John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

“That may be so,” McClaren began.

“It’s all a trick, you see,” Craine explained, leaning forward still more, both hands clinging to the cup as if without it he’d be dragged — like Atlantis, like Rome and the British Empire — into the darkness below the table. “These notions of time and space we have, it all comes of thinking too much about objects — including ourselves, you see, the ‘subjects’ embedded in the general clutter of objectivity. Now I, for one, have refused to be deluded! What I cannot endorse, I take no part in.”

“But you are here , sitting at this table ,” McClaren said uncertainly.

“Only for practical purposes,” Craine said.

McClaren frowned, slowly shaking his head. He feigned professorial patience, a decent man’s willingness to hear all points of view — leaning back comfortably, glass in hand — but his eyes were smoldering, as if he suspected his intelligence was being trifled with. “You’ve got all this from that book?” he asked, nodding toward Craine’s book.

“No, a different one,” Craine said. “The Avengers . It’s a comic book. You’d be surprised what a man can learn from comic books.” He cackled and threw McClaren a wink, then raised his cup two-handed and drank.

“Crazy stupid shit,” Inspector McClaren said; or perhaps Craine only imagined it. “I see,” McClaren said. He considered the matter from all angles. “What I don’t quite follow,” he said, “is why this makes you forget things.” For all his studied dignity — the professorial jacket, the carefully cultivated look of one who has encountered this question a time or two before — he looked vulnerable as a chicken, as if he feared that his question might have given him away, might have revealed that, contrary to the impression he’d so diligently labored to create, that huge pink dome was empty.

“Ah, that!” Craine said. “Why do I forget things? Yes, that’s the question we must grapple with.”

Slowly, as if Craine had drained off some of his vital energy, Inspector McClaren leaned forward again and settled his weight, more heavily than before, on his elbows. “You actually have no memory of your past whatsoever?

Dogged son of a bitch , Craine thought. But he thought it almost fondly. His glimpse of the man’s vulnerability had put him off his guard. He’d be sorry, he suspected, but he nodded soberly, solemnly, and sipped his Scotch-coffee.

McClaren turned his glass, empty now, between the palms of his hands. “Ordinarily,” he said, like a professor reaching deep into his treasury of information, “when we forget things it’s for one of two reasons, as Sigmund Freud observed.”

“That’s right! Exactly! Sigmund Freud!” Craine said, but McClaren kept coming, like a bulldozer.

“Either because we’re repressing them — refusing to look at them — or because we’re looking with all our attention at something else.”

“That’s it!” Craine said. “That’s Freud all right!” He pointed at McClaren’s glass. “You want more whiskey?”

“The second explanation might well be the correct one in your case,” McClaren said. “You’re familiar with the theories of Sigmund Freud, I presume?”

Craine rolled his eyes up, clear out of sight, but McClaren, looking straight at him like a slightly baffled dog — a boxer — seemed not to notice.

“By reputation, at least, you’re an excellent detective, or were at one time”—he blushed, quickly smiled—“… no doubt still are. Yet this failure of memory is so extreme , as you describe it.…” Mysteriously, his shoulders and dome began to rise. Craine stared. The odd phenomenon continued. The large man rose from the table as if levitating, unaware of it himself, or so it seemed, all his faculties engrossed, and, still talking, he drifted toward the bar like a somnambulist, stretching his arm out through the murky room, groping. “It’s hard to believe that what blocks out your past is an intense preoccupation with the present, the details of your work, and so on. Surely the cases you encounter in a place like Carbondale … And also, of course, there’s the matter of your drinking. Ordinarily that wouldn’t seem to indicate … ” His hand rose over the service bell, moving as if independent of his will, and came down hard, clanging it. Even though Craine had been waiting for the noise, he jumped. McClaren seemed not to hear it. His hand came down again on the bell, clanging it a second time; then he came drifting back toward Craine, still, it seemed, thinking out loud “You’re a complicated person. I’m told you won a number of medals, up in Chicago. That’s very good, admirable — so it is! — and yet I always distrust such things. ‘Why was he so desperate to prove himself?’ I ask. Pessimistic, I admit, though it’s a fault you share, I suspect.” He smiled, conspiratorial, lowering himself like a descending spider into his chair. “We wouldn’t last a minute in this business if we weren’t a bit distrustful, eh?”

“Now you’ve got it!” Craine said, cackling, and slapped the table. His voice rang loudly in the hollow, gloomy room.

But McClaren was onto him. “I admire you, Gerald. The energy it must have taken! You’ve never been to a psychiatrist, I suppose. Never been hospitalized, nothing like that—”

“No, nothing like that,” Craine said, laughing, “no.”

“Well if it works, do it, as the philosopher William James would say — brother to the novelist.” He gave Craine a little look. “Most people don’t know they were brothers, I find.”

“Brothers?” Craine exclaimed.

The inspector looked uneasy and hurried back to his subject. “You have no idea what it is you’re suppressing?” he asked, “—what it is you feel guilty about?”

“None,” Craine said wearily, and. smiled.

The waiter appeared at the curtain.

“Whiskey here,” McClaren said. He glanced at Craine’s cup. “And more coffee — with cream. A little Scotch in it.” He leaned toward Craine. “This is on me, Gerald. You keep what’s in the bottle.” He smiled like a mother, head tipped.

“Thank you,” Craine said. “Thank you very much!”

The waiter disappeared.

“I imagine you saw the movie The Seven Percent Solution ?” McClaren said. “Excellent movie. Very good acting in it.”

“Yes I did,” Craine said. He hadn’t, in fact. For that matter, he’d never seen Columbo on TV. “It was excellent. I thought the acting was very very good.” Instantly he saw he’d again gone too far. McClaren was smiling, far back in his chair, his smoky blue eyes murderous. The darkness of his blush was alarming.

“You take us all for fools, don’t you, Craine,” he said. “The police, I mean. Perhaps because few of us read books about Sanskrit.”

Few of us , Craine thought. McClaren too had put wonderful energy into becoming what he’d become. Guilt flooded through him, the kind of guilt he felt, at times, with Carnac. (He glanced at his watch and saw that it had started again, though it was still, of course, behind.) Mock all he liked — and mockery was Craine’s nature; a serious fault, he admitted it — the inspector had a good deal invested in that ludicrous image of his, the genteel, all-knowing professor who almost without thinking could talk like The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire . Who was he, Craine, to make light of it? All the while Craine was thinking this, something else was happening, and now, suddenly, he came awake to it. Inspector McClaren was whispering, his lips slightly parted, not visibly moving, I’ll get you, you cocky little son of a bitch. You’ll make your mistake, taking us for fools, you’ll steal somebody’s money, or you’ll kill some poor bastard, and I’ll be down on your little white ass like a duck on a daisy! Craine jerked so badly that the coffee remaining in his cup splashed all over him. McClaren jerked too, first forward, as if instinctively defending himself, then back, almost knocking his chair over, getting out of the way.