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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.

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?