Dying Inside Read online

  Carefully he sits up. A tumult of impressions strikes him. The room is crowded and noisy, with beds pushed close together. The beds have curtains but no curtains are drawn. Most of his fellow patients are black, and many of them are in serious condition, surrounded by festoons of equipment. Mutilated by knives? Lacerated by windshields? Friends and relatives, clustering around each bed, gesticulate and argue and berate; the normal tone of voice is a yelping shout. Impassive nurses drift through the room, showing much the same distant concern for the patients as museum guards do for mummies in display cases. No one is paying any attention to Selig except Selig, who returns to the examination of himself. His fingertips explore his cheeks. Without a mirror he cannot tell how battered his face is, but there are many tender places. His left clavicle aches as from a light, glancing karate chop. His right knee radiates throbbings and twinges, as though he twisted it in falling. Still, he feels less pain than might have been anticipated; perhaps they have given him some sort of shot.

  His mind is foggy. He is receiving some mental input from those about him in the ward, but everything is garbled, nothing is distinct; he picks up auras but no intelligible verbalizations. Trying to get his bearings, he asks passing nurses three times to tell him the time, for his wristwatch is gone; they go by, ignoring him. Finally a bulky, smiling black woman in a frilly pink dress looks over to him and says, “It’s quarter to four, love.” In the morning? In the afternoon? Probably the afternoon, he decides. Diagonally across from him, two nurses have begun to erect what perhaps is an intravenous feeding system, with a plastic tube snaking into the nostril of a huge unconscious bandage-swathed black. Selig’s own stomach sends him no hunger signals. The chemical smell in the hospital air gives him nausea; he can barely salivate. Will they feed him this evening? How long will he be kept here? Who pays? Should he ask that Judith be notified? How badly has he been injured?

  An intern enters the ward: a short dark man, concise and fine-boned of body, a Pakistani by the looks of him, moving with bouncy precision. A rumpled and soiled handkerchief jutting from his breast pocket spoils, though, the trig, smart effect of his tight white uniform. Surprisingly, he comes right to Selig. “The X-rays show no breakages,” he says without preamble in a firm, unresonant voice. “Therefore your only injuries are minor abrasions, bruises, cuts, and an unimportant concussion. We are ready to authorize your release. Please get up.”

  “Wait,” Selig says feebly. “I just came to. I don’t know what’s been going on. Who brought me here? How long have I been unconscious? What—”

  “I know none of these things. Your discharge has been approved and the hospital has need of this bed. Please. On your feet, now. I have much to do.”

  “A concussion? Shouldn’t I spend the night here, at least, if I had a concussion? Or did I spend the night here? What day is today?”

  “You were brought in about noon today,” says the intern, growing more fretful. “You were treated in the emergency room and given a thorough examination after having been beaten on the steps of Low Library.” Once more the command to rise, given wordlessly this time, an imperious glare and a pointing forefinger. Selig probes the intern’s mind and finds it accessible, but there is nothing apparent in it except impatience and irritation. Ponderously Selig climbs from the bed. His body seems to be held together with wire. His bones grind and scrape. There is still the sensation of broken rib-ends rubbing in his chest; can the X-ray have been in error? He starts to ask, but too late. The intern, making his rounds, has whirled off to another bed.

  They bring him his clothing. He pulls the curtain around his bed and dresses. Yes, bloodstains on his shirt, as he had feared; also on his trousers. A mess. He checks his belongings: everything here, wallet, wristwatch, pocket-comb. What now? Just walk out? Nothing to sign? Selig edges uncertainly toward the door. He actually gets into the corridor unperceived. Then the intern materializes as if from ectoplasm and points to another room across the hall, saying, “You wait in there until the security man comes.” Security man? What security man?

  There are, as he had feared, papers to sign before he is free of the hospital’s grasp. Just as he finishes with the red tape, a plump, gray-faced, sixtyish man in the uniform of the campus security force enters the room, puffing slightly, and says, “You Selig?”

  He acknowledges that he is.

  “The dean wants to see you. You able to walk by yourself or you want me to get you a wheelchair?”

  “I’ll walk,” Selig says.

  They go out of the hospital together, up Amsterdam Avenue to the 115th Street campus gate, and into Van Am Quad. The security man stays close beside him, saying nothing. Shortly Selig finds himself waiting outside the office of the Dean of Columbia College. The security man waits with him, arms folded placidly, wrapped in a cocoon of boredom. Selig begins to feel almost as though he is under some sort of arrest. Why is that? An odd thought. What does he have to fear from the dean? He probes the security man’s dull mind but can find nothing in it but drifting, wispy masses of fog. He wonders who the dean is, these days. He remembers the deans of his own college era well enough: Lawrence Chamberlain, with the bow ties and the warm smile, was Dean of the College, and Dean McKnight, Nicholas McD. McKnight, a fraternity enthusiast (Sigma Chi?) with a formal, distinctly nineteenth-century manner, was Dean of Students. But that was twenty years ago. Chamberlain and McKnight must have had several successors by now, but he knows nothing about them; he has never been one for reading alumni newsletters.

  A voice from within says, “Dean Cushing will see him now.”

  “Go on in,” the security man says.

  Cushing? A fine deanly name. Who is he? Selig limps in, awkward from his injuries, bothered by his sore knee. Facing him behind a glistening uncluttered desk sits a wide-shouldered, smooth-cheeked, youthful-looking man, junior-executive model, wearing a conservative dark suit. Selig’s first thought is of the mutations worked by the passage of time: he had always looked upon deans as lofty symbols of authority, necessarily elderly or at least of middle years, but here is the Dean of the College and he seems to be a man of Selig’s own age. Then he realizes that this dean is not merely an anonymous contemporary of his but actually a classmate, Ted Cushing ’56, a campus figure of some repute back then, class president and football star and A-level scholar, whom Selig had known at least in a passing way. It always surprises Selig to be reminded that he is no longer young, that he has lived into a time when his generation has control of the mechanisms of power. “Ted?” he blurts. “Are you dean now, Ted? Christ, I wouldn’t have guessed that. When—”

  “Sit down, Dave,” Cushing says, politely but with no great show of friendliness. “Did you get badly hurt?”

  “The hospital says nothing’s broken. I feel half ruined, though.” As he eases into a chair he indicates the blood-stains on his clothing, the bruises on his face. Talking is an effort; his jaws creak at their hinges. “Hey, Ted, it’s been a long time! Must be twenty years since I last saw you. Did you remember my name, or did they identify me from my wallet?”

  “We’ve arranged to pay the hospital costs,” Cushing says, not seeming to hear Selig’s words. “If there are any further medical expenses, we’ll take care of those too. You can have that in writing if you’d like.”

  “The verbal commitment is fine. And in case you’re worrying that I’ll press charges, or sue the University, well, I wouldn’t do anything like that. Boys will be boys, they let their feelings run away with themselves a little bit, but—”

  “We weren’t greatly concerned about your pressing charges, Dave,” Cushing says quietly. “The real question is whether we’re going to press charges against you.”

  “Me? For what? For getting mauled by your basketball players? For damaging their expensive hands with my face?” He essays a painful grin. Cushing’s face remains grave. There is a little moment of silence. Selig struggles to interpret Cushing’s joke. Finding no rationale for it, he decides to venture a probe. But
he runs into a wall. He is suddenly too timid to push, fearful that he will be unable to break through. “I don’t understand what you mean,” he says finally. “Press charges for what?”

  “For these, Dave.” For the first time Selig notices the stack of typewritten pages on the dean’s desk. Cushing nudges them forward. “Do you recognize them? Here: take a look.”

  Selig leafs unhappily through them. They are term papers, all of them of his manufacture. Odysseus as a Symbol of Society. The Novels of Kafka. Aeschylus and the Aristotelian Tragedy. Resignation and Acceptance in the Philosophy of Montaigne. Virgil as Dante’s Mentor. Some of them bear marks: A-, B+, A-, A and marginal comments, mainly favorable. Some are untouched except by smudges and smears; these are the ones he had been about to deliver when he was set upon by Lumumba. With immense care he tidies the stack, aligning the edges of the sheets precisely, and pushes them back toward Cushing. “All right,” he says. “You’ve got me.”

  “Did you write those?”

  “Yes.”

  “For a fee?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s sad, Dave. That’s awfully sad.”

  “I needed to earn a living. They don’t give scholarships to alumni.”

  “What were you getting paid for these things?”

  “Three or four bucks a typed page.”

  Cushing shakes his head. “You were good, I’ll give you credit for that. There must be eight or ten guys working your racket here, but you’re easily the best.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But you had one dissatisfied customer, at least. We asked Lumumba why he beat you up. He said he hired you to write a term paper for him and you did a lousy job, you ripped him off, and then you wouldn’t refund his money. All right, we’re dealing with him in our own way, but we have to deal with you, too. We’ve been trying to find you for a long time, Dave.”

  “Have you?”

  “We’ve circulated xeroxes of your work through a dozen departments the last couple of semesters, warning people to be on the lookout for your typewriter and your style. There wasn’t a great deal of cooperation. A lot of faculty members didn’t seem to care whether the term papers they received were phony or not. But we cared, Dave. We cared very much.” Cushing leans forward. His eyes, terribly earnest, seek Selig’s. Selig looks away. He cannot abide the searching warmth of those eyes. “We started closing in a few weeks ago,” Cushing continues. “We rounded up a couple of your clients and threatened them with expulsion. They gave us your name, but they didn’t know where you lived, and we had no way of finding you. So we waited. We knew you’d show up again to deliver and solicit. Then we got this report of a disturbance on the steps of Low, basketball players beating somebody up, and we found you with a pile of undelivered papers clutched in your arm, and that was it. You’re out of business, Dave.”

  “I should ask for a lawyer,” Selig says. “I shouldn’t admit anything more to you. I should have denied everything when you showed me those papers.”

  “No need to be so technical about your rights.”

  “I’ll need to be when you take me to court, Ted.”

  “No,” Cushing says. “We aren’t going to prosecute, not unless we catch you ghosting more papers. We have no interest in putting you in jail, and in any case I’m not sure that what you’ve done is a criminal offense. What we really want to do is help you. You’re sick, Dave. For a man of your intelligence, of your potential, to have fallen so low, to have ended up faking term papers for college kids—that’s sad, Dave, that’s awfully sad. We’ve discussed your case here, Dean Bellini and Dean Tompkins and I, and we’ve come up with a rehabilitation plan for you. We can find you work on campus, as a research assistant, maybe. There are always doctoral candidates who need assistants, and we have a small fund we could dip into to provide a salary for you, nothing much, but at least as much as you were making on these papers. And we’d admit you to the psychological counseling service here. It wasn’t set up for alumni, but I don’t see why we need to be inflexible about it, Dave. For myself I have to say that I find it embarrassing that a man of the Class of ’56 is in the kind of trouble you’re in, and if only out of a spirit of loyalty to our class I want to do everything possible to help you put yourself back together and begin to fulfill the promise that you showed when—”

  Cushing rambles on, restating and embellishing his themes, offering pity without censure, promising aid to his suffering classmate. Selig, listening inattentively, discovers that Cushing’s mind is beginning to open to him. The wall that earlier had separated their consciousnesses, a product perhaps of Selig’s fear and fatigue, has started to dissolve, and Selig is able now to perceive a general image of Cushing’s mind, which is energetic, strong, capable, but also conventional and limited, a stolid Republican mind, a prosaic Ivy League mind. Foremost in it is not his concern for Selig but rather his complacent satisfaction with himself: the brightest glow emanates from Cushing’s awareness of his happy station in life, ornamented by a suburban split-level, a strapping blonde wife, three handsome children, a shaggy dog, a shining new Lincoln Continental. Pushing a bit deeper, Selig sees that Cushing’s show of concern for him is fraudulent. Behind the earnest eyes and the sincere, heartfelt, sympathetic smile lies fierce contempt. Cushing despises him. Cushing thinks he is corrupt, useless, worthless, a disgrace to mankind in general and the Columbia College Class of ’56 in particular. Cushing finds him physically as well as morally repugnant, seeing him as unwashed and unclean, possibly syphilitic. Cushing suspects him of being homosexual. Cushing has for him the scorn of the Rotarian for the junkie. It is impossible for Cushing to understand why anyone who has had the benefit of a Columbia education would let himself slide into the degradations Selig has accepted. Selig shrinks from Cushing’s disgust. Am I so despicable, he wonders, am I such trash?

  His hold on Cushing’s mind strengthens and deepens. It ceases to trouble him that Cushing has such contempt for him. Selig drifts into a mode of abstraction in which he no longer identifies himself with the miserable churl Cushing sees. What does Cushing know? Can Cushing penetrate the mind of another? Can Cushing feel the ecstasy of real contact with a fellow human being? And there is ecstasy in it. Godlike he rides passenger in Cushing’s mind, sinking past the external defenses, past the petty prides and snobberies, past the self-congratulatory smugness, into the realm of absolute values, into the kingdom of authentic self. Contact! Ecstasy! That stolid Cushing is the outer husk. Here is a Cushing that even Cushing does not know: but Selig does.

  Selig has not been so happy in years. Light, golden and serene, floods his soul. An irresistible gaiety possesses him. He runs through misty groves at dawn, feeling the gentle lashing of moist green fern-fronds against his shins. Sunlight pierces the canopy of high foliage, and droplets of dew glitter with a cool inner fire. The birds awaken. Their song is tender and sweet, a distant cheebling, sleepy and soft. He runs through the forest, and he is not alone, for a hand grasps his hand; and he knows that he has never been alone and never will be alone. The forest floor is damp and spongy beneath his bare feet. He runs. He runs. An invisible choir strikes a harmonious note and holds it, holds it, holds it, swelling it in perfect crescendo, until, just as he breaks from the grove and sprints into a sun-bright meadow, that swell of tone fills all the cosmos, reverberating in magical fullness. He throws himself face-forward to the ground, hugging the earth, writhing against the fragrant grassy carpet, flattening his hands against the curve of the planet, and he is aware of the world’s inner throbbing. This is ecstasy! This is contact! Other minds surround his. In whatever direction he moves, he feels their presence, welcoming him, supporting him, reaching toward him. Come, they say, join us, join us, be one with us, give up those tattered shreds of self, let go of all that holds you apart from us. Yes, Selig replies. Yes, I affirm the ecstasy of life. I affirm the joy of contact. I give myself to you. They touch him. He touches them. It was for this, he knows, that I received my gift, my blessing, m
y power. For this moment of affirmation and fulfillment. Join us. Join us. Yes! The birds! The invisible choir! The dew! The meadow! The sun! He laughs; he rises and breaks into an ecstatic dance; he throws back his head to sing, he who has never in his life dared to sing, and the tones that come from him are rich and full, pure, squarely striking the center of the pitch. Yes! Oh, the joining, the touching, the union, the oneness! No longer is he David Selig. He is a part of them, and they are a part of him, and in that joyous blending he experiences loss of self, he gives up all that is tired and worn and sour in him, he gives up his fears and uncertainties, he gives up everything that has separated himself from himself for so many years. He breaks through. He is fully open and the immense signal of the universe rushes freely into him. He receives. He transmits. He absorbs. He radiates. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

  He knows this ecstasy will last forever.

  But in the moment of that knowledge, he feels it slipping from him. The choir’s glad note diminishes. The sun drops toward the horizon. The distant sea, retreating, sucks at the shore. He struggles to hold to the joy, but the more he struggles the more of it he loses. Hold back the tide? How? Delay the fall of night? How? How? The birdsongs are faint now. The air has turned cold. Everything rushes away from him. He stands alone in the gathering darkness, remembering that ecstasy, recapturing it momentarily, reliving it—for it is already gone, and must be summoned back through an act of the will. Gone, yes. It is very quiet, suddenly. He hears one last sound, a stringed instrument in the distance, a cello, perhaps, being plucked, pizzicato, a beautiful melancholy sound. Twang. The plangent chord. Twing. The breaking string. Twong. The lyre untuned. Twang. Twing. Twong. And nothing more. Silence envelops him. A terminal silence, it is, that booms through the caverns of his skull, the silence that follows the shattering of the cello’s strings, the silence that comes with the death of music. He can hear nothing. He can feel nothing. He is alone. He is alone.