John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

Without returning the stranger’s nod, he closed the door, crumpled the pamphlet in his fist and threw it in the direction of the wastepaper basket beside his bed. He thought, with a brief little tingle of alarm, of the incident at Tully’s, the paper airplane. He stood bent forward in the nearly dark room, scratching his bewhiskered Adam’s apple, then moved back toward his chair and book. As he stood at his window, fingertips on his glass, he said aloud, crossly, “Ought to turn the lights on.” But he stared at the street, unconsciously looking for the watcher’s eyes, and, hardly aware that he was doing it, poured whiskey into his glass. His hands were relatively steady again, as they almost always were late in the day. Late in the day , he thought, and smiled grimly. He sipped the warm whiskey and ran his tongue around his lips, lost in thought.

He sat down and picked up the book again.

All languages, the Vedic priests believed, were descended from one original divine language, now corrupted and lost. The concept will be familiar to Western readers through the legend of Babel and the mystic tradition of the kabala. Especially in the 19th century …

The street outside his window was almost deserted. Farther down, in the direction of the university campus, there was a faint roar of talk and music along the strip; the evening was beginning at Zack’s, Bonapart’s, the Zombie’s, Merlin’s. Damn fools , he thought, looking back at his book. He wiped sweat from his forehead. Fever? he wondered. In his mind he saw the crowd of college students, a few of them dressed like elegant savages, the rest of them got up, with careful vanity, to look like junk collectors, sandhogs, farmers, pharmacists time-warped from some other thoroughly insignificant moment—1912, 1932, 1957. (His eyes moved steadily, line after line, four inches from the book, his right hand automatically picking at page corners, turning pages.) As if morosely, they nodded with the music, hands mechanically raising beer mugs to their mouths, or marijuana cigarettes, eyes gazing dully, hungrily at the girl in the wrinkled dark green blouse or at the boy in the tank top, mechanically snapping his fingers. Out on the highway toward Murphysboro, the big, stainless-steel Massage Parlor on Wheels would be rolling toward the Mississippi River, glinting in the darkness like a pistol barrel, a movie on the screen in the room behind the driver, on the bed a young Arab with his hands behind his head, grinning eagerly, sheepishly, at the girl rubbing oil on his chest and belly, then down along his loins, professionally teasing toward his towering, crooked member, softly whispering as her face came nearer, “Tickle?” Mournfully, Craine lowered the book into his lap, thinking he was thinking about the sentence he’d just read, his dim eyes groping along the bookshelves to the old Zenith television set he’d never used, then to the dresser, the rickety table and chair near his bed, the apartment fridge, the imperfectly closed bathroom door beyond which he could make out the gleam of what he knew to be the bathroom sink. Pitiful objects — they’d all been living here when Craine moved in — each with its miserable little history, forgotten.

The legend of the grandfather’s clock came back to him, Time Lost … and quickly, refusing to think again of the person in the stacks, he got up to cross the room and turn the light on. When he flicked the switch, everything around him was changed for an instant: the rug showed its faded and threadbare solidity — atoms to be counted on, its immense charge discrete and self-contained, no threat; Craine’s paperback books, hardbacks, and magazines waiting patient and dependable in their sagging shelves or strewn along the baseboard; his suit coat on the chair back fast asleep. But then, the next instant, nothing was changed; his confusion and distress were everywhere, wide awake, rocketing through the room. From somewhere nearby — Ira Katz’s room, perhaps — came a food smell, toast and coffee.

He’d eaten nothing all day, it occurred to him. He’d forgotten lunch, and when he’d finally gotten to his office — both Meakins and Royce were gone by then, and Hannah was putting on her coat to leave — he’d been too busy keeping his condition from Hannah (she waited, taking off her coat again, while he glanced through the mail she’d slit open for him) to think of anything so practical as supper. It was an outrage, having his comings and goings observed and judged, subtly ruled, in fact, by a fat, middle-aged black secretary. If he’d meant to be a slave he’d have gotten married and had children, like Meakins. (In his mind he saw the second of his agents, Emmit Royce, hips slung forward, hands in his pockets, no doubt playing with himself, grinning lopsidedly at some college girl maybe half his age, his steel tooth glinting like his murderous eyes, big dimple flashing, the handle of his gun poking out, suggestive, from the pocket of his old leather jacket. By midnight he’d have her under him. By two a.m. he’d have forgotten her, maybe found another.) When Craine had glanced through the last of them, he stacked his letters more or less neatly at the side of his desk. He wasn’t drinking, though the bottle in its sack was in his overcoat pocket and God knew he was thinking about it. “Deal with them tomorrow, ”he’d said, nodding at the letters.

“You all right, Craine?” Hannah said, eyes screwed up tight.

“Wonderful,” he said. He stood up, carefully, supporting himself with both hands on the edge of the desk.

She put her coat on again. “Wonderful,” she mimicked. She’d raised boys; she knew pretty well where he was coming from; but she decided to smile. “Lan-a-Goshen,” she said, and patted her forehead with a tissue. “You wanna lock up?”

“I’m coming now,” he said. He’d done it to torment himself, or so he would have claimed, not that he’d thought about it; had done it to make himself be with her a little longer without revealing the extent of his condition. Or partly that. It was a complicated business, of course, like everything. The quirks of human motivation, his stock in trade, spiralled down and down. She was a test of his ability to cope, partly; but also, he had a right to do whatever he pleased, and, leaving with her, maybe falling down the stairs — who knew? who cared? — he would show her his lordly indifference to whatever she might think. Also, of course, he was afraid to be alone; she had a beautiful voice, and a heart as immense as her bosom. Possibly she’d ask him some question, and he could spill it all out. I’ve gone crazy, Hannah. He would laugh as he spoke, reserving certain rights. You think I was crazy before, but listen!

As soon as they’d come out on the sidewalk, there was that feeling again. Eyes nailing him like headlight beams. He got an image of Eggers’ meek face, then McClaren’s — nostrils twitching, pale eyes snapping.

The smell of food was stronger now, and it came to him that what he chiefly desired in this world was a talk with his neighbor Ira Katz. Impossible, of course. He would be busy grading papers or writing poetry or whatever it was he did nights. Listening to his clocks. Or he’d have some young woman with him, yes. Embarrassing all round.

A queer tingling came over him and he looked up. His right hand knuckles and wrist ached. Too much smoking, no doubt. Thickening the blood, pushing the pressure up, loading the system with carbon monoxide. Incredible what the old corpse would tolerate! With the tip of his tongue he touched the sandpaper roof of his mouth just behind the front teeth. His gums were painfully sensitive, as always; advanced case of stomatosis, he’d been told. It wouldn’t become cancer — Craine’s opinion, not the dentist’s — he’d be saved by the law of parsimony; his weak spot had already been found. He hadn’t bothered to mention his theory to the dentist, naturally, lest the dentist convince him that the theory was, as Craine knew, nonsense. Craine frowned, glanced crossly at the door. It was a strange business, how a man rushed tail over tin cup toward the grave, kicking and swinging at every guardian angel that stupidly rose up, batting its wings and blocking his path, yelling, “Halt, maniac! Turn aside!”