A Personal Matter Read Online Free PDF

attack in Bird’s voice. (He was the hospital Director; Bird had seen him scrubbing his hands at his wife’s side.) Bird looked at the Director, waiting for him to speak. Instead of beginning an explanation, he took a pipe from his wrinkled surgeon’s gown and filled it with tobacco. He was a short, barrel of a man, obese to an extreme that gave him an air of dolorous pomposity. The soiled gown was open at his chest, which was as hairy as a camel’s back; not only his upper lip and cheeks but even the fatty crop that sagged to his throat was stubbled with beard. The Director had not had time to shave this morning: he had been fighting for the baby’s life since yesterday afternoon. Bird was grateful, of course, but something suspicious about this hairy, middle-aged doctor prevented him from letting down his guard. As if, deep beneath that hirsute skin, something potentially lethal was trying to rear its bushy head and was being forcibly restrained.
    The Director at last returned the pipe from his thick lips to his bowl of a hand and, abruptly meeting Bird’s stare with his own: “Would you like to see the goods first?” His voice was too loud for the small room.
    “Is the baby dead?” Bird asked, coughing. For a minute the Director looked suspicious of Bird for having assumed the baby’s death, but he erased that impression with an ambiguous smile.
    “Certainly not,” he said. “The infant’s movements are vigorous and its voice strong.”
    Bird heard his mother-in-law sigh deeply, gravely—it was like a broad hint. Either the woman was exhausted or she was signaling to Bird the approximate depth of the swamp of calamity he and his wife were mired in. One or the other.
    “Well then, would you like to see the goods?”
    The young doctor on the Director’s right stood up. He was a tall man, thin, with eyes that somehow violated the horizontal symmetry of his face. One eye was agitated and timid-looking; the other was serene. Bird had started to rise with the doctor and had slumped back into his chair before he noticed that the beautiful eye was made of glass.
    “Could you explain first, please?” Bird sounded increasingly threatened: the revulsion he had felt at the Director’s choice of words—the goods!—was still caught in the mesh of his mind.
    “That might be better: when you first see it, it’s quite a surprise. Even I was surprised when it came out.” Unexpectedly, the Director’s thick eyelids reddened and he burst into a childish giggle. Bird had sensed a suspicious presence lurking beneath that hairy skin, and now he knew that it was this giggle, this giggle that had revealed itself first in the guise of a vague smile. Bird glared at the giggling doctor in rage before he realized the man was laughing from embarrassment. He had extracted from between the legs of another man’s wife a species of monster beyond classification. A monster with a cat’s head, maybe, and a body as swollen as a balloon? Whatever the creature was, the Director was ashamed of himself for having delivered it, and so was giggling. His performance, far from befitting the professional dignity of an experienced obstetrician and hospital director, had belonged in a slapstick comedy: a quack doctor routine. The man had been startled and distracted; now he was suffering from shame.
    Without moving, Bird waited for the Director to recover from his laughing jag. A monster. But what kind? “The goods,” the Director had said, and Bird had heard “monster”; the briars twined around the word had torn the membranes in his thorax. In introducing himself, he had said, “I’m the father,” and the doctors had winced. Because something else entirely must have echoed in their ears—
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