A Bad Man

by Stanley Elkin

“We have serious things to discuss, Leo.”

  “I won’t listen.”

  “Leo, you owe me. As a businessman you have always paid your bills.”

  “I owe you? What do I owe you? What have you done for me?”

  “Like Wilson,” the homunculus said slyly, “I kept you out of war.”

  Feldman admitted grudgingly that this was so.

  The homunculus smiled; it pinched. “What do you make of this bad-man stuff?” it asked confidentially. “Anything to it?”

  “Why ask me?” Feldman said sourly. “You know my heart.”

  “Only its terrain,” the homunculus said.

  “My heart hurts.”

  “Is that why, Leo? Is that it? Do you suffer much?”

  “I never suffer. Never,” Feldman said. “Tell me something. What’s it like down there?”

  “What’s it like?”

  “Is there an odor?”

  “It’s a butcher shop, Leo.”

  “Then you don’t have it so easy, do you?” Feldman touched his chest. “Me, I never suffer,” he said. “Things hurt once in a while. Like my heart just now, but I can stand a little pain. I can stand a lot of pain. I’ve the pain threshold of a giant.”

  “You can stand other people’s pain,” his homunculus said.

  “Everybody’s,” Feldman said. “Pain disappoints me finally. How do you know I’m telling you the truth? Or does a good angel just know?”

  “I’m not a good angel.”

  “An alter ego.”

  “I’m not an alter ego.”

  “Who you?”

  “I’m a homunculus, a fossilized potential.”

  “What might have been,” Feldman said.

  “Not to you. To me.”

  “This is my interview, you sit-in sibling.”

  “Go ahead,” the homunculus said. “Enjoy yourself.”

  “Enjoy myself,” Feldman said. “Listen, sidecar, let me tell you. One summer I went East with Lilly to see her family. They have this place on the Sound. They call it a summer place, but it’s terrific. It’s like a hotel. They’ve got a band shell. They have tennis courts. A swimming pool. All the styrofoam toys—you know, chaise lounges that float around beside you in the water, tables with drinks on them. They’ve got boats. Lilly is a water-skier, did you know that? Your sister-in-law is a water-skier. They’ve got all this stuff. The very best. If you like that sort of thing.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “No. Fun’s fun, but it always turns out to be some new ride. It’s onanistic, if you want to know, because what counts is what’s going on in the pit of your stomach. Sin ought to involve other people too. I don’t see the point. It’s a question of risks and balanced thrills. In a roller coaster the risk is relatively small, but the thrill—the fright and the queerness in the belly—is large. On water skis the queerness is much less but the risk is greater. Do you know what I’m talking about? There’s nothing to do. I can take a lot of suffering because I can take a lot of pleasure too. There’s nothing to do.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re bored.”

  “No. I’m not bored.”

  “I don’t see how you manage to avoid it then, O solo Leo.”

  “There’s a pleasure that never disappoints. It comes from setting other things in motion but not moving yourself.”

  “Ah, Leo, you’ve the soul of a model railroader.”

  “You forget yourself. I’m your host.”

  “I’m sorry. How does one manage this?”

  “Sell,” Feldman said.

  “Cell?”

  “Yes,” Feldman said, “sell.”

  He was going nuts. It was a new phase. He became desperate. It was a new phase. He felt a need for exercise and dreamed of learning to water-ski. It was a new phase. He defined physical health as a flexibility of posture and imagined himself a scientist. It was a new phase. He defined unhappiness as a flexibility of mood and imagined himself a philosopher. And the ground kept shifting on him and he thought again of those rooms where the walls close in and the floors move up to meet a descending ceiling. And he had to take his hat off to that warden, which was an old phase. And for a while he was afraid. He wanted to be able to stretch his legs, really stretch them, slide into third base or climb some high mountain or run the mile. And he felt this rapid alternation of the soul, and he commanded the homunculus to sit still, but it wasn’t doing it, it said, and as far as it, the homunculus, was concerned, solitary confinement was something it was used to, what with being a shut-in and all.

  Feldman didn’t know what to do, so to steady himself he decided to try to sell the homunculus a little something. He tried to sell it some of the soup the guard had brought him for lunch—it was a cold day, and soup warms the heart, Feldman said, and it would do the homunculus good—but there was absolutely no way the little fellow could pay him. Feldman offered to extend credit (he remembered fondly that he had done some marvelous things with credit), but no, the homunculus could never pay him. It was a pauper, of course, a spread-eagled parasite riding the heart like a surfboard. It couldn’t help itself. It had no money. It had never had money. It was born without pockets. Since it was against Feldman’s principles to give anything away, he ate the soup himself.

  “Want to buy back this empty tray?” Feldman asked the guard.

  “Watch out,” the guard said. “You don’t get out of here until I can report to the warden that there’s been a significant change in your behavior.”

  “You?”

  “I’m a trained psychologist,” the guard said.

  Then he entered a very bad phase. It was the one he had the most faith in because it was the one he had the least to do with. That is, he had not invented it as he had invented the others. Instead, it was visited upon him, as a disease might have been, or seven fat years, then seven lean ones.

  He was low, as low perhaps as he had ever been. With the clarity of an insomniac, he saw—and so striking was the impression that he could not remember when it had been otherwise—the inferior quality of his life. Most of the acceptable lives he could think of were lived by strangers. He thought of the warden. How would it feel, he asked himself, to be the warden? Not so hot, perhaps. The man was too much like himself. It was not acceptable, finally, or respectable, to have to deal with those who were not your equals. He and the warden had never dealt with equals. Feldman lacked respectability, the clubby regard of peers. (It was funny, because most people were respectable. All the clerks in his department store were respectable, all the cousins at a wedding.) It was the serenity of the franchised, and Feldman had always lacked it, and because he lacked it his life was without the possibility of consolation.

  Where, he wondered, are Feldman’s peers? Nowhere. Then where are his customers? All gone, taken away, and the salesman locked up in a cage. Then where’s his life? Here’s his life, here in the cage.

  This phase did not soon pass—he had some hope that it might; so sly was he, so long had he lived with aces in the hole, that he thought they must be there always; superstitiously he thought they grew there—but when it finally ended he lay back on his cot, returned to a condition of an earlier phase. He was again the man who could not remember, forced into some narrow channel of the now.

  He was like a sick man, had just that sick-man sense of languid withdrawal even from his own symptoms, and even the sick man’s vague unthrift, his sporty indifference that he existed in an ambience of letters which had still to be answered, appointments which had still to be canceled, invitations which had still to be withdrawn. Deprived of detail, he was brought back into himself and was surprised to learn that this was possible, for he knew that as a selfish man he had never lived very far away from himself, had hedged distance and all horizons like some twelfth-century mariner. The idea that there were pieces of Feldman which could still be recalled gave him a sense of his own enormousness.

  It was just this awe of himself which gave him his first hope in days. He marveled at his s
pinning moods, his barber-pole soul. And again he found himself praying. “Give me back constancy,” he prayed, “make me monolithic, fix my flux and let me consolidate.”

  “Listen,” Feldman asked the guard, “are there any letters for me?” He hadn’t the least idea why he had asked the question. He had told Lilly not to write him, and he was still so turned in on himself that it would have been impossible for him even to read a letter. (He had noticed lately—with some alarm—that without any work for it to do, his will proceeded in its own direction.)

  “You should know that you’re not allowed to receive letters while you’re in solitary confinement,” the guard said.

  Feldman nodded.

  “They hold them for you, of course,” the guard went on. He was looking at Feldman intently.

  Feldman nodded.

  “They keep them in the census office, where my friend works,” the guard said. He was staring at Feldman now.

  “Say,” Feldman said doubtfully, “would it be too much trouble for you to find out if any are being held for me?”

  “I could find out if any are being held for you,” the guard said. “Would you like that?”

  “I’d appreciate it,” Feldman said.

  ‘If you like, I might even be able to tell you who they’re from,” the guard said.

  “Would you do that?” Feldman asked.

  “No trouble,” the guard said.

  “Do you think you could check the postmarks?” Feldman said. “I’d like to have an idea when they were mailed.”

  “Sure.”

  “And if you could make a notation of the station they were sent from,” Feldman said. “Sometimes a person drops off a letter downtown, or on the way to the movie in the shopping center.”

  “Certainly,” the guard said. “The rule states only that mail may not be received by a prisoner in solitary or opened for him.”

  “I see. Then could you check the color of the envelope and the kind of stamp that’s been put on it?”

  “The stamp?”

  “Well, these things could reveal the sender’s mood.”

  “Say, that’s right. I’ll check the color of the envelope and the kind of stamp.”

  “Could you smell the letter for perfume?”

  “Well, I’ll try,” the guard said, “but I have a cold.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Feldman said.

  “Thank you, I’ll be all right.”

  “Thank God for that,” Feldman said.

  “Would you like me to look for little instructions on the front?” the guard asked. “Sometimes it says ‘Personal’ or ‘Please Forward.’”

  “I’d be grateful,” Feldman said. “Could you look at the back too? Often the flaps are scalloped.”

  “No trouble at all.”

  “I miss my people very much,” Feldman said. “I see that,” the guard said.

  The guard brought his lunch. “There weren’t any letters for you,” he said.

  “Then how we doing in the cold war?” Feldman asked.

  “I’m sorry,” the guard said. “You haven’t any newspaper, TV or radio privileges in here. It would be a violation of the spirit of the rules for me to tell you.”

  “I see,” Feldman said.

  The guard winked broadly. “I don’t suppose my cousin Dorothy will be taking that trip to Berlin this week,” he said in a voice somewhat louder than the one in which he normally spoke.

  “That’s too bad,” Feldman said, winking back and raising his voice too. “I can imagine how disappointed she’ll be. But maybe she can go someplace else. They say the Far East is nice this time of year.”

  “Well, they say most of the Far East is nice, but they don’t say it about Thailand,” the guard said. He was practically shouting.

  “Don’t they?” Feldman yelled.

  “No, they don’t,” the guard yelled back. “And they don’t say it about Formosa or the offshore islands either.”

  “I see,” Feldman said. “Is your brother Walter still doing the shopping for the family?” He held a wink for five seconds.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Walter. Has Walter been going down the street to the market recently?”

  “Oh, Walter, the market. Yes, indeed. Walter’s been going to the market. He sure has.” The guard winked, touched his temple, clicked his tongue and nudged Feldman with his elbow.

  “Yes? What has he been bringing back with him?”

  “Missiles, chemicals, utilities,” the guard said.

  Feldman nodded. “How’s your friend Virginia?” he asked after a moment.

  “Virginia?”

  “You know, Carolina’s sister. The sports fan. The one that’s so interested in races.”

  “Races?”

  “Virginia, Carolina’s sister, Georgia’s roommate.”

  “Oh, Virginia. The one that was a riot last summer?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Very quiet,” the guard said, roaring.

  Feldman suddenly began to whistle a popular song of a few weeks before. The guard stared at him as Feldman whistled it all the way through. The guard shook his head, and Feldman whistled another song from the same period. He winked one eye, then the other, and began a third song. Before he could finish, the guard brightened and began to hum a tune Feldman had never heard. When he finished that he hummed another song to which he performed in accompaniment a strange shuffling dance Feldman had never seen. Feldman leaned his head against the bars and listened and watched raptly.

  “How are the rest of the fellers?” Feldman asked the guard when he brought his breakfast the next morning.

  At lunch the warden was with the guard. The guard handed Feldman his tray without a word and stepped outside the cell to stand beside the warden. Feldman placed the tray on his lap primly and began to eat his lunch. He took a bite from his sandwich and looked out at the warden. “How did the men enjoy the movie this week?” he asked. The warden didn’t answer, and Feldman ate his pear. He wiped his lips with his napkin. The guard and the warden continued to stare at him. “Have they completed the construction of the new wing in the infirmary?” Feldman asked. “Have the boys at the foundry met their quota this month?” The warden frowned and turned to go. As the warden started off, the guard shook his head sadly and shrugged. “Is Bisch all right? How’s Slipper? What’s going on at the canteen?” Feldman called. The warden looked back over his shoulder for a moment and glared at Feldman. “I’ll never forget,” Feldman said, “one time—it was on a Sunday afternoon—I had just awakened from a nap and my son Billy was in the room.” The warden turned around, looked at him for a moment and came back toward the cell.

  “Yes?” he said.

  “It was on a Sunday afternoon,” Feldman said. “I’ll never forget this. Billy was about six or seven. Six, he was six. I had been sleeping, and when I woke up, the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was my son.”

  “Go on.”

  “He was beautiful. I had never seen how beautiful he was. He was sitting on the floor, cross-legged. You know? He had on these short pants, his back was to me. He had come in to be with me in the room while I slept. He pulled some toy cars along in wide arcs beside him and made the noises in his throat, the low rough truck noises, and the sounds of family cars like the singing master’s hum that gives the pitch. He had fire trucks and he did their sirens, and farm machinery that moved by slowly, going chug chug chug.”

  “Is this true?” the warden asked.

  “Yes,” Feldman said.

  “What did you do?” the guard asked. “Did you kiss him?”

  “No. I was afraid he’d stop.”

  “How long did your mood last?”

  “Something happened,” Feldman said.

  “Yes?”

  “I started to cry. It frightened him.”

  “Did you tell him why you were crying?” The warden had come into the cell. He was searching Feldman’s face. Eternity was on the line. What did h
e have to come into the cell for? “Did you tell him why you were crying?” the warden asked again.

  “Yes,” Feldman said. “I told him it was because he woke me up.”

  “I see,” the warden said.

  “You want the truth, don’t you, Warden?”

  “We’ll see what the truth is.”

  “Here’s what the truth is,” Feldman said. “Billy wasn’t in the room when I woke up. A couple of feathers had come out of my pillow, and I had this idea. I pulled a few more feathers out and I called the kid. ‘Billy, get in here. Come quickly.’

  “He was standing in the doorway, and I told him to get his mother, that my feathers were coming out. I held one up for him to see and then I stuffed it back with some others which I had pushed into my bellybutton. He came over and stared at my stomach. A few feathers were on my chest, and he picked one up. ‘Don’t touch that feather. It’s mine. Put it back in my belly, where it belongs.’

  “‘You’re fooling me,’ Billy said, and I started to scream as if I were in pain.

  “‘Get your mother,’ ‘I yelled, ‘I need a doctor.’ I told him that if you lose fifteen feathers you die.”

  Remembering it all, Feldman became excited. “‘Wait,’ I told him. ‘Count them first so your mother can tell the doctor and he’ll know what medicine to bring. Can you count to fifteen?’

  “‘Yes,’ Billy said.

  “‘Well, don’t make a mistake now, for God’s sake. You’re a pretty stupid kid, and I know how you get mixed up after twelve. Hurry, please, but don’t touch the feathers or more will come out.’ So he started to count the feathers, but they were all rolled up together and it was impossible. ‘Hurry,’ I shouted. He started to cry and got all mixed up and had to count them all over again. He couldn’t do it. He was in a panic. Finally I told him I had felt about eleven come out and that he’d better tell his mother that. As soon as he left, I pulled three more feathers out of the pillow and called him back. ‘Billy,’ I shouted, ‘three more feathers just came loose. If I lose one more I’m a dead man.’ He rushed over to see. Listen, he was sobbing, he was hysterical, out of control, but do you know what he managed to ask me? ‘Daddy,’ he said, ‘do I have feathers too?’ Don’t tell me about love. His daddy is dying of feather loss, and he wants to know if it’s contagious. I am what I am, Warden.” Feldman moved away from him and went to the sink and splashed cold water on his face. “I blew it, right?” he said. “I stay here forever.”