Dying Inside

TWENTY-ONE.

These are the days of David’s passion, when he writhes a lot on his bed of nails. Let’s do it in short takes. It hurts less that way.

Tuesday. Election Day. For months the clamor of the campaign has fouled the air. The free world is choosing its new maximum leader. The sound-trucks rumble along Broadway, belching slogans. Our next President! The man for all America! Vote! Vote! Vote! Vote for X! Vote for Y! The hollow words merge and blur and flow. Republocrat. Demican. Boum. Why should I vote? I will not vote. I do not vote. I am not plugged in. I am not part of the circuit. Voting is for them. Once, in the late autumn of 1968, I think it was, I was standing outside Carnegie Hall, thinking of going over to the paperback bookshop on the other side of the street, when suddenly all traffic halted on 57th and scores of policemen sprang up from the pavement like the dragon’s-teeth warriors sown by Cadmus, and a motorcade came rumbling out of the east, and lo! in a dark black limousine rode Richard M. Nixon, President-Elect of the United States of America, waving jovially to the assembled populace. My big chance at last, I thought. I will look into his mind and make myself privy to great secrets of state; I will discover what it is about our leaders that sets them apart from ordinary mortals. And I looked into his mind, and what I found in there I will not tell you, except to say that it was more or less what I should have expected to find. And since that day I have had nothing to do with politics or politicians. Today I stay home from the polls. Let them elect the next President without my help.

Wednesday. I doodle with Yahya Lumumba’s half-finished term paper and other such projects, a few futile lines on each. Getting nowhere. Judith calls. “A party,” she says. “You’re invited. Everybody’ll be there.”

“A party? Who? Where? Why? When?”

“Saturday night. Near Columbia. The host is Claude Guermantes. Do you know him? Professor of French Literature.” No, the name is not Guermantes. I have changed the name to protect the guilty. “He’s one of those charismatic new professors. Young, dynamic, handsome, a friend of Simone de Beauvoir, of Genet. Karl and I are coming. And a lot of others. He always invites the most interesting people.”

“Genet? Simone de Beauvoir? Will they be there?”

“No, silly, not them. But it’ll be worth your time. Claude gives the best parties of anybody I know. Brilliant combinations of people.”

“Sounds like a vampire to me.”

“He gives as well as takes, Duv. He specifically asked me to invite you.”

“How does he know me at all?”

“Through me,” she says. “I’ve talked of you. He’s dying to meet you.”

“I don’t like parties.”

“Duv—”

I know that warning tone of voice. I have no stomach for a hassle just now. “All right,” I say, sighing. “Saturday night. Give me the address.” Why am I so pliable? Why do I let Judith manipulate me? Is this how I build my love for her, through these surrenders?

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 become 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:

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, mmm. 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 between 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 my 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-noise 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 range 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.”

“Does she?”

“With great love. Also with great guilt. It seems you and she were estranged for many years.’’

“That’s over now. We’re finally becoming friends.”

“How wonderful for you both.” He gestures with a flick of his eyes. “That doctor. No good for her. Too old, too static. After fifty most men lose the capacity to grow. He’ll bore her to death in six months.”

“Maybe boredom is what she needs,” I reply. “She’s had an exciting life. It hasn’t made her happy.”

“No one ever needs boredom,” Guermantes says, and winks.

“Karl and I would love to have you come for dinner next week, Duv. There’s so much we three need to talk about.”

“I’ll see, Jude. I’m not sure about anything about next week yet. I’ll call you.”

Lisa Holstein. John Leibnitz. I think I need another drink.

Sunday. Greatly overhung. Hash, rum, wine, pot, God knows what else. And somebody popping amyl nitrite under my nose about two in the morning. That filthy fucking party. I should never have gone. My head, my head, my head. Where’s the typewriter? I’ve got to get some work done. Let’s go, then:

We see, thus, the difference in method of approach of these three tragedians to the same story. Aeschylus’ primary concern is theological implications of the crime and the inexorable workings of the gods: Orestes is torn between the command of Apollo to slay his mother and his own fear of matricide, and goes mad as a result. Euripides dwells on the characterization, and takes a less allegorical

No damned good. Save it for later.

Silence between my ears. The echoing black void. I have nothing going for me at all today, nothing. I think it may be completely gone. I can’t even pick up the clamor of the spics next door. November is the cruelest month, breeding onions out of the dead mind. I’m living an Eliot poem. I’m turning into words on a page. Shall I sit here feeling sorry for myself? No. No. No. No. I’ll fight back. Spiritual exercises designed to restore my power. On your knees, Selig. Bow the head. Concentrate. Transform yourself into a fine needle of thought, a slim telepathic laser-beam, stretching from this room to the vicinity of the lovely star Betelgeuse. Got it? Good. That sharp pure mental beam piercing the universe. Hold it. Hold it firm. No spreading at the edges allowed, man. Good. Now ascend. We are climbing Jacob’s ladder. This will be an out-of-the-body experience, Duvid. Up, up and away! Rise through the ceiling, through the roof, through the atmosphere, through the ionosphere, through the stratosphere, through the whatsisphere. Outward. Into the vacant interstellar spaces. O dark dark dark. Cold the sense and lost the motive of action. No, stop that stuff! Only positive thinking is allowed on this trip. Soar! Soar! Toward the little green men of Betelgeuse IX. Reach their minds, Selig. Make contact. Make . . . contact. Soar, you lazy yid-bastard! Why aren’t you soaring? Soar!

Well?

Nothing. Nada. Niente. Nowhere. Nulla. Nicht.

Tumbling back to earth. Into the silent funeral. All right, give up, if that’s what you want. All right. Rest, for a little while. Rest and then pray, Selig. Pray.

Monday. The hangover gone. The brain once again receptive. In a glorious burst of creative frenzy I rewrite The “Electra” Theme in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides from gunwale to fetlock, completely recasting it, revoicing it, clarifying and strengthening the ideas while simultaneously catching what I think is just the perfect tone of offhand niggerish hipness. As I hammer out the final words the telephone rings. Nicely timed; I feel sociable now. Who calls? Judith? No. It is Lisa Holstein who calls. “You promised to take me home after the party,” she says mournfully, accusingly. “What the hell did you do, sneak away?”

“How did you get my number?”

“From Claude. Professor Guermantes.” That sleek devil. He knows everything. “Look, what are you doing right now?”

“Thinking about having a shower. I’ve been working all morning and I stink like a goat.”

“What kind of work do you do?”

“I ghostwrite term papers for Columbia men.”

She ponders that a moment. “You sure have a weird head, man. I mean really: what do you do?”

“I just told you.”

A long digestive silence. Then: “Okay. I can dig it. You ghostwrite term papers. Look, Dave, go take your shower. How long is it on the subway from 110th Street and Broadway to your place?”

“Maybe forty minutes, if you get a train right away.”

“Swell. See you in an hour, then.” Click.

I shrug. A crazy broad. Dave, she calls me. Nobody calls me Dave. Stripping, I head for the shower, a long leisurely soaping. Afterward, sprawling out in a rare interlude of relaxation, Dave Selig re-reads this morning’s labors and finds pleasure in what he has wrought. Let’s hope Lumumba does too. Then I pick up the Updike book. I get to page four and the phone rings again. Lisa: she’s on the train platform at 225th, wants to know how to get to my apartment. This is more than a joke, now. Why is she pursuing me so singlemindedly? But okay. I can play her game. I give her the instructions. Ten minutes later, a knock on the door. Lisa in thick black sweater, the same sweaty one as Saturday night, and tight blue jeans. A shy grin, strangely out of character for her. “Hi,” she says. Making herself comfortable. “When I first saw you, I had this intuitive flash on you: This guy’s got something special. Make it with him. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, its that you’ve got to trust your intuition. I go with the flow, Dave, I go with the flow.” Her sweater is off by now. Her breasts are heavy and round, with tiny, almost imperceptible nipples. A Jewish star nestles in the deep valley between them. She wanders the room, examining my books, my records, my photographs. “So tell me,” she says. “Now that I’m here. Was I right? Is there anything special about you?”

“There once was.”

“What?”

“That’s for me to know and you to find out,” I say, and gathering my strength, I ram my mind into hers. It’s a brutal frontal assault, a rape, a true mindfuck. Of course she doesn’t feel a thing. I say, “I used to have a really extraordinary gift. It’s mostly worn off by now, but some of the time I still have it, and as a matter of fact I’m using it on you right now.”

“Far out,” she says, and drops her jeans. No underpants. She will be fat before she’s 30. Her thighs are thick, her belly protrudes. Her pubic hair is oddly dense and widespread, less a triangle than a sort of diamond, a black diamond reaching past her loins to her hips, almost. Her buttocks are deeply dimpled. While I inspect her flesh I savagely ransack her mind, sparing her no areas of privacy, enjoying my access while it lasts. I don’t need to be polite. I owe her nothing: she forced herself on me. I check, first, to see if she had been lying when she said she’d never heard of Kitty. The truth: Kitty is no kin to her. A meaningless coincidence of surnames, is all. “I’m sure you’re a poet, Dave,” she says as we entwine and drop onto the unmade bed. “That’s an intuition flash too. Even if you’re doing this term paper thing now, poetry is where you’re really at, right?” I run my hands over her breasts and belly. A sharp odor comes from her skin. She hasn’t washed in three or four days, I bet. No matter. Her nipples mysteriously emerge, tiny rigid pink nubs. She wriggles. I continue to loot her mind like a Goth plundering the Forum. She is fully open to me; I delight in this unexpected return of vigor. Her autobiography assembles itself for me. Born in Cambridge. Twenty years old. Father a professor. Mother a professor. One younger brother. Tomboy childhood. Measles, chicken pox, scarlet fever. Puberty at eleven, lost her virginity at twelve. Abortion at sixteen. Several Lesbian adventures. Passionate interest in French decadent poets. Acid, mescaline, psilocybin, cocaine, even a sniff of smack. Guermantes gave her that. Guermantes also took her to bed five or six times. Vivid memories of that. Her mind shows me more of Guermantes than I want to see. He’s hung very impressively. Lisa comes through with a tough, aggressive self-image, captain of her soul, master of her fate, etc. Underneath that it’s just the opposite, of course; she’s scared as hell. Not a bad kid. I feel a little guilty about the casual way I slammed into her head, no regard for her privacy at all. But I have my needs. I continue to prowl her, and meanwhile she goes down on me. I can hardly remember the last time anyone did that. I can hardly remember my last lay, it’s been so bad lately. She’s an expert fellatrice. I’d like to reciprocate but I can’t bring myself to do it; sometimes I’m fastidious and she’s not the douching type. Oh, well, leave that stuff for the Guermanteses of this world. I lie there picking her brain and accepting the gift of her mouth. I feel virile, bouncy, cocksure, and why not, getting my kicks from two inputs at once, head and crotch? Without withdrawing from her mind I withdraw, at last, from her lips, turn around, part her thighs, slide deep into her tight narrow-mouthed harbor. Selig the stallion. Selig the stud. “Oooh,” she says, flexing her knees. “Oooh.” And we begin to play the beast with two backs. Covertly I feed on feedback, tapping into her pleasure-responses and thereby doubling my own; each thrust brings me a factored and deliciously exponential delight. But then a funny thing happens. Although she is nowhere close to coming—an event that I know will disrupt our mental contact when it occurs—the broadcast from her mind is already becoming erratic and indistinct, more noise than signal. The images break up in a pounding of static. What comes through is garbled and distant; I scramble to maintain my hold on her consciousness, but no use, no use, she slips away, moment by moment receding from me, until there is no communion at all. And in that moment of severance my cock suddenly softens and slips out of her. She is jolted by that, caught by surprise. “What brought you down?” she asks. I find it impossible to tell her. I remember Judith asking me, some weeks back, whether I had ever regarded my loss of mental powers as a kind of metaphor of impotence. Sometimes yes, I told her. And now here, for the first time, metaphor blends with reality; the two failures are integrated. He is impotent here and he is impotent there. Poor David. “I guess I got distracted,” I tell her. Well, she has her skills; for half an hour she works me over, fingers, lips, tongue, hair, breasts, not getting a rise out of me with anything, in fact turning me off more than ever by her grim purposefulness. “I don’t understand it,” she says. “You were doing so well. Was there something about me that brought you down?” I reassure her. You were great, baby. Stuff like this sometimes just happens, no one knows why. I tell her, “Let’s just rest and maybe I’ll come back to life.” We rest. Side by side, stroking her skin in an abstract way, I run a few tentative probing efforts. Not a flicker on the telepathic level. Not a flicker. The silence of the tomb. Is this it, the end, right here and now? Is this where it finally burns out? And I am like all the rest of you now. I am condemned to make do with mere words. “I have an idea,” she says. “Let’s take a shower together. That sometimes peps a guy up.” To this I make no objection; it might just work, and in any case she’ll smell better afterward. We head for the bathroom. Torrents of brisk cool water.

Success. The ministrations of her soapy hand revive me.

We spring toward the bed. Still stiff, I top her and take her. Gasp gasp gasp, moan moan moan. I can get nothing on the mental band. Suddenly she goes into a funny little spasm, intense but quick, and my own spurt swiftly follows. So much for sex. We curl up together, cuddly in the afterglow. I try again to probe her. Zero. Zee-ro. Is it gone? I think it’s really gone. You have been present today at an historic event, young lady. The perishing of a remarkable extrasensory power. Leaving behind this merely mortal husk of mine. Alas.

“I’d love to read some of your poetry, Dave,” she says.

Monday night, about seven-thirty. Lisa has left, finally. I go out for dinner, to a nearby pizzeria. I am quite calm. The impact of what has befallen me hasn’t really registered yet. How strange that I can be so accepting. At any moment, I know, it’s bound to come rushing in on me, crushing me, shattering me; I’ll weep, I’ll scream, I’ll bang my head against walls. But for now I’m surprisingly cool. An oddly posthumous feeling, as of having outlived myself. And a feeling of relief: the suspense is over, the process has completed itself, the dying is done, and I’ve survived it. Of course I don’t expect this mood to last. I’ve lost something central to my being, and now I await the anguish and the grief and the despair that must surely be due to erupt shortly.

But it seems that my mourning must be postponed. What I thought was all over isn’t over yet. I walk into the pizzeria and the counterman gives me his flat cold New York smile of welcome, and I get this, unsolicited, from behind his greasy face: Hey, here’s the fag who always wants extra anchovies.

Reading him clearly. So it’s not dead yet! Not quite dead! Only resting a while. Only hiding.

Tuesday. Bitter cold; one of those terrible late-autumn days when every drop of moisture has been squeezed from the air and the sunlight is like knives. I finish two more term papers for delivery tomorrow. I read Updike. Judith calls after lunch. The usual dinner invitation. My usual oblique reply.

“What did you think of Karl?” she asks.

“A very substantial man.”

“He wants me to marry him.”

“Well?”

“It’s too soon. I don’t really know him, Duv. I like him, I admire him tremendously, but I don’t know whether I love him.”

“Then don’t rush into anything with him,” I say. Her soap-opera hesitations bore me. I don’t understand why anybody old enough to know the score ever gets married, anyway. Why should love require a contract? Why put yourself into the clutches of the state and give it power over you? Why invite lawyers to fuck around with your assets? Marriage is for the immature and the insecure and the ignorant. We who see through such institutions should be content to live together without legal coercion, eh, Toni? Eh? I say, “Besides, if you marry him, he’d probably want you to give up Guermantes. I don’t think he could dig it.”

“You know about me and Claude?”

“Of course.”

“You always know everything.”

“This was pretty obvious, Jude.”

“I thought your power was waning.”

“It is, it is, it’s waning faster than ever. But this was still pretty obvious. To the naked eye.”

“All right. What did you think of him?”

“He’s death. He’s a killer.”

“You misjudged him, Duv.”

“I was in his head. I saw him, Jude. He isn’t human. People are toys to him.”

“If you could hear the sound of your own voice now, Duv. The hostility, the outright jealousy—”

“Jealousy? Am I that incestuous?”

“You always were,” she says. “But let that pass. I really thought you’d enjoy meeting Claude.”

“I did. He’s fascinating. I think cobras are fascinating too.”

“Oh, fuck you, Duv.”

“You want me to pretend I liked him?”

“Don’t do me any favors.” The old icy Judith.

“What’s Karl’s reaction to Guermantes?”

She pauses. Finally: “Pretty negative. Karl’s very conventional, you know. Just as you are.”

“Me?”

“Oh, you’re so fucking straight, Duv! You’re such a puritan! You’ve been lecturing me on morality all my goddamned life. The very first time I got laid there you were, wagging your finger at me—”

“Why doesn’t Karl like him?”

“I don’t know. He thinks Claude’s sinister. Exploitive.” Her voice is suddenly flat and dull. “Maybe he’s just jealous. He knows I’m still sleeping with Claude. Oh, Jesus, Duv, why are we fighting again? Why can’t we just talk?”

“I’m not the one who’s fighting. I’m not the one who raised his voice.”

“You’re challenging me. That’s what you always do. You spy on me and then you challenge me and try to put me down.”

“Old habits are hard to break, Jude. Really, though: I’m not angry with you.”

“You sound so smug!”

“I’m not angry. You are. You got angry when you saw that Karl and I agree about your friend Claude. People always get angry when they’re told something they don’t want to hear. Listen, Jude, do whatever you want. If Guermantes is your trip, go ahead.”

“I don’t know. I just don’t know.” An unexpected concession: “Maybe there is something sick about my relationship with him.” Her flinty self-assurance vanishes abruptly. That’s the wonderful thing about her: you get a different Judith every two minutes. Now, softening, thawing, she sounds uncertain of herself. In a moment she’ll turn her concern outward, away from her own troubles, toward me. “Will you come to dinner next week? We very much do want to get together with you.”

“I’ll try.”

“I’m worried about you, Duv.” Yes, here it comes. “You looked so strung out on Saturday night.”

“It’s been a pretty rough time for me. But I’ll manage.” I don’t feel like talking about myself. I don’t want her pity, because after I get hers, I’ll start giving myself mine. “Listen, I’ll call you soon, okay?”

“Are you still in so much pain, Duv?”

“I’m adapting. I’m accepting the whole thing. I mean, I’ll be okay. Keep in touch, Jude. My best to Karl.” And Claude, I add, as I put down the receiver.

Wednesday morning. Downtown to deliver my latest batch of masterpieces. It’s colder even than yesterday, the air clearer, the sun brighter, more remote. How dry the world seems. The humidity is minus sixteen percent, I think. The sort of weather in which I used to function with overwhelming clarity of perception. But I was picking up hardly anything at all on the subway ride down to Columbia, just muzzy little blurts and squeaks, nothing coherent. I can no longer be certain of having the power on any given day, apparently, and this is one of the days off. Unpredictable. That’s what you are, you who live in my head: unpredictable. Thrashing about randomly in your death-throes. I go to the usual place and await my clients. They come, they get from me what they have come for, they cross my palm with greenbacks. David Selig, benefactor of undergraduate mankind. I see Yahya Lumumba like a black sequoia making his way across from Butler Library. Why am I trembling? It’s the chill in the air, isn’t it, the hint of winter, the death of the year. As the basketball star approaches he waves, nods, grins; everyone knows him, everyone calls out to him. I feel a sense of participation in his glory. When the season starts maybe I’ll go watch him play.

“You got the paper, man?”

“Right here.” I deal it off the stack. “Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides. Six pages. That’s $21, minus the five you already gave me is $16 you owe me.”

“Wait, man.” He sits down beside me on the steps. “I got to read this fucker first, right? How I know you did a righteous job if I don’t read it?”

I watch him as he reads. Somehow I expect him to be moving his lips, to be stumbling over the unfamiliar words, but no, his eyes flicker rapidly over the lines. He gnaws his lip. He reads faster and faster, impatiently turning the pages. At length he looks at me and there is death in his eyes.

“This is shit, man,” he says. “I mean, this here is just shit. What kind of con you trying to pull?”

“I guarantee you’ll get a B+. You don’t have to pay me until you get the grade. Anything less than B+ and—”

“No, listen to me. Who talking about grades? I can’t turn this fucking thing in at all. Look, half this thing is jive-talk, the other half it copied straight out of some book. Crazy shit, that’s what. The prof he going to read it, he going to look at me, he going to say, Lumumba, who you think I am? You think I a dummy, Lumumba? You didn’t write this crap, he going to say to me. You don’t believe Word One of this.” Angrily he rises. “Here, I going to read you some of this, man. I show you what you give me.” Leafing through the pages, he scowls, spits, shakes his head. “No. Why the hell should I? You know what you up to here, man? You making fun of me, that’s what. You playing games with the dumb nigger, man.”

“I was trying to make it look plausible that you had written—”

“Crap. You pulling a mindfuck, man. You making up a pile of stinking Jew shit about Europydes and you hoping I get in trouble trying to pass it off as my own stuff.”

“That’s a lie. I did the best possible job for you, and don’t think I didn’t sweat plenty. When you hire another man to write a term paper for you, I think you have to be prepared to expect a certain—”

“How long this take you? Fifteen minutes?”

“Eight hours, maybe ten,” I say. “You know what I think you’re trying to do, Lumumba? You’re pulling reverse racism on me. Jew this and Jew that—if you don’t like Jews so much, why didn’t you get a black to write your paper for you? Why didn’t you write it yourself? I did an honest job for you. I don’t like hearing it put down as stinking Jew shit. And I tell you that if you turn it in, you’ll get a passing grade for sure, you’ll probably get a B+ at the very least.”

“I gonna get flunked, is what.”

“No. No. Maybe you just don’t see what I was driving at. Let me try to explain it to you. If you’ll give it to me for a minute so I can read you a couple of things—maybe it’ll be clearer if I—” Getting to my feet, I extend a hand toward the paper, but he grins and holds it high above my head. I’d need a ladder to reach it. No use jumping. “Come on, damn it, don’t play games with me! Let me have it!” I snap, and he flicks his wrist and the six sheets of paper soar into the wind and go sailing eastward along College Walk. Dying, I watch them go. I clench my fists; an astonishing burst of rage explodes in me. I want to smash in his mocking face. “You shouldn’t have done that,” I say. “You shouldn’t have just thrown it away.”

“You owe me my five bucks back, man.”

“Hold on, now. I did the work you hired me to do, and—”

“You said you don’t charge if the paper’s no good. Okay, the paper was shit. No charge. Give me the five.”

“You aren’t playing fair, Lumumba. You’re trying to rip me off.”

“Who ripping who off? Who set up that money-back deal anyhow? Me? You. What I gonna do for a term paper now? I got to take an incomplete and it your fault. Suppose they make me ineligible for the team because of that. Huh? Huh? What then? Look, man, you make me want to puke. Give me the five.”

Is he serious about the refund? I can’t tell. The idea of paying him back disgusts me, and it isn’t just on account of losing the money. I wish I could read him, but I can’t get anything out of him on that level; I’m completely blocked now. I’ll bluff. I say, “What is this, slavery turned upside down? I did the work. I don’t give a damn what kind of crazy irrational reasons you’ve got for rejecting it. I’m going to keep the five. At least the five.”

“Give me the money, man.”

“Go to hell.”

I start to walk away. He grabs me—his arm, fully outspread toward me, must be as long as one of my legs—and hauls me toward him. He starts to shake me. My teeth are rattling. His grin is broader than ever, but his eyes are demonic. I wave my fists at him, but, held at arm’s length, I can’t even touch him. I stare to yell. A crowd is gathering. Suddenly there are three or four other men in varsity jackets surrounding us, all black, all gigantic, though not as big as he is. His teammates. Laughing, whooping, cavorting. I am a toy to them. “Hey, man, he bothering you?” one of them asks. “You need help, Yahya?” yells another. “What’s the mothafuck honkie doing to you, man?” calls a third. They form a ring and Lumumba thrusts me toward the man on his left, who catches me and flings me onward around the circle. I spin; I stumble; I reel; they never let me fall. Around and around and around. An elbow explodes against my lip. I taste blood. Someone slaps me, and my head rockets backward. Fingers jabbing my ribs. I realize that I’m going to get very badly hurt, that in fact these giants are going to beat me up. A voice I barely recognize as my own offers Lumumba his refund, but no one notices. They continue to whirl me from one to the next. Not slapping now, not jabbing, but punching. Where are the campus police? Help! Help! Pigs to the rescue! But no one comes. I can’t catch my breath. I’d like to drop to my knees and huddle against the ground. They’re yelling at me, racial epithets, words I barely comprehend, soul-brother jargon that must have been invented last week; I don’t know what they’re calling me, but I can feel the hatred in every syllable. Help? Help? The world spins wildly. I know now how a basketball would feel, if a basketball could feel. The steady pounding, the blur of unending motion. Please, someone, anyone, help me, stop them. Pain in my chest: a lump of white-hot metal back of my breastbone. I can’t see. I can only feel. Where are my feet? I’m falling at last. Look how fast the steps rush toward me. The cold kiss of the stone bruises my cheek. I may already have lost consciousness; how can I tell? There’s one comfort, at least. I can’t get any further down than this.