On Wings of Song

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 another 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.

Eugene would sneak single volumes down to his room hidden in his underwear and read them there by candlelight late at night. The books were like ghosts themselves, their margins crumbling to dust at his fingers’ touch. He’d read each story once quickly and if it was one he liked, a second time, lingeringly. Then, with its topic fresh in his memory, he would retell the story to the news-carriers at the Register office, while they waited for the truck to arrive with the papers. Sometimes he would draw it out over several days to increase the suspense.

Daniel also had a paper route, though not as lucrative a one as the ex-Mayor’s son. He listened to Eugene Mueller’s stories with the ravished reverence of a disciple. They — and their presumed author — became an emotional necessity to him. Months ago he’d exhausted the school library’s meager resources — a ragged copy of thirteen tales by Poe and bowdlerised editions of Frankenstein and The War of the Worlds. Once he’d bicycled to Fort Dodge and back, forty miles each way, to see a double feature of old black-and-white horror movies. It was terrible, loving something so inaccessible, and all the more wonderful therefore, when the long drought came to an end. Even when Eugene confessed, privately, to having practiced on his friend’s credulity and had shown him his store of treasure, even then Daniel went on thinking of him as a superior person, set apart from other seventh and eighth graders, possibly even a genius.

Daniel became a frequent overnight guest at the Mueller home. He ate with Eugene’s family at their dinner table, even times when his father was there. With all of them Daniel was charming, but he only came alive when he was alone with Eugene — either in the attic, reading and creating their own artless Grand Guignol, or in Eugene’s room, playing with the great arsenal of his toys and games.

In his own way he was as bad — that is, as good — a social climber as his mother.

Three days before he got his certificate for passing seventh grade, Daniel received third prize in a statewide contest sponsored by the Kiwanis (a pair of front row seats at a Hawkeye game of his choosing) for his essay on the topic, “Good Sports Make Good Citizens.” He read the essay aloud at a school assembly and everyone had to clap until Mr. Cameron, the Principal, held up his hand. Then Mr. Cameron gave him a book of speeches by Herbert Hoover, who was born in West Branch. Mr. Cameron said that someday, when the country got back on its feet again, he wouldn’t be surprised to see another Iowan occupying the White House. Daniel supposed that Mr. Cameron was referring to him and felt a brief intense ache of gratitude.

On that same day the Weinrebs moved to their new home on Chickasaw Avenue, which was reckoned (by those who lived there) to be nearly as nice a neighborhood as Linden Drive. It was a smallish gray clapboard ranch-style house with two bedrooms. Inevitably the second bedroom fell to the twins, Aurelia and Cecelia, and Daniel was relegated to the room in the basement. Despite its gloom and the damp cinder-block walls he decided it was to be preferred to the twins’ room, being larger and so private that it could boast its own entrance onto the driveway.

The last owner of the house had tried to make ends meet (and failed, apparently) by renting the basement room to a family of Italian refugees. Think of it: four people living in this one room, with two basement windows for light, and a sink with only a cold water tap!

Daniel kept the laminated nameplate with their name on it: Bosola. Often late at night, alone in his room, he tried to imagine the sort of life the Bosolas had led hemmed in by these four gray walls. His mother said they’d probably been happier, which was her way of ignoring any otherwise incontrovertible misery. No one in the neighborhood knew what had become of them. Maybe they were still in Amesville. A lot of Italians lived in trailer courts on the outskirts of town and worked for Ralston-Purina.

Daniel’s father was a refugee too, though his case was different from most. His mother had been American, his father a native-born Israeli. He’d grown up on a kibbutz four miles from the Syrian border, and gone to the University in Tel Aviv, majoring in chemistry. When he was twenty his maternal grandparents offered to put him through Dental School if he would come and live with them in Queens. A providential kindness, for two weeks after he left for the States the rockets were launched that destroyed most of Tel Aviv. On his twenty-first birthday he had the choice of which country’s citizen he wanted to be. At that point it couldn’t really be called a choice. He pledged his allegiance to the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stood, and changed his name from Shazer to Weinreb in deference to his grandfather and the bill he was footing at N.Y.U. He got through Dental School and joined the elder Weinreb’s faltering practice in Elmhurst, which went on faltering for twelve more years. The one action in his whole life he had seemed to undertake of his own spontaneous and uncoerced will was at age thirty-nine to marry sixteen-year-old Milly Baer, who had come to him with an impacted wisdom tooth. As Milly would often later insist, in her fits of reminiscense, even that choice had not been, in the final analysis, his.

Daniel was never able to satisfactorily account for the fact that he didn’t like his father. Because he wasn’t as important or as well-to-do as Roy Mueller, for instance? No, for Daniel’s feeling, or lack of it, went back before the time he’d become aware of his father’s limitations in these respects. Because he was, after all, a refugee? Specifically, a Jewish refugee? No, for if anything he wasn’t sufficiently a Jewish refugee. Daniel was still young enough to take a romantic view of hardship, and to his way of thinking the Bosolas (as he imagined them) were a much better, more heroic sort than any Weinrebs whatsoever. Then why?

Because — and this possibly was the real reason, or one of them — he sensed that his father, like every other father, expected him and, what was worse, wanted him to follow the same career that he’d been sinking in all through his life. He wanted Daniel to become a dentist.

It wasn’t enough for Daniel to insist that he didn’t want to be one. He had to find something he did want to be. And he couldn’t. Not that it made a great deal of difference, yet. He was young, he had time. But even so — he didn’t like thinking about it.

The house of Mrs. Boismortier, his old fourth-grade teacher, was the very last stop on Daniel’s route. She was an older woman, forty or fifty years old, and fat, like a lot of other women her age in Amesville. Her name was pronounced Boys-More-Teer. No one that Daniel had ever talked to could remember a time when there had been a Mr. Boismortier, but there must have been once in order for her to be a Mrs.

Daniel remembered her as a careful rather than an inspired teacher, content to return eternally to the verities of spelling, grammer, and long division rather than to call down the lightning of a new idea. She would never read them stories, for instance, or talk about things from her own life. Her only livelier moments were on Fridays when for an hour at the end of the day she led her class in singing. They always started with the National Anthem and ended with “Song of Iowa.” Daniel’s three favorite songs in their songbook had been “Santa Lucia,” “Old Black Joe,” and “Anchors Aweigh.” Most teachers shied away from teaching music in the Friday free periods, because it was controversial, but Mrs. Boismortier, whenever the subject came up — at a PTA meeting or even in class discussions — simply declared that any country whose schoolchildren could not do justice to their own National Anthem was a country in deep trouble, and how could you argue with that? But for all her talk of God and Country, it was obvious to the children in her classes that she taught them singing because she enjoyed it herself. In every song her voice was loudest and loveliest, and no matter what kind of singer you might be yourself it was a pleasure to sing along because it was her voice you heard, not your own.

Nevertheless, over the years Mrs. Boismortier had made enemies by insisting on teaching music, especially among undergoders, who were very strong in this part of Iowa, and very outspoken and sure of themselves. If you could believe the Register, they practically ran Iowa, and they’d been even more powerful in the days just after the defeat of the national Anti-Flight Amendment, when they were able to get the State Legislature to pass a law prohibiting all secular musical performances, live or recorded. Three days after Governor Brewster vetoed this law his only daughter was shot at and though it was never proven that her would-be killer had been an undergoder the crime did turn a lot of sympathizers away. Those days were over, and the worst that Mrs. Boismortier had to worry about now was the occasional broken window or dead cat strung up to her front porch. Once when Daniel was delivering her paper he found a two-inch hole drilled into the middle of the front door. At first he supposed it was for the paper, and then he realized it was meant to be a fairy-hole. As a sign of his solidarity Daniel made a tight cylinder of the paper and forced it into the hole, as if that were what it was there for. At school the next day Mrs. Boismortier went out of her way to thank him, and instead of repairing the hole she enlarged it and covered it with a metal plate that could be slipped to the side, thereby making it officially a slot for the Register.

That had been the beginning of the special relationship between Daniel and Mrs. Boismortier. Often on the coldest winter nights she would waylay him when he brought the paper and have him come into her living room for a hot cup of something she made from corn starch. “Embargo cocoa” she called it. There were either books or pictures on all the walls, including a very careful watercolor of the First Baptist Church and a store next to it (where there wasn’t any now) called A P. Also, right in plain sight, with shelves of records above it up to the ceiling, was a stereo phonograph. There wasn’t anything illegal about that, strictly speaking, but most people who had records — the Muellers, for instance — kept them out of sight and, usually, locked up. It seemed very gutsy, considering the way she was harrassed in general.

As his fingers and ears grew warmer and started tingling, Mrs. Boismortier would ask him questions. Somehow she’d learned that he liked ghost stories, and she would recommend titles that he could ask his mother to take out for him from the adult section of the library. Sometimes these were a little too plodding and high-toned for his taste but twice at least she hit the nail on the head. She almost never talked about herself, which seemed unusual in someone basically so talkative.

Gradually, as he began to realize that despite her reticence and her fat incapable body Mrs. Boismortier was a definite human being, Daniel began to grow curious. Mostly about the music. He knew that music was not something you talked about with other people, but it was hard not to think about, especially with those shelves of records looming down, like a microfilm library of all the sins in the world. Not that music was wrong, exactly. But where there’s smoke, as they say. After all, it was music that helped people fly. Not listening to music, of course, but doing it. And anything associated with flying was irresistably interesting.

And so, one snowy afternoon in November, after he’d accepted his cup of embargo cocoa, he screwed up his courage and asked if he might be allowed to hear one of her records.

“Why surely, Daniel, what record would you like to hear?”

The only pieces of music he knew by name were the songs in the school’s songbook. He was certain, just because they were in the songbook, that those weren’t the kinds of music that people used to fly.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Something that you like.”

“Well, here’s something I listened to last night, and it seemed quite splendid, though it may not appeal to you at all. A string quartet, by Mozart.” Ever so tenderly, as if the record were a living thing, she slipped it from its cardboard sleeve and placed it on the turntable.

He braced his mind against some unimaginable shock, but the sounds that issued from the speakers were dull and innocuous — wheezings and whinings, groanings and grindings that continued interminably without getting anywhere. Once or twice out of the murk he could hear melodies begin to get started but then they’d sink back into the basic diddle-diddle-diddle of the thing before you could start to enjoy them. On and on and on, sometimes faster, sometimes slower, but all of a dullness and drabness uniform as housepaint. Even so, you couldn’t just say thank you, that was enough, not while Mrs. Boismortier was swaying her head back and forth and smiling in a faraway way, as if this really were some incredible mystic revelation. So he stared at the record revolving on the turntable and sweated it out to the end. Then he thanked Mrs. Boismortier and trudged home through the snow feeling betrayed, disillusioned and amazed.

That couldn’t be all there was to it. It just could not. She was hiding something. There was a secret.

That winter, in the first week of the new year, there was a national crisis. Of course if you could believe the Register the nation was always having crises, but they seldom impinged on Iowa. There had been a small uproar once when the Federal Government threatened to send in agents to collect the twelve percent luxury tax on meat, but before a real confrontation could develop the Supreme Court declared Iowa to have been right all along in maintaining that meats, except for ham and sausages, were “unprocessed” and so not taxable, at least in Iowa. Another time there had been a riot in Davenport concerning which Daniel only remembered that the Register printed an unusual number of photos, all showing the State Police in firm control. With these two exceptions life had gone along from day to day without being affected by the news. What happened in January was that unidentified terrorists blew up the Alaska pipeline. Despite precautions this had happened many times before, and there was supposed to be a foolproof system for shutting down the flow, patching up the damage, and getting back to normal before there were major repercussions. This time, though, several miles of line were taken out by bombs that went off at neat six hundred yard intervals. According to the Register this meant that the bombs must have traveled inside the giant pipes, with the oil, and there were diagrams showing why this was impossible. Fairies were blamed, but so were, variously, Iran, Panama, several sorts of terrorists, and the League of Women Voters.

How this affected Iowa was very simple: there was no fuel. Every conceivable form of leverage and legal blackmail was used to wangle concessions for the Farm Belt states, but the fuel really wasn’t there. Now they were going to have a taste of what winter rationing was like for the unfortunates who lived in less affluent parts of the country.

The taste was bitter. The winter’s cold crept into stores and schools and houses, into the food you ate and the water you bathed in, into your every bone and thought. The Weinrebs camped in their own living room and kitchen to squeeze as much warmth as possible from the remaining liters of fuel in the tank. After eight P.M. there was no electricity, so you couldn’t even read or watch tv to make the freezing hours pass a little faster. Daniel would sit with his parents in the dark and silent room, unmoving, unable to sleep, hoarding the warmth of his sweaters and blankets. The boredom became a worse torment than the cold. Nine-thirty was bedtime. He slept between his two sisters and began to smell of their piss.

Sometimes he would be allowed to visit Eugene and if he were lucky he might be asked to spend the night. The Muellers’ house was noticably warmer. For one thing, they had a fireplace and through the early evening there would always be a fire going. They used the books in the attic as fuel (with Daniel’s help Eugene was able to spirit away their horror stories), as well as unwanted sticks of furniture. Mr. Mueller also had a source (Daniel suspected) of bootleg fuel.

The Register had temporarily suspended publication for the duration of the crisis, so that at least he didn’t have to freeze his ass off delivering papers. The world seemed different without news. Daniel hadn’t supposed, till now, that he was interested in the official world represented by the Register, the world of strikes and settlements, debates and issues, Republicans and Democrats. He would have been hard-pressed to say what most of the headlines he’d looked at were about, but now that there were none it was as though civilization had ground to a halt, like some old Chevy that no one could get started, as though winter had overtaken not only nature but history as well.

In March, with life beginning to look almost ordinary again, Daniel’s father came down with pneumonia. The Iowa winters had always been hard for him. He got through them by pumping himself full of antihistamines. Finally like a tooth that’s been drilled and filled until there’s nothing left of it, his health collapsed. He’d gone into the office feverish and had to let his nurse finish the draining of a root-canal when he couldn’t keep his hands from shaking. Against her employer’s protest the nurse called in Dr. Caskey from down the hall. Caskey, after examining his colleague, wrote out an admission order to the hospital in Fort Dodge.

Through the whole crisis hospitals were the one place you could be warm, and Milly, Daniel and the twins would have basked at Abraham’s bedside every day from the start of visiting hours till the nurses threw them out — if only Fort Dodge hadn’t been so far away. As it was, they wouldn’t have seen him at all if it hadn’t been for Roy Mueller, who drove in to Fort Dodge in his pickup two or three times a week and always had room for either Daniel or Milly, though not for both at once.

There wasn’t a great deal of communication at the best of times between Daniel and his father. Abraham Weinreb was fifty-two now and he looked, with his fringe of gray hair and the loose flesh wrinkling on his face, like someone living on Social Security. Since coming to the hospital he had developed a strain of lachrymose seriousness that made Daniel more than usually uneasy when they were together. One windy Saturday during the first real thaw of the year Abraham took a New Testament from the metal night-table by his bed and asked Daniel to read aloud to him from the beginning of John. All the while he read Daniel kept worrying whether his father were developing into some kind of religious fanatic, and when he told Milly about it that night she was even more alarmed. They were both certain he was dying.

The Weinrebs were church-goers as a matter of course. No one who earned more than a certain amount of money in Amesville was so impolitic as not to be. But they went to the Congregationalist Church, which was generally recognized as the most lukewarm and temporizing of the town’s churches. The Congregationalist God was the God commemorated on the coins and dollar bills that went into the collection baskets, a God who made no other demands of his worshippers than that they waste a certain amount of cash and time each Sunday on his behalf. One could have met a better class of people by being Episcopalian but then one stood the risk of being snubbed. The real aristocracy of Iowa, the farmers, were undergoders — Lutherans, Baptists, Methodists — but it was impossible to pretend to be an undergoder since it involved giving up almost anything you might enjoy — not just music, but tv and most books and even talking with anyone who wasn’t another undergoder. Besides, the farmers lumped all the townspeople together anyhow with the great unregenerate mass of agitators, middlemen, and the unemployed that comprised the rest of the country, so it didn’t do much good even for those who tried to pretend.

Milly and Daniel needn’t have worried. Abraham did not become an undergoder, and after a few failed dialogues he didn’t even try to talk about whatever it was that had got him going on the subject of Jesus. The only difference in his behavior after he came back from Fort Dodge was that he seemed to have lost some of his old confidence and his appetite for the jokes and trivia of day-to-day life that had kept conversation alive at the dinner table. It was as though his recent brush with death had made every ordinary food taste rotten to him.

Daniel avoided him more than ever. His father seemed not to notice or not to mind.

The Register never did go back into business, even after the pipeline was functional and the President had assured the whole country that the emergency was over. Its circulation had been dwindling for a long time, advertising revenues were down to a record low, and even at the current newstand price of one buck ($5.50 a week for subscribers) it could no longer survive. Furthermore, it had become increasingly easy anywhere in Iowa to get copies of the Star-Tribune. Though its editorials were outspokenly against flying per se, the Star-Tribune ran ads for flight apparatus and its news stories often shed a well-nigh roseate light on various self-confessed fairies, especially in the media. The ads by themselves were enough to make the Minneapolis paper illegal in Iowa, but the police didn’t seem to be interested in cracking down on the two taverns that sold smuggled-in copies, despite recurrent anonymous denunciations (phoned in by Register delivery boys) to the Amesville Sheriff’s office and the State Police as well. Apparently the paper’s seventy-cent cover price included a percentage for pay-offs.

The demise of the Register came at a bad time for Daniel. Over and above his father’s theoretical objections to allowances for teenagers (which Daniel had lately become) the money just wasn’t there. Though he had at last taken up his indentures and was no longer in debt to the county, Abraham Weinreb did have to meet stiff monthly payments on the house, and now there were the hospital’s bills to settle. What’s more, he was under strict orders to cut back on his work load, so there was significantly less money coming in.

Daniel stewed over the dilemma for the better part of a month, while the daily demands of friendship and ostentation ate up the little money he’d saved against the day, next July, when Young Iowa was to go camping in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Then he took the initiative and went to speak to Heinie Youngermann at the Sportsman’s Rendezvous, one of the taverns that sold the Star-Tribune. Not only was Daniel able to secure a route for himself, but he was put in charge of the entire delivery operation (with a two percent rake-off). Admittedly, there weren’t as many subscribers as there had been for the above-board Register, but the per-copy profit was as good, and by making each route a little larger each of the boys stood to earn as much as he used to, while Daniel, with that beautiful two percent, was pulling down a weekly income of nearly fifty dollars, which was as much as a lot of grown-ups got at full-time jobs. His friend Eugene Mueller continued to deliver in the Linden Drive section of town, virtually guaranteeing that the police would not interfere, for who’d dare hassle Roy Mueller’s son?

Besides the basic good news of being flush, it was spring. Lawns were turning green before the rains had washed away the last traces of the snow. The main street was alive with pushcarts and bicycles. Suddenly it was Central Daylight Time and the sun stayed up till seven-thirty. Milly’s face went from sallow to rosy to tan from her stints of backyard gardening. She acted happier than he could ever remember. Even the twins seemed interesting and agreeable now that he no longer had to be their bed-warmer. They’d learned to talk. In (as Daniel had quipped) a manner of speaking. Buds swelled on branches, clouds scudded through the sky, robins appeared out of nowhere. It truly was spring.

One Sunday for the sheer hell of it Daniel decided to ride his bicycle out along County Road B to where a schoolfriend of his, Geraldine McCarthy, lived in the village of Unity, a round trip of fourteen miles. In the fields on either side of the road the new cornplants were springing up through the black Iowa soil. The cool air rippled through his cotton shirt as if on purpose to share its growing excitement.

Halfway to Unity he stopped pedalling, overcome with a sense that he was an incredibly important person. The future, which usually he never gave much thought to, became as intensely real as the sky overhead, which was sliced in two neat pieces by the vapor trail of a jet. The feeling became so powerful it almost got frightening. He knew, with an absoluteness of knowing that he would never doubt for many years, that someday the whole world would know who he was and honor him. How and why remained a mystery.

After the vision had departed he lay down in the young weeds by the side of the road and watched the clouds massing at the horizon. How strange, how fortunate, and how unlikely to be Daniel Weinreb, in this small town in Iowa, and to have such splendors in store.

3

General Roberta Donnelly, the Republican candidate for President, was going to be giving a major speech at a Fight Against Flight Rally in Minneapolis, according to the Star-Tribune, and Daniel and Eugene decided to go and hear her and even get her autograph if they could. They’d have a real adventure for a change instead of just going off into the Muellers’ attic or the Weinreb’s basement and acting one out. In any case they were getting too old for that sort of thing. Eugene was fifteen, Daniel fourteen (though of the two he seemed the older, being so much hairier everywhere it counted).

There was no way they could let their parents know what they were planning. Setting off for Des Moines on their own would have been gently discouraged and maybe eventually allowed, but Minneapolis was as unthinkable a destination as Peking or Las Vegas. Never mind that the reason for their going there was to see General Donnelly, as true-blue and red-blooded a motive as any undergoder could have asked for. For all right-thinking Iowans the Twin Cities were Sodom and Gomorrah (On the other hand, as right-thinking Minnesotans liked to point out, what had happened there would have happened in Iowa too, if only six percent more voters had swung the other way). It was scary — but also, for that very reason, exciting — to think of going across the border, and there comes a time in your life when you have to do something that is scary in this particular way. No one else would ever need to know about it, except Jerry Larsen, who had agreed to take over both their routes for the two afternoons they meant to be gone.

Having told their parents they were going camping and skillfully avoided saying where, they rode their bikes north as far as U.S.18, where they folded them up and hid them inside a storm culvert under the road. They struck luck with their very first ride, an empty semi returning to Albert Lea. It smelled of pigshit, even up in the cab with the driver, but that simply became the special smell of their adventure. They became so friendly talking with the driver that they considered changing their plans and asking him to say that they were all together, but that seemed an unnecessary complication. When they got to the border Eugene needed only to mention his father’s name to the Customs Inspector and they were across.

The unspoken understanding was that they were on their way to see the latest double-feature at the Star-Lite Drive-In outside of Albert Lea. Flying was far from being the only forbidden fruit available in Minnesota. Pornography was also an attraction, and — in the eyes of most Iowans — a much more real one. (It was chiefly on account of its ads for border drive-ins that the Star-Tribune was banned in neighboring Farm Belt states.) Eugene and Daniel were doubtless a little young to be sneaking across the border to the Star-Lite, but no one was about to make a fuss over Roy Mueller’s son, since both Roy himself and his older son Donald were such frequent visitors at this particular check-point. Sexual precocity has always been one of the prerogatives — if not indeed a solemn duty — of the ruling class.

From Albert Lea it was eighty miles due north to Minneapolis. They went in a Greyhound bus without even bothering to try and hitch. The fields you could see from the bus window seemed no different from equivalent fields in Iowa, and even when they hit the outskirts of the city it was distressingly like the outskirts of Des Moines — patches of ramshackle slums alternating with smaller well-secured stretches of suburban affluence, with the occasional shopping mall and service station saluting them with the giant letters of their names revolving on high poles. There was possibly a little more traffic than there would have been outside Des Moines, but that may have been on account of the rally. Everywhere you went — on lawns, in store windows, stuck to the sides of buildings, — were posters announcing the rally and urging the enactment of the Twenty-Eighth Amendment. It was hard to believe, when there were obviously so many million people behind it, that the Amendment could ever be defeated, but it had been, twice.

Downtown Minneapolis was an amazement of urbanity: its colossal buildings, its sumptuous stores, its swarming streets, the sheer noise, and then, beyond these ascertainable realities, the existence, surmised but wholly probable, of fairies swooping and darting through the glass-and-stone canyons, flitting above the trafficked streets, lighting in flocks on the carved facades of monolithic banks, then spiraling larklike into the azures of mid-afternoon, like a vastation of bright invisible locusts that fed not on the leaves of trees or on the potted flowers decorating the Mall but on the thoughts, the minds, the souls of all these calm pedestrians. If indeed they did. If indeed they were there at all.

The Rally was to be at eight o’clock, which gave them another good five hours to kill. Eugene suggested that they see a movie. Daniel was amenable but he didn’t want to be the one to suggest which one, since they both knew, from the ads that had been appearing for months in the Star-Tribune, what it would have to be. They asked the way to Hennepin Avenue, along which all the moviehouses clustered, and there on the marquee of the World, spelled out in electric letters big as table lamps, was the unacknowledged golden fleece of their questing (not General Donnelly, not for a moment): the last legendary musical of the great Betti Bailey, Gold-Diggers of 1984.

The movie had a considerable effect on Daniel, then and thereafter. Even if the movie hadn’t, the World would have, being so grand and grave, a temple fit for the most solemn initiations. They found seats at the front of the theater and waited while wild sourceless music swelled about them.

This, then, was what it was all about. This, when it issued from within you, was the liberating power that all other powers feared and wished to extirpate: song. It seemed to Daniel that he could feel the music in the most secret recesses of his body, an ethereal surgeon that would rip his soul free from its crippling flesh. He wanted to surrender himself to it utterly, to become a mere magnificence of resonating air. Yet at the same time he wanted to rush back to the usher with the handsome gold braid hat and ask him what this music was called so he could buy the cassette for himself and possess it forever. How terrible that each new rapture should be a farewell! That it could only exist by being taken from him!

Then the lights dimmed, motors parted the shimmering curtains on the stage, and the movie began. The very first sight of Betti Bailey extinguished every thought of the music’s ravishments. She was the spitting image of his mother — not as she was now but as he first had seen her: the fingernails, the bra-ed-up breasts and mane of hair, the crisp ellipses drawn above the eyes, the lips that seemed to have been freshly dipped in blood. He had forgotten the impact of that meeting, the embarrassment. The horror. He wished Eugene weren’t sitting by him, seeing this.

And yet you had to admit that she — Betti Bailey — was beautiful. In even, strangest of all, an ordinary way.

In the story she was a prostitute who worked in a special brothel in St. Louis that was only for policemen. She didn’t like being a prostitute though and dreamed of being a great singer. In her dreams she was a great singer, the kind that made the whole audience in the movie theater forget it was only shadows moving on a screen and applaud her along with the audiences of the dream. But in real life, in the brothel’s big red bathtub, for instance, or the one time she went walking through the ruins of a Botanical Garden with the interesting stranger (played by Jackson Florentine), her voice was all wobbly and rasping. People who listened couldn’t help cringing, even Jackson Florentine, who (it turned out) was a sex maniac being hunted by the police. By the time you found out he was already working at the brothel, since it was one of the few places people weren’t bothered about their I.D. He did a comic tap dance in black face with a chorus line of real life black cops, which led into the big production number of the show, “March of the Businessmen.” At the end of the movie the two lovers hooked into a flight apparatus and took off from their bodies for an even bigger production number, an aerial ballet representing their flight north to the icebergs of Baffin Island. The special effects were so good you couldn’t help but believe the dancers weren’t verily fairies, especially Betti Bailey, and it certainly added to one’s sense of its gospel truth to know that shortly after making Gold-Diggers Betti Bailey had done the same thing herself — hooked in and taken off, never to return. Her body was still curled up in a foetal ball in some L.A. hospital and God only knew where the rest of her was — burning up inside the sun or whirling around the rings of Saturn, anything was possible. It did seem a pity that she had never come back just long enough to make another movie like Gold-Diggers, at the end of which the police found the bodies of the lovers hooked up into the apparatus and machine-gunned them with the most vivid and painstaking cinematic detail. There wasn’t a dry eye in the theater when the lights came on again.

Daniel wanted to stay and hear the music that was starting up again. Eugene needed to go to the toilet. They agreed to meet in the lobby when the music was over. There was still plenty of time to get to the Donnelly Rally.

Coming on top of the movie the music no longer seemed so impressive, and Daniel decided that his time in Minneapolis was too precious to bother repeating any experience, however sublime. Eugene wasn’t in the lobby, so he went downstairs to the Men’s Room. Eugene wasn’t there either, unless he were inside the one locked stall. Daniel bent down to look under the door and saw not one pair but two pairs of shoes. He was shocked silly but at the same time a little gratified, as though he’d just scored a point for having seen another major sight of the big city. In Iowa people did not do such things, or if they did and were found out, they were sent away to prison. And rightly so, Daniel thought, making a hasty exit from the Men’s Room.

He wondered whether the same thing had been going on when Eugene had been down here. And if so, what he’d thought of it. And whether he dared to ask.

The problem never arose. Daniel waited five, ten, fifteen minutes in the lobby and still no sign of Eugene. He went up to the front of the theater as the credits for Gold-Diggers came on and stood in the flickering dark scanning the faces in the audience. Eugene was not there.

He didn’t know if something awful and typically urban had happened to his friend — a mugging, a rape — or if some whim had taken him and he’d gone off on his own. To do what? In any case there seemed no point in waiting around the World, where the usher was obviously becoming impatient with him.

On the theory that whatever had happened to Eugene he’d be sure to try and meet back up with Daniel there, he started walking to Gopher Stadium on the University of Minnesota campus, where the rally was to be held. For a block before he got to the pedestrian bridge across the Mississippi there were squadrons of students and older sorts handing out leaflets to whoever would take them. Some leaflets declared that a vote for Roberta Donnelly was a vote against the forces that were destroying America and told you how to get to the Rally. Other leaflets said that people had every right to do what they wanted, even if that meant killing themselves, and still others were downright peculiar, simple headlines without text that could be interpreted as neither for nor against any issue. As, for instance: I DON’T CARE IF THE SUN DON’T SHINE. Or: GIVE US FIVE MINUTES MORE. Just by looking at their faces as you approached them you couldn’t tell which were undergoders and which weren’t. Apparently there were sweet types and sour types on both sides.

The Mississippi was everything people said, a beautiful flat vastness that seemed to have swallowed the sky, with the city even more immense on either shore. Daniel stopped in the middle of the bridge and let his collection of colored leaflets flutter down one by one through that unthinkable space that was neither height nor depth. Houseboats and shops were moored on both sides of the river, and on three or four of them were naked people, men as well as women, tanning in the sun. Daniel was stirred, and disturbed. You could never fully understand any city of such extent and such variety: you could only look at it and be amazed, and look again and be terrified.

He was terrified now. For he knew that Eugene would not be at the rally. Eugene had made his break for it. Maybe that had been his intention from their starting out or maybe it was the movie that convinced him, since the moral of it (if you could say it had one) was: Give Me Liberty — Or Else! Long ago Eugene had confided that someday he meant to leave Iowa and learn to fly. Daniel had envied him his bravado without for a moment suspecting he could be so dumb as to go and do it like this. And so treacherous! Is that what a best friend was for — to betray?

The son of a bitch!

The sneaky little shit!

And yet. And even so. Hadn’t it been and wouldn’t it always be worth it — for just this one sight of the river and the memory of that song?

The answer pretty definitely was no, but it was hard to face the fact that he’d been so thoroughly and so needlessly fucked-over. There was no point in seeing General Donnelly, even as an alibi. There was nothing to be done but scoot back to Amesville and hope. He’d have till tomorrow to come up with some halfway likely story to tell the Muellers.

When Eugene’s mother stopped by, two evenings later, Daniel’s story was plain and unhelpful. Yes, they had camped out in the State Park, and no, he couldn’t imagine where Eugene could have gone to if he hadn’t come home. Daniel had ridden back to Amesville ahead of Eugene (for no very cogent reason) and that was the last he knew about him. She didn’t ask half the questions he’d been expecting, and she never called back. Two days later it became generally known that Eugene Mueller was missing. His bicycle was discovered in the culvert, where Daniel had left it. There were two schools of thought as to what had happened: one, that he was the victim of foul play; the other, that he’d run away. Both were common enough occurrences. Everyone wanted to know Daniel’s opinion, since he was the last person to have seen him. Daniel said that he hoped that he’d run away, violence being such a horrible alternative, though he couldn’t believe Eugene would have done something so momentous without dropping a hint. In a way his speculations were entirely sincere.

No one seemed at all suspicious, except possibly Milly, who gave him odd looks now and then and wouldn’t stop pestering him with questions that became increasingly personal and hard to answer, such as where, if Eugene had run away, would he have gone to? More and more Daniel felt as though he’d murdered his friend and concealed the body. He could understand what a convenience it was for Catholics to be able to go to confession.

Despite such feelings things soon went back to normal. Jerry Larsen took over Eugene’s paper route permanently, and Daniel developed an enthusiasm for baseball that gave him an exuse for being out of the house almost as much as his father.

In July there was a tornado that demolished a trailer court a mile outside of town. That same night, when the storm was over, the county sheriff appeared at the Weinreb’s front door with a warrant for Daniel’s arrest. Milly became hysterical and tried to phone Roy Mueller, but couldn’t get past his answering device. The sheriff insisted stonily that this had nothing to do with anyone but Daniel. He was being arrested for the sale and possession of obscene and seditious materials, which was a Class D felony. For misdemeanors there was a juvenile court, but for felonies Daniel was an adult in the eyes of the law.

He was taken to the police station, fingerprinted, photographed, and put in a cell. The whole process seemed quite natural and ordinary, as if all his life he’d been heading towards this moment. It was a large moment, certainly, and rather solemn, like graduating from high school, but it didn’t come as a surprise.

Daniel was as sure as his mother that Roy Mueller was behind his being arrested, but he also knew that he’d been caught dead to rights and that there’d be no wriggling out of it. He’d done what he’d been booked for. Of course, so had about ten other people, not even counting the customers. And what about Heinie Youngermann — were all his pay-offs down the drain? How could they try Daniel and not him?

He found out a week later when the trial was held. Every time the Weinreb’s lawyer would ask Daniel, on the witness stand, where his copies of the Star-Tribune had come from, or who else had delivered them, anything that would have involved naming other names, the opposing lawyer raised an objection, which the judge, Judge Cofflin, sustained. Simple as that. The jury found him guilty as charged and he was sentenced to eight months in the State Correction Facility at Spirit Lake. He could have got as much as five years, and their lawyer advised them against entering an appeal, since it was up to the same judge whether Daniel would be let off on probation when school started in the fall. They’d have been certain to lose the appeal in any case. Iowa and the rest of the Farm Belt weren’t called police states for nothing.

Sitting in the cell day after day and night after night with no one to talk to and nothing to read, Daniel had had a thousand imaginary conversations with Roy Mueller. So that by the time, late on the night before he was to be sent off to Spirit Lake, that Roy Mueller finally did get around to seeing him, he’d been through every possible combination of anger, anguish, dread, and mutual mistrust, and the actual confrontation was a little like the trial, something he had to go through and get over with.

Mueller stayed outside the locked cell. He was a substantial-looking man with a paunch, thick muscles and a friendly manner, even when he was being mean. With his own children he liked to think of himself as a kind of Solomon, stern but munificent, but his children (Daniel knew from Eugene) all lived in terror of him, even as they acted out their roles as his spoiled darlings.

“Well, Daniel, you’ve got yourself in a fair fix, haven’t you?”

Daniel nodded.

“It’s too bad, your being sent away like this, but maybe it will do you good. Build some moral fiber. Eh?”

Their eyes met. Mueller’s were beaming with pleasure, which he passed off as benevolence.

“I thought there might be something you’d want to tell me before you go. Your mother has been on the phone with me at least once a day since you got in trouble. I thought the least I could do for the poor woman was to come and talk to you.”

Daniel said what he’d made his mind up to, that he was guilty of selling the Star-Tribune and very sorry for it.

“I’m glad to hear you’re taking your medicine in the right spirit, Daniel, but that wasn’t exactly what I had in mind for us to talk about. I want to know where my son is, and you’re the one who can tell me. Right, Daniel?”

“Honestly, Mr. Mueller, I don’t know where he is. If I knew I’d tell you. Believe me.”

“No hunches or theories?”

“He might—” Daniel had to clear his throat, which was dry and sticky with fear. “He might have gone to Minneapolis.”

“Why Minneapolis?”

“We… used to read about it. When we were delivering the Star-Tribune.”

Mueller brushed aside the implications of this — that his son had shared Daniel’s so-called crime, and that he’d known about it all along — with another toothy smile and a lifting and settling of his paunch.

“And it seemed like an exciting place to go, is that it?”

“Yes. But not… I mean, we never talked about leaving Amesville permanently. We just wanted to see it.”

“Well, what did you think when you saw it. Did it live up to your expectations?”

“I didn’t say—”

But there seemed no point in sparring just for the sake of delaying the inevitable. Daniel could see it went beyond suspicions: Mueller knew.

“We did go there, Mr. Mueller, but believe me, I didn’t have any idea that Eugene didn’t mean to come back with me. We went there to see Roberta Donnelly. She was giving a speech at Gopher Stadium. After he saw her we were heading right back here. Both of us.”

“You admit going there, that’s some progress. But I didn’t need you to tell me that, Daniel. I knew the night you set off, from Lloyd Wagner, who let the two of you across the border, which is a mistake that Lloyd has had reason to regret. But that’s another story. When there was no sight of you coming back after the Star-Lite’s last show, Lloyd realized he’d made a mistake and called me. It was a simple thing, from there, to have the Albert Lea police check out the bus station and the drivers. So you see, my lad, I need a little more information than just—” He parodied Daniel, making his eyes wide with false candor, and whispering: “—Minneapolis.”

“Truly, Mr. Mueller, I’ve told you all I know. We went to a movie together and at the end of it Eugene said he had to go to the bathroom. That was the last I saw of him.”

“What movie?”

“Gold-Diggers of 1984. At the World Theater. The tickets cost four dollars.”

“He disappeared and that was it? You didn’t look for him?”

“I waited around. And then, after a while, I went to the Rally, hoping to see him there. What else could I do? Minneapolis is huge. And also…”

“Yes?”

“Well, I figured he probably meant to get away from me. So he was probably deliberately hiding from me. But what I couldn’t understand then, and I still can’t, is why, if he knew he wasn’t coming back, why he had to involve me in it. I mean, I’m his best friend.”

“It’s not very logical, is it?”

“It’s not. So my theory — and I’ve had a lot of time to think about this — my theory is that the idea came to him while he was there, probably right during the movie. It was a movie that could have done that.”

“There’s only one thing wrong with your theory, Daniel.”

“Mr. Mueller, I’m telling you everything I know. Everything.”

“There’s one good reason why I don’t believe you.”

Daniel looked down at the toes of his shoes. None of his imaginary conversations with Mr. Mueller had gone as badly as this. He made his confession but it had done him no good. He’d run out of possible things to say.

“Don’t you want to know what that reason is?”

“What?”

“Because my son had the foresight to steal eight hundred and forty-five dollars from my desk before he went away. That doesn’t sound like a spur-of-the-moment decision, does it?”

“No.” Daniel shook his head vigorously. “Eugene wouldn’t do that. He just wouldn’t.”

“Well, he did. The money’s gone, and I scarcely think it was a coincidence that Eugene should decide to run away at the exact same time.”

Daniel couldn’t think what he thought. His expression of disbelief had been no more than the last remnant of his loyalty. Friends don’t involve their friends in crimes. Except, apparently, they do.

“Do you have any other suggestions, Daniel, as to where I can tell the police to look for my son?”

“No, Mr. Mueller. Honestly.”

“If any idea should come to you, you have only to ask to talk to Warden Shiel at Spirit Lake. Of course, you understand that if you are able to help us find Eugene you’ll be doing yourself a considerable favor when it comes time to discuss your parole. Judge Cofflin knows about this situation, and it was only at my repeated insistence that you weren’t indicted for first degree robbery as well.”

“Mr. Mueller, believe me, if I knew anything else at all, I’d tell you.”

Mueller looked at him with a look of leisurely, contented malice and turned to leave.

“Really!” Daniel insisted.

Mueller turned back to look at him a last time. From the way he stood there, smiling, Daniel knew that he believed him — but that he didn’t care. He’d got what he was after, a new victim, an adopted son.

4

His first night in the compound at Spirit Lake, sleeping out of doors on sparse, trampled crabgrass, Daniel had a nightmare. It began with music, or sounds like but less ordered than music, long notes of some unknown timbre, neither voice nor violin, each one sustained beyond thought’s reach, yet lacing together into a structure large and labyrinthine. At first he thought he was inside a church but it was too plain for that, the space too open.

A bridge. The covered bridge above the Mississippi. He stood on it, suspended above the moving waters, an intolerable expanse of blackness scored with the wavering lights of boats that seemed as far away, as unapproachable as stars. And then, causelessly, awfully, this scene was rotated through ninety degrees and the flowing river became a wall still whirling upwards. It towered to an immense unthinkable height and hung there, threatening to collapse. No, its flowing and its collapse were a single, infinitely slow event, and he fled from it over the windows of the inner bridge. Sometimes the long sheets of glass would fracture under his weight, like the winter’s earliest ice. He felt as though he were being hunted by some sluggish, shapeless god that would — let him flee where he might — surely crush him and roll him flat beneath his supreme inexorable immensity. All this, as the music lifted, note by note, into a whistling louder and more fierce than any factory’s to become at last the P.A. system’s tape of reveille.

His stomach still hurt, though not so acutely as in the first hours after he’d forced down the P-W lozenge. He’d been afraid then that despite all the water he was drinking it would lodge in his throat instead of his stomach. It was that big. The first set of its time-release enzymes burned out a small ulcer in the lining of the stomach, which the second set (the ones working now) proceeded to heal, sealing the lozenge itself into the scar tissue of the wound it had created. The whole process took less than a day, but even so Daniel and the seven other newly-admitted prisoners had nothing to do but let their situation sink in while the lozenges wove themselves into the ruptured tissues.

Daniel had supposed he’d be the youngest prisoner, but as it turned out a good percentage of the people he could see being assembled and sent out in work crews were his own age, and many of these, if not probably younger, were a lot scrawnier. The moral of this observation was the basically happy one that if they could survive at Spirit Lake, then so could he.

It seemed to be the case that a majority of the others, even those his age, had been in prison before. That, anyhow, was the subject that united five of the seven others once the compound had been emptied by the morning’s call-up. For a while he sat on the sidelines taking it in, but their very equanimity and easy humor began to get at him. Here they were, sentenced many of them to five years or more of what they already knew was going to be sheer misery, and they were acting like it was a family reunion. Insane.

By comparison the poultry farmer from Humboldt County who’d been sent up for child abuse seemed, for all his belly-aching, or maybe because of it, normal and reasonable, a man with a grievance who wanted you to know just how all-out miserable he was. Daniel tried talking to him, or rather, listening, to help him get his mind more settled, but after a very short time the man developed a loop, saying the same things over in almost the identical words as the first and then the second time through — how sorry he was for what he’d done, how he hadn’t meant to harm the child, though she had baited him and knew she was at fault, how the insurance might pay for the chickens but not for all the work, not for the time, how children need their parents and the authority they represent; and then, again, how sorry he was for what he’d done. Which was (as Daniel later found out) to beat his daughter unconscious and almost to death with the carcass of a hen.

To get away from him Daniel wandered about the compound, facing up to his bad news item by item — the stink of the open latrines, the not much nicer stink inside the dormitories, where a few of the feeblest prisoners were laid out on the floor, sleeping or watching the sunlight inch along the grimy sheets of plywood. One of them asked him for a glass of water, which he went and drew at the tap outside, not in a glass, since there were none to be found, but in a paper cup from McDonald’s so old and crunched out of shape it barely served to hold the water till he got back inside.

The strangest thing about Spirit Lake was the absence of bars, barbed wire, or other signs of their true condition. There weren’t even guards. The prisoners ran their own prison democratically, which meant, as it did in the bigger democracy outside, that almost everyone was cheated, held ransom, and victimized except for the little self-appointed army that ran the place. This was not a lesson that Daniel learned at once. It took many days and as many skimped dinners before the message got across that unless he reached some kind of accommodation with the powers-that-be he wasn’t going to survive even as long as to September, when he expected to be paroled back to school. It was possible, actually, to starve to death. That, in fact, was what was happening to the people in the dormitory. If you didn’t work, the prison didn’t feed you, and if you didn’t have money, or know someone who did, that was it.

What he did learn that first morning, and unforgettably, was that the P-W lozenge sealed in his innards was the authentic and bonafide sting of death.

Some time around noon there was a commotion among the other convalescent prisoners. They were shouting at the poultry farmer Daniel had talked to earlier, who was running full tilt down the gravel road going to the highway. When he’d gone a hundred yards and was about the same distance from the fieldstone posts that marked the entrance to the compound a whistle started blowing. A few yards farther on the farmer doubled over; radio signals broadcast by P-W security system as he passed through the second perimeter had detonated the plastic explosive in the lozenge in his stomach.

In a while the Warden’s pickup appeared far off down the highway, hooting and flashing its lights.

“You know,” said one of the black prisoners, in a reflective, ingratiating tone, like an announcer’s, “I could see that coming a mile away, a mile away. It’s always that kind that lets go first.”

“Dumb shit,” said a girl who had something wrong with her legs. “That’s all he was, a dumb shit.”

“Oh, I’m not so sure,” said the black. “Anyone can get an attack of conscience. Usually it takes a bit more abuse, not just the idea.”

“Do many people… uh… ?” It was the first Daniel had spoken, except to fend off questions.

“Let go? A camp this size, about one a week, I’d say. Less in summer, more in winter, but that’s the average.”

Others agreed. Some disagreed. Soon they were comparing notes again. The farmer’s body, meanwhile, had been loaded into the rear of the pickup. Before he got back into the cab, the guard waved at the watching prisoners. They did not wave back. The truck did a u-turn and returned, squealing, back to the green horizon from which it had appeared.

Originally the P-W security system (the initials commemorated the Welsh physicians who developed it, Drs. Pole and Williams) had employed less drastic means of reforming character than instant death. When triggered, the earliest lozenges released only enough toxins to cause momentary, acute nausea and colonic spasms. In this form the P-W system had been hailed as the Model-T of behavioral engineering. Within a decade of its commercial availability there was scarcely a prison anywhere in the world that hadn’t converted to its use. Though the motive for reform may have been economic, the result invariably was a more humane prison environment, simple because there was no longer a need for the same close scrutiny and precautions. It was for this reason that Drs. Pole and Williams were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991.

Only gradually, and never in the United States, was its use extended to so-called “hostage populations” of potentially dissident civilians — the Basques in Spain, Jews in Russia, the Irish in England, and so on. It was in these countries that explosives began to replace toxins and where, too, systems of decimation and mass reprisal were developed, whereby a central broadcasting system could transmit coded signals that could put to death any implanted individual, any group or a given proportion of that group, or, conceivably, an entire population. The largest achieved kill-ratio was the decimation of Palestinians living in the Gasa Strip, and this was not the consequence of a human decision but of computer error. Usually the mere presence of the P-W system was sufficient to preclude its use except in individual cases.

At the Spirit Lake Correction Facility it was possible to send out work crews to farms and industries within a radius of fifty miles (the range of the system’s central radio tower) with no other supervision than the black box by which the prisoners, singly or as a group, could be directed, controlled, and, if need be, extirpated. The result was a work-force of singular effectiveness that brought the State of Iowa revenues far in excess of the cost of administration. However, the system was just as successful in reducing crime, and so there was never enough convict labor to meet the demands of the area’s farms and factories, which had to resort to the more troublesome (if somewhat less costly) migrant workers, recruited in the bankrupt cities of the eastern seaboard.

It was such urban migrants who, falling afoul of the law, constituted by far the better part of the prison population at Spirit Lake. Daniel had never in his life known such various, interesting people, and it wasn’t just Daniel who was impressed. They all seemed to take an inflated view of their collective identity, as though they were an exiled aristrocracy, beings larger and more honorable than the dogged trolls and dwarves of day-to-day life. Which is not to say that they were nice to each other (or to Daniel); they weren’t. The resentment they felt for the world at large, their sense of having been marked, almost literally, for the slaughter, was too great to be contained. It could lead even the mildest of them at times to betray this theoretical sodality for the sake of a hamburger or a laugh or the rush that accompanied the smash of your own fist into any available face. But the bad moments were like firecrackers — they exploded and a smell lingered for a few hours and then even that was gone — while the good moments were like sunlight, a fact so basic you almost never considered it was there.

Of course it was summer, and that helped. They worked longer hours, but they worked at pleasant jobs, out of doors, for farmers who had a rational regard for what was possible (The factories were said to be much worse, but they wouldn’t re-open till late in October). Often there would be extra food, and when your life centers around getting enough to eat (the rations at Spirit Lake were, deliberately, not enough) this was an important consideration.

It was the times in between that were so weirdly wonderful, times of an idleness as plain and pure as the shaking of leaves in a tree. Times between reveille and being hustled into the trucks, or times you waited for a truck to come and take you back. Times that a sudden storm would cancel out the day’s appointed baling and you could wait among the silences of the ceasing rain, in the glow of the late, returning light.

At such times consciousness became something more than just a haphazard string of thoughts about this, that, and the other. You knew yourself to be alive with a vividness so real and personal it was like God’s gloved hand wrapping itself about your spine and squeezing. Alive and human: he, Daniel Weinreb, was a human being! It was something he’d never even considered up till now.

There was a part of the compound set aside for visitors with pine trees, picnic tables, and a row of swings. Since visitors were only allowed on Sundays, and since few of the prisoners were ever visited in any case, the place looked unnaturally nice compared to the weedy fields and bare dirt of the compound proper, though for the visitors, coming to it from the outside world, it probably seemed plain enough, a park such as you would have found in any neighboring town.

Hearing the squeals of his sisters before they became visible behind the screen of pines, Daniel stopped to get hold of himself. He seemed quite steady and far from tears. Approaching nearer, he could see them through the branches. Aurelia was on one of the swings and Cecelia was pushing her. He felt like a ghost in a story, hovering about his living past. There beyond the twins was his father, in the front seat of a Hertz, smoking his pipe. Milly was nowhere to be seen. Daniel had thought she wouldn’t come but even so it was a disappointment.

To his credit he didn’t let that show when at last he emerged from behind the trees. He was all hugs and kisses for the twins, and by the time his father reached the swings, Daniel’s arms were full.

“How are you, Daniel?” Abraham asked.

Daniel said, “I’m fine.” And then, to nail it down, “In fact I really am.” He smiled — a smile as plausible as this little park.

He set the twins down on the grass and shook hands with his father.

“Your mother meant to come but at the last minute she didn’t feel up to it. We agreed it probably wouldn’t do your morale any good to see her in one of her… uh…”

“Probably,” Daniel agreed.

“And it probably wouldn’t be that good for her morale, either. Though, I must say, this place—” pointing at the trees with his pipestem “—is a bit, uh, nicer than I was expecting.”

Daniel nodded.

“Are you hungry? We brought a picnic.”

“Me? I’m always hungry.” Which was truer than he would have cared to be known.

While they spread out the food on the table, another car arrived with other visitors. Having them as an audience made it easier. There was a roast chicken, which Daniel got the better part of, and a bowl of potato salad with what seemed a pound of bacon crumbled in it. Abraham apologized for there being only a quart of milk for everyone to drink. The beer he’d brought had been confiscated at the checkpoint on the highway.

While he ate, his father explained all that was being done to have Daniel released. A lot of people, apparently, were incensed about his being sent to Spirit Lake, but they were none of them the right people. A petition had been sent to Mayor MacLean, who returned it saying the whole thing was out of his hands. His father showed him a typed list of the names on the petition. A lot of them had been customers on his route, others he recognized as his father’s patients, but the surprising thing was how many of them he’d never heard of. He had become a cause.

For all that it was the food that registered. Daniel had got so used to the process food at Spirit Lake he’d forgotten what an enormous difference there could be between that and the real thing. After the chicken and potato salad, Abraham unwrapped a carrot cake. It was the closest Daniel came to breaking down during the whole visit.

When the food was gone Daniel became conscious of the usual obscuring awkwardness rising up again between him and his father. He sat there staring at the weathered boards of the table, trying to think of what to say, but when he did come up with something it never precipitated a real conversation. The excitement at the other picnic table, where they were talking Spanish, seemed a reproach to their own lengthening silences.

Cecelia, who had already been carsick on the ride to Spirit Lake, rescued them by tossing up her lunch. After her dress had been sponged clean, Daniel played hide-and-seek with the twins. They had finally got the idea that there wasn’t just a single hiding place to hide in, but a whole world. Twice Aurelia went beyond the fieldstone posts marking the perimeter to find a place to hide, and each time it was like a knife right through his stomach. Theoretically you weren’t supposed to be able to feel the lozenge, but no one who’d ever been implanted believed that.

Eventually it was time for them to go. Since he hadn’t found a way to lead round to it by degrees, Daniel was forced to come right out with the subject of McDonald’s. He waited till the twins were strapped into their seatbelts, and then asked his father for a word in private.

“It’s about the food here,” he began when they were by themselves.

As he’d feared, his father became indignant when he’d explained about the rations being deliberately less than the minimum for subsistence. He started going on about the petition again.

Daniel managed to be urgent without being swept along: “It’s no use complaining, Dad. People have tried and it doesn’t do any good. It’s the policy. What you can do is pay what they call the supplement. Then they bring in extra food from McDonald’s. It doesn’t make such a big difference now, ’cause most of the farmers, when we go out and work for them, usually scrape up something extra for us. But later on, in winter, it can be nasty. That’s what they say.”

“Of course, Daniel, we’ll do all we possibly can. But you certainly will be home before winter. As soon as school starts again they’ll have to put you on probation.”

“Right. But meanwhile I need whatever you can let me have. The supplement costs thirty-five dollars a week, which is a lot to pay for a Big Mac and french fries, but what can I say? They’ve got us over a barrel.”

“My God, Daniel, it’s not the money — it’s the idea of what they’re doing here. It’s extortion! I can’t believe—”

“Please, Dad — whatever you do, don’t complain.”

“Not till you’re out of here, certainly. Who do I pay?”

“Ask for Sergeant Di Franco when they stop you at the checkpoint on the way back. He’ll tell you an address to send the money to. I’ll pay it all back, I promise.”

Abraham took his appointment book out of the breast pocket of his suit and wrote down the name. His hand was shaking. “Di Franco,” he repeated. “That reminds me. I think that was the fellow who made me leave your book with him. Your old friend Mrs. Boismortier has been by the house several times, asking after you, and the last time she brought a present for me to bring you. A book. You may get it eventually, once they’ve made sure it’s not subversive.”

“I don’t know. They don’t let many books through. Just bibles and like that. But tell her thank you for me anyhow.”

The last formalities went off without a hitch, and the Hertz drove away into the brightness of the inaccessible world outside. Daniel stayed in the visiting area, rocking gently in one of the swings until the whistle blew, summoning him to the six o’clock roll-call. He kept thinking of the mixing bowl that the potato salad had come in. Something about its shape or its color seemed to sum up everything he’d ever loved. And lost forever.

Forever, fortunately, isn’t a notion that can do you lasting harm at the flexible age of fourteen. True enough, there was something Daniel had lost forever by coming here to Spirit Lake. Call it faith in the system — the faith that had allowed him to write his third prize essay way back when — or maybe just an ability to look the other way while the losers were being trounced by the winners in the fixed game of life. But whatever you call it, it was something he’d have had to lose eventually anyhow. This was just a rougher form of farewell — a kick in the stomach rather than a wave of the hand.

It didn’t even take a night’s sleep with its standard nightmare to put Daniel into a fitter frame of mind. By lights-out he was already looking at the little horrors and afflictions of his prison in the perspective of practical sanity, the perspective by which one’s immediate surroundings, whatever they are, are seen simply as what is.

He had played a game of chess with his friend Bob Lundgren, not an especially good game but no worse than usual. Then he had wormed his way into a conversation between Barbara Steiner and some of the other older prisoners on the subject of politics. Their talk was in its own way as much over his head as Bob James’ chess, at least as far as his being able to contribute to it. They made hash of his most basic assumptions, but it was delicious hash, and Barbara Steiner, who was the clearest-headed and sharpest-tongued of the lot of them, seemed to know the effect she was having on Daniel and to enjoy leading him from one unspeakable heresy to the next. Daniel didn’t consider whether he actually agreed with any of this. He was just caught up in the excitement of being a spectator to it, the way he enjoyed watching a fight or listening to a story. It was a sport and he was its fan.

But it was the music that had the largest (if least understandable) effect on him. Night after night there was music. Not music such as he’d ever conceived of before; not music that could be named, the way, when it was your turn to ask for your favorite song in Mrs. Boismortier’s class you could ask for “Santa Lucia” or “Old Black Joe” and the class would sing it and it would be there, recognizably the same, fixed always in that certain shape. Here there were tunes usually, yes, but they were always shifting round, disintegrating into mere raw rows of notes that still somehow managed to be music. The way they did it was beyond him, and at times the why of it as well. Especially, it seemed, when the three prisoners who were generally accounted the best musicians got together to play. Then, though he might be swept off his feet at the start, inevitably their music would move off somwhere he couldn’t follow. It was like being a three-year-old and trying to pay attention to grown-up talk. But there seemed to be this difference between the language of words. It didn’t seem possible, in the language of music, to lie.

Days later, after he’d dismissed the possibility of ever seeing it, the book Mrs. Boismortier had sent Daniel via his father arrived. It had got past the censor relatively intact, with only a few pages snipped out towards the end. The front cover showed an ingratiating Jesus crowned with thorns, holding out a hamburger. Drops of blood from Jesus and drops of catsup from the burger mingled in a crimson pool from which the words of the title rose up like little lime-green islands: THE PRODUCT IS GOD by Jack Van Dyke. It came with testimonials from a number of unfamiliar show business celebrities and from the Wall Street Journal, which called Reverend Van Dyke “the sinister minister” and declared his theology to be “the newest wrinkle in eternal truth. A real bombshell.” He was the head of Marble Collegiate Church in New York City.

Though it was about religion, an area Daniel had never supposed he could take an interest in, he was glad to get it. In the congested dorms of Spirit Lake, a book, any book, was a refuge, the nearest possible approach to privacy. Besides, Mrs. Boismortier’s earlier batting average had been pretty good, so maybe The Product Is God would be truly interesting. The cover was lurid enough. Anyhow what was the competition? A couple of scruffy bibles and a stack of unread (because unreadable) undergod tracts about iniquity, repentance, and how suffering was a matter for rejoicing once you found Christ. Only prisoners with desperately long terms, fifteen or twenty years, ever pretended to take any of that seriously. There was theoretically a better chance to get paroled if you could convince the authorities you were of his existence or nonexistence, as the case might hope was part of the punishment.

It was clear right from page one that Van Dyke was no undergoder, though just what he was Daniel couldn’t quite tell. An atheist it almost seemed, from some of the things he said. Like this, from the “Prefatory Postscript,” before he even got warmed up: “Often it has been objected, by this book’s admirers and its detractors alike, that I speak of Almighty God as though He were no more than some exceptionally clever Idea I’d got hold of, like a new theorem in geometry, or a scenario for an original ballet. In large part I must allow that this is so, but it doesn’t bother me, and I’m sure it doesn’t bother God. However He may concern Himself with human fate, He is surely indifferent to human controversy.” Or this, from the same Postscript: “The Most High is perfectly willing to be understood as an illusion since our doubts only make our trust in Him that much more savory on His tongue. He is, we must remember, the King of Kings, and shares the general kinky taste of kings for displays of their subjects’ abasement. Doubt Him, by all means, say I, when I speak to doubters, but don’t on that account neglect to worship Him.”

This was religion? It seemed almost the opposite, a burlesque, but Mrs. Boismortier (a good Episcopalian) had sent the book to him, and someone in the hierarchy of the prison, possibly even Warden Shiel, has passed it on, and millions of people, according to the cover, were able to take Reverend Van Dyke seriously.

Seriousness aside, Daniel was enthralled by the book. After a long dusty day of detasseling corn he would return to its paradoxes and mental loop-the-loops with a feeling of immersing himself in seltzer water. Just a few paragraphs and his mind was all tingly and able to think again, at which point he would return the book to its home in his mattress of huskings and straw.

Chapter One was an explanation, more or less, of the book’s garish cover, and of its title too. It was about a bunch of people who start a chain of fast-food restaurants, called Super-King. The chain is run not for profit but to give everybody something really good — Super-King Hamburgers and Super-King Cola, which, according to the chain’s big ad campaign, are supposed to make you live forever and always be happy, if you eat enough of them. No one is actually expected to believe the ads, but the chain is an enormous success anyhow. There were graphs and sales figures to illustrate its growth across the whole country and around the world. Of course the actual product the Super-King people were selling wasn’t hamburgers and such, it was an idea — the idea of Jesus, the Super-King. All products, Van Dyke insisted, were only ideas, and the most mind-boggling idea was the idea of Jesus, who was both God and an ordinary man and therefore a complete impossibility. Therefore, since He represented the best possible bargain, everybody should buy that product, which was basically what had happened over the last two thousand years — the rise of Christianity being the same as the success of the Super-King chain.

Chapter Two was about the difficulty of believing in things — not just in religion, but in advertising, in sex, in your own daily life. Van Dyke argued that even when we know that companies aren’t telling the complete truth about their products, we should buy them anyhow (as long as they aren’t actually harmful) because the country and the economy would collapse if we didn’t. “By the same token,” Van Dyke wrote, “lies about God, such as we find in Holy Scripture, help us keep our psychic economy running. If we can believe, for instance, that the world was all knocked together in six days rather than in however many billions of years, we’ve come a long way toward self-mastery.” The rest of the chapter was a kind of advertisement for God and all the things He would do for you once you “bought” him, such as keeping you from ever being depressed or bitter or coming down with colds.

Chapter Three was titled “Wash Your Own Brain” and was about techniques you could use in order to start beleving in God. Most of the techniques were based on methods of acting. Van Dyke explained that long ago religious-type people had been against plays and actors because by watching them people learned to think of all their feelings and ideas as arbitrary and interchangeable. An actor’s identity was nothing more than a hat he put on or took off at will, and what was true for actors was true for us all. The world was a stage.

“What our Puritan forebears failed to recognize,” Van Dyke wrote, “is the evangelical application of these insights. For if the way we become the kind of people we are is by pretending, then the way to become good, devout, and faithful Christians (which, admit it, is a well-nigh impossible undertaking) is to pretend to be good, devout, and faithful. Study the role and rehearse it energetically. You must seem to love your neighbor no matter how much you hate his guts. You must seem to accept sufferings, even if you’re drafting your suicide note. You must say that you know that your Redeemer liveth, even though you know no such thing. Eventually, saying makes it so.”

He went on to relate the story of one of his parishioners, the actor Jackson Florentine (the same Jackson Florentine who’d co-starred in Gold-Diggers of 1984!), who had been unable to believe in Jesus with a fervent and heartfelt belief until Reverend Van Dyke had made him pretend to believe in the Easter Bunny, a major idol in Florentine’s childhood pantheon. The doubting actor prayed before holographic picture of the Easter Bunny, wrote long confessional letters to him, and meditated on the various mysteries of his existence or nonexistence, as the case might be, until at last on Easter morning he found no less than one-hundred-forty-four brightly dyed Easter eggs hidden all over the grounds of his East Hampton estate. Having revived this “splinter of the Godhead,” as Van Dyke termed it, it was a simple matter to take the next step and be washed in the blood of the Lamb and dried with its soft white fleece.

Before Daniel got to Chapter Four — “A Salute to Hypocrisy” — the book was missing from his mattress. For a moment, finding it gone, he felt berserk with loss. Wave after wave of desolation swept through him and kept him from sleep. Why should it mean so much? Why should it mean anything? It was a ridiculous book that he’d never have bothered with if there had been anything else on hand.

But the feeling couldn’t be argued away. He wanted it back. He ached to be reading it again, to be outraged by its dumb ideas. It was as though part of his brain had been stolen.

Over and above this simple hurt and hunger was the frustration of having no one to complain to. The theft of a book was a trifling injustice in a world where justice did not obtain and no one expected it to.

Late in September the word came through, in a letter from his lawyer in Amesville, that his sentence was not to be reduced or suspended. It didn’t come as a surprise. He’d tried to believe he’d be paroled but never really believed he’d believed it. He didn’t believe anything. It amazed him how cynical he’d become in just a couple months.

Even so there were times when he felt such a passionate self-pity he had to go off by himself and cry, and other times worse than that when a depression would settle over him so black and absolute that there was no way to fight against it or argue his way out of it. It was like a physical disease.

He would tell himself, though not out loud, that he refused to be broken, that it was just a matter of holding out one day at a time. But this was whistling in the dark. He knew if they wanted to break him they would. In fact, they probably weren’t going to bother. It was enough that he should be made to appreciate that their power, so far as it affected him, was limitless.

Until March 14.

What he hadn’t been prepared for was the effect this news had on the attitude of the other prisoners. All through the summer Daniel had felt himself ignored, avoided, belittled. Even the friendliest of his fellow prisoners seemed to take the attitude that this was his summer vacation, while the unfriendliest were openly mocking. Once he’d had to fight to establish his territorial rights in the dorm, and thereafter no one had overstepped the bounds of a permitted formal sarcasm. But now, surely, the fact (so clear to Daniel) that he was as much a victim as they were should have begun to be clear to them too. But it wasn’t. There were no more jokes about summer camp, since summer was definitely over, but otherwise he remained an outsider, tolerated at the edge of other people’s conversations but not welcomed into them.

This is not to say that he was lonely. There were many other outsiders at Spirit Lake — native Iowans who’d been sent up for embezzlement or rape and who still considered themselves to be uniquely and privately guilty (or not guilty, for what difference that made) rather than members of a community. They still believed in the possibility of good and evil, right and wrong, whereas the general run of prisoners seemed genuinely impatient with such ideas. Besides the Iowa contingent there was another large group of prisoners who were outsiders — the ones who were crazy. There were perhaps twenty concerning whom there was no question. They weren’t resented the way Iowans were, but they were avoided, not just because they were liable to fly off the handle but because craziness was thought to be catching.

Daniel’s friend Bob Lundgren was both an Iowan and crazy, in a mildly dangerous but amiable way. Bob, who was twenty-three and the youngest son of and undergod farmer in Dickson County, was serving a year for drunk driving, though that was only a pretext. In fact he’d tried to kill his older brother, but a jury had found him not guilty, since there’d been no one’s word for it but the brother’s, who was an unpleasant, untrustworthy individual. Bob told Daniel that he had indeed tried to kill his brother and that as soon as he was out of Spirit Lake he was going to finish the job. It was hard not to believe him. When he talked about his family his face lighted up with a kind of berserk poetic hatred, a look that Daniel, who never felt such passionate angers, would watch entranced as if it were a log burning in a fireplace.

Bob wasn’t a big talker. Mostly they just played slow, thinking games of chess when they got together. Strategically, Bob was always way ahead. There was never any chance of Daniel’s winning, any more than he could have won against Bob at arm-wrestling, but there was a kind of honor in losing by a slow attrition rather then being wiped out by a completely unexpected coup. After a while there got to be a strange satisfaction that had nothing to do with winning or losing, a fascination with the patterns of play that developed on the board, patterns like the loops of magnetic force that iron filings will form on a sheet of paper, only much more complicated. Such a blessed self-forgetfulness came over them then, as if, as they sat there contemplating the microcosm of the chessboard, they were escaping from Spirit Lake; as if the complex spaces of the board were truly another world, created by thought but as real as electrons. Even so, it would have been nice to win just one game. Or to play to a draw, at least.

He always lost to Barbara Steiner too, but there seemed less disgrace in that, since their contests were only verbal and there were no hard-and-fast rules. Logomachies. Winning was anything from a look in the other person’s eye to downright belly laughter. Losing was simply the failure to score as many points, though you could also lose more spectacularly by being a bore. Barbara had very definite opinions as to who was and wasn’t a bore. People who told jokes, even very good jokes, were automatically set down as bores, as well as people who described the plots of old movies or argued about the best make of automobile. Daniel she accounted a hick, but not a bore, and she would listen contentedly to his descriptions of various typical Amesville types, such as his last year’s homeroom teacher, Mrs. Norberg, who was a social studies teacher and had not read a newspaper in over five years because she thought they were seditious. Sometimes she let him run on for what seemed hours, but usually they took turns, one anecdote leading to another. Her range was enormous. She’d been everywhere, done everything, and seemed to remember it all. Now she was serving three years, half of it behind her, for performing abortions in Waterloo. But that, as she liked to say, was just the tip of the iceberg. Every new anecdote seemed to have her in a different state working at another kind of job. Sometimes Daniel wondered if she wasn’t making at least a part of it up.

People had different opinions as to whether Barbara was homely or only plain. Her two most noticeable defects were her wide, meaty-looking lips and her stringy black hair that was always dotted with enormous flakes of dandruff. Perhaps with good clothes and beauty parlors she might have passed muster, but lacking such assists there wasn’t much she could do. Also, it didn’t help that she was six months pregnant. None of which stood in the way of her having as much sex as she liked. Sex at Spirit Lake was a seller’s market.

Officially the prisoners weren’t supposed to have sex at all, except when spouses came to visit, but the monitors who watched them over the closed-circuit tv would usually let it pass so long as it didn’t look like a rape. There was even a corner in one of the dorms screened off with newspapers, like a Japanese house, where you could go to fuck in relative privacy. Most women charged two Big Macs or the equivalent, though there was one black girl, a cripple, who gave blow jobs for free. Daniel watched the couples going in back of the paper screen and listened to them with a kind of haunted feeling in his chest. He thought about it more than he wanted to, but he abstained. Partly from prudential reasons, since a lot of the prisoners, men and women both, had a kind of venereal warts for which there didn’t seem to be a cure, but also partly (as he explained to Barbara) because he wanted to wait till he was in love. Barbara was quite cynical on the subject of love, having suffered more than her share in that area, but Daniel liked to think she secretly approved of his idealism.

She wasn’t cynical about everything. At times, indeed, she could outdo Daniel in the matter of principles, the most amazing of which was her latest idea that everyone always got exactly what he or she deserved. At Spirit Lake this was on a par with praising steak to vegetarians, since just about everyone, including Daniel, felt he’d been railroaded. They might or might not believe in justice in an abstract sense, but they certainly didn’t think justice had anything to do with the legal system of the State of Iowa.

“I mean,” Daniel insisted earnestly, “what about my being here? Where is the justice in that?”

Only a few days before he’d told her the complete story of how, and why, he’d been sent up (hoping all the while that the monitors, off in their offices, were tuned in), and Barbara had agreed then it was a travesty. She’d even offered a theory that the world was arranged so that simply to exist you had to be violating some law or other. That way the higher-ups always had some pretext for pouncing when they wanted you.

“The justice of your being here isn’t for what you did, dumbbell. It’s for what you didn’t do. You didn’t follow your own inner promptings. That was your big mistake. That’s what you’re here for.”

“Bullshit.”

“Bull-shit,” she replied coolly, turning the inflection around against him. “Purity of heart is to will one thing. You ever heard that saying?”

“A stitch in time saves nine. Won’t that do as well?”

“Think about it. When you went to Minneapolis with that friend of yours, then you were doing the right thing, following the spirit where it led. But when you came back you did the wrong thing.”

“For Christ’s sake, I was fourteen.”

“Your friend didn’t go back to Iowa. How old was he?”

“Fifteen.”

“In any case, Daniel, age has nothing to do with anything. It’s the excuse people use till they’re old enough to acquire better excuses — a wife, or children, or a job. There are always going to be excuses if you look for them.”

“Then what’s yours?”

“The commonest in the world. I got greedy. I was pulling in money hand over fist, and so I stayed on in a hick town long after I should have left. I didn’t like it there, and it didn’t like me.”

“You think it’s fair you should be sent to prison for that, for going after the money? Cause you did say, the other day, that you didn’t think doing the abortions was in any way wrong.”

“It was the first time I ever sinned against my own deepest feelings, and also the first time I’ve been to prison.”

“So? It could be a coincidence, couldn’t it? I mean, if there were a tornado tomorrow, or you were struck by lightning, would that also be something you deserved?”

“No. And that’s how I know there won’t be a tornado. Or the other thing.”

“You’re impossible.”

“You’re sweet,” she said, and smiled. Because of her pregnancy her teeth were in terrible condition. She got supplements, but apparently not enough. If she wasn’t careful, she was going to lose all of them. At twenty-seven years of age. It didn’t seem fair.

There were a couple weeks in the middle of October when the pace slackened. There wasn’t enough work left on the farms to make it worth the gasoline to drive to Spirit Lake and get a crew. Daniel wondered if the prisoners were really as glad to be lazing about the compound as they said. Without work the days stretched out into Saharas of emptiness, with the certainty of something much worse waiting up ahead.

When the new winter rosters were made up, Daniel found himself assigned to Consolidated Food systems nearby “Experimental Station 78,” which was not, in fact, all that experimental, having been in production steadily for twenty years. The company’s P.R. department had simply never found a more attractive way to describe this side of the business, which was the breeding of a specially mutated form of termite that was used as a supplement in various extended meat and cheese products. The bugs bred at Station 78 in all their billions, were almost as economical a source of protein as soybeans, since they could be grown in the labyrinthine underground bunkers to quite remarkable sizes with no other food source than a black sludge-like paste produced for next to nothing by various urban sanitation departments. The termites’ ordinary life-cycle had been simplified and adapted to assembly-line techniques, which were automated so that, unless there was a breakdown, workers weren’t obliged to go into the actual tunnels. Daniel’s job at the station was to tend a row of four-kiloliter vats in which the bugs were cooked and mixed with various chemicals, in the course of which they changed from a lumpy dark-gray mulch to a smooth batter the color of orange juice. In either condition it was still toxic, so as to protein there was no dividend working here. However, the job was considered something of a plum, since it involved very little real work and the temperature down in the station was an invariable 83°F. For eight hours a day you were guaranteed a level of warmth and well-being that was actually illegal in some parts of the country.

Even so, Daniel wished he’d been posted to any other job. He’d never had any qualms before about extended foods, and there was little resemblance between what he could imagine back in the tunnels and what he could see in the vats, but despite that he couldn’t get over a constant queasiness. Sometimes a live termite, or a whole little swarm of them, would manage to make it past the mashers and into the area where Daniel worked, and each time it was as though a switch had been thrown that turned reality into nightmare. None of the other prisoners were so squeamish, it was irrational, but he couldn’t help it. He would have to go after the loose bugs, to keep them from getting into the batter in the vats. They were blind and their wings were not suited to sustained flight, which made them easy to swat but also more sinister somehow, the way they caromed and collided into each other. There was nothing they could do and nowhere they could go, since they couldn’t reproduce sexually and there was nothing outside the station’s tunnels they could digest. Their only purpose in life was to grow to a certain size and then be pulped — and they’d evaded that purpose. To Daniel it seemed that the same thing had happened to him.

With the coming of winter things got steadily worse, week by week. Working down in the station, Daniel saw less and less of actual daylight, but that wasn’t so different from going to school during the darkest months of the year. The worst of it was the cold. The dorms leaked so badly that from the middle of November on it was hard to sleep, the cold was that intense. Daniel slept with two older men who worked the same shift at the station, since people in general objected to the smell of the bugs they all swore they could smell on themselves. One of the men had a problem with his bladder and wet the bed sometimes while he was asleep. It was strange having the same thing happen again here with grown men that had happened during the pipeline crisis with the twins.

He began having trouble with his digestion. Even though he was hungry all the time, something had happened to his stomach acids so that he constantly felt on the verge of throwing up. Other people had the same problem, and blamed it on the Big Macs, which the guards delivered to the dorm half-frozen. Daniel himself believed it was psychological and had to do with his job at the station. Whatever the reason, the result was that he was always at odds with his body, which was cold and weak and nauseous and would fumble the simplest task, turning a doorknob or blowing his nose. And it stank, not just at the crotch and the armpits, but through and through. He began to hate himself. To hate, that is, the body he was attached to. He hated the other prisoners just as much, for they were all in more or less the same falling-to-pieces condition. He hated the dorms, and the station, and the frozen ground of the compound, and the clouds that hung low in the sky, with the weight of the winter within them, waiting to fall.

Every night there were fights, most of them inside the dorms. The monitors, if they were watching, seldom tried to intervene. They probably enjoyed it the way the prisoners did, as sport, a break in the monotony, a sign of life.

Time was the problem, how to get through the bleak hours at work, the bleaker hours at the dorm. Never mind the days and weeks. It was the clock, not the calendar, that was crushing him. What to think of in those hours? Where to turn? Barbara Steiner said the only resources are inner resources, and that so long as you were free to think your own thoughts you had as much freedom as there is. Even if Daniel could have believed that, it wouldn’t have done him much good. Thoughts have got to be about something, they’ve got to go somewhere. His thoughts were just loops of tape, vain repetitions. He tried deliberately daydreaming about the past, since a lot of the prisoners swore that your memory was a regular Disneyland where you spend days wandering from one show to another. Not for Daniel: his memory was like a box of someone else’s snapshots. He would stare at each frozen moment in its turn, but none of them ever came alive to lead the way into a living past.

The future was no better. For the future to be interesting your desires, or your fears, must have a home there. Any future Daniel could foresee back in Amesville seemed only a more comfortable form of prison which he could neither wish for nor dread. The problem of what he would do with his life had been with him for as many years as he could remember, but there had never been any urgency about it. Quite the opposite: he’d always felt contempt for those of his school-fellows who were already hot on the scent of a “career.” Even now the word, or the idea behind it, seemed blackly ridiculous. Daniel knew he didn’t want anything that could be called a career, but that seemed perilously near to not wanting a future. And when people stopped having an idea of their future after Spirit Lake, they were liable to let go. Daniel didn’t want to let go, but he didn’t know what to hang on to.

This was his frame of mind when he began reading The Bible. It served the essential purpose of passing time, but beyond that it was a disappointment. The stories were seldom a match for the average ghost story, and the language they were told in, though poetic in patches, was usually just antiquated and obscure. Long stretches of it made no sense at all. The epistles of St. Paul were particularly annoying that way. What was he to make of: “Beware of dogs, beware of evil workers, beware of the concision, for we are the circumcision, which worship God in the spirit, and rejoice in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh, though I might also have confidence in the flesh.” Gobbledegook! Even when the language was clearer, the ideas were murky, and when the ideas were clear they were usually dumb, like the dumb ideas of Reverend Van Dyke but without his sense of humor. Why did serious people ever take it seriously? Unless the whole thing was a kind of secret code (this was Bob Lundgren’s theory), which made completely good sense when you translated it from the language of two thousand years ago to the language that people spoke today. On the other hand (this was Daniel’s theory) what if St. Paul was talking about experiences that nobody had any more, or only people crazy enough to believe that black was white, and suffering some kind of medicine, and death the beginning of a better kind of life? Even then it was doubtful if believers believed in all they said they did. More likely they’d taken Van Dyke’s advice and were brainwashing themselves, saying they believed such stuff so that some day they actually might.

But he didn’t believe it, and he wouldn’t pretend that he did. He only kept reading it because there was nothing else to read. He only kept thinking about it because there was nothing else to think about.

By the first snowfall, in mid-November, Barbara Steiner was very pregnant and very depressed. People began avoiding her, including the men she’d been having sex with. Not having sex meant she wasn’t getting as many Big Macs as usual, so Donald, who’d been having stomach trouble, would often let her share his, or even give her the whole thing. She ate like a dog, quickly and without any sign of pleasure.

All the talk had gone out of her. They would sit cross-legged on her rolled-up bedding and listen to the wind slam against the windowpanes and rattle the doors. The first full-scale blizzard of the year. Slowly it buttressed the leaky walls with snowdrifts, and the dorm, so sealed, became warmer and more bearable.

There was such a feeling of finality somehow, as though they were all inside some ancient wooden ship that was locked into the ice, eking out rations and fuel and quietly waiting to die. Cardplayers went on playing cards as long as the lights were on, and knitters would knit with the wool they had knit and unraveled a hundred times before, but no one spoke. Barbara, who had already been through two winters at Spirit Lake, assured Daniel that this was just a phase, that by Christmas at the latest things would get back to normal.

Before they did, though, something quite extraordinary happened, an event that was to shape the rest of Daniel’s life — and Barbara’s as well, though in a far more terrible way. A man sang.

There had been less and less music of any sort lately. One of the best musicians at Spirit Lake, a man who could play just about any musical instrument there was, had been released in October. A short time later a very good tenor who was serving twelve years for manslaughter had let go, walking out beyond the perimeter early one Sunday morning to detonate the lozenge in his stomach. No one had had the heart, after that, to violate the deepening silence of the dorms with songs unworthy of those whom they could all still clearly call to mind. The only exception was a feeble-minded migrant woman who liked to drum her fingers on the pipes of the Franklin stove, drumming with a stolid, steady, rather cheerful lack of invention until someone would get fed up and drag her back to her mattress at the far end of the dorm.

Then on the evening in question, a windless Tuesday and bitterly cold, that single voice rose from their assembled silence like a moon rising over endless fields of snow. For the briefest moment, for the length of a phrase, it seemed to Daniel that the song could not be real, that it sprang from inside himself, so perfect it was, so beyond possibility, so willing to confess what must always remain inexpressible, a despair flowering now like a costly fragrance in the dorm’s fetid air.

It took hold of each soul so, leveling them all to ashes with a single breath, like the breath of atomic disintegration, joining them in the communion of an intolerable and lovely knowledge, which was the song and could not be told of apart from the song, so that they listened for each further swelling and subsiding as if it issued from the chorus of their mortal hearts, which the song had made articulate. Listening, they perished.

Then it stopped.

For another moment the silence sought to extend the song, and then even that vestige was gone. Daniel breathed, and the plumes of his breath were his own. He was alone inside his body in a cold room.

“Christ,” Barbara said softly.

There was a sound of cards being shuffled and dealt.

“Christ,” she repeated. “Couldn’t you just curl up and die?” Seeing Daniel look puzzled, she translated: “I mean, it’s just so fucking beautiful.”

He nodded.

She lifted her jacket off the nail on which it hung. “Let’s go outside. I don’t care if I freeze to death — I want some fresh air.”

Despite the cold, it did come as a relief to be out of the dorm, in the seeming freedom of the snow. They went where no feet had trampled it to stand beside one of the square stone posts that marked the camp’s perimeter. If it hadn’t been for the glare of the lights on the snow they might have been standing in any empty field. Even the lights, high on their metal poles, didn’t seem so pitiless tonight, with the stars so real above them in the spaces of the sky.

Barbara, too, was considering the stars. “They go there, you know. Some of them.”

“To the stars?”

“Well, to the planets, anyhow. But to the stars too, for all that anybody knows. Wouldn’t you, if you could?”

“If they do, they must never come back. It would take such a long time. I can’t imagine it.”

“I can.”

She left it at that. Neither of them spoke again for a long while. Far off in the night a tree creaked, but there was no wind.

“Did you know,” she said, “that when you fly the music doesn’t stop? You’re singing and at a certain point you kind of lose track that it’s you who’s singing, and that’s when it happens. And you’re never aware that the music stops. The song is always going on somewhere. Everywhere! Isn’t that incredible?”

“Yeah, I read that too. Some celebrity in the Minneapolis paper said the first time you fly it’s like being a blind man who has an operation and can see things for the first time. But then, after the shock is over, after you’ve been flying regularly, you start taking it all for granted, the same as the people do who’ve never been blind.”

“I didn’t read it,” Barbara said, miffed. “I heard it.”

“You mean you flew?”

“Yes.”

“No kidding!”

“Just once, when I was fifteen.”

“Jesus. You’ve actually done it. I’ve never known anyone who has.”

“Well, now you know two of us.”

“You mean the guy who sang in there tonight? You think he can fly?”

“It’s pretty obvious.”

“I did wonder. It wasn’t like anyone else’s singing I’d ever heard. There was something… uncanny about it. But Jesus, Barbara, you’ve done it! Why didn’t you ever say so before? I mean, Christ Almighty, it’s like finding out you shook hands with God.”

“I don’t talk about it because I only did it that one time. I’m not naturally musical. It just isn’t in me. When it happened I was very young, and very stoned, and I just took off.”

“Where were you? Where did you go? Tell me about it!”

“I was at my cousin’s house in West Orange, New Jersey. They had a hook-up in the basement, but no one had ever got off on it. People would buy an apparatus then the way they’d buy a grand piano, as a status symbol. So when I hooked up I didn’t really expect anything to happen. I started singing, and something happened inside my head, like when you’re falling asleep and you begin to lose your sense of what size you are, if you’ve ever had that feeling. I didn’t pay any attention to it, though, and went right on singing. And then the next thing I knew I was outside my body. At first I thought my ears had popped, it was as simple as that.”

“What did you sing?”

“I was never able to remember. You lose touch with your ego in an ordinary way. If you’re totally focused on what you’re singing, any song can get you off, supposedly. It must have been something from the top twenty, since I wouldn’t have known much else in those days. But what counts isn’t the song. It’s the way you sing it. The commitment you can give.”

“Like tonight?”

“Right.”

“Uh-huh. So then what happened?”

“I was alone in the house. My cousin had gone off with her boyfriend, and her parents were away somewhere. I was nervous and a bit afraid, I guess. For a while I just floated where I was.”

“Where was that?”

“About two inches above the tip of my nose. It felt peculiar.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Then I began flying from one part of the basement to the other.”

“You had wings? I mean, real wings?”

“I couldn’t see myself, but it felt like real wings. It felt like a great charge of power in the middle of my spine. Will power, in the most literal sense. I had this sense of being totally focused on what I was doing, and where I was going — and that’s what the flying was. It was as though you could drive a car by just looking at the road ahead of you.”

Daniel closed his eyes to savor the idea of a freedom so perfect and entire.

“I flew around the basement for what seemed like hours. I’d closed the basement door behind me, like a dummy, and the windows were all sealed tight, so there was no way to get out of the basement. People don’t consider making fairy-holes until they’ve actually got off the ground. It didn’t matter though. I was so small that the basement seemed as big as a cathedral. And almost that beautiful. More than almost — it was incredible.”

“Just flying around?”

“And being aware. There was a shelf of canned goods. I can still remember the light that came out of the jars of jam and tomatoes. Not really a light though. It was more as though you could see the life still left in them, the energy they’d stored up while they were growing.”

“You must have been hungry.”

She laughed. “Probably.”

“What else?” he insisted. It was Daniel who was hungry, who was insatiable.

“At a certain point I got afraid. My body — my physical body that was lying there in the hook-up — didn’t seem real to me. No, I suppose it seemed real enough, maybe even too much so. But it didn’t seem mine. Have you ever been to a zoo?”

Daniel shook his head.

“Well then I can’t explain.”

Barbara was quiet for a while. Daniel looked at her body, swollen with pregnancy, and tried to imagine the feeling she couldn’t explain. Except in gym class he didn’t pay much attention to his own body. Or to other people’s, for that matter.

“There was a freezer in the basement. I hadn’t noticed it till at one point the motor started up. You know how there’s a shudder first, and then a steady hum. Well, for me, then, it was like a symphony orchestra starting up. I was aware, without seeing it, of the part of the engine that was spinning around. I didn’t go near it, of course. I knew that any kind of rotary motor is supposed to be dangerous, like quicksand, but it was so… intoxicating. Like dance music that you can’t possibly resist. I began spinning around where I was, very slowly at first, but there was nothing to keep me from going faster. It was still pure will power. The faster I let myself spin the more exciting, and inviting, the motor seemed. Without realizing it, I’d drifted over to the freezer and I was spinning along the same axis as the motor. I lost all sense of everything but that single motion. I felt like… a planet! It could have gone on forever and I wouldn’t have cared. But it stopped. The freezer shut itself off, and as the motor slowed down, so did I. Even that part was wonderful. But when it had stopped completely, I was scared shitless. I realized what had happened, and I’d heard that that was how a lot of people had just disappeared. I would have. Gladly. I would to this day. When I remember.”

“What did you do then?”

“I went back to the hook-up. Back to my body. There’s a kind of crystal you touch, and the moment you touch it, zip, you’re back inside yourself.”

“And the whole thing was real? You didn’t just imagine it?”

“As real as the two of us talking. As real as the snow on the ground.”

“And you never flew again after that?”

“It wasn’t for want of trying, believe me. I’ve spent a small fortune on voice lessons, on drugs, on every kind of therapy there is. But I could never reach escape velocity no matter how I tried. A part of my mind wouldn’t join in, wouldn’t let go. Maybe it was fear of getting trapped inside some dumb engine. Maybe, like I said before, I just don’t have a gift for singing. Anyhow, nothing helped. Finally I stopped trying. And that’s the story of my life. And all I can say is, piss on it.”

Daniel had the good sense not to try and argue against her bitterness. There even seemed something noble and elevated about it. Compared to Barbara Steiner’s, his own little miseries seemed pretty insignificant.

There was still a chance, after all, that he could fly.

And he would! Oh, he would! He knew that now. It was the purpose of his life. He’d found it at last! He would fly! He would learn how to fly!

Daniel didn’t know how long they’d been standing there in the snow. Gradually, as his euphoria sailed away, he realized that he was cold, that he was aching with the cold, and that they’d better head back to the dorm.

“Hey, Barbara,” he said, catching the sleeve of her coat in his numb fingers and giving it a reminding yank. “Hey.”

“Right,” she agreed sadly, but without stirring.

“We’d better head back to the dorm.”

“Right.”

“It’s cold.”

“Very. Yes.” She still stood there. “Would you do me a favor first?”

“What?”

“Kiss me.”

Usually he would have been flustered by such a suggestion, but there was something in the tone of her voice that reassured him. He said, “Okay.”

With her eyes looking straight into his, she slid her fingers under the collar of his jacket and then back around his neck. She pulled him close until their faces touched. Hers was as cold as his, and probably as numb. Her mouth opened and she pressed her tongue against his lips, gently urging them apart.

He closed his eyes and tried to let the kiss be real. He’d kissed a girl once before, at a party, and thought the whole process a bit unnatural, if also, at last, rather nice. But he couldn’t stop thinking of Barbara’s bad teeth, and by the time he’d braced himself to the idea of pushing his tongue around inside her mouth, she’d had enough.

He felt guilty for not having done more, but she seemed not to care. At least Daniel supposed that her faraway look meant she’d got what she wanted, though he didn’t really know what that might have been. Even so, he felt guilty. Or at the very least confused.

“Thank you,” she said. “That was sweet.”

With automatic politeness Daniel answered, “You’re welcome.” Oddly that was not the wrong thing to say.

Of the man whose song had so wrought upon him, Daniel knew little, not even his real name. In the camp he was known as Gus, having inherited a work shirt across the back of which a former prisoner had stenciled that name. He was a tall, lean, red-faced, ravaged-looking man, somewhere in his forties, who had arrived two weeks ago with a nasty cut over his left eye that was now a puckered scarlet scar. People speculated that he’d been sent up for the fight that had got him the scar, which would have been congruent with his sentence, a bare ninety days. Likely, he’d started the fight on purpose to get that sentence, since a winter at Spirit Lake was more survivable than a jobless and houseless winter in Des Moines, where he came from, and where vagrants, which is what he seemed to be, often died en masse during the worst cold spells.

An ugly customer, without a doubt, but that did not prevent Daniel, as he lay awake that night, from rehearsing, in rather abundant detail, their future relationship, beginning at the moment, tomorrow, that Daniel, would approach him as supplicant and maybe, ultimately, even as friend, though the latter possibility was harder to envision in concrete terms, since, aside from his being such a sensational singer, Daniel couldn’t see, as yet, what there was to like in Gus, or whoever he was, though it had to be there — his song was the proof. With this faith then in Gus’s essential goodness, despite appearances, Daniel (in his daydream) approached the older man (who was, at first, not friendly at all and used some extremely abusive language) and put this simple proposition to him — that Gus should teach Daniel to sing. In payment for his lessons Daniel agreed, after much haggling and more abuse, to give over to Gus each day his supplementary dinner from McDonald’s. Gus was skeptical at first, then delighted at such generous and self-sacrificing terms. The lessons began (this part was rather sketchy, since Daniel had no very clear notion of what, besides scales, voice lessons might entail) and came to an end with a kind of graduation ceremony that took place on the evening before Daniel’s release. Daniel, gaunt from his long fast, his eyes aglow with inspiration, took leave of his fellow prisoners with a song as piercing and authentic as the song Gus had sung tonight. Perhaps (being realistic) this was asking too much. Perhaps that level of mastery would take longer. But the essential part of the daydream seemed feasible, and in the morning, or at the latest after work, Daniel meant to set his plan in motion.

Daniel’s life — the life of his own choosing — was about to begin! Meanwhile, once more, he let his wishes soar, like a little flock of birds, over the vistas of an achieved and merited delight, towards the rustling fields of sleep.

The next morning, several minutes before the usual 5:30 reveille, the whistle sounded. While people were still struggling out of their blankets, its shrill ululation stopped. They all realized that someone had let go, and by the simple process of counting off they found out it had been Barbara Steiner, at whose number, 22, there was only a silence.

A man at the other end of the dorm remarked, in a tone of elegy, “Well, she’s performed her last abortion.”

Most of the prisoners curled back into their mattresses for the moments of warmth still due them, but three of them, including Daniel, got dressed and went outside in time to see the Warden’s pickup come and cart her body away. She’d gone through the perimeter at just the point where they had talked together the night before.

All the rest of the day, as he tended the vats in the steamy false summer of the station, Daniel tried to reconcile his grief at Barbara’s suicide, which was quite genuine, with a euphoria that no other consideration could deplete or noticeably modify. His new-fledged ambition was like a pair of water-wings that bore him up to the sunlit surface of the water with a buoyancy stronger than every contrary effort towards a decent, respectful sorrow. Sometimes, indeed, he would feel himself drifting toward tears, but with a sense rather of comfort than of pain. He wondered, even, if there hadn’t been more of comfort than of pain for Barbara in the thought of death. Wasn’t it possible that that was what their kiss had been about? A kind of farewell, not just to Daniel but to hopefulness in general?

Of course, the thought of death and the fact of it are two different things, and Daniel couldn’t finally agree that the fact is ever anything but bad news. Unless you believed in some kind of afterlife or other. Unless you thought that a spark of yourself could survive the ruin of your body. After all, if fairies could slip loose from the knot of the flesh, why not souls? That had been Daniel’s father’s view of the matter, the one time they’d discussed it, long ago.

There was, however, one major stumbling-block to believing in the old-fashioned, Christian type of soul. Namely, that while fairies were aware of fairies in exactly the way that people are aware of each other, by the senses of sight and hearing and touch, no fairy had ever seen a soul. Often (Daniel had read) a group of them would gather at the bedside of someone who was dying, to await the moment, wished for or believed in, of the soul’s release. But what they always had witnessed, instead, was simply a death — not a release but a disappearance, a fading-out, an end. If there were souls, they were not made of the same apprehensible substance as fairies, and all the theories about the soul that had been concocted over the centuries were probably based on the experience of the rare, fortunate individuals who’d found their way to flight without the help of a hookup, like the saints who had floated while they prayed, and the yogis of India, etc… Such was the theory of people who had flown, and their outspokenness was one of the reasons that flying and everything to do with it were the focus of such distress and downright hatred among the undergoders, who had to believe in the soul and all the rest of that, since what else was there for them to look forward to except their hereafter? The poor, benighted sons-of-bitches.

For that matter, what had he had to believe in up till now? Not a thing. But now! Now belief had come to him and burned inside him. By the light of its fire all things were bright and fair, and the darkness beyond the range of his vision was of no concern.

His faith was simple. All faiths are. He would fly. He would learn to sing, and by singing he would fly. It was possible. Millions of others had done it, and like them, so would he. He would fly. It was only necessary to hang on to that one idea. As long as he did, nothing else mattered — not the horror of these vats, not the rigors or desolations of Spirit Lake, not Barbara’s death, nor the life he’d go back to in Amesville. Nothing in the world mattered except the moment, dim but certain in the blackness of the years ahead, when he would feel wings spring from his immaterial will and he would fly.

Daniel got back to the dorm just as the auction of Barbara Steiner’s personal effects was getting under way. They were spread out for inspection, and people were filing past the table with the same skittish curiosity mourners would pay to a dead body. Daniel took his place in the line, but when he got near enough to the table to recognize the single largest item being offered up (besides the ticking and stuffing of her mattress), he let out a whoop of pure, unthinking indignation, pushed his way to the table, and reappropriated his long-lost copy of The Product Is God.

“Put that back, Weinreb,” said the trustee in charge of the auction, a Mrs. Gruber, who was also, by virtue of her seniority at Spirit Lake the chief cook and head janitor. “You can bid for that the same as anyone else.”

“This book isn’t up for auction,” he said with the belligerence of righteousness. “It’s already mine. It was stolen out of my mattress weeks ago and I never knew who by.”

“Well, now you know,” said Mrs. Gruber complacently. “So put it the fuck back on the table.”

“God damn it, Mrs. Gruber, this book belongs to me!”

“It was inside Steiner’s matress with the rest of her crap, and it is going to be auctioned.”

“If that’s where it was, it’s because she stole it.”

“Begged, borrowed, stole — makes no difference to me. Shame on you anyhow for talking that way about your own friend. God only knows what she had to do to get that book.”

There was laughter, and one voice in the crowd, and then another, elaborated Mrs. Gruber’s implication with specific suggestions. It was flustering, but Daniel stood by his rights.

“It is my book. Ask the guards. They had to cut pages out before I could have it. There’s probably a record of that somewhere. It is mine.”

“Well, that may be or it may not, but there’s no way you can prove to us that Barbara didn’t come by it fair and square. We’ve only got your word for it.”

He could see that she had the majority behind her. There was nothing to be done. He gave her the book, and it was the first item to go to the block (There weren’t that many more). Then some son-of-a-bitch had the nerve to bid against him, and he had to go up to five Big Macs, almost a full week’s dinners, to get it back.

Only after the bidding was done did he realize that the voice he’d been bidding against belonged to Gus.

After the auction was the lottery. Everyone had the number he counted off by at reveille. Daniel was 34, and it came up, winning him back one of his McDonald’s vouchers. But not the one for tonight’s meal, so that when the guard brought round the dinners that night Daniel had to make do with a bowl of Mrs. Gruber’s watery soup and a single slice of white bread smeared with a dab of extended cheese.

For the first time in weeks he felt hungry. Usually dinner left him with a queasy sensation. It must have been the anger. He would have liked to drown old Mrs. Gruber in a kettle of the slop she cooked. And that was just the first of his angers. Peel that away and there were more — against Barbara for stealing his book, against Gus for bidding for it, against the whole lousy prison and its guards, and all the world outside the prison, because they were the ones who had sent him here. There was no way to think about it without going crazy, and there was no way, once you started, to stop.

Clearly, this was not the right time to approach Gus and make his proposition. Instead he played chess with Bob Lundgren, and played so well that (although he didn’t finally win) for the first time he put Lundgren on the defensive and even captured his queen.

While they played he was aware, at different times, that Gus, who had never (so far as he knew) paid any notice to him before, was looking at him with a far-off but unwavering attention. Why should that be? It seemed almost a kind of telepathy, as if Gus knew, without his saying anything, what Daniel had in mind.

The next day the truck conveying Daniel and the rest of the E.S.78 work crew back to the compound was delayed by a roadblock. This was an unusually thorough one. Everyone, including the guards, had to get out and be frisked, while another set of inspectors examined the truck from its broken headlights to its raggedy mudflaps.

They were an hour late clocking in at the dorm. Daniel had been meaning, very first thing, to go to Gus and get it over, but once again the moment wasn’t right. Gus and Bob Lundgren were already deep in a game of chess, which Daniel was invited to watch, and which for a while he did. But they played slowly, and without a personal stake in the game it was impossible to pay attention.

Daniel decided to return to The Product Is God. It was no longer the book he’d begun four months ago. Just the fact that Barbara Steiner had preceded him through its final chapters, leaving behind a spoor of scribbled marginalia, made it seem not quite the harmless trampoline for bright, beside-the-point ideas that it had seemed at first glance.

Dangerous ideas, however, are also, necessarily, more interesting ideas, and Daniel read the book this time with none of his former, lingering pleasure. He read greedily, as though it might be snatched away again before he’d discovered its secret. Again and again he found ideas that Barbara had lifted out of the book and used in her own arguments, such as the one about purity of heart being to will one thing, which turned out not even to be Van Dyke’s idea, but somebody else’s centuries ago.

What did seem to be Van Dyke’s own idea (and which eventually connected up with the other) was his theory that people live in two completely unrelated worlds. The first world that comes in a set with the flesh and the devil — the world of desire, the world people think they can control. Over against this was God’s world, which is larger and more beautiful, but crueler too, at least from the limited viewpoint of human beings. The example Van Dyke gave was Alaska. In God’s world you just had to give up trying and trust to luck, and you would probably either freeze to death or die of starvation.

The other world, the human world, was more visible, more survivable, but it was also, unfortunately, completely corrupt, and the only way to get ahead in it was to take a hand in the corruption. Van Dyke called this “rendering unto Caesar.” The basic problem, then, for anyone wanting to lead a life that wasn’t just dog-eat-dog, was how to render unto God. Not, Van Dyke insisted, by trying to live in God’s world, since that amounted to suicide, concerning which there was an entire chapter called “The Saints Go Marchin’ In!” (Here Barbara’s underlinings became almost co-extensive with the text, and the margins flowered with breathless assents: “How true!” “Exactly!” “I Agree.”) Rather than try to take heaven by storm Van Dyke suggested that you set yourself a single life-task and stick to it through hell or high water. (Purity of heart, etc.) It made no difference which life-task, so long as it was of no material advantage. Van Dyke offered a number of silly possibilities and anecdotes about celebrities who’d found their way to God by such diverse paths as basket-weaving, breeding dachshunds, and translating The Mill on the Floss into a language that only computers could read.

Daniel, happy in the discovery of his own life-task, could follow the book easily up to this point, but not beyond. For the notion that all this seemed to be leading up to was that the world was coming to an end. Not God’s world — that would always go rolling along — but the world of man, Caesar’s world. Van Dyke, like some bearded prophet in a cartoon, was announcing the end of Western Civilization — or as he styled it, “the Civilization of the Business Man.” (“Biz. Civ.” for short.)

Van Dyke seemed to face this prospect with his usual cold-blooded equanimity. “How much better,” he wrote, “to live at the end of such a civilization than at its heights! Now, with half the faulty mechanism in ruins and the other half grinding to a halt for want of lubrication, its power over our souls and our imaginations is so much less than it would have been if we’d lived a hundred or two hundred years ago, when the whole capitalist contraption was just getting its first head of steam. We see now, as our forebears never could, where this overweening enterprise was leading — to the ruin of humankind, or of as much of humankind, at least, as has cast its lot with Biz. Civ. But a ruin, let us admit it, that is altogether fitting and proper, a thoroughly merited ruin, which we are obliged to inhabit as becomes decaying gentry. That is to say, with as much style as we can muster, with whatever pride we can still pretend to, and with, most importantly, a perfect nonchalance.”

Daniel was not about to admit that his world was coming to an end, much less that it ought to. This particular corner of it was nothing to write home about, certainly, but it would be a hard thing for any lad freshly come to a sense of his own high purpose to be told that the firm is going out of business. Who was Reverend Van Dyke to be making such pronouncements? Just because he’d spent a few weeks traveling to such places as Cairo and Bombay for the National Council of Churches’ Triage Committee didn’t give him the authority to write off the whole damned world! Things might be as bad as he said in the places he’d been to, but he hadn’t been everywhere. He hadn’t, for one thing, been to Iowa (Unless the pages the prison censor had torn from the back of the book were about the Farm Belt, which didn’t seem likely from the title of the missing chapter as printed on the contents page — “Where Peace Prevails”). Iowa, for all its faults, was not about to run into an iceberg and sink, like Van Dyke’s favorite example of the fate of Biz. Civ., the lost city of Brasilia.

It was an infuriating book. Daniel was glad to be done with it. If that was the way people thought in New York he could almost understand undergoders wanting to send in the National Guard and take the city over. Almost but not quite.

The next day was Christmas Eve, and when Daniel got back from work a ratty old tree was going up in the dorm under Warden Shiel’s personal supervision. Once the limbs were slotted into the trunk and the ornaments had been hung up and, for a final glory, a tinsely angel had been tied to the top, the prisoners were assembled around the tree (Daniel stood in the last row, with the tallest) and Warden Shiel took their picture, copies of which would later be mailed out to relevant relatives.

Then they sang carols. “Silent Night” first, then “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” then “Faith of Our Fathers,” and finally “Silent Night” again. Three or four clear strong voices rose above the muddy generality, but strangely Gus’s was not among these. Daniel screwed up his courage — he’d never liked singing in public (or anywhere else, for that matter) — and sang. Really sang. The man directly in front of him turned his head round briefly to see who was making such a noise, and even Warden Shiel, sitting there on his folding chair, with his right hand resting benignly on the P-W module, seemed to take approving notice. It was embarrassing in the same way and to the same degree as getting undressed in front of other kids in a locker room. The worst of it was in the imagining. By the time you were doing it, so was everybody else.

After the carols, presents were distributed to the prisoners who had families and friends on the outside thinking of them, following which the Warden went on to the next dorm to repeat these holiday procedures. The presents, as many as were edible, were further portioned out. Daniel bolted one slice of his mother’s fruitcake and put aside another in his mattress. As long as you assumed some part of the burden towards the dorm’s have-nots you could choose whom you were nice to, and the next slice of the fruitcake went, as a matter of course, to Bob Lundgren. The Lundgrens had sent their son a packet of Polaroids taken at their last Thanksgiving dinner, which Bob was studying with baleful incredulity. The banked fires of his inner rage glowed at that intensity. It was all he could do to say thank you.

Gus was in the farthest corner of the room, doling out crumbled cookies from a large tin box. Somehow Daniel hadn’t been expecting that. For some reason, perhaps the slow-healing scar, he’d imagined Gus as utterly bereft and friendless, unless Daniel himself were to become his friend. Daniel made his way over to Gus’s corner and, with what diffidence he could summon up, offered him a piece of cake.

Gus smiled. This close, Daniel, who had a developed judgement of dental work, could see that his perfect upper incisors were actually caps, and of the first quality at that. The lower incisors, as well. All in all, a couple thousand dollars worth of work, and that was only what showed when he smiled.

“The other night,” Daniel said, taking the plunge, “when you sang… I really enjoyed that.”

Gus nodded, swallowing. “Right,” he said. And then, taking another bite. “This is terrific cake.”

“My mother made it.”

Daniel stood there, watching him eat, not knowing what else to say. Even as he ate, Gus went on smiling at him, a smile that encompassed the compliment to his singing, his pleasure in the good, and something else besides. A recognition, it seemed to Daniel, of some common bond.

“Here,” Gus said, holding out the box of crumbs, “have some of mine, Danny-boy.”

Danny-boy? That was several degrees worse than just ‘Danny,’ and even that he’d always resisted as a nickname. Still, it showed that Gus — without their ever talking to each other before — was aware of him, was even curious about him perhaps.

He took a couple broken cookies and nodded his thanks. Then, with an uneasy sense of having done the wrong thing, he moved off, bearing the ever-diminishing cake.

Soon enough the goodies were gone and the party was over. The dorm became very quiet. Over intermittent blasts of wind you could hear the prisoners singing the same carols in the next dorm. Mrs. Gruber, with her mattress wrapped around her where she sat in front of the Franklin stove, began to croon along wordlessly, but when no one else showed any Christmas spirit, she gave up.

In the next dorm the caroling stopped, and a short while later there was the sound of the pickup’s motor turning over. As if he’d been waiting for this signal, Gus got up and went over to where the Christmas tree had been. Someone sounded a note on a harmonica, and Gus hummed the same note, rumblingly.

The hush of the room, from having been a hush of gloom, became the hush of fixed attention. Some people went and formed a ring around the singer, while others stayed where they were. But all of them listened as if the song were a newscast announcing a major worldwide disaster.

These were the words of the song Gus sang:

Daniel couldn’t tell for quite a while if this were a real song or one that Gus was making up then and there, but when people started to sing along at the part that started “Roll over Joe,” he decided it had to be real. There were a lot of songs you never heard in Iowa, radio braodcasts being so strictly controlled.

They sang the song over and over, not just the chorus, which got louder and rowdier with each repetition, but the whole thing. It seemed, if you didn’t fasten on the words, like the most exquisite and decorative of Christmas carols, a treasure from a dim and pretty past of sleigh rides, church bells, and maple syrup. Annette, the feeble-minded migrant woman who liked to drum on the stovepipes, got caught up in the excitement and started doing an impromptu strip dressed in the discarded Christmas wrappings, until Mrs. Gruber, who was officially responsible for the collective good behavior of the dorm, put a stop to it. Prisoners from the next-door dorm came and insisted, against Mrs. Gruber’s protests, that the song be sung over from the beginning for them, and this time round Daniel was able to add his own few decibles to the general effect. People started dancing, and the ones who didn’t dance held on to each other and swayed in time. Even Bob Lundgren forgot about murdering his brother and sang along.

The festivity lasted till at last the loudspeaker blared out: “All right, assholes, Christmas is over so shut the fuck up!” With no more warning than that the lights went out, and people had to scramble around in the dark locating their mattresses and spreading them out on the floor. But the song had already served its purpose. The foul taste of Christmas had been washed from every mind.

Everyone got to take off Christmas Day as a holiday except for the workers at E.S. 78, since there was no way to tell the termites, squirming forward through their black tunnels on their way to the waiting vats, to slow down because it was Christmas. It was just as well, Daniel told himself. It was easier to lead a rotten life than to lie back and think about it.

That night, when he got back to the dorm, Gus was lying in front of the lukewarm stove. His eyes were closed, but his fingers were moving in slow, fixed patterns across the zipper of his jacket. It was almost as though he were waiting for him. In any case, the moment couldn’t be put off any longer. Daniel squatted beside him, nudged his shoulder, and asked him, when he opened his eyes, if they could go outside to talk. He didn’t have to explain. There was supposed to be much less chance of the monitors’ tuning in on conversations if you were out of the dorms. In any case, Gus didn’t seem surprised to be asked.

At the mid-point between dorm and latrine, Daniel delivered his message with telegraphic brevity. He’d been thinking of just how to say it for days. “The other night, last night, when I said how much I enjoyed your singing, I actually had something more in mind. You see, I’ve never heard much real singing before. Not like yours. And it really got to me. And I’ve decided…” He lowered his voice. “I’ve decided that I want to learn to sing. I’ve decided that’s what I’m going to do with my life.”

“Just sing?” Gus asked, smiling in a superior way and shifting his weight from one leg to the other. “Nothing else?”

Daniel looked up, imploring. He didn’t dare spell it out in more detail. The monitors might be listening. They might be recording everything he said. Surely Gus understood.

“You want to fly — isn’t that it, really?”

Daniel nodded.

“Pardon?”

“Yes,” he said. And then, since there was no reason now not to blurt out anything, he put his own rhetorical question to Gus: “Isn’t that why most people learn to sing?”

“Some of us do just fall into it, but in the sense you mean, yes, I suppose that’s so for most people. But this is Iowa, you know. Flying’s not legal here.”

“I know.”

“And you don’t care?”

“There’s no law says I’ve got to live in Iowa the rest of my life.”

“True enough.”

“And there’s no law against singing, even in Iowa. If I want to learn to sing, that’s my own business.”

“And that’s true enough too.”

“Will you teach me?”

“I was wondering where I came into this.”

“I’ll give you all my vouchers from here on in. I get the full supplement. It costs thirty-five dollars a week.”

“I know. I get it too.”

“If you don’t want to eat that much, you can trade my vouchers for something you do want. It’s all I’ve got, Gus. If I had anything else, I’d offer that.”

“But you do, Danny-boy,” Gus said. “You’ve got something I find much more appealing.”

“The book? You can have that too. If I’d known it was you who was bidding, I wouldn’t have bid against you.”

“Not the book. I only did that to get your goat.”

“Then what do you want?”

“Not your hamburgers, Danny-boy. But I could go for the buns.”

He didn’t understand at first, and Gus offered no more by way of explanation than a strange relaxed sort of smile, with his mouth half open and his tongue passing slowly back and forth behind his capped teeth. When it finally dawned on him what Gus was after, he couldn’t believe it. That, anyhow, was what he told himself: I can’t believe it! He tried to pretend, even then, that he still hadn’t got the message.

Gus knew better. “Well, Danny-boy?”

“You’re not serious.”

“Try me out and see.”

“But—” His objection seemed so self-evident he didn’t see any need to spell it out beyond that.

Gus shifted his weight again in a single over-all shrug. “That’s the price of music lessons, kiddo. Take it or leave it.”

Daniel had to clear his throat to be able to say that he would leave it. But he said it loud and clear, in case the monitors were taking any of it down.

Gus nodded. “You’re probably doing the right thing.”

Daniel’s indignation finally bubbled over. “I don’t need you to tell me that! Jesus!”

“Oh, I don’t mean holding on to your cherry. You’ll lose that one of these days. I mean it’s just as well you don’t try and become a singer.”

“Who says I’m not going to?”

“You can try, true enough. No one can stop that.”

“But I won’t make it, is that what you mean? Sounds like sour grapes to me.”

“Yes, partly. I wouldn’t have offered my candid opinion if you’d decided to invest in lessons. But now there’s no reason not to. And my candid opinion is that you are a punk singer. You could take voice lessons from here till doomsday and you’d never get near escape velocity. You’re too tight. Too mental. Too merely Iowa. It’s a shame, really, that you got this idea into your head, cause it can only mess you up.”

“You’re saying that from spite. You’ve never heard me sing.”

“Don’t have to. It’s enough to watch you walk across a room. But in fact I have heard you sing. Last night. That was quite enough. Anyone who can’t handle ‘Jingle Bells’ is not cut out for a major career.”

“We didn’t sing ‘Jingle Bells’ last night.”

“That was the point of my joke.”

“I know I need lessons. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have asked.”

“Lessons can only do so much. There has to be a basic capacity. A dog won’t learn arithmetic, no matter who his teacher is. You want the particulars? Number one, you’re tone-deaf. Two, you’ve got no more sense of rhythm than a road-grader. Beyond one and two, there is something still more essential missing, which we who have it call soul.”

“Fuck you.”

“That might be the beginning, yes.”

With which Gus patted Daniel’s cheeks smartly with the flat of both hands and smiled a still partly-friendly parting smile and left him to a desolation he had never imagined could be his, a foretaste of failure as black and bitter as a child’s first taste of coffee. The thing he wanted most in life, the only thing, would never be. Never. The idea was a skull in his hand. He couldn’t put it down. He couldn’t look away.

A month went by. It was as though the worst single hour of his life, the absolutely blackest moment, were to be stretched out, like railroad tracks on a bed of cinders, to the horizon. Each day he woke, each night he went to bed, he faced the same unrelieved prospect, a bleakness by whose wintry light all other objects and events became a monotony of cardboard zeroes. There was no way to combat it, no way to ignore it. It was the destined shape of his life, as the trunk and branches of a pine are the shape of its life.

Gus’s eyes seemed always to be following him. His smile seemed always to be at Daniel’s expense. The worst torment of all was when Gus sang, which he’d begun to do more often since Christmas Eve. His songs were always about sex, and always beautiful. Daniel could neither resist their beauty nor yield to it. Like Ulysses he struggled against the bonds that tethered him to the mast, but they were the bonds of his own obdurate will and he could not break them. He could only twist and plead. No one noticed, no one knew.

He kept repeating, in his thoughts, the same lump of words, like an old woman telling beads. “I wish I were dead. I wish I were dead.” If he ever thought about it, he knew this was only a maudlin imposture. But yet in a way it was true. He did wish he were dead. Whether he ever mustered the courage to carry out such a wish was another matter. The means lay readily to hand. He had only, like Barbara Steiner, to step across the perimeter of the camp and a radio transmitter would take care of the rest. One step. But he was chickenshit, he couldn’t do it. He would stand there, though, for hours, beside the fieldstone post that marked the possible end of his life, repeating the mindless lie that seemed so nearly true: “I wish I were dead. I wish I were dead. I wish I were dead.”

Once, just once, he managed to go past the post, whereupon, as he had known it must, the warning whistle started to blow. The sound petrified him. It was only a few yards farther to his wish, but his legs had stopped obeying him. He stood fast in an enchantment of rage and shame, while people filed out of the dorms to see who’d let go. The whistle kept blowing till at last he tucked his tail between his legs and returned to the dorm. No one would talk to him, or even look at him. The next morning, after roll-call, a guard gave Daniel a bottle of tranks and watched while he swallowed the first capsule. The pills didn’t stop his depression, but he was never so silly again.

In February, a month before he was due to be released, Gus was paroled. Before he left Spirit Lake he made a point of taking Daniel aside and telling him not to worry, that he could be a singer if he really wanted to and made a big enough effort.

“Thanks,” Daniel said, without much conviction.

“It’s not your vocal equipment that matters so much as the way you feel what you sing.”

“Does not wanting to be buggered by some skid row derelict show that I don’t have enough feeling? Is that my problem, huh?”

“You can’t blame a guy for trying. Anyhow, Danny-boy, I didn’t want to leave without telling you not to give up the ghost on my say-so.”

“Good. I never intended to.”

“If you work at it, you’ll probably get there. In time.”

“Your generosity is killing me.”

Gus persisted. “So I’ve thought about it, and I’ve got a word of advice for you. My own last word on the subject of how to sing.”

Gus waited. For all his resentment, Daniel couldn’t keep from clutching at the talisman being dangled before him. He swallowed his pride and asked, “And what is that?”

“Make a mess of your life. The best singers always do.”

Daniel forced a laugh. “I seem to have a good head start at that.”

“Precisely. That’s why there’s still hope for you.” He pursed his lips and tilted his head to the side. Daniel backed away from him as though he’d been groped. Gus smiled. He touched a finger to the almost-vanished scar above his eye. “Then, you see, when the mess is made, the music pulls it all together. But remember, the mess has to come first.”

“I’ll remember. Anything else?”

“That’s all.” He offered his hand. “Friends?”

“Well, not enemies,” Daniel allowed, with a smile of his own that was not more than fifty percent sarcastic.

At the end of February, only a couple weeks before Daniel was due to be released, the Supreme Court ruled, in a six-to-three decision, that the measures taken by Iowa and other Farm Belt states to prohibit the distribution of newspapers and related printed material originating in other states was in violation of the First Amendment. Three days later Daniel was released from Spirit Lake.

On the night before he was to leave the prison Daniel dreamed that he was back in Minneapolis, standing on the shore of the Mississippi at the point where it was spanned by the pedestrian bridge. But now instead of that remembered bridge there were only three inch-thick steel cables — a single cable to walk on and two higher up to hold on to. The girl with Daniel wanted him to cross the river on these simulated vines, but the span was too wide, the river too immensely far below. Going out even a little way seemed certain death. Then a policeman offered to handcuff one of his hands to a cable. With that safeguard Daniel agreed to try.

The cables bounced and swayed as he inched his way out over the river, and his insides frothed with barely controlled terror. But he kept going. He even forced himself to take real footsteps instead of sliding his feet along the cable.

At the midpoint of the bridge he stopped. The fear was gone. He looked down at the river where its storybook blue reflected a single sunlit cloud. He sang. It was a song he’d learned in the fourth grade from Mrs. Boismortier.

“I am the captain of the Pinafore,” Daniel sang, “and a right good captain too. I’m very very good, and be it understood, I command a right good crew.”

From either shore choruses of admiring spectators replied, like the faintest of echoes.

He didn’t know the rest of the song, so he stopped. He looked at the sky. He was feeling terrific. If it hadn’t been for the damned handcuffs he could have flown. The air that had accepted his song would have accepted his body with no greater difficulty. He was as sure of this as he was that he was alive and his name was Daniel Weinreb.