Dying Inside

TWENTY.

There was always the danger of being found out. He knew he had to be on his guard. This was an era of witch-hunters, when anyone who departed from community norms was ferreted out and burned at the stake. Spies were everywhere, probing for young Selig’s secret, fishing for the awful truth about him. Even Miss Mueller, his biology teacher. She was a pudgy little poodle of a woman, about 40, with a glum face and dark arcs under her eyes; like a cryptodyke of some sort she wore her hair cut brutally short, the back of her neck always showing the stubble of a recent shave, and came to class every day in a gray laboratory smock. Miss Mueller was very deep into the realm of extrasensory and occult phenomena. Of course they didn’t use phrases like “very deep into” in 1949, when David Selig was in her class, but let the anachronism stand: she was ahead of her time, a hippie born too soon. She really grooved behind the irrational, the unknown. She knew her way around the high-school bio curriculum in her sleep, which was more or less the way she taught it. What turned her on, really, were things like telepathy, clairvoyance, telekinesis, astrology, the whole parapsychological bag. The most slender provocation was enough to nudge her away from the day’s assignment, the study of metabolism or the circulatory system or whatever, and onto one of her hobbyhorses. She was the first on her block to own the I Ching. She had done time inside orgone boxes. She believed that the Great Pyramid of Gizeh held divine revelations for mankind. She had sought deeper truths by way of Zen, General Semantics, the Bates eyesight exercises, and the readings of Edgar Cayce. (How easily I can extend her quest past the year of my own exposure to her! She must have gone on to dianetics, Velikovsky, Bridey Murphy, and Timothy Leary, and ended up, in her old age, as a lady guru in some Los Angeles eyrie, heavy into psilocybin and peyote. Poor silly gullible pitiful old bitch.)

Naturally she kept up with the research into extrasensory perception that J. B. Rhine was doing down at Duke University. It terrified David whenever she spoke of this. He constantly feared that she was going to give way to the temptation to run some Rhine experiments in class, and would thereby flush him out of hiding. He had read Rhine himself, of course, The Reach of the Mind and New Frontiers of the Mind, had even peered into the opacities of The Journal of Parapsychology, hoping to find something that would explain him to himself, but there was nothing there except statistics and foggy conjecture. Okay, Rhine was no threat to him so long as he went on piddling around in North Carolina. But muddled Miss Mueller might just strip him naked and deliver him to the pyre.

Inevitable, the progression toward disaster. The topic for the week, suddenly, was the human brain, its functions and capabilities. See, this is the cerebrum, this is the cerebellum, this is the medulla oblongata. A child’s garden of synapses. Fat-cheeked Norman Heimlich, gunning for a 99, knowing precisely which button to push, put up his hand: “Miss Mueller, do you think it’ll ever be possible for people really to read minds, I mean not by tricks or anything but actual mental telepathy?” Oh, the joy of Miss Mueller! Her lumpy face glowing. This was her cue to launch into an animated discussion of ESP, parapsychology, inexplicable phenomena, supernormal modes of communication and perception, the Rhine researches, et cetera, et cetera, a torrent of metaphysical irrelevance. David wanted to hide under his desk. The word “telepathy” made him wince. He already suspected that half the class realized what he was. Now a flash of wild paranoia. Are they looking at me, are they staring and pointing and tapping their heads and nodding? Certainly these were irrational fears. He had surveyed every mind in the class again and again, desperately trying to amuse himself during the arid stretches of boredom, and he knew that his secret was safe. His classmates, plodding young Brooklynites all, would never cotton to the veiled presence of a superman in their midst. They thought he was strange, yes, but had no notion of how strange. Would Miss Mueller now blow his cover, though? She was talking about conducting parapsychology experiments in class to demonstrate the potential reach of the human brain. Oh where can I hide?

No escape. She had her cards with her the next day. “These are known as Zener cards,” she explained solemnly, holding them up, fanning them out like Wild Bill Hickok about to deal himself a straight flush. David had never actually seen a set of the cards before, yet they were as familiar to him as the deck his parents used in their interminable canasta games. “They were devised about twenty-five years ago at Duke University by Dr. Karl E. Zener and Dr. J. B. Rhine. Another name for them is ‘ESP cards.’ Who can tell me what ‘ESP’ means?”

Norman Heimlich’s stubby hand waving in the air. “Extrasensory perception, Miss Mueller!”

“Very good, Norman.” Absentmindedly she began to shuffle the cards. Her eyes, normally inexpressive, gleamed with a Las Vegas intensity. She said, “The deck consists of 25 cards, divided into five ‘suits’ or symbols. There are five cards marked with a star, five with a circle, five with a square, five with a pattern of wavy lines, and five with a cross or plus sign. Otherwise they look just like ordinary playing cards.” She handed the pack to Barbara Stein, another of her favorites, and told her to copy the five symbols on the blackboard. “The idea is for the subject being examined to look at each card in turn, face down, and try to name the symbol on the other side. The test can be run in many different ways. Sometimes the examiner looks briefly at each card first; that gives the subject a chance to pick the right answer out of the examiner’s mind, if he can. Sometimes neither the subject nor the examiner sees the card in advance. Sometimes the subject is allowed to touch the card before he makes his guess. Sometimes he may be blindfolded, and other times he may be permitted to stare at the back of each card. No matter how it’s done, though, the basic aim is always the same: for the subject to determine, using extrasensory powers, the design on a card that he can’t see. Estelle, suppose the subject has no extrasensory powers at all, but is simply operating on pure guesswork. How many right guesses could we expect him to make, out of the 25 cards?”

Estelle, caught by surprise, reddened and blurted, “Uh—twelve and a half?”

A sour smirk from Miss Mueller, who turned to the brighter, happier twin. “Beverly?”

“Five, Miss Mueller?”

“Correct. You always have one chance out of five of guessing the right suit, so five right calls out of 25 is what luck alone ought to bring. Of course, the results are never that neat. On one run through the deck you might have four correct hits, and then next time six, and then five, and then maybe seven, and then perhaps only three—but the average, over a long series of trials, ought to be about five. That is, if pure chance is the only factor operating. Actually, in the Rhine experiments some groups of subjects have averaged 6 1/2 or 7 hits out of 25 over many tests. Rhine believes that this above-average performance can only be explained as ESP. And certain subjects have done much better. There was a man once who called nine straight cards right, two days in a row. Then a few days later he hit 15 straight cards, 21 out of 25. The odds against that are fantastic. How many of you think it could have been nothing but luck?”

About a third of the hands in the class went up. Some of them belonged to dullards who failed to realize that it was shrewd politics to show sympathy for the teacher’s pet enthusiasms. Some of them belonged to incorrigible skeptics who disdained such cynical manipulations. One of the hands belonged to David Selig. He was merely trying to don protective coloration.

Miss Mueller said, “Let’s run a few tests today. Victor, will you be our first guinea pig? Come to the front of the room.”

Grinning nervously, Victor Schlitz shambled forward. He stood stiffly beside Miss Mueller’s desk as she cut the cards and cut them again. Then, peering quickly at the top card, she slid it toward him. “Which symbol?” she asked.

“Circle?”

“We’ll see. Class, don’t say anything.” She handed the card to Barbara Stein, telling her to place a checkmark under the proper symbol on the blackboard. Barbara checked the square. Miss Mueller glanced at the next card. Star, David thought.

“Waves,” Victor said. Barbara checked the star.

“Plus.” Square, dummy! Square.

“Circle.” Circle. Circle. A sudden ripple of excitement in the classroom at Victor’s hit. Miss Mueller, glaring, called for silence.

“Star.” Waves. Waves was what Barbara checked.

“Square.” Square, David agreed. Square. Another ripple, more subdued.

Victor went through the deck. Miss Mueller had kept score: four correct hits. Not even as good as chance. She put him through a second round. Five. All right, Victor: you may be sexy, but a telepath you aren’t. Miss Mueller’s eyes roved the room. Another subject? Let it not be me, David prayed. God, let it not be me. It wasn’t. She summoned Sheldon Feinberg. He hit five the first time, six the second. Respectable, unspectacular. Then Alice Cohen. Four and four. Stony soil, Miss Mueller. David, following each turn of the cards, had hit 25 out of 25 every time, but he was the only one who knew that.

“Next?” Miss Mueller said. David shrank into his seat. How much longer until the dismissal bell? “Norman Heimlich.” Norman waddled toward the teacher’s desk. She glanced at a card. David, scanning her, picked up the image of a star. Bouncing then to Norman’s mind, David was amazed to detect a flicker of an image there, a star perversely rounding its points to form a circle, then reverting to being a star. What was this? Did the odious Heimlich have a shred of the power? “Circle,” Norman murmured. But he hit the next one—the waves—and the one after that, the square. He did indeed seem to he picking up emanations, fuzzy and indistinct but emanations all the same, from Miss Mueller’s mind. Fat Heimlich had the vestiges of the gift. But only the vestiges; David, scanning his mind and the teacher’s, watched the images grow ever more cloudy and vanish altogether by the tenth card, fatigue scattering Norman’s feeble strength. He scored a seven, though, the best so far. The bell, David prayed. The bell, the bell, the bell! Twenty minutes away.

A small mercy. Miss Mueller briskly distributed test paper. She would run the whole class at once. “I’ll call numbers from 1 to 25,” she said. “As I call each number, write down the symbol you think you see. Ready? One.”

David saw a circle. Waves, he wrote.

Star. Square.

Waves. Circle.

Star. Waves.

As the test neared its close, it occurred to him that he might be making a tactical error by muffing every call. He told himself to put down two or three right ones, just for camouflage. But it was too late for that. There were only four numbers left; it would look too conspicuous if he hit several of them correctly after missing all the others. He went on missing.

Miss Mueller said, “Now exchange papers with your neighbor and mark his answers. Ready? Number one: circle. Number two: star. Number three: waves. Number four. . . .”

Tensely she called for results. Had anyone scored ten hits or more? No, teacher. Nine? Eight? Seven? Norman Heimlich had seven again. He preened himself: Heimlich the mind-reader. David felt disgust at the knowledge that Heimlich had even a crumb of power. Six? Four students had six. Five? Four? Miss Mueller diligently jotted down the results. Any other figures? Sidney Goldblatt began to snicker. “Miss Mueller, how about zero?”

She looked startled. “Zero? Was there someone who got all 25 cards wrong?”

“David Selig did!”

David Selig wanted to drop through the floor. All eyes were on him. Cruel laughter assailed him. David Selig got them all wrong. It was like saying, David Selig wet his pants, David Selig cheated on the exam, David Selig went into the girls’ toilet. By trying to conceal himself, he had made himself terribly conspicuous. Miss Mueller, looking stern and oracular, said, “A null score can be quite significant too, class. It might mean extremely strong ESP abilities, rather than the total absence of such powers, as you might think.” Oh, God. Extremely strong ESP abilities. She went on, “Rhine talks of phenomena such as ‘forward displacement’ and ‘backward displacement,’ in which an unusually powerful ESP force might accidentally focus on one card ahead of the right one, or one card behind it, or even two or three cards away. So the subject would appear to get a below-average result when actually he’s hitting perfectly, just off the target! David, let me see your answers.”

“I wasn’t getting anything, Miss Mueller. I was just putting down my guesses, and I suppose they were all wrong.”

“Let me see.”

As though marching to the scaffold, he brought her the sheet. She placed it beside her own list and tried to realign it, searching for some correlation, some displacement sequence. But the randomness of his deliberately wrong answers protected him. A forward displacement of one card gave him two hits; a backward displacement of one card gave him three. Nothing significant there. Nevertheless, Miss Mueller would not let go. “I’d like to test you again,” she said. “We’ll run several kinds of trials. A null score is fascinating.” She began to shuffle the deck. God, God, God, where are you? Ah. The bell! Saved by the bell! “Can you stay after class?” she asked. In agony, he shook his head. “Got to go to geometry next, Miss Mueller.” She relented. Tomorrow, then. We’ll run the tests tomorrow. God! He was up all the night in a turmoil of fear, sweating, shivering; about four in the morning he vomited. He hoped his mother would make him stay home from school, but no luck: at half past seven he was aboard the bus. Would Miss Mueller forget about the test? Miss Mueller had not forgotten. The fateful cards were on her desk. There would be no escape. He found himself the center of all attention. All right, Duv, be cleverer this time. “Are you ready to begin?” she asked, tipping up the first card. He saw a plus sign in her mind.

“Square,” he said.

He saw a circle. “Waves,” he said.

He saw another circle. “Plus,” he said.

He saw a star. “Circle,” he said.

He saw a square. “Square,” he said. That’s one.

He kept careful count. Four wrong answers, then a right one. Three wrong answers, another right one. Spacing them with false randomness, he allowed himself five hits on the first test. On the second he had four. On the third, six. On the fourth, four. Am I being too average, he wondered? Should I give her a one-hit run, now? But she was losing interest. “I still can’t understand your null score, David,” she told him. “But it does seem to me as if you have no ESP ability whatever.” He tried to look disappointed. Apologetic, even. Sorry, teach, I ain’t got no ESP. Humbly the deficient boy made his way to his seat.

In one blazing instant of revelation and communion, Miss Mueller, I could have justified your whole lifelong quest for the improbable, the inexplicable, the unknowable, the irrational. The miraculous. But I didn’t have the guts to do it. I had to look after my own skin, Miss Mueller. I had to keep a low profile. Will you forgive me? Instead of giving you truth, I faked you out, Miss Mueller, and sent you spinning blindly onward to the tarot, to the signs of the zodiac, to the flying-saucer people, to a thousand surreal vibrations, to a million apocalyptic astral antiworlds, when the touch of my mind against yours might have been enough to heal your madness. One touch from me. In a moment. In the twinkling of an eye.