Thomas Disch - 334

One Tuesday, a week before M-Day (it was the early a.m. and only three Alexandrians were on hand to witness this confrontation), Alyona so far put aside his own reticence as to try to start a conversation going with Miss Kraus.

He stood squarely in front of her and began by reading aloud, slowly, in that distressingly indefinite accent, from the text of STOP THE SLAUGHTER: “The Department of the Interior of the United States Government, under the secret direction of the Zionist Ford Foundation, is systematically poisoning the oceans of the World with so called ‘food farms.’ Is this ‘peaceful application of Nuclear Power’? Unquote, the New York Times, August 2, 2024. Or a new Moondoggle!! Nature World, Jan. Can we afford to remain indifferent any longer. Every day 15,000 seagulls die as a direct result of Systematic Genocides while elected Officials falsify and distort the evidence. Learn the facts. Write to the Congressmen. Make your voice heard!!”

As Alyona had droned on, Miss Kraus turned a deeper and deeper red. Tightening her fingers about the turquoise broomhandle to which the placard was stapled, she began to jerk the poster up and down rapidly, as though this man with his foreign accent were some bird of prey who’d perched on it.

“Is that what you think?” he asked, having read all the way down to the signature despite her jiggling tactic. He touched his bushy white beard and wrinkled his face into a philosophical expression. “I’d like to know more about it, yes, I would. I’d be interested in hearing what you think.”

Horror had frozen up every motion of her limbs. Her eyes blinked shut but she forced them open again.

“Maybe,” he went on remorselessly, “we can discuss this whole thing. Some time when you feel more like talking. All right?”

She mustered her smile, and a minimal nod. He went away then. She was safe, temporarily, but even so she waited till he’d gone halfway to the other end of the seafront promenade before she let the air collapse into her lungs. After a single deep breath the muscles of her hands thawed into trembling.

M-Day was an oil of summer, a catalog of everything painters are happiest painting—clouds, flags, leaves, sexy people, and in back of it all the flat empty baby blue of the sky. Little Mister Kissy Lips was the first one there, and Tancred, in a kind of kimono (it hid the pilfered Luger), was the last.

Celeste never came. (She’d just learned she’d been awarded the exchange scholarship to Sofia.) They decided they could do without Celeste, but the other nonappearance was more crucial. Their victim had neglected to be on hand for M-Day. Sniffles, whose voice was most like an adult’s over the phone, was delegated to go to the Citibank lobby and call the West 16th Street dorm.

The nurse who answered was a temporary. Sniffles, always an inspired liar, insisted that his mother—“Mrs. Anderson, of course she lives there, Mrs. Alma F. Anderson”—had to be called to the phone. This was 248 West 16th, wasn’t it? Where was she if she wasn’t there? The nurse, flustered, explained that the residents, all who were fit, had been driven off to a July 4th picnic of Lake Hopatcong as guests of a giant Jersey retirement condominium. If he called bright and early tomorrow they’d be back and he could talk to his mother then.

So the initiation rites were postponed, it couldn’t be helped. Amparo passed around some pills she’d taken from her mother’s jar, a consolation prize. Jack left, apologizing that he was a borderline psychotic, which was the last that anyone saw of Jack till September. The gang was disintegrating, like a sugar cube soaking up saliva, then crumbling into the tongue. But what the hell—the sea still mirrored the same blue sky, the pigeons behind their wicket were no less iridescent, and trees grew for all of that.

They decided to be silly and make jokes about what the M really stood for in M-Day. Sniffles started off with “Miss Nomer, Miss Carriage, and Miss Steak.”

Tancred, whose sense of humor did not exist or was very private, couldn’t do better than “Mnemone, mother of the Muses.” Little Mister Kissy Lips said, “Merciful Heavens!” MaryJane maintained reasonably that M was for MaryJane. But Amparo said it stood for “Aplomb” and carried the day.

Then, proving that when you’re sailing the wind always blows from behind you, they found Terry Riley’s day-long Orfeo at 99.5 on the FM dial. They’d studied Orfeo in mime class and by now it was part of their muscle and nerve. As Orpheus descended into a hell that mushroomed from the size of a pea to the size of a planet, the Alexandrians metamorphosed into as credible a tribe of souls in torment as any since the days of Jacopo Peri. Throughout the afternoon little audiences collected and dispersed to flood the sidewalk with libations of adult attention. Expressively they surpassed themselves, both one by one and all together, and though they couldn’t have held out till the apotheosis (at 9.30) without a stiff psychochemical wind in their sails, what they had danced was authentic and very much their own. When they left the Battery that night they felt better than they’d felt all summer long. In a sense they had been exorcised.

But back at the Plaza Little Mister Kissy Lips couldn’t sleep. No sooner was he through the locks than his guts knotted up into a Chinese puzzle. Only after he’d unlocked his window and crawled out onto the ledge did he get rid of the bad feelings. The city was real. His room was not. The stone ledge was real and his bare buttocks absorbed reality from it. He watched slow movements in enormous distances and pulled his thoughts together.

He knew without having to talk to the rest that the murder would never take place. The idea had never meant for them what it had meant for him. One pill and they were actors again, content to be images in a mirror.

Slowly, as he watched, the city turned itself off. Slowly the dawn divided the sky into an east and a west. Had a pedestrian been going past on 58th Street and had that pedestrian looked up, he would have seen the bare soles of a boy’s feet swinging back and forth, angelically.

He would have to kill Alyona Ivanovna himself. Nothing else was possible.

Back in his bedroom, long ago, the phone was ringing its fuzzy night-time ring. That would be Tancred (or Amparo?) trying to talk him out of it. He foresaw their arguments. Celeste and Jack couldn’t be trusted now. Or, more subtly: they’d all made themselves too visible with their Orfeo . If there were even a small investigation, the benches would remember them, remember how well they had danced, and the police would know where to look.

But the real reason, which at least Amparo would have been ashamed to mention now that the pill was wearing off, was that they’d begun to feel sorry for their victim. They’d got to know him too well over the last month and their resolve had been eroded by compassion.

A light came on in Papa’s window. Time to begin. He stood up, golden in the sunbeams of another perfect day, and walked back along the foot-wide ledge to his own window. His legs tingled from having sat so long.

He waited till Papa was in the shower, then tippytoed to the old secretaire in his bedroom (W. & J. Sloan, 1952). Papa’s keychain was coiled atop the walnut veneer. Inside the secretaire’s drawer was an antique Mexican cigar box, and in the cigar box a velvet bag, and in the velvet bag Papa’s replica of a French dueling pistol, circa 1790. These precautions were less for his son’s sake than on account of Jimmy Ness, who every so often felt obliged to show he was serious with his suicide threats.

He’d studied the booklet carefully when Papa had bought the pistol and was able to execute the loading procedure quickly and without error, tamping the premeasured twist of powder down into the barrel and then the lead ball on top of it.