Dying Inside

David Selig wanted to drop through the floor. All eyes were on him. Cruel laughter assailed him. David Selig got them all wrong. It was like saying, David Selig wet his pants, David Selig cheated on the exam, David Selig went into the girls’ toilet. By trying to conceal himself, he had made himself terribly conspicuous. Miss Mueller, looking stern and oracular, said, “A null score can be quite significant too, class. It might mean extremely strong ESP abilities, rather than the total absence of such powers, as you might think.” Oh, God. Extremely strong ESP abilities. She went on, “Rhine talks of phenomena such as ‘forward displacement’ and ‘backward displacement,’ in which an unusually powerful ESP force might accidentally focus on one card ahead of the right one, or one card behind it, or even two or three cards away. So the subject would appear to get a below-average result when actually he’s hitting perfectly, just off the target! David, let me see your answers.”

“I wasn’t getting anything, Miss Mueller. I was just putting down my guesses, and I suppose they were all wrong.”

“Let me see.”

As though marching to the scaffold, he brought her the sheet. She placed it beside her own list and tried to realign it, searching for some correlation, some displacement sequence. But the randomness of his deliberately wrong answers protected him. A forward displacement of one card gave him two hits; a backward displacement of one card gave him three. Nothing significant there. Nevertheless, Miss Mueller would not let go. “I’d like to test you again,” she said. “We’ll run several kinds of trials. A null score is fascinating.” She began to shuffle the deck. God, God, God, where are you? Ah. The bell! Saved by the bell! “Can you stay after class?” she asked. In agony, he shook his head. “Got to go to geometry next, Miss Mueller.” She relented. Tomorrow, then. We’ll run the tests tomorrow. God! He was up all the night in a turmoil of fear, sweating, shivering; about four in the morning he vomited. He hoped his mother would make him stay home from school, but no luck: at half past seven he was aboard the bus. Would Miss Mueller forget about the test? Miss Mueller had not forgotten. The fateful cards were on her desk. There would be no escape. He found himself the center of all attention. All right, Duv, be cleverer this time. “Are you ready to begin?” she asked, tipping up the first card. He saw a plus sign in her mind.

“Square,” he said.

He saw a circle. “Waves,” he said.

He saw another circle. “Plus,” he said.

He saw a star. “Circle,” he said.

He saw a square. “Square,” he said. That’s one.

He kept careful count. Four wrong answers, then a right one. Three wrong answers, another right one. Spacing them with false randomness, he allowed himself five hits on the first test. On the second he had four. On the third, six. On the fourth, four. Am I being too average, he wondered? Should I give her a one-hit run, now? But she was losing interest. “I still can’t understand your null score, David,” she told him. “But it does seem to me as if you have no ESP ability whatever.” He tried to look disappointed. Apologetic, even. Sorry, teach, I ain’t got no ESP. Humbly the deficient boy made his way to his seat.

* * *

In one blazing instant of revelation and communion, Miss Mueller, I could have justified your whole lifelong quest for the improbable, the inexplicable, the unknowable, the irrational. The miraculous. But I didn’t have the guts to do it. I had to look after my own skin, Miss Mueller. I had to keep a low profile. Will you forgive me? Instead of giving you truth, I faked you out, Miss Mueller, and sent you spinning blindly onward to the tarot, to the signs of the zodiac, to the flying-saucer people, to a thousand surreal vibrations, to a million apocalyptic astral antiworlds, when the touch of my mind against yours might have been enough to heal your madness. One touch from me. In a moment. In the twinkling of an eye.

TWENTY-ONE.

These are the days of David’s passion, when he writhes a lot on his bed of nails. Let’s do it in short takes. It hurts less that way.

* * *