I know, I fell down last night.

” Stepping out of the barber chair, Bird glanced at

his face in a mirror that glistened like a noon beach. His hair was definitely
matted, crackly as dry straw, but his face from his high cheekbones to his jaw
was as bright and as fresh a pink as the belly of a rainbow trout. If only a strong
light were shining in those glue-colored eyes, if the taut eyelids were relaxed
and the thin lips weren’t twitching, this would be a conspicuously younger and
livelier Bird than the portrait reflected in the store window last night.

Stopping at a barbershop had been a good idea: Bird was satisfied. If nothing
else, he had introduced one positive element to a psychological balance which
had been tipped to negative since dawn. A glance at the blood that had dried
under his nose like a triangular mole, and Bird left the barbershop. By the time
he got to the college, the glow the razor had left on his cheeks would probably
have faded. But he would have scraped away with his nail the mole of dried
blood by then: no danger of impressing his father-in-law as a sad and ludicrous
hangdog. Searching the street for a bus stop, Bird remembered the extra money
he was carrying in his pocket and hailed a passing cab.

Bird stepped out of the cab into a crowd of students swarming through the main
gate on their way to lunch: five minutes past twelve. On the campus, he stopped
a big fellow and asked directions to the English department. Surprisingly, the
student beamed a smile and singsonged, nostalgically, “It’s certainly been a
long time, sensei!” Bird was horrified. “I was in your class at the cram-school.
None of the government schools worked out, so I had my old man donate some
money here and got in, you know, through the back door.”

“So you’re a student here now,” Bird said with relief, remembering who the
student was. Though not unhandsome, the boy had saucer eyes and a bulbous
nose that recalled the illustrations of German peasants in Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

“It sounds as if cram-school wasn’t much help to you,” Bird said.

“Not at all, sensei! Study is never a waste. You may not remember a single
thing but, you know, study is study!”

Bird suspected he was being ridiculed and he glowered at the boy. But the
student was trying with his whole large body to demonstrate his good will. Even
in a class of one hundred, Bird vividly recalled, this one had been a conspicuous
dullard. And precisely for that reason he was able to report simply and jovially
to Bird that he had entered a second-rate private college through the back door,
and to express gratitude for classes that had availed him nothing. Any of the
ninety-nine other students would have tried to avoid their cram-school
instructor.
“With our tuition as high as it is, it’s a relief to hear you say that.”

“With our tuition as high as it is, it’s a relief to hear you say that.”
“Oh, it was worth every penny. Will you be teaching here from now on?” Bird
shook his head.

“Oh. ...” The student tactfully expanded the conversation: “Let me take you to
the English department; it’s this way. But seriously, sensei, the studying I did at
cram-school didn’t go to waste. It’s all in my head someplace, taking root sort
of; and someday it will come in handy. It’s just a matter of waiting for the time
to come—isn’t that pretty much what studying is in the final analysis, sensei?”

Bird, following this optimistic and somehow didactic former student, cut across
a walk bordered by trees in full blossom and came to the front of a red- ochre
brick building. “The English department is on the third floor at the back. I was
so happy to get in here, I explored the campus until I know it like the palm of
my hand,” the boy said proudly, and flashed a grin so eloquently self-derisive
that Bird doubted his own eyes.

“I sound pretty simple, don’t I!”

“Not at all; not so simple.”

“It’s awfully nice of you to say so. Well then, I’ll be seeing you around, sensei.
And take care of yourself: you’re looking a little pale!”

Climbing the stairs, Bird thought: That guy will manage his adult life with a
thousand times more cunning than I manage mine; at least he won’t go around
having babies die on him with brain hernias. But what an oddly unique moralist
he had had in his class!

Bird peered around the door into the English department office and located his
father-in-law. On a small balcony that extended from a far corner of the room,
the professor was slumped in an oak rocking chair, gazing at the partly open
skylight. The office had the feeling of a conference room, far larger and brighter
than the English offices at the university from which Bird had graduated. Bird’s
father-in-law often said (he told the story wryly, like a favorite joke on himself)
that the treatment he received at this private college, including facilities such as
the rocking chair, was incomparably better than what he had been used to at the
National University: Bird could see there was more to the story than a joke. If
the sun got any stronger, though, the rocking chair would have to be moved
back or the balcony shaded with an awning, one or the other.
At a large table near the door, three young teaching assistants, oil gleaming on
their ruddy faces, were having a cup of coffee, apparently after lunch. All three
of them Bird knew by sight: honor students who had been a class ahead of

three of them Bird knew by sight: honor students who had been a class ahead of
him at college. But for the incident with the whisky and Bird’s withdrawal from
graduate school, he certainly would have found himself in pursuit of their
careers.

Bird knocked at the open door, stepped into the room, and greeted his three
seniors. Then he crossed the room to the balcony; his father-in-law twisted
around to watch him as he approached, his head thrown back, balancing himself
on the rocking chair. The assistants watched too, with identical smiles of no
special significance. It was true that they considered Bird a phenomenon of
some rarity, but at the same time he was an outsider and therefore not an object
of serious concern. That funny, peculiar character who went on a long binge for
no reason in the world and finally dropped out of graduate school—something
like that.

“Professor!” Bird said out of habit established before he had married the old
man’s daughter. His father-in-law swung himself and the chair around to face
him, the wooden rockers squeaking on the floor, and waved Bird into a swivel
chair with long arm rests.

“Was the baby born?” he asked.

“Yes, the baby was born—” Bird winced to hear his voice shrivel into a timid
peep, and he closed his mouth. Then, compelling himself to say it all in one
breath: “The baby has a brain hernia and the doctor says he’ll die sometime
tomorrow or the day after, the mother is fine!”

The taffy-colored skin of the professor’s large, leonine face quietly turned
vermilion. Even the sagging bags on his lower eyelids colored brightly, as
though blood were seeping through. Bird felt the color rising to his own face.
He realized all over again how alone and helpless he had been since dawn.

“Brain hernia. Did you see the baby?”

Bird detected a hidden intimation of his wife’s voice even in the professor’s thin
hoarseness, and, if anything, it made him miss her.

“Yes, I did. His head was in bandages, like Apollinaire.”

“Like Apollinaire ... his head in bandages.” The professor tried the words on his
own tongue as if he were pondering the punch line of a little joke. When he
spoke, it was not so much to Bird as to the three assistants: “In this age of ours
it’s hard to say with certainty that having lived was better than not having been
born in the first place.” The three young men laughed with restraint, but
audibly: Bird turned and stared at them. They stared back, and the composure in
their eyes meant they were not the least surprised that a queer fellow like Bird
had

eyes meant they were not the least surprised that a queer fellow like Bird had
met with a freak accident. Resentful, Bird looked