Personal Matter Read online

  2

  BENEATH the mud- and blood- and bile-streaked map of West Africa thumbtacked to the wall, curled up in a ball like a threatened sow bug, Bird lay sleeping. He was in their bedroom, his and his wife’s. The baby’s white bassinet, still wrapped in its vinyl hood, crouched like a huge insect between the two beds. Bird was dreaming, groaning in protest against the dawn chill.

  He is standing on a plateau on the western bank of Lake Chad, east of Nigeria. What can he be waiting for in such a place? Suddenly he is sighted by a giant phacochoere. The vicious beast charges, churning sand. But that’s all right! Bird has come to Africa for adventure, encounters with new tribes and with the perils of death, for a glimpse beyond the horizon of quiescent and chronically frustrated everyday life. But he has no weapon to fight the phacochoere. I’ve arrived in Africa unequipped and with no training, he thinks, and fear prods him. Meanwhile the phacochoere is bearing down. Bird remembers the switchblade he used to sew inside his pants cuff when he was a delinquent in a provincial city. But he threw those pants away a long time ago. Funny he can’t remember the Japanese word for phacochoere. Phacochoere! He hears the group that has abandoned him and fled to a safety zone shouting: Watch out! Run! It’s a Phacochoere! The enraged animal is already at the clump of low brush a few yards away: Bird hasn’t a chance of escaping. Then, to the north, he discovers an area protected by an oblique blue line. It must be steel wire; if he can get behind it he may be safe; the people who left him behind are shouting from there. Bird begins to run. Too late! the phacochoere is almost on him. I’ve come to Africa unequipped and with no training; I cannot escape. Bird despairs, but fear drives him on. Numberless eyes of the safe people behind the oblique blue line watch Bird racing toward them. The phacochoere’s abominable teeth close sharply, firmly, on Bird’s ankle. …

  The phone was ringing. Bird woke up. Dawn, and raining still. Bird hit the damp floor in his bare feet and hopped to the phone like a rabbit. He lifted the receiver and a man’s voice asked his name without a word of greeting and said, “Please come to the hospital right away. The baby is abnormal; the doctor will explain.”

  Instantly, Bird was stranded. He longed to backtrack to that Nigerian plateau to lick up the dregs of his dream, no matter that it was an evil, sea urchin of a dream, thinly planted with the spines of fear. But he checked himself and, in a voice so objective it might have issued from a stranger with a cast-iron heart, said: “Is the mother all right?” Bird had a feeling he had heard himself asking the same question a thousand times in the same voice.

  “Your wife is fine. Please come as quickly as you can.”

  Bird scuttled back to the bedroom, like a crab making for a ledge. He shut his eyes tight and tried to submerge in the warmth of his bed, as if by denying reality he could instantly banish it. But nothing changed. Bird shook his head in resignation, and picked up his shirt and pants from the side of the bed where he had thrown them. The pain in his body when he bent over recalled the battle the night before. His strength had been equal to the fight, and how proud it had made him! He tried to recapture that feeling of pride, but of course he couldn’t. Buttoning his shirt, Bird looked up at the map of West Africa. The plateau in his dream was at a place called Deifa. There was a drawing of a charging wart hog just above it—wart hog! A phacochoere was a wart hog. And the oblique azure line on the map signified a game reserve. So he wouldn’t have been safe even if he had reached the slanting fence in his dream.

  Bird shook his head again, squirmed into his jacket as he left the bedroom, and tiptoed down the stairs. The old woman who was his landlady lived on the first floor: if she woke up and came into the hall, Bird would have to answer questions honed on the whetstone of her curiosity and good will. But what could he say? So far he had heard only the declaration on the phone: the baby is abnormal! But it was probably as bad as it could be. Bird groped for his shoes on the earth floor in the vestibule, unlocked the front door as quietly as he could, and stepped into the dawn.

  The bicycle was lying on its side on the gravel under a hedge. Bird righted it and wiped the tenacious rain off the rotting leather seat with his jacket sleeve. Before the seat was dry, Bird leaped astride and, scattering gravel like an angry horse, pumped past the hedges into the paved street. In an instant his buttocks were chilled and clammy. And it was raining again; the wind drove the rain straight into his face. He kept his eyes wide open, watching for potholes in the street: rain pellets struck his eyeballs. At a broader, brighter street, Bird turned left. Now the wind was whipping the rain into his right side and the going was easier. Bird leaned into the wind to balance the bike. The speeding tires churned the sheet of water on the asphalt street and scattered it like fine mist. As Bird watched the water ripple away from the tires with his body tilted sharply into the wind, he began to feel dizzy. He looked up: no one on the dawn street as far as he could see. The ginkgo trees that hemmed the street were thick and dark with leaves and each of those countless leaves was swollen with the water it had drunk. Black trunks supporting deep oceans of green. If those oceans all at once collapsed, Bird and his bike would be drowned in a raw-green-smelling flood. Bird felt threatened by the trees. High above him, the leaves massed on the topmost branches were moaning in the wind. Bird looked up through the trees at the narrowed eastern sky. Blackish-gray all over, with a faint hint of the sun’s pink seeping through at the back. A mean sky that seemed ashamed, roughly violated by clouds like galloping shaggy dogs. A trio of magpies arrowed in front of Bird as brazen as alley cats and nearly toppled him. He saw the silver drops of water bunched like lice on their light-blue tails. Bird noticed that he was startled easily now, and that his eyes and ears and sense of smell had become acutely sensitive. It occurred to him vaguely that this was a bad omen: the same things had happened during those weeks he had stayed drunk.

  Lowering his head, Bird raised himself on the pedals and picked up speed. The feeling of futile flight in his dream returned. But he raced on. His shoulder snapped a slender ginkgo branch and the splintered end sprang back and cut his ear. Even so, Bird didn’t slow up. Raindrops that whined like bullets grazed his throbbing ear. Bird skidded to a stop at the hospital entrance with a squeal of brakes that might have been his own scream. He was soaking wet: shivering. As he shook the water off, he had the feeling he had sped down a long, unthinkably long, road.

  Bird paused in front of the examination room to catch his breath, then peered inside and addressed the indistinct faces waiting for him in the dimness.

  “I’m the father,” he said hoarsely, wondering why they were sitting in a darkened room. Then he noticed his mother-in-law, her face half-buried in her kimono sleeve as though she were trying not to vomit. Bird sat down in the chair next to her and felt his clothes stick fast to his back and rear. He shivered, not violently as in the driveway, but with the helplessness of a weakened chick. His eyes were adjusting to the darkness in the room: now he discovered a tribunal of three doctors watching in careful silence as he settled himself in the chair. Like the national flag in a courtroom, the colored anatomy chart on the wall behind them was a banner symbolic of their private law.

  “I’m the father,” Bird repeated irritably. It was clear from his voice that he felt threatened.

  “Yes, all right,” the doctor in the middle replied somewhat defensively, as if he had detected a note of attack in Bird’s voice. (He was the hospital Director; Bird had seen him scrubbing his hands at his wife’s side.) Bird looked at the Director, waiting for him to speak. Instead of beginning an explanation, he took a pipe from his wrinkled surgeon’s gown and filled it with tobacco. He was a short, barrel of a man, obese to an extreme that gave him an air of dolorous pomposity. The soiled gown was open at his chest, which was as hairy as a camel’s back; not only his upper lip and cheeks but even the fatty crop that sagged to his throat was stubbled with beard. The Director had not had time to shave this morning: he had been fighting for the baby’s life since yesterday afternoon. Bird was gratefu
l, of course, but something suspicious about this hairy, middle-aged doctor prevented him from letting down his guard. As if, deep beneath that hirsute skin, something potentially lethal was trying to rear its bushy head and was being forcibly restrained.

  The Director at last returned the pipe from his thick lips to his bowl of a hand and, abruptly meeting Bird’s stare with his own: “Would you like to see the goods first?” His voice was too loud for the small room.

  “Is the baby dead?” Bird asked, coughing. For a minute the Director looked suspicious of Bird for having assumed the baby’s death, but he erased that impression with an ambiguous smile.

  “Certainly not,” he said. “The infant’s movements are vigorous and its voice strong.”

  Bird heard his mother-in-law sigh deeply, gravely—it was like a broad hint. Either the woman was exhausted or she was signaling to Bird the approximate depth of the swamp of calamity he and his wife were mired in. One or the other.

  “Well then, would you like to see the goods?”

  The young doctor on the Director’s right stood up. He was a tall man, thin, with eyes that somehow violated the horizontal symmetry of his face. One eye was agitated and timid-looking; the other was serene. Bird had started to rise with the doctor and had slumped back into his chair before he noticed that the beautiful eye was made of glass.

  “Could you explain first, please?” Bird sounded increasingly threatened: the revulsion he had felt at the Director’s choice of words—the goods!—was still caught in the mesh of his mind.

  “That might be better: when you first see it, it’s quite a surprise. Even I was surprised when it came out.” Unexpectedly, the Director’s thick eyelids reddened and he burst into a childish giggle. Bird had sensed a suspicious presence lurking beneath that hairy skin, and now he knew that it was this giggle, this giggle that had revealed itself first in the guise of a vague smile. Bird glared at the giggling doctor in rage before he realized the man was laughing from embarrassment. He had extracted from between the legs of another man’s wife a species of monster beyond classification. A monster with a cat’s head, maybe, and a body as swollen as a balloon? Whatever the creature was, the Director was ashamed of himself for having delivered it, and so was giggling. His performance, far from befitting the professional dignity of an experienced obstetrician and hospital director, had belonged in a slapstick comedy: a quack doctor routine. The man had been startled and distracted; now he was suffering from shame.

  Without moving, Bird waited for the Director to recover from his laughing jag. A monster. But what kind? “The goods,” the Director had said, and Bird had heard “monster”; the briars twined around the word had torn the membranes in his thorax. In introducing himself, he had said, “I’m the father,” and the doctors had winced. Because something else entirely must have echoed in their ears—I’m the monster’s father.

  The Director quickly mastered himself and regained his mournful dignity. But the pink flush remained on his eyelids and cheeks. Bird looked away, fighting an urgent eddy of anger and fear inside, and said, “What kind of condition is it that it’s so surprising?”

  “You mean appearance, how it looks? There appear to be two heads! You know a piece by Josef Wagner called ‘Under the Double Eagle’? Anyway, it’s quite a shock.” The Director nearly began to giggle again, but he checked himself just in time.

  “Something like the Siamese twins, then?” Bird timidly asked.

  “Not at all: there only appear to be two heads. Do you want to see the goods?”

  “Medically speaking—” Bird faltered.

  “Brain hernia, we call it. The brain is protruding from a fault in the skull. I founded this clinic when I got married, and this is the first case I’ve seen. Extremely rare. I can tell you I was surprised!”

  Brain hernia—Bird groped for an image, anything, and drew a blank. “Is there any hope that this kind of brain-hernia baby will develop normally?” he said in a daze.

  “Develop normally!” The Director’s voice rose as though in anger. “We’re speaking of a brain hernia! You might cut open the skull and force the brain back, but even then you’d be lucky to get some kind of vegetable human being. Precisely what do you mean by ‘normally’?” The Director shook his head at the young doctors on either side of him as though dismayed by Bird’s lack of common sense. The doctor with the glass eye quickly nodded his agreement, and so did the other, a taciturn man wrapped from his high forehead to his throat in the same expressionless, sallow skin. Both turned stern eyes on Bird—professors disapproving of a student for a poor performance in an oral exam.

  “Will the baby die right away?” Bird said.

  “Not right away, no. Tomorrow perhaps, or it may hold out even longer. It’s an extremely vigorous infant,” the Director observed clinically. “Now then, what do you intend to do?”

  Disgracefully bewildered, like a punch-drunk pigmy, Bird was silent. What in hell could he do? First the man drives you down a blind alley, then he asks what you intend to do. Like a malicious chess player. What should he do? Fall to pieces? Wail?

  “If you wish, I can have the baby transferred to the hospital at the National University—if you wish!” The offer sounded like a puzzle with a built-in trap. Bird, straining to see beyond the suspicious mist and failing to discover a single clue, was left merely with a futile wariness: “If there are no alternatives—”

  “None,” the Director said. “But you will have the satisfaction of knowing you have done everything possible.”

  “Couldn’t we just leave the child here?”

  Bird as well as the three doctors gawked at the originator of the abrupt question. Bird’s mother-in-law sat quite still, the world’s most forlorn ventriloquist. The Director inspected her like an appraiser determining a price. When he spoke, it was ugly, he was protecting himself so obviously: “That’s impossible! This is a case of brain hernia, don’t forget. Quite impossible!” The woman listened without budging, her mouth still buried in her kimono sleeve.

  “Then we’ll move it to the other hospital,” Bird declared. The Director leaped at Bird’s decision and he began at once to display a dazzling spectrum of administrative talents. When his two subordinates had left the room under orders to contact the university hospital and make arrangements for an ambulance, the Director filled his pipe again and said with a look of relief, as though he had disposed of a heavy, questionable burden: “I’ll have one of our people ride along in the ambulance, so you can be assured we’ll get the infant there safely.”

  “Thank you very much.”

  “It would be best if our new grandmother stayed here with her daughter. Why don’t you go home and change into some dry clothes? The ambulance won’t be ready for half an hour.”

  “I’ll do that,” Bird said. The Director sidled up to him and whispered, too familiarly, as if he were beginning a dirty joke, “Of course, you can forbid them to operate if you choose to.”

  Poor wretched little baby! Bird thought.

  The first person my baby meets in the real world has to be this hairy porkchops of a little man.

  But Bird was still dazed: his feelings of anger and grief, the minute they had crystallized, shattered.

  Bird and his mother-in-law and the Director walked in a little group as far as the reception desk, silently, avoiding one another’s faces. At the entrance, Bird turned around to say good-by. His mother-in-law returned his gaze with eyes so like his wife’s they might have been sisters, and she was trying to say something. Bird waited. But the woman only stared at him in silence, her dark eyes contracting until they were empty of expression. Bird could feel her embarrassment, and it was specific, as though she were standing naked on a public street. But what could be making her so uncomfortable as to deaden her eyes and even the skin on her face? Bird looked away himself before the woman could lower her gaze, and said to the Director: “Is it a boy or a girl?” The question took the Director off his guard, and he leaked that funny giggle again.
Sounding like a young intern: “Let’s see now, I can’t quite remember, but I have a feeling I saw one, sure I did—a penis!”

  Bird went out to the driveway alone. It wasn’t raining and the wind had died: the clouds sailing the sky were bright, dry. A brilliant morning had broken from the dawn’s cocoon of semidarkness, and the air had a good, first-days-of-summer smell that slackened every muscle in Bird’s body. A night softness had lingered in the hospital, and now the morning light, reflecting off the wet pavement and off the leafy trees, stabbed like icicles at Bird’s pampered eyes. Laboring into this light on his bike was like being poised on the edge of a diving board; Bird felt severed from the certainty of the ground, isolated. And he was as numb as stone, a weak insect on a scorpion’s sting.

  You can race this bicycle to a strange land and soak in whisky for a hundred days—Bird heard the voice of a dubious revelation. And as he wobbled down the street, awash in the morning light, he waited for the voice to speak again. But there was only silence. Lethargically, like a sloth on the move, Bird began to pedal. …

  Bird was bending forward in the breakfast nook for the clean underwear on top of the TV when he saw his arm and realized that he was naked. Swiftly, as though he were pursuing a fleeing mouse with his eyes, he glanced down at his genitals: the heat of shame scorched him. Bird hurried into his underwear and put on his slacks and a shirt. Even now he was a link in the chain of shame that connected his mother-in-law and the Director. Peril-ridden and fragile, the imperfect human body, what a shameful thing it was! Trembling, Bird fled the apartment with his eyes on the floor, fled down the stairs, fled through the hall, straddled his bicycle and fled everything behind him. He would have liked to flee his own body. Speeding away on a bike, he felt he was escaping himself more effectively than he could on foot, if only a little.

  As Bird turned into the hospital driveway, a man in white hurried down the steps with what looked like a hay basket and pushed his way through the crowd to the open tail of an ambulance. The soft, weak part of Bird that wanted to escape tried to apprehend the scene as though it were occurring at a vast remove and had nothing to do with Bird, simply an early morning stroller. But Bird could only advance, struggling like a mole burrowing into an imaginary mud wall through the heavy, viscid resistance that impeded him.