by Kenzaburo Oe
“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?”
In the end the doctor gave in, sat the little man down next to his desk, took out a medical card, and began to explain. Now the doctor’s voice and occasionally the voice of the little man edged with a note of doubt ferried between the two men with an intentness that excluded Bird. He was trying to eavesdrop, head cocked in their direction, when a doctor about his own age bucked through the door and moved briskly into the ward to a spot directly behind him.
“Is the relative of the baby with the brain hernia here?” the doctor called in a high thin voice like the piping of a tin flute.
“Yes,” Bird said, turning around. “I’m the father—”
The doctor inspected Bird with eyes that made him think of a turtle. And it didn’t stop with the eyes; his boxy chin and sagging, wrinkled throat recalled a turtle too—a brutal snapping turtle. But in his eyes, which had a whitish east because the pupils were hardly more than expressionless dots, there was also a hint of something uncomplicated and benign.
“Is this your first child?” the doctor said, continuing to examine Bird suspiciously. “You must have been wild.”
“Yes—”
“No developments worth mentioning so far today. We’ll have somebody from brain surgery examine the child in the next four or five days; our Assistant Director is tops in the field, you know. Of course, the baby will have to get stronger before they can operate or there wouldn’t be any point to it. We’re terribly crowded at brain surgery here so naturally the surgeons try to avoid pointless wastes of time.”
“Then—there will be an operation?”
“If the infant gets strong enough to withstand surgery, yes,” the doctor said, misinterpreting Bird’s hesitation.
“Is there any possibility that the baby will grow up normally if he’s operated on? At the hospital where he was born yesterday they said the most we could hope for even with surgery was a kind of vegetable existence.”
“A vegetable—I don’t know if I’d put it that way. …“The doctor, without a direct reply to Bird’s question, lapsed into silence. Bird watched his face, waiting for him to speak again. And suddenly he felt himself being seized by a disgraceful desire. It had quickened in the darkness of his mind like a clot of black slugs when he had learned at the reception window that his baby was still alive, and gradually had made clear to him its meaning as it propagated with horrid vigor. Bird again dredged the question up to the surface of his conscious mind: how can we spend the rest of our lives, my wife and I, with a monster baby riding on our backs? Somehow I must get away from the monster baby. If I don’t, ah, what will become of my trip to Africa? In a fervor of self-defense, as if he were being stalked through the glass partition by the monster baby in an incubator, Bird braced himself for battle. At the same time he blushed and began to sweat, ashamed of the tapeworm of egotism that had attached itself to him. One ear was deafened by the roar of blood hurtling through it and his eyes gradually reddened as though walloped by a massive, invisible fist. The sensation of shame fanned the red fire in his face and tears seeped into his eyes—ah, Bird longed, if only I could spare myself the burden of a monstrous vegetable baby. But voice his thoughts in an appeal to the doctor he could not do, the burden of his shame was too heavy. Despairing, his face as red as a tomato, Bird hung his head.
“You don’t want the baby to have an operation and recover, partially recover anyway?”
Bird shivered: he felt as if a knowing finger had just stroked the ugliest part of his body and the most sensitive to pleasure, like the fleshy pleats in his scrotum. His face turning scarlet, Bird made his appeal in a voice so mean he couldn’t bear to hear it himself:
“Even with surgery, if the chances are very slight … that he’ll grow up a normal baby. …”
Bird sensed that he had taken the first step down the slope of contemptibility. The chances were he would run down the slope at full tilt, his contemptibility would snowball even as he watched it. Bird shuddered again, aware of the ineluctability of it. Yet now, as before, his feve
rish, misted eyes were imploring the doctor.
“I suppose you realize I can’t take any direct steps to end the baby’s life!” The doctor haughtily returned Bird’s gaze, a glint of disgust in his eyes.
“Of course not—” Bird said hurriedly, very much as if he had heard something highly irregular. Then he realized that the doctor had not been taken in by his deviousness. That made it a double humiliation, and Bird, in his resentment, didn’t try to vindicate himself.
“It’s true that you’re a young father—what, about my age?” Slowly turning his turtle head, the doctor glanced at the other members of the staff on this side of the glass partition. Bird suspected the doctor was trying to mock him, and he was terror-stricken. If he tries to make a game of me, he whispered at the back of his throat with empty bravado, his head swimming, I’ll kill him! But the doctor intended to conspire in Bird’s disgraceful plot. In a hushed voice that no one else in the ward could hear, he said:
“Let’s try regulating the baby’s milk. We can even give him a sugar-water substitute. We’ll see how he does on that for a while, but if he still doesn’t seem to be weakening, we’ll have no choice but to operate.”
“Thank you,” Bird said with a dubious sigh.
“Don’t mention it.” The doctor’s tone of voice made Bird wonder again if he wasn’t being ridiculed. Soothingly then, as at a bedside, “Drop around in four or five days. You can’t expect a significant change right away and there’s no point getting all worked up and rushing things,” he declared, and, like a frog gulping down a fly, snapped his mouth shut.
Bird averted his eyes from the doctor and, bowing, headed for the door. The nurse’s voice caught up with him before he could get out:
“As soon as possible, please, the hospitalization forms!”
Bird hurried down the gloomy corridor as if he were fleeing the scene of a crime. It was hot. He realized now for the first time that the ward had been air conditioned, his first air conditioning of the summer. Bird wiped furtively at tears that were hot with shame. But the inside of his head was hotter than the air around him and hotter than his tears; shivering, he moved down the corridor with the uncertain step of a convalescent. As he passed the open window of the sick ward, crying still, patients like soiled animals supine or sitting up in bed watched him go with wooden faces. The fit of tears had subsided when he reached an area where the corridor was lined with private rooms, but the sensation of shame had become a kernel lodged like glaucoma behind his eyes. And not only behind his eyes, it was hardening in all the many depths of his body. The sensation of shame: a cancer. Bird was aware of the foreign body, but he could not consider it; his brain was burned out, extinguished. One of the sickrooms was open. A slight, young, completely naked girl was standing just inside as if to bar the door. In bluish shadow, her body seemed less then fully developed. Hugging the meager protuberances that were her breasts with her left hand, as though in pity, the girl dropped her right hand to stroke her flat belly and pluck her pubic hair; then, challenging Bird with eyes that glittered, she inched her feet apart until her legs were spread and sank a gentle and once again pitying finger into the golden cilia around her vagina, sharply silhouetted for an instant in the light from the window behind her. Bird, though he was moved to compassion not unlike love for the girl, walked past the open door without giving the nymphomaniac time to reach her lonely climax. The sensation of shame was too intense for him to sustain concern for any existence but his own.
As Bird emerged at the passageway that led to the main wing of the hospital, the little logician with the leather belt and the alligator watchband caught up with him. He fell into step alongside Bird with the same overbearing defiance he had demonstrated in the ward, bouncing off the balls of his feet in an attempt to cover the difference in their heights. When he began to talk, looking up into Bird’s face, it was in the booming voice of a man who has made up his mind. Bird listened in silence.
“You’ve got to give them a battle, you know, fight! fight! fight!” he said. “It’s a fight with the hospital, especially the doctors! Well, I really let them have it today, you must have heard me.”
Bird nodded, remembering the little man’s “white stole.” Bluffing wildly to gain the advantage in his fight with the hospital, he had lost a round to Mrs. Malaprop.
“My boy hasn’t got a liver, you see, so I’ve got to fight and keep fighting or they might just cut him up alive. No, that’s the God’s truth! You want things to go right in a big hospital, you’ve got to get in a mood to fight first thing! It doesn’t do any good to behave nice and quiet and try to get them to like you. I mean, you take a patient that’s dying, he’s quieter than a year-old corpse. But us relatives of the patient can’t afford to be so nice. Fight! let me tell you, it’s a fight. Like a few days ago I told them right out, if the baby hasn’t got a liver then you go ahead and make him one! You’ve got to know some tactics if you want to fight, so I’ve been reading up. And I told them, I said babies with no rectum have been fitted out with artificial rectums so you ought to be able to figure out an artificial liver. Besides, I said, you take a liver, it’s got a lot more class than an ordinary asshole!”
They were at the main entrance to the hospital. Bird sensed that the little man was trying to make him laugh, but of course he wasn’t in a laughing mood. “Will the baby recover by the fall?” he asked in place of an apology for his long face.
“Recover? Fat chance: my son has no liver! I’m just fighting all two thousand employees in this great big hospital.”
The hint of unique grief and of the dignity of the weak in the little man’s reply was enough to shock Bird. Refusing an offer of a lift to the station in his three-wheel truck, Bird walked out to the bus stop alone. He thought about the thirty thousand yen he would have to pay the hospital. He had already decided where he would get the money; and for just the instant needed for the decision, the sensation of shame was displaced by a despairing rage at no one in particular, that made Bird tremble. He had just slightly more than thirty thousand yen in the bank, but it was money he had deposited as the beginning of a reserve fund for his trip to Africa. For the present, that thirty thousand odd yen was hardly more than a marker indicating a frame of mind. But even the marker was now about to be removed. Now, except for two road maps. Bird was left with nothing that related directly to a trip to Africa. Sweat gushed from all the skin on his body, and Bird felt a damp, ugly chill on his lips and ears and fingertips. He took his place at the end of the line at the bus stop, and, in a voice like the droning of a mosquito, swore: “Africa? What a fucking laugh!” The old man directly in front of Bird started to turn around, decided against it, and slowly straightened his large, bald head. Everyone had been beaten senseless by the summer that had consumed the city prematurely.
Bird, too, closed his eyes feebly and, shivering with a chill, sweated. Soon he could smell his body beginning to exude an unpleasant odor. The bus didn’t come; it was hot. Folding in the shame and all the rage eddying in Bird’s head, a reddish darkness spread. And then a sprout of sexual desire pushed up through the darkness and grew before Bird’s eyes like a young rubber tree. His eyes closed still, Bird groped for his trousers and felt his erected penis through the cloth. He felt wretched, base, rueful; he longed for the ultimate in antisocial sex. The kind of coitus that would strip and hold up to the light the shame that was worming into him. Bird left the line and looked for a taxi with eyes brutalized by the light, seeing the square as though in a negative, with blacks and whites reversed. He intended to return to Himiko’s room, where the light of day was shut out. If she turns me down, he thought irritably, as if to whip himself, I’ll beat her unconscious and fuck her then.
7
YOU know, Bird, you’re always in the worst condition when you try to get me into bed with you.” Himiko sighed. “Right now you’re about the least attractive Bird I’ve ever seen.”
Bird was obstinately silent.
“But I’ll sleep with you
just the same. I haven’t been fastidious about morality since my husband committed suicide; besides, even if you intend to have the most disgusting kind of sex with me, I’m sure I’ll discover something genuine in no matter what we do.”
Genuine—authentic, true, real, pure, natural, sincere, earnest; the English instructor at a cram-school arranged the translation words inside his head. And in his present state, Bird thought, none of those meanings came even near to applying to him.
“Bird, you get into bed first; I want to wash.”
Slowly Bird took off his sweaty clothes and lay back on top of the worn blanket. Propping his head on both fists he squinted down at the paunch around his belly and at his whitish, insufficiently erected penis. Himiko, with the glass door to the bathroom wide open, lowered herself backwards onto the toilet, opened her thighs wide and doused her genitals with water from a large pitcher which she held in one hand. Bird watched her from the bed for a while and supposed that this was wisdom obtained from sexual relations with foreign men. Then he returned to gazing quietly down at his own belly and penis, and waited.
“Bird …” Himiko called as she vigorously rubbed herself dry with a large towel; the water had splashed all the way to her chest.“… there’s a danger of pregnancy today; have you come prepared?”
“No, I haven’t.”
Pregnancy! The flaming thorns on the word pierced Bird to the softest quick and a low, grieved moan escaped him. The thorns burrowed all the way into his vital organs and continued to burn there.
“Then we’ll have to think of something, Bird.” Himiko lowered the pitcher to the floor with a noise like a pistol report, and came back to Bird’s side rubbing her body with the bath towel. With one hand, Bird clenched his wilted penis in embarrassment.
“I lost it all of a sudden,” he said. “Himiko! I’m no good at all now.” Breathing strongly, healthily, Himiko peered down at Bird and continued to dry her sides and her chest between her breasts. She appeared to be speculating on the meaning hidden in Bird’s words. The smell of her body roused acute memories of college summers and Bird caught his breath: skin toasting in the sun. Himiko wrinkled her nose like a spaniel puppy and laughed a simple, dry laugh. Bird went scarlet.