A Personal Matter Read Online Free PDF Page A

of her curiosity and good will. But what could he say? So far he had heard only the declaration on the phone: the baby is abnormal! But it was probably as bad as it could be. Bird groped for his shoes on the earth floor in the vestibule, unlocked the front door as quietly as he could, and stepped into the dawn.
    The bicycle was lying on its side on the gravel under a hedge. Bird righted it and wiped the tenacious rain off the rotting leather seat with his jacket sleeve. Before the seat was dry, Bird leaped astride and, scattering gravel like an angry horse, pumped past the hedges into the paved street. In an instant his buttocks were chilled and clammy. And it was raining again; the wind drove the rain straight into his face. He kept his eyes wide open, watching for potholes in the street: rain pellets struck his eyeballs. At a broader, brighter street, Bird turned left. Now the wind was whipping the rain into his right side and the going was easier. Bird leaned into the wind to balance the bike. The speeding tires churned the sheet of water on the asphalt street and scattered it like fine mist. As Bird watched the water ripple away from the tires with his body tilted sharply into the wind, he began to feel dizzy. He looked up: no one on the dawn street as far as he could see. The ginkgo trees that hemmed the street were thick and dark with leaves and each of those countless leaves was swollen with the water it had drunk. Black trunks supporting deep oceans of green. If those oceans all at once collapsed, Bird and his bike would be drowned in a raw-green-smelling flood. Bird felt threatened by the trees. High above him, the leaves massed on the topmost branches were moaning in the wind. Bird looked up through the trees at the narrowed eastern sky. Blackish-gray all over, with a faint hint of the sun’s pink seeping through at the back. A mean sky that seemed ashamed, roughly violated by clouds like galloping shaggy dogs. A trio of magpies arrowed in front of Bird as brazen as alley cats and nearly toppled him. He saw the silver drops of water bunched like lice on their light-blue tails. Bird noticed that he was startled easily now, and that his eyes and ears and sense of smell had become acutely sensitive. It occurred to him vaguely that this was a bad omen: the same things had happened during those weeks he had stayed drunk.
    Lowering his head, Bird raised himself on the pedals and picked up speed. The feeling of futile flight in his dream returned. But he raced on. His shoulder snapped a slender ginkgo branch and the splintered end sprang back and cut his ear. Even so, Bird didn’t slow up. Raindrops that whined like bullets grazed his throbbing ear. Bird skidded to a stop at the hospital entrance with a squeal of brakes that might have been his own scream. He was soaking wet: shivering. As he shook the water off, he had the feeling he had sped down a long, unthinkably long, road.
    Bird paused in front of the examination room to catch his breath, thenpeered inside and addressed the indistinct faces waiting for him in the dimness.
    “I’m the father,” he said hoarsely, wondering why they were sitting in a darkened room. Then he noticed his mother-in-law, her face half-buried in her kimono sleeve as though she were trying not to vomit. Bird sat down in the chair next to her and felt his clothes stick fast to his back and rear. He shivered, not violently as in the driveway, but with the helplessness of a weakened chick. His eyes were adjusting to the darkness in the room: now he discovered a tribunal of three doctors watching in careful silence as he settled himself in the chair. Like the national flag in a courtroom, the colored anatomy chart on the wall behind them was a banner symbolic of their private law.
    “I’m the father,” Bird repeated irritably. It was clear from his voice that he felt threatened.
    “Yes, all right,” the doctor in the middle replied somewhat defensively, as if he had detected a note of