Stanley Elkin - Searches & Seizures

“I’ll raise it,” Main rasped. He didn’t see how but he would. People were in debt to him for favors — the nigger, Billy Basket (who only this morning had fallen all over him trying to thank him for going his bond), that other one, the guy who worked in his cousin’s car wash. It would only be for a short while. He would stay with Oyp and Glyp. He would hire an army to stay with them. It was true that the Mafia was down on him right now, but there were others, retired guards and nightwatchmen in Cincinnati who would help him baby-sit the two of them. Oyp’s and Glyp’s freedom would be nominal only, but it was necessary that he buy it for them. “I’ll raise it,” he repeated.

“Has it occurred to you that your fees alone would cost Mr. Oyp and Mr. Glyp two thousand million dollars? That such a figure might be prohibitive for them?”

“There’s two of them,” Main shouted, “it’s only a thousand million apiece!”

“The police report lists them as indigents,” the judge said calmly.

The Phoenician glared at the two. Tinhorns, he thought. Cheap no god fucking damn good chiselers, lousy pikers. He swallowed hard. “A personal favor,” he said. “It’s on the cuff. I waive my fee.”

“There is no question of bail,” the judge said.

“ Why? ” Main demanded. “Nothing in the statutes prevents it.”

“There are laws and there are laws,” the judge said, “crimes and crimes. Degrees of guilt like figures on thermometers. There are acts which so far exceed the permissible that to define them in statutes would be to register them in the imagination. And we’re talking now of legislators who would have to write these laws, who would subject them to discussion and argument, with all its qualification and demurrer and contingency. We’re talking of what would, ideally, occur to the best of men. To acknowledge that the best of men, thinking ideally and plotting academically, platonically and picturesquely, could conceive of these actions, would be to admit that ordinary men, with none of the superior man’s built-in checks and balances of the heart and mind, could do the same, opening up the unthinkable to refinements, twists, debasing the depraved and declining the corrupt like a verb wheel of evil, some irregularized grammar of the monstrous that would turn the unspeakable into only a sort of French. And what of men who are not ordinary? Who live below the timberline of grace? What of bad men? What of the vicious, of villains, the ugly customer and the mad-dog killer? What of them? What perversions of the senators’ only abstract paradigm of evil would they be capable of? What argot and babble and moral solecism and sheer bone-breaking noise? What’s unthinkable requires no legislation, eschews statute and repudiates law. There’s no question of bail.”

“ Ostriches, ” Main shouted. “You’re ostriches. You bury your Pharaohs in the sand with their eggs.”

“How can the unthinkable be defined?” the judge asked sincerely.

“Unthinkable? What’s unthinkable? How many Pharaohs have died? Fifty? A hundred? Their tombs are like slums. Everywhere busted windows and the plumbing ripped out to get cash to buy dope. Everywhere the rats nibble the masterpieces for the lead in the paint. The doors are broke down and the stairs are missing, the furniture’s askew and what’s too heavy to carry gets broken up. And every generation the neighborhood changing and every dynasty the desert a little less safe at night. Good God, there aren’t any playgrounds, kids play wall ball on the Pyramids, write Fuck on the Sphinx. What’s unthinkable? Bond these men. What’s unthinkable? ”

“For a crime like theirs?” the judge growled. “Not just breakers and enterers but ghouls, and not just ghouls but ghouls against the state, and not just ghouls against the state but ghouls against God. Handling His things, picking and choosing among His leftovers like junkmen. Derelicts who’ve never seen the inside of a museum assigning value to God’s wardrobe and effects, fingering His empty garments, trying them on. ‘Take this, not that, these, not those. How do you think I look in this, Oyp?’ ‘Not bad, Glyp. Rakish, in fact.’ Oyp had Pharaoh’s heart in his pocket.”

“I told you, Oyp!” Glyp shouted. “I told you not to do that!”

“They siphoned His juices like there was gas rationing. They wiped it up from the floor using His cloth-of-gold as if it was toilet paper. They slashed bandages and let in air, diluting the natron. A dozen embalmers worked an entire season preparing His soil, polishing His seed to last an eternity. They divoted His course with their knives and crowbars and banged His sarcophagus like boys do drums.”

Yes, thinks Main, what a bond this would make! What a feather in my cap!

“They set His platform on fire and tilted it like cheats at pinball. They clumsied His corpse and sat on His throne like Weathermen in an occupied boardroom. They used his Double familiarly and snatched His crook and filched His flail. And not just ghouls against God who goosed and grab-assed above their station, but who stoppered His cycle, who condemned God not even to Hell but to nothingness, who exiled Him, annihilating His soul and sending it to graze in no man’s land beyond the twelve-mile limit. Bond them? Bond them? ”

“There’s something else,” the Phoenician says. “There’s something else, though.”

“Please,” the judge says, “there can be no bail in this case.”

“They’re wanted in another state.”

“Please?”

“They’re wanted in Ohio.” He produces the warrant which he always carries and hands it to a bailiff who brings it to the bench.

The judge examines it. “There can be no bond,” he says.

“They’re fugitives,” Main shouts. “I’ve been hunting them for years.”

“No bond.”

“They got away from me. They’re the only ones who ever did.”

“No bond. Bond is refused.”,

“It couldn’t happen again,” Main pleads.

“Bond is refused !” The judge bangs his gavel, and the Phoenician knows the hearing is over. Then the judge makes an astonishing statement. He instructs the guards to release the prisoners. If there are crimes, he says, that are so unthinkable that no laws can proscribe them, then they must be of such magnitude that no punishment can redress them. Oyp and Glyp were free to go.

The Phoenician trembled. The fugitives were fugitives still, fugitives once from his scrutiny and control, then from his intercession, and now from earth itself. Fugitives from the bullying freedom he needed to give them who till now could stand between the law and its violators, having that power vouchsafed to him, the power to middleman, to doodle people’s destiny; the power, like a natural right, to put killers back on the streets and return the lunatics to their neighborhoods; the good power to loose the terrible, to grant freedom where he felt it was due, more magisterial than a king, controlling the sluices and locks of ordinary life, adjusting at whim the levels and proportions of guilt to innocence, poisoning the streets with possibility. But Oyp and Glyp were fugitives from fugitiveness itself, and because they were, there were limits to his power and his own precious freedom.

He groaned in his bed, chewed a piece of his pillowcase, twisted in his smooth hotel sheets, moaned, objected, knew helplessness, awoke and was embarrassed to discover that his dream was not just a dream but a wet dream. And sure enough, when he switched on his bedside lamp and looked, there was his cobra cock and, still spilling from it, the white sweet venom of his come.

He did not speculate about the dream’s meaning. He’d lived with its meaning for years, since his hair had thinned and his belly bloomed, since his legs had begun to go and his reflexes climb down from true, since his aches and since his pains and his BM’s became irregular and he could see into the stream of his weakened piss. Not that death held any particular horror for him, nor the cessation of his personality seem an offense against Nature. Indeed, he might quite welcome that. He was sick of his slick contempt, his ability to win which had never left him, his knack of topping the other guy. It took a dream to beat him, and even then he was the dreamer, the judge no more than dummy to his ventriloquist. But the other thing, the other thing. Curiosity was killing the cat. Oyp and Glyp were his only failures, but Oyp and Glyp in life were as they had been in his dream: punks, losers. Their collective bond — this was something which surprised him whenever he remembered it, or contemplated one of those expensive safaris which would take him across the country or out of it when a rumor ripened and fell his way — had been less than eleven hundred dollars. Not masterminds, not arch criminals, just ordinary car thieves. Probably they were already dead, or living through an anonymity that was as close to death as one could come. Split up by now almost certainly, gone their separate sordid ways. Perhaps in some Mexican or Central American jail, too poor or too guilty to obtain lawyers, more sinned against than sinning and, because they were dim, without the mother wit to enlist the help of their embassy, thinking, We’re wanted men anyway, why jump out of the frying pan into the fire? Best to stay here, rot for the twenty to thirty years these greasers gave us than get ourselves extradited, go back, make all that fuss, be locked up in Ohio or maybe even some Federal pen because we jumped bail. Doesn’t that bring the Feds into it? Shit, we’re warm enough here, don’t even speak the lingo, which is an advantage since nobody kicks us around too much because we don’t understand.