John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

“You suppose it’s all one man?” the doctor said. His concern was personal, not ghoulish. He had a wife of his own, no doubt. She’d be home alone right now.

“No telling,” Craine said.

“No, no telling,” the doctor agreed.

It was not quite true. Craine could narrow it down, he had a feeling, if he put his mind to it. The twelve beer cans, the woman beaten and stabbed and tied up afterward … But it was none of his business. The police had all the help they wanted; even hired a university specialist, it said in the paper. They’d stumble along as usual, trying this and that, following false leads — maybe even shadowing poor miserable Craine, if what Carnac said was true — and possibly sooner or later, by accident … Craine scowled, trying hard to concentrate, but abruptly, as if shaken loose by the shudder that now rocked through him, the whole thing fell out of his mind.

He drifted with the doctor toward Tully’s desk. The girl in the cape was gone now. Light shot in through the transom above the door, tinted green by the glass, giving the room a kind of underwater look, the light shaft aswirl with motes. The grandfather’s clock behind the desk read one fifteen. The pendulum wasn’t swinging. On the glass of the pendulum chamber a chipped, ornate golden legend read Time Lost Can Ne’er Be Recaptured.

“Don’t forget what I tole you!” Two-heads Carnac called from behind him. “They watchin you, brother — gettin ready to jump — so mine your p’s and q’s!

Craine’s jaw tightened, cracking the pipe bit, and his mind flashed an image of chipped, ornate p’s and q’s. Except for the tightening of his jaw he showed no sign of hearing. One fifteen, he thought, gazing fixedly at the clock, which gazed fixedly back at him. He tried to remember if he’d had lunch.

“Fascinating mind,” the doctor said, and smiled again, tentative, as if meaning to imply some question. He cocked his large head sideways to see the title of Craine’s book. Craine, misunderstanding at first, held his arm up so the doctor could read his watch, then, seeing his mistake, tilted the spine of the book so the doctor could read it.

“Sanskrit?” the doctor said, and briefly met Craine’s eyes.

Craine nodded vaguely, only now registering the doctor’s observation—“fascinating mind”—and scowled, thinking about Carnac’s wrecked brain. Raising his left hand, book and all, he took the pipe from his mouth. “Sometimes you’d swear he’s as sane as you or me,” he said. He shifted the pipe to his right hand.

The doctor glanced at him to see if the irony was intended, a smile flickering at the edges of his mouth, then nodded. “It’s fascinating to watch him,” he said at last. Again he spoke a little tentatively, watching for Craine’s reaction. He was a handsome old man, broad-shouldered, smooth-gaited, his teeth white as snow. No doubt he’d been an athlete, fifty years ago. All the well built and good-looking were athletes in the doctor’s day. Health nuts. Bernarr MacFadden, if that was the fellow’s name. Sun baths, air baths. The world was innocent; honest work for honest pay. Not that Craine remembered. He remembered nothing — on principle, he liked to say: “Reality is what we say it is, correct? Language is our prison.” “Why not our walled garden,” his neighbor the poet had broken in, but Craine had hurried on, pleased with his opinion and unwilling to be disabused of it: “Only those who remember the past are condemned to repeat it! He he! Ha ha!” His neighbor had grinned, shaking his head. “I’ll say this about you, Craine, your craziness runs deep.” But though Craine refused to remember the past, and for the most part couldn’t anyway, he’d read about it, even read MacFadden. Five leather-bound red books, with anatomy cutouts in various colors. No photographs.

Still the doctor stood head forward, like the sphinx. If his snow-white teeth were false, there was no way of guessing it. Craine’s teeth, Craine remembered, closing his mouth, were gray.

“They think like lightning, these people,” the doctor was murmuring confidentially, “but sometimes it’s difficult to translate.” Craine nodded, a quick jerk. (There were words in Choctaw, he’d read somewhere, that had no equivalents in English. Indians did badly on IQ tests, he’d read. Lived in a whole different world.) He nodded again. The doctor’s face was pink — benevolent and serene. Though he’d been handling books, his hands were as clean as if he’d just finished washing them. Craine did remember now where it was that he’d first seen him: they’d met at the AAUW Book Fair and had a long conversation — more like a lecture by the doctor — about Roman baths and lead poisoning. Dimout of the Empire through idiocy; the rich and powerful were all either half-wits or crazy. “Pollution is the Number One threat against humanity,” Craine had read. Especially cigarettes. Only ten percent of the people who get lung cancer were never habitual cigarette smokers, he’d read. On the brighter side, however, there was scientific evidence for life after death. “I saw a white light, and I knew at once it was Jesus,” someone had said, brought back to life. Craine smiled wryly. He remembered the doctor’s name now. Dr. Tummelty.

“They work by instinct, that’s the thing,” Dr. Tummelty was saying. He swung his chin toward his shoulder, indicating Carnac, behind them. “They say the first thing that comes into their heads, and so — theoretically at least — they’re never wrong.” He slowed his walk a little, his light blue eyes on Craine’s neck. “Fascinating, the way they work.” His nostrils flared and narrowed, and he shifted his gaze to Craine’s forehead. Perhaps he’d only now caught the whiskey smell.

“Never wrong?” Craine said. He strained to make his mind focus, nailing his gaze to the grandfather’s clock, and stopped, partly to let Tummelty go ahead of him to Tully’s desk, partly to put distance between his breath and the doctor’s nose, but Dr. Tummelty stopped too.

“I’m not a specialist in these things,” Dr. Tummelty said softly, “it’s just a hair outside my field, but it’s a theory I’ve been, so to speak, toying with.” It was clear that he was ready to abandon the theory if Craine had good arguments against it. He studied Craine earnestly, his head once more thrown forward and slightly tilted, his faint smile encouraging, assuring Craine that an honest opinion would not offend him. His hair was snow-white, perfectly combed, exactly the same white as his manicured cuticles. White with blue shadows, like the shadows in bone. Carnac had dropped out of sight again, vanished utterly into the darkness of the stacks. If there was anyone else there, Craine could see no sign of him; but then, Craine had bad eyesight. Tully glanced up, then returned his attention to the ledger, his jaw working furiously, chewing. Craine looked again at the legend on the clock, Time Lost … The universe, if physicists were right, was fifteen billion years old. So he’d read. He shook his head just perceptibly to clear it. The bulldog lay perfectly still, as if dead, beside his dish. Waiting for one sixteen, Craine thought, and smiled grimly, as if enraged.

“There’s an idea medieval theologians had,” Dr. Tummelty said, studying him. “They took the view that the angels never stammer — the way humans do — because they never tell lies.” He grinned. Craine’s eyes narrowed and, quickly, apologetically, Dr. Tummelty went on, “It’s not the opinion about angels that interests me, it’s the opinion about stammering. Not that I generalize about stammerers — not at all!” He glanced around, smiling, slightly blushing, then back at Craine. Again, he cocked his head, princely, the gesture of a man about to make a terribly important, though tentative, point. “But it got me to thinking about how quickly these people like Carnac there can make leaps from thought to thought — the swiftness and ease of their, so to speak … so to speak … gibberish. The unconscious is wonderfully intelligent, you know? That’s the great point the Zen Buddhists make. A woman walks down the street, for instance—” He waved the magnifying glass, showing where the hypothetical woman was, suggesting the dignity and indifference of the woman’s walk. Craine nodded, pondering it, his mind darting off to the complexity of the human walk — two legs. Strange process, when you thought about it, two ungainly projections we balance over, hurrying here or there, or teeter on, pausing between backward or forward falls … And the human eye even stranger, heaven knows! — a single cell, he’d read, stretched and ingeniously adapted. All those centuries of experiment, hit-or-miss development, millions of years of Nature’s tinkering with an eye that for most of that time couldn’t see, and then, clink, “Snake eyes!” Who in his right mind would believe it? In fact he didn’t believe it. No, he was with Einstein, not that Craine was a religious man.