John Cheever: Falconer

"Some sort of kindness," he said. He was helpless. "A little kindness."

"Kindness?" she asked. "Do you expect kindness from meat a time like this? What have you ever done to deserve kindness? What have you ever given me? Drudgery. A superficial and a meaningless life. Dust. Cobwebs, Cars and cigarette lighters that don't work. Bathtub rings, unflushed toilets an international renown for sexual depravity, clinical alcoholism and drug addiction, broken arms, legs, brain concussions and now a massive attack of heart failure. That's what you've given me to live with, and now you expect kindness." The drumming of his heart worsened, his vision got dimmer and he fell asleep, but when he awoke Marcia was cooking something in the kitchen and he was still alive.

Eben entered again. It was at a party in a New York brownstone. Some guests were leaving and he stood in an open window, shouting goodbye. It was a large window and he was standing on the sill. Below him was an areaway with an iron fence of palings, cast to look like spears. As he stood in the window, someone gave him a swift push. He jumped or fell out the window, missed the iron spears and landed on his knees on the paving. One of the departing guests returned and helped him to his feet and he went on talking about when they would meet again. He did this to avoid looking back at the window to see, if he might, who had pushed him. That he didn't want to know. He had sprained an ankle and bruised a knee, but he refrained from thinking about the incident again. Many years later, walking in the woods, Eben had suddenly asked: "Do you remember that party at Sarah's when you got terribly drunk and someone pushed you out the window?" "Yes," said Farragut. "I've never told you who it was," said Eben. "It was that man from Chicago." Farragut thought that his brother had incriminated himself with this remark, but Eben seemed to feel exonerated. He braced his shoulders, lifted his head to the light and began to kick the leaves on the path vigorously.

The lights and the TV went off. Tennis began to ask: "Have you been taken care of? Have you been taken care of?" Farragut, lying on his cot thinking of the morning and his possible death, thought that the dead, compared to the imprisoned, would have some advantages. The dead would at least have panoramic memories and regrets, while he, as a prisoner, found his memories of the shining world to be broken, intermittent and dependent upon chance smells-grass, shoe leather, the odor of piped water in the showers. He possessed some memories, but they were eclipsed and indisposed. Waking in the morning, he cast wildly and desperately around for a word, a metaphor, a touch or smell that would grant him a bearing, but he was left mostly with methadone and his unruly keel. He seemed, in prison, to be a traveler and he had traveled in enough strange countries to recognize this keen alienation. It was the sense that on waking before dawn, everything, beginning with the dream from which he waked, was alien. He had dreamed in another language and felt on waking the texture and smell of strange bedclothes. From the window came the strange smell of strange fuels. He bathed in strange and rusty water, wiped his ass on strange and barbarous toilet paper and climbed down unfamiliar stairs to be served a strange and profoundly offensive breakfast. That was travel. It was the same here. Everything he saw, touched, smelted and dreamed of was cruelly alien, but this continent or nation in which he might spend the rest of his living days had no flag, no anthem, no monarch, president, taxes, boundaries or graves.

He slept poorly and felt haggard when he woke. Chicken Number Two brought him gruel and coffee, but his heart was moving along with his watch. If the methadone didn't come at nine he would begin to die. It would not be anything that he could walk into, like an electric chair or a noose. At five minutes to nine he began to shout at Tiny. "I want my fix, it's time for my fix, just let me get down to the infirmary and get my fix." "Well, he has to take care of the line down there," Tiny said. "Home deliveries don't come until later." "Maybe they don't make home deliveries" said Farragut. He sat on his cot, closed his eyes and tried to force himself into unconsciousness. This lasted a few minutes. Then he roared: "Get me my fix, for Jesus Christ's sake!" Tiny went on figuring work sheets, but Farragut could barely see him. The rest of the men who hadn't gone to shop began to watch. There was no one else in cell lock but the Cuckold. Then Chisholm, the deputy warden, came in with two other assholes. "I hear you got a withdrawal show scheduled," he said. "Yeah," said Tiny. "It's not my idea." He didn't look up from his work sheets. "Take any empty table. The floor show's about to begin."

Farragut had begun to sweat from his armpits, crotch and brow. Then the sweat flowed down his ribs and soaked his trousers. His eyes were burning. He could still marshal the percentiles. He would lose fifty percent vision. When the sweat was in full flood, he began to shake. This began with his hands. He sat on them, but then his head began to wag. He stood. He was shaking all over. Then his right arm flew out. He pulled it back. His left knee jerked up into the air. He pushed it down, hut it went up again and began to go up and down like a piston. He fell and beat his head on the floor, trying to achieve the reasonableness of pain. Pain would give him peace. When he realized that he could not reach pain this way, he began the enormous struggle to hang himself. He tried fifteen or a million times before he was able to get his hand on his belt buckle. His hand flew away and after another long struggle he got it back to the buckle and unfastened it. Then, on his knees, with his head still on the floor, he jerked the belt out of the loops. The sweat had stopped. Convulsions of cold racked him. No longer even on his knees, but moving over the floor like a swimmer, he got to the chair, looped the buckle onto itself for a noose and fastened the belt to a nail on the chair. He was trying to strangle himself when Chisholm said: "Cut the poor prick down and get his fix." Tiny unlocked the cell door. Farragut couldn't see much, but he could see this, and the instant the cell was unlocked he sprang to his feet, collided with Tiny and was halfway out the cell and running for the infirmary when Chisholm brained him with a chair. He came to in the infirmary with his left leg in a plaster cast and half his head in bandages. Tiny was there in civilian clothes. "Farragut, Farragut," he asked, "why is you an addict?"

Farragut didn't reply. Tiny patted him on the head. "I'll bring you in some fresh tomatoes tomorrow. My wife puts up fifty jars of tomato sauce. We have tomatoes for breakfast, lunch and supper. But I still got tomatoes left over. I'll bring some in tomorrow. You want anything else?"

"No, thank you," said Farragut. "I'd like some tomatoes."

"Why is you an addict?" asked Tiny, and he went away.

Farragut was not disconcerted by the question, but he was provoked. It was only natural that he should be an addict. He had been raised by people who dealt in contraband. Not hard drugs, but unlicensed spiritual, intellectual and erotic stimulants. He was the citizen, the product of some border principality such as Liechtenstein. His background lacked the mountainous scenery, but his passport was fat with visas, he dealt in spiritual contraband, spoke four languages poorly and knew the words to four national anthems. Once when he was sitting in a café in Kitzbuhel with his brother, listening to a band concert, Eben suddenly sprang to his feet and clapped his Tyrolean hat over his heart. "What's up?" Farragut asked, and Eben said, "They are about to play the national anthem." What the band was about to play was "Home on the Range," but Farragut remembered this to illustrate the fact that his family had endeavored to be versatile at every political, spiritual and erotic level. It helped to explain the fact that he was an addict.