Thomas Disch - On Wings of Song

There was, however, one major stumbling-block to believing in the old-fashioned, Christian type of soul. Namely, that while fairies were aware of fairies in exactly the way that people are aware of each other, by the senses of sight and hearing and touch, no fairy had ever seen a soul. Often (Daniel had read) a group of them would gather at the bedside of someone who was dying, to await the moment, wished for or believed in, of the soul’s release. But what they always had witnessed, instead, was simply a death — not a release but a disappearance, a fading-out, an end. If there were souls, they were not made of the same apprehensible substance as fairies, and all the theories about the soul that had been concocted over the centuries were probably based on the experience of the rare, fortunate individuals who’d found their way to flight without the help of a hookup, like the saints who had floated while they prayed, and the yogis of India, etc… Such was the theory of people who had flown, and their outspokenness was one of the reasons that flying and everything to do with it were the focus of such distress and downright hatred among the undergoders, who had to believe in the soul and all the rest of that, since what else was there for them to look forward to except their hereafter? The poor, benighted sons-of-bitches.

For that matter, what had he had to believe in up till now? Not a thing. But now! Now belief had come to him and burned inside him. By the light of its fire all things were bright and fair, and the darkness beyond the range of his vision was of no concern.

His faith was simple. All faiths are. He would fly. He would learn to sing, and by singing he would fly. It was possible. Millions of others had done it, and like them, so would he. He would fly. It was only necessary to hang on to that one idea. As long as he did, nothing else mattered — not the horror of these vats, not the rigors or desolations of Spirit Lake, not Barbara’s death, nor the life he’d go back to in Amesville. Nothing in the world mattered except the moment, dim but certain in the blackness of the years ahead, when he would feel wings spring from his immaterial will and he would fly.

Daniel got back to the dorm just as the auction of Barbara Steiner’s personal effects was getting under way. They were spread out for inspection, and people were filing past the table with the same skittish curiosity mourners would pay to a dead body. Daniel took his place in the line, but when he got near enough to the table to recognize the single largest item being offered up (besides the ticking and stuffing of her mattress), he let out a whoop of pure, unthinking indignation, pushed his way to the table, and reappropriated his long-lost copy of The Product Is God .

“Put that back, Weinreb,” said the trustee in charge of the auction, a Mrs. Gruber, who was also, by virtue of her seniority at Spirit Lake the chief cook and head janitor. “You can bid for that the same as anyone else.”

“This book isn’t up for auction,” he said with the belligerence of righteousness. “It’s already mine. It was stolen out of my mattress weeks ago and I never knew who by.”

“Well, now you know,” said Mrs. Gruber complacently. “So put it the fuck back on the table.”

“God damn it, Mrs. Gruber, this book belongs to me!”

“It was inside Steiner’s matress with the rest of her crap, and it is going to be auctioned.”

“If that’s where it was, it’s because she stole it.”

“Begged, borrowed, stole — makes no difference to me. Shame on you anyhow for talking that way about your own friend. God only knows what she had to do to get that book.”

There was laughter, and one voice in the crowd, and then another, elaborated Mrs. Gruber’s implication with specific suggestions. It was flustering, but Daniel stood by his rights.

“It is my book. Ask the guards. They had to cut pages out before I could have it. There’s probably a record of that somewhere. It is mine.”

“Well, that may be or it may not, but there’s no way you can prove to us that Barbara didn’t come by it fair and square. We’ve only got your word for it.”

He could see that she had the majority behind her. There was nothing to be done. He gave her the book, and it was the first item to go to the block (There weren’t that many more). Then some son-of-a-bitch had the nerve to bid against him, and he had to go up to five Big Macs, almost a full week’s dinners, to get it back.

Only after the bidding was done did he realize that the voice he’d been bidding against belonged to Gus.

After the auction was the lottery. Everyone had the number he counted off by at reveille. Daniel was 34, and it came up, winning him back one of his McDonald’s vouchers. But not the one for tonight’s meal, so that when the guard brought round the dinners that night Daniel had to make do with a bowl of Mrs. Gruber’s watery soup and a single slice of white bread smeared with a dab of extended cheese.

For the first time in weeks he felt hungry. Usually dinner left him with a queasy sensation. It must have been the anger. He would have liked to drown old Mrs. Gruber in a kettle of the slop she cooked. And that was just the first of his angers. Peel that away and there were more — against Barbara for stealing his book, against Gus for bidding for it, against the whole lousy prison and its guards, and all the world outside the prison, because they were the ones who had sent him here. There was no way to think about it without going crazy, and there was no way, once you started, to stop.

Clearly, this was not the right time to approach Gus and make his proposition. Instead he played chess with Bob Lundgren, and played so well that (although he didn’t finally win) for the first time he put Lundgren on the defensive and even captured his queen.

While they played he was aware, at different times, that Gus, who had never (so far as he knew) paid any notice to him before, was looking at him with a far-off but unwavering attention. Why should that be? It seemed almost a kind of telepathy, as if Gus knew, without his saying anything, what Daniel had in mind.

The next day the truck conveying Daniel and the rest of the E.S.78 work crew back to the compound was delayed by a roadblock. This was an unusually thorough one. Everyone, including the guards, had to get out and be frisked, while another set of inspectors examined the truck from its broken headlights to its raggedy mudflaps.

They were an hour late clocking in at the dorm. Daniel had been meaning, very first thing, to go to Gus and get it over, but once again the moment wasn’t right. Gus and Bob Lundgren were already deep in a game of chess, which Daniel was invited to watch, and which for a while he did. But they played slowly, and without a personal stake in the game it was impossible to pay attention.

Daniel decided to return to The Product Is God . It was no longer the book he’d begun four months ago. Just the fact that Barbara Steiner had preceded him through its final chapters, leaving behind a spoor of scribbled marginalia, made it seem not quite the harmless trampoline for bright, beside-the-point ideas that it had seemed at first glance.

Dangerous ideas, however, are also, necessarily, more interesting ideas, and Daniel read the book this time with none of his former, lingering pleasure. He read greedily, as though it might be snatched away again before he’d discovered its secret. Again and again he found ideas that Barbara had lifted out of the book and used in her own arguments, such as the one about purity of heart being to will one thing, which turned out not even to be Van Dyke’s idea, but somebody else’s centuries ago.

What did seem to be Van Dyke’s own idea (and which eventually connected up with the other) was his theory that people live in two completely unrelated worlds. The first world that comes in a set with the flesh and the devil — the world of desire, the world people think they can control. Over against this was God’s world, which is larger and more beautiful, but crueler too, at least from the limited viewpoint of human beings. The example Van Dyke gave was Alaska. In God’s world you just had to give up trying and trust to luck, and you would probably either freeze to death or die of starvation.