A personal matter pdfdrive com

looking for a fight?
Nevertheless, Bird bent forward, opened the top of the professor’s desk, and
lifted out the bottle of Johnnie Walker with both hands. He was crimson even to
his eyeballs, yet he felt a twisted, feverish joy. Ask a man to trample a crucifix
and make him prove he’s not a Christian: well, they wouldn’t see him hesitate.
“Thank you,” Bird said. The three assistants relaxed. The professor was
working his chair slowly around to its original position, his head erect, his face
still slack and scarlet. Bird glanced at the younger men, swiftly bowed, and left
the room.
Down the stairs and into the stone courtyard, Bird kept a prudent grip on the
whisky bottle, as though it were a hand grenade. The rest of the day was his to
spend as he liked by himself—the thought merged in his mind with an image of
the Johnnie Walker and foamed into a promise of ecstasy and peril.
Tomorrow, or the day after, or maybe after a week’s reprieve, when my wife

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has learned about the wretched baby’s death, the two of us are going to be
locked up in a dungeon of cruel neurosis. Accordingly—Bird argued with the
bubbly voice of apprehension inside himself—I have a perfect right to today’s
bottle of whisky and liberating time. Quietly the bubble collapsed. Fine! Let’s
get down to drinking. First Bird thought of going back to his apartment and
drinking in his study, but clearly that was a bad idea. If he returned, the old
landlady and his friends might besiege him, by telephone if not in person, with
detailed questions about the birth; besides, whenever he looked into the
bedroom, the baby’s white enamel bassinet would tear his nerves like a gnashing
shark. Shaking his head roughly, Bird drove the notion from his mind. Why not
hole up in a cheap hotel where only strangers stayed? But Bird pictured himself
getting drunk in a locked hotel room and he felt afraid. Bird gazed enviously at
the jolly Scotsman in the red cutaway striding across the Johnnie Walker label.
Where was he going in such a hurry? All of a sudden, Bird remembered an old
girlfriend. 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.
Bird stopped to wait for a cab just outside the college gates. Through the large
window in the coffee shop across the street he could see his former student
sitting at a table with some friends. The student noticed Bird at once and began
like an affectionate puppy to send sincere, ungainly signals. His friends, too,
regarded Bird with vague, blunted curiosity. How would he explain Bird to his
friends! As an English instructor who had drunk himself out of graduate school,
a man in the grip of an unexplainable passion, or maybe a crazy fear?
The student smiled at him tenaciously until he was in the taxicab. Bird
realized as he drove away that he felt as if he had just received charity. And from
a boy who in all his time at the cram-school had never learned to distinguish
English gerunds from present participles, a former student with a brain no bigger
than a cat’s!
Bird’s friend lived on one of the city’s many hills, in a quarter ringed by
temples and cemeteries. The girl lived alone in a tiny house at the end of an
alley. Bird had met her at a class mixer in October of his freshman year. When it
was her turn to stand and introduce herself, she had challenged the class to guess
the source of her unusual name: Himiko—fire-sighting-child. Bird had
answered, correctly, that the name was taken from the Chronicles of the ancient
province of Higo—The Emperor commanded his oarsmen, saying: There in the