334

by Thomas M. Disch

  The first time he’d come to Milly’s apartment he’d walked up these stairs behind her, watching her tight little ass shift to the right, to the left, to the right, and the tinsel fringes of her street shorts shivering and sparkling like a liquor-store display. All the way to the top she hadn’t looked back once.

  At the eleventh or the twelfth floor the hand left the railing and didn’t reappear. So it hadn’t been Milly after all.

  He had a hard-on just from remembering. He unzipped and reached in to give it a couple half-hearted strokes but it was gone before he could get started.

  He looked at his guaranteed Timex watch. Eight, on the dot. He could afford to wait two more hours. Then, if he didn’t want to pay a full fare on the subway, it was a forty-minute walk back to his dorm. If he hadn’t been on probation because of his grades, he might have waited all night long.

  He sat down to study the History of Art. He stared at the picture of Socrates in the bad light. With one hand he was holding a big cup, with the other he was giving somebody the finger. He didn’t seem to be dying at all. The midterm was going to be tomorrow afternoon at two o’clock. He really had to study. He stared at the picture more intently. Why did people paint pictures anyhow? He stared until his eyes hurt.

  The baby started up again, zeroing in on Central Park. Some Burmese nationals came barreling down the stairs, gibbering, and a minute later another gang of kids in black masks—U. S. guerillas—came after them, screaming obscenities.

  He began to cry. He was certain, though he wouldn’t admit it yet in so many words, that Milly was cheating on him. He loved her so much and she was so beautiful. The last time he’d seen her she’d called him stupid. “You’re so stupid, Birdie Ludd,” she said, “sometimes you make me sick.” But she was so beautiful. And he loved her.

  A tear fell into Socrates’s cup and he was absorbed by the cheap paper. He realized that he was crying. He hadn’t cried before in all his adult life. His heart was broken.

  2

  Birdie had not always been such a droop. Quite the opposite—he’d been friendly as a flower, easygoing, uncomplaining, and a lot of fun. He didn’t start a contest going the minute he met you, and when contests were unavoidable he knew how to be a graceful loser. The competitive factor had received little emphasis at P. S. 141 and even less at the center he was moved to after his parents’ divorce. A nice guy who got along, that was Birdie.

  Then in the summer after his high school graduation, just when the thing with Milly was developing towards total seriousness, he’d been called in to Mr. Mack’s office and the bottom had dropped out of his life. Norman Mack was a thin, balding, middle-aged man with a paunch and a Jewish nose, though whether or not he was Jewish Birdie could only guess. His chief reason, aside from the nose, for thinking so was that at all of their counseling sessions Birdie got the feeling, which he also got with Jews, that Mr. Mack was toying with him, that his bland, professional good will was a disguise for an unbounded contempt, that all his sound advice was a snare. The pity was that Birdie could not in his very nature help but be caught in it. It was Mr. Mack’s game and had to be played by his rules.

  “Sit down, Birdie.” The first rule.

  Birdie had sat down, and Mr. Mack had explained that he’d received a letter from the upstate Regents Office. He handed Birdie a large gray envelope from which Birdie took out a bonanza of papers and forms, and the gist of it was—Birdie tucked the papers back inside—that Birdie had been reclassified.

  “But I’ve taken the tests, Mr. Mack! Four years ago. And I passed.”

  “I’ve called Albany to make certain this wasn’t the result of a crossed wire somewhere. And it wasn’t. The letter—”

  “Look!” He reached for his wallet, took out his card. “Look, it says there, right in black and white—twenty-seven.”

  Mr. Mack took the frayed card with a sympathetic sucking of his cheeks. “Well, Birdie, I’m sorry to say that your new card says twenty-four.”

  “One point? For one point you’re going to—” He couldn’t bring himself even to think of what it was they were going to do. “Oh, Mr. Mack!”

  “I know, Birdie. Believe me, I’m as sorry as you are.”

  “I took their goddamn tests and I passed them.”

  “As you know, Birdie, there are other factors to be weighed besides the test scores, and one of those has changed. Your father, it seems, has come down with diabetes.”

  “That’s the first I’ve heard of it.”

  “It’s possible that your father doesn’t know himself yet. The hospitals have an automatic data link with the Regents system, which in turn mailed you that letter automatically.”

  “But what does my father have to do with anything?”

  Over the years Birdie’s relationship with his father had been whittled down to a voice on the phone on holidays and a perfunctory visit to the federal flophouse on 16th Street an average of four times a year, on which occasions Mr. Ludd would be issued meal vouchers for an outside restaurant. Family life was the single greatest cohesive force in any society, and so, willy-nilly, the MODICUM people tried to keep families together, even families as tenuous as one father and one son eating lasagna at twelve-week intervals at The Sicilian Vespers. His father? Birdie almost had to laugh.

  Mr. Mack explained first of all that there was nothing to be ashamed of. A full 2 1/2 per cent of the population scored under 25, or over twelve million people. A low score didn’t make Birdie a freak, it didn’t debar him from any of his civil rights, it only meant, as of course he knew, that he would not be allowed to father children, either directly, through marriage, or indirectly, by artificial insemination. He wanted to make certain that Birdie understood this. Did Birdie understand this?

  Yes. He did.

  Brightening, Mr. Mack pointed out that it was still quite possible—probable even, considering he was right on the borderline—to be reclassified again: up. Patiently, point by point, he went over with Birdie the components of his Regents score, indicating the ways he could hope to add to his score as well as the ways he couldn’t.

  Diabetes was a hereditary disease. Treatment was costly and could continue for years. The original proposers of the Act had wanted to put diabetes on a par with hemophilia and the XYY gene. That was rather Draconian but surely Birdie could understand why a genetic drift towards diabetes had to be discouraged.

  Surely. He could.

  Then there was the other unfortunate matter concerning his father—that, during the past decade, he had been actively employed less than 50 per cent of the time. At first sight it might seem unfair to penalize Birdie for his father’s carefree life-style, but statistics showed this trait tended to be quite as heritable as, say, intelligence.

  The old antithesis of heredity versus environment! But before Birdie protested too strongly he should look at the next item on his sheet. Mr. Mack tapped it with his pencil. Now here was a curious illustration of history at work. The Revised Genetics Testing Act had finally gone through the Senate in 2011 as a result of the so-called Jim Crow Compromise, and here was that compromise virtually breathing down Birdie’s neck, for the five points he’d lost through his father’s unemployment pattern he’d gained back by being a Negro!

  On the physical scale Birdie had scored 9, which placed him at the modal point, or peak, of the normal curve. Mr. Mack made a little joke at his own expense concerning the score he would probably have got on the physical scale. Birdie could ask for a new physical but it was rare that anyone’s score on this scale went up, while only too often it sank. For instance, in Birdie’s case, the least tendency towards hypoglycemia might now, in view of his father’s diabetes, drop him altogether out of reach of the cutoff point.

  Didn’t it seem best, then, to leave well enough alone?

  It did seem best.

  Mr. Mack could feel more hopeful about the other two tests, the Stanford-Binet (Short Form) and the Skinner-Waxman Scale. Birdie had not done badly on these (7 and 6), bu
t he had not done very well either. People often improved dramatically a second time around. A headache, anxiety, even indifference—there are so many things that can get in the way of a top mental performance. Four years was a long time, but did Birdie have any reason to believe he hadn’t done as well as he might have?

  He did! He remembered wanting to complain about it at the time, but since he’d passed the tests he hadn’t bothered. The day of the test a sparrow had got into the auditorium. It kept flying witlessly back and forth, back and forth, from one sealed window to the other. Who could concentrate with that going on? They decided that Birdie would apply to be retested on both the Stanford-Binet and the Skinner-Waxman. If for any reason he wasn’t feeling confident on the date the Regents office slotted him into, he could take a rain check. Mr. Mack thought that Birdie would find everyone ready to bend over backward.

  The problem appeared to be solved and Birdie was ready to go, but Mr. Mack was obliged, for form’s sake, to go over one or two more details. Beyond hereditary factors and the Regents tests, both of which measured potentiality, there was another group of components for accomplishment. Any exceptional service for the country or the economy was an automatic twenty-five points but this was hardly anything to count on. Similarly, a demonstration of physical, intellectual, or creative abilities markedly above the levels indicated by et cetera, et cetera.

  Birdie thought they could skip that too. But here, beneath the eraser, here was something to consider—the educational component. Already Birdie had five points for finishing high school. If he were to go on to college—

  Out of the question. Birdie wasn’t the college type. He wasn’t anybody’s fool, but on the other hand he wasn’t anybody’s Isaac Einstein.

  In general Mr. Mack would have applauded the realism of such a decision, but in the present circumstances it was better not to burn bridges. Any New York City resident had a right to attend any of the colleges in the city, either as a regular student or, lacking certain prerequisites, in a General Studies Annexe. It was something for Birdie to bear in mind.

  Mr. Mack felt terrible. He hoped Birdie would learn to look at his reclassification as a setback rather than a permanent defeat. Failure was only a point of view.

  Birdie agreed, but even this wasn’t enough to obtain his release. Mr. Mack urged Birdie to consider the question of contraception and genetics in the broadest possible light. Already there were too many people for the available resources. Without some system of voluntary limitation there would be more, more, disastrously more. Mr. Mack hoped that eventually Birdie would come to see that the Regents system, for all its obvious drawbacks, was both desirable and necessary.

  Birdie promised to try and look at it this way, and then he could go. Among the papers in the gray envelope was a pamphlet, “Your Regents,” put out by the National Educational Council, who said that the only effective way to prepare for his reexamination was to develop a confident, lively frame of mind. A month later Birdie kept his appointment on Centre Street in a confident, lively frame of mind. Only afterward, sitting by the fountain in the plaza discussing the tests with his fellow martyrs, did he realize that this had been Friday, July 13th. Jinxed! He didn’t have to wait for the special delivery letter to know his score was a cherry, an apple, and a banana. Even so, the letter was a mind-staggerer. He’d gone down one point on the I.Q. test; on the Skinner-Waxman Creativity Scale he’d sunk to a moron-level score of 4. His new total: 21.

  The 4 riled him. The first part of the Skinner-Waxman test had involved picking the funniest punch line from four multiple choices, and ditto the best endings to stories. This much he remembered from before but then they took him into a weird empty room. Two pieces of rope were hanging from the ceiling and Birdie was given a pliers and told to tie the two ropes together. You weren’t allowed to pull the ropes off their hooks.

  It was impossible. If you held the very end of one rope in your hand, you couldn’t possibly get hold of the other rope, even by fishing for it with your toe. The extra few inches advantage you got from the pliers was no help at all. He was about ready to scream by the end of the ten minutes. There were three more impossible problems but by then he was only going through the motions.

  At the fountain some jerkoff boy genius explained what they all could have done: tie the pliers to the end of one string and set it swinging like a pendulum; then go and get—

  “Do you know what I’d like to see,” Birdie said, interrupting the boy genius, “tied up and swinging from that ceiling? Huh, schmuck? You!”

  Which the others agreed was a better joke than any of their multiple choices.

  Only after he’d lucked out on the tests did he tell Milly about his reclassification. A coolness had come into their love affair about then, just a cloud across the sun, but Birdie had been afraid all the same what her reaction might be, the names he might be called. As it turned out, Milly was heroic, all tenderness, concern, and stout-hearted resolve. She hadn’t realized before, she cried, how much she did love, and need, Birdie. She loved him more now, because— But she didn’t have to explain: it was in their faces, in their eyes, Birdie’s brown and glistening, Milly’s hazel flecked with gold. She promised to stand by him through the whole ordeal. Diabetes! And not even his own diabetes! The more she thought about it the angrier she got, the more determined never to let some Moloch of a bureaucracy play God with her and Birdie. (Moloch?) If Birdie was willing to go to Barnard G.S.A., Milly was willing to wait for him as long as need be.

  Four years, as it turned out. The point system was gimmicked so that each year only counted half a point until graduation, but that was worth 4. Had Birdie been content with his old Regents scores, he could have worked his way back up to 25 in two years. Now he’d actually have to go for a degree.

  But he did love Milly, and he did want to marry Milly, and let them say what they like, a marriage isn’t a marriage unless you can have children.

  He went to Barnard. What choice had there been?

  3

  On the morning of the day of his Art History test Birdie lay in bed in the empty Annexe dorm, drowsing and thinking about love. He couldn’t get back to sleep, but he didn’t want to get up yet either. His body was bursting with energy, full to the top and flowing over, but it wasn’t energy for getting up to brush his teeth or going down to breakfast. Anyhow it was too late for breakfast and he was happy where he was.

  Sunlight spilled in through the south window. A breeze rustled outdated announcements pinned to the bulletin board, spun round a shirt that hung on a curtain rail, touched the down on the back of Birdie’s hand, where her name was now just a faded smudge inside a ballpoint heart. Birdie laughed with a sense of his own fullness and the promise of good weather. He turned over on his left side, letting the blanket slide to the floor. The window framed a perfect blue rectangle of sky. Beautiful! It was March but it might have been April or May. It was going to be a wonderful day, a wonderful spring. He could feel it in the muscles of his chest and the muscles of his stomach when he took a breath of air.

  Spring! Then summer. Breezes. No shirts.

  Last summer out at Great Kills Harbor, the hot sand, the sea breeze in Milly’s hair. Again and again her hand would lift to push it back, like a veil. What had they talked about all that day? Everything. About the future. About her rotten father. Milly was desperate to get away from 334 and live her own life. Now, with her airline job, she had the option of a dorm, though, not being as used to a communal life as Birdie was, it was hard for her. But soon, soon….

  Summer. Walking with her, a snake dance through the other bodies spread out across the sand, lawns of flesh. Rubbing the lotion into her. Summer Magic. His hand slithering. Nothing definite and then it would be definite, as daylight. As though the whole world were having sex, the sea and the sky and everyone. They’d be puppies and they’d be pigs. The air would fill up with the sound of songs, a hundred at a time. At such moments he knew what it must be like to be a composer or a grea
t musician. He became a giant, swollen with greatness. A time bomb.

  The clock on the wall said 11:07. This is my lucky day: he made it a promise. He threw himself out of bed and did ten push-ups on the tile floor, still damp from its morning mopping. Then ten more. After the last push-up Birdie rested on the floor, his lips pressed against the cool, moist tile. He had a hard-on.

  He grabbed it, closing his eyes. Milly! Your eyes.o Milly, I love you. Milly,o Milly,o Milly. So much! Milly’s arms. The small of her back. Bending back. Milly, don’t leave me! Milly? Love me? I!

  He came in a smooth, spread-open flow till his fingers were covered with semen, and the back of his hand, and the blue heart, and “Milly.”

  11:35. The Art History test was at two. He’d already missed a ten o’clock field trip for Consumership. Tough.

  He wrapped his toothbrush, his Crest, his razor, and foam in a towel and went to what had been, in the days when the Annexe was an office building, the executive washroom of the actuarial division of New York Life. The music started when he opened the door: SLAM, BANG! WHY AM I SO HAPPY?

  Slam, Bang!

  Why am I so happy?

  God Damn,

  I don’t really know.

  He decided to wear his white sweater with white Levi’s and white sneakers. He brushed a whitening agent into his hair, which was natural again. He looked at himself in front of the bathroom mirror. He smiled. The sound system started in on his favorite Ford commercial. Alone in the empty space before the urinals he danced with himself, singing the words of the commercial.