On Wings of Song

by Thomas M. Disch

  “Dumb shit,” said a girl who had something wrong with her legs. “That’s all he was, a dumb shit.”

  “Oh, I’m not so sure,” said the black. “Anyone can get an attack of conscience. Usually it takes a bit more abuse, not just the idea.”

  “Do many people… uh… ?” It was the first Daniel had spoken, except to fend off questions.

  “Let go? A camp this size, about one a week, I’d say. Less in summer, more in winter, but that’s the average.”

  Others agreed. Some disagreed. Soon they were comparing notes again. The farmer’s body, meanwhile, had been loaded into the rear of the pickup. Before he got back into the cab, the guard waved at the watching prisoners. They did not wave back. The truck did a u-turn and returned, squealing, back to the green horizon from which it had appeared.

  Originally the P-W security system (the initials commemorated the Welsh physicians who developed it, Drs. Pole and Williams) had employed less drastic means of reforming character than instant death. When triggered, the earliest lozenges released only enough toxins to cause momentary, acute nausea and colonic spasms. In this form the P-W system had been hailed as the Model-T of behavioral engineering. Within a decade of its commercial availability there was scarcely a prison anywhere in the world that hadn’t converted to its use. Though the motive for reform may have been economic, the result invariably was a more humane prison environment, simple because there was no longer a need for the same close scrutiny and precautions. It was for this reason that Drs. Pole and Williams were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991.

  Only gradually, and never in the United States, was its use extended to so-called “hostage populations” of potentially dissident civilians — the Basques in Spain, Jews in Russia, the Irish in England, and so on. It was in these countries that explosives began to replace toxins and where, too, systems of decimation and mass reprisal were developed, whereby a central broadcasting system could transmit coded signals that could put to death any implanted individual, any group or a given proportion of that group, or, conceivably, an entire population. The largest achieved kill-ratio was the decimation of Palestinians living in the Gasa Strip, and this was not the consequence of a human decision but of computer error. Usually the mere presence of the P-W system was sufficient to preclude its use except in individual cases.

  At the Spirit Lake Correction Facility it was possible to send out work crews to farms and industries within a radius of fifty miles (the range of the system’s central radio tower) with no other supervision than the black box by which the prisoners, singly or as a group, could be directed, controlled, and, if need be, extirpated. The result was a work-force of singular effectiveness that brought the State of Iowa revenues far in excess of the cost of administration. However, the system was just as successful in reducing crime, and so there was never enough convict labor to meet the demands of the area’s farms and factories, which had to resort to the more troublesome (if somewhat less costly) migrant workers, recruited in the bankrupt cities of the eastern seaboard.

  It was such urban migrants who, falling afoul of the law, constituted by far the better part of the prison population at Spirit Lake. Daniel had never in his life known such various, interesting people, and it wasn’t just Daniel who was impressed. They all seemed to take an inflated view of their collective identity, as though they were an exiled aristrocracy, beings larger and more honorable than the dogged trolls and dwarves of day-to-day life. Which is not to say that they were nice to each other (or to Daniel); they weren’t. The resentment they felt for the world at large, their sense of having been marked, almost literally, for the slaughter, was too great to be contained. It could lead even the mildest of them at times to betray this theoretical sodality for the sake of a hamburger or a laugh or the rush that accompanied the smash of your own fist into any available face. But the bad moments were like firecrackers — they exploded and a smell lingered for a few hours and then even that was gone — while the good moments were like sunlight, a fact so basic you almost never considered it was there.

  Of course it was summer, and that helped. They worked longer hours, but they worked at pleasant jobs, out of doors, for farmers who had a rational regard for what was possible (The factories were said to be much worse, but they wouldn’t re-open till late in October). Often there would be extra food, and when your life centers around getting enough to eat (the rations at Spirit Lake were, deliberately, not enough) this was an important consideration.

  It was the times in between that were so weirdly wonderful, times of an idleness as plain and pure as the shaking of leaves in a tree. Times between reveille and being hustled into the trucks, or times you waited for a truck to come and take you back. Times that a sudden storm would cancel out the day’s appointed baling and you could wait among the silences of the ceasing rain, in the glow of the late, returning light.

  At such times consciousness became something more than just a haphazard string of thoughts about this, that, and the other. You knew yourself to be alive with a vividness so real and personal it was like God’s gloved hand wrapping itself about your spine and squeezing. Alive and human: he, Daniel Weinreb, was a human being! It was something he’d never even considered up till now.

  There was a part of the compound set aside for visitors with pine trees, picnic tables, and a row of swings. Since visitors were only allowed on Sundays, and since few of the prisoners were ever visited in any case, the place looked unnaturally nice compared to the weedy fields and bare dirt of the compound proper, though for the visitors, coming to it from the outside world, it probably seemed plain enough, a park such as you would have found in any neighboring town.

  Hearing the squeals of his sisters before they became visible behind the screen of pines, Daniel stopped to get hold of himself. He seemed quite steady and far from tears. Approaching nearer, he could see them through the branches. Aurelia was on one of the swings and Cecelia was pushing her. He felt like a ghost in a story, hovering about his living past. There beyond the twins was his father, in the front seat of a Hertz, smoking his pipe. Milly was nowhere to be seen. Daniel had thought she wouldn’t come but even so it was a disappointment.

  To his credit he didn’t let that show when at last he emerged from behind the trees. He was all hugs and kisses for the twins, and by the time his father reached the swings, Daniel’s arms were full.

  “How are you, Daniel?” Abraham asked.

  Daniel said, “I’m fine.” And then, to nail it down, “In fact I really am.” He smiled — a smile as plausible as this little park.

  He set the twins down on the grass and shook hands with his father.

  “Your mother meant to come but at the last minute she didn’t feel up to it. We agreed it probably wouldn’t do your morale any good to see her in one of her… uh…”

  “Probably,” Daniel agreed.

  “And it probably wouldn’t be that good for her morale, either. Though, I must say, this place—” pointing at the trees with his pipestem “—is a bit, uh, nicer than I was expecting.”

  Daniel nodded.

  “Are you hungry? We brought a picnic.”

  “Me? I’m always hungry.” Which was truer than he would have cared to be known.

  While they spread out the food on the table, another car arrived with other visitors. Having them as an audience made it easier. There was a roast chicken, which Daniel got the better part of, and a bowl of potato salad with what seemed a pound of bacon crumbled in it. Abraham apologized for there being only a quart of milk for everyone to drink. The beer he’d brought had been confiscated at the checkpoint on the highway.

  While he ate, his father explained all that was being done to have Daniel released. A lot of people, apparently, were incensed about his being sent to Spirit Lake, but they were none of them the right people. A petition had been sent to Mayor MacLean, who returned it saying the whole thing was out of his hands. His father showed him a typed list of the names on the petition. A lot of them ha
d been customers on his route, others he recognized as his father’s patients, but the surprising thing was how many of them he’d never heard of. He had become a cause.

  For all that it was the food that registered. Daniel had got so used to the process food at Spirit Lake he’d forgotten what an enormous difference there could be between that and the real thing. After the chicken and potato salad, Abraham unwrapped a carrot cake. It was the closest Daniel came to breaking down during the whole visit.

  When the food was gone Daniel became conscious of the usual obscuring awkwardness rising up again between him and his father. He sat there staring at the weathered boards of the table, trying to think of what to say, but when he did come up with something it never precipitated a real conversation. The excitement at the other picnic table, where they were talking Spanish, seemed a reproach to their own lengthening silences.

  Cecelia, who had already been carsick on the ride to Spirit Lake, rescued them by tossing up her lunch. After her dress had been sponged clean, Daniel played hide-and-seek with the twins. They had finally got the idea that there wasn’t just a single hiding place to hide in, but a whole world. Twice Aurelia went beyond the fieldstone posts marking the perimeter to find a place to hide, and each time it was like a knife right through his stomach. Theoretically you weren’t supposed to be able to feel the lozenge, but no one who’d ever been implanted believed that.

  Eventually it was time for them to go. Since he hadn’t found a way to lead round to it by degrees, Daniel was forced to come right out with the subject of McDonald’s. He waited till the twins were strapped into their seatbelts, and then asked his father for a word in private.

  “It’s about the food here,” he began when they were by themselves.

  As he’d feared, his father became indignant when he’d explained about the rations being deliberately less than the minimum for subsistence. He started going on about the petition again.

  Daniel managed to be urgent without being swept along: “It’s no use complaining, Dad. People have tried and it doesn’t do any good. It’s the policy. What you can do is pay what they call the supplement. Then they bring in extra food from McDonald’s. It doesn’t make such a big difference now, ’cause most of the farmers, when we go out and work for them, usually scrape up something extra for us. But later on, in winter, it can be nasty. That’s what they say.”

  “Of course, Daniel, we’ll do all we possibly can. But you certainly will be home before winter. As soon as school starts again they’ll have to put you on probation.”

  “Right. But meanwhile I need whatever you can let me have. The supplement costs thirty-five dollars a week, which is a lot to pay for a Big Mac and french fries, but what can I say? They’ve got us over a barrel.”

  “My God, Daniel, it’s not the money — it’s the idea of what they’re doing here. It’s extortion! I can’t believe—”

  “Please, Dad — whatever you do, don’t complain.”

  “Not till you’re out of here, certainly. Who do I pay?”

  “Ask for Sergeant Di Franco when they stop you at the checkpoint on the way back. He’ll tell you an address to send the money to. I’ll pay it all back, I promise.”

  Abraham took his appointment book out of the breast pocket of his suit and wrote down the name. His hand was shaking. “Di Franco,” he repeated. “That reminds me. I think that was the fellow who made me leave your book with him. Your old friend Mrs. Boismortier has been by the house several times, asking after you, and the last time she brought a present for me to bring you. A book. You may get it eventually, once they’ve made sure it’s not subversive.”

  “I don’t know. They don’t let many books through. Just bibles and like that. But tell her thank you for me anyhow.”

  The last formalities went off without a hitch, and the Hertz drove away into the brightness of the inaccessible world outside. Daniel stayed in the visiting area, rocking gently in one of the swings until the whistle blew, summoning him to the six o’clock roll-call. He kept thinking of the mixing bowl that the potato salad had come in. Something about its shape or its color seemed to sum up everything he’d ever loved. And lost forever.

  Forever, fortunately, isn’t a notion that can do you lasting harm at the flexible age of fourteen. True enough, there was something Daniel had lost forever by coming here to Spirit Lake. Call it faith in the system — the faith that had allowed him to write his third prize essay way back when — or maybe just an ability to look the other way while the losers were being trounced by the winners in the fixed game of life. But whatever you call it, it was something he’d have had to lose eventually anyhow. This was just a rougher form of farewell — a kick in the stomach rather than a wave of the hand.

  It didn’t even take a night’s sleep with its standard nightmare to put Daniel into a fitter frame of mind. By lights-out he was already looking at the little horrors and afflictions of his prison in the perspective of practical sanity, the perspective by which one’s immediate surroundings, whatever they are, are seen simply as what is.

  He had played a game of chess with his friend Bob Lundgren, not an especially good game but no worse than usual. Then he had wormed his way into a conversation between Barbara Steiner and some of the other older prisoners on the subject of politics. Their talk was in its own way as much over his head as Bob James’ chess, at least as far as his being able to contribute to it. They made hash of his most basic assumptions, but it was delicious hash, and Barbara Steiner, who was the clearest-headed and sharpest-tongued of the lot of them, seemed to know the effect she was having on Daniel and to enjoy leading him from one unspeakable heresy to the next. Daniel didn’t consider whether he actually agreed with any of this. He was just caught up in the excitement of being a spectator to it, the way he enjoyed watching a fight or listening to a story. It was a sport and he was its fan.

  But it was the music that had the largest (if least understandable) effect on him. Night after night there was music. Not music such as he’d ever conceived of before; not music that could be named, the way, when it was your turn to ask for your favorite song in Mrs. Boismortier’s class you could ask for “Santa Lucia” or “Old Black Joe” and the class would sing it and it would be there, recognizably the same, fixed always in that certain shape. Here there were tunes usually, yes, but they were always shifting round, disintegrating into mere raw rows of notes that still somehow managed to be music. The way they did it was beyond him, and at times the why of it as well. Especially, it seemed, when the three prisoners who were generally accounted the best musicians got together to play. Then, though he might be swept off his feet at the start, inevitably their music would move off somwhere he couldn’t follow. It was like being a three-year-old and trying to pay attention to grown-up talk. But there seemed to be this difference between the language of words. It didn’t seem possible, in the language of music, to lie.

  Days later, after he’d dismissed the possibility of ever seeing it, the book Mrs. Boismortier had sent Daniel via his father arrived. It had got past the censor relatively intact, with only a few pages snipped out towards the end. The front cover showed an ingratiating Jesus crowned with thorns, holding out a hamburger. Drops of blood from Jesus and drops of catsup from the burger mingled in a crimson pool from which the words of the title rose up like little lime-green islands: THE PRODUCT IS GOD by Jack Van Dyke. It came with testimonials from a number of unfamiliar show business celebrities and from the Wall Street Journal, which called Reverend Van Dyke “the sinister minister” and declared his theology to be “the newest wrinkle in eternal truth. A real bombshell.” He was the head of Marble Collegiate Church in New York City.

  Though it was about religion, an area Daniel had never supposed he could take an interest in, he was glad to get it. In the congested dorms of Spirit Lake, a book, any book, was a refuge, the nearest possible approach to privacy. Besides, Mrs. Boismortier’s earlier batting average had been pretty good, so maybe The Product Is God would be truly
interesting. The cover was lurid enough. Anyhow what was the competition? A couple of scruffy bibles and a stack of unread (because unreadable) undergod tracts about iniquity, repentance, and how suffering was a matter for rejoicing once you found Christ. Only prisoners with desperately long terms, fifteen or twenty years, ever pretended to take any of that seriously. There was theoretically a better chance to get paroled if you could convince the authorities you were of his existence or nonexistence, as the case might hope was part of the punishment.

  It was clear right from page one that Van Dyke was no undergoder, though just what he was Daniel couldn’t quite tell. An atheist it almost seemed, from some of the things he said. Like this, from the “Prefatory Postscript,” before he even got warmed up: “Often it has been objected, by this book’s admirers and its detractors alike, that I speak of Almighty God as though He were no more than some exceptionally clever Idea I’d got hold of, like a new theorem in geometry, or a scenario for an original ballet. In large part I must allow that this is so, but it doesn’t bother me, and I’m sure it doesn’t bother God. However He may concern Himself with human fate, He is surely indifferent to human controversy.” Or this, from the same Postscript: “The Most High is perfectly willing to be understood as an illusion since our doubts only make our trust in Him that much more savory on His tongue. He is, we must remember, the King of Kings, and shares the general kinky taste of kings for displays of their subjects’ abasement. Doubt Him, by all means, say I, when I speak to doubters, but don’t on that account neglect to worship Him.”

  This was religion? It seemed almost the opposite, a burlesque, but Mrs. Boismortier (a good Episcopalian) had sent the book to him, and someone in the hierarchy of the prison, possibly even Warden Shiel, has passed it on, and millions of people, according to the cover, were able to take Reverend Van Dyke seriously.