Stanley Elkin - A Bad Man

His eyes could not get accustomed to the darkness, and since it seemed unlikely that he could find the narrow stairway again in this pitch, he decided to try for the wall which the button might have bounced against. He put his hands out in front of him to grope with the darkness. Momentarily he expected the tips of his fingers to smash against a wall. He was so conscious of them that they seemed wet, as if he had licked them and thrust them out to test the direction of the wind. Without realizing it, he had slipped back into the sliding, skatey progress he had adopted earlier. Again he had a sense of all the strange rooms he’d ever been in.

He moved his left foot forward, but it hit bluntly against a solid barrier. The sudden contact, slow and cautious, sent something like an electric shock through his body. He leaned forward and found the wall. The same bad smell of the stairway met his nostrils. He slid his hand over the rough, grainy wall and felt the metal panel over an electric switch. He flicked it on, and instantly the place was flush with light. Just to his right was an arch and the stairway he had descended. He had traveled in a circle. He turned around.

Across the room — it was enormous — thrust out from the wall, was a narrow wooden platform like a low stage. On it, stiff, its rigid form and strict ninety-degree angles already suggesting its function, was the electric chair.

“ Aiiee ,” Feldman shouted. “ Aiiee, aiiee! ”

He turned off the lights; then, afraid to be with that thing in the dark, he turned them back on. Shielding his eyes with his arm as though he moved through a sandstorm, he approached the chair. It looked, on the platform, like a throne. Its high straight back and stiff thrusting arms suggested the stern posture of pharaohs. Two straps rose on each arm, and at the back, attached at the level of a man’s chest, a huge leather strap, the color of a barber’s strop but bigger, hung down, curling on the wooden seat like some mechanical snake. He reached out as though he would stir the leather coils, but pulled his hand back at once. Jesus, he thought, what if it’s turned on? He leaned forward and examined the chair closely. How did it kill you? He spotted a thick black cable that ran from the wall behind the chair and climbed its ladder-back into a queer device at the top, a soft puffy collar like something on a dentist’s chair. Two metal nodes — electrodes probably — protruded through the sides of the collar.

“Oh boy,” he said. “Oh boy oh boy.”

A notice was scotch-taped to a corner of the platform. CAUTION, it said. “This penitentiary, like comparable institutions, operates exclusively on DC (Direct Current) current only. Electrocution, however, must be performed using AC ( Alternating ) current, or the condemned’s body will be charred beyond recognition, making legal identification of the corpse impossible. Also, because of the high-body-heat factor in electrocution — the electrocutionee’s body temp. will normally rise to 140 degrees F. (Fahrenheit) — even under a jolt of the more humane Alternating (AC) Current, care must be taken to avoid administering DC current, since two to three thousand volts will immediately raise the body temp. to 400 degrees F., or sufficiently beyond the kindling point of human flesh to create a fire hazard. This chair is equipped with AC/DC conversion facilities. Make sure that the following procedures are carefully followed.” Then there was a complicated list of directions that Feldman found impossible to follow. The electrical schema was incoherent. How is the guy supposed to know what to do? he wondered. They even have to tell him what AC and DC stands for. He read the sheet again, then a third time. Finally the letters seemed to blur and the arrows on the schema to move around.

He clapped his fists rapidly, excitedly, just under his chin, pantomiming a kind of classic vaudeville distress. “I’ve got to get out of here,” he said moving away from the platform, and he began to tour the room in great rough circles. “The last mile, the last mile,” he said, still knocking his fists together. Out of breath, he paused at the far edge of one of his circles. He could still see the awful chair, and he turned his back to it and sat down cross-legged on the cold floor.

“All right,” he asked himself, “where do I stand? Where do I stand, what did I do? I didn’t do anything.” Adultery, he thought. “Adultery,” he said, “I committed adultery. Two victims I made tonight. Lilly. Lilly is a victim. And the other one — her husband. Her husband is a victim. Now, are they married? She’s married, Mona’s married. But are they married? She knew about the bidet, she found the kitchen. So let’s say they’re married, where do I stand now?

“The unwritten law is that the husband has the right to kill the man taken in adultery. Or the woman. It’s his choice. There have been cases where the unwritten law has given him the right to kill both. Taken in adultery. I’m a dead duck. Taken in adultery. But I wasn’t taken in adultery. Hey, what is this? I wasn’t taken in adultery. I walked into the goddamn kitchen. The guy was counting deposit bottles. It was the furthest thing from his mind.”

He got up and rushed to the stairway. “ What is this? ” he roared up the stairs. “What do you think you’re doing? I wasn’t taken in adultery. You’ll never get away with it.” He started up the stairs. “Do you hear me? I was not taken in adultery! It doesn’t count twenty minutes later. The unwritten law says you’ve got to kill the guy immediately. And it means bare hands, or a blunt instrument, or a handy knife. Electric chairs are out. Do you hear me? They’re out. I don’t have to be anybody’s electrocutionee! ”

He sat down on the stairs, exhausted. “What the fuck am I talking about?” he said. He shook his head. “That’s not where I stand. That has nothing to do with where I stand. He hates me. That’s where I stand.” It’s the unwritten law, he thought. Sure, power liked to play by the rules. But power was arbitrary. It changed its mind. It killed you with its alternating current. There were ways to get rid of Feldman — he thought of his discharge suit carefully made sizes small a week after he’d arrived — and they didn’t even have to be clever. They could shoot him, stick a shiv in him, beat him up, run him over — anything. The thing is, he thought, I don’t really understand why the warden hates me. It was very puzzling. He could not honestly say that he hated the warden. He wondered if that was what was wrong. Really, he thought, I don’t hate enough. It’s a weakness. He had never hated the Communists. He had not even hated the Nazis. Nazis were nuts, but they had been good for business. Did the warden know he had not hated the Nazis? He was a little sorry now. Not hating was bad for business, but to tell the truth, he didn’t even hate what was bad for business. Then he remembered that he didn’t give a shit about his neighborhood and always voted No on bond issues. Once he had rejected a referendum which proposed to merge the population in the county with the population in the city, lifting the city into seventh place in the nation. The campaign slogan had been “Seventh in America, Seventy-fifth in the World.” It hadn’t appealed to him. Well, that was too bad, because they could kill him for that. They could kill him for his lack of support, for his indifference to having a National League team in the town, for not getting behind the United Fund, for his public indifference and for his private indifference. For not signing petitions, and rejecting their projects. And for his ambiguous status: not partisan or loyal opposition, not anarchist, not anything. Simply inattentive, mealy-hearted. They could kill him for that.