"The man in the bed has an excruciating sense of humour. It is a very simple bed. Pine. People visited him and left flowers. A Chinese chrysanthemum means cheerfulness under adversity. A red chrysanthemum means I love. A white chrysanthemum is truth. Pine represents pity, but the bed is not pine after all. It is steel, steel that has been painted white, a hospital bed. The man was in a hospital bed. He was sick. This is a story. It represents chrysanthemums."

(from Quincunx, Thomas M Disch, The New SF, Arrow, 1970)


On the fourth of July Thomas Disch killed himself. This morning I read his short story, Quincunx, a ludic word puzzle written the best part of four decades ago now. Quincunx means an arrangement of five things at the corners and centre of a square. The story - or stories, it’s an arrangement of five of course - is not really science fiction. Disch didn’t really write science fiction as the term is understood. Speculative fiction - that 1960s notion promulgated by Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds magazine - is a better description. I don’t really understand the story (stories). But that’s okay. I keep reading.

The last section, entitled The Assumption, is set in a "room 334". The number prompts a memory. A memory of the teenage me trying (and mostly failing) to read Disch’s novel of that number, 334. That book is set in a terminally overcrowded New York. The sense of claustrophobia is what I remember, the squeezed-tight world Disch’s words conjure up.

It’s all I remember of the book. Not the plot or the prose but that perfume. It’s actually a lot to remember after the best part of 30 years. It’s the best tribute I can think of.

The M stood for Michael by the way.