3. Silence at meals. Sit at your assigned table. There’s no real complaint here.
4. You already know the mechanics of permission slips and passes and so forth, so I won’t go into that here except to say that it’s to a man’s benefit to learn to live with nuisance. Accustom yourself to it. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for an annoyed man to enter into Heaven.
5. Work. THIS IS MOST IMPORTANT! I can’t emphasize this too much. Develop a good work ethic. The most difficult thing you will have to face up to here is the problem of sharpening your work ethic in the absence of a profit motive. But this is very important. I assure you, Feldman, if you can overcome your qualms in this area the world will absolutely open up for you. You will begin to understand how ordinary life is. What do you need here that isn’t provided? Food? We give you food. Shelter ditto. Likewise plumbing. If you need an operation or an aspirin tablet, ask and it shall be given. What’s left? Movies? We show subsistence-level movies once a week. Live with an edge on. I don’t say suffer. Repress, repress. Have Spartan sensibilities. Be always a little uncomfortable. Then, when pain comes — and how often does it come? real pain is very rare — it won’t matter so much. I’ve already said more than is necessary. (I don’t owe you anything.) Work hard at your job. You’re in the canteen. These men have a limited amount of money to spend. Still, you’re a merchandiser. See what you can do to improve business in your department. Let’s make that more positive. I want to see improvement over last month’s figures, or else!
6. Sex. There’s no complaint here. I’m no prude. I don’t know what your tastes are and I don’t want to know. What’s okay by consenting adults is okay by me.
7. Free time. This is up to you. You can read, play sports, work in the model shop — whatever. It’s a good idea, however, to make a friend. Many of the men here develop lasting relationships that enrich their lives. Now I know that you’ve been listening to several of these men recently and letting them tell you about their troubles. All I can say is, that isn’t exactly what I mean. You were selfish there, Feldman. You did that out of morbid, unhealthy curiosity and to achieve a basis of comparison for your own comfort. That must stop. (Some of them were putting you on, anyway.) Life is ordinary. Mine is, his is, yours is. I could give you literally hundreds of examples that come readily to mind, but right here on my desk now is the file of Rudolph Held. Held is in this prison for arson. (You’ve probably seen him. Rudy’s the trusty who runs the projector.) Now you might think that arson is a sick, dramatic, extraordinary crime, and for some perhaps it is, but Rudy gets no hard-ons from setting fires. He doesn’t wet his pants when he hears a siren. Rudy’s a looter. He starts a fire and is there on the scene when it takes. He’s always been very athletic, fast, a champion sprinter in high school, and a superb broken-field runner. However, Rudy didn’t have the opportunity of going on to college to develop these interests. He might conceivably have been offered athletic scholarships, but his father died when he was very young — of a perfectly ordinary coronary — and he had to remain with his mother and support her. Actually, he didn’t even finish high school, need was so pressing. Well, this was the Depression, and there wasn’t much work available for a boy like Rudy. He found a job delivering groceries in a wealthy part of town, but then his mother became ill — these things happen — and he needed extra money for an operation. He remembered those wealthy homes and the valuable things he had seen in them. What was more natural for a loyal, dutiful boy than to think of stealing them in order to obtain money for his mom’s operation? But how could a kid delivering groceries, limited mostly to the kitchen, grab anything of value? He knew he’d have to go back at night, to break and to enter. In a wealthy home there are always plenty of people around — servants, guests. It was too risky. (Again, self-preservation is a perfectly normal, ordinary motivation in human beings.) If it was to do himself or his mother any good he had to find some sure-fire way of getting into these homes and stealing the stuff. He asked himself: under what conditions will it seem normal to force your way into a home that is not your own? And the answer came — perfectly rational, perfectly normal: when that house is on fire and it looks like you’re going in to save someone! So Rudy would start a fire and then bust through a window and go in and take what he needed. He made so much noise he was actually responsible for saving many lives, and then, with his God-given talent for broken-field running — and what’s more natural than making use of your talents? — he’d dodge around in the flames and burning rooms, grabbing up whatever he needed. So you see? When you understand the background, there’s a reason for everything. Nothing is strange. Consecutive, the world is consecutive. It’s rational. Life is ordinary.
You’ll be getting another examination in a month. If you’re no better then, stronger measures will have to be taken.
Fisher
Sure it’s ordinary, Feldman thought, awakened the next morning by the flash of sun on the bright mirror surfaces of the bars Lurie had shined. Sure it’s ordinary, he thought, plunging his arm deep into the toilet bowl to polish it. He looked up and down the long line of cells. Men sat on the sides of their cots, their shoulders slumped, their heads in their hands. Sure it is.
“Good morning, fellas,” he said to the cellblock at large, to the murderers and robbers of banks, “how’d you sleep?”
“Stow it, big mouth,” warned a convict in another cell. “Watch your step, pig creep. Fuck with me and I’ll get you on your way through the foundry to deposit the chits. I’ll crack your skull with a shovel and stuff your body into furnace six.”
“These things happen,” Feldman said.
He would give the warden his way. When in jail, he thought. It was a matter of indifference to him. Life was ordinary. Only what happens to you, he thought, not entirely clear what he meant. Then he thought: My crime, one of them, was that I thought the world itself was happening to me. And when it didn’t, I tried to make it happen. Ah, he thought, like the other bad man — like Mix.
That warden, he thought, shuddering, he’ll pull me apart. The thing to do is to play ball. The warden was a great man. As great a man as he had encountered. As great as his father. Greater. To use his health like that, to scare him into docility! The man used the character of the opposition. To fright he applied fear, to greed dreams of surfeit, to courage (the complicated possibilities of his system of silence in the dining hall) encouragement. It was important to know what he thought of you. Feldman remembered his file. What was in it? Ed Slipper had let him down. Slipper had been in the infirmary nine days. Had the warden anything to do with that? Incommunicado. When he was there for his physical, Feldman had bribed an orderly to get a report on him.
Higher purposes. He was all higher purposes, the warden. Feldman knew that, and the warden knew he knew. That probably explained the warden’s note, the explanations that explained nothing, the warden’s fear that Feldman was on to something. (Sure, fear. The son of a bitch was on the run. You didn’t understand fear that well without having known a fair amount of it yourself. You couldn’t manipulate greed unless you’d been there.) Then — he had come a long way today — this: he’s one too. The warden. He’s a bad man too!
Maybe. Higher purposes. Nobody understood the prison. Rules, exceptions to rules. The world as tightrope. Feldman didn’t know. Does he want me to understand? Does he not want me to understand?