“A little.”

“A lot, Duv.”

“All right, a lot. I’m of two minds. I’d like it to vanish completely. Christ, I wish I’d never had it. But on the other hand if I lose it, who am I? Where’s my identity? I’m Selig the Mindreader, right? The Amazing Mental Man. So if I stop being him—you see, Jude?”

“I see. The pain’s all over your face. I’m so sorry, Duv.”

“For what?”

“That you’re losing it.”

“You despised my guts for using it on you, didn’t you?”

“That’s different. That was a long time ago. I know what you must be going through, now. Do you have any idea why you’re losing it?”

“No. A function of aging, I guess.”

“Is there anything that might be done to stop it from going?”

“I doubt it, Jude. I don’t even know why I have the gift in the first place, let alone how to nurture it now. I don’t know how it works. It’s just something in my head, a genetic fluke, a thing I was born with, like freckles. If your freckles start to fade, can you figure out a way of making them stay, if you want them to stay?”

“You’ve never let yourself be studied, have you?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t like people poking in my head any more than you do,” I say softly. “I don’t want to be a case history. I’ve always kept a low profile. If the world ever found out about me, I’d become a pariah. I’d probably be lynched. Do you know how many people there are to whom I’ve openly admitted the truth about myself? In my whole life, how many?”

“A dozen?”

“Three,” I say. “And I wouldn’t willingly have told any of them.”

“Three?”

“You. I suppose you suspected it all along, but you didn’t find out for sure till you were sixteen, remember? Then there’s Tom Nyquist, who I don’t see any more. And a girl named Kitty, who I don’t see any more either.”

“What about the tall brunette?”

“Toni? I never explicitly told her. I tried to hide it from her. She found out indirectly. A lot of people may have found out indirectly. But I’ve only told three. I don’t want to be known as a freak. So let it fade. Let it die. Good riddance.”

“You want to keep it, though.”

“To keep it and lose it both.”

“That’s a contradiction.”

“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes. What can I say, Jude? What can I tell you that’s true?”

“Are you in pain?”

“Who isn’t in pain?”

She says, “Losing it is almost like becoming impotent, isn’t it, Duv? To reach into a mind and find out that you can’t connect? You said there was ecstasy in it for you, once. That flood of information, that vicarious experience. And now you can’t get it as much, or at all. Your mind can’t get it up. Do you see it that way, as a sexual metaphor?”

“Sometimes.” I give her more wine. For a few minutes we sit silently, shoveling down the spaghetti, exchanging tentative grins. I almost feel warmth toward her. Forgiveness for all the years when she treated me like a circus attraction. You sneaky fucker, Duv, stay out of my head or I’ll kill you! You voyeur. You peeper. Keep away, man, keep away. She didn’t want me to meet her fiancé. Afraid I’d tell him about her other men, I guess. I’d like to find you dead in the gutter some day, Duv, with all my secrets rotting inside you. So long ago. Maybe we love each other a little now, Jude. Just a little, but you love me more than I love you.

“I don’t come any more,” she says abruptly. “You know, I used to come, practically every time. The original Hot Pants Kid, me. But around five years ago something happened, around the time my marriage was first breaking up. A short circuit down below. I started coming every fifth time, every tenth time. Feeling the ability to respond slip away, from me. Lying there waiting for it to happen, and of course that doused it every time. Finally I couldn’t come at all. I still can’t. Not in three years. I’ve laid maybe a hundred men since the divorce, give or take five or ten, and not one brought me off, and some of them were studs, real bulls. It’s one of the things Karl’s going to work on with me. So I know what it’s like, Duv. What you must be going through. To lose your best way of making contact with others. To lose contact gradually with yourself. To become a stranger in your own head.” She smiles. “Did you know that about me? About the troubles I’ve been having in bed?”

I hesitate briefly. The icy glare in her eyes gives her away. The aggressiveness. The resentment she feels. Even when she tries to be loving she can’t help hating. How fragile our relationship is! We’re locked in a kind of marriage, Judith and I, an old burned-out marriage held together with skewers. What the hell, though. “Yes,” I tell her. “I knew about it.”

“I thought so. You’ve never stopped probing me.” Her smile is all hateful glee now. She’s glad I’m losing it. She’s relieved. “I’m always wide open to you, Duv.”

“Don’t worry, you won’t be much longer.” Oh, you sadistic bitch! Oh, you beautiful ball-buster! And you’re all I’ve got. “How about some more spaghetti, Jude?” Sister. Sister. Sister.

 

 

FOURTEEN.

 

 

Yahya Lumumba

Humanities 2A, Dr. Katz

November 10. 1976

 

 

The “Electra” Theme in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides

 

The use of the “Electra” motif by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides is a study in varying dramatic methods and modes of attack. The plot is basically the same in Aeschylus’ Choephori and the Electras of Sophocles and Euripides: Orestes, exiled son of murdered Agamemnon, returns to his native Mycenae, where he discovers his sister Electra. She persuades him to avenge Agamemnon’s murder by killing Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, who had slain Agamemnon on his return from Troy. The treatment of the plot varies greatly at the hands of each dramatist.

Aeschylus, unlike his later rivals, held as prime consideration the ethical and religious aspects of Orestes’ crime. Characterization and motivation in The Choephori are simple to the point of inviting ridicule—as, indeed, can we see when the more worldly-minded Euripides ridicules Aeschylus in the recognition scene of his Electra. In Aeschylus’ play Orestes appears accompanied by his friend Pylades and places an offering on Agamemnon’s tomb: a lock of his hair. They withdraw, and lamenting Electra comes to the tomb. Noticing the lock of hair, she recognizes it as being “like unto those my father’s children wear,” and decides Orestes has sent it to the tomb as a token of mourning. Orestes then reappears, and identifies himself to Electra. It is this implausible means of identification which was parodied by Euripides.

Orestes reveals that Apollo’s oracle had commanded him to avenge Agamemnon’s murder. In a long poetic passage, Electra steels Orestes’ courage, and he goes forth to kill Clytemnestra and Aegisthus. He obtains entrance to the palace by deception, pretending to his mother Clytemnestra that he is a messenger from far-off Phocis, bearing news of Orestes’ death. Once inside, he slays Aegisthus, and then, confronting his mother, he accuses her of the murder and kills her.

The play ends with Orestes, maddened by his crime, seeing the Furies coming to pursue him. He takes refuge in the temple of Apollo. The mystic and allegorical sequel, The Eumenides, sees Orestes absolved of blame.

Aeschylus, in short, was not overly concerned with the credibility of his play’s action. His purpose in the Oresteia trilogy was a theological one: to examine the actions of the gods in placing a curse upon a house, a curse stemming from murder and leading to further murder. The keynote of his philosophy is perhaps the line, “’Tis Zeus alone who shows the perfect way of knowledge. He hath ruled, men shall learn wisdom, by affliction schooled.” Aeschylus sacrifices dramatic technique, or at least holds it in secondary importance, in order to focus attention on the religious and psychological aspects of the matricide.

The Electra of Euripides is virtually at an opposite pole from the concept of Aeschylus; though he uses the same plot, he elaborates and innovates to provide far richer texture. Electra and Orestes stand out in relief in Euripides: Electra a near-mad woman, banished from the court, married to a peasant, craving vengeance; Orestes a coward, sneaking into Mycenae the back way, abjectly stabbing Aegisthus from behind, luring Clytemnestra to her doom by a ruse. Euripides is concerned with dramatic credibility, whereas Aeschylus is not. After the famous parody of the Aeschylean recognition scene, Orestes makes himself known to Electra not by his hair or the size of his foot, but rather by

 

*     *     *

 

Oh God. Oh shit. Shit shit shit. This is deadly. This is no fucking good at all. Could Yahya Lumumba have written any of this crap? Phony from Word One. Why should Yahya Lumumba give a shit about Greek tragedy? Why should I? What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba, that he should weep for her? I’ll tear this up and start again. I’ll write it jivey, man. I’ll give it dat ole watermelon rhythm. God help me to think black. But I can’t. But I can’t. But I can’t. Christ, I’d like to throw up. I think I’m getting a fever. Wait. Maybe a joint would help some. Yeah. Let’s get high and try again. A lil ole stick of mootah. Get some soul into it, man. Smartass white Jew-bastard, get some soul into it, you hear? Okay, now. There was this cat Agamemnon, he was one big important fucker, you hear, he was The Man, but he got fucked all the same. His old lady Clytemnestra, she was makin’ it with this chickenshit muthafuck Aegisthus, and one day she say, Baby, let’s waste old Aggie, you and me, and then you gonna be king—gwine be king?—gonna—and we have a high ole time. Aggie, he off in the Nam runnin’ the show, but he come home for some R & R and before he know what happenin’ they stick him good, right, they really cut him, and that all for him. Now there this crazy cunt Electra, dig, she the daughter of ole Aggie, and she get real uptight when they use him up, so she say to her brother, his name Orestes, she say, listen, Orestes, I want you to get them two muthafucks, I want you to get them real good. Now, this cat Orestes he been out of town for a while, he don’t know the score, but—

Yeah, that’s it, man! You’re digging it! Now go on to explain about Euripides’ use of the deus ex machina and the cathartic virtues of Sophocles’ realistic dramatic technique. Sure. What a dumb schmuck you are, Selig. What a dumb schmuck.

 

 

FIFTEEN.

 

 

I tried to be good to Judith, I tried to be kind and loving, but our hatred kept coming between us. I said to myself, She’s my kid sister, my only sibling, I must love her more. But you can’t will love. You can’t conjure it into existence on nothing more than good intentions. Besides, my intentions had never been that good. I saw her as a rival from the word go. I was the firstborn, I was the difficult one, the maladjusted one. I was supposed to be the center of everything. Those were the terms of my contract with God: I must suffer because I am different, but by way of compensation the entire universe will revolve about me. The girlbaby who was brought into the household was intended to be nothing more than a therapeutic aid designed to help me relate better to the human race. That was the deal: she wasn’t supposed to have independent reality as a person, she wasn’t supposed to have her own needs or make demands or drain away their love. Just a thing, an item of furniture. But I knew better than to believe that. I was ten years old, remember, when they adopted her. Your ten-year-old, he’s no fool. I knew that my parents, no longer feeling obliged now to direct all their concern exclusively toward their mysteriously intense and troubled son, would rapidly and with great relief transfer their attention and their love—yes, particularly their love—to the cuddly, uncomplicated infant. She would take my place at the center; I’d become a quirky obsolescent artifact. I couldn’t help resenting that. Do you blame me for trying to kill her in her bassinet? On the other hand you can understand the origin of her lifelong coldness toward me. I offer no defense at this late date. The cycle of hatred began with me. With me, Jude, with me, with me, with me. You could have broken it with love, though, if you wanted to. You didn’t want to.

On a Saturday afternoon in May, 1961, I went out to my parents’ house. In those years I didn’t go there often, though I lived twenty minutes away by subway. I was outside the family circle, autonomous and remote, and I felt powerful resistance to any kind of reattachment. For one thing I had free-floating hostilities toward my parents: it was their fluky genes, after all, that had sent me into the world this way. And then too there was Judith, shriveling me with her disdain: did I need more of that? So I stayed away from the three of them for weeks, months, at a time, until the melancholy maternal phonecalls became too much for me, until the weight of my guilt overcame my resistances.

I was happy to discover, when I got there, that Judith was still in her bedroom, asleep. At three in the afternoon? Well, my mother said, she was out very late last night on a date. Judith was sixteen, I imagined her going to a high school basketball game with some skinny pimply kid and sipping milkshakes afterwards. Sleep well, sister, sleep on and on. But of course her absence put me into direct and unshielded confrontation with my sad depleted parents. My mother, mild and dim; my father, weary and bitter. All my life they had steadily grown smaller. They seemed very small now. They seemed close to the vanishing point.

I had never lived in this apartment. For years Paul and Martha had struggled with the upkeep of a three-bedroom place they couldn’t afford, simply because it had become impossible for Judith and me to share the same bedroom once she was past her infancy. The moment I left for college, taking a room near campus, they found a smaller and far less expensive one. Their bedroom was to the right of the entry foyer, and Judith’s, down a long hall and past the kitchen, was to the left; straight ahead was the livingroom, in which my father sat dreamily leafing through the Times. He read nothing but the newspaper these days, though once his mind had been more active. From him came a dull sludgy emanation of fatigue. He was making some decent money for the first time in his life, actually would end up quite prosperous, yet he had conditioned himself to the poor-man psychology: poor Paul, you’re a pitiful failure, you deserved so much better from life. I looked at the newspaper through his mind as he turned the pages. Yesterday Alan Shepard had made his epochal sub-orbital flight, the first manned venture into space by the United States. U.S. HURLS MAN 115 MILES INTO SPACE, cried the banner headline. SHEPARD WORKS CONTROLS IN CAPSULE, REPORTS BY RADIO IN 15-MINUTE FLIGHT. I groped for some way to connect with my father. “What did you think of the space voyage?” I asked. “Did you listen to the broadcast?” He shrugged. “Who gives a damn? It’s all crazy. A mishigos. A waste of everybody’s time and money.” ELIZABETH VISITS POPE IN VATICAN. Fat Pope John, looking like a well-fed rabbi. JOHNSON TO MEET LEADERS IN ASIA ON U.S. TROOP USE. He skimmed onward, skipping pages. HELP OF GOLDBERG ASKED ON ROCKETS. KENNEDY SIGNS WAGE-FLOOR BILL. Nothing registered on him, not even KENNEDY TO SEEK INCOME TAX CUTS. He lingered at the sports pages. A faint flicker of interest. MUD MAKES CARRY BACK STRONGER FAVORITE FOR 87th KENTUCKY DERBY TODAY. YANKS OPPOSE ANGELS IN OPENER OF 3-GAME SERIES BEFORE 21,000 ON COAST. “Who do you like in the Derby?” I asked. He shook his head. “What do I know about horses?” he said. He was, I realized, already dead, although in fact his heart would beat for another decade. He had stopped responding. The world had defeated him.

I left him to his brooding and made polite talk with my mother: her Hadassah reading group was discussing To Kill a Mockingbird next Thursday and she wanted to know if I had read it. I hadn’t. What was I doing with myself? Had I seen any good movies? L’Avventura, I said. Is that a French film? she asked. Italian, I said. She wanted me to describe the plot. She listened patiently, looking troubled, not following anything. “Who did you go with?” she asked. “Are you seeing any nice girls?” My son the bachelor. Already 26 and not even engaged. I deflected the tiresome question with patient skill born of long experience. Sorry, Martha. I won’t give you the grandchildren you’re waiting for. You’ll have to get them from Judith; it won’t be all that long.

“I have to baste the chicken now,” she said, and disappeared. I sat with my father for a while, until I couldn’t stand that and went down the hall to the john, next to Judith’s room. Her door was ajar. I glanced in. Lights off, blinds drawn, but I touched her mind and found that she was awake and thinking of getting up. All right, make a gesture, be friendly, Duvid. It won’t cost you anything. I knocked lightly. “Hi, it’s me,” I said. “Okay if I come in?”

She was sitting up, wearing a frilly white bathrobe over dark-blue pajamas. Yawning, stretching. Her face, usually so taut, was puffy from too much sleep. Out of force of habit I went into her mind, and saw something new and surprising there. My sister’s erotic inauguration. The night before. The whole thing: the scurry in the parked car, the rise of excitement, the sudden realization that this was going to be more than an interlude of petting, the panties coming down, the awkward shiftings of position, the fumble with the condom, the moment of ultimate hesitation giving way to total willingness, the hasty inexpert fingers coaxing lubrication out of the virgin crevice, the cautious clumsy poking, the thrust, the surprise of discovering that penetration was accomplished without pain, the pistoning of body against body, the boy’s quick explosion, the messy aftermath, the guilt and confusion and disappointment as it ended with Judith still unsatisfied. The drive home, silent, shamefaced. Into the house, tiptoe, hoarsely greeting the vigilant, unsleeping parents. The late-night shower. Inspection and cleansing of the deflowered and slightly swollen vulva. Uneasy sleep, frequently punctured. A long stretch of wakefulness, in which the night’s event is considered: she is pleased and relieved to have entered womanhood, but also frightened. Unwillingness to rise and face the world the next day, especially to face Paul and Martha. Judith, your secret is no secret to me.

“How are you?” I asked.

Stagily casual, she drawled, “Sleepy. I was out very late. How come you’re here?”

“I drop in to see the family now and then.”

“Nice to have seen you.”

“That isn’t friendly, Jude. Am I that loathsome to you?”

“Why are you bothering me, Duv?”

“I told you, I’m trying to be sociable. You’re my only sister, the only one I’ll ever have. I thought I’d stick my head in the door and say hello.”

“You’ve done that. So?”

“You might tell me what you’ve been doing with yourself since the last time I saw you.”

“Do you care?”

“If I didn’t care, would I ask?”

“Sure,” she said. “You don’t give a crap about what I’ve been doing. You don’t give a crap about anybody but David Selig, and why pretend otherwise? You don’t need to ask me polite questions. It isn’t natural coming from you.”

“Hey, hold on!” Let’s not be dueling so fast, sister. “What gives you the idea that—”

“Do you think of me from one week to the next? I’m just furniture to you. The drippy little sister. The brat. The inconvenience. Have you ever talked to me? About anything? Do you even know the name of the school I go to? I’m a total stranger to you.”

“No, you’re not.”

“What the hell do you know about me?”

“Plenty.”

“For example.”

“Quit it, Jude.”

“One example. Just one. One thing about me. For example—”

“For example. All right. For example, I know that you got laid last night.”

We were both amazed by that. I stood in shocked silence, not believing that I had allowed those words to pass my lips; and Judith jerked as though electrified, her body stiffening and rearing, her eyes blazing with astonishment. I don’t know how long we remained frozen, unable to speak.

“What?” she said finally. “What did you say, Duv?”

“You heard it.”

“I heard it but I think I must have dreamed it. Say it again.”

“No.”

“‘Why not?”

“Leave me alone, Jude.”

“Who told you?”

“Please, Jude—”

“Who told you?”

“Nobody,” I muttered.

Her smile was terrifyingly triumphant. “You know something? I believe you. I honestly believe you. Nobody told you. You pulled it right out of my mind, didn’t you, Duv?”

“I wish I had never come in here.”

“Admit it. Why won’t you admit it? You see into people’s minds, don’t you, Duvid? You’re some kind of circus freak. I’ve suspected that a long time. All those little hunches you have, and they always turn out to be right, and the embarrassed phony way you cover up for yourself when you’re right. Talking about your ‘luck’ at guessing things. Sure! Sure, luck! I knew the real scoop. I said to myself, This fucker is reading my mind. But I told myself it was crazy, there aren’t any such people, it has to be impossible. Only it’s true, isn’t it? You don’t guess. You look. We’re wide open to you and you read us like books. Spying on us. Isn’t that so?”

I heard a sound behind me. I jumped, frightened. But it was only Martha, poking her head into Judith’s bedroom. A vague, dreamy grin. “Good morning, Judith. Or good afternoon, I should say. Having a nice chat, children? I’m so glad. Don’t forget to have breakfast, Judith.” And she drifted on her way.

Judith said sharply, “Why didn’t you tell her? Describe the whole thing. Who I was with last night, what I did with him, how it felt—”

“Stop it, Jude.”

“You didn’t answer my other question. You’ve got this weird power, don’t you? Don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve been secretly spying on people all your life.”

“Yes. Yes.”

“I knew it. I didn’t know, but I really did, all along. And it explains so much. Why I always felt dirty when I was a kid and you were around. Why I felt as if anything I did was likely to show up in tomorrow’s newspapers. I never had any privacy, even when I was locked in the bathroom. I didn’t feel private.” She shuddered. “I hope I never see you again, Duv. Now that I know what you are. I wish I never had seen you. If I ever catch you poking around in my head after this, I’ll cut your balls off. Got that? I’ll cut your balls off. Now clear out of here so I can get dressed.”

I stumbled away. In the bathroom I gripped the cold edge of the sink and leaned close to the mirror to study my flushed, flustered face. I looked stunned and dazed, my features as rigid as though I had had a stroke. I know that you got laid last night. Why had I told her that? An accident? The words spilling out of me because she had goaded me past the point of prudence? But I had never let anyone push me into a revelation like that before. There are no accidents, Freud said. There are never any slips of the tongue. Everything’s deliberate, on one level or another. I must have said what I did to Judith because I wanted her at last to know the truth about me. But why? Why her? I had already told Nyquist, yes; there could be no risk in that; but I had never admitted it to anyone else. Always taken such great pains to conceal it, eh, Miss Mueller? And now Judith knew. I had given her a weapon with which she could destroy me.

 

*     *     *

 

I had given her a weapon. How strange that she never chose to use it.

 

 

SIXTEEN.

 

 

Nyquist said, “The real trouble with you, Selig, is that you’re a deeply religious man who doesn’t happen to believe in God.” Nyquist was always saying things like that, and Selig never could be sure whether he meant them or was just playing verbal games. No matter how deeply Selig penetrated the other man’s soul, he never could be sure of anything. Nyquist was too wily, too elusive.

Playing it safe, Selig said nothing. He stood with his back to Nyquist, looking out the window. Snow was  falling. The narrow streets below were choked with it; not even the municipal snowplows could get through, and a strange serenity prevailed. High winds whipped the drifts about. Parked cars were disappearing under the white blanket. A few janitors from the apartment houses on the block were out, digging manfully. It had been snowing on and off for three days. Snow was general all over the Northeast. It was falling on every filthy city, on the arid suburbs, falling softly upon the Appalachians and, farther eastward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Atlantic waves. Nothing was moving in New York City. Everything was shut down: office buildings, schools, the concert halls, the theaters. The railroads were out of commission and the highways were blocked. There was no action at the airports. Basketball games were being canceled at Madison Square Garden. Unable to get to work, Selig had waited out most of the blizzard in Nyquist’s apartment, spending so much time with him that by now he had come to find his friend’s company stifling and oppressive. What earlier had seemed amusing and charming in Nyquist had become abrasive and tricksy. Nyquist’s bland self-assurance conveyed itself now as smugness; his casual forays into Selig’s mind were no longer affectionate gestures of intimacy, but rather, conscious acts of aggression. His habit of repeating aloud what Selig was thinking was increasingly irritating, and there seemed to be no deterring him from that. Here he was doing it again, plucking a quotation from Selig’s head and declaiming it in half-mocking tones: “Ah. How pretty. ‘His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.’ I like that. What is it, David?”

“James Joyce,” said Selig sourly. “ ‘The Dead,’ from Dubliners. I asked you yesterday not to do that.”

“I envy the breadth and depth of your culture. I like to borrow fancy quotations from you.”

“Fine. Do you always have to play them back at me?”

Nyquist, gesturing broadly as Selig stepped away from the window, humbly turned his palms outward. “I’m sorry. I forgot you didn’t like it.”

“You never forget a thing, Tom. You never do anything accidentally.” Then, guilty over his peevishness: “Christ, I’ve had about enough snow!”

“Snow is general,” said Nyquist. “It isn’t ever going to stop. What are we going to do today?”

“The same as yesterday and the day before, I imagine. Sitting around watching the snowflakes fall and listening to records and getting sloshed.”

“How about getting laid?”

“I don’t think you’re my type,” Selig said.

Nyquist flashed an empty smile. “Funny man. I mean finding a couple of ladies marooned somewhere in this building and inviting them to a little party. You don’t think there are two available ladies under this roof?”

“We could look, I suppose,” Selig said, shrugging. “Is there any more bourbon?”

“I’ll get it,” Nyquist said.

He brought the bottle over. Nyquist moved with a strange slowness, like a man moving through a dense reluctant atmosphere of mercury or some other viscous fluid. Selig had never seen him hurry. He was heavy without being fat, a thick-shouldered, thick-necked man with a square head, close-cropped yellow hair, a flat wide-flanged nose, and an easy, innocent grin. Very, very Aryan: he was Scandinavian, a Swede perhaps, raised in Finland and transplanted to the United States at the age of 10. He still had the elusive traces of an accent. He said he was 28 and looked a few years older than that to Selig, who had just turned 23. This was February, 1958, in an era when Selig still had the delusion that he was going to make it in the adult world. Eisenhower was President, the stock market had gone to hell, the post-Sputnik emotional slump was troubling everybody even though the first American space satellite had just been orbited, and the latest feminine fashion was the gunny-sack chemise. Selig was living in Brooklyn Heights, on Pierrepont Street, commuting several days a week to the lower Fifth Avenue office of a publishing company for which he was doing freelance copy-editing at $3 an hour. Nyquist lived in the same building, four floors higher.

He was the only other person Selig knew who had the power. Not only that, having it hadn’t crippled him at all. Nyquist used his gift as simply and naturally as he did his eyes or his legs, for his own advantage, without apologies and without guilt. Perhaps he was the least  neurotic person Selig had ever met. By occupation he was a predator, skimming an income by raiding the minds of others; but, like any jungle cat, he pounced only when hungry, never for sheer love of pouncing. He took what he needed, never questioning the providence that had made him so superbly fitted for taking, yet he did not take more than he needed, and his needs were moderate. He held no job and apparently never had. Whenever he wanted money he made the ten-minute subway ride to Wall Street, sauntered through the gloomy canyons of the financial district, and rummaged about freely in the minds of the moneymen cloistered in the lofty boardrooms. On any given day there was always some major development hatching that would have an impact on the market—a merger, a stock split, an ore discovery, a favorable earnings report—and Nyquist had no difficulty learning the essential details. This information he swiftly sold at handsome but reasonable fees to some twelve or fifteen private investors who had learned in the happiest possible way that Nyquist was a reliable tout. Many of the unaccountable leaks on which quick fortunes had been made in the bull market of the ’50’s were his doing. He earned a comfortable living this way, enough to support himself in a congenial style. His apartment was small and agreeable—black Naugahyde upholstery, Tiffany lamps, Picasso wallpaper, a well-stocked liquor closet, a superb music system that emitted a seamless flow of Monteverdi and Palestrina, Bartok and Stravinsky. He lived a gracious bachelor life, going out often, making the rounds of his favorite restaurants, all of them obscure and ethnic—Japanese, Pakistani, Syrian, Greek. His circle of friends was limited but distinguished: painters, writers, musicians, poets, mainly. He slept with many women, but Selig rarely saw him with the same one twice.

Like Selig, Nyquist could receive but was unable to send; he was, however, able to tell when his own mind was being probed. That was how they had happened to meet. Selig, newly arrived in the building, had indulged himself in his hobby, letting his consciousness rove freely from floor to floor by way of getting acquainted with his neighbors. Bouncing about, surveying this head and that, finding nothing of any special interest, and then suddenly:

—Tell me where you are.

A crystalline string of words glimmering at the periphery of a sturdy, complacent mind. The statement came through with the immediacy of an explicit message. Yet Selig realized that no act of active transmission had taken place; he had simply found the words lying passively in wait. He made quick reply:

—35 Pierrepont Street.

—No, I know that. I mean, where are you in the building?

—Fourth floor.

—I’m on the eighth. What’s your name?

—Selig.

—Nyquist.

The mental contact was stunningly intimate. It was almost a sexual thing, as though he were slicing into a body, not a mind, and he was abashed by the resonant masculinity of the soul he had entered; he felt that there was something not quite permissible about such closeness with another man. But he did not draw back. That rapid interplay of verbal communication across the gap of darkness was a delicious experience, too rewarding to reject. Selig had the momentary illusion of having expanded his powers, of having learned how to send as well as to draw forth the contents of other minds. It was, he knew, only an illusion. He was sending nothing, nor was Nyquist. He and Nyquist were merely picking information out of each other’s minds. Each planted phrases for the other to find, which was not quite the same thing, in terms of the situational dynamics, as sending messages to one another. It was a fine and possibly pointless distinction, though; the net effect of the juxtaposition of two wide-open receivers was an efficient send/receive circuit as reliable as a telephone. The marriage of true minds, to which let no impediments be admitted. Tentatively, self-consciously, Selig reached into the lower levels of Nyquist’s consciousness, seeking the man as well as the messages, and as he did so he was vaguely aware of disquiet in the depths of his own mind, probably indicating that Nyquist was doing the same to him. For long minutes they explored each other like lovers entwined in the first discovering caresses, although there was nothing loving about Nyquist’s touch, which was cool and impersonal. Nevertheless Selig quivered; he felt as if he stood at the edge of an abyss. At last he gently withdrew, as did Nyquist. Then, from the other:

—Come upstairs. I’ll meet you by the elevator.

He was bigger than Selig expected, a fullback of a man, his blue eyes uninviting, his smile a purely formal one. He was remote without actually being cold. They went into his apartment: soft lights, unfamiliar music playing, an atmosphere of unostentatious elegance. Nyquist offered him a drink and they talked, keeping out of one another’s minds as much as possible. It was a subdued visit, unsentimental, no tears of joy at having come together at last. Nyquist was affable, accessible, pleased that Selig had appeared, but not at all delirious with excitement at the discovery of a fellow freak. Possibly it was because he had discovered fellow freaks before. “There are others,” he said. “You’re the third, fourth, fifth I’ve met since I came to the States. Let’s see: one in Chicago, one in San Francisco, one in Miami, one in Minneapolis. You’re the fifth. Two women, three men.

“Are you still in touch with the others?”

“No.”

“What happened?”

“We drifted apart,” Nyquist said. “What did you expect? That we’d be clannish? Look, we talked, we played games with our minds, we got to know each other, and after a while we got bored. I think two of them are dead now. I don’t mind being isolated from the rest of my kind. I don’t think of myself as one of a tribe.”

“I never met another one,” said Selig. “Until today.”

“It isn’t important. What’s important is living your own life. How old were you when you found out you could do it?”

“I don’t know. Five, six years old, maybe. And you?”

“I didn’t realize I had anything special until I was eleven. I thought everybody could do it. It was only after I came to the States and heard people thinking in a different language that I knew there was something out of the ordinary about my mind.”

“What kind of work do you do?” Selig asked.

“As little as I can,” said Nyquist. He grinned and thrust his perceptors brusquely into Selig’s mind. It seemed like an invitation of sorts; Selig accepted it and pushed forth his own antennae. Roaming the other man’s consciousness, he quickly grasped the picture of Nyquist’s Wall Street sorties. He saw the entire balanced, rhythmic, unobsessive life of the man. He was amazed by Nyquist’s coolness, his wholeness, his clarity of spirit. How limpid Nyquist’s soul was! How unmarred by life! Where did he keep his anguish? Where did he hide his loneliness, his fear, his insecurity? Nyquist, withdrawing, said, “Why do you feel so sorry for yourself?”

“Do I?”

“It’s all over your head. What’s the problem, Selig? I’ve looked into you and I don’t see the problem, only the pain.”

“The problem is that I feel isolated from other human beings.”

“Isolated? You? You can get right inside people’s heads. You can do something that 99.999% of the human race can’t do. They’ve got to struggle along using words, approximations, semaphore signals, and you go straight to the core of meaning. How can you pretend you’re isolated?”

“The information I get is useless,” Selig said. “I can’t act on it. I might just as well not be reading it in.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s just voyeurism. I’m spying on them.”

“You feel guilty about that?”

“Don’t you?”

“I didn’t ask for my gift,” Nyquist said. “I just happen to have it. Since I have it, I use it. I like it. I like the life I lead. I like myself. Why don’t you like yourself, Selig?”

“You tell me.”

But Nyquist had nothing to tell him, and when he finished his drink he went back downstairs. His own apartment seemed so strange to him as he re-entered it that he spent a few minutes handling familiar artifacts: his parents’ photograph, his little collection of adolescent love-letters, the plastic toy that the psychiatrist had given him years ago. The presence of Nyquist continued to buzz in his mind—a residue of the visit, nothing more, for Selig was certain that Nyquist was not now probing him. He felt so jarred by their meeting, so intruded upon, that he resolved never to see him again, in fact to move somewhere else as soon as possible, to Manhattan, to Philadelphia, to Los Angeles, anywhere that might be beyond Nyquist’s reach. All his life he had yearned to meet someone who shared his gift, and now that he had, he felt threatened by it. Nyquist was so much in control of his life that it was terrifying. He’ll humiliate me, Selig thought. He’ll devour me. But that panic faded. Two days later Nyquist came around to ask him out to dinner. They ate in a nearby Mexican restaurant and got smashed on Carta Blanca. It still appeared to Selig that Nyquist was toying with him, teasing him, holding him at arm’s length and tickling him; but it was all done so amiably that Selig felt no resentment. Nyquist’s charm was irresistible, and his strength was worth taking as a model of behavior. Nyquist was like an older brother who had preceded him through this same vale of traumas and had emerged unscathed long ago; now he was jollying Selig into an acceptance of the terms of his existence. The superhuman condition, Nyquist called it.

They became close friends. Two or three times a week they went out together, ate together, drank together. Selig had always imagined that a friendship with someone else of his kind would be uniquely intense, but this was not; after the first week they took their specialness for granted and rarely discussed the gift they shared, nor did they ever congratulate each other on having formed an alliance against the ungifted world around them. They communicated sometimes by words, sometimes by the direct contact of minds; it became an easy, cheerful relationship, strained only when Selig slipped into his habitual brooding mood and Nyquist mocked him for such self-indulgence. Even that was no difficulty between them until the days of the blizzard, when all tensions became exaggerated because they were spending so much time together.

“Hold out your glass,” Nyquist said.

He poured an amber splash of bourbon. Selig settled back to drink while Nyquist set about finding girls for them. The project took him five minutes. He scanned the building and turned up a pair of roommates on the fifth floor. “Take a look,” he said to Selig. Selig entered Nyquist’s mind. Nyquist had attuned himself to the consciousness of one of the girls—sensual, sleepy, kittenish—and was looking through her eyes at the other, a tall gaunt blonde. The doubly refracted mental image nevertheless was quite clear: the blonde had a leggy voluptuousness and fashion-model poise. “That one’s mine,” Nyquist said. “Now tell me if you like yours.” He jumped, Selig following along, to the mind of the blonde. Yes, a fashion model, more intelligent than the other girl, cold, selfish, passionate. From her mind, via Nyquist, came the image of her roommate, sprawled out on a sofa in a pink housecoat: a short plump redhead, breasty, full-faced. “Sure,” Selig said. “Why not?” Nyquist, rummaging through minds, found the girls’ phone number, called, worked his charm. They came up for drinks. “This awful snowstorm,” the blonde said, shuddering. “It can drive you crazy!” The four of them went through a lot of liquor to a tinkling jazz accompaniment: Mingus, MJQ, Chico Hamilton. The redhead was better-looking than Selig expected, not quite so plump or coarse—the double refraction must have introduced some distortions—but she giggled too much, and he found himself disliking her to some degree. Still, there was no backing out now. Eventually, very late in the evening, they coupled off, Nyquist and the blonde in the bedroom, Selig and the redhead in the livingroom. Selig grinned self consciously at her when they were finally alone. He had never learned how to suppress that infantile grin, which he knew must reveal a mingling of gawky anticipation and plummeting terror. “Hello,” he said. They kissed and his hands went to her breasts, and she pushed herself up against him in an unashamedly hungry way. She seemed a few years older than he was, but most women seemed that way to him. Their clothes dropped away. “I like lean men,” she said, and giggled as she pinched his sparse flesh. Her breasts rose to him like pink birds. He caressed her with a virgin’s timid intensity. During the months of their friendship Nyquist had occasionally supplied him with his own discarded women, but it was weeks since he had been to bed with anyone, and he was afraid that his abstinence would rush him into an embarrassing calamity. No: the liquor cooled his ardor just enough, and he held himself in check, ploughing her solemnly and energetically with no fears of going off too fast.

About the time he realized the redhead was too drunk to come, Selig felt a tickle in his skull: Nyquist was probing him! This show of curiosity, this voyeurism, seemed an odd diversion for the usually self-contained Nyquist. Spying’s my trick, Selig thought, and for a moment he was so disturbed by being observed in the act of love that he began to soften. Through conscious effort he reconstituted himself. This has no deep significance, he told himself. Nyquist is wholly amoral and does what he pleases, peeks here and peeks there without regard for propriety, and why should I let his scanning bother me? Recovering, he reached toward Nyquist and reciprocated the probe. Nyquist welcomed him:

—How you doing, Davey?

—Fine. Just fine.

—I got me a hot one here. Take a look.

Selig envied Nyquist’s cool detachment. No shame, no guilt, no hangups of any kind. No trace of exhibitionistic pride nor voyeuristic panting, either: it seemed altogether natural to him to exchange such contacts now. Selig, though, could not help feeling queasy as he watched, through closed eyes, Nyquist busily working over the blonde, and watched Nyquist similarly watching him, echoing images of their parallel copulations reverberating dizzily from mind to mind. Nyquist, pausing a moment to detect and isolate Selig’s sense of uneasiness, mocked it gently. You’re worried that there’s some kind of latent gayness in this thing, Nyquist told him. But I think what really scares you is contact, any sort of contact. Right? Wrong, Selig said, but he had felt the point hit home. For five minutes more they monitored each other’s minds, until Nyquist decided the time had come to come, and the tempestuous tremors of his nervous system flung Selig, as usual, from his consciousness. Soon after, growing bored with humping the jiggling, sweaty redhead, Selig let his own climax overwhelm him and slumped down, shivering, weary.

Nyquist came into the livingroom half an hour later, the blonde with him, both of them naked. He didn’t bother to knock, which surprised the redhead a little; Selig had no way of telling her that Nyquist had known they were finished. Nyquist put some music on and they all sat quietly, Selig and the redhead working on the bourbon, Nyquist and the blonde nipping into the Scotch, and toward dawn, as the snow began to slacken, Selig tentatively suggested a second round of lovemaking with a change of partners. “No,” the redhead said. “I’m all flicked out. I want to go to sleep. Some other time, okay?” She fumbled for her clothes. At the door, wobbling and staggering, making a boozy farewell, she let something slip. “I can’t help thinking there’s something peculiar about you two guys,” she said. In vino veritas. “You aren’t a couple of queers, by any chance, are you?”

 

 

SEVENTEEN.

 

 

I remain on dead center. Becalmed, static, anchored. No, that’s a lie, or if not a lie then at the very least a benign misstatement, a faulty cluster of metaphors. I am ebbing. Ebbing all the time. My tide is going out. I am revealed as a bare rocky shore, iron-hard, with trailing streamers of dirty brown seaweed dangling toward the absenting surf. Green crab scuttling about. Yes, I ebb, which is to say I diminish, I attenuate. Do you know, I feel quite calm about it now? Of course my moods fluctuate but

I feel

Quite calm

About it now.

This is the third year since first I began to recede from myself. I think it started in the spring of 1974. Up till then it worked faultlessly, I mean the power, always there when I had occasion to call upon it, always dependable, doing all its customary tricks, serving me in all my dirty needs; and then without warning, without reason, it began dying. Little failures of input. Tiny episodes of psychic impotence. I associate these events with early spring, blackened wisps of late snow still clinging to the streets, and it could not have been ’75 nor was it ’73, which leads me to place the onset of outgo in the intermediate year. I would be snug and smug inside someone’s head, scanning scandals thought to be safely hidden, and suddenly everything would blur and become uncertain. Rather like reading the Times and having the text abruptly turn to Joycean dream-gabble between one line and the next, so that a straightforward dreary account of the latest Presidential fact-finding commission’s finding of futile facts has metamorphosed into a foggy impenetrable report on old Earwicker’s borborygmi. At such times I would falter and pull out in fear. What would you do if you believed you were in bed with your heart’s desire and awakened to find yourself screwing a starfish? But these unclarities and distortions were not the worst part: I think the inversions were, the total reversal of signal. Such as picking up a flash of love when what is really being radiated is frosty hatred. Or vice versa. When that happens I want to pound on walls to test reality. From Judith one day I got strong waves of sexual desire, an overpowering incestuous yearning, which cost me a fine dinner as I ran nauseated and retching to the bowl. All an error, all a deception; she was aiming spears at me and I took them for Cupid’s arrows, more fool I. Well, after that I got blank spaces, tiny deaths of perception in mid-contact, and after that came mingled inputs, crossed wires, two minds coming in at once and me unable to tell the which from the which. For a time the color appercept dropped out, though that has come back, one of the many false returns. And there were other losses, barely discernible ones but cumulative in their effect. I make lists now of the things I once could do that I can no longer. Inventories of the shrinkage. Like a dying man confined to his bed, paralyzed but observant, watching his relatives pilfer his goods. This day the television set has gone, and this day the Thackeray first editions, and this day the spoons, and now they have made off with my Piranesis, and tomorrow it will be the pots and pans, the Venetian blinds, my neckties, and my trousers, and by next week they will be taking toes, intestines, corneas, testicles, lungs, and nostrils. What will they use my nostrils for? I used to fight back with long walks, cold showers, tennis, massive doses of Vitamin A, and other hopeful, implausible remedies, and more recently I experimented with fasting and pure thoughts, but such struggling now seems to me inappropriate and even blasphemous; these days I strive toward cheerful acceptance of loss, with such success as you may have already perceived. Aeschylus warns me not to kick against the pricks, also Euripides and I believe Pindar, and if I were to check the New Testament I think I would find the injunction there as well, and so I obey, I kick not, even when the pricks are fiercest. I accept, I accept. Do you see that quality of acceptance growing in me? Make no mistake, I am sincere. This morning, at least, I am well on my way to acceptance, as golden autumn sunlight floods my room and expands my tattered soul. I lie here practicing the techniques that will make me invulnerable to the knowledge that it’s all fleeing from me. I search for the joy that I know lies buried in the awareness of decline. Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, The last of life, for which the first was made. Do you believe that? I believe that. I’m getting better at believing all sorts of things. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. Good old Browning! How comforting he is:

 

Then welcome each rebuff

That turns earth’s smoothness rough,

Each sting that bids nor sit nor stand, but go!

Be our joys three parts pain!

Strive, and hold cheap the strain.

 

Yes. Of course. And be our pains three parts joy, he might have added. Such joy this morning. And it’s all fleeing from me, all ebbing. Going out of me from every pore.

 

*     *     *

 

Silence is coming over me. I will speak to no one after it’s gone. And no one will speak to me.

 

*     *     *

 

I stand here over the bowl patiently pissing my power away. Naturally I feel some sorrow over what’s happening, I feel regret, I feel—why crap around?—I feel anger and, frustration, and despair, but also, strangely, I feel shame. My cheeks burn, my eyes will not meet other eyes, I can hardly face my fellow mortals for the shame of it, as if something precious has been entrusted to me and I have failed in my trusteeship. I must say to the world, I’ve wasted my assets, I’ve squandered my patrimony, I’ve let it slip away, going, going, I’m a bankrupt now, a bankrupt. Perhaps this is a family trait, this embarrassment when disaster comes. We Seligs like to tell the world we are orderly people, captains of our souls, and when something external downs us we are abashed. I remember when my parents briefly owned a car, a dark-green 1948 Chevrolet purchased at some absurdly low price in 1950, and we were driving somewhere deep in Queens, perhaps on our way to my grandmother’s grave, the annual pilgrimage, and a car emerged from a blind alley and hit us. A schvartze at the wheel, drunk, giddy. Nobody hurt, but our fender badly crumpled and our grille broken, the distinctive T-bar that identified the 1948 model hanging loose. Though the accident was in no way his fault my father reddened and reddened, transmitting feverish embarrassment, as though he were apologizing to the universe for having done anything so thoughtless as allowing his car to be hit. How he apologized to the other driver, too, my grim bitter father! It’s all right, it’s all right, accidents can happen, you mustn’t feel upset about it, see, we’re all okay! Looka mah car, man, looka mah car, the other driver kept saying, evidently aware that he was on to a soft touch, and I feared my father was going to give him money for the repairs, but my mother, fearing the same thing, headed him off at the pass. A week later he was still embarrassed; I popped into his mind while he was talking with a friend and heard him trying to pretend my mother had been driving, which was absurd—she never had a license—and then I felt embarrassed for him. Judith, too, when her marriage broke up, when she walked out on an impossible situation, registered enormous grief over the shameful fact that someone so purposeful and effective in life as Judith Hannah Selig should have entered into a lousy, murderous marriage which had to be terminated vulgarly in the divorce courts. Ego, ego, ego. I the miraculous mindreader, entering upon a mysterious decline, apologizing for my carelessness. I have misplaced my gift somewhere. Will you forgive me?

 

*     *     *

 

Good, to forgive;

Best, to forget!

Living, we fret;

Dying, we live.

 

*     *     *

 

Take an imaginary letter, Mr. Selig. Harrumph. Miss Kitty Holstein, Something West Sixty-something Street, New York City. Check the address later. Don’t bother about the zipcode.

Dear Kitty:

I know you haven’t heard from me in ages but I think now it’s appropriate to try to get in touch with you again. Thirteen years have passed and a certain maturity must have come over both of us, I think, healing old wounds and making communication possible. Despite all hard feelings that may once have existed between us I never lost my fondness for you, and you remain bright in my mind.

Speaking of my mind, there’s something I ought to tell you. I no longer do things very well with it. By “things” I mean the mental thing, the mindreading trick, which of course I couldn’t do on you in any case, but which defined and shaped my relationship to everybody else in the world. This power seems to be slipping away from me now. It caused us so much grief, remember? It was what ultimately split us up, as I tried to explain in my last letter to you, the one you never answered. In another year or so—who knows, six months, a month, a week?—it will be totally gone and I will be just an ordinary human being, like yourself. I will be a freak no longer. Perhaps then there will be an opportunity for us to resume the relationship that was interrupted in 1963 and to reestablish it on a more realistic footing.

I know I did dumb things then. I pushed you mercilessly. I refused to accept you for yourself, and tried to make something else out of you, something freakish, in fact, something just like myself. I had good reasons in theory for attempting that, I thought then, but of course they were wrong, they had to be wrong, and I never saw that until it was too late. To you I seemed domineering, overpowering, dictatorial—me, mild self-effacing me! Because I was trying to transform you. And eventually I bored you. Of course you were very young then, you were—shall I say it?—shallow, unformed, and you resisted me. But now that we’re both adults we might be able to make a go of it.

I hardly know what my life will be like as an ordinary human being unable to enter minds. Right now I’m floundering, looking for definitions of myself, looking for structures. I’m thinking seriously of entering the Roman Catholic Church. (Good Christ, am I? That’s the first I’ve heard of that! The stink of incense, the mumble of priests, is that what I want?) Or perhaps the Episcopalians, I don’t know. It’s a matter of affiliating myself with the human race. And also I want to fall in love again. I want to be part of someone else. I’ve already begun tentatively, timidly getting in touch with my sister Judith again, after a whole lifetime of warfare; we’re starting to relate to each other for the first time, and that’s encouraging to me. But I need more: a woman to love, not just sexually but in all ways. I’ve really had that only twice in my life, once with you, once about five years later with a girl named Toni who wasn’t very much like you, and both times this power of mine ruined things, once because I got too close with it, once because I couldn’t get close enough. As the power slips away from me, as it dies, perhaps there’s a chance for an ordinary human relationship between us at last, of the kind that ordinary human beings have all the time. For I will be ordinary. For I will be very ordinary.

I wonder about you. You’re 35 years old now, I think. That sounds very old to me, even though I’m 41. (41 doesn’t sound old, somehow!) I still think of you as being 22. You seemed even younger than that: sunny, open, naive. Of course that was my fantasy-image of you; I had nothing to go by but externals, I couldn’t do my usual number on your psyche, and so I made up a Kitty who probably wasn’t the real Kitty at all. Anyway, so you’re 35. I imagine you look younger than that today. Did you marry? Of course you did. A happy marriage? Lots of kids? Are you still married? What’s your married name, then, and where do you live, and how can I find you? If you’re married, will you be able to see me anyway? Somehow I don’t think you’d be a completely faithful wife—does that insult you?—and so there ought to be room in your life for me, as a friend, as a lover. Do you ever see Tom Nyquist? Did you go on seeing him for long, after you and I broke up? Were you bitter toward me for the things I told you about him in that letter? If your marriage has broken up, or if somehow you never married, would you live with me now? Not as a wife, not yet, just as a companion. To help me get through the last phases of what’s happening to me? I need help so much. I need love. I know that’s a lousy way to go about making a proposition, let alone a proposal, that is, saying, Help me, comfort me, stay with me. I’d rather reach to you in strength than in weakness. But right now I’m weak. There’s this globe of silence growing in my head, expanding, expanding, filling my whole skull, creating this big empty place. I’m suffering a slow reality leakage. I can only see the edges of things, not their substance, and now the edges are getting indistinct too. Oh, Christ. Kitty I need you. Kitty how will I find you? Kitty I hardly knew you. Kitty Kitty Kitty

 

*     *     *

 

Twang. The plangent chord. Twing. The breaking string. Twong. The lyre untuned. Twang. Twing. Twong.

 

*     *     *

 

Dear children of God, my sermon this morning will be a very short one. I wish only that you should ponder and meditate the deep meaning and mystery of a few lines I intend to rip off the saintly Tom Eliot, a thoughtful guide for troubled times. Beloved, I direct you to his Four Quartets, to his paradoxical line, “In my beginning is my end,” which he amplifies some pages later with the comment, “What we call the beginning is often the end/ And to make an end is to make a beginning.” Some of us are ending right now, dear children; that is to say, aspects of their lives that once were central to them are drawing to a close. Is this an end or is it a beginning? Can the end of one thing not be the beginning of another? I think so, beloved. I think that the closing of a door does not preclude the opening of a different door. Of course, it takes courage to walk through that new door when we do not know what may lie beyond it, but one who has faith in our Lord who died for us, who trusts fully in Him who came for the salvation of man, need have no fears. Our lives are pilgrimages toward Him. We may die small deaths every day, but we are reborn from death to death, until at last we go into the dark, into the vacant interstellar spaces where He awaits us, and why should we fear that, if He is there? And until that time comes let us live our lives without giving way to the temptation to grieve for ourselves. Remember always that the world still is full of wonders, that there are always new quests, that seeming ends are not ends in truth, but only transitions, stations of the way. Why should we mourn? Why should we give ourselves over to sorrow, though our lives be daily subtractions? If we lose this, do we also lose that? If sight goes, does love go also? If feeling grows faint, may we not return to old feelings and draw comfort from them? Much of our pain is mere confusion.

Be then of good cheer on this Our Lord’s day, beloved, and spin no snares in which to catch yourselves, nor allow yourselves the self-indulgent sin of misery, and make no false distinctions between ends and beginnings, but go onward, ever searching, to new ecstasies, to new communions, to new worlds, and give no space in your soul to fear, but yield yourself up to the Peace of Christ and await that which must come. In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

 

*     *     *

 

Now comes a dark equinox out of its proper moment. The bleached moon glimmers like a wretched old skull. The leaves shrivel and fall. The fires die down. The dove, wearying, flutters to earth. Darkness spreads. Everything blows away. The purple blood falters in the narrowing veins; the chill impinges on the straining heart; the soul dwindles; even the feet become untrustworthy. Words fail. Our guides admit they are lost. That which has been solid grows transparent. Things pass away. Colors fade. This is a gray time, and I fear it will be grayer still, one of these days. Tenants of the house, thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.

 

 

EIGHTEEN.

 

 

When Toni moved out of my place on 114th Street I waited two days before I did anything. I assumed she would come back when she calmed down; I figured she’d call, contrite, from some friend’s house and say she was sorry she panicked and would I come get her in a cab. Also, in those two days I was in no shape to take any sort of action, because I was still suffering the aftereffects of my vicarious trip; I felt as though someone had seized my head and pulled on it, stretching my neck like a rubber band, letting it finally snap back into place with a sharp thwock! that addled my brains. I spent those two days in bed, dozing mostly, occasionally reading, and rushing madly out into the hall every time the telephone rang.

But she didn’t come back and she didn’t call, and on the Tuesday after the acid trip I started searching for her. I phoned her office first. Teddy, her boss, a bland sweet scholarly man, very gentle, very gay. No, she hadn’t been to work this week. No, she hadn’t been in touch at all. Was it urgent? Would I like to have her home number? “I’m calling from her home number,” I said. “She isn’t here and I don’t know where she’s gone. This is David Selig, Teddy.” “Oh,” he said. Very faintly, with great compassion. “Oh.” And I said, “If she happens to call in, will you tell her to get in touch with me?” Next I started to phone her friends, those whose numbers I could find: Alice, Doris, Helen, Pam, Grace. Most of them, I knew, didn’t like me. I didn’t have to be telepathic to realize that. They thought she was throwing herself away on me, wasting her life with a man without career, prospects, money, ambition, talent, or looks. All five of them told me they hadn’t heard from her. Doris, Helen, and Pam sounded sincere. The other two, it seemed to me, were lying. I took a taxi over to Alice’s place in the Village and shot a probe upward, zam! nine stories into her head, and I learned a lot of things about Alice that I hadn’t really wanted to know, but I didn’t find out where Toni was. I felt dirty about spying and didn’t probe Grace. Instead I called my employer, the writer, whose book Toni was editing, and asked if he’d seen her. Not in weeks, he told me, all ice. Dead end. The trail had run out.

I dithered on Wednesday, wondering what to do, and finally, melodramatically, called the police. Gave a bored desk sergeant her description: tall, thin, long dark hair, brown eyes. No bodies found in Central Park lately? In subway trash cans? The basements of Amsterdam Avenue tenements? No. No. No. Look, buddy, if we hear anything we’ll let you know, but it don’t sound serious to me. So much for the police. Restless, hopelessly strung out, I walked down to the Great Shanghai for a miserable half-eaten dinner, good food gone to waste. (Children are starving in Europe, Duv. Eat. Eat.) Afterwards, sitting around over the sad scattered remnants of my shrimp with sizzling rice and feeling myself drop deep into bereavement, I scored a cheap pickup in a manner I’ve always despised: I scanned the various single girls in the big restaurant, of whom there were numerous, looking for one who was lonely, thwarted, vulnerable, sexually permissive, and in generally urgent need of ego reinforcement. It’s no trick getting laid if you have a sure way of knowing who’s available, but there’s not much sport in the chase. She was, this fish in the barrel, a passably attractive married lady in her mid-20’s, childless, whose husband, a Columbia instructor, evidently had more interest in his doctoral thesis than in her. He spent every night immured in the stacks of Butler Library doing research, creeping home late, exhausted, irritable, and generally impotent. I took her to my room, couldn’t get it up either—that bothered her; she assumed it was a sign of rejection—and spent two tense hours listening to her life story. Ultimately I managed to screw her, and I came almost instantly. Not my finest hour. When I returned from walking her home—110th and Riverside Drive—the phone was ringing. Pam. “I’ve heard from Toni,” she said, and suddenly I was slimy with guilt over my sleazy consolatory infidelity. “She’s staying with Bob Larkin at his place over on East 83rd Street.”

Jealousy, despair, humiliation, agony.

“Bob who?”

“Larkin. He’s that high-bracket interior decorator she always talks about.”

“Not to me.”

“One of Toni’s oldest friends. They’re very close. I think he used to date her when she was in high school.” A long pause. Then Pam chuckled warmly into my numb silence. “Oh, relax, relax, David! He’s gay! He’s just a kind of father-confessor for her. She goes to him when there’s trouble.”

“I see.”

“You two have broken up, haven’t you?”

“I’m not sure. I suppose we have. I don’t know.”

“Is there anything I can do to help?” This from Pam, who I had always thought regarded me as a destructive influence of whom Toni was well advised to be quit.

“Just give me his phone number,” I said.

I phoned. It rang and rang and rang. At last Bob Larkin picked up. Gay, all right, a sweet tenor voice complete with lisp, not very different from the voice of Teddy-at-work. Who teaches them to speak with the homo accent? I asked, “Is Toni there?” A guarded response: “Who’s calling, please?” I told him. He asked me to wait, and a minute or so passed while he conferred with her, hand over the mouthpiece. At last he came back and said Toni was there, yes, but she was very tired and resting and didn’t want to talk to me right now. ‘It’s urgent,” I said. “Please tell her it’s urgent. Another muffled conference. Same reply. He suggested vaguely that I call back in two or three days. I started to wheedle, to whine, to beg. In the middle of that unheroic performance the phone abruptly changed hands and Toni said to me, “Why did you call?”

“That ought to be obvious. I want you to come back.”

“I can’t.”

She didn’t say I won’t. She said I can’t.

I said, “Would you like to tell me why?”

“Not really.”

“You didn’t even leave a note. Not a word of explanation. You ran out so fast.”

“I’m sorry, David.”

“It was something you saw in me while you were tripping, wasn’t it?”

“Let’s not talk about it,” she said. “It’s over.”

“I don’t want it to be over.”

“I do.”

I do. That was like the sound of a great gate clanging shut in my face. But I wasn’t going to let her throw home the bolts just yet. I told her she had left some of her things in my room, some books, some clothing. A lie: she had made a clean sweep. But I can be persuasive when I’m cornered, and she began to think it might be true. I offered to bring the stuff over right now. She didn’t want me to come. She preferred never to see me again, she told me. Less painful all around, that way. But her voice lacked conviction; it was higher in pitch and much more nasal than it was when she spoke with sincerity. I knew she still loved me, more or less; even after a forest fire, some of the burned snags live on, and green new shoots spring from them. So I told myself. Fool that I was. In any case she couldn’t entirely turn me away. Just as she had been unable to refrain from picking up the telephone, now she found it impossible to refuse me access to her. Talking very fast, I bludgeoned her into yielding. All right, she said. Come over. Come over. But you’re wasting your time.

It was close to midnight. The summer air was clinging and clammy, with a hint of rain on the way. No stars visible. I hurried crosstown, choked with the vapors of the humid city and the bile of my shattered love. Larkin’s apartment was on the nineteenth floor of an immense new terraced white-brick tower, far over on York Avenue. Admitting me, he gave me a tender, compassionate smile, as if to say, You poor bastard, you’ve been hurt and you’re bleeding and now you’re going to get ripped open again. He was about 30, a stocky, boyish-faced man with long unruly curly brown hair and large uneven teeth. He radiated warmth and sympathy and kindness. I could understand why Toni ran to him at times like this. “She’s in the livingroom,” he said. “To the left.”

It was a big, impeccable place, somewhat freaky in decor, with jagged blurts of color dancing over the walls, pre-Columbian artifacts in spotlighted showcases, bizarre African masks, chrome-steel furniture—the kind of implausible apartment you see photographed in the Sunday Times’ magazine section. The livingroom was the core of the spectacle, a vast white-walled room with a long curving window that revealed all the splendors of Queens across the East River. Toni sat at the far end, near the window, on an angular couch, dark blue flecked with gold. She wore old, dowdy clothes that clashed furiously with the splendor around her: a motheaten red sweater that I detested, a short frumpy black skirt, dark hose—and she was slumped down sullenly on her spine, leaning on one elbow, her legs jutting awkwardly forward. It was a posture that made her look bony and ungraceful. A cigarette drooped in her hand and there was a huge pile of butts in the ashtray beside her. Her eyes were bleak. Her long hair was tangled. She didn’t move as I walked toward her. Such an aura of hostility came from her that I halted twenty feet away.

“Where’s the stuff you were bringing?” she asked.

“There wasn’t any. I just said that to have an excuse to see you.”

“I figured that.”

“What went wrong, Toni?”

“Don’t ask. Just don’t ask.” Her voice had dropped into its lowest register, a bitter husky contralto. “You shouldn’t have come here at all.”

“If you’d tell me what I did—”

“You tried to hurt me,” she said. “You tried to bum-trip me.” She stubbed out her cigarette and immediately lit another. Her eyes, somber and hooded, refused to meet mine. “I realized finally that you were my enemy, that I had to escape from you. So I packed and got out.”

“Your enemy? You know that isn’t true.”

“It was strange,” she said. “I didn’t understand what was happening, and I’ve talked to some people who’ve dropped a lot of acid and they can’t understand it either. It was like our minds were linked, David. Like a telepathic channel had opened between us. And all sorts of stuff was pouring from you into me. Hateful stuff. Poisonous stuff. I was thinking your thoughts. Seeing myself as you saw me. Remember, when you said you were tripping too, even though you hadn’t had any acid? And then you told me you were, like, reading my mind. That was what scared me. The way our minds seemed to blur together, to overlap. To become one. I never knew acid could do that to people.”

This was my cue to tell her that it wasn’t only the acid, that it hadn’t been some druggy delusion, that what she had felt was the impingement of a special power granted me at birth, a gift, a curse, a freak of nature. But the words congealed in my mouth. They sounded insane to me. How could I confess such stuff? I let the moment pass. Instead I said lamely, “Okay, it was a strange moment for both of us. We were a little out of our heads. But the trip’s over. You don’t have to hide from me now. Come back, Toni.”

“No.”

“In a few days, then?”

“No.”

“I don’t understand this.”

“Everything’s changed,” she said. “I couldn’t ever live with you now. You scare me too much. The trip’s over, but I look at you and I see demons. I see some kind of things that’s half-bat, half-man, with big rubbery wings and long yellow fangs and—oh, Jesus, David, I can’t help any of this! I still feel as if our minds are linked. Stuff creeping out of you into my head, I should never have touched the acid.” Carelessly she crushed her cigarette and found another. “You make me uncomfortable now. I wish you’d go. It gives me a headache just being this close to you. Please. Please. I’m sorry, David.”

I didn’t dare look into her mind. I was afraid that what I’d find there would blast and shrivel me. But in those days my power was still so strong that I couldn’t help picking up, whether I sought it or not, a generalized low-level mental radiation from everyone I came close to, and what I picked up now from Toni confirmed what she was saying. She hadn’t stopped loving me. But the acid, though lysergic and not sulfuric, had scarred and corroded our relationship by opening that terrible gateway between us. It was torment for her to be in the same room with me. No resources of mine could deal with that. I considered strategies, looked for angles of approach, ways to reason with her, to heal her through soft earnest words. No way. No way at all. I ran a dozen trial dialogs in my head and they all ended with Toni begging me to get out of her life. So. The end. She sat there all but motionless, downcast, dark-faced, her wide mouth clamped in pain, her brilliant smile extinguished. She seemed to have aged twenty years. Her odd, exotic desert-princess beauty had wholly fled from her. Suddenly she was more real to me, in her shroud of pain, than ever before. Ablaze with suffering, alive with anguish. And no way for me to reach her. “All right,” I said quietly. “I’m sorry too.” Over, done with, swiftly, suddenly, no warning, the bullet singing through the air, the grenade rolling treacherously into the tent, the anvil falling from the placid sky. Done with. Alone again. Not even any tears. Cry? What shall I cry?

Bob Larkin had tactfully remained outside, in his long foyer papered with dazzling black and white optical illusions, during our brief muffled conversation. Again the gentle sorrowing smile from him as I emerged.

“Thanks for letting me bother you this late,” I said.

“No trouble at all. Too bad about you and Toni.”

I nodded. “Yes. Too bad.”

We faced each other uncertainly, and he moved toward me, digging his fingers momentarily into the muscle of my arm, telling me without words to shape up, to ride out the storm, to get myself together. He was so open that my mind sank unexpectedly into his, and I saw him plain, his goodness, his kindness, his sorrow. Out of him an image rose to me, a sharp encapsulated memory: himself and a sobbing, demolished Toni, the night before last, lying naked together on his modish round bed, her head cradled against his muscular hairy chest, his hands fondling the pale heavy globes of her breasts. Her body trembling with need. His unwilling drooping manhood struggling to offer her the consolation of sex. His gentle spirit at war with itself, flooded with pity and love for her but dismayed by her disturbing femaleness, those breasts, that cleft, her softness. You don’t have to, Bob, she keeps saying, you don’t have to, you really don’t have to, but he tells her he wants to, it’s about time we made it after knowing each other all these years, it’ll cheer you up, Toni, and anyway a man needs a little variety, right? His heart goes out to her but his body resists, and their lovemaking, when it happens, is a hurried, pathetic, fumbled thing, a butting of troubled reluctant bodies, ending in tears, tremors, shared distress, and, finally, laughter, a triumph over pain. He kisses her tears away. She thanks him gravely for his efforts. They fall into childlike sleep, side by side. How civilized, how tender. My poor Toni. Goodbye. Goodbye. “I’m glad she went to you,” I said. He walked me to the elevator. What shall I cry? “If she snaps out of it I’ll make sure she calls you,” he told me. I put my hand to his arm as he had to mine, and gave him the best smile in my repertoire. Goodbye.

 

 

NINETEEN.

 

 

This is my cave. Twelve floors high in the Marble Hill Houses, Broadway and 228th Street, formerly a middle-income municipal housing project, now a catchall for classless and deracinated urban detritus. Two rooms plus bathroom, kitchenette, hallway. Once upon a time you couldn’t get into this project unless you were married and had kids. Nowadays a few singles have slipped in, on the grounds that they’re destitute. Things change as the city decays; regulations break down. Most of the building’s population is Puerto Rican, with a sprinkling of Irish and Italian. In this den of papists a David Selig is a great anomaly. Sometimes he thinks he owes his neighbors a daily lusty rendition of the Shma Yisroel, but he doesn’t know the words. Kol Nidre, perhaps. Or the Kaddish. This is the bread of affliction which our forefathers ate in the land of Egypt. He is lucky to have been led out of Egypt into the Promised Land.

Would you like the guided tour of David Selig’s cave? Very well. Please come this way. No touching anything, please, and don’t park your chewing gum on the furniture. The sensitive, intelligent, amiable, neurotic man who will be your guide is none other than David Selig himself. No tipping allowed. Welcome, folks, welcome to my humble abode. We’ll begin our tour in the bathroom. See, this is the tub—that yellow stain in the porcelain was already there when he moved in—this is the crapper, this is the medicine chest. Selig spends a great deal of time in here; it’s a room significant to any in-depth understanding of his existence. For example, he sometimes takes two or three showers a day. What is it, do you think, that he’s trying to wash away? Leave that toothbrush alone, sonny. All right, come with me. Do you see these posters in the hallway? They are artifacts of the 1960’s. This one shows the poet Allen Ginsberg in the costume of Uncle Sam. This one is a crude vulgarization of a subtle topological paradox by the Dutch printmaker M. G. Escher. This one shows a nude young couple making love in the Pacific surf. Eight to ten years ago, hundreds of thousands of young people decorated their rooms with such posters. Selig, although he was not exactly young even then, did the same. He often has followed current fads and modes in an attempt to affiliate himself more firmly with the structures of contemporary existence. I suppose these posters are quite valuable now; he takes them with him from one cheap rooming house to the next.

This room is the bedroom. Dark and narrow, with the low ceiling typical of municipal construction a generation ago. I keep the window closed at all times so that the elevated train, roaring through the adjacent sky late at night, doesn’t awaken me. It’s hard enough to get some sleep even when things are quiet around you. This is his bed, in which he dreams uneasy dreams, occasionally, even now, involuntarily reading the minds of his neighbors and incorporating their thoughts in his fantasies. On this bed he has fornicated perhaps fifteen women, one or two or occasionally three times each, during the two and a half years of his residence here. Don’t look so abashed, young lady! Sex is a healthy human endeavor and it remains an essential aspect of Selig’s life, even now in middle age! It may become even more important to him in the years ahead, for sex is, after all, a way of establishing communication with other human beings, and certain other channels of communication appear to be closing for him. Who are these girls? Some of them are not girls; some are women well along in life. He charms them in his diffident way and persuades them to share an hour of joy with him. He rarely invites any of them back, and those whom he does invite back often refuse the invitation, but that’s all right. His needs are met. What’s that? Fifteen girls in two and a half years isn’t very many for a bachelor? Who are you to judge? He finds it sufficient. I assure you, he finds it sufficient. Please don’t sit on his bed. It’s an old one, bought secondhand at an upstairs bargain basement that the Salvation Army runs in Harlem. I picked it up for a few bucks when I moved out of my last place, a furnished room on St. Nicholas Avenue, and needed some furniture of my own. Some years before that, around 1971, 1972, I had a waterbed, another example of my following of transient fads, but I couldn’t ever get used to the swooshing and gurgling and I gave it, finally, to a hip young lady who dug it the most. What else is in the bedroom? Very little of interest, I’m afraid. A chest of drawers containing commonplace clothing. A pair of worn slippers. A cracked mirror: are you superstitious? A lopsided bookcase packed tight with old magazines that he will never look at again—Partisan Review, Evergreen, Paris Review, New York Review of Books, Encounter, a mound of trendy literary stuff, plus a few journals of psychoanalysis and psychiatry, which Selig reads sporadically in the hope of increasing his self-knowledge; he always tosses them aside in boredom and disappointment. Let’s get out of here. This room must be depressing you. We go past the kitchenette—four-burner stove, half-size refrigerator, formica-topped table—where he assembles very modest breakfasts and lunches (dinner he usually eats out) and enter the main focus of the apartment, the L-shaped blue-walled jam-packed livingroom/study.

Here you can observe the full range of David Selig’s intellectual development. This is his record collection, about a hundred well-worn disks, some of them purchased as far back as 1951. (Archaic monophonic records!) Almost entirely classical music, although you will note two intrusive deposits: five or six jazz records dating from 1959 and five or six rock records dating from 1969, both groups acquired in vague, abortive efforts at expanding the horizons of his taste. Otherwise, what you will find here, in the main, is pretty austere stuff, thorny, inaccessible: Schoenberg, late Beethoven, Mahler, Berg, the Bartok quartets, Bach passacaglias. Nothing that you’d be likely to whistle after one hearing. He doesn’t know a lot about music, but he knows what he likes; you wouldn’t much care for it.

And these are his books, accumulated since the age of ten and hauled lovingly about with him from place to place. The archaeological strata of his reading can readily be isolated and examined. Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Mark Twain, Dashiell Hammett at the bottom. Sabatini. Kipling. Sir Walter Scott. Van Loon, The Story of Mankind. Verrill, Great Conquerors of South and Central America. The books of a sober, earnest, alienated little boy. Suddenly, with adolescence, a quantum leap: Orwell, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Hardy, the easier Faulkner. Look at these rare paperbacks of the 1940’s and early 1950’s, in odd off-sized formats, with laminated plastic covers! See what you could buy then for only 25 cents! Look at the prurient paintings, the garish lettering! These science-fiction books date from that era too. I gobbled the stuff whole, hoping to find some clues to my own dislocated self’s nature in the fantasies of Bradbury, Heinlein, Asimov, Sturgeon, Clarke. Look, here’s Stapledon’s Odd John, here’s Beresford’s Hampdenshire Wonder, here’s a whole book called Outsiders: Children of Wonder, full of stories of little superbrats with freaky powers. I’ve underlined a lot of passages in that last one, usually places where I quarreled with the writers. Outsiders? Those writers, gifted as they were, were the outsiders, trying to imagine powers they’d never had; and I, who was on the inside, I the youthful mind-prowler (the book is dated 1954), had bones to pick with them. They stressed the angst of being supernormal, forgot about the ecstasy. Although, thinking about angst vs. ecstasy now, I have to admit they knew whereof they writ. Fellows, I have fewer bones to pick these days. This is rats’ alley, where the dead men lost their bones.

Observe how Selig’s reading becomes more rarefied as we reach the college years. Joyce, Proust, Mann, Eliot, Pound, the old avant-garde hierarchy. The French period: Zola, Balzac, Montaigne, Celine, Rimbaud, Baudelaire. This thick slug of Dostoevsky occupying half a shelf. Lawrence. Woolf. The mystical era: Augustine, Aquinas, the Tao Te Ching, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad-Gita. The psychological era: Freud, Jung, Adler, Reich, Reik. The philosophical era. The Marxist era. All that Koestler. Back to literature: Conrad, Forster, Beckett. Moving onward toward the fractured ’60’s: Bellow, Pynchon, Malamud, Mailer, Burroughs, Barth. Catch-22 and The Politics of Experience. Oh, yes, ladies and gentlemen, you are in the presence of a well-read man!

Here we have his files. A treasure-trove of personalia, awaiting a biographer yet unknown. Report cards, always with low marks for conduct. (“David shows little interest in his work and frequently disrupts the class.”) Crudely crayoned birthday cards for his mother and father. Old photographs: can this fat freckled boy be the gaunt individual who stands before you now? This man with the high forehead and the forced rigid smile is the late Paul Selig, father of our subject, deceased (olav hasholom!) 11 August 1971 of complications following surgery for a perforated ulcer. This gray-haired woman with the hyperthyroid eyes is the late Martha Selig, wife of Paul, mother of David, deceased (oy, veh, mama!) 15 March 1973 of mysterious rot of internal organs, probably cancerous. This grim young lady with cold knifeblade face is Judith Hannah Selig, adopted child of P. and M., unloving sister of D. Date on back of photo: July 1963. Judith is therefore 18 years old and in the summertime of her hate for me. How much she looks like Toni in this picture! I never noticed the resemblance before, but they’ve got the same dusky Yemenite look, the same long black hair. But Toni’s eyes were always warm and loving, except right at the very end, and Jude’s eyes never held anything for me other than ice, ice, Plutonian ice. Let us continue with the examination of David Selig’s private effects. This is his collection of essays and term papers, written during his college years. (“Carew is a courtly and elegant poet, whose work reflects influences both of Jonson’s precise classicism and Donne’s grotesque fancy—an interesting synthesis. His poems are neatly constructed and sharp of diction; in a poem such as ‘Ask me no more where Jove bestows,’ he captures Jonson’s harmonious austerity perfectly, while in others, such as ‘Mediocrity in Love Rejected’ or ‘Ingrateful Beauty Threatened,’ his wit is akin to that of Donne.”) How fortunate for D. Selig that he kept all this literary twaddle: here in his later years these papers have become the capital on which he lives, for you know, of course, how the central figure of our investigations earns his livelihood nowadays. What else do we find in these archives? The carbon copies of innumerable letters. Some of them are quite impersonal missives. Dear President Eisenhower. Dear Pope John. Dear Secretary-General Hammarskjold. Quite often, once, though rarely in recent years, he launched these letters to far corners of the globe. His fitful unilateral efforts at making contact with a deaf world. His troubled futile attempts at restoring order in a universe plainly tumbling toward the ultimate thermodynamic doom. Shall we look at a few of these documents? You say, Governor Rockefeller, that “with nuclear weapons multiplying, our security is dependent on the credibility of our willingness to resort to our deterrent. It is our heavy responsibility as public officials and as citizens to save the lives and to protect the health of our people. A lagging civil-defense effort cannot be excused by our conviction that nuclear war is a tragedy and that we must strive by all honorable means to assure peace.” Permit me to disagree. Your bomb-shelter program, Governor, is the project of a morally impoverished mind. To divert energy and resources from the search for a lasting peace to this ostrich-in-the-sand scheme is, I think, a foolish and dangerous policy that. . . . The Governor, by way of replying, sent his thanks and an offprint of the very speech which Selig was protesting. Can one expect more? Mr. Nixon, your entire campaign is pitched to the theory that America never had it so good under President Eisenhower, and so let’s have four more years of the same. To me you sound like Faust, crying out to the passing moment, Bleibe doch, du bist so schoen! (Am I too literate for you, Mr. Vice-President?) Please bear in mind that when Faust utters those words, Mephistopheles arrives to collect his soul. Does it honestly seem to you that this instant in history is so sweet that you would stop the clocks forever? Listen to the anguish in the land. Listen to the voices of Mississippi’s Negroes, listen to the cries of the hungry children of factory workers thrown out of work by a Republican recession, listen to. . . . Dear Mrs. Hemingway: Please allow me to add my words to the thousands expressing sorrow at the death of your husband. The bravery he showed in the face of a life-situation that had become unendurable and intolerable is indeed an example for those of us who. . . . Dear Dr. Buber. . . . Dear Professor Toynbee. . . . Dear President Nehru. . . . Dear Mr. Pound: The whole civilized world rejoices with you upon your liberation from the cruel and unnatural confinement which. . . . Dear Lord Russell. . . . Dear Chairman Khrushchev. . . . Dear M. Malraux. . . . dear. . . . dear. . . . dear. . . . A remarkable collection of correspondence, you must agree. With equally remarkable replies. See, this answer says, You may be right, and this one says, I am grateful for your interest, and this one says, Of course time does not permit individual replies to all letters received, but nevertheless please be assured that your thoughts will receive careful consideration, and this one says, Send this bastard the bedbug letter.

Unfortunately we do not have the imaginary letters which he dictates constantly to himself but never sends. Dear Mr. Kierkegaard: I agree entirely with your celebrated dictum equating “the absurd” with “the fact that with God all things are possible,” and declaring, “The absurd is not one of the factors which can be discriminated within the proper compass of the understanding: it is not identical with the improbable, the unexpected, the unforeseen.” In my own experiences with the absurd. . . . Dear Mr. Shakespeare: How aptly you put it when you say, “Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove.” Your sonnet, however, begs the question: If love is not love, what then is it, that feeling of closeness which can be so absurdly and unexpectedly destroyed by a trifle? If you could suggest some alternate existential mode of relating to others that. . . . Since they are transient, the product of vagrant impulses, and often incomprehensible, we have no satisfactory access to such communications, which Selig sometimes produces at a rate of hundreds per hour. Dear Mr. Justice Holmes: In Southern Pacific Co. v. Jensen, 244 U.S. 205, 221 [1917], you ruled, “I recognize without hesitation that judges do and must legislate, but they can do so only interstitially; they are confined from molar to molecular motions.” This splendid metaphor is not entirely clear to me, I must confess, and. . . .

 

*     *     *

 

Dear Mr. Selig:

The present state of the world and the whole of life is diseased. If I were a doctor and were asked for my advice, I should reply, “Create silence.”

Yours very sincerely,

 Sören Kierkegaard

(1813—1855)

 

*     *     *

 

And then there are these three folders here, thick beige cardboard. They are not available for public inspection, since they contain letters of a rather more personal kind. Under the terms of our agreement with the David Selig Foundation, I am forbidden to quote, though I may paraphrase. These are his letters to and occasionally from the girls he has loved or has wanted to love. The earliest is dated 1950 and bears the notation at the top in large red letters, NEVER SENT. Dear Beverly, it begins, and it is full of embarrassingly graphic sexual imagery. What can you tell us about this Beverly, Selig? Well, she was short and cute and freckled, with big headlights and a sunny disposition, and sat in front of me in my biology class, and had a creepy twin sister, Estelle, who scowled a lot and through some fluke of genetics was as flat as Beverly was bosomy. Maybe that was why she scowled so much. Estelle liked me in her bitter murky way and I think might eventually have slept with me, which would have done my 15-year-old ego a lot of good, but I despised her. She seemed like a blotchy, badly done imitation of Beverly, whom I loved. I used to wander barefoot in Beverly’s mind while the teacher, Miss Mueller, droned on about mitosis and chromosomes. She had just yielded her cherry to Victor Schlitz, the big rawboned green-eyed red-haired boy who sat next to her, and I learned a lot about sex from her at one remove, with a 12-hour time-lag, as she radiated every morning her adventure of the night before with Victor. I wasn’t jealous of him. He was handsome and self-confident and deserved her, and I was too shy and insecure to lay anybody anyway, then. So I rode secretly piggyback on their romance and fantasized doing with Beverly the gaudy things Victor was doing with her, until I desperately wanted to get into her myself, but my explorations of her head told me that to her I was just an amusing gnomish child, an oddity, a jester. How then to score? I wrote her this letter describing in vivid sweaty detail everything that she and Victor had been up to, and said, Don’t you wonder how I know all this, heh heh heh? The implication being that I’m some kind of superman with the power to penetrate the intimacies of a woman’s mind. I figured that would topple her right into my arms in a swoon of awe, but some second thoughts led me to see that she’d either think I was crazy or a peeping tom, and would in either case be wholly turned off me, so I filed the letter away undelivered. My mother found it one night but she didn’t dare say anything about it to me, hopelessly blocked as she was on the entire subject of sexuality; she just put it back in my notebook. I picked her thoughts that night and discovered she’d sneaked a look. Was she shocked and disturbed? Yes, she was, but also she felt very proud that her boy was a man at last, writing smutty stuff to pretty girls. My son the pornographer.

Most of the letters in this file date between 1954 and 1968. The most recent was written in the autumn of 1974, after which time Selig began to feel less and less in touch with the rest of the human race and stopped writing letters, except in his head. I don’t know how many girls are represented here, but there must have been quite a few. Generally these were all superficial affairs, for Selig, as you know, never married or even had many serious involvements with women. As in the case of Beverly, the ones he loved most deeply he usually never had actual relationships with, though he was capable of pretending he felt love for someone who was in fact a casual pickup. At times he made use of his special gifts knowingly to exploit women sexually, especially about the age of 25. He is not proud of that period. Wouldn’t you like to read these letters, you stinking voyeurs? But you won’t. You won’t get your paws on them. Why have I invited you in here, anyway? Why do I let you peer at my books and my photographs and my unwashed dishes and my stained bathtub? It must be that my sense of self is slipping. Isolation is choking me; the windows are closed but at least I’ve opened the door. I need you to bolster my grip on reality by looking into my life, by incorporating parts of it into your own experience, by discovering that I’m real, I exist, I suffer, I have a past if not a future. So that you can go away from here saying, Yes, I know David Selig, actually I know him quite well. But that doesn’t mean I have to show you everything. Hey, here’s a letter to Amy! Amy who relieved me of my festering virginity in the spring of 1953. Wouldn’t you like to know the story of how that happened? Anybody’s first time has an irresistible fascination. Well, fuck you: I don’t feel like discussing it. It isn’t much of a story anyway. I put it in her and I came and she didn’t, that’s how it was, and if you want to know the rest, who she was, how I seduced her, make up the details yourself. Where’s Amy now? Amy’s dead. How do you like that? His first lay, and he’s outlived her already. She died in an auto accident at the age of 23 and her husband, who knew me vaguely, phoned me to tell me, since I had once been a friend of hers. He was still in trauma because the police had made him come down to identify the body, and she had really been destroyed, mangled, mutilated. Like something from another planet, that’s how she looked, he told me. Catapulted through the windshield and into a tree. And I told him, “Amy was the first girl I ever slept with,” and he started consoling me. He, consoling me, and I had only been trying to be sadistic.

Time passes. Amy’s dead and Beverly’s a pudgy middle-aged housewife, I bet. Here’s a letter to Jackie Newhouse, telling her I can’t sleep for thinking about her. Jackie Newhouse? Who’s that? Oh, yes. Five feet two and a pair of boobs that would have made Marilyn Monroe feel topheavy. Sweet. Dumb. Puckered lips, babyblue eyes. Jackie had nothing going for her at all except her bosom, but that was enough for me, 17 years old and hung up on breasts, God knows why. I loved her for her mammaries, so globular and conspicuous in the tight white polo shirts she liked to wear. Summer of 1952. She loved Frank Sinatra and Perry Como, and had FRANKIE written in lipstick down the left thigh of her jeans and PERRY on the right. She also loved her history teacher, whose name, I think, was Leon Sissinger or Zippinger or something like that, and she had LEON on her jeans too, from hip to hip. I kissed her twice but that was all, not even my tongue in her mouth; she was even more shy than I, terrified that some hideous male hand would violate the purity of those mighty knockers. I followed her around, trying not to get into her head because it depressed me to see how empty it was. How did it end? Oh, yes: her kid brother Arnie was telling me how he sees her naked at home all the time, and I, desperate for a vicarious glimpse of her bare breasts, plunged into his skull and stole a second-hand peek. I hadn’t realized until then how important a bra can be. Unbound, they hung to her plump little belly, two mounds of dangling meat crisscrossed by bulging blue veins. Cured me of my fixation. So long ago, so unreal to me now, Jackie.

Here. Look. Spy on me. My fervid frenzied outpourings of love. Read them all, what do I care? Donna, Elsie, Magda, Mona, Sue, Lois, Karen. Did you think I was sexually deprived? Did you think my lame adolescence sent me stumbling into manhood incapable of finding women? I quarried for my life between their thighs. Dear Connie, what a wild night that was! Dear Chiquita, your perfume still lingers in the air. Dear Elaine, when I woke this morning the taste of you was on my lips. Dear Kitty, I—

Oh, God. Kitty. Dear Kitty, I have so much to explain to you that I don’t know where to begin. You never understood me, and I never understood you, and so the love I had for you was fated to bring us to a bad pass sooner or later. Which it now has. The failures of communication extended all up and down our relationship, but because you were different from any person I had ever known, truly and qualitatively different, I made you the center of my fantasies and could not accept you as you were, but had to keep hammering and hammering and hammering away at you, until—Oh, God. This one’s too painful. What the hell are you doing reading someone else’s mail? Don’t you have any decency? I can’t show you this. The tour’s over. Out! Out! Everybody out! For Christ’s sake, get out!

 

 

TWENTY.

 

 

There was always the danger of being found out. He knew he had to be on his guard. This was an era of witch-hunters, when anyone who departed from community norms was ferreted out and burned at the stake. Spies were everywhere, probing for young Selig’s secret, fishing for the awful truth about him. Even Miss Mueller, his biology teacher. She was a pudgy little poodle of a woman, about 40, with a glum face and dark arcs under her eyes; like a cryptodyke of some sort she wore her hair cut brutally short, the back of her neck always showing the stubble of a recent shave, and came to class every day in a gray laboratory smock. Miss Mueller was very deep into the realm of extrasensory and occult phenomena. Of course they didn’t use phrases like “very deep into” in 1949, when David Selig was in her class, but let the anachronism stand: she was ahead of her time, a hippie born too soon. She really grooved behind the irrational, the unknown. She knew her way around the high-school bio curriculum in her sleep, which was more or less the way she taught it. What turned her on, really, were things like telepathy, clairvoyance, telekinesis, astrology, the whole parapsychological bag. The most slender provocation was enough to nudge her away from the day’s assignment, the study of metabolism or the circulatory system or whatever, and onto one of her hobbyhorses. She was the first on her block to own the I Ching. She had done time inside orgone boxes. She believed that the Great Pyramid of Gizeh held divine revelations for mankind. She had sought deeper truths by way of Zen, General Semantics, the Bates eyesight exercises, and the readings of Edgar Cayce. (How easily I can extend her quest past the year of my own exposure to her! She must have gone on to dianetics, Velikovsky, Bridey Murphy, and Timothy Leary, and ended up, in her old age, as a lady guru in some Los Angeles eyrie, heavy into psilocybin and peyote. Poor silly gullible pitiful old bitch.)

Naturally she kept up with the research into extrasensory perception that J. B. Rhine was doing down at Duke University. It terrified David whenever she spoke of this. He constantly feared that she was going to give way to the temptation to run some Rhine experiments in class, and would thereby flush him out of hiding. He had read Rhine himself, of course, The Reach of the Mind and New Frontiers of the Mind, had even peered into the opacities of The Journal of Parapsychology, hoping to find something that would explain him to himself, but there was nothing there except statistics and foggy conjecture. Okay, Rhine was no threat to him so long as he went on piddling around in North Carolina. But muddled Miss Mueller might just strip him naked and deliver him to the pyre.

Inevitable, the progression toward disaster. The topic for the week, suddenly, was the human brain, its functions and capabilities. See, this is the cerebrum, this is the cerebellum, this is the medulla oblongata. A child’s garden of synapses. Fat-cheeked Norman Heimlich, gunning for a 99, knowing precisely which button to push, put up his hand: “Miss Mueller, do you think it’ll ever be possible for people really to read minds, I mean not by tricks or anything but actual mental telepathy?” Oh, the joy of Miss Mueller! Her lumpy face glowing. This was her cue to launch into an animated discussion of ESP, parapsychology, inexplicable phenomena, supernormal modes of communication and perception, the Rhine researches, et cetera, et cetera, a torrent of metaphysical irrelevance. David wanted to hide under his desk. The word “telepathy” made him wince. He already suspected that half the class realized what he was. Now a flash of wild paranoia. Are they looking at me, are they staring and pointing and tapping their heads and nodding? Certainly these were irrational fears. He had surveyed every mind in the class again and again, desperately trying to amuse himself during the arid stretches of boredom, and he knew that his secret was safe. His classmates, plodding young Brooklynites all, would never cotton to the veiled presence of a superman in their midst. They thought he was strange, yes, but had no notion of how strange. Would Miss Mueller now blow his cover, though? She was talking about conducting parapsychology experiments in class to demonstrate the potential reach of the human brain. Oh where can I hide?

No escape. She had her cards with her the next day. “These are known as Zener cards,” she explained solemnly, holding them up, fanning them out like Wild Bill Hickok about to deal himself a straight flush. David had never actually seen a set of the cards before, yet they were as familiar to him as the deck his parents used in their interminable canasta games. “They were devised about twenty-five years ago at Duke University by Dr. Karl E. Zener and Dr. J. B. Rhine. Another name for them is ‘ESP cards.’ Who can tell me what ‘ESP’ means?”

Norman Heimlich’s stubby hand waving in the air. “Extrasensory perception, Miss Mueller!”

“Very good, Norman.” Absentmindedly she began to shuffle the cards. Her eyes, normally inexpressive, gleamed with a Las Vegas intensity. She said, “The deck consists of 25 cards, divided into five ‘suits’ or symbols. There are five cards marked with a star, five with a circle, five with a square, five with a pattern of wavy lines, and five with a cross or plus sign. Otherwise they look just like ordinary playing cards.” She handed the pack to Barbara Stein, another of her favorites, and told her to copy the five symbols on the blackboard. “The idea is for the subject being examined to look at each card in turn, face down, and try to name the symbol on the other side. The test can be run in many different ways. Sometimes the examiner looks briefly at each card first; that gives the subject a chance to pick the right answer out of the examiner’s mind, if he can. Sometimes neither the subject nor the examiner sees the card in advance. Sometimes the subject is allowed to touch the card before he makes his guess. Sometimes he may be blindfolded, and other times he may be permitted to stare at the back of each card. No matter how it’s done, though, the basic aim is always the same: for the subject to determine, using extrasensory powers, the design on a card that he can’t see. Estelle, suppose the subject has no extrasensory powers at all, but is simply operating on pure guesswork. How many right guesses could we expect him to make, out of the 25 cards?”

Estelle, caught by surprise, reddened and blurted, “Uh—twelve and a half?”

A sour smirk from Miss Mueller, who turned to the brighter, happier twin. “Beverly?”

“Five, Miss Mueller?”

“Correct. You always have one chance out of five of guessing the right suit, so five right calls out of 25 is what luck alone ought to bring. Of course, the results are never that neat. On one run through the deck you might have four correct hits, and then next time six, and then five, and then maybe seven, and then perhaps only three—but the average, over a long series of trials, ought to be about five. That is, if pure chance is the only factor operating. Actually, in the Rhine experiments some groups of subjects have averaged 6 1/2 or 7 hits out of 25 over many tests. Rhine believes that this above-average performance can only be explained as ESP. And certain subjects have done much better. There was a man once who called nine straight cards right, two days in a row. Then a few days later he hit 15 straight cards, 21 out of 25. The odds against that are fantastic. How many of you think it could have been nothing but luck?”

About a third of the hands in the class went up. Some of them belonged to dullards who failed to realize that it was shrewd politics to show sympathy for the teacher’s pet enthusiasms. Some of them belonged to incorrigible skeptics who disdained such cynical manipulations. One of the hands belonged to David Selig. He was merely trying to don protective coloration.

Miss Mueller said, “Let’s run a few tests today. Victor, will you be our first guinea pig? Come to the front of the room.”

Grinning nervously, Victor Schlitz shambled forward. He stood stiffly beside Miss Mueller’s desk as she cut the cards and cut them again. Then, peering quickly at the top card, she slid it toward him. “Which symbol?” she asked.

“Circle?”

“We’ll see. Class, don’t say anything.” She handed the card to Barbara Stein, telling her to place a checkmark under the proper symbol on the blackboard. Barbara checked the square. Miss Mueller glanced at the next card. Star, David thought.

“Waves,” Victor said. Barbara checked the star.

“Plus.” Square, dummy! Square.

“Circle.” Circle. Circle. A sudden ripple of excitement in the classroom at Victor’s hit. Miss Mueller, glaring, called for silence.

“Star.” Waves. Waves was what Barbara checked.

“Square.” Square, David agreed. Square. Another ripple, more subdued.

Victor went through the deck. Miss Mueller had kept score: four correct hits. Not even as good as chance. She put him through a second round. Five. All right, Victor: you may be sexy, but a telepath you aren’t. Miss Mueller’s eyes roved the room. Another subject? Let it not be me, David prayed. God, let it not be me. It wasn’t. She summoned Sheldon Feinberg. He hit five the first time, six the second. Respectable, unspectacular. Then Alice Cohen. Four and four. Stony soil, Miss Mueller. David, following each turn of the cards, had hit 25 out of 25 every time, but he was the only one who knew that.

“Next?” Miss Mueller said. David shrank into his seat. How much longer until the dismissal bell? “Norman Heimlich.” Norman waddled toward the teacher’s desk. She glanced at a card. David, scanning her, picked up the image of a star. Bouncing then to Norman’s mind, David was amazed to detect a flicker of an image there, a star perversely rounding its points to form a circle, then reverting to being a star. What was this? Did the odious Heimlich have a shred of the power? “Circle,” Norman murmured. But he hit the next one—the waves—and the one after that, the square. He did indeed seem to he picking up emanations, fuzzy and indistinct but emanations all the same, from Miss Mueller’s mind. Fat Heimlich had the vestiges of the gift. But only the vestiges; David, scanning his mind and the teacher’s, watched the images grow ever more cloudy and vanish altogether by the tenth card, fatigue scattering Norman’s feeble strength. He scored a seven, though, the best so far. The bell, David prayed. The bell, the bell, the bell! Twenty minutes away.

A small mercy. Miss Mueller briskly distributed test paper. She would run the whole class at once. “I’ll call numbers from 1 to 25,” she said. “As I call each number, write down the symbol you think you see. Ready? One.”

David saw a circle. Waves, he wrote.

Star. Square.

Waves. Circle.

Star. Waves.

As the test neared its close, it occurred to him that he might be making a tactical error by muffing every call. He told himself to put down two or three right ones, just for camouflage. But it was too late for that. There were only four numbers left; it would look too conspicuous if he hit several of them correctly after missing all the others. He went on missing.

Miss Mueller said, “Now exchange papers with your neighbor and mark his answers. Ready? Number one: circle. Number two: star. Number three: waves. Number four. . . .”

Tensely she called for results. Had anyone scored ten hits or more? No, teacher. Nine? Eight? Seven? Norman Heimlich had seven again. He preened himself: Heimlich the mind-reader. David felt disgust at the knowledge that Heimlich had even a crumb of power. Six? Four students had six. Five? Four? Miss Mueller diligently jotted down the results. Any other figures? Sidney Goldblatt began to snicker. “Miss Mueller, how about zero?”

She looked startled. “Zero? Was there someone who got all 25 cards wrong?”

“David Selig did!”

David Selig wanted to drop through the floor. All eyes were on him. Cruel laughter assailed him. David Selig got them all wrong. It was like saying, David Selig wet his pants, David Selig cheated on the exam, David Selig went into the girls’ toilet. By trying to conceal himself, he had made himself terribly conspicuous. Miss Mueller, looking stern and oracular, said, “A null score can be quite significant too, class. It might mean extremely strong ESP abilities, rather than the total absence of such powers, as you might think.” Oh, God. Extremely strong ESP abilities. She went on, “Rhine talks of phenomena such as ‘forward displacement’ and ‘backward displacement,’ in which an unusually powerful ESP force might accidentally focus on one card ahead of the right one, or one card behind it, or even two or three cards away. So the subject would appear to get a below-average result when actually he’s hitting perfectly, just off the target! David, let me see your answers.”

“I wasn’t getting anything, Miss Mueller. I was just putting down my guesses, and I suppose they were all wrong.”

“Let me see.”

As though marching to the scaffold, he brought her the sheet. She placed it beside her own list and tried to realign it, searching for some correlation, some displacement sequence. But the randomness of his deliberately wrong answers protected him. A forward displacement of one card gave him two hits; a backward displacement of one card gave him three. Nothing significant there. Nevertheless, Miss Mueller would not let go. “I’d like to test you again,” she said. “We’ll run several kinds of trials. A null score is fascinating.” She began to shuffle the deck. God, God, God, where are you? Ah. The bell! Saved by the bell! “Can you stay after class?” she asked. In agony, he shook his head. “Got to go to geometry next, Miss Mueller.” She relented. Tomorrow, then. We’ll run the tests tomorrow. God! He was up all the night in a turmoil of fear, sweating, shivering; about four in the morning he vomited. He hoped his mother would make him stay home from school, but no luck: at half past seven he was aboard the bus. Would Miss Mueller forget about the test? Miss Mueller had not forgotten. The fateful cards were on her desk. There would be no escape. He found himself the center of all attention. All right, Duv, be cleverer this time. “Are you ready to begin?” she asked, tipping up the first card. He saw a plus sign in her mind.

“Square,” he said.

He saw a circle. “Waves,” he said.

He saw another circle. “Plus,” he said.

He saw a star. “Circle,” he said.

He saw a square. “Square,” he said. That’s one.

He kept careful count. Four wrong answers, then a right one. Three wrong answers, another right one. Spacing them with false randomness, he allowed himself five hits on the first test. On the second he had four. On the third, six. On the fourth, four. Am I being too average, he wondered? Should I give her a one-hit run, now? But she was losing interest. “I still can’t understand your null score, David,” she told him. “But it does seem to me as if you have no ESP ability whatever.” He tried to look disappointed. Apologetic, even. Sorry, teach, I ain’t got no ESP. Humbly the deficient boy made his way to his seat.

 

*     *     *

 

In one blazing instant of revelation and communion, Miss Mueller, I could have justified your whole lifelong quest for the improbable, the inexplicable, the unknowable, the irrational. The miraculous. But I didn’t have the guts to do it. I had to look after my own skin, Miss Mueller. I had to keep a low profile. Will you forgive me? Instead of giving you truth, I faked you out, Miss Mueller, and sent you spinning blindly onward to the tarot, to the signs of the zodiac, to the flying-saucer people, to a thousand surreal vibrations, to a million apocalyptic astral antiworlds, when the touch of my mind against yours might have been enough to heal your madness. One touch from me. In a moment. In the twinkling of an eye.

 

 

TWENTY-ONE.

 

 

These are the days of David’s passion, when he writhes a lot on his bed of nails. Let’s do it in short takes. It hurts less that way.

 

*     *     *

 

Tuesday. Election Day. For months the clamor of the campaign has fouled the air. The free world is choosing its new maximum leader. The sound-trucks rumble along Broadway, belching slogans. Our next President! The man for all America! Vote! Vote! Vote! Vote for X! Vote for Y! The hollow words merge and blur and flow. Republocrat. Demican. Boum. Why should I vote? I will not vote. I do not vote. I am not plugged in. I am not part of the circuit. Voting is for them. Once, in the late autumn of 1968, I think it was, I was standing outside Carnegie Hall, thinking of going over to the paperback bookshop on the other side of the street, when suddenly all traffic halted on 57th and scores of policemen sprang up from the pavement like the dragon’s-teeth warriors sown by Cadmus, and a motorcade came rumbling out of the east, and lo! in a dark black limousine rode Richard M. Nixon, President-Elect of the United States of America, waving jovially to the assembled populace. My big chance at last, I thought. I will look into his mind and make myself privy to great secrets of state; I will discover what it is about our leaders that sets them apart from ordinary mortals. And I looked into his mind, and what I found in there I will not tell you, except to say that it was more or less what I should have expected to find. And since that day I have had nothing to do with politics or politicians. Today I stay home from the polls. Let them elect the next President without my help.

 

*     *     *

 

Wednesday. I doodle with Yahya Lumumba’s half-finished term paper and other such projects, a few futile lines on each. Getting nowhere. Judith calls. “A party,” she says. “You’re invited. Everybody’ll be there.”

“A party? Who? Where? Why? When?”

“Saturday night. Near Columbia. The host is Claude Guermantes. Do you know him? Professor of French Literature.” No, the name is not Guermantes. I have changed the name to protect the guilty. “He’s one of those charismatic new professors. Young, dynamic, handsome, a friend of Simone de Beauvoir, of Genet. Karl and I are coming. And a lot of others. He always invites the most interesting people.”

“Genet? Simone de Beauvoir? Will they be there?”

“No, silly, not them. But it’ll be worth your time. Claude gives the best parties of anybody I know. Brilliant combinations of people.”

“Sounds like a vampire to me.”

“He gives as well as takes, Duv. He specifically asked me to invite you.”

“How does he know me at all?”

“Through me,” she says. “I’ve talked of you. He’s dying to meet you.”

“I don’t like parties.”