Personal Matter Read online

  Bird got off his bike and was locking a chain around the front tire when a voice bit into him from behind, terrifying in its disapproval: “You can’t leave that bike here!” Bird turned and looked up into the hairy Director’s reproving eyes. Hoisting the bike onto his shoulder, he walked into the shrubbery with it. Raindrops clustered on fatsia leaves showered his neck and ran down his back. Ordinarily his temper was quick, but he didn’t even click his tongue in irritation. Whatever happened to him now seemed part of an inevitable design which he must accept without protest.

  Bird emerged from the bushes with his shoes covered with mud; the Director appeared to regret a little having been so abrupt. Encircling Bird with one short, pudgy arm, he led him toward the ambulance and said emphatically, as though he were disclosing a marvelous secret: “It was a boy! I knew I’d seen a penis!”

  The one-eyed doctor and an anesthetist were sitting in the ambulance with the basket and an oxygen cylinder between them. The anesthetist’s back hid the contents of the basket. But the faint hissing noise of oxygen bubbling through water in a flask communicated like a signal from a secret transmitter. Bird lowered himself onto the bench opposite theirs—insecurely perched—there was a canvas stretcher on top of the bench. Shifting his rear uncomfortably, he glanced through the ambulance window and—shuddered. From every window on the second floor and even from the balcony, just out of bed most likely, their freshly washed faces gleaming whitely in the morning sun, pregnant women were peering down at Bird. All of them wore flimsy nylon nightgowns, either red or shades of blue, and those on the balcony in particular, with the nightgowns billowing about their ankles, were like a host of angels dancing on the air. Bird read anxiety in their faces, and expectation, even glee; he lowered his eyes. The siren began to wail, and the ambulance lurched forward. Bird planted his feet on the floor to keep from slipping off the bench and thought: That siren! Until now, a siren had always been a moving object: it approached from a distance, hurtled by, moved away. Now a siren was attached to Bird like a disease he carried in his body: this siren would never recede.

  “Everything’s fine,” said the doctor with the glass eye, turning around to Bird. There was authority in his attitude, mild but evident, and its heat threatened to melt Bird like a piece of candy.

  “Thank you,” he mumbled. His passivity erased the shadow of hesitation from the doctor’s good eye. He took a firm grip on his authority, and thrust it out in front of him: “This is a rare case, all right; it’s a first for me, too.” The doctor nodded to himself, then nimbly crossed the lurching ambulance and sat down at Bird’s side. He didn’t seem to notice how uncomfortable the stretcher made the bench.

  “Are you a brain specialist?” Bird asked.

  “Oh no, I’m an obstetrician.” The doctor didn’t have to make the correction: his authority was already beyond injury by a misapprehension so minor. “There are no brain men at our hospital. But the symptoms are perfectly clear: it’s a brain hernia, all right. Of course, we would know more if we had tapped some spinal fluid from that lump protruding from the skull. The trouble with that is you might just prick the brain itself and then you’d be in trouble. That’s why we’re taking the baby to the other hospital without touching him. As I said, I’m in obstetrics, but I consider myself fortunate to have run across a case of brain hernia—I hope to be present at the autopsy. You will consent to an autopsy, won’t you? It may distress you to talk about autopsies at this point, but, well, look at it this way! Progress in medicine is cumulative, isn’t it. I mean, the autopsy we perform on your child may give us just what we need to save the next baby with a brain hernia. Besides, if I may be frank, I think the baby would be better off dead, and so would you and your wife. Some people have a funny way of being optimistic about this kind of case, but it seems to me the quicker the infant dies, the better for all concerned. I don’t know, maybe it’s the difference in generations. I was born in 1935. How about you?”

  “Somewhere around there,” Bird said, unable to convert quickly into the Western calendar. “I wonder if it’s suffering.”

  “What, our generation?”

  “The baby!”

  “That depends on what you mean by suffering. I mean, the baby can’t see or hear or smell, right? And I bet the nerves that signal pain aren’t functioning, either. It’s like the Director said, you remember—a kind of vegetable. In your opinion, does a vegetable suffer?”

  Does a vegetable suffer, in my opinion? Bird wondered silently. Have I ever considered that a cabbage being munched by a goat was in pain?

  “Do you think a vegetable baby can suffer?” the doctor repeated eagerly, pressing with confidence for an answer.

  Bird meekly shook his head: as if to say the problem exceeded his flushed brain’s capacity for judgment. And there was a time when he never would have submitted to a person he had just met, at least not without feeling some resistance. …

  “The oxygen isn’t feeding well,” the anesthetist reported. The doctor stood up and turned to check the rubber tube; Bird had his first look at his son.

  An ugly baby with a pinched, tiny, red face covered with wrinkles and blotchy with fat. Its eyes were clamped shut like the shells of a bivalve, rubber tubes led into its nostrils; its mouth was wrenched open in a soundless scream that exposed the pearly-pink membrane inside. Bird found himself rising half off the bench, stretching for a look at the baby’s bandaged head. Beneath the bandage, the skull was buried under a mound of bloody cotton; but there was no hiding the presence there of something large and abnormal.

  Bird looked away, and sat down. Pressing his face to the window glass, he watched the city recede. People in the street, alarmed by the siren, stared at the ambulance with curiosity and an unaccountable expectation plainly written on their faces—just as that host of pregnant angels had stared. They gave the impression of unnaturally halted motion, like film caught in a projector. They were glimpsing an infinitesimal crack in the flat surface of everyday life and the sight filled them with innocent awe.

  My son has bandages on his head and so did Apollinaire when he was wounded on the field of battle. On a dark and lonely battlefield I have never seen, my son was wounded like Apollinaire and now he is screaming soundlessly. …

  Bird began to cry. Head in bandages, like Apollinaire: the image simplified his feelings instantly and directed them. He could feel himself turning into a sentimental jelly, yet he felt himself being sanctioned and justified: he even discovered a sweetness in his tears.

  Like Apollinaire, my son was wounded on a dark and lonely battlefield that I have never seen, and he has arrived with his head in bandages. I’ll have to bury him like a soldier who died at war.

  Bird continued to cry.

  3

  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 th
ough 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.