059 - Dying Inside by Robert Silverberg

Author:Robert Silverberg
Format: epub

Be our joys three parts pain!

Strive, and hold cheap the strain.

Yes. Of course. And be our pains three parts joy, he might have added. Such joy this morning. And it’s all flee­ing from me, all ebbing. Going out of me from every pore.

Silence is coming over me. I will speak to no one after it’s gone. And no one will speak to me.

I stand here over the bowl patiently pissing my power away. Naturally I feel some sorrow over what’s happening, I feel regret, I feel—why crap around?—I feel anger and frustration and despair, but also, strangely, I feel shame. My cheeks burn, my eyes will not meet other eyes, I can hardly face my fellow mortals for the shame of it, as if something precious has been entrusted to me and I have failed in my trusteeship. I must say to the world, I’ve wasted my assets, I’ve squandered my patrimony, I’ve let it slip away, going, going, I’m a bankrupt now, a bankrupt. Perhaps this is a family trait, this embarrassment when dis­aster comes. We Seligs like to tell the world we are orderly people, captains of our souls, and when something external downs us we are abashed. I remember when my parents briefly owned a car, a darkgreen 1948 Chevrolet pur­chased at some absurdly low price in 1950, and we were driving somewhere deep in Queens, perhaps on our way to my grandmother’s grave, the annual pilgrimage, and a car emerged from a blind alley and hit us. A schvartze at the wheel, drunk, giddy. Nobody hurt, but our fender badly crumpled and our grille broken, the distinctive T-bar that identified the 1948 model hanging loose. Though the acci­dent was in no way his fault my father reddened and red­dened, transmitting feverish embarrassment, as though he were apologizing to the universe for having done anything so thoughtless as allowing his car to be hit. How he apol­ogized to the other driver, too, my grim bitter father! It’s all right, it’s all right, accidents can happen, you mustn’t feel upset about it, see, we’re all okay! Looka mah car, man, looka mah car, the other driver kept saying, evidently aware that he was on to a soft touch, and I feared my fa­ther was going to give him money for the repairs, but my mother, fearing the same thing, headed him off at the pass. A week later he was still embarrassed; I popped into his mind while he was talking with a friend and heard him try­ing to pretend my mother had been driving, which was ab­surd—she never had a license—and then I felt embarrassed for him. Judith, too, when her marriage broke up, when she walked out on an impossible situation, registered enormous grief over the shameful fact that someone so purposeful and effective in life as Judith Hannah Selig should have entered into a lousy, murderous marriage which had to be terminated vulgarly in the divorce courts. Ego, ego, ego. I the miraculous mindreader, entering upon a mysterious decline, apologizing for my carelessness.

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