Stanley Elkin - A Bad Man

Or of someone forlorn, abandoned. He remembered films he had seen as a child, victims abandoned in trick rooms whose ceilings descended hydraulically, an inch an hour, or rooms inexorably flooding with some killing acid. He remembered terrified men standing tiptoe, climbing the bed, pulling a table on top of that, and a chair on top of that, and the mashed, heaped bedclothes on top of that, building a Tower of Babel with the furniture on whose nervous pinnacle they could place themselves, tottering, swaying out some sure-footed doom.

But he was wrong there too. There was no one-way mirror, so there could not have been a two-way one. The place was not bugged, not because that possibility was too fantastic, but because there was nothing they could learn from Feldman. He was simply isolated, avoided, quarantined, steered clear of in the jail’s society, as one might steer clear of a man who always failed, or one with a contagious disease. And indeed, there were times he had precisely this sense of his confinement, other times when he experienced the same brief, pointless confinement that occurs sometimes during a convalescence.

What struck him at last, after those first hours when his expectations about the nature of what would happen to him failed, was that there was something faintly old-fashioned and rural about his punishment. He might have been the town drunk locked into a cell while he slept one off. Even the man who brought him his supper seemed more bailiff, more turnkey than stern guard. Feldman speculated that the man might even be more approachable than the other guards. He couldn’t help himself; he had begun to notice a certain predisposition in himself to like the guards, to look upon them as finer somehow than the prisoners; to, in fact, show off in front of them: in the exercise yard to hold down the swearing, never to fart in front of one, to offer them cigarettes during breaks — hinting a sort of gentlemen’s “You’re one, I’m one too” special relationship. It was the way, in the old days, he had reacted to Jews he might come upon in a Howard Johnson’s in the state of Nebraska, on the way West. Feldman supposed that the guard assigned to such a place, where the special enclavic sense of being in a different rhythm from the rest of the prison induced an atmosphere of things in abeyance, might have wrought in him that vulnerability toward democracy found among men working late, or among witnesses to the same accident. But when he tried to talk to the man to find out what might be expected of him here, merely asking for the same precision of rule that was available upstairs — he still felt, though he knew it wasn’t so, knew he was only in a different wing, that he was in some old sub-basement of the penitentiary — he found that the man was even less permissive and more reserved than the side-armed, rifle-pointing, machine-gun-dug-in troopers on the walls. When he asked the simplest questions the guard just stared, frowned and walked away.

Now I am alone.

Yet for a time this remained his chief concern, after he became accustomed to the idea that the ceiling would not crush him, that the bed was not electrified, the drinking water scalding. If there was nothing to resist, what was there to comply with?

He couldn’t ask other prisoners. There were no other prisoners. Through the bars of his cell he could see only a long corridor of blank wall. And when he shouted for others to identify themselves— expecting no answer — no one replied. Not even the guard came by to make him shut up.

Feldman had an insight after the guard left. Of course, he thought, he brought me dinner. The rule of silence! The same here as in the dining hall. Now he had a clue about how to act. He was impatient for the guard to return for his tray so he could ask him if he was right. But after an hour the man had not returned. Now the question was immense. Each time he heard a noise Feldman sprang from his cot to see if the guard was coming. There was never anyone in the corridor.

A little soup he had not finished filmed the bottom of the bowl. His fork was chinked at its interstices with bits of carrot, scabs of meat. On the metal tray the scraps had become garbage. Feldman flushed the larger remnants down the toilet and tried to wash off the tinier pieces in his small sink, but he had no soap and the sink would not drain properly. A rich thin scum collected in the basin. Feldman scooped it up with his soupspoon and tried to knock it into the toilet, but it splattered on the floor and along the rim of the bowl. It looked as if he had vomited. He cleaned it up with the last four sheets of toilet paper. Still the guard had not come.

Now it was very late. He was tired, but he did not want to go to sleep until he had asked the guard his question. He couldn’t risk lying down. Faintly, he heard the signal that meant lights out in the other parts of the prison. Another hour passed. He sat in the dark and no longer jumped at each noise. It was difficult to keep his eyes open. After a while he lay down. Soon he was asleep.

When he awoke in the morning his tray was still there. It frightened him. He knew what it was all about now. They meant to starve him. He thought at once of the end a few weeks from now — how long could a man go without food? two weeks? three? — when he would be on his cot, delirious, deranged, hunger like swallowed knives, his head an open sore, and already he could feel it starting. That was why he was so isolated, why no one could hear him when he shouted. Science. It was science. The goddamned scientific soundproof walls, their scientific thickness. He was ferociously hungry. He sprang up, despising his fastidiousness of the night before, regretting that he had thrown away those scraps. His action had had the heavy renunciatory quality of an obligation. I did it to myself, I did it to myself was all he could think of, as if, his resistance surrendered, he had shamefully compounded the loss of his life. He examined the sink. A thin band of dried smutty food remained, the color and consistency of apple butter. He scraped this up, carefully collecting it in his spoon and placing it back in the tray. He began to plan how he would apportion it to himself. It was senseless, he knew, but he prayed that some small value remained in it. Didn’t they say that in the peels and skins, in the cut green tufts of carrots and vitals of animals and rinds of cheese and cores of fruit and calluses of vegetables, the real nutrition lay? Why not in garbage? Why not some dear good stuff residual in that? See the niggers, how they thrived, hearty on the shitty cuts.

Just then the guard came with his breakfast.

Feldman was too astonished to ask his question. He simply took it and gave back his empty tray.

“Use the same silver,” the guard said, and left.

At noon Feldman asked him. “Do I have to be silent during mealtimes?”

“What for?” the guard said.

So, the rules did not operate!

He had been oppressed by the prison’s deflecting forms. Even in his resistance to those forms he had been deflected, his life eaten up by a concern with behavior, the appearance of behavior. All rights wrested their existence from something inimical to rights. Upstairs, the simplest thing he could will had to be meshed with the prison’s routine opposition to the thing willed. This was why he assumed there would be something he could resist in solitary, because he felt his life changed. Upstairs, it was the prison which resisted. Each thing he wanted— each thing — the prison did not want. It should have been a relief, then, to get away from the rules of silence, permission slips, warden’s flags, assigned tables, assemblies, the censuses when the prisoners froze and the pencil man came by to count them. But it wasn’t.