A Personal Matter (24 page)

“It doesn’t look like you, Bird,” Himiko whispered in a rasping, ugly voice.

“It doesn’t look like anybody; it doesn’t even look human!”

“I wouldn’t say that—” the pediatrician offered in feeble reproof.

Bird glanced quickly at the babies beyond the glass partition. At the
moment all of them were writhing in their beds, uniformly agitated. Bird suspected they were gossiping about their comrades who had been taken away. Whatever happened to that piddling pocket-monkey of an incubator baby with the meditative eyes? And the fighting father of the baby without a liver, was he here to start another argument in his brown knickers and wide leather belt?

“Are you all checked out at the office?” the nurse asked.

“All finished.”

“Then you may do as you like!”

“You’re sure you won’t reconsider?” The pediatrician sounded troubled.

“Quite sure,” Bird adamantly said. “Thanks for everything.”

“Don’t thank me—I’ve done nothing.”

“Well then, good-by.”

The doctor flushed around his eyes and, as if he regretted having raised his voice just now, said in a voice as soft as Bird’s: “Good-by, take care of yourself.”

As Bird stepped out of the ward, the patients loitering in the corridor turned as if at a signal and advanced toward the baby. Bird, glowering, marched straight down the corridor with his elbows cocked, hunching protectively over the basket. Himiko hurried after him. Dismayed by the fury in Bird’s face, the convalescents moved to the sides of the dim corridor, suspicious still, but, probably on the baby’s account, smiling.

“Bird,” said Himiko, turning to look behind her, “that doctor or one of the nurses might notify the police.”

“Like hell they will,” Bird said savagely. “Don’t forget they nad a crack at killing the baby themselves, with watered milk and sugar-water!”

They were approaching the main entrance and what looked to Bird like a seething crowd of out-patients; to defend the baby from their mammoth curiosity with nothing but his own two elbows this time, seemed a pure impossibility. Bird felt like a lone player running with a rugby ball at a goal defended by the entire enemy team. He hesitated, and, remembering, “There’s a cap in my pants pocket. Would you get it out and cover the back of his head?”

Bird watched Himiko’s arm tremble as she did his bidding. Together then they hurled themselves at the strangers who sidled toward them with brash smiles. “What a darling baby, like an angel!” one middle-aged
lady crooned, and though Bird felt like the butt of a horrid joke he didn’t falter or even lift his head until he had broken free of the crowd.

Outside it was raining again, yet another of the day’s downpours. Himiko’s car backed through the rain with the fleetness of a water skimmer to where Bird waited with the basket. Bird handed the basket to Himiko, then climbed into the car himself and took it back. In order to secure it on his lap, Bird had to hold himself rigidly erect, statue of an Egyptian king.

“All set?”

“Ah.”

The car leaped forward as at the start of a race. Bird struck his ear against the metal brace of the roof and caught his breath in pain.

“What time is it, Bird?”

Bird, supporting the basket with his right arm only, looked at his wristwatch. The hands stood at a nonsensical hour; the watch had stopped. Bird had been wearing the watch out of habit but he hadn’t looked at the time in days, much less set or wound the watch. He felt as if he had been living outside the zone of time which regulated the placid lives of those who were not afflicted with a grotesque baby.

“My watch has stopped,” he said.

Himiko pushed a button on the car radio. A news broadcast: the announcer was commenting on the repercussions of the Soviet resumption of nuclear testing. The Japan Anti-Nuclear Warfare League had come out in support of the Soviet test. There was factional strife within the League, however, and a strong possibility that the next world conference on the abolishment of nuclear weapons would founder in a hopeless bog of disagreement. A tape was played, Hiroshima victims challenging the League’s proclamation. Could there really be such a thing as a
clean
atomic weapon? What if the tests
were
being conducted by Soviet scientists in the wastelands of Siberia, could there really be such a thing as a hydrogen bomb that was not harmful to man or beast?

Himiko changed the station. Popular music, a tango—not that Bird could distinguish between one tango and another. This one was interminable: Himiko finally switched the radio off. They had failed to come up with a time signal.

“Bird, it looks like the ANWL has copped out on the issue of Soviet tests,” Himiko said with no particular interest in her voice.

“It seems that way,” Bird said.

In a world shared by all those others, time was passing, mankind’s one and only time, and a destiny apprehended the world over as one and the same destiny was taking evil shape. Bird, on the other hand, was answerable only to the baby in the basket on his lap, to the monster who governed his personal destiny.

“Bird, do you suppose there are people who want an atomic war, not because they stand to benefit from the manufacture of nuclear weapons economically, say, or politically, but simply because that’s what they want? I mean, just as most people believe for no particular reason that this planet should be perpetuated and hope that it will be, there must be black-hearted people who believe, for no reason
they
could name, that mankind should be annihilated. In northern Europe there’s a little animal like a rat, it’s called a lemming, and sometimes these lemmings commit mass suicide. I just wonder if somewhere on this earth there aren’t lemming-people. Bird?”

“Lemming-people with black hearts? The UN would have to get right to work on a program for tracking them down.”

Bird, though he played along, felt no desire to march in the crusade against the lemming-people with black hearts. In fact, he was aware of a black-hearted lemming presence whispering through himself.

“Hot, isn’t it,” Himiko said, as if to suggest by her brusque changing of the subject that their conversation so far had not much interested her.

“Yes, it’s hot all right.”

Heat from the engine continued to vibrate upward from the thin metal plate of the floor, and since the canvas hood sealed the car shut they began gradually to feel as if they were trapped inside a hothouse. But clearly the wind would blow in the rain if they detached a corner of the hood. Bird examined the latches wistfully; it was a particularly old-fashioned hood.

“There’s nothing you can do, Bird.” Himiko had detected his despair. “Let’s stop every once in a while and open the door.”

Bird saw a rain-soaked sparrow lying dead in the road just ahead of the car. Himiko saw it, too. The car bore down on the dead bird, and, as it sank out of sight, sharply swerved and dropped one tire into a pothole which lay hidden under muddy yellow water. Bird rapped both hands against the dashboard, but he didn’t loosen his grip on the baby’s basket. Sadly Bird thought: by the time we get to the abortionist’s clinic I’ll be covered with bruises.

“Sorry, Bird,” Himiko said. She must have taken a blow, too, it was a voice set against pain. They both avoided mentioning the dead sparrow.

“It’s nothing serious.” Settling the basket on his lap again, Bird looked down at the baby for the first time since he had climbed into the car. The baby’s face was burning a steadily angrier red, but whether it was breathing wasn’t clear. Suffocation! Bird was driven by panic to shake the basket. Abruptly, opening its mouth wide as if to sink its teeth into Bird’s fingers, the baby began to cry in a voice too loud to be believed.

Waaaaaaaaaagh-uh. … waaaaaaaaaagh-uh. … waaaaaaaaaagh-uh. … on and on the baby screamed and delicately convulsed while tear after large, transparent tear seeped from tightly closed eyes like inch-long shreds of thread. As Bird recovered from his panic, he moved to cover with his palm the screaming baby’s rosy lips and barely checked himself in time as a new panic welled. Iiiiiiiiiigh-uh. … iiiiiiiiiigh-uh … the baby continued to bawl. … Yaaaaaaaaa-uh. … yaaaaaaaaagh-uh. … fluttering the cap with the pattern of baby goats that covered the lump on its head.

“You always feel that a baby’s cry is full of meaning,” Himiko said, raising her voice above the baby’s. “For all we know, it may contain all the meaning of all of man’s words.”

Still the baby wailed: waaaaaaaaaagh-uh. … yaaaaaaaaaaaagh-uh. … aaaaaaaaaaaagh-uh. … waagh … waagh … waagh … waagh. … yaiiiiiiiiiigh-uh. …

“It’s a lucky thing we don’t have the ability to understand,” Bird said uneasily.

The car sped on, carrying with it the baby’s screams. It was like a load of five thousand shrilling crickets, or again as if Bird and Himiko had burrowed into the body of a single cricket and were stridulating with it. Soon the heat trapped in the car and the baby’s crying became unbearable; Himiko pulled over and they opened both doors. The damp, hot air inside the car roared out like a feverish invalid’s belch; cold, wet air gushed in and with it, the rain. Bird and Himiko had been bathed in sweat, now they shivered with a chill. A little rain even stole into the basket on Bird’s lap, the water clinging to the baby’s flaming cheeks in drops much smaller than tears. Now the baby’s crying was fitful——aagh-uh—aagh-uh—aagh-uh—and every so often a spasm of
coughing would shake its body. The coughing was clearly abnormal: Bird wondered if the baby hadn’t developed a respiratory disease. By tilting the basket away from the door he finally managed to shield it from the rain.

“Bird, it’s dangerous to expose a baby suddenly to cold air like this when he’s been living in an incubator—he could even catch pneumonia!”

“I know,” Bird said, his fatigue heavy and deep-rooted.

“I can’t think what to do.”

“What the hell are you supposed to do to make a baby stop crying at a time like this?” Never before had Bird felt so utterly inexperienced.

“I’ve seen them given a breast to suck lots of times—” Himiko paused as though in horror, then she quickly added, “We should have brought some milk along, Bird.”

“Watered milk? Or maybe sugar-water?” It was the fatigue that dredged up the cynic in him.

“Let me just run into a drugstore. They might have one of those toys, what do you call them? you know, they’re shaped like nipples?”

And Himiko dashed out into the rain. Bird, rocking the baby’s basket uncertainly, watched his lover hurry away in her flat shoes. No Japanese woman her age was better educated than Himiko, but that education was rotting on the pantry shelf; nor was she as knowledgeable about daily life as even the most ordinary of women. Probably she would never have children of her own. Bird remembered Himiko as she had been in their first year at college, the liveliest of a group of freshman girls, and he felt pity for the Himiko who was now flopping through a mud puddle like a clumsy dog. Who in the whole world would have foreseen this future for that co-ed so full of youth and pedantry and confidence? Several long-distance moving vans rumbled by like a herd of rhinoceros, shaking the car and Bird and the baby with it. Bird thought he could hear a call in the rumbling of the trucks, urgent though its meaning was unclear. It had to be an illusion, but for a futile minute he listened hard.

Himiko leaned into the rainy gusts of wind as she labored back to the car, her face so publicly in a scowl that she might have been fuming alone in the dark. She wasn’t running anymore: Bird read in all of her ample body an ugly fatigue to match his own. But when Himiko reached the car she said happily, raising her voice above the baby’s,
who was crying as before, “They call these sucking toys pacifiers, it just slipped my mind for a minute—here, I bought two kinds.”

Rummaging the word “pacifier” out of the storeroom of distant memory seemed to have given Himiko back her confidence. But the yellow rubber objects resting in her open hand like enlarged, winged maple seeds looked like troublesome implements for a newborn baby to manage.

“The one with the blue stuff inside is for teething, that’s for older infants. But this squooshy one should be just what the doctor ordered.” As she spoke, Himiko placed the pacifier in the screaming baby’s pink mouth.

Why did you have to buy one for teething? Bird started to ask. Then he saw that the baby wasn’t even responding to the pacifier intended for infants. The only indication it was aware of the gadget inserted in its mouth was a slight working of its face, as if the baby was trying to expel the pacifier with its tongue.

“It doesn’t seem to work; I guess he’s too young,” Himiko said miserably after experimenting for a minute. Her confidence again was gone.

Bird withheld criticism.

“But I don’t know any other way to quiet a baby down.”

“Then we’ll have to go on this way—let’s get started.” Bird closed the door on his side.

“The clock in the drugstore just now said four o’clock. I think we can get to the clinic by five.” Himiko started the engine, an ugly look on her face. She too was heading for the north pole of disgruntlement.

“He can’t possibly cry for a whole hour,” Bird said.

Five-thirty: the baby had cried itself to sleep but they had not yet reached their destination. For a full fifty minutes now they had been making a grand tour around the same hollow. They had driven up and down hills, crossed a winding, muddy river any number of times, blundered down blind alleys, emerged again and again on the wrong side of one of the steep slopes that rose out of the valley to the north and south. Himiko remembered having driven right to the entrance of the clinic, and when the car climbed to the top of a rise she was even able to locate its general vicinity. But then they would descend into the
crowded hollow with its maze of narrow streets and it would become impossible to say with certainty even which direction they were heading. When they finally turned into a street Himiko thought she remembered, it was only to encounter a small truck which refused absolutely to yield the way. They had to back up a hundred yards, and when they had let the truck pass and tried to go back, they found that they had turned a different corner. The street at the next corner was one way: return was impossible.