John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

But near the foot of the stairs he saw Ira again. He’d come down after all and was striding past the elevators, fifty feet away, moving, almost running, toward the high glass doors that led outside. “Excuse me,” Craine said, “sorry, emergency!” trying to push through. The students in front of him looked up over their shoulders, not eager to let him pass, and moved only a little, neither so little he had a right to be angry nor so much that he had room to get by. When he reached the main floor, Ira Katz was nowhere to be seen. He made his way to the big glass doors, but it was clearly hopeless. He ought to be right out there, in the wide span of sunlight between Faner and the woods, but if Ira was among those unchaining their bicycles or moving, heads bent, into the shadows of trees, Craine was miraculously missing him.

He turned back toward the stairs and registered now for the first time that there were pay phones over by the elevators. He crossed to them quickly — only one of them was in use — and hunted through his pockets for dimes, then called Hannah.

“Any news?” he asked.

“You heard about the man at the computer center?”

“Professor Furth, yes. They’re sure it was an accident?”

“I don’t see how they can be, but I haven’t talked with McClaren yet.”

“Did Meakins catch up with Terrance Rush?”

“Hasn’t checked in yet. I expect I’ll get a call from him any time.”

“OK. Listen, Hannah, I need you to take over with the girl for me. I got some things I gotta do. All right?”

“Whatever you say, Craine,” she said, less than eager.

“Make it ten minutes, then. No, on second thought, half an hour. And bring the Bible.”

“What?”

“The Bible — you know, the big white one.”

“Craine,” she said, then hesitated, then came out with it, “what for?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Magic.” He felt pressed, surrounded, beginning to rise to anger. Whose business was it, etc., etc. But it was an interesting question, why he wanted the thing. Magic was the truth. The way he looked forward to getting it in his hands again was the way a child looked forward to a toy or some particular suit of clothes that would change his life — or looked forward to being four, or riding on the school bus. From the minute he’d bought it, God knew why, it had been clear to him, at least in the back of his mind, that there were stories he wanted to look at again, after all these years. Purely for pleasure, he would have said: the sense of getting out of oneself. How the prophet Nathan had been so furious at Saul for raising him from the dead that he’d prophesied Saul’s death in battle the next day, with all his sons. How King David had looked over and seen what’s-her-name sunning on the roof. How the ghost of Jesus had appeared to the fishermen and called out, “Boys! Cast your net over there on the left!” It would not have been the same, he would willingly admit, if the stories in the book were “Rumpelstiltskin” or even Shakespeare’s Macbeth or The Tempest . Tomes, tombs … If all books were séances, conversations with the dead, there were times — for some reason unknown to him — when some ghosts’ voices cried out with vastly more urgency than others. He looked forward to getting that Bible in his hands as if he thought when he held it the light would change, become the airier sunlight of his childhood, before his mistakes. He looked forward to reading those stories — not just reading them, poring over them, boring into them, digging down and down, all his muscles snapping steel, the way you’d dig into some newly discovered great cave of the Incas — as if he thought they had a spell in them, the Fountain of Youth, such magical power as the Vedic priests, in that book he’d started, had imagined they’d worked into Sanskrit. A fool would say, “So Craine, in his old age, is hungry for religion.” If it was true, it wasn’t true in any sense a common fool would understand. There was something he’d known and hadn’t known the importance of, and had a feeling he could maybe know again. Not life-after-death, or “walking hand in hand with God.” Something those sharp-eyed, big-nosed Jews of old had known, dickering with God, dying for righteousness, carefully, carefully writing it all down — some truth, some lies, the same way other poets wrote, but with some strange ingredient that suffused the whole, crept through the parchment like the hungry, ever unfulfilled spirit of the vowels. never written in the name of God.

In a word, he had no idea why he wanted it. It was an impulse that had come over him, a dowser’s hunch.

“All right,” Hannah said, “I’ll trine remember.”

He hung up, felt to see if his dime had come back, then hurried for the stairs.

It was only when he was walking down the second-floor corridor toward the room where he’d left her that Craine understood, with a jolt, the mistake he’d made. It was not that those classes had gotten out early. It was at ten minutes to, not on the hour (as he’d thought), that classes ended. He’d abandoned her just as her class was getting out, and had left her alone there for nearly ten minutes. His hand went to his coat pocket, but the whiskey wasn’t there. “Damn,” he whispered, hurrying more now, again and again banging his fist into his palm. He was in trouble again, more than before, he thought. She’d be sure he’d done the whole thing on purpose, and maybe in some crazy way he had. “Jesus,” he whispered.

The door where her class had been was closed, and inside there was a different class. His blood ran cold, or anyway so it felt, no warmth in his body, his neck hairs rising. He jumped to the little window and pressed his eyes to the glass to see as much as he could. The teacher was now a man, short, white-bearded, waving a cigar. Craine’s hand was on the doorknob, but he decided not to turn it; she wouldn’t be there. Where then? he wondered, spinning around in panic, looking down the corridor one way, then the other. Now nausea leaped up in him, and the building swayed. This had happened before, one minute the girl right beside him, and the next … His mind went blank.

“Mr. Craine!” Elaine cried, “what’s the matter? Are you all right?”

He turned to her, baffled. She was right at his shoulder, her hands closed on his arm. Her eyes were wide with fear.

“I’m all right,” he said. “Just faint.”

“You’ve been drinking!” she said, half angry, half pitying him. “I suspected that was it, when I came out and you were gone.”

He nodded, accepting it, leaning back for a moment against the wall and gently putting his hand on hers, wearily smiling.

“Have you?” she asked, beginning to change her mind.

“I’m all right,” he said, and freed her hand. “I guess it gave me a start there, when I thought I’d lost you.” When he saw that she was thinking about the murderer, he said quickly, “I thought you’d decided to dump me, get some other private eye. Quite a shock to the ticker.”

She smiled. “I was in the ladies’ room.”

“Ah,” he said, and pushed his hat up with one finger. “I’d have thought of that sooner or later. No dummy, take my word for it.” He straightened up from the wall and held out his arm to her, formal, like a fancy-dress escort.

She looked at his arm, then up at his face, then laughed, shaking her head, shifted her books to her left arm, and with her right took the arm he held out to her. “Thank you, sir,” she said, and gave a curtsy.

“My pleasure, ma’am,” said Craine, and bowed.

They made a curious couple, an objective observer would perhaps have remarked: Elaine with thick ankles and blue, pointed shoes, on her square face the smile of a girl strangely happy, also nearsighted; as for Gerald B. Craine, he walked with his chin out, his hat tipped back, his dyed-black hair hanging down over his forehead, walking not at all like an old man, just now, or a half-crazy drunkard, though it was true, an objective observer would have noticed, that his coat hung low, something bulky in the lining, and his shoelaces were not well tied.