IN THE ALLEY

Four months after he was to have died, Mr. Feldman became very bored. He had been living with his impending death for over a year, and when it did not come he grew first impatient, then hopeful that perhaps the doctors had made a mistake, and then — since the pains stayed with him and he realized that he was not, after all, a well man — bored. He was not really sure what to do. When he had first been informed by the worried-looking old man who was his physician that the disquieting thing he felt in his stomach was malignant, he had taken it for granted that some role had been forced upon him. He knew at once, as though he had been expecting the information and had long since decided his course, what shape that role had to assume, what measures his unique position had forced him to. It was as if until then his intuitions had been wisely laid by, and now, thriftlessly, he might spend them in one grand and overwhelming indulgence. As soon as the implications of the word “malignant” had settled peaceably in his mind, Feldman decided he must (it reduced to this) become a hero.

Though the circumstances were not those he might have chosen had he been able to determine them, there was this, at least: what he was going to do had about it a nice sense of rounded finality. Heroism depended upon sacrifice, and that which he was being forced to sacrifice carried with it so much weight, was so monumental, that he could not, even if he were yet more critical of himself than he was, distrust his motives. Motives, indeed, had nothing to do with it. He was not motivated to die; he was motivated to live. His heroism was that he would die and did not want to.

The doctor, who would know of and wonder at Feldman’s generous act, could serve as an emotional check to the whole affair. He could represent, in a way, the world; thus Feldman, by observing the doctor observing him, might be in a better position to determine whether or not he was going too far.

While Feldman had known with certainty the exact dimension of his heroism, it was almost a disappointment to understand that heroism, in his particular situation, demanded nothing, and therefore everything. It demanded, simply, acquiescence. He must, of course, tell no one. But this was not the drawback. It was, indeed, the one advantage he was sure of, since heroism, real heroism, like real treachery, was the more potent for being done in the dark. He knew that the hero who performed his services before an audience risked a surrender to pride, chanced a double vision of himself: a view of himself as he must appear before those who would judge him. All that frightened Feldman was his awareness that his peculiar situation allowed him the same opportunity for change that might come to ordinary men during the course of normal lifetimes — permitting it, moreover, to occur in the split second of his essentially unnatural act. His chance for heroism, then, stretched-out as it had to be by the doctor’s pronouncement that he had still one year to live, was precariously and unfortunately timed. For a year he must go on as he had gone on, work for what he had worked for, talk to others as he had talked to others. In this way his heroism would be drawn out, but there would be the sustained temptation to self-awareness, to sweet but inimical self-consciousness. Since the essence of his role was to pretend that he was playing none, he would have to prevent any knowledge of the wonderful change wrought in himself, even at the moment of his death.

Feldman set upon his course and performed conscientiously everything he thought was required of him. That is, he did until the others found him out. They had, seeing signs of his physical discomfort, pressed the doctor for information. Urged from the beginning by his patient to say nothing, the doctor told them some elaborate lie about ulcers. So, on top of his other discomfitures, Feldman’s family saw to it that he remained on a strict diet, directed toward dissolving a nonexistent ulcer. When his family saw that his pains continued, and the doctor refused to carry the joke to the uncomfortable extreme of operating on what did not in fact exist, the family realized that far graver things than they had been led to believe were wrong with Feldman.

The doctor, under pressure and understandably unwilling to invent further (and anyway he himself, though old, though experienced, though made accustomed by years of practice of his art to the melodramatic issue of his trade, had, despite his age, his experience, his familiarity with crises, still maintained a large measure of that sentimental attachment which the witness to-tragedy has toward great rolling moments of life and death: an attachment which, indeed, had first attracted him to medicine and had given him that which in his superb flair for the dramatic would have been called in men of lesser talent their “bedside manner,” but which, in him, soared beyond the bedside — beyond, in fact, the sickroom itself to the family in the waiting room, the nurses in the corridor, to the whole hospital, in fact), thought it best that others learn of Feldman’s sacrifice, and so went back on his promise and told the anxious family everything. They were, of course, astounded, and misread Feldman’s composure as a sign of solicitude lest he might hurt them. Feldman’s anger at having been found out was badly translated into a magnificent display of unselfishness. They thought, in their innocence, that he had merely meant not to worry them. Had they had any insight, however, they would have realized, at some cost to their pride, that far from the secrecy of his suffering being unendurable to him, contemplation of it had provided him with his only source of comfort (he had gone back that quickly on his resolves), and that what they had mistaken for unselfishness was Feldman’s last desperate attempt to exploit the self. But in a game where certain feelings, of necessity, masquerade as certain others, what is so is hardly to be distinguished from what is not so. What they, in their blindness, had forced upon Feldman was the one really unendurable feature of his illness. What had come to him gratuitously — his immediate, heroic reaction to the prospect of his own death — had now to be called back, reappraised, withdrawn.

Feldman had now to compose himself and deliberately scheme out what he was to do with the remainder of his life. He was now the prisoner of his freedom of choice. Further heroism (pretending that death meant nothing) would be ludicrous with all of them looking on, their eyes shielded by impossible lace handkerchiefs. It was almost better deliberately to impale himself upon their sympathies, to cry out for water in the middle of the night, to languish visibly before their frightened stares, to call to strangers in the street, “Look, look, I’m dying.”

With their discovery of his situation, what he had hoped would be the dignified end of his life threatened in fact to become a stagey, circusy rout, rather like the disorganized, sentimental farewell of baseball fans to a team moving forever to another city. And since he would not soon die (the one year he had been given had already extended itself to sixteen months and there were no visible signs of any acceleration of his decay) he became rather annoyed with his position. He quickly discovered that planning one’s death had as many attendant exigencies as planning one’s life. Were he a youth, a mistake in planning could be neutralized, even changed perhaps to an unexpected asset; the simple fact was that he had no time. That he was still alive four months after his year of grace indicated only a mistake in calculation, not in diagnosis. Strangely, the additional four months served to make his expected end more imminent for him.

He found himself suddenly an object. On Sundays, distant cousins and their children would make pilgrimages to his home to see him. They meant no harm, he knew, but in a way they had come for a kind of thrill, and when they discovered this they grew uncomfortable in his presence. Ashamed of what they suddenly realized were their motives, they secretly blamed him for having forced their tastes into a debauch. Others, not so sensitive, made him a hero long after he himself had dismissed this as a possibility. A nephew of his, who consistently mistook in himself as legitimate curiosity what was only morbid necrophilism, would force him into ridiculous conversations which the boy considered somehow ennobling. On one occasion he had completely shocked Feldman.

“Do you find yourself believing in an after-life?”

“I think that’s in poor taste,” Feldman said.

“No, what I mean is that before it happens, lots of people who had never been particularly religious before suddenly find themselves slipping into a kind of wish-fulfillment they call faith.”

“Stop that,” Feldman told him angrily.

After his conversation with his nephew Feldman realized something he found very disturbing. He knew that he had not, after all, accepted his death as a very real possibility. Though he had made plans and changed them, though he had indulged in protean fantasies in which he had gone alone to the edge of sheer marble precipices, he had been playing merely. It was as if he had been toying with the idea of a “grim reaper,” playing intellectual games with chalky skeletons and bogeymen; he had not in fact thought about his death, only about his dying: the preoccupied man of affairs casually scribbling last words on a telephone memorandum pad. His nephew’s absolute acceptance of the likelihood that one day Feldman would cease to exist had offended him. He had considered the boy’s proposition an indelicacy, the continuance of the familiar world after his own absence from it a gross insult. He knew the enormity of such vanity and he was ashamed. He thought for the first time of other dying men, and though he knew that each man’s cancer was or should be a sacred circumstance of that man’s existence, he felt a sudden urgency to know such men, to submerge himself in their presence. Because he could think of no other way of doing this, he determined to speak to his doctor about having himself committed to a hospital.



It was evening and the other patients had left the old man’s office. They had gone, he knew, to drugstores to obtain prescriptions which would make them well. The doctor stood over the small porcelain sink, rubbing from his hands the world’s germs.

“You’ve been lucky,” the doctor said. “The year I gave you has turned out to be much more than a year. Perhaps your luck will continue longer, but it can’t continue indefinitely. Get out of your mind that there’s any cure for what you have. You’ve been mortally wounded.”

“I didn’t say anything about cures.”

“Then what good would a hospital be? Surely you don’t mean to die in a hospital? I can’t operate. There’s no chance.” The doctor spoke slowly, his voice soft. Obviously, Feldman thought, he was enjoying the conversation.

“What I have, this imperfection in my side, is too private to remove,” Feldman said, rising to the occasion of the other’s rhetoric, engaging the old man’s sense of drama, his conspicuous taste for the heavy-fated wheelings of the Great Moment. Looking at the doctor, Feldman was reminded of his nephew. He felt, not unpleasantly, like an actor feeding cues. “I thought that with the others…”

“You’re wrong. Have you ever been in a hospital room with three old men who are dying, or who think they are? Each is jealous of the others’ pain. Nothing’s so selfish. People die hard. The death rattle, when it comes, is a terrored whine, the scream of sirens wailing their emergency.”

“You’re healthy,” Feldman told him. “You don’t understand them.”

The doctor did not answer immediately. He remained by the porcelain bowl and turned on the hot-water tap. When it was so hot that Feldman could see steam film the mirror above the sink, the doctor plunged his hands into the water. “I’m old,” he finally said.

Oh no, Feldman thought; really, this was too much. Even this ridiculous old man could not contemplate another’s death without insisting on his own. “But you’re not dying,” Feldman said. “There is nothing imminent.” He noted with unreasonable sadness that he had soiled the tissue paper which covered the examination table. He stood up self-consciously. “I want to be with the others. Please arrange it.”

“What could you gain from it? I’m tired of this talk. It smells of voices from the other side. Disease has taught you nothing, Feldman. When you first knew, you behaved like a man. You continued to go to business. You weren’t frightened. I thought, ‘This is wonderful. Here’s a man who knows how to die.’ ”

“I didn’t know I would be stared at. The others watch me, as though by rubbing against it now they can get used to it.”

“I had a patient,” the doctor said, “who had more or less what you have. When I told him he was to die, his doom lifted from him all the restraints he had ever felt. He determined to have the most fun he could in the time he had left. He left here a dangerous, but a reasonably contented, man.”

“Of course,” Feldman said. “I’ve thought about this too. It’s always the first thing that occurs to you after the earthquakes and the air raids, after the ice cream truck overturns. It’s a strong argument. To make off with all you can before the militia comes. I feel no real compulsion to appease myself, to reward myself for dying. Had I been forced to this, I would have been forced to it long before I learned I must die. For your other patient, nothing mattered. To me, things matter very much. We’re both selfish. Will you send me to the hospital?”

The ring of steam had thickened on the mirror. Feldman could see no reflection, only a hazy riot of light. The doctor told him he would make the arrangements.



At first the rituals of the hospital room strangely excited Feldman. He watched the nurses eagerly as they came into the four-bed ward to take temperatures and pulses. He studied their professional neutrality as they noted the results of blood pressure readings on the charts. When he could he read them. When they brought medication to the men in the other beds, Feldman asked what each thing was, what it could be expected to do. By casually observing the activity in the room, Feldman discovered that he could keep tabs on the health of the others, despite what even the men themselves might tell him when he asked how they were feeling.

He soon knew, though, that his was an outsider’s view, a casualness that was the result of a life’s isolation from disease, the residual prejudice of the healthy that somehow the sick are themselves to blame for what is wrong with them. Realizing this, he deliberately tried to negate those techniques which had come naturally to him while he was still the stranger in the room. He would have to acknowledge himself their diseased ally. If his stay in the hospital were to help him at all, he knew he had willfully to overcome all reluctance. Thus, he began to watch everything with the demanding curiosity of a child, as though only through a constant exercise of what once he might have considered bad taste could he gain important insight into the processes of life and death. He began, then, non-judiciously to observe everything. It was a palpable disappointment to him when a doctor or a nurse had occasion to place a screen around the bed of one of the other patients, and often he would ask the man after the nurse had gone what had been done for him.

Even the meals they ate together were a new experience for him. There was something elemental in the group feedings. Everything about the eating process became familiar to him. He examined their trays. He studied the impressions their teeth made on unfinished pieces of bread. He stared at bones, bits of chewed meat; he looked for saliva left in spoons. Everything was pertinent. Processes he had before considered inviolate now all had a place in the design. When a nurse brought a bedpan for one of the men and he sat straight up in his bed and pulled the sheet high up over his chest, Feldman would not look away.

He asked them to describe their pain.

The others in the room with Feldman were not, as the doctor had predicted they would be, old men. Only one, the man in the bed next to his own, was clearly older than Feldman. But if they were not as aged as he had expected, they were as sick. The chronic stages of their illnesses — even the fetid patterns of the most coarse inroads of their decay — were somehow agreeable to Feldman and seemed to support his decision to come to the hospital. These men shared with him, if not his own unconditional surrender of the future, then certainly a partial disavowal of it; and if they counted on getting better, at least they did not make the claims on that future which Feldman had found (it came to this) so disagreeable in others. It had been suggested to them that they might not get well. They considered this seriously and acknowledged, once they understood the nature of their conditions, the unpleasant priority of doom. Only then did they hire their doctors, call in their specialists, retire from their businesses, and set themselves resolutely to the task of getting well. This much Feldman could accept as long as — and here he drew an arbitrary line — they behaved like gentlemen. He found in the sick what he had wanted to find: a group of people who knew their rights, but would not insist on them. Their calm was his own assurance that his instincts had been right, and so what little he said to them was to encourage them in that calm.

One morning the youngest of the four, a college boy who had been stricken with a severe heart attack, showed signs of rapid weakening. He had vomited several times and was in great pain. Someone called the nurse. Seeing the serious pallor of the suffering man, she called the intern. The intern, a nervous young doctor who gave the air of being at once supremely interested in the patient’s convulsions and supremely incapable of rising to their occasion, immediately dispatched a call for the boy’s doctor.

“It seems,” the boy said, smiling weakly, “that I won’t be able to die until all of them have examined me.”

It was for Feldman precisely the right note. “Hang on,” he said to him. “If you feel yourself going, ask for a specialist from Prague.”

The boy laughed and did not die at all. Feldman attributed this to some superior element in this patient’s character which fell halfway between resolutely dignified determination and good sportsmanship.



He had come, he knew, to a sort of clearing house for disease, and sometimes at night (he did not sleep much) he could visualize what seemed to him to be the tremendous forces of destruction at work in the room. His own cancer he saw as some horribly lethal worm that inched its way through his body, spraying on everything it touched small death. He saw it work its way up through the channels of his body and watched as pieces of it fell from his mouth when he spit into his handkerchief. He knew that inside the other men something like the same dark ugliness worked with a steady, persevering ubiquity, and supposed that the worm was pridefully aware that its must be the triumph.

One night as Feldman lay between sleep and wakefulness, there came a terrible groan from the next bed. He looked up quickly, not sure he had not made the sound himself. It came again, as if pushed out by unbearable pain. Feldman buried his head in the pillow to smother the sound, but the groan continued. It was a noise that started deep in the man’s chest and became at last a gasping yell for breath. Feldman lay very still. He did not want the man to know he was awake. Such pain could not continue long. He would lie quietly and wait it out. When the noise did not stop, Feldman held his breath and bit his lips. There was such urgency in the screams, nothing of gentlemanly relinquishment. He was about to give in to the overbearing insistence of the man’s pain, but before he could force himself to do something he heard the sick man push himself nearer. Feldman turned his face to watch, and in the glow from the red night lamp above the door he could see that the man lay half out of the bed. He was trying, with a desperate strength that came from somewhere deep inside, to reach Feldman. He watched as the man’s hand clawed the air as though it were some substance by which he could sustain himself. He called to him, but Feldman could not answer.

“Mister, mister. You up?”

The hand continued to reach toward Feldman until the wild strength in it pulled the man off balance and the upper half of his body was thrust suddenly toward the floor. He was almost completely out of the bed.

“Mister. Mister. Please, are you up?”

Feldman forced himself to say yes.

The man groaned again.

“Do you want me to get the nurse?” Feldman asked him.

“Help me. Help me in the bed.”

Feldman got out of bed and put his arms around the man’s body. The other worked his arms around Feldman’s neck and they remained for a moment in a crazy embrace. Suddenly all his weight fell heavily in Feldman’s arms. Feldman feared the man was dead and half lifted, half pushed him back onto the bed. He listened carefully and heard at last, gratefully, spasms of breath. They sounded like sobs.

He was an old man. Whatever he had been like before, his contact and exchange with what Feldman had come to think of as a kind of poisoned, weathering rain, had left his skin limp, flaccid. (He had discovered that people die from the outside in.) After a minute the man opened his eyes. He looked at Feldman, who still held him, leaning over his bed with his arms around his shoulders as though to steady them.

“It’s gone now,” the man said. His breath was sweetly sick, like garbage fouled by flies and birds. “I’m better.”

The man closed his eyes and lowered his head on his chest. “I needed,” he said after a while, “someone’s arms to hold me. At the house my daughter would come when I cried. My wife couldn’t take it. She’s not so well herself, and my daughter would come to hold me when I cried from the pain. She’s just a teenager.” The man sobbed.

Feldman took his hands from the man’s shoulders and sat on the edge of the bed.

“It’s all right,” the man said. “Nothing will happen now. I’m sorry I made a nuisance.”

“You’ll be all right?”

“Sure. Yes. I’m good now.”

Feldman watched the man’s hand draw the blanket up over him. He held the blanket as one would hold the reins of a horse. The man turned his face away, and Feldman got up and started to go back to his own bed. “Mister,” the man called. Feldman turned quickly around. “Mister, would you ring the nurse? I think…I think I wet myself.”

After that, in the last stages of the man’s last illness, the disease multiplied itself; it possessed him, occupied him like an angry invader made to wait too long in siege beyond the gates. For Feldman it represented a stage in the process of decay he knew he might some day reach himself. When he spoke to the man he found that what he really wanted to say circled somewhere above them both like an unsure bird. It became increasingly difficult for him to speak to him at all. Instead, he lay quietly at night when in the urgency of his remarkable pain the man screamed, and pretended he was asleep. He could stand it only a week. Like the man’s wife, Feldman thought, I am not so well myself. No, I am not so very damned well myself. And one more thing, dissolution and death are not as inscrutable as they’re cracked up to be. They’re scrutable as hell. I’m tired, Feldman thought, of all this dying.

Once he had determined to leave he was impatient. He had wasted too much time already. He had been, he realized, so in awe of death that he had cut his own to his notions of it as a tailor cuts cloth to his model.

He moved quickly. That morning, while the old man slept and the two others were in private sections of the hospital for treatment, Feldman dressed. He hoped that the nurse would not come in. “Don’t you groan. Be still,” he silently addressed the sleeping body in the next bed. In the closet he found his clothes where the nurse had hung them. When he put them on he discovered that though he had worn them into the hospital only a few weeks before, they were now too big for him. They hung, almost without shape, over a body he did not remember until he began to clothe it. He dressed quickly, but could not resist tying his tie before the mirror in the bathroom. Knotting and reknotting it, adjusting the ends, gave him pleasure, imposed a kind of happiness.

He started to leave the room, but something held him. It was a vase of flowers set carefully on the window sill. The flowers had been a gift for the old man. They had been there for several days and now were fading. He walked to the window, lifted the vase and took it with him into the hospital corridor.

He waited until a student nurse came by. “Miss,” Feldman called after her softly. “Miss.” The nurse did not recognize him. “I want you to give these flowers to Feldman in Room 420.” She looked at the decayed blossoms. Feldman shrugged and said, “Alas, poor man, he’s dying. I did not want to offend him with anything too bright.” The nurse, bewildered, took the flowers he pushed into her hands. Feldman walked to the elevator and jabbed at the button. When the elevator did not come at once, he decided he couldn’t wait and took the four flights of steps down.

At the main desk in the lobby he had an inspiration. “How is Feldman, Room 420?” he asked the receptionist.

The girl thumbed through the card file in front of her. When she found his card she said, “Feldman, sir? He’s satisfactory.”

“I understood he was very sick. Condemned.”

The girl looked again at the card. “My card says ‘Satisfactory.’ ”

“Oh,” Feldman said.

“That only means he’s comfortable. In these terminal cases that’s all they ever say.”

“Satisfactory? Comfortable? Why doesn’t the hospital tell him? He’d be pleased.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Sure,” Feldman said.

Outside, it occurred to him that since he had been partner to him in everything else, he would call his doctor. He went into a drugstore and dialed.

“It’s me. It’s Feldman. I’m out.”

“Where are you, Feldman?” the doctor asked.

“In a phone booth. You’ve cured me. You’ve made me well. I wanted to thank you.”

“What are you talking about? Where are you?”

“I told you. I’ve left the hospital. That idea of mine about a fraternity among the sick? It wasn’t any good. I just blackballed myself. A man almost died in my room a few days ago and it paralyzed me. I couldn’t help him. I held him away from me as though he were soiled linen.”

“Get back to the hospital.”

“What for?”

“What am I going to say, that you’re cured? The charts still exist.”

“So do I. I’m not going back. I’m going to business.”

“You’re in no condition to go to business. Do you want to aggravate an already untenable position?”

“You are maybe the world’s all-time lousy doctor. You promised death. Now you threaten it. You said a year, and I sat down to wait. Well, I’m not waiting any more, that’s all.” He wondered if the old doctor’s passion for rhetoric were still strong in him. He decided to try him. “On every occasion I am going to hit for the solar plexus of the solar system,” Feldman said.

There was silence. Then the doctor, calmer, said, “I’ll call your wife.”



Outside the drugstore the sun was shining brightly and everything looked clean and new. Feldman was aware of the keenness of his impressions, but astonished more by the world itself than by his perception of it, he wondered at the absolute luminescence of the things about him. Objects seemed bathed in their own light. Things looked not new, he decided, so much as extraordinarily well kept up.

Across the street was a park, but between the park and Feldman was a boulevard where traffic raced by swiftly. He had to dodge the cars. It was an exciting game, having to dodge cars for one’s life as though death were, after all, something that could be held off by an effort of the will. The idea that he could control death made him giddy, and once, in his excitement, he almost slipped and fell. He thought, even in the act of regaining his lost balance, how strange that the death that might have resulted from his misstep would have been an accident unrelated to his disease. I’ve cured cancer, he thought happily.

In the park he sat down on a bench to rest. His activity had made him tired. “Slowly, slowly,” he cautioned himself. He had been aware of pain in his stomach since he left the hospital. Though it was not great, it was becoming gradually more severe, and he was afraid that it would become too much for him. He found that by holding his breath and remaining very still he could control the pain. Does it hurt? he asked himself. Only when I breathe, he answered. Nevertheless, he waited until he thought he could move without reawakening what he still thought of as the slothful parasite within himself, and then he looked around.

The world he had thought he was never to see again when he entered the hospital lay now around and before him in adjacent strata, disparate but contiguous planes in space. Because of his heightened awareness it seemed compartmentalized. He had the impression that he could distinguish where each section had been sewn onto the next. He saw the wide-arced slope of grass and trees — the park. Interrupting it — the busy boulevard like an un-calm sea. Beyond the angry roll and toss of traffic and black frozen asphalt like queer, dark ice in perpetual lap against the gutters of a foreign shore — an avenue. A commercial country of bank and shop where the billboards and marquees hung appended and unfurled, annexed like gaudily partisan consulate flags — almost, it seemed to Feldman in its smugly high-tariffed insularity, like a young and enterprising foreign power. Tall apartment buildings backstopped the planet, mountain ranges stacked against the world’s last margins, precarious and unbalanced. He knew that over these and beyond the curve of his world there were many leftover worlds. And the sun shone on them all. It was remarkable to him that people and worlds should be dying beneath such a sun.

A young Negro girl came by, pushing a baby carriage. She sat down on Feldman’s bench.

Feldman smiled at her. “Is your baby a boy or a girl?” he asked her.

The girl laughed brightly. “My baby an elevator operator downtown. This one here is a white child, mister.”

“Oh,” Feldman said.

“It’s okay,” she said.

Feldman wondered whether she would get up now, whether she had taken him for one of the old men who sit in parks and tamper with the healthy they meet there.

He got up to go. “ ’Bye, mister,” the girl said.

He looked to see if she was mocking him.

He started toward the corner. He could catch a bus there. With a panic that startled the worm sleeping in his stomach and made it lurch forward, bringing him pain, he realized that in leaving the hospital he had given no thought to where he would go. He understood for the first time that when he had gone into the hospital not to be cured but to die, he had relinquished a sort of citizenship. Now he had no rights in a place given over to life. People did not come back from the grave. Others wouldn’t stand for it. He could not even stay in the park, unless he was to stay as one of the old men he had for a moment feared he had become.

He could go home, of course. He could kiss his wife and explain patiently to her what had happened to him. He could tell her that his disease had been a joke between the doctor and himself — not a joke in the sense that it didn’t really exist, but merely a sort of pale irony in that while it did exist, it did not behave as it had in others; that he was going to die, all right, but that they must both be patient.

He saw a large green and yellow bus halted at the stop light. He did not recognize its markings, but when it came abreast of him he got on. He sat up front, near the driver. When the bus had made its circuit two times, the driver turned toward Feldman.

“Okay, mister, end of the line.”

“What?”

“You should have slept it off by this time. End of the line. Far as we go.”

“But there are still people on the bus.”

“Sorry. Company rule.”

“If I pay another fare?”

“Sorry.”

“Look,” he started to say, but he was at a loss as to how to complete his thought. “All right,” he said. “Thank you.”

He got off and saw that he had come to a part of the city with which he was unfamiliar. He could not remember ever having been there before. It was a factory district, and the smoke from many furnaces forced on the day, still in its early afternoon, a twilight haze. He walked down a block to where the bare, unpainted shacks of the workers led into a half-commercial, half-residential section. He saw that secured between the slate-colored homes was more than the usual number of taverns. The windows in all the houses were smudged with the opaque soot from the chimneys. The brown shades behind them had been uniformly pulled down almost to the sills. Feldman sensed that the neighborhood had a peculiar unity. Even the deserted aspect of the streets seemed to suggest that the people who lived there acted always in concert.

The porches, their peeling paint like dead, flaking skin, were wide and empty except for an occasional piece of soiled furniture. One porch Feldman passed, old like the rest, had on it a new card table and four brightly chromed, red plastic-upholstered chairs, probably the prize in a church bingo party. The self-conscious newness of the set, out of place in the context of the neighborhood, had been quickly canceled by the universal soot which had already begun to settle over it, and which, Feldman imagined, through that same silent consent to all conditions here, had not been wiped away.

Behind the window of each tavern Feldman passed was the sign of some brewery. They hung, suspended neon signatures, red against the dark interiors. He went into one of the bars. Inside it was almost dark, but the room glowed with weird, subdued colors, as though it were lighted by a juke box which was burning out. The place smelled of urine and beer. The floor was cement, the color of an overcast sky.

There were no other men in the tavern. Two women, one the barmaid, a coarse, thick-set woman whose dirty linen apron hung loosely from her big body, stood beside an electric bowling machine. She held the hands of a small boy who was trying to intercept the heavy silver disk that the other woman, probably his mother, aimed down the sanded wooden alley of the machine.

“Let me. Let me,” the boy said.

The mother, a thin girl in a man’s blue jacket, was wearing a red babushka. Under it, her blond hair, pulled tightly back on her head, almost looked wet. The child continued to squirm in the older woman’s grasp. The mother, looking toward a glass of beer set on the edge of the machine, spoke to the woman in the apron. “Don’t let him, Rose. He’ll knock over the beer.”

“He wants to play.”

“I’ll break his hands he wants to play. Where’s his dime?”

Feldman sat down on a stool at the bar. The barmaid, seeing him, let go of the child and stepped behind the bar. “What’ll you have?” she said.

“Have you sandwiches?”

“Yeah. Cheese. Salami. Ham and cheese.”

“Ham and cheese.”

She took a sandwich wrapped in wax paper from a dusty plastic pie bell and brought it to him. “You must be new around here. Usually I say ‘What’ll you have?’ the guy answers ‘Pabst Blue Ribbon.’ It’s a joke.”

Feldman, who had not often drunk beer even before his illness, suddenly felt a desire to have some. “I’ll have some ‘Pabst Blue Ribbon.’ ”

The woman drew it for him and put it next to his sandwich. “You a social worker?” she asked.

“No,” Feldman said, surprised.

“Rose thinks every guy wears a suit he’s a social worker,” the blond girl said, sitting down next to him. “Especially the suit don’t fit too good.” The child had run to the machine and was throwing the silver disk against its back wall. The machine, still activated, bounced the disk back to him.

“Don’t scratch the surface,” the woman behind the bar yelled at him. “Look, he scratches the surface, the company says I’m responsible. They won’t give me a machine.”

“Petey, come away from the machine. Rose is gonna break your hands.” Looking again at Rose, she said, “He don’t even carry a case.”

“Could be he’s a parole officer,” Rose said.

“No,” Feldman said.

“We ain’t used up the old one yet,” the blond woman said, grinning.

Feldman felt the uncomfortable justice of these speculations, made almost as though he were no longer in the room with them. He finished his beer and held up his glass to be refilled.

“You got people in this neighborhood, mister?”

“Yes,” he said. “My old grandmother lives here.”

“Yeah?” the woman behind the bar said.

“What’s her name?” the blond girl asked suspiciously.

Feldman looked at the thin blonde. “Sterchik,” he said. “Dubja Sterchik.”

“Dubja Finklestein,” the girl said. She took off her blue jacket. Feldman saw that her arms, though thin, were very muscular. She raised her hand to push some hair that had come loose back under the tight caress of the red babushka. He saw that the inside of her white wrist was tattooed. In thin blue handwriting, the letters not much thicker than ink on an ordinary envelope, was the name “Annie.” He looked away quickly, as though inadvertently he had seen something he shouldn’t have, as though the girl had leaned forward and he had looked down her blouse and seen her breasts.

“I don’t know nobody named Dubja Sterchik,” Rose said to him. “Maybe she drinks across the street with Stanley,” she added.

He finished the second glass of beer and, getting used to the taste, asked for another. He wondered whether, had they known he was a dying man, they would have been alarmed at his outlandish casualness in strolling into a strange bar in a neighborhood where he had never been. He wondered whether they would be startled to realize that he had brought to them, strangers, the last pieces of his life, giving no thought now to reclamation, since one could not reclaim, ever, what one still had, no matter how fragile or even broken it might be. He held the beer in his mouth until it burned the soft skin behind his lips. It felt good to feel pain in an area where, for once, it was not scheduled. He felt peculiarly light-hearted.

He turned to the girl beside him. “Your husband work around here?”

“A1?”

“Yes, Al. Does Al work around here?”

She nodded. “When Al works, he works around here.”

Feldman smiled. He felt stirrings which were now so unfamiliar to him he had to remember deliberately what they were. The death rattle is starting in my pants, he thought, dismissing what he could not take seriously. It would not be dismissed. Instead, the warmth he felt began to crowd him, to push him into unaccustomed corners. You’ve got the wrong man, he thought. He was not sure, however, which instincts he encouraged, which side he was on.

Feldman was surprised to discover that he really wanted to talk to her, to tell her that he had come with his disease into their small tavern to die for them. He thought jealously of the blond girl’s husband, the man Al, with lunch pail and silk team bowling jacket. She rubs him with her wounded wrist, he thought, excited.

“Would you like another drink?” he asked the girl haltingly. “Would you?” he asked again. He looked at her shabby clothes. “I just got paid today,” he added.

“Why not?” she said lightly. The little boy came over to her, drew her down and whispered something in her ear. The woman looked up at Feldman. “Excuse me,” she said, “he needs to pee.”

“Of course,” Feldman said stiffly. She took the child through a little door at the back of the tavern. When the door swung open Feldman could see cases of beer stacked on both sides of the lidless toilet. He turned to the woman behind the bar. “I want to buy a bottle of whiskey,” he said to her. “We’ll sit in that booth over there.”

“I don’t sell by the bottle. This ain’t no package store.”

“I’ll pay you,” he said.

“What are you, a jerk, mister? I run a nice place. I don’t want to have to throw you out.”

“It’s all right. I just want to talk.”

“She’s got a kid.”

“I just want to talk to her,” he said. “Here, here,” he said quietly. He reached into his pocket and pulled out two loose bills and flung them on the counter. The woman laughed at him.

“I’ll be damned,” she said. She handed him a bottle.

Feldman took it and walked unsteadily to the booth. When the woman brought two glasses, he poured a drink and swallowed it quickly. He felt as though a time limit had been imposed upon him, that it was all right to do anything in the world he wanted so long as he did it quickly. He saw the door at the rear of the tavern open and the girl step out. She leaned over her son, buttoning his pants. Feldman bit his lips. She straightened and, seeing Feldman sitting in the booth, glanced quickly at the woman behind the bar. The woman shrugged and held up the two five-dollar bills. The girl took the boy to the bowling machine and put a dime into its slot for him. He watched her as she came slowly toward his table. He was sure she wore no underclothing. He motioned for her to sit down. “There’s more room,” he said apologetically, indicating the booth.

She sat down and Feldman nodded toward her drink. “That’s yours,” he said. “That’s for you.”

“Thanks,” she said absently, but made no effort to drink it. Feldman raised his own glass and touched hers encouragingly in some mute toast. She continued to stare at him blankly.

“Look,” he said, “I’m bad at this. I don’t know what to say to you.”

She smiled, but said nothing.

“I want you to understand,” he went on stiffly, “I’m not trying to be funny with you.”

“Better not,” she said.

“I know,” Feldman said. “That girl behind the bar said she’d throw me out of here.”

“Rose could do it,” the girl said. “I could do it.”

“Anyone can do it,” Feldman said glumly. “Look, do you want me to go? Do you want to forget about it?”

“No,” she said, “Just be nice is all. What’s the matter with you, Jack?”

“I’m dying.” He had not meant to say it. It was out of his mouth before he could do anything about it. He thought of telling her a lie, of expanding his statement to something not so preposterously silly: that he was dying of boredom, of love for her, of fear for his job. Anything with more reason behind it than simply death. It occurred to him that dying was essentially ludicrous. In any real context it was out of place. It was not merely unwelcome; it was unthinkable. Then he realized that this was what he had meant to say all along. He had no interest in the girl; his body had played tricks on him, had made him believe for a moment that it was still strong. What he wanted now was to expose it. It was his enemy. Its sexlessness was a good joke on it. He could tell her that.

“I’m dying,” he said again. “I don’t know what to do.” He could no longer hear himself speaking. The words tumbled out of his mouth in an impotent rage. He wondered absently if he was crying. “The doctor told me I’m supposed to die, only I don’t do it, do you see?”

“Go to a different doctor,” the girl said.

She joked with him. It was impossible that she didn’t understand. He held the worm in his jaws. It was in his stomach, in the hollows of his armpits. Pieces of it stoppered his ears. “No, no. I’m really dying. There have been tests. Everything.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes. You don’t know what it’s like.”

“You married?”

“Yes.”

“Got kids, I suppose, and a family?”

“Yes.”

“They know about this?”

He nodded.

“Don’t care, probably, right? Hey,” she said, “look at me sitting and talking to you like this. You ain’t got something contagious, have you?”

“No,” he said. “Where are you going?” The girl was standing. “No, don’t go. Please sit down.”

“I’m sorry for your trouble, mister. Thanks for the drink.”

“Have another. There’s a whole bottle.”

She was looking down at him. He wondered if she really meant to go, whether her standing up was merely a form, a confused deference to death. She leaned toward him unexpectedly. “What is it, mister?” she said. She came to his side of the booth and sat down. “What is it, mister? Do you want to kiss me?” He was sure he had not heard her correctly. She repeated her question. She was smiling. He saw now that she had made a decision, had determined to cheat him. He didn’t care.

“Yes,” he answered weakly. “Would you kiss me?”

“Sure,” she said, her voice level, flat. Her eyes were nowhere. She sat closer. He put his hand on her warm thighs. They were hard and thin. She put one arm around Feldman and ground her lips against his. Her kid was staring at them. Feldman could taste the girl’s breath. It was foul. He put his hand inside the girl’s skirt and touched her thighs. He felt nothing inside himself. There was no urgency. The girl, incorrectly gauging Feldman’s responses, took his hand in one of hers and began to squeeze it. She held his wrist. Her hands, as Feldman had known they would be, were powerful. She dug her nails into his wrist. He could not get free. He tried to pull his wrist away. “Stop it,” he said. “Stop it, you’re hurting me.”

“See?” she said. “I’ll break your wrist.”

Under the table he kicked at her. She let go of him.

“You son of a bitch, I’ll break your face for that.” She started to scratch him. He struck her wildly and she began to cry. The little boy had rushed over and was pulling at Feldman’s suit jacket. The woman behind the bar came over with a billy club she had taken from some hiding place, and began to hit Feldman on his neck and chest. The girl recovered and pulled him from the booth. She sat on his chest, her legs straddling his body as a jockey rides a horse, thighs spread wide, knees up. Her body was exposed to him. He smelled her cunt. He saw it. They beat him until he was unconscious.



The men from the factories lifted him from the floor where he lay and carried him into the street. It was dark now. Under the lamplight they marched with him. Children ran behind and chanted strange songs. He heard the voices even in his sleep, and dreamed that he was an Egyptian king awaking in the underworld. About him were the treasures, the artifacts with which his people mocked his death. He was betrayed, forsaken. He screamed he was not dead and for answer heard their laughter as they retreated through the dark passage.



Before he died Feldman awoke in an alley. The pains in his stomach were more severe than ever. He knew he was dying. On his torn jacket was a note, scribbled in an angry hand: STAY AWAY FROM WHITE WOMEN, it said.

He thought of the doctor’s somber face telling him more than a year ago that he was going to die. He thought of his family and the way they looked at him, delicately anticipating in his every sudden move something breaking inside himself, and of the admiration in all their eyes, and the unmasked hope that it would never come to this for them, but that if it should, if it ever should, it would come with grace. But nothing came gracefully — not to heroes.

In the alley, before the dawn, by the waiting garbage, by the coffee grounds in their cups of wasted orange hemispheres, by the torn packages of frozen fish, by the greased, ripped labels of hollow cans, by the cold and hardened fat, by the jagged scraps of flesh around the nibbled bones, and the coagulated blood of cow and lamb, Feldman saw the cunt one last time and raised himself and crawled in the darkness toward a fence to sit upright against it. He tugged at his jacket to straighten it, tugged at the note appended to him like a price tag: STAY AWAY FROM WHITE WOMEN. He did not have the strength to pull the tag from his jacket. Smiling, he thought sadly of the dying hero.

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