Until now, a siren had always been a moving object: it approached from a distance, hurtled by, moved away. Now a siren was attached to Bird like a disease he carried in his body: this siren would never recede.
If nothing else, he had introduced one positive element to a psychological balance which had been tipped to negative since dawn.
“It depends, Bird,” Himiko replied with terrific indifference, as if she were trying to impress on Bird the boredom of his question.
Bird had torn open the envelope and was about to read the note when he remembered from his student days a funny superstition about probability—when you were faced with two errands at the same time and didn’t know what either held in store, one would always be pregnant with good fortune if the other turned out calamitously—and stuffed the letter into his pocket unread. If his meeting with the Principal went very badly, he would have a valid reason for expecting the best of the letter in his pocket.
“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.
“I will not return. My girlfriend wants me to stay,” Mr. Delchef said with a broad smile.
“Then it is not for political reasons? You are hiding away here simply because of sentimental attachment to your girlfriend?”
“Yes, precisely.”
“Mr. Delchef, you are a strange man.”
“Strange, why?”
“But your friend cannot speak English, can she?”
“We understand each other always in silence.”
“I’ll tell you a story until the whisky and pills take effect—an episode from that African novel. Did you read the chapter about the pirate demons?”
Bird shook his head in the dark.
“When a woman conceives, the pirate demons elect one of their own kind to sneak into the woman’s house. During the night, this demon representative chases out the real fetus and climbs into the womb himself. And then on the day of the birth the demon is born in the guise of the innocent fetus. …”
Bird listened in silence. Before long, such a baby invariably fell ill. When the mother made offerings in hopes of curing her child, the pirate demons secretly deposited them in a secret cache. Never were these babies known to recover. When the baby died and it was time for the burial, the demon resumed its true form, and, escaping from the graveyard, returned to the lair of the pirate demons with all the offerings from the secret cache.
“… apparently the bewitched fetus is born as a beautiful baby so it can capture the mother’s heart and she won’t hesitate to offer everything she has. The Africans call these babies ‘children born into the world to die,’ but isn’t it wonderful to imagine how beautiful they must be, even pigmy babies!”
Probably Bird would tell the story to his wife. And since our baby was born to die if any baby was, she’ll imagine him as a terrifically beautiful baby; I may even correct my own memory. And that will be the hugest deception of my whole life.
“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.”
Bird eased out of the bucket chair and slowly lowered his feet to the floor. To Himiko, questioning him with eyes slackened by fatigue and sudden drunkenness, he said: “I’ve decided to take the baby back to the university hospital and let them operate. I’ve stopped rushing at every exit door.”
“What are you talking about?” Himiko said suspiciously. “Bird! What’s happened to you! What kind of a time is this to start talking about an operation!”
“Ever since the morning my baby was born I’ve been running away,” Bird said with certainty.
“But you’re having that baby murdered right this minute, dirtying your hands and mine. How can you call that running away? Besides, we’re leaving for Africa together!”
“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.”
“I’m participating, Bird, dirtying my own hands along with yours. Don’t you say I’m running away!” Himiko’s shout echoed in the caves of her hysteria.
“Have you forgotten that you drove the car into a pothole today rather than run over a dead sparrow? Is that what a person does just before he cuts a baby’s throat?”
Himiko’s large face flushed, swelling, then darkened with fury and a presentiment of despair. She glared at Bird, shuddering in vexation: she was trying to fault him and couldn’t find her voice.
“If I want to confront this monster honestly instead of running away from it, I have only two alternatives: I can strangle the baby to death with my own hands or I can accept him and bring him up. I’ve understood that from the beginning but I haven’t had the courage to accept it—”
“…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.”
There are people who leap-frog from one deception to another until the day they die.