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BIRD, gazing down at the map of Africa that reposed in the showcase with the haughty elegance of a wild deer, stifled a short sigh.
Because a youth who tries so hard to be faithful to the warp in himself that he ends up searching the street in drag for perverts, a young man like that must have eyes and ears and a heart exquisitely sensitive to the fear that roots in the backlands of the subconscious.
that first summer he stayed drunk for four weeks straight. He suddenly began to drift on a sea of alcohol, a besotted Robinson Crusoe. Neglecting all his obligations as a graduate student, his job, his studies, discarding everything without a thought, Bird sat all day long and until late every night in the darkened kitchen of his apartment, listening to records and drinking whisky. It seemed to him now, looking back on those terrible days, that with the exception of listening to music and drinking and immersing in harsh, drunken sleep, he hadn’t engaged in a single living human activity.
He was like a mental incompetent with only the slightest chance of recovery, but he had to tame all over again not only the wilderness inside himself, but the wilderness of his relations to the world outside.
The thought, not so much of his wife in labor as of his mother-in-law’s nerves as she hovered over the telephone reserved for in-patients, irritated him.
Bird, ascertaining through the glass doors rimmed with red and indigo tape that a public telephone was installed in a corner at the rear, stepped into the Gun Corner, passed a Coke machine and a juke box howling rock-n-roll already out of vogue,
It was a medieval instrument of torture, an Iron Maiden—twentieth-century model. A beautiful, life-sized maiden of steel with mechanical red-and-black stripes was protecting her bare chest with stoutly crossed arms. The player attempted to pull her arms away from her chest for a glimpse of her hidden metal breasts; his grip and pull appeared as numbers in the windows which were the maiden’s eyes. Above her head was a chronological table of average grip and pull.
the thought danced with new poignancy to the frontlines of consciousness. A sudden rage took him, and rough despair. Until now, out of terror and bewilderment, Bird had been contriving only to escape. But he had no intention of running now.
Bird let his arms dangle and thrust out his chin, affecting the limp befuddlement of a carnival doll.
drove like a ferocious bull into his attacker’s belly.
The joy of battle had reawakened in him;
Soon an old-fashioned steam engine spewing fiery cinders came chugging down the track. Passing over Bird’s head, the train was a colossal black rhinoceros galloping across an inky sky.
Instantly, Bird was stranded. He longed to backtrack to that Nigerian plateau to lick up the dregs of his dream, no matter that it was an evil, sea urchin of a dream, thinly planted with the spines of fear.
Bird would have to answer questions honed on the whetstone of her curiosity and good will.
Before the seat was dry, Bird leaped astride and, scattering gravel like an angry horse, pumped past the hedges into the paved street.
Instead of beginning an explanation, he took a pipe from his wrinkled surgeon’s gown and filled it with tobacco. He was a short, barrel of a man, obese to an extreme that gave him an air of dolorous pomposity.
the briars twined around the word had torn the membranes in his thorax.
a taciturn man wrapped from his high forehead to his throat in the same expressionless, sallow skin.
The first person my baby meets in the real world has to be this hairy porkchops of a little man.
A night softness had lingered in the hospital, and now the morning light, reflecting off the wet pavement and off the leafy trees, stabbed like icicles at Bird’s pampered eyes. Laboring into this light on his bike was like being poised on the edge of a diving board; Bird felt severed from the certainty of the ground, isolated. And he was as numb as stone, a weak insect on a scorpion’s sting.
From every window 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.
Now a siren was attached to Bird like a disease he carried in his body: this siren would never recede.
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?
Pressing his face to the window glass, he watched the city recede.
They were glimpsing an infinitesimal crack in the flat surface of everyday life and the sight filled them with innocent awe.
Bird was both angry at the silliness of his question and at the firemen’s response. And his anger was connected by a slender pipe to a tank of huge, dark rage compressed inside him. A rage he had no way of releasing had been building inside him under increasing pressure since dawn.
time to himself to be spent alone and as he liked—
Forenoon: the most exhilarating hour of an early summer day. And a breeze that recalled elementary school excursions quickened the worms of tingling pleasure on Bird’s cheeks and earlobes, flushed from lack of sleep. The nerve cells in his skin, the farther they were from conscious restraint, the more thirstily they drank the sweetness of the season and the hour. Soon a sense of liberation rose to the surface of his consciousness.
The bud of an existence appeared on a plain of nothingness that stretched for zillions of years and there it grew for nine months. Of course, there was no consciousness in a fetus, it simply curled in a ball and existed, filling utterly a warm, dark, mucous world. Then, perilously, into the external world. It was cold there, and hard, scratchy, dry and fiercely bright. The outside world was not so confined that the baby could fill it by himself: he must live with countless strangers. But, for a baby like a vegetable, that stay in the external world would be nothing more than a few hours of
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Winter and summer alike, during the day she was always sprawled in her darkened bedroom, pondering something extremely metaphysical while she chain-smoked Players until an artificial fog hung over her bed. She never left the house until after dusk.
“You couldn’t possibly satisfy a woman when you’ve been drinking that way. What’s more important, I doubt that you could bring it off yourself, no matter how hard you tried. You’d end up with a whacky heart like a prostrate distance swimmer—and leave an alcohol slick like a rainbow next to the woman’s head!”
A funny dwarf was dancing around inside the fiery sun that was his head, scattering powdered light like the fairy he had seen in Peter Pan.
the numberless devils spawning in his belly pierced his innards with their tiny arrows and forced a moan from his own lips.
Bird would have elected to hurl himself into the toilet as he pulled the chain and thus be flushed with a roar of water down into a sewery hell.
and he discovered that successive waves of nausea had washed his strength onto the beach.
It had quickened in the darkness of his mind like a clot of black slugs when he had learned at the reception window that his baby was still alive,
ashamed of the tapeworm of egotism that had attached itself to him.
he felt as if a knowing finger had just stroked the ugliest part of his body and the most sensitive to pleasure, like the fleshy pleats in his scrotum.
but the sensation of shame had become a kernel lodged like glaucoma behind his eyes.
Besides, I said, you take a liver, it’s got a lot more class than an ordinary asshole!”
And then a sprout of sexual desire pushed up through the darkness and grew before Bird’s eyes like a young rubber tree.
“... I can’t send my weakling penis onto that battleground!”
To worry about the woman’s orgasm as you screwed, registering in your mind the responsibility for her after she was pregnant, was to do battle with your shuddering rear in order to put shackles around your own neck.
Bird found himself looking at Himiko as an old and tested warrior in the campaigns of daily life, with incomparably more experience than himself.
a thing armored in burrs that inspired anguish. Sleep for Bird was a funnel which he entered through the wide and easy entrance and had to leave by the narrow exit.
whispered, thrusting only the antlers of wariness through a vague fog.
Bird raised his voice a little and could hear that it was pickled in the vinegars of fear.
Like a soldier accompanying a comrade in arms to private battle, Bird stood by in stoic self-restraint while Himiko wrested from their coition the genuine something that was all her own.
that woman with green halos in the hollows of her eyes, flagging signals like the poses in a Kabuki dance.
He sensed that lacunas had formed in each of the pleats of his consciousness since the trouble with the baby had begun.
