Dying Inside

About a third of the hands in the class went up. Some of them belonged to dullards who failed to realize that it was shrewd politics to show sympathy for the teacher’s pet enthusiasms. Some of them belonged to incorrigible skeptics who disdained such cynical manipulations. One of the hands belonged to David Selig. He was merely trying to don protective coloration.

Miss Mueller said, “Let’s run a few tests today. Victor, will you be our first guinea pig? Come to the front of the room.”

Grinning nervously, Victor Schlitz shambled forward. He stood stiffly beside Miss Mueller’s desk as she cut the cards and cut them again. Then, peering quickly at the top card, she slid it toward him. “Which symbol?” she asked.

“Circle?”

“We’ll see. Class, don’t say anything.” She handed the card to Barbara Stein, telling her to place a checkmark under the proper symbol on the blackboard. Barbara checked the square. Miss Mueller glanced at the next card. Star, David thought.

“Waves,” Victor said. Barbara checked the star.

“Plus.” Square, dummy! Square.

“Circle.” Circle. Circle. A sudden ripple of excitement in the classroom at Victor’s hit. Miss Mueller, glaring, called for silence.

“Star.” Waves. Waves was what Barbara checked.

“Square.” Square, David agreed. Square. Another ripple, more subdued.

Victor went through the deck. Miss Mueller had kept score: four correct hits. Not even as good as chance. She put him through a second round. Five. All right, Victor: you may be sexy, but a telepath you aren’t. Miss Mueller’s eyes roved the room. Another subject? Let it not be me, David prayed. God, let it not be me. It wasn’t. She summoned Sheldon Feinberg. He hit five the first time, six the second. Respectable, unspectacular. Then Alice Cohen. Four and four. Stony soil, Miss Mueller. David, following each turn of the cards, had hit 25 out of 25 every time, but he was the only one who knew that.

“Next?” Miss Mueller said. David shrank into his seat. How much longer until the dismissal bell? “Norman Heimlich.” Norman waddled toward the teacher’s desk. She glanced at a card. David, scanning her, picked up the image of a star. Bouncing then to Norman’s mind, David was amazed to detect a flicker of an image there, a star perversely rounding its points to form a circle, then reverting to being a star. What was this? Did the odious Heimlich have a shred of the power? “Circle,” Norman murmured. But he hit the next one — the waves — and the one after that, the square. He did indeed seem to he picking up emanations, fuzzy and indistinct but emanations all the same, from Miss Mueller’s mind. Fat Heimlich had the vestiges of the gift. But only the vestiges; David, scanning his mind and the teacher’s, watched the images grow ever more cloudy and vanish altogether by the tenth card, fatigue scattering Norman’s feeble strength. He scored a seven, though, the best so far. The bell, David prayed. The bell, the bell, the bell! Twenty minutes away.

A small mercy. Miss Mueller briskly distributed test paper. She would run the whole class at once. “I’ll call numbers from 1 to 25,” she said. “As I call each number, write down the symbol you think you see. Ready? One.”

David saw a circle. Waves, he wrote.

Star. Square.

Waves. Circle.

Star. Waves.

As the test neared its close, it occurred to him that he might be making a tactical error by muffing every call. He told himself to put down two or three right ones, just for camouflage. But it was too late for that. There were only four numbers left; it would look too conspicuous if he hit several of them correctly after missing all the others. He went on missing.

Miss Mueller said, “Now exchange papers with your neighbor and mark his answers. Ready? Number one: circle. Number two: star. Number three: waves. Number four. . . .”

Tensely she called for results. Had anyone scored ten hits or more? No, teacher. Nine? Eight? Seven? Norman Heimlich had seven again. He preened himself: Heimlich the mind-reader. David felt disgust at the knowledge that Heimlich had even a crumb of power. Six? Four students had six. Five? Four? Miss Mueller diligently jotted down the results. Any other figures? Sidney Goldblatt began to snicker. “Miss Mueller, how about zero?”

She looked startled. “Zero? Was there someone who got all 25 cards wrong?”

“David Selig did!”