John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

When they’d diagnosed him—“colon carcinoma”—in the hospital just across the parking lot from the Baptist building where his offices were, he hadn’t felt the slightest trace of fear or shock; he’d simply been interested; perhaps — strange to say — almost pleased. He’d been sick for weeks: diarrhea, cramps; he couldn’t say how long ago it had started. They’d rammed in the old sigmoidoscope, casual and fierce as veterinarians, and that was that. So it’s cancer, he’d thought. He’d assumed from the start it meant curtains. He’d never known anyone who’d been told he had cancer and not died of it. With cancer of the colon it wasn’t necessarily that bad, people told him. Tom Meakins had an uncle who’d lived forty-one years after a cancer-of-the-colon operation. But the doctors at Johns Hopkins, where the doctors at Carbondale had immediately shipped him, had spoken guardedly, neither holding out nor withholding hope, so he’d gone on figuring he was done for. Better than a twenty-minute death by angina pectoris, which was what he’d been expecting, he’d thought — better than bouncing around, slamming against walls, screaming his head off with pain, nothing anyone could do. And of course he was done for. They could take out the growth, get all of it out, as apparently they’d done, but he still had cancer, a shadow inside him for life, the same drab shadow that lay over the world. Well, well! was all he’d thought, so Craine is to go to his reward! His indifference had gone deep. Even here, far from home, in Baltimore, he hadn’t had a hint of a nightmare. When friends, or rather acquaintances, had stopped in to visit him, happening by plane or train toward Washington, even coming on purpose — true foul-weather friends — and had delicately skirted the subject of death, piously mentioning prayer and God, bringing him amulets, miraculous diets, a cut-glass-windowed silver case which contained what appeared to be a very small part of the tooth of a saint, Mother Seton by name (tell him no more about modern enlightenment: someone had sawed that poor woman to bits and laid her aside like money in the bank in the hope that, in spite of the odds, she might one day be canonized), he’d nodded as politely as patience would allow, had hurried them over the difficult parts, and soothed them with Styrofoam cups of the Teachers’ Scotch he kept hidden in his nightstand.

It should have been one of the most significant periods of his life, he would have said. When a man thinks he’s dying, that’s when you’d think he’d take stock in earnest, face up to things. Take stock of what, though? The meaning of life? There he’d take his stand with that fellow Celine, best writer in the world, in Craine’s opinion: “Shut your eyes, that’s all that’s necessary. There you have life seen from the other side .” Dying did not change what he knew to be the case, that one way of life was as good as another. Farmer, priest, murderer …Ah, when you were young, watching the colorful, noisy parade, one set of bandsmen took your fancy above all others — perhaps it was the one with the silver trombones, or the one where the drummers threw their sticks in the air, or perhaps it was the one where the drum majorettes were young gentlemen in drag — no matter, you made your choice, threw in your lot with them, chose their company as if all other companies were ludicrous, contemptible; you fell in behind them, hopping to get in step, sucked in your belly, prettily lifted your chest and chin, threw your elbows out left and right like corn knives, and by diligent apprenticeship you became, by God, what you became. Very good; congratulations! And so the world paraded, overwhelmed with itself, until dusk, when the music petered out and the marching stopped, and, standing in a light, smoky rain, all the bandsmen — band on band from horizon to horizon — stood trying to keep their cigarettes lit, grumbling about wages, waiting for the chartered bus. It was all proud, childish foolishness. Third Reich, Mother Russia, China, driving permit, merit badges …shit clouds collapsing into planets, proud boulders in space …That had been Gerald Craine’s opinion before, and it was his opinion now that he was dying. Bankers against bank robbers; indignant, trembling teachers against proud or distressed ignoramuses; priests superstitiously kissing their crosses against bug-eyed, whimpering atheists pissing on altars. Righteousness, patriotism, “good manners” on one side, crouching in fear and brave comradery beside the cannons that cautiously peeked out, small dark O’s of alarm, above the battlements; on the other side, in the woods beyond the moat, Flint’s bedraggled cult, ready to die like heroes — nay, martyrs — for General Fornication; Anarchists United — outrageous idea — willing and eager to die for freedom from the accidental chains of geography and geometry, the rivers, mountain ranges, invisible dotted lines that invest one set of hills with unholy majesty far beyond that of all other green tumescences and can send you to prison if you fail to see the glow; and somewhere, sulking behind the worshippers of flesh and the anarchists, the unwashed and uncivil — tanned, half-naked bums huddled on the heat vents of the sidewalks of Washington, D.C., in the middle of winter, kings of disgust to whom style, even thank you and please , is more loath than Treblinka …

He, for one, had nothing against any of them. Perhaps, when he was young he’d imagined that he was working for Law & Order, but he’d been disabused of such foolishness long since. In the mindless game Winning-or-Losing-One’s-Case, he served whoever got him when the teams chose up. In that, he was no different from any other, in his opinion. Take a perfectly good, decent Republican young man from the pastures of Ohio, put him in a large university — in English, sociology, or political science — his conscience would drive him to the Democratic Party within the year. Send him to BankAmerica as a responsible executive, and reason — common decency — would turn him Republican within the month. Make him a policeman, within a week he’d start memorizing football scores. One must talk, after all; share interests with the people one’s surrounded by. What kind of humbug, in a city of rapists, holds out for the dignity of womanhood? No crime; no shame. Reality! So the life force rose up sometimes as an elephant, sometimes as a tree. No harm; Craine had no objection — no serious objection. Nevertheless, having noticed that the whole game was rigged, one had to concentrate, make small adjustments, to keep on playing.

Ironically, Craine had been the darling of his doctors, a marvel of good attitude. He healed as if magically, seemed hardly to notice the pain or confinement. The first cut in his abdomen had infected — no fault of Craine’s; the intestines are known to be a filthy place — and so he’d lain for weeks with gray packing in the wound, which nurses came to change every three, then four hours, and doctors would come, every three or four days, to pick at a little with their knives. Craine read, slept, read. “It must make you want to scream, just lying here like this,” his surgeon, a woman, had said to him once, not looking at him, running her eyes over his chart. She was lean as a sapling; hard-boned, sharp-eyed. Her blond hair was cut like pillow feathers. Her chin was like an Indian’s stone knife. “Well, no,” Craine had said. Sometimes, troubled by intestinal cramps (this was later, after his second operation, when he’d begun to be mobile), he’d considered screaming. It was the worst pain he’d ever experienced, and where pain was concerned, Craine was no novice. He’d been shot, wrecked in cars, beaten, et cetera, the usual fol-de-rol of his witless occupation. But the idea of screaming was tiresome and depressing, especially the idea of screaming over a thing so unheroic, even bestial, as intestinal cramps. Screaming, even if the cause was Justice or Truth or earthquakes in Chile, seemed to Craine a little babyish, a foolish exaggeration of one’s importance in the world — though groaning was all right, a little honest groaning could be a blessed thing, like healthy defecation. Inhale: silence; exhale: groan. Like the rhythm of the womb. It was not, like screaming, an appeal for pity or even interest. A noise, simply; a temporary annoyance of one’s neighbors, like traffic sounds or bells of a clock tower out of tune, a noise that, making no demands, could be endured, tuned out. He’d clenched his teeth and hobbled up and down the hospital corridors — the usual cure for intestinal cramps — inching along like a ninety-year-old man, gripping in his right hand, half-leaning against it, the aluminum tree from which his tubes and bottles hung.