Dying Inside

A hermit, say. He lives in a dark cave. No information penetrates. He eats mushrooms. They give him just enough energy to keep going, but otherwise he lacks inputs. He’s forced back on his own spiritual and mental resources, which he eventually exhausts. Gradually the chaos expands in him, gradually the forces of entropy seize possession of this ganglion, that synapse. He takes in a decreasing amount of sensory data until his surrender to entropy is complete. He ceases to move, to grow, to respire, to function in any way. This condition is known as death.

One doesn’t have to hide in a cave. One can make an interior migration, locking oneself away from the life-giving energy sources. Often this is done because it appears that the energy sources are threats to the stability of the self. Indeed, inputs do threaten the self: a push usually will upset equilibrium. However, equilibrium itself is a threat to the self, though this is frequently overlooked. There are married people who strive fiercely to reach equilibrium. They seal themselves off, clinging to one another and shutting out the rest of the universe, making themselves into a two-person closed system from which all vitality is steadily and inexorably expelled by the deadly equilibrium they have established. Two can perish as well as one, if they are sufficiently isolated from everything else. I call this the monogamous fallacy. My sister Judith said she left her husband because she felt herself dying, day by day, while she was living with him. Of course, Judith’s a slut.

The sensory shutdown is not always a willed event, naturally. It happens to us whether we like it or not. If we don’t climb into the box ourselves, we’ll get shoved in anyway. That’s what I mean about entropy inevitably nailing us all in the long run. No matter how vital, how vigorous, how world-devouring we are, the inputs dwindle as time goes by. Sight, hearing, touch, smell — everything goes, as good old Will S. said, and we end up sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. Sans everything. Or, as the same clever man also put it, from hour to hour we ripe and ripe, and then from hour to hour we rot and rot, and thereby hangs a tale.

I offer myself as a case in point. What does this man’s sad history reveal? An inexplicable diminution of once-remarkable powers. A shrinkage of the inputs. A small death, endured while he still lives. Am I not a casualty of the entropic wars? Do I not now dwindle into stasis and silence before your very eyes? Is my distress not evident and poignant? Who will I be, when I have ceased to be myself? I am dying the heat death. A spontaneous decay. A random twitch of probability undoes me. And I am made into nothingness. I am becoming cinders and ash. I will wait here for the broom to gather me up.

* * *

That’s very eloquent, Selig. Take an A. Your writing is clear and forceful and you show an excellent grasp of the underlying philosophical issues. You may go to the head of the class. Do you feel better now?

TWENTY-FOUR.

It was a crazy idea, Kitty, a dumb fantasy. It could never have worked. I was asking the impossible from you. There was only one conceivable outcome, really: that is, that I would annoy you and bore you and drive you away from me. Well, blame Tom Nyquist. It was his idea. No, blame me. I didn’t have to listen to his crazy ideas, did I? Blame me. Blame me.

Axiom: It’s a sin against love to try to remake the soul of someone you love, even if you think you’ll love her more after you’ve transformed her into something else.

Nyquist said, “Maybe she’s a mindreader too, and the blockage is a matter of interference, of a clash between your transmissions and hers, canceling out the waves in one direction or in both. So that there’s no transmission from her to you and probably none from you to her.”

“I doubt that very much,” I told him. This was August of 1963, two or three weeks after you and I had met. We weren’t living together yet but we had already been to bed a couple of times. “She doesn’t have a shred of telepathic ability,” I insisted. “She’s completely normal. That’s the essential thing about her, Tom: she’s a completely normal girl.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Nyquist said.

He hadn’t met you yet. He wanted to meet you, but I hadn’t set anything up. You had never heard his name.

I said, “If there’s one thing I know about her, it’s that she’s a sane, healthy, well-balanced, absolutely normal girl. Therefore she’s no mindreader.”

“Because mindreaders are insane, unhealthy, and unbalanced. Like you and like me. Q.E.D., eh? Speak for yourself, man.”

“The gift tips the spirit,” I said. “It darkens the soul.”

“Yours, maybe. Not mine.”

He was right about that. Telepathy hadn’t injured him. Maybe I’d have had the problems I have even if I hadn’t been born with the gift. I can’t credit all my maladjustments to the presence of one unusual ability, can I? And God knows there are plenty of neurotics around who have never read a mind in their lives.