A Bad Man

12

Feldman, behaving, sold his quota of toothpaste and shaving articles and filter-tip cigarettes in the canteen — no more, no less — and tried to feel the virtue that is the reward of the routinized life. He thought with dread of the volumes in the library that bore his name, and guessing what might be in them, tried to act in such a manner that others might think him some other Feldman. He made small talk with the guards, just as the others did, warming to their crude kidding like some old yardman. (It was true. Each time they addressed him he felt as if he had just come from trimming hedges, pulling weeds, growing roses. He felt soil on himself and the small sharp plunge of thorns, and thought comfortably about baths with brown soap and worried about frost, about drought, about flood and the blight of beetles.) He looked for them to kid him, encouraged it in small ways, offering himself like a sparring partner or the bandaged man in a first-aid demonstration. He had it in him, he felt, to be a favorite, like a fatty, like a baldy, like a loony, like a spoony. Like a dummy. Like a guy with clap, with lush, beautiful daughters, with a small dong. He envied the loved, classic fall guys and thought with jealousy of the libeled butts in the prison paper: the “Nigger Lips” Johnsons and “Pigface” Parkers and “Beergut” Kellys and all the others.

“Give me gland trouble,” he prayed. “Treble my chins and pull back my hairline. Make me a farter, a stutterer, a guy bad at games. A patsy make me. Amen.”

He was afraid of the warden, afraid of his party, afraid in particular, afraid in general. It was as if he were a traveler unused to the currencies of a new country. He was reminded of all queer special units used to fix values: the score of butter and the proof of booze, the carat of gold and the pile of a carpet and the line of a tire. The way of a warden, he thought.

A memorandum came down from the warden that the dinner would be semiformal and that Feldman had permission to request the pre-release of the suit of clothes the state had made for his discharge. Feldman took the note to the tailor shop and showed it to Bisch. It was still months until his release. “Is this ready?” he asked Bisch.

“Sure,” Bisch said, “it was ready a week after you came. I’ll have my apprentice get it.”

The apprentice brought back a dark suit of coarse material. There were stiff tickets pinned to both sleeves of the jacket and over the breast and stapled across the creases of the trousers. Faint chalky marks, like military piping, were soaped around the seams at the shoulders.

“Try it on,” Bisch said.

Feldman took off the blue fool suit Bisch had made for him and struggled into the new clothes. It was as if the suit had been made for someone of exactly his frame but twenty or thirty pounds lighter. “It doesn’t fit,” Feldman said. “It’s too tight.”

“Where?”

“Where? Everywhere. Across the shoulders, in the back, around the arms, the waist, the crotch, the seat. Everywhere. There’s some mistake here.”

“Take it off,” Bisch said. “I’ll check.”

“You’ll check? You don’t have to check. You can see it doesn’t fit.”

“I want to see the measurements on the tickets.” He turned to his apprentice. “Get the body book.”

The man came back with an enormous ringed notebook. Bisch took the book from him and spread it open on a sewing table. “Here’s your page,” he said, peering at the figures on the page and then at those on the tickets. He took a tape measure and measured the different planes of Feldman’s clothes. “Every figure checks out perfectly, Leo. It’s a well-made suit of clothes.”

“Well, where did you get those figures? Nobody measured me.”

“They come from the physician,” Bisch’s apprentice said. It was the first indication Feldman had that they expected him to die. These were to be the graveclothes of a wasted Feldman.

He refused to wear the suit and sent a message at once to Warden’s Desk. (It was a prisoner’s only recourse to direct appeal and was rarely used. The petition had to be framed as a question backed up by a single reason. If the response was negative, the petitioner was subject to a heavy fine or a severe punishment for “Aggrandizement.”)

Feldman waited nervously for his reply. He had it inside of half an hour:

Yes. A guest should be comfortable. If you’re uncomfortable in the suit, don’t wear it. Get your old suit from Convict’s Wardrobe and have it pressed. W. Fisher.

When it was ready Feldman put it on. It was enormous, almost as big on him as the other had been small. He sent another note to Warden’s Desk. The reply came:

Yes. Suit yourself. Come as you are. Warden F.

Feldman, released from his cell at 7:45 by a guard with a machine gun, went to the party in his blue fool suit.

The guard led him down passages he had never seen. Every hundred feet or so there were abandoned directions — narrowing converging walls, crawl spaces, oblique slopes. They might have been traveling along the played-out channels of a mine, tracing prosperity’s whimmed route. They came to locked doors, barred gates. Bolts shot, tumblers bristled, plopped, falling away before the guard’s keys and signals. Feldman had the impression he moved through zones, seamed places, climbing a latitude — as once, in winter, driving north from the Florida Keys, he had come all the way up the country to the top of Maine, feeling the subtle, dangerous differences, the ominous botanical shifts and reversals of season.

They came to a last steel door. The guard moved Feldman against the wall with the muzzle of his machine gun. “Fix your tie,” he said, “or I’ll kill you.”

Feldman looked back along the dim passageway through which they had just come. He felt like a bull in the toril before a fight, a bronco in the chute. The sunlight will startle me, he thought. I’ll be confused by the day. Men will thrust capes at me. Cowboys will scrape their spurs across my sides. Not a mark on me till now, he thought sadly. He mourned his ruined flanks.

The guard inserted a key into the door, and a buzzer buzzed somewhere on the other side. As the door slid back into the wall an enormous butler stepped toward them, pulling his huge formal silhouette through the lighted room behind him. “Hands up,” he said quietly.

“The butler’s a bodyguard,” the guard explained. “He has to frisk you in case you bribed me on the way over.”

“He’s clean,” the butler said gloomily.

The guard tilted his cap further back on his head with the barrel of his machine gun and leaned casually against the wall. “I guess I’ll hang around the kitchen till it’s time to take him back,” he said. “Who’s supervising?”

“Molly Badge.”

“Molly? No kidding? I haven’t seen old Molly since I was with the Fire Department and she catered the dinner dance. Good old Molly.”

“Come inside,” the butler told Feldman. “No tricks tonight. Some of the guests are plainclothesmen. Follow me.”

He followed the butler through the doorway. He was conscious of the brightness; he had not seen so much light since his arrest months before. He wondered where they were — outside the walls, more deeply within them? Coming here, he’d had a sense of tunneling, of a Chinesey-boxish progress. The warden lived well, but there was about the place an air of exile, as if, perhaps, he were someone bought off, bribed to live here. Taking in everything, he had an impression of wells sunk miles, a special flicker in the lights that hinted of generators, a suggestion of things done to the air. The wood, so long now had he lived without wood, seemed strange, extravagant. The upholstery and drapes, though he suspected no windows lay behind them, were almost oriental in their luxury. He moved across the carpet as over the fabricked backs of beasts in a dream. Apprehension was gone. Here the blue fool suit, loose on his body, no travesty, was a robe, exotic, falling away from his chest like the awry gown of a seducer. Will there be women? he wondered. He hoped so. He rubbed his hands together and turned to the butler. “I’m a sucker for civilization,” he told him.

The butler pulled back the heavy doors to the library and motioned him inside. Feldman found himself on tiptoe, leaning forward, his eyes darting, in the eager posture of a host. The room was empty. The butler left him.

The library was ship-in-the bottle, oakey. “Oakey-doakey,” Feldman said. Wing-chaired. Beamish. Rifles over the mantelpiece, a clock with a visible movement, dark portraits of the founders of banks. “Generations of gentiles,” Feldman said. There was a big desk behind which a landlord with a schmear in his integrity could kill himself. “After brandy,” Feldman said, “a silver bullet in a silver sideburn.” The will would be read here to out-of-towners in black suits.

There were decanters of whiskey and silver bottles of soda. He fixed a drink, drank it off quickly and made another. When he turned, the warden, in carpet slippers and a red silk smoking jacket, was watching him. Feldman raised his glass. “To crime and punishment,” he said.

The warden motioned Feldman to go ahead. “I’m pleased you came,” he said, “and glad you’ve made yourself comfortable, though I doubt the sincerity of your ease. I wanted the sergeant to show you this room first. Do you like it?”

“A showcase, Warden,” he said.

The warden smiled. “I’m being urbane,” he said. He sat in a wing chair and crossed his legs smartly. Feldman saw the bright bottom of a carpet slipper, like the clean soles of the shoes of an actor on a rug on a stage. He stared at the light that slipped up and down the smooth stripe of his trousers. “Say what you will, Feldman,” the warden said, “but urbanity is a Christian gift. Rome, London, Wittenberg, Geneva—cities, Feldman. The history of us Christians is bound up with the history of the great cities. I mean no offense, of course, but yours is a desert sensibility, a past of pitched tents and camps. Excuse me, Leo, but you’re a hick. Have you held canes? Have binoculars hung from your jackets?” He indicated a portrait in a gilt frame. “Just a moment,” he said, standing. He moved to the portrait and pulled a small chain, turning on the light in an oblong reflector. “Where would you buy one of these? Tell me, merchant. You see? You don’t know. You’ve seen them, but you haven’t experienced them. I’ve stood beside sideboards and spent Christmas with friends. There’s leather on my bookshelves, Feldman. I’ve been to Connecticut. I know how to sail. What are you in our culture? A mimic. A spade in a tux at a function in Harlem.

“I make this astonishing speech to you not out of malice. It’s way of life against way of life with me, Feldman. I show you alternatives to wholesale and retail. I push past your poetics, your metaphors of merchandise, and scorn the emptiness of your caveat emptor. I, the least of Christians, do this. Come, the others will have gathered.”

They went to the drawing room, where, as the warden had said, the others had gathered. They must have collected suddenly, but as he and the warden entered they were already lounging in a stiff, suspect sereneness. Feldman recognized none of them, but their ease was familiar to him. He was reminded of his own casual duplicities, the petite infighting of maneuvered-for advantage and self-control. They were people one step ahead of other people, he thought, like schoolchildren whose teacher has come back to find them all studying. Or spies who have rifled drawers, suitcases, the seams of pillows. As he preceded the warden, who had turned deferential, he had a sense of the queer, sedate violence of entering a strange room. He thought with wonder of all the times he had arrived early for appointments, guiltily examining the instruments in doctors’ offices, a lawyer’s framed degrees, family photographs, of all the times, left alone in hotel rooms while others shaved and apologized through closed doors for their lateness, he had picked candy from boxes open on the table.

Though he no longer cared, there were women. Men in dinner jackets stood with ladies in cocktail dresses. “Excuse me,” the warden said, abandoning him, “I have to see to some guests.” Feldman stayed nervously where he was, smiling back tentatively into the remote stares of the others.

A tall graying man came up to him. “Tell me,” he said, “which is worse for you, the day or the night?”

“That old chestnut,” another said, slowly wheeling from the margin of a small group to which he had attached himself. “Paul’s still espousing those malfeasant ideas. As Chargé de Disease, I couldn’t permit his theories to become operational in any institution in which I had an infirmary.”

“I believe, Chargé de Disease,” the tall man said with much dignity, “that I was addressing the thief here.”

“I’m not a thief, sir,” Feldman said shyly.

“There’s only one crime,” the man said. “It’s theft.”

“A dietary approach to punishment,” the second man said. “Paul, it’s medieval.”

“Please, Chargé, let him answer.” He turned grimly back to Feldman.

“The day is worse,” Feldman said.

“Morning or afternoon?”

“Afternoon.”

“Early or late afternoon?”

“Early afternoon.”

“You see?” the tall man said. “He means that dead center of a waking life fifteen minutes past lunch, three hundred forty-five minutes before dinner. My techniques would extend that desperation. Stretch the fabric of his hopelessness — all crimes are wishes, Chargé—over an entire day, and you’ve returned his aggressions to his dream life, where they belong. Let him writhe in bed. Cut out this fellow’s lunch, remove the water coolers, make the water in the sinks as nonpotable as on European trains. Forbid him cigarettes. Abolish his coffee breaks and canteen privileges, poleax the penny gum machines as if they were gaming tables, Chargé, and you’ve denatured him. Nullify his oral gratifications, and you’ve stripped his hope, I tell you, and made his imagination as incapable of crime as of epic poetry.”

“Well perhaps—”

“Not perhaps, Chargé—certainly, absolutely. It’s historical, Chargé. When was the golden age of obedience in this country?”

“Historical, Paul? Historical? Pooh pooh, tut tut.”

“When was the golden age of obedience in this country?” Paul insisted.

“Well—”

“It was the sweatshop age, Chargé. It was the piecework age. It was the twelve- and fourteen-hour-day age. The simultaneity of those hard times with the flourishing of the city park system, when parks were safe, was no coincidence. Where were your Coca Cola machines then, Chargé? Where were your refreshment stands? Sweat and hopelessness, Chargé, is our only hope.”

“Well, I agree with you in principle, of course, Paul, but do you really think you can keep hope down? ‘Hope springs eternal.’”

“Hope does not spring eternal forever, Chargé,” the tall scholarly man said.

Feldman excused himself and went up to a servant who carried a tray of drinks. He had already had three in the library, but they had not been enough. He removed a glass from the tray and nodded his thanks. The servant looked at him blankly. A plainclothesman, Feldman thought. He finished it quickly, and the servant handed him another. Flatfoot, Feldman thought. I’d better not get drunk here. Keep me sober, he prayed. He reminded himself merely to sip the next drink, but in a few minutes the servant was beside him again, extending the tray. “No, no, I’m fine,” Feldman said. The servant did not move, and Feldman drank the rest of the liquor in his glass and took another from the tray. Watch your step, he thought. Watch my step, he prayed.

He remembered an empty, comfortable-looking couch he had seen on first entering the room, and now he looked for it again. There were no empty couches. He was very puzzled. That’s funny, he thought, they must have taken it out. There was a couch just where he remembered the empty couch to have been, but five people were sitting on it.

It was essential that he make himself inconspicuous, so he went up to the couch and squeezed in. Because it was already crowded, he had to place the edge of one thigh in a woman’s lap. He had not had this close a contact with a woman in months, and soon he had a hard-on. In those close quarters his erection was pretty apparent, but he reasoned that because of her age — she was about seventy — the woman might not mind.

“Recidivism’s not important, Julia. What counts is that we catch these guys,” the man on Feldman’s left said. “The very fact that we have statistics on recidivism demonstrates the efficacy of our policework.”

“I don’t contest that,” Julia said. It was the old lady. She had a gentle voice. Feldman fought off a vagrant impulse to blow in her ear. “It isn’t that at all. It’s the older parolees. Men who’ve done twenty and thirty years. It annoys me that they don’t behave.”

“You think age quiets those old thieves down?” the man asked. “Infirmity? How thick is plate glass? How heavy is a watch? A diamond bracelet?”

“The inspector’s right,” said a man at the other end, half of whose body Feldman’s presence had forced far over the arm of the couch. He supported himself with his right arm extended on the floor, so that he looked like a downed boxer waiting to rise. Feldman hoped someone would step on his watch. “And I’ll tell you something else. Science in its development of transistorized equipment has made our problem tougher. A thief’s armload today is worth more than a thief’s armload was yesterday, and a thief’s armload tomorrow will be worth even more. I foresee a time when the thief’s armload will be approximate in value to the thief’s truckload of yesteryear. That’s what science has done with its vaunted miniaturization!”

With the strain on his arm the man had spoken louder than he had perhaps intended, and Paul heard him. “And not only that,” Paul said, “but improper diet — the snack-food industry is a three-billion-dollar-a-year business today — has made his thief’s arms longer.” He saw Feldman. “Which it worse for you, the day or the night?”

“The night,” Feldman said. He got up quickly and moved away from them. Across the room he blew a kiss covertly to Julia.

Behind him the warden was standing with two men. “Keep them under,” one was saying.

“But there’s no need to keep them under,” the second man said. “You’ve changed the goal,” he objected. “Hasn’t he, Warden? Hasn’t he changed the goal?”

“Well—” the warden said evasively.

“What’s the goal?” Feldman asked, turning around.

“Order,” the second man said.

“Acquiescence, I’d say,” said the first man.

“Acquiescence?” Feldman said.

“Well, silence,” the first man said.

Feldman nodded. He joined another group. He was afraid he was drunk. The Lord has failed me, he thought miserably. On his own he avoided the servant with the tray, turning his back whenever the man approached. In a while, though, he could no longer remember his reason for wanting to remain sober. What am I afraid of, he asked himself — that I won’t be invited again? He giggled and sought out the fellow with the drinks. “Thanks, gumshoe,” he said, taking another drink from the cop. They were all cops here. It was the Policemen’s Ball. He could smell rectitude. The odor of ordinance was in the air.

Suddenly he felt compassion for his fellow inmates. It was a shame, he thought. They talked about the underworld—“Keep them under,” someone had said — but what about the overworld? They talked about organized crime, but Feldman couldn’t think of two hoods who could stand each other. If one had a gun, sooner or later the other was a dead man. The real organization belonged to the overworld. Did cops shoot each other, horn in on each other’s territory, beat each other’s time? No, the cops had their cop cartels, their FBI’s and state troopers and Policemen’s Benevolent Associations. It was the poor crook who was alone. The crook had no ecumenical sense at all. For one Appalachia Conference, and he could just imagine the screaming and backbiting that must have gone on, there were hundreds of parties like this one. He was consumed by a truth, sudden and overwhelming. He had to share it at once or he would burst. He rushed up to someone. “There isn’t any,” he told him passionately.

“What’s that?”

“There isn’t any. It doesn’t exist.”

“There isn’t any what?”

“There isn’t any Syndicate. There isn’t any Mafia. There isn’t any Cosa Nostra. You can all go home.”

“Try to eat something,” the man said. “Would you like some coffee?” he asked solicitously.

“No,” Feldman said glumly. He found a chair and sat down. They’d probably have to shut him up, now they knew he was on to them. Already the man was conferring with someone; together they were staring at him. It was all a fake. Maybe even evil was a fake. He’d better keep his ears open and his mouth shut. (The thought nauseated him.) He had to focus, concentrate. There were things to learn he could bring back to the boys. He thought fondly of the boys. Good old Bisch. That grand old man Ed Slipper. And Hover — fine, maligned Hover. Sky and Flesh and Walls were the best pals a guy ever had. He thought of his friends asleep on their cots. They might be thieves and murderers, but they were good old boys. He had a duty to the guys to sober up, to tell them what he’d learned: that they were a myth. He imagined a youthful eagerness in his voice as he told them. It was news to make a tenor of a man.

Concentrating, he was astonished at the enormous varieties of cophood there were in the room. In addition to those he had already met, the sheriffs and marshals and constables and private detectives, there were insurance investigators and high officials in the National Guard. There was a man who trained German shepherds and leased them to department stores and warehouses. Another man was in charge of an army of crowd handlers at ball parks and arenas. There was a chief of house detectives for a large hotel chain and a woman who headed up an agency of store detectives. There were polygraph experts and fingerprint men and a police artist who was introduced to Feldman as the Rembrandt of his field. There were prison chaplains and expert witnesses for the prosecution at murder trials.

He felt as if he had been caught in the guts of an enormous machine. As he had noted before, there were no windows, and he rushed instead to the door to get some air. Outside stood the deputy who had brought him to the prison. The man passed him by, smiling. “It’s ten thirty-seven,” he said, waving his wrist with Feldman’s watch on it.

When he was calm enough Feldman went to the buffet table; his new knowledge had made him hungry. He was surprised at the meager character of the food. Perhaps there was something in the make-up of good men that subdued their tastes and deadened their appetites, something surly in their hearts that made them trim their lettuce and chop their food, as though matter had first to be finely diced and its atoms exposed before they would eat it. Feldman almost gagged on the liquescent potatoes and minced loaves of meat and could not even look at the colorless gelatinous molds with their suspended chips of pimento and halved olives and thin, biopsic bits of carrot, like microbes in a culture.

He toured the room, a spy among spies. There was an element of nervousness in their talk, which surprised him. They spoke of men still at large, public enemies who were armed and dangerous, their very vocabularies reminding Feldman of news bulletins that interrupted dance music on the radio in old films. They could have been residents of some storm-threatened outpost on the mainland. But there was smugness too, a basic confidence in their cellars of guns and stacked riot helmets and cases of tear gas. What was Armageddon to these guys?

“All the borders were closed,” one said. “It was the tightest security net in the history of the state. They used three hundred squad cars, for Christ’s sake. They couldn’t have done any more.”

“I know, Chief Parker was telling me,” another said.

“Still,” someone else said, “I see Commissioner Randle’s point. They didn’t take the mountains into account. One call to Lane Field, and they could have had fifty helicopters over that area in twenty minutes. They could have dropped troopers with infrared gun sights. They could have lit up the entire state with flares. It doesn’t make any sense for a manhunt to fail when you can get that kind of cooperation.”

“I’m glad you brought that up about the mountains. We’d improve security a thousand percent if the borders were redefined. Take Wyoming and Montana, for example.”

“Flanders and Labe have a tough one there, all right. I wouldn’t want to be those two lawmen.”

“Well, sure. They’ve got it tough, but it’s not much different for True in Tennessee or Wright in South Carolina, or even Grand and Nobel in Massachusetts and Connecticut. I could give you a dozen examples. The mountainous common borders of those states offer the criminal a million places he can hole up. We’ve simply got to recognize that sooner or later the frontiers have to be moved in this country. The natural border is a thing of the past anyway, since four-wheel drive. Place your state lines far enough away from your mountain ranges — create a twenty-mile belt of flatland around the high country — and when they come down from those hills they fall right into our nets without all this crap about extradition.”

“I don’t know, Jim, it sounds pretty idealistic to me.”

“Hell, Murray, we’ve been doing it in our penitentiaries for years. What’s your yard between your outside walls and your main buildings?”

We’re surrounded, Feldman thought. We’re lost, but we’re surrounded.

He took a cup of coffee with him into an empty room. Even normally he moved around a lot at parties, but tonight he had covered miles. He was looking for a place to hole up, but what he really wanted was to go back to his cell, to be with those who knew him. I’m Feldman, he thought; my book is in the library. He longed to be with anyone who had read his book, who knew about his life. What was this party all about, anyway?

Always an invitation had meant to him something more than it was: a secret message, a signal, a declaration of love. And though he was not a public man he had gone to all parties open to the regard of others, to their attention. It was all that he would ever do for anyone — show them his moods, demonstrate himself. I should have been a late-model automobile, he thought. But these people, these cops and armored-car executives and czars of baseball and auditors of books, wanted only to be protected from him, and to have the right of protecting others from him. His blue fool suit was as heavy as armor. Ah, he thought, I’m such an amateur. He despised his clumsiness, his bad balance. He knew himself for a stumbler in the dark, a stubber of toes, a snagger of pockets. The insurance companies wouldn’t touch him.

Once — it was the year his father died — he had sent himself to Boy Scout summer camp. Joining on a whim at the last moment — he had seen a poster of some boys around a campfire, Negroes, Asians, white kids, all of them strangely Caucasoid — he’d had to go as a Tenderfoot, years older than any other boy of that rank, and as a pauper, with none of the equipment that the others had. He hadn’t understood why he’d come. He couldn’t tie the knots or make a fire or pitch a tent. He didn’t know the pressure points and was clumsy in the canoe and didn’t recognize the plants. He couldn’t find the North Star. He suffered much from the taunts of the other boys and from the commands of boys much younger than himself; yet for the two weeks he was there he had been convinced of his happiness. He remembered one clear, cool evening of a three-day portage when they had slept in the open. He had no sleeping bag and lay in his town clothes, his only protection the few rubber rain slickers the others had lent him and would take back as soon as it rained. He recalled looking at the sky, knowing none of nature’s names but smelling its woods and feeling its earth, sensing himself there in it, who knew no cloud formations nor the shapes of leaves. He was too excited to sleep, and he began to talk to a thirteen-year-old boy who lay near him, telling him about himself, speaking as someone younger might have spoken to someone older but rarely as someone older ever spoke to someone younger. And the kid listened. Then it rained and that kid was the first to ask for his slicker back. Best pal I ever had, Feldman thought.

It’s the liquor, he told himself. It makes you sentimental. Hell, he thought, something has to.

A woman came into the room and sat down in a straight chair a few feet from the couch where Feldman was sitting. She slumped backwards, her behind sliding down inside her clothing, so that her body appeared to be lowered from her dress, exposing thigh, straps, the top of a stocking like a vase of flesh. Her position might have been something the Red Cross recommended as a specific against a certain kind of respiratory attack. Feldman waited for her to speak, then realized that she was tipsy and hadn’t yet noticed him. He watched her underwear, soon imagining shapes in it, lumps and shadows and stains. It made him nervous to stare, and he wondered if he should cough or scrape his feet. He looked at her face. He knew nothing about people’s eyes, couldn’t tell character from facial planes. People were young or old, dark or fair, fat or thin. This woman seemed to be in her thirties, a brunette, an inch or so taller than he was, though perhaps it was only the way her legs were extended in front of her that made her seem tall. (He thought of her posture as Lincolnesque.) He found it pleasant to be there with her, their accidental intimacy and her apparent ignorance of his presence enormously sexy. She looked up once and still didn’t seem to notice him, and he settled into a comfortable contemplation of her. He let his hands rest in his lap.

“I read about you,” she said suddenly, and Feldman jumped. “I read about you,” she repeated, her voice shriller than Feldman would have guessed. He allowed himself a stiff, frightened nod in her direction, only then realizing the danger of his position. There were many things that he, their prisoner, could do to earn their anger, and knowing this, he had had any disadvantaged man’s low-souled regard for his own prerogative. His contempt for his captors had been modest, abased, and he had moved only reluctantly around their rules, all the while unconsciously — doing superstitiously the personality’s special pleading — trusting in miracle to save him in some final pinch. Now he was furious with himself. He had been about to commit the great sin: to have been at ease with one of their women. And that, he understood at last, was what the party was all about.

Of course, he thought, seeing everything. Guest of honor, life of the party. His first thought, his first, had been to wonder if there would be women. He thought of the omniscient Fisher. How that man worked him! He had wanted a maudlin Feldman, a Feldman sorry for himself — Boy, oh boy, Feldman thought, he’s yours, you’ve got him — and had scared him into self-pity with the shilled routines he had been suckered into overhearing. Then they had softened his fear, using forgotten comfort as an aphrodisiac, turning him into a yearner for tenderness and solace, off balance as a man on tiptoe. Even now, as he looked at the girl, he found it difficult to resist, and he longed to touch her, to pull at one of her straps as at a ripcord. He considered rape, though even as it crossed his mind, he knew she would know judo, know karate, know Burmese foot fighting, and he contemplated his sensuous, bone-shattering comeuppance, the intimate complicated smells of the hammer lock and bear hug. But all that she could do to him would be nothing; it was what the others — he thought of them as of her older brothers — would do. He could see a creosote-and-spit-on-the-floor doom, some blunt-instrumented humiliation, steamy clouds of race hatred, rage, righteous anger, an edge-of-the-bread-knife ruin. He understood how they felt. In a way, he was even on their side.

“My name is Mona,” the woman said.

“Mona. Well, well. How do you do? Mona, is it? Nice weather, Miss Mona. Well, well.”

“Why are you so nervous, a tough guy like you?”

“Me? Tough? Say, that’s rich. Yes sir. Kind of chilly, don’t you think? Feels like rain.”

“You just said it was nice.”

“Nice for some, not nice for others. Me, I like it. I do, I like it. Suits me.”

“Hey, where are you going?”

“Got to be running along, got to be skedaddling. It’s been a real pleasure, Miss Mona. Yes.”

“Ooh, I love you tough guys. You killers kill me.”

“Pshaw, Miss Mona, I’m no killer.”

“Well, you wheelers and dealers then, you big-time operators, you behind-the-scenes guys who can get someone killed by picking up a phone.”

“Heck, miss, I wouldn’t know what number to dial.”

“Sure, sure. I know. Tell me something, will you? Will you tell me something?”

“I’ll try,” Feldman said. “I’ll give it a try.” I’ll kick it around, he thought. I’ll see what I can come up with.

“Well, a thing that’s always fascinated me is why when you people are arrested and step out of those cars at the courthouse you always hold your hats over your face. It can’t be you’re afraid of the publicity. Everyone already knows what you look like. Why do you do it?”

“Our hats, is it?” Feldman said.

“Yes. Why?”

“Yes, well, we like the smell, that’s why we do that.”

Mona looked at him. Now she blows the whistle, Feldman thought. Now she taps the glass with the little hammer. Mona to Warden, Mona to Warden, come in, Warden. “That’s cute,” Mona said. She came over to his couch and sat next to him. She put out a finger and touched his arm. Don’t touch me with that, he thought. “I liked the part,” she said, “in the basement, where you did all those terrible things for people.”

Feldman couldn’t move. He was frightened, but now that she was close he could smell her perfume, the odor, he imagined, of cunning poisons. Her hand on the sleeve of his jacket made a complicated gesture of petition and restraint; it was as light as air and weighed forty-seven pounds. He could feel the warm tickle of her fingernail beneath the cloth of his suit.

“I liked the part,” she said hoarsely, “about Dedman and Freedman — and the other one, that other man.”

“Victman,” Feldman whispered. Her hand was on his neck, the long nails grazing gently against his skin. The area about his ear prickled with a soft malarial chill. I love you, Miss Mona, he thought.

“I liked the part,” she said, placing her hand on his leg, “where you make Lilly play those games.” She touched his chest inside his shirt.

“I liked the part,” he said, “where your hand was on my leg.”

“That’s cute,” she said. She put both her arms around his neck. Now he could not sit still. She bent to kiss him. I’ll pay for this, he thought. So I’ll pay for it, I’m rich. They kissed.

Seduction’s suction, he thought. He wanted action. He wanted tearing, room-defiling. He broke her hold and regrasped her. My way, he thought. He wanted the pillows on the sofa at lewd angles, the pictures askew, rape-happened furniture and the stains of love. “Awghrrh,” he roared, and pushed the girl back, shoving up her dress, up to his elbows in it, getting a fugitive image of someone rolling someone else in a blanket to put out a fire. He fumbled around inside the blue fool suit.

“Aren’t you going to take your clothes off?”

“A tough guy like me?”

“That’s cute,” she said.

Feldman rampant, roaring, amuck. Tumbling the world, rising, falling. He pummeled. He tummeled and tunneled. Aroused, he browsed and caroused and roamed and caromed. He smashed and crashed. “THAT WASN’T BAD AT ALL,” he cried in climax. It was a lyric scream.

“Shh,” she said. “Shh, shh.”

“That wasn’t bad at all,” he chopped out. He started to cough and laugh at the same time.

“You’ll bring the others,” she said.

“You are the others,” he said.

“I’m not,” she said, as if she knew what he was talking about.

“Say, give me a cigarette. Wow, I’m some tough guy. Wow. Wow. Look at me, I’m gulping like a kiddie. My heart says, ‘Gosh.’ Everything goes on. This goes on too. What a place, what a world! My heart says, ‘Golly.’”

“Shh,” she said. “Shh. Shh.”

Feldman got off her, but she made no effort to move. He had done some job on her. Through the girdle. She lay, hobbled by her dropped, ripped pants, like a fallen sack-racer. Her stockings were collapsed at her knees. Straps and buttons, clasps and wires loose on her thighs made an opened package of her legs. He stared at her thighs. They were red. They fascinated him. He took his time, bent forward and touched one. He pinched it hard, drawing no white marks. The redness goes all the way through, he thought, swallowing. It excited him. She might have been some ur-colleen, some boggy, seaside lady in black linen, shawled, a keener at shipwrecks and storms. A coffinside wailer. The real Catholic hot stuff. “Look at that,” he whispered. “How about that!”

“Pull my dress down.”

“Psst, Leo, what’s going on out there?” It was his homunculus.

“It’s terrific,” Feldman said. “It’s fabulous.”

“Pull my dress down. What is this?”

“No,” he said, “please. Wait a minute.”

“I will like hell,” she said. She sat up, tugged at her underwear and pulled her stockings taut. It was the old story. Disarray inspired him, and as she adjusted her clothing Feldman felt his energy drain off. “I think I’ve been taken,” he said quietly. “I’m over a barrel in some new way.” He sighed.

“You’ve been taken?” Mona said.

“What I don’t understand are the elaborate processes. The technicalities of your justice. Why do you have to have me dead to rights?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“All right,” he said. It was true. He didn’t understand the trouble they went to. Why didn’t they fake their photographs, rig their lie detectors? What difference did it make?

Mona finished dressing and turned to face him, sitting on a leg, flexing her big knee toward him like an enormous muscle. He recollected her red thighs. There was something terrifying about them, something powerful and secret like those biological myths about the angled cunts of Asians and erogenous palms of Negresses. There were rumors about the tough, horned nipples of Russian girls and the queer asses of squaws. Were these things true? They must be. Everything goes on. The forms of life were infinite — look at himself, his homunculus, old Short Ribs — as were the forms of death. You were nuts not to acknowledge power, whatever its source. Mona smiled at him. She must love me, he thought, she must. Otherwise — a flick of those red thighs, and he would have been done for, sent flying. He prayed silently to the red thighs, while one spur of his imagination conjured speculatively the thighs of his schicksa mom. Were they red too? Nah, he thought. She’d be alive today.

One of Mona’s earrings had fallen on the carpet, and he picked it up. It was for a pierced ear; you could have hung drapes on its hook. “Here,” he said.

“Hey, thanks. I didn’t feel it fall out.”

“Listen,” he said, “can I put it back?”

“What’s that?”

“May I put it back?”

“Go ahead.” She shook her head, and her hair swung. Feldman, failure in forests and catcher of poison ivy who never knew the planets or found the North Star and couldn’t remember which were the months with thirty days, gingerly held red-thighed Mona’s milky ear lobe. He bent his neck to see the hole, and then on impulse, arranging carefully his lips and tongue, precisely as a musician’s mouth at a flute, he blew through the aperture.

“Don’t fool around,” she said.

Feldman, who had already made several connections with the universe in the last half-hour, leaned back gratefully. He handed the girl her earring. “I might hurt you,” he said.

“Not a chance. The skin’s tough in there. I can’t feel a thing.”

He took back the earring and threaded it through her ear, deliberately clumsy. He felt marvelous. How many points, he wondered, for that sweet basket?

“We’ve been in here too long,” she said. “What about the others?”

But he had forgotten the others. He was interested now in what he might do with Mona. He saw himself at her controls: combing her hair, going through her purse for lint; then if she’d let him — always remembering the power of those red thighs, those tough pierced lobes — putting her toes in his mouth, her nipples in his ears, sitting in her lap and exploring her teeth with his fingers. “What about the others?” she repeated. “Is this smart?” It was hard to reconcile her anxiety with her red thighs, but then, he thought, he didn’t know what kind of thighs the others had. Maybe theirs canceled hers, bleached them in blood’s bright pecking order. Or maybe he was right the first time: she had done a job on him, and time was up. He stood reluctantly, nervous again, and said that maybe it would be better if they weren’t seen going out together.

“It’s too late to think about that,” she said.

“Why?”

“Don’t you know where we are? This is the warden’s bedroom.”

“It’s not,” Feldman said. “It can’t be. It doesn’t even look like a bedroom.”

“The couch is a hideaway. The wing chair’s a bidet.”

“Oh,” Feldman said. And the sofa pillows are sprinkled with Spanish fly, he thought. And the lamp is a camera. And the coffee table is a plainclothesman. Everything goes on, he thought. Why do you let everything go on? he prayed.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s face the music.” She tried to take his hand, but he wouldn’t let her have it. At the door she passed through first, and he followed sheepishly.

They were all gone; the room was empty. Mona went to the sideboard and made herself a sandwich. Feldman stood beside her as she spread mustard on a roll. “Where is everybody?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, her mouth full. “Gone home, I guess. Tomorrow’s a working day.”

“Tomorrow’s Saturday,” he said.

“Are the jails closed?”

“Well, what do we do now?” he asked.

“How do you mean? Have a sandwich.”

“They’re all gone.”

“Well, I know that. They’re all gone. They’re a bunch of party poopers. Have a sandwich.”

“I don’t want a sandwich,” Feldman said. “Listen, how do I get back to jail?”

She shrugged. Feldman left her impatiently and looked into another room. No one was around. He went into all the rooms he could find, and it was the same. The idea of being alone in Warden’s Quarters terrified him; somehow it seemed to be the ultimate defilement. There wasn’t a more serious crime. He sat down in the library and put his head in his hands. Then he remembered that the guard had said he would be waiting in the kitchen. He found Mona again. She had finished her sandwich and was making another. “Change your mind?” she asked. “Want a sandwich?”

“Where’s the kitchen?” Feldman demanded.

“What do you need the kitchen for? There’s plenty of stuff right here. Look, here’s some meatloaf. Here’s eggplant. What do you want? Shall I pour you a glass of Vegemato?”

“Where’s the fucking kitchen? Tomorrow’s Saturday. I have to get back to jail.”

“Well, listen to him,” she said. “Oh, all right, follow me.”

They went down a service hall Feldman had missed. Mona stopped at a wide white door. “In here,” she said, and pushed open the door.

“Look,” Feldman said, following her, “I’m sorry I’m late. I was off by myself and—”

The warden was counting desposit bottles and arranging them in neat rows.

“It’s me,” Feldman said softly.

The warden looked up and saw them, and Feldman whimpered. The warden’s face seemed momentarily to fall, as though some symptom he had not felt for months had suddenly recurred. In a second he had recovered, but when he opened his mouth it was to Mona he spoke. “You know each other,” he said. Feldman noticed her ring for the first time.

Mona nodded nervously.

Were they married? Oh Christ, was she his wife? The thief’s armful, he thought awfully. His mouthful. How do I get back to jail? he wondered. Crime and punishment, he thought. Punishment and punishment. Suddenly he felt compelled to offer the warden a confession, to admit everything, sign papers. He did not exactly feel moral obligation, but a necessity to flatter the warden with his crimes. It was what the man thrived on, what he deserved. The urge to plead was strong, but he did not yet know what he should plead to. He shrugged helplessly and smiled and tamped down a yawn. “Late,” he said.

“Your guard has been dismissed,” the warden said. “The prison’s closed.”

“Closed?”

“It’s sealed until morning. A warden’s danger is at night,” he said, and looked at Feldman.

“I drank like a pig,” Feldman blurted.

The warden nodded, bored.

“I drank like a pig, and I hated the food. It was too wet.”

“Was it?”

“It was too wet. There wasn’t any delicatessen. I hoped there would be delicatessen, and there wasn’t. If there was I would have had six sandwiches.”

“I see,” the warden said.

“You do?” Mona said.

“He’s copping a plea,” the warden said.

“No,” Feldman said, “I’m not.”

“You’re copping a plea,” the warden said.

“I coveted my neighbor’s wife.”

“What else?” the warden said.

“Everything else,” Feldman said. He saw that it made the warden wince to look at him, and he felt like someone with no nose, with reamed hollows where the eyes went. He stared out from behind the holes in his face, beneath his singed queer brows. “What happens now?” he asked.

“You can’t stay here,” Fisher said.

Feldman nodded. He understood. Fair was fair.

“Come with me,” the warden said.

He was comforted. People said “Come with me” to him, and he followed them down long, twisting corridors, through crowded rooms, a content sense of irresponsibility in his trailing footsteps, of abeyance, things held off. You climbed stairs and went to doom by degrees. You waited for elevators at the end of hallways; you crossed bridges that connected buildings. Then, at the end of it all, there were comfortable chairs; you could smoke; there were magazines to read. It surprised and disappointed him then when the warden merely walked across the kitchen to a narrow metal doorway and took some keys from his pocket. “Go in,” Fisher said. Feldman had seen the doorway when he had first come in, and thought that it must be some kind of freezer. He hesitated, then saw that the warden had produced a gun. “Go in,” the warden commanded. Feldman walked through the doorway; the door slammed behind him, and he heard the key turn in the metal lock.

Automatically he began to stamp his feet and rub his arms. He still thought he was in a freezer. “I’ve got to keep moving,” he said, but saw at once that the words had produced no visible breath. “I’m not cold,” he said, testing to make sure. Then he saw that he was in a kind of areaway and that a few feet in front of him was an arch and a stairway leading down, probably to the basement, though he had never gotten over the impression that Warden’s Quarters, like the solitary-confinement cells, were already below ground. “I can’t stand here all night,” he said, but that was an excuse. He knew that he wanted to go down the stairs and that the warden probably expected him to. He stood at the head of the stairway and looked down. The stairs declined at a rude angle. He could not see the bottom, although a line of naked bulbs — incredibly dim, like those drained lights before the curtain rises in a theater — hung from the narrow, curved Conestoga ceiling that canopied the stairway. I’m a fool, he thought, and began to descend the stairs.

There was no rail, and the rough stone walls felt damp, a thousand years old. A bad smell covered the walls like a tapestry. The lights overhead were spaced further and further apart. Soon he had left the last light behind him and entered the darkness. At the bottom he could see nothing, and stepped off the last stair as into space. The underworld, he thought.

He stopped where he was and listened, afraid to go further. He might be on a narrow stone apron, above water perhaps, although he couldn’t hear water. Perhaps it was a pit he stood over. He imagined enormous drops, plummets of miles. He took a cautious step, holding one foot in place and sliding the other carefully forward. Then he brought the other foot up. He tried to stand with his feet together — he imagined himself on a small platform about the size of a man’s handkerchief — but the strain of keeping his balance in so constricted a space was too great for him and he fell. He hit the floor abruptly, and because he had expected to tumble forever—“Come with me,” the warden had said; he recalled the leisurely fate he had anticipated — the impact knocked the breath out of him. He lay on the stone floor until he got his wind back, and then stood up slowly. Again he put one leg out, sliding it forward along the ground and then bringing the other leg up with it. In this way he proceeded for about five minutes. He had lost the stairway. He decided to throw something to see if he could judge from the sound if he was above a pit. He looked in his pockets for something to throw. He had nothing. What a poor man I am, he thought. He tugged a button off the jacket of his blue fool suit and threw it in front of him. It clattered on the floor. That doesn’t prove anything, he thought; I might have thrown it too far. He tossed the next button gently, and heard it drop a few feet in front of him, roll a foot or so and stop. He removed another button and flipped it to his left. It fell heavily. The remaining buttons, which he took from the sleeve of his jacket, he threw all around him. One rolled up against what was possibly a wall off to his left. The last button he threw behind him; it hit almost at once. “Well,” he said, “no pit.” Boldly he did a little dance, finishing with a daring leap in the dark.

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.

He looked around wearily. Only then did he realize that there was no one to put him in the chair. He was alone. It was out of the question that he would die. He climbed the rest of the stairs and stood before the metal door.

“Ha, ha,” he said, “you think I’m going to volunteer for that? What’s the matter with you? Ha, ha. Fat chance, you hear me? Big fat chance.” He put his ear to the door to see if he could hear the warden. Nothing. It was probably too thick. He might be out there and he might not. Still, he felt better about his position now that he realized he could save himself from electrocution by the simple expedient of not sitting down in the chair. And if they had decided to starve him — that would be ironic, he thought, starved to death with the kitchen just on the other side of the metal door — he would take his shoe off and pound it against the door. Someone would hear that. A trusty. Or Mona, if the unwritten law had not taken care of her and she was still alive, raiding the icebox. Someone would hear him. God would hear him.

“Dear God,” Feldman prayed, “dear Jesus and Buddha, Jehovah and Love, Mind, Spirit, Soul and Guts, dear Yin, dear Yang, Allah, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, Jupiter, Zeus, Thou and Almighty Dollar — blast and cream them, wreck their plans, rip them for Feldman.”

What in the name of all that’s holy am I praying about?

Calmly he thought of his fears. Tonight he had feared death by freezing and death by falling. He had feared death by frying and death by being left alone. And each he had hoped to forestall: by refusing to sit, by ripping his buttons, by pounding his shoe. But those deaths, far-fetched as those salvations, had not happened. They had not happened because the warden had not meant them to. They were not the Warden’s Deaths, who could have him shot or beaten or run over, who could have him thrown into machinery or dropped from walls. They were his own, Feldman’s Deaths. Feldman’s death was Feldman’s doing. His imagination was the murderer, and the deadly plans and bloody businesses and the doom schemas had been all his own, everything his own. Him the killer, the assassin in trees, him the waylayer.

It was true: he wanted his death. He wanted his death because it was coming to him and he wanted everything that was coming to him.

He turned again, went down the stairs, entered the room and rushed to the platform, scrambling onto it awkwardly. Maybe it was converted to AC and maybe it wasn’t, but it was turned on all right. He picked up the leather strap and flung it aside so that he could sit down. He sat well back in the chair, excited by the idea of the two or three thousand volts that would course up his ass. “All right,” he told the warden, “we both get what we want.”

Nothing happened.

“Tch tch,” he said. “I don’t do anything right.” Of course, he thought, he had to be strapped in. He reached around and grabbed the great leather strap and fastened it to the metal buckle attached to the other side of the chair. He pulled it tight. He could hardly breathe. He slipped his fists and wrists through the leather loops on the arms of the chair. Still nothing happened, and he realized that he was not making the proper contact. A curved metal band like a leg shackle was connected to the right front leg of the chair, and Feldman kicked off his shoe and tried to push his foot through it. Restrained as he was by the leather strap across his chest, he could not get the correct leverage. He pulled his hands out of the loops, undid the buckle at his side and forced his feet into the hoop. It was like stepping into a boot. Then he refastened the chest restraint and put his wrists back through the loops. They needed adjustment, but he could only tighten one. He chose the right, since it was to his right leg that the electrode was attached and the probability was that that side would take the initial jolt. He imagined his loose left arm, involuntarily escaped from its bond, waving in electric death.

He was ready. Now he would die. Last words? Nah. He wondered if there would be time enough to know what it was like. He hoped so, or what was he doing in the damn chair? Here goes, he thought, the big one. “It is finished.” He giggled and leaned his head far back into the headrest at the top of the chair, his neck scraping against the metal plates.

He lived.

This too, he thought. I’m a lousy conductor.

He undid all the straps, rose and stretched. His foot was still in the leg manacle. I didn’t know, he thought. I supposed it was turned on. What he had felt about his death was perhaps all he would ever feel. If that was so, then now, in a way, he didn’t have to die. Ever.

It is finished, he thought. But he was very sleepy. He got his foot out of the hoop, found his shoe, sat back down in the chair and made himself comfortable. Soon he was dead to the world.