Dying Inside

“I didn’t.”

“Then how can you be tripping?”

I make no reply. I crouch, I huddle, I sweat, I moan. This is the descent into hell. Huxley warned me. I didn’t want Toni’s trip. I didn’t ask to see any of this. My defenses are destroyed now. She overwhelms me. She engulfs me.

Toni says, “Are you reading my mind, David?”

“Yes.” The miserable ultimate confession. “I’m reading your mind.”

“What did you say?”

“I said I’m reading your mind. I can see every thought. Every experience. I see myself the way you see me. Oh, Christ, Toni, Toni, Toni, it’s so awful!”

She tugs at me and tries to pull me up to look at her… Finally I rise. Her face is horribly pale; her eyes are rigid. She asks for clarifications. What’s this about reading minds? Did I really say it, or is it something her acid-blurred mind invented? I really said it, I tell her. You asked me if I was reading your mind and I said yes, I was.

“I never asked any such thing,” she says.

“I heard you ask it.”

“But I didn’t—” Trembling, now. Both of us. Her voice is bleak. “You’re trying to bum-trip me, aren’t you, David? I don’t understand. Why would you want to hurt me? Why are you messing me up? It was a good trip. It was a good trip.”

“Not for me,” I say.

“You weren’t tripping.”

“But I was.”

She gives me a look of total incomprehension and pulls away from me and throws herself on the bed, sobbing. Out of her mind, cutting through the grotesqueries of the acid images, comes a blast of raw emotion: fear, resentment, pain, anger. She thinks I’ve deliberately tried to injure her. Nothing I can say now will repair things. Nothing can ever repair things. She despises me. I am a vampire to her, a bloodsucker, a leech; she knows my gift for what it is. We have crossed some fatal threshold and she will never again think of me without anguish and shame. Nor I her. I rush from the room, down the hall to the room shared by Donaldson and Aitken. “Bad trip,” I mutter. “Sorry to trouble you, but—”

I stayed with them the rest of the afternoon. They gave me a tranquilizer and brought me gently through the downslope of the trip. The psychedelic images still came to me out of Toni for half an hour or so, as though an inexorable umbilical chain linked us across all the length of the hallway; but then to my relief the sense of contact began to slip and fade, and suddenly, with a kind of audible click at the moment of severance, it was gone altogether. The flamboyant phantoms ceased to vex my soul. Color and dimension and texture returned to their proper states. And at last I was free from that merciless reflected self-image. Once I was fully alone in my own skull again I felt like weeping to celebrate my deliverance, but no tears would come, and I sat passively, sipping a Bromo-Seltzer. Time trickled away. Donaldson and Aitken and I talked in a peaceful, civilized, burned-out way about Bach, medieval art, Richard M. Nixon, pot, and a great many other things. I hardly knew these two, yet they were willing to surrender their time to ease a stranger’s pain. Eventually I felt better. Shortly before six o’clock, thanking them gravely, I went back to my room. Toni was not there. The place seemed oddly altered. Books were gone from the shelves, prints from the walls; the closet door stood open and half the things in it were missing. In my befuddled, fatigued state it took me a moment or two to grasp what had happened. At first I imagined burglary, abduction, but then I saw the truth. She had moved out.

ELEVEN.

Today there is a hint of encroaching winter in the air: it takes tentative nips at the cheeks. October is dying too quickly. The sky is mottled and unhealthy-looking, cluttered by sad, heavy, low-hanging clouds. Yesterday it rained, ski

Here I sit. Office hours. On my knees rests a thick manila folder, held closed by a ballsy big rubber band. Within, neatly typed, each with its own coppery paperclip, are five term papers, the products of my busy week. The Novels of Kafka. Shaw as Tragedian. The Concept of Synthetic A Priori Statements. Odysseus as a Symbol of Society. Aeschylus and the Aristotelian Tragedy. The old academic bullshit, confirmed in its hopeless fecality by the cheerful willingness of these bright young men to let an old grad turn the stuff out for them. This is the day appointed for delivering the goods and, perhaps, picking up some new assignments. Five minutes to eleven. My clients will be arriving soon. Meanwhile I scan the passing parade. Students hurrying by, clutching mounds of books. Hair rippling in the wind, breasts bobbling. They all look frighteningly young to me, even the bearded ones. Especially the bearded ones. Do you realize that each year there are more and more young people in the world? Their tribe ever increases as the old farts drop off the nether end of the curve and I shuttle graveward. Even the professors look young to me these days. There are people with doctorates who are fifteen years younger than I am. Isn’t that a killer? Imagine a kid born in 1950 who has a doctorate already. In 1950 I was shaving three times a week, and masturbating every Wednesday and Saturday; I was a hearty pubescent bulyak five feet nine inches tall, with ambitions and griefs and knowledge, with an identity. In 1950 today’s newly fledged Ph.D.’s were toothless infants just squirting from the womb, their faces puckered, their skins sticky with amniotic juices. How can those infants have doctorates so soon? Those infants have lapped me as I plod along the track.

I find my own company wearisome when I descend into self-pity. To divert myself I try to touch the minds of passers-by and learn what I can learn. Playing my old game, my only game. Selig the voyeur, the soul-vampire, ripping off the intimacies of i