John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

“Now wait a minute,” Inspector McClaren said, scowling, prepared to smile if it should prove that Craine was joking.

“It’s the number one problem of existence,” Craine said, “finding the adequate function for your form, or coming to understanding of the form behind your function, in common parlance value or motive , criminal or otherwise.” He showed his teeth. “Now the determinists maintain—”

“Listen,” Inspector McClaren broke in. He touched the corner of his horn-rims with his thumb and first finger. “Let me see if I understand this.” He pointed at Craine’s coffee cup, then frowned, raised his eyebrows, and looked over at the curtain where the waiter had disappeared. He forgot his question — one could see the gears shudder and stop like huge old mill-wheel gears when the mill’s foundation breaks, giving way to the flood. A blush of fury rose up in him and he pushed back his chair, got up, went over to the service bell on the bar, and clanged it. When nothing happened, he clanged it again, stared at the curtain for a moment, then came back to the table. “This ‘character’ you put on, this strange manner of behaving—”

He saw by Craine’s face that the waiter had appeared, and he swung his head around. “Waiter, what happened to that cream?”

“Ah!” the boy said, throwing both hands up, laughing. He went back out through the curtain. McClaren pursed his lips, still angry, then after a moment checked the chair seat and carefully sat down again.

“That now,” Craine said, leaping with both feet into the hole in the conversation, meaning to kick it in yet another direction — he pointed toward where the waiter had been, and leaned forward to speak more confidentially—“that’s a typical case!”

“Case?” McClaren said.

“Brute substance,” Craine said. “Here we are having an intelligent conversation, a meeting of minds, as one might say, and what happens? A zenseless—” He checked himself. “Senseless accident! We don’t think of events as brute substance, but they are! Of course they are!” He hit the table. “In the war of mind and matter we have to keep these things clear. Nothing’s static, that’s the great lesson we’ve learned. Process, the meaningless spinning of wheels — click, spin, click — that’s materiality! So how do you work?”

“Pardon?” Inspector McClaren said and blinked.

“How do you work?” Craine pushed his hat back, thinking of Sam Spade, and waited, showing his rat smile, deeply interested.

“How do I work?” Inspector McClaren said. He looked at Craine over the tops of his glasses. He had the expression of a man on the verge of becoming airsick.

“Technique,” Craine said. “M.O.”

The Chinese boy came through the curtain with the cream, glided to the table, and set it down. “Everything aw-right?” he said.

“Fine,” Craine said. “Wonderful.” He winked at him.

McClaren glanced from Craine to the waiter, then back into his glass. The waiter left. Craine poured cream into his coffee and Scotch. He smiled and waited.

“Let me ask you this, Gerald,” Inspector McClaren said at last, as if forgetting Craine’s question, or maybe thinking himself clever to have managed to avoid it so easily. “Do you remember nothing whatso ever of your personal past?”

“Nothing,” Craine said.

“Your parents? Your schooldays? University?” His head slowly tilted, and his right hand moved up to take his glasses partway off.

“Nothing.”

Inspector McClaren pushed the horn-rims back on, then raised his whiskey glass and swirled the yellow liquid. The ice had all melted. He was frowning ferociously. “How about things that happened, say, two weeks ago?

He was zeroing in now in earnest, Craine saw. Figuring out how much of the decline in the quality of American life they could pin on him.

“I sometimes remember some of that,” Craine said. “It comes back to me when I need it, more often than not. I have what you might call ‘practical memory.’ I could tell you my father’s name, if you give me time to think.”

“Incredible,” McClaren said. He worked on it some more. “Perhaps you drink too much?”

Craine leered and raised his cup.

“Even so,” McClaren said, blushing, “to have forgotten your parents, your affaires de coeur —if you don’t mind my saying so, it would seem to indicate—” Again he shot Craine a furtive, scrutinizing look. “You’re teasing me,” he said, and abruptly smiled. “It’s part of that act you spoke of.”

“Well, think what you please,” Craine said. If he was smart, he knew, he’d claim that, yes, it was indeed an act. His chest was full of panic: it was like playing with dynamite, fooling with a creature like McClaren. But some madness was in him, some craziness finally metaphysical, or chemical; same thing. No doubt to McClaren it was Craine who seemed the enemy of mankind, outrage against decency and reason. No doubt to McClaren it was Craine who seemed the alien, the terrible beast from deep space, the spider. Oh yes, yes, one could easily understand these things, take the larger view. Suddenly, Craine felt defensive, annoyed. Though perhaps it was just his drunkenness, it seemed to him now that it was a serious matter, this door he’d closed on his past, closed on all of it, and sealed up tight, so that hardly a shred of light broke through. How many people in the history of the world had ever done such a thing, freely, for no reason, for the pure existential élan of it? or if not that (for no doubt he was exaggerating now, it had not been entirely voluntary), if not that, then how many people, having found themselves forgetting things, had confirmed and approved the unsettling process, voluntarily shaped it as a sculptor confirms and shapes the design in marble? He was a walking proof of the physicist’s proposition that everything that can happen in the universe does happen. Once in the history of the universe, it could be said from now on, a man locked himself outside Time. A petty-minded fool would say, “Why? What caused it?” The man of heroic vision would say, “Behold what has been caused!”

Craine found himself whining. “It’s the truth, actually. Most people don’t like that kind of thing. If they don’t do it — in this case, forget things — then it shouldn’t be done. That’s the universal law. ‘Herd law,’ I call it, as in cattle, not ears.”

“Ah yes, Nietzsche,” the inspector said.

Craine nodded, grimacing. “Perhaps. But I ask you, why should a man remember things? I grant you, there are various opinions about Time. There’s the popular, simpleminded one — no, let me finish, let me explain!” Craine raised his hand.

McClaren leaned back in his chair, letting him hang himself.

“There’s the popular notion, Time as an onward rushing stream, a river — a notion that brings with it the corollary assumption of a moving present moment, the little bubble of now . But obviously the meaning of past and future must be determined not merely at the surface, that is, the psychological level — you can see that yourself — but also at a deeper, ontological level. All around and in between the no more and the not yet come lies the eternally present and at the same time eternally absent time zone called now . Correct? Absent in the same sense that if Time is the whole created universe from Big Bang to Fizzle, then we’re not it, we’re a hole in it, or rather we’re the mice in the hole in it.” He laughed. “But neither of these times, psychological or ontological, gets mentioned at all in the mathematician’s or the physicist’s description of Time, or rather Space-time.” Again he raised his hand. “No wait, I’m not finished!” He took a sip from his cup, spilling a little down his chin in his haste. His whine became, even in his own ears, more petulant. “In the physicist’s description of the universe, there’s no provision whatever for a flowing time or, by implication, a moving now .”