Thomas Disch: 334

The clock on the wall said 11:07. This is my lucky day: he made it a promise. He threw himself out of bed and did ten push-ups on the tile floor, still damp from its morning mopping. Then ten more. After the last push-up Birdie rested on the floor, his lips pressed against the cool, moist tile. He had a hard-on.

He grabbed it, closing his eyes. Milly! Your eyes.o Milly, I love you. Milly,o Milly,o Milly. So much! Milly’s arms. The small of her back. Bending back. Milly, don’t leave me! Milly? Love me? I!

He came in a smooth, spread-open flow till his fingers were covered with semen, and the back of his hand, and the blue heart, and “Milly.”

11:35. The Art History test was at two. He’d already missed a ten o’clock field trip for Consumership. Tough.

He wrapped his toothbrush, his Crest, his razor, and foam in a towel and went to what had been, in the days when the Annexe was an office building, the executive washroom of the actuarial division of New York Life. The music started when he opened the door: SLAM, BANG! WHY AM I SO HAPPY?

He decided to wear his white sweater with white Levi’s and white sneakers. He brushed a whitening agent into his hair, which was natural again. He looked at himself in front of the bathroom mirror. He smiled. The sound system started in on his favorite Ford commercial. Alone in the empty space before the urinals he danced with himself, singing the words of the commercial.

It was a fifteen-minute ride to the South Ferry stop. In the ferry building was a PanAm restaurant where the waitresses wore uniforms just like Milly’s. Though he couldn’t afford it, he ate lunch there, just the lunch that Milly might be serving that very moment at an altitude of seven thousand feet. He tipped a quarter. Now, except for the token to take him back to the dorm, he was broke. Freedom Now.

He walked along the rows of benches where the old people came to sit every day to look out at the sea while they waited to die. Birdie didn’t feel the same hatred for old people this morning that he’d felt last night. Lined up in helpless rows in the glare of the afternoon sun, they seemed remote, they posed no threats, they didn’t matter.

The breeze coming in off the Hudson smelled of salt, oil, and rot. It wasn’t a bad smell at all. Invigorating. Maybe if he had lived centuries ago instead of now, he’d have been a sailor. Moments from movies about ships flitted by. He kicked an empty Fun container out through the railing and watched it bob up and down in the green and the black.

The sky roared with jets. Jets heading in every direction. She could have been on any of them. A week ago what had she said, “I’ll love you forever.” A week ago?

“I’ll love you forever.” If he’d had a knife he could have carved that on something.

He felt just great. Absolutely.

An old man in an old suit shuffled along the walk, holding on to the sea railing. His face was covered with a thick, curly, white beard, though his head was as bare as a police helmet. Birdie backed from the rail to let him go by.

He stuck his hand in Birdie’s face and said, “How about it, Jack?”

Birdie crinkled his nose. “Sorry.”

“I need a quarter.” A foreign accent. Spanish? No. He reminded Birdie of something, someone.

“So do I.”

The bearded man gave him the finger and then Birdie remembered who he looked like. Socrates!

He glanced at his wrist but he’d left his watch in the locker as it hadn’t fit in with today’s all-white color scheme. He spun round. The gigantic advertising clock on the face of First National Citibank said 2:15. That wasn’t possible. Birdie asked two of the old people on the benches if that was the right time. Their watches agreed.

There was no use trying to get to the test now. Without quite knowing why, Birdie smiled. He breathed a sigh of relief and sat down to watch the ocean. In June there was the usual family reunion at The Sicilian Vespers. Birdie polished off his tray without paying too much attention to either the food or the story his dad was dawdling over, something about someone at 16th Street who’d opted for Room 7, after which it was discovered that he had been a Catholic priest. Mr. Ludd seemed upset. Birdie couldn’t tell if it was the idea of Room 7 or the idea of having to cut down his intake because of the diabetes. Finally, to give the old guy a chance at his noodles, Birdie told him about the essay project Mr. Mack had arranged, even though (as Mr. Mack had pointed out and pointed out) Birdie’s problems and his papers belonged to Barnard G.S.A., not to P. S. 141. In other words, this would be Birdie’s last chance, but that could be, if Birdie would let it, a source of motivation. And he let it.

“And you’re going to write a book?”

“Goddamn, Dad, will you listen?”

Mr. Ludd shrugged, wound the food on his fork, and listened. What Birdie had to do to climb back to 25 was demonstrate abilities markedly above the abilities he’d demonstrated back on that Friday the 13th. Mr. Mack had gone over the various components of his profile, and since he’d scored most on Verbal Skills they decided that his best bet would be to write something. When Birdie asked what, Mr. Mack had given him, to keep, a copy of By Their Bootstraps.

Birdie reached under the bench where he’d set it down when they came in. He held it up for his dad to see: By Their Bootstraps. Edited and with an Introduction (encouraging but not too clear) by Lucille Mortimer Randolph-Clapp. Lucille Mortimer Randolph-Clapp was the architect of the Regents system.

The last string of spaghetti was wound and eaten. Reverently Mr. Ludd touched his spoon tip to the skin of the spumoni. Holding back from that first taste, he asked, “And so they’re paying you money just to … ?”

“Five hundred dollars. Ain’t it a bitch. They call it a stipend. It’s supposed to last me three months but I don’t know about that. My rent at Mott Street isn’t so bad, but other things.”

“They’re crazy.”

“It’s the system they have. You see, I need time to develop my ideas.”

“The whole system’s crazy. Writing! You can’t write a book.”

“Not a book. Just a story, an essay, something like that. It doesn’t have to be more than a page or two. It says in the book that the best stuff usually is very… I forget the exact word but it means short. You should read some of the crap that got past. Poetry and stuff where every other word is something foul. I mean, really foul. But there’s some okay things, too. One guy that didn’t finish eighth grade wrote a story about working on an alligator preserve. In Florida. And philosophy. There was this one girl who was blind and crippled. I’ll show you.” Birdie found the place where’d he left off: “My Philosophy” by Delia Hunt. He read the first paragraph aloud:

“Sometimes I’d like to be a huge philosophy, and sometimes I’d like to come along with a big axe and chop myself down. If I heard somebody calling out Help, Help! I could just sit there on the trunk and think, I guess somebody’s in trouble. But not me, because I’m sitting here looking at the rabbits and so on running and jumping. I guess they’re trying to get away from the smoke. But I would just sit there on my philosophy and think, Well, I guess the forest is really on fire now.”

Mr. Ludd, involved in his spumoni, only nodded pleasantly. He refused to be bewildered by anything he heard or make protests or try to understand why things never worked out the way he planned. If people wanted him to do one thing he’d do it. If they wanted him to do something else he’d do that. No questions asked. La vida, as Delia Hunt also observed, es un sueño.