“
You’ve
been taken?” Mona said.
“What I don’t understand are the elaborate processes. The technicalities of your justice. Why do you have to have me dead to rights?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“All right,” he said. It was true. He didn’t understand the trouble they went to. Why didn’t they fake their photographs, rig their lie detectors? What difference did it make?
Mona finished dressing and turned to face him, sitting on a leg, flexing her big knee toward him like an enormous muscle. He recollected her red thighs. There was something terrifying about them, something powerful and secret like those biological myths about the angled cunts of Asians and erogenous palms of Negresses. There were rumors about the tough, horned nipples of Russian girls and the queer asses of squaws. Were these things true? They must be. Everything goes on. The forms of life were infinite—look at himself, his homunculus, old Short Ribs—as were the forms of death. You were nuts not to acknowledge power, whatever its source. Mona smiled at him. She must love me, he thought, she
must
. Otherwise—a flick of those red thighs, and he would have been done for, sent flying. He prayed silently to the red thighs, while one spur of his imagination conjured speculatively the thighs of his
schicksa
mom. Were they red too? Nah, he thought. She’d be alive today.
One of Mona’s earrings had fallen on the carpet, and he picked it up. It was for a pierced ear; you could have hung drapes on its hook. “Here,” he said.
“Hey, thanks. I didn’t feel it fall out.”
“Listen,” he said, “can I put it back?”
“What’s that?”
“May I put it back?”
“Go ahead.” She shook her head, and her hair swung. Feldman, failure in forests and catcher of poison ivy who never knew the planets or found the North Star and couldn’t remember which were the months with thirty days, gingerly held red-thighed Mona’s milky ear lobe. He bent his neck to see the hole, and then on impulse, arranging carefully his lips and tongue, precisely as a musician’s mouth at a flute, he blew through the aperture.
“Don’t fool around,” she said.
Feldman, who had already made several connections with the universe in the last half-hour, leaned back gratefully. He handed the girl her earring. “I might hurt you,” he said.
“Not a chance. The skin’s tough in there. I can’t feel a thing.”
He took back the earring and threaded it through her ear, deliberately clumsy. He felt marvelous. How many points, he wondered, for
that
sweet basket?
“We’ve been in here too long,” she said. “What about the others?”
But he had forgotten the others. He was interested now in what he might do with Mona. He saw himself at her controls: combing her hair, going through her purse for lint; then if she’d let him—always remembering the power of those red thighs, those tough pierced lobes—putting her toes in his mouth, her nipples in his ears, sitting in her lap and exploring her teeth with his fingers. “What about the others?” she repeated. “Is this smart?” It was hard to reconcile her anxiety with her red thighs, but then, he thought, he didn’t know what kind of thighs the others had. Maybe theirs canceled hers, bleached them in blood’s bright pecking order. Or maybe he was right the first time: she had done a job on him, and time was up. He stood reluctantly, nervous again, and said that maybe it would be better if they weren’t seen going out together.
“It’s too late to think about that,” she said.
“Why?”
“Don’t you know where we are? This is the warden’s bedroom.”
“It’s not,” Feldman said. “It can’t be. It doesn’t even look like a bedroom.”
“The couch is a hideaway. The wing chair’s a bidet.”
“Oh,” Feldman said. And the sofa pillows are sprinkled with Spanish fly, he thought. And the lamp is a camera. And the coffee table is a plainclothesman. Everything goes on, he thought.
Why do you let everything go on?
he prayed.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s face the music.” She tried to take his hand, but he wouldn’t let her have it. At the door she passed through first, and he followed sheepishly.
They were all gone; the room was empty. Mona went to the sideboard and made herself a sandwich. Feldman stood beside her as she spread mustard on a roll. “Where is everybody?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said, her mouth full. “Gone home, I guess. Tomorrow’s a working day.”
“Tomorrow’s Saturday,” he said.
“Are the jails closed?”
“Well, what do we do now?” he asked.
“How do you mean? Have a sandwich.”
“They’re all
gone
.”
“Well, I know that. They’re all gone. They’re a bunch of party poopers. Have a sandwich.”
“I don’t want a sandwich,” Feldman said. “Listen, how do I get back to jail?”
She shrugged. Feldman left her impatiently and looked into another room. No one was around. He went into all the rooms he could find, and it was the same. The idea of being alone in Warden’s Quarters terrified him; somehow it seemed to be the ultimate defilement. There
wasn’t
a more serious crime. He sat down in the library and put his head in his hands. Then he remembered that the guard had said he would be waiting in the kitchen. He found Mona again. She had finished her sandwich and was making another. “Change your mind?” she asked. “Want a sandwich?”
“Where’s the kitchen?” Feldman demanded.
“What do you need the kitchen for? There’s plenty of stuff right here. Look, here’s some meatloaf. Here’s eggplant. What do you want? Shall I pour you a glass of Vegemato?”
“Where’s the fucking kitchen? Tomorrow’s Saturday. I have to get back to jail.”
“Well, listen to him,” she said. “Oh, all right, follow me.”
They went down a service hall Feldman had missed. Mona stopped at a wide white door. “In here,” she said, and pushed open the door.
“Look,” Feldman said, following her, “I’m sorry I’m late. I was off by myself and—”
The warden was counting desposit bottles and arranging them in neat rows.
“It’s me,” Feldman said softly.
The warden looked up and saw them, and Feldman whimpered. The warden’s face seemed momentarily to fall, as though some symptom he had not felt for months had suddenly recurred. In a second he had recovered, but when he opened his mouth it was to Mona he spoke. “You know each other,” he said. Feldman noticed her ring for the first time.
Mona nodded nervously.
Were they married? Oh Christ, was she his wife? The thief’s armful, he thought awfully. His mouthful. How do I get back to jail? he wondered. Crime and punishment, he thought. Punishment and punishment. Suddenly he felt compelled to offer the warden a confession, to admit everything, sign papers. He did not exactly feel moral obligation, but a necessity to flatter the warden with his crimes. It was what the man thrived on, what he deserved. The urge to plead was strong, but he did not yet know what he should plead to. He shrugged helplessly and smiled and tamped down a yawn. “Late,” he said.
“Your guard has been dismissed,” the warden said. “The prison’s closed.”
“Closed?”
“It’s sealed until morning. A warden’s danger is at night,” he said, and looked at Feldman.
“I drank like a pig,” Feldman blurted.
The warden nodded, bored.
“I drank like a pig, and I hated the food. It was too wet.”
“Was it?”
“It was too wet. There wasn’t any delicatessen. I hoped there would be delicatessen, and there wasn’t. If there was I would have had six sandwiches.”
“I see,” the warden said.
“You do?” Mona said.
“He’s copping a plea,” the warden said.
“No,” Feldman said, “I’m not.”
“You’re copping a plea,” the warden said.
“I coveted my neighbor’s wife.”
“What else?” the warden said.
“Everything else,” Feldman said. He saw that it made the warden wince to look at him, and he felt like someone with no nose, with reamed hollows where the eyes went. He stared out from behind the holes in his face, beneath his singed queer brows. “What happens now?” he asked.
“You can’t stay here,” Fisher said.
Feldman nodded. He understood. Fair was fair.
“Come with me,” the warden said.
He was comforted. People said “Come with me” to him, and he followed them down long, twisting corridors, through crowded rooms, a content sense of irresponsibility in his trailing footsteps, of abeyance, things held off. You climbed stairs and went to doom by degrees. You waited for elevators at the end of hallways; you crossed bridges that connected buildings. Then, at the end of it all, there were comfortable chairs; you could smoke; there were magazines to read. It surprised and disappointed him then when the warden merely walked across the kitchen to a narrow metal doorway and took some keys from his pocket. “Go in,” Fisher said. Feldman had seen the doorway when he had first come in, and thought that it must be some kind of freezer. He hesitated, then saw that the warden had produced a gun. “
Go in
,” the warden commanded. Feldman walked through the doorway; the door slammed behind him, and he heard the key turn in the metal lock.
Automatically he began to stamp his feet and rub his arms. He still thought he was in a freezer. “I’ve got to keep moving,” he said, but saw at once that the words had produced no visible breath. “I’m not cold,” he said, testing to make sure. Then he saw that he was in a kind of areaway and that a few feet in front of him was an arch and a stairway leading down, probably to the basement, though he had never gotten over the impression that Warden’s Quarters, like the solitary-confinement cells, were already below ground. “I can’t stand here all night,” he said, but that was an excuse. He knew that he wanted to go down the stairs and that the warden probably expected him to. He stood at the head of the stairway and looked down. The stairs declined at a rude angle. He could not see the bottom, although a line of naked bulbs—incredibly dim, like those drained lights before the curtain rises in a theater—hung from the narrow, curved Conestoga ceiling that canopied the stairway. I’m a fool, he thought, and began to descend the stairs.
There was no rail, and the rough stone walls felt damp, a thousand years old. A bad smell covered the walls like a tapestry. The lights overhead were spaced further and further apart. Soon he had left the last light behind him and entered the darkness. At the bottom he could see nothing, and stepped off the last stair as into space. The underworld, he thought.
He stopped where he was and listened, afraid to go further. He might be on a narrow stone apron, above water perhaps, although he couldn’t
hear
water. Perhaps it was a pit he stood over. He imagined enormous drops, plummets of miles. He took a cautious step, holding one foot in place and sliding the other carefully forward. Then he brought the other foot up. He tried to stand with his feet together—he imagined himself on a small platform about the size of a man’s handkerchief—but the strain of keeping his balance in so constricted a space was too great for him and he fell. He hit the floor abruptly, and because he had expected to tumble forever—“Come with me,” the warden had said; he recalled the leisurely fate he had anticipated—the impact knocked the breath out of him. He lay on the stone floor until he got his wind back, and then stood up slowly. Again he put one leg out, sliding it forward along the ground and then bringing the other leg up with it. In this way he proceeded for about five minutes. He had lost the stairway. He decided to throw something to see if he could judge from the sound if he
was
above a pit. He looked in his pockets for something to throw. He had nothing. What a poor man I am, he thought. He tugged a button off the jacket of his blue fool suit and threw it in front of him. It clattered on the floor. That doesn’t prove anything, he thought; I might have thrown it too far. He tossed the next button gently, and heard it drop a few feet in front of him, roll a foot or so and stop. He removed another button and flipped it to his left. It fell heavily. The remaining buttons, which he took from the sleeve of his jacket, he threw all around him. One rolled up against what was possibly a wall off to his left. The last button he threw behind him; it hit almost at once. “Well,” he said, “no pit.” Boldly he did a little dance, finishing with a daring leap in the dark.
His eyes could not get accustomed to the darkness, and since it seemed unlikely that he could find the narrow stairway again in this pitch, he decided to try for the wall which the button might have bounced against. He put his hands out in front of him to grope with the darkness. Momentarily he expected the tips of his fingers to smash against a wall. He was so conscious of them that they seemed wet, as if he had licked them and thrust them out to test the direction of the wind. Without realizing it, he had slipped back into the sliding, skatey progress he had adopted earlier. Again he had a sense of all the strange rooms he’d ever been in.
He moved his left foot forward, but it hit bluntly against a solid barrier. The sudden contact, slow and cautious, sent something like an electric shock through his body. He leaned forward and found the wall. The same bad smell of the stairway met his nostrils. He slid his hand over the rough, grainy wall and felt the metal panel over an electric switch. He flicked it on, and instantly the place was flush with light. Just to his right was an arch and the stairway he had descended. He had traveled in a circle. He turned around.
Across the room—it was enormous—thrust out from the wall, was a narrow wooden platform like a low stage. On it, stiff, its rigid form and strict ninety-degree angles already suggesting its function, was the electric chair.
“
Aiiee
,” Feldman shouted. “
Aiiee, aiiee!
”
He turned off the lights; then, afraid to be with that thing in the dark, he turned them back on. Shielding his eyes with his arm as though he moved through a sandstorm, he approached the chair. It looked, on the platform, like a throne. Its high straight back and stiff thrusting arms suggested the stern posture of pharaohs. Two straps rose on each arm, and at the back, attached at the level of a man’s chest, a huge leather strap, the color of a barber’s strop but bigger, hung down, curling on the wooden seat like some mechanical snake. He reached out as though he would stir the leather coils, but pulled his hand back at once. Jesus, he thought, what if it’s turned on? He leaned forward and examined the chair closely. How did it kill you? He spotted a thick black cable that ran from the wall behind the chair and climbed its ladder-back into a queer device at the top, a soft puffy collar like something on a dentist’s chair. Two metal nodes—electrodes probably—protruded through the sides of the collar.