Dying Inside Read online

  * * *

  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 became 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, mmmm. 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 betwee
n 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 any 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-noised 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 rang
e 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.”