Collected Short Fiction, page 879
The sensory shutdown is not always a willed event, naturally. It happens to us whether we like it or not. If we don’t climb into the box ourselves we’ll get shoved in anyway. That’s what I mean about entropy’s inevitably nailing us all in the long run. No matter how vital, how vigorous, how world-devouring we are, the inputs dwindle as time goes by. Sight, hearing, touch, smell—everything goes, as good old Will S. said, and we end up sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. Sans everything. Or, as the same clever man also put it, from hour to hour we ripe and ripe, then from hour to hour we rot and rot—and thereby hangs a tale.
I offer myself as a case in point. What does this man’s sad history reveal? An inexplicable diminution of once-remarkable powers, A shrinkage of the inputs. A small death, endured while he still lives. Am I not a casualty of the entropic wars? Do I not now dwindle into stasis and silence before your very eyes? Is my distress not evident and poignant? Who will I be when I have ceased to be myself? I am dying the heat death. A spontaneous decay. A random twitch of probability undoes me. And I am made into nothingness. I am becoming cinders and ash. I will wait here for the broom to gather me up.
That’s very eloquent, Selig. Take an A. Your writing is clear and forceful and you show an excellent grasp of the underlying philosophical issues. You may go to the head of the class. Do you fed better now?
XXII
IT WAS a crazy idea, Kitty, a dumb fantasy. It could never have worked. I was asking the impossible from you. There was only one conceivable outcome, really—that I would annoy you and bore you and drive you away from me. Well, blame Tom Nyquist. It was his idea. No, blame me. I didn’t have to listen to his crazy ideas, did I? Blame me. Blame me.
Axiom: It’s a sin against love to try to remake the soul of someone you love, even if you think you’ll love her more after you’ve transformed her into something else.
Nyquist said, “Maybe she’s a mind-reader, too, and the blockage is a matter of interference, of a clash between your transmissions and hers, canceling out the waves in one direction or in both. So that there’s no transmission from her to you and probably none from you to her.”
“I doubt that very much,” I told him. This was August of 1963, two or three weeks after you and I had met. We weren’t living together yet but we had already been to bed couple of times. “She doesn’t have a shred of telepathic ability,” I insisted. “She’s completely normal. That’s the essential thing about her, Tom—she’s a completely normal girl.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Nyquist said.
He hadn’t met you yet. He wanted to meet you, but I hadn’t set anything up. You had never heard his name.
I said, “If there’s one thing I know about her, it’s that she’s a sane, healthy, nicely balanced, absolutely normal girl. Therefore she’s no mind-reader.”
“Because mind-readers are insane, unhealthy and unbalanced. Like you and like me. Q.E.D., eh? Speak for yourself, man.”
“The gift tips the spirit,” I said. “It darkens the soul.”
“Yours, maybe. Not mine.”
He was right about that. Telepathy hadn’t injured him. Maybe I’d would have had the problems I have even if I hadn’t been born with the gift. I can’t credit all my maladjustments to the presence of one unusual ability, can I? And God knows there are plenty of neurotics around who have never read a mind in their lives.
Syllogism:
Some telepaths are not neurotic.
Some neurotics are not telepaths.
Therefore telepathy and neurosis aren’t necessarily related.
Corollary:
You can seem cherry-pie normal and still have the power.
I remained skeptical of this. Nyquist agreed, under pressure, that if you did have the power you would have probably revealed it to me by now through certain unconscious mannerisms that any telepath would readily recognize. I had detected no such mannerisms. He suggested, though, that you might be a latent telepath—that the gift was there, undeveloped, unfunctional, lurking at the core of your mind and serving somehow to screen your mind from my probing. Just a hypothesis, he said. But it tickled me with temptation. “Suppose she’s got this latent power,” I said. “Could it be awakened, do you think?”
“Why not?” Nyquist asked.
I was willing to believe it. I had this vision of your awakened to full receptive capacity, able to pick up transmissions as easily and as sharply as Nyquist and I. How intense our love would be then! We would be wholly open to one another, shorn of all the little pretenses and defenses that keep even the closest of lovers from truly achieving a union of souls. I had already tasted a limited form of that sort of closeness with Tom Nyquist, but of course I had no love for him, I didn’t even really like him, and so it was a waste, a brutal irony, that our minds could have such intimate contact. But you? If I could only awaken you, Kitty! And why not? I asked Nyquist if he thought it might be possible. Try it and find out, he said. Make experiments. Hold hands, sit together in the dark, put some energy into trying to get across to her. It’s worth trying, isn’t it? Yes, I said, of course it’s worth trying.
YOU seemed latent in so many other ways, Kitty—a potential human being rather than an actual one. An air of adolescence surrounded you. You seemed much younger than you actually were—if I hadn’t known you were a college graduate I would have guessed you were eighteen or nineteen. You hadn’t read much outside your fields of interest—mathematics, computers, technology—and, since those weren’t my fields of interest, I thought of you as not having read anything at all. So I saw you as raw material awaiting the sculptor’s hand. I would be your Pygmalion.
In September of 1963 you moved in with me. You were spending so much time at my place anyway that you agreed it didn’t make sense to keep going back and forth. I felt very married—wet stockings hanging over the shower-curtain rod, an extra toothbrush on the shelf, long brown hairs in the sink. The warmth of you beside me in bed every night. My belly against your smooth cool butt, yang and yin. I gave you books to read: poetry, novels, essays. How diligently you devoured them! You read Trilling on the bus going to work and Conrad in the quiet after-dinner hours and Yeats on a Sunday morning while I was out hunting for the Times. But nothing really seemed to stick with you—you had no natural bent for literature. I think you had trouble distinguishing Lord Jim from Lucky Jim, Malcolm Lowry from Malcolm Cowley, James Joyce from Joyce Kilmer. Your fine mind, so easily able to master cobol and fortran, could not decipher the language of poetry and you would look up from The Waste Land, baffled, to ask some naive schoolgirl question that would leave me irritated for hours. A hopeless case, I sometimes thought. Although on a day when the stock market was closed you took me down to the computer center where you worked and I listened to your explanations of the equipment and your functions as though you were talking so much Sanskrit to me. Different worlds, different kinds of mind. Yet I always had hope of creating a bridge.
At strategically timed moments I spoke elliptically of my interest in extrasensory phenomena.
I made it out to be a hobby of mine, a cool dispassionate study. I was fascinated, I said, by the possibility of attaining true mind-to-mind communication between human beings. I took care not to come on like a fanatic, not to oversell my case. I kept my desperation out of sight. Because I genuinely couldn’t read you, it was easier for me to pretend to a scholarly objectivity than it would have been with anyone else. And I had to pretend. My strategy didn’t allow for any true confessions. I didn’t want to frighten you, Kitty. I didn’t want to turn you off by giving you reason to think I was a freak or, as it probably would have seemed to you, a lunatic. Just a hobby, then. A hobby.
You couldn’t bring yourself to believe in ESP. If it can’t be measured with a voltmeter or recorded on an electroencephalograph, you said, it isn’t real. Be tolerant, I pleaded. There are such things as telepathic powers. I know there are. (Be careful, Duv!) I couldn’t cite EEG readings—I’ve never been near an EEG in my life, have no idea whether my power would register. And I had barred myself from conquering your skepticism by calling in some outsider and doing some party-game mind-reading on him. But I could offer other arguments. Look at Rhine’s results, look at all these series of correct readings of the Zener cards. How can you explain them, if not by ESP? And the evidence for telekinesis, teleportation, clairvoyance . . .
You remained skeptical, coolly putting down most of the data I cited. Your reasoning was keen and close—there was nothing fuzzy about your mind when it was on its own home territory, the scientific method. Rhine, you said, fudges his results by testing heterogeneous groups, then selecting for further testing only those subjects who show unusual runs of luck, dropping the others from his surveys. And he publishes only the scores that seem to prove his thesis. It’s a statistical anomaly, not an extrasensory one, that turns up all those correct guesses of the Zener cards, you insisted. Besides, the experimenter is prejudiced in favor of belief in ESP—and that surely leads to all sorts of unconscious errors of precedure, tiny accesses of unintentional bias that inevitably skew the outcome. Cautiously I invited you to try some experiments with me, letting you set up the procedures to suit yourself. You said okay mainly, I think, because it was something we could do together and—this was early October—we were already searching for areas of closeness, your literary education having become a strain for both of us.
WE AGREED—how subtly I made it seem like your own idea!—to concentrate on transmitting images or ideas to one another. And right at the outset we had a cruelly deceptive success. We assembled some packets of pictures and tried to relay them mentally. I still have, here in the archives, our notes on those experiments:
PICTURES SEEN BY ME
1. A rowboat
2. Marigolds in a field
3. A kangaroo
4. Twin baby girls
5. The Empire State Building
6. A snow-capped mountain
7. Profile of old man’s face
8. Baseball player at bat
9. An elephant
10. A locomotive
YOUR GUESS
1. Oak trees
2. Bouquet of roses
3. President Kennedy
4. A statue
5. The Pentagon
6. ? image unclear
7. A pair of scissors
8. A carving knife
9. A tractor
10. An airplane
You had no direct hits. But four out of ten could be considered close associations: marigolds and roses, the Empire State and the Pentagon, elephant and tractor, locomotive and airplane. (Flowers, buildings, heavy-duty equipment, means of transportation.) Enough to give us false hopes of true transmission. Followed by this:
PICTURES SEEN BY YOU
1. A butterfly
2. An octopus
3. Tropical beach scene
4. Young Negro boy
5. Map of South America
6. George Washington Bridge
7. Bowl of apples and bananas
8. El Greco’s Toledo
9. A highway at rush hour
10. An ICBM
MY GUESS
1. A railway train
2. Mountains
3. Landscape, bright sunlight
4. An automobile
5. Grapevines
6. The Washington Monument
7. Stock market quotations
8. A shelf of books
9. A beehive
10. Cary Grant
No direct hits for me either. But three close associations, of sorts, out of ten: tropical beach and sunny landscape, George Washington Bridge and the Washington Monument, highway at rush hour and beehive—the common denominators being sunlight, George Washington and intense, tight-packed activity. At least we deceived ourselves into seeing them as close associations rather than coincidences. I confess I was stabbing in the dark at all times, guessing rather than receiving, and I had little faith even then in the quality of our responses. Nevertheless those probably random collisions of images aroused your curiosity—there’s something in this stuff, maybe, you began to say.
We varied the conditions for thought transmission. We tried doing it in absolute darkness, one room apart. We tried it with the lights on, holding hands. We tried it during sex. We tried it drunk. We tried it fasting. We tried it under conditions of sleep deprivation, forcing ourselves to stay up around the clock in the random hope that minds groggy with fatigue might permit mental impulses to slip through the barriers separating us. We sought in a dozen other ways to open the telepathic conduit. I thought you were as dedicated to the work as I was. But it had ceased to be either an experiment or a game—it was, you saw, plainly an obsessive quest and you asked several times in November if we could quit. All this mind-reading, you said, left you with woeful headaches. But I couldn’t give up, Kitty. I overrode your objections and insisted we go on. I was hooked, I brow-beat you mercilessly into cooperating, I tyrannized you in the name of love, seeing always that telepathic Kitty I would ultimately produce. Every ten days, maybe, some delusive flicker of seeming contact buoyed my idiotic optimism. We would break through; we would touch each other’s minds. How could I quit now when we were so close? But we were never close.
EARLY in November Nyquist gave one of his occasional dinner parties, catered by a Chinatown restaurant he favored. His parties were always brilliant events—to refuse the invitation would have been absurd. So at last I would have to expose you to him. For more than three months I had been more or less deliberately concealing you from him, avoiding the moment of confrontation out of a cowardice I didn’t fully understand. We came late—you were slow getting ready. I introduced you to Nyquist. He smiled and murmured a sleek compliment and gave you a bland, impersonal kiss. You seemed shy, almost afraid of him, of his confidence and smoothness. After a moment of patter he went spinning away to answer the doorbell. A little later, as we were handed our first drinks, I planted a thought for him:
—Well? What do you think of her?
But he was too busy with his other guests to probe me and didn’t pick up on my question. I had to seek my own answers in his skull. I inserted myself—he glanced at me across the room, realizing what I was doing—and rummaged for information. Layers of hostly trivia masked his surface levels: he was simultaneously offering drinks, steering a conversation, signaling for the eggrolls to be brought from the kitchen and inwardly going over the guest list to see who was yet to arrive. But I cut swiftly through that stuff and in a moment found his locus of Kitty-thoughts. At once I acquired the knowledge I wanted and dreaded. He could read you. Yes. To him you were as transparent as anyone else. Only to me were you opaque, for reasons none of us knew. Nyquist had instnatly penetrated you, had assessed you, had formed his judgment of you, there for me to examine—he saw you as awkward, immature, naive, yet also attractive and charming. (That’s how he really saw you. I’m not trying, for ulterior reasons of my own, to make him seem more critical of you than he really was. You were very young—you were unsophisticated and he saw that.) The discovery numbed me. Jealousy curdled me. That I should work so ponderously for so many weeks to reach you, getting nowhere, and he could knife so easily to your depths, Kitty! I was instantly suspicious. Nyquist and his malicious games—was this yet one more? Could he read you? How could I be sure he hadn’t planted a fiction for me? He picked up on that:
—You don’t trust me? Of course I’m reading her.
—Maybe yes, maybe no.
—Do you want me to prove it?
—How?
—Watch.
Without interrupting for a moment his role of host, he entered your mind, while mine remained locked on his. And so, through him, I had my first and only glimpse of your inwardness, Kitty, reflected by way of Tom Nyquist. Oh! It was no glimpse I ever wanted. I saw myself through your eyes through his mind. Physically I looked, if anything, better than I imagined I would, my shoulders broader than they really are, my face leaner, the features more regular. You left no doubt that you responded to me physically. But the emotional associations! You saw me as stern father, as grim schoolmaster, as grumbling tyrant. Read this, read that, improve your mind, girl! Study hard to be worthy of me! Oh! Oh! And that flaming core of resentment over our ESP experiments—worse than useless to you, a monumental bore, an excursion into insanity, a wearying, grinding drag. Night after night to be bugged by monomaniacal me. Even our screwing invaded by the foolish quest for mind-to-mind contact. How sick you were of me, Kitty! How monstrously dull you thought me!
Stung, I retreated, pulling away quickly from Nyquist. You looked at me in a startled way, I recall, as if you knew on some subliminal level that mental energies were flashing around the room, revealing the privacies of your soul. You blinked and your cheeks reddened and you took a hasty diving gulp of your drink. Nyquist shot me a sardonic smile. I couldn’t meet his eyes.
Later, after we had eaten, I saw you talking animatedly to Nyquist at the far side of the room. You were flirtatious and giddy. I imagined you were discussing me and not being complimentary. I tried to pick up the conversation by way of Nyquist, but at my first tentative probe he glared at me.
—Get out of my head, will you?
I obeyed. I heard your laughter, too loud, rising above the hum of conversation. I drifted off to talk to a lithe little Japanese sculptress whose flat tawny chest sprouted untemptingly from a low-cut black sheath, and found her thinking, in French, that she would like me to ask her to go home with me. But I went home with you, Kitty, sitting sullen and graceless beside you on the empty subway train. And when I asked you what you and Nyquist had been discussing you said, “Oh, we were just kidding around. Just having a little fun.”
ABOUT two weeks later, on a clear crisp autumn afternoon, President Kennedy was shot in Dallas. The stock market closed early after a calamitous slide and Martinson shut down the office, turning me out, dazed, into the street. I couldn’t easily accept the reality of the progression of events. Someone shot at the President . . . someone shot the President . . . someone shot the President in the head . . . the President has been critically wounded . . . the President has been rushed to Parkland Hospital . . . the President has received the last rites . . . the President is dead. Kennedy was the only presidential candidate I ever voted for who won—and they killed him the story of my life in one compressed bloody parable.
