Dying Inside

  “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 organ
ization 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 showercurtain 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.