Dying Inside

TWELVE.

In his more flamboyantly Dostoevskian moments, David Selig liked to think of his power as a curse, a savage penalty for some unimaginable sin. The mark of Cain, perhaps. Certainly his special ability had caused a lot of trouble for him, but in his saner moments he knew that calling it a curse was sheer self-indulgent melodramatic bullshit. The power was a divine gift. The power brought ecstasy. Without the power he was nothing, a schmendrick; with it he was a god. Is that a curse? Is that so terrible? Something funny happens when gamete meets gamete, and destiny cries, Here, Selig-baby: be a god! This you would spurn? Sophocles, age 88 or so, was heard to express his great relief at having outlived the pressures of the physical passions. I am freed at last from a tyrannical master, said the wise and happy Sophocles. Can we then assume that Sophocles, had Zeus given him a chance retroactively to alter the entire course of his days, would have opted for lifelong impotence? Don’t kid yourself, Duvid: no matter how badly the telepathy stuff fucked you up, and it fucked you up pretty badly, you wouldn’t have done without it for a minute. Because the power brought ecstasy.

The power brought ecstasy. That’s the whole megillah in a single crisp phrase. Mortals are born into a vale of tears and they get their kicks wherever they can. Some, seeking pleasure, are compelled to turn to sex, drugs, booze, television, movies, pinochle, the stock market, the racetrack, the roulette wheel, whips and chains, collecting first editions, Caribbean cruises, Chinese snuff bottles, Anglo-Saxon poetry, rubber garments, professional football games, whatever. Not him, not the accursed David Selig. All he had to do was sit quietly with his apparatus wide open and drink in the thought-waves drifting on the telepathic breeze. With the greatest of ease he lived a hundred vicarious lives. He heaped his treasurehouse with the plunder of a thousand souls. Ecstasy. Of course, the ecstatic part was all quite some time ago.

The best years were those between the ages of fourteen and twenty-five. Younger, and he was still too naive, too unformed, to wring much appreciation from the data he took in. Older, and his growing bitterness, his sour sense of isolation, damped his capacity for joy. Fourteen to twenty-five, though. The golden years. Ah!

It was so very much more vivid then. Life was like a waking dream. There were no walls in his world; he could go anywhere and see anything. The intense flavor of existence. Steeped in the rich juices of perception. Not until Selig was past forty did he realize how much he had lost, over the years, in the way of fine focus and depth of field. The power had not begun detectibly to dim until he was well along in his thirties, but it obviously must have been fading by easy stages all through his manhood, dwindling so gradually that he remained unaware of the cumulative loss. The change had been absolute, qualitative rather than quantitative. Even on a good day, now, the inputs did not begin to approach the intensity of those he remembered from his adolescence. In those remote years the power had brought him not only bits of subcranial conversation and scattered snatches of soul, as now, but also a gaudy universe of colors, textures, scents, densities: the world through an infinity of other sensory intakes, the world captured and played out for his delight on the glassy radiant spherical screen within his mind.

For instance. He lies propped against an itchy August haystack in a hot Brueghelesque landscape, shortly past noon. This is 1950 and he hangs becalmed midway between his fifteenth birthday and his sixteenth. Some sound effects, Maestro: Beethoven’s Sixth, bubbling up gently, sweet flutes and playful piccolos. The sun dangles in a cloudless sky. A gentle wind stirs the willows bordering the cornfield. The young corn trembles. The brook burbles. A starling circles overhead. He hears crickets. He hears the drone of a mosquito, and watches calmly as it zeroes in on his bare, hairless, sweat-shiny chest. His feet are bare too; he wears only tight, faded blue jeans. City boy, digging the country.

The farm is in the Catskills, twelve miles north of Ellenville. It is owned by the Schieles, a tribe of tawny Teutons, who produce eggs and an assortment of vegetable crops and who supplement their earnings every summer by renting out their guest house to some family of urban Yids looking for rural solace. This year the tenants are Sam and Annette Stein of Brooklyn, New York, and their daughter Barbara. The Steins have invited their close friends, Paul and Martha Selig, to spend a week on the farm with their son David and their daughter Judith. (Sam Stein and Paul Selig are hatching a scheme, destined ultimately to empty their bank accounts and destroy the friendship between the two families, to enter into a partnership and act as jobbers for replacement parts for television sets. Paul Selig is forever attempting unwise business ventures.) Today is the third day of the visit, and this afternoon, mysteriously, David finds himself utterly alone. His father has gone on an all-day hike with Sam Stein: in the serenity of the nearby hills they will plot the details of their commercial coup. Their wives have driven off, taking five-year-old Judith with them, to explore the antique shops of Ellenville. No one remains on the premises except the tightlipped Schieles, going somberly about their unending chores, and sixteen-year-old Barbara Stein, who has been David’s classmate from the third grade on through high school. Willy-nilly, David and Barbara are thrown together for the day. The Steins and the Seligs evidently have some unvoiced hope that romance will blossom between their offspring. This is naive of them. Barbara, a lush and reasonably beautiful dark-haired girl, sleek-skinned and long-legged, sophisticated and smooth of manner, is six months older than David chronologically and three or four years ahead of him in social development. She does not actually dislike him, but she regards him as strange, disturbing, alien, and repellent. She has no knowledge of his special gift—no one does; he’s seen to that—but she’s had seven years to observe him at close range, and she knows there’s something fishy about him. She is a conventional girl, plainly destined to marry early (a doctor, a lawyer, an insurance broker) and have lots of babies, and the chances of romance flowering between her and anyone as dark-souled and odd as David Selig are slight. David knows this very well and he is not at all surprised, or even dismayed, when Barbara slips away in mid-morning. “If anyone asks,” she says, “tell them I went for a stroll in the woods.” She carries a paperback poetry anthology. David is not deceived by it. He knows she goes off to screw 19-year-old Hans Schiele at every chance she gets.

So he is left to his own resources. No matter. He has ways of entertaining himself. He wanders the farm for a while, peering at the hen-coop and the combine, and then settles down in a quiet corner of the fields. Time for mind-movies. Lazily he casts his net. The power rises and goes forth, looking for emanations. What shall I read, what shall I read? Ah. A sense of contact. His questing mind has snared another mind, a buzzing one, small, dim, intense. It is a bee’s mind, in fact: David is not limited only to contact with humans. Of course there are no verbal outputs from the bee, nor any conceptual ones. If the bee thinks at all, David is incapable of detecting those thoughts. But he does get into the bee’s head. He experiences a strong sense of what it is like to be tiny and compact and winged and fuzzy. How dry the universe of a bee is: bloodless, desiccated, arid. He soars. He swoops. He evades a passing bird, as monstrous as a winged elephant. He burrows deep into a steamy, pollen-laden blossom. He goes aloft again. He sees the world through the bee’s faceted eyes. Everything breaks into a thousand fragments, as though seen through a cracked glass; the essential color of everything is gray, but odd hues lurk at the corners of things, peripheral blues and scarlets that do not correspond in any way to the colors he knows. The effect, he might have said twenty years later, is an extremely trippy one. But the mind of a bee is a limited one. David bores easily. He abandons the insect abruptly and, zooming his perceptions barnward, clicks into the soul of a hen. She is laying an egg! Rhythmic internal contractions, pleasurable and painful, like the voiding of a mighty turd. Frenzied squawks. The smarmy hen-coop odor, sharp and biting. A sense of too much straw all about. The world looks dark and dull to this bird. Heave. Heave. Oooh! Orgasmic excitement! The egg slides through the hatch and lands safely. The hen subsides, fulfilled, exhausted. David departs from her in this moment of rapture. He plunges deep into the adjoining woods, finds a human mind, enters it. How much richer and more intense it is to make communion with his own species. His identity blurs into that of his communicant, who is Barbara Stein, who is getting laid by Hans Schiele. She is naked and lying on a carpet of last year’s fallen leaves. Her legs are spread and her eyes are closed. Her skin is damp with sweat. Hans’ fingers dig into the soft flesh of her shoulders and his cheek, rough with blond stubble, abrades her cheek. His weight presses down on her chest, flattening her breasts and emptying her lungs. With steady thrusts and unvarying tempo he penetrates her, and as his long stiff member slowly and patiently rams into her again and again, throbbing sensation spreads in eddying ripples outward from her loins, growing less intense with distance. Through her mind David observes the impact of the hard penis against the tender, slippery internal membranes. He picks up her clamorous heartbeat. He notices her hammering her heels against the calves of Hans’ legs. He is aware of the slickness of her own fluids on her buttocks and thighs. And now he senses the first dizzying spasms of orgasm. David struggles to remain with her, but he knows he won’t succeed; clinging to the consciousness of someone who’s coming is like trying to ride a wild horse. Her pelvis bucks and heaves, her fingernails desperately rake her lover’s back, her head twists to one side, she gulps for air, and, as she erupts with pleasure, she catapults David from her unsaddled mind. He travels only a short way, into the stolid soul of Hans Schiele, who unknowingly grants the virgin voyeur a few instants of knowledge of what it is like to be stoking the furnace of Barbara Stein, thrust and thrust and thrust and thrust, her inner muscles clamping fiercely against the swollen prod, and then, almost immediately, comes the tickle of Hans’ onrushing climax. Hungry for information, David holds on with all his strength, hoping to keep contact right through the tumult of fulfillment, but no, he is flipped free, he tumbles uncontrollably, the world goes swinging past him in giddy streaks of color, until—click!—he finds a new sanctuary. All is calm here. He glides through a dark cold environment. He has no weight; his body is long and slender and agile; his mind is nearly a void, but through it run faint chilly flickering perceptions of a low order. He has entered the consciousness of a fish, perhaps a brook trout. Downstream he moves in the swiftly rushing creek, taking delight in the smoothness of his motions and the delicious texture of the pure icy water flowing past his fins. He can see very little and smell even less; information comes to him in the form of minute impacts on his scales, tiny deflections and interferences. Easily he responds to each incoming news item, now twisting to avoid a fang of rock, now fluttering his fins to seize some speedy subcurrent. The process is fascinating, but the trout itself is a dull companion, and David, having extracted the troutness of the experience in two or three minutes, leaps gladly to a more complex mind the moment he approaches one. It is the mind of gnarled old Georg Schiele, Hans’ father, who is at work in a remote corner of the cornfield. David has never entered the elder Schiele’s mind before. The old man is a grim and forbidding character, well past sixty, who says little and stalks dourly through his day-long round of chores with his heavy-jowled face perpetually locked in a frosty scowl. David occasionally wonders whether he once might have been a concentration-camp attendant, though he knows the Schieles came to America in 1935. The farmer gives off so unpleasant a psychic aura that David has steered clear of him, but so bored is he with the trout that he slips into Schiele now, slides down through dense layers of unintelligible Deutsch ruminations, and strikes bottom in the basement of the farmer’s soul, the place where his essence lives. Astonishment: old Schiele is a mystic, an ecstatic! No dourness here. No dark Lutheran vindictiveness. This is pure Buddhism: Schiele stands in the rich soil of his fields, leaning on his hoe, feet firmly planted, communing with the universe. God floods his soul. He touches the unity of all things. Sky, trees, earth, sun, plants, brook, insects, birds—everything is one, part of a seamless whole, and Schiele resonates in perfect harmony with it. How can this be? How can such a bleak, inaccessible man entertain such raptures in his depths? Feel his joy! Sensations drench him! Birdsong, sunlight, the scent of flowers and clods of upturned earth, the rustling of the sharp-bladed green cornstalks, the trickle of sweat down the reddened deep-channeled neck, the curve of the planet, the fleecy premature outline of the full moon—a thousand delights enfold this man. David shares his pleasure. He kneels in his mind, reverent, awed. The world is a mighty hymn. Schiele breaks from his stasis, raises his hoe, brings it down; heavy muscles go taut and metal digs into earth, and everything is as it should be, all conforms to the divine plan. Is this how Schiele goes through his days? Is such happiness possible? David is surprised to find tears bulging in his eyes. This simple man, this narrow man, lives in daily grace. Suddenly sullen, bitterly envious, David rips his mind free, whirls, projects it toward the woods, drops down into Barbara Stein again. She lies back, sweat-sticky, exhausted. Through her nostrils David receives the stink of semen already going sour. She rubs her hands over her skin, plucking stray bits of leaf and grass from herself. Idly she touches her softening nipples. Her mind is slow, dull, almost as empty as the trout’s, just now: sex seems to have drained her of personality. David shifts to Hans and finds him no better. Lying by Barbara’s side, still breathing hard after his exertions, he is torpid and depressed. His wad is shot and all desire is gone from him; peering sleepily at the girl he has just possessed, he is conscious mainly of body odors and the untidiness of her hair. Through the upper levels of his mind wanders a wistful thought, in English punctuated by clumsy German, of a girl from an adjoining farm who will do something to him with her mouth that Barbara refuses to do. Hans will be seeing her on Saturday night. Poor Barbara, David thinks, and wonders what she would say if she knew what Hans is thinking. Idly he tries to bridge their two minds, entering both in the mischievous hope that thoughts may flow from one to the other, but he miscalculates his span and finds himself returning to old Schiele, deep in his ecstasy, while holding contact with Hans as well. Father and son, old and young, priest and profaner. David sustains the twin contact a moment. He shivers. He is filled with a thundering sense of the wholeness of life.

It was like that all the time, in those years: an endless trip, a gaudy voyage. But powers decay. Time leaches the colors from the best of visions. The world becomes grayer. Entropy beats us down. Everything fades. Everything goes. Everything dies.