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“You’re still tormenting yourself about your husband’s suicide, aren’t you? And you’ve conceived this whole philosophical swindle in order to rob death of its finality.”
The feeling had been growing in him slowly since he had learned that his baby was a freak.
Bird shifted in his chair and yawned, shedding one tear as meaningless as saliva.
Sex for Bird and Himiko would be linked to the dying baby, linked to all of mankind’s miseries, to the wretchedness so loathsome that people unafflicted pretended not to see it, an attitude they called humanism.
I haven’t been fastidious about morality since my husband committed suicide; besides, even if you intend to have the most disgusting kind of sex with me, I’m sure I’ll discover something genuine in no matter what we do.”
Bird raised his voice a little and could hear that it was pickled in the vinegars of fear.
“Maybe she was speaking out of jealousy,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean I got away from everything she said unscathed.”
“Now that you mention it, it’s like the taste of a broken tooth.”
“Kafka, you know, wrote in a letter to his father, the only thing a parent can do for a child is to welcome it when it arrives. And are you rejecting your baby instead? Can we excuse the egotism that rejects another life because a man is a father?”
Bird, stiffening, answered in a voice like the whine of a mosquito.
“You always feel that a baby’s cry is full of meaning,” Himiko said, raising her voice above the baby’s. “For all we know, it may contain all the meaning of all of man’s words.”
