Stanley Elkin - A Bad Man

In the prison, however, he was never more docile. He had gone underground. He tightened his belt and became a very Englishman of austerity. Realizing how close he was to being discharged — his Statement of Remaining Obligation was sent from the state capital on the same day he received an answer to his last letter to Billing — he regarded the time he spent there more bitterly than ever. He no longer speculated about Warden’s Mind or the meaning behind the sytem. Nor did he seek advantage. (In a way, he was actually grateful to Ed Slipper for exposing him. If Slipper had still been under an obligation to him, even one the old man did not acknowledge, he might have felt compelled to extract it, might have done something that would get him into trouble. The trick now was to stay out of trouble.)

When one day he awoke with what he was certain was a fever, he panicked. Suppose he was wrong, he reasoned. Suppose he reported to the infirmary and had no temperature — he would be charged a day for goldbricking. Suppose, on the other hand, he reported for work and the fever cut into his efficiency. Suppose he made a mistake; why, they would charge him for that too. Weeks could be added to his term. The percentage player would report to the infirmary, but suppose the fever had clouded his reason and he wasn’t reading the percentages clearly. What was he to do? In the end he decided — perhaps unreasonably; he was aware of that — that one ought not arrive at a decision and then, simply on the basis of some estimated margin for error, reverse that decision. But again, could he say he had arrived at a decision when he was only inclined toward one? What was he to do? What?

Eventually he went to the infirmary. His temperature was 102, and they put him to bed. Weak, feverish, feeling as if he would throw up, pains in his arms, his legs, all he could think of was that it was good time, perfect in fact, that it couldn’t be counted against him: that he was safest as a sick man. He resented the medications but took them obediently, unwilling to give any trouble which could boomerang. He thought it a hideous irony that perhaps the very medicines he took to make him well enough to return to that part of the prison where the dangers were might have been purchased with the funds he had given to Slipper.

In three days he was well enough to be discharged, and was granted an additional half day of “soft duty” to be performed in and about his cell. He was as grateful for the three and a half days he had gained as some other man might have been for a long, paid vacation. But he was careful not to appear too happy, lest his happiness be counted against him.

Indeed, his expression was now one of intense disengagement. He could have been one of those stone-faced palace guards whom tourists try to ruffle for a photograph. He performed all his duties — even those which he had once found loathsome, like scrubbing the toilet bowl or, in the canteen, fetching the petty items the prisoners requested and ringing up the petty sales — with a determination that rose from the bedrock of the will. In the exercise yard he counseled his body like a fight manager, and with the effort of a trained athlete, managed to get through his now near-perfect mimes of the ordinary strolls and walks and pacings of the unmarked convicts. Only he knew how much he sweated. (Perhaps it was this that had brought him down sick before, and unwilling to risk the disease again for fear that he might not have temperature the next time — sure, immunities, antibodies and unhealth’s diminishing returns — he let up a little, allowing his body those occasional epileptic leaps of character that he had formerly feared.)

He went to the movies when they were shown, and paid careful attention to the plots for fear that a disarmed answer to a guard’s or fellow prisoner’s question about the film might be taken amiss and register a chain of consequences that he would live to regret. He devoured the prison newspaper for the same reason, and familiarized himself with every notice on every bulletin board. (Confronted from time to time with some strange new obligation—“Prisoners not involved themselves with intramural athletics are nevertheless required to pick a sport and a team, and to familiarize themselves with the records of all the players on that team”—he never speculated as to meanings. Meaning was beside the point; only performance mattered.) He memorized his table assignments as if the numbers had been state secrets and he a spy, and because prisoners were encouraged to have interests as well as duties, he participated in a hobby club, joylessly teaching himself to make irrelevant little leather and wooden artifacts. He took special care to be in the right place at the right time, rushing to his cell long before lockup, conspicuously present at each major census four times a day and at most of the minor ones on each half-hour.

Yet for all his attention to detail, for all the assiduity which the prospect of his release provoked in him, he never became what could be called a “model prisoner.” He had none of the cheerfulness of such men, nothing of their dopey good will. Even this was calculated, for he anticipated the effect that such falseness might have on others. (And by “others” he meant everyone .) Instead, he sought to impart a sense of performance without eagerness, a careful balance of going through motions and touching all bases. (Ironically, he behaved exactly as a good cop would who neither hated nor cared for his suspects.) This, of course, made him vulnerable too, and he was aware of the dimensions of that vulnerability, knowing that he must appear to them exactly as he was, keeping nothing of himself in reserve, his distaste for his plight obvious, the desperation behind his willingness to do his job clear to anyone. In short, his eagerness, though it was the reverse eagerness of a model prisoner, was clearly visible. Anyone could see it. Yet it was his only feasible choice: tight-faced to walk the tightrope, his discomfort and hatred public as a monument. If this were a lying low it was a lying low with his head visible, his bald spot bright as a bull’s-eye.

Besides, there was still the notoriety of the bad-man crap: news items about him in the paper, editorials, the book of his life a public record in the library, his club the only one disbanded by a warden’s fiat in thirty-five years, the semi-sent-to-Coventry treatment from the other prisoners, whose only remarks to him since Warden’s Assembly had smacked of command, distinctly like the no-nonsense exchanges between officers and men. Why, he had not had conversation as such in months. (And now that he thought of it, when had he had it? When had he last listened to someone else or spoken to offer an opinion that another might take or leave alone? He had always been in Coventry. He could not remember a time when he hadn’t been, though again, now that he thought of it, he had listened to Miss Lane’s letter, reading it over to see what she thought. Then he fired her.) How low, then, could he lie? But despite their ominous interest in him, he behaved the deaf-mute, a pretended mantle of invisiblity as fastidiously assumed as ever any by some discreet serving man in the presence of his quarreling masters. That was it. Of course! They had turned him into a nigger, and he had learned to live under threat, a quality of last-hired, first-fired doom dogging his steps and days.

It was what had made the time fly until Warden’s Assembly. And afterwards, it was what had slowed it down. When he first arrived at the penitentiary, each threat, its manifestation specific but its source veiled — the warden’s early aggressions and the contempt of the guards, the appearance of the blue fool suit on the cot in his cell, the discovery of the Feldman books in the library, solitary confinement — had posed a problem for him and created an interest that rose to meet it like the love of truth rising to meet fact. Time raced. Later, when he had learned to identify the source, the episodes became indistinct, and it stood still. Yet everything had involved waiting, and everything had been exciting. But for what had he waited? For them to make good on their bad-man talk. And they hadn’t. They hadn’t . Now, he realized, they would have to get him soon or miss him forever. They would have to get him at once. (Though he didn’t intend to search for meaning, it occurred to him that maybe this was what it was all about: to do him a favor, to excite him, to distract him, to make time race.) Now, for the first time, he realized that he had never been beaten up. It seemed astonishing. No guard had made his nose bleed, no cons had punched him! A blow in the chest, and his homunculus could dislodge, rupturing his heart. They knew that, but nothing had happened. Nothing. Only a physical disaster would have meant anything. Blows, pain counted. Death did. (Boredom would have been unbearable, but it wouldn’t have mattered, and anxiety was interesting, and it hadn’t mattered.) Only a physical catastrophe. Only that.