John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

With a start, he realized that he had read the book. It was M. B. Dykshoorn’s biography, of course. Disgust leaped up in him — an emotion too violent, he realized even as it came, to be merely disgust. Fierce disappointment, then. Yes, that was it, yes. Craine grinned, angry. Ah, the tricks of the mind, or rather heart! Poor Gerald Craine wanted to be a psychic, yes. Wanted to save Elaine Glass without the usual nuisance — not even believing she needed saving, in fact; knowing full well … His mind snagged, and only after a moment did he know what had snagged it. He had seen something, surely not a memory: a man standing in the dark, among trees. He could smell them now, and felt again the simultaneous terror and guilt, as if he were himself both the killer and the victim. He jerked his eyes down to the book and read:

The next morning at the town hall I found everyone in a rare state of excitement, for Mallee had come up with a remarkable discovery. On his map the day before he had charted the route I had taken on my psychic walk through the town. Because I had kept bumping into buildings and having to go around them in order to “follow” the old priest, my path bore little relation to the plan of the modern town. But when they overlaid my route on a map of the town as it had been at the time of the Iconoclasm — the year 1566—they discovered that my walk would have taken me through the streets of the town exactly as it was then — four hundred years earlier!

There were pages of comment. Dykshoorn, like many clairvoyants of our time … The next quotation from Dykshoorn read:

… I am convinced that if I have a definite psychic impression that something will happen, it will happen and cannot be avoided. Neither I nor any of the people involved can intervene to prevent its occurrence. If I see that a person will have an automobile accident, for example …

Pages later, Craine read:

Because of this deep emotional involvement, psychopathic murders are easier for me to work out than crimes committed in cold blood, where the killing is only incidental to the purpose of the crime. I never investigate killings by members of organized crime, for example, because …

He skipped again.

Can I see my own future? The answer is yes and no, sometimes and occasionally. Whenever I try to find out what will happen in my own life, my gift turns out to be unreliable. I believe it is influenced by what I consciously or subconsciously want to happen. If I like the idea of something, or I’m looking forward to it, and I ask myself “Will it happen?” my gift always says yes, it will, and it will be just as you want it. But most of the time it doesn’t happen. It’s the same with my family, and sometimes with other people with whom I am very close. If I like them …

Craine closed the book. “Thank you very much,” he whispered. He took off his glasses, folded them, and put them in his suit coat’s top pocket. Time , he thought, and then — consciously, at least — thought nothing.

In the cloudy swirl of his mind something vaguely like this went on, not that he’d be able to use it, consciously at least: that Dykshoorn was a man who had served the police, both in Europe and America, on countless occasions. There was no real doubt that he and others like him were on to something, never mind what. One might doubt his assertions that he could know the future or the four-hundred-year-old past; but there was no real doubt that he could find bodies and killers, an ability at least as outrageous as knowledge of the future and distant past. Remembering Dykshoorn’s book (not quite consciously), Craine remembered Dykshoorn’s fury at Rhine and the statistical parapsychologists, and his annoyance at those who gave the credit to God, as if the psychics of ancient Greece, or psychics who professed themselves atheists, were not equally to be trusted, insofar as (Dykshoorn would be the first to admit) any self-proclaimed psychic should be trusted. But the interesting point, to Craine’s fumbling mind, was Time. He remembered Dr. Tummelty’s curious phrase, “the bioplasmic universe.” Even in the depth of his daze, Craine had no real idea what it meant. But what it hinted was clear enough: that in some odd way the future has happened already, and the past is still happening.

For an instant Craine’s mind switched on, shivering with anger. Most of the world would dismiss with scorn the possibilities he was secretly entertaining, even the stone-hard facts those possibilities were based on. Again and again bodies have been found, murderers have been identified, by psychic means. Matter of record. When one spoke of such matters with friends and acquaintances, their eyes glazed over, their smiles became fixed. One showed them clippings, gave the names of books. Glazed eyes. Fixed smiles. So Columbus must have felt. Galileo. Einstein. Fools! There’s a whole new world out there!

All the same, it was exceedingly odd, no denying it — the idea that Time was a trick of perception, like the solidity of tables and floors — the idea that the future was inevitable, had happened already and could no more be changed by human will, human love, than the fall of Constantinople. How sad and silly it made all human labor! — ten thousand lives wasted moving stones for a wall that was doomed to be overthrown in half a century, surgeons working hour after hour, bent like boxers, every nerve on edge, on the heart of a man who’d been dead on the table from the beginning. If that was how God saw, the end and the beginning, then God help God! Craine clamped his eyes shut. Unhealthy way to think, he reminded himself. It was the cancer talking, maybe. A walking dead man saw the world with peculiar eyes. Young people’s hopes and dreams, what were they to a man like Craine? Fools! There’s no world at all out there!

Abruptly, Craine jerked in his chair, then glanced at his watch. He must meet Elaine Glass at one forty-five. It was nearly one now, and he had a great deal to do. Rush might never arrive. He might have gone home for his mother’s funeral, he might have been hit by a train or taken sick …

Craine closed the book and struggled up out of the plastic chair.

At the first-floor pay phone he called his office. The book on clairvoyance was down in the lining of his coat, more or less out of sight.

“Meakins?” he said.

“Craine? Is that you, Craine?”

“I’m at the Morris Library. I want you to come down here, take over for me.”

“What?”

“Don’t ask questions, just listen. You got a pencil and paper?”

After a moment Meakins said, “OK …”

“Terrance Rush,” Craine said, “fifth floor, carrel thirty-four. You got that?”

“Yes,” Meakins said, distant.

“Good. Terrance Rush. He’s the guy in the blue and white runner’s jacket. I want—”

“What?” Meakins said.

“I said just listen, OK? I want you to come talk to him. See what it’s about. He was Elaine Glass’s teacher in freshman composition, or something like that. She wrote him a piece about the man in blue and white. I want you to come figure out the mystery. You got that?”

“Hey, Craine—”

“Sit and wait till he comes here. I got no time for the details, but I saw him in the jacket. He’s mixed up in it somehow. He’ll be no trouble — that’s my opinion. But all the same—”

“You think it’s serious, this ‘threat’ she—”

Quickly, Craine broke in: “Anything at your end?”

“Well—” There was a pause. Craine could see Meakins’ blush. Meakins said lightly, “Hannah’s mad as hell, you know.” Too casually, he said, “Royce came in, cleaned out his desk.”

Craine waited.

Meakins said, “He’s really mad. You know how he gets.”