ONE.

 

 

So, then, I have to go downtown to the University and forage for dollars again. It doesn’t take much cash to keep me going—$200 a month will do nicely—but I’m running low, and I don’t dare try to borrow from my sister again. The students will shortly be needing their first term papers of the semester; that’s always a steady business. The weary, eroding brain of David Selig is once more for hire. I should be able to pick up $75 worth of work on this lovely golden October morning. The air is crisp and clear. A high-pressure system covers New York City, banishing humidity and haze. In such weather my fading powers still flourish. Let us go then, you and I, when the morning is spread out against the sky. To the Broadway-IRT subway. Have your tokens ready, please.

You and I. To whom do I refer? I’m heading downtown alone, after all. You and I.

Why, of course I refer to myself and to that creature which lives within me, skulking in its spongy lair and spying on unsuspecting mortals. That sneaky monster within me, that ailing monster, dying even more swiftly than I. Yeats once wrote a dialogue of self and soul; why then shouldn’t Selig, who is divided against himself in a way poor goofy Yeats could never have understood, speak of his unique and perishable gift as though it were some encapsulated intruder lodged in his skull? Why not? Let us go then, you and I. Down the hall. Push the button. Into the elevator. There is a stink of garlic in it. These peasants, these swarming Puerto Ricans, they leave their emphatic smells everywhere. My neighbors. I love them. Down. Down.

It is 10:43 A.M., Eastern Daylight Savings Time. The current temperature reading in Central Park is 57°. The humidity stands at 28% and the barometer is 30.30 and falling, with the wind northeast at 11 miles per hour. The forecast is for fair skies and sunny weather today, tonight, and tomorrow, with the highs in the low to middle 60’s. The chance of precipitation is zero today and 10% tomorrow. Air quality level is rated good. David Selig is 41 and counting. Slightly above medium height, he has the lean figure of a bachelor accustomed to his own meager cooking, and his customary facial expression is a mild, puzzled frown. He blinks a lot. In his faded blue denim jacket, heavy-duty boots, and 1969-vintage striped bells he presents a superficially youthful appearance, at least from the neck down; but in fact he looks like some sort of refugee from an illicit research laboratory where the balding, furrowed heads of anguished middle-aged men are grafted to the reluctant bodies of adolescent boys. How did this happen to him? At what point did his face and scalp begin to grow old? The dangling cables of the elevator hurl shrieks of mocking laughter at him as he descends from his two-room refuge on the twelfth floor. He wonders if those rusty cables might be even older than he is. He is of the 1935 vintage. This housing project, he suspects, might date from 1933 or 1934. The Hon. Fiorello H. LaGuardia, Mayor. Though perhaps it’s younger—just immediately pre-war, say. (Do you remember 1940, Duvid? That was the year we took you to the World’s Fair. This is the trylon, that’s the perisphere.) Anyway the buildings are getting old. What isn’t?

The elevator halts grindingly at the 7th floor. Even before the scarred door opens I detect a quick mental flutter of female Hispanic vitality dancing through the girders. Of course, the odds are overwhelming that the summoner of the elevator is a young Puerto Rican wife—the house is full of them, the husbands are away at work at this time of day—but all the same I’m pretty certain that I’m reading her psychic emanations and not just playing the hunches. Sure enough. She is short, swarthy, maybe about 23 years old, and very pregnant. I can pick up the double neural output clearly: the quicksilver darting of her shallow, sensual mind and the furry, blurry thumpings of the fetus, about six months old, sealed within her hard bulging body. She is flat-faced and broad-hipped, with little glossy eyes and a thin, pinched mouth. A second child, a dirty girl of about two, clutches her mother’s thumb. The babe giggles up at me and the woman favors me with a brief, suspicious smile as they enter the elevator.

They stand with their backs toward me. Dense silence. Buenos dias, señora. Nice day, isn’t it, ma’am? What a lovely little child. But I remain mute. I don’t know her; she looks just like all the others who live in this project, and even her cerebral output is standard stuff, unindividuated, indistinguishable: vague thoughts of plantains and rice, this week’s lottery results, and tonight’s television highlights. She is a dull bitch but she is human and I love her. What’s her name? Maybe it’s Mrs. Altagracia Morales. Mrs. Amantina Figueroa. Mrs. Filomena Mercado. I love their names. Pure poetry. I grew up with plump clumping girls named Sondra Wiener, Beverly Schwartz, Sheila Weisbard. Ma’am, can you possibly be Mrs. Inocencia Fernandez? Mrs. Clodomira Espinosa? Mrs. Bonifacia Colon? Perhaps Mrs. Esperanza Dominguez. Esperanza. Esperanza. I love you, Esperanza. Esperanza springs eternal in the human breast. (I was there last Christmas for the bullfights. Esperanza Springs, New Mexico; I stayed at the Holiday Inn. No, I’m kidding.) Ground floor. Nimbly I step forward to hold the door open. The lovely stolid pregnant chiquita doesn’t smile at me as she exits.

To the subway now, hippity-hop, one long block away. This far uptown the tracks are still elevated. I sprint up the cracking, peeling staircase and arrive at the station level hardly winded at all. The results of clean living, I guess. Simple diet, no smoking, not much drinking, no acid or mesc, no speed. The station, at this hour, is practically deserted. But in a moment I hear the wailing of onrushing wheels, metal on metal, and simultaneously I pick up the blasting impact of a sudden phalanx of minds all rushing toward me at once out of the north, packed aboard the five or six cars of the oncoming train. The compressed souls of those passengers form a single inchoate mass, pressing insistently against me. They quiver like trembling jellylike bites of plankton squeezed brutally together in some oceanographer’s net, creating one complex organism in which the separate identities of all are lost. As the train glides into the station I am able to pick up isolated blurts and squeaks of discrete selfhood: a fierce jab of desire, a squawk of hatred, a pang of regret, a sudden purposeful inner mumbling, rising from the confusing totality the way odd little scraps and stabs of melody rise from the murky orchestral smear of a Mahler symphony. The power is deceptively strong in me today. I’m picking up plenty. This is the strongest it’s been in weeks. Surely the low humidity is a factor. But I’m not deceived into thinking that the decline in my ability has been checked. When I first began to lose my hair, there was a happy period when the process of erosion seemed to halt and reverse itself, when new patches of fine dark floss began to sprout on my denuded forehead. But after an initial freshet of hope I took a more realistic view: this was no miraculous reforestation but only a twitch of the hormones, a temporary cessation of decay, not to be relied upon. And in time my hairline resumed its retreat. So too in this instance. When one knows that something is dying inside one, one learns not to put much trust in the random vitalities of the fleeting moment. Today the power is strong yet tomorrow I may hear nothing but distant tantalizing murmurs.

I find a seat in the corner of the second car, open my book, and wait out the ride downtown. I am reading Beckett again, Malone Dies; it plays nicely to my prevailing mood, which as you have noticed is one of self-pity. My time is limited. It is thence that one fine day, when all nature smiles and shines, the rack lets loose its black unforgettable cohorts and sweeps away the blue for ever. My situation is truly delicate. What fine things, what momentous things, I am going to miss through fear, fear of falling back into the old error, fear of not finishing in time, fear of revelling, for the last time, in a last outpouring of misery, impotence and hate. The forms are many in which the unchanging seeks relief from its formlessness. Ah yes, the good Samuel, always ready with a word or two of bleak comfort.

Somewhere about 180th Street I look up and see a girl sitting diagonally opposite me and apparently studying me. She is in her very early twenties, attractive in a sallow way, with long legs, decent breasts, a bush of auburn hair. She has a book too—the paperback of Ulysses, I recognize the cover—but it lies neglected on her lap. Is she interested in me? I am not reading her mind; when I entered the train I automatically stopped my inputs down to the minimum, a trick I learned when I was a child. If I don’t insulate myself against scatter-shot crowd-noises on trains or in other enclosed public places I can’t concentrate at all. Without attempting to detect her signals, I speculate on what she’s thinking about me, playing a game I often play. How intelligent he looks. . . . He must have suffered a good deal, his face is so much older than his body . . . tenderness in his eyes . . . so sad they look . . . a poet, a scholar. . . . I bet he’s very passionate . . . pouring all his pent-up love into the physical act, into screwing. . . . What’s he reading? Beckett? Yes, a poet, a novelist, he must be . . . maybe somebody famous. . . . I mustn’t be too aggressive, though. He’ll be turned off by pushiness. A shy smile, that’ll catch him. . . . One thing leads to another. . . . I’ll invite him up for lunch. . . . Then, to check on the accuracy of my intuitive perceptions, I tune in on her mind. At first there is no signal. My damnable waning powers betraying me again! But then it comes—static, first, as I get the low-level muzzy ruminations of all the passengers around me, and then the clear sweet tone of her soul. She is thinking about a karate class she will attend later this morning on 96th Street. She is in love with her instructor, a brawny pockmarked Japanese. She will see him tonight. Dimly through her mind swims the memory of the taste of sake and the image of his powerful naked body rearing above her. There is nothing in her mind about me. I am simply part of the scenery, like the map of the subway system on the wall above my head. Selig, your egocentricity kills you every time. I note that she does indeed wear a shy smile now, but it is not for me, and when she sees me staring at her the smile vanishes abruptly. I return my attention to my book.

The train treats me to a long sweaty unscheduled halt in the tunnel between stations north of 137th Street; eventually it gets going again and deposits me at 116th Street, Columbia University. I climbed toward the sunlight. I first climbed these stairs a full quarter of a century ago, October ‘51, a terrified high-school senior with acne and a crew-cut, coming out of Brooklyn for my college entrance interview. Under the bright lights in University Hall. The interviewer terribly poised, mature—why, he must have been 24, 25 years old. They let me into their college, anyway. And then this was my subway station every day, beginning in September ‘52 and continuing until I finally got away from home and moved up close to the campus. In those days there was an old cast-iron kiosk at street level marking the entrance to the depths; it was positioned between two lanes of traffic, and students, their absent minds full of Kierkegaard and Sophocles and Fitzgerald, were forever stepping in front of cars and getting killed. Now the kiosk is gone and the subway entrances are placed more rationally, on the sidewalks.

I walk along 116th Street. To my right, the broad greensward of South Field; to my left, the shallow steps rising to Low Library. I remember South Field when it was an athletic field in the middle of the campus: brown dirt, basepaths, fence. My freshman year I played softball there. We’d go to the lockers in University Hall to change, and then, wearing sneakers, polo shirts, dingy gray shorts, feeling naked amidst the other students in business suits or ROTC uniforms, we’d sprint down the endless steps to South Field for an hour of outdoor activity. I was good at softball. Not much muscle, but quick reflexes and a good eye, and I had the advantage of knowing what was on the pitcher’s mind. He’d stand there thinking, This guy’s too skinny to hit, I’ll give him a high fast one, and I’d be ready for it and bust it out into left field, circling the bases before anyone knew what was happening. Or the other side would try some clumsy bit of strategy like hit-and-run, and I’d move effortlessly over to gather up the grounder and start the double play. Of course it was only softball and my classmates were mostly pudgy dubs who couldn’t even run, let alone read minds, but I enjoyed the unfamiliar sensation of being an outstanding athlete and indulged in fantasies of playing shortstop for the Dodgers. The Brooklyn Dodgers, remember? In my sophomore year they ripped up South Field and turned it into a fine grassy showplace divided by a paved promenade, in honor of the University’s 200th birthday. Which happened in 1954. Christ, so very long ago. I grow old . . . I grow old . . . I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. The mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me.

I go up the steps and take a seat about fifteen feet to the left of the bronze statue of Alma Mater. This is my office in fair weather or foul. The students know where to look for me, and when I’m there the word quickly spreads. There are five or six other people who provide the service I provide—impecunious graduate students, mostly, down on their luck—but I’m the quickest and most reliable, and I have an enthusiastic following. Today, though, business gets off to a slow start. I sit for twenty minutes, fidgeting, peering into Beckett, staring at Alma Mater. Some years ago a radical bomber blew a hole in her side, but there’s no sign of the damage now. I remember being shocked at the news, and then shocked at being shocked—why should I give a damn about a dumb statue symbolic of a dumb school? That was about 1969, I guess. Back in the Neolithic.

“Mr. Selig?”

Big brawny jock looming above me. Colossal shoulders, chubby innocent face. He’s deeply embarrassed. He’s taking Comp Lit 18 and needs a paper fast, on the novels of Kafka, which he hasn’t read. (This is the football season; he’s the starting halfback and he’s very very busy.) I tell him the terms and he hastily agrees. While he stands there I covertly take a reading of him, getting the measure of his intelligence, his probable vocabulary, his style. He’s smarter than he appears. Most of them are. They could write their own papers well enough if they only had the time. I make notes, setting down my quick impressions of him, and he goes away happy. After that, trade is brisk: he sends a fraternity brother, the brother sends a friend, the friend sends one of his fraternity brothers, a different fraternity, and the daisy-chain lengthens until by early afternoon I find I’ve taken on all the work I can handle. I know my capacity. So all is well. I’ll eat regularly for two or three weeks, without having to tap my sister’s grudging generosity. Judith will be pleased not to hear from me. Home, now, to begin my ghostly tasks. I’m good—glib, earnest, profound in a convincingly sophomoric way—and I can vary my styles. I know my way around literature, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, all the soft subjects. Thank God I kept my own term papers; even after twenty-odd years they can still be mined. I charge $3.50 a typed page, sometimes more if my probing reveals that the client has money. A minimum grade of B+ guaranteed or there’s no fee. I’ve never had to make a refund.

 

 

TWO.

 

 

When he was seven and a half years old and causing a great deal of trouble for his third-grade teacher, they sent little David to the school psychiatrist, Dr. Hittner, for an examination. The school was an expensive private one on a quiet leafy street in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn; its orientation was socialist-progressive, with a smarmy pedagogical underpinning of warmed-over Marxism and Freudianism and John Deweyism, and the psychiatrist, a specialist in the disturbances of middle-class children, paid a call every Wednesday afternoon to peer into the soul of the current problem child. Now it was David’s turn. His parents gave their consent, of course. They were deeply concerned about his behavior. Everyone agreed that he was a brilliant child: he was extraordinarily precocious, with a reading-comprehension score on the twelve-year-old level, and adults found him almost frighteningly bright. But he was uncontrollable in class, raucous, disrespectful; the schoolwork, hopelessly elementary for him, bored him to desperation; his only friends were the class misfits, whom he persecuted cruelly; most of the children hated him and the teachers feared his unpredictability. One day he had up-ended a hallway fire extinguisher simply to see if it would spray foam as promised. It did. He brought garter snakes to school and let them loose in the auditorium. He mimed classmates and even teachers with vicious accuracy. “Dr. Hittner would just like to have a little chat with you,” his mother told him. “He’s heard you’re a very special boy and he’d like to get to know you better.” David resisted, kicking up a great fuss over the psychiatrist’s name. “Hitler? Hitler? I don’t want to talk to Hitler!” It was the fall of 1942 and the childish pun was an inevitable one, but he clung to it with irritating stubbornness. “Dr. Hitler wants to see me. Dr. Hitler wants to get to know me.” And his mother said, “No, Duvid, it’s Hittner, Hittner, with an n.” He went anyway. He strutted into the psychiatrist’s office, and when Dr. Hittner smiled benignly and said, “Hello, there, David,” David shot forth a stiff arm and snapped: “Heil!”

Dr. Hittner chuckled. “You’ve got the wrong man,” he said. “I’m Hittner, with an n.” Perhaps he had heard such jokes before. He was a huge man with a long homey face, a wide fleshy mouth, a high curving forehead. Watery blue eyes twinkled behind rimless glasses. His skin was soft and pink and he had a good tangy smell, and he was trying hard to seem friendly and amused and big-brotherly, but David couldn’t help picking up the impression that Dr. Hittner’s brotherliness was just an act. It was something he felt with most adults: they smiled a lot, but inside themselves they were thinking things like, What a scary brat, what a creepy little kid. Even his mother and father sometimes thought things like that. He didn’t understand why adults said one thing with their faces and another with their minds, but he was accustomed to it. It was something he had come to expect and accept.

“Let’s play some games, shall we?” Dr. Hittner said.

Out of the vest pocket of his tweed suit he produced a little plastic globe on a metal chain. He showed it to David; then he pulled on the chain and the globe came apart into eight or nine pieces of different colors. “Watch closely, now, while I put it back together,” said Dr. Hittner. His thick fingers expertly reassembled the globe. Then he pulled it apart again and shoved it across the desk toward David. “Your turn. Can you put it back together too?”

David remembered that the doctor had started by taking the E-shaped white piece and fitting the D-shaped blue piece into one of its grooves. Then had come the yellow piece, but David didn’t recall what to do with it; he sat there a moment, puzzled, until Dr. Hittner obligingly flashed him a mental image of the proper manipulation. David did it and the rest was easy. A couple of times he got stuck, but he was always able to pull the answer out of the doctor’s mind. Why does he think he’s testing me, David wondered, if he keeps giving me so many hints? What’s he proving? When the globe was intact David handed it back. “Would you like to keep it?” Dr. Hittner asked.

“I don’t need it,” David said. But he pocketed it anyway.

They played a few more games. There was one with little cards about the size of playing cards, with drawings of animals and birds and trees and houses on them; David was supposed to arrange them so that they told a story, and then tell the doctor what the story was. He scattered them at random on the desk and made up a story as he went along. “The duck goes into the forest, you see, and he meets a wolf, so he turns into a frog and jumps over the wolf right into the elephant’s mouth, only he escapes out of the elephant’s tushie and falls into a lake, and when he comes out he sees the pretty princess here, who says come home and I’ll give you gingerbread, but he can read her mind and he sees that she’s really a wicked witch, who—” Another game involved slips of paper that had big blue ink-blots on them. “Do any of these shapes remind you of real things?” the doctor asked. “Yes,” David said, “this is an elephant, see, his tail is here and here all crumpled up, and this is his tushie, and this is where he makes pee-pee.” He had already discovered that Dr. Hittner became very interested when he talked about tushies or pee-pee, so he gave the doctor plenty to be interested about, finding such things in every inkblot picture. This seemed a very silly game to David, but apparently it was important to Dr. Hittner, who scribbled notes on everything David was saying. David studied Dr. Hittner’s mind while the psychiatrist wrote things down. Most of the words he picked up were incomprehensible, but he did recognize a few, the grown-up terms for the parts of the body that David’s mother had taught him: penis, vulva, buttocks, rectum, things like that. Obviously Dr. Hittner liked those words a great deal, so David began to use them. “This is a picture of an eagle that’s picking up a little sheep and flying away with it. This is the eagle’s penis, down here, and over here is the sheep’s rectum. And in the next one there’s a man and a woman, and they’re both naked, and the man is trying to put his penis inside the woman’s vulva only it won’t fit, and—” David watched the fountain pen flying over the paper. He grinned at Dr. Hittner and turned to the next ink-blot.

Next they played word games. The doctor spoke a word and asked David to say the first word that came into his head. David found it more amusing to say the first word that came into Dr. Hittner’s head. It took only a fraction of a second to pick it up, and Dr. Hittner didn’t seem to notice what was going on. The game went like this:

“Father.”

“Penis.”

“Mother.”

“Bed.”

“Baby.”

“Dead.”

“Water.”

“Belly.”

“Tunnel.”

“Shovel.”

“Coffin.”

“Mother.”

Were those the right words to say? Who was the winner in this game? Why did Dr. Hittner seem so upset?

Finally they stopped playing games and simply talked. “You’re a very bright little boy,” Dr. Hittner said. “I don’t have to worry about spoiling you by telling you that, because you know it already. What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“I just want to play and read a lot of books and swim.”

“But how will you earn a living?”

“I’ll get money from people when I need it.”

“If you find out how, I hope you’ll tell me the secret,” the doctor said. “Are you happy here in school?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“The teachers are too strict. The work is too dumb. The children don’t like me.”

“Do you ever wonder why they don’t like you?”

“Because I’m smarter than they are,” David said. “Because I—” Ooops. Almost said it. Because I can see what they’re thinking. Mustn’t ever tell anyone that. Dr. Hittner was waiting for him to finish the sentence. “Because I make a lot of trouble in class.”

“And why do you do that, David?”

“I don’t know. It gives me something to do, I guess.”

“Maybe if you didn’t make so much trouble, people would like you more. Don’t you want people to like you?”

“I don’t care. I don’t need it.”

“Everybody needs friends, David.”

“I’ve got friends.”

“Mrs. Fleischer says you don’t have very many, and that you hit them a lot and make them unhappy. Why do you hit your friends?”

“Because I don’t like them. Because they’re dumb.”

“Then they aren’t really friends, if that’s how you feel about them.”

Shrugging, David said, “I can get along without them. I have fun just being by myself.”

“Are you happy at home?”

“I guess so.”

“You love your mommy and daddy?”

A pause. A feeling of great tension coming out of the doctor’s mind. This is an important question. Give the right answer, David. Give him the answer he wants.

“Yes,” David said.

“Do you ever wish you had a baby brother or sister?”

No hesitation now. “No.”

“Really, no? You like being all alone?”

David nodded. “The afternoons are the best time. When I’m home from school and there’s nobody around. Am I going to have a baby brother or sister?”

Chuckles from the doctor. “I’m sure I don’t know. That would be up to your mommy and daddy, wouldn’t it?”

“You won’t tell them to get one for me, will you? I mean, you might say to them that it would be good for me to have one, and then they’d go and get one, but I really don’t want—” I’m in trouble, David realized suddenly.

“What makes you think I’d tell your parents it would be good for you to have a baby brother or sister?” the doctor asked quietly, not smiling now at all.

“I don’t know. It was just an idea.” Which I found inside your head, doctor. And now I want to get out of here. I don’t want to talk to you any more. “Hey, your name isn’t really Hittner, is it? With an n? I bet I know your real name. Heil!”

 

 

THREE.

 

 

I never could send my thoughts into anybody else’s head. Even when the power was strongest in me, I couldn’t transmit. I could only receive. Maybe there are people around who do have that power, who can transmit thoughts. even to those who don’t have any special receiving gift, but I wasn’t ever one of them. So right there I was condemned to be society’s ugliest toad, the eavesdropper, the voyeur. Old English proverb: He who peeps through a hole may see what will vex him. Yes. In those years when I was particularly eager to communicate with people, I’d work up fearful sweats trying to plant my thoughts in them. I’d sit in a classroom staring at the back of some girl’s head, and I’d think hard at her: Hello, Annie, this is David Selig calling, do you read me? Do you read me? I love you, Annie. Over. Over and out. But Annie never read me, and the currents of her mind would roll on like a placid river, undisturbed by the existence of David Selig.

No way, then, for me to speak to other minds, only to spy on them. The way the power manifests itself in me has always been highly variable. I never had much conscious control over it, other than being able to stop down the intensity of input and to do a certain amount of fine tuning; basically I had to take whatever came drifting in. Most often I would pick up a person’s surface thoughts, his subvocalizations of the things he’s just about to say. These would come to me in a clear conversational manner, exactly as though he had said them, except the tone of voice was different, it was plainly not a tone produced by the vocal apparatus. I don’t remember any period even in my childhood when I confused spoken communication with mental communication. This ability to read surface thoughts has been fairly consistent throughout: I still can anticipate verbal statements more often than not, especially when I’m with someone who has the habit of rehearsing what he intends to say.

I could also and to some extent still can anticipate immediate intentions, such as the decision to throw a short right jab to the jaw. My way of knowing such things varies. I might pick up a coherent inner verbal statement—I’m now going to throw a short right jab to his jaw—or, if the power happens to be working on deeper levels that day, I may simply pick up a series of non-verbal instructions to the muscles, which add up in a fraction of a second to the process of bringing the right arm up for a short jab to the jaw. Call it body language on the telepathic wavelength.

Another thing I’ve been able to do, though never consistently, is tune in to the deepest layers of the mind—where the soul lives, if you will. Where the consciousness lies bathed in a murky soup of indistinct unconscious phenomena. Here lurk hopes, fears, perceptions, purposes, passions, memories, philosophical positions, moral policies, hungers, sorrows, the whole ragbag accumulation of events and attitudes that defines the private self. Ordinarily some of this bleeds through to me even when the most superficial mental contact is established: I can’t help getting a certain amount of information about the coloration of the soul. But occasionally—hardly ever, now—I fasten my hooks into the real stuff, the whole person. There’s ecstasy in that. There’s an electrifying sense of contact. Coupled, of course, with a stabbing, numbing sense of guilt, because of the totality of my voyeurism: how much more of a peeping tom can a person be? Incidentally, the soul speaks a universal language. When I look into the mind of Mrs. Esperanza Dominguez, say, and I get a gabble of Spanish out of it, I don’t really know what she’s thinking, because I don’t understand very much Spanish. But if I were to get into the depths of her soul I’d have complete comprehension of anything I picked up. The mind may think in Spanish or Basque or Hungarian or Finnish, but the soul thinks in a languageless language accessible to any prying sneaking freak who comes along to peer at its mysteries.

No matter. It’s all going from me now.

 

 

FOUR.

 

 

Paul F. Bruno

Comp Lit 18, Prof. Schmitz

October 15, 1976

 

The Novels of Kafka

 

In the nightmare world of The Trial and The Castle, only one thing is certain: that the central figure, significantly known by the initial K, is doomed to frustration. All else is dreamlike and unsure; courtrooms spring up in tenements, mysterious warders devour one’s breakfast, a man thought to be Sordini is actually Sortini. The central fact is certain, though: K will fail in his attempt to attain grace.

The two novels have the same theme and approximately the same basic structure. In both, K seeks for grace and is led to the final realization that it is to be withheld from him. (The Castle is unfinished, but its conclusion seems plain.) Kafka brings his heroes into involvement with their situations in opposite ways: in The Trial, Joseph K. is passive until he is jolted into the action of the book by the unexpected arrival of the two warders; in The Castle, K is first shown as an active character making efforts on his own behalf to reach the mysterious Castle. To be sure, though, he has originally been summoned by the Castle; the action did not originate in himself, and thus he began as as passive a character as Joseph K. The distinction is that The Trial opens at a point earlier in the time-stream of the action—at the earliest possible point, in fact. The Castle follows more closely the ancient rule of beginning in medias res, with K already summoned and trying to reach the Castle.

Both books get off to rapid starts. Joseph K. is arrested in the very first sentence of The Trial, and his counterpart K arrives at what he thinks is going to be the last stop before the Castle on the first page of that novel. From there, both K’s struggle futilely toward their goals (in The Castle, simply to get to the top of the hill; in The Trial, first to understand the nature of his guilt, and then, despairing of this, to achieve acquittal without understanding). Both actually get farther from their goals with each succeeding action. The Trial reaches its peak in the wonderful Cathedral scene, quite likely the most terrifying single sequence in any of Kafka’s work, in which K is given to realize that he is guilty and can never be acquitted; the chapter that follows, describing K’s execution, is little more than an anticlimactic appendage. The Castle, less complete than The Trial, lacks the counterpart of the Cathedral scene (perhaps Kafka was unable to devise one?) and thus is artistically less satisfying than the shorter, more intense, more tightly constructed Trial.

Despite their surface artlessness, both novels appear to be built on the fundamental threepart structure of the tragic rhythm, labeled by the critic Kenneth Burke as “purpose, passion, perception.” The Trial follows this scheme with greater success than does the incomplete Castle; the purpose, to achieve acquittal, is demonstrated through as harrowing a passion as any fictional hero has undergone. Finally, when Joseph K. has been reduced from his original defiant, self-confident attitude to a fearful, timid state of mind, and he is obviously ready to capitulate to the forces of the Court, the time is at hand for the final moment of perception.

The agent used to bring him to the scene of the climax is a classically Kafkaesque figure—the mysterious “Italian colleague who was on his first visit to the town and had influential connexions that made him important to the Bank.” The theme that runs through all of Kafka’s work, the impossibility of human communication, is repeated here: though Joseph has spent half the night studying Italian in preparation for the visit, and is half asleep in consequence, the stranger speaks an unknown southern dialect which Joseph cannot understand. Then—a crowning comic touch—the stranger shifts to French, but his French is just as difficult to follow, and his bushy mustache foils Joseph’s attempts at lip-reading.

Once he reaches the Cathedral, which he has been asked to show to the Italian (who, as we are not surprised to find, never keeps the date), the tension mounts. Joseph wanders through the building, which is empty, dark, cold, lit only by candles flickering far in the distance, while night inexplicably begins fast to fall outside. Then the priest calls to him, and relates the allegory of the Doorkeeper. It is only when the story is ended that we realize we did not at all understand it; far from being the simple tale it had originally seemed to be, it reveals itself as complex and difficult. Joseph and the priest discuss the story at great length, in the manner of a pair of rabbinical scholars disputing a point in the Talmud. Slowly its implications sink in, and we and Joseph see that the light streaming from the door to the Law will not be visible for him until it is too late.

Structurally the novel is over right here. Joseph has received the final perception that acquittal is impossible; his guilt is established, and he is not yet to receive grace. His quest is ended. The final element of the tragic rhythm, the perception that ends the passion, has been reached.

We know that Kafka planned further chapters showing the progress of Joseph’s trial through various later stages, ending in his execution. Kafka’s biographer Max Brod says the book could have been prolonged infinitely. This is true, of course; it is inherent in the nature of Joseph K.’s guilt that he could never get to the highest Court, just as the other K could wander for all time without ever reaching the Castle. But structurally the novel ends in the Cathedral; the rest of what Kafka intended would not have added anything essential to Joseph’s self-knowledge. The Cathedral scene shows us what we have known since page one: that there is no acquittal. The action concludes with that perception.

The Castle, a much longer and more loosely constructed book, lacks the power of The Trial. It rambles. The passion of K is much less clearly defined, and K is a less consistent character, not as interesting psychologically as he is in The Trial. Whereas in the earlier book he takes active charge of his case as soon as he realizes his danger, in The Castle he quickly becomes the victim of the bureaucracy. The transit of character in The Trial is from early passivity to activity back to passive resignation after the epiphany in the Cathedral. In The Castle K undergoes no such clearcut changes; he is an active character as the novel opens, but soon is lost in the nightmare maze of the village below the Castle, and sinks deeper and deeper into degradation. Joseph K. is almost an heroic character, while K of The Castle is merely a pathetic one.

The two books represent varying attempts at telling the same story, that of the existentially disengaged man who is suddenly involved in a situation from which there is no escape, and who, after making attempts to achieve the grace that will release him from his predicament, succumbs. As they exist today, The Trial is unquestionably the greater artistic success, firmly constructed and at all times under the author’s technical control. The Castle, or rather the fragment of it we have, is potentially the greater novel, however. Everything that was in The Trial would have been in The Castle, and a great deal more. But, one feels, Kafka abandoned work on The Castle because he saw he lacked the resources to carry it through. He could not handle the world of the Castle, with its sweeping background of Brueghelesque country life, with the same assurance as he did the urban world of The Trial. And there is a lack of urgency in The Castle; we are never too concerned over K’s doom because it is inevitable; Joseph K., though, is fighting more tangible forces, and until the end we have the illusion that victory is possible for him. The Castle, also, is too ponderous. Like a Mahler symphony, it collapses of its own weight. One wonders if Kafka had in mind some structure enabling him to end The Castle. Perhaps he never intended to close the novel at all, but meant to have K wander in ever-widening circles, never arriving at the tragic perception that he can never reach the Castle. Perhaps this is the reason for the comparative formlessness of the later work: Kafka’s discovery that the true tragedy of K, his archetypical hero-as-victim figure, lies not in his final perception of the impossibility of attaining grace, but in the fact that he will never reach even as much as that final perception. Here we have the tragic rhythm, a structure found throughout literature, truncated to depict more pointedly the contemporary human condition—a condition so abhorrent to Kafka. Joseph K., who actually reaches a form of grace, thereby attains true tragic stature; K, who simply sinks lower and lower, might symbolize for Kafka the contemporary individual, so crushed by the general tragedy of the times that he is incapable of any tragedy on an individual level. K is a pathetic figure, Joseph K. a tragic one. Joseph K. is a more interesting character, but perhaps it was K whom Kafka understood more deeply. And for K’s story no ending is possible, perhaps, save the pointless one of death.

 

 

That’s not so bad. Six double-spaced typed pages. At $3.50 per, it earns me a cool $21 for less than two hours’ work, and it’ll earn the brawny halfback, Mr. Paul F. Bruno, a sure B+ from Prof. Schmitz. I’m confident of that because the very same paper, differing only in a few minor stylistic flourishes, got me a B from the very demanding Prof. Dupee in May, 1955. Standards are lower today, after two decades of academic inflation. Bruno may even rack up an A—for the Kafka job. It’s got just the right quality of earnest intelligence, with the proper undergraduate mixture of sophisticated insight and naive dogmatism, and Dupee found the writing “clear and forceful” in ‘55, according to his note in the margin. All right, now. Time out for a little chow mein, with maybe a side order of eggroll. Then I’ll tackle Odysseus as a Symbol of Society or perhaps Aeschylus and the Aristotelian Tragedy. I can’t work from my own old term papers for those, but they shouldn’t be too tough to do. Old typewriter, old humbugger, stand me now and ever in good stead.

 

 

FIVE.

 

 

Aldous Huxley thought that evolution has designed our brains to serve as filters, screening out a lot of stuff that’s of no real value to us in our daily struggle for bread. Visions, mystical experiences, psi phenomena such as telepathic messages from other brains—all sorts of things along these lines would forever be flooding into us were it not for the action of what Huxley called, in a little book entitled Heaven and Hell, “the cerebral reducing valve.” Thank God for the cerebral reducing valve! If we hadn’t evolved it, we’d be distracted all the time by scenes of incredible beauty, by spiritual insights of overwhelming grandeur, and by searing, utterly honest mind-to-mind contact with our fellow human beings. Luckily, the workings of the valve protect us—most of us—from such things, and we are free to go about our daily lives, buying cheap and selling dear.

Of course, some of us seem to be born with defective valves. I mean the artists like Bosch or El Greco, whose eyes did not see the world as it appears to thee and me; I mean the visionary philosophers, the ecstatics and the nirvana-attainers; I mean the miserable freakish flukes who can read the thoughts of others. Mutants, all of us. Genetic sports.

However, Huxley believed that the efficiency of the cerebral reducing valve could be impaired by various artificial means, thus giving ordinary mortals access to the extrasensory data customarily seen only by the chosen few. The psychedelic drugs, he thought, have this effect. Mescaline, he suggested, interferes with the enzyme system that regulates cerebral function, and by so doing “lowers the efficiency of the brain as an instrument for focusing mind on the problems of life on the surface of our planet. This . . . seems to permit the entry into consciousness of certain classes of mental events, which are normally excluded, because they possess no survival value. Similar intrusions of biologically useless, but aesthetically and sometimes spiritually valuable, material may occur as the result of illness or fatigue; or they may be induced by fasting, or a period of confinement in a place of darkness and complete silence.”

Speaking for himself, David Selig can say very little about the psychedelic drugs. He had only one experience with them, and it wasn’t a happy one. That was in the summer of 1968, when he was living with Toni.

Though Huxley thought highly of the psychedelics, he didn’t see them as the only gateway to visionary experience. Fasting and physical mortification could get you there also. He wrote of mystics who “regularly used upon themselves the whip of knotted leather or even of iron wire. These beatings were the equivalent of fairly extensive surgery without anaesthetics, and their effects on the body chemistry of the penitent were considerable. Large quantities of histamine and adrenalin were released while the whip was actually being plied; and when the resulting wounds began to fester (as wounds practically always did before the age of soap), various toxic substances, produced by the decomposition of protein, found their way into the bloodstream. But histamine produces shock, and shock affects the mind no less profoundly than the body. Moreover, large quantities of adrenalin may cause hallucinations, and some of the products of its decomposition are known to induce symptoms resembling those of schizophrenia. As for toxins from wounds—these upset the enzyme systems regulating the brain, and lower its efficiency as an instrument for getting on in a world where the biologically fittest survive. This may explain why the Curé d’Ars used to say that, in the days when he was free to flagellate himself without mercy, God would refuse him nothing. In other words, when remorse, self-loathing, and the fear of hell release adrenalin, when self-inflicted surgery releases adrenalin and histamine, and when infected wounds release decomposed protein into the blood, the efficiency of the cerebral reducing valve is lowered and unfamiliar aspects of Mind-at-Large (including psi phenomena, visions, and, if he is philosophically and ethically prepared for it, mystical experiences) will flow into the ascetic’s consciousness.”

Remorse, self-loathing, and the fear of hell. Fasting and prayer. Whips and chains. Festering wounds. Everybody to his own trip, I suppose, and welcome to it. As the power fades in me, as the sacred gift dies, I toy with the idea of trying to revive it by artificial means. Acid, mescaline, psiocybin? I don’t think I’d care to go there again. Mortification of the flesh? That seems obsolete to me, like marching off to the Crusades or wearing spats: something that simply isn’t appropriate for 1976. I doubt that I could get very deep into flagellation, anyway. What does that leave? Fasting and prayer? I could fast, I suppose. Prayer? To whom? To what? I’d feel like a fool. Dear God, give me my power again. Dear Moses, please help me. Crap on that. Jews don’t pray for favors, because they know nobody will answer. What’s left, then? Remorse, self-loathing, and the fear of hell? I have those three already, and they do me no good. We must try some other way of goading the power back to life. Invent something new. Flagellation of the mind, perhaps? Yes. I’ll try that. I’ll get out the metaphorical cudgels and let myself have it. Flagellation of the aching, weakening, throbbing, dissolving mind. The treacherous, hateful mind.

 

 

SIX.

 

 

But why does David Selig want his power to come back? Why not let it fade? It’s always been a curse to him, hasn’t it? It’s cut him off from his fellow men and doomed him to a loveless life. Leave well enough alone, Duvid. Let it fade. Let it fade. On the other hand, without the power, what are you? Without that one faltering unpredictable unsatisfactory means of contact with them, how will you be able to touch them at all? Your power joins you to mankind, for better or for worse, in the only joining you have: you can’t bear to surrender it. Admit it. You love it and you despise it, this gift of yours. You dread losing it despite all it’s done to you. You’ll fight to cling to the last shreds of it, even though you know the struggle’s hopeless. Fight on, then. Read Huxley again. Try acid, if you dare. Try flagellation. Try fasting, at least. All right, fasting. I’ll skip the chow mein. I’ll skip the eggroll. Let’s slide a fresh sheet into the typewriter and think about Odysseus as a symbol of society.

 

 

SEVEN.

 

 

Hark to the silvery jangle of the telephone. The hour is late. Who calls? Is it Aldous Huxley from beyond the grave, urging me to have courage? Dr. Hittner, with some important questions about making pee-pee? Toni, to tell me she’s in the neighborhood with a thousand mikes of dynamite acid and is it okay to come up? Sure. Sure. I stare at the telephone, clueless. My power even at its height was never equal to the task of penetrating the consciousness of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company. Sighing, I pick up the receiver on the fifth ring and hear the sweet contralto voice of my sister Judith.

“Am I interrupting something?” Typical Judith opening.

“A quiet night at home. I’m ghosting a term paper on The Odyssey. Got any bright ideas for me, Jude?”

“You haven’t called in two weeks.”

“I was broke. After that scene the last time I didn’t want to bring up the subject of money, and lately it’s been the only subject I can think of talking about, so I didn’t call.”

“Shit,” she says, “I wasn’t angry at you..”

“You sounded mad as hell.”

“I didn’t mean any of that stuff. Why did you think I was serious? Just because I was yelling? Do you really believe that I regard you as—as—what did I call you?”

“A shiftless sponger, I think.”

“A shiftless sponger. Shit. I was tense that night, Duv; I had personal problems, and my period was coming on besides. I lost control. I was just shouting the first dumb crap that came into my head, but why did you believe I meant it? You of all people shouldn’t have thought I was serious. Since when do you take what people say with their mouths at face value?”

“You were saying it with your head too, Jude.”

“I was?” Her voice is suddenly small and contrite. “Are you sure?”

“It came through loud and clear.”

“Oh, Jesus, Duv, have a heart! In the heat of the moment I could have been thinking anything. But underneath the anger—underneath, Duv—you must have seen that I didn’t mean it. That I love you, that I don’t want to drive you away from me. You’re all I’ve got, Duv, you and the baby.”

Her love is unpalatable to me, and her sentimentalism is even less to my taste. I say, “I don’t read much of what’s underneath any more, Jude. Not much comes through these days. Anyway, look, it isn’t worth hassling over. I am a shiftless sponger, and I have borrowed more from you than you can afford to give. The black sheep big brother feels enough guilt as it is. I’m damned if I’m ever going to ask for money from you again.”

“Guilt? You talk about guilt, when I—”

“No,” I warn her, “don’t you go on a guilt trip now, Jude. Not now.” Her remorse for her past coldness toward me has a flavor even more stinking than her newfound love. “I don’t feel up to assigning the ratio of blames and guilts tonight.”

“All right. All right. Are you okay now for money, though?”

“I told you, I’m ghosting term papers. I’m getting by.”

“Do you want to come over here for dinner tomorrow night?”

“I think I’d better work instead. I’ve got a lot of papers to write, Jude. It’s the busy season.”

“It would be just the two of us. And the kid, of course, but I’ll put him to sleep early. Just you and me. We could talk. We’ve got so much to talk about. Why don’t you come over, Duv? You don’t need to work all day and all night. I’ll cook up something you like. I’ll do the spaghetti and hot sauce. Anything. You name it.” She is pleading with me, this icy sister who gave me nothing but hatred for twenty-five years. Come over and I’ll be a mama for you, Duv. Come let me be loving, brother.

“Maybe the night after next. I’ll call you.”

“No chance for tomorrow?”

“I don’t think so,” I say. There is silence. She doesn’t want to beg me. Into the sudden screeching silence I say, “What have you been doing with yourself, Judith? Seeing anyone interesting?”

“Not seeing anyone at all.” A flinty edge to her voice. She is two and a half years into her divorce; she sleeps around a good deal; juices are souring in her soul. She is 31 years old. “I’m between men right now. Maybe I’m off men altogether. I don’t care if I never do any screwing again ever.”

I throttle a somber laugh. “What happened to that travel agent you were seeing? Mickey?”

“Marty. That was just a gimmick. He got me all over Europe for 10% of the fare. Otherwise I couldn’t have afforded to go. I was using him.”

“So?”

“I felt shitty about it. Last month I broke off. I wasn’t in love with him. I don’t think I even liked him.”

“But you played around with him long enough to get a trip to Europe, first.”

“It didn’t cost him anything, Duv. I had to go to bed with him; all he had to do was fill out a form. What are you saying, anyway? That I’m a whore?”

“Jude—”

“Okay, I’m a whore. At least I’m trying to go straight for a while. Lots of fresh orange juice and plenty of serious reading. I’m reading Proust now, would you believe that? I just finished Swann’s Way and tomorrow—”

“I’ve still got some work to do tonight, Jude.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to intrude. Will you come for dinner this week?”

“I’ll think about it. I’ll let you know.”

“Why do you hate me so much, Duv?”

“I don’t hate you. And we were about to get off the phone, I think.”

“Don’t forget to call,” she says. Clutching at straws.

 

 

EIGHT.

 

 

Toni. I should tell you about Toni now.

I lived with Toni for seven weeks, one summer eight years ago. That’s as long as I’ve ever lived with anybody, except my parents and my sister, whom I got away from as soon as I decently could, and myself, whom I can’t get away from at all. Toni was one of the two great loves of my life, the other being Kitty. I’ll tell you about Kitty some other time.

Can I reconstruct Toni? Let’s try it in a few swift strokes. She was 24 that year. A tall coltish girl, five feet six, five feet seven. Slender. Agile and awkward, both at once. Long legs, long arms, thin wrists, thin ankles. Glossy black hair, very straight, cascading to her shoulders. Warm, quick brown eyes, alert and quizzical. A witty, shrewd girl, not really well educated but extraordinarily wise. The face by no means conventionally pretty—too much mouth, too much nose, the cheekbones too high—but yet producing a sexy and highly attractive effect, sufficient to make a lot of heads turn when she enters a room. Full, heavy breasts. I dig busty women: I often need a soft place to rest my tired head. So often so tired. My mother was built 32-A, no cozy pillows there. She couldn’t have nursed me if she’d wanted to, which she didn’t. (Will I ever forgive her for letting me escape from the womb? Ah, now, Selig, show some filial piety, for God’s sake!)

I never looked into Toni’s mind except twice, once on the day I met her and once a couple of weeks after that, plus a third time on the day we broke up. The third time was a sheer disastrous accident. The second was more or less an accident too, not quite. Only the first was a deliberate probe. After I realized I loved her I took care never to spy on her head. He who peeps through a hole may see what will vex him. A lesson I learned very young. Besides, I didn’t want Toni to suspect anything about my power. My curse. I was afraid it might frighten her away.

That summer I was working as an $85-a-week researcher, latest in my infinite series of odd jobs, for a well-known professional writer who was doing an immense book on the political machinations involved in the founding of the State of Israel. Eight hours a day I went through old newspaper files for him in the bowels of the Columbia library. Toni was a junior editor for the publishing house that was bringing out his book. I met her one afternoon in late spring at his posh apartment on East End Avenue. I went over there to deliver a bundle of notes on Harry Truman’s 1948 campaign speeches and she happened to be there, discussing some cuts to be made in the early chapters. Her beauty stung me. I hadn’t been with a woman in months. I automatically assumed she was the writer’s mistress—screwing editors, I’m told, is standard practice on certain high levels of the literary profession—but my old peeping-tom instincts quickly gave me the true scoop. I tossed a fast probe at him and found that his mind was a cesspool of frustrated longings for her. He ached for her and she had no yen for him at all, evidently. Next I poked into her mind. I sank in, deep, finding myself in warm, rich loam. Quickly got oriented. Stray fragments of autobiography bombarded me, incoherent, non-linear: a divorce, some good sex and some bad sex, college days, a trip to the Caribbean, all swimming around in the usual chaotic way. I got past that fast and checked out what I was after. No, she wasn’t sleeping with the writer. Physically he registered absolute zero for her. (Odd. To me he seemed attractive, a romantic and appealing figure, so far as a drearily heterosexual soul like me is able to judge such things.) She didn’t even like his writing, I learned. Then, still rummaging around, I learned something else, much more surprising: I seemed to be turning her on. Forth from her came the explicit line: I wonder if he’s free tonight. She looked upon the aging researcher, a venerable 33 and already going thin on top, and did not find him repellent. I was so shaken by that—her dark-eyed glamour, her leggy sexiness, aimed at me—that I got the hell out of her head, fast. “Here’s the Truman stuff,” I said to my employer. “There’s more coming in from the Truman Library in Missouri.” We talked a few minutes about the next assignment he had for me, and then I made as though to leave. A quick guarded look at her.

“Wait,” she said. “We can ride down together. I’m just about done here.”

The man of letters shot me a poisonous envious glance. Oh, God, fired again. But he bade us both civil goodbyes. In the elevator going down we stood apart, Toni in this corner, I in that one, with a quivering wall of tension and yearning separating and uniting us. I had to struggle to keep from reading her; I was afraid, terrified, not of getting the wrong answer but of getting the right one. In the street we stood apart also, dithering a moment. Finally I said I was getting a cab to take me to the Upper West Side—me, a cab, on $85 a week!—and could I drop her off anywhere? She said she lived on 105th and West End. Close enough. When the cab stopped outside her place she invited me up for a drink. Three rooms, indifferently furnished: mostly books, records, scatter-rugs, posters. She went to pour some wine for us and I caught her and pulled her around and kissed her. She trembled against me, or was I the one who was trembling?

Over a bowl of hot-and-sour soup at the Great Shanghai, a little later that evening, she said she’d be moving in a couple of days. The apartment belonged to her current roommate—male—with whom she’d split up just three days before. She had no place to stay. “I’ve got only one lousy room,” I said, “but it has a double bed.” Shy grins, hers, mine. So she moved in. I didn’t think she was in love with me, not at all, but I wasn’t going to ask. If what she felt for me wasn’t love, it was good enough, the best I could hope for; and in the privacy of my own head I could feel love for her. She had needed a port in a storm. I had happened to offer one. If that was all I meant to her now, so be it. So be it. There was time for things to ripen.

We slept very little, our first two weeks. Not that we were screwing all the time, though there was a lot of that; but we talked. We were new to each other, which is the best time of any relationship, when there are whole pasts to share, when everything pours out and there’s no need to search for things to say. (Not quite everything poured out. The only thing I concealed from her was the central fact of my life, the fact that had shaped my every aspect.) She talked of her marriage—young, at 20, and brief, and empty—and of how she had lived in the three years since its ending—a succession of men, a dip into occultism and Reichian therapy, a newfound dedication to her editing career. Giddy weeks.

 

*    *    *

 

Then, our third week. My second peep into her mind. A sweltering June night, with a full moon sending cold illumination through the slatted blinds into our room. She was sitting astride me—her favorite position—and her body, very pale, wore a white glow in the eerie darkness. Her long lean form rearing far above me. Her face half hidden in her own dangling unruly hair. Her eyes closed. Her lips slack. Her breasts, viewed from below, seeming even bigger than they really were. Cleopatra by moonlight. She was rocking and jouncing her way to a private ecstasy, and her beauty and the strangeness of her so overwhelmed me that I could not resist watching her at the moment of climax, watching on all levels, and so I opened the barrier that I had so scrupulously erected, and, just as she was coming, my mind touched a curious finger to her soul and received the full uprushing volcanic intensity of her pleasure. I found no thought of me in her mind. Only sheer animal frenzy, bursting from every nerve. I’ve seen that in other women, before and after Toni, as they come: they are islands, alone in the void of space, aware only of their bodies and perhaps of that intrusive rigid rod against which they thrust. When pleasure takes them it is a curiously impersonal phenomenon, no matter how titanic its impact. So it was then with Toni. I didn’t object; I knew what to expect and I didn’t feel cheated or rejected. In fact my joining of souls with her at that awesome moment served to trigger my own coming and to treble its intensity. I lost contact with her then. The upheavals of orgasm shatter the fragile telepathic link. Afterwards I felt a little sleazy at having spied, but not overly guilty about it. How magical a thing it was, after all, to have been with her in that moment. To be aware of her joy not just as mindless spasms of her loins but as jolts of brilliant light flaring across the dark terrain of her soul. An instant of beauty and wonder, an illumination never to be forgotten. But never to be repeated, either. I resolved, once more, to keep our relationship clean and honest. To take no unfair advantage of her. To stay out of her head forever after.

 

*     *     *

 

Despite which, I found myself some weeks later entering Toni’s consciousness a third time. By accident. By damnable abominable accident. Oy, that third time!

That bummer—that disaster—

That catastrophe—

 

 

NINE.

 

 

In the early spring of 1945, when he was ten years old, his loving mother and father got him a little sister. That was exactly how they phrased it: his mother, smiling her warmest phony smile, hugging him, telling him in her best this-is-how-we-talk-to-bright-children tone, “Dad and I have a wonderful surprise for you, Duvid. We’re going to get a little sister for you.”

It was no surprise, of course. They had been discussing it among themselves for months, maybe for years, always making the fallacious assumption that their son, clever as he was, didn’t understand what they were talking about. Thinking that he was unable to associate one fragment of conversation with another, that he was incapable of putting the proper antecedents to their deliberately vague pronouns, their torrent of “it” and “him.” And, naturally, he had been reading their minds. In those days the power was sharp and clear; lying in his bedroom, surrounded by his dog-eared books and his stamp albums, he could effortlessly tune in on everything that went on behind the closed door of theirs, fifty feet away. It was like an endless radio broadcast without commercials. He could listen to WJZ, WHN, WEAF, WOR, all the stations on the dial, but the one he listened to most was WPMS, Paul-and-Martha-Selig. They had no secrets from him. He had no shame about spying. Preternaturally adult, privy to all their privities, he meditated daily on the raw torrid stuff of married life: the financial anxieties, the moments of sweet undifferentiated lovingness, the moments of guiltily suppressed hatred for the wearisome eternal spouse, the copulatory joys and anguishes, the comings together and the failings apart, the mysteries of failed orgasms and wilted erections, the intense and terrifyingly singleminded concentration on the growth and proper development of The Child. Their minds poured forth a steady stream of rich yeasty foam and he lapped it all up. Reading their souls was his game, his toy, his religion, his revenge. They never suspected he was doing it. That was one point on which he constantly sought reassurance, anxiously prying for it, and constantly he was reassured: they didn’t dream his gift existed. They merely thought he was abnormally intelligent, and never questioned the means by which he learned so much about so many improbable things. Perhaps if they had realized the truth, they would have choked him in his crib. But they had no inkling. He went on comfortably spying, year after year, his perceptions deepening as he came to comprehend more and more of the material his parents unwittingly offered.

He knew that Dr. Hittner—baffled, wholly out of his depth with the strange Selig child—believed it would be better for everyone if David had a sibling. That was the word he used, sibling, and David had to fish the meaning out of Hittner’s head as though out of a dictionary. Sibling: a brother or a sister. Oh, the treacherous horse-faced bastard! The one thing young David had asked Hittner not to suggest, and naturally he had suggested it. But what else could he have expected? The desirability of siblings had been in Hittner’s mind all along, lying there like a grenade. David, picking his mother’s mind one night, had found the text of a letter from Hittner. The only child is an emotionally deprived child. Without the rough-and-tumble interplay with siblings he has no way of learning the best techniques of relating to his peers, and he develops a dangerously burdensome relation with his parents, for whom he becomes a companion instead of a dependent. Hittner’s universal panacea: lots of siblings. As though there are no neurotics in big families.

David was aware of his parents’ frantic attempts at filling Hittner’s prescription. No time to waste; the boy grows older all the time, siblingless, lacking each day the means of learning the best techniques of relating to his peers. And so, night after night, the poor aging bodies of Paul and Martha Selig grapple with the problem. They force themselves sweatily onward to self-defeating prodigies of lustfulness, and each month the bad news comes in a rush of blood: there will be no sibling this time. But at last the seed takes root. They said nothing about that to him, ashamed, perhaps, to admit to an eight-year-old that such things as sexual intercourse occurred in their lives. But he knew. He knew why his mother’s belly was beginning to bulge and why they still hesitated to explain it to him. He knew, too, that his mother’s mysterious “appendicitis” attack of July, 1944, was actually a miscarriage. He knew why they both wore tragic faces for months afterward. He knew that Martha’s doctor had told her that autumn that it really wasn’t wise for her to be having babies at the age of 35, that if they were going to insist on a second child the best course was to adopt one. He knew his father’s traumatic response to that suggestion: What, bring into the household a bastard that some shiksa threw away? Poor old Paul lay tossing awake every night for weeks, not even confessing to his wife why he was so upset, but unknowingly spilling the whole thing to his nosy son. The insecurities, the irrational hostilities. Why do I have to raise a stranger’s brat, just because this psychiatrist says it’ll do David some good? What kind of garbage will I be taking into the house? How can I love this child that isn’t mine? How can I tell it that it’s a Jew when—who knows?—it may have been made by some Irish mick, some Italian bootblack, some carpenter? All this the all-perceiving David perceives. Finally the elder Selig voices his misgivings, carefully edited, to his wife, saying, Maybe Hittner’s wrong, maybe this is just a phase David’s going through and another child isn’t the right answer at all. Telling her to consider the expense, the changes they’d have to make in their way of life—they’re not young, they’ve grown settled in their ways, a child at this time of their lives, the getting up at four in the morning, the crying, the diapers. And David silently cheering his father on, because who needs this intruder, this sibling, this enemy of the peace? But Martha tearfully fights back, quoting Hittner’s letter, reading key passages out of her extensive library on child psychology, offering damning statistics on the incidence of neurosis, maladjustment, bed-wetting, and homosexuality among only children. The old man yields by Christmas. Okay, okay, we’ll adopt, but let’s not take just anything, hear? It’s got to be Jewish. Wintry weeks of touring the adoption agencies, pretending all the while to David that these trips to Manhattan are mere innocuous shopping excursions. He wasn’t fooled. How could anyone fool this omniscient child? He had only to look behind their foreheads to know that they were shopping for a sibling. His one comfort was the hope that they would fail to find one. This was still wartime: if you couldn’t buy a new car, maybe you couldn’t get siblings either. For many weeks that appeared to be the case. Not many babies were available, and those that were seemed to have some grave defect: insufficiently Jewish, or too fragile-looking, or too cranky, or of the wrong sex. Some boys were available but Paul and Martha had decided to get David a little sister. Already that limited things considerably, since people tended not to give girls up for adoption as readily as they did boys, but one snowy night in March David detected an ominous note of satisfaction in the mind of his mother, newly returned from yet another shopping trip, and, looking more closely, he realized that the quest was over. She had found a lovely little girl, four months old. The mother, aged 19, was not only certifiably Jewish but even a college girl, described by the agency as “extremely intelligent.” Not so intelligent, evidently, as to avoid being fertilized by a handsome, young air force captain, also Jewish, while he was home on leave in February, 1944. Though he felt remorse over his carelessness he was unwilling to marry the victim of his lusts, and was now on active duty in the Pacific, where, so far as the girl’s parents were concerned, he should only be shot down ten times over. They had forced her to give the child out for adoption. David wondered why Martha hadn’t brought the baby home with her that very afternoon, but soon he discovered that several weeks of legal formalities lay ahead, and April was well along before his mother finally announced, “Dad and I have a wonderful surprise for you, Duvid.”

They named her Judith Hannah Selig, after her adoptive father’s recently deceased mother. David hated her instantly. He had been afraid they were going to move her into his bedroom, but no, they set up her crib in their own room; nevertheless, her crying filled the whole apartment night after night, unending raucous wails. It was incredible how much noise she could emit. Paul and Martha spent practically all their time feeding her or playing with her or changing her diapers, and David didn’t mind that very much, for it kept them busy and took some of the pressure off him. But he loathed having Judith around. He saw nothing cute about her pudgy limbs and curly hair and dimpled cheeks. Watching her while she was being changed, he found some academic interest in observing her little pink slit, so alien to his experience; but once he had seen it his curiosity was assuaged. So they have a slit instead of a thing. Okay, but so what? In general she was an irritating distraction. He couldn’t read properly because of the noise she made, and reading was his one pleasure. The apartment was always full of relatives or friends, paying ceremonial visits to the new baby, and their stupid conventional minds flooded the place with blunt thoughts that impinged like mallets on David’s vulnerable consciousness. Now and then he tried to read the baby’s mind, but there was nothing in it except vague blurry formless globs of cloudy sensation; he had had more rewarding insights reading the minds of dogs and cats. She didn’t appear to have any thoughts. All he could pick up were feelings of hunger, of drowsiness, and of dim orgasmic release as she wet her diaper. About ten days after she arrived, he decided to try to kill her telepathically. While his parents were busy elsewhere he went to their room, peered into his sister’s bassinet, and concentrated as hard as he could on draining her unformed mind out of her skull. If only he could manage somehow to suck the spark of intellect from her, to draw her consciousness into himself, to transform her into an empty mindless shell, she would surely die. He sought to sink his hooks into her soul. He stared into her eyes and opened his power wide, taking her entire feeble output and pulling for more. Come. . . . come. . . . your mind is sliding toward me. . . . I’m getting it, I’m getting all of it. . . . zam! I have your whole mind! Unmoved by his conjurations, she continued to gurgle and wave her arms about. He stared more intensely, redoubling the vigor of his concentration. Her smile wavered and vanished. Her brows puckered into a frown. Did she know he was attacking her, or was she merely bothered by the faces he was making? Come. . . . come. . . . your mind is sliding toward me. . . .

For a moment he thought he might actually succeed. But then she shot him a look of frosty malevolence, incredibly fierce, truly terrifying coming from an infant, and he backed away, frightened, fearing some sudden counterattack. An instant later she was gurgling again. She had defeated him. He went on hating her, but he never again tried to harm her. She, by the time she was old enough to know what the concept of hatred meant, was well aware of how her brother felt about her. And she hated back. She proved to be a far more efficient hater than he was. Oh, was she ever an expert at hating.

 

 

TEN.

 

 

The subject of this composition is My Very First Acid Trip.

My first and my last, eight years ago. Actually it wasn’t my trip at all, but Toni’s. D-lysergic acid diethlyamide has never passed through my digestive tract, if truth be told. What I did was hitchhike on Toni’s trip. In a sense I’m still a hitchhiker on that trip, that very bad trip. Let me tell you.

This happened in the summer of ’68. That summer was a bad trip all in itself. Do you remember ’68 at all? That was the year we all woke up to the fact that the whole business was coming apart. I mean American society. That pervasive feeling of decay and imminent collapse, so familiar to us all—it really dates from ’68, I think. When the world around us became a metaphor for the process of violent entropic increase that had been going on inside our souls—inside my soul, at any rate—for some time.

That summer Lyndon Baines MacBird was in the White House, just barely, serving out his time after his abdication in March. Bobby Kennedy had finally met the bullet with his name on it, and so had Martin Luther King. Neither killing was any surprise; the only surprise was that they had been so long in coming. The blacks were burning down the cities—back then, it was their own neighborhoods they burned, remember? Ordinary everyday people were starting to wear freaky clothes to work, bells and body shirts and mini-miniskirts, and hair was getting longer even for those over 25. It was the year of sideburns and Buffalo Bill mustachios. Gene McCarthy, a Senator from—where? Minnesota? Wisconsin?—was quoting poetry at news conferences as part of his attempt to gain the Democratic presidential nomination, but it was a sure bet that the Democrats would give it to Hubert Horatio Humphrey when they got together for their convention in Chicago. (And wasn’t that convention a lovely festival of American patriotism?) Over in the other camp Rockefeller was running hard to catch up with Tricky Dick, but everybody knew where that was going to get him. Babies were dying of malnutrition in a place called Biafra, which you don’t remember, and the Russians were moving troops into Czechoslovakia in yet another demonstration of socialist brotherhood. In a place called Vietnam, which you probably wish you didn’t remember either, we were dumping napalm on everything in sight for the sake of promoting peace and democracy, and a lieutenant named William Calley had recently coordinated the liquidation of 100-odd sinister and dangerous old men, women, and children at the town of Mylai, only we didn’t know anything about that yet. The books everybody was reading were Couples, Myra Breckinridge, The Confessions of Nat Turner, and The Money Game. I forget that year’s movies. Easy Rider hadn’t happened yet and The Graduate was the year before. Maybe it was the year of Rosemary’s Baby. Yes, that sounds right: 1968 was the devil’s year for sure. It was also the year when a lot of middle-class middle-aged people started using, self-consciously, terms like “pot” and “grass” when they meant “marijuana.” Some of them were smoking it as well as talking it. (Me. Finally turning on at the age of 33.) Let’s see, what else? President Johnson nominated Abe Fortas to replace Earl Warren as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Where are you now, Chief Justice Fortas, when we need you? The Paris peace talks, believe it or not, had just begun that summer. In later years it came to seem that the talks had been going on since the beginning of time, as eternal and everlasting as the Grand Canyon and the Republican Party, but no, they were invented in 1968. Denny McLain was on his way toward winning 31 games that season. I guess McLain was the only human being who found 1968 a worthwhile experience. His team lost the World Series, though. (No. What am I saying? The Tigers won, 4 games to 3. But Mickey Lolich was the star, not McLain.) That was the sort of year it was. Oh, Christ, I’ve forgotten one significant chunk of history. In the spring of ‘68 we had the riots at Columbia, with radical students occupying the campus (“Kirk Must Go!”) and classes being suspended (“Shut it Down!”) and final exams called off and nightly confrontations with the police, in the course of which a good many undergraduate skulls were laid open and much high-quality blood leaked into the gutters. How funny it is that I pushed that event out of my mind, when of all the things I’ve listed here it was the only one I actually experienced at first hand. Standing at Broadway and 116th Street watching platoons of cold-eyed fuzz go racing toward Butler Library. (“Fuzz” is what we called policemen before we started calling them “pigs,” which happened a little later that same year.) Holding my hand aloft in the forked V-for-Peace gesture and screaming idiotic slogans with the best of them. Cowering in the lobby of Furnald Hall as the blue-clad nightstick brigade went on its rampage. Debating tactics with a ragged-bearded SDS gauleiter who finally spat in my face and called me a stinking liberal fink. Watching sweet Barnard girls ripping open their blouses and waving their bare breasts at horny, exasperated cops, while simultaneously shrieking ferocious Anglo-Saxonisms that the Barnard girls of my own remote era hadn’t ever heard. Watching a group of young shaggy Columbia men ritualistically pissing on a pile of research documents that had been liberated from the filing cabinet of some hapless instructor going for his doctorate. It was then that I knew there could be no hope for mankind, when even the best of us were capable of going berserk in the cause of love and peace and human equality. On those dark nights I looked into many minds and found only hysteria and madness, and once, in despair, realizing I was living in a world where two factions of lunatics were battling for control of the asylum, I went off to vomit in Riverside Park after a particularly bloody riot and was caught unawares (me, caught unawares!) by a lithe 14-year-old black mugger who smilingly relieved me of $22.

I was living near Columbia in ’68, in a seedy residence hotel on 114th Street, where I had one medium-big room plus kitchen and bathroom privileges, cockroaches at no extra charge. It was the very same place where I had lived as an undergraduate in my junior and senior years, 1955-56. The building had been going downhill even then and was an abominable hellhole when I came back to it twelve years later—the courtyard was littered with broken hypodermic needles the way another building’s courtyard might be littered with cigarette butts—but I have an odd way, maybe masochistic, of not letting go of bits of my past however ugly they may be, and when I needed a place to live I picked that one. Besides, it was cheap—$14.50 a week—and I had to be close to the University because of the work I was doing, researching that Israel book. Are you still following me? I was telling you about my first acid trip, which was really Toni’s trip.

We had shared our shabby room nearly seven weeks—a bit of May, all of June, some of July—through thick and thin, heat waves and rainstorms, misunderstandings and reconciliations, and it had been a happy time, perhaps the happiest of my life. I loved her and I think she loved me. I haven’t had much love in my life. That isn’t intended as a grab for your pity, just as a simple statement of fact, objective and cool. The nature of my condition diminishes my capacity to love and be loved. A man in my circumstances, wide open to everyone’s innermost thoughts, really isn’t going to experience a great deal of love. He is poor at giving love because he doesn’t much trust his fellow human beings: he knows too many of their dirty little secrets, and that kills his feelings for them. Unable to give, he cannot get. His soul, hardened by isolation and ungivingness, becomes inaccessible, and so it is not easy for others to love him. The loop closes upon itself and he is trapped within. Nevertheless I loved Toni, having taken special care not to see too deeply into her, and I didn’t doubt my love was returned. What defines love, anyway? We preferred each other’s company to the company of anyone else. We excited one another in every imaginable way. We never bored each other. Our bodies mirrored our souls’ closeness: I never failed of erection, she never lacked for lubrication, our couplings carried us both to ecstasy. I’d call these things the parameters of love.

On the Friday of our seventh week Toni came home from her office with two small squares of white blotting paper in her purse. In the center of each square was a faint blue-green stain. I studied them a moment or two, without comprehending.

“Acid,” she said finally.

“Acid?”

“You know. LSD. Teddy gave them to me.”

Teddy was her boss, the editor-in-chief. LSD, yes. I knew. I had read Huxley on mescaline in 1957. I was fascinated and tempted. For years I had flirted with the psychedelic experience, even once attempting to volunteer for an LSD research program at the Columbia Medical Center. I was too late signing up, though; and then, as the drug became a fad, came all the horror stories of suicides, psychoses, bad trips. Knowing my vulnerabilities, I decided it was the part of wisdom to leave acid to others. Though still I was curious about it. And now these squares of blotting paper sitting in the palm of Toni’s hand.

“It’s supposed to be dynamite stuff,” she said. “Absolutely pure, laboratory quality. Teddy’s already tripped on a tab from this batch and he says it’s very smooth, very clean, no speed in it or any crap like that. I thought we could spend tomorrow tripping, and sleep it off on Sunday.”

“Both of us?”

“Why not?”

“Do you think it’s safe for both of us to be out of our minds at the same time?”

She gave me a peculiar look. “Do you think acid drives you out of your mind?”

“I don’t know. I’ve heard a lot of scary stories.”

“You’ve never tripped?”

“No,” I said. “Have you?”

“Well, no. But I’ve watched friends of mine while they were tripping.” I felt a pang at this reminder of the life she had led before I met her. “They don’t go out of their minds, David. There’s a kind of wild high for an hour or so when things sometimes get jumbled up, but basically somebody who’s tripping sits there as lucid and as calm as—well, Aldous Huxley. Can you imagine Huxley out of his mind? Gibbering and drooling and smashing furniture?”

“What about the fellow who killed his mother-in-law while he was on acid, though? And the girl who jumped out of a window?”

Toni shrugged. “They were unstable,” she said loftily. “Perhaps murder or suicide was where they were really at, and the acid just gave them the push they needed to go and do it. But that doesn’t mean you would, or me. Or maybe the doses were too strong, or the stuff was cut with some other drug. Who knows? Those are one-in-a-million cases. I have friends who’ve tripped fifty, sixty times, and they’ve never had any trouble.” She sounded impatient with me. There was a patronizing, lecturing tone in her voice. Her esteem for me seemed clearly diminished by these old-maid hesitations of mine; we were on the threshold of a real rift. “What’s the matter, David? Are you afraid to trip?”

“I think it’s unwise for both of us to trip at once, that’s all. When we aren’t sure where the stuff is going to take us.”

“Tripping together is the most loving thing two people can do,” she said.

“But it’s a risky thing. We just don’t know. Look, you can get more acid if you want it, can’t you?”

“I suppose so.”

“Okay, then. Let’s do this thing in an orderly way, one step at a time. There’s no hurry. You trip tomorrow and I’ll watch. I’ll trip on Sunday and you’ll watch. If we both like what the acid does to our heads, we can trip together next time. All right, Toni? All right?”

It wasn’t all right. I saw her begin to speak, begin to frame some argument, some objection; but also I saw her catch herself, back up, rethink her position, and decide not to make an issue of it. Although I at no time entered her mind, her facial expressions made her sequence of thoughts wholly evident to me. “All right,” she said softly. “It isn’t worth a hassle.”

Saturday morning she skipped breakfast—she’d been told to trip on an empty stomach—and, after I had eaten, we sat for a time in the kitchen with one of the squares of blotting paper lying innocently on the table between us. We pretended it wasn’t there. Toni seemed a little clutched; I didn’t know whether she was bothered about my insisting that she trip without me or just troubled, here at the brink of it, by the whole idea of tripping. There wasn’t much conversation. She filled an ashtray with a great dismal mound of half-smoked cigarettes. From time to time she grinned nervously. From time to time I took her hand and smiled encouragingly. During this touching scene various of the tenants with whom we shared the kitchen on this floor of the hotel drifted in and out. First Eloise, the sleek black hooker. Then Miss Theotokis, the grim-faced nurse who worked at St. Luke’s. Mr. Wang, the mysterious little roly-poly Chinese who always walked around in his underwear. Aitken, the scholarly fag from Toledo, and his cadaverous mainlining roommate, Donaldson. A couple of them nodded to us but no one actually said anything, not even “Good morning.” In this place it was proper to behave as though your neighbors were invisible. The fine old New York tradition. About half past ten in the morning Toni said, “Get me some orange juice, will you?” I poured a glass from the container in the refrigerator that was labeled with my name. Giving me a wink and a broad toothy smile, all false bravado, she wadded up the blotting paper and pushed it into her mouth, bolting it and gulping the orange juice as a chaser.

“How long will it take to hit?” I asked.

“About an hour and a half,” she said.

In fact it was more like fifty minutes. We were back in our own room, the door locked, faint scratchy sounds of Bach coming from the portable phonograph. I was trying to read, and so was Toni; the pages weren’t turning very fast. She looked up suddenly and said, “I’m starting to feel a little funny.”

“Funny how?”

“Dizzy. A slight touch of nausea. There’s a prickling at the back of my neck.”

“Can I get you anything? Glass of water? Juice?”

“Nothing, thanks. I’m fine. Really I am.” A smile, timid but genuine. She seemed a little apprehensive but not at all frightened. Eager for the voyage. I put down my book and watched her vigilantly, feeling protective, almost wishing that I’d have some occasion to be of service to her. I didn’t want her to have a bad trip but I wanted her to need me.

She gave me bulletins on the progress of the acid through her nervous system. I took notes until she indicated that the scratching of pencil against paper was distracting her. Visual effects were beginning. The walls looked a trifle concave to her, and the flaws in the plaster were taking on extraordinary texture and complexity. The color of everything was unnaturally bright. The shafts of sunlight coming through the dirty window were prismatic, shattering and spewing pieces of the spectrum over the floor. The music—I had a stack of her favorite records on the changer—had acquired a curious new intensity; she was having difficulty following melodic lines, and it seemed to her that the turntable kept stopping and starting, but the sound itself, as sound, had some indescribable quality of density and tangibility that fascinated her. There was a whistling sound in her ears, too, as of air rushing past her cheeks. She spoke of a pervading sense of strangeness—“I’m on some other planet,” she said twice. She looked flushed, excited, happy. Remembering the terrible tales I had heard of acid-induced descents into hell, harrowing accounts of grueling bummers lovingly recounted for the delight of the millions by the diligent anonymous journalists of Time and Life, I nearly wept in relief at this evidence that my Toni would come through her journey unscathed. I had feared the worst. But she was making out all right. Her eyes were closed, her face was serene and exultant, her breathing was deep and relaxed. Lost in transcendental realms of mystery was my Toni. She was barely speaking to me now, breaking her silences only every few minutes to murmur something indistinct and oblique. Half an hour had passed since she first had reported strange sensations. As she drifted deeper into her trip, my love for her grew deeper also. Her ability to cope with acid was proof of the basic toughness of her personality, and that delighted me. I admire capable women. Already I was planning my own trip for the next day—selecting the musical accompaniment, trying to imagine the sort of interesting distortions of reality I’d experience, looking forward to comparing notes with Toni afterward. I was regretting the cowardice that had deprived me of the pleasure of tripping with Toni this day.

But what is this, now? What’s happening to my head? Why this sudden feeling of suffocation? The pounding in my chest? The dryness in my throat? The walls are flexing; the air seems close and heavy; my right arm is suddenly a foot longer than the left one. These are effects Toni had noticed and described a little while ago. Why do I feel them now? I tremble. Muscles leap about of their own accord in my thighs. Is this what they call a contact high? Merely being so close to Toni while she trips—did she breathe particles of LSD at me, have I inadvertently turned on through some contagion of the atmosphere?

“My dear Selig,” says my armchair smugly, “how can you be so foolish? Obviously you’re picking these phenomena right out of her mind!”

Obviously? Is it so obvious? I consider the possibility. Am I reading Toni without knowing it? Apparently I am. In the past some effort of concentration, however slight, has always been necessary in order for me to manage a fine-focus peep into another head. But it seems that the acid must intensify her outputs and bring them to me unsolicited. What other explanation can there be? She is broadcasting her trip; and somehow I have tuned to her wavelength, despite all my noble resolutions about respecting her privacy. And now the acid’s strangenesses, spreading across the gap between us, infect me as well.

Shall I get out of her mind?

The acid effects distract me. I look at Toni and she seems transformed. A small dark mole on her lower cheek, near the corner of her mouth, flashes a vortex of blazing color: red, blue, violet, green. Her lips are too full, her mouth too wide. All those teeth. Row upon row upon row, like a shark. Why have I never noticed that predatory mouth before? She frightens me. Her neck elongates; her body compresses; her breasts move about like restless cats beneath her familiar red sweater, which itself has taken on an ominous, threatening purplish tinge.  To escape her I glance toward the window. A pattern of cracks that I have never been aware of before runs through the soiled panes. In a moment, surely, the shattered window will implode and shower us with fiery fragments of glass. The building across the street is unnaturally squat today. There is menace in its altered form. The ceiling is coming toward me, too; I hear muffled drumbeats overhead—the footsteps of my upstairs neighbor, I tell myself—and I imagine cannibals preparing their dinner. Is this what tripping is like? Is this what the young of our nation have been doing to themselves, voluntarily, even eagerly, for the sake of amusement?

I should turn this off, before it freaks me altogether. I want out.

Well, easily done. I have my ways of stopping down the inputs, of blocking the flow. Only they don’t work this time. I am helpless before the power of the acid. I try to shut myself away from these unfamiliar and unsettling sensations, and they march onward into me all the same. I am wide open to everything emanating from Toni. I am caught up in it. I go deeper and deeper. This is a trip. This is a bad trip. This is a very bad trip. How odd: Toni was having a good trip, wasn’t she? So it seemed to one outside observer. Then why do I, accidentally hitchhiking on her trip, find myself having a bad one?

Whatever is in Toni’s mind floods into mine. Receiving another’s soul is no new experience for me, but this is a transfer such as I have never had before, for the information, modulated by the drug, comes to me in ghastly distortions. I am an unwilling spectator in Toni’s soul, and what I see is a feast of demons. Can such darkness really live within her? I saw nothing like this those other two times: has the acid released some level of nightmare not accessible to me before? Her past is on parade. Gaudy images, bathed in a lurid light. Lovers. Copulations. Abominations. A torrent of menstrual blood, or is that scarlet river something more sinister? Here is a clot of pain: what is that, cruelty to others, cruelty to self? And look how she gives herself to that army of monstrous men! They advance mechanically, a thundering legion. Their rigid cocks blaze with a terrible red light. One by one they plunge into her, and I see the light streaming from her loins as they plow her. Their faces are masks. I know none of them. Why am I not on line too? Where am I? Where am I? Ah, there: off to one side, insignificant, irrelevant. Is that thing me? Is that how she really sees me? A hairy vampire bat, a crouching huddled bloodsucker? Or is that merely David Selig’s own image of David Selig, bouncing between us like the reflections in a barber shop’s parallel mirrors? God help me, am I laying my own bad trip on her, then reading it back from her and blaming her for harboring nightmares not of her own making?

How can I break this link?

I stumble to my feet. Staggering, splay-footed, nauseated. The room whirls. Where is the door? The doorknob retreats from me. I lunge for it.

“David?” Her voice reverberates unendingly. “David David David David David David—”

 “Some fresh air,” I mutter. “Just stepping outside a minute—”

It does no good. The nightmare images pursue me through the door. I lean against the sweating wall, clinging to a flickering sconce. The Chinaman drifts by me as though a ghost. Far away I hear the telephone ringing. The refrigerator door slams, and slams again, and slams again, and the Chinaman goes by me a second time from the same direction, and the doorknob retreats from me, as the universe folds back upon itself, locking me into a looped moment. Entropy decreases. The green wall sweats green blood. A voice like thistles says, “Selig? Is something wrong?” It’s Donaldson, the junkie. His face is a skull’s face. His hand on my shoulder is all bones. “Are you sick?” he asks. I shake my head. He leans toward me until his empty eye-sockets are inches from my face, and studies me a long moment. He says, “You’re tripping, man! Isn’t that right? Listen, if you’re freaking out, come on down the hall, we’ve got some stuff that might help you."

“No. No problem.”

I go lurching into my room. The door, suddenly flexible, will not close; I push it with both hands, holding it in place until the latch clicks. Toni is sitting where I left her. She looks baffled. Her face is a monstrous thing, pure Picasso; I turn away from her, dismayed.

“David?”

Her voice is cracked and harsh, and seems to be pitched in two octaves at once, with a filling of scratchy wool between the top tone and the bottom. I wave my hands frantically, trying to get her to stop talking, but she goes on, expressing concern for me, wanting to know what’s happening, why I’ve been running in and out of the room. Every sound she makes is torment for me. Nor do the images cease to flow from her mind to mine. That shaggy toothy bat, wearing my face, still glowers in a corner of her skull. Toni, I thought you loved me. Toni, I thought I made you happy. I drop to my knees and explore the dirt-encrusted carpet, a million years old, a faded thinning threadbare piece of the Pleistocene. She comes to me, bending down solicitously, she who is tripping looking after the welfare of her untripping companion, who mysteriously is tripping also. “I don’t understand,” she whispers. “You’re crying, David. Your face is all blotchy. Did I say something wrong? Please don’t carry on, David. I was having such a good trip, and now—I just don’t understand—”

The bat. The bat. Spreading its rubbery wings. Baring its yellow fangs.

Biting. Sucking. Drinking.

I choke a few words out: “I’m—tripping—too—”

My face pushed against the carpet. The smell of dust in my dry nostrils. Trilobites crawling through my brain. A bat crawling through hers. Shrill laughter in the hallway. The telephone. The refrigerator door: slam, slam, slam! The cannibals dancing upstairs. The ceiling pressing against my back. My hungry mind looting Toni’s soul. He who peeps through a hole may see what will vex him. Toni says, “You took the other acid? When?”

“I didn’t.”

“Then how can you be tripping?”

I make no reply. I crouch, I huddle, I sweat, I moan. This is the descent into hell. Huxley warned me. I didn’t want Toni’s trip. I didn’t ask to see any of this. My defenses are destroyed now. She overwhelms me. She engulfs me.

Toni says, “Are you reading my mind, David?”

“Yes.” The miserable ultimate confession. “I’m reading your mind.”

“What did you say?”

“I said I’m reading your mind. I can see every thought. Every experience. I see myself the way you see me. Oh, Christ, Toni, Toni, Toni, it’s so awful!”

She tugs at me and tries to pull me up to look at her.. Finally I rise. Her face is horribly pale; her eyes are rigid. She asks for clarifications. What’s this about reading minds? Did I really say it, or is it something her acid-blurred mind invented? I really said it, I tell her. You asked me if I was reading your mind and I said yes, I was.

“I never asked any such thing,” she says.

“I heard you ask it.”

“But I didn’t—” Trembling, now. Both of us. Her voice is bleak. “You’re trying to bum-trip me, aren’t you, David? I don’t understand. Why would you want to hurt me? Why are you messing me up? It was a good trip. It was a good trip.”

“Not for me,” I say.

“You weren’t tripping.”

“But I was.”

She gives me a look of total incomprehension and pulls away from me and throws herself on the bed, sobbing. Out of her mind, cutting through the grotesqueries of the acid images, comes a blast of raw emotion: fear, resentment, pain, anger. She thinks I’ve deliberately tried to injure her. Nothing I can say now will repair things. Nothing can ever repair things. She despises me. I am a vampire to her, a bloodsucker, a leech; she knows my gift for what it is. We have crossed some fatal threshold and she will never again think of me without anguish and shame. Nor I her. I rush from the room, down the hall to the room shared by Donaldson and Aitken. “Bad trip,” I mutter. “Sorry to trouble you, but—”

 

*     *     *

 

I stayed with them the rest of the afternoon. They gave me a tranquilizer and brought me gently through the downslope of the trip. The psychedelic images still came to me out of Toni for half an hour or so, as though an inexorable umbilical chain linked us across all the length of the hallway; but then to my relief the sense of contact began to slip and fade, and suddenly, with a kind of audible click at the moment of severance, it was gone altogether. The flamboyant phantoms ceased to vex my soul. Color and dimension and texture returned to their proper states. And at last I was free from that merciless reflected self-image. Once I was fully alone in my own skull again I felt like weeping to celebrate my deliverance, but no tears would come, and I sat passively, sipping a Bromo-Seltzer. Time trickled away. Donaldson and Aitken and I talked in a peaceful, civilized, burned-out way about Bach, medieval art, Richard M. Nixon, pot, and a great many other things. I hardly knew these two, yet they were willing to surrender their time to ease a stranger’s pain. Eventually I felt better. Shortly before six o’clock, thanking them gravely, I went back to my room. Toni was not there. The place seemed oddly altered. Books were gone from the shelves, prints from the walls; the closet door stood open and half the things in it were missing. In my befuddled, fatigued state it took me a moment or two to grasp what had happened. At first I imagined burglary, abduction, but then I saw the truth. She had moved out.

 

 

ELEVEN.

 

 

Today there is a hint of encroaching winter in the air: it takes tentative nips at the cheeks. October is dying too quickly. The sky is mottled and unhealthy-looking, cluttered by sad, heavy, low-hanging clouds. Yesterday it rained, skinning yellow leaves from the trees, and now they lie pasted to the pavement of College Walk, their tips fluttering raggedly in the harsh breeze. There are puddles everywhere. As I settled down beside Alma Mater’s massive green form I primly spread newspaper sheets, selected portions of today’s issue of The Columbia Daily Spectator, over the cold damp stone steps. Twenty-odd years ago, when I was a foolishly ambitious sophomore dreaming of a career in journalism—how sly, a reporter who reads minds!—Spec seemed central to my life; now it serves only for keeping my rump dry.

Here I sit. Office hours. On my knees rests a thick manila folder, held closed by a ballsy big rubber band. Within, neatly typed, each with its own coppery paperclip, are five term papers, the products of my busy week. The Novels of Kafka. Shaw as Tragedian. The Concept of Synthetic A Priori Statements. Odysseus as a Symbol of Society. Aeschylus and the Aristotelian Tragedy. The old academic bullshit, confirmed in its hopeless fecality by the cheerful willingness of these bright young men to let an old grad turn the stuff out for them. This is the day appointed for delivering the goods and, perhaps, picking up some new assignments. Five minutes to eleven. My clients will be arriving soon. Meanwhile I scan the passing parade. Students hurrying by, clutching mounds of books. Hair rippling in the wind, breasts bobbling. They all look frighteningly young to me, even the bearded ones. Especially the bearded ones. Do you realize that each year there are more and more young people in the world? Their tribe ever increases as the old farts drop off the nether end of the curve and I shuttle graveward. Even the professors look young to me these days. There are people with doctorates who are fifteen years younger than I am. Isn’t that a killer? Imagine a kid born in 1950 who has a doctorate already. In 1950 I was shaving three times a week, and masturbating every Wednesday and Saturday; I was a hearty pubescent bulyak five feet nine inches tall, with ambitions and griefs and knowledge, with an identity. In 1950 today’s newly fledged Ph.D.’s were toothless infants just squirting from the womb, their faces puckered, their skins sticky with amniotic juices. How can those infants have doctorates so soon? Those infants have lapped me as I plod along the track.

I find my own company wearisome when I descend into self-pity. To divert myself I try to touch the minds of passers-by and learn what I can learn. Playing my old game, my only game. Selig the voyeur, the soul-vampire, ripping off the intimacies of innocent strangers to cheer his chilly heart. But no: my head is full of cotton today. Only muffled murmurs come to me, indistinct, content-free. No discrete words, no flashes of identity, no visions of soul’s essence. This is one of the bad days. All inputs converge into unintelligibility; each bit of information is identical to all others. It is the triumph of entropy. I am reminded of Forster’s Mrs. Moore, listening tensely for revelation in the echoing Marabar caves, and hearing only the same monotonous noise, the same meaningless all-dissolving sound: Boum. The sum and essence of mankind’s earnest strivings: Boum. The minds flashing past me on College Walk now give me only: Boum. Perhaps it is all I deserve. Love, fear, faith, churlishness, hunger, self-satisfaction, every species of interior monolog, all come to me with identical content. Boum. I must work to correct this. It is not too late to wage war against entropy. Gradually, sweating, struggling, scrabbling for solid purchase, I widen the aperture, coaxing my perceptions to function. Yes. Yes. Come back to life. Get it up, you miserable spy! Give me my fix! Within me the power stirs. The inner murk clears a bit; stray scraps of isolated but coherent thought find their way into me. Neurotic but not altogether psycho yet. Going to see the department head and tell him to shove it up. Tickets for the opera, but I have to. Fucking is fun, fucking is very important, but there’s more. Like standing on a very high diving board about to take a plunge. This scratchy chaotic chatter tells me nothing except that the power is not yet dead, and I take comfort enough in that. I visualize the power as a sort of worm wrapped around my cerebrum, a poor tired worm, wrinkled and shrunken, its once-glossy skin now ulcerous with shabby, flaking patches. That is a relatively recent image, but even in happier days I always thought of the gift as something apart from myself, something intrusive. An inhabitant. It and me, me and it. I used to discuss such things with Nyquist. (Has he entered these exhalations yet? Perhaps not. A person I once knew, a certain Tom Nyquist, a former friend of mine. Who carried a somewhat similar intruder within his skull.) Nyquist didn’t like my outlook. “That’s schizoid, man, setting up a duality like that. Your power is you. You are your power. Why try to alienate yourself from your own brain?” Probably Nyquist was right, but it’s much too late. It and me is how it will be, till death do us part.

Here is my client, the bulky halfback, Paul F. Bruno. His face is swollen and purple, and he is unsmiling, as though Saturday’s heroics have cost him some teeth. I flip the rubber band down, extract The Novels of Kafka, and offer the paper to him. “Six pages,” I say. He has given me a ten-dollar advance. “You owe me another eleven bucks. Do you want to read it first?”

“How good is it?”

“You won’t be sorry.”

“I’ll take your word for it.” He manages a painful, close-mouthed grin. Pulling forth his thick wallet, he crosses my palm with greenbacks. I slip quickly into his mind, just for the hell of it now that my power is working again, a fast psychic rip-off, and pick up the surface levels: loose teeth at the football game, a sweet compensatory blow-job at the frat house Saturday night, vague plans for getting laid after next Saturday’s game, etc., etc. Concerning the present transaction I detect guilt, embarrassment, even some annoyance with me for having helped him. Oh, well: the gratitude of the goy. I pocket his money. He favors me with a curt nod and tucks The Novels of Kafka under his immense forearm. Hastily, in shame, he goes hustling down the steps and off in the direction of Hamilton Hall. I watch his broad retreating back. A sudden gust of malevolent wind, rising off the Hudson, comes knifing eastward and cuts me bone-deep.

Bruno has paused at the sundial, where a slender black student close to seven feet tall has intercepted him. A basketball player, obviously. The black wears a blue varsity jacket, green sneakers, and tight tubular yellow slacks. His legs alone seem five feet long. He and Bruno talk for a moment. Bruno points toward me. The black nods. I am about to gain a new client, I realize. Bruno vanishes and the black trots springlegged across the walk, up the steps. He is very dark, almost purple-skinned, yet his features have a Caucasian sharpness, fierce cheekbones, proud aquiline nose, thin frosty lips. He is formidably handsome, some kind of walking statuary, some sort of idol. Perhaps his genes are not Negroid at all: an Ethiopian, maybe, some tribesman of the Nile bulrushes? Yet he wears his midnight mass of kinky hair in a vast aggressive Afro halo a foot in diameter or more, fastidiously trimmed. I would not have been surprised by scarified cheeks, a bone through the nostrils. As he nears me, my mind, barely slit-wide, picks up peripheral generalized emanations of his personality. Everything is predictable, even stereotyped: I expect him to be touchy, cocky, defensive, hostile, and what comes to me is a bouillabaisse of ferocious racial pride, overwhelming physical self-satisfaction, explosive mistrust of others—especially whites. All right. Familiar patterns.

His elongated shadow falls suddenly upon me as the sun momentarily pierces the clouds. He sways bouncily on the balls of his feet. “Your name Selig?” he asks. I nod. “Yahya Lumumba,” he says.

“Pardon me?”

“Yahya Lumumba.” His eyes, glossy white against glossy purple, blaze with fury. From the impatience of his tone I realize that he is telling me his name, or at least the name he prefers to use. His tone indicates also that he assumes it’s a name everyone on this campus will recognize. Well, what would I know of college basketball stars? He could throw the ball through the hoop fifty times a game and I’d still not have heard of him. He says, “I hear you do term papers, man.”

“That’s right.”

“You got a good recommend from my pal Bruno there. How much you charge?”

“$3.50 a page. Typed, double-spaced.”

He considers it. He shows many teeth and says, “What kind of fucking rip-off is that?”

“It’s how I earn my living, Mr. Lumumba.” I hate myself for that toadying, cowardly mister. “That’s about $20 for an average-length paper. A decent job takes a fair amount of time, right?”

“Yeah. Yeah.” An elaborate shrug. “Okay, I’m not hassling you, man. I got need for your work. You know anything about Europydes?”

“Euripides?”

“That’s what I said.” He’s baiting me, coming on with exaggerated black mannerisms, talking watermelon-nigger at me with his Europydes. “That Greek cat who wrote plays.”

“I know who you mean. What sort of paper do you need, Mr. Lumumba?”

He pulls a scrap of a notebook sheet from a breast pocket and makes a great show of consulting it. “The prof he want us to compare the ‘Electra’ theme in Europydes, Sophocles, and Eesk—Aysk—”

“Aeschylus?”

“Him, yeah. Five to ten pages. It due by November 10. Can you swing it?”

“I think so,” I say, reaching for my pen. “It shouldn’t be any trouble at all,” especially since there resides in my files a paper of my own, vintage 1952, covering this very same hoary old humanities theme. “I’ll need some information about you for the heading. Exact spelling of your name, the name of your professor, the course number—” He starts to tell me these things. As I jot them down, I simultaneously open the aperture of my mind for my customary scan of the client’s interior, to give me some idea of the proper tone to use in the paper. Will I be able to do a convincing job of faking the kind of essay Yahya Lumumba is likely to turn in? It will be a taxing technical challenge if I have to write in black hipster jargon, coming on all cool and jazzy and snotty, every line laughing in the ofay prof’s fat face. I imagine I could do it: but does Lumumba want me to? Will he think I’m mocking him if I adopt the jiveass style and seem to be puffing him on as he might put on the prof? I must know these things. So I slip my snaky tendrils past his woolly scalp into the hidden gray jelly. Hello, big black man. Entering, I pick up a somewhat more immediate and vivid version of the generalized persona he constantly projects: the hyped-up black pride, the mistrust of the paleface stranger, the chuckling enjoyment of his own lean long-legged muscular frame. But these are mere residual attitudes, the standard furniture of his mind. I have not yet reached the level of this-minute thought. I have not penetrated to the essential Yahya Lumumba, the unique individual whose style I must assume. I push deeper. As I sink in, I sense a distinct warming of the psychic temperature, an outflow of heat, comparable perhaps to what a miner might experience five miles down, tunneling toward the magmatic fires at the earth’s core. This man Lumumba is constantly boiling within, I realize. The glow from his tumultuous soul warns me to be careful, but I have not yet gained the information I seek, and so I go onward, until abruptly the molten frenzy of his stream of consciousness hits me with terrible force. Fucking Jew bigbrain shit head Christ how I hate the little bald mother conning me three-fifty a page I ought to Jew him down I ought to bust his teeth the exploiter the oppressor he wouldn’t charge a Jew that much I bet special price for niggers sure well I ought to jew him down that’s a good one Jew him down I ought to bust his teeth pick him up throw him into the trash what if I wrote the fucking paper myself show him but I can’t shit I can’t that’s the whole fucking trouble mom I can’t Europydes Sophocles Eeskilus who knows shit about them I got other stuff on my mind the Rutgers game one-on-one down the court gimme the ball you dumb prick that’s it and it’s up and in for Lumumba! and wait folks he was fouled in the act of shooting now he goes to the line big confident easy six feet ten inches tall holder of every Columbia scoring record bounces the ball once twice up, swish! Lumumba on his way to another big evening tonight folks Europydes Sophocles Eeskilus why the fuck do I have to know anything about them write anything about them what good is it to a black man those old dead Greek fuckers how are they relevant to the black experience relevant relevant relevant not to me Just to the Jews shit what do any of them know four hundred years of slavery we got other stuff on our minds what do any of them know especially this shithead mother here I got to pay him twenty bucks to do something I’m not good enough to do for myself who says I have to what good is any of it why why why why

A roaring furnace. The heat is overwhelming. I’ve been in contact with intense minds before, far more intense even than this one, but that was when I was younger, stronger, more resilient. I can’t handle this volcanic blast. The force of his contempt for me is magnified factorially by the force of the self-contempt that needing my services makes him feel. He is a pillar of hatred. And my poor enfeebled power can’t take it. Some sort of automatic safety device cuts in to protect me from an overload: the mental receptors shut themselves down. This is a new experience for me, a strange one, this load-shedding phenomenon. It is as though limbs are dropping off, ears, balls, anything disposable, leaving nothing but a smooth torso. The inputs fall away, the mind of Yahya Lumumba retreats and is inaccessible to me, and I find myself involuntarily reversing the process of penetration until I can feel only his most superficial emanations, then not even those, only a gray furry exudation marking the mere presence of him alongside me. All is indistinct. All is muffled. Boum. We are back to that again. There is a ringing in my ears: it is an artifact of the sudden silence, a silence loud as thunder. A new stage on my downward path. Never have I lost my grip and slipped from a mind like this. I look up, dazed, shattered. Yahya Lumumba’s thin lips are tightly compressed; he stares down at me in distaste, having no inkling of what has occurred. I say faintly, “I’d like ten dollars now in advance. The rest you pay when I deliver the paper.” He tells me coldly that he has no money to give me today. His next check from the scholarship fund isn’t due until the beginning of the coming month. I’ll just have to do the job on faith, he says. Take it or leave it, man. “Can you manage five?” I ask. “As a binder. Faith isn’t enough. I have expenses.” He glares. He draws himself to his full height; he seems nine or ten feet tall. Without a word he takes a five-dollar bill from his wallet, crumples it, scornfully tosses it into my lap. “I’ll see you here the morning of November 9,” I call after him, as he stalks away. Europydes, Sophocles, Eeskilus. I sit stunned, shivering, listening to the bellowing silence. Boum. Boum. Boum.

 

 

TWELVE.

 

 

In his more flamboyantly Dostoevskian moments, David Selig liked to think of his power as a curse, a savage penalty for some unimaginable sin. The mark of Cain, perhaps. Certainly his special ability had caused a lot of trouble for him, but in his saner moments he knew that calling it a curse was sheer self-indulgent melodramatic bullshit. The power was a divine gift. The power brought ecstasy. Without the power he was nothing, a schmendrick; with it he was a god. Is that a curse? Is that so terrible? Something funny happens when gamete meets gamete, and destiny cries, Here, Selig-baby: be a god! This you would spurn? Sophocles, age 88 or so, was heard to express his great relief at having outlived the pressures of the physical passions. I am freed at last from a tyrannical master, said the wise and happy Sophocles. Can we then assume that Sophocles, had Zeus given him a chance retroactively to alter the entire course of his days, would have opted for lifelong impotence? Don’t kid yourself, Duvid: no matter how badly the telepathy stuff fucked you up, and it fucked you up pretty badly, you wouldn’t have done without it for a minute. Because the power brought ecstasy.

The power brought ecstasy. That’s the whole megillah in a single crisp phrase. Mortals are born into a vale of tears and they get their kicks wherever they can. Some, seeking pleasure, are compelled to turn to sex, drugs, booze, television, movies, pinochle, the stock market, the racetrack, the roulette wheel, whips and chains, collecting first editions, Caribbean cruises, Chinese snuff bottles, Anglo-Saxon poetry, rubber garments, professional football games, whatever. Not him, not the accursed David Selig. All he had to do was sit quietly with his apparatus wide open and drink in the thought-waves drifting on the telepathic breeze. With the greatest of ease he lived a hundred vicarious lives. He heaped his treasurehouse with the plunder of a thousand souls. Ecstasy. Of course, the ecstatic part was all quite some time ago.

The best years were those between the ages of fourteen and twenty-five. Younger, and he was still too naive, too unformed, to wring much appreciation from the data he took in. Older, and his growing bitterness, his sour sense of isolation, damped his capacity for joy. Fourteen to twenty-five, though. The golden years. Ah!

It was so very much more vivid then. Life was like a waking dream. There were no walls in his world; he could go anywhere and see anything. The intense flavor of existence. Steeped in the rich juices of perception. Not until Selig was past forty did he realize how much he had lost, over the years, in the way of fine focus and depth of field. The power had not begun detectibly to dim until he was well along in his thirties, but it obviously must have been fading by easy stages all through his manhood, dwindling so gradually that he remained unaware of the cumulative loss. The change had been absolute, qualitative rather than quantitative. Even on a good day, now, the inputs did not begin to approach the intensity of those he remembered from his adolescence. In those remote years the power had brought him not only bits of subcranial conversation and scattered snatches of soul, as now, but also a gaudy universe of colors, textures, scents, densities: the world through an infinity of other sensory intakes, the world captured and played out for his delight on the glassy radiant spherical screen within his mind.

 

*     *     *

 

For instance. He lies propped against an itchy August haystack in a hot Brueghelesque landscape, shortly past noon. This is 1950 and he hangs becalmed midway between his fifteenth birthday and his sixteenth. Some sound effects, Maestro: Beethoven’s Sixth, bubbling up gently, sweet flutes and playful piccolos. The sun dangles in a cloudless sky. A gentle wind stirs the willows bordering the cornfield. The young corn trembles. The brook burbles. A starling circles overhead. He hears crickets. He hears the drone of a mosquito, and watches calmly as it zeroes in on his bare, hairless, sweat-shiny chest. His feet are bare too; he wears only tight, faded blue jeans. City boy, digging the country.

The farm is in the Catskills, twelve miles north of Ellenville. It is owned by the Schieles, a tribe of tawny Teutons, who produce eggs and an assortment of vegetable crops and who supplement their earnings every summer by renting out their guest house to some family of urban Yids looking for rural solace. This year the tenants are Sam and Annette Stein of Brooklyn, New York, and their daughter Barbara. The Steins have invited their close friends, Paul and Martha Selig, to spend a week on the farm with their son David and their daughter Judith. (Sam Stein and Paul Selig are hatching a scheme, destined ultimately to empty their bank accounts and destroy the friendship between the two families, to enter into a partnership and act as jobbers for replacement parts for television sets. Paul Selig is forever attempting unwise business ventures.) Today is the third day of the visit, and this afternoon, mysteriously, David finds himself utterly alone. His father has gone on an all-day hike with Sam Stein: in the serenity of the nearby hills they will plot the details of their commercial coup. Their wives have driven off, taking five-year-old Judith with them, to explore the antique shops of Ellenville. No one remains on the premises except the tightlipped Schieles, going somberly about their unending chores, and sixteen-year-old Barbara Stein, who has been David’s classmate from the third grade on through high school. Willy-nilly, David and Barbara are thrown together for the day. The Steins and the Seligs evidently have some unvoiced hope that romance will blossom between their offspring. This is naive of them. Barbara, a lush and reasonably beautiful dark-haired girl, sleek-skinned and long-legged, sophisticated and smooth of manner, is six months older than David chronologically and three or four years ahead of him in social development. She does not actually dislike him, but she regards him as strange, disturbing, alien, and repellent. She has no knowledge of his special gift—no one does; he’s seen to that—but she’s had seven years to observe him at close range, and she knows there’s something fishy about him. She is a conventional girl, plainly destined to marry early (a doctor, a lawyer, an insurance broker) and have lots of babies, and the chances of romance flowering between her and anyone as dark-souled and odd as David Selig are slight. David knows this very well and he is not at all surprised, or even dismayed, when Barbara slips away in mid-morning. “If anyone asks,” she says, “tell them I went for a stroll in the woods.” She carries a paperback poetry anthology. David is not deceived by it. He knows she goes off to screw 19-year-old Hans Schiele at every chance she gets.

So he is left to his own resources. No matter. He has ways of entertaining himself. He wanders the farm for a while, peering at the hen-coop and the combine, and then settles down in a quiet corner of the fields. Time for mind-movies. Lazily he casts his net. The power rises and goes forth, looking for emanations. What shall I read, what shall I read? Ah. A sense of contact. His questing mind has snared another mind, a buzzing one, small, dim, intense. It is a bee’s mind, in fact: David is not limited only to contact with humans. Of course there are no verbal outputs from the bee, nor any conceptual ones. If the bee thinks at all, David is incapable of detecting those thoughts. But he does get into the bee’s head. He experiences a strong sense of what it is like to be tiny and compact and winged and fuzzy. How dry the universe of a bee is: bloodless, desiccated, arid. He soars. He swoops. He evades a passing bird, as monstrous as a winged elephant. He burrows deep into a steamy, pollen-laden blossom. He goes aloft again. He sees the world through the bee’s faceted eyes. Everything breaks into a thousand fragments, as though seen through a cracked glass; the essential color of everything is gray, but odd hues lurk at the corners of things, peripheral blues and scarlets that do not correspond in any way to the colors he knows. The effect, he might have said twenty years later, is an extremely trippy one. But the mind of a bee is a limited one. David bores easily. He abandons the insect abruptly and, zooming his perceptions barnward, clicks into the soul of a hen. She is laying an egg! Rhythmic internal contractions, pleasurable and painful, like the voiding of a mighty turd. Frenzied squawks. The smarmy hen-coop odor, sharp and biting. A sense of too much straw all about. The world looks dark and dull to this bird. Heave. Heave. Oooh! Orgasmic excitement! The egg slides through the hatch and lands safely. The hen subsides, fulfilled, exhausted. David departs from her in this moment of rapture. He plunges deep into the adjoining woods, finds a human mind, enters it. How much richer and more intense it is to make communion with his own species. His identity blurs into that of his communicant, who is Barbara Stein, who is getting laid by Hans Schiele. She is naked and lying on a carpet of last year’s fallen leaves. Her legs are spread and her eyes are closed. Her skin is damp with sweat. Hans’ fingers dig into the soft flesh of her shoulders and his cheek, rough with blond stubble, abrades her cheek. His weight presses down on her chest, flattening her breasts and emptying her lungs. With steady thrusts and unvarying tempo he penetrates her, and as his long stiff member slowly and patiently rams into her again and again, throbbing sensation spreads in eddying ripples outward from her loins, growing less intense with distance. Through her mind David observes the impact of the hard penis against the tender, slippery internal membranes. He picks up her clamorous heartbeat. He notices her hammering her heels against the calves of Hans’ legs. He is aware of the slickness of her own fluids on her buttocks and thighs. And now he senses the first dizzying spasms of orgasm. David struggles to remain with her, but he knows he won’t succeed; clinging to the consciousness of someone who’s coming is like trying to ride a wild horse. Her pelvis bucks and heaves, her fingernails desperately rake her lover’s back, her head twists to one side, she gulps for air, and, as she erupts with pleasure, she catapults David from her unsaddled mind. He travels only a short way, into the stolid soul of Hans Schiele, who unknowingly grants the virgin voyeur a few instants of knowledge of what it is like to be stoking the furnace of Barbara Stein, thrust and thrust and thrust and thrust, her inner muscles clamping fiercely against the swollen prod, and then, almost immediately, comes the tickle of Hans’ onrushing climax. Hungry for information, David holds on with all his strength, hoping to keep contact right through the tumult of fulfillment, but no, he is flipped free, he tumbles uncontrollably, the world goes swinging past him in giddy streaks of color, until—click!—he finds a new sanctuary. All is calm here. He glides through a dark cold environment. He has no weight; his body is long and slender and agile; his mind is nearly a void, but through it run faint chilly flickering perceptions of a low order. He has entered the consciousness of a fish, perhaps a brook trout. Downstream he moves in the swiftly rushing creek, taking delight in the smoothness of his motions and the delicious texture of the pure icy water flowing past his fins. He can see very little and smell even less; information comes to him in the form of minute impacts on his scales, tiny deflections and interferences. Easily he responds to each incoming news item, now twisting to avoid a fang of rock, now fluttering his fins to seize some speedy subcurrent. The process is fascinating, but the trout itself is a dull companion, and David, having extracted the troutness of the experience in two or three minutes, leaps gladly to a more complex mind the moment he approaches one. It is the mind of gnarled old Georg Schiele, Hans’ father, who is at work in a remote corner of the cornfield. David has never entered the elder Schiele’s mind before. The old man is a grim and forbidding character, well past sixty, who says little and stalks dourly through his day-long round of chores with his heavy-jowled face perpetually locked in a frosty scowl. David occasionally wonders whether he once might have been a concentration-camp attendant, though he knows the Schieles came to America in 1935. The farmer gives off so unpleasant a psychic aura that David has steered clear of him, but so bored is he with the trout that he slips into Schiele now, slides down through dense layers of unintelligible Deutsch ruminations, and strikes bottom in the basement of the farmer’s soul, the place where his essence lives. Astonishment: old Schiele is a mystic, an ecstatic! No dourness here. No dark Lutheran vindictiveness. This is pure Buddhism: Schiele stands in the rich soil of his fields, leaning on his hoe, feet firmly planted, communing with the universe. God floods his soul. He touches the unity of all things. Sky, trees, earth, sun, plants, brook, insects, birds—everything is one, part of a seamless whole, and Schiele resonates in perfect harmony with it. How can this be? How can such a bleak, inaccessible man entertain such raptures in his depths? Feel his joy! Sensations drench him! Birdsong, sunlight, the scent of flowers and clods of upturned earth, the rustling of the sharp-bladed green cornstalks, the trickle of sweat down the reddened deep-channeled neck, the curve of the planet, the fleecy premature outline of the full moon—a thousand delights enfold this man. David shares his pleasure. He kneels in his mind, reverent, awed. The world is a mighty hymn. Schiele breaks from his stasis, raises his hoe, brings it down; heavy muscles go taut and metal digs into earth, and everything is as it should be, all conforms to the divine plan. Is this how Schiele goes through his days? Is such happiness possible? David is surprised to find tears bulging in his eyes. This simple man, this narrow man, lives in daily grace. Suddenly sullen, bitterly envious, David rips his mind free, whirls, projects it toward the woods, drops down into Barbara Stein again. She lies back, sweat-sticky, exhausted. Through her nostrils David receives the stink of semen already going sour. She rubs her hands over her skin, plucking stray bits of leaf and grass from herself. Idly she touches her softening nipples. Her mind is slow, dull, almost as empty as the trout’s, just now: sex seems to have drained her of personality. David shifts to Hans and finds him no better. Lying by Barbara’s side, still breathing hard after his exertions, he is torpid and depressed. His wad is shot and all desire is gone from him; peering sleepily at the girl he has just possessed, he is conscious mainly of body odors and the untidiness of her hair. Through the upper levels of his mind wanders a wistful thought, in English punctuated by clumsy German, of a girl from an adjoining farm who will do something to him with her mouth that Barbara refuses to do. Hans will be seeing her on Saturday night. Poor Barbara, David thinks, and wonders what she would say if she knew what Hans is thinking. Idly he tries to bridge their two minds, entering both in the mischievous hope that thoughts may flow from one to the other, but he miscalculates his span and finds himself returning to old Schiele, deep in his ecstasy, while holding contact with Hans as well. Father and son, old and young, priest and profaner. David sustains the twin contact a moment. He shivers. He is filled with a thundering sense of the wholeness of life.

 

*     *     *

 

It was like that all the time, in those years: an endless trip, a gaudy voyage. But powers decay. Time leaches the colors from the best of visions. The world becomes grayer. Entropy beats us down. Everything fades. Everything goes. Everything dies.

 

 

THIRTEEN.

 

 

Judith’s dark, rambling apartment fills with pungent smells. I hear her in the kitchen, bustling, dumping spices into the pot: hot chili, oregano, tarragon, cloves, garlic, powdered mustard, sesame oil, curry powder, God knows what else. Fire burn and cauldron bubble. Her famous fiery spaghetti sauce is in the making, a compound product of mysterious antecedents, part Mexican in inspiration, part Szechuan, part Madras, part pure Judith. My unhappy sister is not really much of a domestic type, but the few dishes she can cook she does extraordinarily well, and her spaghetti is celebrated on three continents; I’m convinced there are men who go to bed with her just to have dining-in privileges here.

I have arrived unexpectedly early, half an hour before the appointed time, catching Judith unprepared, not even dressed; so I am on my own while she readies dinner. “Fix yourself a drink,” she calls to me. I go to the sideboard and pour a shot of dark rum, then into the kitchen for ice cubes. Judith, flustered, wearing housecoat and headband, flies madly about, breathlessly selecting spices. She does everything at top speed. “Be with you in another ten minutes,” she gasps, reaching for the pepper mill. “Is the kid making a lot of trouble for you?”

My nephew, she means. His name is Paul, in honor of our father which art in heaven, but she never calls him that, only “the baby,” “the kid.” Four years old. Child of divorce, destined to be as taut-strung as his mother. “He’s not bothering me at all,” I assure her, and go back to the livingroom.

The apartment is one of those old, immense West Side jobs, roomy and high-ceilinged, which carries with it some sort of aura of intellectual distinction simply because so many critics, poets, playwrights, and choreographers have lived in similar apartments in this very neighborhood. Giant livingroom with many windows looking out over West End Avenue; formal dining room; big kitchen; master bedroom; child’s room; maid’s room; two bathrooms. All for Judith and her cub. The rent is cosmic, but Judith can manage it. She gets well over a thousand a month from her ex, and earns a modest but decent living of her own as an editor and translator; aside from that she has a small income from a portfolio of stocks, shrewdly chosen for her a few years ago by a lover from Wall Street, which she purchased with her inherited share of our parents’ surprisingly robust savings. (My share went to clean up accumulated debts; the whole thing melted like June snow.) The place is furnished half in 1960 Greenwich Village and half in 1970 Urban Elegance—black pole-lamps, gray string chairs, red brick bookcases, cheap prints, and wax-encrusted Chianti bottles on the one hand; leather couches, Hopi pottery, psychedelic silkscreens, glass-topped coffee-tables, and giant potted cacti on the other. Bach harpsichord sonatas tinkle from the thousand-dollar speaker system. The floor, ebony-dark and mirror-bright, gleams between the lush, thick area rugs. A pile of broken-backed paperbacks clutters one wall. Opposite it stand two rough unopened wooden crates, wine newly arrived from her vintner. A good life my sister leads here. Good and miserable.

The kid eyes me untrustingly. He sits twenty feet away, by the window, fiddling with some intricate plastic toy but keeping close watch on me. A dark child, slender and tense like his mother, aloof, cool. No love is lost between us: I’ve been inside his head and I know what he thinks of me. To him I’m one of the many men in his mother’s life, a real uncle being not very different from the innumerable uncle-surrogates forever sleeping over; I suppose he thinks I’m just one of her lovers who shows up more often than most. An understandable error. But while he resents the others merely because they compete with him for her affection, he looks coldly upon me because he thinks I’ve caused his mother pain; he dislikes me for her sake. How shrewdly he’s discerned the decades-old network of hostilities and tensions that shapes and defines my relationship with Judith! So I’m an enemy. He’d gut me if he could.

I sip my drink, listen to Bach, smile insincerely at the kid, and inhale the aroma of spaghetti sauce. My power is practically quiescent; I try not to use it much here, and in any case its intake is feeble today. After some time Judith emerges from the kitchen and, flashing across the livingroom, says, “Come talk to me while I get dressed, Duv.” I follow her to her bedroom and sit down on the bed; she takes her clothes into the adjoining bathroom, leaving the door open only an inch or two. The last time I saw her naked she was seven years old. She says, “I’m glad you decided to come.”

“So am I.”

“You look awfully peaked though.”

“Just hungry, Jude.”

“I'll fix that in five minutes.” Sounds of water running. She says something else; the sink drowns her out. I look idly around the bedroom. A man’s white shirt, much too big for Judith, hangs casually from the doorknob of the closet. On the night-table sit two fat textbooky-looking books, Analytical Neuroendocrinology and Studies in the Physiology of Thermoregulation. Unlikely reading for Judith. Maybe she’s been hired to translate them into French. I observe that they’re brand new copies, though one book was published in 1964 and the other in 1969. Both by the same author: K. F. Silvestri, M.D., Ph.D.

“You going to medical school these days?” I ask.

“The books, you mean? They’re Karl’s.”

Karl? A new name. Dr. Karl F. Silvestri. I touch her mind lightly and extract his image: a tall hefty sober-faced man, broad shoulders, strong dimpled chin, flowing mane of graying hair. About fifty, I’d guess. Judith digs older men. While I raid her consciousness she tells me about him. Her current “friend,” the kid’s latest “uncle.” He’s someone very big at Columbia Medical Center, a real authority on the human body. Including her body, I assume. Newly divorced after a 25-year marriage. Uh-huh: she likes getting them on the rebound. He met her three weeks ago through a mutual friend, a psychoanalyst. They’ve only seen each other four or five times; he’s always busy, committee meetings at this hospital or that, seminars, consultations. It wasn’t very long ago that Judith told me she was between men, maybe off men altogether. Evidently not. It must be a serious affair if she’s trying to read his books. They look absolutely opaque to me, all charts and statistical tables and heavy Latinate terminology.

She comes out of the bathroom wearing a sleek purple pants-suit and the crystal earrings I gave her for her 29th birthday. “When I visit she always tries to register some little sentimental touch to tie us together; tonight it’s the earrings. There is a convalescent quality to our friendship nowadays, as we tiptoe gently through the garden where our old hatred lies buried. We embrace, a brother-sister hug. A pleasant perfume. “Hello,” she says. “I’m sorry I was such a mess when you walked in.”

“It’s my fault. I was too early. Anyway, you weren’t a mess at all.”

She leads me to the livingroom. She carries herself well. Judith is a handsome woman, tall and extremely slender, exotic-looking, with dark hair, dark complexion, sharp cheekbones. The slim sultry type. I suppose she’d be considered very sexy, except that there is something cruel about her thin lips and her quick glistening brown eyes, and that cruelty, which grows more intense in these years of divorce and discontent, turns people off. She’s had lovers by the dozen, by the gross, but not much love. You and me, sis, you and me. Chips off the old block.

She sets the table while I fix a drink for her, the usual, Pernod on the rocks. The kid, thank God, has already eaten; I hate having him at the table. He plays with his plastic thingy and favors me with occasional sour glares. Judith and I clink our cocktail glasses together, a stagy gesture. She produces a wintry smile. “Cheers,” we say. Cheers.

“Why don’t you move back downtown?” she asks. “We could see more of each other.”

“It’s cheap up there. Do we want to see more of each other?”

“Who else do we have?”

“You have Karl.”

“I don’t have him or anybody. Just my kid and my brother.”

I think of the time when I tried to murder her in her bassinet. She doesn’t know about that. “Are we really friends, Jude?”

“Now we are. At last.”

“We haven’t exactly been fond of each other all these years.”

“People change, Duv. They grow up. I was dumb, a real shithead, so wrapped up in myself that I couldn’t give anything but hate to anybody around me. That’s over now. If you don’t believe me, look into my head and see.”

“You don’t want me poking around in there.”

“Go ahead,” she says. “Take a good look and see if I haven’t changed toward you.”

“No. I’d rather not.” I deal myself another two ounces of rum. The hand shakes a little. “Shouldn’t you check the spaghetti sauce? Maybe it’s boiling over.”

“Let it boil. I haven’t finished my drink. Duv, are you still having trouble? With your power, I mean.”

“Yes. Still. Worse than ever.”

“What do you think is happening?”

I shrug. Insouciant old me. “I’m losing it, that’s all. It’s like hair, I suppose. A lot of it when you’re young, then less and less, and finally none. Fuck it. It never did me any good anyway.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“Show me any good it did me, Jude.”

“It made you someone special. It made you unique. When everything else went wrong for you, you could always fall back on that, the knowledge that you could go into minds, that you could see the unseeable, that you could get close to people’s souls. A gift from God.”

“A useless gift. Except if I’d gone into the sideshow business.”

“It made you a richer person. More complex, more interesting. Without it you might have been someone quite ordinary.”

“With it I turned out to be someone quite ordinary. A nobody, a zero. Without it I might have been a happy nobody instead of a dismal one.”

“You pity yourself a lot, Duv.”

“I’ve got a lot to pity myself for. More Pernod, Jude?”

“Thanks, no. I ought to look after dinner. Will you pour the wine?”

She goes into the kitchen. I do the wine thing; then I carry the salad bowl to the table. Behind me the kid begins to chant derisive nonsense syllables in his weirdly mature baritone. Even in my current state of dulled deceptivity I feel the pressure of the kid’s cold hatred against the back of my skull. Judith returns, toting a well-laden tray: spaghetti, garlic bread, cheese. She flashes a warm smile, evidently sincere, as we sit down. We clink wine-glasses. We eat in silence a few minutes. I praise the spaghetti. She says, finally. “Can I do some mindreading on you, Duv?”

“Be my guest.”

“You say you’re glad the power’s going. Is that snow-job directed at me or at yourself? Because you’re snowing somebody. You hate the idea of losing it, don’t you?”