On Wings of Song Read online

  On Wings of Song

  Thomas M. Disch

  In his seventh novel, Disch reaches a literary high point in the field of science fiction. At once hilarious and frightening, it follows Daniel Weinreb as he attempts to escape the repressive laws and atmosphere of the isolationist State of Iowa. A rich black comedy of bizarre sexual ambiguity and adventurism, a bitter satire that depicts a near-future America falling into worsening economic and social crisis.

  Won John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1980.

  Nominated for Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1979.

  Nominated for Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1980.

  On Wings of Song

  by Thomas M. Disch

  Profiscicere, anima Christiana, de hoc mundo.

  For Charles Naylor

  PART ONE

  1

  When he was five Daniel Weinreb’s mother disappeared. Though, like his father, he chose to regard this as a personal affront, he soon came to prefer the life they led without her. She’d been a weepy sort of girl, given to long disconnected speeches and spells of stifled hatred for Daniel’s father, some of which always spilled over onto Daniel. She was sixteen when she’d married, twenty-one when she vanished with her two suitcases, the sound system, and the silver flatware in a service for eight that had been their wedding present from her husband’s grandmother, Adah Weinreb.

  After the bankruptcy proceedings were over — they’d been going on for a good while even before this — Daniel’s father, Abraham Weinreb, D.D.S., took him a thousand miles away to live in the town of Amesville, Iowa, which needed a dentist because their last one had died. They lived in an apartment over the clinic, where Daniel had his own room, not just a couch that made up into a bed. There were backyards and streets to play in, trees to climb, and mountains of snow all winter long. Children seemed more important in Amesville, and there were more of them. Except for breakfast, he ate most of his meals in a big cafeteria downtown, and they were much better than his mother had cooked. In almost every way it was a better life.

  Nevertheless when he was cross or bored or sick in bed with a cold he told himself that he missed her. It seemed monstrous that he, who was such a success ingratiating himself with the mothers of his friends, should not have a mother of his own. He felt set apart. But even this had its positive side: apart might be above. At times it seemed so. For his mother’s absence was not the matter-of-fact missingness of death, but a mystery that Daniel was always pondering. There was an undeniable prestige in being the son of a mystery and associated with such high drama. The absent Milly Weinreb became Daniel’s symbol of all the wider possibilities of the world beyond Amesville, which even at age six and then age seven seemed much diminished from the great city he’d lived in before.

  He knew, vaguely, the reason she had gone away. At least the reason his father had given to Grandmother Weinreb over the phone on the day it happened. It was because she wanted to learn to fly. Flying was wrong, but a lot of people did it anyhow. Not Abraham Weinreb, though, and not any of the other people in Amesville either, because out here in Iowa it was against the law and people were concerned about it as part of the country’s general decline.

  Wrong, as it surely was, Daniel did like to imagine his mother, shrunk down to just the size of a grown-up finger, flying across the wide expanse of snowy fields that he had flown over in the plane, flying on tiny, golden, whirring wings (back in New York he’d seen what fairies looked like on tv, though of course that was an artist’s conception), flying all the way to Iowa just to secretly visit him.

  He would be playing, for instance with his Erector set, and then he’d get an impulse to turn off the fans in all three rooms, and open the flue of the chimney. He imagined his mother sitting on the sooty bricks up at the top, waiting for hours for him to let her in the house, and then at last coming down the opened flue and fluttering about. She would sit watching him while he played, proud and at the same time woebegone because there was no way she could talk to him or even let him know that she existed. Maybe she might bring her fairy friends to visit too… a little troupe of them, perched on the bookshelves and the hanging plants, or clustered like moths about an electric light bulb.

  And maybe they were there. Maybe it wasn’t all imagination, since fairies are invisible. But if they were, then what he was doing was wrong, since people shouldn’t let fairies into their houses. So he decided it was just himself, making up the story in his mind.

  When he was nine Daniel Weinreb’s mother reappeared. She had the good sense to telephone first, and since it was a Saturday when the girl was off and Daniel was handling the switchboard, he was the first to talk to her.

  He answered the phone the way he always did, with, “Good morning, Amesville Medical Arts Group.”

  An operator said there was a collect call from New York for Abraham Weinreb.

  “I’m sorry,” Daniel recited, “but he can’t come to the phone now. He’s with a patient. Could I take a message?”

  The operator conferred with another voice Daniel could barely make out, a voice like the voice on a record when the speakers are off and someone else is listening with earphones.

  When the operator asked him who he was, somehow he knew it must be his mother who was phoning. He answered that he was Abraham Weinreb’s son. Another shorter conference ensued, and the operator asked if he would accept the call.

  He said he would.

  “Danny? Danny, is that you, love?” said a whinier voice than the operator’s.

  He wanted to say that no one ever called him Danny, but that seemed unfriendly. He limited himself to an equivocal Uh.

  “This is your mother, Danny.”

  “Oh. Mother. Hi.” She still didn’t say anything. It was up to him entirely. “How are you?”

  She laughed and that seemed to deepen her voice. “Oh, I could be worse.” She paused, and added, “But not a lot. Where is your father, Danny? Can I talk to him?”

  “He’s doing a filling.”

  “Does he know I’m calling?”

  “No, not yet.”

  “Well, would you tell him? Tell him it’s Milly calling from New York.”

  He weighed the name on his tongue: “Milly.”

  “Right. Milly. Short for… do you know?”

  He thought. “Millicent?”

  “God almighty, no. Mildred — isn’t that bad enough? Doesn’t he ever talk about me?”

  He wasn’t trying to avoid her question. It was just that his own seemed so much more important: “Are you coming here?”

  “I don’t know. It depends for one thing on whether Abe sends me the money. Do you want me to?”

  Even though he wasn’t sure, it seemed required of him to say that yes he did. But he’d hesitated, noticeably, so most of the credit for saying the right thing was lost. She knew he was being polite.

  “Danny, why don’t you go tell him I’m on the phone?” Her voice was whiney again.

  Daniel obeyed. As he’d known he would be, his father was annoyed when Daniel appeared in the doorway. For a while he just stood there. He didn’t want to say who it was out loud in front of the patient in the chair, a fat farmwoman who was getting a crown put on a left upper canine. He said, “There’s a phone call from New York.”

  His father still looked daggers. Did he understand?

  “A woman,” Daniel added significantly. “She’s calling collect.”

  “You know better than to interrupt me, Daniel. Tell her to wait.”

  He went back to the switchboard. Another call was coming in. He put it on Hold quickly, then said to his mother: “I told him. He said to wait. He really can’t stop in the middle.”

  “Well then I’ll wait.”

  “There’s a
nother call. I have to put you on Hold.”

  She laughed again. It was a pleasant laugh. He foresaw, though not in so many words, the necessity of keeping her in a good humor. Assuming that she came to Amesville. So, almost deliberately, he added a fond P.S.: “Gee, Mom, I hope it works out so you can come and live with us.” He put her on Hold before she could reply.

  Because the plane had come from New York there was a long wait for the passengers and their luggage to be cleared through the State Police Inspection Station. Daniel thought that several of the women who came through the white formica doors might be his mother, but when she finally did appear, all frazzled and frayed, the very last passenger to be processed, there was no mistaking her. She wasn’t the mother he’d imagined over the years, but she was undoubtedly the one he’d tried and never quite managed to forget.

  She was pretty but in the direction of vulnerability rather than of zest and health, with big tired brown eyes, and a tangled mass of horsetail hair that hung down over her shoulders as if it were meant to be a decoration. Her clothes were plain and pleasant but not warm enough for Iowa in the middle of October. She was no taller than an average eighth-grader, and except for big, bra-ed-up breasts, no more fleshed-out than the people you saw in advertisements for religion on tv. She’d let her nails grow weirdly long and she fluttered her fingers when she talked so you were always noticing. One arm was covered with dozens of bracelets of metal and plastic and wood that clinked and jangled all the time. To Daniel she seemed as bizarre as an exotic breed of dog, the kind that no one ever owns and you only see in books. People in Amesville would stare at her. The other people in the airport restaurant already were.

  She was eating her hamburger with a knife and fork. Maybe (Daniel theorized) her long fingernails prevented her from picking it up by the bun. The fingernails were truly amazing, a spectacle. Even while she ate she never stopped talking, though nothing that she said was very informative. Obviously she was trying to make a good impression, on Daniel as well as his father. Just as obviously she was pissed off with the inspection she’d gone through. The police had confiscated a transistor radio and four cartons of cigarettes she hadn’t had the cash to pay the Iowa Stamp Tax on. Daniel’s father was able to get the cigarettes back for her but not the radio since it received stations in the prohibited frequency ranges.

  In the car on the way back to Amesville his mother smoked and chattered and made lots of nervous not very funny jokes. She admired everything she saw in a tone of syrupy earnestness, as though Daniel and his father were personally responsible and must be praised for the whole of Iowa, the stubble of cornstalks in the fields, the barns and siloes, the light and the air. Then she’d forget herself for a moment and you could tell she really didn’t mean a word of it. She seemed afraid.

  His father started smoking the cigarettes too, though it was something he never did otherwise. The rented car filled with smoke and Daniel began to feel sick. He focused his attention on the odometer’s steady whittling away of the distance left to go to get to Amesville.

  Next morning was Saturday and Daniel had to be up at six a.m. to attend a Young Iowa Rally in Otto Hassler Park. By the time he was back home, at noon, Milly had been shaped up into a fair approximation of an Amesville housewife. Except for her undersize stature she might have stepped right out of a lady’s clothing display in Burns and McCauley’s window: a neat practical green blouse speckled with neat practical white daisies, a knee-length skirt with wavy three-inch horizontal bands of violet and lime, with matching heavy-duty hose. Her fingernails were clipped to an ordinary length and her hair was braided and wound around into a kind of cap like Daniel’s fourth-grade teacher’s (he was in fifth grade now), Mrs. Boismortier. She was wearing just one of yesterday’s bracelets, a plastic one matching the green in her skirt.

  “Well?” she asked him, striking a pose that made her look more than ever like a plaster mannikin.

  He felt dismayed all over again. His hamstrings were trembly from the calisthenics in the park, and he collapsed on the sofa hoping to cover his reaction with a show of exhaustion.

  “It’s that bad?”

  “No, I was only…” He decided to be honest, and then decided against it. “I liked you the way you were.” Which was half the truth.

  “Aren’t you the proper little gentleman!” She laughed.

  “Really.”

  “It’s sweet of you to say so, dear heart, but Abe made it quite clear that the old me just would not do. And he’s right, it wouldn’t. I can be realistic. So—” She struck another shop-window pose, arms lifted in a vaguely defensive gesture. “—what I want to know is: will the new me do?”

  He laughed. “For sure, for sure.”

  “Seriously,” she insisted, in a tone he could not believe was at all serious. It was as though just by doing any ordinary thing she parodied it, whether she wanted to or not.

  He tried to consider her freshly, as though he’d never seen her the way she’d arrived. “As far as what you’re wearing and all, you look just fine. But that won’t make you…” He blushed, “… invisible. I mean…”

  “Yes?” She crinkled her painted eyebrows.

  “I mean, people are curious, especially about Easterners. Already this morning kids had heard and they were asking me.”

  “What about, exactly?”

  “Oh, what you look like, how you talk. They see things on television and they think they’re true.”

  “And what did you tell them?”

  “I said they could wait and see for themselves.”

  “Well, don’t worry, Danny — when they do see me I’ll look so ordinary they’ll lose all their faith in tv. I didn’t come here without a good idea of what I’d be getting into. We’ve got tv in the East too, you know, and the Farm Belt gets its share of attention.”

  “They say we’re very conformist, don’t they?”

  “Yes, that’s certainly one thing they say.”

  “So why did you want to come here? I mean, aside from us.”

  “Why? I want a nice, comfortable, safe, prosperous life, and if conformity’s the price I’ve got to pay, so be it. Wherever you are, you know, you’re conforming to something.”

  She held out her hands in front of her, as though considering the pared-down nails. When she started talking again it was in a tone of unquestionable seriousness. “Last night I told your father I’d go out and get a job to help him take up his indenture a little faster. It would actually be a joy for me to work. But he said no, that wouldn’t look right. That’s my job, looking right. So I’ll be a nice little homebody and crochet the world’s largest potholder. Or whatever homebodies do here. I’ll do it and by damn I’ll look right!”

  She plunked down in an armchair and lit a cigarette. Daniel wondered if she knew that most Amesville housewives didn’t smoke, and especially not in public. And then he thought: being with him wasn’t the same as being in public. He was her son!

  “Mother… could I ask you a question?”

  “Certainly, so long as I don’t have to answer it.”

  “Can you fly?”

  “No.” She inhaled shallowly and let the smoke spill out of her open mouth. “No, I tried to but I never had the knack. Some people never do learn, no matter how hard they try.”

  “But you wanted to.”

  “Only a fool would deny wanting to. I knew people who flew, and from the way they talked about it…” She rolled back her eyes and pouted her bright red lips, as if to say, Pure heaven!

  “At school there was a special lecture in the gym last year, an authority from the government, and he said it’s all in your head. You just think you’re flying but it’s a kind of dream.”

  “That’s propaganda. They don’t believe it. If they did they wouldn’t be so afraid of fairies. There wouldn’t be fans whirling everywhere you went.”

  “It’s real then?”

  “As real as the two of us sitting here. Does that answer your question?”

/>   “Yeah. I guess so.” He decided to wait till later on to ask what her friends had said it felt like.

  “Good. Then remember this: you must never, never talk about this to anyone else. I don’t even want you to talk about it again to me. Anything to do with flying, anything at all. Has your father explained to you about sex?”

  Daniel nodded.

  “About fucking?”

  “Uh… here in Iowa… you don’t ever…”

  “You don’t talk about it, right?”

  “Well, kids don’t talk about it with grown-ups.”

  “Flying’s just the same. We don’t talk about it. Ever. Except to say that it’s very very wrong, and that people wicked enough to do it deserve every terrible thing that happens to them.”

  “Is that what you believe?”

  “Never mind ‘believe.’ What I’m saying now is the official under-god truth. Flying is wrong. Say that.”

  “Flying is wrong.”

  She pushed herself up out of the armchair and came over and kissed him on the cheek. “You and I,” she said with a wink, “are two of a kind. And we’re going to get along.”

  2

  At the age of eleven Daniel developed a passion for ghosts; also vampires, werewolves, mutated insects, and alien invaders. At the same time and mostly because he shared this appetite for the monstrous, he fell in love with Eugene Mueller, the younger son of Roy Mueller, a farm equipment dealer who’d been the mayor of Amesville until just two years ago. The Muellers lived in the biggest and (they said) oldest house on Amesville’s prestigious Linden Drive. A total of five of the town’s mayors and police chiefs had lived in that house, and three of those five had been Muellers. In the attic of the Muellers’ house, among many other forms of junk, were a great many boxes of old books, mostly unreadable relics of the irrelevant past — books about dieting and being successful, the multi-volume memoirs of a dead president, textbooks for French, home ec, accounting, and yard upon yard of Readers’ Digest Condensed Books. Buried, however, in the deepest level of these cast-off ideas, Eugene Mueller had discovered an entire carton filled with paperback collections of supernatural tales, tales of an artfulness and awfulness surpassing any known to him from the oral traditions of summer camp and the Register delivery office.