A Personal Matter (19 page)

“My wife says she’d want to think about a divorce if I neglected the baby and it died.”

“Once a person has been poisoned by self-deception, he can’t make decisions about himself as neatly as all that,” Himiko said, elaborating her friend’s terrific prophecy. “You won’t get a divorce, Bird. You’ll
justify yourself like crazy, and try to salvage your married life by confusing the real issues. A decision like divorce is way beyond you now, Bird, the poison has gone to work. And you know how the story ends? Not even your own wife will trust you absolutely, and one day you’ll discover for yourself that your entire private life is in the shadow of deception and in the end you’ll destroy yourself. Bird, the first signs of self-destruction have appeared already!”

“But that’s a blind alley! Leave it to you to paint the most hopeless future you can think of.” Bird lunged at jocularity but his large, heavy classmate was perverse enough to parry him: “Right now, it’s too clear that you
are
up a blind alley, Bird.”

“But the fact that an abnormal baby was born to my wife was a simple accident; neither of us is responsible. And I’m neither such a tough villain that I can wring the baby’s neck nor a tough enough angel to mobilize all the doctors and try to keep him alive somehow no matter how hopeless a baby he may be. So all I can do is leave him at a university hospital and make certain that he’ll weaken and die naturally. When it’s all over if I get sick on self-deception like a sewer rat that scurries down a blind alley after swallowing rat poison, well, there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, Bird. You should have become either a tough villain or a tough angel, one or the other.”

Bird caught just a whiff of alcohol stealing into the sweet sourness of the air. He looked at the girl producer’s large face and even in the dimness saw that it was flushed and twitching, as though from facial neuritis.

“You’re drunk, aren’t you; I just realized—”

“That doesn’t mean you escape unscathed from everything I’ve said up to now,” the girl declared triumphantly, and, publicly expelling her hot, whisky breath, “however you may deny it, Bird, the problem of the dregs of self-deception after the baby’s death just isn’t apparent to you now. Can you deny that your biggest worry at the moment is that your freaky baby may grow like a weed and not die at all?”

Bird’s heart constricted: the sweat began to pour. For a long time he sat in silence, feeling like a beaten dog. Then he stood up without a word and went to get some beer from the refrigerator. A frosty part where it had lain against the ice tray and the rest of the bottle warm—Bird instantly lost his thirst for beer. Still, he took the bottle and three
glasses back to the bedroom with him. Himiko’s friend was in the living room, with the light on, fixing her hair and make-up and putting on her dress. Bird turned his back on the living room and filled a glass for himself and one for Himiko with beer that clouded to a dirty brown.

“We’re having a beer,” Himiko called in to her friend.

“None for me; I have to go to the station.”

“But it’s still so early,” Himiko said coquettishly.

“I’m sure you don’t need me now that Bird is here,” the girl said, as if to trap Bird in a net of suggestion. Then, directly to Bird: “I’m fairy godmother to all the girls who graduated with me. They all need a fairy godmother, need me, because they don’t know what they want yet. And whenever it looks as if someone is about to have some difficulty I turn up and lend her strength. Bird, try not to drag Himiko too deeply into your private family problems? Not that I don’t sympathize personally—”

When Himiko had left with her friend to see her to a cab, Bird dumped the rest of the tepid beer into the sink and took a cold shower. He recalled as the water pelted him an elementary school excursion when he had been caught in an icy downpour after having dropped behind and lost his way. The overwhelming loneliness, and the mortifying sense of helplessness. At the moment, like a soft-shell crab that had just shed its shell, he yielded instantly under attack by even the puniest enemy. He was in the worst condition ever, Bird thought. That he had managed to offer considerable resistance in his fight with the teen-age gang that night now seemed like such an impossible miracle that he was afraid all over again.

Vaguely aroused after his shower, Bird lay down naked on the bed. The smell of the outsider had disappeared; once again the house gave off its distinctive odor of oldness. This was Himiko’s lair. She had to rub the odor of her body into all its corners and thereby certify her territory or she could not escape anxiety, like a small, timid animal. Bird was already so used to the odor of the house that he mistook it sometimes for the odor of his own body. What could be keeping Himiko? Bird had washed the old sweat away in the shower and now his skin was beading again. He moved sluggishly to the kitchen and tried another bottle of the slightly chilled beer.

When Himiko finally returned an hour later she found Bird disgruntled.

“She was jealous,” she said in defense of her friend.

“Jealous?”

“Would you believe, she’s the most pathetic member of our little group. Every so often one of us girls will go to bed with her to make her feel a little better. And she’s convinced herself that that makes her our fairy godmother.”

Bird’s moral mechanism had been broken since he had abandoned his baby in the hospital; Himiko’s relationship with her producer friend didn’t shock him particularly.

“Maybe she was speaking out of jealousy,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean I got away from everything she said unscathed.”

T
HEY
were watching the midnight news, Bird in bed on his stomach, lifting only his head like a baby sea urchin, Himiko hugging her knees on the floor. The heat of day had departed and like primeval cave dwellers they were enjoying the cool air in nakedness. Since they had turned the volume way down with the telephone bell in mind, the only sound in the room was a voice as faint as the buzzing of a bee’s wings. But what Bird heard was not a human voice endowed with meaning and mood, nor was he distinguishing meaningful shapes in the flickering shadows on the screen. From the external world he was letting in nothing to project its image on the screen of his consciousness. He was simply waiting, like a radio set equipped with a receiver only, for a signal from the distance which he wasn’t even certain would be transmitted. Until now the signal had not arrived and the waiting receiver, Bird, was temporarily out of order. Himiko abruptly put down the book on her lap,
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts,
by the African writer Amos Tutuola, and, leaning forward, turned up the volume on the television set. Even then, Bird received no clear impression of the picture his eyes were watching or the voice his ears heard. He merely continued to wait, gazing vacantly at the screen. A minute later Himiko extended one arm, her knees and the other hand on the floor, and turned the set off. The mercury dot blazed, receded instantly, extinguished itself—a pure abstraction of the shape of death. Bird gasped, my baby may have died just now! he had felt. From morning until this late hour of the night he had been waiting for word by phone; save for lunching on some bread and ham and beer and entering Himiko repeatedly, he had done nothing, not even looked at his maps or read his African novel (Himiko, as though Bird’s African fever had infected her, was enthralled
by the maps and the book), thought about nothing but the baby’s death. Clearly, Bird was in the midst of a regression.

Himiko turned around on the floor and spoke to Bird, a fervid glitter in her eye.

“What?” he frowned, unable to read her meaning.

“I say this may be the beginning of the atomic war that will mean the end of the world!”

“What makes you say that?” Bird said, surprised. “You have a way of saying things out of the blue sometimes.”

“Out of the blue?” It was Himiko’s turn to be surprised. “But wasn’t the news just now a shock to you, too?”

“What news was that? I wasn’t paying attention, it was something else that startled me.”

Himiko stared at Bird reproachfully, but she seemed to realize at once that he was neither having fun with her nor aghast at what he had heard. The glitter of excitement in her eyes dulled.

“Get a hold of yourself, Bird!”

“What news?”

“Khrushchev resumed nuclear testing; apparently they exploded a bomb that makes the hydrogen bombs up to now look like firecrackers.”

“Oh, is that it,” Bird said.

“You don’t seem impressed.”

“I guess I’m not—”

“How strange!”

It
was
strange, Bird felt now for the first time, that the Soviet resumption of nuclear testing had not in the least impressed him. But he didn’t think he could be surprised even by word that a third World War had erupted with a nuclear bang. …

“I don’t know why, I honestly didn’t feel anything,” Bird said.

“Are you completely indifferent to politics these days?”

Bird had to think in silence a minute. “I’m not as sensitive to the international situation as I was when we were students; remember I used to go with you and your husband to all those protest rallies? But the one thing I have been concerned about all along is atomic weapons. Like the only political action our study group ever took was to demonstrate against nuclear warfare. So I should have been shocked by the news about Khrushchev, and yet I was watching all the time and didn’t feel a thing.”

“Bird—” Himiko faltered.

“It feels as if my nervous system is only sensitive to the problem of the baby and can’t be stimulated by anything else,” a vague anxiety impelled Bird to say.

“That’s just it, Bird. All day today, for fifteen hours, you’ve talked of nothing but whether or not the baby is dead yet.”

“It’s true his phantom is in control of my head; it’s like being submerged in a pool of the baby’s image.”

“Bird, that’s not normal. If the baby should take a long time weakening and it went on this way for, say, one hundred days, you’d go mad. You would, Bird!”

Bird glowered at Himiko. As if the echo of her words might bestow on the baby weakening on sugar-water and thinned milk the same energy that Popeye found in a can of spinach. Ah, one hundred days! Twenty-four hundred hours!

“Bird! If you let the baby’s phantom possess you this way, I don’t think you’ll be able to escape from it even after the baby is dead.” Himiko quoted in English from Macbeth: “ ‘These deeds must not be thought after these ways,’ Bird, ‘so it will make us mad.’ ”

“But I can’t help thinking about the baby now, and it may be the same after he’s dead. There’s nothing I can do about that. And you may be right, for all I know the worst part will come after the baby’s death.”

“But it’s not too late to call the hospital and arrange for him to get whole milk—”

“That’s no good,” Bird interrupted in a voice as plaintive and agitated as a scream. “And you’d know it was no good if you saw that lump on its head!”

Himiko peered at Bird and shook her head gloomily at what she saw. They avoided each other’s eyes. Presently Himiko turned off the light and burrowed into the bed alongside Bird. It was cool enough now for two people to lie together on one cramped bed without oppressing each other. For a time they lay in silence, perfectly still. Then Himiko wrapped herself around Bird’s body, moving with a clumsiness that was surprising in one ordinarily so expert. Bird felt a dry tuft of pubic hair against his outer thigh. Loathing grazed him unexpectedly, and passed. He wished that Himiko would stop moving her limbs and slip away into her own feminine sleep. At the same time he was poignantly hopeful that she would remain awake until he was asleep himself. Minutes
passed. Each sensed and tried not to show he knew that the other was wide awake. At last Himiko said, as abruptly as a badger who could endure playing dead no longer, “You dreamed about the baby last night, didn’t you?” Her voice was curiously shrill.

“Yes, I did. Why?”

“What kind of dream?”

“It was a missile base on the moon, and the baby’s bassinet was all alone on those fantastically desolate rocks. That’s all. A simple dream.”

“You curled up like an infant and clenched your fists and started bawling in your sleep. Waagh! Waagh! Your face was all mouth.”

“That’s a horror story, it’s not normal!” Bird said as though in rage, drowning in the hot springs of his shame.

“I was afraid. I thought you might go on that way and not come back to normal.”

Bird was silent, his cheeks flaming in the darkness. And Himiko lay as still as stone.

“Bird—if this weren’t a problem limited just to you personally, I mean if it was something that concerned me, too, that I could share with you, then I’d be able to encourage you so much better—” Himiko’s tone was subdued, as if she regretted having mentioned Bird’s moaning in his sleep.

“You’re right about this being limited to me, it’s entirely a personal matter. But with some personal experiences that lead you way into a cave all by yourself, you must eventually come to a side tunnel or something that opens on a truth that concerns not just yourself but everyone. And with that kind of experience at least the individual is rewarded for his suffering. Like Tom Sawyer! He had to suffer in a pitch-black cave, but at the same time he found his way out into the light he also found a bag of gold! But what I’m experiencing personally now is like digging a vertical mine shaft in isolation; it goes straight down to a hopeless depth and never opens on anybody else’s world. So I can sweat and suffer in that same dark cave and my personal experience won’t result in so much as a fragment of significance for anybody else. Hole-digging is all I’m doing, futile, shameful hole-digging; my Tom Sawyer is at the bottom of a desperately deep mine shaft and I wouldn’t be surprised if he went mad!”

“In my experience there is no such thing as absolutely futile suffering. Bird, right after my husband killed himself I went to bed, unprotected,
with a man who might have been sick and I developed a syphilis phobia. I suffered with that fear for an awfully long time, and while I was suffering it seemed to me that no neurosis could be as barren and unproductive as mine. But you know, after I recovered, I had gained something after all. Ever since then, I can make it with almost anything, no matter how lethal it might be, and I never worry about syphilis for very long!”