A Bad Man

by Stanley Elkin

  What struck him at last, after those first hours when his expectations about the nature of what would happen to him failed, was that there was something faintly old-fashioned and rural about his punishment. He might have been the town drunk locked into a cell while he slept one off. Even the man who brought him his supper seemed more bailiff, more turnkey than stern guard. Feldman speculated that the man might even be more approachable than the other guards. He couldn’t help himself; he had begun to notice a certain predisposition in himself to like the guards, to look upon them as finer somehow than the prisoners; to, in fact, show off in front of them: in the exercise yard to hold down the swearing, never to fart in front of one, to offer them cigarettes during breaks—hinting a sort of gentlemen’s “You’re one, I’m one too” special relationship. It was the way, in the old days, he had reacted to Jews he might come upon in a Howard Johnson’s in the state of Nebraska, on the way West. Feldman supposed that the guard assigned to such a place, where the special enclavic sense of being in a different rhythm from the rest of the prison induced an atmosphere of things in abeyance, might have wrought in him that vulnerability toward democracy found among men working late, or among witnesses to the same accident. But when he tried to talk to the man to find out what might be expected of him here, merely asking for the same precision of rule that was available upstairs—he still felt, though he knew it wasn’t so, knew he was only in a different wing, that he was in some old sub-basement of the penitentiary—he found that the man was even less permissive and more reserved than the side-armed, rifle-pointing, machine-gun-dug-in troopers on the walls. When he asked the simplest questions the guard just stared, frowned and walked away.

  Now I am alone.

  Yet for a time this remained his chief concern, after he became accustomed to the idea that the ceiling would not crush him, that the bed was not electrified, the drinking water scalding. If there was nothing to resist, what was there to comply with?

  He couldn’t ask other prisoners. There were no other prisoners. Through the bars of his cell he could see only a long corridor of blank wall. And when he shouted for others to identify themselves—expecting no answer—no one replied. Not even the guard came by to make him shut up.

  Feldman had an insight after the guard left. Of course, he thought, he brought me dinner. The rule of silence! The same here as in the dining hall. Now he had a clue about how to act. He was impatient for the guard to return for his tray so he could ask him if he was right. But after an hour the man had not returned. Now the question was immense. Each time he heard a noise Feldman sprang from his cot to see if the guard was coming. There was never anyone in the corridor.

  A little soup he had not finished filmed the bottom of the bowl. His fork was chinked at its interstices with bits of carrot, scabs of meat. On the metal tray the scraps had become garbage. Feldman flushed the larger remnants down the toilet and tried to wash off the tinier pieces in his small sink, but he had no soap and the sink would not drain properly. A rich thin scum collected in the basin. Feldman scooped it up with his soupspoon and tried to knock it into the toilet, but it splattered on the floor and along the rim of the bowl. It looked as if he had vomited. He cleaned it up with the last four sheets of toilet paper. Still the guard had not come.

  Now it was very late. He was tired, but he did not want to go to sleep until he had asked the guard his question. He couldn’t risk lying down. Faintly, he heard the signal that meant lights out in the other parts of the prison. Another hour passed. He sat in the dark and no longer jumped at each noise. It was difficult to keep his eyes open. After a while he lay down. Soon he was asleep.

  When he awoke in the morning his tray was still there. It frightened him. He knew what it was all about now. They meant to starve him. He thought at once of the end a few weeks from now—how long could a man go without food? two weeks? three?—when he would be on his cot, delirious, deranged, hunger like swallowed knives, his head an open sore, and already he could feel it starting. That was why he was so isolated, why no one could hear him when he shouted. Science. It was science. The goddamned scientific soundproof walls, their scientific thickness. He was ferociously hungry. He sprang up, despising his fastidiousness of the night before, regretting that he had thrown away those scraps. His action had had the heavy renunciatory quality of an obligation. I did it to myself, I did it to myself was all he could think of, as if, his resistance surrendered, he had shamefully compounded the loss of his life. He examined the sink. A thin band of dried smutty food remained, the color and consistency of apple butter. He scraped this up, carefully collecting it in his spoon and placing it back in the tray. He began to plan how he would apportion it to himself. It was senseless, he knew, but he prayed that some small value remained in it. Didn’t they say that in the peels and skins, in the cut green tufts of carrots and vitals of animals and rinds of cheese and cores of fruit and calluses of vegetables, the real nutrition lay? Why not in garbage? Why not some dear good stuff residual in that? See the niggers, how they thrived, hearty on the shitty cuts.

  Just then the guard came with his breakfast.

  Feldman was too astonished to ask his question. He simply took it and gave back his empty tray.

  “Use the same silver,” the guard said, and left.

  At noon Feldman asked him. “Do I have to be silent during mealtimes?”

  “What for?” the guard said.

  So, the rules did not operate!

  He had been oppressed by the prison’s deflecting forms. Even in his resistance to those forms he had been deflected, his life eaten up by a concern with behavior, the appearance of behavior. All rights wrested their existence from something inimical to rights. Upstairs, the simplest thing he could will had to be meshed with the prison’s routine opposition to the thing willed. This was why he assumed there would be something he could resist in solitary, because he felt his life changed. Upstairs, it was the prison which resisted. Each thing he wanted—each thing—the prison did not want. It should have been a relief, then, to get away from the rules of silence, permission slips, warden’s flags, assigned tables, assemblies, the censuses when the prisoners froze and the pencil man came by to count them. But it wasn’t.

  He learned at last, then, that his punishment down here was to be himself. It was ridiculous. How could he be Feldman if there was no one there that he could be Feldman to? He thought of the garbage with which he had hoped a few hours before to support his life. He thought of all nugatory things thrown away, of vast lots blooming with junk. That’s where the nutrition wasn’t.

  Now I am alone.

  Don’t say that Feldman was unwilling to go along with the program.

  What is the program?

  The clever warden didn’t do things haphazardly. There was significance in the placement of each water cooler. (Hadn’t he seen the bills? Eight hundred twelve dollars for replumbing, for pulling out the old pipes and settling them in a new pattern. Why?) He supposed he was meant to go over his sins, to parse his past like a grammarian. It was the old wilderness routine. They’d left him in this desert to think about things.

  Feldman refused to think about his past. If that was the warden’s purpose the man was out of luck. People don’t remember what has happened to them, he thought. You couldn’t even remember how you felt. Unhappiness was always neutralizing itself. Likewise joy. So that the past had no character—neither of pain nor pleasure. It gave the impression of something canceled out, a sort of eternal breaking even. It was like what happened with the leaves. In the first flush days of spring, he couldn’t remember when the trees had been without leaves. Again in autumn it seemed as if they had never had them. Even this experience—if I outlive it, he thought—will neutralize itself. It was a kind of fallout. Too much was lost. Too much was lost even of his neutralized life. He knew that you were supposed to be able to store in your subconscious everything that had ever happened to you. How many slices of cake you’d had at your eighth birthday party, the names of
all the people you’d ever met. That if they gave you truth serum you’d spew all this stuff back. He didn’t believe it.

  He sat up and pinched his arm. Remember this pinch, he commanded himself, squeezing. Remember the date and the hour and the exact pain, and on the anniversary of the pinch a year from now, five years, ten, fifteen, think about it. Try to remember to remember it on your deathbed.

  He released his flesh, and instantly the pain thinned out, was absorbed, halved, quartered, sixteenthed. He couldn’t have taken up exactly the same flesh in his fingers again. It was as if he had thrown a stone into a lake. In seconds he could no longer identify the precise spot where it had gone down.

  “Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered.” Who said that?

  If he had difficulty remembering, he had none at all imagining. On about the third day he began to fantasize. He thought much about girls and women and kept himself exhausted by yielding to every sexual impulse, building the foundations of his lust always on real women—girls who had worked for him, his buyers’ wives, customers to whom he had given his personal attention. Sometimes, however, at the moment of climax, he swiftly substituted some film goddess, or girl seen on television, or a record sleeve, or a billboard, or some girl never seen, some college woman from books and imagination.

  He became almost animally potent, yet remained somehow in control, cool enough to build his fantasies carefully, starting again if he made a mistake, constructing what he said to her, what she said to him. It was a more careful wooing than any he had ever done in his life, and he saw himself in a new light, gallant, charming. He held off climax and teased himself with manufactured complexities, sudden jealousies—seeing himself deep in love, smitten till it cost him. Together, he and his girl friend worried about new places they could go, and later, what they were to do about their affair, how the children were to be told, how it was to be broken to the husband, to Lilly. It was marvelous. All that disturbed him were those occasions when his carefully managed, highly organized affairs were interrupted by random, spontaneous introductions of new women—the movie star, the imaginary TV singer—as unplanned and unprovided for as a freak in nature. At these times all his cool will would be suddenly broken and as he came he groaned the erotic words, invoking flesh almost violently, spraying his sperm, fucking completely. Cunt, he thought, oh pussy, oh tits and oh, oh, ass!

  But even taking into account these aberrant moments, robbed of the gentle consummation he had planned, he realized that he had never had so active nor so satisfactory a sex life.

  It’s a goddamned love nest in here.

  He was illimitably free to plunder and profane. In his unvisited cell, with all the privacy he could want and all the time in the world, he had enough for the first time in his life. Oddly, however, it was through just these fantasies that his real past was finally evoked. Why, he remembered suddenly, it’s exactly the way he had lain beside Lilly!

  He could see himself—himself and Lilly—the two big people huddled in their corner of the bed. They should have had a king-size bed. Feldman had asked for one, but Lilly had said they didn’t make king-size in French Provincial, that it would look ridiculous. “But they had all the kings,” Feldman said.

  “That doesn’t matter,” Lilly said.

  Feldman thought bitterly of the small kings, the teensy-weensy, itsy-bitsy kings of France.

  And twin beds would somehow have strengthened the appearance of their consanguinity. He didn’t even ask for twin beds. He thought of Dagwood and Blondie, of the husband and wife on “The Donna Reed Show,” of Lucy and Desi, and all the conjugal Thompsons and Richardsons and Wilsons and Morgans in America in their twin beds, in their rooms within rooms—each with his own table, his own bedlamp, his own electric blanket; each with his own slippers beneath the bed, the polished toes just sticking out, like the badly concealed feet of lovers in farces. Such things bespoke order, reason, calm. Paradoxically, they bespoke a sort of detached tenderness for the mate that Feldman had never felt. Twin beds were out. (But they did say that love was more exciting in a twin bed. Feldman wondered. It raised penumbral questions like what happened at sea when in the mixed company of a life raft somebody had to go to the bathroom. How did two unmarried archeologists, holed up in a cave, hiding from savages, take a crap? The shipwrecked and the archeologists and the coed Yugoslav guerrilla fighters, they were the ones who had the fun. Policemen raiding wild parties, firemen rescuing ladies in their nightgowns from burning buildings, they did.)

  So they lay together in the regular double bed, Feldman pulling back his knee when it brushed Lilly’s thigh, creating a space between them, imagining the space a distance, making that distance into a journey he would never willingly take. She could have been in Europe, in Asia, in craters on the moon. And wild. Wild! As unfaithful to Lilly right there beside him as some philanderer at a convention across the country.

  He waited until she slept. It was easy to tell. She was a deep breather. (She breathes for six people, he thought.) Then, silkenly sheathed, luxurious in his mandarin’s pajamas, he would begin his fantasies. (Feldman picked out his pajamas like a pajama scientist. No millionaire, no playboy, no bedroom sybarite has pajamas like mine, Feldman thought.) If Lilly happened to snore at one of these moments, he experienced the most intense irritation. If she snored a second time, he poked her, jabbed her with rigid, extended fingers in some soft part of her soft body. “Close your mouth,” he’d hiss. “Get over on your own side.” And in her sleep she’d obey. (Lilly listened in her sleep. Sometimes he’d give her pointless commands and watch with interest their clumsy, torpid execution. It was like playing a great fat musical instrument, some giant bellows thing.)

  He never permitted himself the luxury of an orgasm, gradually abandoning, as sleep encroached, his carefully arranged trysts, his logical seductions, losing his place, forgetting to touch himself, until finally his erection waned like an unstoked fire.

  And Lilly never knew, (Pure kindness on his part, for in truth he didn’t give a damn what she thought.) If she had ever discovered his teen-age games he would have laughed in her face at her disgust, since it was her fault anyway. Because she was unbeautiful. Because her body harbored a traitor to love which pushed up bumps, jellied her flesh, dilated the veins on the backs of her legs. She was wrapped in her skin like a bad package. Everywhere there were excrescences, tumescences, body hair, cold pale scar tissue the blood never warmed, black-and-blue marks which arose from no ever-identified origin. She gets them from drying herself with a towel, Feldman thought, from dressing, from sitting in drafts.

  Because Lilly was unbeautiful. Unbeautiful. And because she didn’t care. She accepted every blemish—they’re benign, she reasoned, they’re all benign; she was benign—forgiving herself. Because she had no vanity. None at all. (No. One. A-line dresses to conceal her big hips. And he didn’t mind big hips. He liked big hips.) What he hated was the strange combination in Lilly of fragility and a peasant heart. When she visited her parents in the East she would sit up for two nights in the coach. Or she took a bus. “I don’t mind buses,” she said. She didn’t mind buses, but the air conditioning gave her a sore throat. She didn’t mind a sore throat. He took her to expensive restaurants. She ordered liver. Thick steaks gave her heartburn, she said. Thick steaks did. A play came to town. Feldman bought seats in the orchestra; she preferred the balcony. Sitting close gave her headache, she said. Feldman wished she were beside him now. He would give her one in the back with his fingers. Unbeautiful Lilly!

  Aghh, he sounded like a night-club comic. But what if all the tasteless jokes were true? What if they were true? Lilly made them true. She made them come true. She was like a fairy. Lilly the joke fairy. Poor Lilly, Feldman thought. Till death us do part, you. And why? Just give me one good reason!

  Because during the war, when he was putting his store together, when 4-F—the homunculus wrapping his heart—he was getting rich, he had no time: 80,000 miles in ’42, 112,000 in ’43, 100,000 mi
les in ’44, 128,000 in ’45, in ’46, 215,000 miles and in ’47 even more. Getting the stock, traveling where the goods were, riding the trains—endless, endless—riding the planes, bumping full colonels, the whole country on the take, “table” a dirty word, and under it where the action was. A United States Senator told him once, “We know what you’re up to and we don’t mind a bit. During a war these things have to happen. It’s an abstract factor but very important. It keeps up morale. You sell your wares, and the people on the home front, the factory people and the civil servants and the fillers-in, buy them and it gives them strength. Most people get their strength from the things they own. We have to keep up the balance between guilt and strength to get them to produce. The war news isn’t enough. That just takes care of the guilt. So we know how you manage and we don’t mind a bit.” But the Senator was wrong. Because genius went beyond mere bribery, beyond shaking hands all around on an insinuation, beyond favors and winked eyes and the inference of evil like a secret between friends—though he did all that too, did all of it, though mostly in the beginning, folding bills into hundreds of palms, using cash like a password or a message from spies. (Cash, cash, the whole country crazy for cash, the only thing they’d touch, wanting no records, his far-seeing countrymen, those practical folks. What the hell, it couldn’t last forever. Nothing could last forever, not even greed.)

  Because the Senator was wrong. Because genius was genius. There was something physical in it too. Feldman took risks. (What, are you kidding? All those miles in all those airplanes in the forties? The cities blacked out, radar not perfected yet? Remember those plane crashes in the forties?) He was there, ubiquitous, making his pitch. Looking over the operator’s shoulder while she sewed the last seam; among the toys, sneezing over the teddy bears; his feet the first ones up on the sofa when it came from the shop. In the small-arms factory too. He was the first merchandiser to sell government surplus on the open market. And during the war! The first department store in America to offer a magazine-subscription service. Food departments. Virginia Sugar-Cured Ham departments. Setting things up. Collecting his merchandise. Inventing it. Johnny on the spot, picking over America, the rummage champion of World War Two, hearing the rumors, getting the word (“St. Louis has shoes”; “There are baskets in Vermont, dishes in Portland”; “Carolina has hats”). Tours through the plants. (And not just those innocuous preserves where they turned out the belt buckles for civilian consumption—the other parts too, to see what he could use. His suits on those days had holes in the lapels and over all the breast pockets from the badges he had to wear.) And this isn’t just New York City and Chicago and Cleveland and Los Angeles and Pittsburgh and St. Louis we’re talking about. We’re talking about places in Nebraska and the Dakotas and southern Indiana and Montana and Idaho and small towns in Dixie. Places with lousy accommodations for travelers and rotten food. And you can’t always get there from here. He got there. Feldman got there.