A Personal Matter (11 page)

What a relief to reach the top of the stairs! and then someone called his name and Bird’s uneasiness returned. It was a friend who was helping sponsor a Slavic languages study group that Bird had formed with some other interpreters. But since Bird had all he could do at the moment playing cat-and-mouse with his hangover, meeting someone he had not expected struck him as a terrific nuisance. He closed himself like a shellfish under attack.

“Hey—Bird!” his friend called: the nickname was still valid in any situation, for all categories of friend. “I’ve been calling since last night but I couldn’t get you. So I thought I’d come over—”

“Oh?” said Bird, unsociably.

“Have you heard the news about Mr. Delchef?”

“News?” Bird repeated, feeling vaguely apprehensive. Mr. Delchef was an attaché in the legation from a small socialist state in the Balkans and the study group’s instructor.

“Apparently he’s moved in with a Japanese girl and won’t go back to the legation. They say it’s been a week. The legation wants to keep things in the family and bring Mr. Delchef back themselves, but they’ve
only been here a little while and, well, they’re short of people. The girl lives in the slummiest part of Shinjuku, it’s like a maze in there; there just isn’t anyone at the legation who gets around well enough to search for strays in a neighborhood like that. That’s where we come in: the legation has asked the study group to help out. Of course, we’re partly responsible for the whole thing anyway—”

“Responsible?”

“Mr. Delchef met her at that bar we took him to after a meeting, you know, the Pullman Car.” Bird’s friend snickered. “Don’t you remember that small, peculiar, pasty-faced girl?”

Bird recalled her right away, a small, peculiar, pasty-faced girl. “But she didn’t speak English or any Slavic language and Mr. Delchef’s Japanese is no good at all—how do they get along?”

“That’s the hell of it; how do you suppose they spent a whole week, clammed up, or what?” The friend seemed embarrassed by his own innuendo.

“What will happen if Mr. Delchef doesn’t go back to the legation? Will that make him a defector or something?”

“You can bet it will!”

“He’s really asking for trouble, Mr. Delchef—” Bird said glumly.

“We’d like to call a meeting of the study group and think it over. Are you free tonight?”

“Tonight?—” Bird was nonplused. “—I—can’t make it tonight.”

“But you were closer than any of us to Mr. Delchef. If we decide to send an envoy from the study group, we were hoping you’d agree to go—”

“An envoy—anyway, I couldn’t possibly make it tonight,” Bird said. Then he forced himself to add: “We had a child but there was something wrong and he’s either dead already or dying right now.”

“God!” Bird’s friend exclamed, wincing. Above their heads the bell began to ring.

“That’s awful, really awful. Listen, we’ll manage without you tonight. And try not to let it get the best of you—is your wife all right?”

“Fine, thank you.”

“When we decide what to do about Mr. Delchef, I’ll get in touch. God, you look run down—take care of yourself—”

“Thank you.”

Bird, watching his friend flounce down the spiral stairs in reckless
haste, as though he were running away, was angry with himself for having kept silent about his hangover. Bird went into his classroom. And just for a second he was confronting one hundred fly-head faces. Then he lowered his gaze as though reflexively; wary of lifting his head again and looking his students in the face, and holding the reader and the chalk box in front of his chest like weapons of self-defense, he stepped up to the lectern.

Classtime! Bird opened the reader at the bookmark to the passage at which he had stopped the week before, without any notion of what it was. He began to read aloud, and he realized right away that it was a paragraph from Hemingway. The reader was a large collection of short passages from modern American literature, chosen by the department chairman because he happened to like them and because each was mined with grammatical traps. Hemingway! Bird was encouraged. He liked Hemingway, especially
The Green Hills of Africa.
The passage in the reader was from
The Sun Also Rises,
a scene near the end when the hero goes for a swim in the ocean. The narrator swims out beyond the breakers, taking a dunking now and then, and when he reaches the offing where the water is calm, he turns over on his back and floats. All he can see is sky, and beneath him he feels the rise of the swell and the fall. …

In the depths of his body, Bird felt the beginning of an irrepressible and certain crisis. His throat went utterly dry; his tongue swelled in his mouth like a foreign body. Bird submerged in the amniotic fluid of fear. But he continued to read aloud, glancing like a sick weasel, craftily and feebly, at the door. Could he make it in time if he charged in that direction? But how much better to ride the crisis out without having to make a run for it. Hoping to take his mind off his stomach, Bird tried to place the paragraph he was reading in context. The hero lay around on the beach and went in for another swim. When he returned to the hotel, a telegram was waiting from his mistress, who had run off with a young bullfighter. Bird tried to remember the telegram:
COULD YOU COME HOTEL MONTANA MADRID AM RATHER IN TROUBLE BRETT
.

Yes, that sounded right: and he had remembered it easily. It’s a good omen, of all the telegrams I’ve ever read, this was the most appealing. I should be able to overcome the nausea—more a prayer than a thought. Bird continued to reconstruct: the hero dives into the ocean with his eyes open and sees something green oozing along the bottom. If that
appears in this passage, I’ll make it through without throwing up. It’s a magic spell. Bird went on: “I” came out of the water, returned to the hotel, and picked up his telegram. It was just as Bird had remembered it:
COULD YOU COME HOTEL MONTANA MADRID AM RATHER IN TROUBLE BRETT.

But the hero had left the beach, and not a word about swimming underwater with his eyes open. Bird was surprised; had he been thinking of another Hemingway novel? Or was the scene from an altogether different writer? Doubt broke the spell and Bird lost his voice. A web of bone-dry cracks opened in his throat and his tongue swelled until it tried to burst from his lips. Facing one hundred fly-heads, Bird lifted his eyes and smiled. Five seconds of ridiculous, desperate silence. Then Bird crumpled to his knees, spread his fingers like a toad on the muddy wooden floor, and with a groan began to vomit. Bird vomited like a retching cat, his neck thrust stiffly from his shoulders. And his guts were being twisted and wrung dry: he looked like a puny demon writhing beneath the foot of an enormous Deva king. Bird had hoped at least to achieve a little humor in his vomiting style, but his actual performance was anything but funny. One thing, as the vomit submerged the base of his tongue and ran back down his throat, just as Himiko had predicted, it had a definite taste of lemons. The violet that blooms from the dungeon wall, Bird told himself, trying to regain his composure. But such psychological wiles crumbled like pie crust in the face of spasms that now struck with the force of a full gale: a thundrous groan wrenched Bird’s mouth open and his body stiffened. From both sides of his head a blackness swiftly grew like blinders on a horse and darkly narrowed his field of vision. Bird longed to burrow into a still darker, still deeper place, and from there to leap away into another universe!

A second later, Bird found himself in the same universe. With tears wetting both sides of his nose, he gazed mournfully down into the puddle of his own vomit. A pale, red-ochre puddle, scattered with vivid yellow lemon lees. Seen from a low-flying plane at a desolate and withered time of year, the plains of Africa might hue to these same colors: lurking in the shadow of those lemon dregs were hippo and anteaters and wild mountain goats. Strap on a parachute, grip your rifle, and leap out and down in grasshopper haste.

The nausea had subsided. Bird brushed at his mouth with a muddy, bile-fouled hand and then stood up.

“Due to circumstances, I’d like to dismiss class early today,” he said in a voice like a dying gasp. The class appeared convinced; Bird moved to pick up his reader and the box of chalk. All of a sudden, one of the fly-heads leaped up and began to shout. The boy’s pink lips fluttered, and his round, effeminate, peasant’s face turned a vibrant red, but as he muffled his words inside his mouth and tended to stutter besides, it wasn’t easy to understand what he was asserting. Gradually, all became quite clear. From the beginning, the boy had been criticizing the unsuitability of Bird’s attitude as an instructor, but when he saw that Bird’s only response was to display an air of perplexity, he had become a hostile devil of attack. Endlessly he harangued about the high cost of the tuition, the briefness of the time remaining until college entrance exams, the students’ faith in the cram-school, and their sense of outrage now that their expectations had been betrayed. Gradually, as wine turns to vinegar, Bird’s consternation turned to fear, aureoles of fear spread around his eyes like deep rings: he felt himself turning into a frightened monocle monkey. Before long, his attacker’s indignation would infect the other ninety-nine fly-heads: Bird would be surrounded by one hundred furious college rejects and not a chance of breaking free. It was brought home to him again how little he understood the students he had been instructing week after week. An inscrutable enemy one hundred strong had brought him to bay, and he discovered that successive waves of nausea had washed his strength onto the beach.

The accuser’s agitation mounted until he was on the verge of tears. But Bird couldn’t have answered the young man even if he tried: after the vomiting his throat was as dry as straw, secreting not one drop of saliva. The most he felt he could manage was one eminently birdlike cry. Ah, he moaned, soundlessly, what should I do? This kind of awful pitfall is always lurking in my life, waiting for me to tumble in. And this is different from the kind of crisis I was supposed to encounter in my life as an adventurer in Africa. Even if I did fall into this pit I couldn’t pass out or die a violent death. I could only stare blankly at the walls of the trap forever. I’m the one who’d like to send a telegram,
AM RATHER IN TROUBLE
—but addressed to whom?

It was then a youth with a quick-witted look stood up from his seat in
a middle row and said quietly, untheatrically, “Knock it off, will you—stop complaining!”

The mirage of hard, thorny feeling that was beginning to mount throughout the classroom instantly disappeared. Amused excitement welled in its place and the class raised its voice in laughter. Time to act! Bird put the reader on top of the chalk box and walked over to the door. He was stepping out of the room when he heard shouting again and turned around; the student who had persisted in attacking him was down on all fours, just as Bird had been when he was sick, and he was sniffing the pool of Bird’s vomit. “This stinks of whisky!” the boy screamed. “You’ve got a hangover, you bastard! I’m going to the Principal with a darektapeel and getting your ass fired!”

A darektapeel? Bird wondered, and as he comprehended—Ah!—a direct appeal!—that delightful young man stood up again and said in gloomy tones that brought new laughter from the class, “You shouldn’t lap that stuff up; it’ll make you puke.”

Liberated from his sprawling prosecutor, Bird climbed down the spiral stairs. Maybe, just as Himiko said, there really was a band of young vigilantes ready to ride to his assistance when he blundered into trouble. For the two or three minutes it took him to climb down the spiral stairs, though from time to time he scowled at the sourness of vomit lingering on his tongue or at the back of his throat—for those few minutes, Bird was happy.

A
T
the junction of corridors that led to the pediatrics office and the intensive care ward, Bird halted in indecision. A young patient approaching in a wheelchair swerved, glowering, to let him pass. Where his two feet should have been, the patient rested a large, old-fashioned radio. Nor were his feet to be seen in any other place. Abashed, Bird pressed himself against the wall. Once again the patient looked at him threateningly, as if Bird represented all men who carried their bodies through life on two feet; then he shot down the corridor at amazing speed. Watching him go, Bird sighed. Assuming his baby was still alive, he should proceed straight to the ward. But if the baby was dead, he would have to present himself at the pediatrics office to make arrangements for an autopsy and cremation. It was a gamble. Bird began to walk toward the office. He had placed his bet on the baby’s death, he installed the fact prominently in his consciousness. Now he was the baby’s true enemy, the first enemy in its life, the worst. If life was eternal and if there was a god who judged, Bird thought, then he would be found guilty. But his guilt now, like the grief that had assailed him in the ambulance when he had compared the baby to Apollinaire with his head in bandages, tasted primarily of honey.

His step quickening steadily, as if he were on his way to meet a lover, Bird hurried in quest of a voice that would announce his baby’s death. When he received the news, he would make the necessary arrangements (arranging for the autopsy would be easy because the hospital would be eager to cooperate; probably the cremation would be a nuisance). Today I’ll mourn the baby alone, tomorrow I’ll report our misfortune to my wife. The baby died of a head wound and now he has become a bond of flesh between us—I’ll say something like that. We’ll manage to restore our family life to normal. And then, all over again, the same
dissatisfactions, the same desires unrealized, Africa the same vast distance away. …

With his head atilt, Bird peered into the low reception window, gave his name to the nurse who stared back at him from behind the glass, and explained the situation as it had stood a day ago when the baby had been brought in.

“Oh yes, you want to see that baby with the brain hernia,” the nurse said cheerfully, her face relaxing into a smile. She was a woman in her forties, with a scattering of black hairs growing around her lips. “You should go directly to the intensive care ward. Do you know where it is?”