“Duv—”

I know that warning tone of voice. I have no stomach for a hassle just now. “All right,” I say, sighing. “Saturday night. Give me the address.” Why am I so pliable? Why do I let Judith manipulate me? Is this how I build my love for her, through these surrenders?

 

*     *     *

 

Thursday. I do two paragraphs, a. m., for Yahya Lumumba. Very apprehensive about his reaction to the thing I’m writing for him. He might just loathe it. If I ever finish it. I must finish it. Never missed a deadline yet. Don’t dare to. In the p.m. I walk up to the 230th St. bookstore, needing fresh air and wanting, as usual, to see if anything interesting has come out since my last visit, three days before. Compulsively buy a few paperbacks—an anthology of minor metaphysical poets, Updike’s Rabbit Redux, and a heavy Levi-Straussian anthropological study, folkways of some Amazonian tribe, that I know I’ll never get around to reading. A new clerk at the cash register: a girl, 19, 20, pale, blond, white silk blouse, short plaid skirt, impersonal smile. Attractive in a vacant-eyed way. She isn’t at all interesting to me, sexually or otherwise, and as I think that I chide myself for putting her down—let nothing human be alien to me—and on a whim I invade her mind as I pay for my books, so that I won’t be judging her by superficials. I burrow in easily, deep, down through layer after layer of trivia, mining her without hindrance, getting right to the real stuff. Oh! What a sudden blazing communion, soul to soul! She glows. She streams fire. She comes to me with a vividness and a completeness that stun me, so rare has this sort of experience become for me. No dumb pallid mannequin now. I see her full and entire, her dreams, her fantasies, her ambitions, her loves, her soaring ecstasies (last night’s gasping copulation and the shame and guilt afterward), a whole churning steaming sizzling human soul. Only once in the last six months have I hit this quality of total contact, only once, that awful day with Yahya Lumumba on the steps of Low Library. And as I remember that searing, numbing experience, something is triggered in me and the same thing happens. A dark curtain falls. I am disconnected. My grip on her consciousness is severed. Silence, that terrible mental silence, rushes to enfold me. I stand there, gaping, stunned, alone again and frightened, and I start to shake and drop my change, and she says to me, worried, “Sir? Sir?” in that sweet fluting little-girl voice.

 

*     *     *

 

Friday. Wake up with aches, high fever. Undoubtedly an attack of psychosomatic ague. The angry, embittered mind mercilessly flagellating the defenseless body. Chills followed by hot sweats followed by chills. Empty-gut puking. I feel hollow. Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Can’t work. I scribble a few pseudo-Lumumbesque lines and toss the sheet away. Sick as a dog. Well, a good excuse not to go to that dumb party, anyhow. I read my minor metaphysicals. Some of them not so minor. Traherne, Crashaw, William Cartwright. As for instance, Traherne:

 

Pure native Powers that Corruption loathe,

Did, like the fairest Glass

Or, spotless polished Brass,

Themselves soon in their Object’s Image clothe:

Divine Impressions, when they came,

Did quickly enter and my Soul enflame.

’Tis not the Object, but the Light,

That maketh Heav’n: ’Tis a clearer Sight.

Felicity

Appears to none but them that purely see.

 

Threw up again after that. Not to be interpreted as an expression of criticism. Felt better for a while. I should call Judith. Have her make some chicken soup for me. Oy, veh. Veh is mir.

 

*     *     *

 

Saturday. Without help of chicken soup I recover and decide to go to the party. Veh is mir, in spades. Remember, remember, the sixth of November. Why has David allowed Judith to drag him from his cave? An endless subway ride downtown; spades full of weekend wine add a special frisson to the ordinary adventure of Manhattan transportation. At last the familiar Columbia station. I must walk a few blocks, shivering, not dressed properly for the wintry weather, to the huge old apartment house at Riverside Drive and 112th St. where Claude Guermantes is reputed to live. I stand hesitantly outside. A cold, sour breeze ripping malevolently across the Hudson at me, bearing the windborne detritus of New Jersey. Dead leaves swirling in the park. Inside, a mahogany doorman eyes me fishily. “Professor Guermantes?” I say. He jerks a thumb. “Seventh floor, 7-G.” Waving me toward the elevator. I’m late; it’s almost ten o’clock. Upstairs in the weary Otis, creak creak creak creak, elevator door rolls back, silkscreen poster in the hallway proclaims the route to Guermantes’ lair. Not that posters are necessary. A high-decibel roar from the left tells me where the action is. I ring the bell. Wait. Nothing. Ring again. Too loud for them to hear me. Oh, to be able to transmit thoughts instead of just to receive them! I’d announce myself in tones of thunder. Ring again, more aggressively. Ah! Yes! Door opens. Short dark-haired girl, undergraduate-looking, wearing a sort of orange sari that leaves her right breast—small—bare. Nudity a la mode. Flashes her teeth gaily. “Come in, come in, come in!”

A mob scene. Eighty, ninety, a hundred people, everyone dressed in Seventies Flamboyant, gathered in groups of eight to ten, shouting profundities at one another. Those who hold no highballs are busily passing joints, ritualistic hissing intake of breath, much coughing, passionate exhaling. Before I have my coat off someone pops an elaborate ivory-headed pipe in my mouth. “Super hash,” he explains. “Just in from Damascus. Come on, man, toke up!” I suck smoke willy-nilly and feel an immediate effect. I blink. “Yeah,” my benefactor shouts. “It’s got the power to cloud men’s minds, don’t it?” In this mob my mind is already pretty well clouded, however, sans cannabis, solely from input overload. My power seems to be functioning at reasonably high intensity tonight, only without much differentiation of persons, and I am involuntarily taking in a thick soup of overlapping transmissions, a chaos of merging thoughts. Murky stuff. Pipe and passer vanish and I stumble stonedly forward into a cluttered room lined from floor to ceiling with crammed bookcases. I catch sight of Judith just as she catches sight of me, and from her on a direct line of contact comes her outflow, fiercely vivid at first, trailing off in moments into mush: brother, pain, love, fear, shared memories, forgiveness, forgetting, hatred, hostility, murmphness, froomz, zzzhhh, mmm. Brother. Love. Hate. Zzzhhh.

“Duv!” she cries. “Oh, here I am, Duvid!”

 

 

Judith looks sexy tonight. Her long lithe body is sheathed in a purple satiny wrap, skin-tight, throat-high, plainly showing her breasts and the little bumps of her nipples and the cleft between her buttocks. On her bosom nestles a glittering slab of gold-rimmed jade, intricately carved; her hair, unbound, tumbles gloriously. I feel pride in her beauty. She is flanked by two impressive-looking men. On one side is Dr. Karl F. Silvestri, author of Studies in the Physiology of Thermoregulation. He corresponds fairly closely to the image of him that I had plucked from Judith’s mind at her apartment a week or two ago, though he is older than I had guessed, at least 55, maybe closer to 60. Bigger, too—perhaps six feet five. I try to envision his huge burly body atop Jude’s wiry slender self, pressing down. I can’t. He has florid cheeks, a stolid self-satisfied facial expression, tender intelligent eyes. He radiates something avuncular or even paternal toward her. I see why Jude is attracted to him: he is the powerful father-figure that poor beaten Paul Selig never could have been for her. On Judith’s other side is a man whom I suspect to be Professor Claude Guermantes; I bounce a quick probe into him and confirm that guess. His mind is quicksilver, a glittering, shimmering pool. He thinks in three or four languages at once. His rampaging energy exhausts me at a single touch. He is about 40, just under six feet tall, muscular, athletic; he wears his elegant sandy hair done in swirling baroque waves, and his short goatee is impeccably clipped. His clothing is so advanced in style that I lack the vocabulary to describe it, being unaware of fashions myself: a kind of mantle of coarse green and gold fabric (linen? muslin?), a scarlet sash, flaring satin trousers, turned-up pointed-toed medieval boots. His dandyish appearance and mannered posture suggest that he might be gay, but he gives off a powerful aura of heterosexuality, and from Judith’s stance and fond way of looking at him I begin to realize that he and she must once have been lovers. May still be. I am shy about probing that. My raids on Judith’s privacy are too sore a point between us.

“I’d like you to meet my brother David,” Judith says.

Silvestri beams. “I’ve heard so much about you, Mr. Selig.”

“Have you really?” (I’ve got this freak of a brother, Karl. Would you believe it, he can actually read minds? Your thoughts are as clear as a radio broadcast to him.) How much has Judith actually revealed about me? I’ll try to probe him and see. “And call me David. You’re Dr. Silvestri, right?”

“That’s right. Karl. I’d prefer Karl.”

“I’ve heard a lot about you from Jude,” I say. No go on the probe. My abominable waning gifts; I get only sputtering bits of static, misty scraps of unintelligible thought. His mind is opaque to me. My head starts to throb. “She showed me two of your books. I wish I could understand things like that.”

A pleased chuckle from lofty Silvestri. Judith meanwhile has begun to introduce me to Guermantes. He murmurs his delight at making my acquaintance. I half expect him to kiss my cheeks, or maybe my hand. His voice is soft, purring; it carries an accent, but not a French one. Something strange, a mixture, Franco-Italic, maybe, or Franco-Hispanic. Him at least I can probe, even now; somehow his mind, more volatile than Silvestri’s, remains within my reach. I slither in and take a look, even while exchanging platitudes about the weather and the recent election. Christ! Casanova Redivivus! He’s slept with everything that walks or crawls, masculine feminine neuter, including of course my accessible sister Judith, whom—according to a neatly filed surface memory—he last penetrated just five hours ago, in this very room. His semen now curdles within her. He is obscurely restless over the fact that she never has come with him; he takes it as a failure of his flawless technique. The professor is speculating in a civilized way on the possibilities of nailing me before the night is out. No hope, professor. I will not be added to your Selig collection. He asks me pleasantly about my degrees. “Just one,” I say. “A B.A. in ‘56. I thought about doing graduate work in English literature but never got around to it.” He teaches Rimbaud, Verlain, Mallarmé, Baudelaire, Lautréamont, that whole sick crew, and identifies with them spiritually; his classes are full of adoring Barnard girls whose thighs open gladly for him, although in his Rimbaud facet he is not averse to romping with hearty Columbia men on occasions. As he talks to me he fondles Judith’s shoulderblades affectionately, proprietorially. Dr. Silvestri appears not to notice, or else not to care. “Your sister,” Guermantes murmurs, “she is a marvel, she is an original, a splendor—a type, M’sieu Selig, a type.” A compliment, in the froggish sense. I poke his mind again and learn that he is writing a novel about a bitter, voluptuous young divorcee and a French intellectual who is an incarnation of the life-force, and expects to make millions from it. He fascinates me: so blatant, so phony, so manipulative, and yet so attractive despite all his transparent failings. He offers me cocktails, highballs, liqueurs, brandies, pot, hash, cocaine, anything I crave. I feel engulfed and escape from him, in some relief, slipping away to pour a little rum.

A girl accosts me at the liquor table. One of Guermantes’ students, no more than 20. Coarse black hair tumbling into ringlets; pug nose; fierce perceptive eyes; full fleshy lips. Not beautiful but somehow interesting. Evidently I interest her, too, for she grins at me and says, “Would you like to go home with me?”

“I just got here.”

“Later. Later. No hurry. You look like you’re fun to fuck.”

“Do you say that to everybody you’ve just met?”

“We haven’t even met,” she points out. “And no, I don’t say it to everybody. To lots, though. What’s wrong? Girls can take the initiative these days. Besides, it’s leap year. Are you a poet?”

“Not really.”

“You look like one. I bet you’re sensitive and you suffer a lot.” My familiar dopy fantasy, coming to life before my eyes. Her eyes are red-rimmed. She’s stoned. An acrid smell of sweat rising from her black sweater. Her legs are too short for her torso, her hips too wide, her breasts too heavy. Probably she’s got the clap. Is she putting me on? I bet you’re sensitive and you suffer a lot. Are you a poet? I try to explore her, but it’s useless; fatigue is blanking my mind, and the collective shriek of the massed mob of partygoers is drowning out all individual outputs now. “What’s your name?” she asks.

“David Selig.”

“Lisa Holstein. I’m a senior at Barn—”

“Holstein?” The name triggers me. Kitty, Kitty, Kitty! “Is that what you said? Holstein?”

“Holstein, yes, and spare me the cow jokes.”

“Do you have a sister named Kitty? Catherine, I guess. Kitty Holstein. About 35 years old. Your sister, maybe your cousin—”

“No. Never heard of her. Someone you know?”

“Used to know,” I say. “Kitty Holstein.” I pick up my drink and turn away.

“Hey,” she calls after me. “Did you think I was kidding? Do you want to go home with me tonight or don’t you?”

 

 

A black colossus confronts me. Immense Afro nimbus, terrifying jungle face. His clothing a sunburst of clashing colors. Him, here? Oh, God. Just who I most need to see. I think guiltily of the unfinished term paper, lame, humpbacked, a no-ass monstrosity, sitting on my desk. What is he doing here? How has Claude Guermantes managed to draw Yahya Lumumba into his orbit? The evening’s token black, perhaps. Or the delegate from the world of high-powered sports, summoned here by way of demonstrating our host’s intellectual versatility, his eclectic ballsiness. Lumumba stands over me, glowering, coldly examining me from his implausible height like an ebony Zeus. A spectacular black woman has her arm through his, a goddess, a titan, well over six feet tall, skin like polished onyx, eyes like beacons. A stunning couple. They shame us all with their beauty. Lumumba says, finally, “I know you, man. I know you from someplace.”

“Selig. David Selig.”

“Sounds familiar. Where do I know you?”

“Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus.”

“What the fuck?” Baffled. Pausing, then. Grinning. “Oh, yeah. Yeah, baby. That fucking term paper. How you coming along on that, man?”

“Coming along.”

“You gonna have it Wednesday? Wednesday when it due.”

“I’ll have it, Mr. Lumumba.” Doin’ my best, massa.

“You better, boy. I counting on you.”

“—Tom Nyquist—”

The name leaps suddenly, startlingly, out of the white-noise background hum of party chatter. For an instant it hangs in the smoky air like a dead leaf caught by a lazy October breeze. Who said “Tom Nyquist” just then? Who was it who spoke his name? A pleasant baritone voice, no more than a dozen feet from me. I look for likely owners of that voice. Men all around. You? You? You? No way of telling. Yes, one way. When words are spoken aloud, they reverberate in the mind of the speaker for a short while. (Also in the minds of his hearers, but the reverberations are different in tonality.) I summon my slippery skill and, straining, force needles of inquiry into the nearby consciousnesses, hunting for echoes. The effort is murderously great. The skulls I enter are solid bony domes through whose few crevices I struggle to ram my limp, feeble probes. But I enter. I seek the proper reverberations. Tom Nyquist? Tom Nyquist? Who spoke his name? You? You? Ah. There. The echo is almost gone, just a dim hollow clangor at the far end of a cavern. A tall plump man with a comic fringe of blond beard.

“Excuse me,” I say. “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but I heard you mention the name of a very old friend of mine—”

“Oh?”

“—and I couldn’t help coming over to ask you about him. Tom Nyquist. He and I were once very close. If you know where he is now, what he’s doing—”

“Tom Nyquist?”

“Yes. I’m sure I heard you mention him.”

A blank smile. “I’m afraid there’s been a mistake. I don’t know anyone by that name. Jim? Fred? Can you help?”

“But I’m positive I heard—” The echo. Boum in the cave. Was I mistaken? At close range I try to get inside his head, to hunt in his filing system for any knowledge of Nyquist. But I can’t function at all, now. They are conferring earnestly. Nyquist? Nyquist? Did anybody hear a Nyquist mentioned? Does anyone know a Nyquist?

One of them suddenly cries: “John Leibnitz!”

“Yes,” says the plump one happily. “Maybe that’s who you heard me mention. I was talking about John Leibnitz a few moments ago. A mutual friend. In this racket that might very well have sounded like Nyquist to you.”

 Leibnitz. Nyquist. Leibnitz. Nyquist. Boum. Boum. “Quite possibly,” I agree. “No doubt that’s what happened. Silly of me.” John Leibnitz. “Sorry to have bothered you.”

 

 

Guermantes says, mincing and prancing at my elbow, “You really must audit my class one of these days. This Wednesday afternoon I start Rimbaud and Verlaine, the first of six lectures on them. Do come around. You’ll be on campus Wednesday, won’t you?”

Wednesday is the day I must deliver Yahya Lumumba’s term paper on the Greek tragedians. I’ll be on campus, yes. I’d better be. But how does Guermantes know that? Is he getting into my head somehow? What if he has the gift too? And I’m wide open to him, he knows everything, my poor pathetic secret, my daily increment of loss, and there he stands, patronizing me because I’m failing and he’s as sharp as I ever was. Then a quick paranoiac flash: not only does he have the gift but perhaps he’s some kind of telepathic leech, draining me, bleeding the power right out of my mind and into his. Perhaps he’s been tapping me on the sly ever since ’74.

I shake these useless idiocies away. “I expect to be around on Wednesday, yes. Perhaps I will drop in.”

There is no chance whatever that I will go to hear Claude Guermantes lecture on Rimbaud or Verlaine. If he’s got the power, let him put that in his pipe and smoke it!

“I’d love it if you came,” he tells me. He leans close to me. His androgynous Mediterranean smoothness permits him casually to breach the established American code of male-to-male distancing customs. I smell hair tonic, shaving lotion, deodorant, and other perfumes. A small blessing: not all my senses are dwindling at once. “Your sister,” he murmurs. “Marvelous woman! How I love her! She speaks often of you.”

“Does she?”

“With great love. Also with great guilt. It seems you and she were estranged for many years.’’

“That’s over now. We’re finally becoming friends.”

“How wonderful for you both.” He gestures with a flick of his eyes. “That doctor. No good for her. Too old, too static. After fifty most men lose the capacity to grow. He’ll bore her to death in six months.”

“Maybe boredom is what she needs,” I reply. “She’s had an exciting life. It hasn’t made her happy.”

“No one ever needs boredom,” Guermantes says, and winks.

 

 

“Karl and I would love to have you come for dinner next week, Duv. There’s so much we three need to talk about.”

“I’ll see, Jude. I’m not sure about anything about next week yet. I’ll call you.”

 

 

Lisa Holstein. John Leibnitz. I think I need another drink.

 

*     *     *

 

Sunday. Greatly overhung. Hash, rum, wine, pot, God knows what else. And somebody popping amyl nitrite under my nose about two in the morning. That filthy fucking party. I should never have gone. My head, my head, my head. Where’s the typewriter? I’ve got to get some work done. Let’s go, then:

 

We see, thus, the difference in method of approach of these three tragedians to the same story. Aeschylus’ primary concern is theological implications of the crime and the inexorable workings of the gods: Orestes is torn between the command of Apollo to slay his mother and his own fear of matricide, and goes mad as a result. Euripides dwells on the characterization, and takes a less allegorical

 

No damned good. Save it for later.

Silence between my ears. The echoing black void. I have nothing going for me at all today, nothing. I think it may be completely gone. I can’t even pick up the clamor of the spics next door. November is the cruelest month, breeding onions out of the dead mind. I’m living an Eliot poem. I’m turning into words on a page. Shall I sit here feeling sorry for myself? No. No. No. No. I’ll fight back. Spiritual exercises designed to restore my power. On your knees, Selig. Bow the head. Concentrate. Transform yourself into a fine needle of thought, a slim telepathic laser-beam, stretching from this room to the vicinity of the lovely star Betelgeuse. Got it? Good. That sharp pure mental beam piercing the universe. Hold it. Hold it firm. No spreading at the edges allowed, man. Good. Now ascend. We are climbing Jacob’s ladder. This will be an out-of-the-body experience, Duvid. Up, up and away! Rise through the ceiling, through the roof, through the atmosphere, through the ionosphere, through the stratosphere, through the whatsisphere. Outward. Into the vacant interstellar spaces. O dark dark dark. Cold the sense and lost the motive of action. No, stop that stuff! Only positive thinking is allowed on this trip. Soar! Soar! Toward the little green men of Betelgeuse IX. Reach their minds, Selig. Make contact. Make . . . contact. Soar, you lazy yid-bastard! Why aren’t you soaring? Soar!

Well?

Nothing. Nada. Niente. Nowhere. Nulla. Nicht.

Tumbling back to earth. Into the silent funeral. All right, give up, if that’s what you want. All right. Rest, for a little while. Rest and then pray, Selig. Pray.

 

*     *     *

 

Monday. The hangover gone. The brain once again receptive. In a glorious burst of creative frenzy I rewrite The “Electra” Theme in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides from gunwale to fetlock, completely recasting it, revoicing it, clarifying and strengthening the ideas while simultaneously catching what I think is just the perfect tone of offhand niggerish hipness. As I hammer out the final words the telephone rings. Nicely timed; I feel sociable now. Who calls? Judith? No. It is Lisa Holstein who calls. “You promised to take me home after the party,” she says mournfully, accusingly. “What the hell did you do, sneak away?”

“How did you get my number?”

“From Claude. Professor Guermantes.” That sleek devil. He knows everything. “Look, what are you doing right now?”

“Thinking about having a shower. I’ve been working all morning and I stink like a goat.”

“What kind of work do you do?”

“I ghostwrite term papers for Columbia men.”

She ponders that a moment. “You sure have a weird head, man. I mean really: what do you do?”

“I just told you.”

A long digestive silence. Then: “Okay. I can dig it. You ghostwrite term papers. Look, Dave, go take your shower. How long is it on the subway from 110th Street and Broadway to your place?”

“Maybe forty minutes, if you get a train right away.”

“Swell. See you in an hour, then.” Click.

I shrug. A crazy broad. Dave, she calls me. Nobody calls me Dave. Stripping, I head for the shower, a long leisurely soaping. Afterward, sprawling out in a rare interlude of relaxation, Dave Selig re-reads this morning’s labors and finds pleasure in what he has wrought. Let’s hope Lumumba does too. Then I pick up the Updike book. I get to page four and the phone rings again. Lisa: she’s on the train platform at 225th, wants to know how to get to my apartment. This is more than a joke, now. Why is she pursuing me so singlemindedly? But okay. I can play her game. I give her the instructions. Ten minutes later, a knock on the door. Lisa in thick black sweater, the same sweaty one as Saturday night, and tight blue jeans. A shy grin, strangely out of character for her. “Hi,” she says. Making herself comfortable. “When I first saw you, I had this intuitive flash on you: This guy’s got something special. Make it with him. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, its that you’ve got to trust your intuition. I go with the flow, Dave, I go with the flow.” Her sweater is off by now. Her breasts are heavy and round, with tiny, almost imperceptible nipples. A Jewish star nestles in the deep valley between them. She wanders the room, examining my books, my records, my photographs. “So tell me,” she says. “Now that I’m here. Was I right? Is there anything special about you?”

“There once was.”

“What?”

“That’s for me to know and you to find out,” I say, and gathering my strength, I ram my mind into hers. It’s a brutal frontal assault, a rape, a true mindfuck. Of course she doesn’t feel a thing. I say, “I used to have a really extraordinary gift. It’s mostly worn off by now, but some of the time I still have it, and as a matter of fact I’m using it on you right now.”

“Far out,” she says, and drops her jeans. No underpants. She will be fat before she’s 30. Her thighs are thick, her belly protrudes. Her pubic hair is oddly dense and widespread, less a triangle than a sort of diamond, a black diamond reaching past her loins to her hips, almost. Her buttocks are deeply dimpled. While I inspect her flesh I savagely ransack her mind, sparing her no areas of privacy, enjoying my access while it lasts. I don’t need to be polite. I owe her nothing: she forced herself on me. I check, first, to see if she had been lying when she said she’d never heard of Kitty. The truth: Kitty is no kin to her. A meaningless coincidence of surnames, is all. “I’m sure you’re a poet, Dave,” she says as we entwine and drop onto the unmade bed. “That’s an intuition flash too. Even if you’re doing this term paper thing now, poetry is where you’re really at, right?” I run my hands over her breasts and belly. A sharp odor comes from her skin. She hasn’t washed in three or four days, I bet. No matter. Her nipples mysteriously emerge, tiny rigid pink nubs. She wriggles. I continue to loot her mind like a Goth plundering the Forum. She is fully open to me; I delight in this unexpected return of vigor. Her autobiography assembles itself for me. Born in Cambridge. Twenty years old. Father a professor. Mother a professor. One younger brother. Tomboy childhood. Measles, chicken pox, scarlet fever. Puberty at eleven, lost her virginity at twelve. Abortion at sixteen. Several Lesbian adventures. Passionate interest in French decadent poets. Acid, mescaline, psilocybin, cocaine, even a sniff of smack. Guermantes gave her that. Guermantes also took her to bed five or six times. Vivid memories of that. Her mind shows me more of Guermantes than I want to see. He’s hung very impressively. Lisa comes through with a tough, aggressive self-image, captain of her soul, master of her fate, etc. Underneath that it’s just the opposite, of course; she’s scared as hell. Not a bad kid. I feel a little guilty about the casual way I slammed into her head, no regard for her privacy at all. But I have my needs. I continue to prowl her, and meanwhile she goes down on me. I can hardly remember the last time anyone did that. I can hardly remember my last lay, it’s been so bad lately. She’s an expert fellatrice. I’d like to reciprocate but I can’t bring myself to do it; sometimes I’m fastidious and she’s not the douching type. Oh, well, leave that stuff for the Guermanteses of this world. I lie there picking her brain and accepting the gift of her mouth. I feel virile, bouncy, cocksure, and why not, getting my kicks from two inputs at once, head and crotch? Without withdrawing from her mind I withdraw, at last, from her lips, turn around, part her thighs, slide deep into her tight narrow-mouthed harbor. Selig the stallion. Selig the stud. “Oooh,” she says, flexing her knees. “Oooh.” And we begin to play the beast with two backs. Covertly I feed on feedback, tapping into her pleasure-responses and thereby doubling my own; each thrust brings me a factored and deliciously exponential delight. But then a funny thing happens. Although she is nowhere close to coming—an event that I know will disrupt our mental contact when it occurs—the broadcast from her mind is already becoming erratic and indistinct, more noise than signal. The images break up in a pounding of static. What comes through is garbled and distant; I scramble to maintain my hold on her consciousness, but no use, no use, she slips away, moment by moment receding from me, until there is no communion at all. And in that moment of severance my cock suddenly softens and slips out of her. She is jolted by that, caught by surprise. “What brought you down?” she asks. I find it impossible to tell her. I remember Judith asking me, some weeks back, whether I had ever regarded my loss of mental powers as a kind of metaphor of impotence. Sometimes yes, I told her. And now here, for the first time, metaphor blends with reality; the two failures are integrated. He is impotent here and he is impotent there. Poor David. “I guess I got distracted,” I tell her. Well, she has her skills; for half an hour she works me over, fingers, lips, tongue, hair, breasts, not getting a rise out of me with anything, in fact turning me off more than ever by her grim purposefulness. “I don’t understand it,” she says. “You were doing so well. Was there something about me that brought you down?” I reassure her. You were great, baby. Stuff like this sometimes just happens, no one knows why. I tell her, “Let’s just rest and maybe I’ll come back to life.” We rest. Side by side, stroking her skin in an abstract way, I run a few tentative probing efforts. Not a flicker on the telepathic level. Not a flicker. The silence of the tomb. Is this it, the end, right here and now? Is this where it finally burns out? And I am like all the rest of you now. I am condemned to make do with mere words. “I have an idea,” she says. “Let’s take a shower together. That sometimes peps a guy up.” To this I make no objection; it might just work, and in any case she’ll smell better afterward. We head for the bathroom. Torrents of brisk cool water.

Success. The ministrations of her soapy hand revive me.

We spring toward the bed. Still stiff, I top her and take her. Gasp gasp gasp, moan moan moan. I can get nothing on the mental band. Suddenly she goes into a funny little spasm, intense but quick, and my own spurt swiftly follows. So much for sex. We curl up together, cuddly in the afterglow. I try again to probe her. Zero. Zee-ro. Is it gone? I think it’s really gone. You have been present today at an historic event, young lady. The perishing of a remarkable extrasensory power. Leaving behind this merely mortal husk of mine. Alas.

“I’d love to read some of your poetry, Dave,” she says.

 

*     *     *

 

Monday night, about seven-thirty. Lisa has left, finally. I go out for dinner, to a nearby pizzeria. I am quite calm. The impact of what has befallen me hasn’t really registered yet. How strange that I can be so accepting. At any moment, I know, it’s bound to come rushing in on me, crushing me, shattering me; I’ll weep, I’ll scream, I’ll bang my head against walls. But for now I’m surprisingly cool. An oddly posthumous feeling, as of having outlived myself. And a feeling of relief: the suspense is over, the process has completed itself, the dying is done, and I’ve survived it. Of course I don’t expect this mood to last. I’ve lost something central to my being, and now I await the anguish and the grief and the despair that must surely be due to erupt shortly.

But it seems that my mourning must be postponed. What I thought was all over isn’t over yet. I walk into the pizzeria and the counterman gives me his flat cold New York smile of welcome, and I get this, unsolicited, from behind his greasy face: Hey, here’s the fag who always wants extra anchovies.

Reading him clearly. So it’s not dead yet! Not quite dead! Only resting a while. Only hiding.

 

*     *     *

 

Tuesday. Bitter cold; one of those terrible late-autumn days when every drop of moisture has been squeezed from the air and the sunlight is like knives. I finish two more term papers for delivery tomorrow. I read Updike. Judith calls after lunch. The usual dinner invitation. My usual oblique reply.

“What did you think of Karl?” she asks.

“A very substantial man.”

“He wants me to marry him.”

“Well?”

“It’s too soon. I don’t really know him, Duv. I like him, I admire him tremendously, but I don’t know whether I love him.”

“Then don’t rush into anything with him,” I say. Her soap-opera hesitations bore me. I don’t understand why anybody old enough to know the score ever gets married, anyway. Why should love require a contract? Why put yourself into the clutches of the state and give it power over you? Why invite lawyers to fuck around with your assets? Marriage is for the immature and the insecure and the ignorant. We who see through such institutions should be content to live together without legal coercion, eh, Toni? Eh? I say, “Besides, if you marry him, he’d probably want you to give up Guermantes. I don’t think he could dig it.”

“You know about me and Claude?”

“Of course.”

“You always know everything.”

“This was pretty obvious, Jude.”

“I thought your power was waning.”

“It is, it is, it’s waning faster than ever. But this was still pretty obvious. To the naked eye.”

“All right. What did you think of him?”

“He’s death. He’s a killer.”

“You misjudged him, Duv.”

“I was in his head. I saw him, Jude. He isn’t human. People are toys to him.”

“If you could hear the sound of your own voice now, Duv. The hostility, the outright jealousy—”

“Jealousy? Am I that incestuous?”

“You always were,” she says. “But let that pass. I really thought you’d enjoy meeting Claude.”

“I did. He’s fascinating. I think cobras are fascinating too.”

“Oh, fuck you, Duv.”

“You want me to pretend I liked him?”

“Don’t do me any favors.” The old icy Judith.

“What’s Karl’s reaction to Guermantes?”

She pauses. Finally: “Pretty negative. Karl’s very conventional, you know. Just as you are.”

“Me?”

“Oh, you’re so fucking straight, Duv! You’re such a puritan! You’ve been lecturing me on morality all my goddamned life. The very first time I got laid there you were, wagging your finger at me—”

“Why doesn’t Karl like him?”

“I don’t know. He thinks Claude’s sinister. Exploitive.” Her voice is suddenly flat and dull. “Maybe he’s just jealous. He knows I’m still sleeping with Claude. Oh, Jesus, Duv, why are we fighting again? Why can’t we just talk?”

“I’m not the one who’s fighting. I’m not the one who raised his voice.”

“You’re challenging me. That’s what you always do. You spy on me and then you challenge me and try to put me down.”

“Old habits are hard to break, Jude. Really, though: I’m not angry with you.”

“You sound so smug!”

“I’m not angry. You are. You got angry when you saw that Karl and I agree about your friend Claude. People always get angry when they’re told something they don’t want to hear. Listen, Jude, do whatever you want. If Guermantes is your trip, go ahead.”

“I don’t know. I just don’t know.” An unexpected concession: “Maybe there is something sick about my relationship with him.” Her flinty self-assurance vanishes abruptly. That’s the wonderful thing about her: you get a different Judith every two minutes. Now, softening, thawing, she sounds uncertain of herself. In a moment she’ll turn her concern outward, away from her own troubles, toward me. “Will you come to dinner next week? We very much do want to get together with you.”

“I’ll try.”

“I’m worried about you, Duv.” Yes, here it comes. “You looked so strung out on Saturday night.”

“It’s been a pretty rough time for me. But I’ll manage.” I don’t feel like talking about myself. I don’t want her pity, because after I get hers, I’ll start giving myself mine. “Listen, I’ll call you soon, okay?”

“Are you still in so much pain, Duv?”

“I’m adapting. I’m accepting the whole thing. I mean, I’ll be okay. Keep in touch, Jude. My best to Karl.” And Claude, I add, as I put down the receiver.

 

*     *     *

 

Wednesday morning. Downtown to deliver my latest batch of masterpieces. It’s colder even than yesterday, the air clearer, the sun brighter, more remote. How dry the world seems. The humidity is minus sixteen percent, I think. The sort of weather in which I used to function with overwhelming clarity of perception. But I was picking up hardly anything at all on the subway ride down to Columbia, just muzzy little blurts and squeaks, nothing coherent. I can no longer be certain of having the power on any given day, apparently, and this is one of the days off. Unpredictable. That’s what you are, you who live in my head: unpredictable. Thrashing about randomly in your death-throes. I go to the usual place and await my clients. They come, they get from me what they have come for, they cross my palm with greenbacks. David Selig, benefactor of undergraduate mankind. I see Yahya Lumumba like a black sequoia making his way across from Butler Library. Why am I trembling? It’s the chill in the air, isn’t it, the hint of winter, the death of the year. As the basketball star approaches he waves, nods, grins; everyone knows him, everyone calls out to him. I feel a sense of participation in his glory. When the season starts maybe I’ll go watch him play.

“You got the paper, man?”

“Right here.” I deal it off the stack. “Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides. Six pages. That’s $21, minus the five you already gave me is $16 you owe me.”

“Wait, man.” He sits down beside me on the steps. “I got to read this fucker first, right? How I know you did a righteous job if I don’t read it?”

I watch him as he reads. Somehow I expect him to be moving his lips, to be stumbling over the unfamiliar words, but no, his eyes flicker rapidly over the lines. He gnaws his lip. He reads faster and faster, impatiently turning the pages. At length he looks at me and there is death in his eyes.

“This is shit, man,” he says. “I mean, this here is just shit. What kind of con you trying to pull?”

“I guarantee you’ll get a B+. You don’t have to pay me until you get the grade. Anything less than B+ and—”

“No, listen to me. Who talking about grades? I can’t turn this fucking thing in at all. Look, half this thing is jive-talk, the other half it copied straight out of some book. Crazy shit, that’s what. The prof he going to read it, he going to look at me, he going to say, Lumumba, who you think I am? You think I a dummy, Lumumba? You didn’t write this crap, he going to say to me. You don’t believe Word One of this.” Angrily he rises. “Here, I going to read you some of this, man. I show you what you give me.” Leafing through the pages, he scowls, spits, shakes his head. “No. Why the hell should I? You know what you up to here, man? You making fun of me, that’s what. You playing games with the dumb nigger, man.”

“I was trying to make it look plausible that you had written—”

“Crap. You pulling a mindfuck, man. You making up a pile of stinking Jew shit about Europydes and you hoping I get in trouble trying to pass it off as my own stuff.”

“That’s a lie. I did the best possible job for you, and don’t think I didn’t sweat plenty. When you hire another man to write a term paper for you, I think you have to be prepared to expect a certain—”

“How long this take you? Fifteen minutes?”

“Eight hours, maybe ten,” I say. “You know what I think you’re trying to do, Lumumba? You’re pulling reverse racism on me. Jew this and Jew that—if you don’t like Jews so much, why didn’t you get a black to write your paper for you? Why didn’t you write it yourself? I did an honest job for you. I don’t like hearing it put down as stinking Jew shit. And I tell you that if you turn it in, you’ll get a passing grade for sure, you’ll probably get a B+ at the very least.”

“I gonna get flunked, is what.”

“No. No. Maybe you just don’t see what I was driving at. Let me try to explain it to you. If you’ll give it to me for a minute so I can read you a couple of things—maybe it’ll be clearer if I—” Getting to my feet, I extend a hand toward the paper, but he grins and holds it high above my head. I’d need a ladder to reach it. No use jumping. “Come on, damn it, don’t play games with me! Let me have it!” I snap, and he flicks his wrist and the six sheets of paper soar into the wind and go sailing eastward along College Walk. Dying, I watch them go. I clench my fists; an astonishing burst of rage explodes in me. I want to smash in his mocking face. “You shouldn’t have done that,” I say. “You shouldn’t have just thrown it away.”

“You owe me my five bucks back, man.”

“Hold on, now. I did the work you hired me to do, and—”

“You said you don’t charge if the paper’s no good. Okay, the paper was shit. No charge. Give me the five.”

“You aren’t playing fair, Lumumba. You’re trying to rip me off.”

“Who ripping who off? Who set up that money-back deal anyhow? Me? You. What I gonna do for a term paper now? I got to take an incomplete and it your fault. Suppose they make me ineligible for the team because of that. Huh? Huh? What then? Look, man, you make me want to puke. Give me the five.”

Is he serious about the refund? I can’t tell. The idea of paying him back disgusts me, and it isn’t just on account of losing the money. I wish I could read him, but I can’t get anything out of him on that level; I’m completely blocked now. I’ll bluff. I say, “What is this, slavery turned upside down? I did the work. I don’t give a damn what kind of crazy irrational reasons you’ve got for rejecting it. I’m going to keep the five. At least the five.”

“Give me the money, man.”

“Go to hell.”

I start to walk away. He grabs me—his arm, fully outspread toward me, must be as long as one of my legs—and hauls me toward him. He starts to shake me. My teeth are rattling. His grin is broader than ever, but his eyes are demonic. I wave my fists at him, but, held at arm’s length, I can’t even touch him. I stare to yell. A crowd is gathering. Suddenly there are three or four other men in varsity jackets surrounding us, all black, all gigantic, though not as big as he is. His teammates. Laughing, whooping, cavorting. I am a toy to them. “Hey, man, he bothering you?” one of them asks. “You need help, Yahya?” yells another. “What’s the mothafuck honkie doing to you, man?” calls a third. They form a ring and Lumumba thrusts me toward the man on his left, who catches me and flings me onward around the circle. I spin; I stumble; I reel; they never let me fall. Around and around and around. An elbow explodes against my lip. I taste blood. Someone slaps me, and my head rockets backward. Fingers jabbing my ribs. I realize that I’m going to get very badly hurt, that in fact these giants are going to beat me up. A voice I barely recognize as my own offers Lumumba his refund, but no one notices. They continue to whirl me from one to the next. Not slapping now, not jabbing, but punching. Where are the campus police? Help! Help! Pigs to the rescue! But no one comes. I can’t catch my breath. I’d like to drop to my knees and huddle against the ground. They’re yelling at me, racial epithets, words I barely comprehend, soul-brother jargon that must have been invented last week; I don’t know what they’re calling me, but I can feel the hatred in every syllable. Help? Help? The world spins wildly. I know now how a basketball would feel, if a basketball could feel. The steady pounding, the blur of unending motion. Please, someone, anyone, help me, stop them. Pain in my chest: a lump of white-hot metal back of my breastbone. I can’t see. I can only feel. Where are my feet? I’m falling at last. Look how fast the steps rush toward me. The cold kiss of the stone bruises my cheek. I may already have lost consciousness; how can I tell? There’s one comfort, at least. I can’t get any further down than this.

 

 

TWENTY-TWO.

 

 

He was ready to fall in love when he met Kitty, overripe and eager for an emotional entanglement. Perhaps that was the whole trouble; what he felt for her was not so much love as simply satisfaction at the idea of being in love. Or perhaps not. He never understood his feelings for Kitty in any orderly way. They had their romance in the summer of 1963, which he remembers as the last summer of hope and good cheer before the long autumn of entropic chaos and philosophical despair descended on western society. Jack Kennedy was running things then, and while things weren’t going especially well for him politically, he still managed to give the impression that he was going to get it all together, if not right away then in his inevitable second term. Atmospheric nuclear tests had just been banned. The Washington-to-Moscow hot line was being set up. Secretary of State Rusk announced in August that the South Vietnamese government was rapidly taking control of additional areas of the countryside. The number of Americans killed fighting in Vietnam had not yet reached 100.

Selig, who was 28 years old, had just moved from his Brooklyn Heights apartment to a small place in the West Seventies. He was working as a stockbroker then, of all unlikely things. This was Tom Nyquist’s idea. After six years, Nyquist was still his closest and possibly only friend, although the friendship had waned considerably in the last year or two: Nyquist’s almost arrogant self-assurance made Selig increasingly more uncomfortable, and he found it desirable to put some distance, psychological and geographical, between himself and the older man. One day Selig had said wistfully that if he could only manage to get a bundle of money together—say, $25,000 or so—he’d go off to a remote island and spend a couple of years writing a novel, a major statement about alienation in contemporary life, something like that. He had never written anything serious and wasn’t sure he was sincere about wanting to. He was secretly hoping that Nyquist would simply hand him the money—Nyquist could pick up $25,000 in one afternoon’s work, if he felt like it—and say, “Here, chum, go and be creative.” But Nyquist didn’t do things that way. Instead he said that the easiest way for someone without capital to make a lot of money in a hurry was to take a job as a customer’s man with a brokerage firm. The commissions would be decent, enough to live on and something left over, but the real money would come from riding along on all the in-shop maneuvers of the experienced brokers—the short sales, the new-issue purchases, the arbitrage ploys. If you’re dedicated enough, Nyquist told him, you can make just about as much as you like. Selig protested that he knew nothing about Wall Street. “I could teach you everything in three days,” said Nyquist.

Actually it took less than that. Selig slipped into Nyquist’s mind for a quick cram course in financial terminology. Nyquist had all the definitions beautifully arranged: common stocks and preferred, shores and longs, puts and calls, debentures, convertibles, capital gains, special situations, closed-end versus open-end funds, secondary offerings, specialists and what they do, the over-the-counter market, the Dow-Jones averages, point-and-figure charts, and everything else. Selig memorized all of it. There was a vivid quality about mind-to-mind transferences with Nyquist that made memorizing things easy. The next step was to enroll as a trainee. Every big brokerage firm was looking for beginners—Merrill Lynch, Goodbody, Hayden Stone, Clark Dodge, scads of them. Selig picked one at random and applied. They gave him a stock-market quiz by way of preliminary screening; he knew most of the answers, and those he didn’t know he picked up out of the minds of his fellow testees, most of whom had been following the market since childhood. He got a perfect score and was hired. After a brief training period he passed the licensing test, and before long he was a registered representative operating out of a fairly new brokerage office on Broadway near 72nd Street.

He was one of five brokers, all of them fairly young. The clientele was predominantly Jewish and generally geriatric: 75-year-old widows from the huge apartment houses along 72nd Street, and cigar-chomping retired garment manufacturers who lived on West End Avenue and Riverside Drive. Some of them had quite a lot of money, which they invested in the most cautious way possible. Some were practically penniless, but insisted on buying four shares of Con Edison or three shares of Telephone just to have the illusion of prosperity. Since most of the clients were elderly and didn’t work, the bulk of dealings at the office were transacted in person rather than by phone; there were always ten or twelve senior citizens schmoozing in front of the stock ticker, and now and then one of them would dodder to the desk of his pet broker and place an order. On Selig’s fourth day at work one venerable client suffered a fatal heart attack during a nine-point rally. Nobody seemed surprised or even dismayed, neither the brokers nor the friends of the victim: customers died in the shop about once a month, Selig learned. Kismet. You come to expect your friends to drop dead, once you reach a certain age. He quickly became a favorite, especially among the old ladies; they liked him because he was a nice Jewish boy, and several offered to introduce him to comely granddaughters. These offers he always refused, but politely; he made a point of being courteous and patient with them, of playing grandson. Most of them were ignorant, practically illiterate women, kept in a state of lifelong innocence by their hard-driving, acquisitive, coronary-prone husbands; now, having inherited more money than they could possibly spend, they had no real idea of how to manage it, and were wholly dependent on the nice young broker. Probing their minds, Selig found them almost always to be dim and sadly unformed—how could you live to the age of 75 without ever having had an idea?—but a few of the livelier ladies showed vigorous, passionate peasant rapacity, charming in its way. The men were less agreeable—loaded with dough, yet always on the lookout for more. The vulgarity and ferocity of their ambitions repelled him, and he glanced into their minds no more often than necessary, merely probing to have a better idea of their investment goals so he could serve them as they would be served. A month among such people, he decided, would be sufficient to turn a Rockefeller into a socialist.

Business was steady but unspectacular; once he had acquired his own nucleus of regulars, Selig’s commissions ran to about $160 a week, which was more money than he had ever made before, but hardly the kind of income he imagined brokers pulled down. “You’re lucky you came here in the spring,” one of the other customer’s men told him. “In the winter months all the clients go to Florida and we can choke before anybody gives us any business here.” As Nyquist had predicted, he was able to turn some pleasant profits by trading for his own account; there were always nice little deals circulating in the office, hot tips with substance behind them. He started with savings of $350 and quickly pyramided his wad to a high four-figure sum, making money on Chrysler and Control Data and RCA and Sunray DX Oil, nimbly trading in and out on rumors of mergers, stock splits, or dynamic earnings gains; but he discovered that Wall Street runs in two directions, and much of his winnings melted away through badly timed trades in Brunswick, Beckman Instruments, and Martin Marietta. He came to see that he was never going to have enough of a stake to go off and write that novel. Possibly just as well: did the world need another amateur novelist? He wondered what he would do next. After three months as a broker he had some money in the bank, but not much, and he was hideously bored.

Luck delivered Kitty to him. She came in one muggy July morning at half past nine. The market hadn’t opened yet, most of the customers had fled to the Catskills for the summer, and the only people in the office were Martinson, the manager, Nadel, one of the other customer’s men, and Selig. Martinson was going over his totals, Nadel was on the phone to somebody downtown trying to work a complicated finagle in American Photocopy, and Selig, idle, was daydreaming of falling in love with somebody’s beautiful granddaughter. Then the door opened and somebody’s beautiful granddaughter came in. Not exactly beautiful, maybe, but certainly attractive: a girl in her early twenties, slim and well proportioned, perhaps five feet three or four, with fluffy light-brown hair, blue-green eyes, finely outlined features, a graceful slender figure. She seemed shy, intelligent, somehow innocent, a curious mixture of knowledge and naiveté. She wore a white silk blouse—gold chain lying on the smallish breasts—and an ankle-length brown skirt, offering a hint of excellent legs beneath. No, not a beautiful girl, but certainly pretty. Refreshing to look at. What the hell, Selig wondered, does she want in this temple of Mammon at her age? She’s here fifty years too early. Curiosity led him to send a probe drilling into her forehead as she walked toward him. Seeking only surface stuff: name, age, marital status, address, telephone number, purpose of visit—what else?

He got nothing.

That shocked him. It was an incredible experience. Unique. To reach toward a mind and find it absolutely inaccessible, opaque, hidden as if behind an impenetrable wall—he had never had that happen to him before. He got no aura from her at all. She might as well have been a department store’s plaster window mannequin, or a mindless robot from another planet. He sat there blinking, trying to account for his failure to make contact. He was so astounded by her total blankness that he forgot to listen to what she was saying to him, and had to ask her to repeat.

“I said, I’d like to open a brokerage account. Are you a broker?”

Sheepish, fumbling, stricken with sudden adolescent clumsiness, he gave her the new-account forms. By this time the other brokers had arrived, but too late: by the rules of the house she was his client. Sitting beside his cluttered desk, she told him of her investment needs while he studied the elegant tapered structure of her high-bridged nose, fought without success against her perplexing and enigmatic mental inaccessibility, and, despite or perhaps because of that inaccessibility, felt himself helplessly falling in love with her.

She was 22, one year out of Radcliffe, came from Long Island, and shared a West End Avenue apartment with two other girls. Unmarried—there had been a long futile love affair ending in a broken engagement not long before, he would discover later. (How strange it was for him not to be discovering everything at once, taking the information as he desired it.) Her background was in mathematics and she worked as a computer programmer, a term which, in 1963, meant very little to him; he wasn’t sure whether she designed computers, operated them, or repaired them. Recently she had inherited $6500 from an aunt in Arizona, and her parents, who evidently were stern and formidable advocates of sink-or-swim education, had told her to invest the money on her own, by way of assuming adult responsibilities. So she had gone to her friendly neighborhood brokerage office, a lamb for the shearing, to invest her money. “What do you want?” Selig asked her. “To stash it away in safe blue chips, or to go for a little action, a chance for capital gains?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know the first thing about the market. I just don’t want to do anything silly.”

Another broker—Nadel, say—would have given her the Nothing Ventured, Nothing Gained speech, and, advising her to forget about such old and tired concepts as dividends, would have steered her into an action portfolio—Texas Instruments, Collins Radio, Polaroid, stuff like that. Then he would churn her account every few months, switch Polaroid into Xerox, Texas Instruments into Fairchild Camera, Collins into American Motors, American Motors back into Polaroid, running up fancy commissions for himself and, perhaps, making some money for her, or perhaps losing some. Selig had no stomach for such maneuvers. “This is going to sound stodgy,” he said, “but let’s play it very safe. I’ll recommend some decent things that won’t ever make you rich but that you won’t get hurt on, either. And then you can just put them away and watch them grow, without having to check the market quotations every day to find out if you ought to sell. Because you don’t really want to bother worrying about the short-term fluctuations, do you?” This was absolutely not what Martinson had instructed him to tell new clients, but to hell with that. He got her some Jersey Standard, some Telephone, a little IBM, two good electric utilities, and 30 shares of a closed-end fund called Lehman Corporation that a lot of his elderly customers owned. She didn’t ask questions, didn’t even want to know what a closed-end fund was. “There,” he said. “Now you have a portfolio. You’re a capitalist.” She smiled. It was a shy, half-forced smile, but he thought he detected flirtatiousness in her eyes. It was agony for him not to be able to read her, to be compelled to depend on external signals alone in order to know where he stood with her. But he took the chance. “What are you doing this evening?” he asked. “I get out of here at four o’clock.”

She was free, she said. Except that she worked from eleven to six. He arranged to pick her up at her apartment around seven. There was no mistaking the warmth of her smile as she left the office. “You lucky bastard,” Nadel said. “What did you do, make a date with her? It violates the SEC rules for customer’s men to go around laying the customers.”

Selig only laughed. Twenty minutes after the market opened he shorted 200 Molybdenum on the Amex, and covered his sale a point and a half lower at lunchtime. That ought to take care of the cost of dinner, he figured, with some to spare. Nyquist had given him the tip yesterday: Moly’s a good short, she’s sure to fall out of bed. During the mid-afternoon lull, feeling satisfied with himself, he phoned Nyquist to report on his maneuver. “You covered too soon,” Nyquist said immediately. “She’ll drop five or six more points this week. The smart money’s waiting for that.”

“I’m not that greedy. I’ll settle for the quick three bills.”

“That’s no way to get rich.”

“I guess I lack the gambling instinct,” Selig said. He hesitated. He hadn’t really called Nyquist to talk about shorting Molybdenum. I met a girl, he wanted to say, and I have this funny problem with her. I met a girl, I met a girl. Sudden fears held him back. Nyquist’s silent passive presence at the other end of the telephone line seemed somehow threatening. He’ll laugh at me, Selig thought. He’s always laughing at me, quietly, thinking I don’t see it. But this is foolishness. He said, “Tom, something strange happened today. A girl came into the office, a very attractive girl. I’m seeing her tonight.”

“Congratulations.”

“Wait. The thing is, I was entirely unable to read her. I mean, I couldn’t even pick up an aura. Blank, absolutely blank. I’ve never had that with anybody before. Have you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“A complete blank. I can’t understand it. What could account for her having such a strong screen?”

“Maybe you’re tired today,” Nyquist suggested.

“No. No. I can read everybody else, same as always. Just not her.”

“Does that irritate you?”

“Of course it does.”

“Why do you say of course?”

It seemed obvious to Selig. He could tell that Nyquist was baiting him: the voice calm, uninflected, neutral. A game. A way of passing time. He wished he hadn’t phoned. Something important seemed to be coming across on the ticker, and the other phone was lighting up. Nadel, grabbing it, shot a fierce look at him: Come on, man, there’s work to do! Brusquely Selig said, “I’m—well, very interested in her. And it bothers me that I have no way of getting through to her real self.”

Nyquist said, “You mean you’re annoyed that you can’t spy on her.”

“I don’t like that phrase.”

“Whose phrase is it? Not mine. That’s how you regard what we do, isn’t it? As spying. You feel guilty about spying on people, right? But it seems you also feel upset when you can’t spy.”

“I suppose,” Selig admitted sullenly.

“With this girl you find yourself forced back on the same old clumsy guesswork techniques for dealing with people that the rest of the world is condemned to use all the time, and you don’t like that. Yes?”

“You make it sound so evil, Tom.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“I don’t want you to say anything. I’m just telling you that there’s this girl I can’t read, that I’ve never been up against this situation before, that I wonder if you have any theories to account for why she’s the way she is.”

“I don’t,” Nyquist said. “Not off the top of my head.”

“All right, then. I—”

But Nyquist wasn’t finished. “You realize that I have no way of telling whether she’s opaque to the telepathic process in general or just opaque to you, David.” That possibility had occurred to Selig a moment earlier. He found it deeply disturbing. Nyquist went on smoothly, “Suppose you bring her around one of these days and let me take a look at her. Maybe I’ll be able to learn something useful about her that way.”

“I’ll do that,” Selig said without enthusiasm. He knew such a meeting was necessary and inevitable, but the idea of exposing Kitty to Nyquist produced agitation in him. He had no clear understanding of why that should be happening. “One of these days soon,” he said. “Look, all the phones are lighting up. I’ll be in touch, Tom.”

“Give her one for me,” said Nyquist.

 

 

TWENTY-THREE.

 

 

David Selig

Selig Studies 101, Prof. Selig

November 10, 1976

 

Entropy As a Factor in Everyday Life

 

Entropy is defined in physics as a mathematical expression of the degree to which the energy of a thermodynamic system is so distributed as to be unavailable for conversion into work. In more general metaphorical terms, entropy may be seen as the irreversible tendency of a system, including the universe, toward increasing disorder and inertness. That is to say, things have a way of getting worse and worse all the time, until in the end they get so bad that we lack even the means of knowing how bad they really are.

The great American physicist Josiah Willard Gibbs (1839-1903) was the first to apply the second law of thermodynamics—the law that defines the increasing disorder of energy moving at random within a closed system—to chemistry. It was Gibbs who most firmly enunciated the principle that disorder spontaneously increases as the universe grows older. Among those who extended Gibbs’ insights into the realm of philosophy was the brilliant mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894-1964), who declared, in his book The Human Use of Human Beings, “As entropy increases, the universe, and all closed systems in the universe, tend naturally to deteriorate and lose their distinctiveness, to move from the least to the most probable state, from a state of organization and differentiation in which distinctions and forms exist, to a state of chaos and sameness. In Gibbs’ universe order is least probable, chaos most probable. But while the universe as a whole, if indeed there is a whole universe, tends to run down, there are local enclaves whose direction seems opposed to that of the universe at large and in which there is a limited and temporary tendency for organization to increase. Life finds its home in some of these enclaves.”

Thus Wiener hails living things in general and human beings in particular as heroes in the war against entropy—which he equates in another passage with the war against evil: “This random element, this organic incompleteness [that is, the fundamental element of chance in the texture of the universe], is one which without too violent a figure of speech we may consider evil.” Human beings, says Wiener, carry on anti-entropic processes. We have sensory receptors. We communicate with one another. We make use of what we learn from one another. Therefore we are something more than mere passive victims of the spontaneous spread of universal chaos. “We, as human beings, are not isolated systems. We take in food, which generates energy, from the outside, and are, as a result, parts of that larger world which contains those sources of our vitality. But even more important is the fact that we take in information through our sense organs, and we act on information received.” There is feedback, in other words. Through communication we learn to control our environment, and, he says, “In control and communication we are always fighting nature’s tendency to degrade the organized and to destroy the meaningful; the tendency . . . for entropy to increase.” In the very long run entropy must inevitably nail us all; in the short run we can fight back. “We are not yet spectators at the last stages of the world’s death.”

But what if a human being turns himself, inadvertently or by choice, into an isolated system?

A hermit, say. He lives in a dark cave. No information penetrates. He eats mushrooms. They give him just enough energy to keep going, but otherwise he lacks inputs. He’s forced back on his own spiritual and mental resources, which he eventually exhausts. Gradually the chaos expands in him, gradually the forces of entropy seize possession of this ganglion, that synapse. He takes in a decreasing amount of sensory data until his surrender to entropy is complete. He ceases to move, to grow, to respire, to function in any way. This condition is known as death.

One doesn’t have to hide in a cave. One can make an interior migration, locking oneself away from the life-giving energy sources. Often this is done because it appears that the energy sources are threats to the stability of the self. Indeed, inputs do threaten the self: a push usually will upset equilibrium. However, equilibrium itself is a threat to the self, though this is frequently overlooked. There are married people who strive fiercely to reach equilibrium. They seal themselves off, clinging to one another and shutting out the rest of the universe, making themselves into a two-person closed system from which all vitality is steadily and inexorably expelled by the deadly equilibrium they have established. Two can perish as well as one, if they are sufficiently isolated from everything else. I call this the monogamous fallacy. My sister Judith said she left her husband because she felt herself dying, day by day, while she was living with him. Of course, Judith’s a slut.

The sensory shutdown is not always a willed event, naturally. It happens to us whether we like it or not. If we don’t climb into the box ourselves, we’ll get shoved in anyway. That’s what I mean about entropy inevitably nailing us all in the long run. No matter how vital, how vigorous, how world-devouring we are, the inputs dwindle as time goes by. Sight, hearing, touch, smell—everything goes, as good old Will S. said, and we end up sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. Sans everything. Or, as the same clever man also put it, from hour to hour we ripe and ripe, and then from hour to hour we rot and rot, and thereby hangs a tale.

I offer myself as a case in point. What does this man’s sad history reveal? An inexplicable diminution of once-remarkable powers. A shrinkage of the inputs. A small death, endured while he still lives. Am I not a casualty of the entropic wars? Do I not now dwindle into stasis and silence before your very eyes? Is my distress not evident and poignant? Who will I be, when I have ceased to be myself? I am dying the heat death. A spontaneous decay. A random twitch of probability undoes me. And I am made into nothingness. I am becoming cinders and ash. I will wait here for the broom to gather me up.

 

*     *     *

 

That’s very eloquent, Selig. Take an A. Your writing is clear and forceful and you show an excellent grasp of the underlying philosophical issues. You may go to the head of the class. Do you feel better now?

 

 

TWENTY-FOUR.

 

 

It was a crazy idea, Kitty, a dumb fantasy. It could never have worked. I was asking the impossible from you. There was only one conceivable outcome, really: that is, that I would annoy you and bore you and drive you away from me. Well, blame Tom Nyquist. It was his idea. No, blame me. I didn’t have to listen to his crazy ideas, did I? Blame me. Blame me.

 

Axiom: It’s a sin against love to try to remake the soul of someone you love, even if you think you’ll love her more after you’ve transformed her into something else.

 

Nyquist said, “Maybe she’s a mindreader too, and the blockage is a matter of interference, of a clash between your transmissions and hers, canceling out the waves in one direction or in both. So that there’s no transmission from her to you and probably none from you to her.”

“I doubt that very much,” I told him. This was August of 1963, two or three weeks after you and I had met. We weren’t living together yet but we had already been to bed a couple of times. “She doesn’t have a shred of telepathic ability,” I insisted. “She’s completely normal. That’s the essential thing about her, Tom: she’s a completely normal girl.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Nyquist said.

He hadn’t met you yet. He wanted to meet you, but I hadn’t set anything up. You had never heard his name.

I said, “If there’s one thing I know about her, it’s that she’s a sane, healthy, well-balanced, absolutely normal girl. Therefore she’s no mindreader.”

“Because mindreaders are insane, unhealthy, and unbalanced. Like you and like me. Q.E.D., eh? Speak for yourself, man.”

“The gift tips the spirit,” I said. “It darkens the soul.”

“Yours, maybe. Not mine.”

He was right about that. Telepathy hadn’t injured him. Maybe I’d have had the problems I have even if I hadn’t been born with the gift. I can’t credit all my maladjustments to the presence of one unusual ability, can I? And God knows there are plenty of neurotics around who have never read a mind in their lives.

 

Syllogism:

Some telepaths are not neurotic.

Some neurotics are not telepaths.

Therefore telepathy and neurosis aren’t necessarily related.

Corollary:

You can seem cherry-pie normal and still have the power.

 

I remained skeptical of this. Nyquist agreed, under pressure, that if you did have the power, you would have probably revealed it to me by now through certain unconscious mannerisms that any telepath would readily recognize; I had detected no such mannerisms. He suggested, though, that you might be a latent telepath—that the gift was there, undeveloped, unfunctional, lurking at the core of your mind and serving somehow to screen your mind from my probing. Just a hypothesis, he said. But it tickled me with temptation. “Suppose she’s got this latent power,” I said. “Could it be awakened, do you think?”

“Why not?” Nyquist asked.

I was willing to believe it. I had this vision of you awakened to full receptive capacity, able to pick up transmissions as easily and as sharply as Nyquist and I. How intense our love would be, then! We would be wholly open to one another, shorn of all the little pretenses and defenses that keep even the closest of lovers from truly achieving a union of souls. I had already tasted a limited form of that sort of closeness with Tom Nyquist, but of course I had no love for him, I didn’t even really like him, and so it was a waste, a brutal irony, that our minds could have such intimate contact. But you? If I could only awaken you, Kitty! And why not? I asked Nyquist if he thought it might be possible. Try it and find out, he said. Make experiments. Hold hands, sit together in the dark, put some energy into trying to get across to her. It’s worth trying, isn’t it? Yes, I said, of course it’s worth trying.

You seemed latent in so many other ways, Kitty: a potential human being rather than an actual one. An air of adolescence surrounded you. You seemed much younger than you actually were; if I hadn’t known you were a college graduate I would have guessed you were 18 or 19. You hadn’t read much outside your fields of interest—mathematics, computers, technology—and, since those weren’t my fields of interest, I thought of you as not having read anything at all. You hadn’t traveled; your world was limited by the Atlantic and the Mississippi, and the big trip of your life was a summer in Illinois. You hadn’t even had much sexual experience: three men, wasn’t it, in your 22 years, and only one of those a serious affair? So I saw you as raw material awaiting the sculptor’s hand. I would be your Pygmalion.

In September of 1963 you moved in with me. You were spending so much time at my place anyway that you agreed it didn’t make sense to keep going back and forth. I felt very married: wet stockings hanging over the shower-curtain rod, an extra toothbrush on the shelf, long brown hairs in the sink. The warmth of you beside me in bed every night. My belly against your smooth cool butt, yang and yin. I gave you books to read: poetry, novels, essays. How diligently you devoured them! You read Trilling on the bus going to work and Conrad in the quiet after-dinner hours and Yeats on a Sunday morning while I was out hunting for the Times. But nothing really seemed to stick with you; you had no natural bent for literature; I think you had trouble distinguishing Lord Jim from Lucky Jim, Malcolm Lowry from Malcolm Cowley, James Joyce from Joyce Kilmer. Your fine mind, so easily able to master COBOL and FORTRAN, could not decipher the language of poetry, and you would look up from The Waste Land, baffled, to ask some naive high-school-girl question that would leave me irritated for hours. A hopeless case, I sometimes thought. Although on a day when the stock market was closed you took me down to the computer center where you worked and I listened to your explanations of the equipment and your functions as though you were talking so much Sanskrit to me. Different worlds, different kinds of mind. Yet I always had hope of creating a bridge.

At strategically timed moments I spoke elliptically of my interest in extrasensory phenomena.

I made it out to be a hobby of mine, a cool dispassionate study. I was fascinated, I said, by the possibility of attaining true mind-to-mind communication between human beings. I took care not to come on like a fanatic, not to oversell my case; I kept my desperation out of sight. Because I genuinely couldn’t read you, it was easier for me to pretend to a scholarly objectivity than it would have been with anyone else. And I had to pretend. My strategy didn’t allow for any true confessions. I didn’t want to frighten you, Kitty, I didn’t want to turn you off by giving you reason to think I was a freak, or, as I probably would have seemed to you, a lunatic. Just a hobby, then. A hobby.

You couldn’t bring yourself to believe in ESP. If it can’t be measured with a voltmeter or recorded on an electroencephalograph, you said, it isn’t real. Be tolerant, I pleaded. There are such things as telepathic powers. I know there are. (Be careful, Duv!) I couldn’t cite EEG readings—I’ve never been near an EEG in my life, have no idea whether my power would register. And I had barred myself from conquering your skepticism by calling in some outsider and doing some party-game mind-reading on him. But I could offer other arguments. Look at Rhine’s results, look at all these series of correct readings of the Zener cards. How can you explain them, if not by ESP? And the evidence for telekinesis, teleportation, clairvoyance—

You remained skeptical, coolly putting down most of the data I cited. Your reasoning was keen and close; there was nothing fuzzy about your mind when it was on its own home territory, the scientific method. Rhine, you said, fudges his results by testing heterogeneous groups, then selecting for further testing only those subjects who show unusual runs of luck, dropping the others from his surveys. And he publishes only the scores that seem to prove his thesis. It’s a statistical anomaly, not an extrasensory one, that turns up all those correct guesses of the Zener cards, you insisted. Besides, the experimenter is prejudiced in favor of belief in ESP, and that surely leads to all sorts of unconscious errors of procedure, tiny accesses of unintentional bias that inevitably skew the outcome. Cautiously I invited you to try some experiments with me, letting you set up the procedures to suit yourself. You said okay, mainly, I think, because it was something we could do together, and—this was early October—we were already searching selfconsciously for areas of closeness, your literary education having become a strain for both of us.

We agreed—how subtly I made it seem like your own idea!—to concentrate on transmitting images or ideas to one another. And right at the outset we had a cruelly deceptive success. We assembled some packets of pictures and tried to relay them mentally. I still have, here in the archives, our notes on those experiments:

 

Pictures Seen By Me                                      Your Guess

1. A rowboat                                                  1.    Oak Trees

2. Marigolds in a field                         2.         Bouquet of roses

3. A kangaroo                                                 3.    President Kennedy

4. Twin baby girls                                           4.    A statue

5. The Empire State Building                           5.    The Pentagon

6. A snow-capped mountain                             6.    ? image unclear

7. Profile of old man’s face                             7.    A pair of scissors

8. Baseball player at bat                      8.         A carving knife

9. An elephant                                                9.    A tractor

10.   A locomotive                             10.        An airplane

 

You had no direct hits. But four out of ten could be considered close associations: marigolds and roses, the Empire State and the Pentagon, elephant and tractor, locomotive and airplane. (Flowers, buildings, heavy-duty equipment, means of transportation.) Enough to give us false hopes of true transmission. Followed by this:

 

Pictures Seen By You                                     My Guess

1. A butterfly                                                 1.    A railway train

2. An octopus                                                 2.    Mountains

3. Tropical beach scene                      3.         Landscape, bright sunlight

4. Young Negro boy                            4.         An automobile

5. Map of South America                     5.         Grapevines

6. George Washington Bridge                          6.    The Washington Monument

7. Bowl of apples and bananas                         7.    Stock market quotations

8. El Greco’s Toledo                           8.         A shelf of books

9. A highway at rush hour                                9.    A beehive

10.          An ICBM                                          10.   Cary Grant

 

No direct hits for me either. But three close associations, of sorts, out of ten: tropical beach and sunny landscape, George Washington Bridge and Washington Monument, highway at rush hour and beehive, the common denominators being sunlight, George Washington, and intense tight-packed activity. At least we deceived ourselves into seeing them as close associations rather than coincidences. I confess I was stabbing in the dark at all times, guessing rather than receiving, and I had little faith even then in the quality of our responses. Nevertheless those probably random collisions of images aroused your curiosity: there’s something in this stuff, maybe, you began to say. And we went onward.

We varied the conditions for thought transmission. We tried doing it in absolute darkness, one room apart. We tried it with the lights on, holding hands. We tried it during sex: I entered you and held you in my arms and thought hard at you, and you thought hard at me. We tried it drunk. We tried it fasting. We tried it under conditions of sleep-deprivation, forcing ourselves to stay up around the clock in the random hope that minds groggy with fatigue might permit mental impulses to slip through the barriers separating us. We would have tried it under the influence of pot or acid, but no one thought much about pot or acid in ’63. We sought in a dozen other ways to open the telepathic conduit. Perhaps you recall the details of them even now; embarrassment drives them from my mind. I know we wrestled with our futile project night after night for more than a month, while your involvement with it swelled and peaked and dwindled again, carrying you through a series of phases from skepticism to cool neutral interest to unmistakable fascination and enthusiasm, then to an awareness of inevitable failure, a sense of the impossibility of our goal, leading then to weariness, to boredom, and to irritation. I realized none of this: I thought you were as dedicated to the work as I was. But it had ceased to be either an experiment or a game; it was, you saw, plainly an obsessive quest, and you asked several times in November if we could quit. All this mindreading, you said, left you with woeful headaches. But I couldn’t give up, Kitty. I overrode your objections and insisted we go on. I was hooked, I was impaled, I browbeat you mercilessly into cooperating, I tyrannized you in the name of love, seeing always that telepathic Kitty I would ultimately produce. Every ten days, maybe, some delusive flicker of seeming contact buoyed my idiotic optimism. We would break through; we would touch each other’s minds. How could I quit now, when we were so close? But we were never close.

Early in November Nyquist gave one of his occasional dinner parties, catered by a Chinatown restaurant he favored. His parties were always brilliant events; to refuse the invitation would have been absurd. So at last I would have to expose you to him. For more than three months I had been more or less deliberately concealing you from him, avoiding the moment of confrontation, out of a cowardice I didn’t fully understand. We came late: you were slow getting ready. The party was well under way, fifteen or eighteen people, many of them celebrities, although not to you, for what did you know of poets, composers, novelists? I introduced you to Nyquist. He smiled and murmured a sleek compliment and gave you a bland, impersonal kiss. You seemed shy, almost afraid of him, of his confidence and smoothness. After a moment of patter he went spinning away to answer the doorbell. A little later, as we were handed our first drinks, I planted a thought for him:

—Well? What do you think of her.

But he was too busy with his other guests to probe me, and didn’t pick up on my question. I had to seek my own answers in his skull. I inserted myself—he glanced at me across the room, realizing what I was doing—and rummaged for information. Layers of hostly trivia masked his surface levels; he was simultaneously offering drinks, steering a conversation, signaling for the eggrolls to be brought from the kitchen; and inwardly going over the guest list to see who was yet to arrive. But I cut swiftly through that stuff and in a moment found his locus of Kitty-thoughts. At once I acquired the knowledge I wanted and dreaded. He could read you. Yes. To him you were as transparent as anyone else. Only to me were you opaque, for reasons none of us knew. Nyquist had instantly penetrated you, had assessed you, had formed his judgment of you, there for me to examine: he saw you as awkward, immature, naive, but yet also attractive and charming. (That’s how he really saw you. I’m not trying, for ulterior reasons of my own, to make him seem more critical of you than he really was. You were very young, you were unsophisticated, and he saw that.) The discovery numbed me. Jealousy curdled me. That I should work so ponderously for so many weeks to reach you, getting nowhere, and he could knife so easily to your depths, Kitty! I was instantly suspicious. Nyquist and his malicious games: was this yet one more? Could he read you? How could I be sure he hadn’t planted a fiction for me? He picked up on that:

—You don’t trust me? Of course I’m reading her.

—Maybe yes, maybe no.

—Do you want me to prove it?

—How?

—Watch.

Without interrupting for a moment his role of host, he entered your mind, while mine remained locked on his. And so, through him, I had my first and only glimpse of your inwardness, Kitty, reflected by way of Tom Nyquist. Oh! It was no glimpse I ever wanted. I saw myself through your eyes through his mind. Physically I looked, if anything, better than I imagined I would, my shoulders broader than they really are, my face leaner, the features more regular. No doubt that you responded to my body. But the emotional associations! You saw me as stern father, as grim schoolmaster, as grumbling tyrant. Read this, read that, improve your mind, girl! Study hard to be worthy of me! Oh! Oh! And that flaming core of resentment over our ESP experiments: worse than useless to you, a monumental bore, an excursion into insanity, a wearying, grinding drag. Night after night to be bugged by monomaniacal me. Even our screwing invaded by the foolish quest for mind-to-mind contact. How sick you were of me, Kitty! How monstrously dull you thought me!

An instant of such revelation was more than enough. Stung, I retreated, pulling away quickly from Nyquist. You looked at me in a startled way, I recall, as if you knew on some subliminal level that mental energies were flashing around the room, revealing the privacies of your soul. You blinked and your cheeks reddened and you took a hasty diving gulp of your drink. Nyquist shot me a sardonic smile. I couldn’t meet his eyes. But even then I resisted what he had showed me. Had I not seen odd refraction effects before in such relays? Should I not mistrust the accuracy of his picture of your image of me? Was he not shading and coloring it? Introducing sly distortions and magnifications? Did I truly bug you all that much, Kitty, or was he not playfully exaggerating mild annoyance into vivid distaste? I chose not to believe I bored you quite so much. We tend to interpret events according to the way we prefer to see them. But I vowed to go easier on you in the future.

Later, after we had eaten, I saw you talking animatedly to Nyquist at the far side of the room. You were flirtatious and giddy, as you had been with me that first day at the brokerage office. I imagined you were discussing me and not being complimentary. I tried to pick up the conversation by way of Nyquist, but at my first tentative probe he glared at me.

—Get out of my head, will you?

I obeyed. I heard your laughter, too loud, rising above the hum of conversation. I drifted off to talk to a lithe little Japanese sculptress whose flat tawny chest sprouted untemptingly from a low-cut black sheath, and found her thinking, in French, that she would like me to ask her to go home with me. But I went home with you, Kitty, sitting sullen and graceless beside you on the empty subway train, and when I asked you what you and Nyquist had been discussing you said, “Oh, we were just kidding around. Just having a little fun.”

 

*     *     *

 

About two weeks later, on a clear crisp autumn afternoon, President Kennedy was shot in Dallas. The stock market closed early after a calamitous slide and Martinson shut the office down, turning me out, dazed, into the street. I couldn’t easily accept the reality of the progression of events. Someone shot at the President. . . . Someone shot the President. . . . Someone shot the President in the head. . . . The President has been critically wounded. . . . The President has been rushed to Parkland Hospital. . . . The President has received the last rites. . . . The President is dead. I was never a particularly political person, but this rupture of the commonwealth devastated me. Kennedy was the only presidential candidate I ever voted for who won, and they killed him: the story of my life in one compressed bloody parable. And now there would be a President Johnson. Could I adapt? I cling to zones of stability. When I was 10 years old and Roosevelt died, Roosevelt who had been President all my life, I tested the unfamiliar syllables of President Truman on my tongue and rejected them at once, telling myself that I would call him President Roosevelt too, for that was what I was accustomed to calling the President.

That November afternoon I picked up emanations of fear on all sides as I walked fearfully home. Paranoia was general everywhere. People sidled warily, one shoulder in front of the other, ready to bolt. Pale female faces peered between parted curtains in the windows of the towering apartment houses, high above the silent streets. The drivers of cars looked in all directions at intersections, as if expecting the tanks of the storm troopers to come rumbling down Broadway. (At this time of day it was generally believed that the assassination was the first blow in a right-wing putsch.) No one lingered in the open; everyone hurried toward shelter. Anything might happen now. Packs of wolves might burst out of Riverside Drive. Maddened patriots might launch a pogrom. From my apartment—door bolted, windows locked—I tried to phone you at the computer center, thinking you might somehow not have heard the news, or perhaps I just wanted to hear your voice in this traumatic time. The telephone lines were choked. I gave up the attempt after twenty minutes. Then, wandering aimlessly from bedroom to livingroom and back, clutching my transistor, twisting the dial trying to find the one radio station whose newscaster would tell me that he was still alive after all, I detoured into the kitchen and found your note on the table, telling me that you were leaving, that you couldn’t stay with me any more. The note was dated 10:30 A.M., before the assassination, in another era. I rushed to the bedroom closet and saw what I had not seen before, that your things were gone. When women leave me, Kitty, they leave suddenly and stealthily, giving no warning.

 

*     *     *

 

Toward evening I telephoned Nyquist. This time the lines were open. “Is Kitty there?” I asked. “Yes,” he said. “Just a minute.” And put you on. You explained that you were going to live with him for a while, until you got yourself sorted out. He had been very helpful. No, you had no hard feelings toward me, no bitterness at all. It was just that I seemed, well, insensitive, whereas he—he had this instinctive, intuitive grasp of your emotional needs—he was able to get onto your trip, Kitty, and I couldn’t manage that. So you had gone to him for comfort and love. Goodbye, you said, and thanks for everything, and I muttered a goodbye and put down the phone. During the night the weather changed, and a weekend of black skies and cold rain saw JFK to his grave. I missed everything—the casket in the rotunda, the brave widow and the gallant children, the murder of Oswald, the funeral procession, all that instant history. Saturday and Sunday I slept late, got drunk, read six books without absorbing a word. On Monday, the day of national mourning, I wrote you that incoherent letter, Kitty, explaining everything, telling you what I had tried to make out of you and why, confessing my power to you and describing the effects it had had on my life, telling you also about Nyquist, warning you of what he was, that he had the power too, that he could read you and you would have no secrets from him, telling you not to mistake him for a real human being, telling you that he was a machine, self-programmed for maximum self-realization, telling you that the power had made him cold and cruelly strong whereas it had made me weak and jittery, insisting that essentially he was as sick as I, a manipulative man, incapable of giving love, capable only of using. I told you that he would hurt you if you made yourself vulnerable to him. You didn’t answer. I never heard from you again, never saw you again, never heard from or saw him again either. Thirteen years. I have no idea what became of either of you. Probably I’ll never know. But listen. Listen. I loved you, lady, in my clumsy way. I love you now. And you are lost to me forever.

 

 

TWENTY-FIVE.

 

 

He wakes, feeling stiff and sore and numb, in a bleak, dreary hospital ward. Evidently this is St. Luke’s, perhaps the emergency room. His lower lip is swollen, his left eye opens only reluctantly, and his nose makes an unfamiliar whistling sound at every intake of air. Did they bring him here on a stretcher after the basketball players finished with him? He has spent relatively little [time he breathes, he imagines he can feel the ragged edges] with dried blood, but when he succeeds in looking down—his neck, oddly rigid, does not want to obey him—he sees only the dingy whiteness of a hospital gown. Each time he breathes, he imagines he can feel the ragged edges of broken ribs scraping together; slipping a hand under the gown, he touches his bare chest and finds that it has not been taped. He does not know whether to be relieved or apprehensive about that.

Carefully he sits up. A tumult of impressions strikes him. The room is crowded and noisy, with beds pushed close together. The beds have curtains but no curtains are drawn. Most of his fellow patients are black, and many of them are in serious condition, surrounded by festoons of equipment. Mutilated by knives? Lacerated by windshields? Friends and relatives, clustering around each bed, gesticulate and argue and berate; the normal tone of voice is a yelping shout. Impassive nurses drift through the room, showing much the same distant concern for the patients as museum guards do for mummies in display cases. No one is paying any attention to Selig except Selig, who returns to the examination of himself. His fingertips explore his cheeks. Without a mirror he cannot tell how battered his face is, but there are many tender places. His left clavicle aches as from a light, glancing karate chop. His right knee radiates throbbings and twinges, as though he twisted it in falling. Still, he feels less pain that might have been anticipated; perhaps they have given him some sort of shot.

His mind is foggy. He is receiving some mental input from those about him in the ward, but everything is garbled, nothing is distinct; he picks up auras but no intelligible verbalizations. Trying to get his bearings, he asks passing nurses three times to tell him the time, for his wristwatch is gone; they go by, ignoring him. Finally a bulky, smiling black woman in a frilly pink dress looks over to him and says, “It’s quarter to four, love.” In the morning? In the afternoon? Probably the afternoon, he decides. Diagonally across from him, two nurses have begun to erect what perhaps is an intravenous feeding system, with a plastic tube snaking into the nostril of a huge unconscious bandage-swathed black. Selig’s own stomach sends him no hunger signals. The chemical smell in the hospital air gives him nausea; he can barely salivate. Will they feed him this evening? How long will he be kept here? Who pays? Should he ask that Judith be notified? How badly has he been injured?

An intern enters the ward: a short dark man, concise and fine-boned of body, a Pakistani by the looks of him, moving with bouncy precision. A rumpled and soiled handkerchief jutting from his breast pocket spoils, though, the trig, smart effect of his tight white uniform. Surprisingly, he comes right to Selig. “The X-rays show no breakages,” he says without preamble in a firm, unresonant voice. “Therefore your only injuries are minor abrasions, bruises, cuts, and an unimportant concussion. We are ready to authorize your release. Please get up.”

“Wait,” Selig says feebly. “I just came to. I don’t know what’s been going on. Who brought me here? How long have I been unconscious? What—”

“I know none of these things. Your discharge has been approved and the hospital has need of this bed. Please. On your feet, now. I have much to do.”

“A concussion? Shouldn’t I spend the night here, at least, if I had a concussion? Or did I spend the night here? What day is today?”

“You were brought in about noon today,” says the intern, growing more fretful. “You were treated in the emergency room and given a thorough examination after having been beaten on the steps of Low Library.” Once more the command to rise, given wordlessly this time, an imperious glare and a pointing forefinger. Selig probes the intern’s mind and finds it accessible, but there is nothing apparent in it except impatience and irritation. Ponderously Selig climbs from the bed. His body seems to be held together with wire. His bones grind and scrape. There is still the sensation of broken rib-ends rubbing in his chest; can the X-ray have been in error? He starts to ask, but too late. The intern, making his rounds, has whirled off to another bed.

They bring him his clothing. He pulls the curtain around his bed and dresses. Yes, bloodstains on his shirt, as he had feared; also on his trousers. A mess. He checks his belongings: everything here, wallet, wristwatch, pocket-comb. What now? Just walk out? Nothing to sign? Selig edges uncertainly toward the door. He actually gets into the corridor unperceived. Then the intern materializes as if from ectoplasm and points to another room across the hall, saying, “You wait in there until the security man comes.” Security man? What security man?

There are, as he had feared, papers to sign before he is free of the hospital’s grasp. Just as he finishes with the red tape, a plump’ gray-faced, sixtyish man in the uniform of the campus security force enters the room, puffing slightly, and says, “You Selig?”

He acknowledges that he is.

“The dean wants to see you. You able to walk by yourself or you want me to get you a wheelchair?”

“I’ll walk,” Selig says.

They go out of the hospital together, up Amsterdam Avenue to the 115th Street campus gate, and into Van Am Quad. The security man stays close beside him, saying nothing. Shortly Selig finds himself waiting outside the office of the Dean of Columbia College. The security man waits with him, arms folded placidly, wrapped in a cocoon of boredom. Selig begins to feel almost as though he is under some sort of arrest. Why is that? An odd thought. What does he have to fear from the dean? He probes the security man’s dull mind but can find nothing in it but drifting, wispy masses of fog. He wonders who the dean is, these days. He remembers the deans of his own college era well enough: Lawrence Chamberlain, with the bow ties and the warm smile, was Dean of the College, and Dean McKnight, Nicholas McD. McKnight, a fraternity enthusiast (Sigma Chi?) with a formal, distinctly nineteenth-century manner, was Dean of Students. But that was twenty years ago. Chamberlain and McKnight must have had several successors by now, but he knows nothing about them; he has never been one for reading alumni newsletters.

A voice from within says, “Dean Cushing will see him now.”

“Go on in,” the security man says.

Cushing? A fine deanly name. Who is he? Selig limps in, awkward from his injuries, bothered by his sore knee. Facing him behind a glistening uncluttered desk sits a wide-shouldered, smooth-cheeked, youthful-looking man, junior-executive model, wearing a conservative dark suit. Selig’s first thought is of the mutations worked by the passage of time: he had always looked upon deans as lofty symbols of authority, necessarily elderly or at least of middle years, but here is the Dean of the College and he seems to be a man of Selig’s own age. Then he realizes that this dean is not merely an anonymous contemporary of his but actually a classmate, Ted Cushing ’56, a campus figure of some repute back then, class president and football star and A-level scholar, whom Selig had known at least in a passing way. It always surprises Selig to be reminded that he is no longer young, that he has lived into a time when his generation has control of the mechanisms of power. “Ted?” he blurts. “Are you dean now, Ted? Christ, I wouldn’t have guessed that. When—”

“Sit down, Dave,” Cushing says, politely but with no great show of friendliness. “Did you get badly hurt?”

“The hospital says nothing’s broken. I feel half ruined, though.” As he eases into a chair he indicates the bloodstains on his clothing, the bruises on his face. Talking is an effort; his jaws creak at their hinges. “Hey, Ted, it’s been a long time! Must be twenty years since I last saw you. Did you remember my name, or did they identify me from my wallet?”

“We’ve arranged to pay the hospital costs,” Cushing says, not seeming to hear Selig’s words. “If there are any further medical expenses, we’ll take care of those too. You can have that in writing if you’d like.”

“The verbal commitment is fine. And in case you’re worrying that I’ll press charges, or sue the University, well, I wouldn’t do anything like that. Boys will be boys, they let their feelings run away with themselves a little bit, but—”

“We weren’t greatly concerned about your pressing charges, Dave,” Cushing says quietly. “The real question is whether we’re going to press charges against you.”

“Me? For what? For getting mauled by your basketball players? For damaging their expensive hands with my face?” He essays a painful grin. Cushing’s face remains grave. There is a little moment of silence. Selig struggles to interpret Cushing’s joke. Finding no rationale for it, he decides to venture a probe. But he runs into a wall. He is suddenly too timid to push, fearful that he will be unable to break through. “I don’t understand what you mean,” he says finally. “Press charges for what?”

“For these, Dave.” For the first time Selig notices the stack of typewritten pages on the dean’s desk. Cushing nudges them forward. “Do you recognize them? Here: take a look.”

Selig leafs unhappily through them. They are term papers, all of them of his manufacture. Odysseus as a Symbol of Society. The Novels of Kafka. Aeschylus and the Aristotelian Tragedy. Resignation and Acceptance in the Philosophy of Montaigne. Virgil as Dante’s Mentor. Some of them bear marks: A—, B+, A—, A and marginal comments, mainly favorable. Some are untouched except by smudges and smears; these are the ones he had been about to deliver when he was set upon by Lumumba. With immense care he tidies the stack, aligning the edges of the sheets precisely, and pushes them back toward Cushing. “All right,” he says. “You’ve got me.”

“Did you write those?”

“Yes.”

“For a fee?”

“Yes.”

“That’s sad, Dave. That’s awfully sad.”

“I needed to earn a living. They don’t give scholarships to alumni.”

“What were you getting paid for these things?”

“Three or four bucks a typed page.”

Cushing shakes his head. “You were good, I’ll give you credit for that. There must be eight or ten guys working your racket here, but you’re easily the best.”

“Thank you.”

“But you had one dissatisfied customer, at least. We asked Lumumba why he beat you up. He said he hired you to write a term paper for him and you did a lousy job, you ripped him off, and then you wouldn’t refund his money. All right, we’re dealing with him in our own way, but we have to deal with you, too. We’ve been trying to find you for a long time, Dave.”

“Have you?”

“We’ve circulated xeroxes of your work through a dozen departments the last couple of semesters, warning people to be on the lookout for your typewriter and your style. There wasn’t a great deal of cooperation. A lot of faculty members didn’t seem to care whether the term papers they received were phony or not. But we cared, Dave. We cared very much.” Cushing leans forward. His eyes, terribly earnest, seek Selig’s. Selig looks away. He cannot abide the searching warmth of those eyes. “We started closing in a few weeks ago,” Cushing continues. “We rounded up a couple of your clients and threatened them with expulsion. They gave us your name, but they didn’t know where you lived, and we had no way of finding you. So we waited. We knew you’d show up again to deliver and solicit. Then we got this report of a disturbance on the steps of Low, basketball players beating somebody up, and we found you with a pile of undelivered papers clutched in your arm, and that was it. You’re out of business, Dave.”

“I should ask for a lawyer,” Selig says. “I shouldn’t admit anything more to you. I should have denied everything when you showed me those papers.”

“No need to be so technical about your rights.”

“I’ll need to be when you take me to court, Ted.”

“No,” Cushing says. “We aren’t going to prosecute, not unless we catch you ghosting more papers. We have no interest in putting you in jail, and in any case I’m not sure that what you’ve done is a criminal offense. What we really want to do is help you. You’re sick, Dave. For a man of your intelligence, of your potential, to have fallen so low, to have ended up faking term papers for college kids—that’s sad, Dave, that’s awfully sad. We’ve discussed your case here, Dean Bellini and Dean Tompkins and I, and we’ve come up with a rehabilitation plan for you. We can find you work on campus, as a research assistant, maybe. There are always doctoral candidates who need assistants, and we have a small fund we could dip into to provide a salary for you, nothing much, but at least as much as you were making on these papers. And we’d admit you to the psychological counseling service here. It wasn’t set up for alumni, but I don’t see why we need to be inflexible about it, Dave. For myself I have to say that I find it embarrassing that a man of the Class of ’56 is in the kind of trouble you’re in, and if only out of a spirit of loyalty to our class I want to do everything possible to help you put yourself back together and begin to fulfill the promise that you showed when—”

Cushing rambles on, restating and embellishing his themes, offering pity without censure, promising aid to his suffering classmate. Selig, listening inattentively, discovers that Cushing’s mind is beginning to open to him. The wall that earlier had separated their consciousnesses, a product perhaps of Selig’s fear and fatigue, has started to dissolve, and Selig is able now to perceive a general image of Cushing’s mind, which is energetic, strong, capable, but also conventional and limited, a stolid Republican mind, a prosaic Ivy League mind. Foremost in it is not his concern for Selig but rather his complacent satisfaction with himself: the brightest glow emanates from Cushing’s awareness of his happy station in life, ornamented by a suburban split-level, a strapping blonde wife, three handsome children, a shaggy dog, a shining new Lincoln Continental. Pushing a bit deeper, Selig sees that Cushing’s show of concern for him is fraudulent. Behind the earnest eyes and the sincere, heartfelt, sympathetic smile lies fierce contempt. Cushing despises him. Cushing thinks he is corrupt, useless, worthless, a disgrace to mankind in general and the Columbia College Class of ’56 in particular. Cushing finds him physically as well as morally repugnant, seeing him as unwashed and unclean, possibly syphilitic. Cushing suspects him of being homosexual. Cushing has for him the scorn of the Rotarian for the junkie. It is impossible for Cushing to understand why anyone who has had the benefit of a Columbia education would let himself slide into the degradations Selig has accepted. Selig shrinks from Cushing’s disgust. Am I so despicable, he wonders, am I such trash?

His hold on Cushing’s mind strengthens and deepens. It ceases to trouble him that Cushing has such contempt for him. Selig drifts into a mode of abstraction in which he no longer identifies himself with the miserable churl Cushing sees. What does Cushing know? Can Cushing penetrate the mind of another? Can Cushing feel the ecstasy of real contact with a fellow human being? And there is ecstasy in it. Godlike he rides passenger in Cushing’s mind, sinking past the external defenses, past the petty prides and snobberies, past the self-congratulatory smugness, into the realm of absolute values, into the kingdom of authentic self. Contact! Ecstasy! That stolid Cushing is the outer husk. Here is a Cushing that even Cushing does not know: but Selig does.

Selig has not been so happy in years. Light, golden and serene, floods his soul. An irresistible gaiety possesses him. He runs through misty groves at dawn, feeling the gentle lashing of moist green fern-fronds against his shins. Sunlight pierces the canopy of high foliage, and droplets of dew glitter with a cool inner fire. The birds awaken. Their song is tender and sweet, a distant cheebling, sleepy and soft. He runs through the forest, and he is not alone, for a hand grasps his hand; and he knows that he has never been alone and never will be alone. The forest floor is damp and spongy beneath his bare feet. He runs. He runs. An invisible choir strikes a harmonious note and holds it, holds it, holds it, swelling it in perfect crescendo, until, just as he breaks from the grove and sprints into a sun-bright meadow, that swell of tone fills all the cosmos, reverberating in magical fullness. He throws himself face-forward to the ground, hugging the earth, writhing against the fragrant grassy carpet, flattening his hands against the curve of the planet, and he is aware of the world’s inner throbbing. This is ecstasy! This is contact! Other minds surround his. In whatever direction he moves, he feels their presence, welcoming him, supporting him, reaching toward him. Come, they say, join us, join us, be one with us, give up those tattered shreds of self, let go of all that holds you apart from us. Yes, Selig replies. Yes. I affirm the ecstasy of life. I affirm the joy of contact. I give myself to you. They touch him. He touches them. It was for this, he knows, that I received my gift, my blessing, my power. For this moment of affirmation and fulfillment. Join us. Join us. Yes! The birds! The invisible choir! The dew! The meadow! The sun! He laughs; he rises and breaks into an ecstatic dance; he throws back his head to sing, he who has never in his life dared to sing, and the tones that come from him are rich and full, pure, squarely striking the center of the pitch. Yes! Oh, the joining, the touching, the union, the oneness! No longer is he David Selig. He is a part of them, and they are a part of him, and in that joyous blending he experiences loss of self, he gives up all that is tired and worn and sour in him, he gives up his fears and uncertainties, he gives up everything that has separated himself from himself for so many years. He breaks through. He is fully open and the immense signal of the universe rushes freely into him. He receives. He transmits. He absorbs. He radiates. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

He knows this ecstasy will last forever.

But in the moment of that knowledge, he feels it slipping from him. The choir’s glad note diminishes. The sun drops toward the horizon. The distant sea, retreating, sucks at the shore. He struggles to hold to the joy, but the more he struggles the more of it he loses. Hold back the tide? How? Delay the fall of night? How? How? The birdsongs are faint now. The air has turned cold. Everything rushes away from him. He stands alone in the gathering darkness, remembering that ecstasy, recapturing it momentarily, reliving it—for it is already gone, and must be summoned back through an act of the will. Gone, yes. It is very quiet, suddenly. He hears one last sound, a stringed instrument in the distance, a cello, perhaps, being plucked, pizzicato, a beautiful melancholy sound. Twang. The plangent chord. Twing. The breaking string. Twong. The lyre untuned. Twang. Twing. Twong. And nothing more. Silence envelops him. A terminal silence, it is, that booms through the caverns of his skull, the silence that follows the shattering of the cello’s strings, the silence that comes with the death of music. He can hear nothing. He can feel nothing. He is alone. He is alone.

He is alone.

“So quiet,” he murmurs. “So private. It’s—so—private—here.”

“Selig?” a deep voice asks. “What’s the matter with you, Selig?”

“I’m all right,” Selig says. He tries to stand, but nothing has any solidity. He is tumbling through Cushing’s desk, through the floor of the office, falling through the planet itself, seeking and not finding a stable platform. “So quiet. The silence, Ted, the silence!” Strong arms seize him. He is aware of several figures bustling about him. Someone is calling for a doctor. Selig shakes his head, protesting that nothing is wrong with him, nothing at all, except for the silence in his head, except for the silence, except for the silence.

Except for the silence.

 

 

TWENTY-SIX.

 

 

Winter is here. Sky and pavement form a seamless, inexorable band of gray. There will be snow soon. For some reason this neighborhood has gone without refuse pickups for three or four days, and bulging plastic sacks of trash are heaped in front of every building, yet there is no odor of garbage in the air. Not even smells can flourish in these temperatures: the cold drains away every stink, every sign of organic reality. Only concrete triumphs here. Silence reigns. Scrawny black and gray cats, motionless, statues of themselves, peer out of alleys. Traffic is light. Walking quickly through the streets from the subway station to Judith’s place, I avert my eyes from the faces of the few people I pass. I feel shy and selfconscious among them, like a war veteran who has just been discharged from the rehabilitation center and is still embarrassed about his mutilations. Naturally I’m unable to tell what anybody is thinking; their minds are closed to me now and they go by me wearing shields of impenetrable ice; but, ironically, I have the illusion that they all have access to me. They can look right into me and see me for what I’ve become. There’s David Selig, they must be thinking. How careless he was! What a poor custodian of his gift! He messed up and let it all slip away from him, the dope. I feel guilty for causing them this disappointment. Yet I don’t feel as guilty as I thought I might. On some ultimate level I just don’t give a damn at all. This is what I am, I tell myself. This is what I now shall be. If you don’t like it, tough crap. Try to accept me. If you can’t do that, just ignore me.

 

*     *     *

 

“As the truest society approaches always nearer to solitude, so the most excellent speech finally falls into silence. Silence is audible to all men, at all times, and in all places.” So said Thoreau, in 1849, in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Of course, Thoreau was a misfit and an outsider with very serious neurotic problems. When he was a young man just out of college he fell in love with a girl named Ellen Sewall, but she turned him down, and he never married. I wonder if he ever made it with anybody. Probably not. I can’t imagine Thoreau actually balling, can you? Oh, maybe he didn’t die a virgin, but I bet his sex life was lousy. Perhaps he didn’t even masturbate. Can you visualize him sitting next to that pond and whacking off? I can’t. Poor Thoreau. Silence is audible, Henry.

 

*     *     *

 

I imagine, as I near Judith’s building, that I meet Toni in the street. I seem to see a tall figure walking toward me from Riverside Drive, hatless, bundled up in a bulky orange coat. When we are half a block apart I recognize her. Strangely, I feel neither excitement nor apprehension over this unexpected reunion; I am quite calm, almost unmoved. At another time I might have crossed the street to avoid a possibly disturbing encounter, but not now: coolly I halt in her path, smile, hold up my hands in greeting. “Toni?” I say. “Don’t you know me?”

She studies me, frowns, seems puzzled for a moment. But only a moment.

“David. Hello.”

Her face looks more lean, the cheekbones higher and sharper. There are some strands of gray in her hair. In the days when I knew her she had one curious gray lock at her temple, very unusual; now the gray is scattered more randomly through the black. Well, of course she’s in her middle thirties now. Not exactly a girl. As old now, in fact, as I was when I first met her. But in fact I know she has hardly changed at all, only matured a little. She seems as beautiful as ever. Yet desire is absent from me. All passion spent, Selig. All passion spent. And she too is mysteriously free of turbulence. I remember our last meeting, the look of pain on her face, her obsessive heap of cigarette butts. Now her expression is amiable and casual. We both have passed through the realm of storms.

“You’re looking good,” I say. “What is it, eight years, nine?”

I know the answer to that. I’m merely testing her. And she passes the test, saying, “The summer of ’68.” I’m relieved to see that she hasn’t forgotten. I’m still a chapter of her autobiography, then. “How have you been, David?”

“Not bad.” The conversational inanities. “What are you doing these days?”

“I’m with Random House now. And you?”

“Freelancing,” I say. “Here and there.” Is she married? Her gloved hands offer no data. I don’t dare ask. I’m incapable of probing. I force a smile and shift my weight from foot to foot. The silence that has come between us suddenly seems unbridgeable. Have we exhausted all feasible topics so soon? Are there no areas of contact left except those too pain-filled to reopen?

She says, “You’ve changed.”

“I’m older. Tireder. Balder.”

“It isn’t that. You’ve changed somewhere inside.”

“I suppose I have.”

“You used to make me feel uncomfortable. I’d get a sort of queasy feeling. I don’t any more.”

“You mean, after the trip?”

“Before and after both,” she says.

“You were always uncomfortable with me?”

“Always. I never knew why. Even when we were really close, I felt—I don’t know, on guard, off balance, ill at ease, when I was with you. And that’s gone now. It’s entirely gone. I wonder why.”

“Time heals all wounds,” I say. Oracular wisdom.

“I suppose you’re right. God, it’s cold! Do you think it’ll snow?”

“It’s bound to, before long.”

“I hate the cold weather.” She huddles into her coat. I never knew her in cold weather. Spring and summer, then goodbye, get out, goodbye, goodbye. Odd how little I feel for her now. If she invited me up to her apartment I’d probably say, No, thank you, I’m on my way to visit my sister. Of course she’s imaginary; that may have something to do with it. But also I’m not getting an aura from her. She’s not broadcasting, or rather I’m not receiving. She’s only a statue of herself, like the cats in the alleys. Will I be incapable of feeling, now that I’m incapable of receiving? She says, “It’s been good to see you, David. Let’s get together some time, shall we?”

“By all means. We’ll have a drink and talk about old times.”

“I’d like that.”

“So would I. Very much.”

“Take care of yourself, David.”

“You too, Toni.”

We smile. I give her a little mock-salute of farewell. We move apart; I continue walking west, she hurries up the windy street toward Broadway. I feel a little warmer for having met her. Everything cool, friendly, unemotional between us. Everything dead, in fact. All passion spent. It’s been good to see you, David. Let’s get together some time, shall we? When I reach the corner I realize I have forgotten to ask for her phone number. Toni? Toni? But she is out of sight. As though she never was there at all.

 

*     *     *

 

It is the little rift within the lute,

That by and by will make the music mute,

And ever widening slowly silence all.

 

That’s Tennyson: Merlin and Vivien. You’ve heard that line about the rift within the lute before, haven’t you? But you never knew it was Tennyson. Neither did I. My lute is riven. Twang. Twing. Twong.

Here’s another little literary gem:

 

Every sound shall end in silence, but the silence never dies.

 

Samuel Miller Hageman wrote that, in 1876, in a poem called Silence. Have you ever heard of Samuel Miller Hageman before? I haven’t. You were a wise old cat, Sam, whoever you were.

 

*     *     *

 

One summer when I was eight or nine—it was before they adopted Judith, anyway—I went with my parents to a resort in the Catskills for a few weeks. There was a daycamp for the kiddies, in which we received instruction in swimming, tennis, softball, arts & crafts, and other activities, thus leaving the older folks free for gin rummy and creative drinking. One afternoon the daycamp staged some boxing matches. I had never worn boxing gloves, and in the free-for-alls of boyhood I had found myself to be an incompetent fighter, so I was unenthusiastic. I watched the first five matches in much dismay. All that hitting! All those bloody noses!

Then it was my turn. My opponent was a boy named Jimmy, a few months younger than I but taller and heavier and much more athletic. I think the counselors matched us deliberately, hoping Jimmy would kill me: I was not their favorite child. I started to shake even before they put the gloves on me. “Round One!” called a counselor, and we approached each other. I distinctly heard Jimmy thinking about hitting me on the chin, and as his glove came toward my face I ducked and hit him in the belly. That made him furious. He proposed now to clobber me on the back of the head, but I saw that coming too and stepped aside and hit him on the neck close to his adam’s-apple. He gagged and turned away, half in tears. After a moment he returned to the attack, but I continued to anticipate his moves and he never touched me. For the first time in my life I felt tough, competent, aggressive. As I battered him I looked past the improvised ring and saw my father flushed with pride, and Jimmy’s father next to him looking angry and perplexed. End of round one. I was sweating, bouncy, grinning.

Round two: Jimmy came forth determined to knock me to pieces. Swinging wildly, frantically, still going for my head. I kept my head where he couldn’t reach it and danced around to his side and hit him in the belly again, very hard, and when he folded up I hit him on the nose and he fell down, crying. The counselor in charge very quickly counted to ten and raised my hand. “Hey, Joe Louis!” my father yelled. “Hey, Willie Pep!” The counselor suggested I go over to Jimmy and help him up and shake his hand. As he got to his feet I very clearly detected him deciding to butt me in the teeth with his head, and I pretended to be paying no attention, except when he charged I stepped coolly to one side and banged my fists down on his lowered back. That shattered him. “David cheats!” he moaned. “David cheats!”

How they all hated me for my cleverness! What they interpreted as my cleverness, that is. My sly knack of always guessing what was going to happen. Well, that wouldn’t be a problem now. They’d all love me. Loving me, they’d beat me to a pulp.

 

*     *     *

 

Judith answers the door. She wears an old gray sweater and blue slacks with a hole in the knee. She holds her arms out to me and I embrace her warmly, pulling her tight against my body for perhaps half a minute. I hear music from within: the Siegfried Idyll, I think. Sweet, loving, accepting music.

“Is it snowing yet?” she asks.

“Not yet. Gray and cold, that’s all.”

“I’ll get you a drink. Go into the livingroom.”

I stand by the window. A few snowflakes blow by. My nephew appears and studies me at a distance of thirty feet. To my amazement he smiles. He says warmly, “Hi, Uncle David!”

Judith must have put him up to it. Be nice to Uncle David, she must have said. He isn’t feeling well, he’s had a lot of trouble lately. So there the kid stands, being nice to Uncle David. I don’t think he’s ever smiled at me before. He didn’t even gurgle and coo at me out of his cradle. Hi, Uncle David. All right, kid. I can dig it.

“Hello, Pauly. How have you been?”

“Fine,” he says. With that his social graces are exhausted; he does not inquire in return about the state of my health, but picks up one of his toys and absorbs himself in its intricacies. Yet his large dark glossy eyes continue to examine me every few moments, and there does not seem to be any hostility in his glance.

Wagner ends. I prowl through the record racks, select one, put it on the turntable. Schoenberg, Verklaerte Nacht. Music of tempestuous anguish followed by calmness and resignation. The theme of acceptance again. Fine. Fine. The swirling strings enfold me. Rich, lush chords. Judith appears, bringing me a glass of rum. She has something mild for herself, sherry or vermouth. She looks a little peaked but very friendly, very open.

“Cheers,” she says.

“Cheers.”

“That’s good music you put on. A lot of people won’t believe Schoenberg could be sensuous and tender. Of course, it’s very early Schoenberg.”

“Yes,” I say. “The romantic juices tend to dry up as you get older, eh? What have you been up to lately, Jude?”

“Nothing much. A lot of the same old.”

“How’s Karl?”

“I don’t see Karl any more.”

“Oh.”

“Didn’t I tell you that?”

“No,” I say. “It’s the first I’ve heard of it.”

“I’m not accustomed to needing to tell you things, Duv.”

“You’d better get accustomed to it. You and Karl—”

“He became very insistent about marrying me. I told him it was too soon, that I didn’t know him well enough, that I was afraid of structuring my life again when it might possibly be the wrong structure for me. He was hurt. He began lecturing me about retreats from involvement and commitment, about self-destructiveness, a lot of stuff like that. I looked right at him in the middle of it and I flashed on him as a kind of father-figure; you know, big and pompous and stern, not a lover but a mentor, a professor, and I didn’t want that. And I started thinking about what he’d be like in another ten or twelve years. He’d be in his sixties and I’d still be young. And I realized there was no future for us together. I told him that as gently as I could. He hasn’t called in ten days or so. I suppose he won’t.”

‘‘I’m sorry.

“No need to be, Duv. I did the smart thing. I’m sure of it. Karl was good for me, but it couldn’t have been permanent. My Karl phase. A very healthy phase. The thing is not to let a phase go on too long after you know it’s really over.”

“Yes,” I say. “Certainly.”

“Would you like some more rum?”

“In a little while.”

“What about you?” she asks. “Tell me about yourself. How you’re making out, now that—now that—”

“Now that my superman phase is over?”

“Yes,” she says. “It’s really gone, eh?”

“Really. All gone. No doubt.”

“And so, Duv? How has it been for you since it happened?”

 

*     *     *

 

Justice. You hear a lot about justice, God’s justice. He looketh after the righteous. He doeth dirt to the ungodly. Justice? Where’s justice? Where’s God, for that matter? Is He really dead, or merely on vacation, or only absent-minded? Look at His justice. He sends a flood to Pakistan. Zap, a million people dead, the adulterer and the virgin both. Justice? Maybe. Maybe the supposedly innocent victims weren’t so innocent after all. Zap, the dedicated nun at the leprosarium gets leprosy and her lips fall off overnight. Justice. Zap, the cathedral that the congregation has been building for the past two hundred years is reduced to rubble by an earthquake the day before Easter. Zap. Zap. God laughs in our faces. This is justice? Where? How? I mean, consider my case. I’m not trying to wring some pity from you now; I’m being purely objective. Listen, I didn’t ask to be a superman. It was handed to me at the moment of my conception. God’s incomprehensible whim. A whim that defined me, shaped me, malformed me, dislocated me, and it was unearned, unasked for, entirely undesired, unless you want to think of my genetic heritage in terms of somebody else’s bad karma, and crap on that. It was a random twitch. God said, Let this kid be a superman, and Lo! young Selig was a superman, in one limited sense of the word. For a time, anyhow. God set me up for everything that happened: the isolation, the suffering, the loneliness, even the self-pity. Justice? Where? The Lord giveth, who the hell knoweth why, and the Lord taketh away. Which He has now done. The power’s gone. I’m just plain folks, even as you and you and you. Don’t misunderstand: I accept my fate, I’m completely reconciled to it, I am NOT asking you to feel sorry for me. I simply want to make a little sense out of this. Now that the power’s gone, who am I? How do I define myself now? I’ve lost my special thing, my power, my wound, my reason for apartness. All I have left now is the memory of having been different. The scars of it. What am I supposed to do now? How do I relate to mankind, now that the difference is gone and I’m still here? It died. I live on. What a strange thing you did to me, God. I’m not protesting, you understand. I’m just asking things, in a quiet, reasonable tone of voice. I’m inquiring into the nature of divine justice. I think Goethe’s old harpist had the right slant on you, God. You lead us forth into life, you let the poor man fall into guilt, and then you leave him to his misery. For all guilt is revenged on earth. That’s a reasonable complaint. You have ultimate power, God, but you refuse to take ultimate responsibility. Is that fair? I think I have a reasonable complaint too. If there’s justice, why does so much of life seem unjust? If you’re really on our side, God, why do you hand us a life of pain? Where’s justice for the baby born without eyes? The baby born with two heads? The baby born with a power men weren’t meant to have? Just asking, God. I accept your decree, believe me, I bow to your will, because I might as well—what choice do I have, after all?—but I’m still entitled to ask. Right?

Hey, God? God? Are you listening, God?

I don’t think you are. I don’t think you give a crap. God, I think you’ve been fucking me.

 

*     *     *

 

Dee-dah-de-doo-dah-dee-da. The music is ending. Celestial harmonies filling the room. Everything merging into oneness. Snowflakes swirling beyond the windowpane. Right on, Schoenberg. You understood, at least when you were young. You caught truth and put it on paper. I hear what you’re saying, man. Don’t ask questions, you say. Accept. Only accept, that’s the motto. Accept. Accept. Whatever comes to you, accept.

 

*     *     *

 

Judith says, “Claude Guermantes has invited me to go skiing with him in Switzerland over Christmas. I can leave the baby with a friend in Connecticut. But I won’t go if you need me, Duv. Are you okay? Can you manage?”

“Sure I can. I’m not paralyzed, Jude. I haven’t lost my sight. Go to Switzerland, if that’s what you want.”

“I’ll only be gone eight days.”

“I’ll survive.”

“When I come back, I hope you’ll move out of that housing project. You ought to live down here close to me. We should see more of each other.”

“Maybe.”

“I might even introduce you to some girlfriends of mine. If you’re interested.”

“Wonderful, Jude.”

“You don’t sound enthusiastic about it.”

“Go easy with me,” I tell her. “Don’t rush me with a million things. I need time to sort things out.”

“All right. It’s like a new life, isn’t it, Duv?”

“A new life. Yes. A new life, that’s what it is, Jude.”

 

*     *     *

 

The storm is intense, now. Cars are vanishing under the first layers of whiteness. At dinner time the radio weather forecaster talked of an accumulation of eight to ten inches before morning. Judith has invited me to spend the night here, in the maid’s room. Well, why not? Now of all times, why should I spurn her? I’ll stay. In the morning we’ll take Pauly out to the park, with his sled, into the new snow. It’s really coming down, now. The snow is so beautiful. Covering everything, cleansing everything, briefly purifying this tired eroded city and its tired eroded people. I can’t take my eyes from it. My face is close to the window. I hold a brandy snifter in one hand, but I don’t remember to drink from it, because the snow has caught me in its hypnotic spell.

“Boo!” someone cries behind me.

I jump so violently that the cognac leaps from the snifter and splashes the window. In terror I whirl, crouching, ready to defend myself; then the instinctive fear subsides and I laugh. Judith laughs too.

“That’s the first time I’ve ever surprised you,” she says. “In 31 years, the first time!”

“You gave me one hell of a jolt.”

“I’ve been standing here for three or four minutes thinking things at you. Trying to get a rise out of you, but no, no, you didn’t react, you just went on staring at the snow. So I sneaked up and yelled in your ear. You were really startled, Duv. You weren’t faking at all.”

“Did you think I was lying to you about what had happened to me?”

“No, of course not.”

“Then why’d you think I’d be faking?”

“I don’t know. I guess I doubted you just a little. I don’t any more. Oh, Duv, Duv, I feel so sad for you!”

“Don’t,” I say. “Please, Jude.”

She is crying softly. How strange that is, to watch Judith cry. For love of me, no less. For love of me.

 

*     *     *

 

It’s very quiet now.

The world is white outside and gray within. I accept that. I think life will be more peaceful. Silence will become my mother tongue. There will be discoveries and revelations, but no upheavals. Perhaps some color will come back into the world for me, later on. Perhaps.

Living, we fret. Dying, we live. I’ll keep that in mind. I’ll be of good cheer. Twang. Twing. Twong. Until I die again, hello, hello, hello, hello.