A Bad Man

11

Now I am alone.

The cell to which they brought Feldman for his solitary confinement was no smaller than the one he shared with Bisch. If anything, because of the absence of the other cot and the small table on which each convict was allowed to arrange his possessions, it seemed a little larger. Nor was it, as he expected, darker. When the warden roared the words “solitary confinement,” they had suggested some black hole-and-corner of the universe, or cramped subterranean quarter the sun never touched. He had expected, really, that it would be a place bad for one’s bronchial condition — a calcimined, limey strongbox locked by big keys, the bedsprings rusted and the mattress mildewed.

It ain’t the Ritz.

On the other hand, it was no less institutional-looking, and thus, in a strange way, competent, functional, than anyplace else in the prison.

When he had taken in that they had not put him into a torture chamber, that he was nowhere where preceding sufferers had etched their dark dates on the walls of their cells like poems of their catastrophes, he substituted another expectation: science. That is, he began to think of himself as of some modern, poisonous by-product, a radioactive pile perhaps, which may only be handled remotely, by tube digits, mechanical arms operated from the other side of thick walls by men in lab jackets.

Or of someone forlorn, abandoned. He remembered films he had seen as a child, victims abandoned in trick rooms whose ceilings descended hydraulically, an inch an hour, or rooms inexorably flooding with some killing acid. He remembered terrified men standing tiptoe, climbing the bed, pulling a table on top of that, and a chair on top of that, and the mashed, heaped bedclothes on top of that, building a Tower of Babel with the furniture on whose nervous pinnacle they could place themselves, tottering, swaying out some sure-footed doom.

But he was wrong there too. There was no one-way mirror, so there could not have been a two-way one. The place was not bugged, not because that possibility was too fantastic, but because there was nothing they could learn from Feldman. He was simply isolated, avoided, quarantined, steered clear of in the jail’s society, as one might steer clear of a man who always failed, or one with a contagious disease. And indeed, there were times he had precisely this sense of his confinement, other times when he experienced the same brief, pointless confinement that occurs sometimes during a convalescence.

What struck him at last, after those first hours when his expectations about the nature of what would happen to him failed, was that there was something faintly old-fashioned and rural about his punishment. He might have been the town drunk locked into a cell while he slept one off. Even the man who brought him his supper seemed more bailiff, more turnkey than stern guard. Feldman speculated that the man might even be more approachable than the other guards. He couldn’t help himself; he had begun to notice a certain predisposition in himself to like the guards, to look upon them as finer somehow than the prisoners; to, in fact, show off in front of them: in the exercise yard to hold down the swearing, never to fart in front of one, to offer them cigarettes during breaks — hinting a sort of gentlemen’s “You’re one, I’m one too” special relationship. It was the way, in the old days, he had reacted to Jews he might come upon in a Howard Johnson’s in the state of Nebraska, on the way West. Feldman supposed that the guard assigned to such a place, where the special enclavic sense of being in a different rhythm from the rest of the prison induced an atmosphere of things in abeyance, might have wrought in him that vulnerability toward democracy found among men working late, or among witnesses to the same accident. But when he tried to talk to the man to find out what might be expected of him here, merely asking for the same precision of rule that was available upstairs — he still felt, though he knew it wasn’t so, knew he was only in a different wing, that he was in some old sub-basement of the penitentiary — he found that the man was even less permissive and more reserved than the side-armed, rifle-pointing, machine-gun-dug-in troopers on the walls. When he asked the simplest questions the guard just stared, frowned and walked away.

Now I am alone.

Yet for a time this remained his chief concern, after he became accustomed to the idea that the ceiling would not crush him, that the bed was not electrified, the drinking water scalding. If there was nothing to resist, what was there to comply with?

He couldn’t ask other prisoners. There were no other prisoners. Through the bars of his cell he could see only a long corridor of blank wall. And when he shouted for others to identify themselves—expecting no answer — no one replied. Not even the guard came by to make him shut up.

Feldman had an insight after the guard left. Of course, he thought, he brought me dinner. The rule of silence! The same here as in the dining hall. Now he had a clue about how to act. He was impatient for the guard to return for his tray so he could ask him if he was right. But after an hour the man had not returned. Now the question was immense. Each time he heard a noise Feldman sprang from his cot to see if the guard was coming. There was never anyone in the corridor.

A little soup he had not finished filmed the bottom of the bowl. His fork was chinked at its interstices with bits of carrot, scabs of meat. On the metal tray the scraps had become garbage. Feldman flushed the larger remnants down the toilet and tried to wash off the tinier pieces in his small sink, but he had no soap and the sink would not drain properly. A rich thin scum collected in the basin. Feldman scooped it up with his soupspoon and tried to knock it into the toilet, but it splattered on the floor and along the rim of the bowl. It looked as if he had vomited. He cleaned it up with the last four sheets of toilet paper. Still the guard had not come.

Now it was very late. He was tired, but he did not want to go to sleep until he had asked the guard his question. He couldn’t risk lying down. Faintly, he heard the signal that meant lights out in the other parts of the prison. Another hour passed. He sat in the dark and no longer jumped at each noise. It was difficult to keep his eyes open. After a while he lay down. Soon he was asleep.

When he awoke in the morning his tray was still there. It frightened him. He knew what it was all about now. They meant to starve him. He thought at once of the end a few weeks from now — how long could a man go without food? two weeks? three? — when he would be on his cot, delirious, deranged, hunger like swallowed knives, his head an open sore, and already he could feel it starting. That was why he was so isolated, why no one could hear him when he shouted. Science. It was science. The goddamned scientific soundproof walls, their scientific thickness. He was ferociously hungry. He sprang up, despising his fastidiousness of the night before, regretting that he had thrown away those scraps. His action had had the heavy renunciatory quality of an obligation. I did it to myself, I did it to myself was all he could think of, as if, his resistance surrendered, he had shamefully compounded the loss of his life. He examined the sink. A thin band of dried smutty food remained, the color and consistency of apple butter. He scraped this up, carefully collecting it in his spoon and placing it back in the tray. He began to plan how he would apportion it to himself. It was senseless, he knew, but he prayed that some small value remained in it. Didn’t they say that in the peels and skins, in the cut green tufts of carrots and vitals of animals and rinds of cheese and cores of fruit and calluses of vegetables, the real nutrition lay? Why not in garbage? Why not some dear good stuff residual in that? See the niggers, how they thrived, hearty on the shitty cuts.

Just then the guard came with his breakfast.

Feldman was too astonished to ask his question. He simply took it and gave back his empty tray.

“Use the same silver,” the guard said, and left.

At noon Feldman asked him. “Do I have to be silent during mealtimes?”

“What for?” the guard said.

So, the rules did not operate!

He had been oppressed by the prison’s deflecting forms. Even in his resistance to those forms he had been deflected, his life eaten up by a concern with behavior, the appearance of behavior. All rights wrested their existence from something inimical to rights. Upstairs, the simplest thing he could will had to be meshed with the prison’s routine opposition to the thing willed. This was why he assumed there would be something he could resist in solitary, because he felt his life changed. Upstairs, it was the prison which resisted. Each thing he wanted—each thing — the prison did not want. It should have been a relief, then, to get away from the rules of silence, permission slips, warden’s flags, assigned tables, assemblies, the censuses when the prisoners froze and the pencil man came by to count them. But it wasn’t.

He learned at last, then, that his punishment down here was to be himself. It was ridiculous. How could he be Feldman if there was no one there that he could be Feldman to? He thought of the garbage with which he had hoped a few hours before to support his life. He thought of all nugatory things thrown away, of vast lots blooming with junk. That’s where the nutrition wasn’t.

Now I am alone.

Don’t say that Feldman was unwilling to go along with the program.

What is the program?

The clever warden didn’t do things haphazardly. There was significance in the placement of each water cooler. (Hadn’t he seen the bills? Eight hundred twelve dollars for replumbing, for pulling out the old pipes and settling them in a new pattern. Why?) He supposed he was meant to go over his sins, to parse his past like a grammarian. It was the old wilderness routine. They’d left him in this desert to think about things.

Feldman refused to think about his past. If that was the warden’s purpose the man was out of luck. People don’t remember what has happened to them, he thought. You couldn’t even remember how you felt. Unhappiness was always neutralizing itself. Likewise joy. So that the past had no character — neither of pain nor pleasure. It gave the impression of something canceled out, a sort of eternal breaking even. It was like what happened with the leaves. In the first flush days of spring, he couldn’t remember when the trees had been without leaves. Again in autumn it seemed as if they had never had them. Even this experience — if I outlive it, he thought — will neutralize itself. It was a kind of fallout. Too much was lost. Too much was lost even of his neutralized life. He knew that you were supposed to be able to store in your subconscious everything that had ever happened to you. How many slices of cake you’d had at your eighth birthday party, the names of all the people you’d ever met. That if they gave you truth serum you’d spew all this stuff back. He didn’t believe it.

He sat up and pinched his arm. Remember this pinch, he commanded himself, squeezing. Remember the date and the hour and the exact pain, and on the anniversary of the pinch a year from now, five years, ten, fifteen, think about it. Try to remember to remember it on your deathbed.

He released his flesh, and instantly the pain thinned out, was absorbed, halved, quartered, sixteenthed. He couldn’t have taken up exactly the same flesh in his fingers again. It was as if he had thrown a stone into a lake. In seconds he could no longer identify the precise spot where it had gone down.

“Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered.” Who said that?

If he had difficulty remembering, he had none at all imagining. On about the third day he began to fantasize. He thought much about girls and women and kept himself exhausted by yielding to every sexual impulse, building the foundations of his lust always on real women — girls who had worked for him, his buyers’ wives, customers to whom he had given his personal attention. Sometimes, however, at the moment of climax, he swiftly substituted some film goddess, or girl seen on television, or a record sleeve, or a billboard, or some girl never seen, some college woman from books and imagination.

He became almost animally potent, yet remained somehow in control, cool enough to build his fantasies carefully, starting again if he made a mistake, constructing what he said to her, what she said to him. It was a more careful wooing than any he had ever done in his life, and he saw himself in a new light, gallant, charming. He held off climax and teased himself with manufactured complexities, sudden jealousies — seeing himself deep in love, smitten till it cost him. Together, he and his girl friend worried about new places they could go, and later, what they were to do about their affair, how the children were to be told, how it was to be broken to the husband, to Lilly. It was marvelous. All that disturbed him were those occasions when his carefully managed, highly organized affairs were interrupted by random, spontaneous introductions of new women — the movie star, the imaginary TV singer — as unplanned and unprovided for as a freak in nature. At these times all his cool will would be suddenly broken and as he came he groaned the erotic words, invoking flesh almost violently, spraying his sperm, fucking completely. Cunt, he thought, oh pussy, oh tits and oh, oh, ass!

But even taking into account these aberrant moments, robbed of the gentle consummation he had planned, he realized that he had never had so active nor so satisfactory a sex life.

It’s a goddamned love nest in here.

He was illimitably free to plunder and profane. In his unvisited cell, with all the privacy he could want and all the time in the world, he had enough for the first time in his life. Oddly, however, it was through just these fantasies that his real past was finally evoked. Why, he remembered suddenly, it’s exactly the way he had lain beside Lilly!

He could see himself — himself and Lilly — the two big people huddled in their corner of the bed. They should have had a king-size bed. Feldman had asked for one, but Lilly had said they didn’t make king-size in French Provincial, that it would look ridiculous. “But they had all the kings,” Feldman said.

“That doesn’t matter,” Lilly said.

Feldman thought bitterly of the small kings, the teensy-weensy, itsy-bitsy kings of France.

And twin beds would somehow have strengthened the appearance of their consanguinity. He didn’t even ask for twin beds. He thought of Dagwood and Blondie, of the husband and wife on “The Donna Reed Show,” of Lucy and Desi, and all the conjugal Thompsons and Richardsons and Wilsons and Morgans in America in their twin beds, in their rooms within rooms — each with his own table, his own bedlamp, his own electric blanket; each with his own slippers beneath the bed, the polished toes just sticking out, like the badly concealed feet of lovers in farces. Such things bespoke order, reason, calm. Paradoxically, they bespoke a sort of detached tenderness for the mate that Feldman had never felt. Twin beds were out. (But they did say that love was more exciting in a twin bed. Feldman wondered. It raised penumbral questions like what happened at sea when in the mixed company of a life raft somebody had to go to the bathroom. How did two unmarried archeologists, holed up in a cave, hiding from savages, take a crap? The shipwrecked and the archeologists and the coed Yugoslav guerrilla fighters, they were the ones who had the fun. Policemen raiding wild parties, firemen rescuing ladies in their nightgowns from burning buildings, they did.)

So they lay together in the regular double bed, Feldman pulling back his knee when it brushed Lilly’s thigh, creating a space between them, imagining the space a distance, making that distance into a journey he would never willingly take. She could have been in Europe, in Asia, in craters on the moon. And wild. Wild! As unfaithful to Lilly right there beside him as some philanderer at a convention across the country.

He waited until she slept. It was easy to tell. She was a deep breather. (She breathes for six people, he thought.) Then, silkenly sheathed, luxurious in his mandarin’s pajamas, he would begin his fantasies. (Feldman picked out his pajamas like a pajama scientist. No millionaire, no playboy, no bedroom sybarite has pajamas like mine, Feldman thought.) If Lilly happened to snore at one of these moments, he experienced the most intense irritation. If she snored a second time, he poked her, jabbed her with rigid, extended fingers in some soft part of her soft body. “Close your mouth,” he’d hiss. “Get over on your own side.” And in her sleep she’d obey. (Lilly listened in her sleep. Sometimes he’d give her pointless commands and watch with interest their clumsy, torpid execution. It was like playing a great fat musical instrument, some giant bellows thing.)

He never permitted himself the luxury of an orgasm, gradually abandoning, as sleep encroached, his carefully arranged trysts, his logical seductions, losing his place, forgetting to touch himself, until finally his erection waned like an unstoked fire.

And Lilly never knew, (Pure kindness on his part, for in truth he didn’t give a damn what she thought.) If she had ever discovered his teen-age games he would have laughed in her face at her disgust, since it was her fault anyway. Because she was unbeautiful. Because her body harbored a traitor to love which pushed up bumps, jellied her flesh, dilated the veins on the backs of her legs. She was wrapped in her skin like a bad package. Everywhere there were excrescences, tumescences, body hair, cold pale scar tissue the blood never warmed, black-and-blue marks which arose from no ever-identified origin. She gets them from drying herself with a towel, Feldman thought, from dressing, from sitting in drafts.

Because Lilly was unbeautiful. Unbeautiful. And because she didn’t care. She accepted every blemish — they’re benign, she reasoned, they’re all benign; she was benign — forgiving herself. Because she had no vanity. None at all. (No. One. A-line dresses to conceal her big hips. And he didn’t mind big hips. He liked big hips.) What he hated was the strange combination in Lilly of fragility and a peasant heart. When she visited her parents in the East she would sit up for two nights in the coach. Or she took a bus. “I don’t mind buses,” she said. She didn’t mind buses, but the air conditioning gave her a sore throat. She didn’t mind a sore throat. He took her to expensive restaurants. She ordered liver. Thick steaks gave her heartburn, she said. Thick steaks did. A play came to town. Feldman bought seats in the orchestra; she preferred the balcony. Sitting close gave her headache, she said. Feldman wished she were beside him now. He would give her one in the back with his fingers. Unbeautiful Lilly!

Aghh, he sounded like a night-club comic. But what if all the tasteless jokes were true? What if they were true? Lilly made them true. She made them come true. She was like a fairy. Lilly the joke fairy. Poor Lilly, Feldman thought. Till death us do part, you. And why? Just give me one good reason!

Because during the war, when he was putting his store together, when 4-F — the homunculus wrapping his heart — he was getting rich, he had no time: 80,000 miles in ’42, 112,000 in ’43, 100,000 miles in ’44, 128,000 in ’45, in ’46, 215,000 miles and in ’47 even more. Getting the stock, traveling where the goods were, riding the trains — endless, endless — riding the planes, bumping full colonels, the whole country on the take, “table” a dirty word, and under it where the action was. A United States Senator told him once, “We know what you’re up to and we don’t mind a bit. During a war these things have to happen. It’s an abstract factor but very important. It keeps up morale. You sell your wares, and the people on the home front, the factory people and the civil servants and the fillers-in, buy them and it gives them strength. Most people get their strength from the things they own. We have to keep up the balance between guilt and strength to get them to produce. The war news isn’t enough. That just takes care of the guilt. So we know how you manage and we don’t mind a bit.” But the Senator was wrong. Because genius went beyond mere bribery, beyond shaking hands all around on an insinuation, beyond favors and winked eyes and the inference of evil like a secret between friends — though he did all that too, did all of it, though mostly in the beginning, folding bills into hundreds of palms, using cash like a password or a message from spies. (Cash, cash, the whole country crazy for cash, the only thing they’d touch, wanting no records, his far-seeing countrymen, those practical folks. What the hell, it couldn’t last forever. Nothing could last forever, not even greed.)

Because the Senator was wrong. Because genius was genius. There was something physical in it too. Feldman took risks. (What, are you kidding? All those miles in all those airplanes in the forties? The cities blacked out, radar not perfected yet? Remember those plane crashes in the forties?) He was there, ubiquitous, making his pitch. Looking over the operator’s shoulder while she sewed the last seam; among the toys, sneezing over the teddy bears; his feet the first ones up on the sofa when it came from the shop. In the small-arms factory too. He was the first merchandiser to sell government surplus on the open market. And during the war! The first department store in America to offer a magazine-subscription service. Food departments. Virginia Sugar-Cured Ham departments. Setting things up. Collecting his merchandise. Inventing it. Johnny on the spot, picking over America, the rummage champion of World War Two, hearing the rumors, getting the word (“St. Louis has shoes”; “There are baskets in Vermont, dishes in Portland”; “Carolina has hats”). Tours through the plants. (And not just those innocuous preserves where they turned out the belt buckles for civilian consumption — the other parts too, to see what he could use. His suits on those days had holes in the lapels and over all the breast pockets from the badges he had to wear.) And this isn’t just New York City and Chicago and Cleveland and Los Angeles and Pittsburgh and St. Louis we’re talking about. We’re talking about places in Nebraska and the Dakotas and southern Indiana and Montana and Idaho and small towns in Dixie. Places with lousy accommodations for travelers and rotten food. And you can’t always get there from here. He got there. Feldman got there.

But he was busy and didn’t meet girls. Except those who worked for him. And life wasn’t exciting enough, kissing the ladies in the big black hats and black dresses, the buyers in long black gloves, those boozers and flatterers and users of make-up and smellers from perfume. Feldman’s buyers. (After he had set up the possibility of buying, established that there was something to be bought.) Feldman’s girls, who were taken to lunch. And got fucked at the gift shows, wooed in the Merchandise Mart in Chicago, in the showrooms of the McAlpin Hotel in New York, in motels that were no bargain along the highways on the outskirts of those two-bit towns Feldman had rummaged. (Well, didn’t I tell you? Genius is more than just being able to put down a cash bribe. Cash, cash, that’s all most people know. Take a little risk, have a little fun. And pussy leaves less record than cash. Feldman’s buyers were famous.)

But he had a sense of humor and wished to parody his situation. (It is in the long sad tradition of my people to pluck laughter from despair.) And then he met Lilly in New York City in 1949 in the Pennsylvania Hotel at the wedding of the son of his handbag supplier. She was the kid’s aunt. She was infinitely boring, but she didn’t have on a big black hat, and she had never been to a gift show. Feldman had never been so excited. He needed something special or he would go mad. (The war over four years. Nothing for him to do. The way he saw it, those fools in Washington would never bomb Russia.) Lilly’s unspecialness was spectacular. He grew breathless contemplating it. What a mismatch! The two people stuck with each other — if they married — miserable together for the rest of their lives. Miserable in some important domestic way that Feldman had never known. A mystery. They would tear each other up. That would mean something. A little grief would mean something. Excitement, excitement, give me excitement. Give me Sturm and give me Drang. Wring me out. Let me touch bottom. I don’t care how. Thrown from the rocks, keel-hauled or shoved off the plank. Let me go down, down to the depths, further than fish, down by the monsters, the spiky and fanged. God, give me monsters. Scare me, please!

He married Lilly.

And one monstrousness was that she wouldn’t go along with a gag. Nor would she pluck laughter from despair. Despair depressed her; it gave her heartburn, like steak in a restaurant.

At this time — it was before he invented the basement — Feldman was a game player, a heavy gambler. He bet the horses, the ballgames, the fights, the elections, the first early launches of rockets. And though he mostly broke even, or better — he was lucky with money — he found that to be a bettor, to deal with bookies, accepting another’s odds as fixed and beyond his control as the value of a share on the market, was to make of himself a consumer like anyone else. He would have quit long before he ultimately did but for Lilly’s nervousness in the matter of his gambling. It worried her and she urged him to give it up. Her anxiety kept him going, but Lilly’s anxieties — her fear of bookies, the association of them in her mind with a gangster style that had ended with the end of Prohibition — were part of her character. She worried for the safety of relatives in airplanes flying to Miami, for the careers of nephews, the betrothals of nieces and cousins. She was not anxious only about her own life, assuming safety and happiness and good luck like guaranteed rights. Feldman saw that he was not getting his money’s worth from the gambling and abandoned it. On the other hand, he thought, if he could get her involved, concerned for her own losses, that would be something.

He made up games. Lilly played reluctantly. Sometimes they played gin rummy for wishes. The stakes weren’t high, a twentieth of a wish a point. Lilly was a good cardplayer, and Feldman did not always win. He sweated the games out. Even at those small stakes, ten to fifteen wishes could change hands in a single game. When he lost, however, Lilly’s wishes were always insignificant, unimaginative. She might ask him to bring her a glass of water, or to sing a song, or to clap his hands five times. Feldman insisted that she try harder, that she think of more damaging things for him to do.

“You’re wasting your wishes, Lilly. Do you think wishes grow on trees? Why do you want to win them if all you do after you get them is throw them away?”

“I like to hear you sing, Leo. You have a nice voice.”

“You try harder. It’s no fun for me otherwise.”

They had set a time limit, twenty-four hours, in which the winner had to make his wishes. By constantly harassing her and forcing her to think of more and more complex wishes, Feldman knew that he would be able to finesse at least half the wishes he owed her. She simply couldn’t think of things for him to do. (And the truth was he hated to sing songs for her, hated to bring her a glass of water, to clap his hands for her.)

Chiefly, however, he won. Then he let her have it. (Another rule he had invented was that you could never wish the other fellow to do something that the other fellow had wished you to do. It was a way of protecting himself, of course. Ah, he thought, this was better than playing with the bookies. It was a marvelous thing to make house odds. House odds, domestic bliss.)

“Lilly, I wish you to take a bath.” It was two in the morning. And when she had come from the tub, “Run around the block, Lilly, please.”

“Leo, my pores are open.”

“We are not fourflushers, Lilly. We are not welshers and Indian givers.”

He watched her from their picture window. She came back puffing. He opened the glass doors and stood in the doorway. “Lilly, pretend you’re drunk. Stagger around in the street and make noises.”

“Leo, it’s after two. People are sleeping. I won’t do it. I balk.” It was the formula for refusal. But they had another rule. If a player balked, he had to grant three wishes for the one he had balked at.

“Come inside,” Feldman said sullenly. “Bake a cake,” he wished half-heartedly. (She was on a diet.) “Have three big pieces and a glass of milk and go to sleep on the sofa.”

Then he lost a close game.

“Leo, I wish that you wouldn’t shout at Billy today.”

“I balk.”

“I wish you’d be nicer to me.”

“I balk.”

She sighed and had him count from a hundred backwards, say a tongue twister, read her the funnies, wind the clock, open the window, shut it.

Eventually, of course, she refused to play with him. It was the result of a fight. They had finished dinner, and Lilly was in the kitchen, fixing blueberries and sour cream. She still owed him a wish. Feldman saw a man on the sidewalk. “Lilly,” he called, “there’s a stranger outside. I wish you to go out and ask that stranger what he’s doing in this neighborhood.”

She didn’t answer and Feldman walked into the kitchen. Lilly was spooning blueberries into a bowl from a basket.

“Didn’t you hear me? I made my wish.”

“No, Leo.”

“He’s right outside. You can see him through the window.”

“No, Leo.”

“Are you balking?”

“I’m not going to do it.”

“Then say it. Say ‘I balk.’”

“I’m not going to do it.”

Feldman was furious. “You know the formula for refusing,” he shouted. Billy was in the kitchen, wrapping rubber bands on the doorknob. The sight enraged him. Billy was six years old and took sides. He would whisper to his mother that he loved her most and that Daddy was bad, and to his father that Mommy wasn’t very smart. Feldman pulled him away from the doorknob and told him to hide in his room. “A boy loses respect if he sees his father kick his mother’s ass,” Feldman said.

Lilly, saying nothing, continued to spoon the blueberries. She patted them around the sides of the bowl and fluffed them up with the spoon.

“When you finish there you can do the rest of the rubber bands,” Feldman said.

Lilly said nothing.

“What’s wrong with you?” Feldman demanded. It was one of his questions. He asked it when they were doing something together and he was having a better time doing it than his wife. He asked it on complicated occasions like this one, when his head hurt and there was a sourness in the air, unsortable wrong, rife and general as a high pollen count. “You be careful, Lilly. I am as fed up as a revolutionary, as righteous at this moment as a terrorist. You better watch out.”

Lilly was dipping sour cream onto the blueberries.

“You’re a shitty sport,” Feldman screamed, and went for her. When he tore the spoon out of her hands some sour cream got on his shirt. He stared at it as if she had drawn blood. “Oh, you will, will you?” he roared. In his room Billy was crying. Feldman thought of all the times she had refused him. In the car, nothing on the radio but static, he might suggest that they both make speeches. Inaugural Addresses or nominating speeches at the Republican National Convention. And she would refuse. She didn’t even want to hear his speech. Why couldn’t she say “I balk”? What would that cost her? More sour cream got on his shirt, and Feldman made a fist and punched her in the behind.

She overturned the blueberries in the sink.

“You son of a bitch,” Feldman screamed. “Those are out of goddamn season!”

“We shall never play gin rummy again,” Lilly announced softly. She had tremendous self-possession at this moment, superhuman dignity. She seemed as calm and studied and smug as a circus performer holding acrobats on her shoulder. It was too much for Feldman. The sour cream burned holes in his shirt. He pulled her from the sink and spun her roughly away from him. She went turning and twirling across the kitchen, rapt as a blind woman in a dance, concentrating on her injuries as if they were already memories. She fell back against the refrigerator, and Feldman imagined the black-and-blue marks, proliferating on her back like stains.

“Oof,” she said demurely.

“I can’t stand it,” Feldman roared. He stooped down and opened the cabinet beneath the sink. He pulled out the garbage pail. He reached inside it and scooped up great handfuls of garbage — ovoid clumps of wet coffee grounds, the pulps of oranges, eggshells, pits, bones, fat, the shallow rinds of honeydew melon like the hulls of toy boats. He flung all this onto the kitchen floor. He might have been sowing seeds.

In the distance Billy cried uncontrollably.

Lilly folded her arms across her breast, a look of mock indifference on her face like that of someone who has just done a turn in a challenge dance. Feldman stopped short and dropped the rest of the garbage. He folded his arms across his breast. “You serve, Lilly, I think,” he said.

“Billy,” Lilly shouted, “come in here.”

Feldman was delighted. “What are you calling him for? This is between us,” he said.

“Billy,” she shouted again, “I’ve told you once. Come in here right now.”

“Leave the kid out of it,” Feldman snarled. He could have hugged her. Something magnificent was going to happen.

Billy appeared at the entrance to the kitchen, his face a smear of snot and tears. He seemed blind, breathless, choked as a child in a polyethylene bag.

“Go back to your room, Billy,” Feldman said.

“If you do I’ll follow and beat you up,” Lilly said.

“If she does I’ll kill her, Billy. Don’t you worry, son.”

Billy wailed.

“Pick up the garbage your father threw down. Every piece,” Lilly commanded.

Billy, crying insanely, moved toward the garbage.

“What is this?” Feldman said. “What is this?”

The little boy bent over a piece of lettuce coated with cocktail sauce and picked it up.

“Give me that,” Feldman cried. He pulled at it. The lettuce tore, and they each held a piece of it. Feldman turned to Lilly. “Is this how you raise a child?” he said angrily. Lilly’s arms were still folded. Billy, terrified, was on his hands and knees, pushing the scraps together. Feldman pressed the point of his shoe into the rind of an orange that his son was trying to pick up. “I had not realized, Lilly, that the boy is so terrified of you,” Feldman told her.

“Let me pick it up, Daddy,” Billy said. “Let me pick it up.”

“Get up, Billy,” Feldman said with great, deliberate compassion.

“I’ll do it,” Billy said. “Please. I’ll do it.”

“He’s hysterical,” Feldman said. “He won’t listen to me. You win, Lilly. You win. Tell him to get off the floor. I’ll pick it all up.”

“Get up, Billy,” Lilly said, “your father will do it.”

Feldman got down on his hands and knees. He breathed heavily. His palm slipped on something, and he fell forward awkwardly. His cheek lay in the wet coffee grounds. He got clumsily to his knees and put his hands on the boy’s shoulders. “Listen to me, Billy. Make me a promise, son.” He hung his head down a moment, apparently trying to catch his breath. He rubbed his eyes, then put his hand back on Billy’s shoulder. “If she ever touches you, I want you to tell me, darling, and I’ll break her bones, sweetheart. You tell Daddy, honey, if Mommy bothers you, and Daddy makes you this promise, adorable, that he’ll smash her nose and pound her heart and crush her skull, pumpkin. You’re Daddy’s darlin’, chicken, remember that. She’s a great rough pig, angel, but Daddy will protect you. If that bitch ever bothers you — I don’t care where I am or what I’m doing — you get to a telephone, lamb chop, and call me up, and I’ll come home and put her in the hospital. Do you understand that, Billy? Do you understand that, dumpling? You’re getting to be a big boy, watermelon, and you’ve got to understand these things. Give Dad a kiss now and promise that you’ll never be afraid of her any more.” He put his hands behind the boy’s head and brought him up close to kiss him. “Now run and play, son,” Feldman said. “Poppy will pick up the garbage for you.”

Lilly’s arms had come unfolded. They hung down like untied laces.

Feldman looked at her through an eggshell and smiled and splashed in the garbage and thought: Your serve, Lilly, I think, your serve, Lilly, I think. It’s a regular second honeymoon, it’s a second regular goddamned honeymoon.

Although he had not touched himself in two days, the jerking off had taken it out of him and he was exhausted. Now he would be continent. It would be a new phase. He lived by phases, like an artist with a blue period, a green one, a red. Seeking some ultimate violet. Did others do that? Lilly didn’t; no one he knew did. Others had homogenized lives. Not Feldman. Feldman had periods.

How do you do it, Feldman?

This is how I do it, kid. I live by phases. Full Feldman. Quarter Feldman. Half-by-full three-quarter Feldman. Feldman waxing, Feldman waning. The astrological heart. Down through time to high night’s noony now.

The homunculus, little stunted brother of his heart, stirred. The homunculus, stony, bony paradigm, scaled-down schema of waxing Feldman, flexed its visey brothership.

“Ouch,” Feldman said. “You again.”

“Move over, O greater frater. Give a toy twin space.”

“No, pet. What can I do? I’m in solitary confinement. O solo mio.”

“Have a little consideration, please. I feel terrible. For days I’ve been riding your passionate bronco heart. I’m seasick. I must look a fright, Leo.”

“Are you sure you’re my brother? You talk like my sister.”

“Leo, please,” the homunculus said.

“O steak-knife soul in my heart’s bloody meat, leave off.”

“Listen, brother,” the homunculus said, “we have to talk. Watch your step. You forget you’re living for two. Why can’t you remember that? You specially. You’re your brother’s keeper if there ever was one.”

“My little brother,” Feldman said, giggling.

“To think,” the homunculus said, “I might have been alive today but for some freak in the genes. Alas the blood’s rip, alack my spilled amino acids, my done-in DNA. Woe for the watered marrow and the split hairs.”

“Don’t get clinical, you fossil.”

“Oh, Leo, I would have done things differently. I would have taken better care. You have no right—”

“I have no right? I have no right? Didn’t you ever hear of primogeniture? You’re out of the picture, short division.”

“Leo,” his homunculus said sharply, “you stop that. All your cynicism — that’s just our father speaking. You insist on siding with him.”

“I never knew our mother,” Feldman said. “She was your department, death.”

“Don’t be sentimental either. Really, Leo, I’m surprised you try to pull this stuff with me. I know your heart. I’ve been there. I’ve been lying on it for years. It’s a rack, buddy, a desert, some prehistoric potholed thing. It’s a moon of a heart. It will not support life, Leo. So don’t start up.”

“You don’t happen to have a deck of cards on you, do you?”

“We have serious things to discuss, Leo.”

“I won’t listen.”

“Leo, you owe me. As a businessman you have always paid your bills.”

“I owe you? What do I owe you? What have you done for me?”

“Like Wilson,” the homunculus said slyly, “I kept you out of war.”

Feldman admitted grudgingly that this was so.

The homunculus smiled; it pinched. “What do you make of this bad-man stuff?” it asked confidentially. “Anything to it?”

“Why ask me?” Feldman said sourly. “You know my heart.”

“Only its terrain,” the homunculus said.

“My heart hurts.”

“Is that why, Leo? Is that it? Do you suffer much?”

“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.)

“You should know that you’re not allowed to receive letters while you’re in solitary confinement,” the guard said.

Feldman nodded.

“They hold them for you, of course,” the guard went on. He was looking at Feldman intently.

Feldman nodded.

“They keep them in the census office, where my friend works,” the guard said. He was staring at Feldman now.

“Say,” Feldman said doubtfully, “would it be too much trouble for you to find out if any are being held for me?”

“I could find out if any are being held for you,” the guard said. “Would you like that?”

“I’d appreciate it,” Feldman said.

‘If you like, I might even be able to tell you who they’re from,” the guard said.

“Would you do that?” Feldman asked.

“No trouble,” the guard said.

“Do you think you could check the postmarks?” Feldman said. “I’d like to have an idea when they were mailed.”

“Sure.”

“And if you could make a notation of the station they were sent from,” Feldman said. “Sometimes a person drops off a letter downtown, or on the way to the movie in the shopping center.”

“Certainly,” the guard said. “The rule states only that mail may not be received by a prisoner in solitary or opened for him.”

“I see. Then could you check the color of the envelope and the kind of stamp that’s been put on it?”

“The stamp?”

“Well, these things could reveal the sender’s mood.”

“Say, that’s right. I’ll check the color of the envelope and the kind of stamp.”

“Could you smell the letter for perfume?”

“Well, I’ll try,” the guard said, “but I have a cold.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Feldman said.

“Thank you, I’ll be all right.”

“Thank God for that,” Feldman said.

“Would you like me to look for little instructions on the front?” the guard asked. “Sometimes it says ‘Personal’ or ‘Please Forward.’”

“I’d be grateful,” Feldman said. “Could you look at the back too? Often the flaps are scalloped.”

“No trouble at all.”

“I miss my people very much,” Feldman said. “I see that,” the guard said.

The guard brought his lunch. “There weren’t any letters for you,” he said.

“Then how we doing in the cold war?” Feldman asked.

“I’m sorry,” the guard said. “You haven’t any newspaper, TV or radio privileges in here. It would be a violation of the spirit of the rules for me to tell you.”

“I see,” Feldman said.

The guard winked broadly. “I don’t suppose my cousin Dorothy will be taking that trip to Berlin this week,” he said in a voice somewhat louder than the one in which he normally spoke.

“That’s too bad,” Feldman said, winking back and raising his voice too. “I can imagine how disappointed she’ll be. But maybe she can go someplace else. They say the Far East is nice this time of year.”

“Well, they say most of the Far East is nice, but they don’t say it about Thailand,” the guard said. He was practically shouting.

“Don’t they?” Feldman yelled.

“No, they don’t,” the guard yelled back. “And they don’t say it about Formosa or the offshore islands either.”

“I see,” Feldman said. “Is your brother Walter still doing the shopping for the family?” He held a wink for five seconds.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Walter. Has Walter been going down the street to the market recently?”

“Oh, Walter, the market. Yes, indeed. Walter’s been going to the market. He sure has.” The guard winked, touched his temple, clicked his tongue and nudged Feldman with his elbow.

“Yes? What has he been bringing back with him?”

“Missiles, chemicals, utilities,” the guard said.

Feldman nodded. “How’s your friend Virginia?” he asked after a moment.

“Virginia?”

“You know, Carolina’s sister. The sports fan. The one that’s so interested in races.”

“Races?”

“Virginia, Carolina’s sister, Georgia’s roommate.”

“Oh, Virginia. The one that was a riot last summer?”

“That’s the one.”

“Very quiet,” the guard said, roaring.

Feldman suddenly began to whistle a popular song of a few weeks before. The guard stared at him as Feldman whistled it all the way through. The guard shook his head, and Feldman whistled another song from the same period. He winked one eye, then the other, and began a third song. Before he could finish, the guard brightened and began to hum a tune Feldman had never heard. When he finished that he hummed another song to which he performed in accompaniment a strange shuffling dance Feldman had never seen. Feldman leaned his head against the bars and listened and watched raptly.

“How are the rest of the fellers?” Feldman asked the guard when he brought his breakfast the next morning.

At lunch the warden was with the guard. The guard handed Feldman his tray without a word and stepped outside the cell to stand beside the warden. Feldman placed the tray on his lap primly and began to eat his lunch. He took a bite from his sandwich and looked out at the warden. “How did the men enjoy the movie this week?” he asked. The warden didn’t answer, and Feldman ate his pear. He wiped his lips with his napkin. The guard and the warden continued to stare at him. “Have they completed the construction of the new wing in the infirmary?” Feldman asked. “Have the boys at the foundry met their quota this month?” The warden frowned and turned to go. As the warden started off, the guard shook his head sadly and shrugged. “Is Bisch all right? How’s Slipper? What’s going on at the canteen?” Feldman called. The warden looked back over his shoulder for a moment and glared at Feldman. “I’ll never forget,” Feldman said, “one time — it was on a Sunday afternoon — I had just awakened from a nap and my son Billy was in the room.” The warden turned around, looked at him for a moment and came back toward the cell.

“Yes?” he said.

“It was on a Sunday afternoon,” Feldman said. “I’ll never forget this. Billy was about six or seven. Six, he was six. I had been sleeping, and when I woke up, the first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was my son.”

“Go on.”

“He was beautiful. I had never seen how beautiful he was. He was sitting on the floor, cross-legged. You know? He had on these short pants, his back was to me. He had come in to be with me in the room while I slept. He pulled some toy cars along in wide arcs beside him and made the noises in his throat, the low rough truck noises, and the sounds of family cars like the singing master’s hum that gives the pitch. He had fire trucks and he did their sirens, and farm machinery that moved by slowly, going chug chug chug.”

“Is this true?” the warden asked.

“Yes,” Feldman said.

“What did you do?” the guard asked. “Did you kiss him?”

“No. I was afraid he’d stop.”

“How long did your mood last?”

“Something happened,” Feldman said.

“Yes?”

“I started to cry. It frightened him.”

“Did you tell him why you were crying?” The warden had come into the cell. He was searching Feldman’s face. Eternity was on the line. What did he have to come into the cell for? “Did you tell him why you were crying?” the warden asked again.

“Yes,” Feldman said. “I told him it was because he woke me up.”

“I see,” the warden said.

“You want the truth, don’t you, Warden?”

“We’ll see what the truth is.”

“Here’s what the truth is,” Feldman said. “Billy wasn’t in the room when I woke up. A couple of feathers had come out of my pillow, and I had this idea. I pulled a few more feathers out and I called the kid. ‘Billy, get in here. Come quickly.’

“He was standing in the doorway, and I told him to get his mother, that my feathers were coming out. I held one up for him to see and then I stuffed it back with some others which I had pushed into my bellybutton. He came over and stared at my stomach. A few feathers were on my chest, and he picked one up. ‘Don’t touch that feather. It’s mine. Put it back in my belly, where it belongs.’

“‘You’re fooling me,’ Billy said, and I started to scream as if I were in pain.

“‘Get your mother,’ ‘I yelled, ‘I need a doctor.’ I told him that if you lose fifteen feathers you die.”

Remembering it all, Feldman became excited. “‘Wait,’ I told him. ‘Count them first so your mother can tell the doctor and he’ll know what medicine to bring. Can you count to fifteen?’

“‘Yes,’ Billy said.

“‘Well, don’t make a mistake now, for God’s sake. You’re a pretty stupid kid, and I know how you get mixed up after twelve. Hurry, please, but don’t touch the feathers or more will come out.’ So he started to count the feathers, but they were all rolled up together and it was impossible. ‘Hurry,’ I shouted. He started to cry and got all mixed up and had to count them all over again. He couldn’t do it. He was in a panic. Finally I told him I had felt about eleven come out and that he’d better tell his mother that. As soon as he left, I pulled three more feathers out of the pillow and called him back. ‘Billy,’ I shouted, ‘three more feathers just came loose. If I lose one more I’m a dead man.’ He rushed over to see. Listen, he was sobbing, he was hysterical, out of control, but do you know what he managed to ask me? ‘Daddy,’ he said, ‘do I have feathers too?’ Don’t tell me about love. His daddy is dying of feather loss, and he wants to know if it’s contagious. I am what I am, Warden.” Feldman moved away from him and went to the sink and splashed cold water on his face. “I blew it, right?” he said. “I stay here forever.”

“We are all what we are,” the warden said angrily. “Jackass, we are all what we are. What’s so terrific? ‘I am what I am,’ the hooligan says, and hopes by that to lend some integrity to his evil. To be what one is is nothing. It’s easy as pie. The physics of least resistance. What appealed to me in your story was the regret in your voice just now when you asked if you blew it. ‘We’ll see what the truth is,’ I said. And we shall. Think, Feldman. Think before you irrevocably indulge what you are. Did you tell him why you were crying?”

“What?”

“Did you tell him why you were crying?”

Feldman, astonished, stared at the warden. The guard laughed. “Hush,” the warden said, and turned back to look at Feldman with a bland indifference. “We have no time. Make your reply at once.”

Feldman had to. He had to. “I told him—” But he didn’t finish. He couldn’t talk. “I told him—” He held out his hands helplessly.

“Yes?” the warden said. “What did you tell him?”

“I told him that I thought he was beautiful. I told him I loved him. I lifted him up next to me in the bed. I held him in my arms.” He was sobbing.

“Good,” the warden said, “not only what you told him but also what you did. Good.” He turned to the guard. “Guard, I think we can let this man join the others.” Feldman was on the cot now, his head in his hands, and the warden gripped him by the shoulders. “There, there,” he said, “it’s all right. Everything is all right. You’ll be back in your regular cell in a jiffy” He looked back at the guard. “Make the arrangements, Guard, please.” He slapped Feldman on the back. “Well,” he said, “I think this calls for a celebration. As a matter of fact, I usually give a party in Warden’s Quarters when a man is reclaimed from solitary. Let’s say Friday night. About eightish. Will you be able to come to dinner?” He leaned down and whispered to Feldman. “Stop it. Stop your crying. Get it out of your head, you fool, that you’ve been mortified by the devil. You think you’re rid of your soul and now your comfort comes, but it isn’t so. I’m not the devil, and you’ve still got your soul. Your passion’s on you like perfume. Undream your dreams of fuck and freedom. Your warden warns you. Stop it. Stop your crying. You’ll need your tears.”