Thomas Disch - On Wings of Song

Then on the evening in question, a windless Tuesday and bitterly cold, that single voice rose from their assembled silence like a moon rising over endless fields of snow. For the briefest moment, for the length of a phrase, it seemed to Daniel that the song could not be real, that it sprang from inside himself, so perfect it was, so beyond possibility, so willing to confess what must always remain inexpressible, a despair flowering now like a costly fragrance in the dorm’s fetid air.

It took hold of each soul so, leveling them all to ashes with a single breath, like the breath of atomic disintegration, joining them in the communion of an intolerable and lovely knowledge, which was the song and could not be told of apart from the song, so that they listened for each further swelling and subsiding as if it issued from the chorus of their mortal hearts, which the song had made articulate. Listening, they perished.

Then it stopped.

For another moment the silence sought to extend the song, and then even that vestige was gone. Daniel breathed, and the plumes of his breath were his own. He was alone inside his body in a cold room.

“Christ,” Barbara said softly.

There was a sound of cards being shuffled and dealt.

“Christ,” she repeated. “Couldn’t you just curl up and die?” Seeing Daniel look puzzled, she translated: “I mean, it’s just so fucking beautiful.”

He nodded.

She lifted her jacket off the nail on which it hung. “Let’s go outside. I don’t care if I freeze to death — I want some fresh air.”

Despite the cold, it did come as a relief to be out of the dorm, in the seeming freedom of the snow. They went where no feet had trampled it to stand beside one of the square stone posts that marked the camp’s perimeter. If it hadn’t been for the glare of the lights on the snow they might have been standing in any empty field. Even the lights, high on their metal poles, didn’t seem so pitiless tonight, with the stars so real above them in the spaces of the sky.

Barbara, too, was considering the stars. “They go there, you know. Some of them.”

“To the stars?”

“Well, to the planets, anyhow. But to the stars too, for all that anybody knows. Wouldn’t you, if you could?”

“If they do, they must never come back. It would take such a long time. I can’t imagine it.”

“I can.”

She left it at that. Neither of them spoke again for a long while. Far off in the night a tree creaked, but there was no wind.

“Did you know,” she said, “that when you fly the music doesn’t stop? You’re singing and at a certain point you kind of lose track that it’s you who’s singing, and that’s when it happens. And you’re never aware that the music stops. The song is always going on somewhere. Everywhere! Isn’t that incredible?”

“Yeah, I read that too. Some celebrity in the Minneapolis paper said the first time you fly it’s like being a blind man who has an operation and can see things for the first time. But then, after the shock is over, after you’ve been flying regularly, you start taking it all for granted, the same as the people do who’ve never been blind.”

“I didn’t read it,” Barbara said, miffed. “I heard it.”

“You mean you flew?”

“Yes.”

“No kidding!”

“Just once, when I was fifteen.”

“Jesus. You’ve actually done it. I’ve never known anyone who has.”

“Well, now you know two of us.”

“You mean the guy who sang in there tonight? You think he can fly?”

“It’s pretty obvious.”

“I did wonder. It wasn’t like anyone else’s singing I’d ever heard. There was something… uncanny about it. But Jesus, Barbara, you’ve done it! Why didn’t you ever say so before? I mean, Christ Almighty, it’s like finding out you shook hands with God.”

“I don’t talk about it because I only did it that one time. I’m not naturally musical. It just isn’t in me. When it happened I was very young, and very stoned, and I just took off.”

“Where were you? Where did you go? Tell me about it!”

“I was at my cousin’s house in West Orange, New Jersey. They had a hook-up in the basement, but no one had ever got off on it. People would buy an apparatus then the way they’d buy a grand piano, as a status symbol. So when I hooked up I didn’t really expect anything to happen. I started singing, and something happened inside my head, like when you’re falling asleep and you begin to lose your sense of what size you are, if you’ve ever had that feeling. I didn’t pay any attention to it, though, and went right on singing. And then the next thing I knew I was outside my body. At first I thought my ears had popped, it was as simple as that.”

“What did you sing?”

“I was never able to remember. You lose touch with your ego in an ordinary way. If you’re totally focused on what you’re singing, any song can get you off, supposedly. It must have been something from the top twenty, since I wouldn’t have known much else in those days. But what counts isn’t the song. It’s the way you sing it. The commitment you can give.”

“Like tonight?”

“Right.”

“Uh-huh. So then what happened?”

“I was alone in the house. My cousin had gone off with her boyfriend, and her parents were away somewhere. I was nervous and a bit afraid, I guess. For a while I just floated where I was.”

“Where was that?”

“About two inches above the tip of my nose. It felt peculiar.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Then I began flying from one part of the basement to the other.”

“You had wings? I mean, real wings?”

“I couldn’t see myself, but it felt like real wings. It felt like a great charge of power in the middle of my spine. Will power, in the most literal sense. I had this sense of being totally focused on what I was doing, and where I was going — and that’s what the flying was . It was as though you could drive a car by just looking at the road ahead of you.”

Daniel closed his eyes to savor the idea of a freedom so perfect and entire.

“I flew around the basement for what seemed like hours. I’d closed the basement door behind me, like a dummy, and the windows were all sealed tight, so there was no way to get out of the basement. People don’t consider making fairy-holes until they’ve actually got off the ground. It didn’t matter though. I was so small that the basement seemed as big as a cathedral. And almost that beautiful. More than almost — it was incredible.”

“Just flying around?”

“And being aware. There was a shelf of canned goods. I can still remember the light that came out of the jars of jam and tomatoes. Not really a light though. It was more as though you could see the life still left in them, the energy they’d stored up while they were growing.”

“You must have been hungry.”

She laughed. “Probably.”

“What else?” he insisted. It was Daniel who was hungry, who was insatiable.

“At a certain point I got afraid. My body — my physical body that was lying there in the hook-up — didn’t seem real to me. No, I suppose it seemed real enough, maybe even too much so. But it didn’t seem mine. Have you ever been to a zoo?”

Daniel shook his head.

“Well then I can’t explain.”

Barbara was quiet for a while. Daniel looked at her body, swollen with pregnancy, and tried to imagine the feeling she couldn’t explain. Except in gym class he didn’t pay much attention to his own body. Or to other people’s, for that matter.

“There was a freezer in the basement. I hadn’t noticed it till at one point the motor started up. You know how there’s a shudder first, and then a steady hum. Well, for me, then, it was like a symphony orchestra starting up. I was aware, without seeing it, of the part of the engine that was spinning around. I didn’t go near it, of course. I knew that any kind of rotary motor is supposed to be dangerous, like quicksand, but it was so… intoxicating. Like dance music that you can’t possibly resist. I began spinning around where I was, very slowly at first, but there was nothing to keep me from going faster. It was still pure will power. The faster I let myself spin the more exciting, and inviting, the motor seemed. Without realizing it, I’d drifted over to the freezer and I was spinning along the same axis as the motor. I lost all sense of everything but that single motion. I felt like… a planet! It could have gone on forever and I wouldn’t have cared. But it stopped. The freezer shut itself off, and as the motor slowed down, so did I. Even that part was wonderful. But when it had stopped completely, I was scared shitless. I realized what had happened, and I’d heard that that was how a lot of people had just disappeared. I would have. Gladly. I would to this day. When I remember.”