A Personal Matter (25 page)

Bird was silent throughout, and so was Himiko. They were both so irritated that they lacked the confidence to say anything for fear of hurting each other. Even a remark as innocent as
I’m sure we’ve already passed this corner twice
seemed dangerously likely to open a jagged crack between them. And there was the police box they kept driving by. An officer was certain to be sitting just inside the entrance to the ramshackle wooden structure, and each time they whispered by they grew a little more afraid of attracting his attention. Asking the policeman directions to the clinic was out of the question; they were unwilling even to check the address with any of the local delivery boys. A sports car carrying a baby with a lump on its head was looking for a clinic with a questionable reputation—such a rumor was certain to cause trouble. In fact, the doctor had gone as far as to caution Himiko on the phone not to make any stops in the neighborhood, not even for cigarettes. And so they continued what began to seem like an endless tour of the vicinity. And gradually, paranoia took hold of Bird: probably they would drive around all night and never reach the clinic they were looking for; probably a clinic for murdering babies never existed in the first place. Nor was paranoia Bird’s only problem, there was a tenacious sleepiness. What if he fell asleep and the baby’s basket slid off his lap? If the skin on the baby’s lump were really the dura mater that enclosed the brain, it would rupture instantly. The baby would submerge in the muddy water seeping through the floorboards between the gear shift and the brake, then he would develop breathing difficulty and gasp his life away—but that was much too horrible a death. Bird labored to stay awake. Even so he sank for an instant into the shadows of unconsciousness and was called back by Himiko’s tense voice pleading: “For God’s sake, Bird, stay awake!”

The basket was slipping off Bird’s lap. Shuddering, he gripped it with both hands.

“Bird, I’m sleepy too. I have this scary feeling I might run into something.”

Even now the dusky aura of evening was dancing down into the hollow. The wind had died, but the rain had continued here and changed at some point to mist which narrowly closed the field of vision. Himiko switched on the headlights and only one lamp lighted: her childish lover’s spite had begun to take effect. As the car again approached the twin ginkgo trees in front of the police box, an officer who might have been a young farmer ambled into the street and waved them to a stop.

It was a pale, bedraggled, and thoroughly suspicious state that Bird and Himiko were exposed to the policeman’s gaze, as, stooping, he peered into the car.

“Driver’s license please!” The cop sounded like the world’s most jaded policeman. In fact he was about the age of Bird’s students at the cram-school, but he knew perfectly well that he was intimidating them and he was enjoying it. “I could see you had only one good light, you know, the first time you drove by. And I looked the other way. But when you keep coming around the way you have, well, you’re just begging to get stopped. And now you cruise up as big as life with just that one light on—you can’t get away with that. It reflects on our authority.”

“Naturally,” Himiko said, with no inflection whatsoever.

“That a baby in there or what?” Himiko’s attitude appeared to have offended the officer. “Maybe I better ask you to leave the car here and carry the baby.”

The baby’s face was now grotesquely red, its breath coming in ragged rasps through its open mouth and both its nostrils. For an instant Bird forgot the police officer peering into the car to wonder if the baby had come down with pneumonia. Fearfully he pressed his hand against the baby’s brow. The sensation of heat was piercing, of an entirely different quality from that of human body temperature. Bird involuntarily cried out.

“What?” said the startled cop in a voice appropriate to his age.

“The baby is sick,” Himiko said. “So we decided to bring him in the car even though we noticed the headlight was broken.” Whatever Himiko was plotting involved taking advantage of the policeman’s consternation. “But then we lost the way and now we don’t know what to do.”

“Where do you want to go? What’s the doctor’s name?”

Hesitating, Himiko finally told the policeman the name of the clinic. The officer informed her that she would find it at the end of the little street just to the left of where they were parked. Then he said, anxious to demonstrate that he was no soft-hearted pushover of a cop: “But since it’s so close it won’t hurt you to get out and walk, maybe I’d better ask you to do that.”

Himiko hysterically extended one long arm and plucked the woolen cap from the baby’s head. It was the decisive blow to the young policeman.

“If he’s moved at all he must be shaken as little as possible.”

Himiko had pursued the enemy and overwhelmed him. Glumly, as though he regretted having taken it, the policeman returned her driver’s license. “See that you take the car in to be repaired as soon as you drop the baby off,” he said stupidly, his eyes still fixed to the lump on the baby’s head. “But—that’s really awful! Is that what you call brain fever?”

Bird and Himiko turned down the street the officer had indicated. By the time they had parked in front of the clinic, Himiko was composed enough to say: “He didn’t take down my license number or name or anything—what a dumb-ass cop!”

The clinic seemed to be built of plasterboard; they carried the baby’s basket into the vestibule. There was no sign of nurses, or patients either; it was the man with the egg-shaped head who appeared the minute Himiko called. And this time he wasn’t wearing a linen tuxedo but a stained, terrifying smock.

Ignoring Bird completely, he chided Himiko in a gentle voice, peering all the while into the baby’s basket as though he were buying mackerel from a fish peddler:

“You’re late, Himi. I was beginning to think you were having a little joke with me.”

It was Bird’s overwhelming impression that the clinic vestibule was ruinous: he felt menaced to the quick.

“We had some trouble getting here,” Himiko said coolly.

“I was afraid you might have done something dreadful on the way. There are radicals, you know, once they’ve decided to take the step they don’t see any distinction between letting a baby weaken and die and
strangling it to death—oh, dear,” the doctor exclaimed, lifting the baby’s basket, “as if he wasn’t in enough trouble already, this poor little fella is coming down with pneumonia.” As before, the doctor’s voice was gentle.

L
EAVING
the sports car at a garage, they set out in a cab for the gay bar Himiko knew. They were exhausted, anguished with a need to sleep, but their mouths were dry with an occult excitement that made them uneasy about returning all by themselves to that gloomy house.

They stopped the cab in front of a clumsy imitation of a gas lantern with the word
KIKUHIKO
in blue paint written on the glass globe. Bird pushed open a door held together tenuously with a few boards of unequal length and stepped into a room as crude and narrow as a shed for livestock; there was only a short counter and, against the opposite wall, two sets of outlandishly high-backed chairs. The bar was empty except for the smallish man standing in a far corner behind the counter who now confronted the two intruders. He was of a curious rotundity, with lips like a young girl’s and misted sheep-eyes which were warily inspecting but by no means rejecting them. Bird stood where he was, just inside the door, and returned his gaze. Gradually, a memento of his young friend Kikuhiko permeated the membrane of the ambiguous smile on the man’s face.

“Would you believe, it’s Himi, and looking a sight!” The man spoke through pursed lips, his eyes still on Bird. “I know this one; it’s been ages now, but didn’t they used to call him Bird?”

“We might as well sit down,” Himiko said. She appeared to be discovering only an atmosphere of anticlimax in the drama of this reunion. Not that Kikuhiko was exciting any very poignant emotion in Bird. He was fatigued utterly, he was sleepy: he felt certain nothing in the world remained that could interest him vitally. Bird found himself sitting down a little apart from Himiko.

“What do they call this one now, Himi?”

“Bird.”

“You can’t mean it. Still? It’s been seven years.” Kikuhiko moved over to Bird. “What are you drinking, Bird?”

“Whisky, please. Straight.”

“And Himi?”

“The same for me.”

“You both have that tired look and it’s still so early in the night!”

“Well, it has nothing to do with sex—we spent half the day driving around in circles.”

Bird reached for the glass of whisky that had been poured for him and, feeling something tighten in his chest, hesitated. Kikuhiko—he can’t be more than twenty-two yet he looks like a more formidable adult than I; on the other hand, he seems to have retained a lot of what he was at fifteen—Kikuhiko, like an amphibian at home in two ages.

Kikuhiko was drinking straight whisky, too. He poured himself another drink, and one for Himiko, who had emptied her first glass in a swallow. Bird found himself watching Kikuhiko and Kikuhiko glanced repeatedly at Bird, the nerves of his body arching like the back of a threatened cat. At last he turned directly to Bird and said: “Bird, do you remember me?”

“Of course,” said Bird. Strange, he was more conscious of talking to the proprietor of a gay bar (this was his first time) than to a sometime friend whom he hadn’t seen in years.

“It’s been ages, hasn’t it, Bird. Ever since that day we went over to the next town and saw a G.I. looking out of a train window with the bottom half of his face shot off.”

“What’s all this about a G.I.?” Himiko said. Kikuhiko told her, his eyes impudently roaming Bird.

“It was during the Korean war and these gorgeous soldier boys who’d been all wounded in the field were being shipped back to bases in Japan. Whole trainloads of them and we saw one of those trains one day. Bird, do you suppose they were passing through our district all the time?”

“Not all the time, no.”

“You used to hear stories about slave dealers catching Japanese high-school boys and selling them as soldiers, there were even rumors that the government was going to ship us off to Korea—I was terrified in those days.”

Of course! Kikuhiko had been horribly afraid. The night they had
quarreled and separated, he had shouted “Bird, I was afraid!” Bird thought about his baby and decided it was still incapable of fear. He felt relieved, a suspect, brittle relief. “Those rumors were certainly meaningless,” he said, trying to veer his consciousness from the baby.

“You say, but I did all kinds of nasty things on account of rumors like that. Which reminds me, Bird. Did you have any trouble catching that madman we were chasing?”

“He was dead when I found him, he’d hung himself on Castle Hill—I knocked myself out for nothing.” The taste of an old regret returned sourly to the tip of Bird’s tongue. “We found him at dawn, the dogs and I. Talk about something being meaningless!”

“I wouldn’t say that. You kept up the chase until dawn and I dropped out and ran in the middle of the night and our lives have been completely different ever since. You stopped mixing with me and my kind and went to a college in Tokyo, didn’t you? But I’ve been like falling steadily ever since that night and look at me now—tucked away nice and comfy in this nelly little bar. Bird, if you hadn’t… gone on alone that night, I might be in a very different groove now.”

“If Bird hadn’t abandoned you that night, you wouldn’t have become a homosexual?” Himiko audaciously asked.

Rattled, Bird had to look away.

“A homosexual is someone who has chosen to let himself love a person of the same sex: and I made that decision myself. So the responsibility is all my own.” Kikuhiko’s voice was quiet.

“I can see you’ve read the existentialists,” Himiko said.

“When you run a bar for faggots, you have to know where all kinds of things are at!” As though it were part of the song of his profession, Kikuhiko sang the line. Then he turned to Bird and said, in his normal voice, “I’m sure you’ve been on the rise all the time I’ve been falling. What are you doing now, Bird?”

“I’ve been teaching at a cram-school, but it turns out that I’m fired as of the summer vacation—‘on the rise’ isn’t quite how I’d put it,” Bird said. “And that isn’t all; it’s been one weird hassle after another.”

“Now that you mention it, the Bird I knew at twenty was never this droopy-woopy. It’s as if something has got you awfully scared and you’re trying to run away from it—” This was a shrewd and observant Kikuhiko, no longer the simple fairy Bird had known: his friend’s life of apostasy and descent could not have been easy or uninvolved.

“You’re right,” Bird admitted. “I’m all used up. I’m afraid. I’m trying to run away.”

“When he was twenty this one was immune to fear, I never saw him frightened of anything,” Kikuhiko said to Himiko. Then he turned back to Bird, and, provokingly: “But tonight you seem extra sensitive to fear; it’s like you’re so afraid you don’t have the foggiest notion where your head is at!”

“I’m not twenty anymore,” Bird said.

Kikuhiko’s face froze over with icy indifference. “The old gray mare just ain’t what she used to be,” he said, and moved abruptly to Himiko’s side.

A minute later two of them began a game of dice and Bird was given his freedom. Relieved, he lifted his glass of whisky. After a blank of seven years it had taken him and his friend just seven minutes of conversation to eliminate everything worthy of their mutual curiosity. I’m not twenty anymore! And of all my possessions at the age of twenty, the only thing I’ve managed not to lose is my childish nickname—Bird gulped down his first whisky of what had been a long day. Seconds later, something substantial and giant stirred sluggishly inside him. The whisky he had just poured into his stomach Bird effortlessly puked. Kikuhiko swiftly wiped the counter clean and set up a glass of water; Bird only stared dumbly into space. What was he trying to protect from that monster of a baby that he must run so hard and so shamelessly? What was it in himself he was so frantic to defend? The answer was horrifying—nothing! Zero!