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After,
Bird thought,
after
abandoning the baby with a shady abortionist!
Bird recalled abandoning his young friend Kikuhiko late one night in a
provincial city. And now the baby he was about to abandon was also to be called
Kikuhiko. So devious traps surrounded even the act of naming. For an instant
Bird considered going back and correcting the name, but this intention was
Bird considered going back and correcting the name, but this intention was
corroded instantly in the acid of enervation. Bird was left only with a need to
inflict pain upon himself. “Let’s drink away the night at the gay bar Kikuhiko,”
he said. “It will be a wake.”
Bird’s baby—Kikuhiko had been carried around to this side of the glass
partition and he was lying in his basket in the wooly baby clothes Himiko had
chosen for him. Next to the basket the pediatrician in charge was waiting self-
consciously for Bird. Bird and Himiko faced the doctor across the basket. Bird
could feel the shock Himiko received when she looked down and saw the baby.
It was a size larger now, its eyes open like deep creases in its crimson skin and
staring at them, sidelong. Even the lump on the baby’s head seemed to have
grown considerably. It was redder than its face, lustrous, tumescent. Now that its
eyes were open, the baby had the shriveled, ancient look of the hermits in the
Southern Scrolls, but it definitely lacked a human quality, probably because the
frontal portion of its head that ought to have counterpoised the lump was still
severely pinched. The baby was oscillating its tightly clenched fists, as if it
wanted to flee its basket.
“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
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
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
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