“And why do you do that, David?”

“I don’t know. It gives me something to do, I guess.”

“Maybe if you didn’t make so much trouble, people would like you more. Don’t you want people to like you?”

“I don’t care. I don’t need it.”

“Everybody needs friends, David.”

“I’ve got friends.”

“Mrs. Fleischer says you don’t have very many, and that you hit them a lot and make them unhappy. Why do you hit your friends?”

“Because I don’t like them. Because they’re dumb.”

“Then they aren’t really friends, if that’s how you feel about them.”

Shrugging, David said, “I can get along without them. I have fun just being by myself.”

“Are you happy at home?”

“I guess so.”

“You love your mommy and daddy?”

A pause. A feeling of great tension coming out of the doctor’s mind. This is an important question. Give the right answer, David. Give him the answer he wants.

“Yes,” David said.

“Do you ever wish you had a baby brother or sister?”

No hesitation now. “No.”

“Really, no? You like being all alone?”

David nodded. “The afternoons are the best time. When I’m home from school and there’s nobody around. Am I going to have a baby brother or sister?”

Chuckles from the doctor. “I’m sure I don’t know. That would be up to your mommy and daddy, wouldn’t it?”

“You won’t tell them to get one for me, will you? I mean, you might say to them that it would be good for me to have one, and then they’d go and get one, but I really don’t want—” I’m in trouble, David realized suddenly.

“What makes you think I’d tell your parents it would be good for you to have a baby brother or sister?” the doctor asked quietly, not smiling now at all.

“I don’t know. It was just an idea.” Which I found inside your head, doctor. And now I want to get out of here. I don’t want to talk to you any more. “Hey, your name isn’t really Hittner, is it? With an n? I bet I know your real name. Heil!”

I never could send my thoughts into anybody else’s head. Even when the power was strongest in me, I couldn’t transmit. I could only receive. Maybe there are people around who do have that power, who can transmit thoughts. even to those who don’t have any special receiving gift, but I wasn’t ever one of them. So right there I was condemned to be society’s ugliest toad, the eavesdropper, the voyeur. Old English proverb: He who peeps through a hole may see what will vex him. Yes. In those years when I was particularly eager to communicate with people, I’d work up fearful sweats trying to plant my thoughts in them. I’d sit in a classroom staring at the back of some girl’s head, and I’d think hard at her: Hello, Annie, this is David Selig calling, do you read me? Do you read me? I love you, Annie. Over. Over and out. But Annie never read me, and the currents of her mind would roll on like a placid river, undisturbed by the existence of David Selig.

No way, then, for me to speak to other minds, only to spy on them. The way the power manifests itself in me has always been highly variable. I never had much conscious control over it, other than being able to stop down the intensity of input and to do a certain amount of fine tuning; basically I had to take whatever came drifting in. Most often I would pick up a person’s surface thoughts, his subvocalizations of the things he’s just about to say. These would come to me in a clear conversational manner, exactly as though he had said them, except the tone of voice was different, it was plainly not a tone produced by the vocal apparatus. I don’t remember any period even in my childhood when I confused spoken communication with mental communication. This ability to read surface thoughts has been fairly consistent throughout: I still can anticipate verbal statements more often than not, especially when I’m with someone who has the habit of rehearsing what he intends to say.

I could also and to some extent still can anticipate immediate intentions, such as the decision to throw a short right jab to the jaw. My way of knowing such things varies. I might pick up a coherent inner verbal statement — I’m now going to throw a short right jab to his jaw — or, if the power happens to be working on deeper levels that day, I may simply pick up a series of non-verbal instructions to the muscles, which add up in a fraction of a second to the process of bringing the right arm up for a short jab to the jaw. Call it body language on the telepathic wavelength.

Another thing I’ve been able to do, though never consistently, is tune in to the deepest layers of the mind — where the soul lives, if you will. Where the consciousness lies bathed in a murky soup of indistinct unconscious phenomena. Here lurk hopes, fears, perceptions, purposes, passions, memories, philosophical positions, moral policies, hungers, sorrows, the whole ragbag accumulation of events and attitudes that defines the private self. Ordinarily some of this bleeds through to me even when the most superficial mental contact is established: I can’t help getting a certain amount of information about the coloration of the soul. But occasionally — hardly ever, now — I fasten my hooks into the real stuff, the whole person. There’s ecstasy in that. There’s an electrifying sense of contact. Coupled, of course, with a stabbing, numbing sense of guilt, because of the totality of my voyeurism: how much more of a peeping tom can a person be? Incidentally, the soul speaks a universal language. When I look into the mind of Mrs. Esperanza Dominguez, say, and I get a gabble of Spanish out of it, I don’t really know what she’s thinking, because I don’t understand very much Spanish. But if I were to get into the depths of her soul I’d have complete comprehension of anything I picked up. The mind may think in Spanish or Basque or Hungarian or Finnish, but the soul thinks in a languageless language accessible to any prying sneaking freak who comes along to peer at its mysteries.

No matter. It’s all going from me now.

Paul F. Bruno

Comp Lit 18, Prof. Schmitz

October 15, 1976

In the nightmare world of The Trial and The Castle, only one thing is certain: that the central figure, significantly known by the initial K, is doomed to frustration. All else is dreamlike and unsure; courtrooms spring up in tenements, mysterious warders devour one’s breakfast, a man thought to be Sordini is actually Sortini. The central fact is certain, though: K will fail in his attempt to attain grace.

The two novels have the same theme and approximately the same basic structure. In both, K seeks for grace and is led to the final realization that it is to be withheld from him. (The Castle is unfinished, but its conclusion seems plain.) Kafka brings his heroes into involvement with their situations in opposite ways: in The Trial, Joseph K. is passive until he is jolted into the action of the book by the unexpected arrival of the two warders; in The Castle, K is first shown as an active character making efforts on his own behalf to reach the mysterious Castle. To be sure, though, he has originally been summoned by the Castle; the action did not originate in himself, and thus he began as as passive a character as Joseph K. The distinction is that The Trial opens at a point earlier in the time-stream of the action — at the earliest possible point, in fact. The Castle follows more closely the ancient rule of beginning in medias res, with K already summoned and trying to reach the Castle.

Both books get off to rapid starts. Joseph K. is arrested in the very first sentence of The Trial, and his counterpart K arrives at what he thinks is going to be the last stop before the Castle on the first page of that novel. From there, both K’s struggle futilely toward their goals (in The Castle, simply to get to the top of the hill; in The Trial, first to understand the nature of his guilt, and then, despairing of this, to achieve acquittal without understanding). Both actually get farther from their goals with each succeeding action. The Trial reaches its peak in the wonderful Cathedral scene, quite likely the most terrifying single sequence in any of Kafka’s work, in which K is given to realize that he is guilty and can never be acquitted; the chapter that follows, describing K’s execution, is little more than an anticlimactic appendage. The Castle, less complete than The Trial, lacks the counterpart of the Cathedral scene (perhaps Kafka was unable to devise one?) and thus is artistically less satisfying than the shorter, more intense, more tightly constructed Trial.