On Wings of Song

by Thomas M. Disch

  Seriousness aside, Daniel was enthralled by the book. After a long dusty day of detasseling corn he would return to its paradoxes and mental loop-the-loops with a feeling of immersing himself in seltzer water. Just a few paragraphs and his mind was all tingly and able to think again, at which point he would return the book to its home in his mattress of huskings and straw.

  Chapter One was an explanation, more or less, of the book’s garish cover, and of its title too. It was about a bunch of people who start a chain of fast-food restaurants, called Super-King. The chain is run not for profit but to give everybody something really good — Super-King Hamburgers and Super-King Cola, which, according to the chain’s big ad campaign, are supposed to make you live forever and always be happy, if you eat enough of them. No one is actually expected to believe the ads, but the chain is an enormous success anyhow. There were graphs and sales figures to illustrate its growth across the whole country and around the world. Of course the actual product the Super-King people were selling wasn’t hamburgers and such, it was an idea — the idea of Jesus, the Super-King. All products, Van Dyke insisted, were only ideas, and the most mind-boggling idea was the idea of Jesus, who was both God and an ordinary man and therefore a complete impossibility. Therefore, since He represented the best possible bargain, everybody should buy that product, which was basically what had happened over the last two thousand years — the rise of Christianity being the same as the success of the Super-King chain.

  Chapter Two was about the difficulty of believing in things — not just in religion, but in advertising, in sex, in your own daily life. Van Dyke argued that even when we know that companies aren’t telling the complete truth about their products, we should buy them anyhow (as long as they aren’t actually harmful) because the country and the economy would collapse if we didn’t. “By the same token,” Van Dyke wrote, “lies about God, such as we find in Holy Scripture, help us keep our psychic economy running. If we can believe, for instance, that the world was all knocked together in six days rather than in however many billions of years, we’ve come a long way toward self-mastery.” The rest of the chapter was a kind of advertisement for God and all the things He would do for you once you “bought” him, such as keeping you from ever being depressed or bitter or coming down with colds.

  Chapter Three was titled “Wash Your Own Brain” and was about techniques you could use in order to start beleving in God. Most of the techniques were based on methods of acting. Van Dyke explained that long ago religious-type people had been against plays and actors because by watching them people learned to think of all their feelings and ideas as arbitrary and interchangeable. An actor’s identity was nothing more than a hat he put on or took off at will, and what was true for actors was true for us all. The world was a stage.

  “What our Puritan forebears failed to recognize,” Van Dyke wrote, “is the evangelical application of these insights. For if the way we become the kind of people we are is by pretending, then the way to become good, devout, and faithful Christians (which, admit it, is a well-nigh impossible undertaking) is to pretend to be good, devout, and faithful. Study the role and rehearse it energetically. You must seem to love your neighbor no matter how much you hate his guts. You must seem to accept sufferings, even if you’re drafting your suicide note. You must say that you know that your Redeemer liveth, even though you know no such thing. Eventually, saying makes it so.”

  He went on to relate the story of one of his parishioners, the actor Jackson Florentine (the same Jackson Florentine who’d co-starred in Gold-Diggers of 1984!), who had been unable to believe in Jesus with a fervent and heartfelt belief until Reverend Van Dyke had made him pretend to believe in the Easter Bunny, a major idol in Florentine’s childhood pantheon. The doubting actor prayed before holographic picture of the Easter Bunny, wrote long confessional letters to him, and meditated on the various mysteries of his existence or nonexistence, as the case might be, until at last on Easter morning he found no less than one-hundred-forty-four brightly dyed Easter eggs hidden all over the grounds of his East Hampton estate. Having revived this “splinter of the Godhead,” as Van Dyke termed it, it was a simple matter to take the next step and be washed in the blood of the Lamb and dried with its soft white fleece.

  Before Daniel got to Chapter Four — “A Salute to Hypocrisy” — the book was missing from his mattress. For a moment, finding it gone, he felt berserk with loss. Wave after wave of desolation swept through him and kept him from sleep. Why should it mean so much? Why should it mean anything? It was a ridiculous book that he’d never have bothered with if there had been anything else on hand.

  But the feeling couldn’t be argued away. He wanted it back. He ached to be reading it again, to be outraged by its dumb ideas. It was as though part of his brain had been stolen.

  Over and above this simple hurt and hunger was the frustration of having no one to complain to. The theft of a book was a trifling injustice in a world where justice did not obtain and no one expected it to.

  Late in September the word came through, in a letter from his lawyer in Amesville, that his sentence was not to be reduced or suspended. It didn’t come as a surprise. He’d tried to believe he’d be paroled but never really believed he’d believed it. He didn’t believe anything. It amazed him how cynical he’d become in just a couple months.

  Even so there were times when he felt such a passionate self-pity he had to go off by himself and cry, and other times worse than that when a depression would settle over him so black and absolute that there was no way to fight against it or argue his way out of it. It was like a physical disease.

  He would tell himself, though not out loud, that he refused to be broken, that it was just a matter of holding out one day at a time. But this was whistling in the dark. He knew if they wanted to break him they would. In fact, they probably weren’t going to bother. It was enough that he should be made to appreciate that their power, so far as it affected him, was limitless.

  Until March 14.

  What he hadn’t been prepared for was the effect this news had on the attitude of the other prisoners. All through the summer Daniel had felt himself ignored, avoided, belittled. Even the friendliest of his fellow prisoners seemed to take the attitude that this was his summer vacation, while the unfriendliest were openly mocking. Once he’d had to fight to establish his territorial rights in the dorm, and thereafter no one had overstepped the bounds of a permitted formal sarcasm. But now, surely, the fact (so clear to Daniel) that he was as much a victim as they were should have begun to be clear to them too. But it wasn’t. There were no more jokes about summer camp, since summer was definitely over, but otherwise he remained an outsider, tolerated at the edge of other people’s conversations but not welcomed into them.

  This is not to say that he was lonely. There were many other outsiders at Spirit Lake — native Iowans who’d been sent up for embezzlement or rape and who still considered themselves to be uniquely and privately guilty (or not guilty, for what difference that made) rather than members of a community. They still believed in the possibility of good and evil, right and wrong, whereas the general run of prisoners seemed genuinely impatient with such ideas. Besides the Iowa contingent there was another large group of prisoners who were outsiders — the ones who were crazy. There were perhaps twenty concerning whom there was no question. They weren’t resented the way Iowans were, but they were avoided, not just because they were liable to fly off the handle but because craziness was thought to be catching.

  Daniel’s friend Bob Lundgren was both an Iowan and crazy, in a mildly dangerous but amiable way. Bob, who was twenty-three and the youngest son of and undergod farmer in Dickson County, was serving a year for drunk driving, though that was only a pretext. In fact he’d tried to kill his older brother, but a jury had found him not guilty, since there’d been no one’s word for it but the brother’s, who was an unpleasant, untrustworthy individual. Bob told Daniel that he had indeed tried to kill his brother and that as
soon as he was out of Spirit Lake he was going to finish the job. It was hard not to believe him. When he talked about his family his face lighted up with a kind of berserk poetic hatred, a look that Daniel, who never felt such passionate angers, would watch entranced as if it were a log burning in a fireplace.

  Bob wasn’t a big talker. Mostly they just played slow, thinking games of chess when they got together. Strategically, Bob was always way ahead. There was never any chance of Daniel’s winning, any more than he could have won against Bob at arm-wrestling, but there was a kind of honor in losing by a slow attrition rather then being wiped out by a completely unexpected coup. After a while there got to be a strange satisfaction that had nothing to do with winning or losing, a fascination with the patterns of play that developed on the board, patterns like the loops of magnetic force that iron filings will form on a sheet of paper, only much more complicated. Such a blessed self-forgetfulness came over them then, as if, as they sat there contemplating the microcosm of the chessboard, they were escaping from Spirit Lake; as if the complex spaces of the board were truly another world, created by thought but as real as electrons. Even so, it would have been nice to win just one game. Or to play to a draw, at least.

  He always lost to Barbara Steiner too, but there seemed less disgrace in that, since their contests were only verbal and there were no hard-and-fast rules. Logomachies. Winning was anything from a look in the other person’s eye to downright belly laughter. Losing was simply the failure to score as many points, though you could also lose more spectacularly by being a bore. Barbara had very definite opinions as to who was and wasn’t a bore. People who told jokes, even very good jokes, were automatically set down as bores, as well as people who described the plots of old movies or argued about the best make of automobile. Daniel she accounted a hick, but not a bore, and she would listen contentedly to his descriptions of various typical Amesville types, such as his last year’s homeroom teacher, Mrs. Norberg, who was a social studies teacher and had not read a newspaper in over five years because she thought they were seditious. Sometimes she let him run on for what seemed hours, but usually they took turns, one anecdote leading to another. Her range was enormous. She’d been everywhere, done everything, and seemed to remember it all. Now she was serving three years, half of it behind her, for performing abortions in Waterloo. But that, as she liked to say, was just the tip of the iceberg. Every new anecdote seemed to have her in a different state working at another kind of job. Sometimes Daniel wondered if she wasn’t making at least a part of it up.

  People had different opinions as to whether Barbara was homely or only plain. Her two most noticeable defects were her wide, meaty-looking lips and her stringy black hair that was always dotted with enormous flakes of dandruff. Perhaps with good clothes and beauty parlors she might have passed muster, but lacking such assists there wasn’t much she could do. Also, it didn’t help that she was six months pregnant. None of which stood in the way of her having as much sex as she liked. Sex at Spirit Lake was a seller’s market.

  Officially the prisoners weren’t supposed to have sex at all, except when spouses came to visit, but the monitors who watched them over the closed-circuit tv would usually let it pass so long as it didn’t look like a rape. There was even a corner in one of the dorms screened off with newspapers, like a Japanese house, where you could go to fuck in relative privacy. Most women charged two Big Macs or the equivalent, though there was one black girl, a cripple, who gave blow jobs for free. Daniel watched the couples going in back of the paper screen and listened to them with a kind of haunted feeling in his chest. He thought about it more than he wanted to, but he abstained. Partly from prudential reasons, since a lot of the prisoners, men and women both, had a kind of venereal warts for which there didn’t seem to be a cure, but also partly (as he explained to Barbara) because he wanted to wait till he was in love. Barbara was quite cynical on the subject of love, having suffered more than her share in that area, but Daniel liked to think she secretly approved of his idealism.

  She wasn’t cynical about everything. At times, indeed, she could outdo Daniel in the matter of principles, the most amazing of which was her latest idea that everyone always got exactly what he or she deserved. At Spirit Lake this was on a par with praising steak to vegetarians, since just about everyone, including Daniel, felt he’d been railroaded. They might or might not believe in justice in an abstract sense, but they certainly didn’t think justice had anything to do with the legal system of the State of Iowa.

  “I mean,” Daniel insisted earnestly, “what about my being here? Where is the justice in that?”

  Only a few days before he’d told her the complete story of how, and why, he’d been sent up (hoping all the while that the monitors, off in their offices, were tuned in), and Barbara had agreed then it was a travesty. She’d even offered a theory that the world was arranged so that simply to exist you had to be violating some law or other. That way the higher-ups always had some pretext for pouncing when they wanted you.

  “The justice of your being here isn’t for what you did, dumbbell. It’s for what you didn’t do. You didn’t follow your own inner promptings. That was your big mistake. That’s what you’re here for.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Bull-shit,” she replied coolly, turning the inflection around against him. “Purity of heart is to will one thing. You ever heard that saying?”

  “A stitch in time saves nine. Won’t that do as well?”

  “Think about it. When you went to Minneapolis with that friend of yours, then you were doing the right thing, following the spirit where it led. But when you came back you did the wrong thing.”

  “For Christ’s sake, I was fourteen.”

  “Your friend didn’t go back to Iowa. How old was he?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “In any case, Daniel, age has nothing to do with anything. It’s the excuse people use till they’re old enough to acquire better excuses — a wife, or children, or a job. There are always going to be excuses if you look for them.”

  “Then what’s yours?”

  “The commonest in the world. I got greedy. I was pulling in money hand over fist, and so I stayed on in a hick town long after I should have left. I didn’t like it there, and it didn’t like me.”

  “You think it’s fair you should be sent to prison for that, for going after the money? Cause you did say, the other day, that you didn’t think doing the abortions was in any way wrong.”

  “It was the first time I ever sinned against my own deepest feelings, and also the first time I’ve been to prison.”

  “So? It could be a coincidence, couldn’t it? I mean, if there were a tornado tomorrow, or you were struck by lightning, would that also be something you deserved?”

  “No. And that’s how I know there won’t be a tornado. Or the other thing.”

  “You’re impossible.”

  “You’re sweet,” she said, and smiled. Because of her pregnancy her teeth were in terrible condition. She got supplements, but apparently not enough. If she wasn’t careful, she was going to lose all of them. At twenty-seven years of age. It didn’t seem fair.

  There were a couple weeks in the middle of October when the pace slackened. There wasn’t enough work left on the farms to make it worth the gasoline to drive to Spirit Lake and get a crew. Daniel wondered if the prisoners were really as glad to be lazing about the compound as they said. Without work the days stretched out into Saharas of emptiness, with the certainty of something much worse waiting up ahead.

  When the new winter rosters were made up, Daniel found himself assigned to Consolidated Food systems nearby “Experimental Station 78,” which was not, in fact, all that experimental, having been in production steadily for twenty years. The company’s P.R. department had simply never found a more attractive way to describe this side of the business, which was the breeding of a specially mutated form of termite that was used as a supplement in various extended meat and cheese products.
The bugs bred at Station 78 in all their billions, were almost as economical a source of protein as soybeans, since they could be grown in the labyrinthine underground bunkers to quite remarkable sizes with no other food source than a black sludge-like paste produced for next to nothing by various urban sanitation departments. The termites’ ordinary life-cycle had been simplified and adapted to assembly-line techniques, which were automated so that, unless there was a breakdown, workers weren’t obliged to go into the actual tunnels. Daniel’s job at the station was to tend a row of four-kiloliter vats in which the bugs were cooked and mixed with various chemicals, in the course of which they changed from a lumpy dark-gray mulch to a smooth batter the color of orange juice. In either condition it was still toxic, so as to protein there was no dividend working here. However, the job was considered something of a plum, since it involved very little real work and the temperature down in the station was an invariable 83°F. For eight hours a day you were guaranteed a level of warmth and well-being that was actually illegal in some parts of the country.

  Even so, Daniel wished he’d been posted to any other job. He’d never had any qualms before about extended foods, and there was little resemblance between what he could imagine back in the tunnels and what he could see in the vats, but despite that he couldn’t get over a constant queasiness. Sometimes a live termite, or a whole little swarm of them, would manage to make it past the mashers and into the area where Daniel worked, and each time it was as though a switch had been thrown that turned reality into nightmare. None of the other prisoners were so squeamish, it was irrational, but he couldn’t help it. He would have to go after the loose bugs, to keep them from getting into the batter in the vats. They were blind and their wings were not suited to sustained flight, which made them easy to swat but also more sinister somehow, the way they caromed and collided into each other. There was nothing they could do and nowhere they could go, since they couldn’t reproduce sexually and there was nothing outside the station’s tunnels they could digest. Their only purpose in life was to grow to a certain size and then be pulped — and they’d evaded that purpose. To Daniel it seemed that the same thing had happened to him.