On Wings of Song

by Thomas M. Disch

  Harry had never been notably gregarious. For some like Daniel the gym served as a social club. For Harry it was a religion, and he wasn’t the sort to talk in church. Yet he had been liked, and even reverenced, by those who shared his faith but lacked his zeal. Now, in proportion as he had been liked, he was pitied — and avoided. Whatever corner of the gym he worked in would gradually be deserted, as though there might be a kind of contagion in Harry’s agony. In any case there were fewer people showing up these days. No one had that much surplus energy. And no one liked to be around Harry.

  There were, inevitably, those who lacked the compassion or the moral imagination to understand what was happening to Harry, and it was one of this small number who, early one April afternoon, pushed him over the edge. Harry was doing bench presses and using, as he always did now, much more weight than he could handle. On the last rep of his second set his left arm began to buckle but he managed to straighten his arm and lock his elbow. His face was flushed a violent red. The straining cords of his neck formed a delta with his grimacing teeth at its apex. The barbell swayed alarmingly, and Ned jumped up from the desk, where he’d been talking with Daniel, and raced across the floor of the gym to get to Harry in time. It was then that the moral imbecile in question called out, from his perch on the parallel bars, “Okay, Hercules, one more rep!”

  The bar crashed down into the stanchions and Harry sprang up from the bench with a scream. Daniel thought the bar had crushed his hand, but it was rage, not pain, that spilled from his lungs. Months and years of swallowed angers exploded in an instant. He swept up an eighty-pound dumbbell lying by the bench and hurled it at his tormentor. It missed him shattering an expanse of mirror and passing through a wall of plaster and lathe into the changing room behind. “Harry!” Ned pleaded, but Harry was out of control, beyond appeal, berserk. One by one, in a systematic ecstasy of destruction, he smashed every mirror in the gym, using the heaviest barbells in the rack. He sailed a twenty-pound plate, discus-like, into the soft-drink dispenser. He overturned a rack of dumbbells onto the floor. It felt like a bomb had hit the building. Through it all no one dared try and stop him.

  When the last mirror was gone, and much of the supporting wall, Harry turned to face the three windows that looked down at Sheridan Square. They were still intact. He walked over to one of them, dumbbell in hand, and regarded the crowd that had gathered on the sidewalk and in the street.

  “Harry, please,” Ned said softly.

  “Fuck it,” said Harry in a mournful, tired voice. He turned away from the windows and went into the changing room, closing the door behind him. Daniel watched him, through a rent in the plaster wall, go to his locker. For a long while he fumbled patiently with the combination lock. When he had got it open at last, he took his police-issue revolver from its holster, walked over to the single surviving mirror that hung above the sink, and struck his last, unconscious, classic pose as he pointed the barrel of the pistol at his temple. Then he blew out his brains.

  Adonis, Inc., never did reopen.

  Food had become everyone’s problem. According to the media’s steady buzz of placatory bulletins, there was enough to go round for many months to come. The difficulty was distribution. Supermarkets and grocery stores throughout the city had been pressed into service by the Rationing Board, but black market prices were now so inflated that it was worth your life to be seen leaving a distribution center with an armload (or pocketful) of groceries. Even convoys of five or six men might be set upon. As for the police, they were mainly concentrated in the parks or outside the parking lots where the black markets operated. Despite this protective presence not a week went by without another, and more violent, mob-assault upon these last tawdry bastions of privilege. By the end of March there was no longer a black market in the physical sense — only a network of individuals united by an invisible hierarchy. The economic system was being simplified to its atomic components: every man was his own armed camp.

  Thanks to the closet stocked with Pet Bricquettes, Daniel and Mrs. Schiff were never reduced to direst need. Daniel, a passable though seldom inspired cook, concocted a kind of bread pudding from crumbled Bricquettes, Hyprotine powder, and an artificial sweetener, which Mrs. Schiff claimed actually to prefer to her usual fare. He also organized groups of the building’s residents to make trips to their distribution center, a former Red Owl Supermarket on Broadway. And, in general, he coped.

  As the weather warmed it began to look as though he would scrape through the crisis without having to ask for Ernesto Rey’s help. He would have, if worst had come to worst (if, for instance, Miss Marspan had balked at the rising cost of charity). Living with Boa’s body had confirmed Daniel in his sense of duty, had made it seem less abstract. He would do anything he had to to keep her alive — and in his own possession. What could Rey demand of him, after all, that he hadn’t done already, either by preference or out of curiosity? This was a question he tended to dwell on rather more than was quite healthy. He would lie there alone in his room going over the possibilities with a glazed, insomniac persistence. Some of those possibilities were pretty terrible, but fortunately none of his imaginings, even the mildest, would come to pass.

  It had become clear that Incubus was dying, though neither the dog nor his mistress were prepared to face the fact. He kept pretending he wanted to be taken out for a walk, moping about the hallway and whining and scratching at the outside door. Even if he’d had the strength to make it as far as the corner lamppost, there was no question of giving in to him, since a dog on the street these days was just meat on the hoof and an incitement to riot.

  Mrs. Schiff was devoted to the dying spaniel, and Incubus took every unfair advantage of her sympathy. He was everlastingly querulous, begging for food that he then refused to eat. He wouldn’t let Mrs. Schiff read or write or even talk to anyone but himself. If she tried to get round these prohibitions by disguising a conversation with Daniel as a tête-a-tête with Incubus, he would sense it and punish her by staggering off to the darkest part of the apartment and flopping down in inert despair. A few moments later Mrs. Schiff would be there beside him, petting him and apologizing, for she could never hold out very long against his sulks.

  One night, not long after the closing of the gym, Incubus came into Mrs. Schiff’s room and insisted on being helped up onto her bed, though until now he’d accepted the new prohibition against this. His incontinence and the ensuing drastic overhaul of the apartment had inspired Incubus with an almost human sense of guilt, which each new spontaneous defecation served to keep alive.

  Daniel, passing the room and seeing Incubus sprawled on the bed, set in to scolding him, but both dog and mistress gave him such pitiable looks that he didn’t have the heart to insist. He came in the room and sat in the armchair by the bed. Incubus lifted his tail a scant inch off the sheets and let it drop. Daniel patted him on the rump. He began to whine: he wanted a story.

  “I think he wants you to tell him a story,” said Daniel.

  Mrs. Schiff nodded wearily. She had developed a kind of subdued horror of her own whimsies from having had to recite them so many times when she was feeling the opposite of whimsical herself. Her Scheherazade complex, she called it. It was useless, at these times, to try and abridge the tale being told, for Incubus could always sense when she’d departed from the established format and formulae and would whine and worry her until the straying story-line had been brought back to the narrow paths of orthodoxy. At last she’d learned, like a good sheep, not to stray.

  “This is the story,” Mrs. Schiff began, as she’d begun so many times before, “of Bunny Honeybunny and his sister Honey Honeybunny and of the beautiful Christmas they spent in Bethlehem, the very first Christmas of all. One night, just about at bedtime, when Bunny Honeybunny was about to turn in for a well-deserved rest, for he had had, as usual, a very busy day, his dear little sister Honey Honeybunny came hopping, hippity-hop, into their cozy little burrow deep in the roots of a gnarly old oak tree, and she
said to her brother — ‘Bunny! Bunny! You must come out and look at the sky!’ Bunny had seldom seen his sister so excited, so, sleepy as he was (and he was very sleepy)—”

  Incubus knew better than to succumb to such hints. He was wide-awake and intent upon the story.

  “—he hopped, hippity-hop, out of their dear little burrow, and what do you think he saw, shining up there in the sky?”

  Incubus looked at Daniel.

  “What did he see?” Daniel asked.

  “He saw a star! And he said to his sister Honey Honeybunny, ‘What a beautiful and truly amazing star! Let us follow it.’ So they followed the star. They followed it over the meadows where the cows had settled down to sleep, and across the broad highways, and over the lakes as well, for it was winter and the lakes were all covered with ice, until at last they arrived in Bethlehem, which is in Judea. By this time, naturally, they were both quite tired from their journey and wanted nothing so much as to go to bed. So they went to the biggest hotel in town, the Bethlehem Hotel, but the night-clerk was very rude and said there was no room at the hotel, because of the census the government was taking, and that even if there had been room he wouldn’t have let rabbits into his hotel. Poor Honey Honeybunny thought she would cry, but as she didn’t want to make her brother unhappy on her account she decided to be brave. So, with a merry twitch of her long furry ears, she turned to Bunny and said, ‘We don’t need to stay at any silly old hotel. Let’s go find a manger and stay there. Mangers are more fun anyhow!’ So they went to look for a manger, which was no problem at all, for lo and behold, there was a cheery little manger just behind the Bethlehem Hotel with oxen and asses and cows and sheep… and something else besides! Something so wonderful and soft and warm and precious they couldn’t believe their bunnyrabbit eyes.”

  “What did they see in the manger?” asked Daniel.

  “They saw Baby Jesus!”

  “No kidding.”

  “Yes, there he was, the little Lord God, and Mary and Joseph too, kneeling beside him, and any number of shepherds and angels and wise men, all kneeling down and offering Baby Jesus presents. Poor Bunny Honeybunny and Honey Honeybunny felt just terrible, of course, because they didn’t have any presents for Baby Jesus. So, to cut a long story short—”

  Incubus looked up vigilantly.

  “—the two darling rabbits hopped off into the night, hippity-hop, all the way to the North Pole, which represents a lot of hopping, but there was never a word of complaint from them. And when they got to the North Pole, what do you suppose they found?”

  “What did they find there?”

  “Santa’s workshop is what they found. It was still early in the evening, so Santa was still there, and Mrs. Santa Claus as well, and all the little elves, millions of them, who help Santa make his toys, and the reindeer who help Santa deliver them, but I’m not going to name all the reindeer.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m tired and I have a headache.”

  Incubus began to whine.

  “Comet and Cupid and Donner and Blitzen. And Dasher and Prancer and… and… Help me.”

  “Rudolph?”

  “With his nose so bright, of course. How could I forget Rudolph? Well, after everyone had sat down in front of the blazing fire and warmed their little paws and enjoyed a nice slice of Mrs. Santa’s carrot cake, the two Honeybunnies explained why they’d had to come to the North Pole. They told Santa about Baby Jesus and how they’d wanted to give him a present for Christmas but didn’t have any. ‘So what we were hoping,’ said Honey Honeybunny, ‘was that we could give him ours.’ Santa Claus, naturally, was deeply touched by this, and Mrs. Santa had to turn away to dry her tears. Tears of happiness, you understand.”

  “Is there any other kind?” Daniel asked.

  Incubus shifted his head uneasily.

  “Well,” said Mrs. Schiff, folding her hands purposefully in her lap, “Santa told the Honeybunnies that of course they could give their presents to Baby Jesus, if they would help him load them into his great bag and put it into his sleigh.”

  “And what were the presents they put in the bag?” Daniel asked.

  “There were rooty-toot-toots and rummy-tum-tums and dolls and frisbees and doctor kits with candy pills and tiny little thermometers for pretending to take a temperature. Oh, and a hundred other lovely things: games and candy and myrrh and frankincense and opera records and the Complete Works of Sir Walter Scott.”

  Incubus laid down his head, content.

  “And he loaded the bag of presents into his sleigh, and helped the two Honeybunnies in behind him, and gave a crack of his whip and—”

  “Since when does Santa have a whip?”

  “Santa’s had a whip time out of mind. But he rarely if ever has to use it. Reindeer know instinctively where they should fly. So — away they all flew, instinctively, like the down of a thistle, straight to the manger in Bethlehem where Jesus and Mary and Joseph and the shepherds and angels and wise men, and even the night-clerk at the hotel, who’d experienced a change of heart, were waiting for Santa and the Honeybunnies, and when they saw them up there in the sky, which was lit up, you’ll remember, by that beautiful star, they all let out a great hurrah. ‘Hurrah!’ they shouted. ‘Hurrah for the Honeybunnies! Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!’”

  “Is that the end of the story?”

  “That’s the end of the story.”

  “Do you know what, Mrs. Schiff?”

  “What?”

  “Incubus just went wee-wee in your bed. I can see it on the sheets.”

  Mrs. Schiff sighed, and nudged Incubus, who was dead.

  16

  There seemed to be general agreement among the commentators, many of them not given to expressions of easy optimism, that a new day was dawning, that a corner had been turned, that life would go on. Those for whom the word was not a bugaboo said there had been a revolution, while those less millenially-minded called it a time of reconciliation. The weather was nicer, of course, as it invariably is in May and June. No one was quite sure what marked the commencement of this brighter era, much less whether the forces of darkness were in full retreat or had only stopped to catch their breath, but when the country woke up from the nightmare of its long collapse, a lot of problems had disappeared from the headlines along with a number of people.

  The most amazing change, from Daniel’s point of view, was that flight had been decriminalized in four of the Farm Belt states (though not yet in Iowa). Further, the government had dropped its prosecution of the publishers of the anonymous under-the-counter shocker, Tales of Terror, which purported to be the confessions of the man who’d blown up the Alaska pipeline nineteen years ago, single-handed, and who now regretted this and subsequent crimes, all the while plainly glorifying in their depiction. The government, by ceasing to require the publishers to divulge the author’s identity, was saying, in effect, that by-gones were by-gones. The result was that people could now afford to buy the book at its lower (over-the-counter) price, and were, by the millions, Daniel among them.

  Along another axis of reconciliation, the Reverend Jack Van Dyke was back in the news as the first big-shot liberal to support the Puritan Renewal League, the latest splinter-group of undergoders to try and make it in the big time. Time Magazine had a cover photo showing Van Dyke and Goodman Halifax rigged out in the black Stetsons, stiff white collars, red rayon bow-ties, and insignia-blazoned denim jackets that were the P.R.L.’s cheerfully anachronistic uniform. The two men were shown pledging allegiance to a flag in Arlington Cemetery. It wasn’t Daniel’s idea of the dawn of a new era, but Halifax had been behind the move to decriminalize flight, which was certainly to be counted to his favor, however involuted and Van Dykean the motives ascribed to him by Time.

  Daniel would have taken a larger and more affirming interest in these developments, but sad to say the vector of his own life refused to follow this general upward trend. Worst, in fact, had come to worst, for Miss Marspan had discontinued her ass
istance in the most definitive way. She was dead, one of a multitude to perish in London’s ongoing, multiple epidemic. Daniel was informed of her death in a telex from her bank. The bank regretted any inconvenience that might issue from the sudden interruption of its monthly drafts, but as the deceased had made no provision in her will for such payments to be maintained, it could not act otherwise.

  Daniel was similarly limited in his course of action. Until the spirit of the new era reached the Rationing Board and moved them to reconsider the plight of such as Boa, it would not be possible to return her to the dismal wards of the First National Flightpaths annex. In any case, he no longer had cash sufficient to secure her stay at the annex for more than a few months. Telling himself he had no choice, he went to Ernesto Rey.

  The terms set for his capitulation were not generous. He was to have his skin dyed a deep teak-brown, all but a broad circle on each cheek that would be left its natural color, so as (Rey explained) to reveal his blushes. His hair, being jet-black, need not be dyed, but would be frizzed, fluffed, and shaped, topiary-wise, as fashion should dictate. He would accompany Rey whenever required to, wearing the livery of the Metastasio, or something equally gay and gaudy, and he would perform small services symbolic of his subjection, such as opening doors, page-turning, and shining shoes. Further, he would engage, actively and unstintingly, in whatever carnal pursuits Rey should direct him towards, provided only (this was the one concession Daniel was able to obtain) such pursuits were legal and within the natural range of his competence. He would not otherwise be permitted to have sex, to which end he was to be fitted with an insanity belt. He would affect, both in public and private, to be infatuated with his benefactor, and to all inquiries as to why he acted in these ways he was to reply that he followed the promptings of a loving heart. In return Rey undertook to provide for Boa’s well-being for such time as he should require these services of Daniel and for a year thereafter.