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He was aging with the speed of a short-distance runner.
(I’ve been in the cage ever since my marriage but until now the door has always seemed open; the baby on its way into the world may clang that door shut).
Bird married in May when he was twenty-five, and that first summer he stayed drunk for four weeks straight. He suddenly began to drift on a sea of alcohol, a besotted Robinson Crusoe.
Disgracefully bewildered, like a punch-drunk pigmy, Bird was silent.
Ask a man to trample a crucifix and make him prove he’s not a Christian: well, they wouldn’t see him hesitate.
Facing one hundred fly-heads, Bird lifted his eyes and smiled.
A vegetable existence? Maybe so; a deadly cactus.
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.
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?
At the same time he blushed and began to sweat, ashamed of the tapeworm of egotism that had attached itself to him.
Bird lacked even the reckless honesty of the aspiring pervert.
Long after Himiko had fallen asleep Bird lay awake at her side, his body rigid from shoulders to belly as though he had been stricken with elephantiasis.
At the moment, as long as the baby was not involved, his capacity for calm detachment was infinite.
Bird felt as if he had been downed by a bullet of criticism from an unexpected sniper.
At this hottest hour of the day, he was the only man in the city on the run.