Dying Inside

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

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

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

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

  * * *

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

  * * *

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

  That bummer—that disaster—

  That catastrophe—

  NINE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  TEN.

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

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

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

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