On Wings of Song

by Thomas M. Disch

  “I laughed,” she said, in her next breath. “And I’m so…” She raised both her hands and pressed the fingers together. “… inexpressibly relieved!”

  “Well, that’s anatomy for you.”

  “Oh, not just physically relieved. Though perhaps that is the more important aspect, at last. But I’d worried so. About having no feelings. No earthly feelings. I didn’t think I’d be able to sing again, without feelings. But if I can laugh… You see?”

  “Good. I’m glad you can laugh. Maybe it was my kiss that did the trick. Just like the fairy tale. Almost like it, anyhow.”

  She let her hands rest, one atop the other, on her stomach. “I don’t feel tired now. I’ll tell you about my life in the beyond, if you like.”

  “So you won’t have to wait till tomorrow to leave?”

  She smiled, and it was, though faint, a real smile, not the simulation she’d been practicing. “Oh, you’ll have months of me. How can I sing in this condition? And months are a long time here, aren’t they? They’re not, in the beyond. Time is quite beside the point.”

  “Fifteen years just go by in a flash?”

  “Thirteen did. That’s what I’m trying to explain.”

  “I’m sorry. Tell your story. I won’t interrupt.” He put his coat on the hook, pulled the chair a bit closer to her bed, and sat down.

  “I was caught in a trap, you see. The first night, after I left my body, I was so… delighted.” She spoke with a peculiar fervor, with the sudden, illumined lucidity of martyrdom. The present, flesh-encumbered moment vanished in the blaze of a remembered noon. “I flew out of the hotel, and up, and the city, beneath me, became a kind of slow, ponderous, magnificent firework display. It was a cloudy night, without stars, so that, very soon, the city became the stars, some still, some moving. The longer I looked, the clearer it became, and vaster too, and more orderly, as though each node of light were laboring to explain itself, to tear itself up out of the darkness and… and kiss me. Though not like your kiss, Daniel. Really, I don’t think it can be explained. It was such an immensity of beauty.” She smiled, and held up her hands to mark off some twelve inches. “Bigger than this.”

  “And you didn’t want to leave it in order to come back to the hotel and nurse my wounded ego. That’s natural enough.”

  “I did though, reluctantly. You were still singing, and I could tell you wouldn’t make it. You weren’t even near the edge. You are now. But you weren’t then.”

  “Thanks for the Band-Aid. But do go on. You returned to the starry night. And then.”

  “The hotel was near the airport. The planes coming in and out seemed, in a comic way, irresistible. Like elephants dancing in a circus. And the sound they made was like Mahler, pulverized and homogenized. It seemed objectively fascinating, though I suppose there was a fascination, underlying that, of a different nature. For what I did that night was follow one of these planes back to Des Moines. It was the same plane we’d come in, as a matter of fact. From Des Moines it was easy to find Worry. I was there by morning. I knew you’d be furious that I wasn’t back yet. I knew I’d made us miss our flight to Rome.”

  “Providentially.”

  “None of that mattered. I was determined to see my father. To see him as he really was. That had always been my obsession, and that part of me hadn’t changed.”

  “So did you get to see him naked?”

  “It was moral nakedness I was after.”

  “I know that, Boa.”

  “No, I never did. I saw him get up on the day after our wedding, eat breakfast, talk to Alethea about the stables, and then he went into his office. I tried to follow. And never made it, of course. I was caught in the fairy-trap in the corridor.”

  “You must have known it was there.”

  “I didn’t believe it could harm me. There didn’t seem to be any limit to what I could do. I felt like some giant unstoppable wave. I believed I could have anything I wanted just by wanting it. Flying is like that. The only thing was, when I saw the trap, or heard it, rather, for one’s first sense of it is of a kind of siren song played on a tuning fork, far, far away and posing no possible danger… when I heard it, that was what I wanted, what my soul lusted for. Whoever designed the thing is someone who has flown, who knows the sweetest sensations of flight and how to magnify them and draw them out. The damned machine is irresistible.”

  “A little rotary engine that spins round and round like a clothes dryer?”

  “Oh, it is easy to resist the lure of ordinary machinery. As easy as refusing a piece of candy. But this bore no relation to anything except, possibly, the solar system itself. There were wheels within wheels, and sets of wheels within sets of wheels, in an infinite recession. One moved through them, flew through them, with a kind of mathematical exultation, a steady unfolding of ‘Eureka!’s, each one pitched, so to speak, an octave higher than the last.”

  “It sounds better than television, I’ve got to admit.”

  “It was like that too: a drama whose plot always became more interesting. Like a game of contract bridge that was, at the same time, a string quartet. Like a test you couldn’t fail, though it stretched you to your limit.”

  “It must have been a great vacation.”

  “They were the thirteen happiest years of my life.”

  “And then?”

  “The tv was turned off. I can still remember the dismay of that moment, as the thing ground down to a stop, and I became aware of where I was and what I’d done. I wasn’t alone, of course. There had been hundreds of us whirling in the same ring-dance, dosie-do, and then ker-plunk. The spell was broken, and there we were, reeling a little still, but beginning to remember. And wishing the dead machine would start up again and sweep us back up into its lovely gears.”

  “Had your father turned it off then?”

  “He? No, never. A mob had broken into Worry. A large mob by the look of the damage they’d been able to do. I never saw the fighting. By the time I’d mustered some purpose and worked my way out of the trap, the National Guard was in charge. So I know nothing about my rescuers, neither their reasons nor what became of them. Perhaps they’d all been killed.”

  “It was never in the news.”

  “My father doesn’t like publicity.”

  “When was that?”

  “The spring before last. Before the trees had budded.”

  Daniel nodded. “Things were pretty desperate in general around then. That was when—” He stopped short.

  “When my aunt died, were you going to say? I know about that. In fact, I was there. I was here too, of course. I didn’t really think you’d have wanted, or been able, to keep my body alive all that time, but I had to find out. I went to the hotel. There’s a kind of cemetery on the roof, with the names of all the missing, and where we must go to find our bodies. Once I’d seen what I’d become, my only wish was to get as far from it as I could. It seemed another kind of trap. I didn’t want to become… meat. I still felt, in a way, new-born, unfledged. For all its fascinations, one doesn’t grow inside a trap. My own sense of it was that only a few weeks had gone by, the weeks I’d spent in Amesville after I’d got out of the trap.”

  “Pursuing your father still?”

  “No. He’d changed. He was older, of course, and also, I thought, smaller. No, it wasn’t on his account I lingered there. It was the landscape. That was as fine as ever. The skies and fields, they seemed my real parents, my source. I watched the first shoots force their way into the light, and each one was like a parable. I was a bird. In the trap I had rushed from complexity to further complexity. Now I became simpler, slower. Though I would still be overtaken by sudden alarms. One of them brought me to New York, and when I’d found this body, a worse alarm drove me away. I went to London, and after my aunt’s death, fled again, this time to Vilars, where I’d been sent to school. I fell in love again with the mountains and lived an eagle’s life. There were many of us there, and I began to learn, from the others, that there w
ere forces of beauty and of… attraction… greater than the earth’s. As you leave it, as you mount above the clouds, above the winds, you shrink into a pinpoint of… it isn’t thought, it isn’t sentience… of purpose, call it. But a purpose so pure, so… unearthly… And then, at a certain height, you cease to be finite at all. There is no distinction of you and them, of here and there, of mind and matter.”

  “What is there then? Anything?”

  “One joins a kind of conscious sphere with the earth at its center, and the sphere revolves. It’s what, in a way, the trap had imitated.”

  “Is it real?”

  “Who can say? It seems, at the time, the only reality. But there’s something beyond even that. What I describe is the view from the threshold, as it were. I knew that, but I didn’t take the next step. If I had, I wouldn’t have returned. That’s quite certain. Something always held me back. The present delight. But not just that. That other gravity: of the earth and its fields, of my body. This body.”

  “Jesus.” Daniel shook his head in mournful admiration. “I’m sorry. I really am sorry.”

  “You needn’t be. I did what I had to, no more. I wasn’t ready to go farther than I did. I hadn’t made a proper farewell. Now I have.”

  “You don’t want me to come back here again?”

  “Did my words betray me again? Come back again if you feel you need to. But not on my account. I’ve told you as much as I know how to tell.”

  Daniel accepted this with the politest of grimaces. Then, smiling at the absurdity of the question that had popped into his head but seeing that it was, by its very irrelevance and triviality, a small revenge for her own Olympian betrayals, he said: “Before I go then, there’s one dumb question I’d like to ask you. Can you guess what it is?”

  “About your family?”

  “No. Time Magazine filled me in about them. My father’s retired and a bit senile. My mother runs a restaurant, and considers me an ingrate. Aurelia works for your father, and like him, has nothing to say about me. My other sister is married and has taken over my father’s dental practice. My question was dumber than that. What did you sing the night you took off? Did you get off on the first song you sang? Was it as easy as that?”

  “I remembered the dream you’d told me about, the dream you had at Spirit Lake. So I sang that song. It was the first thing that came into my head.”

  “ ‘I am the captain of the Pinafore.’ You sang that?”

  “And not even all the way through.”

  Daniel laughed. It seemed splendidly unfair.

  “I’m sorry I asked. Well… good-bye, then.” He took his coat from the hook on the door.

  “Good-bye, Daniel. You will fly, won’t you?”

  He nodded, and closed the door.

  He did, of course, return many times to the Clinic, and Boa never failed to be cordial. Daniel felt obliged to give his own account of the intervening years, though he doubted whether his story held any real interest for her. Mostly when they talked it was about music. Day by day she grew stronger, until at last she was strong enough to attempt departure. She offered to let him be present on the day, just as she might have asked him to see her off at a dock. He declined to do so. She had been certain she’d succeed and she did. Two weeks after she had left her body, medical support was withdrawn, according to her written instructions. Her body continued its automatic processes for another few days, and then it stopped.

  Early in July her ashes were spread, secretly, from a low-flying plane, over the fields of her father’s estate.

  EPILOGUE

  The turkey was half raw, but when Michael, at the head of the table, declared it to be done to a turn, they all assented to the proposition in open defiance of the truth. Poor Cecelia wasn’t to blame. She’d had to drive in to Amesville at noon to pick up Milly and Abe, and Milly, who had been threatening to boycott the family reunion along with her other daughter, had taken an hour to be persuaded to get in the car. By the time Cecelia got back to Unity and shoved the turkey in the oven, the dinner was doomed to failure, at least as a culinary event. If it was anyone’s fault it was Daniel’s, since it was because of his eight o’clock curtain that they couldn’t wait till the turkey was done. Family reunions shouldn’t have to be run on a timetable.

  Daniel loved the house the Hendricks lived in. He wanted to move it, stuffed pike, slapdash sylvan canvas, and all, onto the stage of a theater and use it for the set of Werther. Behold, it would say, this is the way you must live! With coasters under drinks and African violets pining on the windowsill and mincing china statuettes and babies growing up and trying to smash the lot of it.

  Daniel was entranced and already half-in-love with his nephew and namesake, and had already begun, in an avuncular manner, to corrupt the boy, building up towers of alphabet blocks for him to knock down and then inciting everyone to clap for this display of wit and skill. Danny understood at once the nature of applause, that it represented the highest degree of adult attention one could command. He wanted more. Daniel built higher towers, spelling out longer words — TOWER, FLOWER, MANIFEST — and Danny knocked them down with the lightning-bolts of his god-like hands, and the adults continued to enjoy themselves and to applaud. Until they did at last grow restive and started talking to each other again, at which point Danny had knocked over his father’s drink and had to be taken upstairs to bed.

  Of the six other grown-ups at the family reunion, three were complete strangers to Daniel, though Michael, Cecelia’s husband, claimed to be able to remember Daniel from the days when they’d been neighbors on Chickasaw Avenue. Daniel, trying to dredge up a reciprocal remembrance, could only produce an account of a slice of apple pie he’d received as a trick-or-treat offering from Michael’s parents, the Hendricks, and the difficulty he’d had eating it through the mouth-hole of his mask. Actually, it had been another neighbor who’d given him that slice of pie, and the reason he remembered it so clearly was because it had been so much better than his mother’s apple pie. He didn’t however, go into that.

  Across the table from Daniel sat Michael’s much younger brother, Jerry, and Jerry’s girlfriend (his fiancée, until a week ago), Rose. Rose was (if Daniel were excepted) Amesville’s first genuine phoney. Her color didn’t come off in the bathtub. She was also a follower of NBC’s Dr. Silentius and wore a large button that said GOD IS WITHIN. Between them, Rose and Daniel had kept the table-talk limping along in the face of several massive brown-outs. It wasn’t that his family was being unduly hostile (except for Milly, who was); it was more the natural reticence that anyone feels who’s forced to cozy up to a stranger, which, after all, was the situation they were in.

  Of them all Abe seemed least unstrung. He was his usual gently taciturn self. Daniel thought Time had been unfair to say he was senile. The only time his mind seemed distinctly to slip the tracks was when after his second whiskey sour, he asked Daniel, in a tone of guarded inquiry, what prison had been like. Daniel gave the same evasive answer he’d given the first time his father had asked the question nineteen years ago. Prison was a disgrace and he’d rather not discuss it. To which his father replied, once again, that that was probably the wisest attitude Daniel could take. Time, Abe declared, heals all wounds.

  Daniel declined, and then was compelled to accept, a ritual second helping of the stuffing. Just as his plate was passed back to him the phone rang. Cecelia disappeared into the kitchen and returned looking disappointed.

  “That was Mr. Tauber,” she informed Daniel. “He was making sure you were here. He said your chauffeur will be here in half an hour or so.”

  “His chauffeur!” Millie echoed, scathingly. “Get that.”

  She spoke — habitually, it seemed — with her mouth full. Daniel couldn’t remember her doing that when he’d known her. She seemed, in just about every way, to have become coarser. Perhaps it came of running a restaurant.

  “I thought,” Cecelia said, frowning (for she warned her mother about being sarcastic), “that
it might be Aurelia. The least she could do is call up and say hello to Daniel.”

  “Well, I’m sure she would,” said Milly, grinding pepper onto her potatoes, “if she didn’t have her job to think of.”

  “Aurelia works for your old buddy Whiting,” Abe volunteered.

  “He knows that,” Milly said, glaring at her husband.

  “But it’s about all I know,” Daniel said, placatingly. “How did it happen?”

  “Very simple,” Cecelia answered. “She sucked up to him.”

  “Cecelia! Really!”

  “Oh, not physically, Mother. But every other way she could think of. It started actually, on the day of your wedding, Daniel. My sister isn’t one to waste time. She started in on Boadicea, gushing about horses. Boadicea had to promise her that she could come out and ride one of her father’s horses.”

  “It was perfectly natural for Aurelia to talk about horses. She had a passion for horses. Even Daniel should be able to remember that.” Milly was determined to defend her absent daughter, if only because Aurelia had had the courage to stick to her guns and stay away from the family reunion.

  “She had a passion for anything that cost money. Anyhow,” Cecelia went on, relieved to have found, at last, a subject for conversation, “when we all next got together, at the memorial service for you and Boa, Aurelia’s first concern was to remind Miss Whiting, the one who lives in Brazil now—”

  “Alethea lives in Brazil?” Daniel asked.

  Cecelia nodded impatiently. “She came right out and told her about Boadicea’s promise. Well, what could they do? They invited her out there, and she did one of her numbers, and got invited back. She was out at Worry at least once a week for the rest of that summer.”

  “You could have gone too, if you’d wanted,” Milly argued.

  Cecelia disdained to reply.

  “And from that she went on to become his secretary?” Daniel asked.

  “One of his secretaries.”