Thomas Disch: On Wings of Song

“Thanks for the Band-Aid. But do go on. You returned to the starry night. And then.”

“The hotel was near the airport. The planes coming in and out seemed, in a comic way, irresistible. Like elephants dancing in a circus. And the sound they made was like Mahler, pulverized and homogenized. It seemed objectively fascinating, though I suppose there was a fascination, underlying that, of a different nature. For what I did that night was follow one of these planes back to Des Moines. It was the same plane we’d come in, as a matter of fact. From Des Moines it was easy to find Worry. I was there by morning. I knew you’d be furious that I wasn’t back yet. I knew I’d made us miss our flight to Rome.”

“Providentially.”

“None of that mattered. I was determined to see my father. To see him as he really was. That had always been my obsession, and that part of me hadn’t changed.”

“So did you get to see him naked?”

“It was moral nakedness I was after.”

“I know that, Boa.”

“No, I never did. I saw him get up on the day after our wedding, eat breakfast, talk to Alethea about the stables, and then he went into his office. I tried to follow. And never made it, of course. I was caught in the fairy-trap in the corridor.”

“You must have known it was there.”

“I didn’t believe it could harm me. There didn’t seem to be any limit to what I could do. I felt like some giant unstoppable wave. I believed I could have anything I wanted just by wanting it. Flying is like that. The only thing was, when I saw the trap, or heard it, rather, for one’s first sense of it is of a kind of siren song played on a tuning fork, far, far away and posing no possible danger… when I heard it, that was what I wanted, what my soul lusted for. Whoever designed the thing is someone who has flown, who knows the sweetest sensations of flight and how to magnify them and draw them out. The damned machine is irresistible.”

“A little rotary engine that spins round and round like a clothes dryer?”

“Oh, it is easy to resist the lure of ordinary machinery. As easy as refusing a piece of candy. But this bore no relation to anything except, possibly, the solar system itself. There were wheels within wheels, and sets of wheels within sets of wheels, in an infinite recession. One moved through them, flew through them, with a kind of mathematical exultation, a steady unfolding of ‘Eureka!’s, each one pitched, so to speak, an octave higher than the last.”

“It sounds better than television, I’ve got to admit.”

“It was like that too: a drama whose plot always became more interesting. Like a game of contract bridge that was, at the same time, a string quartet. Like a test you couldn’t fail, though it stretched you to your limit.”

“It must have been a great vacation.”

“They were the thirteen happiest years of my life.”

“And then?”

“The tv was turned off. I can still remember the dismay of that moment, as the thing ground down to a stop, and I became aware of where I was and what I’d done. I wasn’t alone, of course. There had been hundreds of us whirling in the same ring-dance, dosie-do, and then ker-plunk. The spell was broken, and there we were, reeling a little still, but beginning to remember. And wishing the dead machine would start up again and sweep us back up into its lovely gears.”

“Had your father turned it off then?”

“He? No, never. A mob had broken into Worry. A large mob by the look of the damage they’d been able to do. I never saw the fighting. By the time I’d mustered some purpose and worked my way out of the trap, the National Guard was in charge. So I know nothing about my rescuers, neither their reasons nor what became of them. Perhaps they’d all been killed.”

“It was never in the news.”

“My father doesn’t like publicity.”

“When was that?”

“The spring before last. Before the trees had budded.”

Daniel nodded. “Things were pretty desperate in general around then. That was when—” He stopped short.

“When my aunt died, were you going to say? I know about that. In fact, I was there. I was here too, of course. I didn’t really think you’d have wanted, or been able, to keep my body alive all that time, but I had to find out. I went to the hotel. There’s a kind of cemetery on the roof, with the names of all the missing, and where we must go to find our bodies. Once I’d seen what I’d become, my only wish was to get as far from it as I could. It seemed another kind of trap. I didn’t want to become… meat. I still felt, in a way, new-born, unfledged. For all its fascinations, one doesn’t grow inside a trap. My own sense of it was that only a few weeks had gone by, the weeks I’d spent in Amesville after I’d got out of the trap.”

“Pursuing your father still?”

“No. He’d changed. He was older, of course, and also, I thought, smaller. No, it wasn’t on his account I lingered there. It was the landscape. That was as fine as ever. The skies and fields, they seemed my real parents, my source. I watched the first shoots force their way into the light, and each one was like a parable. I was a bird. In the trap I had rushed from complexity to further complexity. Now I became simpler, slower. Though I would still be overtaken by sudden alarms. One of them brought me to New York, and when I’d found this body, a worse alarm drove me away. I went to London, and after my aunt’s death, fled again, this time to Vilars, where I’d been sent to school. I fell in love again with the mountains and lived an eagle’s life. There were many of us there, and I began to learn, from the others, that there were forces of beauty and of… attraction… greater than the earth’s. As you leave it, as you mount above the clouds, above the winds, you shrink into a pinpoint of… it isn’t thought, it isn’t sentience… of purpose, call it. But a purpose so pure, so… unearthly… And then, at a certain height, you cease to be finite at all. There is no distinction of you and them, of here and there, of mind and matter.”

“What is there then? Anything?”

“One joins a kind of conscious sphere with the earth at its center, and the sphere revolves. It’s what, in a way, the trap had imitated.”

“Is it real?”

“Who can say? It seems, at the time, the only reality. But there’s something beyond even that. What I describe is the view from the threshold, as it were. I knew that, but I didn’t take the next step. If I had, I wouldn’t have returned. That’s quite certain. Something always held me back. The present delight. But not just that. That other gravity: of the earth and its fields, of my body. This body.”

“Jesus.” Daniel shook his head in mournful admiration. “I’m sorry. I really am sorry.”

“You needn’t be. I did what I had to, no more. I wasn’t ready to go farther than I did. I hadn’t made a proper farewell. Now I have.”

“You don’t want me to come back here again?”

“Did my words betray me again? Come back again if you feel you need to. But not on my account. I’ve told you as much as I know how to tell.”

Daniel accepted this with the politest of grimaces. Then, smiling at the absurdity of the question that had popped into his head but seeing that it was, by its very irrelevance and triviality, a small revenge for her own Olympian betrayals, he said: “Before I go then, there’s one dumb question I’d like to ask you. Can you guess what it is?”

“About your family?”

“No. Time Magazine filled me in about them. My father’s retired and a bit senile. My mother runs a restaurant, and considers me an ingrate. Aurelia works for your father, and like him, has nothing to say about me. My other sister is married and has taken over my father’s dental practice. My question was dumber than that. What did you sing the night you took off? Did you get off on the first song you sang? Was it as easy as that?”