William Gass - Middle C

Our concern that the human race might not endure has been succeeded by the fear it will survive.

Oh — Skizzen oh’d, in his sermons to, in his repetitions of, himself. Oh — the decomposition of man will stench the sky at first but how immeasurably it will manure the soil, how thoroughly it will improve the land with all those fine bones added, while plants cover and trees stand. For worms the climate will be tropical, they will grow longer than tunnels, and their four hearts beat for blocks. Lakes will deepen and be blue again. Clean sky will harbor happy winds. Mountainsides of aspens will be able to color and flutter without having their picture taken. Waterfalls will fall free of enterprising eyes. It will be grand.

Unless there is a universal flood and fish school in corner offices; unless there is an atomic wind and an image of our race is burned into the side of a glass cliff; unless glaciers creep down from the North almost as blue as green as winedark as the solidifying sea.

The thought that mankind might not endure has been replaced by the fear it may luck out.

End zone to end zone, Armageddon’s final field was nearly laid out once before. It was half a cataclysm — a clysm — maybe. Preliminary bout. A third of the world sickened during the three years of the Black Plague: 1348–1349—1350. And the plague swung its scythe four times, its last swath reducing Europe to half what it had been the century before: in 1388–1389—1390. They believed the disease was Evil advancing like an army. They said it was Satan’s century. Diabolus in musica . That was before Passchendaele. The population of the planet diminished by a fifth.

Those who suffered the plague and survived: they suggested to Joseph Skizzen the unpleasant likelihood that Man might squeak through even a loss at Armageddon, one death per second not fast enough, and outlive the zapping of the planet, duck a fleet of meteors, hunkerbunker through a real world war with cannons going grump to salute our last breath as if horror were a ceremony, emerge to sing of bombs bursting, endure the triggers of a trillion guns amorously squeezed until every nation’s ammo was quite spent, and all the private stock was fired off at the life and livestock of a neighbor, so that in battle’s final silence one could hear only the crash after crash of financial houses, countless vacuum cleaners, under their own orders, sucking up official lies, contracts screaming like lettuce shredded for a salad, outcries from the crucifixion of caring borne on the wind as if in an ode, the screech of every wheel as it becomes uninvented, brief protests from dimming tubes, destimulated wires; though the slowing of most functions would go on in silence, shit merded up in the street to be refried by aberrant microwaves, diseases coursing about and competing for victims, slowdowns coming to standstills without a sigh, until the heavy quiet of war’s cease is broken by … by what? might we imagine boils bursting out of each surviving eye … the accumulated pus of perception? a burst like what? like trumpets blowing twenty centuries of pointless noise at an already deaf-eared world … with what sort of sound exactly? with a roar that rattles nails already driven in their boards, so … so that, as the sound comes through their windows, houses will heave and sag into themselves, as unfastened as flesh from a corset; yet out of every heap of rubble, smoking ruin, ditch of consanguineous corpses, could creep a survivor —he was such a survivor, Joseph Skizzen, faux doctor and musician — someone born of ruin as flies are from offal; that from a cave or collection of shattered trees there might emerge a creature who could thrive on a prolonged diet of phlegm soup and his own entrails even, and in spite of every imaginable catastrophe salvage at least a remnant of his race with the strength, the interest, the spunk, to fuck on, fuck on like Christian soldiers, stiff-pricked still, with some sperm left with the ability to engender, to fuck on, so what if with one leg or a limp, fuck on, or a severed tongue, fuck on, or a blind eye, fuck on, in order to multiply, first to spread and then to gather, to confer, to wonder why, to invent, to philosophize, accumulate, connive: to wonder, why this punishment? to wonder, why this pain? why did we — among the we’s that were — survive? what was accomplished that couldn’t have been realized otherwise? why were babies born to be so cruelly belabored back into the grave? who of our race betrayed our trust? what was the cause of our bad luck? what divine plan did this disaster further? why were grandfathers tortured by the deaths they were about to sigh for? why? … but weren’t we special? we few, we leftovers, without a tree to climb, we must have been set aside, saved for a moment of magnificence! to be handed the trophy, awarded the prize; because the Good Book, we would — dumb and blind — still believe in, said a remnant would be saved; because the good, the great, the wellborn and internetted, the rich, the incandescent stars, will win through, that … that … that we believed, we knew, God will see to our good outcome, he will see, see to it, if he hasn’t had a belly full, if the liar’s, the liar’s beard is not on fire like Santa Claus stuck in a chimney.

The thought that mankind might not endure has been replaced by the fear it may make it through another age of ice.

In spite of death and desolation, music, Professor Joseph Skizzen assured himself, would still be made. Toms would be tom’d, the earth beaten by bones born to a rhythm if not a rhyme, a ground swept by sweet dancing feet. There would be voices raised in song to celebrate heaven, to thank the gods for the radish about to be eaten, to pray for victory in tomorrow’s war, or the reinvention of the motorcar. Someone would, like Simonides, remember where everyone was sitting when the roof of the world fell in, or how the stars were configured, and would be able to identify the dead, if anyone cared. With that feat on his résumé, Simonides could easily sell his memory method for a lot of cabbages, many messes of pottage, thirty carloads of silver. Because we would want everyone properly buried in their appropriately consecrated ground, sacred ground we would kill one another to acquire, to protect and fill with our grateful dead — each race decomposing, each would allege, with more dignity, more delight to those worms, more … more to the nth than the others.

We would bury our dead with more tender regard for their bits and pieces than we ever had shown a shin or a thigh while elbow or knee was alive.

Soon there would be family clans and prisons again. Beneath all ash, hate would still be warm enough to make tea. That’s the state in which Professor Skizzen’s mind would be when he left off worrying his sentence: imagining man’s return, the triumph of the club and the broken knees of enemies, the harvesting of ferns, the refinement of war paint — each time taking a slightly different route to new triumphs and fresh renown. Upon our Second Coming, we would hate the earth and eat only air. We would live in ice like a little bit of lost light. We would grow fur and another nose. Fingernails, hard as horn, would curl like crampons. We would scuttle in and out of caves, live on insects, bats, and birds, and grow blue as a glacier. Perhaps we’d emerge in the shape of those ten-foot tropical worms, and like Lumbricus terrestris have many hundreds of species. It was so discouraging, but such thoughts had one plus: they drove him away from his obsession with words like “fear” and “concern” and “worry” and returned him to his profitable work — the study of the late piano pieces of Franz Liszt, a passion that his former colleagues found amusing, especially in an Austrian such as himself, who ought to disdain the French/Slav Musical Axis in favor of a hub that was purely German (little did they know where he’d already been!), and who had foolishly chosen a solo instrument to play when the entire Vienna Philharmonic could have been strumming and tootling his tunes.