1Farragut was a drug addict and felt that the consciousness of the opium eater was much broader, more vast and representative of the human condition than the consciousness of someone who had never experienced addiction. The drug he needed was a distillate of earth, air, water and fire. He was mortal and his addiction was a beautiful illustration of the bounds of his mortality. He had been introduced to drugs during a war on some island where the weather was suffocating, the jungle rot of his hairy parts was suppurating and the enemy were murderers. The company medic had ordered gallons of a sticky yellow cough syrup and every morning the “in” group drank a glass of this and went into combat, drugged and at peace with suffocation, suppuration and murder. This was followed by Benzedrine, and Benzedrine and his beer ration got him through the war and back to his own shores, his own home and his wife. He went guiltlessly from Benzedrine to heroin, encouraged in his addiction by almost every voice he heard. Yesterday was the age of anxiety, the age of the fish, and today, his day, his morning, was the mysterious and adventurous age of the needle. His generation was the generation of addiction. It was his school, his college, the flag under which he marched into battle. The declaration of addiction was in every paper, magazine and airborne voice. Addiction was the law of the prophets. When he began to teach, he and his department head would shoot up before the big lecture, admitting that what was expected of them from the world could be produced only by the essence of a flower. It was challenge and response. The new buildings of the university outstripped the human scale, the human imagination, the wildest human dreams. The bridges that he drove across to get to the university were the distillate of engineering computers, a sort of mechanical Holy Ghost. The planes that took him from his university to some other university arced luxuriously into an altitude where men would perish. There was no philosophical suture that could make anything but destructiveness of the sciences that were taught in the high buildings he could see from the windows of English and Philosophy. There were some men of such stupidity that they did not respond to these murderous contradictions and led lives that were without awareness and distinction. His memory of a life without drugs was like a memory of himself as a blond, half-naked youth in good flannels, walking on a white beach between the dark sea and a rank of leonine granite, and to seek out such a memory was contemptible. A life without drugs seemed in fact and in spirit a remote and despicable point in his past—binoculars upon telescopes, lens grating lens, employed to pick out a figure of no consequence on a long gone summer’s day.

2But in the vastness of his opium eater’s consciousness was—no more than a grain of sand—the knowledge that if his inspired knowledge of the earth’s drugs was severed, he would face a cruel and unnatural death. Congressmen and senators sometimes visited prison. They were seldom shown the methadone line, but twice when they had stumbled on this formation they had objected to the sweat of the taxpayers’ brow being wasted to sustain convicted felons in their diseased addiction. Their protests had not been effective, but Farragut’s feeling about visiting senators in prison had turned into a murderous hatred since these men might kill him. The fear of death is for all of us everywhere, but for the great intelligence of the opium eater it is beautifully narrowed into the crux of drugs. To starve to death, to burn or drown in the bliss of a great high, would be nothing at all. Drugs belonged to all exalted experience, thought Farragut. Drugs belonged in church. Take this in memory of me and be grateful, said the priest, laying an amphetamine on the kneeling man’s tongue. Only the opium eater truly understands the pain of death. When one morning the orderly who gave Farragut his methadone sneezed, this was for Farragut an ominous and a dreadful sound. The orderly might come down with a cold, and considering the nature of the prison bureaucracy, there might not be anyone else who had permission to issue the drug. The sound of a sneeze meant death.

3A search for contraband was called on Thursday and the cellblocks were off limits until after night chow. At around eight the names of the malefactors were announced. The Cuckold and Farragut were called and they went down to the deputy warden’s office. Two spoons had been found, hidden in Farragut’s toilet bowl. He was given six days cell lock. Farragut faced the sentence calmly by first considering the pain of confinement. He assured himself that he could stand confinement with composure. He was at that time the prison’s chief typist, respected for his intelligence, efficiency and speed, and he had to face the possibility that in his absence some new typist might be put in his place in the shop and his slot, his job, his self-importance, would be eclipsed. Someone might have come in that afternoon on the bus who could fire off dittos at twice his speed and usurp his office, his chair, his desk and his lamp. Worried about the thrall of confinement and the threat of his self-esteem, Farragut went back to Tiny, gave him his penance slip and asked: “How will I get my fix?”

4“I’ll check,” said Tiny. “They’ll bring it up from the infirmary, I guess. You don’t get nothing until tomorrow morning.” Farragut didn’t need methadone then, but the morning threatened to usurp the facts of the night. He undressed, got into bed and watched the news on TV. The news for the last two weeks had been dominated by a murderess. She had been given the usual characteristics. She and her husband lived in an expensive house in an exclusive community. The house was painted white, the grounds were planted with costly firs and the lawn and the hedges were beautifully maintained. Her character had been admired. She taught Sunday school and had been a den mother for the Girl Scouts. Her coffeecakes for the Trinity Church bake sale were famous and at PTA meetings she expressed herself with intelligence, character and charm. “Oh, she was so kind,” her neighbors said, “so clean, so friendly, she loved him so that I can’t imagine…” What they couldn’t imagine was that she had murdered her husband, carefully drained his blood and flushed it down the toilet, washed him clean and begun to rectify and improve his physique. First she decapitated the corpse and replaced his head with the drained head of a second victim. She then replaced his genitals with the genitals of her third victim and his feet with the feet of her fourth. It was when she invited a neighbor in to see this perfect man that suspicions had been aroused. She then vanished. Offers to exploit the remains for commercial purposes were being considered, but nothing had been agreed upon. Night after night the fragments of the tale ended with a draw-away shot of the serene white house, the specimen planting and the velvet lawn.

5Lying in bed, Farragut felt his anxiety beginning to mount. He would be denied his fix in the morning. He would die. He would be murdered. He then remembered the times when his life had been threatened. Firstly his father, having written Farragut’s name with his cock, had tried to erase the writing. One of his mother’s favorite stories was of the night that Farragut’s father brought a doctor to the house for dinner. Halfway through the dinner it turned out that the doctor was an abortionist and had been asked to dinner in order to kill Farragut. This, of course, he could not remember, but he could remember walking on a beach with his brother. This was on one of the Atlantic islands. At the tip of the island there was a narrows called Chilton Gut. “Swim?” his brother asked. His brother didn’t like to swim, but Farragut, it was well known, would strip and jump into any body of water. He got out of his clothes and was wading into the sea when some stranger, a fisherman, came running up the beach, shouting: “Stop, stop! What do you think you’re doing?” “I was going in for a dip,” said Farragut. “You’re crazy,” the stranger said. “The tide is turning and even if the rip doesn’t get you the sharks will. You can’t ever swim here. They ought to put up a sign—but at the rip tide you wouldn’t last a minute. You can’t ever swim here. They waste all the taxpayers’ money putting up traffic signs, speeding signs, yield signs, stop signs, but on a well-known deathtrap like this they don’t have any sign at all.” Farragut thanked the stranger and got back into his clothes. His brother had started down the beach. Eben must have jogged or run because he had put quite a distance between them. Farragut caught up with him and the first thing he asked was, “When is Louisa coming back from Denver? I know you’ve told me, but I’ve forgotten.” “Tuesday,” Eben said. “She’s staying over for Ruth’s wedding.” So they walked back to the house, talking about Louisa’s visit. Farragut remembered being happy at the fact that he was alive. The sky was blue.

6At a rehabilitation center in Colorado where Farragut had been confined to check his addiction, the doctors discovered that heroin had damaged his heart. His cure lasted thirty-eight days and before he was discharged he was given his instructions. He was being discharged as an outpatient. Because of his heart he could not, for six weeks, climb stairs, drive a car or exert himself in any way. He must avoid strenuous changes in temperature and above all excitement. Excitement of any sort would kill him. The doctor then used the classic illustration of the man who shoveled snow, entered a hot house and quarreled with his wife. It was as quick as a bullet through the head. Farragut flew east and his flight was uneventful. He got a cab to their apartment, where Marcia let him in. “Hi,” he said and bent to kiss her, but she averted her face. “I’m an outpatient,” he said. “A salt-free diet—not really salt-free, but no salt added. I can’t climb stairs or drive a car and I do have to avoid excitement. It seems easy enough. Maybe we could go to the beach.”

7Marcia walked down the long hall to their bedroom and slammed the door. The noise of the sound was explosive and in case he had missed this she opened the door and slammed it again. The effect on his heart was immediate. He became faint, dizzy and shortwinded. He staggered to the sofa in the living room and lay down. He was in too much pain and fear to realize that the homecoming of a drug addict was not romantic. He fell asleep. The daylight had begun to go when he regained consciousness. His heart was still drumming, his vision was cloudy and he was very weak and frightened. He heard Marcia open the door to their room and come down the hall. “Is there anything I can get you?” she asked. Her tone was murderous.

8“Some sort of kindness,” he said. He was helpless. “A little kindness.”

9“Kindness?” she asked. “Do you expect kindness from me at a time like this? What have you ever done to deserve kindness? What have you ever given me? Drudgery. A superficial and a meaningless life. Dust. Cobwebs. Cars and cigarette lighters that don’t work. Bathtub rings, unflushed toilets, an international renown for sexual depravity, clinical alcoholism and drug addiction, broken arms, legs, brain concussions and now a massive attack of heart failure. That’s what you’ve given me to live with, and now you expect kindness.” The drumming of his heart worsened, his vision got dimmer and he fell asleep, but when he awoke Marcia was cooking something in the kitchen and he was still alive.

10Eben entered again. It was at a party in a New York brownstone. Some guests were leaving and he stood in an open window, shouting goodbye. It was a large window and he was standing on the sill. Below him was an areaway with an iron fence of palings, cast to look like spears. As he stood in the window, someone gave him a swift push. He jumped or fell out the window, missed the iron spears and landed on his knees on the paving. One of the departing guests returned and helped him to his feet and he went on talking about when they would meet again. He did this to avoid looking back at the window to see, if he might, who had pushed him. That he didn’t want to know. He had sprained an ankle and bruised a knee, but he refrained from thinking about the incident again. Many years later, walking in the woods, Eben had suddenly asked: “Do you remember that party at Sarah’s when you got terribly drunk and someone pushed you out the window?” “Yes,” said Farragut. “I’ve never told you who it was,” said Eben. “It was that man from Chicago.” Farragut thought that his brother had incriminated himself with this remark, but Eben seemed to feel exonerated. He braced his shoulders, lifted his head to the light and began to kick the leaves on the path vigorously.

11The lights and the TV went off. Tennis began to ask: “Have you been taken care of? Have you been taken care of?” Farragut, lying on his cot thinking of the morning and his possible death, thought that the dead, compared to the imprisoned, would have some advantages. The dead would at least have panoramic memories and regrets, while he, as a prisoner, found his memories of the shining world to be broken, intermittent and dependent upon chance smells—grass, shoe leather, the odor of piped water in the showers. He possessed some memories, but they were eclipsed and indisposed. Waking in the morning, he cast wildly and desperately around for a word, a metaphor, a touch or smell that would grant him a bearing, but he was left mostly with methadone and his unruly keel. He seemed, in prison, to be a traveler and he had traveled in enough strange countries to recognize this keen alienation. It was the sense that on waking before dawn, everything, beginning with the dream from which he waked, was alien. He had dreamed in another language and felt on waking the texture and smell of strange bedclothes. From the window came the strange smell of strange fuels. He bathed in strange and rusty water, wiped his ass on strange and barbarous toilet paper and climbed down unfamiliar stairs to be served a strange and profoundly offensive breakfast. That was travel. It was the same here. Everything he saw, touched, smelled and dreamed of was cruelly alien, but this continent or nation in which he might spend the rest of his living days had no flag, no anthem, no monarch, president, taxes, boundaries or graves.

12He slept poorly and felt haggard when he woke. Chicken Number Two brought him gruel and coffee, but his heart was moving along with his watch. If the methadone didn’t come at nine he would begin to die. It would not be anything that he could walk into, like an electric chair or a noose. At five minutes to nine he began to shout at Tiny. “I want my fix, it’s time for my fix, just let me get down to the infirmary and get my fix.” “Well, he has to take care of the line down there,” Tiny said. “Home deliveries don’t come until later.” “Maybe they don’t make home deliveries,” said Farragut. He sat on his cot, closed his eyes and tried to force himself into unconsciousness. This lasted a few minutes. Then he roared: “Get me my fix, for Jesus Christ’s sake!” Tiny went on figuring work sheets, but Farragut could barely see him. The rest of the men who hadn’t gone to shop began to watch. There was no one else in cell lock but the Cuckold. Then Chisholm, the deputy warden, came in with two other assholes. “I hear you got a withdrawal show scheduled,” he said. “Yeah,” said Tiny. “It’s not my idea.” He didn’t look up from his work sheets. “Take any empty table. The floor show’s about to begin.”

13Farragut had begun to sweat from his armpits, crotch and brow. Then the sweat flowed down his ribs and soaked his trousers. His eyes were burning. He could still marshal the percentiles. He would lose fifty percent vision. When the sweat was in full flood, he began to shake. This began with his hands. He sat on them, but then his head began to wag. He stood. He was shaking all over. Then his right arm flew out. He pulled it back. His left knee jerked up into the air. He pushed it down, but it went up again and began to go up and down like a piston. He fell and beat his head on the floor, trying to achieve the reasonableness of pain. Pain would give him peace. When he realized that he could not reach pain this way, he began the enormous struggle to hang himself. He tried fifteen or a million times before he was able to get his hand on his belt buckle. His hand flew away and after another long struggle he got it back to the buckle and unfastened it. Then, on his knees, with his head still on the floor, he jerked the belt out of the loops. The sweat had stopped. Convulsions of cold racked him. No longer even on his knees, but moving over the floor like a swimmer, he got to the chair, looped the buckle onto itself for a noose and fastened the belt to a nail on the chair. He was trying to strangle himself when Chisholm said: “Cut the poor prick down and get his fix.” Tiny unlocked the cell door. Farragut couldn’t see much, but he could see this, and the instant the cell was unlocked he sprang to his feet, collided with Tiny and was halfway out the cell and running for the infirmary when Chisholm brained him with a chair. He came to in the infirmary with his left leg in a plaster cast and half his head in bandages. Tiny was there in civilian clothes. “Farragut, Farragut,” he asked, “why is you an addict?”

14Farragut didn’t reply. Tiny patted him on the head. “I’ll bring you in some fresh tomatoes tomorrow. My wife puts up fifty jars of tomato sauce. We have tomatoes for breakfast, lunch and supper. But I still got tomatoes left over. I’ll bring some in tomorrow. You want anything else?”

15“No, thank you,” said Farragut. “I’d like some tomatoes.”

16“Why is you an addict?” asked Tiny, and he went away.

17Farragut was not disconcerted by the question, but he was provoked. It was only natural that he should be an addict. He had been raised by people who dealt in contraband. Not hard drugs, but unlicensed spiritual, intellectual and erotic stimulants. He was the citizen, the product of some border principality such as Liechtenstein. His background lacked the mountainous scenery, but his passport was fat with visas, he dealt in spiritual contraband, spoke four languages poorly and knew the words to four national anthems. Once when he was sitting in a café in Kitzbühel with his brother, listening to a band concert, Eben suddenly sprang to his feet and clapped his Tyrolean hat over his heart. “What’s up?” Farragut asked, and Eben said, “They are about to play the national anthem.” What the band was about to play was “Home on the Range,” but Farragut remembered this to illustrate the fact that his family had endeavored to be versatile at every political, spiritual and erotic level. It helped to explain the fact that he was an addict.

18Farragut could remember his mother coming down a circular staircase in a coral-colored dress heavily embroidered with pearls on her way to hear Tosca; and he could remember her pumping gas on the main road to Cape Cod at that memorable point in the landscape where scrub pine takes over and the nearness of the Great Atlantic Ocean can be read in the pallor of the sky and the salt air. His mother didn’t actually wear tennis sneakers, but she wore some kind of health shoe and her dress was much lower in the bow than in the stern. He could remember her casually and repeatedly regretting invitations to dine with the Trenchers, who were famous in the village for having, in the space of a week, bought both a pipe organ and a yacht. The Trenchers were millionaires—they were arrivistes—they had a butler; but then, the Farraguts had run through several butlers—Mario, Fender and Chadwick—and now claimed to enjoy setting their own table. The Farraguts were the sort of people who had lived in a Victorian mansion and when this was lost had moved back to the family homestead. This included a shabby and splendid eighteenthcentury house and the franchise on two Socony gas pumps that stood in front of the house where Grandmother’s famous rose garden had been. When the news got out that they had lost all their money and were going to run a gas station, Farragut’s Aunt Louisa came directly to the house and, standing in the hallway, exclaimed: “You cannot pump gasoline!” “Why not?” asked Farragut’s mother. Aunt Louisa’s chauffeur came in and put a box of tomatoes on the floor. He wore puttees. “Because,” said Aunt Louisa, “you will lose all your friends.” “To the contrary,” said Farragut’s mother. “I shall discover precisely who they are.” The cream of the post-Freudian generation were addicts. The rest were those psychiatric reconstructions you used to see in the back of unpopular rooms at cocktail parties. They seemed to be intact, but if you touched them in the wrong place at the wrong time they would collapse all over the floor like a spatch-cocked card trick. Drug addiction is symptomatic. Opium eaters know. Farragut remembered a fellow opium eater named Polly, whose mother was an on-again off-again recording and club singer. Her name was Corinne. When Corinne was way down and struggling to get back, Farragut took Polly to her mother’s big breakthrough in Las Vegas. The breakthrough was successful and Corinne went on from a has-been to the third-biggest recording star in the world, and while this was important, what he remembered was that Polly, who had trouble with her size, ate all the bread and butter on the table during her mummy’s first critical set and when this was finished— Farragut meant the set—everybody stood up and cheered and Polly grasped his arm and said: “That’s my mummy, that’s my dear mummy.” So there was dear mummy in a hard spot that blazed with the blues of a diamond and would in fact prove to be the smile of the world and how could you square this with lullabys and breast-feeding except by eating opium? For Farragut the word “mother” evoked the image of a woman pumping gas, curtsying at the Assemblies and banging a lectern with her gavel. This confused him and he would blame his confusion on the fine arts, on Degas. There is a Degas painting of a woman with a bowl of chrysanthemums that had come to represent to Farragut the great serenity of “mother.” The world kept urging him to match his own mother, a famous arsonist, snob, gas pumper and wing shot, against the image of the stranger with her autumnal and bitter-smelling flowers. Why had the universe encouraged this gap? Why had he been encouraged to cultivate so broad a border of sorrow? He had not been plucked off some star by a stork, so why should he and everybody else behave as if this were the case? The opium eater knew better. After Corinne’s big comeback and breakthrough there was a big triumphant party and when he and Polly came in, dear Mummy made a straight line for her only daughter, her only child. “Polly,” she said, “I could have killed you. You sat right in front of me, right in front of me, and during the first set of my big comeback you ate a whole basket of rolls—eight: I counted them— and you cleaned up one of those ice cream scoops of butter. How can I follow my arrangements when I’m counting the rolls you eat? Oh, I could have killed you.” Polly, plucked from a star, began to weep, of course, and he got her out of there and back to the hotel, where they had some great Colombian cocaine that made their noses bleed. What else could you do? But Polly was thirty pounds overweight and he had never really liked fat women; he had never really liked any woman who wasn’t a dark-eyed blonde, who didn’t speak at least one language other than English, who didn’t have an income of her own and who couldn’t say the Girl Scout Oath.

19Farragut’s father, Farragut’s own father, had wanted to have his life extinguished as he dwelt in his mother’s womb, and how could he live happily with this knowledge without the support of those plants that draw their wisdom from the soil? Farragut’s father had taken him fishing in the wilderness and had taught him to climb high mountains, but when he had discharged these responsibilities he neglected his son and spent most of his time tacking around Travertine harbor in a little catboat. He talked about having outmaneuvered great storms—a tempest off Falmouth was his favorite—but during Farragut’s lifetime he preferred safe harbors. He was one of those old Yankees who are very adroit at handling their tiller and their sheets. He was great with all lines—kite lines, trout lines and moorings—and he could coil a garden hose with an authority that seemed to Farragut princely. Dance—excepting a German waltz with a pretty woman—the old man thought detestable, but dance best described his performance on a boat. The instant he dropped the mooring he began a performance as ordained, courtly and graceful as any pavane. Line squalls, luffing sails, thunder and lightning never broke his rhythm.

20O heroin, be with me now! When Farragut was about twenty-one he began to lead the Nanuet Cotillion. The Nanuet landed in the New World in 1672. The leader of the expedition was Peter Wentworth. With his brother Eben away, Farragut was, after his drunken and cranky father, the principal male descendent of Wentworth, and so he led the cotillion. It had been a pleasure to leave the gas tanks to Harry—a spastic—and dress in his father’s tails. This was again the thrill of living in a border principality and of course the origin of his opium eating. His father’s tails fitted perfectly. They were made of black broadcloth, as heavy as the stuff of an overcoat, and Farragut thought he looked great in tails. He would drive into the city in whichever car was working, lead some debutante, chosen by the committee for her wealth and her connections, down to the principal box, and bow to its occupants. Then he would dance all night and get back to the gas pumps in the morning.

21The Farraguts were the sort of people who claimed to be sustained by tradition, but who were in fact sustained by the much more robust pursuit of a workable improvisation, uninhibited by consistency. While they were still living in the mansion, they used to have dinner at the club on Thursdays and Sundays. Farragut remembered such a night. His mother had brought the car under the porte-cochere. The car was a convertible called a Jordan Blue Boy that his father had won in a raffle. His father wasn’t with them and was probably on his catboat. Farragut got into the Blue Boy, but his brother remained on the carriage step. Eben was a handsome young man, but his face that night was very white. “I will not go to the club,” he told his mother, “unless you call the steward by his name.” “His name,” said Mrs. Farragut, “is Horton.” “His name is Mr. Horton,” said Eben. “Very well,” said Mrs. Farragut. Eben got into the car. Mrs. Farragut was not an intentionally reckless driver, but her vision was failing and on the road she was an agent of death. She had already killed one Airedale and three cats. Both Eben and Farragut shut their eyes until they heard the sound of the gravel on the club driveway. They took a table and when the steward came to welcome them their mother asked: “What are you going to tempt us with tonight, Horton?” “Excuse me,” said Eben. He left the table and walked home. When Farragut returned he found his brother—a grown man—sobbing in his room; but even Eben, his only brother, had been inconsistent. Years later, when they used to meet for drinks in New York, Eben would summon the waiter by clapping his hands. Once, after the headwaiter had asked them to leave and Farragut had tried to explain to Eben that there were simpler and more acceptable ways of getting a waiter’s attention, Eben had said, “I don’t understand, I simply don’t understand. All I wanted was a drink.”

22Opium had helped Farragut recall with serenity the fact that he had not been sixteen the first time his father threatened to commit suicide. He was sure of his age because he didn’t have a driver’s license. He came in from pumping gas to find the supper table set for two. “Where’s Dad?” he asked—impetuously, because the laconism cultivated by the Farraguts was ceremonial and tribal and one seldom asked questions. His mother sighed and served the red flannel hash with poached eggs. Farragut had already faulted and so he went on: “But where is Dad?” he asked. “I’m not sure,” his mother said. “When I came downstairs to make supper he handed me a long indictment enumerating my failures as a woman, a wife and a mother. There were twenty-two charges. I didn’t read them all. I threw it into the fire. He was quite indignant. He said that he was going to Nagasakit and drown himself. He must have begged rides since he didn’t take the car.” “Excuse me,” said Farragut, quite sincerely. No sarcasm was intended. Some of the family must have said as much as they lay dying. He got into the car and headed for the beach. That’s how he remembered that he was not sixteen, because there was a new policeman in the village of Hepworth, who was the only one who might have stopped him and asked to see his license. The policeman in Hepworth had it in for the family for some reason. Farragut knew all the other policemen in the villages along that coast.

23When he got to Nagasakit he ran down to the beach. It was late in the season, late in the day, and there were no bathers, no lifeguards, nothing at all but a very weary swell from what was already a polluted ocean. How could he tell if it contained his father, with pearls for eyes? He walked along the crescent of the beach. The amusement park was still open. He could hear some music from there, profoundly unserious and belonging very much to the past. He examined the sand to keep from crying. There had been that year a big run on Japanese sandals and also a run on toy knights in armor. There were, left over from the summer, many dismembered knights and odd sandals mixed in the shingle. Respiratory noises came from his beloved sea. The roller coaster was still running. He could hear the clack of the cars on the rail joints and also some very loud laughter—a sound that seemed wasted on that scene. He left the beach. He crossed the road to the entrance of the amusement park. The façade marked a period in the Italian emigration. Workmen from Italy had built a wall of plaster and cement, painted it the saffrons of Rome, and decorated the wall with mermaids and scallop shells. Over the arch was Poseidon with a trident. On the other side of the wall the merrygo-round was turning. There was not a passenger on it. The loud laughter came from some people who were watching the roller coaster. There was Farragut’s father, pretending to drink from an empty bottle and pretending to contemplate suicide from every rise. This clowning was successful. His audience was rapt. Farragut went up to the razorback who ran the controls. “That’s my father,” he said, “could you land him?” The smile the razorback gave Farragut was profoundly sympathetic. When the car carrying his father stopped at the platform, Mr. Farragut saw his son, his youngest, his unwanted, his killjoy. He got out and joined Farragut, as he knew he must. “Oh, Daddy,” said Farragut, “you shouldn’t do this to me in my formative years.” Oh, Farragut, why is you an addict?

24In the morning Tiny brought him four large tomatoes and he was touched. They tasted grievously of summer and freedom. “I’m going to sue,” he told Tiny. “Can you get me a copy of Gilbert’s criminal code?” “I can try,” said Tiny. “Mishkin has one, but he’s renting it out at four cartons a month. You got four?” “I can get them if my wife ever comes,” said Farragut. “I’m going to sue, Tiny, but you’re not whom I’m after. I want to see Chisholm and those other two assholes eating franks and beans for four years with a spoon. And maybe I can. Will you testify?” “Sure, sure,” said Tiny. “I will if I can. I don’t like the way Chisholm gets his kicks out of watching men in withdrawal. I’ll do what I can.” “The case seems very simple to me,” said Farragut. “I was sentenced to prison by the people of the state and the nation. Medicine was prescribed for me, during my imprisonment, by three estimable members of the medical profession. This medicine was denied me by the deputy warden, a man employed by the people to supervise my penance. He then declared my predictable death throes to be an entertainment. It’s that simple.”

25“Well, you can try,” said Tiny. “Ten, fifteen years ago a fellow who got beat up sued and they gave him a lot of skin grafts. And when they knocked out Freddy the Killer’s teeth he sued and they gave him two new sets of teeth. He never wore them except when we had turkey. Freddy was a great basketball star, but that was long before your time. Twenty-five, twenty-four years ago we had an undefeated basketball team here. I’m off tomorrow, but I’ll see you the day after. Oh, Farragut, why is you an addict?”

26When the bandages were taken off Farragut’s skull, he found, of course, that his head had been shaven, but there were no mirrors around the infirmary and he didn’t have his appearance to worry about. He tried with his fingers to count the stitches on his skull, but he could not keep an accurate count. He asked the orderly if he knew how many there were. “Oh, sure, sure,” the orderly said. “You got twenty-two. I went to cellblock F to get you. You was lying on the floor. Tony and I got the stretcher and brought you up to the operating room.” The fact that he, Farragut, had it in his power to send Chisholm, the deputy warden, to prison appeared to him as an unchallengeable fact. The image of the deputy warden eating franks and rice with a spoon appeared to him with the windless serenity of a consummated obsession. It was simply a question of time. His leg was in a cast, he had been told, because he had torn the cartilage in his knee. That he had twice before torn the cartilage in his knee in skiing accidents was something that he was absolutely incapable of remembering. He would limp for the rest of his life and he was profoundly gratified to think that the deputy warden had made an entertainment of his death throes and left him a cripple.

27“Tell me again,” Farragut asked the orderly. “How many stitches were there in my skull?” “Twenty-two, twenty-two,” said the orderly. “I already told you. You bled like a pig. I know what I’m talking about because I used to kill pigs. When Tony and I went down to your cellblock there was blood all over the place. You was lying on the floor.” “Who else was there?” asked Farragut. “Tiny, naturally,” said the orderly. “Chisholm, the deputy warden, and Lieutenant Sutfin and Lieutenant Tillitson. Also there was a dude in cell lock. I don’t know who he was.” “Would you repeat what you’ve just said to a lawyer?” asked Farragut. “Sure, sure—it’s what I saw. I’m a truthful man. I say what I see.” “Could I see a lawyer?” “Sure, sure,” said the orderly. “They come in once or twice a week. There’s a Committee for the Legal Protection of Inmates. The next time one comes in I’ll tell him about you.” A few days later a lawyer came over to Farragut’s bed. His hair and his beard were so full that Farragut couldn’t judge his age or his face, although there was no gray in his beard. His voice was light. His brown suit was worn, there was mud on his right shoe and two of his fingernails were dirty. The investment in his legal education had never been recouped. “Good morning,” he said, “let’s see, let’s see. I’m sorry to be so slow, but I didn’t know that you wanted the law until the day before yesterday.” He carried a clipboard with a thick file of papers. “Here are your facts,” he said. “I think I’ve got everything here. Armed robbery. Zip to ten. Second offense. That’s you, isn’t it?” “No,” said Farragut. “Burglary?” the lawyer asked. “Breaking and entering with criminal intent?” “No,” said Farragut. “Well, then, you must be second-degree homicide. Fratricide. You attempted escape on the eighteenth and you were disciplined. If you’ll just sign this release here, no charges will be brought.” “What kind of charges?” “Attempted escape,” said the lawyer. “You can get seven years for that. But if you sign this release the whole thing will be forgotten.” He passed Farragut the clipboard and a pen. Farragut held the board on his knees and the pen in his hand. “I didn’t attempt escape,” he said, “and I have witnesses. I was in the lower tier of cellblock F in the sixth lock-in of a maximum-security prison. I attempted to leave my cell, driven by the need for prescribed medicine. If an attempt to leave one’s cell six lock-ins deep in a maximum-security prison constitutes an attempted escape, this prison is a house of cards.” “Oh, my,” said the lawyer. “Why don’t you reform the Department of Correction?”

28“The Department of Correction,” said Farragut, “is merely an arm of the judiciary. It is not the warden and the assholes who sentenced us to prison. It is the judiciary.”

29“Oh ho ho,” said the lawyer. “I have a terrible backache.” He leaned forward stiffly and massaged his back with his right hand. “I got a backache from eating cheeseburgers. You got any home remedy for backaches contracted while eating cheeseburgers? Just sign the release and I’ll leave you and your opinions alone. You know what they say about opinions?”

30“Yes,” said Farragut. “Opinions are like assholes. Everybody has one and they all smell.”

31“Oh ho ho,” said the lawyer. His voice sounded very light and youthful. Farragut hid his pen under the bedclothes. “You know Charlie?” the lawyer asked, softly, softly. “I’ve seen him in chow,” said Farragut. “I know who he is. I know that nobody speaks to him.”

32“Charlie’s a great fellow,” said the lawyer. “He used to work for Pennigrino, the top pimp. Charlie used to discipline the chicks.” Now his voice was very low. “When a chick went wrong Charlie used to break her legs backwards. You want to play Scrabble with Charlie—you want to play Scrabble with Charlie or you want to sign this release?”

33Farragut, with a swift, geometrical calculation of the possible charges involved, fired the clipboard at the beard. “Oh, my back,” said the lawyer, “oh, God, my back.” He got to his feet. He carried the clipboard. He put his right hand in his pocket. He did not seem to notice the loss of his pen. He did not speak to the orderly or the guards, but went straight out of the ward. Farragut began to insert the pen up his asshole. From what he had been told—from what he had seen of the world—his asshole was singularly small, unreceptive and frigid. He got the pen in only as far as the clip and this was painful, but the pen was concealed. The orderly was called out of the ward and when he returned he went directly to Farragut and asked if he had the lawyer’s pen. “I know I threw the clipboard at him,” said Farragut. “I’m terribly sorry. I lost my temper. I hope I didn’t hurt him.”

34“He said he left his pen here,” said the orderly. He looked under the bed, in the drawer of the cabinet, under the pillow, along the window sill and under the mattress. Then a guard joined him in the search, stripped the bed, stripped Farragut naked and made some slighting reference to the size of his cock, but neither of them —through kindness, Farragut thought—went near the pen. “I can’t find it,” said the orderly. “We’ve got to find it,” said the guard. “He says we’ve got to find it.” “Well, tell him to find it himself,” said the orderly. The guard went out and Farragut was afraid that the beard would return, but the guard returned alone and spoke to the orderly. “You’re going up in the world,” said the orderly to Farragut, very sadly. “They’re putting you in a private room.”

35He passed Farragut his crutches and helped him into his shift. Farragut, swinging forward clumsily on his crutches and with the pen up his ass, followed the guard out of the ward and down a corridor that smelled sharply of quicklime to a door locked with a bar and a padlock. The guard had some trouble with the key. The door opened onto a very small cell with a window too high to be seen from, a toilet, a Bible and a mattress with a folded sheet and blanket. “How long?” asked Farragut. “The lawyer’s booked you in for a month,” said the guard, “but I seen Tiny give you some tomatoes and if Tiny’s your friend you’ll be out in a week.” He shut and barred the door.

36Farragut removed the pen. It was with this precious instrument that he would indict Chisholm, and he clearly saw Chisholm in his third year of prison grays eating franks and rice with a bent tin spoon. He needed paper. There was no toilet paper. If he demanded this he would, he knew, with luck get one sheet a day. He seized on the Bible. This was a small copy, bound in red, but the end pages were a solid, clerical black and the rest of the pages were so heavily printed that he could not write over them. He wanted to write his indictment of Chisholm at once. That the lawyer had been determined to deny him a pen may have exaggerated the importance of his writing the indictment, but the only alternative would be to phrase his accusation and commit this to memory and he doubted if he could accomplish this. He had the pen, but the only surface upon which he could write seemed to be the wall of his cell. He could write his indictment on the wall and then commit it to memory, but some part of his background and its influence on his character restrained him from using the wall for a page. He was a man, he preserved at least some vision of dignity, and to write what might be his last statement on the wall seemed to him an undue exploitation of a bizarre situation. His regard for rectitude was still with him. He could write on his plaster cast, his shift or his sheet. The plaster cast was out since he could reach only half of its surface and the roundness of the cast left him a very limited area. He wrote a few letters on his shift. The instant the felt pen touched the cloth, the ink spread to display the complexity of the thread count, the warp and woof of this very simple garment. The shift was out. His prejudice against the wall was still strong and so he tried the sheet. The prison laundry had, mercifully, used a great deal of starch and he found the surface of the sheet nearly as useful as paper. He and the sheet would be together for at least a week. He could cover the sheet with his remarks, clarify and edit these, and then commit them to memory. When he returned to cellblock F and the shop, he could type his remarks and have them kited to his governor, his bishop and his girl.