Dying Inside

NINETEEN.

This is my cave. Twelve floors high in the Marble Hill Houses, Broadway and 228th Street, formerly a middle-income municipal housing project, now a catchall for classless and deracinated urban detritus. Two rooms plus bathroom, kitchenette, hallway. Once upon a time you couldn’t get into this project unless you were married and had kids. Nowadays a few singles have slipped in, on the grounds that they’re destitute. Things change as the city decays; regulations break down. Most of the building’s population is Puerto Rican, with a sprinkling of Irish and Italian. In this den of papists a David Selig is a great anomaly. Sometimes he thinks he owes his neighbors a daily lusty rendition of the Shma Yisroel, but he doesn’t know the words. Kol Nidre, perhaps. Or the Kaddish. This is the bread of affliction which our forefathers ate in the land of Egypt. He is lucky to have been led out of Egypt into the Promised Land.

Would you like the guided tour of David Selig’s cave? Very well. Please come this way. No touching anything, please, and don’t park your chewing gum on the furniture. The sensitive, intelligent, amiable, neurotic man who will be your guide is none other than David Selig himself. No tipping allowed. Welcome, folks, welcome to my humble abode. We’ll begin our tour in the bathroom. See, this is the tub — that yellow stain in the porcelain was already there when he moved in — this is the crapper, this is the medicine chest. Selig spends a great deal of time in here; it’s a room significant to any in-depth understanding of his existence. For example, he sometimes takes two or three showers a day. What is it, do you think, that he’s trying to wash away? Leave that toothbrush alone, so

This room is the bedroom. Dark and narrow, with the low ceiling typical of municipal construction a generation ago. I keep the window closed at all times so that the elevated train, roaring through the adjacent sky late at night, doesn’t awaken me. It’s hard enough to get some sleep even when things are quiet around you. This is his bed, in which he dreams uneasy dreams, occasionally, even now, involuntarily reading the minds of his neighbors and incorporating their thoughts in his fantasies. On this bed he has fornicated perhaps fifteen women, one or two or occasionally three times each, during the two and a half years of his residence here. Don’t look so abashed, young lady! Sex is a healthy human endeavor and it remains an essential aspect of Selig’s life, even now in middle age! It may become even more important to him in the years ahead, for sex is, after all, a way of establishing communication with other human beings, and certain other cha

Here you can observe the full range of David Selig’s intellectual development. This is his record collection, about a hundred well-worn disks, some of them purchased as far back as 1951. (Archaic monophonic records!) Almost entirely classical music, although you will note two intrusive deposits: five or six jazz records dating from 1959 and five or six rock records dating from 1969, both groups acquired in vague, abortive efforts at expanding the horizons of his taste. Otherwise, what you will find here, in the main, is pretty austere stuff, thorny, inaccessible: Schoenberg, late Beethoven, Mahler, Berg, the Bartok quartets, Bach passacaglias. Nothing that you’d be likely to whistle after one hearing. He doesn’t know a lot about music, but he knows what he likes; you wouldn’t much care for it.

And these are his books, accumulated since the age of ten and hauled lovingly about with him from place to place. The archaeological strata of his reading can readily be isolated and examined. Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Mark Twain, Dashiell Hammett at the bottom. Sabatini. Kipling. Sir Walter Scott. Van Loon, The Story of Mankind. Verrill, Great Conquerors of South and Central America. The books of a sober, earnest, alienated little boy. Suddenly, with adolescence, a quantum leap: Orwell, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Hardy, the easier Faulkner. Look at these rare paperbacks of the 1940’s and early 1950’s, in odd off-sized formats, with laminated plastic covers! See what you could buy then for only 25 cents! Look at the prurient paintings, the garish lettering! These science-fiction books date from that era too. I gobbled the stuff whole, hoping to find some clues to my own dislocated self’s nature in the fantasies of Bradbury, Heinlein, Asimov, Sturgeon, Clarke. Look, here’s Stapledon’s Odd John, here’s Beresford’s Hampdenshire Wonder, here’s a whole book called Outsiders: Children of Wonder, full of stories of little superbrats with freaky powers. I’ve underlined a lot of passages in that last one, usually places where I quarreled with the writers. Outsiders? Those writers, gifted as they were, were the outsiders, trying to imagine powers they’d never had; and I, who was on the inside, I the youthful mind-prowler (the book is dated 1954), had bones to pick with them. They stressed the angst of being supernormal, forgot about the ecstasy. Although, thinking about angst vs. ecstasy now, I have to admit they knew whereof they writ. Fellows, I have fewer bones to pick these days. This is rats’ alley, where the dead men lost their bones.