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“On the way back?”
Like the fire department’s most talented singing twins,
the firemen repeated the question in unison, exchanged a look, their faces
flushing drunkenly, and snorted a laugh which dilated the wings of their noses.
Bird was both angry at the silliness of his question and at the firemen’s response.
And his anger was connected by a slender pipe to a tank of huge, dark rage
compressed inside him. A rage he had no way of releasing had been building
inside him under increasing pressure since dawn.
But the firemen seemed to wither now, as if they regretted having laughed
imprudently at an unfortunate young father; their obvious distress closed a valve
in the tapline to Bird’s fury. He even felt a twinge of remorse. Who had asked
that silly, anticlimactic question in the first place? And hadn’t the question
seeped from a fault which had opened in his own brain, pickled in the vinegar of
his grief and lack of sleep?
Bird looked into the baby’s hamper under his arm. Now it was like an empty
hole which had been dug unnecessarily. Only a folded blanket remained in the
hamper, and some absorbent cotton and a roll of gauze. The blood on the cotton
and the gauze, though still a vivid red, already failed to evoke an image of the
baby lying there with its head in bandages, inhaling oxygen a little at a time from
the rubber tubes inside its nose. Bird couldn’t even recall accurately the
grotesqueness of the baby’s head, or the shimmering membrane of fat that
gloved its fiery skin. Even now, the baby was receding from him at full speed.
Bird felt a mixture of guilty relief and bottomless fear. He thought: Soon I’ll
forget all about the baby, a life that appeared out of infinite darkness, hovered
for nine months in a fetal state, tasted a few hours of cruel discomfort, and
descended once again into darkness, final and infinite. I wouldn’t be surprised if
I forgot about the baby right away. And when it’s time for me to die I may
remember, and, remembering, if the agony and fear of death increase for me, I
will have fulfilled a small part of my obligation as a father.
Bird and the others reached the front entrance of the main wing. The firemen
ran for the parking lot. Since theirs was a profession that involved them in
ran for the parking lot. Since theirs was a profession that involved them in
emergencies all the time, running around breathlessly must have represented the
normal attitude toward life. Off they dashed across the glistening concrete
square, arms flailing, as if a hungry devil were snapping at their behinds.
Meanwhile, the one-eyed doctor telephoned his hospital from a phone booth and
asked for the Director. He explained the situation in a very few words: almost no
new developments to report. Bird’s mother-in-law came to the phone: “It’s your
wife’s mother,” said the doctor, turning. “Do you want to speak?”
Hell no! Bird wanted to shout. Since those frequent telephone conversations
the night before, the sound of his mother-in-law’s voice reaching him over the
telephone line, like the helpless droning of a mosquito, had hounded Bird like an
obsession. Bird set the baby’s basket on the concrete floor and took the receiver
glumly.
“The brain specialist hasn’t made his examination yet. I have to come back
tomorrow afternoon.”
“But what’s the point of it all; I mean, what can you hope to accomplish?”
Bird’s mother-in-law cross-examined him in the tone of voice he had hoped
most to be spared, as if she held him directly responsible.
“The
point
is that the baby happens to be alive at the moment,” Bird said, and
waited with a premonition of disgust for the woman to speak again. But she was
silent; from the other end of the line came only a faint sound of troubled
breathing.
“I’ll be right over and explain,” Bird said, and he started to hang up.
“Hello?
Please don’t come back here,” his mother-in-law added hurriedly.
“That child thinks you’ve taken the baby to a heart clinic. If you come now
she’ll be suspicious. It would be more natural if you came in a day or so, when
she’s calmer, and said that the baby had died of a weak heart. You can always
get in touch with me by telephone.”
Bird agreed. “I’ll go right over to the college and explain what’s happened,”
he was saying, when he heard the hard click of the connection being broken
arbitrarily at the other end of the line. So his own voice had filled the listener
with disgust, too. Bird put the receiver back and picked up the baby’s basket.
The one-eyed doctor was already in the ambulance. Bird, instead of climbing in
after him, set the basket on the canvas stretcher.
“Thanks for everything. I think I’ll go alone.”
“You’re going home alone?” the doctor said.
“Yes,” Bird replied, meaning “I’m going
out
alone.” He had to report the
circumstances of the birth to his father-in-law, but after that he would have some
free time. And a visit to the professor, compared to returning to his wife and
mother-in-law, held a promise of pure therapy.
The doctor closed the door from the inside and the ambulance moved away
silently, observing the speed limit, like
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