Thomas Disch - On Wings of Song

The first major intrusion of the world’s disorders on their private lives occurred when the pharmacist at First National Flightpaths informed Daniel that the Annex could no longer supply him with the liquid nutrient by which Boa was kept alive. The legal fiction of her death meant that no rationing card could be issued in her name. Daniel’s panicky protests elicited the address of a dealer in black market medical supplies, an elderly, out-of-work pharmacist in Brooklyn Heights, who pretended, when Daniel went to him, to have given up such traffickings. Such were the protocols of the black market. Daniel waited two days for his need to be verified. Finally a boy who couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven called at the apartment while Daniel was at the Teatro, and Mrs. Schiff showed him to Daniel’s room, where Boa lay in her endless enchanted sleep. The need being verified, Daniel was allowed to buy a two weeks’ supply, no more, at a price formidably higher than the going rate at First National. He was advised that the price was likely to continue to rise so long as rationing was in force.

Transatlantic phone lines had been one of the first victims of the crisis. You couldn’t even send a cable now without government authorization. The mail was the only way he could get an S.O.S. through to Miss Marspan. A special delivery letter might take two days, or a month, or might not arrive at all. Daniel sent off four letters from four different post offices; all arrived at Miss Marspan’s flat in Chelsea the same morning. If she had any suspicions that Daniel was inventing difficulties to line his own pocket she kept them to herself. She increased her banker’s order to five hundred dollars a month, twice the sum he’d asked for, and sent him a rather valedictory letter full of news about the decline and fall. Food wasn’t London’s problem any longer. Years ago every park and flower box in the city had been converted to growing vegetables, while in the countryside much pastureland had been restored to tillage, reversing the process of centuries. London’s weak link was its water supply. The Thames was low, its waters too rank to be treated. Miss Marspan went on for two closely-written pages about the exigencies of life on two pints of water a day. “One doesn’t dare drink even that,” she wrote, “though it serves for cooking. We are drunk night and day, all of us who’ve had the wisdom and wherewithal to stock their cellars. I’d never considered becoming an alcoholic, but I find it surprisingly congenial. I begin at breakfast with a Beaujolais, graduate to claret sometime in the afternoon, and turn to brandy in the evening. Lucia and I seldom get so far afield as the South Bank these days, since there is no public transport, but the local churches keep us supplied with music. The performers are usually as drunk as their audience, but that is not without its interest, and even relevance, musically. A Monteverdi madrigal becomes so poignant, bleared with wine, and as for Mahler… Words fail. It is quite generally agreed, even by our leading M.P.’s, that this is, definitely, le fin du monde . I gather it is the same in New York. My love to Alicia. I shall bend every effort to be at the premier of the rediscovered Axur , assuming that the final collapse is postponed for at least another year, as it has been traditionally. Thank you for continuing to care for our dearest Boadicea. Yours, etc.”

Harry Molzer was one of the most serious bodybuilders at Adonis, Inc. No one nowadays had the heroic physiques of the gods of the Golden Age half a century before, but by contemporary standards Harry did well — a 48-inch chest, 16½-inch biceps. What he lacked in sheer bulk he made up in articulate detail. Having that body was Harry’s whole life. When he wasn’t at work patrolling the 12th precinct, he was in the gym perfecting his Michaelangelesque proportions. All his earnings went into the upkeep of his hungry muscles. As an economy he shared a small studio apartment near the gym with two other unmarried cops, whom he despised, though he was never anything less than cordial with them — or, really, with anyone. He was, in the opinion of the manager, Ned Collins, the next-best thing to a saint, and Daniel pretty much had to agree. If purity of heart was to will one thing, Harry Molzer was right up there with Ivory Snow.

Rationing hit Harry hard. The Rationing Board was supposed to allow for individual somatic differences, but Harry was carrying around as much muscle as three or four average men. Even with the supplemental coupons police were entitled to, there was no way that Harry could have kept going at 195 pounds without resorting to the black market. Naturally, he resorted, but even on the black market the powdered protein he needed was not obtainable. Such concentrates were the first things hoarders had gone for. He switched to dry beans as the next-best source of protein, becoming notorious for his farts in the process, but by March even beans cost more, at black market prices, than Harry could afford. His muscles diminished and at the same time, because of the starch in the beans, he began to put on a thin cushion of flab.

Harry would never resign himself to the inevitable. He was always at the gym — staring morosely into the mirrors that lined the inner walls, or grimacing in private combat with the weights; standing at a window between sets and watching the traffic down in the square, or twisting in fast, furious torsion on the inclined sit-up board. But will power alone was not enough. Despite his unremitting effort, Harry’s body was saying good-bye. Without a steady supply of protein the hard exercise only hastened the self-destruction of his tissues. Ned Collins tried to get him to cut back his schedule, but Harry was beyond being reasoned with. He kept to exactly the same routine he’d followed in the days of his glory.

Harry had never been notably gregarious. For some like Daniel the gym served as a social club. For Harry it was a religion, and he wasn’t the sort to talk in church. Yet he had been liked, and even reverenced, by those who shared his faith but lacked his zeal. Now, in proportion as he had been liked, he was pitied — and avoided. Whatever corner of the gym he worked in would gradually be deserted, as though there might be a kind of contagion in Harry’s agony. In any case there were fewer people showing up these days. No one had that much surplus energy. And no one liked to be around Harry.

There were, inevitably, those who lacked the compassion or the moral imagination to understand what was happening to Harry, and it was one of this small number who, early one April afternoon, pushed him over the edge. Harry was doing bench presses and using, as he always did now, much more weight than he could handle. On the last rep of his second set his left arm began to buckle but he managed to straighten his arm and lock his elbow. His face was flushed a violent red. The straining cords of his neck formed a delta with his grimacing teeth at its apex. The barbell swayed alarmingly, and Ned jumped up from the desk, where he’d been talking with Daniel, and raced across the floor of the gym to get to Harry in time. It was then that the moral imbecile in question called out, from his perch on the parallel bars, “Okay, Hercules, one more rep!”

The bar crashed down into the stanchions and Harry sprang up from the bench with a scream. Daniel thought the bar had crushed his hand, but it was rage, not pain, that spilled from his lungs. Months and years of swallowed angers exploded in an instant. He swept up an eighty-pound dumbbell lying by the bench and hurled it at his tormentor. It missed him shattering an expanse of mirror and passing through a wall of plaster and lathe into the changing room behind. “Harry!” Ned pleaded, but Harry was out of control, beyond appeal, berserk. One by one, in a systematic ecstasy of destruction, he smashed every mirror in the gym, using the heaviest barbells in the rack. He sailed a twenty-pound plate, discus-like, into the soft-drink dispenser. He overturned a rack of dumbbells onto the floor. It felt like a bomb had hit the building. Through it all no one dared try and stop him.