Thomas Disch - 334

“But things had been going downhill for two hundred years.”

“Or three, or four.”

“Farmlands had become deserts. It was visible. Look at the sculpture, the architecture.”

“It’s visible with hindsight. But they could be as blind as their comfort required. Trivial poetasters like Ausonius were declared the equals of Virgil, of Homer even, and the Christians, now that they were official, were positively giddy with optimism. They expected to see the city of God shootup like an urbal renewal project.”

“Then explain those dead children.”

“Explain the living ones. Which reminds me. Last week you still hadn’t madeup your mind about Tancred.”

“I sent off the letter this morning, with a check.”

“To?”

“Stuyvesant.”

The rock on the desk split open and became two hands. “Well— there you have it.”

“What?”

“An interpretation for your dream. The blood sacrifice you were ready to make to save the city, the children on the scrapheap—your son.”

She denied it.

By three that afternoon the tops of buildings were invisible at street level.

She had walked crosstown from the office in a lukewarm drizzle, then taken the subway down to East 14th. All the way, the argument with Bernie had continued inside her, like some battery-powered toy, a novelty doll with a loop of tape that croaks after each smack of the old smacker. “Oh, don’t do that again! Oh, please don’t, I can’t stand it!” Before she’d come out through the turnstile she could smell the grease from Big San Juan’s, a dark ground of onion polk a dotted with plantain. By the time she was up on the street, her mouth was watering. She would have bought a quarter bag but customers had gathered three deep around the counters (baseball season—already?) and she saw Lottie Hanson in the crowd in front of the screen. The plantains weren’t worth the risk of a conversation. Lottie’s blowzy sexiness always affected Alexa elegiacally, like a roomful of cut flowers.

Crossing Third Avenue between 11th and 12th, a sound dopplered at her, swelling in an instant from a hum to a roar. She whirled about, scanning the fog for whatever lunatic truck or …

The sound as suddenly diminished. The street was empty. A block to the north the lights winked green. She got to the curb before the traffic—a bus and two shrill Yamahas—reached the second stripe of the ped crossing. Then, several beats after she’d figured it out, her idiot heart caught up with her panic.

A helicopter certainly, but flying lower than any she’d ever known.

Her knees took so to trembling that she had to lean against a hydrant. Long after the distant whirr had diffused into the general midday din the machineries of her glands kept her in a flutter.

Marylou Levin had taken her mother’s place at the corner with the broom and the can. A homely, slow, earnest girl who’d grow up to be a day-care worker, unless, which would probably be more profitable both for Marylou and for society, she took over her mother’s license as a sweep.

Alexa dropped a penny in the can. The girl looked up from her comic book and said thank you.

“I hoped I’d find your mother here, Marylou.”

“She’s home.”

“I’ve got a declaration she had to fill out. I didn’t get it to her last time and now the office is starting to make a fuss.”

“Well, she’s sleeping.” Marylou turned back to the comic book, a sad story about horses in a Dallas circus, then thought to add: “She relieves me at four.”

It meant either waiting or walking up to the seventeenth floor. If the M-28 wasn’t cleared through Blake’s section by tomorrow Mrs. Levin might lose her apartment (Blake had been known to do worse) and it would be Alexa’s fault.

Usually, except for the stink, she didn’t mind the stairs, but all the walking today had taken it out of her. A weariness as of heavy shopping bags focused in the small of her back. On the ninth floor she stopped in at Mr. Anderson’s to hear the poor tedious old man complain about the various ingratitudes of his adopted daughter. (Though “boarder” described that relationship more accurately.) Cats and kittens climbed over Alexa, rubbed against her, inveigled her.

On eleven her legs gave out again. She sat on the top step and listened to the commingled urgencies of a newscast one flight up and a song one flight down. Her ears filtered Latin words from the Spanish phrases.

Imagine, she thought, actually living here. Would one grow numb eventually? One would have to.

Lottie Hanson hove into sight at the landing below, clutching the rail and panting. Recognizing Alexa and conscious of having to look nice for her, she patted her damp, drizzly wig and smiled.

“Glory, isn’t it”—she caught her breath, waved her hand in front of her face, decoratively—“exciting!”

Alexa asked what.

“The bombing.”

“Bombing?”

“Oh, you haven’t heard. They’re bombing New York. They showed it on teevee, where it landed. These steps!” She collapsed beside Alexa with a great huff. The smell that had seemed so appetizing outside Big San Juan’s had lost its savor. “But they couldn’t show”—she waved her hand and it was still, Alexa had to admit, a lovely and a graceful hand—“the actual airplane itself. Because of the fog, you know.”

“Who’s bombing New York?”

“The radicals, I suppose. It’s some kind of protest. Against something.” Lottie Hanson watched her breasts lift and fall. The importance of the news she bore made her feel pleased with herself. She waited for the next question all aglow.

But Alexa had begun calculating with no more input than she had already. The notion had seemed, from Lottie’s first words, inevitable. The city cried out to be bombed. The amazing thing was that no one had ever thought to do it before.

When she did at last ask Lottie a question, it came from an unexpected direction. “Are you afraid?”

“No, not a bit. It’s funny, because usually, you know, I’m just a bundle of nerves. Are you afraid?”

“No. Just the opposite. I feel…” She had to stop and think what it was that she did feel.

Children came storming down the stairs. With a gentle “God-damn,” Lottie squeezed up against the crusty wall. Alexa pressed up to the railing. the children ran down through the canyon they’d formed.

Lottie screamed at the last of them, “Amparo!”

The girl turned round at the landing and smiled. “Oh, hi, Mrs. Miller.”

“Goddamn it, Amparo, don’t you know they’re bombing the city?”

“We’re all going down to the street to watch.”

Dazzling, Alexa thought. She’d always had a thing for pierced ears on children, had even been tempted to do Tank’s for him when he was four, but G. had interposed.

“You get your ass back upstairs and stay there till they shoot that flicking airplane down!”

“The teevee said it doesn’t make any difference where you are.”

Lottie had gone all red. “I don’t care about that. I say—”

But Amparo had already run off.

“One of these days I’m going to kill her.”

Alexa laughed indulgently.

“I am, just wait and see.”

“Not on stage, I hope.”

“What?”

“Ne pueros coram,” she explained, “populo Medea trucidet. Don’t let Medea kill her boys before the audience. It’s Horace.” She got up and bent round to see if she’d soiled her dress.

Lottie remained on the step, inert. An everyday depression began to blunt the exhilaration of the catastrophe, like fog spoiling an April day, today’s fog, today’s April day.

Smells filmed every surface like cheap skin cream. Alexa had to get out of the stairwell, but Lottie had somehow caught hold of her and she wriggled in the meshes of an indefinite guilt.