The Jacket (The Star-Rover)

by Jack London

  “Ha! ha! ha!” Jake Oppenheimer rapped his laughter thirteen cells away.

  “You see, that’s Jake’s trouble,” Morrell went on. “He can’t believe. That one time he tried it he was too strong and failed. And now he thinks I am kidding.”

  “When you die you are dead, and dead men stay dead,” Oppenheimer retorted.

  “I tell you I’ve been dead three times,” Morrell argued.

  “And lived to tell us about it,” Oppenheimer jeered.

  “But don’t forget one thing, Darrell,” Morrell rapped to me. “The thing is ticklish. You have a feeling all the time that you are taking liberties. I can’t explain it, but I always had a feeling if I was away when they came and let my body out of the jacket that I couldn’t get back into my body again. I mean that my body would be dead for keeps. And I didn’t want it to be dead. I didn’t want to give Captain Jamie and the rest that satisfaction. But I tell you, Darrell, if you can turn the trick you can laugh at the Warden. Once you make your body die that way it don’t matter whether they keep you in the jacket a month on end. You don’t suffer none, and your body don’t suffer. You know there are cases of people who have slept a whole year at a time. That’s the way it will be with your body. It just stays there in the jacket, not hurting or anything, just waiting for you to come back.

  “You try it. I am giving you the straight steer.”

  “And if he don’t come back?” Oppenheimer, asked.

  “Then the laugh will be on him, I guess, Jake,” Morrell answered. “Unless, maybe, it will be on us for sticking round this old dump when we could get away that easy.”

  And here the conversation ended, for Pie-Face Jones, waking crustily from stolen slumber, threatened Morrell and Oppenheimer with a report next morning that would mean the jacket for them. Me he did not threaten, for he knew I was doomed for the jacket anyway.

  I lay long there in the silence, forgetting the misery of my body while I considered this proposition Morrell had advanced. Already, as I have explained, by mechanical self-hypnosis I had sought to penetrate back through time to my previous selves. That I had partly succeeded I knew; but all that I had experienced was a fluttering of apparitions that merged erratically and were without continuity.

  But Morrell’s method was so patently the reverse of my method of self-hypnosis that I was fascinated. By my method, my consciousness went first of all. By his method, consciousness persisted last of all, and, when the body was quite gone, passed into stages so sublimated that it left the body, left the prison of San Quentin, and journeyed afar, and was still consciousness.

  It was worth a trial, anyway, I concluded. And, despite the sceptical attitude of the scientist that was mine, I believed. I had no doubt I could do what Morrell said he had done three times. Perhaps this faith that so easily possessed me was due to my extreme debility. Perhaps I was not strong enough to be sceptical. This was the hypothesis already suggested by Morrell. It was a conclusion of pure empiricism, and I, too, as you shall see, demonstrated it empirically.

  CHAPTER X

  And above all things, next morning Warden Atherton came into my cell on murder intent. With him were Captain Jamie, Doctor Jackson, Pie-Face Jones, and Al Hutchins. Al Hutchins was serving a forty-years’ sentence, and was in hopes of being pardoned out. For four years he had been head trusty of San Quentin. That this was a position of great power you will realize when I tell you that the graft alone of the head trusty was estimated at three thousand dollars a year. Wherefore Al Hutchins, in possession of ten or twelve thousand dollars and of the promise of a pardon, could be depended upon to do the Warden’s bidding blind.

  I have just said that Warden Atherton came into my cell intent on murder. His face showed it. His actions proved it.

  “Examine him,” he ordered Doctor Jackson.

  That wretched apology of a creature stripped from me my dirt-encrusted shirt that I had worn since my entrance to solitary, and exposed my poor wasted body, the skin ridged like brown parchment over the ribs and sore-infested from the many bouts with the jacket. The examination was shamelessly perfunctory.

  “Will he stand it?” the Warden demanded.

  “Yes,” Doctor Jackson answered.

  “How’s the heart?”

  “Splendid.”

  “You think he’ll stand ten days of it, Doc.?”

  “Sure.”

  “I don’t believe it,” the Warden announced savagely. “But we’ll try it just the same.—Lie down, Standing.”

  I obeyed, stretching myself face-downward on the flat-spread jacket. The Warden seemed to debate with himself for a moment.

  “Roll over,” he commanded.

  I made several efforts, but was too weak to succeed, and could only sprawl and squirm in my helplessness.

  “Putting it on,” was Jackson ’s comment.

  “Well, he won’t have to put it on when I’m done with him,” said the Warden. “Lend him a hand. I can’t waste any more time on him.”

  So they rolled me over on my back, where I stared up into Warden Atherton’s face.

  “Standing,” he said slowly, “I’ve given you all the rope I am going to. I am sick and tired of your stubbornness. My patience is exhausted. Doctor Jackson says you are in condition to stand ten days in the jacket. You can figure your chances. But I am going to give you your last chance now. Come across with the dynamite. The moment it is in my hands I’ll take you out of here. You can bathe and shave and get clean clothes. I’ll let you loaf for six months on hospital grub, and then I’ll put you trusty in the library. You can’t ask me to be fairer with you than that. Besides, you’re not squealing on anybody. You are the only person in San Quentin who knows where the dynamite is. You won’t hurt anybody’s feelings by giving in, and you’ll be all to the good from the moment you do give in. And if you don’t—”

  He paused and shrugged his shoulders significantly.

  “Well, if you don’t, you start in the ten days right now.”

  The prospect was terrifying. So weak was I that I was as certain as the Warden was that it meant death in the jacket. And then I remembered Morrell’s trick. Now, if ever, was the need of it; and now, if ever, was the time to practise the faith of it. I smiled up in the face of Warden Atherton. And I put faith in that smile, and faith in the proposition I made to him.

  “Warden,” I said, “do you see the way I am smiling? Well, if, at the end of the ten days, when you unlace me, I smile up at you in the same way, will you give a sack of Bull Durham and a package of brown papers to Morrell and Oppenheimer?”

  “Ain’t they the crazy ginks, these college guys,” Captain Jamie snorted.

  Warden Atherton was a choleric man, and he took my request for insulting braggadocio.

  “Just for that you get an extra cinching,” he informed me.

  “I made you a sporting proposition, Warden,” I said quietly. “You can cinch me as tight as you please, but if I smile ten days from now will you give the Bull Durham to Morrell and Oppenheimer?”

  “You are mighty sure of yourself,” he retorted.

  “That’s why I made the proposition,” I replied.

  “Getting religion, eh?” he sneered.

  “No,” was my answer. “It merely happens that I possess more life than you can ever reach the end of. Make it a hundred days if you want, and I’ll smile at you when it’s over.”

  “I guess ten days will more than do you, Standing.”

  “That’s your opinion,” I said. “Have you got faith in it? If you have you won’t even lose the price of the two five-cents sacks of tobacco. Anyway, what have you got to be afraid of?”

  “For two cents I’d kick the face off of you right now,” he snarled.

  “Don’t let me stop you.” I was impudently suave. “Kick as hard as you please, and I’ll still have enough face left with which to smile. In the meantime, while you are hesitating, suppose you accept my original proposition.”

  A man must be terribly weak and pro
foundly desperate to be able, under such circumstances, to beard the Warden in solitary. Or he may be both, and, in addition, he may have faith. I know now that I had the faith and so acted on it. I believed what Morrell had told me. I believed in the lordship of the mind over the body. I believed that not even a hundred days in the jacket could kill me.

  Captain Jamie must have sensed this faith that informed me, for he said:

  “I remember a Swede that went crazy twenty years ago. That was before your time, Warden. He’d killed a man in a quarrel over twenty-five cents and got life for it. He was a cook. He got religion. He said that a golden chariot was coming to take him to heaven, and he sat down on top the red-hot range and sang hymns and hosannahs while he cooked. They dragged him off, but he croaked two days afterward in hospital. He was cooked to the bone. And to the end he swore he’d never felt the heat. Couldn’t get a squeal out of him.”

  “We’ll make Standing squeal,” said the Warden.

  “Since you are so sure of it, why don’t you accept my proposition?” I challenged.

  The Warden was so angry that it would have been ludicrous to me had I not been in so desperate plight. His face was convulsed. He clenched his hands, and, for a moment, it seemed that he was about to fall upon me and give me a beating. Then, with an effort, he controlled himself.

  “All right, Standing,” he snarled. “I’ll go you. But you bet your sweet life you’ll have to go some to smile ten days from now. Roll him over, boys, and cinch him till you hear his ribs crack. Hutchins, show him you know how to do it.”

  And they rolled me over and laced me as I had never been laced before. The head trusty certainly demonstrated his ability. I tried to steal what little space I could. Little it was, for I had long since shed my flesh, while my muscles were attenuated to mere strings. I had neither the strength nor bulk to steal more than a little, and the little I stole I swear I managed by sheer expansion at the joints of the bones of my frame. And of this little I was robbed by Hutchins, who, in the old days before he was made head trusty, had learned all the tricks of the jacket from the inside of the jacket.

  You see, Hutchins was a cur at heart, or a creature who had once been a man, but who had been broken on the wheel. He possessed ten or twelve thousand dollars, and his freedom was in sight if he obeyed orders. Later, I learned that there was a girl who had remained true to him, and who was even then waiting for him. The woman factor explains many things of men.

  If ever a man deliberately committed murder, Al Hutchins did that morning in solitary at the Warden’s bidding. He robbed me of the little space I stole. And, having robbed me of that, my body was defenceless, and, with his foot in my back while he drew the lacing light, he constricted me as no man had ever before succeeded in doing. So severe was this constriction of my frail frame upon my vital organs that I felt, there and then, immediately, that death was upon me. And still the miracle of faith was mine. I did not believe that I was going to die. I knew—I say I knew —that I was not going to die. My head was swimming, and my heart was pounding from my toenails to the hair-roots in my scalp.

  “That’s pretty tight,” Captain Jamie urged reluctantly.

  “The hell it is,” said Doctor Jackson. “I tell you nothing can hurt him. He’s a wooz. He ought to have been dead long ago.”

  Warden Atherton, after a hard struggle, managed to insert his forefinger between the lacing and my back. He brought his foot to bear upon me, with the weight of his body added to his foot, and pulled, but failed to get any fraction of an inch of slack.

  “I take my hat off to you, Hutchins,” he said. “You know your job. Now roll him over and let’s look at him.”

  They rolled me over on my back. I stared up at them with bulging eyes. This I know: Had they laced me in such fashion the first time I went into the jacket, I would surely have died in the first ten minutes. But I was well trained. I had behind me the thousands of hours in the jacket, and, plus that, I had faith in what Morrell had told me.

  “Now, laugh, damn you, laugh,” said the Warden to me. “Start that smile you’ve been bragging about.”

  So, while my lungs panted for a little air, while my heart threatened to burst, while my mind reeled, nevertheless I was able to smile up into the Warden’s face.

  CHAPTER XI

  The door clanged, shutting out all but a little light, and I was left alone on my back. By the tricks I had long since learned in the jacket, I managed to writhe myself across the floor an inch at a time until the edge of the sole of my right shoe touched the door. There was an immense cheer in this. I was not utterly alone. If the need arose, I could at least rap knuckle talk to Morrell.

  But Warden Atherton must have left strict injunctions on the guards, for, though I managed to call Morrell and tell him I intended trying the experiment, he was prevented by the guards from replying. Me they could only curse, for, in so far as I was in the jacket for a ten days’ bout, I was beyond all threat of punishment.

  I remember remarking at the time my serenity of mind. The customary pain of the jacket was in my body, but my mind was so passive that I was no more aware of the pain than was I aware of the floor beneath me or the walls around me. Never was a man in better mental and spiritual condition for such an experiment. Of course, this was largely due to my extreme weakness. But there was more to it. I had long schooled myself to be oblivious to pain. I had neither doubts nor fears. All the content of my mind seemed to be an absolute faith in the over-lordship of the mind. This passivity was almost dream-like, and yet, in its way, it was positive almost to a pitch of exaltation.

  I began my concentration of will. Even then my body was numbing and prickling through the loss of circulation. I directed my will to the little toe of my right foot, and I willed that toe to cease to be alive in my consciousness. I willed that toe to die—to die so far as I, its lord, and a different thing entirely from it, was concerned. There was the hard struggle. Morrell had warned me that it would be so. But there was no flicker of doubt to disturb my faith. I knew that that toe would die, and I knew when it was dead. Joint by joint it had died under the compulsion of my will.

  The rest was easy, but slow, I will admit. Joint by joint, toe by toe, all the toes of both my feet ceased to be. And joint by joint, the process went on. Came the time when my flesh below the ankles had ceased. Came the time when all below my knees had ceased.

  Such was the pitch of my perfect exaltation, that I knew not the slightest prod of rejoicing at my success. I knew nothing save that I was making my body die. All that was I was devoted to that sole task. I performed the work as thoroughly as any mason laying bricks, and I regarded the work as just about as commonplace as would a brick-mason regard his work.

  At the end of an hour my body was dead to the hips, and from the hips up, joint by joint, I continued to will the ascending death.

  It was when I reached the level of my heart that the first blurring and dizzying of my consciousness’ occurred. For fear that I should lose consciousness, I willed to hold the death I had gained, and shifted my concentration to my fingers. My brain cleared again, and the death of my arms to the shoulders was most rapidly accomplished.

  At this stage my body was all dead, so far as I was concerned, save my head and a little patch of my chest. No longer did the pound and smash of my compressed heart echo in my brain. My heart was beating steadily but feebly. The joy of it, had I dared joy at such a moment, would have been the cessation of sensations.

  At this point my experience differs from Morrell’s. Still willing automatically, I began to grow dreamy, as one does in that borderland between sleeping and waking. Also, it seemed as if a prodigious enlargement of my brain was taking place within the skull itself that did not enlarge. There were occasional glintings and flashings of light as if even I, the overlord, had ceased for a moment and the next moment was again myself, still the tenant of the fleshly tenement that I was making to die.

  Most perplexing was the seeming enlargement of brain. Wit
hout having passed through the wall of skull, nevertheless it seemed to me that the periphery of my brain was already outside my skull and still expanding. Along with this was one of the most remarkable sensations or experiences that I have ever encountered. Time and space, in so far as they were the stuff of my consciousness, underwent an enormous extension. Thus, without opening my eyes to verify, I knew that the walls of my narrow cell had receded until it was like a vast audience-chamber. And while I contemplated the matter, I knew that they continued to recede. The whim struck me for a moment that if a similar expansion were taking place with the whole prison, then the outer walls of San Quentin must be far out in the Pacific Ocean on one side and on the other side must be encroaching on the Nevada desert. A companion whim was that since matter could permeate matter, then the walls of my cell might well permeate the prison walls, pass through the prison walls, and thus put my cell outside the prison and put me at liberty. Of course, this was pure fantastic whim, and I knew it at the time for what it was.

  The extension of time was equally remarkable. Only at long intervals did my heart beat. Again a whim came to me, and I counted the seconds, slow and sure, between my heart-beats. At first, as I clearly noted, over a hundred seconds intervened between beats. But as I continued to count the intervals extended so that I was made weary of counting.

  And while this illusion of the extension of time and space persisted and grew, I found myself dreamily considering a new and profound problem. Morrell had told me that he had won freedom from his body by killing his body—or by eliminating his body from his consciousness, which, of course, was in effect the same thing. Now, my body was so near to being entirely dead that I knew in all absoluteness that by a quick concentration of will on the yet-alive patch of my torso it, too, would cease to be. But—and here was the problem, and Morrell had not warned me: should I also will my head to be dead? If I did so, no matter what befell the spirit of Darrell Standing, would not the body of Darrell Standing be for ever dead?