John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

All this while Craine stood motionless, staring out the window like a man in a trance, watching the sky change, dark, silvered cloud patches moving northward through the yellow, reflected in the windows of the buildings across from him, the leaves of the trees moving, inaudible to Craine, and he was thinking, despite his gloomy thoughts about Ira Katz, Strange, how beautiful it is, how peaceful! It was true, no mere illusion, he understood, not quite in words. It was not just that it seemed like some noble old painting, though it did, certainly; on the campus time had in some quite real sense stopped. Everyone noticed it, if only in jest. People distinguished between the campus and “the real world.” It was the last playground; that might be it, perhaps. The last slow, easy breath of childhood. They came here “students” and left “workers.” A grim thought. He remembered now something else he’d run into, in one of those books of Freud’s, that in the unconscious Time does not exist . He felt through his pockets and found a pencil, then a scrap of paper. “In unconscious, no past or future,” he wrote. He studied the writing, making sure he’d be able to read it when he came on it again, a week or a month from now, then folded it and tucked it in his shirt pocket. Almost at once he drew it out again, frowning, and added the words, “also sub-atomic particles, psychic experience.” The last few words were very small, almost off the paper’s ragged edge. He dropped it in his pocket again.

“Complementarity,” he said aloud. Two whole realities in double exposure. Pastoral peace, undeniable as young love, or the childlike old scholar’s endless play, up in his tower; yet in the same immortal garden, neurosis, terror, murder, Elaine Glass dreaming up her death in the colors of the Virgin, while down at the computer center …

He thought of Elaine in there scribbling in her notebook, then of how she’d run to the blind boy to help him and he’d almost knocked her down. What a strange marriage she was of awkwardness and grace! At once, with what felt like a massive blush, he remembered her flying toward him at Denham’s tobacco store, remembered the smell of chocolate malt on her breath, and his surprise that, thin as she was, she had well-developed breasts. Quickly, Craine closed the door on that, and even more quickly he pushed away the thought of Emmit Royce.

He needed a drink. When he looked at his watch — ten to four — he was astonished and once again convinced that it must not be working; impossible that he’d stood here that long, knowing he should go down to the truck and move it, and grab a quick restorative while he was there, handy by. It came to him that he hadn’t had a drink in hours, an incredible feat, he could claim, and anyone who knew him would admit that it was so — though strange to say, it seemed to him, for some reason, like nothing: he could go, if the whim took him, hours more. He wasn’t even shaky, and the sweats had forgotten him. He was feeling quite unusually well, in fact, except gloomy, as he always became when he was sober. Not that he minded. Mortal gloom was the unconfessed ground of being, in southern Illinois. You saw it even in the hogs and chickens, the horses standing in fields, with their heads down, and in the Black Angus browsing in the mustardy, thistle-ridden hills or the cool, heavy shade of woodlots. It was deep in the character of the people of Little Egypt, and it infected the students in no time. Just as well. Let the people all speak the same language.

He looked down at the paperback open in his hand and frowned as if returning his attention to it, though he did not, musing instead on the idea of gloom. It was an odd thought that the dreary, philosophical gloom of Gerald Craine should be the normal gloom of Little Egypt. He was tempted to think otherwise, think something more to his own credit, but it seemed to him that the thought he’d stumbled on was sound. He would not count the young, the people who, by a sad irony, gave Southern Illinois the reputation of a party school — as if there were anything celebratory in that milling in the streets, smoking pot on curbs, drinking, dancing, knocking on the door of the mobile massage-parlor or drifting out at midnight down the county’s dirt roads and weed-choked lanes toward the lakes, woods, caves, or the immense stone cliffs of Giant City. That was just the gloom of indecision and uncertainty, ambition and desire not yet harnessed to some adequate illusion. But the gloom of the crocodiles — the weedlot Baptists and mowed-lawn Methodists, farmers of hardpan, managers of banks of no significant account — that was something else again, worthy of consideration and respect. That was philosophical, not personal gloom: Lazarus’ objective detachment, weighing the husk of life, tossing it in his hand, solemnly judging it: Due cause of woe. It was true, he had never been quite fair to the crocodiles. He’d heard a story once, a meeting of the Klan in some farmer’s back lot. Rain had come, a soaker, and before they could escape all their Ford and Chevy pickups and sedans were stuck. They might have been there for a week, but some blacks came along with a wrecker and helped them, didn’t even specially overcharge them for it. You’d think it might have led to some changes, but no. They’d been fooled all their lives by appearances: land that seemed rich — but then it cracked, or washed out from under them in a sudden roar of yellow — a gospel that seemed to promise happiness but none came … Even the government they’d fought wars for and paid honest taxes to had proved, in the end, one more sinister trick. Heath candy bar and Bell Telephone made a fortune on farming, while they, one by one, moved to town and gave up, to live by welfare. Therefore the crocodiles had no interest in how things seemed. They continued to burn crosses — those who were mean enough — carefully refraining from any other violence than the violence of the heart. They hardly knew what they were doing, not civilized human beings but reversions to the archaic; Craine’s brothers, he thought now: gloom transformed to gesture.

A door opened, down the corridor, apparently someone letting class out early. A few students came into the hall, then more, among others a blond girl Craine had seen around town before, strikingly beautiful but homosexual, real crime. Watching how she walked, legs unbecomingly solid, like a hod carrier’s, head slightly forward — why would even a man want to walk like that? Craine thought — he almost missed it when Ira Katz came out, dressed in jeans and work shirt, carrying a bulging, bursting briefcase, black-bearded head cocked far to the right for balance. He was halfway down the corridor, beyond the crowd of students, when Craine got the presence of mind to go after him. Now someone else had let a class out early, and it was all Craine could do to keep sight of Ira’s hurrying head and shoulders. The students around the doors where their classes had been were in no hurry to break up, talking and laughing, gossiping, complaining, making timid or bold advances in the old, old game. “That’s college,” Craine thought, and accidentally said it aloud as he pressed against the wall, crowding past. They should advertise that way. Looking for a pretty girl that likes geography? Still more doors opened, and more slow-moving students, smiling like theater people between acts, came wandering out into the corridor, massive and indefinite of purpose as cattle.

“Excuse me,” Craine said, pushing past, “excuse me!” But when he came to the stairs going down and up, he couldn’t tell, even when he jumped to get a look above the others’ heads, which way Katz had gone. Down, Craine decided, for no good reason — indeed, when he’d gone two steps he knew he’d chosen wrong, but it was too late to go back, the crowd was all around him.