Stanley Elkin - The Living End

“So you’re the fellow who spouts graffiti to God, are you?” God said and Ladlehaus was kneeling beneath Him, hocus-pocus’d through Hell, terrified and clonic below God’s rhetorical attention. “God,” God said. “Be off.” And Ladlehaus’s quiet “Yes” was as inaudible to the damned as God’s under- the-breath “Oops” when He realized His mistake.

And Ladlehaus thought Well, why not? He didn’t know me any better when He sent me here. He didn’t know my heart. I was an accomplice, what’s that? No hit man, no munitions or electronics expert sent from far; no big deal Indy wheel-man and certainly no mastermind. Only an accomplice, a lookout, a man by the door, like a sentry or a commissionaire, say, little more than an eyewitness really. Almost a mascot. And paid accordingly, his always the lowest share, sometimes nothing more than a good dinner and a night on the town. The crimes would have taken place without him. An accomplice, a redcap, a skycap, a shuffler of suitcases, of doggy bags of boodle, someone with a station wagon, seats that folded down to accommodate cartons of TV sets, stereos. What was the outrage? Even the business of his having been an accomplice to Ellerbee’s murder, though true, was as much talk as anything else, something to give him cachet in his buddy’s eyes, an assertion that he’d left a mark on a pal’s life. And God said “Be off,” and he was off.

The first thing he was aware of was the darkness. A blow of blackness—speleological. He was somewhere secret, somewhere doused. Not void but void’s quenched wilderness. All null subfusc gloom’s bleak eclipse. Hell was downtown by comparison—unless this was Hell too, some lead-lined, heavy-curtained outpost of it. (And Ladlehaus afraid of the dark.) Was it still the universe?

And then he recalled his heresy—He makes mistakes—and thought he knew. He hasn’t been here, He never made this. And thought: Nihility. I am undone. And had to laugh because he knew he was right this time. Why, I’m dead, he thought, I’m the only dead man. Hadn’t he, hadn’t all of them, been snatched from life to Hell? He thought of cemeteries. (Why didn’t he know where he was buried? Because he had not been dead, not properly dead.) Of survivors with their little flags and wreaths and flowers, their pebbles laid like calling cards on the tops of tombstones. No one was ever there, that’s why they thought they had to leave their homeopathic evidences on the graves of their loved ones, why they barbered those graves and, stooping, plucked out weeds, overgrowth, fluffing up the ivy over bald spots in the perpetual care. But the loved ones would never know, they weren’t dead, only gone to Hell. (He means me, Ladlehaus thought, He’s quick to anger and He makes mistakes and I’m the only dead man. And Ladlehaus as afraid of death as of darkness because wasn’t it strange that for all his sojourn in Hell he could not recall a moment of real fear?) It was funny, all those Sunday vigils at graveside, solemn funerals and even the children well turned out, sober and spiffy, to say a ceremonial goodbye to a being already fled, the body in the coffin only an illusion, and a lousy illusion at that. (He’d seen his share of open caskets, the Tussaud effigies actually redolent of wax.) “But no one’s here,” he wanted to shout. “Until today there were no dead. We are not a pasty people. We’re brindled, varnished as violins and cellos, rusted as bloodstain.”

He missed his pain. Settled as stone, fixed as laminate souvenir or gilded baby shoe, Ladlehaus mourned his root-canal’d nerves, insentient now as string. There was not even phantom pain, the mnemonic liveliness of amputated limbs, and if this was at first a comfort—Ha ha, Ladlehaus thought—it was now, he saw—Ha ha, Ladlehaus thought—the ultimate damnation. People were right to fear the dark, death. It was better in land-mined Hell where one had to watch one’s step, where reflex family’d the damned to mountain goats—We were the Goats of Hell, Ladlehaus thought, proud of the designation as the suede and leathered weekend vicious—leaping puddles of booby-trap, learning the falls. Almost conceited. Not because of the attention but because of immortality in such disaster circumstances. Not survival or endurance but the simple inability to stop the steeplechase, to be forced to run forever in jeopardous double time the spited sites of the Underworld, punished in its holocaustal climate and periled along its San Andreas fallibilities, stubbing his toes on the terrible rimmed blossoms of its buried volcanos, eternally tenured in its hurricane alleys and tidal wave bays. In life he had known the Alcatraz’d and Leavenworth’d, all the Big Housed, up-the-river’d chain-gang incarcerate. Like himself they had fattened on sheer grudge, but what was their grudge to his own, to that of the infant damned and the riteless stricken? Temper had tempered him and made him what he had never been as a man, made him, that is, dangerous, lending his very body outrage and turning him into a sort of torch, a real accomplice now to the five- alarm arson of Hell, firing its landscape and using it up with his pain. Which he missed. Because it had kept him company. (What had his friendship with Ellerbee amounted to? Three encounters? Four? Perhaps eighteen or nineteen minutes all told in all the years he’d been in the Underworld. Hell’s measly coffee break.)

Now there was just—He makes mistakes, what did He think He was proving?—lonely painless Ladlehaus, his consciousness locked into his remains like a cry in a doll. (For he felt that that was where he was, somewhere inside his own remains, casketed, coffin’d, pine boxed, in his best suit, the blue wool, the white button-down, the green tie pale as lettuce. But bleached now certainly and in all probability decomposed, the fabric returned not to fiber but to compost, mixed perhaps with his flesh itself so that his duds wore him, an ashen soup, and Ladlehaus only a sort of oil spill tramping his own old beach like a savage footprint. Though this didn’t bother him. He had broken the habit of his body long ago, since old age, before, disabused of flesh, separated from it as from active service.) But it was so dark, dark as a pupil, darker.

“I used to be Jay Ladlehaus.” He paused. “Who did you used to be?” There was no answer. “So this is death,” he said. “Well I’m disappointed. It’s very boring. Where I come from—I come from Hell—it wasn’t ever boring. There was always plenty to do. There was fire, panic in the streets, looting weather. You should have heard us. All those Coconut Grove arias. Our yowls and aiees like the scales of terror. The earthquakes and aftershocks. We could have been holidaymakers, folks ripped out of time on weekends in nightclubs, families in bleachers collapsing on Bat Day. Titanicized, Lusitania’d, Hindenburg’d, Pompeii’d, And very little grace under pressure down there, forget your women and children first protocols, your Alfonse and Gastonics. Men were men, I tell you. Men were men, poor devils.

“Well—So what’s happening? Where’s the action? When? Or is it all monologue here? It’s enough to make you laugh—the way they bury us, I mean. Obsequies and exequies. Cortege and kist. Limousines and hearses—death’s dark motor pool. Oh boy. You’d think a government had changed hands. Well—So what do the rest of you Ken and Barbie dolls think? What’s the bottom line, eh?”

“Oatcakes.”

“Oatcakes?” said astonished Ladlehaus. “Oatcakes is the bottom line?”

“Oatcakes! Oatcakes!”

(There had been darkness but not silence. He’d been distraught, nervous. Well sure, he thought, you get nervous in new circumstances—your first day in kindergarten, your grave. Now he listened, hearing what had been suppressed by his anguish and soliloquies. It was a soft and mushy sound, gassy. Amplified it could have been the noise of chemical reactions, of molecules binding, the caducean spiral of doubled helices or the attenuated pop of parthenogenesis like the delicate withdrawal of a lover. It might have been the sound of maggots burrowing or cells touching at some interface of membrane, the hiss of mathematics.)