Stanley Elkin - A Bad Man

“I never suffer. Never ,” Feldman said. “Tell me something. What’s it like down there?”

“What’s it like? ”

“Is there an odor?”

“It’s a butcher shop, Leo.”

“Then you don’t have it so easy, do you?” Feldman touched his chest. “Me, I never suffer,” he said. “Things hurt once in a while. Like my heart just now, but I can stand a little pain. I can stand a lot of pain. I’ve the pain threshold of a giant.”

“You can stand other people’s pain,” his homunculus said.

“Everybody’s,” Feldman said. “Pain disappoints me finally. How do you know I’m telling you the truth? Or does a good angel just know?”

“I’m not a good angel.”

“An alter ego.”

“I’m not an alter ego.”

“Who you?”

“I’m a homunculus, a fossilized potential.”

“What might have been,” Feldman said.

“Not to you. To me.”

“This is my interview, you sit-in sibling.”

“Go ahead,” the homunculus said. “Enjoy yourself.”

“Enjoy myself,” Feldman said. “Listen, sidecar, let me tell you. One summer I went East with Lilly to see her family. They have this place on the Sound. They call it a summer place, but it’s terrific. It’s like a hotel. They’ve got a band shell. They have tennis courts. A swimming pool. All the styrofoam toys — you know, chaise lounges that float around beside you in the water, tables with drinks on them. They’ve got boats. Lilly is a water-skier, did you know that? Your sister-in-law is a water-skier. They’ve got all this stuff. The very best. If you like that sort of thing.”

“Don’t you?”

“No. Fun’s fun, but it always turns out to be some new ride. It’s onanistic, if you want to know, because what counts is what’s going on in the pit of your stomach. Sin ought to involve other people too. I don’t see the point. It’s a question of risks and balanced thrills. In a roller coaster the risk is relatively small, but the thrill — the fright and the queerness in the belly — is large. On water skis the queerness is much less but the risk is greater. Do you know what I’m talking about? There’s nothing to do. I can take a lot of suffering because I can take a lot of pleasure too. There’s nothing to do.”

“Don’t tell me you’re bored.”

“No. I’m not bored.”

“I don’t see how you manage to avoid it then, O solo Leo.”

“There’s a pleasure that never disappoints. It comes from setting other things in motion but not moving yourself.”

“Ah, Leo, you’ve the soul of a model railroader.”

“You forget yourself. I’m your host.”

“I’m sorry. How does one manage this?”

“Sell,” Feldman said.

“Cell?”

“Yes,” Feldman said, “sell.”

He was going nuts. It was a new phase. He became desperate. It was a new phase. He felt a need for exercise and dreamed of learning to water-ski. It was a new phase. He defined physical health as a flexibility of posture and imagined himself a scientist. It was a new phase. He defined unhappiness as a flexibility of mood and imagined himself a philosopher. And the ground kept shifting on him and he thought again of those rooms where the walls close in and the floors move up to meet a descending ceiling. And he had to take his hat off to that warden, which was an old phase. And for a while he was afraid. He wanted to be able to stretch his legs, really stretch them, slide into third base or climb some high mountain or run the mile. And he felt this rapid alternation of the soul, and he commanded the homunculus to sit still, but it wasn’t doing it, it said, and as far as it, the homunculus, was concerned, solitary confinement was something it was used to, what with being a shut-in and all.

Feldman didn’t know what to do, so to steady himself he decided to try to sell the homunculus a little something. He tried to sell it some of the soup the guard had brought him for lunch — it was a cold day, and soup warms the heart, Feldman said, and it would do the homunculus good — but there was absolutely no way the little fellow could pay him. Feldman offered to extend credit (he remembered fondly that he had done some marvelous things with credit), but no, the homunculus could never pay him. It was a pauper, of course, a spread-eagled parasite riding the heart like a surfboard. It couldn’t help itself. It had no money. It had never had money. It was born without pockets. Since it was against Feldman’s principles to give anything away, he ate the soup himself.

“Want to buy back this empty tray?” Feldman asked the guard.

“Watch out,” the guard said. “You don’t get out of here until I can report to the warden that there’s been a significant change in your behavior.”

“ You? ”

“I’m a trained psychologist,” the guard said.

Then he entered a very bad phase. It was the one he had the most faith in because it was the one he had the least to do with. That is, he had not invented it as he had invented the others. Instead, it was visited upon him, as a disease might have been, or seven fat years, then seven lean ones.

He was low, as low perhaps as he had ever been. With the clarity of an insomniac, he saw — and so striking was the impression that he could not remember when it had been otherwise — the inferior quality of his life. Most of the acceptable lives he could think of were lived by strangers. He thought of the warden. How would it feel, he asked himself, to be the warden? Not so hot, perhaps. The man was too much like himself. It was not acceptable, finally, or respectable, to have to deal with those who were not your equals. He and the warden had never dealt with equals. Feldman lacked respectability, the clubby regard of peers. (It was funny, because most people were respectable. All the clerks in his department store were respectable, all the cousins at a wedding.) It was the serenity of the franchised, and Feldman had always lacked it, and because he lacked it his life was without the possibility of consolation.

Where, he wondered, are Feldman’s peers? Nowhere. Then where are his customers? All gone, taken away, and the salesman locked up in a cage. Then where’s his life? Here’s his life, here in the cage.

This phase did not soon pass — he had some hope that it might; so sly was he, so long had he lived with aces in the hole, that he thought they must be there always; superstitiously he thought they grew there — but when it finally ended he lay back on his cot, returned to a condition of an earlier phase. He was again the man who could not remember, forced into some narrow channel of the now.

He was like a sick man, had just that sick-man sense of languid withdrawal even from his own symptoms, and even the sick man’s vague unthrift, his sporty indifference that he existed in an ambience of letters which had still to be answered, appointments which had still to be canceled, invitations which had still to be withdrawn. Deprived of detail, he was brought back into himself and was surprised to learn that this was possible, for he knew that as a selfish man he had never lived very far away from himself, had hedged distance and all horizons like some twelfth-century mariner. The idea that there were pieces of Feldman which could still be recalled gave him a sense of his own enormousness.

It was just this awe of himself which gave him his first hope in days. He marveled at his spinning moods, his barber-pole soul. And again he found himself praying. “Give me back constancy,” he prayed, “make me monolithic, fix my flux and let me consolidate.”

“Listen,” Feldman asked the guard, “are there any letters for me?” He hadn’t the least idea why he had asked the question. He had told Lilly not to write him, and he was still so turned in on himself that it would have been impossible for him even to read a letter. (He had noticed lately — with some alarm — that without any work for it to do, his will proceeded in its own direction.)