334

1

There was a dull ache, a kind of hollowness, in the general area of his liver—the seat of the intelligence according to the Psychology of Aristotle—a feeling that there was someone inside his chest blowing up a balloon or that his body was that balloon. Stuck here at this desk, it tethered him. It was a swollen gum he must again and again be probing with his tongue or his finger. Yet it wasn’t, exactly, the same as being sick. There was no name for it. Professor Ohrengold was telling them about Dante. Blah, blah, blah, born in 1265. 1265 he wrote in his notebook.

His legs ached from sitting forever on this bench—there was something definite.

And Milly—that was about as definite as you could get. I may die, he thought (though it wasn’t exactly thinking), I may die of a broken heart.

Professor Ohrengold became a messy painting. Birdie stretched his legs out into the aisle, locking his knees tight and finning the thighs. He yawned. Pocahontas gave him a dirty look. He smiled.

And Professor Ohrengold was back again with “Gibble-gabble Rauschenberg and blah, blah, the hell that Dante describes is timeless. It is the hell that each of us holds inside his own most secret soul.” Shit, Birdie thought to himself, with great precision.

It was all a pile of shit. He wrote Shit in his notebook, then made the letters look three-dimensional and shaded their sides carefully. It wasn’t as though this were really education. General Studies Annexe was a joke for the regular Barnard students. Milly’d said so. Sugar on the bitter pill of something-or-other. Chocolate-covered shit.

Now Ohrengold was telling them about Florence and the Popes and such, and then he disappeared. “Okay, what is simony?” the proctor asked. No one volunteered. The proctor shrugged and turned the lecture on again. There was a picture of someone’s feet burning.

He was listening but it didn’t make any sense. Actually he wasn’t listening. He was trying to draw Milly’s face in his notebook, only he couldn’t draw very well. Except skulls. He could draw very convincing skulls, snakes, eagles, Nazi airplanes. Maybe he should have gone to art school. He turned Milly’s face into a skull with long blond hair. He felt sick.

He felt sick to his stomach. Maybe it was the candy bar he’d had in place of a hot lunch. He didn’t eat a balanced diet. A mistake. Half his life he’d been eating in cafeterias and sleeping in dorms. It was a hell of a way to live. He needed a home life, regularity. He needed a good solid fuck. When he married Milly they’d have twin beds, a two-room apartment all their own and one of the rooms with just those two beds. He imagined Milly in her spiffy little hostess uniform. Then with his eyes closed he began undressing her in his head. First the little blue jacket with the PanAm monogram over the right breast. Then he popped the snap at the waist and unzipped the zipper. The skirt slithered down over the smooth Antron of the slip. Pink. No—black, with lace along the hem. Her blouse was an old-fashioned kind, with lots of buttons. He tried to imagine unbuttoning the buttons one by one, but Ohrengold chose just then to crack one of his dumb jokes. Ha, ha. He looked and there was Liz Taylor from his course last year in History of the Cinema, huge pink boobs and hair that was blue string.

“Cleopatra,” said Ohrengold, “and Francesca da Rimini are here because their sin was least.”

Rimini was a town somewhere in Italy, so here once again was the map of Italy. Italy, Shitaly.

What the hell was he supposed to care about this kind of crap? Who cares when Dante was born? Maybe he was never born. What difference did it make to him, to Birdie Ludd?

None.

He should come right out and ask Ohrengold that question, lay it on the line to him, straight. But you can’t talk to a teevee screen and that’s what Ohrengold was—flickering dots. He wasn’t even alive anymore, the proctor had said. Another goddamn dead expert on another goddamn cassette.

It was ridiculous: Dante, Florence, “symbolic punishments” (which was what trusty old Pocahontas was writing down that moment in her trusty old notebook). This wasn’t the fucking Middle Ages. This was the fucking 21st Century, and he was Birdie Ludd and he was in love and he was lonely and he was unemployed (and probably unemployable, too) and there wasn’t a thing he could do, not a goddamn thing, or a single place to turn to in the whole goddamn stinking country.

What if Milly didn’t need him anymore?

The hollow feeling in his chest swelled. He tried easing it away by thinking of the buttons on the imaginary blouse, the warm body beneath, his Milly. He did feel sick. He ripped the sheet with the skull out of his notebook. He folded it in half, tore it neatly along the crease. He repeated this process until the pieces were too small to tear any further, then put them in his shirt pocket.

Pocahontas was watching him with a dirty smile that said what the poster said on the wall: Paper is valuable. Don’t waste it! Pocahontas’s button was Ecology and Birdie had pushed it. He counted on her notebook for the finals, so he smiled a soft pardon-me at her. He had a very nice smile. Everybody was always pointing out what a bright, warm smile he had. His only real problem was his nose, which was short.

Ohrengold was replaced by the logo for the course—a naked man trapped inside a square and a circle—and the proctor, who could have cared less, asked if there were any questions. Much to everyone’s surprise Pocahontas got to her feet and sputtered something about what? About Jews, Birdie gathered. He disliked Jews.

“Could you repeat your questions?” the proctor said. “Some of those in back couldn’t hear.”

“Well, if I understood Dr. Ohrengold, it said that the first circle was for people who weren’t baptised. They hadn’t done anything wrong—they just were born too soon.”

“That’s right.”

“Well, it doesn’t seem fair to me.”

“Yes?”

“I mean, I wasn’t baptised.”

“Nor was I,” said the proctor.

“Then according to Dante we’d both go to hell.”

“Yes, that’s so.”

“It doesn’t seem fair.” Her whine had risen to a squeak.

Some people were laughing, some people were getting up. The proctor raised her hand. “There’ll be a test.”

Birdie groaned, the very first.

“What I mean is,” she persisted, “that if it’s anyone’s fault that they’re born one way and not another it should be God’s.”

“That’s a good point,” the proctor said. “I don’t know if there’s any answer to it. Sit down, please. We’ll have a short comprehension test now.”

Two old monitors began distributing markers and answer sheets. Birdie’s bad feelings became particular, and it helped to have a reason for his misery that he could share with everyone else.

The lights dimmed and the first multiple choice appeared on the screen: 1. Dante Alighieri was born in (a) 1300 (b) 1265 (c) 1625 (d) Date unknown.

Pocahontas was covering up her answers, the dog. So, when was fucking Dante born? He remembered writing the date in his notebook but he didn’t remember what it had been. He looked back at the four choices but the second question was already on the screen. He scratched a mark in the (c) space, then erased it, feeling an obscure sense of unluckiness in the choice, but finally he checked that space anyhow.

The fourth question was on the screen. The answers he had to choose from were all names he’d never seen and the question didn’t make any sense. Disgusted, he marked (c) for every question and carried his paper up to the monitor guarding the door, who wouldn’t let him out anyhow until the test was over. He stood there scowling at all the other dumb assholes scratching their wrong answers on the answer sheets.

The bell rang. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief.

334 East 11th Street was one of twenty units, none identical and all alike, built in the pre-Squeeze affluent ’80’s under the first federal MODICUM program. An aluminum flagpole and a concrete bas-relief representing the address decorated the main entrance just off 1st Avenue. Otherwise the building was plain. One night many years ago the Tenants’ Council, as a kind of protest, had managed to knock off a segment of the monolithic “4,” but by and large (assuming that the trees and prosperous shopfronts had been no more than polite fictions to begin with) the original renderings published in the Times were still a good likeness. Architecturally 334 was on a par with the pyramids—it had dated very little and it hadn’t aged at all.

Inside its skin of glass and yellow brick a population of three thousand, plus or minus (but excluding temps), occupied the 812 apartments (40 to a floor, plus 12 at street level, behind the shops), which was not much more than 30 per cent above the Agency’s original optimum of 2,250. So, realistically, it could be regarded as a fair success in this respect as well. Certainly there were worse places people were willing to live in especially if you were, and Birdie Ludd was, temporary.

Right now, at half past seven of a Thursday night, Birdie was temporary on the sixteenth-floor landing, two floors down from the Holt apartment. Milly’s father wasn’t home, but he hadn’t been asked in anyway, so here he was freezing his ass and listening to someone yelling at someone else about money or sex. (“Money or sex” was a running gag on some comedy show Milly was always playing back to him. “Money or sex—that’s what it all boils down to.” Yuck, yuck.) Meanwhile someone else again was telling them to shut up, far off and nonstop, like an airplane circling the park, a baby was being murdered. HERE’S MY LOVE, a radio sang. HERE’S MY LOVE. IF YOU TAKE IT APART, I MAY DIE. I MAY DIE OF A BROKEN HEART. Number Three in the nation. It had been going through Birdie’s head all day, all week.

Before Milly he’d never believed that love was anything more complicated or awful than just getting goodies. Even the first couple of months with her had only been the usual goodies with a topping. But now any damned dumb song on the radio, even the ads sometimes, could tear him to pieces.

The song snapped off and the people stopped yelling and Birdie heard, below, slow footsteps mounting toward him. It had to be Milly—the feet touched each step with the crisp whack of a woman’s low-heeled shoe—and a lump began to form in his throat—of love, of fear, of pain, of everything but happiness. If it were Milly, what would he say to her? But, oh, if it weren’t…

He opened his textbook and pretended to be reading, smearing the page with the muck he’d got on his hand when he’d tried to open the window onto the utility shaft. He wiped the rest off on his pants. It wasn’t Milly. Some old lady lugging a bag of groceries. She stopped half a flight below him on the landing, leaning against the handrail, and set down her bag with an “oof.” A stick of Oraline was stuck in the corner of her mouth with a premium button on it, a trick mandala that seemed to spin as she moved, like a runaway clock. She looked at Birdie, and Birdie scowled down at the bad reproduction of David’s Death of Socrates in his book. The flaccid lips formed themselves into a smile.

“Studying?” the woman asked.

“Yeah, that’s what I’m doing all right. I’m studying.”

“That’s good.” She took the pale-green stick out of her mouth, holding it like a thermometer, to study what was gone and what was left of her ten metered minutes. Her smile tightened, as though she were elaborating some joke, honing it to an edge. “It’s good,” she said at last, with almost a chuckle, “for a young man to study.”

The radio returned with the new Ford commercial. It was one of Birdie’s favorites, so lighthearted but at the same time solid. He wished the old witch would shut up so he could hear it.

“You can’t get anywhere these days without studying.” Birdie made no reply. She took a different tack. “These stairs,” she said.

Birdie looked up from his book, peeved. “What about them?”

“What about them! The elevators have been out of commission for weeks. That’s what about them. Weeks!”

“So?”

“So, why don’t they fix the elevators? But just try to talk to the area office and get an answer to a question like that and see what happens. Nothing, that’s what happens.”

He wanted to tell her to rinse her hair. She talked like she’d spent all her life in a coop or something instead of the crummy subsidized slum tattooed all over her face. According to Milly it had been years, not weeks, since the elevators in any of these buildings had been working.

With a look of disgust he slid over toward the wall so the old lady could get past him. She walked up three steps till her face was just level with his. She smelled of beer and spearmint and old age. He hated old people. He hated their wrinkled faces and the touch of their cold dry flesh. It was because there were so many old people that Birdie Ludd couldn’t get married to the girl he loved and have a family of his own. It was a goddamned injustice.

“What are you studying about?”

Birdie glanced down at the painting. He read the caption, which he had not read before. “That’s Socrates,” he said, remembering dimly something his Civilization teacher last year had said about Socrates. “It’s a painting,” he explained. “A Greek painting.”

“You going to be an artist? Or what?”

“What,” Birdie shot back.

“You’re Milly Holt’s fellow, aren’t you?” He didn’t reply. “You waiting down here for her to come home?”

“Is there any law against waiting for someone?” The old lady laughed right in his face, and it was like sticking your nose inside a dead cunt. Then she made her way from step to step up to the next landing. Birdie tried not to turn around to look after her but he couldn’t help himself. Their eyes clinched, and she laughed again. Finally he had to ask her what she was laughing about. “Is there a law against laughing?” she asked right back. Then her laughing disintegrated into a cough right out of some old Health Education movie about the dangers of smoking. He wondered if maybe she was an addict. She was old enough. Birdie’s father, who had to be ten years younger than her, smoked tobacco whenever he could get any. Birdie thought it was a waste of money but only slightly disgusting. Milly, on the other hand, loathed it, especially in women.

Somewhere glass shattered, and somewhere children shot at each other—Acka! Ackitta! Ack!—and fell down screaming in a game of guerilla warfare. Birdie peered down into the abyss of the stairwell. A hand touched a railing far below, paused, lifted, touched the railing, approaching him. The fingers were slim (as Milly’s would be) and the nails seemed to be painted gold. In the dim light, at this distance, it was hard to tell. A sudden surge of unbelieving hope made him forget the old woman’s laughter, the stench, the screaming; the stairwell became a scene of romance, a mist of slow motion. The hand lifted and paused and touched the railing.

The first time he’d come to Milly’s apartment he’d walked up these stairs behind her, watching her tight little ass shift to the right, to the left, to the right, and the tinsel fringes of her street shorts shivering and sparkling like a liquor-store display. All the way to the top she hadn’t looked back once.

At the eleventh or the twelfth floor the hand left the railing and didn’t reappear. So it hadn’t been Milly after all.

He had a hard-on just from remembering. He unzipped and reached in to give it a couple half-hearted strokes but it was gone before he could get started.

He looked at his guaranteed Timex watch. Eight, on the dot. He could afford to wait two more hours. Then, if he didn’t want to pay a full fare on the subway, it was a forty-minute walk back to his dorm. If he hadn’t been on probation because of his grades, he might have waited all night long.

He sat down to study the History of Art. He stared at the picture of Socrates in the bad light. With one hand he was holding a big cup, with the other he was giving somebody the finger. He didn’t seem to be dying at all. The midterm was going to be tomorrow afternoon at two o’clock. He really had to study. He stared at the picture more intently. Why did people paint pictures anyhow? He stared until his eyes hurt.

The baby started up again, zeroing in on Central Park. Some Burmese nationals came barreling down the stairs, gibbering, and a minute later another gang of kids in black masks—U. S. guerillas—came after them, screaming obscenities.

He began to cry. He was certain, though he wouldn’t admit it yet in so many words, that Milly was cheating on him. He loved her so much and she was so beautiful. The last time he’d seen her she’d called him stupid. “You’re so stupid, Birdie Ludd,” she said, “sometimes you make me sick.” But she was so beautiful. And he loved her.

A tear fell into Socrates’s cup and he was absorbed by the cheap paper. He realized that he was crying. He hadn’t cried before in all his adult life. His heart was broken.

2

Birdie had not always been such a droop. Quite the opposite—he’d been friendly as a flower, easygoing, uncomplaining, and a lot of fun. He didn’t start a contest going the minute he met you, and when contests were unavoidable he knew how to be a graceful loser. The competitive factor had received little emphasis at P. S. 141 and even less at the center he was moved to after his parents’ divorce. A nice guy who got along, that was Birdie.

Then in the summer after his high school graduation, just when the thing with Milly was developing towards total seriousness, he’d been called in to Mr. Mack’s office and the bottom had dropped out of his life. Norman Mack was a thin, balding, middle-aged man with a paunch and a Jewish nose, though whether or not he was Jewish Birdie could only guess. His chief reason, aside from the nose, for thinking so was that at all of their counseling sessions Birdie got the feeling, which he also got with Jews, that Mr. Mack was toying with him, that his bland, professional good will was a disguise for an unbounded contempt, that all his sound advice was a snare. The pity was that Birdie could not in his very nature help but be caught in it. It was Mr. Mack’s game and had to be played by his rules.

“Sit down, Birdie.” The first rule.

Birdie had sat down, and Mr. Mack had explained that he’d received a letter from the upstate Regents Office. He handed Birdie a large gray envelope from which Birdie took out a bonanza of papers and forms, and the gist of it was—Birdie tucked the papers back inside—that Birdie had been reclassified.

“But I’ve taken the tests, Mr. Mack! Four years ago. And I passed.”

“I’ve called Albany to make certain this wasn’t the result of a crossed wire somewhere. And it wasn’t. The letter—”

“Look!” He reached for his wallet, took out his card. “Look, it says there, right in black and white—twenty-seven.”

Mr. Mack took the frayed card with a sympathetic sucking of his cheeks. “Well, Birdie, I’m sorry to say that your new card says twenty-four.”

“One point? For one point you’re going to—” He couldn’t bring himself even to think of what it was they were going to do. “Oh, Mr. Mack!”

“I know, Birdie. Believe me, I’m as sorry as you are.”

“I took their goddamn tests and I passed them.”

“As you know, Birdie, there are other factors to be weighed besides the test scores, and one of those has changed. Your father, it seems, has come down with diabetes.”

“That’s the first I’ve heard of it.”

“It’s possible that your father doesn’t know himself yet. The hospitals have an automatic data link with the Regents system, which in turn mailed you that letter automatically.”

“But what does my father have to do with anything?”

Over the years Birdie’s relationship with his father had been whittled down to a voice on the phone on holidays and a perfunctory visit to the federal flophouse on 16th Street an average of four times a year, on which occasions Mr. Ludd would be issued meal vouchers for an outside restaurant. Family life was the single greatest cohesive force in any society, and so, willy-nilly, the MODICUM people tried to keep families together, even families as tenuous as one father and one son eating lasagna at twelve-week intervals at The Sicilian Vespers. His father? Birdie almost had to laugh.

Mr. Mack explained first of all that there was nothing to be ashamed of. A full 2 1/2 per cent of the population scored under 25, or over twelve million people. A low score didn’t make Birdie a freak, it didn’t debar him from any of his civil rights, it only meant, as of course he knew, that he would not be allowed to father children, either directly, through marriage, or indirectly, by artificial insemination. He wanted to make certain that Birdie understood this. Did Birdie understand this?

Yes. He did.

Brightening, Mr. Mack pointed out that it was still quite possible—probable even, considering he was right on the borderline—to be reclassified again: up. Patiently, point by point, he went over with Birdie the components of his Regents score, indicating the ways he could hope to add to his score as well as the ways he couldn’t.

Diabetes was a hereditary disease. Treatment was costly and could continue for years. The original proposers of the Act had wanted to put diabetes on a par with hemophilia and the XYY gene. That was rather Draconian but surely Birdie could understand why a genetic drift towards diabetes had to be discouraged.

Surely. He could.

Then there was the other unfortunate matter concerning his father—that, during the past decade, he had been actively employed less than 50 per cent of the time. At first sight it might seem unfair to penalize Birdie for his father’s carefree life-style, but statistics showed this trait tended to be quite as heritable as, say, intelligence.

The old antithesis of heredity versus environment! But before Birdie protested too strongly he should look at the next item on his sheet. Mr. Mack tapped it with his pencil. Now here was a curious illustration of history at work. The Revised Genetics Testing Act had finally gone through the Senate in 2011 as a result of the so-called Jim Crow Compromise, and here was that compromise virtually breathing down Birdie’s neck, for the five points he’d lost through his father’s unemployment pattern he’d gained back by being a Negro!

On the physical scale Birdie had scored 9, which placed him at the modal point, or peak, of the normal curve. Mr. Mack made a little joke at his own expense concerning the score he would probably have got on the physical scale. Birdie could ask for a new physical but it was rare that anyone’s score on this scale went up, while only too often it sank. For instance, in Birdie’s case, the least tendency towards hypoglycemia might now, in view of his father’s diabetes, drop him altogether out of reach of the cutoff point.

Didn’t it seem best, then, to leave well enough alone?

It did seem best.

Mr. Mack could feel more hopeful about the other two tests, the Stanford-Binet (Short Form) and the Skinner-Waxman Scale. Birdie had not done badly on these (7 and 6), but he had not done very well either. People often improved dramatically a second time around. A headache, anxiety, even indifference—there are so many things that can get in the way of a top mental performance. Four years was a long time, but did Birdie have any reason to believe he hadn’t done as well as he might have?

He did! He remembered wanting to complain about it at the time, but since he’d passed the tests he hadn’t bothered. The day of the test a sparrow had got into the auditorium. It kept flying witlessly back and forth, back and forth, from one sealed window to the other. Who could concentrate with that going on? They decided that Birdie would apply to be retested on both the Stanford-Binet and the Skinner-Waxman. If for any reason he wasn’t feeling confident on the date the Regents office slotted him into, he could take a rain check. Mr. Mack thought that Birdie would find everyone ready to bend over backward.

The problem appeared to be solved and Birdie was ready to go, but Mr. Mack was obliged, for form’s sake, to go over one or two more details. Beyond hereditary factors and the Regents tests, both of which measured potentiality, there was another group of components for accomplishment. Any exceptional service for the country or the economy was an automatic twenty-five points but this was hardly anything to count on. Similarly, a demonstration of physical, intellectual, or creative abilities markedly above the levels indicated by et cetera, et cetera.

Birdie thought they could skip that too. But here, beneath the eraser, here was something to consider—the educational component. Already Birdie had five points for finishing high school. If he were to go on to college—

Out of the question. Birdie wasn’t the college type. He wasn’t anybody’s fool, but on the other hand he wasn’t anybody’s Isaac Einstein.

In general Mr. Mack would have applauded the realism of such a decision, but in the present circumstances it was better not to burn bridges. Any New York City resident had a right to attend any of the colleges in the city, either as a regular student or, lacking certain prerequisites, in a General Studies Annexe. It was something for Birdie to bear in mind.

Mr. Mack felt terrible. He hoped Birdie would learn to look at his reclassification as a setback rather than a permanent defeat. Failure was only a point of view.

Birdie agreed, but even this wasn’t enough to obtain his release. Mr. Mack urged Birdie to consider the question of contraception and genetics in the broadest possible light. Already there were too many people for the available resources. Without some system of voluntary limitation there would be more, more, disastrously more. Mr. Mack hoped that eventually Birdie would come to see that the Regents system, for all its obvious drawbacks, was both desirable and necessary.

Birdie promised to try and look at it this way, and then he could go. Among the papers in the gray envelope was a pamphlet, “Your Regents,” put out by the National Educational Council, who said that the only effective way to prepare for his reexamination was to develop a confident, lively frame of mind. A month later Birdie kept his appointment on Centre Street in a confident, lively frame of mind. Only afterward, sitting by the fountain in the plaza discussing the tests with his fellow martyrs, did he realize that this had been Friday, July 13th. Jinxed! He didn’t have to wait for the special delivery letter to know his score was a cherry, an apple, and a banana. Even so, the letter was a mind-staggerer. He’d gone down one point on the I.Q. test; on the Skinner-Waxman Creativity Scale he’d sunk to a moron-level score of 4. His new total: 21.

The 4 riled him. The first part of the Skinner-Waxman test had involved picking the funniest punch line from four multiple choices, and ditto the best endings to stories. This much he remembered from before but then they took him into a weird empty room. Two pieces of rope were hanging from the ceiling and Birdie was given a pliers and told to tie the two ropes together. You weren’t allowed to pull the ropes off their hooks.

It was impossible. If you held the very end of one rope in your hand, you couldn’t possibly get hold of the other rope, even by fishing for it with your toe. The extra few inches advantage you got from the pliers was no help at all. He was about ready to scream by the end of the ten minutes. There were three more impossible problems but by then he was only going through the motions.

At the fountain some jerkoff boy genius explained what they all could have done: tie the pliers to the end of one string and set it swinging like a pendulum; then go and get—

“Do you know what I’d like to see,” Birdie said, interrupting the boy genius, “tied up and swinging from that ceiling? Huh, schmuck? You!”

Which the others agreed was a better joke than any of their multiple choices.

Only after he’d lucked out on the tests did he tell Milly about his reclassification. A coolness had come into their love affair about then, just a cloud across the sun, but Birdie had been afraid all the same what her reaction might be, the names he might be called. As it turned out, Milly was heroic, all tenderness, concern, and stout-hearted resolve. She hadn’t realized before, she cried, how much she did love, and need, Birdie. She loved him more now, because— But she didn’t have to explain: it was in their faces, in their eyes, Birdie’s brown and glistening, Milly’s hazel flecked with gold. She promised to stand by him through the whole ordeal. Diabetes! And not even his own diabetes! The more she thought about it the angrier she got, the more determined never to let some Moloch of a bureaucracy play God with her and Birdie. (Moloch?) If Birdie was willing to go to Barnard G.S.A., Milly was willing to wait for him as long as need be.

Four years, as it turned out. The point system was gimmicked so that each year only counted half a point until graduation, but that was worth 4. Had Birdie been content with his old Regents scores, he could have worked his way back up to 25 in two years. Now he’d actually have to go for a degree.

But he did love Milly, and he did want to marry Milly, and let them say what they like, a marriage isn’t a marriage unless you can have children.

He went to Barnard. What choice had there been?

3

On the morning of the day of his Art History test Birdie lay in bed in the empty Annexe dorm, drowsing and thinking about love. He couldn’t get back to sleep, but he didn’t want to get up yet either. His body was bursting with energy, full to the top and flowing over, but it wasn’t energy for getting up to brush his teeth or going down to breakfast. Anyhow it was too late for breakfast and he was happy where he was.

Sunlight spilled in through the south window. A breeze rustled outdated announcements pinned to the bulletin board, spun round a shirt that hung on a curtain rail, touched the down on the back of Birdie’s hand, where her name was now just a faded smudge inside a ballpoint heart. Birdie laughed with a sense of his own fullness and the promise of good weather. He turned over on his left side, letting the blanket slide to the floor. The window framed a perfect blue rectangle of sky. Beautiful! It was March but it might have been April or May. It was going to be a wonderful day, a wonderful spring. He could feel it in the muscles of his chest and the muscles of his stomach when he took a breath of air.

Spring! Then summer. Breezes. No shirts.

Last summer out at Great Kills Harbor, the hot sand, the sea breeze in Milly’s hair. Again and again her hand would lift to push it back, like a veil. What had they talked about all that day? Everything. About the future. About her rotten father. Milly was desperate to get away from 334 and live her own life. Now, with her airline job, she had the option of a dorm, though, not being as used to a communal life as Birdie was, it was hard for her. But soon, soon….

Summer. Walking with her, a snake dance through the other bodies spread out across the sand, lawns of flesh. Rubbing the lotion into her. Summer Magic. His hand slithering. Nothing definite and then it would be definite, as daylight. As though the whole world were having sex, the sea and the sky and everyone. They’d be puppies and they’d be pigs. The air would fill up with the sound of songs, a hundred at a time. At such moments he knew what it must be like to be a composer or a great musician. He became a giant, swollen with greatness. A time bomb.

The clock on the wall said 11:07. This is my lucky day: he made it a promise. He threw himself out of bed and did ten push-ups on the tile floor, still damp from its morning mopping. Then ten more. After the last push-up Birdie rested on the floor, his lips pressed against the cool, moist tile. He had a hard-on.

He grabbed it, closing his eyes. Milly! Your eyes.o Milly, I love you. Milly,o Milly,o Milly. So much! Milly’s arms. The small of her back. Bending back. Milly, don’t leave me! Milly? Love me? I!

He came in a smooth, spread-open flow till his fingers were covered with semen, and the back of his hand, and the blue heart, and “Milly.”

11:35. The Art History test was at two. He’d already missed a ten o’clock field trip for Consumership. Tough.

He wrapped his toothbrush, his Crest, his razor, and foam in a towel and went to what had been, in the days when the Annexe was an office building, the executive washroom of the actuarial division of New York Life. The music started when he opened the door: SLAM, BANG! WHY AM I SO HAPPY?

He decided to wear his white sweater with white Levi’s and white sneakers. He brushed a whitening agent into his hair, which was natural again. He looked at himself in front of the bathroom mirror. He smiled. The sound system started in on his favorite Ford commercial. Alone in the empty space before the urinals he danced with himself, singing the words of the commercial.

It was a fifteen-minute ride to the South Ferry stop. In the ferry building was a PanAm restaurant where the waitresses wore uniforms just like Milly’s. Though he couldn’t afford it, he ate lunch there, just the lunch that Milly might be serving that very moment at an altitude of seven thousand feet. He tipped a quarter. Now, except for the token to take him back to the dorm, he was broke. Freedom Now.

He walked along the rows of benches where the old people came to sit every day to look out at the sea while they waited to die. Birdie didn’t feel the same hatred for old people this morning that he’d felt last night. Lined up in helpless rows in the glare of the afternoon sun, they seemed remote, they posed no threats, they didn’t matter.

The breeze coming in off the Hudson smelled of salt, oil, and rot. It wasn’t a bad smell at all. Invigorating. Maybe if he had lived centuries ago instead of now, he’d have been a sailor. Moments from movies about ships flitted by. He kicked an empty Fun container out through the railing and watched it bob up and down in the green and the black.

The sky roared with jets. Jets heading in every direction. She could have been on any of them. A week ago what had she said, “I’ll love you forever.” A week ago?

“I’ll love you forever.” If he’d had a knife he could have carved that on something.

He felt just great. Absolutely.

An old man in an old suit shuffled along the walk, holding on to the sea railing. His face was covered with a thick, curly, white beard, though his head was as bare as a police helmet. Birdie backed from the rail to let him go by.

He stuck his hand in Birdie’s face and said, “How about it, Jack?”

Birdie crinkled his nose. “Sorry.”

“I need a quarter.” A foreign accent. Spanish? No. He reminded Birdie of something, someone.

“So do I.”

The bearded man gave him the finger and then Birdie remembered who he looked like. Socrates!

He glanced at his wrist but he’d left his watch in the locker as it hadn’t fit in with today’s all-white color scheme. He spun round. The gigantic advertising clock on the face of First National Citibank said 2:15. That wasn’t possible. Birdie asked two of the old people on the benches if that was the right time. Their watches agreed.

There was no use trying to get to the test now. Without quite knowing why, Birdie smiled. He breathed a sigh of relief and sat down to watch the ocean. In June there was the usual family reunion at The Sicilian Vespers. Birdie polished off his tray without paying too much attention to either the food or the story his dad was dawdling over, something about someone at 16th Street who’d opted for Room 7, after which it was discovered that he had been a Catholic priest. Mr. Ludd seemed upset. Birdie couldn’t tell if it was the idea of Room 7 or the idea of having to cut down his intake because of the diabetes. Finally, to give the old guy a chance at his noodles, Birdie told him about the essay project Mr. Mack had arranged, even though (as Mr. Mack had pointed out and pointed out) Birdie’s problems and his papers belonged to Barnard G.S.A., not to P. S. 141. In other words, this would be Birdie’s last chance, but that could be, if Birdie would let it, a source of motivation. And he let it.

“And you’re going to write a book?”

“Goddamn, Dad, will you listen?”

Mr. Ludd shrugged, wound the food on his fork, and listened. What Birdie had to do to climb back to 25 was demonstrate abilities markedly above the abilities he’d demonstrated back on that Friday the 13th. Mr. Mack had gone over the various components of his profile, and since he’d scored most on Verbal Skills they decided that his best bet would be to write something. When Birdie asked what, Mr. Mack had given him, to keep, a copy of By Their Bootstraps.

Birdie reached under the bench where he’d set it down when they came in. He held it up for his dad to see: By Their Bootstraps. Edited and with an Introduction (encouraging but not too clear) by Lucille Mortimer Randolph-Clapp. Lucille Mortimer Randolph-Clapp was the architect of the Regents system.

The last string of spaghetti was wound and eaten. Reverently Mr. Ludd touched his spoon tip to the skin of the spumoni. Holding back from that first taste, he asked, “And so they’re paying you money just to … ?”

“Five hundred dollars. Ain’t it a bitch. They call it a stipend. It’s supposed to last me three months but I don’t know about that. My rent at Mott Street isn’t so bad, but other things.”

“They’re crazy.”

“It’s the system they have. You see, I need time to develop my ideas.”

“The whole system’s crazy. Writing! You can’t write a book.”

“Not a book. Just a story, an essay, something like that. It doesn’t have to be more than a page or two. It says in the book that the best stuff usually is very… I forget the exact word but it means short. You should read some of the crap that got past. Poetry and stuff where every other word is something foul. I mean, really foul. But there’s some okay things, too. One guy that didn’t finish eighth grade wrote a story about working on an alligator preserve. In Florida. And philosophy. There was this one girl who was blind and crippled. I’ll show you.” Birdie found the place where’d he left off: “My Philosophy” by Delia Hunt. He read the first paragraph aloud:

“Sometimes I’d like to be a huge philosophy, and sometimes I’d like to come along with a big axe and chop myself down. If I heard somebody calling out Help, Help! I could just sit there on the trunk and think, I guess somebody’s in trouble. But not me, because I’m sitting here looking at the rabbits and so on running and jumping. I guess they’re trying to get away from the smoke. But I would just sit there on my philosophy and think, Well, I guess the forest is really on fire now.”

Mr. Ludd, involved in his spumoni, only nodded pleasantly. He refused to be bewildered by anything he heard or make protests or try to understand why things never worked out the way he planned. If people wanted him to do one thing he’d do it. If they wanted him to do something else he’d do that. No questions asked. La vida, as Delia Hunt also observed, es un sueño.

Later, walking back to 16th Street, his father said, “You know what you should do, don’t you?”

“What?”

“Use some of that money they gave you and get somebody really smart to write the thing for you.”

“Can’t. They got computers that can tell if you do that.”

“They do?” Mr. Ludd sighed.

A couple blocks farther on he asked to borrow ten dollars for some Fadeout. It was a traditional part of their reunions and traditionally Birdie would have said no, but having just been bragging about his stipend? He had to.

“I hope you’re able to be a better father than I’ve been,” Mr. Ludd said, putting the folded-up bill into his card-carrier.

“Yeah. Well, I hope so, too.”

They both got a chuckle out of that.

Next morning, following the single piece of advice he’d been able to get out of the advisor he’d paid twenty-five dollars for, Birdie made his first solo visit (years ago he’d been marched through the uptown branch with a few dozen other fourth graders) to the National Library. The Nassau branch was housed in an old wrapped-glass building a little to the west of the central Wall Street area. The place was a honeycomb of research booths, except for the top floor, 28, which was given over to the cables connecting Nassau to the uptown branch and then, by relays, to every other major library outside of France, Japan, and South America. A page who couldn’t have been much older than Birdie showed him how to use the dial-and-punch system. When the page was gone Birdie stared glumly at the blank viewing screen. The only thought in his head was how he’d like to smash in the screen with his fist: dial and punch!

After a hot lunch in the basement of the library he felt better. He recalled Socrates waving his arms in the air and the blind girl’s essay on philosophy. He put out a call for the five best books on Socrates written at a senior high school level and began reading from them at random.

Later that night Birdie finished reading the chapter in Plato’s Republic that contains the famous parable of the cave. Dazedly, dazzled, he wandered through the varied brightness of Wall Street’s third shift. Even after twelve o’clock the streets and plazas were teeming. He wound up in a corridor full of vending machines, sipping a hot Koffee, staring at the faces around him, wondering did any of them—the woman glued to the Times, the old messengers chattering—suspect the truth? Or were they, like the poor prisoners in the cave, turned to the rockface, watching shadows, never imagining that somewhere outside there was a sun, a sky, a whole world of crushing beauty?

He’d never understood before about beauty—that it was more than a breeze coming in through the window or the curve of Milly’s breasts. It wasn’t a matter of how he, Birdie Ludd, felt or what he wanted. It was there inside of things, glowing. Even the dumb vending machines. Even the blind faces.

He remembered the vote of the Athenian Senate to put Socrates to death. Corrupting the youth, ha! He hated the Athenian Senate but it was a different sort of hate from the kind he was used to. He hated them for a reason: Justice!

Beauty. Justice. Truth. Love, too, probably. Somewhere there was an explanation for everything. A meaning. It all made sense. It wasn’t just a lot of words.

He went outside. New emotions kept passing over him faster than he could take account of them, like huge speeded-up clouds. One moment, looking at his face reflected in the darkened window of a specialty food shop, he wanted to laugh out loud. The next moment, remembering the young prostitute in the room downstairs from where he lived now, lying on her shabby bed in a peekaboo dress, he wanted to cry. It seemed to Birdie that he could see the pain and hopelessness of her whole life as clearly as if her past and future were a physical object in front of him, a statue in the park.

He stood alone beside the sea railing in Battery Park. Dark waves lapped at the concrete shore. Signal lights blinked on and off, red and green, white and white, as they moved past the stars toward Central Park.

Beauty? The idea seemed too slight now. Something beyond beauty was involved in all of this. Something that chilled him in ways he couldn’t explain. And yet he was exhilarated, too. His newly awakened soul battled against letting this feeling, this principle, slip away from him unnamed. Each time, just as he thought he had it, it eluded him. Finally, towards dawn, he went home, temporarily defeated.

Just as he was climbing the stairs to his own room, a guerilla, out of uniform but still recognizably a guerilla, with stars and stripes tattooed across his forehead, came out of Frances Schaap’s room. Birdie felt a brief impulse of hatred for him, followed by a wave of compassion for the girl. But tonight he didn’t have the time to try and help her, assuming she wanted his help.

He slept fitfully, like a dead body sinking into the water and floating up to the surface. At noon he woke from a dream that stopped just short of being a nightmare. He’d been inside a room with a beamed ceiling. Two ropes hung from the beams. He stood between them, trying to grasp one or the other, but just as he thought he had caught hold of a rope, it would swing away wildly, like a berserk pendulum.

He knew what the dream meant. The ropes were a test of his creativeness. That was the principle he’d tried to define last night standing by the water. Creativeness was the key to all his problems. If he would only learn about it, analyze it, he’d be able to solve his problems.

The idea was still hazy in his mind but he knew he was on the right track. he made some cultured eggs and a cup of Koffee for breakfast, then went straight to his booth at the library to study. The tremendous excitement of last night had leaked out of things. Buildings were just buildings. People seemed to move a little faster than usual, but that was all. Even so, he felt terrific. In his whole life he’d never felt as good as he did today. He was free. Or was it something else? One thing he knew for sure: nothing in the past was worth shit, but the future, Ah! the future was blazing with promise.

4

5

While Birdie stayed in bed digging at his toenails, Frances went down for the mail. Except when she was at work Birdie more or less lived in her room, his own having got out of hand during the period when he was writing his essay. It was not a sexual relationship, though a couple of times, just to be friendly, Frances had offered and Birdie’d accepted a blow-job, but it had been a chore for both of them.

What did bring them together, besides sharing a bathroom, was the sad, immovable fact that Frances’s Regents score was an absolute 20. Because of some disease she had. Aside from one kid at P.S. 141 who’d been a kind of dwarf and almost an idiot, Frances was Birdie’s first personal acquaintance who’d scored lower than he had. Her own 20 didn’t bother her, or she knew enough not to let it, but for the whole two months Birdie was working on “Problems of Creativeness” she’d listened to every draft of every paragraph. If it hadn’t been for her constant praise and her getting behind him and pushing whenever he got depressed and hopeless, he’d never have seen his way out the other end. It seemed unfair in a way that, now that he was through, he’d be going back to Milly. But Frances had said she didn’t mind about that either. Birdie had never known anyone so completely unselfish, but she said no, it wasn’t that. Helping him had been her way of fighting the system.

“Well?” he asked, when she came back.

“Nope. Just this.” She tossed a postcard onto the bed. A sunset somewhere with palm trees. For her.

“I didn’t think they could write, these guys.”

“Jock? Oh, he’s always sending me stuff. This—” she grabbed a handful of her heavy, glittering bathrobe “—came from Japan.”

Birdie snorted. He’d meant to buy Frances a present himself, as a token of his appreciation, but his money was gone. He was living, till his letter came, on what he could borrow from her. “He doesn’t have much to say for himself.”

“No, I suppose not.” She sounded down. Before she’d gone to get the mail, she’d been happy as an ad. The postcard must have meant more than she’d let on. Maybe she was in love with this Jock. Though back in June, on the night of their first heart-to-heart drunk, after he’d told her about Milly, she’d said that she was still waiting for the real thing to come along.

Whatever it was, he decided, he wasn’t going to let it bring him down too. He plugged himself into the idea of getting dressed. He’d get out his sky-blues and a green scarf and then he’d stroll in his clean bare feet to the river. Then uptown. Not as far as 11th Street, no. In any case it was Thursday, and Milly wouldn’t be home on a Thursday afternoon. In any case he wasn’t going to see her until he could rub her pretty nose in the story of his success.

“It’s bound to come tomorrow.”

“I suppose so.” Frances was sitting cross-legged on the floor, combing her wispy, dull-brown hair down across her face.

“It’s been two weeks. Almost.”

“Birdie?”

“That’s my name.”

“Yesterday when I was in Stuyvesant Town, the market, you know?” She found her part and pulled half the veil to one side. “I bought two pills.”

“Great.”

“Not that kind. The pills you take for … you know, so you can have babies again? They change the stuff that’s in the water. I thought maybe if we each took one… .”

“You can’t just go and do it like that, Frances. For Christ’s sake! They’d make you have an abortion before you could say Lucille Mortimer Randolph-Clapp.”

It was her pet joke that she’d made up herself, but Frances not so much as smiled. “Why would they have to know? I mean, until it was too late.”

“You know what they do, don’t you, to people who try and pull that kind of stunt? To the man as well as the woman?”

“I don’t care.”

“Well, I do.” Then, to close the discussion: “Jesus Christ.”

She gathered all the hair at the back of her head and fumbled a knot into her strand of yellow yarn. She tried to make the next suggestion sound spontaneous. “We could go to Mexico.”

“Mexico! Goddamn, don’t you read anything but comic books?”

Birdie’s indignation was all the more fierce for the fact that not that long ago he’d made essentially the same proposition to Milly. “Mexico! Boy oh boy!”

Frances, her feelings hurt, went over to the mirror and started in with the lotion. Birdie had known her to spend half a day scraping and rubbing and puttying. The result was always the same scaly, middle-aged face. Frances was seventeen.

Their eyes met for a moment in the mirror. Frances’s skittered off. He realized that his letter had come. That she’d read it. That she knew. He went up behind her and took hold of the spindly arms inside the bulky sleeves of the robe. “Where is it, Frances?”

“Where is what?” But she knew, she knew.

He bent the two arms together like a spring exerciser.

“I—I threw it away.”

“You threw it away! My private letter?”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have. I wanted you to be—I wanted just another day like the last couple.”

“What did it say?”

“Birdie, stop!”

“What did it fucking say?”

“Three points. You got three points.”

He let go of her. “That’s all? That’s all it said?”

She rubbed her arms where he’d held her. “It said you had every reason to be proud of what you’d written. Three points is a good score. The team who scored you didn’t know how much you needed. If you don’t believe me, read it yourself. It’s right here.” She opened a drawer, and there was the yellow envelope with its Albany postmark and the burning torch of knowledge in the other corner.

“Aren’t you going to read it?”

“I believe you.”

“It said if you wanted that one extra point you could get it by enlisting in the service.”

“Like your old friend Jock, huh?”

“I’m sorry, Birdie.”

“So am I.”

“Now maybe you’ll reconsider.”

“About what?”

“The pills I bought.”

“Will you leave me alone with those pills? Will you?”

“I’ll never say who the father is. I promise. Birdie, look at me. I promise.”

He looked at the black, bleary eyes, the greasy, flaking skin, the hard little lips that never smiled far enough to betray the fact of her teeth. “I’d as soon jerk off into the toilet as give it to you. Do you know what you are? You’re a moron.”

“I don’t care what you call me, Birdie.”

“You’re a goddamned subnormal.”

“I love you.”

He knew what he had to do. He’d seen the thing last week when he’d gone through her drawers. Not a whip, but he didn’t know what else to call it. He found it again at the bottom of the underwear.

“What was that you just said?” He thrust the thing into her face.

“I love you, Birdie. I really do. And I guess I’m about the only one who does.”

“Well, this is how I feel for you.”

He grabbed the collar of her robe and pulled it down off her shoulders. She’d never let him see her naked before and now he understood why. Welts and bruises covered her body. Her ass was like one big open wound from being whipped. This was what she got paid for, not being fucked. This.

He laid into her with his whole strength. He kept going until it didn’t matter anymore, until he had no feelings left.

The same afternoon, without even bothering to get drunk, he went to Times Square and enlisted in the U.S. Marines to go and defend democracy in Burma. Eight other guys were sworn in at the same time. They raised their right arms and took one step forward and rattled off the Pledge of Allegiance or whatever. Then the sergeant came up and slipped the black Marine Corps mask over Birdie’s sullen face. His new ID number was stenciled across the forehead in big white letters: USMC100-7011-D07. And that was it, they were gorillas.