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.”