On Wings of Song

by Thomas M. Disch

  Then they sang carols. “Silent Night” first, then “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” then “Faith of Our Fathers,” and finally “Silent Night” again. Three or four clear strong voices rose above the muddy generality, but strangely Gus’s was not among these. Daniel screwed up his courage — he’d never liked singing in public (or anywhere else, for that matter) — and sang. Really sang. The man directly in front of him turned his head round briefly to see who was making such a noise, and even Warden Shiel, sitting there on his folding chair, with his right hand resting benignly on the P-W module, seemed to take approving notice. It was embarrassing in the same way and to the same degree as getting undressed in front of other kids in a locker room. The worst of it was in the imagining. By the time you were doing it, so was everybody else.

  After the carols, presents were distributed to the prisoners who had families and friends on the outside thinking of them, following which the Warden went on to the next dorm to repeat these holiday procedures. The presents, as many as were edible, were further portioned out. Daniel bolted one slice of his mother’s fruitcake and put aside another in his mattress. As long as you assumed some part of the burden towards the dorm’s have-nots you could choose whom you were nice to, and the next slice of the fruitcake went, as a matter of course, to Bob Lundgren. The Lundgrens had sent their son a packet of Polaroids taken at their last Thanksgiving dinner, which Bob was studying with baleful incredulity. The banked fires of his inner rage glowed at that intensity. It was all he could do to say thank you.

  Gus was in the farthest corner of the room, doling out crumbled cookies from a large tin box. Somehow Daniel hadn’t been expecting that. For some reason, perhaps the slow-healing scar, he’d imagined Gus as utterly bereft and friendless, unless Daniel himself were to become his friend. Daniel made his way over to Gus’s corner and, with what diffidence he could summon up, offered him a piece of cake.

  Gus smiled. This close, Daniel, who had a developed judgement of dental work, could see that his perfect upper incisors were actually caps, and of the first quality at that. The lower incisors, as well. All in all, a couple thousand dollars worth of work, and that was only what showed when he smiled.

  “The other night,” Daniel said, taking the plunge, “when you sang… I really enjoyed that.”

  Gus nodded, swallowing. “Right,” he said. And then, taking another bite. “This is terrific cake.”

  “My mother made it.”

  Daniel stood there, watching him eat, not knowing what else to say. Even as he ate, Gus went on smiling at him, a smile that encompassed the compliment to his singing, his pleasure in the good, and something else besides. A recognition, it seemed to Daniel, of some common bond.

  “Here,” Gus said, holding out the box of crumbs, “have some of mine, Danny-boy.”

  Danny-boy? That was several degrees worse than just ‘Danny,’ and even that he’d always resisted as a nickname. Still, it showed that Gus — without their ever talking to each other before — was aware of him, was even curious about him perhaps.

  He took a couple broken cookies and nodded his thanks. Then, with an uneasy sense of having done the wrong thing, he moved off, bearing the ever-diminishing cake.

  Soon enough the goodies were gone and the party was over. The dorm became very quiet. Over intermittent blasts of wind you could hear the prisoners singing the same carols in the next dorm. Mrs. Gruber, with her mattress wrapped around her where she sat in front of the Franklin stove, began to croon along wordlessly, but when no one else showed any Christmas spirit, she gave up.

  In the next dorm the caroling stopped, and a short while later there was the sound of the pickup’s motor turning over. As if he’d been waiting for this signal, Gus got up and went over to where the Christmas tree had been. Someone sounded a note on a harmonica, and Gus hummed the same note, rumblingly.

  The hush of the room, from having been a hush of gloom, became the hush of fixed attention. Some people went and formed a ring around the singer, while others stayed where they were. But all of them listened as if the song were a newscast announcing a major worldwide disaster.

  These were the words of the song Gus sang:

  O Bethlehem is burning down

  And Santa Claus is dead

  But the world continues turning round

  And so does my head!

  The Tannenbaum is bare as bone

  And soon I will be too

  But who’s that lady lying prone

  On sheets of baby blue?

  O Christmas Eve is cold and scary

  Who could believe the Virgin Mary

  Would ever discover

  The likes of a lover

  Like you, my lad, or me?

  Chorus:

  Roll over Joe

  I’ve sold my soul

  For a fal doll diddle

  And a jolly little O

  For a fox and a fiddle

  And a ho ho ho!

  So

  Then

  We’ll wang her and bang her

  And rim her and trim her

  And tell her the reason why

  We’ll toast her and roast her

  And nail up a poster

  To show her the set-up to buy

  We’ll poke her and stroke her

  And spank her and thank her

  For a beautiful piece of pie

  We’ll scourge her and urge her

  To consider a merger

  Between the earth and the sky!

  Daniel couldn’t tell for quite a while if this were a real song or one that Gus was making up then and there, but when people started to sing along at the part that started “Roll over Joe,” he decided it had to be real. There were a lot of songs you never heard in Iowa, radio braodcasts being so strictly controlled.

  They sang the song over and over, not just the chorus, which got louder and rowdier with each repetition, but the whole thing. It seemed, if you didn’t fasten on the words, like the most exquisite and decorative of Christmas carols, a treasure from a dim and pretty past of sleigh rides, church bells, and maple syrup. Annette, the feeble-minded migrant woman who liked to drum on the stovepipes, got caught up in the excitement and started doing an impromptu strip dressed in the discarded Christmas wrappings, until Mrs. Gruber, who was officially responsible for the collective good behavior of the dorm, put a stop to it. Prisoners from the next-door dorm came and insisted, against Mrs. Gruber’s protests, that the song be sung over from the beginning for them, and this time round Daniel was able to add his own few decibles to the general effect. People started dancing, and the ones who didn’t dance held on to each other and swayed in time. Even Bob Lundgren forgot about murdering his brother and sang along.

  The festivity lasted till at last the loudspeaker blared out: “All right, assholes, Christmas is over so shut the fuck up!” With no more warning than that the lights went out, and people had to scramble around in the dark locating their mattresses and spreading them out on the floor. But the song had already served its purpose. The foul taste of Christmas had been washed from every mind.

  Everyone got to take off Christmas Day as a holiday except for the workers at E.S. 78, since there was no way to tell the termites, squirming forward through their black tunnels on their way to the waiting vats, to slow down because it was Christmas. It was just as well, Daniel told himself. It was easier to lead a rotten life than to lie back and think about it.

  That night, when he got back to the dorm, Gus was lying in front of the lukewarm stove. His eyes were closed, but his fingers were moving in slow, fixed patterns across the zipper of his jacket. It was almost as though he were waiting for him. In any case, the moment couldn’t be put off any longer. Daniel squatted beside him, nudged his shoulder, and asked him, when he opened his eyes, if they could go outside to talk. He didn’t have to explain. There was supposed to be much less chance of the monitors’ tuning in on conversations if you were out of the dorms. In any case, Gus didn’t seem surprised to be
asked.

  At the mid-point between dorm and latrine, Daniel delivered his message with telegraphic brevity. He’d been thinking of just how to say it for days. “The other night, last night, when I said how much I enjoyed your singing, I actually had something more in mind. You see, I’ve never heard much real singing before. Not like yours. And it really got to me. And I’ve decided…” He lowered his voice. “I’ve decided that I want to learn to sing. I’ve decided that’s what I’m going to do with my life.”

  “Just sing?” Gus asked, smiling in a superior way and shifting his weight from one leg to the other. “Nothing else?”

  Daniel looked up, imploring. He didn’t dare spell it out in more detail. The monitors might be listening. They might be recording everything he said. Surely Gus understood.

  “You want to fly — isn’t that it, really?”

  Daniel nodded.

  “Pardon?”

  “Yes,” he said. And then, since there was no reason now not to blurt out anything, he put his own rhetorical question to Gus: “Isn’t that why most people learn to sing?”

  “Some of us do just fall into it, but in the sense you mean, yes, I suppose that’s so for most people. But this is Iowa, you know. Flying’s not legal here.”

  “I know.”

  “And you don’t care?”

  “There’s no law says I’ve got to live in Iowa the rest of my life.”

  “True enough.”

  “And there’s no law against singing, even in Iowa. If I want to learn to sing, that’s my own business.”

  “And that’s true enough too.”

  “Will you teach me?”

  “I was wondering where I came into this.”

  “I’ll give you all my vouchers from here on in. I get the full supplement. It costs thirty-five dollars a week.”

  “I know. I get it too.”

  “If you don’t want to eat that much, you can trade my vouchers for something you do want. It’s all I’ve got, Gus. If I had anything else, I’d offer that.”

  “But you do, Danny-boy,” Gus said. “You’ve got something I find much more appealing.”

  “The book? You can have that too. If I’d known it was you who was bidding, I wouldn’t have bid against you.”

  “Not the book. I only did that to get your goat.”

  “Then what do you want?”

  “Not your hamburgers, Danny-boy. But I could go for the buns.”

  He didn’t understand at first, and Gus offered no more by way of explanation than a strange relaxed sort of smile, with his mouth half open and his tongue passing slowly back and forth behind his capped teeth. When it finally dawned on him what Gus was after, he couldn’t believe it. That, anyhow, was what he told himself: I can’t believe it! He tried to pretend, even then, that he still hadn’t got the message.

  Gus knew better. “Well, Danny-boy?”

  “You’re not serious.”

  “Try me out and see.”

  “But—” His objection seemed so self-evident he didn’t see any need to spell it out beyond that.

  Gus shifted his weight again in a single over-all shrug. “That’s the price of music lessons, kiddo. Take it or leave it.”

  Daniel had to clear his throat to be able to say that he would leave it. But he said it loud and clear, in case the monitors were taking any of it down.

  Gus nodded. “You’re probably doing the right thing.”

  Daniel’s indignation finally bubbled over. “I don’t need you to tell me that! Jesus!”

  “Oh, I don’t mean holding on to your cherry. You’ll lose that one of these days. I mean it’s just as well you don’t try and become a singer.”

  “Who says I’m not going to?”

  “You can try, true enough. No one can stop that.”

  “But I won’t make it, is that what you mean? Sounds like sour grapes to me.”

  “Yes, partly. I wouldn’t have offered my candid opinion if you’d decided to invest in lessons. But now there’s no reason not to. And my candid opinion is that you are a punk singer. You could take voice lessons from here till doomsday and you’d never get near escape velocity. You’re too tight. Too mental. Too merely Iowa. It’s a shame, really, that you got this idea into your head, cause it can only mess you up.”

  “You’re saying that from spite. You’ve never heard me sing.”

  “Don’t have to. It’s enough to watch you walk across a room. But in fact I have heard you sing. Last night. That was quite enough. Anyone who can’t handle ‘Jingle Bells’ is not cut out for a major career.”

  “We didn’t sing ‘Jingle Bells’ last night.”

  “That was the point of my joke.”

  “I know I need lessons. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have asked.”

  “Lessons can only do so much. There has to be a basic capacity. A dog won’t learn arithmetic, no matter who his teacher is. You want the particulars? Number one, you’re tone-deaf. Two, you’ve got no more sense of rhythm than a road-grader. Beyond one and two, there is something still more essential missing, which we who have it call soul.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “That might be the beginning, yes.”

  With which Gus patted Daniel’s cheeks smartly with the flat of both hands and smiled a still partly-friendly parting smile and left him to a desolation he had never imagined could be his, a foretaste of failure as black and bitter as a child’s first taste of coffee. The thing he wanted most in life, the only thing, would never be. Never. The idea was a skull in his hand. He couldn’t put it down. He couldn’t look away.

  A month went by. It was as though the worst single hour of his life, the absolutely blackest moment, were to be stretched out, like railroad tracks on a bed of cinders, to the horizon. Each day he woke, each night he went to bed, he faced the same unrelieved prospect, a bleakness by whose wintry light all other objects and events became a monotony of cardboard zeroes. There was no way to combat it, no way to ignore it. It was the destined shape of his life, as the trunk and branches of a pine are the shape of its life.

  Gus’s eyes seemed always to be following him. His smile seemed always to be at Daniel’s expense. The worst torment of all was when Gus sang, which he’d begun to do more often since Christmas Eve. His songs were always about sex, and always beautiful. Daniel could neither resist their beauty nor yield to it. Like Ulysses he struggled against the bonds that tethered him to the mast, but they were the bonds of his own obdurate will and he could not break them. He could only twist and plead. No one noticed, no one knew.

  He kept repeating, in his thoughts, the same lump of words, like an old woman telling beads. “I wish I were dead. I wish I were dead.” If he ever thought about it, he knew this was only a maudlin imposture. But yet in a way it was true. He did wish he were dead. Whether he ever mustered the courage to carry out such a wish was another matter. The means lay readily to hand. He had only, like Barbara Steiner, to step across the perimeter of the camp and a radio transmitter would take care of the rest. One step. But he was chickenshit, he couldn’t do it. He would stand there, though, for hours, beside the fieldstone post that marked the possible end of his life, repeating the mindless lie that seemed so nearly true: “I wish I were dead. I wish I were dead. I wish I were dead.”

  Once, just once, he managed to go past the post, whereupon, as he had known it must, the warning whistle started to blow. The sound petrified him. It was only a few yards farther to his wish, but his legs had stopped obeying him. He stood fast in an enchantment of rage and shame, while people filed out of the dorms to see who’d let go. The whistle kept blowing till at last he tucked his tail between his legs and returned to the dorm. No one would talk to him, or even look at him. The next morning, after roll-call, a guard gave Daniel a bottle of tranks and watched while he swallowed the first capsule. The pills didn’t stop his depression, but he was never so silly again.

  In February, a month before he was due to be released, Gus was paroled. Before he left Spirit
Lake he made a point of taking Daniel aside and telling him not to worry, that he could be a singer if he really wanted to and made a big enough effort.

  “Thanks,” Daniel said, without much conviction.

  “It’s not your vocal equipment that matters so much as the way you feel what you sing.”

  “Does not wanting to be buggered by some skid row derelict show that I don’t have enough feeling? Is that my problem, huh?”

  “You can’t blame a guy for trying. Anyhow, Danny-boy, I didn’t want to leave without telling you not to give up the ghost on my say-so.”

  “Good. I never intended to.”

  “If you work at it, you’ll probably get there. In time.”

  “Your generosity is killing me.”

  Gus persisted. “So I’ve thought about it, and I’ve got a word of advice for you. My own last word on the subject of how to sing.”

  Gus waited. For all his resentment, Daniel couldn’t keep from clutching at the talisman being dangled before him. He swallowed his pride and asked, “And what is that?”

  “Make a mess of your life. The best singers always do.”

  Daniel forced a laugh. “I seem to have a good head start at that.”

  “Precisely. That’s why there’s still hope for you.” He pursed his lips and tilted his head to the side. Daniel backed away from him as though he’d been groped. Gus smiled. He touched a finger to the almost-vanished scar above his eye. “Then, you see, when the mess is made, the music pulls it all together. But remember, the mess has to come first.”

  “I’ll remember. Anything else?”

  “That’s all.” He offered his hand. “Friends?”

  “Well, not enemies,” Daniel allowed, with a smile of his own that was not more than fifty percent sarcastic.