Thomas Disch - On Wings of Song

“We did go there, Mr. Mueller, but believe me, I didn’t have any idea that Eugene didn’t mean to come back with me. We went there to see Roberta Donnelly. She was giving a speech at Gopher Stadium. After he saw her we were heading right back here. Both of us.”

“You admit going there, that’s some progress. But I didn’t need you to tell me that, Daniel. I knew the night you set off, from Lloyd Wagner, who let the two of you across the border, which is a mistake that Lloyd has had reason to regret. But that’s another story. When there was no sight of you coming back after the Star-Lite’s last show, Lloyd realized he’d made a mistake and called me. It was a simple thing, from there, to have the Albert Lea police check out the bus station and the drivers. So you see, my lad, I need a little more information than just—” He parodied Daniel, making his eyes wide with false candor, and whispering: “—Minneapolis.”

“Truly, Mr. Mueller, I’ve told you all I know. We went to a movie together and at the end of it Eugene said he had to go to the bathroom. That was the last I saw of him.”

“What movie?”

“ Gold-Diggers of 1984 . At the World Theater. The tickets cost four dollars.”

“He disappeared and that was it? You didn’t look for him?”

“I waited around. And then, after a while, I went to the Rally, hoping to see him there. What else could I do? Minneapolis is huge. And also…”

“Yes?”

“Well, I figured he probably meant to get away from me. So he was probably deliberately hiding from me. But what I couldn’t understand then, and I still can’t, is why, if he knew he wasn’t coming back, why he had to involve me in it. I mean, I’m his best friend.”

“It’s not very logical, is it?”

“It’s not. So my theory — and I’ve had a lot of time to think about this — my theory is that the idea came to him while he was there, probably right during the movie. It was a movie that could have done that.”

“There’s only one thing wrong with your theory, Daniel.”

“Mr. Mueller, I’m telling you everything I know. Everything.”

“There’s one good reason why I don’t believe you.”

Daniel looked down at the toes of his shoes. None of his imaginary conversations with Mr. Mueller had gone as badly as this. He made his confession but it had done him no good. He’d run out of possible things to say.

“Don’t you want to know what that reason is?”

“What?”

“Because my son had the foresight to steal eight hundred and forty-five dollars from my desk before he went away. That doesn’t sound like a spur-of-the-moment decision, does it?”

“No.” Daniel shook his head vigorously. “Eugene wouldn’t do that. He just wouldn’t.”

“Well, he did. The money’s gone, and I scarcely think it was a coincidence that Eugene should decide to run away at the exact same time.”

Daniel couldn’t think what he thought. His expression of disbelief had been no more than the last remnant of his loyalty. Friends don’t involve their friends in crimes. Except, apparently, they do.

“Do you have any other suggestions, Daniel, as to where I can tell the police to look for my son?”

“No, Mr. Mueller. Honestly.”

“If any idea should come to you, you have only to ask to talk to Warden Shiel at Spirit Lake. Of course, you understand that if you are able to help us find Eugene you’ll be doing yourself a considerable favor when it comes time to discuss your parole. Judge Cofflin knows about this situation, and it was only at my repeated insistence that you weren’t indicted for first degree robbery as well.”

“Mr. Mueller, believe me, if I knew anything else at all, I’d tell you.”

Mueller looked at him with a look of leisurely, contented malice and turned to leave.

“Really!” Daniel insisted.

Mueller turned back to look at him a last time. From the way he stood there, smiling, Daniel knew that he believed him — but that he didn’t care. He’d got what he was after, a new victim, an adopted son.

His first night in the compound at Spirit Lake, sleeping out of doors on sparse, trampled crabgrass, Daniel had a nightmare. It began with music, or sounds like but less ordered than music, long notes of some unknown timbre, neither voice nor violin, each one sustained beyond thought’s reach, yet lacing together into a structure large and labyrinthine. At first he thought he was inside a church but it was too plain for that, the space too open.

A bridge. The covered bridge above the Mississippi. He stood on it, suspended above the moving waters, an intolerable expanse of blackness scored with the wavering lights of boats that seemed as far away, as unapproachable as stars. And then, causelessly, awfully, this scene was rotated through ninety degrees and the flowing river became a wall still whirling upwards. It towered to an immense unthinkable height and hung there, threatening to collapse. No, its flowing and its collapse were a single, infinitely slow event, and he fled from it over the windows of the inner bridge. Sometimes the long sheets of glass would fracture under his weight, like the winter’s earliest ice. He felt as though he were being hunted by some sluggish, shapeless god that would — let him flee where he might — surely crush him and roll him flat beneath his supreme inexorable immensity. All this, as the music lifted, note by note, into a whistling louder and more fierce than any factory’s to become at last the P.A. system’s tape of reveille.

His stomach still hurt, though not so acutely as in the first hours after he’d forced down the P-W lozenge. He’d been afraid then that despite all the water he was drinking it would lodge in his throat instead of his stomach. It was that big. The first set of its time-release enzymes burned out a small ulcer in the lining of the stomach, which the second set (the ones working now) proceeded to heal, sealing the lozenge itself into the scar tissue of the wound it had created. The whole process took less than a day, but even so Daniel and the seven other newly-admitted prisoners had nothing to do but let their situation sink in while the lozenges wove themselves into the ruptured tissues.

Daniel had supposed he’d be the youngest prisoner, but as it turned out a good percentage of the people he could see being assembled and sent out in work crews were his own age, and many of these, if not probably younger, were a lot scrawnier. The moral of this observation was the basically happy one that if they could survive at Spirit Lake, then so could he.

It seemed to be the case that a majority of the others, even those his age, had been in prison before. That, anyhow, was the subject that united five of the seven others once the compound had been emptied by the morning’s call-up. For a while he sat on the sidelines taking it in, but their very equanimity and easy humor began to get at him. Here they were, sentenced many of them to five years or more of what they already knew was going to be sheer misery, and they were acting like it was a family reunion. Insane.

By comparison the poultry farmer from Humboldt County who’d been sent up for child abuse seemed, for all his belly-aching, or maybe because of it, normal and reasonable, a man with a grievance who wanted you to know just how all-out miserable he was. Daniel tried talking to him, or rather, listening, to help him get his mind more settled, but after a very short time the man developed a loop, saying the same things over in almost the identical words as the first and then the second time through — how sorry he was for what he’d done, how he hadn’t meant to harm the child, though she had baited him and knew she was at fault, how the insurance might pay for the chickens but not for all the work, not for the time, how children need their parents and the authority they represent; and then, again, how sorry he was for what he’d done. Which was (as Daniel later found out) to beat his daughter unconscious and almost to death with the carcass of a hen.