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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.
    You can race this bicycle to a strange land and soak in whisky for a hundred days
—Bird heard the voice of a dubious revelation. And as he wobbled down the street, awash in the morning light, he waited for the voice to speak again. But there was only silence. Lethargically, like a sloth on the move, Bird began to pedal. …
    Bird was bending forward in the breakfast nook for the clean underwear on top of the TV when he saw his arm and realized that he was naked. Swiftly, as though he were pursuing a fleeing mouse with his eyes, he glanced down at his genitals: the heat of shame scorched him. Bird hurried into his underwear and put on his slacks and a shirt. Even now he was a link in the chain of shame that connected his mother-in-law and the Director. Peril-ridden and fragile, the imperfect human body, what a shameful thing it was! Trembling, Bird fled the apartment with his eyes on the floor, fled down the stairs, fled through the hall, straddled his bicycle and fled everything behind him. He would have liked to flee his own body. Speeding away on a bike, he felt he was escaping himself more effectively than he could on foot, if only a little.
    As Bird turned into the hospital driveway, a man in white hurried down the steps with what looked like a hay basket and pushed his way through the crowd to the open tail of an ambulance. The soft, weak part of Bird that wanted to escape tried to apprehend the scene as though itwere occurring at a vast remove and had nothing to do with Bird, simply an early morning stroller. But Bird could only advance, struggling like a mole burrowing into an imaginary mud wall through the heavy, viscid resistance that impeded him.
    Bird got off his bike and was locking a chain around the front tire when a voice bit into him from behind, terrifying in its disapproval: “You can’t leave that bike here!” Bird turned and looked up into the hairy Director’s reproving eyes. Hoisting the bike onto his shoulder, he walked into the shrubbery with it. Raindrops