He walked to a desk upon which sat a typewriter. He was fascinated with the machine; never in his life had he used one of them. It was a queer instrument, something beyond the rim of his life. Whenever he had been in an office where a girl was typing, he had always involuntarily spoken in whispers. As he had seen others do, he inserted a sheet of paper into the machine. It went in lopsided but he did not know how to straighten it. Spelling in a soft, diffident voice, he pecked his name on the keys: freddaniels. He looked at it and laughed.

Yes, he would take the typewriter too. He lifted the machine and placed it atop of the bulk of money. He did not feel that he was stealing, for the cleaver, the radio, and the money were on the same level of value, all meant the same thing to him. They were the toys of the men who lived in the dead world of sunshine and rain he had left, the world that had condemned him. He contemplated his loot for a long time, then went to the washroom, got a towel and tied the sack tightly. Then he looked up and was momentarily frightened by his shadow looming on the wall in front of him.

He lifted the sack, descended the steps and lugged it across the basement, gasping for breath. Finally he stood in the cave, brooding about the items he had stolen, and he remembered the singing in the church, the people yelling in the theatre, the dead baby, and the nude man stretched out cold upon the white table. . . . He saw these things hovering before his eyes and he felt that some dim meaning tied them together, that some magical relationship made them kin. He stared with vacant eyes, convinced that all of these images, with their tongueless reality, were striving to tell him something.

V

Seeing with his fingers, he emptied the sack and set each item neatly upon the earth floor. Exploring farther, he took the bulb, the socket, and the wire out of the tool chest; he was elated to find a double socket on one end of the wire. He crammed the stuff into his pocket and hoisted himself upon the rusty pipes and looked through the slit; the church was dim and empty. Somewhere in this wall were live electric wires. But where? He lowered himself, groped and tapped the brick wall lightly with the butt of the screwdriver, listening vainly for hollow sounds. I’ll just take a chance, he said.

He tried for an hour to dislodge a brick, but with no success. He struck a match and found that he had dug a depth of only an inch! No use in fooling with this, he said with a sigh. He looked upward in the flickering light of the match, then lowered his eyes, only to glance up again, startled. Directly above his head was a wealth of electric wiring running along the entire length of the low ceiling. I’ll be damned, he said, snickering.