Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers

by Stanley Elkin

  Almost automatically, then, he went into Preminger’s study and began to write all the people he could think of. As he wrote he pulled heavily at the whiskey remaining in the bottle. At first the letters were long, detailed accounts of symptoms and failures and dashed hopes, but as evening came on and he grew inarticulate he realized that it was more important—and, indeed, added to the pathos of his situation—for him just to get the facts to them.

  “Dear Klaff,” he wrote at last, “I am hooked. I am at the bottom, Klaff. I don’t know what to do.” Or “Dear Randle, I’m hooked. Tell your wife. I honestly don’t know where to turn.” And “Dear Myers, how are your wife and kids? Poor Bertie is hooked. He is thinking of suicide.”

  He had known for a long time that one day he would have to kill himself. It would happen, and even in the way he had imagined. One day he would simply drink the bottle of carbon tetrachloride. But previously he had been in no hurry. Now it seemed like something he might have to do before he had meant to, and what he resented most was the idea of having to change his plans.

  He imagined what people would say.

  “I let him down, Klaff,” Randle said.

  “Everybody let him down,” Klaff said.

  “Everybody let him down,” Bertie said. “Everybody let him down.”

  Weeping, he took a last drink from Preminger’s bottle, stumbled into the living room and passed out on the couch.

  That night Bertie was awakened by a flashlight shining in his eyes. He threw one arm across his face defensively and struggled to sit up. So clumsy were his efforts that whoever was holding the flashlight started to laugh.

  “Stop that,” Bertie said indignantly, and thought, I have never been so indignant in the face of danger.

  “You said they were out of town,” a voice said. The voice did not come from behind the flashlight, and Bertie wondered how many there might be.

  “Jesus, I thought so. Nobody’s answered the phone for days. I never seen a guy so plastered. He stinks.”

  “Kill him,” the first voice said.

  Bertie stopped struggling to get up.

  “Kill him,” the voice repeated.

  “What is this?” Bertie said thickly. “What is this?”

  “Come on, he’s so drunk he’s harmless,” the second voice said.

  “Kill him,” the first voice said again.

  “You kill him,” the second voice said.

  The first voice giggled.

  They were playing with him, Bertie knew. Nobody who did not know him could want him dead.

  “Turn on the lights,” Bertie said.

  “Screw that,” the second voice said. “You just sit here in the dark, sonny, and you won’t get hurt.”

  “We’re wasting time,” the first voice said.

  A beam from a second flashlight suddenly intersected the beam from the first.

  “Say,” Bertie said nervously, “it looks like the opening of a supermarket.”

  Bertie could hear them working in the dark, moving boxes, pulling drawers.

  “Are you folks Negroes?” Bertie called. No one answered him. “I mean I dig Negroes, man—men. Miles. Jay Jay. Bird lives.” He heard a closet door open.

  “You are robbing the place, right? I mean you’re actually stealing, aren’t you? This isn’t just a social call. Maybe you know my friend Klaff.”

  The men came back into the living room. From the sound of his footsteps Bertie knew one of them was carrying something heavy.

  “I’ve got the TV,” the first voice said.

  “There are some valuable paintings in the dining room,” Bertie said.

  “Go see,” the first voice said.

  One of Norma’s pictures suddenly popped out of the darkness as the man’s light shone on it.

  “Crap,” the second voice said.

  “You cats can’t be all bad,” Bertie said.

  “Any furs?” It was a third voice, and it startled Bertie. Someone flashed a light in Bertie’s face. “Hey, you,” the voice repeated, “does your wife have any furs?”

  “Wait a minute,” Bertie said as though it were a fine point they must be made to understand, “you’ve got it wrong. This isn’t my place. I’m just taking care of it while my friends are gone.” The man laughed.

  Now all three flashlights were playing over the apartment. Bertie hoped a beam might illuminate one of the intruders, but this never happened. Then he realized that he didn’t want it to happen, that he was safe as long as he didn’t recognize any of them. Suddenly a light caught one of the men behind the ear. “Watch that light. Watch that light,” Bertie called out involuntarily.

  “I found a trumpet,” the second voice said.

  “Hey, that’s mine,” Bertie said angrily. Without thinking, he got up and grabbed for the trumpet. In the dark he was able to get his fingers around one of the valves, but the man snatched it away from him easily. Another man pushed him back down on the couch.

  “Could you leave the carbon tetrachloride?” Bertie asked miserably.

  In another ten minutes they were ready to go. “Shouldn’t we do something about the clown?” the third voice said.

  “Nah,” the second voice said.

  They went out the front door.

  Bertie sat in the darkness. “I’m drunk,” he said after a while. “I’m hooked and drunk. It never happened. It’s still the visions. The apartment is a vision. The darkness is. Everything.”

  In a few minutes he got up and wearily turned on the lights. Magicians, he thought, seeing even in a first glance all that they had taken. Lamps were gone, curtains. He walked through the apartment. The TV was gone. Suits were missing from the closets. Preminger’s typewriter was gone, the champagne glasses, the silver. His trumpet was gone.

  Bertie wept. He thought of phoning the police, but then wondered what he could tell them. The thieves had been in the apartment for twenty minutes and he hadn’t even gotten a look at their faces.

  Then he shuddered, realizing the danger he had been in. “Crooks,” he said. “Killers.” But even as he said it he knew it was an exaggeration. He had never been in any danger. He had the fool’s ancient protection, his old immunity against consequence.

  He wondered what he could say to the Premingers. They would be furious. Then, as he thought about it, he realized that this too was an exaggeration. They would not be furious. Like the thieves they would make allowances for him, as people always made allowances for him. They would forgive him; possibly they would even try to give him something toward the loss of his trumpet.

  Bertie began to grow angry. They had no right to patronize him like that. If he was a clown it was because he had chosen to be. It was a way of life. Why couldn’t they respect it? He should have been hit over the head like other men. How dare they forgive him? For a moment it was impossible for him to distinguish between the thieves and the Premingers.

  Then he had his idea. As soon as he thought of it he knew it would work. He looked around the apartment to see what he could take. There was some costume jewelry the thieves had thrown on the bed. He scooped it up and stuffed it in his pockets. He looked at the apartment one more time and then got the hell out of there. “Bird lives,” he sang to himself as he raced down the stairs. “He lives and lives.”

  It was wonderful. How they would marvel! He couldn’t get away with it. Even the far West wasn’t far enough. How they hounded you if you took something from them! He would be back, no question, and they would send him to jail, but first there would be the confrontation, maybe even in the apartment itself: Bertie in handcuffs, and the Premingers staring at him, not understanding and angry at last, and something in their eyes like fear.

  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 disturbi
ng. 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.