Thomas Disch: On Wings of Song

“It’s real then?”

“As real as the two of us sitting here. Does that answer your question?”

“Yeah. I guess so.” He decided to wait till later on to ask what her friends had said it felt like.

“Good. Then remember this: you must never, never talk about this to anyone else. I don’t even want you to talk about it again to me. Anything to do with flying, anything at all. Has your father explained to you about sex?”

Daniel nodded.

“About fucking?”

“Uh… here in Iowa… you don’t ever…”

“You don’t talk about it, right?”

“Well, kids don’t talk about it with grown-ups.”

“Flying’s just the same. We don’t talk about it. Ever. Except to say that it’s very very wrong, and that people wicked enough to do it deserve every terrible thing that happens to them.”

“Is that what you believe?”

“Never mind ‘believe.’ What I’m saying now is the official under-god truth. Flying is wrong. Say that.”

“Flying is wrong.”

She pushed herself up out of the armchair and came over and kissed him on the cheek. “You and I,” she said with a wink, “are two of a kind. And we’re going to get along.”

At the age of eleven Daniel developed a passion for ghosts; also vampires, werewolves, mutated insects, and alien invaders. At the same time and mostly because he shared this appetite for the monstrous, he fell in love with Eugene Mueller, the younger son of Roy Mueller, a farm equipment dealer who’d been the mayor of Amesville until just two years ago. The Muellers lived in the biggest and (they said) oldest house on Amesville’s prestigious Linden Drive. A total of five of the town’s mayors and police chiefs had lived in that house, and three of those five had been Muellers. In the attic of the Muellers’ house, among many other forms of junk, were a great many boxes of old books, mostly unreadable relics of the irrelevant past — books about dieting and being successful, the multi-volume memoirs of a dead president, textbooks for French, home ec, accounting, and yard upon yard of Readers’ Digest Condensed Books . Buried, however, in the deepest level of these cast-off ideas, Eugene Mueller had discovered an entire carton filled with paperback collections of supernatural tales, tales of an artfulness and awfulness surpassing any known to him from the oral traditions of summer camp and the Register delivery office.

Eugene would sneak single volumes down to his room hidden in his underwear and read them there by candlelight late at night. The books were like ghosts themselves, their margins crumbling to dust at his fingers’ touch. He’d read each story once quickly and if it was one he liked, a second time, lingeringly. Then, with its topic fresh in his memory, he would retell the story to the news-carriers at the Register office, while they waited for the truck to arrive with the papers. Sometimes he would draw it out over several days to increase the suspense.

Daniel also had a paper route, though not as lucrative a one as the ex-Mayor’s son. He listened to Eugene Mueller’s stories with the ravished reverence of a disciple. They — and their presumed author — became an emotional necessity to him. Months ago he’d exhausted the school library’s meager resources — a ragged copy of thirteen tales by Poe and bowdlerised editions of Frankenstein and The War of the Worlds . Once he’d bicycled to Fort Dodge and back, forty miles each way, to see a double feature of old black-and-white horror movies. It was terrible, loving something so inaccessible, and all the more wonderful therefore, when the long drought came to an end. Even when Eugene confessed, privately, to having practiced on his friend’s credulity and had shown him his store of treasure, even then Daniel went on thinking of him as a superior person, set apart from other seventh and eighth graders, possibly even a genius.

Daniel became a frequent overnight guest at the Mueller home. He ate with Eugene’s family at their dinner table, even times when his father was there. With all of them Daniel was charming, but he only came alive when he was alone with Eugene — either in the attic, reading and creating their own artless Grand Guignol, or in Eugene’s room, playing with the great arsenal of his toys and games.

In his own way he was as bad — that is, as good — a social climber as his mother.

Three days before he got his certificate for passing seventh grade, Daniel received third prize in a statewide contest sponsored by the Kiwanis (a pair of front row seats at a Hawkeye game of his choosing) for his essay on the topic, “Good Sports Make Good Citizens.” He read the essay aloud at a school assembly and everyone had to clap until Mr. Cameron, the Principal, held up his hand. Then Mr. Cameron gave him a book of speeches by Herbert Hoover, who was born in West Branch. Mr. Cameron said that someday, when the country got back on its feet again, he wouldn’t be surprised to see another Iowan occupying the White House. Daniel supposed that Mr. Cameron was referring to him and felt a brief intense ache of gratitude.

On that same day the Weinrebs moved to their new home on Chickasaw Avenue, which was reckoned (by those who lived there) to be nearly as nice a neighborhood as Linden Drive. It was a smallish gray clapboard ranch-style house with two bedrooms. Inevitably the second bedroom fell to the twins, Aurelia and Cecelia, and Daniel was relegated to the room in the basement. Despite its gloom and the damp cinder-block walls he decided it was to be preferred to the twins’ room, being larger and so private that it could boast its own entrance onto the driveway.

The last owner of the house had tried to make ends meet (and failed, apparently) by renting the basement room to a family of Italian refugees. Think of it: four people living in this one room, with two basement windows for light, and a sink with only a cold water tap!

Daniel kept the laminated nameplate with their name on it: Bosola. Often late at night, alone in his room, he tried to imagine the sort of life the Bosolas had led hemmed in by these four gray walls. His mother said they’d probably been happier, which was her way of ignoring any otherwise incontrovertible misery. No one in the neighborhood knew what had become of them. Maybe they were still in Amesville. A lot of Italians lived in trailer courts on the outskirts of town and worked for Ralston-Purina.

Daniel’s father was a refugee too, though his case was different from most. His mother had been American, his father a native-born Israeli. He’d grown up on a kibbutz four miles from the Syrian border, and gone to the University in Tel Aviv, majoring in chemistry. When he was twenty his maternal grandparents offered to put him through Dental School if he would come and live with them in Queens. A providential kindness, for two weeks after he left for the States the rockets were launched that destroyed most of Tel Aviv. On his twenty-first birthday he had the choice of which country’s citizen he wanted to be. At that point it couldn’t really be called a choice. He pledged his allegiance to the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stood, and changed his name from Shazer to Weinreb in deference to his grandfather and the bill he was footing at N.Y.U. He got through Dental School and joined the elder Weinreb’s faltering practice in Elmhurst, which went on faltering for twelve more years. The one action in his whole life he had seemed to undertake of his own spontaneous and uncoerced will was at age thirty-nine to marry sixteen-year-old Milly Baer, who had come to him with an impacted wisdom tooth. As Milly would often later insist, in her fits of reminiscense, even that choice had not been, in the final analysis, his.