Robert Silverberg - Dying Inside

We slept very little, our first two weeks. Not that we were screwing all the time, though there was a lot of that; but we talked. We were new to each other, which is the best time of any relationship, when there are whole pasts to share, when everything pours out and there’s no need to search for things to say. (Not quite everything poured out. The only thing I concealed from her was the central fact of my life, the fact that had shaped my every aspect.) She talked of her marriage—young, at 20, and brief, and empty—and of how she had lived in the three years since its ending—a succession of men, a dip into occultism and Reichian therapy, a newfound dedication to her editing career. Giddy weeks.

Then, our third week. My second peep into her mind. A sweltering June night, with a full moon sending cold illumination through the slatted blinds into our room. She was sitting astride me—her favorite position—and her body, very pale, wore a white glow in the eerie darkness. Her long lean form rearing far above me. Her face half hidden in her own dangling unruly hair. Her eyes closed. Her lips slack. Her breasts, viewed from below, seeming even bigger than they really were. Cleopatra by moonlight. She was rocking and jouncing her way to a private ecstasy, and her beauty and the strangeness of her so overwhelmed me that I could not resist watching her at the moment of climax, watching on all levels, and so I opened the barrier that I had so scrupulously erected, and, just as she was coming, my mind touched a curious finger to her soul and received the full uprushing volcanic intensity of her pleasure. I found no thought of me in her mind. Only sheer animal frenzy, bursting from every nerve. I’ve seen that in other women, before and after Toni, as they come: they are islands, alone in the void of space, aware only of their bodies and perhaps of that intrusive rigid rod against which they thrust. When pleasure takes them it is a curiously impersonal phenomenon, no matter how titanic its impact. So it was then with Toni. I didn’t object; I knew what to expect and I didn’t feel cheated or rejected. In fact my joining of souls with her at that awesome moment served to trigger my own coming and to treble its intensity. I lost contact with her then. The upheavals of orgasm shatter the fragile telepathic link. Afterwards I felt a little sleazy at having spied, but not overly guilty about it. How magical a thing it was, after all, to have been with her in that moment. To be aware of her joy not just as mindless spasms of her loins but as jolts of brilliant light flaring across the dark terrain of her soul. An instant of beauty and wonder, an illumination never to be forgotten. But never to be repeated, either. I resolved, once more, to keep our relationship clean and honest. To take no unfair advantage of her. To stay out of her head forever after.

Despite which, I found myself some weeks later entering Toni’s consciousness a third time. By accident. By damnable abominable accident. Oy, that third time!

That bummer— that disaster—

That catastrophe—

In the early spring of 1945, when he was ten years old, his loving mother and father got him a little sister. That was exactly how they phrased it: his mother, smiling her warmest phony smile, hugging him, telling him in her best this-is-how-we-talk-to-bright-children tone, “Dad and I have a wonderful surprise for you, Duvid. We’re going to get a little sister for you.”

It was no surprise, of course. They had been discussing it among themselves for months, maybe for years, always making the fallacious assumption that their son, clever as he was, didn’t understand what they were talking about. Thinking that he was unable to associate one fragment of conversation with another, that he was incapable of putting the proper antecedents to their deliberately vague pronouns, their torrent of “it” and “him.” And, naturally, he had been reading their minds. In those days the power was sharp and clear; lying in his bedroom, surrounded by his dog-eared books and his stamp albums, he could effortlessly tune in on everything that went on behind the closed door of theirs, fifty feet away. It was like an endless radio broadcast without commercials. He could listen to WJZ, WHN, WEAF, WOR, all the stations on the dial, but the one he listened to most was WPMS, Paul-and-Martha-Selig. They had no secrets from him. He had no shame about spying. Preternaturally adult, privy to all their privities, he meditated daily on the raw torrid stuff of married life: the financial anxieties, the moments of sweet undifferentiated lovingness, the moments of guiltily suppressed hatred for the wearisome eternal spouse, the copulatory joys and anguishes, the comings together and the failings apart, the mysteries of failed orgasms and wilted erections, the intense and terrifyingly singleminded concentration on the growth and proper development of The Child. Their minds poured forth a steady stream of rich yeasty foam and he lapped it all up. Reading their souls was his game, his toy, his religion, his revenge. They never suspected he was doing it. That was one point on which he constantly sought reassurance, anxiously prying for it, and constantly he was reassured: they didn’t dream his gift existed. They merely thought he was abnormally intelligent, and never questioned the means by which he learned so much about so many improbable things. Perhaps if they had realized the truth, they would have choked him in his crib. But they had no inkling. He went on comfortably spying, year after year, his perceptions deepening as he came to comprehend more and more of the material his parents unwittingly offered.

He knew that Dr. Hittner—baffled, wholly out of his depth with the strange Selig child—believed it would be better for everyone if David had a sibling. That was the word he used, sibling, and David had to fish the meaning out of Hittner’s head as though out of a dictionary. Sibling: a brother or a sister. Oh, the treacherous horse-faced bastard! The one thing young David had asked Hittner not to suggest, and naturally he had suggested it. But what else could he have expected? The desirability of siblings had been in Hittner’s mind all along, lying there like a grenade. David, picking his mother’s mind one night, had found the text of a letter from Hittner. The only child is an emotionally deprived child. Without the rough-and-tumble interplay with siblings he has no way of learning the best techniques of relating to his peers, and he develops a dangerously burdensome relation with his parents, for whom he becomes a companion instead of a dependent. Hittner’s universal panacea: lots of siblings. As though there are no neurotics in big families.

David was aware of his parents’ frantic attempts at filling Hittner’s prescription. No time to waste; the boy grows older all the time, siblingless, lacking each day the means of learning the best techniques of relating to his peers. And so, night after night, the poor aging bodies of Paul and Martha Selig grapple with the problem. They force themselves sweatily onward to self-defeating prodigies of lustfulness, and each month the bad news comes in a rush of blood: there will be no sibling this time. But at last the seed takes root. They said nothing about that to him, ashamed, perhaps, to admit to an eight-year-old that such things as sexual intercourse occurred in their lives. But he knew. He knew why his mother’s belly was beginning to bulge and why they still hesitated to explain it to him. He knew, too, that his mother’s mysterious “appendicitis” attack of July, 1944, was actually a miscarriage. He knew why they both wore tragic faces for months afterward. He knew that Martha’s doctor had told her that autumn that it really wasn’t wise for her to be having babies at the age of 35, that if they were going to insist on a second child the best course was to adopt one. He knew his father’s traumatic response to that suggestion: What, bring into the household a bastard that some shiksa threw away? Poor old Paul lay tossing awake every night for weeks, not even confessing to his wife why he was so upset, but unknowingly spilling the whole thing to his nosy son. The insecurities, the irrational hostilities. Why do I have to raise a stranger’s brat, just because this psychiatrist says it’ll do David some good? What kind of garbage will I be taking into the house? How can I love this child that isn’t mine? How can I tell it that it’s a Jew when—who knows?—it may have been made by some Irish mick, some Italian bootblack, some carpenter? All this the all-perceiving David perceives. Finally the elder Selig voices his misgivings, carefully edited, to his wife, saying, Maybe Hittner’s wrong, maybe this is just a phase David’s going through and another child isn’t the right answer at all. Telling her to consider the expense, the changes they’d have to make in their way of life—they’re not young, they’ve grown settled in their ways, a child at this time of their lives, the getting up at four in the morning, the crying, the diapers. And David silently cheering his father on, because who needs this intruder, this sibling, this enemy of the peace? But Martha tearfully fights back, quoting Hittner’s letter, reading key passages out of her extensive library on child psychology, offering damning statistics on the incidence of neurosis, maladjustment, bed-wetting, and homosexuality among only children. The old man yields by Christmas. Okay, okay, we’ll adopt, but let’s not take just anything, hear? It’s got to be Jewish. Wintry weeks of touring the adoption agencies, pretending all the while to David that these trips to Manhattan are mere innocuous shopping excursions. He wasn’t fooled. How could anyone fool this omniscient child? He had only to look behind their foreheads to know that they were shopping for a sibling. His one comfort was the hope that they would fail to find one. This was still wartime: if you couldn’t buy a new car, maybe you couldn’t get siblings either. For many weeks that appeared to be the case. Not many babies were available, and those that were seemed to have some grave defect: insufficiently Jewish, or too fragile-looking, or too cranky, or of the wrong sex. Some boys were available but Paul and Martha had decided to get David a little sister. Already that limited things considerably, since people tended not to give girls up for adoption as readily as they did boys, but one snowy night in March David detected an ominous note of satisfaction in the mind of his mother, newly returned from yet another shopping trip, and, looking more closely, he realized that the quest was over. She had found a lovely little girl, four months old. The mother, aged 19, was not only certifiably Jewish but even a college girl, described by the agency as “extremely intelligent.” Not so intelligent, evidently, as to avoid being fertilized by a handsome, young air force captain, also Jewish, while he was home on leave in February, 1944. Though he felt remorse over his carelessness he was unwilling to marry the victim of his lusts, and was now on active duty in the Pacific, where, so far as the girl’s parents were concerned, he should only be shot down ten times over. They had forced her to give the child out for adoption. David wondered why Martha hadn’t brought the baby home with her that very afternoon, but soon he discovered that several weeks of legal formalities lay ahead, and April was well along before his mother finally announced, “Dad and I have a wonderful surprise for you, Duvid.”