Dying Inside

“It was strange,” she said. “I didn’t understand what was happening, and I’ve talked to some people who’ve dropped a lot of acid and they can’t understand it either. It was like our minds were linked, David. Like a telepathic channel had opened between us. And all sorts of stuff was pouring from you into me. Hateful stuff. Poisonous stuff. I was thinking your thoughts. Seeing myself as you saw me. Remember, when you said you were tripping too, even though you hadn’t had any acid? And then you told me you were, like, reading my mind. That was what scared me. The way our minds seemed to blur together, to overlap. To become one. I never knew acid could do that to people.”

This was my cue to tell her that it wasn’t only the acid, that it hadn’t been some druggy delusion, that what she had felt was the impingement of a special power granted me at birth, a gift, a curse, a freak of nature. But the words congealed in my mouth. They sounded insane to me. How could I confess such stuff? I let the moment pass. Instead I said lamely, “Okay, it was a strange moment for both of us. We were a little out of our heads. But the trip’s over. You don’t have to hide from me now. Come back, Toni.”

“No.”

“In a few days, then?”

“No.”

“I don’t understand this.”

“Everything’s changed,” she said. “I couldn’t ever live with you now. You scare me too much. The trip’s over, but I look at you and I see demons. I see some kind of things that’s half-bat, half-man, with big rubbery wings and long yellow fangs and — oh, Jesus, David, I can’t help any of this! I still feel as if our minds are linked. Stuff creeping out of you into my head, I should never have touched the acid.” Carelessly she crushed her cigarette and found another. “You make me uncomfortable now. I wish you’d go. It gives me a headache just being this close to you. Please. Please. I’m sorry, David.”

I didn’t dare look into her mind. I was afraid that what I’d find there would blast and shrivel me. But in those days my power was still so strong that I couldn’t help picking up, whether I sought it or not, a generalized low-level mental radiation from everyone I came close to, and what I picked up now from Toni confirmed what she was saying. She hadn’t stopped loving me. But the acid, though lysergic and not sulfuric, had scarred and corroded our relationship by opening that terrible gateway between us. It was torment for her to be in the same room with me. No resources of mine could deal with that. I considered strategies, looked for angles of approach, ways to reason with her, to heal her through soft earnest words. No way. No way at all. I ran a dozen trial dialogs in my head and they all ended with Toni begging me to get out of her life. So. The end. She sat there all but motionless, downcast, dark-faced, her wide mouth clamped in pain, her brilliant smile extinguished. She seemed to have aged twenty years. Her odd, exotic desert-princess beauty had wholly fled from her. Suddenly she was more real to me, in her shroud of pain, than ever before. Ablaze with suffering, alive with anguish. And no way for me to reach her. “All right,” I said quietly. “I’m sorry too.” Over, done with, swiftly, suddenly, no warning, the bullet singing through the air, the grenade rolling treacherously into the tent, the anvil falling from the placid sky. Done with. Alone again. Not even any tears. Cry? What shall I cry?

Bob Larkin had tactfully remained outside, in his long foyer papered with dazzling black and white optical illusions, during our brief muffled conversation. Again the gentle sorrowing smile from him as I emerged.

“Thanks for letting me bother you this late,” I said.

“No trouble at all. Too bad about you and Toni.”

I nodded. “Yes. Too bad.”