On Wings of Song

by Thomas M. Disch

  With the coming of winter things got steadily worse, week by week. Working down in the station, Daniel saw less and less of actual daylight, but that wasn’t so different from going to school during the darkest months of the year. The worst of it was the cold. The dorms leaked so badly that from the middle of November on it was hard to sleep, the cold was that intense. Daniel slept with two older men who worked the same shift at the station, since people in general objected to the smell of the bugs they all swore they could smell on themselves. One of the men had a problem with his bladder and wet the bed sometimes while he was asleep. It was strange having the same thing happen again here with grown men that had happened during the pipeline crisis with the twins.

  He began having trouble with his digestion. Even though he was hungry all the time, something had happened to his stomach acids so that he constantly felt on the verge of throwing up. Other people had the same problem, and blamed it on the Big Macs, which the guards delivered to the dorm half-frozen. Daniel himself believed it was psychological and had to do with his job at the station. Whatever the reason, the result was that he was always at odds with his body, which was cold and weak and nauseous and would fumble the simplest task, turning a doorknob or blowing his nose. And it stank, not just at the crotch and the armpits, but through and through. He began to hate himself. To hate, that is, the body he was attached to. He hated the other prisoners just as much, for they were all in more or less the same falling-to-pieces condition. He hated the dorms, and the station, and the frozen ground of the compound, and the clouds that hung low in the sky, with the weight of the winter within them, waiting to fall.

  Every night there were fights, most of them inside the dorms. The monitors, if they were watching, seldom tried to intervene. They probably enjoyed it the way the prisoners did, as sport, a break in the monotony, a sign of life.

  Time was the problem, how to get through the bleak hours at work, the bleaker hours at the dorm. Never mind the days and weeks. It was the clock, not the calendar, that was crushing him. What to think of in those hours? Where to turn? Barbara Steiner said the only resources are inner resources, and that so long as you were free to think your own thoughts you had as much freedom as there is. Even if Daniel could have believed that, it wouldn’t have done him much good. Thoughts have got to be about something, they’ve got to go somewhere. His thoughts were just loops of tape, vain repetitions. He tried deliberately daydreaming about the past, since a lot of the prisoners swore that your memory was a regular Disneyland where you spend days wandering from one show to another. Not for Daniel: his memory was like a box of someone else’s snapshots. He would stare at each frozen moment in its turn, but none of them ever came alive to lead the way into a living past.

  The future was no better. For the future to be interesting your desires, or your fears, must have a home there. Any future Daniel could foresee back in Amesville seemed only a more comfortable form of prison which he could neither wish for nor dread. The problem of what he would do with his life had been with him for as many years as he could remember, but there had never been any urgency about it. Quite the opposite: he’d always felt contempt for those of his school-fellows who were already hot on the scent of a “career.” Even now the word, or the idea behind it, seemed blackly ridiculous. Daniel knew he didn’t want anything that could be called a career, but that seemed perilously near to not wanting a future. And when people stopped having an idea of their future after Spirit Lake, they were liable to let go. Daniel didn’t want to let go, but he didn’t know what to hang on to.

  This was his frame of mind when he began reading The Bible. It served the essential purpose of passing time, but beyond that it was a disappointment. The stories were seldom a match for the average ghost story, and the language they were told in, though poetic in patches, was usually just antiquated and obscure. Long stretches of it made no sense at all. The epistles of St. Paul were particularly annoying that way. What was he to make of: “Beware of dogs, beware of evil workers, beware of the concision, for we are the circumcision, which worship God in the spirit, and rejoice in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh, though I might also have confidence in the flesh.” Gobbledegook! Even when the language was clearer, the ideas were murky, and when the ideas were clear they were usually dumb, like the dumb ideas of Reverend Van Dyke but without his sense of humor. Why did serious people ever take it seriously? Unless the whole thing was a kind of secret code (this was Bob Lundgren’s theory), which made completely good sense when you translated it from the language of two thousand years ago to the language that people spoke today. On the other hand (this was Daniel’s theory) what if St. Paul was talking about experiences that nobody had any more, or only people crazy enough to believe that black was white, and suffering some kind of medicine, and death the beginning of a better kind of life? Even then it was doubtful if believers believed in all they said they did. More likely they’d taken Van Dyke’s advice and were brainwashing themselves, saying they believed such stuff so that some day they actually might.

  But he didn’t believe it, and he wouldn’t pretend that he did. He only kept reading it because there was nothing else to read. He only kept thinking about it because there was nothing else to think about.

  By the first snowfall, in mid-November, Barbara Steiner was very pregnant and very depressed. People began avoiding her, including the men she’d been having sex with. Not having sex meant she wasn’t getting as many Big Macs as usual, so Donald, who’d been having stomach trouble, would often let her share his, or even give her the whole thing. She ate like a dog, quickly and without any sign of pleasure.

  All the talk had gone out of her. They would sit cross-legged on her rolled-up bedding and listen to the wind slam against the windowpanes and rattle the doors. The first full-scale blizzard of the year. Slowly it buttressed the leaky walls with snowdrifts, and the dorm, so sealed, became warmer and more bearable.

  There was such a feeling of finality somehow, as though they were all inside some ancient wooden ship that was locked into the ice, eking out rations and fuel and quietly waiting to die. Cardplayers went on playing cards as long as the lights were on, and knitters would knit with the wool they had knit and unraveled a hundred times before, but no one spoke. Barbara, who had already been through two winters at Spirit Lake, assured Daniel that this was just a phase, that by Christmas at the latest things would get back to normal.

  Before they did, though, something quite extraordinary happened, an event that was to shape the rest of Daniel’s life — and Barbara’s as well, though in a far more terrible way. A man sang.

  There had been less and less music of any sort lately. One of the best musicians at Spirit Lake, a man who could play just about any musical instrument there was, had been released in October. A short time later a very good tenor who was serving twelve years for manslaughter had let go, walking out beyond the perimeter early one Sunday morning to detonate the lozenge in his stomach. No one had had the heart, after that, to violate the deepening silence of the dorms with songs unworthy of those whom they could all still clearly call to mind. The only exception was a feeble-minded migrant woman who liked to drum her fingers on the pipes of the Franklin stove, drumming with a stolid, steady, rather cheerful lack of invention until someone would get fed up and drag her back to her mattress at the far end of the dorm.

  Then on the evening in question, a windless Tuesday and bitterly cold, that single voice rose from their assembled silence like a moon rising over endless fields of snow. For the briefest moment, for the length of a phrase, it seemed to Daniel that the song could not be real, that it sprang from inside himself, so perfect it was, so beyond possibility, so willing to confess what must always remain inexpressible, a despair flowering now like a costly fragrance in the dorm’s fetid air.

  It took hold of each soul so, leveling them all to ashes with a single breath, like the breath of atomic disintegration, joining them in the communion of an intolerable and lovel
y knowledge, which was the song and could not be told of apart from the song, so that they listened for each further swelling and subsiding as if it issued from the chorus of their mortal hearts, which the song had made articulate. Listening, they perished.

  Then it stopped.

  For another moment the silence sought to extend the song, and then even that vestige was gone. Daniel breathed, and the plumes of his breath were his own. He was alone inside his body in a cold room.

  “Christ,” Barbara said softly.

  There was a sound of cards being shuffled and dealt.

  “Christ,” she repeated. “Couldn’t you just curl up and die?” Seeing Daniel look puzzled, she translated: “I mean, it’s just so fucking beautiful.”

  He nodded.

  She lifted her jacket off the nail on which it hung. “Let’s go outside. I don’t care if I freeze to death — I want some fresh air.”

  Despite the cold, it did come as a relief to be out of the dorm, in the seeming freedom of the snow. They went where no feet had trampled it to stand beside one of the square stone posts that marked the camp’s perimeter. If it hadn’t been for the glare of the lights on the snow they might have been standing in any empty field. Even the lights, high on their metal poles, didn’t seem so pitiless tonight, with the stars so real above them in the spaces of the sky.

  Barbara, too, was considering the stars. “They go there, you know. Some of them.”

  “To the stars?”

  “Well, to the planets, anyhow. But to the stars too, for all that anybody knows. Wouldn’t you, if you could?”

  “If they do, they must never come back. It would take such a long time. I can’t imagine it.”

  “I can.”

  She left it at that. Neither of them spoke again for a long while. Far off in the night a tree creaked, but there was no wind.

  “Did you know,” she said, “that when you fly the music doesn’t stop? You’re singing and at a certain point you kind of lose track that it’s you who’s singing, and that’s when it happens. And you’re never aware that the music stops. The song is always going on somewhere. Everywhere! Isn’t that incredible?”

  “Yeah, I read that too. Some celebrity in the Minneapolis paper said the first time you fly it’s like being a blind man who has an operation and can see things for the first time. But then, after the shock is over, after you’ve been flying regularly, you start taking it all for granted, the same as the people do who’ve never been blind.”

  “I didn’t read it,” Barbara said, miffed. “I heard it.”

  “You mean you flew?”

  “Yes.”

  “No kidding!”

  “Just once, when I was fifteen.”

  “Jesus. You’ve actually done it. I’ve never known anyone who has.”

  “Well, now you know two of us.”

  “You mean the guy who sang in there tonight? You think he can fly?”

  “It’s pretty obvious.”

  “I did wonder. It wasn’t like anyone else’s singing I’d ever heard. There was something… uncanny about it. But Jesus, Barbara, you’ve done it! Why didn’t you ever say so before? I mean, Christ Almighty, it’s like finding out you shook hands with God.”

  “I don’t talk about it because I only did it that one time. I’m not naturally musical. It just isn’t in me. When it happened I was very young, and very stoned, and I just took off.”

  “Where were you? Where did you go? Tell me about it!”

  “I was at my cousin’s house in West Orange, New Jersey. They had a hook-up in the basement, but no one had ever got off on it. People would buy an apparatus then the way they’d buy a grand piano, as a status symbol. So when I hooked up I didn’t really expect anything to happen. I started singing, and something happened inside my head, like when you’re falling asleep and you begin to lose your sense of what size you are, if you’ve ever had that feeling. I didn’t pay any attention to it, though, and went right on singing. And then the next thing I knew I was outside my body. At first I thought my ears had popped, it was as simple as that.”

  “What did you sing?”

  “I was never able to remember. You lose touch with your ego in an ordinary way. If you’re totally focused on what you’re singing, any song can get you off, supposedly. It must have been something from the top twenty, since I wouldn’t have known much else in those days. But what counts isn’t the song. It’s the way you sing it. The commitment you can give.”

  “Like tonight?”

  “Right.”

  “Uh-huh. So then what happened?”

  “I was alone in the house. My cousin had gone off with her boyfriend, and her parents were away somewhere. I was nervous and a bit afraid, I guess. For a while I just floated where I was.”

  “Where was that?”

  “About two inches above the tip of my nose. It felt peculiar.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “Then I began flying from one part of the basement to the other.”

  “You had wings? I mean, real wings?”

  “I couldn’t see myself, but it felt like real wings. It felt like a great charge of power in the middle of my spine. Will power, in the most literal sense. I had this sense of being totally focused on what I was doing, and where I was going — and that’s what the flying was. It was as though you could drive a car by just looking at the road ahead of you.”

  Daniel closed his eyes to savor the idea of a freedom so perfect and entire.

  “I flew around the basement for what seemed like hours. I’d closed the basement door behind me, like a dummy, and the windows were all sealed tight, so there was no way to get out of the basement. People don’t consider making fairy-holes until they’ve actually got off the ground. It didn’t matter though. I was so small that the basement seemed as big as a cathedral. And almost that beautiful. More than almost — it was incredible.”

  “Just flying around?”

  “And being aware. There was a shelf of canned goods. I can still remember the light that came out of the jars of jam and tomatoes. Not really a light though. It was more as though you could see the life still left in them, the energy they’d stored up while they were growing.”

  “You must have been hungry.”

  She laughed. “Probably.”

  “What else?” he insisted. It was Daniel who was hungry, who was insatiable.

  “At a certain point I got afraid. My body — my physical body that was lying there in the hook-up — didn’t seem real to me. No, I suppose it seemed real enough, maybe even too much so. But it didn’t seem mine. Have you ever been to a zoo?”

  Daniel shook his head.

  “Well then I can’t explain.”

  Barbara was quiet for a while. Daniel looked at her body, swollen with pregnancy, and tried to imagine the feeling she couldn’t explain. Except in gym class he didn’t pay much attention to his own body. Or to other people’s, for that matter.

  “There was a freezer in the basement. I hadn’t noticed it till at one point the motor started up. You know how there’s a shudder first, and then a steady hum. Well, for me, then, it was like a symphony orchestra starting up. I was aware, without seeing it, of the part of the engine that was spinning around. I didn’t go near it, of course. I knew that any kind of rotary motor is supposed to be dangerous, like quicksand, but it was so… intoxicating. Like dance music that you can’t possibly resist. I began spinning around where I was, very slowly at first, but there was nothing to keep me from going faster. It was still pure will power. The faster I let myself spin the more exciting, and inviting, the motor seemed. Without realizing it, I’d drifted over to the freezer and I was spinning along the same axis as the motor. I lost all sense of everything but that single motion. I felt like… a planet! It could have gone on forever and I wouldn’t have cared. But it stopped. The freezer shut itself off, and as the motor slowed down, so did I. Even that part was wonderful. But when it had stopped completely, I was scared shitless. I realized what
had happened, and I’d heard that that was how a lot of people had just disappeared. I would have. Gladly. I would to this day. When I remember.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “I went back to the hook-up. Back to my body. There’s a kind of crystal you touch, and the moment you touch it, zip, you’re back inside yourself.”

  “And the whole thing was real? You didn’t just imagine it?”

  “As real as the two of us talking. As real as the snow on the ground.”

  “And you never flew again after that?”

  “It wasn’t for want of trying, believe me. I’ve spent a small fortune on voice lessons, on drugs, on every kind of therapy there is. But I could never reach escape velocity no matter how I tried. A part of my mind wouldn’t join in, wouldn’t let go. Maybe it was fear of getting trapped inside some dumb engine. Maybe, like I said before, I just don’t have a gift for singing. Anyhow, nothing helped. Finally I stopped trying. And that’s the story of my life. And all I can say is, piss on it.”

  Daniel had the good sense not to try and argue against her bitterness. There even seemed something noble and elevated about it. Compared to Barbara Steiner’s, his own little miseries seemed pretty insignificant.

  There was still a chance, after all, that he could fly.

  And he would! Oh, he would! He knew that now. It was the purpose of his life. He’d found it at last! He would fly! He would learn how to fly!

  Daniel didn’t know how long they’d been standing there in the snow. Gradually, as his euphoria sailed away, he realized that he was cold, that he was aching with the cold, and that they’d better head back to the dorm.

  “Hey, Barbara,” he said, catching the sleeve of her coat in his numb fingers and giving it a reminding yank. “Hey.”