Dying Inside

  How can I break this link?

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

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

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

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

  “No. No problem.”

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

  “David?”

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

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

  Biting. Sucking. Drinking.

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

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

  “I didn’t.”

  “Then how can you be tripping?”

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

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

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

  “What did you say?”

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

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

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

  “I heard you ask it.”

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

  “Not for me,” I say.

  “You weren’t tripping.”

  “But I was.”

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

  * * *

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

  ELEVEN.

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

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

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

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

  “How good is it?”

  “You won’t be sorry.”

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

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

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

  “Pardon me?”

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

  “That’s right.”

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

  “$3.50 a page. Typed, double-spaced.”

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

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

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

  “Euripides?”

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

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

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

  “Aeschylus?”

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

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