by John Cheever
It was half and half. Half the cats cased the slaughter and made for the closed door, Half of them wandered around at a loss, sniffing the blood of their kind and sometimes drinking it. Two of the guards vomited and half a dozen cats got killed eating the vomit. The cats that hung around the door, waiting to be let out, were an easy target. When a third guard got sick Tiny said, “O.K., O.K., that’s enough for tonight, but it don’t give me back my London broil. Get the fire detail to clean this up.” He signaled for the door to open and when it rolled back six or maybe ten cats escaped, giving to Farragut some reminder of the invincible.
The fire detail came in with waste cans, shovels and two lengths of hose. They sluiced down the block and shoveled up the dead cats. They sluiced down the cells as well and Farragut climbed onto his bunk, knelt there and said: “Blessed are the meek,” but he couldn’t remember what came next.
Farragut was a drug addict and felt that the consciousness of the opium eater was much broader, more vast and representative of the human condition than the consciousness of someone who had never experienced addiction. The drug he needed was a distillate of earth, air, water and fire. He was mortal and his addiction was a beautiful illustration of the bounds of his mortality. He had been introduced to drugs during a war on some island where the weather was suffocating, the jungle rot of his hairy parts was suppurating and the enemy were murderers. The company medic had ordered gallons of a sticky yellow cough syrup and every morning the “in” group drank a glass of this and went into combat, drugged and at peace with suffocation, suppuration and murder. This was followed by Benzedrine, and Benzedrine and his beer ration got him through the war and back to his own shores, his own home and his wife. He went guiltlessly from Benzedrine to heroin, encouraged in his addiction by almost every voice he heard. Yesterday was the age of anxiety, the age of the fish, and today, his day, his morning, was the mysterious and adventurous age of the needle. His generation was the generation of addiction. It was his school, his college, the flag under which he marched into battle. The declaration of addiction was in every paper, magazine and airborne voice. Addiction was the law of the prophets. When he began to teach, he and his department head would shoot up before the big lecture, admitting that what was expected of them from the world could be produced only by the essence of a flower. It was challenge and response. The new buildings of the university outstripped the human scale, the human imagination, the wildest human dreams. The bridges that he drove across to get to the university were the distillate of engineering computers, a sort of mechanical Holy Ghost. The planes that took him from his university to some other university arced luxuriously into an altitude where men would perish. There was no philosophical suture that could make anything but destructiveness of the sciences that were taught in the high buildings he could see from the windows of English and Philosophy. There were some men of such stupidity that they did not respond to these murderous contradictions and led lives that were without awareness and distinction. His memory of a life without drugs was like a memory of himself as a blond, half-naked youth in good flannels, walking on a white beach between the dark sea and a rank of leonine granite, and to seek out such a memory was contemptible. A life without drugs seemed in fact and in spirit a remote and despicable point in his past—binoculars upon telescopes, lens grating lens, employed to pick out a figure of no consequence on a long gone summer’s day.
But in the vastness of his opium eater’s consciousness was—no more than a grain of sand—the knowledge that if his inspired knowledge of the earth’s drugs was severed, he would face a cruel and unnatural death. Congressmen and senators sometimes visited prison. They were seldom shown the methadone line, but twice when they had stumbled on this formation they had objected to the sweat of the taxpayers’ brow being wasted to sustain convicted felons in their diseased addiction. Their protests had not been effective, but Farragut’s feeling about visiting senators in prison had turned into a murderous hatred since these men might kill him. The fear of death is for all of us everywhere, but for the great intelligence of the opium eater it is beautifully narrowed into the crux of drugs. To starve to death, to burn or drown in the bliss of a great high, would be nothing at all. Drugs belonged to all exalted experience, thought Farragut. Drugs belonged in church. Take this in memory of me and be grateful, said the priest, laying an amphetamine on the kneeling man’s tongue. Only the opium eater truly understands the pain of death. When one morning the orderly who gave Farragut his methadone sneezed, this was for Farragut an ominous and a dreadful sound. The orderly might come down with a cold, and considering the nature of the prison bureaucracy, there might not be anyone else who had permission to issue the drug. The sound of a sneeze meant death.
A search for contraband was called on Thursday and the cellblocks were off limits until after night chow. At around eight the names of the malefactors were announced. The Cuckold and Farragut were called and they went down to the deputy warden’s office. Two spoons had been found, hidden in Farragut’s toilet bowl. He was given six days cell lock. Farragut faced the sentence calmly by first considering the pain of confinement. He assured himself that he could stand confinement with composure. He was at that time the prison’s chief typist, respected for his intelligence, efficiency and speed, and he had to face the possibility that in his absence some new typist might be put in his place in the shop and his slot, his job, his self-importance, would be eclipsed. Someone might have come in that afternoon on the bus who could fire off dittos at twice his speed and usurp his office, his chair, his desk and his lamp. Worried about the thrall of confinement and the threat of his self-esteem, Farragut went back to Tiny, gave him his penance slip and asked: “How will I get my fix?”
“I’ll check,” said Tiny. “They’ll bring it up from the infirmary, I guess. You don’t get nothing until tomorrow morning.” Farragut didn’t need methadone then, but the morning threatened to usurp the facts of the night. He undressed, got into bed and watched the news on TV. The news for the last two weeks had been dominated by a murderess. She had been given the usual characteristics. She and her husband lived in an expensive house in an exclusive community. The house was painted white, the grounds were planted with costly firs and the lawn and the hedges were beautifully maintained. Her character had been admired. She taught Sunday school and had been a den mother for the Girl Scouts. Her coffeecakes for the Trinity Church bake sale were famous and at PTA meetings she expressed herself with intelligence, character and charm. “Oh, she was so kind,” her neighbors said, “so clean, so friendly, she loved him so that I can’t imagine …” What they couldn’t imagine was that she had murdered her husband, carefully drained his blood and flushed it down the toilet, washed him clean and begun to rectify and improve his physique. First she decapitated the corpse and replaced his head with the drained head of a second victim. She then replaced his genitals with the genitals of her third victim and his feet with the feet of her fourth. It was when she invited a neighbor in to see this perfect man that suspicions had been aroused. She then vanished. Offers to exploit the remains for commercial purposes were being considered, but nothing had been agreed upon. Night after night the fragments of the tale ended with a draw-away shot of the serene white house, the specimen planting and the velvet lawn.
Lying in bed, Farragut felt his anxiety beginning to mount. He would be denied his fix in the morning. He would die. He would be murdered. He then remembered the times when his life had been threatened. Firstly his father, having written Farragut’s name with his cock, had tried to erase the writing. One of his mother’s favorite stories was of the night that Farragut’s father brought a doctor to the house for dinner. Halfway through the dinner it turned out that the doctor was an abortionist and had been asked to dinner in order to kill Farragut. This, of course, he could not remember, but he could remember walking on a beach with his brother. This was on one of the Atlantic islands. At the tip of the island there was a narrows called Chilton Gut. “Swim?” his broth
er asked. His brother didn’t like to swim, but Farragut, it was well known, would strip and jump into any body of water. He got out of his clothes and was wading into the sea when some stranger, a fisherman, came running up the beach, shouting: “Stop, stop! What do you think you’re doing?” “I was going in for a dip,” said Farragut. “You’re crazy,” the stranger said. ‘The tide is turning and even if the rip doesn’t get you the sharks will. You can’t ever swim here. They ought to put up a sign—but at the rip tide you wouldn’t last a minute. You can’t ever swim here. They waste all the taxpayers’ money putting up traffic signs, speeding signs, yield signs, stop signs, but on a well-known deathtrap like this they don’t have any sign at all.” Farragut thanked the stranger and got back into his clothes. His brother had started down the beach. Eben must have jogged or run because he had put quite a distance between them. Farragut caught up with him and the first thing he asked was, “When is Louisa coming back from Denver? I know you’ve told me, but I’ve forgotten.” “Tuesday,” Eben said. “She’s staying over for Ruth’s wedding.” So they walked back to the house, talking about Louisa’s visit. Farragut remembered being happy at the fact that he was alive. The sky was blue.
At a rehabilitation center in Colorado where Farragut had been confined to check his addiction, the doctors discovered that heroin had damaged his heart. His cure lasted thirty-eight days and before he was discharged he was given his instructions. He was being discharged as an outpatient. Because of his heart he could not, for six weeks, climb stairs, drive a car or exert himself in any way. He must avoid strenuous changes in temperature and above all excitement. Excitement of any sort would kill him. The doctor then used the classic illustration of the man who shoveled snow, entered a hot house and quarreled with his wife. It was as quick as a bullet through the head. Farragut flew east and his flight was uneventful. He got a cab to their apartment, where Marcia let him in. “Hi,” he said and bent to kiss her, but she averted her face. “I’m an outpatient,” he said. “A salt-free diet—not really salt-free, but no salt added. I can’t climb stairs or drive a car and I do have to avoid excitement. It seems easy enough. Maybe we could go to the beach.”
Marcia walked down the long hall to their bedroom and slammed the door. The noise of the sound was explosive and in case he had missed this she opened the door and slammed it again. The effect on his heart was immediate. He became faint, dizzy and short-winded. He staggered to the sofa in the living room and lay down. He was in too much pain and fear to realize that the homecoming of a drug addict was not romantic. He fell asleep. The daylight had begun to go when he regained consciousness. His heart was still drumming, his vision was cloudy and he was very weak and frightened. He heard Marcia open the door to their room and come down the hall. “Is there anything I can get you?” she asked. Her tone was murderous.
“Some sort of kindness,” he said. He was helpless. “A little kindness.”
“Kindness?” she asked. “Do you expect kindness from me at a time like this? What have you ever done to deserve kindness? What have you ever given me? Drudgery. A superficial and a meaningless life. Dust. Cobwebs. Cars and cigarette lighters that don’t work. Bathtub rings, unfinished toilets, an international renown for sexual depravity, clinical alcoholism and drug addiction, broken arms, legs, brain concussions and now a massive attack of heart failure. That’s what you’ve given me to live with, and now you expect kindness.” The drumming of his heart worsened, his vision got dimmer and he fell asleep, but when he awoke Marcia was cooking something in the kitchen and he was still alive.
Eben entered again. It was at a party in a New York brownstone. Some guests were leaving and he stood in an open window, shouting goodbye. It was a large window and he was standing on the sill. Below him was an areaway with an iron fence of palings, cast to look like spears. As he stood in the window, someone gave him a swift push. He jumped or fell out the window, missed the iron spears and landed on his knees on the paving. One of the departing guests returned and helped him to his feet and he went on talking about when they would meet again. He did this to avoid looking back at the window to see, if he might, who had pushed him. That he didn’t want to know. He had sprained an ankle and bruised a knee, but he refrained from thinking about the incident again. Many years later, walking in the woods, Eben had suddenly asked: “Do you remember that party at Sarah’s when you got terribly drunk and someone pushed you out the window?” “Yes,” said Farragut. “I’ve never told you who it was,” said Eben. “It was that man from Chicago.” Farragut thought that his brother had incriminated himself with this remark, but Eben seemed to feel exonerated. He braced his shoulders, lifted his head to the light and began to kick the leaves on the path vigorously.
The lights and the TV went off. Tennis began to ask: “Have you been taken care of? Have you been taken care of?” Farragut, lying on his cot thinking of the morning and his possible death, thought that the dead, compared to the imprisoned, would have some advantages. The dead would at least have panoramic memories and regrets, while he, as a prisoner, found his memories of the shining world to be broken, intermittent and dependent upon chance smells—grass, shoe leather, the odor of piped water in the showers. He possessed some memories, but they were eclipsed and indisposed. Waking in the morning, he cast wildly and desperately around for a word, a metaphor, a touch or smell that would grant him a bearing, but he was left mostly with methadone and his unruly keel. He seemed, in prison, to be a traveler and he had traveled in enough strange countries to recognize this keen alienation. It was the sense that on waking before dawn, everything, beginning with the dream from which he waked, was alien. He had dreamed in another language and felt on waking the texture and smell of strange bedclothes. From the window came the strange smell of strange fuels. He bathed in strange and rusty water, wiped his ass on strange and barbarous toilet paper and climbed down unfamiliar stairs to be served a strange and profoundly offensive breakfast. That was travel. It was the same here. Everything he saw, touched, smelled and dreamed of was cruelly alien, but this continent or nation in which he might spend the rest of his living days had no flag, no anthem, no monarch, president, taxes, boundaries or graves.
He slept poorly and felt haggard when he woke. Chicken Number Two brought him gruel and coffee, but his heart was moving along with his watch. If the methadone didn’t come at nine he would begin to die. It would not be anything that he could walk into, like an electric chair or a noose. At five minutes to nine he began to shout at Tiny. “I want my fix, it’s time for my fix, just let me get down to the infirmary and get my fix.” “Well, he has to take care of the line down there,” Tiny said. “Home deliveries don’t come until later.” “Maybe they don’t make home deliveries,” said Farragut. He sat on his cot, closed his eyes and tried to force himself into unconsciousness. This lasted a few minutes. Then he roared: “Get me my fix, for Jesus Christ’s sake!” Tiny went on figuring work sheets, but Farragut could barely see him. The rest of the men who hadn’t gone to shop began to watch. There was no one else in cell lock but the Cuckold. Then Chisholm, the deputy warden, came in with two other assholes. “I hear you got a withdrawal show scheduled,” he said. “Yeah,” said Tiny. “It’s not my idea.” He didn’t look up from his work sheets. “Take any empty table. The floor show’s about to begin.”
Farragut had begun to sweat from his armpits, crotch and brow. Then the sweat flowed down his ribs and soaked his trousers. His eyes were burning. He could still marshal the percentiles. He would lose fifty percent vision. When the sweat was in full flood, he began to shake. This began with his hands. He sat on them, but then his head began to wag. He stood. He was shaking all over. Then his right arm flew out. He pulled it back. His left knee jerked up into the air. He pushed it down, but it went up again and began to go up and down like a piston. He fell and beat his head on the floor, trying to achieve the reasonableness of pain. Pain would give him peace. When he realized that he could not reach pain this way, he began the enormous st
ruggle to hang himself. He tried fifteen or a million times before he was able to get his hand on his belt buckle. His hand flew away and after another long struggle he got it back to the buckle and unfastened it. Then, on his knees, with his head still on the floor, he jerked the belt out of the loops. The sweat had stopped. Convulsions of cold racked him. No longer even on his knees, but moving over the floor like a swimmer, he got to the chair, looped the buckle onto itself for a noose and fastened the belt to a nail on the chair. He was trying to strangle himself when Chisholm said: “Cut the poor prick down and get his fix.” Tiny unlocked the cell door. Farragut couldn’t see much, but he could see this, and the instant the cell was unlocked he sprang to his feet, collided with Tiny and was halfway out the cell and running for the infirmary when Chisholm brained him with a chair. He came to in the infirmary with his left leg in a plaster cast and half his head in bandages. Tiny was there in civilian clothes. “Farragut, Farragut,” he asked, “why is you an addict?”