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.”