Robert Silverberg - Dying Inside

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!”