John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

The doctor was rambling on, oblivious, urgently concerned with his own speculations, objective as a philosopher, but quietly insistent — even desperate, a disinterested observer might have said — the doctor’s head tipped and thrown forward still more, as if to see more deeply into the queerness of things. “She doesn’t seem to look at the strangers she meets, but all the time a part of her mind is, you might say, ‘scanning’—watching for signs of, let us say, let us say, danger . Scanning like a computer, I mean. I don’t suppose you work with computers much?” He saw that Craine did not, and nodded, apologetic. He hurried on, “She judges our eyes, our clothes, our walk, all without consciously knowing she’s doing it, and the first little sign that something’s wrong”—he made a quick jab with the magnifying glass—“she’s suddenly all attention.” Craine leaned, startled, in the direction of the jab. He was thinking again of the murdered women. Did they know, right from the first instant, what was coming?

Dr. Tummelty bent closer and lowered his voice to show that he was serious, dead serious in all this, though of course it was all just a theory, he might be mistaken. His snow-white hair was blow-dried but nevertheless perfect, every hair in place. He wore a wedding ring. “We add and subtract, make up sentences, and so on, with the slowest, most trivial of our faculties — the part of our minds we’re normally most aware of, the part we most value in our … value in our, so to speak …everyday affairs. But all the while, these more ancient faculties, things closer to the brain stem, are scanning the world for us, quicker than instinct, or one with it perhaps, though for the most part we’re scarcely aware of them. We block them, doubt them — that’s partly what makes us civilized, so to speak — but they’re always there, ready to assert themselves, too simple and pure to lie to us — too primitive. By some accident — some severing of a nerve, some altered synapse, conceivably even some conscious choice — a man like Carnac there, a man who occasionally connects with the timeless, or so he believes — the ‘bioplasmic universe …’ whatever … You follow what I’m saying?” He moved the reading glass slowly toward Craine’s arm. The movement struck Craine as obscurely ominous, like a cat’s paw slowly reaching.

Craine smiled in panic, scanning for faint sounds of life behind him, his eyes narrowed, sharp as needles. His head was drawn back, cheeks twitching, as if prepared to jab out and bite. “Interesting,” he said. Now they drifted again toward Tully’s desk, slowly falling toward it on their flesh and bone stilts, gauging and subtly controlling the fall with the swollen cells in their skull holes.

“There’s no greater mystery than the human mind,” the doctor said softly, his head tipped, trying to see into Craine’s eyes. “Some fascinating things came out of Viet Nam — severed lobes are the least of it. I wrote a book on the subject.” He blushed. “I don’t mean to bore you. If I’m talking too much—”

Absentmindedly, Craine nodded. He could feel the unseen stranger’s eyes on him again, drilling into his back. Was it possible, that theory the ancients had, vision as a stream of particles? Physics, he’d read, knows of no one-way events. Then could looking at an object disturb the object? — provoke some infinitely subtle response, a prickling of the thumbs? Could the atoms of his body — that was the point — could his atoms, just perceptibly molested by particles beamed from an observer’s eyes … He must try to remember to think about that, he told himself. He’d write himself a note — he had pockets full of notes, and back at the hotel whole drawers full of them — but it was impossible just now, he had the book in one hand, the unlit pipe in the other, and moreover the doctor had his hand on his forearm, or rather the brass rim of his reading glass, pinning him where he was …

The doctor was still speaking, a curious scent like mint, maybe catnip, on his breath, one more brute obstacle in the way of concentration. “You’ve read about severed lobes?” the doctor was asking. Then, giving his head a little lift to get the lenses of his bifocals right, he smiled and corrected himself: “Yes of course. I’d forgotten. You read everything. Ha ha!” He tapped Craine good-humoredly — a fellow culprit — with the magnifying glass. “So where was I? Ah yes, Carnac! Fascinating mind. You’re good friends, I take it? I’ve noticed the way he keeps an eye on you.”

“Carnac?” Craine said, starting awake, indignant.

“A man can’t have too many friends,” the doctor said, and smiled again, more warmly than ever, as if to comfort him. For all the smile, he was watching Craine shrewdly. Judging his health, perhaps. Yes; he would have heard about Craine’s operation.

The bell above the door clanged and a fat young man in an oversized red sweater came in, opening the door just enough to slip through it, more timid than furtive, or so it seemed to Craine on reflection. A college student. Small, neat features in the middle of an oversized head. Large hands and feet. He affected a bored look, as if his coming to the bookstore was someone else’s idea, not his. Closet intellectual? Pervert in pursuit of dirty books? Poor devil wouldn’t find them at Tully’s — not a chance! Tully was a Baptist. Maniac on the subject of perversion, or such was Craine’s suspicion. He knew the look. The squeezed-shut face, the anger that drove Tully’s everlasting grinding of nothing between filed-down teeth. Tully’s dog opened one eye, then let it fall shut of its own weight. The young man looked at Tully’s sign, a piece of cardboard tacked above the shelf by the door, PLEASE DEPOSIT BOOKS AND PACKAGES HERE — THE MANAGEMENT, glanced down at his canvas bookbag, and then, as if the bookbag were a bomb, or infected with plague germs, slid it, touching it with only his fingertips, onto the warped gray shelf below the sign. He shot a look at Craine and Dr. Tummelty as if the offense were theirs — whatever the offense: the sign, the increasing smell of winter in the air, the tall, stopped clock — then ambled, hands in pockets, rear end rolling, toward the stacks.

They had arrived at Tully’s desk now, and Craine again stepped back to let Tummelty go first. The bulldog looked up mournfully, then down with a weary groan. “Opera,” he seemed to say. Craine slightly widened his eyes. Out on the street a truck passed, making the door rumble. “Oh! Oh, thank you!” Dr. Tummelty said, glancing at Craine as if he’d spoken. He laid the dictionary on the desk in front of Tully, who opened it without bothering to look up, read the price written in red pencil inside the cover, and wrote it down on a sales slip.

“Lovely weather,” the doctor said, holding out a twenty-dollar bill.

Tully frowned and continued to frown; chewing hard, as if thinking it over, checking the truth of the statement from various angles, by various calculations, including Scripture.

“The magnifying glass is my own,” the doctor said.

Now Tully did look up, the creases growing darker around his button chin. Light sparked off his spectacles, and his mouth pursed more tightly, still chewing. Again Craine’s mind tricked him, for it seemed to him that Tully said, just audibly, “Ye think my damn place looks like a pawnshop? Ye think I’m in the Goddamn antique bidness? I’m in books and maps, mister, or doctor, whatever ye call yerself. I’m in the readin bidness. History! Works of the soul , doctor!” But Tully’s mouth wasn’t moving, except to chew. Craine bent closer, making sure. No, no question about it. Whatever he was thinking, Tully was keeping it to himself. Craine should have known, of course. They rarely spoke, these old crocodiles. “Warm ott,” they’d say, or “Little cooler today,” to show they weren’t downright opposed to speech; but that was the end of it — even as they spoke their eyes drifted leftward in their milky slits, then right again, slowly, as if reading the horizon — and then back they sank into their sullen, raging silence. They were born furious, the people of southern Illinois. You could see it in the babies at the hospital. Beef-eaters, hyperglycemics. Red, round faces, as round as the bone-white electric clock that stared inhumanely from the white wall behind them, the clockface dazzling, the white wall dazzling, designed to blind them or anyway to teach them to observe the world asquint, and squint they did, squint they would, from the cradle to the grave. Sternly, gingerly, the nurses held them up like blanketed dolls that might have bombs inside them, which in fact they did, hearts tick-tick-ticking toward the hour appointed, hardly seconds away as astronomers count time — held them up to the wide, glinting window — he’d been there with a client just a week ago — and red-faced, rolling-eyed, the newborns shook their fists and showed the hell-pit blackness inside their wailing mouths, Southern Baptists already: Time is Misery.