Personal Matter

by Kenzaburo Oe

  “Exactly, and that’s so important!” Himiko’s father-in-law declared. “Why don’t the two of you just pack up and leave for Africa?”

  So rudely was he rocked by this proposal that Bird submitted to panic unprotestingly. “I couldn’t do that, I just couldn’t,” he said with a feckless sigh.

  “Why not?” Himiko challenged.

  “It’s too slick, that’s why, just happening to forget in the course of traveling around Africa that your baby’s life has ebbed away. I … ,” Bird stuttered, blushing, “… I just couldn’t do it!”

  “Bird is an extremely moral young man,” Himiko said derisively.

  Bird’s blush deepened and he arranged his face in a look of reproach. In fact he was thinking he would have melted like a cube of bouillon under boiling water if her father-in-law had suggested undertaking a trip to Africa with the moral objective of rescuing Himiko from the phantom of her husband, how eagerly would he then have released himself to that journey into sweet deception! Bird was terrified the older man might make the suggestion in just such a way, at the same time he longed to hear the words: in his loathsome needfulness he felt like concealing himself in a dark hole. An instant later Bird saw in Himiko’s eyes the white flicker of awakening.

  “Bird will be going back to his wife in a week or so.”

  “Oh, I didn’t realize—” her father-in-law said. “I only suggested the trip because this is the first time I’ve seen Himi so alive since my son died. I hope you’re not angry.”

  Bird looked at Himiko’s father-in-law in puzzlement. His head was short, and utterly bald, and it wasn’t clear where it stopped, because the sunburned skin on the back of his skull grew in a piece to his neck and from there to his shoulders. A head that recalled a sea lion, and two slightly clouded, tranquil eyes. Bird looked for some clue to the man’s nature and came up with nothing at all. So he maintained his wary silence and smiled a vague smile, laboring to conceal the disgraceful disappointment gradually climbling from his chest to clog his throat.

  Late that night, in slothful positions that minimized the burden on their bodies, Bird and Himiko fucked in the humid darkness for an uninterrupted hour. Like copulating animals, they were silent to the end. Again and again Himiko soared into orgasm, with brief intervals at the beginning and then after increasingly languorous pauses; Bird each time recalled the sensation of flying a model airplane on the evening playground at his elementary school. Himiko swooped around the axis of his body in ever widening circles, trembling and groaning her way through the sky of her orgasms like a model airplane laboring under the burden of a heavy motor. Then she would descend yet again to the landing ground where Bird waited, and the period of silent, dogged repetition would revive. Sex for them was rooted now in sensations of daily quietude and order; Bird felt as if he had been fucking the girl for more than a hundred years. Her genitals were simple now, and certain, lurking there were not the buds of even the most insubstantial fears. No longer a somehow inscrutable thing, Himiko’s vagina was simplicity itself, a pouch of soft, synthetic resin from which no ghostly hag could possibly emerge to harry Bird. He felt profoundly at peace, because Himiko explicitly and without qualification limited the object of their sex to pleasure. Bird remembered how it was with his wife, their timidity and the unflagging sense of peril. Even now, after years of marriage, they foundered on the same gloomy psychological shoals every time they made love. Bird’s long, clumsy arms and legs would prod his wife’s body, withered and rigid in its battle to overcome disgust, and she invariably would receive the impression that he had meant to strike her. Angry then, she would rail at Bird, even try to strike him back. Ultimately, the alternatives were always the same: he could become involved in a piddling quarrel, withdraw from his wife’s body and continue far into the night the sparring that made the antlers of aroused desire glitter, or he could finish in agitated haste with a wretched feeling of receiving charity. Bird had pinned his hopes for a revolution in their sex life on the birth of the child and what would follow. …

  Since Himiko repeatedly compressed Bird’s penis like a milking hand as she circled her private skies, Bird might have chosen her most ardent orgasm as the moment for his own. But fear of the long night that would follow coitus continually drove him back. Dumbly Bird dreamed of the most saccharine sleep of all, achieved midway on the gentle slope toward orgasm.

  But Himiko continued to fly, dropping groundward in smooth descent and suddenly dancing back into the sky like a kite caught in an upward draft. It was on yet another of these false landings that Bird, carefully restraining himself, heard the telephone ring. He tried to rise, but Himiko clasped her soaking arms around his back. “Go ahead, Bird,” she said a minute later, relaxing her grip. Bird leaped for the phone still ringing in the living room. A young man’s voice asked for the father of the infant in the intensive care ward at the university hospital. Bird, stiffening, answered in a voice like the whine of a mosquito. It was an intern calling with a message from the doctor in charge of the case.

  “I’m sorry it’s so late but we’ve had our hands full over here,” the voice from the distance said. “I’m to ask you to come to brain surgery at eleven o’clock tomorrow morning, it’s the Assistant Director’s office. The doctor would have called you himself but he was exhausted. We had our hands full over here until late!”

  Bird took a deep breath and thought: the baby died, the Assistant Director is going to do the autopsy.

  “I understand. I’ll be there at eleven. Thank you.”

  The baby weakened and died! Bird told himself again as he put the receiver back. But what kind of visit had death paid the baby that the doctor had worn himself out? Bird tasted the bitterness of bile rising from his belly. Something colossal and terrific was glaring at him out of the darkness right in front of his eyes. Like an entomologist trapped in a cave alive with scorpions, Bird gingerfooted back to the bed, trembling from head to toe. The bed, a safe lair: in silence Bird continued to shiver. Then, as if to burrow more satisfactorily into the depths of the lair, he tried to enter Himiko’s body. Impetuously repeating failure and only partially erected, Bird was guided by Himiko’s fingers and, eventually, secured. Quickly his agitation coaxed from her the frenzied motion of the moment when partners share a climax and desist—Bird awkwardly recoiled and, abruptly, emptied in masturbative isolation. Aware of the hammering at the back of his chest as pain, Bird collapsed at Himiko’s side and believed for no reason he could name that he would die one day of a heart attack.

  “Bird, you really can be horrid,” Himiko said, not so much reproachfully as in lament, peering at Bird’s face through the darkness quizzically.

  “Ah, I’m sorry.”

  “The baby?”

  “Yes, but apparently not before he gave them a hell of a time,” Bird said, terrified all over again.

  “What was that about the Assistant Director’s office?”

  “They want me there in the morning.”

  “You should take some sleeping pills with whisky and go to sleep, you don’t have to wait for a telephone call anymore.” Himiko’s voice was infinitely gentle.

  When Himiko had turned on the bedside lamp and gone into the kitchen, Bird shut his eyes against the light, covered them furthermore with one hand on top of the other, and tried to consider the single, sharply pointed kernel that was lodged in his vacant brain—why had the dying baby kept the doctor moving until so late at night? But Bird immediatly encountered a notion that roiled the fear in him and he drew back with arrow swiftness. Opening his eyes just a crack, he took from Himiko’s hand a glass one-third full of whisky and far more than the prescribed number of sleeping tablets, choked them down in a single breath, and closed his eyes again.

  “That was my share too,” Himiko said.

  “Ah, I’m sorry,” Bird repeated stupidly.

  “Bird?” Himiko lay down on the bed at a somehow formal distance from Bird’s side.

  “Yes?”

  “I’
ll tell you a story until the whisky and pills take effect—an episode from that African novel. Did you read the chapter about the pirate demons?”

  Bird shook his head in the dark.

  “When a woman conceives, the pirate demons elect one of their own kind to sneak into the woman’s house. During the night, this demon representative chases out the real fetus and climbs into the womb himself. And then on the day of the birth the demon is born in the guise of the innocent fetus. …”

  Bird listened in silence. Before long, such a baby invariably fell ill. When the mother made offerings in hopes of curing her child, the pirate demons secretly deposited them in a secret cache. Never were these babies known to recover. When the baby died and it was time for the burial, the demon resumed its true form, and, escaping from the graveyard, returned to the lair of the pirate demons with all the offerings from the secret cache.

  “… apparently the bewitched fetus is born as a beautiful baby so it can capture the mother’s heart and she won’t hesitate to offer everything she has. The Africans call these babies ‘children born into the world to die,’ but isn’t it wonderful to imagine how beautiful they must be, even pigmy babies!”

  Probably Bird would tell the story to his wife. And since our baby was born to die if any baby was, she’ll imagine him as a terrifically beautiful baby; I may even correct my own memory. And that will be the hugest deception of my whole life. My grotesque baby died with no correction of his ugly double head, my baby is a grotesque baby with two heads for all of infinite time after death. And if there is a giant presence which imposes order on that infinite time, the baby with the double head must be visible to him, and the baby’s father, too. His stomach churning, Bird plummeted into sleep like a plane falling out of the sky, sleep in a can hermetically sealed against the light of any dream. Still, in the final glinting reflection of consciousness, Bird heard his fairy godmother whisper once again: “Bird, you really can be horrid!” Bird arched backward as if a weight were hanging from his head and, trying to rub behind his ears with the pads of his thumbs, rammed his elbow into Himiko’s mouth. Her eyes tearing from the pain, Himiko peered through the darkness at the unnaturally contracted figure of her sleeping friend. Himiko wondered if Bird hadn’t misinterpreted the phone call from the hospital. The baby hadn’t died at all; wasn’t it that he had been returned to regular milk feedings and the road to recovery? And didn’t they want Bird at the hospital to discuss the baby’s operation? The friend sleeping at her side with his body doubled up uncomfortably like an orangutan in a cage and the stink of whisky flaming on his breath seemed to Himiko at once ridiculous and pitiful. But this sleep would serve as a brief respite before tomorrow morning’s furor. Himiko got out of bed and tugged at Bird’s arms and legs; he was as heavy as a giant under a magic spell, yet his body offered no resistance. When Bird lay stretched full length on the bed so that he could sleep more comfortably, Himiko wrapped herself in a sheet in the manner of a Greek sage and went into the living room. She intended to study the maps of Africa until the sun came up.

  Suddenly aware of his mistake, Bird flushed angrily as though he had been cruelly ridiculed. He had just entered the Assistant Director’s office and had found them waiting for him there, several young doctors including the pediatrician in charge of his baby’s case and an elderly professor with an air of benign authority—realizing his mistake, Bird had come to a dumb halt just inside the door. Now he sat down in a yellow leather chair in the center of the doctor’s circle. He felt like a convict who had been dragged back to the guards’ quarters after bungling a clumsily planned escape from the prison of the grotesque baby. And what about these guards! Hadn’t they conspired to lay a trap for him with that ambiguous phone call the night before in order to enjoy his flight and failure from the height of their lookout tower?

  When Bird remained silent, the pediatrician introduced him: “This gentleman is the infant’s father.” Then he smiled as though in embarrassment and withdrew to an observer’s corner. The professor of brain surgery must have said something on his rounds about the baby’s undernourishment, and the young doctor had probably betrayed him. Damn him to hell! Bird thought, glaring at the young doctor.

  “I examined your child yesterday and again today; I think we’ll be able to operate if he gets a little stronger,” the brain surgeon said.

  Stand your ground! Bird commanded his brain before panic could overwhelm him; you must resist these bastards, protect yourself from that monstrosity. Bird had been on the run from the moment he had realized his sanguine mistake and now he could think of nothing but turning back from time to time to defend himself in flight. I must forbid them to operate, otherwise the baby will march into my world like an occupying army.

  “Is there any chance the baby will grow up normally if you operate?” Bird asked mechanically.

  “I can’t say anything definite yet.”

  Bird fiercely narrowed his eyes, as if to say he was not the man to be made a fool of. In the field of his brain there appeared a flaming circle of shame’s hottest fire. Like a circus tiger, Bird steeled himself for the leap that would carry him through the ring.

  “Which is the stronger possibility, that the baby will grow up normally or not?”

  “I can’t give you a definite answer to that either, not until we operate.”

  Without even blushing, Bird cleared the fiery ring of shame: “Then I think I’d rather you didn’t operate.”

  All of the doctors stared at Bird and seemed to catch their breath. Bird felt capable of even the most shameless assertions at the top of his voice. A good thing he didn’t exercise this audacious freedom, for the brain surgeon was quick to indicate that Bird had made himself clear.

  “Will you take the infant with you, then?” he said brusquely, his anger evident.

  “Yes, I will.” Bird spoke quickly, too.

  “Don’t let me keep you waiting.” The most appealing doctor Bird had encountered in this hospital laid bare the disgust he felt for him.

  Bird stood up and the doctors rose with him. The bell at the end of the match, he thought, I’ve fended the monster baby off.

  “Are you really going to take the baby away?” the young pediatrician asked hesitantly as they stepped into the hall.

  “I’ll come back for him this afternoon.”

  “Don’t forget to bring something for the infant to wear.” The doctor flicked his eyes off Bird’s face and moved off down the corridor.

  Bird hurried out to the square in front of the hospital. It was probably the overcast sky; both Himiko in her sunglasses and the scarlet sports car had an ugly, faded look. “It was all a mistake, the laugh’s on me,” Bird sneered, his face contorting.

  “I was afraid of that.”

  “Why?” Bird’s voice was savage.

  “No special reason, Bird …” Himiko meekly faltered.

  “I decided to take the baby home.”

  “Where, to the other hospital? Back to your apartment?”

  Instantly Bird submerged in consternation. He hadn’t even considered what he might do later, he had merely desperately resisted the doctors in this hospital who wanted to try their hand at surgery and then saddle him for the rest of his life with a baby whose head was mostly cave. The other hospital would never accept again “the goods” it had managed to get rid of once; and if he took the baby back to his apartment he would have to contend with the landlady’s benevolent curiosity. Suppose he continued in his own bedroom the lethal diet therapy which the hospital had administered until a day ago, the baby with the double head would scream its hunger to the whole neighborhood and have the local dogpack howling with it. And suppose the baby died after a few days of that clamor, what doctor in the world would make out a death certificate? Bird pictured himself being arrested on charges of infanticide and the gruesome stories in the press.

  “You’re right, I can’t take the baby anywhere.” Bird slumped, expelling sour breath.

  “If you have no p
lan at all in mind, Bird—”

  “Well?”

  “I was wondering how it would be to leave things up to a doctor I know. I’m sure he’d lend a hand to someone who didn’t want his baby—I met him when I needed an abortion.”

  Once again Bird knew the panic of a craven foot soldier intent on defending himself after his platoon had been decimated by the monster baby’s attack; paling, he cleared another ring of fire: “I’m willing if the doctor will agree.”

  “Naturally—asking the doctor to help us—will mean that we …” there was an abnormal lassitude in Himiko’s voice, “… are dirtying our own hands with the baby’s murder—”

  “Not our hands. Mine! I’ll be dirtying my hands with the baby’s murder.” At least he had liberated himself from one deception, Bird thought. Not that it brought him any joy, it was like descending a stairway into a dungeon, just one step.

  “Our hands, Bird—you’ll see—would you mind—driving?”

  Bird realized that the drawl in Himiko’s speech was a result of her extreme tension. Walking around the front of the car, he climbed into the driver’s seat. He saw in the rear-view mirror that Himiko’s face was ashen and splotched, as if a whitish powder had been dabbed around her lips. His own face must have looked equally abject. Bird tried to spit out of the car but his mouth was bone dry and he achieved only a futile little noise like the tisking of a tongue. He catapulted the car into the street with a rudeness learned from Himiko.

  “Bird, the doctor I have in mind, he’s that middle-aged man with a head like an egg who was calling outside the window the first night you stayed at the house. You remember him?”

  “I remember,” Bird said, thinking it had seemed possible at one time that he might live out his entire life without any contact with such a man.

  “When we’ve phoned him we can figure out what we’ll need to pick up the baby.”

  “The doctor told me not to forget to bring clothes.”