334

by Thomas M. Disch

  It was a fifteen-minute ride to the South Ferry stop. In the ferry building was a PanAm restaurant where the waitresses wore uniforms just like Milly’s. Though he couldn’t afford it, he ate lunch there, just the lunch that Milly might be serving that very moment at an altitude of seven thousand feet. He tipped a quarter. Now, except for the token to take him back to the dorm, he was broke. Freedom Now.

  He walked along the rows of benches where the old people came to sit every day to look out at the sea while they waited to die. Birdie didn’t feel the same hatred for old people this morning that he’d felt last night. Lined up in helpless rows in the glare of the afternoon sun, they seemed remote, they posed no threats, they didn’t matter.

  The breeze coming in off the Hudson smelled of salt, oil, and rot. It wasn’t a bad smell at all. Invigorating. Maybe if he had lived centuries ago instead of now, he’d have been a sailor. Moments from movies about ships flitted by. He kicked an empty Fun container out through the railing and watched it bob up and down in the green and the black.

  The sky roared with jets. Jets heading in every direction. She could have been on any of them. A week ago what had she said, “I’ll love you forever.” A week ago?

  “I’ll love you forever.” If he’d had a knife he could have carved that on something.

  He felt just great. Absolutely.

  An old man in an old suit shuffled along the walk, holding on to the sea railing. His face was covered with a thick, curly, white beard, though his head was as bare as a police helmet. Birdie backed from the rail to let him go by.

  He stuck his hand in Birdie’s face and said, “How about it, Jack?”

  Birdie crinkled his nose. “Sorry.”

  “I need a quarter.” A foreign accent. Spanish? No. He reminded Birdie of something, someone.

  “So do I.”

  The bearded man gave him the finger and then Birdie remembered who he looked like. Socrates!

  He glanced at his wrist but he’d left his watch in the locker as it hadn’t fit in with today’s all-white color scheme. He spun round. The gigantic advertising clock on the face of First National Citibank said 2:15. That wasn’t possible. Birdie asked two of the old people on the benches if that was the right time. Their watches agreed.

  There was no use trying to get to the test now. Without quite knowing why, Birdie smiled. He breathed a sigh of relief and sat down to watch the ocean. In June there was the usual family reunion at The Sicilian Vespers. Birdie polished off his tray without paying too much attention to either the food or the story his dad was dawdling over, something about someone at 16th Street who’d opted for Room 7, after which it was discovered that he had been a Catholic priest. Mr. Ludd seemed upset. Birdie couldn’t tell if it was the idea of Room 7 or the idea of having to cut down his intake because of the diabetes. Finally, to give the old guy a chance at his noodles, Birdie told him about the essay project Mr. Mack had arranged, even though (as Mr. Mack had pointed out and pointed out) Birdie’s problems and his papers belonged to Barnard G.S.A., not to P. S. 141. In other words, this would be Birdie’s last chance, but that could be, if Birdie would let it, a source of motivation. And he let it.

  “And you’re going to write a book?”

  “Goddamn, Dad, will you listen?”

  Mr. Ludd shrugged, wound the food on his fork, and listened. What Birdie had to do to climb back to 25 was demonstrate abilities markedly above the abilities he’d demonstrated back on that Friday the 13th. Mr. Mack had gone over the various components of his profile, and since he’d scored most on Verbal Skills they decided that his best bet would be to write something. When Birdie asked what, Mr. Mack had given him, to keep, a copy of By Their Bootstraps.

  Birdie reached under the bench where he’d set it down when they came in. He held it up for his dad to see: By Their Bootstraps. Edited and with an Introduction (encouraging but not too clear) by Lucille Mortimer Randolph-Clapp. Lucille Mortimer Randolph-Clapp was the architect of the Regents system.

  The last string of spaghetti was wound and eaten. Reverently Mr. Ludd touched his spoon tip to the skin of the spumoni. Holding back from that first taste, he asked, “And so they’re paying you money just to … ?”

  “Five hundred dollars. Ain’t it a bitch. They call it a stipend. It’s supposed to last me three months but I don’t know about that. My rent at Mott Street isn’t so bad, but other things.”

  “They’re crazy.”

  “It’s the system they have. You see, I need time to develop my ideas.”

  “The whole system’s crazy. Writing! You can’t write a book.”

  “Not a book. Just a story, an essay, something like that. It doesn’t have to be more than a page or two. It says in the book that the best stuff usually is very… I forget the exact word but it means short. You should read some of the crap that got past. Poetry and stuff where every other word is something foul. I mean, really foul. But there’s some okay things, too. One guy that didn’t finish eighth grade wrote a story about working on an alligator preserve. In Florida. And philosophy. There was this one girl who was blind and crippled. I’ll show you.” Birdie found the place where’d he left off: “My Philosophy” by Delia Hunt. He read the first paragraph aloud:

  “Sometimes I’d like to be a huge philosophy, and sometimes I’d like to come along with a big axe and chop myself down. If I heard somebody calling out Help, Help! I could just sit there on the trunk and think, I guess somebody’s in trouble. But not me, because I’m sitting here looking at the rabbits and so on running and jumping. I guess they’re trying to get away from the smoke. But I would just sit there on my philosophy and think, Well, I guess the forest is really on fire now.”

  Mr. Ludd, involved in his spumoni, only nodded pleasantly. He refused to be bewildered by anything he heard or make protests or try to understand why things never worked out the way he planned. If people wanted him to do one thing he’d do it. If they wanted him to do something else he’d do that. No questions asked. La vida, as Delia Hunt also observed, es un sueño.

  Later, walking back to 16th Street, his father said, “You know what you should do, don’t you?”

  “What?”

  “Use some of that money they gave you and get somebody really smart to write the thing for you.”

  “Can’t. They got computers that can tell if you do that.”

  “They do?” Mr. Ludd sighed.

  A couple blocks farther on he asked to borrow ten dollars for some Fadeout. It was a traditional part of their reunions and traditionally Birdie would have said no, but having just been bragging about his stipend? He had to.

  “I hope you’re able to be a better father than I’ve been,” Mr. Ludd said, putting the folded-up bill into his card-carrier.

  “Yeah. Well, I hope so, too.”

  They both got a chuckle out of that.

  Next morning, following the single piece of advice he’d been able to get out of the advisor he’d paid twenty-five dollars for, Birdie made his first solo visit (years ago he’d been marched through the uptown branch with a few dozen other fourth graders) to the National Library. The Nassau branch was housed in an old wrapped-glass building a little to the west of the central Wall Street area. The place was a honeycomb of research booths, except for the top floor, 28, which was given over to the cables connecting Nassau to the uptown branch and then, by relays, to every other major library outside of France, Japan, and South America. A page who couldn’t have been much older than Birdie showed him how to use the dial-and-punch system. When the page was gone Birdie stared glumly at the blank viewing screen. The only thought in his head was how he’d like to smash in the screen with his fist: dial and punch!

  After a hot lunch in the basement of the library he felt better. He recalled Socrates waving his arms in the air and the blind girl’s essay on philosophy. He put out a call for the five best books on Socrates written at a senior high school level and began reading from them at random.

  Later that night Bird
ie finished reading the chapter in Plato’s Republic that contains the famous parable of the cave. Dazedly, dazzled, he wandered through the varied brightness of Wall Street’s third shift. Even after twelve o’clock the streets and plazas were teeming. He wound up in a corridor full of vending machines, sipping a hot Koffee, staring at the faces around him, wondering did any of them—the woman glued to the Times, the old messengers chattering—suspect the truth? Or were they, like the poor prisoners in the cave, turned to the rockface, watching shadows, never imagining that somewhere outside there was a sun, a sky, a whole world of crushing beauty?

  He’d never understood before about beauty—that it was more than a breeze coming in through the window or the curve of Milly’s breasts. It wasn’t a matter of how he, Birdie Ludd, felt or what he wanted. It was there inside of things, glowing. Even the dumb vending machines. Even the blind faces.

  He remembered the vote of the Athenian Senate to put Socrates to death. Corrupting the youth, ha! He hated the Athenian Senate but it was a different sort of hate from the kind he was used to. He hated them for a reason: Justice!

  Beauty. Justice. Truth. Love, too, probably. Somewhere there was an explanation for everything. A meaning. It all made sense. It wasn’t just a lot of words.

  He went outside. New emotions kept passing over him faster than he could take account of them, like huge speeded-up clouds. One moment, looking at his face reflected in the darkened window of a specialty food shop, he wanted to laugh out loud. The next moment, remembering the young prostitute in the room downstairs from where he lived now, lying on her shabby bed in a peekaboo dress, he wanted to cry. It seemed to Birdie that he could see the pain and hopelessness of her whole life as clearly as if her past and future were a physical object in front of him, a statue in the park.

  He stood alone beside the sea railing in Battery Park. Dark waves lapped at the concrete shore. Signal lights blinked on and off, red and green, white and white, as they moved past the stars toward Central Park.

  Beauty? The idea seemed too slight now. Something beyond beauty was involved in all of this. Something that chilled him in ways he couldn’t explain. And yet he was exhilarated, too. His newly awakened soul battled against letting this feeling, this principle, slip away from him unnamed. Each time, just as he thought he had it, it eluded him. Finally, towards dawn, he went home, temporarily defeated.

  Just as he was climbing the stairs to his own room, a guerilla, out of uniform but still recognizably a guerilla, with stars and stripes tattooed across his forehead, came out of Frances Schaap’s room. Birdie felt a brief impulse of hatred for him, followed by a wave of compassion for the girl. But tonight he didn’t have the time to try and help her, assuming she wanted his help.

  He slept fitfully, like a dead body sinking into the water and floating up to the surface. At noon he woke from a dream that stopped just short of being a nightmare. He’d been inside a room with a beamed ceiling. Two ropes hung from the beams. He stood between them, trying to grasp one or the other, but just as he thought he had caught hold of a rope, it would swing away wildly, like a berserk pendulum.

  He knew what the dream meant. The ropes were a test of his creativeness. That was the principle he’d tried to define last night standing by the water. Creativeness was the key to all his problems. If he would only learn about it, analyze it, he’d be able to solve his problems.

  The idea was still hazy in his mind but he knew he was on the right track. he made some cultured eggs and a cup of Koffee for breakfast, then went straight to his booth at the library to study. The tremendous excitement of last night had leaked out of things. Buildings were just buildings. People seemed to move a little faster than usual, but that was all. Even so, he felt terrific. In his whole life he’d never felt as good as he did today. He was free. Or was it something else? One thing he knew for sure: nothing in the past was worth shit, but the future, Ah! the future was blazing with promise.

  4

  From:

  PROBLEMS OF CREATIVENESS

  By Berthold Anthony Ludd

  Summary

  From ancient times to today we have seen that there is more than one criteria by which the critic analyzes the products of Creativeness. Can we know which of these measures to use? Shall we deal directly with the subject? Or indirectly.

  There is another source to study Creativeness in the great drama of the philosopher Wolfgang Gothe, called “The Faust.” No one can deny this the undisputed literary pinnacle of “Masterpiece.” Yet what motivation can have drawn him to describe Heaven and Hell in this strange way? Who is the Faust if not ourselves. Does this not show a genuine need to achieve communication? Our only answer can be yes.

  Thus once more we are led to the problem of Creativeness. All beauty has three conditions: 1, The subject shall be of literary format. 2, All parts are contained within the whole. And 3, The meaning is radiantly clear. True Creativeness is only present when it can be observed in the work of art. This too is the Philosophy of Aristotle that is valid for today.

  No, the criteria of Creativeness is not alone sought in the area of “language.” Does not the scientist, the prophet, the painter offer his own criteria of judgement toward the same general purpose. Which road shall we choose if this is so? Or is it true, that “All roads lead to Rome.” We are more then ever living in a time when it is important to define every citizen’s responsibilities.

  Another criteria of Creativeness was made by Socrates, so cruelly put to death by his own people, and I quote, “To know nothing is the first condition of all knowledge.” From the wisdom of that great Greek Philosopher may we not draw our own conclusions concerning these problems? Creativeness is the ability to see relationships where none exist.

  5

  While Birdie stayed in bed digging at his toenails, Frances went down for the mail. Except when she was at work Birdie more or less lived in her room, his own having got out of hand during the period when he was writing his essay. It was not a sexual relationship, though a couple of times, just to be friendly, Frances had offered and Birdie’d accepted a blow-job, but it had been a chore for both of them.

  What did bring them together, besides sharing a bathroom, was the sad, immovable fact that Frances’s Regents score was an absolute 20. Because of some disease she had. Aside from one kid at P.S. 141 who’d been a kind of dwarf and almost an idiot, Frances was Birdie’s first personal acquaintance who’d scored lower than he had. Her own 20 didn’t bother her, or she knew enough not to let it, but for the whole two months Birdie was working on “Problems of Creativeness” she’d listened to every draft of every paragraph. If it hadn’t been for her constant praise and her getting behind him and pushing whenever he got depressed and hopeless, he’d never have seen his way out the other end. It seemed unfair in a way that, now that he was through, he’d be going back to Milly. But Frances had said she didn’t mind about that either. Birdie had never known anyone so completely unselfish, but she said no, it wasn’t that. Helping him had been her way of fighting the system.

  “Well?” he asked, when she came back.

  “Nope. Just this.” She tossed a postcard onto the bed. A sunset somewhere with palm trees. For her.

  “I didn’t think they could write, these guys.”

  “Jock? Oh, he’s always sending me stuff. This—” she grabbed a handful of her heavy, glittering bathrobe “—came from Japan.”

  Birdie snorted. He’d meant to buy Frances a present himself, as a token of his appreciation, but his money was gone. He was living, till his letter came, on what he could borrow from her. “He doesn’t have much to say for himself.”

  “No, I suppose not.” She sounded down. Before she’d gone to get the mail, she’d been happy as an ad. The postcard must have meant more than she’d let on. Maybe she was in love with this Jock. Though back in June, on the night of their first heart-to-heart drunk, after he’d told her about Milly, she’d said that she was still waiting for the real thing to come along.

/>   Whatever it was, he decided, he wasn’t going to let it bring him down too. He plugged himself into the idea of getting dressed. He’d get out his sky-blues and a green scarf and then he’d stroll in his clean bare feet to the river. Then uptown. Not as far as 11th Street, no. In any case it was Thursday, and Milly wouldn’t be home on a Thursday afternoon. In any case he wasn’t going to see her until he could rub her pretty nose in the story of his success.

  “It’s bound to come tomorrow.”

  “I suppose so.” Frances was sitting cross-legged on the floor, combing her wispy, dull-brown hair down across her face.

  “It’s been two weeks. Almost.”

  “Birdie?”

  “That’s my name.”

  “Yesterday when I was in Stuyvesant Town, the market, you know?” She found her part and pulled half the veil to one side. “I bought two pills.”

  “Great.”

  “Not that kind. The pills you take for … you know, so you can have babies again? They change the stuff that’s in the water. I thought maybe if we each took one… .”

  “You can’t just go and do it like that, Frances. For Christ’s sake! They’d make you have an abortion before you could say Lucille Mortimer Randolph-Clapp.”

  It was her pet joke that she’d made up herself, but Frances not so much as smiled. “Why would they have to know? I mean, until it was too late.”

  “You know what they do, don’t you, to people who try and pull that kind of stunt? To the man as well as the woman?”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Well, I do.” Then, to close the discussion: “Jesus Christ.”

  She gathered all the hair at the back of her head and fumbled a knot into her strand of yellow yarn. She tried to make the next suggestion sound spontaneous. “We could go to Mexico.”