On Wings of Song

by Thomas M. Disch

  “Right,” she agreed sadly, but without stirring.

  “We’d better head back to the dorm.”

  “Right.”

  “It’s cold.”

  “Very. Yes.” She still stood there. “Would you do me a favor first?”

  “What?”

  “Kiss me.”

  Usually he would have been flustered by such a suggestion, but there was something in the tone of her voice that reassured him. He said, “Okay.”

  With her eyes looking straight into his, she slid her fingers under the collar of his jacket and then back around his neck. She pulled him close until their faces touched. Hers was as cold as his, and probably as numb. Her mouth opened and she pressed her tongue against his lips, gently urging them apart.

  He closed his eyes and tried to let the kiss be real. He’d kissed a girl once before, at a party, and thought the whole process a bit unnatural, if also, at last, rather nice. But he couldn’t stop thinking of Barbara’s bad teeth, and by the time he’d braced himself to the idea of pushing his tongue around inside her mouth, she’d had enough.

  He felt guilty for not having done more, but she seemed not to care. At least Daniel supposed that her faraway look meant she’d got what she wanted, though he didn’t really know what that might have been. Even so, he felt guilty. Or at the very least confused.

  “Thank you,” she said. “That was sweet.”

  With automatic politeness Daniel answered, “You’re welcome.” Oddly that was not the wrong thing to say.

  Of the man whose song had so wrought upon him, Daniel knew little, not even his real name. In the camp he was known as Gus, having inherited a work shirt across the back of which a former prisoner had stenciled that name. He was a tall, lean, red-faced, ravaged-looking man, somewhere in his forties, who had arrived two weeks ago with a nasty cut over his left eye that was now a puckered scarlet scar. People speculated that he’d been sent up for the fight that had got him the scar, which would have been congruent with his sentence, a bare ninety days. Likely, he’d started the fight on purpose to get that sentence, since a winter at Spirit Lake was more survivable than a jobless and houseless winter in Des Moines, where he came from, and where vagrants, which is what he seemed to be, often died en masse during the worst cold spells.

  An ugly customer, without a doubt, but that did not prevent Daniel, as he lay awake that night, from rehearsing, in rather abundant detail, their future relationship, beginning at the moment, tomorrow, that Daniel, would approach him as supplicant and maybe, ultimately, even as friend, though the latter possibility was harder to envision in concrete terms, since, aside from his being such a sensational singer, Daniel couldn’t see, as yet, what there was to like in Gus, or whoever he was, though it had to be there — his song was the proof. With this faith then in Gus’s essential goodness, despite appearances, Daniel (in his daydream) approached the older man (who was, at first, not friendly at all and used some extremely abusive language) and put this simple proposition to him — that Gus should teach Daniel to sing. In payment for his lessons Daniel agreed, after much haggling and more abuse, to give over to Gus each day his supplementary dinner from McDonald’s. Gus was skeptical at first, then delighted at such generous and self-sacrificing terms. The lessons began (this part was rather sketchy, since Daniel had no very clear notion of what, besides scales, voice lessons might entail) and came to an end with a kind of graduation ceremony that took place on the evening before Daniel’s release. Daniel, gaunt from his long fast, his eyes aglow with inspiration, took leave of his fellow prisoners with a song as piercing and authentic as the song Gus had sung tonight. Perhaps (being realistic) this was asking too much. Perhaps that level of mastery would take longer. But the essential part of the daydream seemed feasible, and in the morning, or at the latest after work, Daniel meant to set his plan in motion.

  Daniel’s life — the life of his own choosing — was about to begin! Meanwhile, once more, he let his wishes soar, like a little flock of birds, over the vistas of an achieved and merited delight, towards the rustling fields of sleep.

  The next morning, several minutes before the usual 5:30 reveille, the whistle sounded. While people were still struggling out of their blankets, its shrill ululation stopped. They all realized that someone had let go, and by the simple process of counting off they found out it had been Barbara Steiner, at whose number, 22, there was only a silence.

  A man at the other end of the dorm remarked, in a tone of elegy, “Well, she’s performed her last abortion.”

  Most of the prisoners curled back into their mattresses for the moments of warmth still due them, but three of them, including Daniel, got dressed and went outside in time to see the Warden’s pickup come and cart her body away. She’d gone through the perimeter at just the point where they had talked together the night before.

  All the rest of the day, as he tended the vats in the steamy false summer of the station, Daniel tried to reconcile his grief at Barbara’s suicide, which was quite genuine, with a euphoria that no other consideration could deplete or noticeably modify. His new-fledged ambition was like a pair of water-wings that bore him up to the sunlit surface of the water with a buoyancy stronger than every contrary effort towards a decent, respectful sorrow. Sometimes, indeed, he would feel himself drifting toward tears, but with a sense rather of comfort than of pain. He wondered, even, if there hadn’t been more of comfort than of pain for Barbara in the thought of death. Wasn’t it possible that that was what their kiss had been about? A kind of farewell, not just to Daniel but to hopefulness in general?

  Of course, the thought of death and the fact of it are two different things, and Daniel couldn’t finally agree that the fact is ever anything but bad news. Unless you believed in some kind of afterlife or other. Unless you thought that a spark of yourself could survive the ruin of your body. After all, if fairies could slip loose from the knot of the flesh, why not souls? That had been Daniel’s father’s view of the matter, the one time they’d discussed it, long ago.

  There was, however, one major stumbling-block to believing in the old-fashioned, Christian type of soul. Namely, that while fairies were aware of fairies in exactly the way that people are aware of each other, by the senses of sight and hearing and touch, no fairy had ever seen a soul. Often (Daniel had read) a group of them would gather at the bedside of someone who was dying, to await the moment, wished for or believed in, of the soul’s release. But what they always had witnessed, instead, was simply a death — not a release but a disappearance, a fading-out, an end. If there were souls, they were not made of the same apprehensible substance as fairies, and all the theories about the soul that had been concocted over the centuries were probably based on the experience of the rare, fortunate individuals who’d found their way to flight without the help of a hookup, like the saints who had floated while they prayed, and the yogis of India, etc… Such was the theory of people who had flown, and their outspokenness was one of the reasons that flying and everything to do with it were the focus of such distress and downright hatred among the undergoders, who had to believe in the soul and all the rest of that, since what else was there for them to look forward to except their hereafter? The poor, benighted sons-of-bitches.

  For that matter, what had he had to believe in up till now? Not a thing. But now! Now belief had come to him and burned inside him. By the light of its fire all things were bright and fair, and the darkness beyond the range of his vision was of no concern.

  His faith was simple. All faiths are. He would fly. He would learn to sing, and by singing he would fly. It was possible. Millions of others had done it, and like them, so would he. He would fly. It was only necessary to hang on to that one idea. As long as he did, nothing else mattered — not the horror of these vats, not the rigors or desolations of Spirit Lake, not Barbara’s death, nor the life he’d go back to in Amesville. Nothing in the world mattered except the moment, dim but certain in the blackness of the years ahead, when he would feel
wings spring from his immaterial will and he would fly.

  Daniel got back to the dorm just as the auction of Barbara Steiner’s personal effects was getting under way. They were spread out for inspection, and people were filing past the table with the same skittish curiosity mourners would pay to a dead body. Daniel took his place in the line, but when he got near enough to the table to recognize the single largest item being offered up (besides the ticking and stuffing of her mattress), he let out a whoop of pure, unthinking indignation, pushed his way to the table, and reappropriated his long-lost copy of The Product Is God.

  “Put that back, Weinreb,” said the trustee in charge of the auction, a Mrs. Gruber, who was also, by virtue of her seniority at Spirit Lake the chief cook and head janitor. “You can bid for that the same as anyone else.”

  “This book isn’t up for auction,” he said with the belligerence of righteousness. “It’s already mine. It was stolen out of my mattress weeks ago and I never knew who by.”

  “Well, now you know,” said Mrs. Gruber complacently. “So put it the fuck back on the table.”

  “God damn it, Mrs. Gruber, this book belongs to me!”

  “It was inside Steiner’s matress with the rest of her crap, and it is going to be auctioned.”

  “If that’s where it was, it’s because she stole it.”

  “Begged, borrowed, stole — makes no difference to me. Shame on you anyhow for talking that way about your own friend. God only knows what she had to do to get that book.”

  There was laughter, and one voice in the crowd, and then another, elaborated Mrs. Gruber’s implication with specific suggestions. It was flustering, but Daniel stood by his rights.

  “It is my book. Ask the guards. They had to cut pages out before I could have it. There’s probably a record of that somewhere. It is mine.”

  “Well, that may be or it may not, but there’s no way you can prove to us that Barbara didn’t come by it fair and square. We’ve only got your word for it.”

  He could see that she had the majority behind her. There was nothing to be done. He gave her the book, and it was the first item to go to the block (There weren’t that many more). Then some son-of-a-bitch had the nerve to bid against him, and he had to go up to five Big Macs, almost a full week’s dinners, to get it back.

  Only after the bidding was done did he realize that the voice he’d been bidding against belonged to Gus.

  After the auction was the lottery. Everyone had the number he counted off by at reveille. Daniel was 34, and it came up, winning him back one of his McDonald’s vouchers. But not the one for tonight’s meal, so that when the guard brought round the dinners that night Daniel had to make do with a bowl of Mrs. Gruber’s watery soup and a single slice of white bread smeared with a dab of extended cheese.

  For the first time in weeks he felt hungry. Usually dinner left him with a queasy sensation. It must have been the anger. He would have liked to drown old Mrs. Gruber in a kettle of the slop she cooked. And that was just the first of his angers. Peel that away and there were more — against Barbara for stealing his book, against Gus for bidding for it, against the whole lousy prison and its guards, and all the world outside the prison, because they were the ones who had sent him here. There was no way to think about it without going crazy, and there was no way, once you started, to stop.

  Clearly, this was not the right time to approach Gus and make his proposition. Instead he played chess with Bob Lundgren, and played so well that (although he didn’t finally win) for the first time he put Lundgren on the defensive and even captured his queen.

  While they played he was aware, at different times, that Gus, who had never (so far as he knew) paid any notice to him before, was looking at him with a far-off but unwavering attention. Why should that be? It seemed almost a kind of telepathy, as if Gus knew, without his saying anything, what Daniel had in mind.

  The next day the truck conveying Daniel and the rest of the E.S.78 work crew back to the compound was delayed by a roadblock. This was an unusually thorough one. Everyone, including the guards, had to get out and be frisked, while another set of inspectors examined the truck from its broken headlights to its raggedy mudflaps.

  They were an hour late clocking in at the dorm. Daniel had been meaning, very first thing, to go to Gus and get it over, but once again the moment wasn’t right. Gus and Bob Lundgren were already deep in a game of chess, which Daniel was invited to watch, and which for a while he did. But they played slowly, and without a personal stake in the game it was impossible to pay attention.

  Daniel decided to return to The Product Is God. It was no longer the book he’d begun four months ago. Just the fact that Barbara Steiner had preceded him through its final chapters, leaving behind a spoor of scribbled marginalia, made it seem not quite the harmless trampoline for bright, beside-the-point ideas that it had seemed at first glance.

  Dangerous ideas, however, are also, necessarily, more interesting ideas, and Daniel read the book this time with none of his former, lingering pleasure. He read greedily, as though it might be snatched away again before he’d discovered its secret. Again and again he found ideas that Barbara had lifted out of the book and used in her own arguments, such as the one about purity of heart being to will one thing, which turned out not even to be Van Dyke’s idea, but somebody else’s centuries ago.

  What did seem to be Van Dyke’s own idea (and which eventually connected up with the other) was his theory that people live in two completely unrelated worlds. The first world that comes in a set with the flesh and the devil — the world of desire, the world people think they can control. Over against this was God’s world, which is larger and more beautiful, but crueler too, at least from the limited viewpoint of human beings. The example Van Dyke gave was Alaska. In God’s world you just had to give up trying and trust to luck, and you would probably either freeze to death or die of starvation.

  The other world, the human world, was more visible, more survivable, but it was also, unfortunately, completely corrupt, and the only way to get ahead in it was to take a hand in the corruption. Van Dyke called this “rendering unto Caesar.” The basic problem, then, for anyone wanting to lead a life that wasn’t just dog-eat-dog, was how to render unto God. Not, Van Dyke insisted, by trying to live in God’s world, since that amounted to suicide, concerning which there was an entire chapter called “The Saints Go Marchin’ In!” (Here Barbara’s underlinings became almost co-extensive with the text, and the margins flowered with breathless assents: “How true!” “Exactly!” “I Agree.”) Rather than try to take heaven by storm Van Dyke suggested that you set yourself a single life-task and stick to it through hell or high water. (Purity of heart, etc.) It made no difference which life-task, so long as it was of no material advantage. Van Dyke offered a number of silly possibilities and anecdotes about celebrities who’d found their way to God by such diverse paths as basket-weaving, breeding dachshunds, and translating The Mill on the Floss into a language that only computers could read.

  Daniel, happy in the discovery of his own life-task, could follow the book easily up to this point, but not beyond. For the notion that all this seemed to be leading up to was that the world was coming to an end. Not God’s world — that would always go rolling along — but the world of man, Caesar’s world. Van Dyke, like some bearded prophet in a cartoon, was announcing the end of Western Civilization — or as he styled it, “the Civilization of the Business Man.” (“Biz. Civ.” for short.)

  Van Dyke seemed to face this prospect with his usual cold-blooded equanimity. “How much better,” he wrote, “to live at the end of such a civilization than at its heights! Now, with half the faulty mechanism in ruins and the other half grinding to a halt for want of lubrication, its power over our souls and our imaginations is so much less than it would have been if we’d lived a hundred or two hundred years ago, when the whole capitalist contraption was just getting its first head of steam. We see now, as our forebears never could, where this overweeni
ng enterprise was leading — to the ruin of humankind, or of as much of humankind, at least, as has cast its lot with Biz. Civ. But a ruin, let us admit it, that is altogether fitting and proper, a thoroughly merited ruin, which we are obliged to inhabit as becomes decaying gentry. That is to say, with as much style as we can muster, with whatever pride we can still pretend to, and with, most importantly, a perfect nonchalance.”

  Daniel was not about to admit that his world was coming to an end, much less that it ought to. This particular corner of it was nothing to write home about, certainly, but it would be a hard thing for any lad freshly come to a sense of his own high purpose to be told that the firm is going out of business. Who was Reverend Van Dyke to be making such pronouncements? Just because he’d spent a few weeks traveling to such places as Cairo and Bombay for the National Council of Churches’ Triage Committee didn’t give him the authority to write off the whole damned world! Things might be as bad as he said in the places he’d been to, but he hadn’t been everywhere. He hadn’t, for one thing, been to Iowa (Unless the pages the prison censor had torn from the back of the book were about the Farm Belt, which didn’t seem likely from the title of the missing chapter as printed on the contents page — “Where Peace Prevails”). Iowa, for all its faults, was not about to run into an iceberg and sink, like Van Dyke’s favorite example of the fate of Biz. Civ., the lost city of Brasilia.

  It was an infuriating book. Daniel was glad to be done with it. If that was the way people thought in New York he could almost understand undergoders wanting to send in the National Guard and take the city over. Almost but not quite.

  The next day was Christmas Eve, and when Daniel got back from work a ratty old tree was going up in the dorm under Warden Shiel’s personal supervision. Once the limbs were slotted into the trunk and the ornaments had been hung up and, for a final glory, a tinsely angel had been tied to the top, the prisoners were assembled around the tree (Daniel stood in the last row, with the tallest) and Warden Shiel took their picture, copies of which would later be mailed out to relevant relatives.