John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

“That may be so,” Davies said. “But I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

“On the contrary,” Craine said, and looked up, his smile wide open, downright friendly, “you’ve helped me very much!”

At the silver-wigged secretary’s desk he got directions to the computer center and borrowed the phone again. As he dialed, Chairman Davies watched, on the chance that he might still be of use, then nodded, smiled, and stepped back into his office. This time he did not close the door.

“Craine,” Hannah said, “where the devil are you?”

“Out in the field,” he said, and grinned.

“Out in the field,” she mimicked. But she knew she’d get nothing more from him and gave it up. “McClaren’s still trying to reach you,” she said.

“I thought he might be. I imagine I’ll eventually run into him.”

“I wish you luck,” she said. “He’s in a very bad mood. I went over and tried to talk with Carnac.”

“Go on.”

“Nothin. Zero.”

Craine frowned. “He wouldn’t talk?”

“Talked a blue streak, but not English. Funny thing was, I’d swear he was trine with all his might to get through to me.”

“Scared, you think?”

“God knows. I think just plain crazy.”

“OK,” Craine said. “Hold the fort, I’ll check in.” He handed the receiver to the girl. When she’d hung it on the cradle, he asked, “You know this person, Terrance Rush? I noticed when I was writing down the name, you seemed—”

“He’s one of our graduate students,” she said. “I can give you his office number — it’s up on the fourth floor — but he probably won’t be there, he’ll be over in the library, in his carrel. You’d have to get that over at the library.”

He waited while she added the office number to the name and address on the slip of paper, then folded it again and tucked it into his shirt pocket, where he thought with luck he might find it. Rush, he thought. Elaine Glass’s teacher. Was it possible that the thing could be that easy?

“Thank you for all your time and trouble,” he said. “Thank you very much!”

“Our pleasure,” she said. As he was about to turn away she gave him an earnest look, a little panicky and furtive, as if she wished the others couldn’t hear what she was saying. “If there’s anything I can do for, you know, the case … don’t hesitate to call me. I’m Janet.”

“Yes, I know.” He smiled. “Thank you, Janet. Thank you very much.” As he approached the door to the hallway he turned to nod good-bye one last time and caught, out of the corner of his eye, Chairman Davies’ door closing, without a sound. He shot a look at Janet and saw that she too had noticed. Their eyes met firmly for an instant. Craine winked.

With magnificent self-control he passed the truck without stopping for a drink and walked on to the library. The clock over the door said 12:05. He walked faster. It was a beautiful building, or such was Gerald Craine’s opinion — grand rooms, black marble columns, marble floors smooth as glass, everywhere the smell — the presence , as people in stereo say — of books. It seemed to him, as it always did when he came here, simply incredible that he didn’t spend his life here. At the sight of students and professors lined up at the checkout computers, or copying down call numbers at the central catalogue, browsing in the seven-day new-acquisitions room, or sprawled in the carpeted lounges, reading, Craine’s soul, ordinarily so indifferent to fortune, stirred toward covetousness and envy. He reminded himself, as he always did here, that maybe ninety percent of the people around him weren’t interested in books, were merely faking their courses, skimming half-heartedly or reading carefully but without real interest or understanding — but he didn’t believe it. Every student who passed with a great, awkward armload clamped under his chin was an affront to Craine, like a fat, smiling czar to a peasant Communist — though of course it was nonsense: he could come here whenever he pleased, if he pleased. Theoretically, at least. It was only in his mind that he was an alien here, a rat darting furtively through a room of sleeping cats.

At the checkout desk he asked a well-dressed black boy in glasses, “Where do I get the number of a person’s library carrel?”

Without looking up from his work the boy pointed at the ceiling and said, “Second floor, main desk.”

“Thank you very much,” Craine said, bowing, and hurried to the elevator.

Two minutes later, with the number of Terrance Rush’s carrel on a pink slip of paper in his hand, Craine got off the elevator at the fifth floor and hurried along the stacks, hunting for where the carrels began. Half unaware that he was doing it, he read titles as he walked. Abruptly, he stopped, staring at a dark blue book almost in front of him, at eye level: Clairvoyance , it said. For the first time since it had happened he remembered that something had come over him when he was standing at Ira Katz’s door, a kind of dream or maybe a vision, very brief, but powerful: he — or someone — was standing in the dark, under trees, and someone was moving very quietly toward him, hands raised. Craine, remembering, put one hand over his mouth. It was that night — somewhere where there were leaves — that Ira’s friend April had been murdered.

The fragments that follow have sufficient internal coherence to justify inclusion — but no attempt has been made to render them sequential. Fragments number two and three are versions of the same scene but distinct enough as presentations to demonstrate the way Gardner worked with what he acknowledges as “borrowed material.” Fragment number seven would appear to pertain to a different story-line — and time, it’s winter — entirely. Craine has had cancer of the colon, not — as in this closing fragment — a mental collapse.

Royce visits Craine’s room well before Hannah’s warning that he’s planning such a visit; Elaine Glass acquires a suntan in inverse proportion to her time spent in the sun. It’s as difficult for the reader as for the book’s protagonist to know the actual hour and the date.

Craine and his creator might have proposed a solution; we cannot. To paraphrase Professor Weintraub’s lecture on computers, there are routines and sub-routines and sub-sub-sub-routines. “How does one man, in a single lifetime, program them all in, you ask me? The answer is, he doesn’t — and therein lies a tale.”

This novel is a “construction” of sorts: The characters and plot are for the most part imaginary, but passages from numerous books have been ripped from their original contexts and inserted, slightly altered, into this story. I cannot explain in detail here — perhaps I could not explain fully, down to the last iota, even to myself — why I have not totally recast borrowed material, so that no acknowledgment is legally or morally necessary; but I can say this much: my ideal novel is a universe of voices, not a work of triumphant individual will but a human chorus, sometimes in harmony, sometimes not — an edifice modified by all who have used it, generation on generation, the way very old churches and schools have been modified, a window plugged here, a chimney added there, here and there old beams replaced by steel — a concatenation in which I, the novelist, serve mainly as moderator, keeping the various contributions more or less relevant both in the sense that they apply and in the sense that they tend to move the whole kaboodle in some direction that satisfies my intuition of where things ought to go. I don’t mean to suggest that I’m indifferent to design (though it’s true that I have no objection to “loose, baggy monsters” if they hold my attention); I mean only that, writing a novel, one is always on familiar philosophical ground. No one, not even the most ingenious writer of sci-fi, can find a wholly new domain for dramas of human personality in conflict, which is our business, mostly, or so it seems to me. And the philosophical ground of this novel, being as old, at least, as human consciousness, has been much trampled over the years and even millions of years, so that to limit one’s dramatizing voice would be like stubbornly refusing to use any mathematics one has not thought up from scratch by oneself.