334

by Thomas M. Disch

  Doctor Smilax chuckled and the parabolas began filling with water, inexorably. It rose above Mickey’s ankles, above his knees, above the two white buttons on his shorts.

  Alexa felt an uncomfortable tickle of memory.

  “Y equals x-squared plus 2, does it?” In his anger the evil scientist’s flesh-shield flickered, revealing glimpses of the infamous skull beneath. “Then, try this on for size, Earthling!” Using his fingerbone as chalk, he scribbled on the magic blackboard (it was actually a computer): Y = x2 - 2.

  The parabola tightened. The water rose level with Mickey’s chin, and when he opened his mouth a final wave diminished his would-have-been scream to a mere, silly gargle.

  (It had been thirty years ago, or longer. The blackboard was wiped clean and she had punched the keys for a final equation: x2, and then 8, and then the operant key for Subtract. She had actually clapped her hands with glee when the pathetic little Mickey Mouse had been crushed to death by the tightening of the parabola.)

  As, in the movie, he was crushed to death now, as he had been crushed to death each day for decades all about the world. It was a fantastically successful textbook.

  “There is a lesson in that,” said Loretta Dickens Couplard, entering the room and filling it.

  “But not about parabolas especially,” had replied before she’d turned round. They looked at each other.

  The thought that came, unexpected and so dissembled, was: How old she looks! how altered! The twenty years that had merely nibbled at Alexa (twenty-four, in fact) had simply heaped themselves on Loretta Couplard like a blizzard. In ’02 she had been a passably pretty girl. Now she was a fat old hen.

  Dissembling, Alexa stood up and bent forward to kiss the pink doughy cheek (they would not, so long as a kiss lasted, see each other’s dismay), but the earphones reined her in inches short of her goal.

  Loretta completed the gesture.

  “Well then—” (after this memento mori) “—let’s go into my shambles, shall we?” Alexa, smiling, disconnected herself from the viewer.

  “It’s out the door and around the corner. The school is spread out over four buildings. Three of them official landmarks.” She led the way, lumbering down the dark hall and chattering about architecture. When she opened the door to the street the wind reached into her dress and made a sail of it. There seemed to be enough orange Wooly© on her to rig up a fair-sized yawl.

  East 77th was innocent of traffic except for a narrow, not very busy, bicycle path. Potted ginkgos dotted the concrete and real grass pressedup voluptuously through the cracks. Rarely did the city afford the pleasure of ruins, and Alexa drank it in.

  (Somewhere she had seen a wall, all built of massive blocks of stone. Birds rested in the cracks where mortar had been chipped away and looked down at her. It had been the underside of a bridge—a bridge that had lost its river.)

  “Such weather,” she said, lingering beside one of the benches.

  “Yes, April.” Loretta, who was still being blown apart, was reluctant to take the hint.

  “It’s the only time, except for maybe a week in October, that New York is even viable.”

  “Mm. Why don’t we talk out here then? At least until the children claim it for their own.” Then, once they’d plunked themselves down: “Sometimes, you know, I almost think I’d like the street rezoned again. Cars make such a soothing noise. Not to mention the graft I have to pay.” She made a honking sound through her nose, expressive of cynicism.

  “Graft?” Alexa asked, feeling it was expected of her.

  “It comes under ‘maintenance’ in the budget.”

  They regarded the windy month of April. The young grass fluttered. Strands of red hair whipped Loretta’s face. She clamped a hand upon her head.

  “What do you think it costs to keep this place going for one school-year—what do you think?”

  “I couldn’t begin to … I’ve never … ”

  “A million and a half. Just slightly under.”

  “It’s hard to believe,” she said. (Could she have cared less?)

  “It would be a lot more if it weren’t that half of us, including me, is paid directly from Albany.” Loretta went on, with aggrieved relish, to render an accounting of the school’s finances circumstantial enough to have satisfied the Angel of Judgment. Alexa could not have felt more embarrassed if Loretta had begun to relate the unseemliest details of her private life. Indeed, between old school chums a friendly titbit or two might have helped restore a lapsed intimacy. In the old days Alexa had even once been in the same room while Loretta was getting laid by the Geology lab assistant. Or was it vice versa? In any case there had been few secrets between them. But to bring up a subject like one’s own private income so blatantly, and then to dwell upon it this way— it was shocking. Alexa was aghast.

  Eventually a hint of purposefulness became apparent in the drift of Loretta’s indiscretions. The school was kept alive by a grant from the Balanchine Foundation. Beyond an annual lump sum of fifty thousand dollars, the Foundation awarded scholarships to thirty-two entering students. Each year the school had to round up a new herd of qualified candidates, for the grant was conditional upon maintaining a sixty/forty ratio between paying and scholarship students.

  “So now you see,” Loretta said, nervously dallying with her big zipper, “why your phone call was such a boon.”

  “No, I don’t see, entirely.” Was she angling, God forbid, for a donation? Alexa tried to think of anything she might have said on the phone that could have given Loretta so false an estimate of G.’s tax bracket. Their address, certainly, couldn’t have led her to this mistake: West 87th was distinctly modest.

  “You spoke of working for the Welfare Department,” Loretta said, with a sense of having laid down all her cards.

  The zipper, having reach aphelion, began to descend. Alexa stared at it with candid incomprehension.

  “Oh, Alexa, don’t you see? You can scout them up for us.”

  “But surely in all New York City you don’t have any trouble finding thirty-two candidates? Why, you told me there was a waiting list!”

  “Of those who can pay. The difficulty is getting scholarship students who can meet the physical requirements. There are enough bright kids in the slums, especially if you know what tests to use to find them, but by the time they’re ten years old, eleven years old, they’re all physical wrecks. It’s the combination of a cheap synthetic diet and the lack of exercise.” The zipper, rising, snagged in orange Wooly©. “The grant is from the Balanchine Foundation—oh dear, now see what I’ve done—so there has to be at least a pretense of these kids becoming dancers. Potentially.”

  The zipper wouldn’t budge. The movement of her shoulders slowly spread apart the opened top of the dress, creating a vast decolletage.

  “I’ll certainly keep my eyes opened,” Alexa promised.

  Loretta made a final attempt. Somewhere something ripped. She rose from the bench and forced an operatic laugh. “Let’s repair inside, shall we?”

  On the way to the office Loretta asked all the questions she’d so far neglected—what sports Tancred played, what programs he watched, what subjects he was most apt at, and what his ambitions were, if any.

  “Right now he’s talking about whaling. In general we’ve tried not to coerce him.”

  “Is coming here his own idea then?”

  “Oh, Tank doesn’t even know we’ve applied. G. and I—that’s Gene, my husband, we call each other by our initials—we thought it would be best if we let him finish out the semester in peace where he is.”

  “P.S. 166,” Loretta said, just to prove that she had gone over the application.

  “It’s a good school for the early grades, but after that… ”

  “Of course. Democracy can be carried too far.”

  “It can,” Alexa conceded.

  They had reached the shambles, which was neither an office nor a bedroom nor yet a restaurant altogether. Loretta rearranged the upper part of h
er person inside a maroon sweater and tucked the lower, grosser half of herself out of sight behind an oak desk. Alexa at once felt herself more friendly disposed to her.

  “I hope you don’t think I’m being too pokey?”

  “Not at all.”

  “And Mr. Miller? What does he do?”

  “He’s in heat-retrieval systems.”

  “Oh.”

  (G. would always add, at this point, “I fight entropy for a living.” Should she?)

  “Well. Most of our parents, you know, come from the humanities. Like us. If Tancred should come to the Lowen School, it’s not likely that he’ll ever follow in his father’s technological footsteps. Does Mr. Miller realize that?”

  “We’ve discussed it. It’s funny—” in evidence she laughed, once, meagerly, through her nose “—but it’s actually G. who’s been more in favor of Tank coming here. Whereas my first thought was to enroll him at Stuyvesant.”

  “Did you apply there?”

  “Yes. I’m still waiting to hear if he’s been accepted.”

  “It would be cheaper, of course.”

  “We’ve tried not to let that be a consideration. G. went to Stuyvesant, but he doesn’t have good feelings about it. And while I enjoyed my education well enough, I can’t see that it’s enriched my life so awfully much more than G.’s that I can feel justified in my uselessness.”

  “Are you useless?”

  “Yes, relative to an engineer. The humanities! What good has it done for either of us, practically? I’m a caseworker and you’re teaching kids the same things we learned so that they can grow up to do what? At best, they’ll be caseworkers and teachers.”

  Loretta nodded her head consideringly. She seemed to be trying to keep from smiling. “But your husband disagrees?”

  “Oh, he feels his life has been wasted too.” This time her laughter was genuine.

  Loretta, after only a moment more of noncommittal silence, joined her. Then they had coffee, from actual beans that Loretta ground herself, and small hard cookies covered with pignoli. They were imported from South America.

  3

  Towards the end of his campaign against the Marcomanni, the Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote: “Consider the past: such great changes of political supremacies. One may foresee as well the things which will be. For they will certainly take the same form. Accordingly, to have contemplated human life for forty years is the same as to have contemplated it for ten thousand years. For what more will you see than you have seen already?”

  Dear Ruth—

  Alexa wrote in ballpoint (it was after eleven, G. was asleep) in the empty back pages of Tank’s fifth-grade project about the moon. She remembered to stick in the date: April 12, 2025. Now the page balanced. She tried the sounds of various openings in her head but they were all stiff with civility. Her usual Introibo, an apology for being late to reply, was this once not so. (What would Bernie have said? He’d have said, “Clear the air—say what you’re really feeling!”)

  First, to clear the air…

  The pen moved slowly, forming large upright letters.

  … I must say that your p.s. about Tank pissed me off more than somewhat. You and your tone of I Speak for the Human Spirit! You always are so ready to trounce on my values.

  It was peanut butter, the very thickest. But she slogged on through it.

  As for Tank, his fate still hangs in the balance. Ideally we’d like to send him somewhere (cheap) to be fed orts and crumbs of every art, science, craft, and…

  She waited for the last term of the series.

  The new Monsanto commercial came roaring through the wall: YOU LOOK SO PRETTY IN SHOES! YOU LOOK SO NICE IN—

  “Turn that down!” she called in to her son, and wrote:

  … fashion until he was old enough to decide for himself what he “liked.” But I might as well fill in his Modicum application right now as doom him with that kind of education. I’ll say this much for the Lowen School—it doesn’t graduate a lot of useless Renaissance nincompoops! I know too many of that sort professionally, and the best sweep streets—illegally!

  Maybe Stuyvesant is as bad as you say, a kind of institutional Moriah, an altar specially put up for the sacrifice of my only begotten. I sometimes think so. But I also believe—the other half of the time—that some such sacrifice is required. You don’t like G, but it’s G. and those like him who are holding our technological world together. If her son could be trained to be either an actor or a soldier, what choice do you think a Roman matron would have made? That’s a bit overmuch but you know what I mean.

  (Don’t you?)

  She realized that, probably, Ruth wouldn’t know what she meant. And she wasn’t entirely sure she meant it.

  At the very beginning of the First World War, as the Germans advanced towards the Marne and the Austrians pressed northward into Poland, a thirty-four-year-old ex-high school teacher living in a Munich rooming house had just completed the first draft of what was going to be the best-selling book of 1919 throughout Germany. In his introduction he wrote:

  We are a civilized people: to us both the springtime pleasures of the 12th Century and the harvests of the 18th have been denied. We must deal with the cold facts of a winter existence, to which the parallel is to be found not in the Athens of Pericles but in the Rome of Augustus. Greatness in painting, in music, in architecture are no longer, for the West, possibilities. For a young man coming of age in late Roman times, a student abubble with all the helter-skelter enthusiasms of youth, it needn’t have been too brutal a disappointment to learn that some of his hopes would, necessarily, come to nothing. And if the hopes that had been blasted were those he held most dear, well, any lad worth his salt will make do, undismayed, with what is possible, and necessary. Say that there is a bridge to be built at Alcantara: then he will build it—and with a Roman’s pride. A lesson can be drawn from this that would be of benefit to coming generations, as showing them what can, and therefore must, be, as well as what is excluded from the spiritual possibilities of their own time. I can only hope that men of the next generation may be moved by this book to devote themselves to engineering instead of poetry, to the sea instead of the paintbrush, to politics instead of epistemology. Better than this they could not do.

  Dear Ruth,

  she began again, on a fresh sheet.

  Each time I write you I’m convinced you don’t understand a word. (In fact, often as not, I don’t even send my finished letter.) It’s not just that I think you’re stupid, though I suppose I do, but that you have so well trained yourself in that difficult form of dishonesty that you call “faith ” that you can’t any longer see the world the way it is.

  And yet… (with you there is always that redeeming “and yet”)… I do continue to invite your misunderstanding, just as I keep on inviting Merriam to the villa. Merriam—have I introduced her yet?—is my latest transfigure of “you.” A highly Christian, terribly sexy Jewess who follows heresy the way other women follow the arena. At her worst she can be as sententious as you at yours, but there are other moments when I’m convinced she really does experience… whatever it is … in a different way than I do. Call it her spirituality, though the word makes me squirm. We will be out in the garden, watching hummingbirds or some such, and Merriam will sink into her own thoughts, and they seem to glow inside her like the flame in an alabaster lamp.

  Yet I wonder if this isn’t, after all, an illusion. Every lout learns at some point in his life to make his silences seem weighty with unspoken meaning. A single word can extinguish the flame in the lamp. It is, this spirituality of yours and hers, so humorless! “Getting into baskets,” indeed!

  And yet… I would—and this is a confession—love to pack a bag and fly out to Idaho and learn to sit still and make baskets or any other dumb thing, so long as I could throw off the weight of my life here. To learn to breathe! Sometimes New York terrifies me and usually it appalls me, and the moments of High Civilization that should compensate for the danger
and the pain of living here are less and less frequent as I grow older. Yes, I would love to surrender myself to your way of life (I fancy it would be something like being raped by a huge, mute, and ultimately gentle Nigger), though I know I never will, It’s important to me, therefore, that you are out there in the wilderness, redeeming my urban sins. Like a stylite.

  Meanwhile I’ll go on doing what I think is my duty. (We are the daughters, after all, of an Admiral!) The city is sinking, but then the city has always been sinking. The miracle is that it works at all, that it doesn’t just…

  The second page of the second letter was filled. Reading it over she realized it could never be mailed to her sister. Their relationship, already rickety, would never support the weight of this much honesty. But she finished the sentence anyhow:

  … collapse.

  A quarter of a millennium after the Meditations and fifteen hundred years before The Decline of the West, Salvian, a priest of Marseilles, described the process whereby the free citizens of Rome were gradually reduced to a condition of serfdom. The upper classes had arranged the tax laws to their own convenience and then administered them crookedly to their further convenience. The entire burden of supporting the army—Rome’s army, of course, was vast, a nation within a nation—fell on the shoulders of the poor. The poor grew poorer. Finally, reduced to utter destitution, some fled from their villages to live among the barbarians, even though (as Salvian notes) they did give off a dreadful odor. Others, living far from the frontiers, became bagaudae, or homemade vandals. The majority, however, rooted to the land by their property and families, had to accept the terms of the rich potentiores, to whom they made over their houses, their lands, their possessions, and at last the freedom of their children. The birth rate declined. All Italy became a wasteland. Repeatedly the Emperors were obliged to invite the politer barbarians across the borders to “colonize” the abandoned farms.