A Personal Matter (12 page)

“Yes, I do,” Bird said in a hoarse, wasted voice. “Does that mean the baby is still alive?”

“Why of course he’s alive! He’s taking his milk very nicely and his arms and legs are good and strong. Congratulations!”

“But it
is
a brain hernia—”

“That’s right, brain hernia,” the nurse smiled, ignoring Bird’s hesitation. “Is this your first child?”

Bird merely nodded, then hurried back down the corridor toward the intensive care ward. So he had lost the bet. How much would he have to pay? Bird encountered the patient in the wheelchair again at a turn in the corridor, but this time he marched straight ahead without so much as a sidelong glance and the cripple had to wheel himself frantically out of the way just before the collision. Far from being intimidated by the other, Bird wasn’t even conscious of the patient’s affliction. What if the man had no feet: Bird was as empty inside as an unloaded warehouse. At the pit of his stomach and deep inside his head, the hangover still sang a lingering, venomous song. Breathing raggedly, his breath fetid, Bird hurried down the corridor. The passageway that connected the main wing and the wards arched upward like a suspension bridge, aggravating Bird’s sense of unbalance. And the corridor through the wards, hemmed on both sides by sickroom doors, was like a dark culvert extending toward a feeble, distant light. His face the color of ash, Bird gradually quickened his step until he was almost running.

The door to the intensive care ward, like the entrance to a freezer, was of rugged tin sheeting. Bird gave his name to the nurse standing just inside the door as if he were whispering something shameful. He was in the grip again of the embarrassment he had felt about himself for having a body and flesh when he had first learned yesterday of the
baby’s abnormality. The nurse ushered Bird inside officiously. While she was closing the door behind him, Bird glanced into an oval mirror that was hanging on a pillar just inside the room and saw oil and sweat glistening from forehead to nose, lips parted with ragged breathing, clouded eyes that clearly were turned in upon themselves: it was the face of a pervert. Jolted by sudden disgust, Bird looked away quickly, but already his face had engraved its impression behind his eyes. A presentiment like a solemn promise grazed his flushed head: from now on I’ll suffer often from the memory of this face.

“Can you tell me which is yours?” Standing at Bird’s side, the nurse spoke as if she were addressing the father of the hospital’s healthiest and most beautiful baby. But she wasn’t smiling, she didn’t even seem sympathetic; Bird decided this must be the standard intensive care ward quiz. Not only the nurse who had asked the question but two young nurses who were rinsing baby bottles beneath a huge water heater on the far wall, and the older nurse measuring powdered milk next to them, and the doctor studying file cards at a cramped desk against the smudgy poster-cluttered wall, and the doctor on this side of him, conversing with a stubby little man who seemed, like Bird, to be the father of one of the seeds of calamity gathered here—everybody in the room stopped what he was doing and turned in expectant silence to look at Bird.

Bird’s eye swept the babies’ room on the other side of the wide, plated-glass partition. His conscious sense of the doctors’ and nurses’ presence in the ward instantly dropped away. Like a puma with fierce, dry eyes searching the plain for feeble prey from the top of a termite mound, Bird surveyed the babies behind the glass.

The ward was flooded with light that was harsh in its opulence. Here it was no longer the beginning of summer, it was summer itself: the reflection of the light was scorching Bird’s brow. Twenty infant beds and five incubators that recalled electric organs. The incubator babies appeared only as blurred shapes, as though mist enshrouded them. But the babies in the beds were too naked and exposed. The poison of the glaring light had withered all of them; they were like a herd of the world’s most docile cattle. Some were moving their arms and legs slightly, but even on these the diapers and white cotton nightshirts looked as heavy as lead diving suits. They gave the impression, all of them, of shackled people. There were a few whose wrists were even secured to the bed
(what if it was
to prevent them from scratching their
own tender skins) or whose ankles were lashed down with strips of gauze
(what if it was
to protect the wounds made during a blood transfusion), and these infants were the more like wee, feeble prisoners. The babies’ silence was uniform. Was the plate glass shutting out their voices? Bird wondered. No, like doleful turtles with no appetite, they all had their mouths closed. Bird’s eyes raced over the babies’ heads. He had already forgotten his son’s face, but his baby was marked unmistakably. How had the hospital director put it, “Appearance? there seem to be two heads! I once heard a thing by Wagner called ‘Under the Double Eagle’—” The bastard must have been a classical music buff.

But Bird couldn’t find a baby with the proper head. Again and again he glanced irritably up and down the row of beds. Suddenly, without any cue, the infants all opened their calf’s liver mouths and began to bawl and squirm. Bird flinched. Then he turned back to the nurse as if to ask “what happened?” But the nurse wasn’t paying any attention to the screaming babies and neither was anyone else in the room; they were all watching Bird, silently and with deep interest, still playing the game: “Have you guessed? He’s in an incubator. Now, which incubator do you suppose is your baby’s home?”

Obediently, as if he were peering into an aquarium tank that was murky with plankton and slime, Bird bent his knees and squinted into the nearest incubator. What he discovered inside was a baby as small as a plucked chicken, with queerly chapped, blotchy skin. The infant was naked, a vinyl bag enclosed his pupa of a penis, and his umbilical cord was wrapped in gauze. Like the dwarfs in illustrated books of fairy tales, he returned Bird’s gaze with a look of ancient prudence on his face, as if he, too, were participating in the nurses’ game. Though obviously he was not Bird’s baby, this quiet, old-mannish preemie, unprotestingly wasting away, inspired Bird with a feeling akin to friendship for a fellow adult. Bird straightened up, looking away with effort from the baby’s moist, placid eyes, and turned back to the nurses resolutely, as if to say that he would play no more games. The angles and the play of light made it impossible to see into the other incubators.

“Haven’t you figured it out yet? It’s the incubator way at the back, against the window. I’ll wheel it over so you can see the baby from here.”

For an instant, Bird was furious. Then he understood that the game had been a kind of initiation into the intensive care ward, for at this final
cue from the nurse, the other doctors and nurses had shifted their concern back to their own work and conversations.

Bird gazed forbearingly at the incubator the nurse had indicated. He had been under her influence ever since he had entered the ward, gradually losing his resentment and his need to resist. He was now feeble and unprotesting himself; he might have been bound with strips of gauze even like the infants who had begun to cry in a baffling demonstration of accord. Bird exhaled a long, hot breath, wiped his damp hands on the seat of his pants, then with his hand wiped the sweat from his brow and eyes and cheeks. He turned his fists in his eyes and blackish flames leaped; the sensation was of falling headlong into an abyss: Bird reeled. …

When Bird opened his eyes, the nurse, like someone walking in a mirror, was already on the other side of the glass partition and wheeling the incubator toward him. Bird braced himself, stiffening, and clenched his fists. Then he saw his baby. Its head was no longer in bandages like the wounded Apollinaire. Unlike any of the other infants in the ward, the baby’s complexion was as red as a boiled shrimp and abnormally lustrous; his face glistened as if it were covered with scar tissue from a newly healed burn. The way its eyes were shut, Bird thought, the baby seemed to be enduring a fierce discomfort. And certainly that discomfort was due to the lump that jutted, there was no denying it, like another red head from the back of his skull. It must have felt heavy, bothersome, like an anchor lashed to the baby’s head. That long, tapered head! It sledge-hammered the stakes of shock into Bird more brutally than the lump itself and induced a nausea altogether different from the queasiness of a hangover, a terrific nausea that affected Bird’s existence fundamentally. To the nurse observing his reactions from behind the incubator, Bird nodded. As if to say “I’ve had enough!” or to acknowledge submission to a thing he could not understand. Wouldn’t the baby grow up with its lump and continue to grow? The baby was no longer on the verge of death; no longer would the sweet, easy tears of mourning melt it away as if it were a simple jelly. The baby continued to live, and it was oppressing Bird, even beginning to attack him. Swaddled in skin as red as shrimp which gleamed with the luster of scar tissue, the baby was beginning ferociously to live, dragging its anchor of a heavy lump. A vegetable existence? Maybe so; a deadly cactus.

The nurse nodded as though satisfied by what she saw in Bird’s face,
and wheeled the incubator back to the window. A squall of infant screaming again blew up, shaking the room beyond the glass partition where light boiled as in a furnace. Bird slumped and hung his head. The screaming loaded his drooping head as gunpowder loads a flintlock. He wished there were a tiny bed or an incubator for himself: an incubator would be best, filled with water vapor that hung like mist, and Bird would lie there breathing through gills like a silly amphibian.

“You should complete the hospitalization forms right away,” the nurse said, returning to his side. “We ask you to leave thirty thousand yen security.”

Bird nodded.

“The baby takes his milk nicely and his arms and legs are lively.”

Why the hell should he drink milk and why exercise? Bird almost asked reproachfully—and checked himself. The querulousness that was becoming a new habit disgusted him.

“If you’ll just wait here I’ll get the pediatrician in charge.”

Bird was left alone, and ignored. Nurses carrying diapers and trays of bottles jostled him with their extended elbows but no one so much as glanced at his face. And it was Bird who whispered the apologies. Meanwhile, the ward on this side of the glass partition was dominated by the loud voice of the little man who seemed to be challenging one of the doctors.

“How can you be sure there’s no liver? And how could a thing like that happen? I’ve heard the explanation about a hundred times but it still doesn’t make sense. I mean, is that stuff about the baby not having any liver true? Is it, doctor?”

Bird managed to wedge himself into a spot where he wasn’t in the way of the bustling nurses and stood there drooping like a willow and looking down at his sweaty hands. They were like wet leather gloves. Bird recalled the hands his baby had been holding up behind its ears. They were large hands like his own, with long fingers. Bird hid his hands in his pants pockets. Then he looked at the little man in his late fifties who was developing a pertinacious logic in conversation with the doctor. He was wearing a pair of brown knickers and a sport shirt with the top button open and the sleeves rolled up. The shirt was too large for his slight frame, which was meagerly fleshed with something like dried meat. His bare arms and neck were burned as black as leather, appallingly sinewed; it was a quality of skin and muscle found in
manual laborers who suffer from chronic fatigue because they are not robust. The man’s kinky hair clung to the saucer-top of his large head like a lewd, oily cap, his forehead was too broad and his eyes were dull, the smallness of his lips and jaw upset the balance of his face. He evidently worked with his hands, but he was not a mere laborer. More likely he had to help out with the heavy work while abrading his power of thought and his nerves with the responsibility of a small business. The man’s leather belt was as wide as an obi, but it was easily counterpoised by the exaggerated alligator watchband armoring the wrist he was waving in the doctor’s face, a good eight inches above his own. The doctor’s language and manner were precisely those of a minor official, and the little man appeared to be trying frantically to turn the argument to his advantage by blowing down the other’s suspect authority with the wind of sheer bravado. But from time to time he turned to glance behind him at the nurses and Bird, and in his eyes was a kind of defeatism, as though he acknowledged a decline from which he would never manage to recover. A strange little man.

“We don’t know how it happened, you’d have to call it an accident, I suppose. But the fact is that your child has no liver. The stool is white, isn’t it! Pure white! Have you ever seen another baby with a stool like that?” the doctor said loftily, trying to move the little man’s challenge out of the way with the toe of one shoe.

“I’ve seen baby chicks leave white droppings. And most chickens have livers, right? Like fried chicken liver and eggs? Most chickens have livers but there are still baby chicks whose droppings are white sometimes!”

“I’m aware of that, but we’re not talking about baby chickens—this is a human baby.”

“But is that really so unusual, a baby with a white stole?”

“A white stole?” the doctor interrupted angrily. “A baby with a white stole would be very unusual, yes. Do you suppose you mean a white stool?”

“That’s right, a white stool. All babies without livers have white stools. I understand that, but does that mean automatically that all babies with white stools have no liver, does it, doctor?”

“I’ve already explained that at least a hundred times!” The doctor’s outraged voice sounded like a scream of grief. He meant to laugh at the
little man, but the large face behind his thick, horn-rimmed glasses was contorted in spite of himself and his lips were trembling.

“Could I hear it just once more, doctor?” The little man’s voice was calm now, and gentle. “Him not having any liver is no laughing matter for my son or me either. I mean, it’s a serious problem, right, doctor?”