John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

“First,” he said, and cocked back like a horseman, “there’s the fall out of Nature, the fall that makes primitive bear cults and corn cults. We kill to eat, and thanks to our consciousness we can’t help but notice that in the act of killing we take a step back from the general connectedness, the harmony of Nature, old Schopenhauer’s universal howl of will: we’ve judged and condemned brother bear to death, or brother stalk of grain — you follow what I’m saying? — and however our intelligence may deal with the event, the chest — the right lobe of the brain, if you like — calls it murder and shudders with guilt.” His eyes bugged, he spoke so earnestly. He stood with his hand drawn dramatically to his chest. “We invent the Corn God, or Artemis-Ursus, and do terrified obeisance, kill virgins to buy our way back in.” He was outraged.

He was talking loudly, but perhaps not as loudly as it sounded in Joan Orrick’s head. The bearded, pink-faced student nodded, sorrowful and logy, keeping his eyes open and smiling politely by a mighty act of will. He stood tipped back, the bottle of beer out in front of him for balance. In the shadows around them — a clutter of bottles and potted plants, a fog of cigarette smoke, a thick stench of gin — other students listened, their heads thrown forward, not so much from interest in Martin Orrick’s theories — they’d heard them all before — as in faint alarm at his drunken intensity. Martin drank quickly from the glass in his hand and, before anyone could speak, widened his eyes again, lifted his eyebrows, and plunged on, still more loudly, shouting down a sudden swell of music from the speakers. “Second, there’s the fall from humanity,” he said. The people around him nodded, and to Joan Orrick’s drugged perception it seemed they nodded in synchronization, like puppets, like a Gilbert and Sullivan chorus. He said, swinging forward dangerously, “ Gil gamesh, for instance! He enslaves his own people — makes them build a great wall for their own protection”—his left arm dramatically cast a wall up through the ceiling—“and thus rightly, necessarily, Gilgamesh sets himself apart from his fellow men, and the people, rightly, cry to heaven for vengeance. Like the hunter, he’s stepped out of the ring of the living. New rituals, some new kind of religion must be found. So we get, for example, Greek tragedy: we watch the hero raise his head above all others and we watch it blasted by the lightning of the gods, and in compassion and fear we at once admire him and reaffirm our common humanity. Ha!” He raised his hand in what looked like sharp warning. “Or consider Achilles and Priam in the tent, or Jesus on brotherly love.” Again his eyes bugged, and his stance was an actor’s pose: utter indignation.

“Or consider Martin Orrick,” someone said behind him, and raised her glass in what looked like a perfectly serious salute. Martin didn’t hear.

Bob Randolph, young poet in a fisherman’s hat, trudging by slowly, as if watching a stream, saluted with his new glass of bourbon and said, “Whole point of Moby Dick.” He laughed as if to himself, for some reason — or giggled, rather — though the comment was serious, apparently, and walked on, out of Martin’s range.

“Exactly!” Martin snapped, turning for a moment toward Bob, then back, blushing, glancing in embarrassment at his pipe. Then he said, “Third—” He hesitated, as if he’d lost his place, looked downright panicky, sipped his martini, then abruptly remembered. “Third—” He spoke still more fiercely now, trembling with emotion, for no reason she could guess. “There’s the fall out of Self — the fall we read of in Jean-Paul Sartre: fall into nothingness, alienation of the eye.” (Or perhaps he meant — she couldn’t tell—“the I.”)

The bearded, pink-faced student said, “Are there rituals to cure that?” and laughed loudly, like a bleating goat.

Joan Orrick was aware of something going by too fast for her drugged brain. For an instant she had an impression of herself as a child, schoolbooks in her arms, watching them in horror. “Buddy,” she would cry — Martin had been “Buddy” when the two of them were children—“what’s the matter with you?” She, Joan-grown-up, had no way to tell her, could hardly explain what had happened even for herself. And then the child’s eyes swung around to meet her own, as she’d known they would, accusing and terrible — a beautiful child with hair like cut copper — and the older Joan shrank back, cheeks stinging as they would if she’d been slapped, and her mind cried through time, I’m sorry!

Perhaps the pink-faced student said it twice, or perhaps time snagged and she heard it twice: “Are there rituals to cure that?”

Martin looked as if he was about to have a stroke. So did the student he was talking to.

Martin laughed exactly as the student had done but looked sick with distress. “I don’t know,” he said. “There may be no cure but Jesus’ mercy—‘He that loses himself shall find himself,’ or …” He shook his head, flashed a horrible grin, pushed back his long silver hair in fierce annoyance. “I don’t know. No one does. ‘Luck.’ ‘Amazing Grace’—whatever that is.” He laughed again, grimly, nodding. “That’s the price we pay for our sensible ‘ungoded sky.’ ” He glanced up at the ceiling as if in anger. One could hardly believe that a split second ago he’d been laughing. She remembered that Hart Crane — ungoded sky — had killed himself.

Though no time had lapsed, or so it seemed, the people in the room were suddenly not where they’d been standing an instant earlier, and it came to Joan Orrick that, sitting upright among the pillows on the waterbed couch, she had fainted. Martin stood exactly where he’d stood before, like a smoldering fixed star, but Steve — the pink-faced, bearded student — was gone, asleep in the bathtub, probably, and it was the pianist, Joe Liberto, the one she liked best, at least among the men, certainly the one she was most willing to trust — he’d helped her hunt for Martin one time, when it seemed almost certain he’d drowned himself in the Sikeston sewer — it was Joe Liberto that Martin was lecturing. She could stand guard no longer, whatever might come of her abandoning him. Where were you, Joe, she heard herself thinking, when I was ready to get married? And she heard herself answering, sadly, but also laughing at the absurdity: Not born. She would faint again soon, and though the fainting so frightened her that she could hardly bear to think of it, much less wonder what it meant, she would rather be in bed when it happened.

She felt for the edge of the waterbed couch, one hand on each side of her, and carefully rose to her feet. The girl, Cezaria, who’d come to sit beside her, looked up, smiling, perhaps slightly puzzled, and she returned the smile, trying to think what Cezaria was saying, then moved, carefully balanced, toward the music room door. As if floating or dreaming, she passed the grand piano, the lounging students in the darkened livingroom, and drifted over to the square, sharp-edged newel post at the foot of the stairs. She paused a moment, steadying herself for the climb.

She’d said nothing to Martin about the fainting. She was sick to death of being always sick, always in pain, always drugged, and though no one could reasonably blame her for it, she was ashamed and angry and afraid it would finally drive him from her. How could he help but believe it was one more trick meant to keep him in her power? That was what he constantly accused her of — not without reason, she told herself bitterly, not without reason. She’d quietly stopped driving — he’d never even noticed that for nearly a month now she’d regularly evaded the steering wheel (she was secretly enraged that he failed to notice) — and she’d managed even to avoid ever mentioning the light-headed feeling. What was the use of telling him? she’d asked herself, and the question had filled her eyes with tears. There was nothing any of them could do. No use going to doctors either. She’d finally resigned herself to that. All her complaints were beyond their skill.