A Bad Man

18

They nailed him in the canteen on a Tuesday evening one week before he was scheduled to get out.

Come with us, Feldman, he had dreamed. Men outside his cell, he had dreamed. I get out in a few days. Go yourselves. Take Bisch. Go with them, Bisch. Come, he had dreamed, with us, Feldman. No. Your plan won’t work. The warden knows what you’re up to. Then a prisoner had put his hands on the bars of Feldman’s cell and drawn the door wide. Come with us. Who left that open? he asked, he had dreamed. And yelled he dreamed, Jailbreak! Jailbreak! And another prisoner came in to get him. They took, he dreamed, him to the basement of Warden’s Quarters, and strapping him in, punched him to death in the electric chair.

What happened was not like this, or, rather, only a little like it. Their posse presence seemed the same, their faces and the dark look of delegation on them, of caucused principle, passionate as the decision of revolutionaries in the street. Also familiar was the queer propriety of their approach, their almost touching courtesy, so that looking at them, he could tell from their shyness, from their air of an up-the-sleeve fate in reserve, that these were merely agents, lumpish younger brothers, and that others would deal with him.

“Come with us, please,” one said softly. (You knew he really wanted to shout it.) “We’re putting you on trial. There’s going to be a kangaroo court.” (And you knew this one had already said too much, exceeded his authority. The others stared at him in shushing shock. Feldman’s heart dived. Aw, shit, he thought, it’s planned. If he can make mistakes, it’s planned. What chance have I?)

A guard came into the canteen and shoved through the men crowding the room. “Listen, Sky,” he said, “it’s almost closing. Start straightening up in here. Get these guys out.”

“There’s going to be a kangaroo court,” Feldman said. “They’re taking me off.”

“Did you hear me, Sky? Walls, Flesh? Start cleaning up.”

“They’re taking me off.”

The guard looked at him. “Up yours,” he said.

Just so. Up mine.

They took Feldman back to his cellblock, walking openly through the corridors, Feldman himself actually setting the pace, the outraged stride of brisk business, of one challenged, leading his accusers to the place where his side of the story would be verified (having decided to show assurance, making not warden’s mouths this time but Feldman’s faces).

A hundred men, it seemed, were waiting for them. Prisoners from other cellblocks stood in the cement court between the cells. Doors were open, just as they had been in his dream, and the convicts had pulled their cots out onto the apron of the cells, where, lolling on them, they seemed like sleepless tenants before their apartment buildings on a hot night. There was a peculiar intimacy of emergency about the scene, of shifted rhythms and lives suddenly changed by, say, a power failure. Even Feldman could feel the good will, the fresh democratic air of the place, the sense of some newmade first-name basis. Bags of potato chips were broken out, cups of soda shared. Only Feldman they stared at with a fixed, rote stoniness. (Now he had slowed down, letting the others lead him. He would soon be with leaders, and the thought of this was not unpleasant. He sensed them before he saw them — suspicioned before he heard it their special articulateness, imagining labor leaders, officers commissioned in the field, and counted on the edge of natural aristocracy in them.) As he went by the men in the corridor he triggered their silences, set off their concentration, so that at last it seemed only he himself could be heard, moving like fire along the fuse of their attention. They brought him finally before a dozen or so men at the end of the cellblock. It was immensely interesting to see who was in on his fate, as though his life had been a mystery or detective story, and now, just before the end, he was to be regaled with solutions, satisfy curiosity in a last sumptuous feast of truth.

But there was no time to savor the irony of his various betrayers. “Get him dressed,” one of them said, and Feldman felt himself deftly turned by the young convict at his side, elbow-urged back up the corridor they had just come down, and guided to his cell.

“Put on those clothes,” the convict said. “We’ll stand in front of the bars.” The deputies with whom he had come from the canteen lined up across the front of his cell, blocking him from the view of the other prisoners. Feldman turned toward his cot and saw neatly laid-out there the suit in which he had come to the prison, the very suit which he had got the buyer to bring him for his trial. Next to it was his white shirt, freshly laundered, and on top of that his tie.

“Wash in the sink before you put that stuff on,” the young convict called over his shoulder. Feldman undressed, and standing over the tiny sink, soaped and scrubbed his body, then rinsed himself off and looked around for a towel. “Dry yourself with the fool suit,” the young convict said. “Okay. Now get dressed.”

He put on the fresh clothes. A bad sign, he thought uneasily. He wasn’t superstitious; it had nothing to do with the fact that he had already been found guilty in this suit. The clothes themselves were ominous, as if dressing him like this were to give him everything they ever would of the doubt’s benefit. All his respectability in his pressed suit, his fresh shirt mustering his innocence, his carefully knotted tie virtue. He knew that everyone out there had once worn clothes like these, trusted hopefully in their telling neatness, thrown themselves impeccably upon the mercy of the court. (It was just this that he feared about justice, its conscientiousness about small things, all its zealous, meaningless courtesies. It appointed lawyers and served up gourmet last suppers, final cigarettes from the warden’s own pack and provided spiritual counsel that would meekly accept any insults. Patiently it abided last words and proffered blindfolds. He bitterly considered all its Greekey gifts.)

His captors escorted him back to the men at the end of the cellblock, and leaving him to stand before them, divided smoothly on either side like spear carriers in opera. Feldman faced his judges — he assumed they were his judges — indifferent now to their identities; his curiosity soured, how they figured in his fate, or that they did, was without solace for him. It was a random collection. He recognized two from the Crime Club, the sluice robber and the man who made up peoples’s names for petitions. Bisch was there, and Harold Flesh. He saw the Fink who had given him his first pass, and Ed Slipper. Two of the men had once approached him to tell him their troubles, and two others he had oversold in the canteen. Three were prisoners with whom he had once shared table assignments. The librarian was there, and the convict who had stepped on his heels as they filed out after assembly. (But where were the folk heroes he had anticipated and depended on?) A few of these men had almost no connection with his life, the three with whom he had sat silently at meals; and to these he turned now, comforted somewhat by the exiguousness of their thin dealings.

“Well?” one of them said. The voice was loud, as if to make up for the rule of silence in the dining hall. Its surly clarity frightened him. “Well? What is it?”

Panicking, Feldman threw himself at once upon their mercy. “I did this bad thing and that bad thing,” he said, raising his voice. “One bad thing and then another. Then I found Christ, and Christ saved me.”

“All right, stow it,” another of his table partners said, coming forward. “These are the ground rules. Court’s in session till a verdict, but we’ve got to be out here in three days. These are the cover stories: an epidemic’s broken out, and they had to shut us off from the rest of the prison. There’s a riot up here, and the warden’s closed off the area until it can be brought under control. We took no hostages except a few trusties, so the strategy is to starve us out. Neither story will be used unless it’s absolutely necessary. We stand to lose if it is. Somebody kicks back at the capital, and Warden has to throw them a few heads. It’s a risk all around, but if we’re out in three, nobody has to know anything. Let’s get on with it.”

“Get his cot for him,” the librarian said.

“Somebody get Feldman’s cot up here,” the sluice robber said. “Jesus Christ, why wasn’t that ready?”

“All right, no sweat. It takes a minute. He can stand for a minute, can’t he?” the Fink said.

“Check,” said the first table partner. “More ground rules. You ever sit in on a kangaroo court, Feldman?”

“No sir.”

“Well, it ain’t anything difficult about it. We try you. And either we find you guilty or we don’t. We make up our mind on the evidence. You remember your other trial, don’t you?”

“Yes sir.”

“Well, think about that one. That’ll give you an idea. Except we ain’t lawyers, so since you ain’t being prosecuted by lawyers, you ain’t entitled to a lawyer to defend you. You defend yourself as best you can. Any man here wants to speak up for you, he can. Questions?”

“Rather an objection.”

“Pretty early for an objection.”

“Well, it’s just that you say anyone who wishes to speak up for me can.”

“That’s correct.”

“Yes. But don’t you get parole credit for bringing me to trial?”

“What’s in it for us ain’t your business. You wouldn’t be here this evening if you’d minded your business.”

“I simply wished to point out that though you say you’re willing to hear testimony in my behalf, there’s nothing in it for anybody who might want to give it.”

“What’s your question?”

“That’s an objection, a demurrer.”

“Pretty early for an objection, too soon for a demurrer. If you have a question I’ll hear it.”

“May I have a change of venue?”

“No.”

“No more questions,” Feldman said.

“Now about punishment,” the man continued. “The law in this state don’t provide for capital punishment anymore, but we don’t provide for anything but. If we find you guilty we kill you. One of the intramural boxers has been practicing on a tackling dummy with a knife sewn inside it and suspended just about where that little thingummy lies on your heart. He punches like a surgeon this guy, like a butcher. He can trim your fats or slip a bone from your flesh like you’d pull one feather from a pillow. He cuts the cloth now five slams out of seven and says he’d have an even better batting average on flesh. The infirmary would put it down as a natural death.”

His cot arrived and was placed in the center of the rough circle. “Go ahead, lie down if you want,” one of the men who had brought it said gently. Several other cots had been lined up along the rear wall, and many of the men were already seated on them. A few were sprawled full length. Looking behind him, Feldman saw that many of the convicts had blankets and were spreading them out on the stone floor. He glanced at his cot but could not bring himself even to sit on it.

“I’d like to suggest that justice might be better served if everyone sat up straight,” he said.

“Feldman’s right,” the librarian said. “Everybody lying down sit up straight.”

It was a small point, but he had won it.

His trial began, and Feldman saw that it was to be no more formal than the introductory proceedings had been. Several men were again lying down on their cots. At times it was difficult to hear what was being said for the conversation and laughter of the convicts behind him or, for that matter, even of some of the major figures in the trial. Feldman himself had long since sat down on his cot. He was bothered, too, by the fact that he was the only one who made an effort to employ a legal vocabulary. It became literally his trial.

He rose to object, to challenge relevancy, to ask that certain statements be stricken from the record, even though he understood that there was no record. Technicality, however, was his only hope — to get them to acknowledge rules of procedure so that he could maneuver them into violating them and then point out the discrepancies. He knew nothing of law, save its clichés, and was aware that he sounded ridiculous, more ignorant with his smattering of courtroom jargon than even they without it. Seeing himself as parodically professional, single-minded as a vaudeville pedant, he had a momentary hope that he could win them with that. He determined to play the fool and objected more vigorously than ever.

Bisch had risen to report that once, talking in his sleep, Feldman had said that the convicts were despicable. Feldman jumped up to object. “Sirs, Your Honors, Your Magistrates,” he cried.

“What is it?” one asked wearily.

“What is it? What is it? Why, sirs, I object, I object, sirs. I do object, on the grounds — yes, I might say literally on the terras firmas—that what plaintiff is saying is inadvisable, inadmissible, irrelevant and immaterial. Moreover, as per established precedent in the case of the State of New York versus Dred Scott, and the decision of Justices Driscoll, Wyatt, Jones and Fowler, only Justice Blaine abstaining, handed down in February, 1947, for which you will find the citation in that great state’s Law Record, volume four, section seven, article fifty-two, page seven forty-six, right-hand column, lower upper-middle of the second full paragraph: ‘It is unconstitutional, immaterial, irrelevant and inadmissible for evidence to be garnered from statements made in trances, stupors, comas, deliriums, tongues and dreams.’ ‘And dreams,’ my sirs and lords, ‘and dreams.’ I call your attentions to the sixth item in that little list, my judges, and your attentions, gentlemen of the jury, peers, twelve good men and true. ‘And dreams,’ it says. ‘Unconstitutional,’ ergo ‘immaterial,’ ergo ‘irrelevant,’ ergo ‘inadmissible.’ Not to be countenanced ergo. Ergo I humbly petition that this is an improper line of testimony and that all that Mr. Bisch has just said be stricken from the record. Throw it out of court, Your Peerlesses. May I come up to the bench for a moment, Your Honors?” Before anyone could answer, he leaped forward and told them all in his loudest voice that he wished to take the stand. Turning quickly toward the rest of the men he saw that they were not amused, but went on anyway. “Raise your right hand.” He raised it. “Do you, Leo Feldman, solemnly swear that what you are about to say is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Say ‘I so solemnly swear it.’” “I so solemnly swear it.” “Now then, proceed.”

“Bisch is lying. I do not despise the convicts. I wanted to be friends with them, but they never let me. They’re stuck up.”

“Sit down, Feldman,” the Fink shouted.

“I have asked for a ruling, Your Honor.”

“What’s that?”

“I have asked for a ruling on Bisch’s testimony, Your Honor, on the basis of the Dred Scott decision of 1947 and the notorious Lindbergh case of 19 and 32 and the famous cherchez la femme precedent in the Scopes trial of 1955, only Justice William Jennings Darrow abstaining.”

“Sit down, Feldman,” said one of the two men who had once told Feldman their troubles.

“A decision, please. Patent pending. A ruling, sir. Yes or no, Your Honor.” But the truth was, he didn’t even know which of them was the judge. The people on blankets behind him had taken as much part in the proceedings as any of the men seated on cots. “Overrule or sustain. Ooh, I hope it’s sustain!”

“Someone knock that son of a bitch down on his cot.”

A convict reached up from the floor and angrily jerked him backwards. Feldman tumbled down on the man’s blanket and tried to get back up again, but the convict grabbed him by his collar and squeezed his neck. “Stay put, you,” he hissed.

“Only to the cot,” Feldman whispered. “I only mean to get back to my cot.” The man released him, and he crawled wearily back to the cot and lay there on his back, listening to the conversation and testimony go on over his head. It echoed hollowly in the stone room, as in some indoor swimming pool, and he had to concentrate in order to make out the words. Though he resisted sleep, he could not bring himself again to rise, or to play the fool, or even to counter the lies, which were now more frequent and which, in this cold enormous room, ricocheted off the walls like the rumble of cannon.

It was like being sick, having to lie there and listen. Like being on a deathbed, and their voices were his symptoms — pain, fever, falling blood count, failing pulse, clots and despondence. Now Feldman understood what he had probably understood even at first, what even the convicts understood or they would have paid more attention to forms: that what he was involved in was not a trial, not even a parody of one — that he was here in a ceremony of denouncement, a process of judgment. The single principle was that he be there with them. It resided in his body, his Feldman frame. If he were to die they would still need that, they would keep it there before them, without movement, without heartbeat, lifeless, to give point to their revilement their hate’s necessary artifact and single technicality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s your comment?”

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

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

“Sure,” Feldman said. “Up mine.”

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

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

“Yes. That’s so. Almost everything.”

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

“No,” the man said. “It doesn’t.”

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

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

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

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

It was this point perhaps, as much as any that might do his case some good, that he meant to make when he rose and interrupted.

“What?” the third dining partner asked.

“I object,” he said wearily.

“What’s your objection?”

“My objection is I’m starving,” a convict said behind him. “What about some food?”

“They’re going to try to bring over some Cokes and snacks from the canteen tonight,” Harold Flesh said.

“What about the chits? I didn’t bring no chits with me.”

“Special credits,” Flesh said. “The warden worked it out.”

“I had an objection,” Feldman said. He was still standing, looking at the third dining partner.

“Well, I already asked you what it was,” the man said irritably. “Do you need an engraved invitation?”

“The evidence,” Feldman said. He indicated with a lame backhand gesture the book that the librarian was holding.

“What about it?”

“It’s all hearsay,” Feldman said.

“Yes?”

“Well?”

“Well, what?”

“Well, it’s hearsay.”

“Yes. That’s right.”

Feldman shrugged and sat back down.

Once more they took up their charges, and again he was conscious of sickness, as if the dry sound of their recitations had power to stir his old fever. Even after he had lost all interest in what they were saying, he made himself listen, but he found he could be attentive only to their mistakes. Some of their statements were contradictory, and he forced himself mechanically to rise and point out the discrepancies. They heard his objections indifferently, and then continued when he had finished, no more concerned or deflected by his words than if they had been coughing spells. After a while he no longer bothered to rise when to make their case or press a point they juggled the truth, but offered his objections from where he reclined on the cot, and then, his strength declining, mumbled them to himself. At last, when even this effort proved too great, he just perceptibly moved his lips, twitching at their calumnies out of some empty but not-to-be-sacrificed form, their deceptions encouraging in him only the last bland energies of superstition, as someone too lazy to seek wood to touch accepts whatever is handy and touches that.

“How’s it going?” Walls asked. They were standing by the food wagon that he and Manfred Sky had pushed into the cellblock.

Feldman shrugged. “Can I get a Coke? Do you have sandwiches?”

“Sure, Leo. Excuse me a minute,” Walls said. “Hey, you guys, where you going with them cups and wrappers? The guard wants the stuff stowed in this litter can.” He turned back to Feldman. “What’ll it be, Leo?”

“Soda. A couple of sandwiches.”

“You got the chits?”

“The warden’s arranged credit.”

“Well…” Walls said doubtfully.

“Come on, Walls. What’s going on?”

“Leo…kid…the rest of these guys’ll be around to pay it back.”

Feldman nodded. Then the idea had been to deprive him. Psychological warfare, redundant here as the built-in scream of a bomb. He started back to his place.

“Just kidding, Leo. Here.” Walls tossed him two sandwiches and marked something down in a ledger. Feldman chewed them dutifully, unable to recall five minutes later what he had eaten. Giving him credit could have been psychological too, he thought, inspiring false confidence, like the presence of enemy ministers on visits of state. Their Prime Minister dances with our President’s daughter. Their field marshal kisses the hand of our First Lady. The bombs will not fall tonight, we think. Not much they won’t.

The food restored them, and they brought a new spirit to their attack. No longer did they need to refer to the book or take recourse in distortion. Though they had touched on his life with Lilly and their son earlier, they went over the ground now in detail.

“Once, at supper,” a convict said, “Feldman made them play ‘To Tell the Truth.’ It’s a game on television, where three people, all claiming to be the same person, answer questions about their lives for a panel, who then try to guess the right person. Feldman made Billy be the panel, and he and Lilly were the contestants. ‘My name is Lilly Feldman,’ he told the kid. ‘I married my husband, Leo Feldman, and came to live with him in this city, where he owns a department store.’ Then Billy had to ask questions. ‘Do you have a son?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ Feldman said, ‘his name is Billy.’ ‘Do you have a son?’ he asked his mother. ‘Say “Lilly Feldman number two,” ’ Feldman said. ‘She’s Lilly Feldman number two, and I’m Lilly Feldman number one. You must say Lilly Feldman number one or number two.’ ‘Lilly Feldman number two,’ the kid said, ‘do you have a son?’ ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘What’s his name?’ Feldman glowered at her, and she knew he meant for her to lie. So Lilly said, ‘His name is Charles.’ Billy asked more questions, and each time Feldman told the truth and made Lilly lie.

“Finally Feldman said the time was up. ‘Which is it? Lilly Feldman number one or number two?’ Billy was confused and shook his head. ‘Come on,’ Feldman said, ‘which is it? You heard the answers. Which is the real Lilly Feldman, that lousy imposter or me?’ The kid finally pointed to his father, and Feldman said, ‘Will the real Lilly Feldman please stand up?’ and both of them feinted for a couple of minutes until the kid was crying, and then Lilly stood up and went to him.”

Feldman was astonished by the disclosures Lilly had had the courage to make, and that now, though their stories were told from some opposed point of view, his life came back easily. He winced at detail. Once, during the narration of a trip they had taken, tears came to his eyes. They made their points so fiercely that he trembled.

Then, when he thought that even they must see that they had flayed him sufficiently — though it was now past midnight, no one slept; there was little of the shuffling of the daylight hours; men who had taken little interest in the trial were leaning forward, straining to catch everything in the difficult, poollike room — they discovered a new theme: his treatment of Victman and Freedman.

They dwelled at length on how he had used these two, decoying competitors with Victman’s destroyed career and giving the doctor the sexless, secular horns of cuckoldry, fool’s bells, the ear’s body blows over the telephone. They were unrelenting. They meant to polish him off. They would bring up Dedman next.

Then, abruptly as it had begun, their attack ceased. A speaker finished, and no one rose to take his place. To this point, the trial had had a marathon quality, an attribute of palm-passed torches, sequenced as choreography. Now, in the silence, Feldman sighed and wondered: Is it over? Is it finished?

It was almost dawn. He could see the washed-out night through the barred windows of a distant cell. They sat together like this for several minutes, and he may even have bowed his head. Sent to Coventry, he thought, to die of the silences. Then someone shuffled his feet, and then another did. He looked to see if they had risen, but they were still seated. He wondered if they meant for him to stand, if he was to listen now to his sentence. He rose quietly. No one said anything, and he understood that it was his turn, that none of his objections before had meant anything, that this, now, was all they would ever give him of his chance.

Feldman drew a deep breath. “Still,” he said finally, “I have not been unstirred.”

“Come on,” a convict said irritably, “your life’s on the line. What is this?”

“I have not been unstirred,” Feldman repeated firmly. “I’m accused of my character. This is my character: I’ve been moved, roused. Lumps in the throat and the heart’s hard-on. I’m telling you something.”

He began to list all the things that had ever moved him, all the things which might have moved them. “Anthems of any nation. Anthems do. The Polack mazurka and male Greek side step. The national dances. Ethnic stamping and the fine, firm artillery of the clog dance. A certain kind of amateurism. The abandon of drunk elder uncles at weddings. There is a clumsy rhythm in me, I tell you, the blood and heart’s oom-pa-pa. So I have not been unstirred, that’s all.

“Girls blowing kisses, cold on floats.”

“Now wait a minute,” said the man who had stepped on his heels.

“Overruled,” Feldman said.

“Hold on a second,” the man said.

“Overruled! I’m telling you about my heart. You asked and I’m telling you. I’ve been moved.

“The beards of real estate men in centennial summers,” he began again desperately, “their barbershop convictions. Movie stars on telethons for charity. The sweetness of conservationists. Professors emeritti who talk about their field in the afternoon on the radio. I hate the fire that the forest ranger hates. What do you think? It’s not so difficult to break matches before throwing them away, or to make certain your campfire’s extinguished. What does it cost a person to carry a litter bag in his automobile? I am stirred that these should be causes.

“I saw a movie on the Late Show. It was made in the thirties, the Depression. One of the characters opened the front door of his apartment to bring in the paper and the milk. There was a picture on the front page of his ex-wife, who had just gotten engaged to his law partner. They showed a close-up of the paper, and while he was reading the story about his ex-wife’s engagement, I read the headlines on the stories around it: ‘Grand Jury Brings in True Bill on Gangland Slaying’; ‘Shipyard Heiress Elopes with Swami, Grandpa Seeks Annulment’; ‘Arctic Expedition Arrives South Pole.’ This was the news. Do you understand? This was the news. I wept.

“And vulgarity. Spangles, brass and all the monuments of the middle class. Luxury motels — listen to me — cloverleaf highways, and the polite wording of signs along the route apologizing for construction, the governor’s signature big at the bottom. The charities of businessmen. Their attentions to the blind, their fresh-air funds, and the parades of their brotherhoods. Their corny clowning and their tossed candies.

“The classic struggles of artists. The genius’ rejections, but more, his first success. Hammerstein out front and the comic drunk backstage, his girl shoving coffee in him and making him walk.

“And though I am not a religious man, the windows of department stores at Christmas time.

“The cook on educational television. Likewise the dedication of weathermen and the seriousness of the officer giving the traffic conditions from the helicopter. Soldiers marching off to World War One, and singers who come down into the audience.

“Glamour, magic and plenitude, I tell you. Plenty of plenitude. High waste in restaurants. Steaks no man can finish by himself, bottomless cups of coffee and lots of butter. Balloons for the kiddies, and the waiter passing mints. Ditto the individual machinery of motel rooms: Vibrabeds and the chamois for shoes, packets of instant coffee and powdered cream — the gizmo to boil the water. The paper ribbon in deference to my ass across the toilet seat breaks my heart. The magician’s shy stooges and the tears of Miss America and her runners-up. Listen. ‘Happy Birthday’ in night clubs and the ‘Anniversary Waltz.’ God bless people who take their celebrations to night clubs, I say. Listen. Miracle drugs, the eye bank, and the first crude word of mutes. The moment they unwrap the bandages four weeks after the operation. Listen. Listen to me. The oaths of foreigners for their final papers. Night-school graduations. A cake for the new nigger in the neighborhood. Towns chipping in for anything. People cured of cancer, and the singing in the London Underground during the Blitz. Listen, listen to me now. Listen to me! Sheriffs shaming lynch mobs. Boys who ask ugly girls to dance, and vice versa. Last stands of individual men, and generosity from unexpected quarters.”

“I like New York in June, how about you?” Harold Flesh said. “I like a Gershwin tune, how about you?”

“That’s why the lady is a tramp,” Bisch said.

“Once, on shipboard,” Feldman said, “coming home from Europe, I was standing at the rail, looking down at the people who had come to greet their relatives and friends. There was a small band, and people were throwing streamers, confetti, pitching this bright storm of festival like a gay weather. And each person at the pier was pointing up at the great ship to see if he could find the person he had come to meet. And when he did, he would leap and make an involuntary shout. Or extend his arm and point up with one lengthened finger of welcome.

“Meanwhile, we on board were rapidly exchanging places with each other, shifting our positions along the rail, trying to catch a glimpse of whoever had come to meet us. The extended arms of those who, unspotted, had spotted the better targets of their friends would then follow the friend, all the energy of welcome confounded at the same time by the effort to set things straight, to get the person on board to stand still and look back at the person on the pier.

“And it worked. No one was there to meet me, and I could stand back and watch it all. Again and again I saw these great, straining magnetic fields of friendship click off contact after contact, the now mutual gestures leaping great distances, touching their loved ones with flung lines of force before they actually touched. The ship still had to dock, there was customs to clear, but they couldn’t wait, and so they pantomimed love, made the signals of lovers and the heart’s semaphore. No longer impatient even, already home, already in each other’s arms.

“And then, after a while, everyone had found everyone else. The arms ceased to crisscross in the air, ceased to sway, and a hush had fallen over us all, and though there was no room actually to do this, there was a kind of hands-on-hips gesture of standing back in estimate and appreciation. Appreciation. Yes. Appreciation. Pride. Making the eyes’ small talk that people do who have not seen each other in a long while. Feasting greedily on each change, making an inventory of differences and then discounting them, accepting the small betrayals of time in the windfall of their returns. Love moved me then.

“Do you understand? How about you, you? I’m decent. I’m decent too!”

He was wringing wet. His face had undergone a remarkable change — his passion visible now, open wide as the groan on a tragic mask. They had never seen him like this. Some of them couldn’t look at him; they stared down at their laps or toyed with the edges of their blankets.

Now it was Feldman’s silence, not theirs, as before it had been theirs and not his. A man, sighing, broke the quiet only to confirm it. There was one absolutely soundless moment of preparatory breathing in, drawing up and looking around, as if to gather up fallen gloves or paper cups on a lawn after a concert — precisely this sense of performance’s end, and a calm in the room like good weather, a lowered-pressure, washed-air quality of folly wised up. He saw he might make it and didn’t dare breathe, still hadn’t moved but remained, posed frozen, a little uncomfortable, wrenched, as though demonstrating a follow-through, on not taking chances with a beast.

He was still thinking he might just make it when the warden spoke. “But he’s kidding,” the warden said.

“I’m not,” Feldman said. “I swear it.”

“He is. He made it all up.”

“I meant it. I meant it all.”

“He’s selling you a bill of goods,” the warden said.

“We didn’t believe him, Warden,” a convict said.

“It’s true,” Feldman said.

“Objection not sustained,” the warden said sweetly. “Contempt of court,” he added, smiling.

Here was justice, Feldman thought, watching him. The man’s dapper, discreet power seemed to be on him like a form of joy. He had never seemed so charming; he had the look of one unarmed, a sort of chairless, whipless, unpistoled lion-tamer rakishness, or of a general in civvies.

“Take him,” Feldman shouted suddenly. “Take him!”

But they hadn’t understood. Only the warden knew what he had said. “That will do, Leo,” he said softly. “Now then, men, where do we stand? Thus far I’ve been able to keep this quiet, but it’s Thursday morning already, and if the court doesn’t finish its work soon I may have to put out a cover story. It’s a good thing I came in when I did. He had you going there. Well, brief me, please.”

“We’ve heard the evidence, Warden,” a convict said.

“What, all of it? About his family?”

“Yes sir.”

“About Victman?”

“Yes sir.”

“Freedman?”

“Yes sir.”

“You’ve heard the evidence, and he’s still alive?” the warden said cheerfully. “Have you heard about Dedman then?”

“Not about Dedman, sir. No, sir.”

“Well then, that explains it. Tell us about Dedman, Feldman.”

“A man can’t be made to testify against himself,” Feldman said.

The warden considered him for a moment. “All right,” he said. “I’m Warden Fisher, the fisher of bad men. I make the rules, and what happens here happens because I make it happen or because I let it happen. You’re innocent. I declare it a standoff and direct these men to ignore whatever they may have heard up to now. Feldman’s innocent. I whitewash his history and make good all the bad checks drawn on his character. He stands or falls on Dedman. Is that fair, Feldman?”

Feldman stared at him.

“Good. Then it’s a deal. We shall have all of it, however. You must give us all of it. All right then. Attention, everyone. Feldman gives us Dedman.” The warden, who had been standing, now sat down on a cot. He folded his arms across his chest and looked up impassively, waiting for him to explain what was inexplicable.

Feldman began.

“I had a friend,” he said. “Leonard Dedman.”

“No one met your boat, Feldman. No one met your boat, you said.”

“No. This was after…He wouldn’t have met it. It was after I decided we could be friends.”

“You decided?”

“Yes. I used to watch them. Boys. In the towns where I lived. I wasn’t envious, you understand. It was strange to me. I grew up in small towns where boys tossed pebbles at each other’s windows, where they imitated the sounds of birds, made signals.” He spoke as before. There was no other way now. “I’d been in their rooms and seen them cross-legged on the bed, browsing possessions, scholars of toy, touching the gifts with a curious peace. Solaced with balls, getting their heft, rolling them off with a wave of the hand. Examining guns and aiming at space, squeezing the trigger and blowing their breath down the barrel as if to clear it — death’s light housekeeping. The model airplanes, the ships and cars and toy soldiers — calmed by all the bright lead effigies of the dangerous world snug in their palms. Borrowing, trading, and a major greed. I understood this. But afterwards, after the trades, an amnesty of self, a queer quiet when the playing began. Using the toys, to be sure, but something else, something undeclared but binding—”

“Dedman. Feldman, Dedman.”

“But binding. It was honor. In the fields, running, exercising—”

“Dedman, Feldman. Feldman, Dedman.”

“—the honor still there. And even in their angers, their roughnesses, there were those who were sure to be each other’s allies, doing favors in a fight, passionate to cheer or console, committed as seconds in old-timey duels. A balance in the world like a struck bargain.

“It was curious to me how they knew whom to select, how they chose up their sides so that there were teams within teams, natural combinations, feats of friendship beyond athletics, a construct of amities. One boy, in practice, who always threw a particular other boy the ball without being asked. And no one left out, not even myself, though when I had the ball I never knew who to throw it to, and had to choose, and sometimes threw it away.

“Or secrets. They told secrets, each day trusting the other with a shame or a plot, trading these as they had their toys.

“How did they know? How? This was the thing I didn’t understand. How they made up their minds whom to like. It had nothing to do with talents, and even less with qualities, or the loved gifted and the loved good would have had it all. It was a Noah’s Ark of regard.

“Was it love? Was friendship love?”

“Dedman, damnit. Damnit, Dedman. Get to Dedman. Get to the part where you betrayed him.”

“I met Dedman in the city when I came there a few years after my father died,” Feldman said. “He was my age and had come from the West. Like myself he had no family. We lived next door to each other in the same rooming house and sometimes ate our meals together. He had been a student, but he’d had to drop out because he had no money. He never had a talent for money. All the time we knew each other, I became richer and richer and he remained the same.”

“But you gave him money,” the warden said.

“Yes. To start up businesses. Dedman’s businesses. They always failed.”

“Yes,” the warden said.

“It was Dedman who proposed our friendship,” Feldman said. “He asked for it formally. It was a wonder he didn’t go down on his knees.”

“Was Dedman queer?” Bisch asked.

“Yes. He was queer. But not in the way you mean. He was queer. ‘We should be friends,’ he said, ‘us birds of a feather. We should take pledges, slice flesh and brush bloods. Two people like us, like the last left alive, no kin in the kit.’

“‘Too sad, Dedman,’ I told him. ‘Too serious, kid. It’s your America’

“‘It’s their America.’

“He felt it did Dedman, his condition a guilt. With a whine for a war cry he assaulted my camp. A poet he was, and two poems he had. Feldman was Dedman’s, and Dedman was Feldman’s. He rhymed our lives, orphan for orphan and hick for hick, and what he made of the city we’d found, I won’t even say. And the rooming house, of course. He told me it was significant that we sometimes chose the same restaurant and picked the same soup. (But he had no sense about money, and what I did for budget he did for hunger.) Each evening a courting, petitions, a woo, his reasons my roses and chocolates. ‘And what have you got to trade?’ I asked him. ‘And show me your toys,’ I said. But Dedman’s dowry was the lack of one. ‘Bankruptcy, Dedman,’ I warned him. ‘Love flies out the window when the wolf comes in the door.’

“About this time I had come on the spoor of my fate. A jobber I was in those days — small-time, of course, just riding the fads and making a go. But getting first clues about a better class of merchandise. Brand names and top grade, first cut and choice and prime. Founded 1780. (This was my dream.) Aspirations of the pushcart heart, stirrings — I have not been unstirred — in the spieler’s soul. (Grand pianos are grand. Peddler. Old clothesman. Alley cat!) Riddled with need I was, hunting a piece of the action like a grapple of grail. ‘Shit on the shoddy,’ I declared to the roomers, and scorning thread-barrenness, gave up the place. I found an apartment, and what do you think?

“Dedman, of course. It took him a week. We were neighbors again. No sense about money, no feel for the score. ‘Dedman,’ I asked, ‘just what do you do?’ He was a clerk, he drove taxis, he worked at a bench, a gardener, an usher, a pumper of gas. Caddy, orderly, schlepper of mail. What didn’t Dedman? Dedman of the semiskill and the student duty. For understand, these were all summer jobs, Christmas rush, the small-time tasks of piecemeal pressure, timed to semesters, holidays, school dismissed because of the snowstorm. As though simply by going through a process of part-time employment, he could maintain the fiction that he was making it the hard way like orphans before him. He lived in a myth. And without the squirrel’s sense of winter but only his busyness had this strange garret notion of himself, laying in his profitless, pointless struggles like grist for those plaque landmarks that honor puny origins. ‘On this day, in this place, on this spot, nothing happened, Dedman,’ I told him.

“But all he gave me was the old business — hot pursuit and the language of romance. ‘Two can live cheaply as one,’ he said, and slipped me ardor and the arguments of old time’s sake.

“‘Dedman, Dedman, tell no tales,’ I told him. There had been no old times, you understand, only Dedman’s hard-sold dream out of books of a Damon Dedman and a Pythias Feldman, a Romulus Leonard and Remus Leo. (And what he made of our names! ‘Leonard, the Leo-hearted,’ I called him once.)

“I tried to discourage him — that’s the truth. The man insisted on our intimacy, giving me — met in the street, on corners, in stores, or even on the stairs or at the mailbox in the hall, gratuitous for us then as the garage in the back — the secret handshake of the heart. He was obsessed by our birthwrong. (And something just occurred to me: how did he know about mine? How did he know? I don’t remember telling him, but I might have. Put that down to my credit. Fair’s fair. Or if I never told him, then put down to my credit that it was written all over my face.) And leaned heavily on the Dedman-deemed mutuality of our lives like some old out-of-work frat man — he’d been, as I say, a student — making a nuisance of himself in his fraternity brother’s office. But of course even his premise was wrong. I’d had my father for sixteen years, and my homunculus, if I’d known it, forever.

“It’s a wonder I didn’t call a cop. ‘Get yourself a girl,’ I said. ‘Buy a paper tonight. Go through the want ads carefully. Look out for something with a future. Flourish. Thrive. Purge those gypsy grudges, Dedman. Lord,’ I called over my shoulder, ‘deliver this delivery boy.’

“So saying, I took hold myself. What’s good for the goose is unexceptionable for the gander, is it not? And to practice what one preaches makes perfect, doesn’t it? I seized the bullish world. What can I tell you? The war and all, opportunity, the seller’s market and all — I grew rich. By 1940 I had already chosen the warehouse that would become my department store, by ’41 I was already in it, and by ’42 and ’43 I was established, getting while the getting was good and the casualties mounted.

“I didn’t see a lot of Dedman in those years. I still maintained the same apartment but was away so much, putting together my store, that I didn’t see him. (Though he was there. Like myself he was four-F, and what he made of that I don’t have to tell you. ‘Our disease,’ he called it.) Then, suddenly, the year the war ended, I decided to capitulate. After a siege of ten years or so, I called him in and told him we would be friends. He smiled me a smile and shook my hand, and we made the manly acknowledgments, the toasts and the jokes, and I discovered before he went back to his apartment that night that it was too late — that we were already friends, that we had been friends all along and that our friendship ended on the evening I gave in to him. That until then I’d been fonder of him than he was of me, because, after all, he’d seen in me only an analogue of himself, only some far-fetched Dedmanic Doppelgänger, while I had seen in him qualities, states of being and the hardware of character. Before that evening was over I’d had it with him, with Feldman’s friend Dedman, his enemy Dedman.

“Though I didn’t let on. I knew I’d get him. (Let me make something clear. I don’t say I needed reasons. Maybe, at first. And maybe I had some. But what happened would have happened without reasons. So let me make something clear. What I did was not because I was acting on faulty reasons. It wasn’t poor judgment or a lousy argument.)

“It was very rough, being his friend. A little Dedman went great distances — light-years. Christ, I was bored.

“‘What do we do, Dedman, now that we’re friends?’ And don’t let him kid you — it was as new to him as it was to me. Neither of us had the hang of it. I know I was sorry we weren’t still kids. Kids have it soft. They wrestle, they run, shout, sing, throw the ball. So we just sat around, seemly now, shy. And suddenly making telephone calls.

“‘What’re you doing?’

“‘Lying around.’

“‘You want to come down?’

“‘I got my TV. Come up if you want.’

“‘Your television came?’

“‘I brought one home from the store.’

“‘How does it work?’

“‘Okay. Pretty good.’

“‘What’re you watching?’

“‘Wrestling.’

“‘Wrestling is fixed.’

“‘It’s all they have on.’”

“My God, the arrangements, the crabbed propositions of regard! Consideration’s deflections like blindness to a wart on a pal’s nose. Friendship is fixed. Friendship is. The dives of deference and the shaved points of solicitude.

“‘Leo, it’s Leonard.’

“‘Yeah, Leonard. Hi.’

“‘Do you want to go out?’

“‘What’s there to do?’

“‘There’s this movie downtown.’

“‘A movie? You think?’

“‘We could go tie one on.’

“‘Well, tomorrow there’s work.’

“‘You’re right. I forgot.’

“‘We’d get back too late.’

“‘There’s a lecture at school.’

“‘Is that so? What’s it on?’

“‘The Second World War.’

“‘Sounds over my head.’

“’Wanna come down and read?’

“‘Well, maybe. Okay.’

“‘Not too exciting.’

“‘Well, I’m tired tonight.’

“‘What time you be down?’

“‘Gee, I’ve still got to eat.’

“‘What time? Say a time.’

“‘Around eight? Around nine?’

“‘All right. See you then.’

“One night Dedman took me to a restaurant. I’d told him it was my birthday, though it wasn’t. I’d said it to give us something to do — just as when he got a new job or I had done well at the store, I would take him out, declare a celebration, so that at this time our relationship was one of shared occasions, Fictive red-letter days, spurious as the commemorative excuse for a sale of used cars. Oh, those celebrations, those pious festivals!

“And this was the night that I told him it wasn’t working out — though I hadn’t planned to, didn’t know that I’d do it till I’d done it, so that, let me make something clear, what happened, what I did, was never what you could call a conspiracy, just as it wasn’t predicated on feeble arguments — that the friendship had failed. ‘Phooey on our kid-glove comity, our loveless diplomatic chumhood. My apartment’s no embassy, Leonard. Tact’s crap, it’s defunct. Well, I take your line,’ I said. ‘No one’s to blame. What, orphans like us? You kidding? Shy, sure we’re shy. Us virgins in croniness, us unpanned-out pals. Oh, the roughnecks, Leonard’ I said, ‘they have the fun. They’re the ones.’ (Let me make something clear. I’ve said I’d known I would get him. I’ve told you that. So that what was beginning to happen that night, unreasoned, not worked out, was maybe just a sort of destiny, Leonard’s lot, say, or Dedman’s portion, perhaps.) ‘Let’s really cut loose. Other guys do. Will you try? Are you game? Will you take my advice?’

“‘What do we do?’

“‘We must do as other men do. Don’t be embarrassed.’

“‘No.’

“‘Don’t be self-conscious. Don’t get cold feet.’

“‘No.’

“‘We must do as other men do.’

“‘But what? What is it?’

“‘Dedman, I’m going to ask you to call me “Ace.” It’s what the roughnecks call each other. I hear it everywhere. I heard it on the campus that time I went with you to the library. “Ace,” call me “Ace.” It’s manly. It has a fine ring. If you see me in the hallway, say “How’s it going, Ace?” When you pick me up to eat, say “Let’s chow down, Ace.” Or “Chow time, Ace.” And I’ll call you “Chief.” Or “Flash.” Whichever you prefer. We’ll work it out. I’ll say, “Way to go, Flash.” “Yo, Chief,” I’ll say. It’ll make a difference. You’ll see.’

“‘It will make a difference?’

“‘Absolutely. It will. Look, do me a favor. Give it a chance. When the waiter brings the check, say, “Here comes the man with the bad news, Ace.” ’

“‘Here comes the man with the bad news, Ace,’ Dedman said when the waiter came.

“‘Read it and weep, Flash,’ I told him.

“Dedman, who had no brains about money, as I say, paid the check without adding it up and overtipped the waiter a dollar. ‘Way to go, big fella,’ I said.

“‘Happy birthday, Ace.’

“‘Thanks, Chief,’ I winked at him. ‘Flash, how are they hanging?’

“‘Better, Ace. Really better.’

“And Dedman was into his fall now, leaning exultant into his descent like a breaster of tape. Lord, we had fun! Such times! The new-goosed Damon and piss-vinegar Pythias. Hurrah, I say! Like student princes we were, like heirs and heroes, raucous as drunks past curfew on cobble. Good times and high, Ace. And Dedman as good a man as myself. Because I had led him into the games now. Shilled and hustled him down this slow-boat-to-China garden path. Led him into the games now of Feldman’s Olympic friendship. And Dedman good at them, you understand, skilled as an actor, no feel only for what was what. Led him into the games now. The latest thing in friendship. Damon down and Pythias perished. Long live Quirk and Flagg! Gusto and zeal and zest and joy like new soaps for the shower!

“Listen, let me make something clear — it was a classic friendship out of operetta, musical comedy, Dennis Morgan movies. I honed this rivalry with him. We played cliches on each other. Jesus, the jokes!

“Dedman bought a car. We went to a ballgame. He had a beer in the third inning. In the parking lot as he was taking out his keys, I clipped him hard as I could on his jaw and knocked him out. ‘Sorry, Flash,’ I said over his unconscious body, ‘that hurt me more than it did you, but it would be suicide to let you get behind the wheel in your condition.’

“We pretended we were athletes in training. At night we’d each try to sneak past the other’s apartment to go out and meet this blond divorcée waitress we made up, who worked in this all-night diner we made believe was on the corner. We’d walk tiptoe and carried our shoes in our hands, wearing a bathrobe and pretending we were dressed underneath it. I’d spot him sneaking out, and Dedman would feign this angelic look and begin whistling. (He couldn’t really whistle, but he’d pretend to.) ‘Where you going, Chief?’

“‘Who? Me, Ace?’

“‘Yeah, big guy, you.’

“‘Oh, nowhere, Ace. I thought I heard a suspicious noise in the hall, and I came out to check it.’

“‘A suspicious noise. You mean like a burglar would make?’

“‘That’s right. Like a burglar.’

“‘Then why were you whistling?’

“‘I was pretending to whistle, Ace.’

“‘You were off to see Trixie O’Toole, weren’t you? Weren’t you?’

“‘Who, Ace?’

“‘You know who. A certain cute little blond hash-slinger with big blue eyes over at Joe’s all-nighter.’

“‘Come on, Ace. But that reminds me, now that you mention it, what are you doing out here in the hall this time of night?’

“‘Who, me? Why, uh — that is, er — well, uh — gulp — er — who, me?’

“Dedman would double up, he’d be laughing so hard. I’d watch him and smile. ‘This is the life, ain’t it, Skippy?’ I’d say.

“‘It is, Ace. It really is.’

“It really was.

“We took these twin sisters to night clubs. We ordered one glass of champagne apiece and then went to another night club, where we ordered another glass of champagne apiece, and then on to another and another, having one glass of champagne in each place, and one dance, building the evening like a montage in films. We danced until dawn and rode home in a milk wagon.

“Once when I wasn’t with him, Dedman got picked up for speeding. He gave my name to the police, and they called up and asked if I wanted to bail him out. I said, ‘Never heard of the dirty rat.’ Do you know, before I hung up, the desk sergeant told him what I’d said and I could hear Dedman laughing?”

“All right, Feldman, get to it,” the warden said.

“Blasts. Balls and binges: We would—”

“Get to it, I said.”

“We courted the same girl,” Feldman said softly. “Marge. Is this it? What you want me to say?”

“Marge,” the warden said. “Yes. Marge.”

“We saw the same girl. We took out the same girl. Only, I didn’t care for her as much as Dedman did.”

“You hated her.”

“Yes.”

“Yet you made believe you loved her.”

“No. I never told her that.”

“Not her. Dedman.”

“Yes.”

“Go on,” the warden said.

“I’d met Lilly by now in New York. We were engaged to be married. Dedman didn’t know — I hadn’t told him. But there was time because we couldn’t be married until Dedman was married.”

“What?”

“Sure,” Feldman said. “Because that’s part of the game, marrying off your friends. You know, the married man who can’t rest until his buddy is married too, who hates the idea of there being bachelors left. So I picked out Marge for him. Scum. She was scum. A bitch. And divorced. A Trixie O’Toole, she was. She even had a kid. Dedman didn’t know. Christ, she was grubby. You could smell her soul on her breath. Not Dedman.

“So I built each of them up to the other. It was easy with Dedman — romance was right up that orphan’s alley — but harder with her, with Marge. I hinted of money. (I think she got the idea that I was queer on him and that I would make him rich if he married.) I told her how to speak to him. I gave her the titles of books and taught her the names of operas and the themes from symphonies. What the hell, Dedman, that dropout, didn’t know much more himself. And I gave her things to say that would make him jealous and bring him around.

“One night Dedman knocked on my door. ‘I want to talk to you,’ he said.

“‘Shoot, Chief.’

“‘No. Listen to me.’

“‘Why so serious? What’s up? Come on in and sit down.’

“‘Listen to me. I want to make something clear. It’s about the game.’

“‘The game?’

“‘The game we play.’

“‘Why such a long face, Flash?’

“‘It’s over, that’s all. I mean it isn’t a game.’

“‘What?’ I was afraid he’d found out.

“‘I mean it. The game is over. I’m not playing any more.’

“‘Look, Leonard, what is it? Tell me, will you?’

“‘I’m in love with her.’

“‘Who?’

“‘You know who.’

“‘Marge?’

“‘Yes, damnit, Marge.’

“‘Oh,’ I said.

“‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’m sorry. Really. I’m sorry. I am.’

“‘Oh.’

“‘I didn’t want this to happen.’

“‘Oh.’

“‘I didn’t.’

“‘Well, say,’ I said. ‘What’s the big deal, Flash? What’s so terrible? Me? Say, is that what you think? You feel bad ’cause of me? Now, look, don’t be silly. I’ll be all right. Hey, old buddy, cheer up. That’s terrific news. That’s swell. That’s really swell, Flash.’

“‘Would you be our best man?’

“‘Your best man? You’ve got some sense of humor, Dedman.’

“‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t have asked you.’

“‘No. Listen. I lost my nerve for a second, that’s all. I’m honored. You just try to get someone else for best man and see what happens to you.’

“Dedman gulped. We gulped in our games, but this was the real thing — the true-blue gulp, and no joke. ‘I wouldn’t have another best man,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t, Ace.’

“And so they were married and I’d won the game. But Dedman was right. The game was over. But it went into extra innings anyway. It was over because it wasn’t a game any more; now it was something I needed to keep me alive. Something I needed—betraying him and betraying him, hooked on his doom.

“I called him in to see me. He looked shitty — she must really have been working him over. Poor Dedman. I told him he was a married man now and had responsibilities; school was out for good now, and he’d better consider his future, I told him. And he nodded, agreed. And that’s when I gave him the money. For his businesses. Dedman’s businesses. But Dedman had no sense about money. And the businesses failed. Because I never gave him enough, you see! Always just a few thousand dollars less than what I knew they would need. They were timed to fail. Two years, three, and he’d be back again. What did it cost me over the years? That lunch counter? That dry-cleaning franchise? That school-supply store? Ten thousand? Fifteen? Those small-time businesses that bled him and bled him, so that he lived always in a crisis of failure. Dedman’s seven lean years that kept me alive.

“He came to our wedding in New York. He paid his own plane fare and stayed in a hotel. I saw him when he came through the receiving line. Jesus, he looked lousy. She did some job on him, that bitch. He shook my hand.

“‘Que será será, Chief?’ I asked.

“‘Comme ci, comme ça, Ace.’”

“Take him.” the warden whispered. “Take him!”

And at first, when they didn’t move, Feldman thought that they had found him innocent. “Why, I’m innocent,” he said. All along, the more they had talked, the more they had made their case, pushing him closer and closer to this last closed corner of their justice, the less guilt he had felt. He wasn’t guilty. He was not. He was no bad man. How I love my life, he thought. How I cherish it. It is the single holiness. My icicle winter snots like the relics of saints. How pious I am, how blessed. I accept wars, history, the deaths of the past, other people’s poverties and losses. Their casualties and bad dreams I write off. I remember all the disasters that have happened and all the disappointments of the generations from time’s beginning to its end, and still I am permitted to live.

But then the warden repeated his command, and they started to close in.

But perhaps the warden’s anger had betrayed him. It may have been an accident, or that he had simply forgotten — the foolish warden — or had maybe never known of the expert, still in the gym, who had been practicing to kill Feldman with a single punch. And possibly they would only beat him very badly, inexpertly. The homunculus would not rip his heart. He would recover. Or perhaps such an “accident” was God’s sign that the Diaspora was still unfinished, and that until it was, until everything had happened, until Feldman had filled the world, all its desert places and each of its precipices, all its surfaces and everywhere under its seas, and along its beaches, he could not be punished or suffer the eternal lean years of death.

Why, I am innocent, he thought, even as they beat him. And indeed, he felt so.