John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

“Have a seat,” he said, and gestured vaguely, letting Craine choose his chair.

Craine, as usual, chose the chair that seemed less likely to be his neighbor’s favorite, the one farthest from the photograph and snapshot, took the glass his neighbor held out to him, and carefully — steadying the bottle against the rim of the glass — splashed in Scotch. His neighbor, standing by the other chair, pouring wine for himself, smiled with just his mouth, like a man lost in thought, then finally seated himself — his head under the lamp so that the black hair shone brown in a ring exactly like a halo around his head — put the bottle on the carpet to the right of his feet, raised his glass as if to say “cheers,” and took a small sip. Craine took a slightly larger sip, then set the wobbly glass down. For a long, awkward moment, they sat listening to the clocks. The cat came wandering in from the kitchen, his wide head tipped, eyes grumpy, to see what they were doing. At last he went over to lie down with his head against Ira Katz’s shoeless left foot. As if by magic, the instant the cat closed his eyes all the clocks began chiming, first one, then another. Ten o’clock.

“Ten o’clock!” Craine said, surprised.

His host half-smiled and nodded. The cat lay quiet as a doorstop, pretending to be asleep.

Craine got his pipe out, loaded it, and lit it, all the while frantically trying to think what he might say.

Ira Katz leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees. After a moment he asked, “Is something wrong, Craine?”

Craine jumped at the terrible simplicity of the thing and, to cover himself, reached for the Scotch glass on the table beside his chair. “I’ve been thinking about what we talked about the last time we talked,” he said. He shot a look at Ira, but the poet’s eyes showed nothing. Craine put the pipe down in his lap to hold the glass with both hands and keep it steady. He drank, then leaned forward. The lines and colors of the books in the lamplight behind Ira’s head were slightly sharper and brighter than they ought to be, intensified by the whiskey. Ira Katz waited, slightly smiling, his eyes sad and distant.

“We were talking about novels, you remember, and detectives and exi—” He paused, stopped cold by a memory lapse, struggling in vain after the word, though he knew it as he knew his own name.

“Existentialists?”

“That’s it!” He took another gulp, then put the glass down and picked up his pipe. “Existentialists, yes!” He paused, feeling awkward about leaping so abruptly into serious conversation. Katz looked bored, as if the word existentialists annoyed him. No doubt it did. He’d know, as a university man, the stupidity of all those big words, all that talk, talk, talk. Craine listened to the clocks — a patternless, frantic clicking like a random beating of electrons — then in spite of himself, in spite of Katz’s displeasure and his own sure knowledge of the uselessness of it all, pressed on: “We were talking about how the existentialists feel about detective novels. It was interesting, and the more I got to thinking about it, the more interesting it got. You don’t like them, I think — these existentialists — but I believe that’s what I am myself — what we have to be, us detectives.”

Ira waited. His shadow lay perfectly still, draped over the cat and reaching halfway to Craine. Another shadow, fainter, stretched up the wall behind him and to the right of him, cast by the dim light coming from the bedroom.

“The world’s neither one thing nor the other, that’s what we believe,” Craine said. “ ‘Complementarity,’ as the physicists say.”

“That’s not exactly—” Ira began, then stopped.

“We’re simply here, that’s the thing,” Craine explained, hurrying, sensing that he’d made some mistake. “We don’t know what happened before we came onto the case, who did what or why, nothing, and we don’t give a damn; not really.” He squinted, playing crafty detective. “We’re not committed one way or the other, that’s our profession. Dispassionate.”

Ira straightened up — the shadow leaped back with him — and looked at his glass. “I suppose that’s true,” he said. He seemed now a little like a detective himself, trying to see around behind the conversation.

Craine laughed, trying to make light of it. “A detective cares no more for the victim than he does for the murderer,” he said. “His heart’s cold as ice. He’s a man without a past, you might say. No past and, for all practical purposes, no future.” He laughed again, then, trembling, put his pipe between his teeth and relit it. Ira Katz watched him, lips pursed, waiting just a touch impatiently, glancing at the bedroom door. “It’s a terrible thing, of course,” Craine said, “a man with no earthly connections, suspicious as a rat; but, you see, that’s how it is.” He gave another little laugh.

“Yes, I suppose,” Ira said.

Craine had a feeling he still wasn’t following, and no wonder; he was half lost himself. “Put it this way,” he said. “It wasn’t us that made the laws — we don’t care about the laws — we just make up a theory about who did what to who, and that’s it, that’s reality, or as much of it as counts, one tiny bubble in the”—he paused, then gestured impatiently—“the foam.”

Ira nodded and smiled, making light blink in his hair. Judging from his face, he was as baffled as ever. “But sometimes the theory’s true and sometimes not — you’d agree with that?” he asked.

“Maybe so, but you can never be sure,” Craine said. “And what’s the difference?”

Ira thought about it, tapping the rim of his glass with one finger. “Interesting,” he said. It was not quite ingenuous, Craine could see. He’d thought it all through before, though he pretended otherwise. He still seemed reluctant to pursue the conversation — no doubt old stuff to him, junk food for freshmen — but after a moment the hint of a smile came back and his eyes met Craine’s. “Tell me this,” he said. “Suppose you should decide to take that gun out of its holster and shoot me, right here and now, and suppose in half an hour you should fall into a river, gun and all”—he gave Craine a quick, apologetic glance, maybe just a touch of hostility in it—“and no one in the world could prove that it was you that killed me. Wouldn’t it be true just the same that it was you who did it?”

Craine narrowed his eyes, thinking hard, on the look-out for traps. “No, not for practical purposes,” he said.

“No, not for practical purposes, I suppose.” Ira tapped the glass, slightly lined up at the checkout computers, or copying down call numbers at the central catalogue, browsing in the seven-day new-acquisitions room, or sprawled in the carpeted lounges, reading, Craine’s soul, ordinarily so indifferent to fortune, stirred toward covetousness and envy. He reminded himself, as he always did here, that maybe ninety percent of the people around him weren’t interested in books, were merely faking their courses, skimming half-heartedly or reading carefully but without real interest or understanding — but he didn’t believe it. Every student who passed with a great, awkward armload clamped under his chin was an affront to Craine, like a fat, smiling czar to a peasant Communist — though of course it was nonsense: he could come here whenever he pleased, if he pleased. Theoretically, at least. It was only in his mind that he was an alien here, a rat darting furtively through a room of sleeping cats.

At the checkout desk he asked a well-dressed black boy in glasses, “Where do I get the number of a person’s library carrel?”

Without looking up from his work the boy pointed at the ceiling and said, “Second floor, main desk.”