Searches & Seizures

by Stanley Elkin

“Take it easy.”

  The Phoenician stands. “You won’t rush me, will you?”

  “No.”

  “You won’t fling the pillows at me?”

  “I’m wanted, I’m a wanted man. You didn’t break in. The clerk called and I agreed to see you.”

  “That’s right. Look, kid, stall. Stall for time, don’t make sudden moves.”

  “All right,” Crainpool says kindly, “how do you think you can get away with a thing like this?”

  “That’s it, that’s the way. Good,” the Phoenician says, “good.”

  And he begins to tell him, feeding him detail, inventing his plausible arrangements as he goes along, reassuring himself as he annihilates loophole, shutting off Crainpool’s harbors and posting guards at his roadblocks, at his gangways and airline check-in counters, watching Crainpool’s trains. And it is all true, even if it is only a sort of foreign language he has learned to speak, the flashy grammar of body contact, a shoptalk of which he is weary because no one has yet bested him at it, least of all this dim Crainpool. And he sees that the man takes it all in, held, not just stalling but actually interested, a disciple to his own destroyer. Puppy! The Phoenician punishes him with strategy, game plan, pressing Crainpool’s nose to the blackboard where the y’s and x’s of opposition spray chalk in Crainpool’s spread, admiring nostrils. It’s what has held him all these years, kept him in town while the Phoenician was off rounding up jumpers; not only what kept him when Main wasn’t looking, but what brought him to the office earlier than usual at such times, and what held him there later, after hours, waiting for a phone call that would check up on him, wanting to hear even if only at long distance what normally he got in person, feeding on comeuppance, humiliation, wisecrack, connoisseur of the Phoenician’s abuse. I am his life’s work, the Phoenician thinks. I have rehabilitated him. He has gone straight man.

  So he pours it on, showers Crainpool with spurious inevitability, moves him to object only to shut him off at the pass.

  “Such force as may be necessary to effect my return,” Crainpool says triumphantly.

  “Asshole. I’ll return you. You’re a fucking deposit bottle.”

  “Suppose I shout? Suppose I shout, ‘Don’t shoot, Mr. Main, I surrender’?”

  “You fucked up fucking fuck. I shout louder. ‘Call the police,’ I shout, ‘Crainpool’s got my gun.’ ”

  “Shmuck. What about the police? Why didn’t you bring them to arrest me?”

  “First principles. Shmuck yourself, I’m a bondsman. My reputation depends upon doing my own enforcing.”

  “You harbored me. Eleven years you harbored me.”

  “I harbored somebody who called himself Crainpool. In the five years it took me to catch up with you, you’d aged beyond recognition. You’d lost hair. You were seventy-five pounds lighter than when you jumped my bond. Your mama wouldn’t have known you.”

  “The perfect crime,” Crainpool says appreciatively.

  “You’re in season. It isn’t even crime.”

  The man nods; he is satisfied that it can be done. Probably he’d never doubted it. But he still doesn’t understand why. “I was your slave,” he says.

  “I paid top dollar. You got annual raises, paid vacations, fringe benefits. The first bondsman’s clerk in the State of Ohio with his own retirement plan.”

  “I don’t want to die,” Crainpool says. “My God, Mr. Main, why would you do this?”

  “Because,” he says quietly, “you’re the only man in the world I’m allowed to kill.” He has drawn his gun.

  Crainpool begins to whimper, and the Phoenician is moved. He owes this forlorn man more than the fringe benefit of his theatrics. “How,” he asks, “can there be indifference? How can there be suicides? Why are there old men? Help me, Crainpool. Why is life so lovely? The night sweeter than the day and the day more joyous than the night? Who alive can grieve? How dare there be good weather, seasons when the world is at room temperature? Where are my muscles, my smooth skin? Why doesn’t desire die? Why is it that it’s the one thing which remains intact, that has some fucking strangle hold on immortality? Who sabotaged us and gave our will insomnia? Why am I more interested in others than others are interested in me? What am I to make of their scents, their firm bodies and their healthy hair? Of the snatches of conversation I overhear, the endearments passed like bread? Who wired this tension in me between ego and detachment? Why do I have this curiosity like a game leg? How can I cross-examine the universe when it jumps my bond?”

  He begins to feel a little of what he has been saying. Crainpool is alive too, and his determination to kill him momentarily wavers. He sees it as a stunt, one more thing to impress this man who has lived eleven years with and for such impressions and who would, in the instant he squeezed the trigger (first the wild warning shot overhead or out the window to establish alibi—Crainpool would understand, having lived so long in ringside connection to technique, a first-nighter in aisle and orchestra to the Phoenician’s thousand performances, would perhaps even roar “Author, author. Bravo, bravo” to his own death—to make the point that in this small room, in these close quarters, he could not possibly have missed his man and had given him a chance to come quietly), probably smile, appreciation riding his lips like dessert, recognition sparking campfires in his eyes.

  “Look at me, Mr. Crainpool. I take all the papers. I. F. Stone wrote me newsletters. I have Scientific American. The Journal of the American Medical Association is on the floor by my bed. National Geographic is in the toilet, American Heritage next to the toaster. Time-Life gives me the prepublication discount. Au courant I am as a deb with my nose for trend and influence and my insider’s thousand knowledges. What does it mean? Everything I don’t know and will never know leans on me like a mountain range. It creams me, Crainpool. It potches my brains and rattles my teeth.”

  “You, Mr. Main? You’re a smart man. I wish I had a tenth your brains.”

  “Yeah. Same here. I wish I had a tenth yours—anyone’s, everyone’s. I’d fatten on your memory and experience like a starver, suck at your inputs and engrams as at sweet fruit. What’s the future going to be like, Mr. Crainpool? What will people whistle a hundred years from now? What snatch of song will run through the beautician’s head as she leans forward over a customer’s hair? Tell me and I’ll let you go. What will the priorities be? What ruins will yet be uncovered, what treasures from what sunk ships will rise from which seas? What cities will be built and destroyed and uncovered again? Whose teeth will come up in the earthquake and go in the case?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Me too. Nothing. Me too. The ocean beds are squeezing together, did you know that? They tow the continents like tugboats. Asia will be a day’s hike from Australia, and a man standing in Italy will cast a shadow in Yugoslavia. Nations shall be resolved like a jigsaw, Mr. Crainpool, and what we call land will one day form a perfect circle, a globe within a globe that sits on the oceans like a skullcap. What a seashore that will be! Like a wet nimbus, Crainpool! Who’ll drive the Golden Spike that first day? What language will he speak?”

  He fires the first shot. It goes out Crainpool’s open window and clears the four-story building across the way. “That will merely wake some of them,” he says. “Wait, you’ll hear.” They listen together and can barely make out the sound of one or two doors opening down the corridor. Somewhere a window scrapes open.

  “Is everything all right?” someone shouts from the dark street.

  The Phoenician levels the gun at Crainpool’s chest in case he calls out. “No,” he whispers. Then to Crainpool in his previous tone, but more excited, “But that’s just the world, the earth. Have you considered astronomy, have you given any thought to physics?”

  “No,” Crainpool says dryly. His voice is parched.

  “Physics breaks my heart, astronomy gives me the blue balls. I dassn’t bother with mathematics. I better not think about chemistry.”

  “No.”

 
; “You asshole, Mr. Crainpool. We’re blind. We ought to have white canes and dark glasses. There should be pencils in our caps. We should sit in the weather against tall buildings and use the caps as offices. Listen, listen to me. They’ve proof that all life is merely four simple compounds arranged on a spiral string of sugars and phosphates. We’re necklaces, Crainpool, sugar and spice and everything nice. We’re fucking candy. And your cocksucker and muffdiver are only guys with a sweet tooth. Listen, listen, there’s a theory now that certain things move faster than light. They think that atoms were lighter millions of years ago, gravity stronger. We live in a universe that puts on weight, that builds its body like a Sumo.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “I don’t lead.”

  “Please, Mr. Main—”

  He is talking very quickly now. “I hear tell that matter enters our universe from another universe. That we get our physical laws from some universe in another country. That gravity comes like the post, imported like teak and coffee beans. Physical law like an unfavorable balance of payments. Our ways are not their ways, Mr. Crainpool. Jesus, atoms, atoms and the crap between stars.”

  “Why are you killing me?”

  “Hush. Einstein’s theory posited objects of infinite density within an infinitely small space. You see? Their atoms would be so fat and their gravity so dense that not even light could escape from them. That was a darkness, fella. Can you imagine such a darkness? That was a darkness so dark it was invisible. You could read your newspaper through it. Listen, listen to me. Wheeler and Ruffini predicted that by their x-rays we would know them—are you keeping up, are you getting any of this?—that they’d give themselves away circling visible stars, nibbling at them with their infinite gravity, drawing at them, giving the stars a toothache.”

  “I don’t know why you want to kill—”

  “They’ve been seen! In recent months. They’ve been detected. The black holes in the universe.”

  “I don’t want you to shoot me, Mr. Main.”

  “And for every black hole there’s a white hole. That’s what Hjellming thinks, how he accounts for the quasars. Are you reading me, Crainpool? The universes are leaking into each other. There’s this transfusion of law in the sky. I’m honest, I’m an honest man. Upright and respectable here in this universe I inhabit. I’m honest, but the fucking laws are leaking, the physical constants bleeding into each other like madras. God Himself nothing but a slow leak, some holy puncture, Nature’s and reality’s sacred flat. Matter and anti-matter. Inside our universe is another. Dig? Chinese boxes of universes. When I kill you in your room here tonight, maybe that’s virtue next-door. You think?”

  “Why? Please, Mr. Main, why?”

  “Shut up about why. I don’t know why!”

  Crainpool changes his tactics. He stops whining and becomes almost angry. “You always have to have the last word,” he says. “You always have to do things big, don’t you? Big shot. You’d kill me for nothing, for the sake of your style.”

  “My style? Nah.”

  “You would. You think you’re so hot.”

  “Me? No, I’m catching cold, I’m in a draft, I’ve got this chill. Brr, Crainpool, it’s the Ice Age in me, record snowfalls and not enough antifreeze in the world to grow a calory. My atoms, my gross thick atoms. Can you see me? Can you make me out?”

  “I see you. I make you out. Like you said—you’re a parade.”

  “Don’t believe everything they tell you, killer. I don’t give a fart for me. You can have my personality for a Green Stamp. My ego wore out years ago. Call Goodwill Industries, I’ll put it in a box on the front porch they can pick it up. Crainpool, dummy, this isn’t heroics, it ain’t no grandstand here. I’m a functional illiterate, I don’t know my ass from my elbow mystery-wise. If I can’t stand being a fool, it’s got nothing to do with pride. Screw the bubble reputation, I say, fuck fame and shove I. Gobble genes and blast being. I pass.”

  Crainpool has had to strain to hear this last, leaning so far forward that he can almost pluck the gun from Main’s lap. “Then it makes no sense to kill me,” he says.

  “All I wanted,” Main says so quietly that the clerk has to watch his lips to understand him, “was to know things. I’m honest, I’m an honest man. I took delight in the impersonal. I’ve lived with curiosity like the seven-year itch. That’s what attracted me to you guys, you mugs and malefactors, you villains and cutpurses. Who done it? What’s the motive? Cherchez la femme. What’s that? What does crime come to at last? Nothing. Crummy hornbook, lousy primer. Slim volume, Crainpool, pot fucking boiler, publisher’s remainder. You taught me nothing, mister. And where did I get the idea that by getting next to aberration I could…But what hurts, I mean what really hurts, is that if I had a brain as big as the Ritz I still wouldn’t know anything. We die dropouts. All of us. Disadvantaged and underachievers. I have questions. I’m up to here with questions. I never needed to be happy; I only needed to know. Simple stuff. A dopey kid of the next century could tell me. If I could only live long enough I would sit at his feet as if he was Socrates and he’d tell me…What? Whether Dubuque ever made it into the majors. If there’s crab grass on distant planets. Who won the war and what they were supposed to be fighting for and old Uncle Tom Cobbly and all. He’d rattle off the damn fool slogans of his time and I’d take them in like the Ten Commandments. What do I do with my wonder, I wonder?”

  Crainpool stands up. He squeezes himself between Main and the bed and walks toward the door. “Please,” he says, “I’ll see you in the office. Go on home, Mr. Main, get some sleep.” He opens the door for him.

  “What?”

  “It’s pretty late, Mr. Main.”

  “You off the hook?”

  “I think so.”

  “Out of the woods?”

  “That’s the chance I’m taking.”

  “And you’ll see me in the office.”

  “Yes.”

  “In the morning.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The Phoenician smiles wearily. “You let me talk myself out, do your stalling for you.”

  “You’re a reasonable man, Mr. Main. You’re a reasonable man, Alex.”

  “Oyp and Glyp are dead.”

  “Well, as you say, who can know what happened? I’m glad you closed the books on them. It was time.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You had a perfect record otherwise.”

  “Sure.”

  “They don’t change that.”

  “No.”

  “Do you want me to call a taxi for you?”

  “Do you think they’re really dead? I mean, I’ve got no actual proof. It’s just a feeling.”

  “You know those two. If they were alive we’d probably have heard something. We were bound to. Leopards don’t change their spots.”

  “I guess.” He raises his pistol and aims it at Crainpool’s hand which is still on the door. “There was always someone to hunt,” he says. “A mystery I was good at. My line of country. But if Oyp and Glyp are dead—”

  “Come on, Mr. Main, don’t—”

  He fires and the bullet chips the knuckles of Crainpool’s hand. Astonished, the clerk raises the hand to his mouth and stares wild-eyed at the Phoenician. The blood makes it appear that he has been eating cherry pie.

  “Run,” the Phoenician commands, hisses. “Run, you bastard.”

  “What?”

  “Run. Down the stairway. Run, run.”

  “What are you doing?”

  He raises the pistol again, and Crainpool turns and flees. The Phoenician walks into the corridor. Doors are ajar down the long line of rooms. Oddly they give the hallway the appearance of stalled traffic. Old women stand before them in nightgowns, their hands at their hearts. The Phoenician can just make out Crainpool’s back as he shoves open the door to the emergency stairway. “OYP,” he shouts, “AND GLYP,” he shouts, “ARE DEAD,” he shouts. He starts after the clerk in his old man’s gravid trot. “LONG,” he
roars, “LIVE CRAINPOOL!”

  He hurries to the stairwell through the door that Crainpool has just moved through. He is panting; the hand that holds the pistol shakes. He leans over the railing and sees a blur of Crainpool as the younger, faster man reaches the bottom stair. He points the pistol downward and fires without looking. Ah, he’s missed. Good. He puts the gun in his jacket and walks lazily down the stairs. He enters the lobby and, feigning breathlessness, calls to the night clerk behind his counter. “Did you—did you see him?”

  “What the hell’s happening?”

  “Did you see him?” He taps his pocket. “I’ve got a warrant for his arrest. Did you see which way he went?”

  The clerk shakes his head. “He went out. I don’t know. He went out. He was bleeding,” he says. “His hand was all blood, his mouth.”

  “Yeah, he was too fast for me. I missed. I catch him I’m going to fuck all over him.”

  He goes through the revolving doors and out into the street. The air is lovely. He looks left and right. Which way, he wonders. North? To the suburbs? East towards the railroad tracks? Or did he double back? Head downtown maybe? To the street where he himself had walked that afternoon? Where the people were more like film stars than the film stars were, as everybody was these days, handsomeness creeping up the avenues of the world like the golden bedsprings in the Cincinnati trees?

  The Making of Ashenden

  I’VE BEEN spared a lot, one of the blessed of the earth, at least one of its lucky, that privileged handful of the dramatically prospering, the sort whose secrets are asked, like the hundred-year-old man. There is no secret, of course; most of what happens to us is simple accident. Highish birth and a smooth network of appropriate connection like a tea service written into the will. But surely something in the blood too, locked into good fortune’s dominant genes like a blast ripening in a time bomb. Set to go off, my good looks and intelligence, yet exceptional still, take away my mouthful of silver spoon and lapful of luxury. Something my own, not passed on or handed down, something seized, wrested—my good character, hopefully, my taste perhaps. What’s mine, what’s mine? Say taste—the soul’s harmless appetite.