John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

Friends — acquaintances — came by, sent cards, wakened him with phone calls, sent flowers. It was astonishing that he, testy, cold-blooded old bastard that he was, should be so rich in friends or anyway acquaintances. Showed what a remarkable capacity people had for self-delusion. Yet there he was lying a little, of course. It was standard practice, in Craine’s profession, to give the client every possible benefit of the doubt; standard practice to lay yourself out for every asshole that hired you. Snarl as he might, it was Gerald Craine’s nature to assume that even the most despicable of mortals had something to be said for him, at any rate as much as could be said for the miserable bastards who rose up against him. He defended the indefensible, blanched at nothing, mothered the monstrous; and this was his reward, a roomful of friends whose names for the most part escaped him. If anyone had pushed him, he’d have admitted more: that he was glad to see them. Sometimes when one of them came grinning through the door, Craine’s eyes, to his shame and indignation, would well up with tears. He was tempted to say to himself, “Life means more than you thought, you old fart. Look how many people, as the saying goes, ‘care.’ ” He imagined an army — Craine’s people against the world. A woman he’d helped with her divorce years ago came, packed like a pigeon, in a tweedy suit, and gave him a “friendship ring.” Her lips were shiny as wax, like the lips of a cadaver in state. A young man, formerly of Carbondale, now fisherman on a boat on the Chesapeake Bay, told Craine how Craine had changed his life. Craine accepted it, smiled grimly, listening — all with the same sublime indifference, or anyway the same metaphysical indifference, that made him heal more quickly than the doctors had had reason to expect. Better people than Craine howled and fought against death, rang their bells for the nurses, asked their doctors for more detail, more detail. Craine visited them — travelling to ward off more cramps — meaninglessly passing his time. To one of them, a pretty young woman without a hope in the world, he gave his Mother Seton tooth. Temporarily, she improved.

He’d had three operations: the exploratory, from which he emerged with the abdominal infection; the extraction of the cancerous section of his colon, which left him with the colostomy bag and cramps; and the colostomy takedown. Coming out of anesthesia for the third time, after the third operation, he came to the realization that each of the three times, just before waking, he’d heard the same queer sentence, a series of syllables in what might have been Finnish, a pronouncement he somehow understood. He hadn’t thought about it, the first and second times, had simply registered, after he’d opened his eyes, its hollowly resonating gibberish — he could not now recall the words, if they were words — and had mused briefly, until present reality took precedence, on the eerie sensation of rising from one plane of existence to another, not as one rises from a dream to waking life, it seemed to him, but in a fashion quite different, something not even he, adept at fancy language and rant, could express. This, perhaps: like being drawn abruptly to human consciousness from the consciousness of a fish. (There was a sound, like the noise on a television set after “The Star-Spangled Banner”; it was through this noise that the other came.) He couldn’t remember, afterward, who had been there with him in the recovery room — possibly one or two nurses, possibly his doctor. He’d had an impression, after each of his awakenings, that after the sentence of, perhaps, gibberish, what he’d next heard was a man’s voice, some intelligible sentence in English, perhaps “Wake up!” or “Mr. Craine, open your eyes!” Perhaps a nurse had joined in the command. But he’d had, the third time, a distinct impression that what the doctor said was not at all what the voice of the drug had said; and, more important, he’d had the impression — it amounted to a chilling certainty — that the sentence in gibberish was exactly the sentence he’d heard both times before. In fact this third time he’d known almost certainly, hearing the strange sentence, that in an instant he’d be awake, and then he was. It was not hard to think of physiological explanations; nevertheless, it was a queer effect. He must have remained awake, if it could be called that, only for a moment before dropping back into sleep, a different sleep now, familiar and comforting, morphine luminous but otherwise no different from an ordinary sleep, or such was his impression. He couldn’t quite remember that either, afterward; in fact, though after the second operation he’d spent three days in the recovery room, he’d found when he was back in his own room — a bright, large private room, with a print by Matisse, on the seventh floor of the Nelson Building — he could remember almost nothing about the recovery room, nothing but the fact that the walls were gray — exactly the shiny, snake-belly gray of the basement walls of the grade school he’d attended fifty years ago, forgotten until now — and that down there in the bowels of the hospital, where the work of life and death was done, the cloth screens set up at the foot of his bed were gray-green, like the garb of those who worked there and the sheets on his metal-railed bed.

One end of his room was now a hedge of flowers and potted plants. Half hidden by the plants, a window ran from one wall to the other, looking out on the old Johns Hopkins tower, Osier dome, reared against the skyline of Baltimore, a dark brick dome cut by arches and blocked-in windows, below it high chimneys ornately corbeled, their flues sealed off half a century ago — stiff, plugged throats around a colossal, brooding dove.

Not that his view of the city displeased him, the sleepy miles of soft gray buildings, copper steeples, stone towers — among them one tower crudely Florentine, with a lighted clock that had letters instead of numbers: B R O M O S E L T Z E R — and not that the symbols he registered without interest reflected any deep unhappiness or distress on his part, much less fear. At night the sky above the city was soy-red beyond the blackness of the dome, and the streets stretching westward were hung with colored lights. When he awakened in the morning, just before dawn, when orderlies came in to take blood from his arm, the sky was dark blue, sprinkled with stars, and the drab, unlit buildings were a misty gray, as if the ocean a little to the east of where he lay had crept nearer when no one was looking. He saw nothing ominous in this or in anything. Life went on, and he was part of it, but not partisan. He thought of Lazarus, tyrannized back, jerking up onto one elbow, opening one eye, then the other, suddenly interrupted in some thought. The voice he’d heard just before awakening, it occurred to him, had been asking him some question, or making some demand; the voice, perhaps, of a German officer.

By day his hospital room was wonderfully pleasant, full of Naples-yellow light, crammed with cards, plants, flowers, sometimes visitors: Tom Meakins and his wife; a Carbondale lawyer for whom Craine had done odd jobs, now visiting Baltimore relatives; old friends from Chicago who’d come to Washington on business; a young man whom Craine had once gotten out of prison; people Craine had helped out, they said, in the sixties — gone bail for or gotten lawyers for, he no longer remembered — now solid citizens, working for NPR or building nuclear power plants, storage tanks for nerve gas (leaky, like all the rest), making car payments, house payments, worried about The Schools …”

At night the nurses left the door open, and the light that came in made him feel as he’d felt in his forgotten childhood, alone in the dark but safe. He lay on his back, the only position available to him, listening to the comfortable clicks and hums of the sleeping building breathing and dreaming like an animal around him, the occasional swish of a door, the suggestion of footsteps, now and then a distant voice — perhaps some guard, or doctor or nurse, or for all he knew, some patient’s TV. He slept, then wakened again as (as if in a dream) the heavy, Virginia-hills night nurse named Audrey came and changed his dressing, emptied his urine can, freshened up the water and ice in his blue plastic pitcher. “Forty years,” she said, and winked at him. “Would you believe it?” He had no idea what she meant at first, but he liked her country face and pretended to be astonished. “Forty years!” she said again, and shook her head as if even she could make no sense of it. She patted his hand as she would a child’s. “Get some sleep now, Mr. Craine.” She snapped the light off. Before her square shape was out the door, he was asleep. Then it was day again — blood samples, breakfast, bustling activity, as if everyone who came here to Nelson had come for pure pleasure.