Collected Short Fiction, page 880
That November afternoon I picked up emanations of fear on all sides as I walked fearfully home. Paranoia was general everywhere. People sidled warily, one shoulder in front of the other, ready to bolt. Pale female faces peered between parted curtains in the windows of the towering apartment houses, high above the silent streets. No one lingered in the open—everyone hurried toward shelter. Anything might happen now. Packs of wolves might burst out of Riverside Drive. Maddened patriots might launch a program. From my apartment—door bolted, windows locked—I tried to phone you at the computer center, thinking you might somehow not have heard the news. Or perhaps I just wanted to hear your voice in this traumatic time. The telephone lines were choked. I gave up the attempt after twenty minutes. Then, wandering aimlessly from bedroom to living room and back, clutching my transistor, twisting the dial trying to find one radio station whose newscaster would tell me that he was still alive after all, I detoured into the kitchen and found your note on the table, telling me that you were leaving, that you couldn’t stay with me any more. The note was dated 10:30 A.M., before the assassination, in another era. I rushed to the bedroom closet and saw what I had not seen before, that your things were gone. When women leave me, Kitty, they leave suddenly and stealthily, giving no warning.
TOWARD evening I telephoned Nyquist. This time the lines were open. “Is Kilty there?” I asked. “Yes,” he said. “Just a minute.” And put you on. You explained that you were going to live with him for a while until you got yourself sorted out. He had been very helpful. No, you had no hard feelings toward me, no bitterness at all. It was just that I seemed, well, insensitive, whereas he—he had this instinctive, intuitive grasp of your emotional needs—he was able to get onto your trip, Kitty, and I couldn’t manage that. So you had gone to him for comfort and love. Goodbye, you said, and thanks for everything, and I muttered a goodbye and put down the phone. During the night the weather changed and a weekend of black skies and cold rain saw JFK to his grave. I missed everything, the casket in the rotunda, the brave widow and the gallant children, the murder of Oswald, the funeral procession, all that instant history. Saturday and Sunday I slept late, got drunk, read six books without absorbing a word. On Monday, the day of national mourning, I wrote you that incoherent letter, Kitty, explaining everything, telling you what I had tried to make out of you and why, confessing my power to you and describing the effects it had had on my life. Telling you also about Nyquist, warning you of what he was, that he had the power, too, that he could read you and you would have no secrets from him. Telling you not to mistake him for a real human being, telling you that he was a machine, self-programed for maximum self-realization. That the power had made him cold and cruelly strong whereas it had made me weak and jittery, insisting that essentially he was as sick as I, a manipulative man, incapable of giving love, capable only of using. I told you that he would hurt you if you made yourself vulnerable to him.
You didn’t answer. I never heard from you again, never saw you again, never heard from him or saw him again either. Thirteen years. I have no idea what became of either of you. Probably I’ll never know. But listen. Listen. I loved you, lady, in my clumsy way. I love you now. And you are lost to me forever.
XXIII
HE WAKES, feeling stiff and sore and numb, in a bleak, dreary hospital ward. Evidently this is St. Luke’s, perhaps the emergency room. His lower lip is swollen. His left eye opens only reluctantly and his nose makes an unfamiliar whistling sound at every intake of air. Did they bring him here on a stretcher after the basketball players finished with him? He has spent relatively little time in hospitals. He wonders if his clothing is stained with dried blood, but when he succeeds in looking down—his neck, oddly rigid, does not want to obey him—he sees only the dingy whiteness of a hospital gown. Each time he breathes he imagines he can feel the ragged edges of broken ribs scraping together. Slipping a hand under the gown, he touches his bare chest and finds that it has not been taped. He does not know whether to be relieved or apprehensive about that.
Carefully he sits up. The room is crowded and noisy, beds pushed close together. The beds have curtains but no curtains are drawn. Most of his fellow patients are black and many of them are in serious condition, surrounded by festoons of equipment. Impassive nurses drift through the room, showing much the same distant concern for the patients as museum guards do for mummies in display cases. No one is paying any attention to Selig except Selig, who returns to the examination of himself. His fingertips explore his cheeks. Without a mirror he cannot tell how battered his face is, but there are many tender places. His left clavicle aches as from a light, glancing karate chop. His right knee radiates throbbings and twinges, as though he had twisted it in falling. Still, he feels less pain than might have been anticipated. Perhaps they have given him some sort of shot.
His mind is foggy. He is receiving some mental input from those about him in the ward, but everything is garbled, nothing is distinct; he picks up auras but no intelligible verbalizations. Diagonally across from him, two nurses have begun to erect what perhaps is a forced-feeding system, with a plastic tube snaking into the nostril of a huge unconscious bandage-swathed black. Selig’s own stomach sends him no hunger signals. The chemical smell in the hospital air gives him nausea—he can barely salivate. Will they feed him this evening? How long will he be kept here? Who pays? Should he ask that Judith be notified? How badly has he been injured?
An intern enters the ward, a short dark man, concise and fine-boned of body, a Pakistani by the looks of him, moving with bouncy precision. Surprisingly, he comes right to Selig. “The X-rays show no breakages,” he says without preamble in a firm, unresonant voice. “Therefore your only injuries are minor abrasions, bruises, cuts and an unimportant concussion. We are ready to authorize your release. Please get up.”
“Wait,” Selig says feebly. “I just came to. I don’t know what’s been going on. Who brought me here? How long have I been unconscious? What—”
“I know none of these things. Your discharge has been approved and the hospital has need of this bed. Please. On your feet, now. I have much to do.”
“A concussion? Shouldn’t I spend the night here, at least, if I had a concussion? Or did I spend the night here? What day is today?”
“You were brought in about noon today,” says the intern, growing more fretful. “You were treated in the emergency room and given a thorough examination after having been beaten on the steps of Low Library.” Once more the command to rise, given wordlessly this time, an imperious glare and a pointing forefinger. Selig probes the intern’s mind and finds it accessible, but there is nothing in it except impatience and irritation. Ponderously Selig climbs from the bed. His body seems to be held together with wire. His bones grind and scrape. There is still the sensation of broken rib ends rubbing in his chest; can the X-ray have been in error? He starts to ask, but too late. The intern, making his rounds, has whirled off to another bed.
They bring him his clothing. He pulls the curtain around his bed and dresses. Yes, bloodstains on his shirt as he had feared—also on his trousers. A mess. He checks his belongings. Everything is here, wallet, wristwatch, pocket comb. What now? Just walk out? Nothing to sign? Selig edges uncertainly toward the door. He actually gets into the corridor unperceived. Then the intern materializes as if from ectoplasm and points to another room across the hall, saying, “You wait in there until the security man comes.” Security man? What security man?
There are, as he had feared, papers to sign before he is free of the hospital’s grasp. Just as he finishes with the red tape, a plump, gray-faced, sixtyish man in the uniform of the campus security force enters the room, puffing slightly, and asks, “You Selig?”
He acknowledges that he is.
“The dean wants to see you. You able to walk by yourself or you want me to get you a wheelchair?”
“I’ll walk,” Selig says.
THEY go out of the hospital together, up Amsterdam Avenue to the 115th Street campus gate and into Van Am Quad. The security man stays close beside him, saying nothing. Shortly Selig finds himself waiting outside the office of the Dean of Columbia College. The security man waits with him, arms folded placidly, wrapped in a cocoon of boredom. Selig begins to feel almost as though he is under some sort of arrest. Why is that? An odd thought. What does he have to fear from the dean? He probes the security man’s dull mind but can find nothing in it but fog.”
A voice from within says, “Dean Cushing will see him now.”
“Go on in,” the security man says.
Cushing? A fine deanly name. Who is he? Selig limps in, awkward from his injuries, bothered by his sore knee. Facing him behind a glistening uncluttered desk sits a wide-shouldered, smooth-cheeked, youthful-looking man, junior-executive model, wearing a conservative dark suit. Selig’s first thought is of the mutations worked by the passage of time—he had always looked upon deans as lofty symbols of authority, necessarily elderly or at least of middle years, but here is the Dean of the College and he seems to be a man of Selig’s own age. Then he realizes that this dean is not merely an anonymous contemporary of his but actually a classmate, Ted Cushing ’56, a campus figure of some repute back then, class president, football star and A-level scholar, whom Selig had known at least in a passing way. It always surprises Selig to be reminded that he is no longer young, that he has lived into a time when his generation has. control of the mechanisms of power. “Ted?” he blurts. “Are you dean now, Ted? Christ, I wouldn’t have guessed that. When—”
“Sit down, Dave,” Cushing says politely but with no great show of friendliness. “Did you get badly hurt?”
“The hospital says nothing’s broken. I feel half ruined, though.” As he eases into a chair he indicates the bloodstains on his clothing, the bruises on his face. Talking is an effort—his jaws creak at their hinges. “Hey, Ted, it’s been a long time! Must be twenty years since I last saw you. Did you remember my name or did they identify me from my wallet?”
“We’ve arranged to pay the hospital costs,” Cushing says, not seeming to hear Selig’s words. “If there are any further medical expenses we’ll take care of those, too. You can have that in writing if you’d like.”
“The verbal commitment is fine. And in case you’re worrying that I’ll press charges or sue the University—well, I wouldn’t do anything like that. Boys will be boys. They let their feelings run away with themselves a little bit, but?”
“We weren’t greatly concerned about your pressing charges, Dave,” Cushing says quietly. “The real question is whether we’re going to press charges against you.”
“Me? For what? For getting mauled by your basketball players? For damaging their expensive hands with my face?” He essays a painful grin. Cushing’s face remains grave. Selig struggles to interpret Cushing’s joke. Finding no rationale for it, he decides to venture a probe. But he runs into a wall. He is suddenly too timid to push, fearful that he will be unable to break through. “I don’t understand what you mean,” he says Finally. “Press charges for what?”
“For these, Dave.” For the First time Selig notices the stack of typewritten pages on the dean’s desk. Cushing nudges them forward. “Do you recognize them? Here, take a look.”
SELIG leafs unhappily through them. They are term papers, all of them of his manufacture. Odysseus as a Symbol of Society. The Novels of Kafka. Aeschylus and the Aristotelian Tragedy. Resignation and Acceptance in the Philosophy of Montaigne. Virgil as Dante’s Mentor. Some of them bear marks—A-, B+, A-, A—and marginal comments, mainly favorable. Some are untouched except by smudges and smears. These are the ones he had been about to deliver when he was set upon by Lumumba. With immense care he tidies the stack, aligning the edges of the sheets precisely, and pushes them back toward Cushing. “All right,” he says. “You’ve got me.”
“Did you write those?”
“Yes.”
“For a fee?”
“Yes.”
“That’s sad, Dave. That’s awfully sad.”
“I needed to earn a living. They don’t give scholarships to alumni.”
“What were you getting paid for these things?”
“Three or four bucks a typed page.”
Cushing shakes his head. “You were good—I’ll give you credit for that. There must be eight or ten guys working your racket here, but you’re easily the best.”
“Thank you.”
“But you had one dissatisfied customer. We asked Lumumba why he beat you up. He said he hired you to write a term paper for him and you did a lousy job—you ripped him off—and then you wouldn’t refund his money. All right. We’re dealing with him in our own way, but we have to deal with you, too. We’ve been trying to find you for a long lime, Dave.”
“Have you?”
“We’ve circulated xeroxes of your work through a dozen departments the last couple of semesters, warning people to be on the lookout for your typewriter and your style. There wasn’t a great deal of cooperation. A lot of faculty members didn’t seem to care whether the term papers they received were phony or not. But we cared, Dave. We cared very much.” Cushing leans forward. His eyes, terribly earnest, seek Selig’s. Selig looks away. He cannot abide the searching warmth of those eyes. “We started closing in a few weeks ago,” Cushing continues. “We rounded up a couple of your clients and threatened them with expulsion.
They gave us your name, but they didn’t know where you lived and we had no way of finding you. So we waited. We knew you’d show up again to deliver and solicit. Then we got this report of a disturbance on the steps of Low-basketball players beating up somebody—and we found you with a pile of undelivered papers clutched in your arm and that was it. You’re out of business, Dave.”
“I should ask for a lawyer,” Selig says. “I shouldn’t admit anything more to you. I should have denied everything when you showed me those papers.”
“No need to be so technical about your rights.”
“I’ll need to be when you take me to court, Ted.”
“No,” Cushing says. “We aren’t going to prosecute, not unless we catch you ghosting more papers. We have no interest in putting you in jail and, in any case, I’m not sure that what you’ve done is a criminal offense. What we really want to do is help you. You’re sick, Dave. For a man of your intelligence, of your potential, to have fallen so low, to have ended up faking term papers for college kids—that’s sad, Dave, that’s awfully sad. We’ve discussed your case here and we’ve come up with a rehabilitation plan for you. We can find you work on campus, as a research assistant, maybe. There are always doctoral candidates who need assistants and we have a small fund we could dip into to provide a salary for you. Nothing much—but at least as much as you were making on these papers. And we’ll admit you to the psychological counseling service here. It wasn’t set up for alumni, but I don’t see why we need to be inflexible about it, Dave. For myself, I have to say that I find it embarrassing that a man of the Class of ’56 is in the kind of trouble you’re in. If only out of a spirit of loyalty to our class, I want to do everything possible to help you put yourself back together and begin to fulfill the promise that you showed when . . .”
CUSHING rambles on, restating and embellishing his themes, offering pity without censure, promising aid to his suffering classmate. Selig, listening inattentively, discovers that Cushing’s mind is beginning to open to him. The wall that earlier had separated their consciousnesses, a product perhaps of Selig’s fear and fatigue, has started to dissolve and Selig is able now to perceive a general image of Cushing’s mind, which is energetic, strong, capable, but also conventional and limited, a stolid Republican mind, a prosaic Ivy League mind.
Foremost in it is not his concern for Selig but rather his complacent satisfaction with himself—the brightest glow emanates from Cushing’s awareness of his happy station in life, ornamented by a suburban split-level, a strapping blond wife, three handsome children, a shaggy dog, a shining new Lincoln Continental. Pushing a bit deeper, Selig sees that Cushing’s show of concern for him is fraudulent. Behind the earnest eyes and the sincere, heartfelt, sympathetic smile lies fierce contempt. Cushing despises him. Cushing thinks he is corrupt, useless, worthless, a disgrace to mankind in general and the Columbia College Class of ’56 in particular. Cushing finds him physically as well as morally repugnant, seeing him as unwashed and unclean, possibly syphilitic. Cushing suspects him of being homosexual. Cushing has for him the scorn of the Rotarian for the junkie. It is impossible for Cushing to understand why anyone who has had the benefit of a Columbia education would let himself slide into the degradations Selig has accepted. Selig shrinks from Cushing’s disgust. Am I so despicable, he wonders, am I such trash?
His hold on Cushing’s mind strengthens and deepens. It ceases to trouble him that Cushing has such contempt for him. Selig drifts into a mode of abstraction in which he no longer identifies himself with the miserable churl Cushing sees. What does Cushing know? Can Cushing penetrate the mind of another? Can Cushing feel the ecstasy of real contact with a fellow human being? And there is ecstasy in it. Godlike he rides passenger in Cushing’s mind, sinking past the external defenses, past the petty prides and snobberies, past the self-congratulatory smugness, into the realm of absolute values, into the kingdom of authentic self. Contact. Ecstasy! That stolid Cushing is the outer husk. Here is a Cushing that even Cushing does not know. But Selig does.
