A Bad Man

17

What would you do if a hole opened up in that wall?” Bisch asked.

“That couldn’t happen,” Feldman said warily. “How could that happen?”

“No, I mean it. Suppose a hole, big enough for a man to go through, suddenly opened up in our cell wall. What would you do?”

“The exercise yard’s right outside, Bisch.”

“Yes, but suppose it wasn’t? Suppose the cell wall was the only thing between you and the outside. Suppose it was light shift and all the guards had rushed to the other side of the prison to put out a fire, and the heat traveling in waves along the wall made this cell so hot you couldn’t stand it, so hot in fact that a hole was melted in the wall. What would you do?”

“What would you do, Bisch?”

“I’d try to save my life.”

“You’d go through the hole?”

“Self-defense,” Bisch said.

“Then what would you do?”

“I’d go around to the other side of the prison and turn myself in,” Bisch said. “And you?”

“So would I.”

“Yes, but suppose the guards are so busy fighting the fire that no one can get to the main gate to let you back in? And suppose it turns cold, below freezing, and you know that all you have to do to get warm is just go down the mountain a few thousand feet? What would you do?”

“I’d go down the few thousand feet,” Feldman said.

“You would?”

“To the first house.”

“Ain’t no houses down there.”

“To the first house. Sooner or later I’d come to one. Now then, what would you do?”

“I’d do the same.”

“What would you do when you got to the house?”

“I’d go inside and wait until I thought the fire was out. Then I’d come back.”

“You wouldn’t turn yourself over to the owner and demand that he make a citizen’s arrest?”

“Goddamnit,” Bisch said angrily, “you wouldn’t either. You made that up.”

“Of course I would, Bisch.”

“You wouldn’t. That’s unrealistic.”

“Oh, it is, is it?” Feldman said. “But it’s not unrealistic I suppose when you tell me you’d go around to the main gate and turn yourself in to a guard. That’s not unrealistic. The only difference is one’s a paid enforcer and the other isn’t. Why, your notion of justice is that it’s of concern only to the professional. You don’t care a fig about law and order for its own sake, do you?”

“Wait a minute. I didn’t say that.”

“You as good as said it.”

Bisch was silent. Then, in a low voice, he asked what Feldman meant to do about it. It was a trap: if he said he was going to report him, Bisch would lean on him, but if he told him to forget it, he would be admitting to exactly the sort of indifference Bisch was trying to maneuver him into confessing.

“I haven’t got enough to go on yet,” he told him finally, “but a few more slips like that last one, Bisch, and I’ll have you dead to rights.”

Bisch ground his teeth and glared. It had been a trap, Feldman saw, though Bisch returned to his bunk, accepting defeat.

It was the sort of conversation that was sweeping the prison. For three months — since, in fact, the strange assembly in which Warden Fisher had first articulated his vigilante policy — the talk in the exercise yards, in the shops, in the discussion groups, everywhere the men gathered, had exactly this quality of probing hypothetical situations, fussy as boys challenging each other to spend a billion dollars. Most of it was just “making warden’s mouths,” as even the most pious convicts conceded. The warden himself, overhearing one of their voices raised in virtue when he passed, would respond with a wry smile, knowing as the expression of a parent come into a noisy bedroom now peaceful with the counterfeit deep breathing of sleep. (Assumed zealousness became a source for certain wicked jokes daringly told by one convict to another. One story — Feldman had had to read it in the warden’s column of the prison newspaper — was about a convict serving a short sentence, caught stealing food from the kitchen. Asked what he was up to, he replied, “The cook’s a lifer. I don’t trust him.” He was caught again some months later in the visiting room, making love to the cook’s wife. “How many times do I have to tell you?” he said. “I just don’t trust that damn cook.”)

Hypocrisy flourished and became a sort of virtue, but warden’s mouths or no, the prison rules had never operated so efficiently. It was almost impossible, for example, to find a Fink who would still help you through the loopholes for a few cigarettes, although the new policy had created in effect another loophole. Because the legitimacy of permission slips and passes was seldom questioned now, one began to feel a positive virtue for being grounded in details and honorably fulfilling the small procedures of prison function. Feldman sometimes wondered if this, rather than the announced object of rooting out the bad men, might not actually be in the back of “Warden’s Mind” (a branch of a sort of speculative philosophy among certain prisoners). Despite himself, even Feldman felt a certain pride in knowing the guards knew he was where he was supposed to be. But if the atmosphere was now a little freer and the prisoners had less to fear from the warden and the guards, they had more to fear from each other. The new policy had shifted the tensions from between prisoners and keepers to between kept and kept.

More than once Feldman had tried to get Bisch to suggest that they drop their pursuit of each other, but the man treated these moves as further maneuvers, and always they had to return to their silly game. Feldman had even told Bisch some overzealous convict jokes that he made up himself, but while Bisch laughed, he never offered to tell Feldman any stories of his own, and Feldman, suspecting Bisch might use these jokes against him, decided he couldn’t risk telling him others. Their strategies spiraled.

Only one time, and that to his cost, had Feldman, weary of their duel, spoken forthrightly. Bisch, obviously trying to tempt him into an open declaration of his feelings, had told him that he personally knew of a conspiracy to break jail. “Oh, come on, Bisch,” Feldman had said. “Grow up. If you know about a jailbreak, either blow the whistle on the guys who are planning it or keep it to yourself. Don’t tell me about it. I’ve only got four months before I get out of here. Why would I get involved in something like that?”

“Oh, so you admit it. You want to get out.”

“Well, Jesus, Bisch, of course I want to get out.”

“It doesn’t make any difference at all to you whether you’ve paid your debt to society or not. I’ll remember that one when your time comes.”

“What do you mean ‘when my time comes’?”

“Never mind,” Bisch said, and from his guilty blush Feldman realized he hadn’t been joking. “Never mind,” Bisch repeated, “the important thing is that you’re unregenerate.”

“I’m not unregenerate,” Feldman said.

“Oh ho, sure not.”

“I’m not.”

“Tell it to the Marines.”

“I’m regenerate,” Feldman said.

It was how, he realized finally, he had to speak, and in a way, because he dared not speak otherwise, he was regenerate.

With others, of course, he was equally wary. Even with the bad men Walls and Sky and Flesh, he was cautious, and with Herb Mix, the bad man who attached himself to Feldman in the exercise yard. (Where, Feldman noticed, the bad men continued to jump about erratically, just as he had seen them do that first time from his cell. He himself, concentrating on imitating the more normal walks of the other convicts so as not to call attention to himself, sometimes found the restraint too great, the sheer watchful concentration too difficult, and would often start abruptly forward, making the disturbing movement of a man bolting in sleep.) But bad men had little to hope for from vigilanteeism. The paroles such tactics might bring others would not be given them, and one might have supposed that they would have fewer occasions, since they had less need, to make warden’s mouths. They made them anyway, at least in the canteen when there were convicts to overhear them. At these times Feldman, who had adopted a somewhat different approach with the bad men than the one he took with Bisch, would go about his business, paying no heed to their absurd challenges of him. If pushed too far, he might stop and call out to the convicts in the canteen, “You men see what I’m doing. You’re my witnesses. See me work. See me fill your orders and make change and keep the books and dust the shelves.”

In certain respects, nevertheless, he was a real offender against the new system. An astonishing news item appeared in the prison paper:

NATION’S 2ND OLDEST CONVICT REVEALS BRIBERY PLOT

Ed Slipper, this country’s second oldest living convict now serving time in a federal or state prison, voluntarily disclosed to Warden’s Office Thursday the existence of thirty-two dollars and forty cents in his personal savings account at the prison. Slipper, the last of whose relatives died many years ago, has admitted that up until eight months ago he had no scource of outside income whatever for several years, and that the money has been accumulating in his account due to direct deposits by the business associates of Leo Feldman, a fellow inmate and “bad man” sentenced to one year’s incarceration here.

Slipper charged that the money had been put into his account on Feldman’s insistence, and that in return he was to render Feldman such services as Feldman saw fit to require of him, and to impart whatever informations affecting Feldman that he as trusty might be privy to.

Slipper, who is himself a “bad man” but who was, in accordance with prison custom and policy, declared an “ancient” and made trusty on his seventy-fifth birthday, insists that he has made use of only seven dollars and sixty cents of the forty dollars placed in his account in eight monthly five-dollar installments. He declared that he has rendered Feldman no services and that he asked Feldman to stop the checks months ago but that Feldman declined. (At present no machinery exists whereby a convict can turn down monies deposited to his account by an outside source, though Warden’s Office has revealed that a rule to that effect is now being considered as a result of this case.)

Slipper has asked that the funds be turned over to the prison infirmary for the purchase of additional medicines.

An editorial in the same edition offered commentary on the affair and disclosed some surprising additional facts:

ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT

That the moral atmosphere of this institution has markedly improved, no one who has witnessed the changes of the past few months can doubt. Yet there remain certain private pockets of pollution which, for all that, smell the worse and offend the more.

A recent fact-finding committee, charged with bringing to light vestigial episodes of corruption among the prisoners at this institution, has stated that while exact figures are unavailable, there is considerable evidence to support a conservative assertion that at least two dozen permission slips are still forged monthly, along with a like number of passes; that while absenteeism is down fortyseven percent, a check with the infirmary has revealed that only eighty-one percent of the current absenteeism is legitimate; that there are perhaps two or three warden’s-flag missions subverted to private ends each month; and that there are even now a handful of convicts who do not observe the proper seating arrangements in the dining hall. All this, capped by the recent frightful disclosure of attempted bribery in the Feldman/Slipper case, demonstrates that some — if admittedly only a few — convicts still seek to exploit their position.

Some good signs are likewise in the wind, of course. The same blue-ribbon committee has reported that attendance is up in Warden’s Forest and that on the whole most cons have responded encouragingly to Warden Fisher’s assembly plea that they keep a closer check on each other, but these ameliorating factors are tainted by the discouraging persistence of even a “little” corruption. Once again, the few bad apples have spoiled the barrel, and many are made to suffer for the mistakes of a few self-styled “privileged” characters. It is no accident, of course, that the bribery attempt, long known to Warden’s Office but only just now revealed by Slipper himself, was the work of a bad man. Perhaps the sad statistics in the committee’s report are largely the responsibility of bad men. Perhaps, too, Feldman himself will be discovered to have contributed even more to these statistics than is now known. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

Meanwhile, it is only fair that we applaud Ed Slipper for his recent revelations, however belated they may have been. It is pertinent too, at this juncture, to encourage the frankness of others. Only with the cooperation of a vigilant population can this prison move closer to the ideals and goals articulated for it by its administration.

As yet, there have been no purges here among the prisoners themselves, and while history informs us that a climate of purge is often sticky, we would remind history that it has always been stickiest for the guilty.

Feldman flushed a greasy permission slip down the toilet while Bisch slept. He even wrote a letter to the editor of the prison paper:

Dear Sir:

All that was almost eight months ago, when I had been in this prison for barely more than a month. As Ed Slipper himself has said, no good ever came to me from the arrangement, and if I sought advantage none was realized. I have not even exchanged greetings with Mr. Slipper for the past half year, and if my “business associates,” as your reporter calls them, have continued to deposit money to the old man’s account — why, it’s no secret, I think, that I am a wealthy man as inmates go, and that I can well afford it. Indeed, I did not stop the deposits for these last six months simply because, advantage to me or not, I realized that he could use the money. While I do not claim fondness for Ed Slipper, his great age alone demands my respect (as does his status as an “ancient” of this institution, the prison’s own term for him), and I can assure you that it has been nothing darker than sympathy that has motivated the continuance of those funds. Now that I learn he means to turn them over to the infirmary for the purchase of medicine, I intend to continue these contributions.

Although Feldman destroyed this letter, he found that many of the expressions in it revealed an indignation that he actually felt. He knew it was best, however, to keep it to himself, best generally to lie low. There were only about four months remaining on his sentence, and then he would be freed. (Actually, he wasn’t sure exactly how much time he had yet to serve. He knew that two or three weeks would be added on to his sentence because of the time he had remained in his cell before asking for an assignment, and perhaps he owed an additional week for other days here and there. He had not bookkept his year well. He was waiting now for the official Statement of Remaining Obligation a prisoner received when he had just twelve weeks to go.)

His decision to lie low was consonant with the preparations he was making to renew his life on the outside. He wrote some letters to Lilly and even to Billy, though no replies came. He began also to direct inquires to the executives at his store — most, like Victman, had left when he went to prison, while others, seeing a chance to improve their position, had stayed on and taken the deserters’ places — but their replies, he discovered, held little interest for him. He had to force himself to follow the figures and detailed reports in the letters. He began to speculate about selling his store outright or merging it with one of the other department stores, and he wrote to his vice-president, asking him to look around for buyers. The reply came from Miss Lane:

Dear Mr. Feldman:

Mr. Nichols is on holiday now with his family, and due to the highly confidential nature of your inquiry, I thought it best to keep your letter here awaiting his return, and in the meantime to offer you some of my own thoughts about this matter. If I am out of line, Mr. Feldman, I hope you will understand that I make these remarks out of a sense of deep loyalty to you and to your store.

I think I know how terrible this past year must have been for you, how very frightful imprisonment would be for anyone like yourself, who has lived apart from violence and viciousness all his life. I have seen a drawn gun but one time in my life — I mean the time that detective came into your office to arrest you — and although I am not a cowardly woman, my mind still registers the terror of that shock. A pistol! Loaded and pointed at a man who, whatever his faults, would never have offered physical opposition! Surely the guns of justice are no less dangerous and insulting than the guns of chaos. That you would never draw one yourself, I know as certainly as that there was never any wild anger in you, but only an experimental sort of cruelty and a will that sought resistance where there was none to be found — in the market place. (And now I think that maybe you have finally found it. In the prison, in the rifles of the guards forever pointed and loaded as in some eternal stick-up. In the bars of your cell, in the stone and steel and lead and leather — that vicious handful of the fierce old elements of the civil world. Am I right?)

I am sorry for you, Mr. Feldman, and I read your letter offering to put your store up for sale, and I despair. Believe me when I tell you it is not concern for my job that makes me bold now. I know my value (if you never did: I recall with pleasure the time you tried to reduce my salary, your suggestion when I was still green that I be paid by the job, by the pages actually typed, so much per letter, per envelope, per licked stamp, per search in the files, per appointment made, per telephone call taken in your absence, per staple driven true — oh, there were so many. I recall all our agreements — my counterproposals and yours. That was a combat!), and I know that I could get another job tomorrow. (Did you know, speaking of combat, that I stole from you? That I used my position as your private secretary to obtain merchandise for which I never paid? I tell you this in writing because I know that in our state a convict may not bring suit against anyone on the basis of evidence obtained while he was in prison. Don’t worry. I said I knew my value, and all I ever took was by way of closing the gap between that value and what you paid me. And that at list prices, so you’re still ahead, or rather, we’re exactly even because I probably owe you something for the charm of the arrangement, and even at that I may still be ahead, for I would owe you something, too, for the secrecy, the thrill of the guerrilla risk, the absurdity and outlandishness.)

There are some around here — your “executives,” your department heads, your lawyers — who say that you have marred your image with the public, that not understanding the terms of your crime, they will be unable to come to this store and feel uncheated. I have heard Mr. Nichols make the very suggestion to Mr. Ray that you make in your letter: that the store be sold or merged, at the very least that its name its name be changed. I hope you never agree to this. I know what went on in that basement. (I came in clothes you had never seen, in a veil — which, it happens, was merchandise I obtained from your store under false pretenses. I disguised my voice and told you that to earn money I meant to become a call girl, and asked if you would put me in touch with any contacts you might have. You told me that the big money was in dirty photographs and tried to talk me into buying an ordinary box camera and doing a series of indecent poses for a “family album” because that was more appealing, more intimate and dirtier than the ordinary studio shots, you said. You even wanted to sell me the “corners” so I could mount the photographs myself when they came back from the drugstore in your physician’s building, where you said they’d develop them.) And I don’t see the harm. (And don’t you see? You’re not the only one who needs freedom, and to be kept alive by the sense of the special. The woods are full of us.)

Anyway, I hope you reconsider your idea about selling the store. The world is getting to be a terrible place, and I don’t know if it’s your kind or their kind who make it more awful, but if we must have terror, let it be gay and exciting, I say.

I know you may fire me for this letter, but if you sell the store I don’t care anyway.

Yours in Crime,

Silvia Lane

Feldman fired her. He wrote Billing a confidential letter to ask if she had a charge account at the store. She did, and he assumed that she would continue to use it. Figuring what she had been worth to him over the years at his figures, he subtracted this amount from his estimate of what she might have figured she was worth to him at her figures. Her figure was seven percent higher than his; she had been with him nine years, so she owed him, he guessed, $4,410. In a second confidential letter from Billing he learned that on the average she spent about $640 a year in his store. This, with her employee’s discount of twenty percent, represented $800 in purchases. Now that she was no longer with the store she would lose the discount, and so he wrote Billing a third confidential letter, asking them to research what single girls of Miss Lane’s approximate age and income and educational background could be expected to spend with him each year. The answer that came back was $500. She would be sore at him for firing her, of course, but he knew that buying habits, once established, were as strong as instincts. Say she spent only $400 a year. Round off the $4,410 she owed him to $4,400. He could get his money back, hiking her bills at the rate of fifty percent a year. It would take work. Sooner or later someone as efficient as Miss Lane would wonder why she was paying $600 a year for only $400 worth of merchandise. Carrying charges. (Beautiful things could be done with carrying charges.) Nickel-and-diming her on every bill. Here and there a really gross mistake in his favor. Occasional charges for items never purchased. Then some really flashy stuff with her credits if she objected. The rest to be done with seconds, damaged goods and the clever substitution of inferior merchandise. It would take work, all right, and patience, but the important thing was that it could be done. Of course, it meant that he could not sell his store for twenty-two years, but if that’s what it meant, that’s what it meant. She wanted combat? He’d give her combat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And if only that, then only at the end of the year, when he had served out his sentence. Only then. The sons of bitches. The fuckers. The sons of bitches. (And anxiety did count. It wasn’t interesting after all, and terror, this kind, the fear of death, was boring. The dread of pain was. Only that.) Only then. Only after the year of shit. They’d had him. They’d had him all along. The bastards. The sons of bitches. The bastards. They had him now. Feldman the sucker, the supersalesman supersold. Suddenly he was very afraid. Oh God, he prayed, call the police! Get my lawyer! Call the Better Business Bureau! I want my money back!

Life had never been so dear to him. He prized his past. He knew he must write letters to his lawyers to tell them what he suspected. (Suspected? What he knew.) But even more urgent was his need to remember his life, to have it in some formal way. He began again to write letters to Lilly. These were different from the others, which had been merely domestic patter, bland household inquiries — devices, really, for starting his life up again. Now his letters contained minutely detailed and loving descriptions of what they both knew: an exact picture of their living room, their entrance hall, the flowers in their garden, the equipment in their kitchen, what hung in a closet, all the meals he could remember, an account of their television-viewing for a week — along with whatever he could recall about the plots and the songs or the reasons a particular guest had appeared before a panel. He described their furniture and the meaning of all the random jottings and stray numbers that lay beside their telephones. He wrote about Billy’s toys and the look of their pantry, and recalled to her pieces of conversations between them, arguments, brief passages of affection. He told her he loved her, asked for her prayers and pled for her help in keeping him alive.

To his lawyers he sent dispatches outlining his apprehensions, desperately offering them reasons which seemed, on paper, always more paltry than they actually were. He told about the poor bargain he’d made, how they had extracted the last penny of his debt to society, for a year keeping him on his toes with their dark menace, only to kill him at the end, compounding the interest, usurers, fiends. Most of these letters he destroyed, but others, equally strident, he sent, hoping, in his despair, to trigger an adjustment of some powerful judicial balance. He reasoned that he had shown restraint when he had destroyed the bulk of the letters and that this entitled him to use those that remained. If the lawyers could know how circumspect he had been, they would give more weight to the letters that got through — a point he felt obliged to include as an addendum to a final letter he was sending.

He was addressing this when Bisch, studying him from where he lay on his cot, spoke out. “You sure been having yourself a correspondence lately.”

“One of the signs of rehabilitation,” Feldman said automatically, “is a con’s interest in sending and receiving mail.”

“Sure,” Bisch said scornfully, “is that what it’s all about? Rehabilitation.” He laughed. Feldman thought for the first time of the censors. Of course, he thought helplessly, none of it would get through.

“Have they been reading my letters, Bisch?”

Bisch winked at him.

“But I’ve written the people at my store,” he said urgently, as though it were Bisch he had to appease if his cries for help were to get to the lawyers, “and been getting answers. Everything I want to know.”

“Is that so?” Bisch said. “Very interesting. I suppose then, now that you’ve taken an interest in your store, the folks back home will be expecting you.”

“What do you mean? What do you mean, Bisch? Do you mean that they let those letters through just to show them I think everything’s all right? Is that it? To throw them off so that when — so that if something happens to me it will seem accidental? Is that how they do it, Bisch?…Bisch?”

Bisch was silent, and Feldman, if anything, was grateful.

Now each moment was precious to him. Only eight weeks of his sentence remained, but he doubted he would live through them. A strange joy was born in him. He had received no word from the lawyers, save only the occasional posting of their ordinary business, and he still had not heard from Lilly. Their silence confirmed his suspicions. He was helpless, but it was this helplessness which gave him strength now. He continued his routines, behaving exactly as he had when he still believed he would be released and did not want to queer his chances by giving trouble. But now his actions came from a desire to savor those actions. Discipline acted as a sort of slow motion on his days, giving him a chance (because he knew where he would be at a given time and what he would be doing) to anticipate, to go over in his imagination exactly what such and such a motion would feel like when he made it, what a particular gesture made, say, by the pencil man when he took the census (laboriously pointing now at one prisoner, now at another with the eraser end, moving his lips as he counted, licking the lead with a thick, slow tongue) would seem like to him when it happened. He prophesied the sounds of machinery starting up and faint individual smells, then softly laughed when they occurred, like a listener appreciating a story whose punch line he has foreseen.

It went on and on like this, and the next time he looked at a calendar he had just over six weeks left, and the time after that just over five, though the time between seemed like a year. It had worked. What he had felt for his furniture he felt now for the bars of his cell, for the counter in the canteen, the lunches of cold cuts they served on Sundays, the bluish flicker of the light in the TV room. And all life, all history, what he had been, what he was now, the stars and everything in books, all the wars that had ever happened, the reason behind things he never questioned, the facts about electricity and the skeletons of beasts and the mystery of God, were contained for him in the few drops of soapy water he felt this moment splash on the back of his hand as he dipped his scrub bush into the pail beside him and scrubbed and prayed to the floor of his cell.

And the next time he looked, he had three weeks left, three weeks before they would kill him, and it seemed as if only yesterday there had been eight. Oh God, he thought, I blew five weeks. Oh Jesus, they cheated me again!