Robert Silverberg - Dying Inside

She sets the table while I fix a drink for her, the usual, Pernod on the rocks. The kid, thank God, has already eaten; I hate having him at the table. He plays with his plastic thingy and favors me with occasional sour glares. Judith and I clink our cocktail glasses together, a stagy gesture. She produces a wintry smile. “Cheers,” we say. Cheers.

“Why don’t you move back downtown?” she asks. “We could see more of each other.”

“It’s cheap up there. Do we want to see more of each other?”

“Who else do we have?”

“You have Karl.”

“I don’t have him or anybody. Just my kid and my brother.”

I think of the time when I tried to murder her in her bassinet. She doesn’t know about that. “Are we really friends, Jude?”

“Now we are. At last.”

“We haven’t exactly been fond of each other all these years.”

“People change, Duv. They grow up. I was dumb, a real shithead, so wrapped up in myself that I couldn’t give anything but hate to anybody around me. That’s over now. If you don’t believe me, look into my head and see.”

“You don’t want me poking around in there.”

“Go ahead,” she says. “Take a good look and see if I haven’t changed toward you.”

“No. I’d rather not.” I deal myself another two ounces of rum. The hand shakes a little. “Shouldn’t you check the spaghetti sauce? Maybe it’s boiling over.”

“Let it boil. I haven’t finished my drink. Duv, are you still having trouble? With your power, I mean.”

“Yes. Still. Worse than ever.”

“What do you think is happening?”

I shrug. Insouciant old me. “I’m losing it, that’s all. It’s like hair, I suppose. A lot of it when you’re young, then less and less, and finally none. Fuck it. It never did me any good anyway.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“Show me any good it did me, Jude.”

“It made you someone special. It made you unique. When everything else went wrong for you, you could always fall back on that, the knowledge that you could go into minds, that you could see the unseeable, that you could get close to people’s souls. A gift from God.”

“A useless gift. Except if I’d gone into the sideshow business.”

“It made you a richer person. More complex, more interesting. Without it you might have been someone quite ordinary.”

“With it I turned out to be someone quite ordinary. A nobody, a zero. Without it I might have been a happy nobody instead of a dismal one.”

“You pity yourself a lot, Duv.”

“I’ve got a lot to pity myself for. More Pernod, Jude?”

“Thanks, no. I ought to look after dinner. Will you pour the wine?”

She goes into the kitchen. I do the wine thing; then I carry the salad bowl to the table. Behind me the kid begins to chant derisive nonsense syllables in his weirdly mature baritone. Even in my current state of dulled deceptivity I feel the pressure of the kid’s cold hatred against the back of my skull. Judith returns, toting a well-laden tray: spaghetti, garlic bread, cheese. She flashes a warm smile, evidently sincere, as we sit down. We clink wine-glasses. We eat in silence a few minutes. I praise the spaghetti. She says, finally. “Can I do some mindreading on you, Duv?”

“Be my guest.”

“You say you’re glad the power’s going. Is that snow-job directed at me or at yourself? Because you’re snowing somebody. You hate the idea of losing it, don’t you?”

“A little.”

“A lot, Duv.”

“All right, a lot. I’m of two minds. I’d like it to vanish completely. Christ, I wish I’d never had it. But on the other hand if I lose it, who am I? Where’s my identity? I’m Selig the Mindreader, right? The Amazing Mental Man. So if I stop being him—you see, Jude?”

“I see. The pain’s all over your face. I’m so sorry, Duv.”

“For what?”

“That you’re losing it.”

“You despised my guts for using it on you, didn’t you?”

“That’s different. That was a long time ago. I know what you must be going through, now. Do you have any idea why you’re losing it?”

“No. A function of aging, I guess.”

“Is there anything that might be done to stop it from going?”

“I doubt it, Jude. I don’t even know why I have the gift in the first place, let alone how to nurture it now. I don’t know how it works. It’s just something in my head, a genetic fluke, a thing I was born with, like freckles. If your freckles start to fade, can you figure out a way of making them stay, if you want them to stay?”

“You’ve never let yourself be studied, have you?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t like people poking in my head any more than you do,” I say softly. “I don’t want to be a case history. I’ve always kept a low profile. If the world ever found out about me, I’d become a pariah. I’d probably be lynched. Do you know how many people there are to whom I’ve openly admitted the truth about myself? In my whole life, how many?”

“A dozen?”

“Three,” I say. “And I wouldn’t willingly have told any of them.”

“Three?”

“You. I suppose you suspected it all along, but you didn’t find out for sure till you were sixteen, remember? Then there’s Tom Nyquist, who I don’t see any more. And a girl named Kitty, who I don’t see any more either.”

“What about the tall brunette?”

“Toni? I never explicitly told her. I tried to hide it from her. She found out indirectly. A lot of people may have found out indirectly. But I’ve only told three. I don’t want to be known as a freak. So let it fade. Let it die. Good riddance.”

“You want to keep it, though.”

“To keep it and lose it both.”

“That’s a contradiction.”

“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes. What can I say, Jude? What can I tell you that’s true?”

“Are you in pain?”

“Who isn’t in pain?”

She says, “Losing it is almost like becoming impotent, isn’t it, Duv? To reach into a mind and find out that you can’t connect? You said there was ecstasy in it for you, once. That flood of information, that vicarious experience. And now you can’t get it as much, or at all. Your mind can’t get it up. Do you see it that way, as a sexual metaphor?”

“Sometimes.” I give her more wine. For a few minutes we sit silently, shoveling down the spaghetti, exchanging tentative grins. I almost feel warmth toward her. Forgiveness for all the years when she treated me like a circus attraction. You sneaky fucker, Duv, stay out of my head or I’ll kill you! You voyeur. You peeper. Keep away, man, keep away. She didn’t want me to meet her fiancé. Afraid I’d tell him about her other men, I guess. I’d like to find you dead in the gutter some day, Duv, with all my secrets rotting inside you. So long ago. Maybe we love each other a little now, Jude. Just a little, but you love me more than I love you.

“I don’t come any more,” she says abruptly. “You know, I used to come, practically every time. The original Hot Pants Kid, me. But around five years ago something happened, around the time my marriage was first breaking up. A short circuit down below. I started coming every fifth time, every tenth time. Feeling the ability to respond slip away, from me. Lying there waiting for it to happen, and of course that doused it every time. Finally I couldn’t come at all. I still can’t. Not in three years. I’ve laid maybe a hundred men since the divorce, give or take five or ten, and not one brought me off, and some of them were studs, real bulls. It’s one of the things Karl’s going to work on with me. So I know what it’s like, Duv. What you must be going through. To lose your best way of making contact with others. To lose contact gradually with yourself. To become a stranger in your own head.” She smiles. “Did you know that about me? About the troubles I’ve been having in bed?”