Dying Inside

That November afternoon I picked up emanations of fear on all sides as I walked fearfully home. Paranoia was general everywhere. People sidled warily, one shoulder in front of the other, ready to bolt. Pale female faces peered between parted curtains in the windows of the towering apartment houses, high above the silent streets. The drivers of cars looked in all directions at intersections, as if expecting the tanks of the storm troopers to come rumbling down Broadway. (At this time of day it was generally believed that the assassination was the first blow in a right-wing putsch.) No one lingered in the open; everyone hurried toward shelter. Anything might happen now. Packs of wolves might burst out of Riverside Drive. Maddened patriots might launch a pogrom. From my apartment — door bolted, windows locked — I tried to phone you at the computer center, thinking you might somehow not have heard the news, or perhaps I just wanted to hear your voice in this traumatic time. The telephone lines were choked. I gave up the attempt after twenty minutes. Then, wandering aimlessly from bedroom to livingroom and back, clutching my transistor, twisting the dial trying to find the one radio station whose newscaster would tell me that he was still alive after all, I detoured into the kitchen and found your note on the table, telling me that you were leaving, that you couldn’t stay with me any more. The note was dated 10:30 A.M., before the assassination, in another era. I rushed to the bedroom closet and saw what I had not seen before, that your things were gone. When women leave me, Kitty, they leave suddenly and stealthily, giving no warning.

* * *

Toward evening I telephoned Nyquist. This time the lines were open. “Is Kitty there?” I asked. “Yes,” he said. “Just a minute.” And put you on. You explained that you were going to live with him for a while, until you got yourself sorted out. He had been very helpful. No, you had no hard feelings toward me, no bitterness at all. It was just that I seemed, well, insensitive, whereas he — he had this instinctive, intuitive grasp of your emotional needs — he was able to get onto your trip, Kitty, and I couldn’t manage that. So you had gone to him for comfort and love. Goodbye, you said, and thanks for everything, and I muttered a goodbye and put down the phone. During the night the weather changed, and a weekend of black skies and cold rain saw JFK to his grave. I missed everything — the casket in the rotunda, the brave widow and the gallant children, the murder of Oswald, the funeral procession, all that instant history. Saturday and Sunday I slept late, got drunk, read six books without absorbing a word. On Monday, the day of national mourning, I wrote you that incoherent letter, Kitty, explaining everything, telling you what I had tried to make out of you and why, confessing my power to you and describing the effects it had had on my life, telling you also about Nyquist, warning you of what he was, that he had the power too, that he could read you and you would have no secrets from him, telling you not to mistake him for a real human being, telling you that he was a machine, self-programmed for maximum self-realization, telling you that the power had made him cold and cruelly strong whereas it had made me weak and jittery, insisting that essentially he was as sick as I, a manipulative man, incapable of giving love, capable only of using. I told you that he would hurt you if you made yourself vulnerable to him. You didn’t answer. I never heard from you again, never saw you again, never heard from or saw him again either. Thirteen years. I have no idea what became of either of you. Probably I’ll never know. But listen. Listen. I loved you, lady, in my clumsy way. I love you now. And you are lost to me forever.

TWENTY-FIVE.

He wakes, feeling stiff and sore and numb, in a bleak, dreary hospital ward. Evidently this is St. Luke’s, perhaps the emergency room. His lower lip is swollen, his left eye opens only reluctantly, and his nose makes an unfamiliar whistling sound at every intake of air. Did they bring him here on a stretcher after the basketball players finished with him? He has spent relatively little [time he breathes, he imagines he can feel the ragged edges] with dried blood, but when he succeeds in looking down — his neck, oddly rigid, does not want to obey him — he sees only the dingy whiteness of a hospital gown. Each time he breathes, he imagines he can feel the ragged edges of broken ribs scraping together; slipping a hand under the gown, he touches his bare chest and finds that it has not been taped. He does not know whether to be relieved or apprehensive about that.