Stanley Elkin - Searches & Seizures

For more than a week he went to such sections of the city, hunting them like a ghost, restless, yet coveting tweed rather than flesh, wools and leathers more than body and form. Perhaps he yearned for an encounter, but in their bars and cocktail lounges he was silent. Nothing happened, he had no adventure, and after the first strong flush of sexuality he was as before — as he had been all his life — calmly admiring, sedately appreciative, his very hopelessness satisfying his lust by quenching it, by stripping him of illusions and granting him a sort of amnesty. All his life he had disposed of his sexuality this way. His tastes and greeds kept him single, fashion’s narrow bigot.

In despair he turned back to the condominium, hopeful of a ride with Mrs. Riker to the High-Low, the Stop-’n-Shop, the I.G.A., washed up on the condominium as on some shabby strand of the average. Never letting on and nursing his grudge like a gent, but for all that some wild and even noble revolutionary instinct smoldering in him. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t right. Why couldn’t he have the things he wanted to have instead of the things — and those in probate — he had? Secretly he was niggered, chinkified, PR’d. If President Salmi knew his thoughts he’d find a way to break the will.

While the cupboard filled and he waited for his possessions from Missoula, he occupied his time by examining libraries — Northwestern’s was not far — purchasing stocks of paper, ballpoint pens, pencils, a new dictionary, a thesaurus. He priced electric typewriters. He even began to work up some ideas for a new lecture — on condominiums — and though he actually wrote about a dozen pages (perhaps twenty or so minutes of platform time), he worked desultorily and with no conviction that he would ever finish it. Indeed, he was more conscious of himself than ever. He knew he was lonely and began to miss his father, fantasizing a dignified life for the two of them in the apartment together. Actually he knew more people here than in Missoula. What had his life been like there? The same, he decided, certainly the same, yet somehow he hadn’t noticed. Maybe this was a good sign. Perhaps unhappiness wakes you up, a signal to the spirit like a chronic cough. All right, he was up.

He wondered how he’d managed to pass time since his heart attack. If he really was awake at last, then didn’t that make him a sort of Rip Van Winkle? Had he slept twenty years? Who’d robbed him in the night, then, of the beard he’d earned in his long sleep? How did he recognize the cars? Why was he not astonished by the jets circling his head in their holding patterns above O’Hare? Why weren’t the styles strange to him, the length of women’s skirts and the cut of men’s pants? How did he know the name of the President, and why didn’t television frighten him? In aspects other than the impersonal he was a true amnesiac, the public life realer to him than his own. Here he was, a thirty-seven-year-old graduate student — how did he know his age? who’d been keeping track of it for him? — lacking only his thesis for his Ph.D. in…what? (He knew, but could not remember why he’d gone into the field. He had no interest in it. He was no scholar. The collapse of the job market had been the one fortunate aspect of his academic career. Why impose him as a teacher on students who probably had more interest in his subject than he had?) He was certain only that he had been no better off in Missoula than he was in Chicago. It was solely this which kept him from returning there at once.

Concomitantly he understood something which could yet prove to be valuable. He understood how unhappy he was — understood, that is, that it was no mood. He did not discount other people’s unhappiness. There were those who lost limbs, whose health failed, who couldn’t make it at today’s prices, those whose loved ones died, who would never get what they wanted and who wanted it more for exactly that reason, those whose reputations were stripped away, those who had done great crimes and knew they’d slipped up, that even now the net was tightening. There were those whose expectations, so nearly realized, were disappointed by technicalities, those who were habituated to subtle poisons, those who were condemned. Even now, he supposed, there were children lost in the forest, and there were those whose plane was going down in the mountains and those whose bodies were being humiliated by sadists. People were drowning who had simply meant to go for a sail in the lake. There were cars overturning, burning, their drivers still alive but trapped by steering wheels and stove-in doors. He didn’t discount other people’s unhappiness. More power to them. All he knew was that he was as unhappy as any of them, as unhappy as anyone who had ever lived in the world. And this was a fact, as true of himself as his right-handedness.

Something else was true. For the first time in his life this man, this in-his-best-moments hypochondriac who feared illness and saw mortality in the headache and the common cold, who prized experience and blessed whatever of geography he had seen for its mystery and disparateness, who honored the accomplishments of others and waited in suspense for their new inventions and next books, who melted at all kindnesses to himself as involuntarily as he grew stiff-necked at slurs — this same fellow sat on his mourner’s bench (even now taking a certain — yes — pleasure at the juxtaposition) and quite seriously, and for the first time in his life, considered suicide. At last a quick and even violent death was preferable to what he now understood he had always, if often unwittingly, endured. He had been left out. Jesus, it was the complaint of a kid in a schoolyard, a thing fat boys confessed to their pillows. Only that. Wallflowered by life. Left out. Not through conspiracy, as little through fault, luck of the draw in an unlucky world. Left out. Many are called but few are chosen. And some, like himself, weren’t even called. Left out. How do you goddamnit like that?

In the books he’d read and films he’d seen the characters found a parade and joined it. They bought loud clothes and a bunch of balloons. And the triumph of pure trying was satisfying, even thrilling, as all existential assertions are thrilling, as all little motions are — the cripple’s faltering step and the mute’s first word, garbled, ripped from a torn cone of throat and lovelier than an aria. Energy admirable at long range, other people’s wills and small defiances a beautiful metaphor. How he’d wept when men climbed the moon, the more impressive for its pointlessness. How impressed he’d been at apothecary measures of all strangers’ bravery, little guys’ puny resistances, Denmark’s treatment of its Jews, his father’s sideburns — all that judo of the spirit. But what did any of that come to? A life of stumble, of maimed conversation, effort a lousy substitute for results — and in the end just another compromise. Why should he settle; why should he make deals with his needs? Why should certain men live? There was nothing for it but to cut throats and slice wrists. To be or not to be, you schmuck. Why couldn’t he do it, then? Fear? A little, but nah. Scruples? The notion that as a suicide he would end up with even less than all those compromised cripples and mitigated heroes with their qualified lives? No, no. Why then? Because by now he had lived too long with a sense of justice, with the conviction that if you pay and pay eventually they must give you something for your money, that otherwise they would be shut down. Christ, he thought, his blood still in his veins, his brains and liver and other organs where they were supposed to be, his internals stashed away in the drawers and cupboards of his belly like things in a well-ordered household, I am religious, I am a religious man. I believe in God.