John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

Craine took them from him, clumsily, put the pills in his mouth, and drank. “Thank you,” he said, and rolled his eyes up. “Thank you very much.” He handed back the glass.

Ira turned away, looked at the cat in the chair, the photographs, then set down the glass on the bookshelf behind Craine. With a part of his mind, Craine registered a noise, perhaps the door opening at the foot of the stairs. He listened more carefully, listless, not even interested — alert in spite of himself, he would have said, like some criminal who’d lost all taste for life yet finds himself paying attention to every strange footfall. There was nothing now, only the ticking of the clocks, the absolute stillness of mounded white sand in the hourglass on the table beside him. Ira went over to the window to stand with his hands in his suspenders, looking down again.

“Personally,” Craine said, “I put such things out of my mind. Gone like smoke.” He leaned his head back and looked at the ceiling.

“I know,” Ira said.

There was another sound, someone on the stairs. He strained to separate out the sound of the clocks. Even now he felt no interest, only a morbid curiosity. The miraculous does not come to those out looking for it. Beauty, high adventure … He closed his eyes.

The man was muttering something, standing there angrily muttering at the window. Stupid bastard, stupid fucking bastard …

Indignation leaped up in him, but he forgot the next instant. He saw the doorknob turning, the door slowly opening, a leather-gloved hand reaching in, groping toward the lightswitch.

“What?” Craine said, snapping his eyes open.

Ira Katz looked at him, far away. “Maybe that’s your trouble, Craine,” he said.

“What?” Craine said again, heart racing.

“This feeling you have of someone following you, spying on you. Maybe it’s Time’s revenge.” He studied Craine a moment, then shifted his gaze away, out the window, down into the street. “I have a theory,” he said. “We have an idea of ourselves, when we’re kids: noble-hearted, honorable, unselfish. It’s a beautiful image, and in fact it’s true — it’s the truth about us — but we betray it, or the nature of the world betrays it. We betray it again and again, one way or another. We can’t do what’s decent. Our commitments prevent it, or it’s beyond our means. There are only so many causes you can die for, only so many good women you can love with all your heart, and even the best twist you downward, limit possibilities, limit your potential. So we lose touch with ourselves, turn our backs on the image, believe ourselves to be the ugly thing we’ve by now half-proved we are. The image is still there, the shadow we cast into the future when we were young. It’s still there haunting us, beckoning us toward it; only now there’s that second shadow, the shadow, behind us, of all those acts unworthy of us.” He put his hand on his beard. At last he said, “I heard a story. There was this girl, a student of one of our graduate students. It seems she saw a rape — or a murder, I forget — and she was afraid to report it. It was years ago, I think. Anyway, all this time she’s been brooding on it, trapped in the past. Snagged on it, that unfulfilled moment. Everywhere she goes, everyone she meets, out pours the story. It’s the most important thing in the world to her. People hide behind trees when they see her coming. You see what I’m saying. Maybe in your case—”

Something astonishing was happening in Craine’s mind — a blinding flash of white, as if all matter had exploded, then blackness, then everything as it was. She was there, out in the hallway, her small ear pressed against the door, dark eyes rolled up. He could hear her breathing.

Ira Katz was looking at him, eyebrows lowered. Craine sat forward. “It’s late,” he said, and shuddered — shuddered from head to foot, like a man just come in from icy wind and deep snow. “I lost track of the time,” he said, and laughed. He rose unsteadily to his feet, three fingers on the chair arm for balance. His legs were like wood.

“It is late,” Ira said.

Craine’s eyes fell again on the snow-white sand mounded up in the bottom of the hourglass, absolutely still.

“I’ll just use your bathroom,” he said, and moved very carefully, like an old, old man, toward the bedroom door. When he was seated in the dark — he’d been unable to find the bathroom lightswitch — his sense that she was listening in the hallway outside became a certainty. He heard her purse snap open, saw her hand slip in. He tried to hurry, full of life again, but his bowel track refused to be rushed, shooting miserable dribbles and insisting with pressure like a wail that he wait a minute longer. Pain tugged at the red gouge five inches below his nipple, another pain lower, where the remains of his anus had been sewn to the remains of his tubing. He strained with all his might, then gave up — he’d take his chances — wiped himself, pulled up his trousers, and flushed the toilet. His heart pounded fiercely, the rest of him sodden and heavy as new concrete. Then the knock came, exactly when he’d known it was coming. Quickly, one hand on the bathroom doorknob, he drew the pistol from its holster. When he heard Ira Katz walk over in his stocking feet and open the hallway door, Craine stepped out of the bathroom and crossed to the door to the livingroom, then, after an instant, stepped out suddenly — smiling like a storm trooper — to greet her.

At once he saw that the woman staring at him was not the one. She was tall, middle-aged, all skin and bones, most of her straggly brown hair up in a bun. Her dress was vaguely Indian; over it, she wore a pale purple cardigan sweater and green beads. Her face went white — all except the birthmark like a coin on her cheek — and the hand that held the purse dropped lower. Ira Katz, too, was staring at Craine’s pistol. He drew the woman back toward himself.

“Craine,” he said at last, eyes wide, “this is April. She’s a friend.” He pulled at the side of his collar with two fingers, letting in air, still looking at the pistol — now aimed at the floor. He stood carefully balanced, like a man on a tightrope thousands of feet up. He said, “April, this is my neighbor from down the hall, Detective Craine.”

She just stared.

Craine smiled crazily, bending forward over the gun. “I just came to borrow some sugar,” he said. He glanced at the cup on the bookshelf, then down at his pistol. He put it away hastily, fingers shaking. “I thought you were here to steal my sugar,” he explained, and gave a laugh.

They looked at him.

“It’s late,” he said, soberly nodding, then laughed again. He went to get the cup from the bookshelf. “I lost track of the time,” he said, hurrying toward the door. He made his face so sober that, unbeknownst to himself, he looked furious. Tears ran down his cheeks. “Thank you very much,” he said. “Sorry I had to trouble you. Thank you very much.”

It was not that he felt guilty; he’d drunk too much to be vulnerable to guilt. Nor was it exactly that his mind was churning. He seemed to be thinking nothing, lying there flat on his back like a corpse patiently awaiting resurrection. He lay in his underwear on top of the covers, head cocked forward by the pillows, his arms at his sides, bare feet splayed outward. He was strongly conscious of the room around him, the faded gray wallpaper splotched and cracked, bulging here and there, like an old bum’s forehead; the padless, once wine-red, threadbare carpet lumped up into ropes, like the veins on the backs of his hands. It was, his story, this room, this miraculous decay — the books that spelled out his consciousness wedged into bookshelves of cheap, stained pine, strewn along the baseboards, stacked up in corners; on the bedpost above him his pistol precariously tilted in its shoulder holster; on his dresser, in its dusty old Bible-black case, the pitted, once-silver cornet that he hadn’t touched in years. A streetlight made the night smoke-gray outside his window, lighting up telephone and electric lines and throwing a negative shadow along the floor toward his closet. The closet door hung open, too warped to close; it had a broken spool for a doorknob. The interior of the closet, just visible from Craine’s bed, was crowded with dark forms. He thought, without emotion, how some murderer might crouch there, waiting for him to sleep. At once he found himself thinking of the women who’d been killed. He imagined their terror as the dark shape detached itself from the other dark shapes and came forward, signalling for silence, reaching out to snatch them. Abruptly, Craine sat upright, threw his feet over the side of the bed, and got up.