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.