Dying Inside Read online

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “How about getting laid?”

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

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

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

  “I’ll get it,” Nyquist said.

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

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

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

  —Tell me where you are.

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

  —35 Pierrepont Street.

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

  —Fourth floor.

  —I’m on the eighth. What’s your name?

  —Selig.

  —Nyquist.

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

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

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

  “Are you still in touch with the others?”

  “No.”

  “What happened?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Do I?”

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

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

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

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

  “Why?”

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

  “You feel guilty about that?”

  “Don’t you?”

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

  “You tell me.”

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

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

  “Hold out your glass,” Nyquist said.

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

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

  —How you doing, Davey?

  —Fine. Just fine.

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

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