Thomas Disch - On Wings of Song

“Where do you go next?” Michael asked, as though reading his thoughts.

“Des Moines, tomorrow. Then Omaha, St. Louis, Dallas, and God only knows. Big cities, mostly. We’re starting out in Amesville for symbolic reasons. Obviously.”

“Well, I envy you, seeing all those places.”

“Then we’re even. I was just sitting here envying your front yard.”

Michael looked out at his front yard and couldn’t see much there besides the fact that the grass was getting brown from lack of rain. It always did in August. Also, the couch out here on the porch smelled of mildew, even in this dry weather. And his car was a heap. In every direction he looked there was something broken down or falling apart.

The year after he’d dropped out of St. Olaf’s College in Mason City, Michael Hendricks had played rhythm guitar in a country-western band. Now, at twenty-five, he’d had to relinquish that brief golden age for the sake of a steady job (he ran his father’s dairy in Amesville) and a family, but the sacrifice still smarted, and the old dreams still thrashed about in his imagination like fish in the bottom of a boat that have outlasted all reasonable expectations. Finding himself, all of a sudden, the brother-in-law of a nationwide celebrity had been unsettling, had set those fish into a proper commotion, but he’d promised his wife not to seem to be looking for a handout from Daniel in the form of a job with his road show. It was hard, though, to think of anything to say to Daniel that didn’t seem to lead in that direction.

At last he came up with, “How is your wife?”

Daniel flinched inwardly. Just that morning, on top of his standard argument with Irwin Tauber, he’d had a fight with him on the subject of Boa. Tauber insisted that until the tour was over they should stick to the story that Boa was still convalescing at the Betti Bailey Clinic. Daniel maintained that honesty, besides being simply the best policy, would also generate further publicity, but Tauber said that death is always bad P.R. And so, as far as the world knew, the romance of the century was still a going concern.

“Boa’s fine,” said Daniel.

“Still in the hospital though?”

“Mm.”

“It must be strange, her coming back after all that time.”

“I can tell you in confidence, Michael. I don’t feel that close to her any more. It’s a heart-throb of a love story in theory. In practice it’s something else.”

“Yeah. People can go thorugh a lot of changes in fifteen years. In less time than that.”

“And Boa isn’t ‘people’.”

“How do you mean?”

“When you’re out of your body that long, you stop being altogether human.”

“You fly though, don’t you?”

Daniel smiled. “Who’s to say I’m altogether human?”

Not Michael, evidently. He chewed on the idea that his brother-in-law was not, in some essential respect, his fellow man. There was something to it.

Far off down County Road B, in the direction of Amesville, you could see the limousine coming for Daniel.

There was a single backdrop for the show as it was being presented that night in the auditorium of the Amesville High School, an all-purpose Arcadian vista of green hills and blue sky framed by a spatter of foliage on one side and a sprightly, insubstantial colonnade on the other. It was utterly bland and unspecific, like a cheese that tastes only of cheese, not like any particular kind, and as such was very American, even (Daniel liked to think) patriotic.

He loved the set and he loved the moment when the curtains parted, or went up, and the lights of a theater discovered him there on his stool in Arcady, ready to sing yet another song. He loved the lights. The brighter they became, the brighter he wanted them to be. They seemed to concentrate in their tireless gaze the attention of the entire audience. They were his audience, and he played to them, and did not, therefore, have to consider the separate faces swimming beneath that sea of light. Most of all he loved his own voice, when it threaded into the delicate tumble of other voices that swelled and subsided in his own twenty-two piece orchestra, the Daniel Weinreb Symphonette. And he was willing, at last, that this should be his life, his only life. If it were small, that was a part of its charm.

So he sang his old favorites, and they looked at him, and listened, and understood, for the force of song is that it must be understood. His mother, with a fixed smile on her face, understood, and his father, sitting beside her and tapping his foot in time to Mrs. Schiff’s a la turca march-tune, understood quite as clearly. Rose, in the next row, hiding her tape recorder under her seat (she had taped the entire family reunion as well), understood, and Jerry, watching little bubbles of colored light behind his closed eyes, understood, although a major part of his understanding was that this sort of thing wasn’t for him. Far at the back of the auditorium Eugene Mueller’s twelve-year-old son, who had come here in defiance of his father’s strict orders, understood with a rapture of understanding, not in gleams and flashes, but as an architect might understand, in a vision of great arching spaces carved by the music from the raw black night; of stately, stated, mathematic intervals; of commodious, firm delight. Even Daniel’s old nemesis from Home Room 113, even the Iceberg understood, though it was a painful thing for her, like the sight of sunlit clouds beyond the iron grating of a high window. She sat there, stiff as a board in her fifth row seat, with her mind fixed on the words, especially on the words, which seemed at once so sinister and so unbearably sad, but it wasn’t the words she understood, it was the song.

At last, when he’d sung all but the last number on the program, Daniel stopped to explain to his audience that though in general this was a practice of which he did not approve, he had been persuaded by his manager, Mr. Irwin Tauber, to use a flight apparatus while he sang his last song for them. Perhaps he would not take off, perhaps he would: one never knew in advance. But he felt as though he might, because it felt so great to be back in Amesville among his family and friends. He wished he could explain all that Amesville meant to him, but really he couldn’t begin to, except to say that there was still more of Amesville in him than of New York.

The audience dutifully applauded this declaration of loyalty.

Daniel smiled and raised his arms, and the applause stopped.

He thanked them.

He wanted them, he said, to understand the wonder and glory of flight. There was nothing, he declared, so glorious, no ecstasy so sublime. What was it he asked rhetorically, to fly? What did it mean? It was the act of love and the vision of God; it was the highest exaltation the soul can reach to; it was, therefore, paradise; and it was as real as the morning or the evening star. And anyone who wanted to fly could do so at the price of a song.

‘The song,’ he had written in one of his songs, ‘does not end,’ and though he had written that song before he’d learned to fly himself, it was true. The moment one leaves one’s body by the power of song, the lips fall silent, but the song goes on, and so long as one flies the song continues. He hoped, if he were to leave his own body tonight, they would remember that. The song does not end.

That wasn’t the song he meant to sing now, however. The song he was going to sing now was “Flying.” (The audience applauded.) The Symphonette started its slow, ripply introduction. Daniel’s assistant wheeled the gimmicked flight apparatus on-stage. Daniel hated the thing. It looked like something from the bargain corner of a mortuary showroom. Irwin Tauber had designed it, since he didn’t want anyone else but himself and Daniel to know that the wiring was rigged. Tauber might be a whiz at electronics but as a designer he had negative flair.