Thomas Disch - On Wings of Song

Gus knew better. “Well, Danny-boy?”

“You’re not serious.”

“Try me out and see.”

“But—” His objection seemed so self-evident he didn’t see any need to spell it out beyond that.

Gus shifted his weight again in a single over-all shrug. “That’s the price of music lessons, kiddo. Take it or leave it.”

Daniel had to clear his throat to be able to say that he would leave it. But he said it loud and clear, in case the monitors were taking any of it down.

Gus nodded. “You’re probably doing the right thing.”

Daniel’s indignation finally bubbled over. “I don’t need you to tell me that! Jesus!”

“Oh, I don’t mean holding on to your cherry. You’ll lose that one of these days. I mean it’s just as well you don’t try and become a singer.”

“Who says I’m not going to?”

“You can try, true enough. No one can stop that.”

“But I won’t make it, is that what you mean? Sounds like sour grapes to me.”

“Yes, partly. I wouldn’t have offered my candid opinion if you’d decided to invest in lessons. But now there’s no reason not to. And my candid opinion is that you are a punk singer. You could take voice lessons from here till doomsday and you’d never get near escape velocity. You’re too tight. Too mental. Too merely Iowa. It’s a shame, really, that you got this idea into your head, cause it can only mess you up.”

“You’re saying that from spite. You’ve never heard me sing.”

“Don’t have to. It’s enough to watch you walk across a room. But in fact I have heard you sing. Last night. That was quite enough. Anyone who can’t handle ‘Jingle Bells’ is not cut out for a major career.”

“We didn’t sing ‘Jingle Bells’ last night.”

“That was the point of my joke.”

“I know I need lessons. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have asked.”

“Lessons can only do so much. There has to be a basic capacity. A dog won’t learn arithmetic, no matter who his teacher is. You want the particulars? Number one, you’re tone-deaf. Two, you’ve got no more sense of rhythm than a road-grader. Beyond one and two, there is something still more essential missing, which we who have it call soul.”

“Fuck you.”

“That might be the beginning, yes.”

With which Gus patted Daniel’s cheeks smartly with the flat of both hands and smiled a still partly-friendly parting smile and left him to a desolation he had never imagined could be his, a foretaste of failure as black and bitter as a child’s first taste of coffee. The thing he wanted most in life, the only thing, would never be. Never. The idea was a skull in his hand. He couldn’t put it down. He couldn’t look away.

A month went by. It was as though the worst single hour of his life, the absolutely blackest moment, were to be stretched out, like railroad tracks on a bed of cinders, to the horizon. Each day he woke, each night he went to bed, he faced the same unrelieved prospect, a bleakness by whose wintry light all other objects and events became a monotony of cardboard zeroes. There was no way to combat it, no way to ignore it. It was the destined shape of his life, as the trunk and branches of a pine are the shape of its life.

Gus’s eyes seemed always to be following him. His smile seemed always to be at Daniel’s expense. The worst torment of all was when Gus sang, which he’d begun to do more often since Christmas Eve. His songs were always about sex, and always beautiful. Daniel could neither resist their beauty nor yield to it. Like Ulysses he struggled against the bonds that tethered him to the mast, but they were the bonds of his own obdurate will and he could not break them. He could only twist and plead. No one noticed, no one knew.

He kept repeating, in his thoughts, the same lump of words, like an old woman telling beads. “I wish I were dead. I wish I were dead.” If he ever thought about it, he knew this was only a maudlin imposture. But yet in a way it was true. He did wish he were dead. Whether he ever mustered the courage to carry out such a wish was another matter. The means lay readily to hand. He had only, like Barbara Steiner, to step across the perimeter of the camp and a radio transmitter would take care of the rest. One step. But he was chickenshit, he couldn’t do it. He would stand there, though, for hours, beside the fieldstone post that marked the possible end of his life, repeating the mindless lie that seemed so nearly true: “I wish I were dead. I wish I were dead. I wish I were dead.”

Once, just once, he managed to go past the post, whereupon, as he had known it must, the warning whistle started to blow. The sound petrified him. It was only a few yards farther to his wish, but his legs had stopped obeying him. He stood fast in an enchantment of rage and shame, while people filed out of the dorms to see who’d let go. The whistle kept blowing till at last he tucked his tail between his legs and returned to the dorm. No one would talk to him, or even look at him. The next morning, after roll-call, a guard gave Daniel a bottle of tranks and watched while he swallowed the first capsule. The pills didn’t stop his depression, but he was never so silly again.

In February, a month before he was due to be released, Gus was paroled. Before he left Spirit Lake he made a point of taking Daniel aside and telling him not to worry, that he could be a singer if he really wanted to and made a big enough effort.

“Thanks,” Daniel said, without much conviction.

“It’s not your vocal equipment that matters so much as the way you feel what you sing.”

“Does not wanting to be buggered by some skid row derelict show that I don’t have enough feeling? Is that my problem, huh?”

“You can’t blame a guy for trying. Anyhow, Danny-boy, I didn’t want to leave without telling you not to give up the ghost on my say-so.”

“Good. I never intended to.”

“If you work at it, you’ll probably get there. In time.”

“Your generosity is killing me.”

Gus persisted. “So I’ve thought about it, and I’ve got a word of advice for you. My own last word on the subject of how to sing.”

Gus waited. For all his resentment, Daniel couldn’t keep from clutching at the talisman being dangled before him. He swallowed his pride and asked, “And what is that?”

“Make a mess of your life. The best singers always do.”

Daniel forced a laugh. “I seem to have a good head start at that.”

“Precisely. That’s why there’s still hope for you.” He pursed his lips and tilted his head to the side. Daniel backed away from him as though he’d been groped. Gus smiled. He touched a finger to the almost-vanished scar above his eye. “Then, you see, when the mess is made, the music pulls it all together. But remember, the mess has to come first.”

“I’ll remember. Anything else?”

“That’s all.” He offered his hand. “Friends?”

“Well, not enemies,” Daniel allowed, with a smile of his own that was not more than fifty percent sarcastic.

At the end of February, only a couple weeks before Daniel was due to be released, the Supreme Court ruled, in a six-to-three decision, that the measures taken by Iowa and other Farm Belt states to prohibit the distribution of newspapers and related printed material originating in other states was in violation of the First Amendment. Three days later Daniel was released from Spirit Lake.

On the night before he was to leave the prison Daniel dreamed that he was back in Minneapolis, standing on the shore of the Mississippi at the point where it was spanned by the pedestrian bridge. But now instead of that remembered bridge there were only three inch-thick steel cables — a single cable to walk on and two higher up to hold on to. The girl with Daniel wanted him to cross the river on these simulated vines, but the span was too wide, the river too immensely far below. Going out even a little way seemed certain death. Then a policeman offered to handcuff one of his hands to a cable. With that safeguard Daniel agreed to try.