John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

I have borrowed so widely that no complete list of original sources is possible. A few books I’ve made heavy use of are Joseph Weizenbaum’s Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation , Howard Gardner’s The Shattered Mind , Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death , Robert E. Ornstein’s The Psychology of Consciousness , and M. B. Dykshoorn’s My Passport Reads Clairvoyant . From all of these books I take individual lines (which I make some character speak), images and symbols which may sink of their own weight to the novel’s bedrock or may, on the other hand, serve as mere surface decorations, and ideas — even ideas for characters — which grope out toward everything else in the construction, helping to hold the thing together. Various other writers have influenced this work almost equally, but for them I can mention no single book. I’ve ranged freely, for instance, through the writings of Darwin, Freud, Jung, and Rank, and through the outpourings of both scientific and popular writers on the so-called paranormal, writers for example like Joseph Chilton Pearce (The Crack in the Cosmic Egg and Exploring the Crack in the Cosmic Egg) —writers who seem to me to range, both collectively and individually, from the profound to the unspeakably silly.

Nothing is stable; all systems fail. Imponderables, improbabilities … Not even the weary man’s willing decline toward the grave is entirely to be trusted. Consider the case of Gerald Craine, detective.

Consider Craine sweating and tossing on his bed, asleep in his miserable, stinking hotel room, his mind numbed by whiskey, weighted like the deadmen in the long-forgotten swamps of his childhood — oak limbs, cotton-woods, once-towering sycamores brought down, back then, not by insects or disease or the voracious mills or by land speculation but by tornadoes and the heaviness of age. The faded gray wallpaper in Craine’s one room is splotched and cracked, bulging here and there, like the old man’s forehead; the padless, once-wine-red threadbare carpet lumps up into ropes, like the veins on the backs of his hands. His history lies around him, miraculously decayed. He has books everywhere, wedged into the bookshelves of cheap, stained pine, strewn along the baseboards, stacked up, dusty, in the corners of the room. On the bedpost above him his pistol hangs, precariously tilted in its shoulder holster; on his dresser, in its dusty old Bible-black case, lies the pitted, once-silver cornet he hasn’t touched in years. A streetlight burns the night smoke-gray outside his window, lighting up telephone and electric lines and throwing a negative shadow along the floor toward his closet. The closet door hangs open, too warped to close. It has a broken spool for a doorknob. The interior of the closet, just visible from Craine’s bed, is crowded with dark, restive forms. Old Craine cries out, as if aware of them, and his hands claw and clench. His knees jerk.

He was standing now beside a long row of carrels that stretched behind and ahead of him. He looked down at the paper: number 34. He was standing almost exactly in front of it. Craine shuddered at the coincidence and moved closer. Through the narrow glass window beside the door he made out that the carrel was unoccupied, but there was clear evidence that it hadn’t been and wouldn’t be unoccupied long. The little room, tight and awkward as an upended coffin, was so crammed with books there was no room to stand, one would have to slip sideways through the door into the chair at the desk, hunched before an old Smith-Corona typewriter, an overflowing bright green plastic ashtray, a ragged stack of paper, more books. On the floor, half hidden by books, there was a hot plate, a coffeepot, several fat paper bags. For all practical purposes, Craine decided, this was home for Terrance Rush.

He looked around for a place to wait. Not far off there were brightly colored, plastic-covered chairs, on the wall behind them a thank you for NOT SMOKING sign. He crossed to the nearest chair and sat down facing carrel 34, got his pipe lit, and opened the book on clairvoyance at random. There was a long passage in small print, a quotation. (It sounded vaguely familiar; perhaps he’d read the book it came from.)

By relating various incidents and circumstances in which my gift brought me specific information, I may have given the impression that it made itself evident only sporadically, whenever I concentrated on a particular person or object, or that it worked in reaction to events in my own life. But this was not the case. In fact, the crucial problem of my youth was that the psychic part of my mind was operating almost constantly, and I could not control it.

Craine skipped down a ways.

But at school I could not withdraw, and my emotional troubles began in earnest. For the first time in my life I found myself obliged to sit for hours on end in the same room with twenty or more other people.

Picture the scene: The teacher is reading a story and the class is attentive, waiting to hear the outcome. One boy, however, sits staring fixedly at the teacher’s face. He already knows the outcome of the story and cannot realize the others do not. Why is the teacher reading the story when everyone knows what will happen and there is no truth in it anyway? None of it ever happened.

The boy sits in silence because he has to — but his mind is buzzing. Today as every day it whirls in confusion, filled with incomprehensible and often frightening images, sounds, smells, tastes, impressions, and sensations. He sees his classmates not only as they are now, but as they have been and as they will be in the future. And he sees their parents, friends, relatives — people he has never met — and he knows them, too.

He knows that one of his friends will fall and break his arm. The mother of another friend is very ill but does not know it…

Again Craine skipped, jumping past the text, moving to the next quotation.

It began with a sense of disorientation, of dizziness, almost nausea, that suddenly congealed into physical pain that took my breath away. It was like an electric shock — suddenly every joint, every muscle ached. I hunched forward, almost fell, and could not straighten up. In my mind I saw beyond reality. I remained aware of my surroundings — Mallee and Berbers, the modern buildings, the traffic, passersby — but I could also “see” a different town. Different streets, old buildings, unpaved, narrow, haphazard streets and lanes …

Then in my mind I saw a priest. Very old, bent, stooped, arthritic, crippled. He stood before us and was as real to me as Mallee and Berbers. In his arms he held an old metal box, a chest, perhaps two-by-one-by-one-foot deep. Then he began walking away, hobbling, shuffling, limping along one of those old lanes with his crippled gait.

I followed, shuffling as he shuffled, bent and pain-wracked as he was — and ran straight into a stone wall. I stopped. The old priest disappeared. I went around the wall, and he was there, shuffling along, leading me.

Craine looked up, checking with a part of his mind to see if Rush had come to his carrel — he had not — but mainly thinking, half in a daze, about other things: Two-heads Carnac, Dr. Tummelty’s interest in psychics, his own strong sense that he’d read all this before somewhere. Suppose he had not. Suppose, like the man who had written this, he simply “knew,” somehow, had read the book without ever seeing it. That was nonsense, of course; he knew that, in a way. But for the moment he let himself forget what he knew. It was a fact that psychics had sometimes been helpful in discovering bodies, even reenacting killings so that the police could work out who had done them. There was one in particular, some famous Dutchman …