A personal matter pdfdrive com

I’m the monster’s father.
The Director quickly mastered himself and regained his mournful dignity. But
the pink flush remained on his eyelids and cheeks. Bird looked away, fighting an
urgent eddy of anger and fear inside, and said, “What kind of condition is it that
it’s so surprising?”
“You mean appearance, how it looks? There appear to be two heads! You
know a piece by Josef Wagner called ‘Under the Double Eagle’? Anyway, it’s
quite a shock.” The Director nearly began to giggle again, but he checked
himself just in time.
“Something like the Siamese twins, then?” Bird timidly asked.
“Not at all: there only appear to be two heads. Do you want to see the
goods?”
“Medically speaking—” Bird faltered.
“Brain hernia, we call it. The brain is protruding from a fault in the skull. I
founded this clinic when I got married, and this is the first case I’ve seen.
Extremely rare. I can tell you I was surprised!”
Brain hernia—Bird groped for an image, anything, and drew a blank. “Is
there any hope that this kind of brain-hernia baby will develop normally?” he
said in a daze.
“Develop normally!” The Director’s voice rose as though in anger. “We’re
speaking of a brain hernia! You might cut open the skull and force the brain
back, but even then you’d be lucky to get some kind of vegetable human being.
Precisely what do you mean by ‘normally’?” The Director shook his head at the

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Precisely what do you mean by ‘normally’?” The Director shook his head at the
young doctors on either side of him as though dismayed by Bird’s lack of
common sense. The doctor with the glass eye quickly nodded his agreement, and
so did the other, a taciturn man wrapped from his high forehead to his throat in
the same expressionless, sallow skin. Both turned stern eyes on Bird—professors
disapproving of a student for a poor performance in an oral exam.
“Will the baby die right away?” Bird said.
“Not right away, no. Tomorrow perhaps, or it may hold out even longer. It’s
an extremely vigorous infant,” the Director observed clinically. “Now then, what
do you intend to do?”
Disgracefully bewildered, like a punch-drunk pigmy, Bird was silent. What in
hell could he do? First the man drives you down a blind alley, then he asks what
you intend to do. Like a malicious chess player. What should he do? Fall to
pieces? Wail?
“If you wish, I can have the baby transferred to the hospital at the National
University—if you wish!” The offer sounded like a puzzle with a built-in trap.
Bird, straining to see beyond the suspicious mist and failing to discover a single
clue, was left merely with a futile wariness: “If there are no alternatives—”
“None,” the Director said. “But you will have the satisfaction of knowing you
have done everything possible.”
“Couldn’t we just leave the child here?”
Bird as well as the three doctors gawked at the originator of the abrupt
question. Bird’s mother-in-law sat quite still, the world’s most forlorn
ventriloquist. The Director inspected her like an appraiser determining a price.
When he spoke, it was ugly, he was protecting himself so obviously: “That’s
impossible! This is a case of brain hernia, don’t forget. Quite impossible!” The
woman listened without budging, her mouth still buried in her kimono sleeve.
“Then we’ll move it to the other hospital,” Bird declared. The Director leaped
at Bird’s decision and he began at once to display a dazzling spectrum of
administrative talents. When his two subordinates had left the room under orders
to contact the university hospital and make arrangements for an ambulance, the
Director filled his pipe again and said with a look of relief, as though he had
disposed of a heavy, questionable burden: “I’ll have one of our people ride along
in the ambulance, so you can be assured we’ll get the infant there safely.”
“Thank you very much.”
“It would be best if our new grandmother stayed here with her daughter. Why
don’t you go home and change into some dry clothes? The ambulance won’t be

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don’t you go home and change into some dry clothes? The ambulance won’t be
ready for half an hour.”
“I’ll do that,” Bird said. The Director sidled up to him and whispered, too
familiarly, as if he were beginning a dirty joke, “Of course, you can forbid them
to operate if you choose to.”
Poor wretched little baby! Bird thought.
The first person my baby meets in the real world has to be this hairy
porkchops of a little man.
But Bird was still dazed: his feelings of anger and grief, the minute they had
crystallized, shattered.
Bird and his mother-in-law and the Director walked in a little group as far as
the reception desk, silently, avoiding one another’s faces. At the entrance, Bird
turned around to say good-by. His mother-in-law returned his gaze with eyes so
like his wife’s they might have been sisters, and she was trying to say something.
Bird waited. But the woman only stared at him in silence, her dark eyes
contracting until they were empty of expression. Bird could feel her
embarrassment, and it was specific, as though she were standing naked on a
public street. But what could be making her so uncomfortable as to deaden her
eyes and even the skin on her face? Bird looked away himself before the woman
could lower her gaze, and said to the Director: “Is it a boy or a girl?” The
question took the Director off his guard, and he leaked that funny giggle again.
Sounding like a young intern: “Let’s see now, I can’t quite remember, but I have
a feeling I saw one, sure I did—a penis!”
Bird went out to the driveway alone. It wasn’t raining and the wind had died:
the clouds sailing the sky were bright, dry. A brilliant morning had broken from
the dawn’s cocoon of semidarkness, and the air had a good, first-days-of-
summer smell that slackened every muscle in Bird’s body. 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.