Now I am alone.
Yet for a time this remained his chief concern, after he became accustomed to the idea that the ceiling would not crush him, that the bed was not electrified, the drinking water scalding. If there was nothing to resist, what was there to comply with?
He couldn’t ask other prisoners. There were no other prisoners. Through the bars of his cell he could see only a long corridor of blank wall. And when he shouted for others to identify themselves—expecting no answer — no one replied. Not even the guard came by to make him shut up.
Feldman had an insight after the guard left. Of course, he thought, he brought me dinner. The rule of silence! The same here as in the dining hall. Now he had a clue about how to act. He was impatient for the guard to return for his tray so he could ask him if he was right. But after an hour the man had not returned. Now the question was immense. Each time he heard a noise Feldman sprang from his cot to see if the guard was coming. There was never anyone in the corridor.
A little soup he had not finished filmed the bottom of the bowl. His fork was chinked at its interstices with bits of carrot, scabs of meat. On the metal tray the scraps had become garbage. Feldman flushed the larger remnants down the toilet and tried to wash off the tinier pieces in his small sink, but he had no soap and the sink would not drain properly. A rich thin scum collected in the basin. Feldman scooped it up with his soupspoon and tried to knock it into the toilet, but it splattered on the floor and along the rim of the bowl. It looked as if he had vomited. He cleaned it up with the last four sheets of toilet paper. Still the guard had not come.
Now it was very late. He was tired, but he did not want to go to sleep until he had asked the guard his question. He couldn’t risk lying down. Faintly, he heard the signal that meant lights out in the other parts of the prison. Another hour passed. He sat in the dark and no longer jumped at each noise. It was difficult to keep his eyes open. After a while he lay down. Soon he was asleep.
When he awoke in the morning his tray was still there. It frightened him. He knew what it was all about now. They meant to starve him. He thought at once of the end a few weeks from now — how long could a man go without food? two weeks? three? — when he would be on his cot, delirious, deranged, hunger like swallowed knives, his head an open sore, and already he could feel it starting. That was why he was so isolated, why no one could hear him when he shouted. Science. It was science. The goddamned scientific soundproof walls, their scientific thickness. He was ferociously hungry. He sprang up, despising his fastidiousness of the night before, regretting that he had thrown away those scraps. His action had had the heavy renunciatory quality of an obligation. I did it to myself, I did it to myself was all he could think of, as if, his resistance surrendered, he had shamefully compounded the loss of his life. He examined the sink. A thin band of dried smutty food remained, the color and consistency of apple butter. He scraped this up, carefully collecting it in his spoon and placing it back in the tray. He began to plan how he would apportion it to himself. It was senseless, he knew, but he prayed that some small value remained in it. Didn’t they say that in the peels and skins, in the cut green tufts of carrots and vitals of animals and rinds of cheese and cores of fruit and calluses of vegetables, the real nutrition lay? Why not in garbage? Why not some dear good stuff residual in that? See the niggers, how they thrived, hearty on the shitty cuts.
Just then the guard came with his breakfast.
Feldman was too astonished to ask his question. He simply took it and gave back his empty tray.
“Use the same silver,” the guard said, and left.
At noon Feldman asked him. “Do I have to be silent during mealtimes?”
“What for?” the guard said.
So, the rules did not operate!
He had been oppressed by the prison’s deflecting forms. Even in his resistance to those forms he had been deflected, his life eaten up by a concern with behavior, the appearance of behavior. All rights wrested their existence from something inimical to rights. Upstairs, the simplest thing he could will had to be meshed with the prison’s routine opposition to the thing willed. This was why he assumed there would be something he could resist in solitary, because he felt his life changed. Upstairs, it was the prison which resisted. Each thing he wanted—each thing — the prison did not want. It should have been a relief, then, to get away from the rules of silence, permission slips, warden’s flags, assigned tables, assemblies, the censuses when the prisoners froze and the pencil man came by to count them. But it wasn’t.
He learned at last, then, that his punishment down here was to be himself. It was ridiculous. How could he be Feldman if there was no one there that he could be Feldman to? He thought of the garbage with which he had hoped a few hours before to support his life. He thought of all nugatory things thrown away, of vast lots blooming with junk. That’s where the nutrition wasn’t.
Now I am alone.
Don’t say that Feldman was unwilling to go along with the program.
What is the program?
The clever warden didn’t do things haphazardly. There was significance in the placement of each water cooler. (Hadn’t he seen the bills? Eight hundred twelve dollars for replumbing, for pulling out the old pipes and settling them in a new pattern. Why?) He supposed he was meant to go over his sins, to parse his past like a grammarian. It was the old wilderness routine. They’d left him in this desert to think about things.
Feldman refused to think about his past. If that was the warden’s purpose the man was out of luck. People don’t remember what has happened to them, he thought. You couldn’t even remember how you felt. Unhappiness was always neutralizing itself. Likewise joy. So that the past had no character — neither of pain nor pleasure. It gave the impression of something canceled out, a sort of eternal breaking even. It was like what happened with the leaves. In the first flush days of spring, he couldn’t remember when the trees had been without leaves. Again in autumn it seemed as if they had never had them. Even this experience — if I outlive it, he thought — will neutralize itself. It was a kind of fallout. Too much was lost. Too much was lost even of his neutralized life. He knew that you were supposed to be able to store in your subconscious everything that had ever happened to you. How many slices of cake you’d had at your eighth birthday party, the names of all the people you’d ever met. That if they gave you truth serum you’d spew all this stuff back. He didn’t believe it.