Stanley Elkin - A Bad Man

He knew he slept, through not from dreams. He did not dream, and awoke to the drone of denouncement, recited into the record of their gathering in the passionless, scrupulous tones of arraignment. Nothing was omitted. They laid out his year in the prison in punctilious detail, round-robining grievance like Indians, retailing sins of commission, omission, licking their snubs like wronged wives. He was denounced for food left uneaten on his tray, or for eating too much, denounced for repulsing a homosexual who had taken a fancy to him. Somehow they had found out about his struggle with the retarded Hover in the shower room, and he was denounced for that. Though he had never tried to bribe anyone but Slipper, they invented stories of others, and pictured his every transaction as a sort of graft. It was charged that he did not enjoy the movies. Bisch testified that he resented cleaning out the toilet bowl, and the librarian that he did not read good books. Amazingly, they had been able to reconstruct his masturbatory seizures in solitary confinement. “I work down there,” said the man who had once tried to get him to polish the bars of his cell. “I go down to clean up the place when they let one of these birds out, and I tell you that his mattress was absolutely brittle with dried gizz. You could have snapped it in two if you turned it over. The man’s a pig.” One of the prisoners he had oversold in the canteen testified to his ability to sell, calling it his “power,” as if it were a form of magic. Others confirmed this and cited endless tales of deprivation they had been forced to endure as a result of their purchases, referring to their hardships as if they had been hexes. Harold Flesh told how Feldman had sought their power of attorney; again a great deal was made of the word “power.” It was objected that he did not care who won the athletic competition; that if he had not known that any day spent goofing off in his cell was ultimately to be added on to the end of his sentence, he would have been content to remain there for the entire year. “He was happiest in solitary, I tell you,” the man who had stepped on his heels said. “He was happier asleep than awake, alone than on line in the dining hall, sick than in health.”

It went on in this way for many hours, and Feldman slept more often and more fitfully. Once when he awoke in the still lighted cellblock, expecting to hear again more of their endless, inflectionless charges, he was surprised to discover that save for the heavy breathing of sleeping prisoners, the room was quiet. He sat up, rubbed his eyes and stumbled off to his cell to pee. When he returned, one of the convicts was sitting up on a blanket, staring at him. “What are you doing?” he asked.

“You missed it,” Feldman said. “I just made a brilliant defense and disproved the entire case against me.”

He fell asleep; when he awoke again, the convict to whom he had spoken and who, till now, had had nothing to say was charging him with having been sarcastic.

He could get no grasp on his trail. It swarmed about him, meaningless as the random arc of flies. He had no techniques to use against them — he was power less —and found everything about it boring except the outcome. But always his life had been in the present, all his means temporal as the first civil responses to an emergency, and even the outcome had no reality for him now. Had he not been so bored, he might have been gay.

At about noon the next day they had taken up a new tack. They were finished with their denunciation of his antisocial behavior and had started to charge him with what they had read about him in the book of his life.

Except for the snacks that a few had brought with them they had not eaten since yesterday’s evening meal, and their breath had begun to turn foul. Feldman could not stand the taste in his own mouth and went back to his cell for toothpaste. He spread this around in his mouth and rinsed it out. Then, before returning to his trial, he looked out the window. Prisoners in the exercise yard were staring up at him. The guards followed their glances. “How’s it going?” Mix yelled, and a guard raised his rifle and aimed at Feldman’s head.

Back at his trial he felt a little better, and when the prisoner testifying had finished, Feldman stood up. “Excuse me,” he said, “I’d like to make a comment here.”

“What’s your comment?”

“Well, it’s about all those charges about how I’ve behaved in prison.”

“The time to make that comment was when we were on that subject,” said one of the men who had sat next to him in the dining hall. “We’re on a different subject now, so your comment’s out of order.”

“Sure,” Feldman said. “Up mine.”

“What’s your comment?” asked the man who had told them about Hover.

“It’s that the things you’ve charged me with — the masturbation, the bribes, my disdain for the place, almost everything — are all things you’re guilty of yourselves.”

“Yes. That’s so. Almost everything.”

“Well, doesn’t that make a difference?”

“No,” the man said. “It doesn’t.”

“The defense rests,” Feldman said, and lay down again on the cot.

They went back to the book. He had never been able to bring himself to read it, and so now he listened closely. Whoever had put it together had done an incredible job. There were things he had nearly forgotten: material about his father, some of the old spiels so accurate that he could almost hear his voice. Somewhere they had learned how he had sold his father’s corpse, the old unsalable thing, and they scorned him for it, Slipper in the vanguard of their tantrum. There was also a lot of information about how he had put his department store together during the war, and much about his crime in the basement. As the convicts spoke, their voices betrayed an envy, so that it seemed to him that they rushed through this part. How they loathed their guns just then, Feldman thought, and despised environment, circumstance, their own low reasons and scaled needs like the curved extrapolations on professors’ graphs. But their shame would do him no good, he saw. They turned vituperative, and for the first time since his trial had begun there was feeling in their accusations, dactyls of rich scorn. But astonishingly, rather than fear, he felt impatient for them to continue, a gossip’s curiosity to hear all they said he had done.

They swept back and forth, from his life at home to his life in the department store, making all they could of his binges of sale, times he had overwhelmed the customers, racking up enormous profits, commanding his powers, inducing his spells with his high, perfect pitch. They recalled the time he had campaigned to lower the employee discount from twenty to fifteen percent, and cited occasions — he listened with a kind of queasy pride — when he had kissed his salesgirls, felt up his models. Here their voices had turned calm again, recounting with easy emotion familiar greed, handling offhand sin’s commonplace. Feldman listened, fascinated, watching each speaker, studying not him but his mouth as it shaped his past, as if in the swift contours of his deeds in another man’s mouth there was a clue to the spent configurations of his life. They spoke from memory, but when this failed they sometimes referred to a copy of the dog-eared, greasy book, browsing silently for a moment and then looking up to relate, in their cool words, some anecdote of his viciousness.

It was four o’clock in the afternoon. Though no one had left— could leave, the place was shut off — fatigue and hunger seemed to have thinned their ranks. There was little fidgeting, though men got up frequently to move toward some unlocked cell, pee, splash water on their faces, or just to stand and stretch or walk about the cellblock for a few moments. The trial continued without pause, the sense of its having gone on forever, having always existed, emphasized by the sight of the convicts who were briefly ignoring it. Feldman saw that a distinct mood had been created in the place, a mood not of dormitory but of lifeboat, a last-ditch sense of equality as pervasive as the common foulness of their breath. He could lie, sit, stand, jump, run, spit, belch, pee, fart; he could reach out for the last scant handful of potato chips in a neighbor’s bag; he could cadge cigarettes or even plop down beside someone on another cot, or step with his shoes across another’s blanket. But he had drawn further apart from them than ever. He had listened all along to their tales of his offenses in order to recover some scrap of his emotion, but none of that, despite their researches, had been catalogued. They had not understood the simplest things. They had seen his life from the outside, and however accurate their perceptions, they had known him only empirically.