John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

“But we don’t, you see. That’s the point.” He spoke patiently, as to a child. “Being mammals, and sentient, we’re aware that it might hurt, landing on those big jagged rocks down below. We obey the age-old law of mammals, the law that precedes our particular existence: Try not to get hurt . It seems to me that our proper business should be to try to figure out what the secret laws are for sentient mammals — what hurts us and what doesn’t, physically, psychologically, spiritually.” He flashed a smile, too quick and neat, a smile he’d used in lectures. “We should work at discovering what values are built into us. Learn to survive — learn what makes us fit . The existentialists point us in the opposite direction, that’s what’s wrong with them. They encourage us to think we can make up values, like Midas deciding, on insufficient evidence, that what people really need is a world made of gold, or like Nietzsche deciding, on insufficient evidence, that the future belongs to ‘the sons of the Prussian officers.’ ”

“But what if it does?” Craine burst out, flustered. “By your law of mere fitness, what if he was right? Take people’s hatred of the Jews.” He looked away from Ira’s face, then resolutely back, straight into his eyes. “You think it was beaten when Hitler lost the war — if he did lose the war?” He was aware, too late, that it came out like a snarl, as if Craine were the chief and most deadly of anti-Semites.

Ira Katz shrugged as if the matter were of no great importance to him, but his eyes lowered, and his voice became more serious, studiously reasonable and offhand. “If Nietzsche was right, then his position will win. Survival of the fittest. Millions upon millions of gentle, well-meaning creatures have been wiped out by the centuries.”

There was a silence, as if both of them, in their embarrassment, had lost the thread. Craine’s eyes settled on the snapshot of Ira Katz’s children. The photograph beside it was of their mother — not Jewish, it came to him. He quickly looked away and busied himself relighting his pipe, then refilling his glass. It was late, he must be going. An increasing sense of urgency churned in him. Whatever it was that he’d come to find out, they hadn’t gotten near it, or rather, one moment they’d be edging in on it, the next they’d be light-years off. He was like a man who’d stayed late at a tedious party, hoping against hope, and now the others were leaving, the talk of the few who remained was turning insidious, his hopes were growing slimmer by the moment. He raised his glass with a quick jerk and drank. Like a train in the station, starting up before you realize it’s done so, the room began to move.

There was a trace of a quaver in Ira Katz’s voice when he spoke again, as if Craine’s accidental attack had stirred memories. “Whatever is true is true,” he said. “We have to live with that.” He shrugged as if trying to submit to his own rule. His eyes, looking down at the carpet between Craine and himself, were solemn. “We were talking about detective novels. About getting at the truth. There’s something I tell my students … ” He took a deep breath, as if he couldn’t get air enough. Craine noticed only now that the room was hot. Sweat ran down his neck. Ira was saying, “We have only two ways of finding out what’s true, what will work. By history’s blind groping, one damn thing after another, as they say”—he took another deep breath—“or by rigorous imagination, which in the end means by poems and novels.” He flicked his eyes up at Craine. “Get everything exactly right, and maybe you save people the pain of history gone wrong.”

“Ha!” Craine barked, not in scorn but only to stop the talk for a moment, make the room stop moving, give himself time to think — though scorn was what it sounded like, Craine knew.

Ira Katz shrugged and leaned back in his chair, abandoning him. The room now moved steadily to the left. Ira Katz remembered his wineglass on the table and took a sip, then put the glass down gently and glanced at the clock just beside it. Quarter to eleven. Again he took one of those deep, pained breaths, and his glance went briefly to the bedroom door. This time Craine registered it. Was it possible that the man had a girl in there? If so, she was as quiet as a corpse. For an instant he imagined it clearly: a lead-gray dead girl, some college student with long blond hair, naked on Ira Katz’s bed. Craine shuddered and drank. No, not possible, he thought, and briefly understood with perfect clarity what Ira Katz was saying about imagination testing truth. At once Craine lost it. “Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense,” the clocks said everywhere around him, heavily sibilant but clear as day. He was imagining it, of course, he told himself; but in fact, he saw the next instant, he was not. The word was unmistakable. They’d been saying it all night, it came to him. He sat still as a boulder, stunned by the discovery. The Vedic priests were right: sounds corresponded to natural forces in the universe. Everything was language, the very atoms maniacally whirling in the chair where he sat. Word of God, he thought, half ironic, half crazily gleeful, and for an instant closed his eyes. He fell through space, plummeting, and at once snapped his eyes open and was stabilized.

For all that was happening — Time off its rhythm, as if rushing out past the edge of the universe — Ira Katz was saying calmly, reasonably, “You may be right that it’s impossible for human beings to know the truth, but whatever the real history of the world is, we’re part of it, made of the same material. The minute we step outside it — or allow some son of a bitch to push us outside it — we’re done for. That’s what survival of the fittest means, being made of the same thing the universe is, and able to move when the universe moves. In that sense all novels are detective novels, or ought to be. People hunting for connections.” Incredibly — since usually, drunk or sober, Craine was like lightning at catching such things — Craine realized only now that Ira Katz was in some way talking about himself. He, Ira Katz, was the man not fit to survive, or so he thought — not “connected.” Was that what it was about, then, the poetry writing? — the endless, passionate turning over of trivia — autumn days, the eyes of chickens? Strange that Craine should be surprised by it. He’d known for years that it was hardly for himself alone that the jig was up.

Before he knew he would do it, Craine heard himself saying, “I’ve been having some queer experiences lately.” He glanced past his shoulder, then leaned forward again. “I keep feeling someone watching me. Crazy, eh? Ha ha!” His free hand slapped the chair arm.

Ira Katz nodded, eyebrows lifted, and tentatively smiled, alerted.

“I’ve got a friend who maintains it’s the Lord watching me. I laugh. I don’t believe in such things, naturally. But I’ll tell you, it gives me the jeebies!” He had an odd sensation — not quite frightening, but curious — of sinking chair and all into the floor.

“I should think so,” Ira said and again just perceptibly nodded. He raised his wineglass and sipped. His eyes had gone vague.

Craine desperately focused his attention on Ira, keeping the chair from sinking further. “I don’t believe in connections — especially metaphysical connections,” Craine said. He laughed, alarmed, as if his words tempted devils, then hurried on, focusing still harder on Ira Katz. In his drunkenness he believed he was zeroing in on the heart of the matter — he would not think so tomorrow, perhaps, but his feeling that he was getting at the truth at last was intense. In a burst, struggling with his thickening tongue, he told Ira Katz how Carnac kept pursuing him, hounding him, and how even as he fled he felt mysteriously bound to the man, doomed to some terrible brotherhood with him. He spoke of the bookstore and how Tummelty had strangely latched onto him, hooked in like a burr, pretending it was Carnac’s mind, not his own, that interested him. Craine laughed, three sharp yelps, as he spoke of how Tummelty had tried to fool him. The feeling that he was onto something grew by leaps and bounds. As he was about to speak of the woman who stood watching from the stacks, unseen — a woman with cat’s eyes, black as coal — there came a terrible whirring and, out of sync, the clocks all struck eleven. Craine stopped short, mouth wide open, listening.