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“It’s the people who have begun to feel they have no more rights in the real world who commit suicide. Bird, please don’t commit suicide,” Himiko said.
She had to rub the odor of her body into all its corners and thereby certify her territory or she could not escape anxiety, like a small, timid animal.
But with some personal experiences that lead you way into a cave all by yourself, you must eventually come to a side tunnel or something that opens on a truth that concerns not just yourself but everyone.
But what I’m experiencing personally now is like digging a vertical mine shaft in isolation;
“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 felt as if he had been downed by a bullet of criticism from an unexpected sniper.
Bird reflected that he had been clinging doggedly to himself from the minute he had moved into his friend’s house, aware of Himiko as a single cell only in the organism of his consciousness.
He had become a chrysalis of personal misfortune, seeing only the inner walls of the cocoon, never doubting for an instant the chrysalis’s prerogatives.
Bird’s blush deepened and he arranged his face in a look of reproach. In fact he was thinking he would have melted like a cube of bouillon under boiling water if her father-in-law had suggested undertaking a trip to Africa with the moral objective of rescuing Himiko from the phantom of her husband, how eagerly would he then have released himself to that journey into sweet deception! Bird was terrified the older man might make the suggestion in just such a way, at the same time he longed to hear the words: in his loathsome needfulness he felt like concealing himself in a dark hole. An instant
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Bird fiercely narrowed his eyes, as if to say he was not the man to be made a fool of. In the field of his brain there appeared a flaming circle of shame’s hottest fire. Like a circus tiger, Bird steeled himself for the leap that would carry him through the ring.
Bird hit into another reality coated with the sugars of fraud.
“Bird, do you suppose there are people who want an atomic war, not because they stand to benefit from the manufacture of nuclear weapons economically, say, or politically, but simply because that’s what they want? I mean, just as most people believe for no particular reason that this planet should be perpetuated and hope that it will be, there must be black-hearted people who believe, for no reason they could name, that mankind should be annihilated. In northern Europe there’s a little animal like a rat, it’s called a lemming, and sometimes these lemmings commit mass suicide. I just wonder if
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“A homosexual is someone who has chosen to let himself love a person of the same sex: and I made that decision myself. So the responsibility is all my own.” Kikuhiko’s voice was quiet.
“I left the baby with that abortionist and then I ran away, I fled here,” Bird said obstinately. “I’ve been running the whole time, running and running, and I pictured Africa as the land at the end of all flight, the final spot, the terminal—you know, you’re running away, too. You’re just another cabaret girl running off with an embezzler.”
“Let’s say you let them operate and saved the baby’s life, what would you have then, Bird? You told me yourself that your son would never be more than a vegetable! Don’t you see, it’s not only that you’d be creating misery for yourself, you’d be nurturing a life that meant absolutely nothing to this world! Do you suppose that would be for the baby’s good? Do you, Bird?” “It’s for my own good. It’s so I can stop being a man who’s always running away,” Bird said.
“All I want is to stop being a man who continually runs away from responsibility.”
“As a matter of fact, I kept trying to run away. And I almost did. But it seems that reality compels you to live properly when you live in the real world. I mean, even if you intend to get yourself caught in a trap of deception, you find somewhere along the line that your only choice is to avoid it.” Bird was surprised at the muted resentment in his voice. “That’s what I’ve found, anyway.”
“But it is possible to live in the real world in quite a different way, Bird. There are people who leap-frog from one deception to another until the day they die.”
He wanted to try reflecting his face in the baby’s pupils. The mirror of the baby’s eyes was a deep, lucid gray and it did begin to reflect an image, but one so excessively fine that Bird couldn’t confirm his new face.
