Personal Matter

by Kenzaburo Oe

  But the hero had left the beach, and not a word about swimming underwater with his eyes open. Bird was surprised; had he been thinking of another Hemingway novel? Or was the scene from an altogether different writer? Doubt broke the spell and Bird lost his voice. A web of bone-dry cracks opened in his throat and his tongue swelled until it tried to burst from his lips. Facing one hundred fly-heads, Bird lifted his eyes and smiled. Five seconds of ridiculous, desperate silence. Then Bird crumpled to his knees, spread his fingers like a toad on the muddy wooden floor, and with a groan began to vomit. Bird vomited like a retching cat, his neck thrust stiffly from his shoulders. And his guts were being twisted and wrung dry: he looked like a puny demon writhing beneath the foot of an enormous Deva king. Bird had hoped at least to achieve a little humor in his vomiting style, but his actual performance was anything but funny. One thing, as the vomit submerged the base of his tongue and ran back down his throat, just as Himiko had predicted, it had a definite taste of lemons. The violet that blooms from the dungeon wall, Bird told himself, trying to regain his composure. But such psychological wiles crumbled like pie crust in the face of spasms that now struck with the force of a full gale: a thundrous groan wrenched Bird’s mouth open and his body stiffened. From both sides of his head a blackness swiftly grew like blinders on a horse and darkly narrowed his field of vision. Bird longed to burrow into a still darker, still deeper place, and from there to leap away into another universe!

  A second later, Bird found himself in the same universe. With tears wetting both sides of his nose, he gazed mournfully down into the puddle of his own vomit. A pale, red-ochre puddle, scattered with vivid yellow lemon lees. Seen from a low-flying plane at a desolate and withered time of year, the plains of Africa might hue to these same colors: lurking in the shadow of those lemon dregs were hippo and anteaters and wild mountain goats. Strap on a parachute, grip your rifle, and leap out and down in grasshopper haste.

  The nausea had subsided. Bird brushed at his mouth with a muddy, bile-fouled hand and then stood up.

  “Due to circumstances, I’d like to dismiss class early today,” he said in a voice like a dying gasp. The class appeared convinced; Bird moved to pick up his reader and the box of chalk. All of a sudden, one of the fly-heads leaped up and began to shout. The boy’s pink lips fluttered, and his round, effeminate, peasant’s face turned a vibrant red, but as he muffled his words inside his mouth and tended to stutter besides, it wasn’t easy to understand what he was asserting. Gradually, all became quite clear. From the beginning, the boy had been criticizing the unsuitability of Bird’s attitude as an instructor, but when he saw that Bird’s only response was to display an air of perplexity, he had become a hostile devil of attack. Endlessly he harangued about the high cost of the tuition, the briefness of the time remaining until college entrance exams, the students’ faith in the cram-school, and their sense of outrage now that their expectations had been betrayed. Gradually, as wine turns to vinegar, Bird’s consternation turned to fear, aureoles of fear spread around his eyes like deep rings: he felt himself turning into a frightened monocle monkey. Before long, his attacker’s indignation would infect the other ninety-nine fly-heads: Bird would be surrounded by one hundred furious college rejects and not a chance of breaking free. It was brought home to him again how little he understood the students he had been instructing week after week. An inscrutable enemy one hundred strong had brought him to bay, and he discovered that successive waves of nausea had washed his strength onto the beach.

  The accuser’s agitation mounted until he was on the verge of tears. But Bird couldn’t have answered the young man even if he tried: after the vomiting his throat was as dry as straw, secreting not one drop of saliva. The most he felt he could manage was one eminently birdlike cry. Ah, he moaned, soundlessly, what should I do? This kind of awful pitfall is always lurking in my life, waiting for me to tumble in. And this is different from the kind of crisis I was supposed to encounter in my life as an adventurer in Africa. Even if I did fall into this pit I couldn’t pass out or die a violent death. I could only stare blankly at the walls of the trap forever. I’m the one who’d like to send a telegram, AM RATHER IN TROUBLE—but addressed to whom?

  It was then a youth with a quick-witted look stood up from his seat in a middle row and said quietly, untheatrically, “Knock it off, will you—stop complaining!”

  The mirage of hard, thorny feeling that was beginning to mount throughout the classroom instantly disappeared. Amused excitement welled in its place and the class raised its voice in laughter. Time to act! Bird put the reader on top of the chalk box and walked over to the door. He was stepping out of the room when he heard shouting again and turned around; the student who had persisted in attacking him was down on all fours, just as Bird had been when he was sick, and he was sniffing the pool of Bird’s vomit. “This stinks of whisky!” the boy screamed. “You’ve got a hangover, you bastard! I’m going to the Principal with a darektapeel and getting your ass fired!”

  A darektapeel? Bird wondered, and as he comprehended—Ah!—a direct appeal!—that delightful young man stood up again and said in gloomy tones that brought new laughter from the class, “You shouldn’t lap that stuff up; it’ll make you puke.”

  Liberated from his sprawling prosecutor, Bird climbed down the spiral stairs. Maybe, just as Himiko said, there really was a band of young vigilantes ready to ride to his assistance when he blundered into trouble. For the two or three minutes it took him to climb down the spiral stairs, though from time to time he scowled at the sourness of vomit lingering on his tongue or at the back of his throat—for those few minutes, Bird was happy.

  6

  AT the junction of corridors that led to the pediatrics office and the intensive care ward, Bird halted in indecision. A young patient approaching in a wheelchair swerved, glowering, to let him pass. Where his two feet should have been, the patient rested a large, old-fashioned radio. Nor were his feet to be seen in any other place. Abashed, Bird pressed himself against the wall. Once again the patient looked at him threateningly, as if Bird represented all men who carried their bodies through life on two feet; then he shot down the corridor at amazing speed. Watching him go, Bird sighed. Assuming his baby was still alive, he should proceed straight to the ward. But if the baby was dead, he would have to present himself at the pediatrics office to make arrangements for an autopsy and cremation. It was a gamble. Bird began to walk toward the office. He had placed his bet on the baby’s death, he installed the fact prominently in his consciousness. Now he was the baby’s true enemy, the first enemy in its life, the worst. If life was eternal and if there was a god who judged, Bird thought, then he would be found guilty. But his guilt now, like the grief that had assailed him in the ambulance when he had compared the baby to Apollinaire with his head in bandages, tasted primarily of honey.

  His step quickening steadily, as if he were on his way to meet a lover, Bird hurried in quest of a voice that would announce his baby’s death. When he received the news, he would make the necessary arrangements (arranging for the autopsy would be easy because the hospital would be eager to cooperate; probably the cremation would be a nuisance). Today I’ll mourn the baby alone, tomorrow I’ll report our misfortune to my wife. The baby died of a head wound and now he has become a bond of flesh between us—I’ll say something like that. We’ll manage to restore our family life to normal. And then, all over again, the same dissatisfactions, the same desires unrealized, Africa the same vast distance away. …

  With his head atilt, Bird peered into the low reception window, gave his name to the nurse who stared back at him from behind the glass, and explained the situation as it had stood a day ago when the baby had been brought in.

  “Oh yes, you want to see that baby with the brain hernia,” the nurse said cheerfully, her face relaxing into a smile. She was a woman in her forties, with a scattering of black hairs growing around her lips. “You should go directly to the intensive care ward. Do you know where it is?�
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  “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-hammer
ed 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.