I've worked hard to retain my chosen self-image as a Pretty Nice Guy, and I really did feel an almost painful degree of empathy with both of them, having been an outcast all my own life . . . and even I am profoundly ashamed of what I thought of them as a couple. I liked them both, wished them both well, and wanted to howl with laughter every time I saw them together. I don't even want to imagine what Zudie must have been picking up from everyone else he walked past. I just wish I could wash my own mind out with soap, retroactively. Somebody said once regret is the sharpest pain.
Oxy became part of our shared life as roommates with no discussion at all. I hardly ever saw them together, actually, and then usually from a distance. Whenever I did encounter her, with or without Zudie, she was friendly enough, but even less talkative than he was. I thought of offering to leave the room to them until curfew on Friday or Saturday nights, as some roommates did for one another . . . but I never actually worked up enough nerve to raise the subject, and Smelly never asked, so as far as I know Oxy never saw the inside of our room. If their relationship was ever consummated, it must have taken place off campus somewhere. So did my own all-too-rare consummations that year. Getting a Catholic girl to agree to sneak into your dorm room was hard enough; getting one to sneak into that room was out of the question.
(This all occurred during an historical period in which, for reasons I despair of explaining, university students—not just in Catholic colleges like Billy Joe but everywhere—lived in sexually segregated quarters with absolutely no parietal hours ever. I can still recall the day in my final year when our floor R.A. called a meeting to tell us the stunning news that the school was considering instituting co-ed visiting hours, "periodically." Slinky John brought the house down by calling out, "Yeah, I knew it. Every twenty-eight days.")
Everyone on campus of course assumed the Smelly/Oxy relationship had been consummated, and most had theories as to where, and exactly how. Some of them were quite imaginative, and a few were actually funny. Not until Michael Jackson married Lisa Marie Presley would I again hear any couple's sex life speculated on with such avid distaste. Apparently we never really do get much less cruel than we were in the playground. Not even in a Catholic college . . . less than six months before what would come to be known as The Summer Of Love.
I'm including myself in that judgment.
I had spent most of my life—pretty much right up until the day I left for college—getting my ass kicked on a regular basis, and being ridiculed in between. For being too smart, too skinny, too sensitive, too sarcastic, too scared, sometimes just for being handy. I knew what it was like to be an outcast, a figure of fun. But even I, who knew just how bad it felt, was not immune to the shameful human pleasure of making myself feel bigger by making someone else seem smaller.
Only in my mind, at least. I was quite sure I hid my secret amusement so well that neither suspected its existence. I took pains to treat Oxy the same way I took pains to treat Smelly: with the same respect I would anyone else, just as if I had it. But inside, I got a big kick out of them.
I tripped over a rock as I stumbled behind him through the Coveney Island undergrowth, banged my knee when I went down, and accepted the bright pain as long overdue penance. A Catholic upbringing is awfully—awefully—hard to shake.
Now, of course, I burned, knowing that back then Zudie had known perfectly well just what a hypocritical condescending smug arrogant jackass I really was inside. The same respect I had pretended to pay him, he had paid me by not busting me for it.
Zudie's arm, astonishingly strong, helped me to my feet. We were out of the wind and away from the shore by now; he didn't have to raise his voice to be heard. "There wasn't anything you could have done differently if you had known. You can't apologize for finding something funny. It isn't an act of the will. All you can do is be polite about it, and you were. I found just about everyone on that campus—yes, including you—hilarious to the point of heartbreak. I also found the majority of you horrifying to the point of hysteria. It wasn't easy to conceal either one, sometimes . . . even with the overwhelming advantage that you people could only see what was shown and hear what was said."
I thought about that, as the pain in my knee dropped back to bearability. "You did okay."
"I know. So did you, is my point. All things considered. You're welcome." He turned and continued on his way.
I felt a weight leave me. I followed him, my thoughts turning now to how it had all ended. I wished they wouldn't, but there was no point trying to stop them.
Smelly and Oxy never attended any school social events, either before or after they met. They were just seen around the campus together, usually in some out of the way corner, and then snickered about behind their backs. A couple of girls who knew Oksana privately asked me what Zudie was really like, and in return I tried to pump them for information about her, but we really didn't have a lot to trade, and nothing very interesting on either side.
Before her hookup with Smelly, Oxy had not been considered particularly eccentric, at least by the standards of sixties college students: just funny-looking. The word on her had been, brilliant poet, here on full scholarship, a little flakey. She was rumored to spend her summers at Duke University in North Carolina, being tested for some sort of mild ESP ability at the famous institute J.B. Rhine had founded there, but just what sort of ESP wasn't clear; it wasn't something she talked about. Not one of the interesting ones like reading minds or making things float, anyway. Remote seeing, maybe, or guessing the weather. Of far more interest, as far as I was concerned, was her poetry. Out of roughly one hundred English majors on campus willing to publicly express opinions about poetry, about ninety-five were willing to admit they found hers impenetrable, and five worshipped her to the point of awe so incoherent, they couldn't explain it to anyone else. I was among the former group, rather to my own surprise. I liked weird, exotic, avant garde stuff, prided myself on it, but hers was just . . . out there. Most often I simply couldn't grasp what she'd been trying to accomplish well enough to hazard a guess as to how well she'd succeeded.
I guess that's my prejudice with art. I don't care what set of rules the artist used . . . as long as I'm given a fighting chance to guess what they were. I like to feel I could tell if he made a mistake.
By the time that school year ended, I had probably had fewer than a dozen conversations with her, none of them long, none about anything of substance. The most personal thing I learned about her was that she could barely taste anything; it turns out the sense of smell is essential to the sense of taste. (Try telling strawberry ice cream from vanilla, blindfolded and holding your nose.) I always meant to ask her about her poetry, but never found a polite way to say, "I find your work impenetrable; can you get me started?" I meant to ask about the ESP stuff, but never found a polite way to ask, "Do you really believe in that crap?" I meant to ask her about her childhood in the Ukraine, but never found a polite way to ask, "So what was Mordor like?" Above all, from the moment she and Zudie first connected I wondered, just like everyone else on campus, how in the hell she could possibly stand to be near anyone who stank so, even if she herself couldn't detect it . . . but I doubt there is a polite way to ask that.
I remember that twice, before the end of that semester, I managed to get her alone, with the intention of working the conversation around to Zudie's unique personal hygiene standards. I wondered if she might be able to shed any light on exactly what his problem with bathing was. Each time, she reacted the same way: she didn't know what I was talking about. She seemed honestly unaware there was anything wrong with the way he smelled. The first time she thought I was making an odd joke; the second time she got mad and I had to apologize.
I didn't dislike her. But I didn't especially like her, either. I couldn't connect with her, didn't get her. I couldn't seem to find a topic of conversation we both cared about. Except Zudie, and she didn't like to talk about him. Most people I'd known who were in love could not be stopped from talking ab
out their beloved, but I guessed maybe poets were different.
I take it back. There was one topic we did nearly discuss . . . until we realized how it was going to turn out, and backed away by mutual agreement. To keep the peace—which was ironic because the topic was war. She supported the war in Vietnam.
Reading accounts of the sixties today, it's easy to get the impression that after some initial confusion, my entire generation united in opposition to that war, and worked arm-in-arm to end it, chanting "Give Peace A Chance!" as one. That's revisionist horse shit. Less than ten percent of Billy Joe's student body opposed the war when I arrived in 1966, and I doubt the figure ever rose higher than thirty percent while I was there . . . until the U.S. pulled out and our numbers doubled overnight retroactively. They've been climbing ever since. Try looking today for someone my age who will admit that he supported the war, voted for Nixon, went short-haired and beardless, abstained from psychedelics, or cheered when antiwar protesters got the shit kicked out of them by right-wing thugs. I haven't found one in decades. All I can tell you is, back then they were in the overwhelming majority on my campus. Perhaps they all died. Of lameness.
But if I stand for anything at all, it's tolerance. So Oksana was not the only friend with whom I tacitly agreed not to discuss the war. A lot of my fellow hippies enjoyed arguing with the straights, because it was so easy. I was more the kind who believed I made my best contribution to the discussion by having better vibes than the pro-war people. And she seemed to believe in the same tactics on her side. There was never a trace of bad feeling between us. I just never warmed to her, or she to me. Our senses of humor didn't match; she always smiled when I made a joke, but clearly only from politeness, and when she made one I usually didn't notice she had until minutes or hours later. She had a knack for telling me things about myself I didn't want to know, and I couldn't even get irritated because she never did it in an aggressive way but merely offered all-too-astute observations. It was only partly because I never saw her without a science fiction paperback in her backpack (she wore a backpack) that I started thinking of her in my head as part Martian.
"I told her that," Zudie told me now. "It made her laugh hard."
I thought about it. "I'm glad to know I made her laugh hard. I used to try."
"You succeeded more often than you knew."
We had reached his home. A big heap of rock at the edge of the water, heavily overgrown with scrub vegetation and moss, over on the far side of the island where no sea landing was possible. He lifted his left hand, and a section of the rock face developed a vertical crack and swung out on hinges, vegetation and all. I keep forgetting that nowadays they can pretty much pack a full service computer, phone and remote control into a watch no bigger than the one he wore. It began to dawn on me that Zudie might be about as naked and defenseless as a cartoon superhero. Who knew what weapons were trained on me now?
"None," he said. "You're with me." He went inside.
To keep being with him, I did too.
I was half expecting to walk into a fully modern luxury apartment with hardwood floors, indirect lighting, all the latest high-tech appliances and entertainment dispensers, and a two-car Batcave in the basement. What I found was quite different . . . but I had to admit it was by far the best upholstered and appointed cave I'd ever seen. Not to mention the neatest bachelor's quarters I'd ever seen: mine were a disaster area by comparison.
He handed me a bath towel. "Give me your clothes; I'll rinse and dry them."
I nodded. I was dripping on his floor. And overdressed.
Temperature and humidity were not cavelike at all but ideal for naked humans. The floor was stone, but somehow warm enough for bare feet without feeling heated. Adequate lighting, with the new hyperefficient bulbs. Ceiling just a bit low for a man of my height, which despite advancing years is so far still 186 centimeters, or six foot one. I saw the room's heat sources, a pair of the same highly efficient Super brand electric/gas radiators that I used myself at home. The floor was stone. I could just barely smell his dinner, something with garlic, and nothing else.
We were in a large kitchen/dining room/living room space, and directly ahead of us was a corridor running the length of the place, with four doors off it. I guessed the total square footage of the place to be a little more than half that of my own cottage. There was a minimum of furniture in the living room area to my right, just two chairs and a coffee table made of a slab of rock, on which lay a Powerbook and an assortment of remotes. But before them were three very large flatscreen monitors, each with its own eight-core Mac Pro workstation, one of those Apple TV gadgets I'd been lusting for, and a couple of eight-speaker towers that looked capable of vaporizing us and sending our constituent molecules back through time. I didn't see any wires anywhere except a few power cords.
"Don't ask," he said, so I didn't. I remembered that Zudie had come from money. Evidently his family had found a way to leave some of it to a scion who did not legally exist.
That pretty much exhausted the high-tech in the place, though. The kitchen was simple, basic, no gourmet gear at all. Small electric two-burner stove with tiny oven, small microwave. Water pumped from a cistern, heated in a standard tank. To my horror I could see no coffee machine, or even a teapot, and I remembered that Zudie regarded caffeine as a poisonous substance. I'm a hardcore caffiend. At home I have a Jura Scala Vario I got thirdhand. Push a single button, and sixty seconds later you're drinking fresh-ground French Press-style coffee. Every few days you toss in a pound of beans and a few gallons of water, and empty the used-grounds hopper. I hoped I wouldn't be here too long.
"Relax," he said. "I have some, and means to make it." Without asking he went to the kitchen end and started a pot of water boiling. After some rummaging in one of the harder-to-reach cabinets, he located coffee, sugar, and one of those little red plastic cones designed to hold a one-cup coffee filter above a cup. "No cream."
"Fine."
As the water heated he said, "Okay, sit down over there and go over it again. Slowly this time. Visualize rather than summarize."
I sat in one of the chairs by the TV and reviewed in my mind everything that had happened from the moment Nika had pulled into my driveway until I had set to sea in the Fiendish Dinghy. He never interrupted. By the time I was done, I was drinking hot coffee. It was startlingly good, for already-ground coffee that was neither refrigerated nor vaccum-packed.
The first comment he made after I finished my mental recap surprised me. "Very impressive young man, your son," he said, sitting down across from me. "It tears you up inside, being hated by him."
"Almost as bad as her death itself," I agreed. "That, I'm getting past, slowly."
"You can't finish getting past it until he at least starts," he said.
I stared at him. Even back in college he'd had a way of doing that: speaking a single short sentence that didn't really say anything you didn't already know, exactly, but somehow got you looking at it from a fresh new angle. "And as long as he stays pissed at me he doesn't have to start," I said.
"It isn't you he's pissed at. You're just the one he can reach."
"Jesus." He'd done it again. "What should I do?"
He smiled a bitter smile. "You are asking me for advice on interpersonal relations?"
I looked him in the eye. "Yes," I said, and nodded. "Yes, Zudie, I am."
Slowly the bitterness leached out of the smile. "Thank you."
"Thank you. What should I do?"
He thought for a moment, and his smile broadened. "Punch him in the mouth."
I nearly choked on my last sip of coffee. "What?"
"Think about it awhile." His smile went away. "Another time. We're busy right now."
He was right. My problem with my son was chronic, Zudie's was acute. "Sorry," I said. "But you brought it up."
He nodded. "It's important."
"And now we move on. Okay." I stopped and tried to organize my thoughts. Suddenly I thought of a question I'd wante
d to ask him ever since we'd met again a few years ago and he'd confessed to being a mind reader. "Zudie . . . can you ever send thoughts, instead of just receiving them? To someone receptive?"
He became a statue of himself.
Was I offending him by suggesting he was a mental voyeur? I tried to explain. "I need a lot of information from you, and it would save an awful lot of time if you could just give it to me in a data dump the way I just did to you. I . . . I'm just asking," I finished lamely.
The sudden transformation in him was horrifying. He was not seeing me anymore. He was not there anymore. Wherever he was, the best thing you could hope for was a week's vacation in Hell.
I closed my eyes and shouted with both voice and mind, "I'M SORRY, ZUDIE!"
Just as suddenly, he was back. "Not your fault. Perfectly reasonable question." All at once I found myself recalling that on the day I'd met Zudie, more than forty years ago, one of the very first thoughts that had gone through my head was, this man can forgive anything. "It just derailed a train of thought. Tesla resonance."
I nodded. "Happens."
He took a deep breath and let it out, then another. Then he rotated his head from side to side to crack his neck. I noticed for the first time his excellent posture.
"Okay," he said finally. "I'm going to tell you the story. I've only told it twice before, and not in years. And when I am done, you will understand why I am absolutely positive that I will never be able to directly touch another mind.
"But listen carefully, Russell: in order to make you understand that, I'm going to have to tell you the most terrible secret I know. One nobody else knows. Once I have, you'll be stuck with it, forever, just like I am." He locked eyes with me. "And it's really rotten. Are you willing to share that with me?"
"Absolutely." I never hesitated. This man had saved my life—and Nika's, and the lives of at least four strangers we never met—by killing a monster with his mind in my living room, in some way so ghastly it had cost him his self-respect and peace of mind for the past two years. If he needed to share a burden, I was there.
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