“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.
PART TWO
5
The clouds over Switzerland were pink puffy lobes of brain with, at intervals, great splintered bones of granite thrusting up through them. She loved the Alps, but only when she was above them. She loved France too, all purposeful and rectilinear in solemn shades of dun and olive-tinged viridian. She loved the whole round world, which seemed, at this moment, to be present to view in all its revolving glory, as the Concorde rose still higher.