Thomas Disch - 334

“I think I’ll go up to the battlement now,” she said, “to watch the siege.”

“Well, don’t wait for me.”

“But later there’s something I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Right. Later.”

When she was one landing up Lottie called after her—“Mrs. Miller?”

“Yes?”

“The first bomb got the museum.”

“Oh. Which museum?”

“The Met.”

“Really.”

“I thought you’d want to know.”

“Of course. Thank you.”

Like a theater just before the movie starts, reduced by the darkness to a bare geometry, the fog had erased all details and distances. Uncertain sounds sifted through the grayness—engines, music, women’s voices. She felt through her whole body the imminence of the collapse, and because now she could feel it, it was no longer debilitating. She ran along the gravel. The roof stretched on and on in front of her without perspective. At the ledge she swerved to the right. She ran on.

She heard, far off, the stolen plane. It neither approached her nor receded, as though it were executing an immense circle, searching for her.

She stood still and lifted her arms, inviting it to her, offering herself to these barbarians, fingers splayed, eyes pressed tightly closed. Commanding. She saw, beneath her but unforeshortened, the bound ox. She saw its heaving belly and desperate eyes. She felt, in her hand, the sharp obsidian.

She told herself that this was what she had to do. Not for her own sake, of course. Never for her own sake—for theirs.

Its blood drenched the gravel. It gushed and splattered. The hem of the palla was stained. She knelt in the blood and dipped her hands into the opened belly to raise the dripping entrails high above her head, tubes and wires in a slime of thick black oil. She wound herself in the soft coils and danced like some god-drenched girl at the festivals, laughing and pulling the torches from their sockets, smashing sacred articles, jeering at the generals.

No one approached her. No one asked what she had read in the haruspices. She climbed up into the jungle gym and stood peering into the featureless air, her legs braced against the thin pipes, raptured and strong with a dawning faith.

The airplane approached, audibly.

She wanted it to see her. She wanted the boys inside to know that she knew, that she agreed.

It appeared quite suddenly, and near, like Minerva sprung full-grown from the brow of Jupiter. It was shaped like a cross.

“Come then,” she said with conscious dignity. “Lay waste.”

But the plane—a Rolls Rapide—passed overhead and returned to the haze from which it had materialized.

She climbed down from the gym with a sense of loss: she had offered herself to History and History had refused. With a sense, equally, of what a fool she’d been.

She felt in her pockets for a pack of hankies but she’d run out at the office. She had her cry anyhow.

Since the Army had begun celebrating its victory the city no longer seemed a sanctuary. Therefore early the next morning Merriam and Arcadius started back home on foot. During the darkest moments of the siege, with the generosity of despair, Arcadius had given the cook and the Theban girl their freedom, so that they were returning to the villa completely unattended.

Merriam was dreadfully hungover. The road was a slough, and when they came to the cut-off, Arcadius insisted on taking the even muddier path that went through Alexa’s fields. But for all that, she felt happy as an apricot. the sun was shining and the fields steamed like some great kitchen full of soup kettles and sauceboats, as though the very earth was sending up its prayer of thanksgiving.

“Lord,” she would murmur, “Lord.” She felt like a new woman.

“Have you noticed,” Arcadius pointed out, after they’d gone some distance, “that there is nowhere any sign of them?”

“Of the barbarians? Yes, I’ve been crossing my fingers.”

“It’s a miracle.”

“Oh yes, it’s God’s work, beyond a doubt.”

“Do you think she knew?”

“Who?” she asked, in not an encouraging tone. Talk always dissipated her good feelings.

“Alexa. Perhaps she’s been sent a sign. Perhaps, after all, she danced in thanksgiving and not… the opposite.”

Merriam pressed her lips together and made no reply. It was a blasphemous proposition. God did not give signs to the servants of the abominations he loathed and comminated! And yet…

“In retrospect,” Arcadius insisted, “there’s really no other explanation.” (And yet, she had seemed altogether jubilant. Perhaps—she had heard this suggested by a priest in Alexandria—there are evil spirits whom God permits, to a limited degree and imperfectly, to see the shape of future things.)

She said, “I thought it was an obscene display.”

Arcadius didn’t contradict her.

Later, after they had circled round the base of the larger hill, the path sloped upward and grew dryer. The trees fell away on their left and permitted a view eastward across Alexa’s melon fields. Hundreds of bodies were scattered over the trampled scenery. Merriam hid her eyes but it was not so easy to escape the scent of decay, which mingled, almost pleasantly, with the odor of smashed, fermenting melons.

“Oh dear,” said Arcadius, realizing that their path would lead them straight through the midst of the carnage.

“Well, we’ll have to do it—that’s all,” Merriam said, lifting her chin with a show of defiance. She took his hand and they walked through the field of defeated barbarians as quickly as they could.

Later, Lottie came up looking for her. “I was wondering if you were all right.”

“Thank you. I just needed a breath of air.”

“The plane crashed, you know.”

“No, I hadn’t heard any more than you told me.”

“Yes—it crashed into a MODICUM project at the end of Christopher Street. One-seventy-six.”

“Oh, that’s awful.”

“But the building was just going up. No one was killed but a couple of electricians.”

“That’s a miracle.”

“I thought you might like to come down and watch the teevee with us. Mom is making Koffee.”

“I’d appreciate that.”

“Good.” Lottie held open the door. The stairwell had achieved evening a couple hours in advance of the day.

On the way downstairs Alexa mentioned that she thought she could arrange for Amparo to get a scholarship at the Lowen School.

“Would that be good?” Lottie asked, and then, embarrassed by her question, “I mean—I’ve never heard of it till just now.”

“Yes, I think it’s pretty good. My son Tancred will be going there next year.”

Lottie seemed unpersuaded.

Mrs. Hanson stood outside the door of the apartment gesturing frantically. “Hurry up, hurry up! They’ve found the boy’s mother, and they’re going to interview her.”

“We can talk about it more later,” Alexa said.

Inside, on the teevee, the boy’s mother was explaining to the camera, to the millions of viewers, what she couldn’t understand.

Summer mornings the balcony would fill up with bona-fide sunshine and Boz would spread open the recliner and lie there languid as something tropical in their own little basin of private air and ultraviolet fifteen floors above entrance level. Just watching, half-awake, the vague geometries of jet trails that formed and disappeared, formed and disappeared in the pale cerulean haze. Sometimes you could hear the dinky preschoolers on the roof piping their nursery rhymes in thin, drugged voices.

A Boeing buzzing from the west brings the boy that I love best. But a Boeing from the east…