Robert Silverberg - Dying Inside

“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!