Stanley Elkin - Van Gogh's Room at Arles

“Help me,” Schiff said. “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.”

Then Schiff moved to the edge of the bed and, leaning over it as far as he could, as if he were stretching for something just beyond his reach, he put out his balled fists, sought reliable purchase on the rug, and maneuvered his stronger right hip, thigh, and leg scant inches out over the mattress, and dragged his left leg up with the right one, hovering there for a moment in a sort of crippled yoga levitation. Then, gently as he could, he lowered himself carefully down off the bed and onto the floor. Stretched out on the carpet, he turned on his back, pulled the blanket off the bed and covered himself. For good measure he reached up and managed to find a pillow, which he placed behind his head.

He was breathless, but he’d just saved himself two hundred dollars, more if you threw in lawsuits and emergencies.

“Professor Schiff?” Miss Simmons was saying. “Professor Schiff?”

He was on the floor in his bedroom, he explained, nothing hurt him, he didn’t think he was bleeding, he didn’t feel faint. She was coming in clear as a bell, and his heart, knock wood, felt sound as a dollar. He was no doctor, he told her, not that kind anyway, and couldn’t estimate the extent of his injuries.

But they’d know soon enough, he said, he thought he heard the ambulance now.

And he did, a crazed, mechanical Geschrei, somewhere between the regulation alarms of police and fire and the amok pitch of a child’s video game raised to its wildest power.

“I know what you’re doing,” Miss Simmons said. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing.”

When the S.O.S. men let themselves in with their key they found Schiff on the floor.

“I see you’ve got a pillow,” one of them said.

“Presence of mind,” Schiff said offhandedly.

Then the other examined him before both lifted him back onto the bed.

“Thanks a lot,” Schiff said.

“Hey,” the guy said who’d noted his pillow, “no problem.”

“I guess I was trying to do too much.”

“Yeah, how’s that?”

Schiff lowered his voice. “Well,” he said, embarrassed, “I was just getting out of bed to try to empty that when I fell.” He pointed to the nightstand.

“I’ll take care of that for you,” said the paramedic who’d examined him.

“Would you?” Schiff said.

“No problem.”

When the man brought it back, empty and odorless, Schiff wondered if he should tip them, then thought of the fines they’d have demanded of him, of all the ways he’d opened himself up to the possibility of bankruptcy by signing their papers. Not one cent for tribute, he decided; then, as they were leaving, called after them. “If you see Bill,” he said, “tell him hi for me.”

“I know what you’re doing,” Miss Simmons said, startling him. He’d forgotten they were still linked up.

“Do you know what I forgot?” Schiff said, realizing he had to pee again and taking advantage of the empty urinal.

“What?”

“To ask for my key back.”

“Gee,” she said, “I had it duplicated. I forgot to get it back to you.”

“That puts us about even then.”

“Oh?”

“Sure,” he said, “my playing with the button, your forgetting my key.”

“I guess maybe it does,” she said.

“Except for one thing,” Schiff said.

“What’s that?”

“My key,” he said, “I need it, I have to have it back today.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I’m filling in on the switchboard today. I can hardly send out another ambulance. I suppose I could bring it by after I’m off, but that’s not until six. Can you wait that long?”

“Hey,” Schiff said, “no problem.”

Checkmate! thought wily old Schiff. Gin! Name of the game! the crippled-up old political-geographer gentleman thought, planting his flags for Spain, for France. Well, he thought, for Farce, at least, Schiff’s own true motherland with its slapstick lakes and Punch and Judy rivers, its burlesque deserts and vaudeville plains, with its minstrel peninsulas and cabaret hills, its music-hall mountains and its dumb-show shores, all its charade forests, all its low-comedy lowlands.

His body not only ravaged — well, he was sixty, or near enough, closing in on retirement, closing in on death, personal wear-and-tear coming with his jokey territory — but savaged now, too, effectively gut shot, brought low, lower than good taste permitted, a dispensated man, on Information’s arm, on some general sufferance — there were federal laws now protecting him like some endangered species — his ass not only covered but sanctioned, like some loony or fool whose culture would not permit itself to raise a hand against him. These were the perks of Farce, the privileges of citizenship, like coins sprinkled to street mimes.

Not, thought Schiff, unearned or had cheap. For even before he’d so openly lived in Farce, even, he meant, when, like some dual-citizen’d child who could declare his allegiance in ripened time, Schiff had had his tendencies; marked by a weird boldness, some not fully thought-out bravery, blind, or anyway indifferent, to consequence, a very inversion of the cautious, look-before-you-leap models of whom he boasted, and whom, at least theoretically, on paperly, boosted, all those coded, once-burned-twice-shy gimps and wary worrywarts whose nine months of toilet training had, in spite of everything, been wasted on them, a crack in their anality and something let-loose and litterbug struck into their souls like a brand. You might as well hand him a pistol and put a single bullet into its chamber like the buck you slip into a gift wallet.

Luring Miss Simmons — Jenny — to the party without even moving the finger Ms. Kohm herself had promised him he’d never have to lift. Here’s, he mentally toasted himself, to dangerous Jackie Schiff, the Have-It-Both-Ways Kid.

Hi! You’ve reached 727-4312, the home of Professor Jack Schiff. I’m sorry, caller, but I’m not in just now. Please wait for the beep and leave a message. This block is protected by armed vigilantes. I’m not saying it is, and I’m not saying it isn’t, but the house just might be booby-trapped. Why take chances?

Because a certain part of him couldn’t afford to admit thoughts toward the down side of things. And even as he thought this — maybe it was the word “afford” that triggered the idea— this occurred: that he’d been a damn fool to call those banks yesterday, that he’d wasted his time. (Oh, his time, thought the damn fool.) That having been married to him all those years, Claire was incapable of great train robberies, of major or minor larcenies, that walking out on him was one thing but stiffing him another. She was, finally, incapable of caper. She hadn’t disturbed the money in their accounts because that’s how she continued to think of them— as “their” accounts, the fiduciary aspect of their relationship intact. Because, because — and this made him furious — they would both be working off the same accounts! Drawing down off the same funds like a couple of old-timey teenagers in the malt shop sipping their soda from the same glass through two separate straws. And why he was furious was that she’d turned over the accounting to him, that he was the one left behind to balance their checking. (All right, granted, her canceled checks would give him, if not her address, then at least some general idea of what she was up to and where she was up to it at.) So this was what his cripple’s code came down to— that he stay out of it; not just that he must avoid doing things twice, but that he must never do them even once if he could help it. Being disabled had made him lazy, his incentive shot, a sort of welfare drag. It was his fate, he saw, to depend — how he’d plaintively pointed out the pisser to the paramedic — on everyone’s mercies. That it had become his job, duty, his life, like some old zayde worrying Torah in shul, to lie in his bed and worry his character. (Flash! he thought. I’m disabled and can’t come to the phone right now, I can’t come to the phone, I can’t come!)