Thomas Disch - On Wings of Song

When the last mirror was gone, and much of the supporting wall, Harry turned to face the three windows that looked down at Sheridan Square. They were still intact. He walked over to one of them, dumbbell in hand, and regarded the crowd that had gathered on the sidewalk and in the street.

“Harry, please,” Ned said softly.

“Fuck it,” said Harry in a mournful, tired voice. He turned away from the windows and went into the changing room, closing the door behind him. Daniel watched him, through a rent in the plaster wall, go to his locker. For a long while he fumbled patiently with the combination lock. When he had got it open at last, he took his police-issue revolver from its holster, walked over to the single surviving mirror that hung above the sink, and struck his last, unconscious, classic pose as he pointed the barrel of the pistol at his temple. Then he blew out his brains.

Adonis, Inc., never did reopen.

Food had become everyone’s problem. According to the media’s steady buzz of placatory bulletins, there was enough to go round for many months to come. The difficulty was distribution. Supermarkets and grocery stores throughout the city had been pressed into service by the Rationing Board, but black market prices were now so inflated that it was worth your life to be seen leaving a distribution center with an armload (or pocketful) of groceries. Even convoys of five or six men might be set upon. As for the police, they were mainly concentrated in the parks or outside the parking lots where the black markets operated. Despite this protective presence not a week went by without another, and more violent, mob-assault upon these last tawdry bastions of privilege. By the end of March there was no longer a black market in the physical sense — only a network of individuals united by an invisible hierarchy. The economic system was being simplified to its atomic components: every man was his own armed camp.

Thanks to the closet stocked with Pet Bricquettes, Daniel and Mrs. Schiff were never reduced to direst need. Daniel, a passable though seldom inspired cook, concocted a kind of bread pudding from crumbled Bricquettes, Hyprotine powder, and an artificial sweetener, which Mrs. Schiff claimed actually to prefer to her usual fare. He also organized groups of the building’s residents to make trips to their distribution center, a former Red Owl Supermarket on Broadway. And, in general, he coped.

As the weather warmed it began to look as though he would scrape through the crisis without having to ask for Ernesto Rey’s help. He would have, if worst had come to worst (if, for instance, Miss Marspan had balked at the rising cost of charity). Living with Boa’s body had confirmed Daniel in his sense of duty, had made it seem less abstract. He would do anything he had to to keep her alive — and in his own possession. What could Rey demand of him, after all, that he hadn’t done already, either by preference or out of curiosity? This was a question he tended to dwell on rather more than was quite healthy. He would lie there alone in his room going over the possibilities with a glazed, insomniac persistence. Some of those possibilities were pretty terrible, but fortunately none of his imaginings, even the mildest, would come to pass.

It had become clear that Incubus was dying, though neither the dog nor his mistress were prepared to face the fact. He kept pretending he wanted to be taken out for a walk, moping about the hallway and whining and scratching at the outside door. Even if he’d had the strength to make it as far as the corner lamppost, there was no question of giving in to him, since a dog on the street these days was just meat on the hoof and an incitement to riot.

Mrs. Schiff was devoted to the dying spaniel, and Incubus took every unfair advantage of her sympathy. He was everlastingly querulous, begging for food that he then refused to eat. He wouldn’t let Mrs. Schiff read or write or even talk to anyone but himself. If she tried to get round these prohibitions by disguising a conversation with Daniel as a tête-a-tête with Incubus, he would sense it and punish her by staggering off to the darkest part of the apartment and flopping down in inert despair. A few moments later Mrs. Schiff would be there beside him, petting him and apologizing, for she could never hold out very long against his sulks.

One night, not long after the closing of the gym, Incubus came into Mrs. Schiff’s room and insisted on being helped up onto her bed, though until now he’d accepted the new prohibition against this. His incontinence and the ensuing drastic overhaul of the apartment had inspired Incubus with an almost human sense of guilt, which each new spontaneous defecation served to keep alive.

Daniel, passing the room and seeing Incubus sprawled on the bed, set in to scolding him, but both dog and mistress gave him such pitiable looks that he didn’t have the heart to insist. He came in the room and sat in the armchair by the bed. Incubus lifted his tail a scant inch off the sheets and let it drop. Daniel patted him on the rump. He began to whine: he wanted a story.

“I think he wants you to tell him a story,” said Daniel.

Mrs. Schiff nodded wearily. She had developed a kind of subdued horror of her own whimsies from having had to recite them so many times when she was feeling the opposite of whimsical herself. Her Scheherazade complex, she called it. It was useless, at these times, to try and abridge the tale being told, for Incubus could always sense when she’d departed from the established format and formulae and would whine and worry her until the straying story-line had been brought back to the narrow paths of orthodoxy. At last she’d learned, like a good sheep, not to stray.

“This is the story,” Mrs. Schiff began, as she’d begun so many times before, “of Bunny Honeybunny and his sister Honey Honeybunny and of the beautiful Christmas they spent in Bethlehem, the very first Christmas of all. One night, just about at bedtime, when Bunny Honeybunny was about to turn in for a well-deserved rest, for he had had, as usual, a very busy day, his dear little sister Honey Honeybunny came hopping, hippity-hop, into their cozy little burrow deep in the roots of a gnarly old oak tree, and she said to her brother — ‘Bunny! Bunny! You must come out and look at the sky!’ Bunny had seldom seen his sister so excited, so, sleepy as he was (and he was very sleepy)—”

Incubus knew better than to succumb to such hints. He was wide-awake and intent upon the story.

“—he hopped, hippity-hop, out of their dear little burrow, and what do you think he saw, shining up there in the sky?”

Incubus looked at Daniel.

“What did he see?” Daniel asked.

“He saw a star! And he said to his sister Honey Honeybunny, ‘What a beautiful and truly amazing star! Let us follow it.’ So they followed the star. They followed it over the meadows where the cows had settled down to sleep, and across the broad highways, and over the lakes as well, for it was winter and the lakes were all covered with ice, until at last they arrived in Bethlehem, which is in Judea. By this time, naturally, they were both quite tired from their journey and wanted nothing so much as to go to bed. So they went to the biggest hotel in town, the Bethlehem Hotel, but the night-clerk was very rude and said there was no room at the hotel, because of the census the government was taking, and that even if there had been room he wouldn’t have let rabbits into his hotel. Poor Honey Honeybunny thought she would cry, but as she didn’t want to make her brother unhappy on her account she decided to be brave. So, with a merry twitch of her long furry ears, she turned to Bunny and said, ‘We don’t need to stay at any silly old hotel. Let’s go find a manger and stay there. Mangers are more fun anyhow!’ So they went to look for a manger, which was no problem at all, for lo and behold, there was a cheery little manger just behind the Bethlehem Hotel with oxen and asses and cows and sheep… and something else besides! Something so wonderful and soft and warm and precious they couldn’t believe their bunnyrabbit eyes.”