Bird was bending forward in the breakfast nook for the clean underwear on top

of the TV when he saw his arm and realized that he was naked. Swiftly, as
though he were pursuing a fleeing mouse with his eyes, he glanced down at his
genitals: the heat of shame scorched him. Bird hurried into his underwear and
put on his slacks and a shirt. Even now he was a link in the chain of shame that
connected his mother-in-law and the Director. Peril-ridden and fragile, the
imperfect human body, what a shameful thing it was! Trembling, Bird fled the
apartment with his eyes on the floor, fled down the stairs, fled through the hall,
straddled his bicycle and fled everything behind him. He would have liked to
flee his own body. Speeding away on a bike, he felt he was escaping himself
more effectively than he could on foot, if only a little.

As Bird turned into the hospital driveway, a man in white hurried down the
steps with what looked like a hay basket and pushed his way through the crowd
to the open tail of an ambulance. The soft, weak part of Bird that wanted to
escape tried to apprehend the scene as though it were occurring at a vast remove
and had nothing to do with Bird, simply an early morning stroller. But Bird
could only advance, struggling like a mole burrowing into an imaginary mud
wall through the heavy, viscid resistance that impeded him.

Bird got off his bike and was locking a chain around the front tire when a voice
bit into him from behind, terrifying in its disapproval: “You can’t leave that
bike here!” Bird turned and looked up into the hairy Director’s reproving eyes.
Hoisting the bike onto his shoulder, he walked into the shrubbery with it.
Raindrops clustered on fatsia leaves showered his neck and ran down his back.
Ordinarily his temper was quick, but he didn’t even click his tongue in
irritation. Whatever happened to him now seemed part of an inevitable design
which he must accept without protest.

Bird emerged from the bushes with his shoes covered with mud; the Director
appeared to regret a little having been so abrupt. Encircling Bird with one short,
pudgy arm, he led him toward the ambulance and said emphatically, as though
he were disclosing a marvelous secret: “It was a boy! I knew I’d seen a penis!”

The one-eyed doctor and an anesthetist were sitting in the ambulance with the
basket and an oxygen cylinder between them. The anesthetist’s back hid the
contents of the basket. But the faint hissing noise of oxygen bubbling through
water in a flask communicated like a signal from a secret transmitter. Bird
lowered himself onto the bench opposite theirs—insecurely perched—there was
a canvas stretcher on top of the bench. Shifting his rear uncomfortably, he
glanced through the ambulance window and—shuddered. From every window
on the second floor and even from the balcony, just out of bed most likely, their
on the second floor and even from the balcony, just out of bed most likely, their
freshly washed faces gleaming whitely in the morning sun, pregnant women
were peering down at Bird. All of them wore flimsy nylon nightgowns, either
red or shades of blue, and those on the balcony in particular, with the
nightgowns billowing about their ankles, were like a host of angels dancing on
the air. Bird read anxiety in their faces, and expectation, even glee; he lowered
his eyes. The siren began to wail, and the ambulance lurched forward. Bird
planted his feet on the floor to keep from slipping off the bench and thought:
That siren! Until now, a siren had always been a moving object: it approached
from a distance, hurtled by, moved away. Now a siren was attached to Bird like
a disease he carried in his body: this siren would never recede.

“Everything’s fine,” said the doctor with the glass eye, turning around to Bird.
There was authority in his attitude, mild but evident, and its heat threatened to
melt Bird like a piece of candy.

“Thank you,” he mumbled. His passivity erased the shadow of hesitation from
the doctor’s good eye. He took a firm grip on his authority, and thrust it out in
front of him: “This is a rare case, all right; it’s a first for me, too.” The doctor
nodded to himself, then nimbly crossed the lurching ambulance and sat down at
Bird’s side. He didn’t seem to notice how uncomfortable the stretcher made the
bench.

“Are you a brain specialist?” Bird asked.

“Oh no, I’m an obstetrician.” The doctor didn’t have to make the correction: his
authority was already beyond injury by a misapprehension so minor. “There are
no brain men at our hospital. But the symptoms are perfectly clear: it’s a brain
hernia, all right. Of course, we would know more if we had tapped some spinal
fluid from that lump protruding from the skull. The trouble with that is you
might just prick the brain itself and then you’d be in trouble. That’s why we’re
taking the baby to the other hospital without touching him. As I said, I’m in
obstetrics, but I consider myself fortunate to have run across a case of brain
hernia—I hope to be present at the autopsy. You will consent to an autopsy,
won’t you? It may distress you to talk about autopsies at this point, but, well,
look at it this way! Progress in medicine is cumulative, isn’t it. I mean, the
autopsy we perform on your child may give us just what we need to save the
next baby with a brain hernia. Besides, if I may be frank, I think the baby would
be better off dead, and so would you and your wife. Some people have a funny
way of being optimistic about this kind of case, but it seems to me the quicker
the infant dies, the better for all concerned. I don’t know, maybe it’s the
difference in generations. I was born in 1935. How about you?”

“Somewhere around there,” Bird said, unable to convert quickly into the
“Somewhere around there,” Bird said, unable to convert quickly into the
Western calendar. “I wonder if it’s suffering.”

“What, our generation?”

“The baby!”

“That depends on what you mean by suffering. I mean, the baby can’t see or
hear or smell, right? And I bet the nerves that signal pain aren’t functioning,
either. It’s like the Director said, you remember—a kind of vegetable. In your
opinion, does a vegetable suffer?”

Does a vegetable suffer, in my opinion? Bird wondered silently. Have I ever

considered that a cabbage being munched by a goat was in pain?

“Do you think a vegetable baby can suffer?” the doctor repeated eagerly,
pressing with confidence for an answer.

Bird meekly shook his head: as if to say the problem exceeded his flushed
brain’s capacity for judgment. And there was a time when he never would have
submitted to a person he had just met, at least not without feeling some
resistance. ...

“The oxygen isn’t feeding well,” the anesthetist reported. The doctor stood up
and turned to check the rubber tube; Bird had his first look at his son.

An ugly baby with a pinched, tiny, red face covered with wrinkles and blotchy
with fat. Its eyes were clamped shut like the shells of a bivalve, rubber tubes led
into its nostrils; its mouth was wrenched open in a soundless scream that
exposed the pearly-pink membrane inside. Bird found himself rising half off the
bench, stretching for a look at the baby’s bandaged head. Beneath the bandage,
the skull was buried under a mound of bloody cotton; but there was no hiding
the presence there of something large and abnormal.

Bird looked away, and sat down. Pressing his face to the window glass, he
watched the city recede. People in the street, alarmed by the siren, stared at the
ambulance with curiosity and an unaccountable expectation plainly written on
their faces—just as that host of pregnant angels had stared. They gave the
impression of unnaturally halted motion, like film caught in a projector. They
were glimpsing an infinitesimal crack in the flat surface of everyday life and the
sight filled them with innocent awe.
My son has bandages on his head and so did Apollinaire when he was wounded
on the field of battle. On a dark and lonely battlefield I have never seen, my son
was wounded like Apollinaire and now he is screaming soundlessly. ...

soundlessly. ...

Bird began to cry. Head in bandages, like Apollinaire: the image simplified his
feelings instantly and directed them. He could feel himself turning into a
sentimental jelly, yet he felt himself being sanctioned and justified: he even
discovered a sweetness in his tears.

Like Apollinaire, my son was wounded on a dark and lonely battlefield that I
have never seen, and he has arrived with his head in bandages. I’ll have to bury
him like a soldier who died at war.

Bird continued to cry.