A Personal Matter (20 page)

Himiko related her story as if it were a droll confession; she even finished with a titter of laughter. What did it matter that her own gaiety was counterfeit, Bird sensed the girl making an effort to cheer him up. Still, he permitted himself a cynical flourish: “In other words, the next time my wife has an abnormal child I won’t have to suffer for very long.”

“That isn’t what I meant at all,” Himiko said dejectedly. “Bird, if only you could convert this experience from a vertical shaft type to a cave experience with an exit tunnel—”

“I don’t think that’s possible.”

The conversation was at an end. “I’m going to get a beer and some sleeping pills,” Himiko said at last. “I guess you’ll need some too?”

Of course Bird needed some too, but it wouldn’t do to miss the telephone when it rang. “None for me,” he said in a voice that sharpened with an excess of longing. “I hate waking up in the morning with the taste of sleeping pills in my mouth.”
None for me
would have sufficed. But the extra words were necessary to extinguish the demand for beer and sleeping pills that was flaming in his throat.

“Really?” Himiko said callously as she washed the tablets down with half a glass of beer. “Now that you mention it, it’s like the taste of a broken tooth.”

Long after Himiko had fallen asleep Bird lay awake at her side, his body rigid from shoulders to belly as though he had been stricken with elephantiasis. Having to lie in bed with another felt like a sacrifice of his own body so great as to be unjust. Bird tried to recall what it had been like during the first year of his marriage, when he and his wife had slept in the same bed, but with so little success it might have been a mistake of memory. Bird finally resolved to sleep on the floor, but as he tried to sit up Himiko moaned savagely in her sleep and twined herself around his body, gnashing her teeth. Bird felt again a scratchy tuft of pubic hair
against his outer thigh. From the darkness beyond Himiko’s partly opened lips blew a rusty metallic odor.

With no room to move, despairing at the pain mounting in his body, Bird lay hopelessly awake. Before long, a suffocating suspicion took hold of him. Might not the doctor and those nurses be feeding the baby ten quarts of rich milk an hour? Bird could see the baby gulping condensed milk, two red mouths open in two red heads. The millet seeds of fever were sowed in every furrow of his body. Bird’s shame lightened, and weight was added to the pan on the other side of the scales, his victimized sense of being harmed by a grotesque baby: the psychological balance weighing Bird’s reprieve tipped. Bird sweated, tormented by an egotistical anxiety. He no longer saw anything, not even the furniture rising out of the darkness, nor heard any sound, not even the rumble of passing trucks; he was now a life form aware only of the prickliness of the heat on its skin and the sweat welling from within its own body. Lying perfectly still, Bird continued to ooze the green-smelling liquid, like a garden slug dusted with a grub killer.

I know the doctor and those nurses are feeding my baby ten quarts of rich milk an hour. …

It would be morning soon, but even then Bird wouldn’t be able to tell Himiko about this disgraceful paranoia: it was the very paranoia the girl producer had predicted in belittling him. He might not speak to Himiko, but very likely he would go over to the ward and reconnoiter when the agony of waiting for the call became too great to bear. The sky dawned and the telephone had not rung. Then dawn passed, morning light began to creep between the curtains, and Bird was still immersed to his neck in a tar vat of anxiety, sleepless, sweating, none but a phantom bell ringing in his ears.

In disgruntled silence, their shoulders rubbing, Bird and the doctor peered through the glass partition as if to examine an octopus in a water tank. Bird’s baby had come out of the incubator and was lying alone on a regular bed. He might just have come from surgery to correct a harelip, there was nothing covert to suggest that special measures were being taken. Bright red as a boiled shrimp, he didn’t look to Bird like a creature weakened to the point of death. He was even somewhat bigger than before. And the lump on his head seemed to have developed. His
head tipped sharply back in order to balance the weight of the lump, the baby was rubbing furiously behind its ears with the undersides of its thumbs, trying to scratch the lump perhaps, with shriveled hands that wouldn’t reach. Its eyes were closed so tightly that half its face was wrinkled.

“Do you suppose the lump itches?”

“What’s that?” the doctor said, and, comprehending, “I don’t really know. But the skin on the underside of the lump is so inflamed it’s ready to split; it could very well be itching. We injected some antibiotic in there once, but now that we’ve stopped all that the lump is liable to split any time. If it does burst, the baby will probably develop breathing difficulty.”

Bird stared at the doctor and started to open his mouth but swallowed in silence instead. He wanted to verify that the doctor had not forgotten that he, the father, desired this baby’s death. Otherwise, he would be trampled once again beneath the hoofs of a suspicion like last night’s. But all he could do was swallow.

“The crisis should come today or tomorrow,” the doctor said. Bird peered at the baby rubbing its head as before with its large, red hands held up above its ears. The baby’s ears were identical to Bird’s, rolled in against its head. “I appreciate all you’re doing,” Bird said in a whisper, as if he were afraid the baby would hear. Then he quickly bowed to the doctor, his cheeks on fire, and hurried out of the ward.

The minute the door closed Bird regretted not having made clear his desire to the doctor once again. He put his hands behind his ears as he walked along the corridor and began to rub his head just below the hairline with the fleshy pads of his thumbs. Gradually he arched backward, as if a heavy weight were attached to his head. He stopped short a minute later when he realized he was imitating the baby’s gestures, and glanced around him nervously. At the corner of the corridor, standing in front of a drinking fountain, two women from the maternity ward were staring blankly in his direction. Feeling his stomach heave, Bird turned toward the main wing and broke into a run.

Bird’s friend spotted him from the restaurant as he slowly drove by looking for a parking place, and he came out into the street. When Bird
finally managed to park, he looked at his watch. Thirty minutes late. His friend’s face as he approached was moldy with impatience.

“The car belongs to a friend,” Bird said in embarrassed justification of the MG. “Sorry I’m late. Is everybody here?”

“Just you and me. The others went to that protest rally at Hibiya Park.”

“Oh, that,” Bird said. He remembered knowing at breakfast that Himiko was reading about the Soviet bomb in the paper and not feeling the least involved himself. Right now my primary worry is personal, a grotesque baby, I’ve turned my back on the real world. It’s all right for those others to participate in global destiny with their protest rallies: a baby with a lump on its head doesn’t have its teeth in them.

“None of the others want to get involved with Mr. Delchef, that’s why they went down to the park.” His friend glanced at Bird irritably, as if he disapproved of Bird’s simple acceptance of the others’ absence. “A few thousand people protesting on the mall in Hibiya Park isn’t going to get anyone in trouble with Mr. Khrushchev personally!”

Bird considered each member of the study group. There was no denying that deep involvement with Mr. Delchef now could lead to trouble for all of them. Several were employed by first-rate export houses, others were with the Foreign Office or taught at universities. In the event that the newspapers picked up the Delchef incident and treated it as a scandal, their situation was certain to be awkward if their superiors should discover that they were associated with the man in any way. Not one of them was as free as Bird, instructor at a cram-school and soon to be fired.

“What are we going to do?” Bird prompted his friend.

“There’s nothing we can do. It seems to me our only choice is to refuse the legation’s request for help.”

“You’ve decided you don’t want to get involved with Mr. Delchef either?” Bird asked merely out of interest with no ulterior motives, yet his friend’s eyes reddened suddenly and he glowered at Bird, as if he had been insulted. Bird realized with surprise that he had been expected to approve at once of turning down the legation’s request.

“But look at this from Mr. Delchef’s point of view,” Bird objected quietly. His friend submerged in peevish silence. “Allowing us to persuade him to come back may be his last chance. Didn’t they say
they’d have to go to the police if we failed? Knowing that, I don’t see how we can refuse with a clear conscience!”

“If Mr. Delchef let himself be persuaded by us, fine, great! But if it didn’t go well and this developed into a scandal, we’d find ourselves in the middle of an international incident!” Avoiding Bird’s face, the friend spoke with his eyes on the gutted sheep’s belly that was the driver’s seat of the MG. “It just doesn’t seem wise to me to mess with Mr. Delchef while all this is going on.”

Bird could feel his friend imploring him to agree without further argument; the plea was so naked it was sad. But awesome words like
scandal
and
international incident
failed entirely to impress him. Even now he was over his head in the scandal of the bizarre baby, and the domestic incident created by the baby had a firmer and more poignant hold on the scruff of his neck than any international incident could ever have. Bird was free of the fear of all the pitfalls he supposed must be concealed around Mr. Delchef’s person. And he noticed now for the first time since the trouble with the baby had begun that the breadth of his life from day to day permitted him a far larger than ordinary margin of action. He was even amused by the irony.

“If you decide to turn down the legation appeal as a group, I’d like to meet Mr. Delchef on my own. I was close to him, and even if the incident does come out in the open and I get involved in a scandal, well, it isn’t going to bother me particularly.”

Bird was looking for something that would occupy him today and tomorrow, the new period of reprieve the doctor’s words had granted him. Besides, he honestly wanted a look at Mr. Delchef’s life as a recluse.

The instant Bird accepted, his friend turned to gold, so swift was the alchemy that Bird on his part was a little embarrassed: “If you feel that’s what you want to do, go ahead! I can’t think of anything better,” the friend said with feverish conviction. “To tell the truth, I was hoping you’d agree to take the job on. The others got cold feet the minute they heard the news about Mr. Delchef, but you were as composed and detached as could be. Bird, I admired you for that!”

Bird smiled blandly, not wishing to offend his suddenly loquacious friend. At the moment, as long as the baby was not involved, his capacity for calm detachment was infinite. But that was no reason, he
thought bitterly, for the rest of Tokyo’s millions without the shackles of a grotesque baby around their necks to feel envious of him.

“I’ll tell you what, I’ll treat you to lunch,” the friend proposed eagerly. “Let’s have a beer first.”

Bird nodded, and they walked back to the restaurant together. They were seated across a table and had called for beer when Bird’s elated friend said: “Bird, did you have that habit of rubbing behind your ears with your thumbs when we were in school together?”

As he edged into the narrow alley that opened like a crack between a Korean restaurant and a bar, Bird wondered if there wasn’t another exit hidden in this labyrinth. According to the map his friend had drawn for him, he had just entered a blind alley by the only entrance. The cul-de-sac was shaped like a stomach, a stomach with an obstruction in the duodenum. How could a man leading a fugitive life bury himself in a place as closed in as this and not feel anxious about it? Had Mr. Delchef felt so hounded that no other spot would have done as a hideaway? Chances were, he wasn’t hiding in this alley anymore. Bird cheered himself with the thought, and then he had come to the tenement house at the end of the alley. He stopped at the entrance to what might have been a secret trail to a mountain fortress, and wiped the sweat off his face. The alley itself seemed shady enough, but Bird saw when he looked up at the sky that the fierce sunlight of summer noon covered it like a white-hot platinum net. His face still uplifted to the glitter of the sky, Bird closed his eyes and rubbed his itching head with his thumbs. Suddenly he let his arms fall as if they had been struck down, and snapped his head upright; in the distance, a girl had raised her voice in a lunatic scream.

With his shoes in one hand, Bird climbed a few stairs that were gritty with dirt and went into the building. The left side of the hallway was lined with prison-like doors. The right side was a blank wall, heavily scrawled on. Bird moved toward the back, checking the numbers on the doors. He could sense people behind each of the doors, yet all of them were closed. Then what did the tenants in this building do about escaping the heat? Was Himiko the forerunner of a tribe propagating wildly all over the city which shut itself up in locked rooms even in the middle of the day? Bird got all the way to the end of the hall and
discovered a flight of steep, narrow stairs hidden away like an inside pocket. Then he happened to look behind him: a large woman was planted in the entranceway, peering in his direction. She was in heavy shadow and so was the hall, for her back shut out the light from the street.

“What do you want back there?” the woman called, moving as though to shoo a dog away.

“I’ve just come to visit a foreign friend of mine,” Bird replied in a quaking voice.

“American?”

“He’s living with a young Japanese girl.”

“Ah, why didn’t you say so! The American is the first room on the second floor.” With that, the large woman nimbly vanished. Assuming “the American” was Mr. Delchef, it was clear that he had won a place in the giantess’s affections. Bird was still doubtful as he climbed the unfinished wooden stairs. But then he executed a turn on the particularly narrow landing and there in front of him, his arms extended in welcome though his eyes were puzzled, Mr. Delchef stood. Bird felt a surge of joy: Mr. Delchef was the only tenant in the building with the wholesome good sense to leave his door open as a measure against the heat.