Thomas Disch - 334

“My brother-in-law?”

Mrs. Hanson nodded. “Exactly. Juano. And she also said why didn’t I try religion.” She shook her head in a pantomime of amazement that such things could be allowed.

“She? Who?”

The dry lips puckered with disappointment. The discontinuity had been intended, a trap, but Boz had slipped past. She knew he wasn’t listening but she couldn’t prove it.

“Mrs. Miller. She said it would be good for me. I told her one religious nut in the family is enough and besides I don’t call that religion. I mean, I enjoy a stick of Oraline as much as anyone, but religion has to come from the heart.” Again she rumpled the violet, orange, and heather-gold flames of her bodice. Down below there somewhere it filled up with blood and squirted it out into the arteries: her heart.

“Are you still that way?” she asked.

“Religious? No, I was off that before I got married. Milly’s dead against it too. It’s all chemistry.”

“Try and tell that to your sister.”

“Oh, but for Shrimp it’s a meaningful experience. She understands about the chemistry. She just doesn’t care, so long as it works.”

Boz knew better than to take sides in any family quarrel. Once already in his life he had had to slip loose from those knots, and he knew their strength.

Mickey returned with the mail, laid it on the TV, and was out the door before his grandmother could invent new errands.

One envelope.

“Is it for me?” Mrs. Hanson asked. Boz didn’t stir. She took a deep wheezing breath and pushed herself up out of the chair.

“It’s for Lottie,” she announced, opening the envelope. “It’s from the Alexander Lowen School. Where Amparo wants to go.”

“What’s it say?”

“They’ll take her. She has a scholarship for one year. Six thousand dollars.”

“Jesus. That’s great.”

Mrs. Hanson sat down on the couch, across Boz’s ankles, and cried. She cried for well over five minutes. Then the kitchen timer went off: As the World Turns. She hadn’t missed an installment in years and neither had Boz. She stopped crying. They watched the program.

Sitting there pinned beneath his mother’s weight, warmed by her flesh, Boz felt good. He could shrink down to the size of a postage stamp, a pearl, a pea, a wee small thing, mindless and happy, nonexistent, utterly lost in the mail.

Shrimp was digging God, and God (she felt sure) was digging Shrimp: her. Here on the roof of 334; Him, out there in the russet smogs of dusk, in the lovely poisons of the Jersey air, everywhere. Or maybe it wasn’t God but something moving more or less in that direction. Shrimp wasn’t sure.

Boz, dangling his feet over the ledge, watched the double moire patterns of her skin and her shift. The spiral patterns of the cloth moved widdershins, the flesh patterns stenciled beneath ran deasil. The March wind fluttered the material and Shrimp swayed and the spirals spun, vortices of gold and green, lyric illusions.

Off somewhere on another roof an illegal dog yapped. Yap, yap, yap; I love you, I love you, I love you.

Usually Boz tried to stay on the surface of something nice like this, but tonight he was exiled to inside of himself, redefining his problem and coming to grips with it realistically. Basically (he decided) the trouble lay in his own character. He was weak. He had let Milly have her own way in everything until she’d forgotten that Boz might have his own legitimate demands. Even Boz had forgotten. It was a one-sided relationship. He felt he was vanishing, melting into air, sucked down into the green-gold whirlpool. He felt like shit. The pills had taken him in exactly the wrong direction, and Shrimp, out there in St. Theresa country, was no aid or comfort.

The russet dimmed to a dark mauve and then it was night. God veiled His glory and Shrimp came down. “Poor Boz.” she said.

“Poor Boz,” he agreed.

“On the other hand you’ve gotten away from this.” Her hand whisked away the East Village roofscape and every ugliness. A second, more impatient whisk, as though she’d found the whole mess glued to her hand. In fact, it had become her hand, her arm, the whole stiff contraption of flesh she had managed for three hours and fifteen minutes to escape.

“And poor Shrimp.”

“Poor Shrimp too,” he agreed.

“Because I’m stuck here.”

“This morning who was telling me it isn’t where you live, it’s how you live?”

She shrugged a sharp-edged scapula. She hadn’t been speaking of the building but of her own body, but it would have taken too much trouble to explain that to blossoming Narcissus. She was annoyed with Boz for dwelling on his miseries, his inner conflicts. She had her own dissatisfactions that she wanted to discuss, hundreds.

“Your problem is very simple, Boz. Once you face it. Your problem is that basically you’re a Republican.”

“Oh, come off it, Shrimp!”

“Honestly. When you and Milly started living together, Lottie and I couldn’t believe it. It had always been clear as day to us.”

“Just because I have a pretty face doesn’t mean—”

“Oh, Boz, you’re being dense. You know that has nothing to do with it one way or the other. And I’m not saying you should vote Republican because I do. But I can read the signs. If you’d look at yourself with a little psychoanalysis you’d be forced to see how much you’ve been repressing.”

He flared up. It was one thing to be called a Republican but no one was going to call him repressed. “Well, shit on you, sister. If you want to know my party, I’ll tell you. When I was thirteen I used to jerk off while I watched you undress, and believe me, it takes a pretty dedicated Democrat to do that.”

“That’s nasty,” she said.

It was nasty, and as untrue as it was nasty. He’d fantasized often enough about Lottie, about Shrimp never. Her short thin brittle body appalled him. She was a gothic cathedral bristling with crockets and pinnacles, a forest of leafless trees; he wanted nice sunshiny cortiles and flowery glades. She was a Dürer engraving; he was a landscape by Domenichino. Screw Shrimp? He’d as soon turn Republican, even if she was his own sister.

“Not that I’m against Republicanism,” he added diplomatically. “I’m no Puritan. I just don’t enjoy having sex with other guys.”

“You’ve never given it a chance.” She spoke in an aggrieved tone.

“Sure I have. Plenty of times.”

“Then why is your marriage breaking up?”

Tears started dripping. He cried all the time nowadays, like an air conditioner. Shrimp, skilled in compassion, wept right along with him, wrapping a length of wiry arm around his bare, exquisite shoulders.

Snuffling, he threw back his head. Flip flop of auburn, big brave smile. “How about the party?”

“Not for me, not tonight. I’m feeling too religious and holy, sort of. Maybe later perhaps.”

“Aw, Shrimp.”

“Really.” She wrapped herself in her arms, stuck out her chin, waited for him to plead.

The dog in the distance made new noises.

“One time, when I was a kid… right after we moved here, in fact…” Boz began dreamily.

But he could see she wasn’t listening.

Dogs had just been made finally illegal and the dog owners were doing Anne-Frank numbers to protect their pups from the city Gestapo. They stopped walking them on the streets, so the roof of 334, which the Park Commission had declared to be a playground (they’d built a cyclone fence all round the edge to give it a playground atmosphere), got to be ankle-deep in dogshit. A war developed between the kids and dogs to see who the roof would belong to. The kids would hunt down off-leash dogs, usually at night, and throw them over the edge. German shepherds fought back the hardest. Boz had seen a shepherd take one of Milly’s cousins down to the pavement with him.