird shook his head.
“Oh. …” The student tactfully expanded the conversation: “Let me take you to the English department; it’s this way. But seriously, sensei, the studying I did at cram-school didn’t go to waste. It’s all in my head someplace, taking root sort of; and someday it will come in handy. It’s just a matter of waiting for the time to come—isn’t that pretty much what studying is in the final analysis, sensei?”
Bird, following this optimistic and somehow didactic former student, cut across a walk bordered by trees in full blossom and came to the front of a red-ochre brick building. “The English department is on the third floor at the back. I was so happy to get in here, I explored the campus until I know it like the palm of my hand,” the boy said proudly, and flashed a grin so eloquently self-derisive that Bird doubted his own eyes.
“I sound pretty simple, don’t I!”
“Not at all; not so simple.”
“It’s awfully nice of you to say so. Well then, I’ll be seeing you around, sensei. And take care of yourself: you’re looking a little pale!”
Climbing the stairs, Bird thought: That guy will manage his adult life with a thousand times more cunning than I manage mine; at least he won’t go around having babies die on him with brain hernias. But what an oddly unique moralist he had had in his class!
Bird peered around the door into the English department office and located his father-in-law. On a small balcony that extended from a far corner of the room, the professor was slumped in an oak rocking chair, gazing at the partly open skylight. The office had the feeling of a conference room, far larger and brighter than the English offices at the university from which Bird had graduated. Bird’s father-in-law often said (he told the story wryly, like a favorite joke on himself) that the treatment he received at this private college, including facilities such as the rocking chair, was incomparably better than what he had been used to at the National University: Bird could see there was more to the story than a joke. If the sun got any stronger, though, the rocking chair would have to be moved back or the balcony shaded with an awning, one or the other.
At a large table near the door, three young teaching assistants, oil gleaming on their ruddy faces, were having a cup of coffee, apparently after lunch. All three of them Bird knew by sight: honor students who had been a class ahead of him at college. But for the incident with the whisky and Bird’s withdrawal from graduate school, he certainly would have found himself in pursuit of their careers.
Bird knocked at the open door, stepped into the room, and greeted his three seniors. Then he crossed the room to the balcony; his father-in-law twisted around to watch him as he approached, his head thrown back, balancing himself on the rocking chair. The assistants watched too, with identical smiles of no special significance. It was true that they considered Bird a phenomenon of some rarity, but at the same time he was an outsider and therefore not an object of serious concern. That funny, peculiar character who went on a long binge for no reason in the world and finally dropped out of graduate school—something like that.
“Professor!” Bird said out of habit established before he had married the old man’s daughter. His father-in-law swung himself and the chair around to face him, the wooden rockers squeaking on the floor, and waved Bird into a swivel chair with long arm rests.
“Was the baby born?” he asked.
“Yes, the baby was born—” Bird winced to hear his voice shrivel into a timid peep, and he closed his mouth. Then, compelling himself to say it all in one breath: “The baby has a brain hernia and the doctor says he’ll die sometime tomorrow or the day after, the mother is fine!”
The taffy-colored skin of the professor’s large, leonine face quietly turned vermilion. Even the sagging bags on his lower eyelids colored brightly, as though blood were seeping through. Bird felt the color rising to his own face. He realized all over again how alone and helpless he had been since dawn.
“Brain hernia. Did you see the baby?”
Bird detected a hidden intimation of his wife’s voice even in the professor’s thin hoarseness, and, if anything, it made him miss her.
“Yes, I did. His head was in bandages, like Apollinaire.”
“Like Apollinaire … his head in bandages.” The professor tried the words on his own tongue as if he were pondering the punch line of a little joke. When he spoke, it was not so much to Bird as to the three assistants: “In this age of ours it’s hard to say with certainty that having lived was better than not having been born in the first place.” The three young men laughed with restraint, but audibly: Bird turned and stared at them. They stared back, and the composure in their eyes meant they were not the least surprised that a queer fellow like Bird had met with a freak accident. Resentful, Bird looked down at his muddy shoes. “I’ll call you when it’s all over,” he said.
The professor, rocking his chair almost imperceptibly, said nothing. It occurred to Bird that his father-in-law might be feeling a little disgusted with the satisfaction the rocking chair gave him ordinarily.
Bird was silent, too. He felt he had said everything he had to say. Would he be able to conclude on such a clear and simple note when it came time to let his wife in on the secret? Not a chance. There would be tears, questions by the truckload, a sense of the futility of fast talk, an aching throat, and a flushed head: finally a rope of screaming nerves would fetter Mr. and Mrs. Bird.
“I’d better be getting back; there are still papers to be signed at the hospital,” Bird said at last.
“It was good of you to come over.” The professor showed no sign of getting out of his rocking chair. Bird, feeling lucky not to have been asked to stay longer, stood up. “There’s a bottle of whisky in that desk,” the professor said. “Take it along.”
Bird stiffened, and he could feel the three assistants tense. They must have known as well as his father-in-law about that long, disastrous drunk; now he sensed their eyes beginning to track the development of the incident. Bird, hesitating, recalled a line from the English textbook he was reading with his students; a young American was speaking angrily: Are you kidding me? Are you looking for a fight?
Nevertheless, Bird bent forward, opened the top of the professor’s desk, and lifted out the bottle of Johnnie Walker with both hands. He was crimson even to his eyeballs, yet he felt a twisted, feverish joy. Ask a man to trample a crucifix and make him prove he’s not a Christian: well, they wouldn’t see him hesitate.
“Thank you,” Bird said. The three assistants relaxed. The professor was working his chair slowly around to its original position, his head erect, his face still slack and scarlet. Bird glanced at the younger men, swiftly bowed, and left the room.
Down the stairs and into the stone courtyard, Bird kept a prudent grip on the whisky bottle, as though it were a hand grenade. The rest of the day was his to spend as he liked by himself—the thought merged in his mind with an image of the Johnnie Walker and foamed into a promise of ecstasy and peril.
Tomorrow, or the day after, or maybe after a week’s reprieve, when my wife has learned about the wretched baby’s death, the two of us are going to be locked up in a dungeon of cruel neurosis. Accordingly—Bird argued with the bubbly voice of apprehension inside himself—I have a perfect right to today’s bottle of whisky and liberating time. Quietly the bubble collapsed. Fine! Let’s get down to drinking. First Bird thought of going back to his apartment and drinking in his study, but clearly that was a bad idea. If he returned, the old landlady and his friends might besiege him, by telephone if not in person, with detailed questions about the birth; besides, whenever he looked into the bedroom, the baby’s white enamel bassinet would tear his nerves like a gnashing shark. Shaking his head roughly, Bird drove the notion from his mind. Why not hole up in a cheap hotel where only strangers stayed? But Bird pictured himself getting drunk in a locked hotel room and he felt afraid. Bird gazed enviously at the jolly Scotsman in the red cutaway striding across the Johnnie Walker label. Where was he going in such a hurry? All of a sudden, Bird remembered an old girlfriend. Winter and summer alike, during the day she was always sprawled in her darkened bedroom, pondering something extremely metaphysical while she chain-smoked Players until an artificial fog hung over her bed. She never left the house until after dusk.
Bird stopped to wait for a cab just outside the college gates. Through the large window in the coffee shop across the street he could see his former student sitting at a table with some friends. The student noticed Bird at once and began like an affectionate puppy to send sincere, ungainly signals. His friends, too, regarded Bird with vague, blunted curiosity. How would he explain Bird to his friends! As an English instructor who had drunk himself out of graduate school, a man in the grip of an unexplainable passion, or maybe a crazy fear?
The student smiled at him tenaciously until he was in the taxicab. Bird realized as he drove away that he felt as if he had just received charity. And from a boy who in all his time at the cram-school had never learned to distinguish English gerunds from present participles, a former student with a brain no bigger than a cat’s!
Bird’s friend lived on one of the city’s many hills, in a quarter ringed by temples and cemeteries. The girl lived alone in a tiny house at the end of an alley. Bird had met her at a class mixer in October of his freshman year. When it was her turn to stand and introduce herself, she had challenged the class to guess the source of her unusual name: Himiko—fire-sighting-child. Bird had answered, correctly, that the name was taken from the Chronicles of the ancient province of Higo—The Emperor commanded his oarsmen, saying: There in the distance a signal fire burns; make for it straightaway. After that, Bird and the girl Himiko from the island of Kyushu had become friends.
There were very few girls at Bird’s university, only a handful in the liberal arts who had come to Tokyo from the provinces; and all of those, as far as Bird knew, had undergone a transmutation into peculiar and unclassifiable monsters shortly after they had graduated. A certain percentage of their body cells slowly overdeveloped, clustered and knotted until the girls were moving sluggishly and looking dull and melancholic. In the end, they became fatally unfit for everyday, postgraduate life. If they got married, they were divorced; if they went to work, they were fired; and those who did nothing but travel met with ludicrous and gruesome auto accidents. Himiko, shortly after graduation, had married a graduate student, and she hadn’t been divorced. Worse, a year after the marriage, her husband had committed suicide. Himiko’s father-in-law had made her a present of the house the couple had been living in, and he still provided her every month with money for living expenses. He hoped that Himiko would remarry, but at present she devoted her days to contemplation and cruised the city in a sports car every night.
Bird had heard open rumors that Himiko was a sexual adventuress who had broken out of conventional orbit. Even rumors that related her husband’s suicide to her deviate tastes. Bird had slept with the girl just once, but both of them had been terribly drunk and he wasn’t even certain coitus had been achieved. That was long before Himiko’s unfortunate marriage, and though she had been driven by keen desire and had pursued her pleasure actively, Himiko had been nothing more in those days than an inexperienced college girl.
Bird got out of the cab at the entrance to the alley where Himiko lived. Quickly, he calculated the money remaining in his wallet; he shouldn’t have any trouble getting an advance on this month’s salary after class tomorrow.
Bird twisted the bottle of Johnnie Walker into his jacket pocket and hurried down the alley, covering the neck of the bottle with his hand. Since the neighborhood knew all about Himiko’s eccentric life, it was impossible not to suspect that visitors were observed discreetly from windows here and there.
Bird pushed the buzzer in the vestibule. There was no response. He rattled the door a few times and softly called Himiko’s name. This was just a formality. Bird walked around toward the back of the house and saw that a dusty, secondhand MG was parked beneath Himiko’s bedroom window. With its empty seats exposed, the scarlet MG seemed to have been abandoned here for a long time. But it was proof that Himiko was at home. Bird propped a muddy shoe on the badly dented bumper and brought his weight to bear. The MG rocked gently, like a boat. Bird called Himiko’s name again, looking up at the curtained bedroom window. Inside the room, the curtains were lifted slightly where they met and a single eye looked down at Bird through the narrow peephole. Bird stopped rocking the MG and smiled: he could always behave freely and naturally in front of this girl.
“Hey! Bird—” Her voice impeded by the curtain and by the window glass, sounded like a feeble, silly sigh.
Bird knew he had discovered the ideal spot for beginning a bottle of Johnnie Walker in the middle of the day. Feeling as though he had entered just one more plus on the psychological balance sheet for the day, he walked back to the front of the house.