Dying Inside

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 18 or 19. 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. You hadn’t traveled; your world was limited by the Atlantic and the Mississippi, and the big trip of your life was a summer in Illinois. You hadn’t even had much sexual experience: three men, wasn’t it, in your 22 years, and only one of those a serious affair? 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-di

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 I 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 procedure, 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 selfconsciously 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 Your Guess

1. A rowboat 1. Oak Trees

2. Marigolds in a field 2. Bouquet of roses

3. A kangaroo 3. President Ke

4. Twin baby girls 4. A statue

5. The Empire State Building 5. The Pentagon

6. A snow-capped mountain 6. ? image unclear

7. Profile of old man’s face 7. A pair of scissors

8. Baseball player at bat 8. A carving knife

9. An elephant 9. A tractor

10. A locomotive 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 My Guess

1. A butterfly 1. A railway train

2. An octopus 2. Mountains

3. Tropical beach scene 3. Landscape, bright sunlight

4. Young Negro boy 4. An automobile

5. Map of South America 5. Grapevines

6. George Washington Bridge 6. The Washington Monument

7. Bowl of apples and bananas 7. Stock market quotations

8. El Greco’s Toledo 8. A shelf of books

9. A highway at rush hour 9. A beehive

10. An ICBM 10. Cary Grant

No direct hits for me either. But three close associations, of sorts, out of ten: tropical beach and su

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: I entered you and held you in my arms and thought hard at you, and you thought hard at me. 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 would have tried it under the influence of pot or acid, but no one thought much about pot or acid in ’63. We sought in a dozen other ways to open the telepathic conduit. Perhaps you recall the details of them even now; embarrassment drives them from my mind. I know we wrestled with our futile project night after night for more than a month, while your involvement with it swelled and peaked and dwindled again, carrying you through a series of phases from skepticism to cool neutral interest to unmistakable fascination and enthusiasm, then to an awareness of inevitable failure, a sense of the impossibility of our goal, leading then to weariness, to boredom, and to irritation. I realized none of this: 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 mindreading, 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 was impaled, I browbeat you mercilessly into cooperating, I tyra