John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

He read on, sucking at the dryness of his mouth, wincing at the book, muttering as if the page had not only the gift of language but also ears. He remembered his grandfather, for no reason, he believed — for no better reason than that the book spoke of Hebrew. He saw the man standing in his natty robe, arms outstretched behind the pulpit — moustached, slightly plump, his spectacles blanked out by light. He was Presbyterian, Craine remembered; pastor to a well-off congregation in St. Louis. “So that’s it,” Craine muttered, and winced again. It had come to him why at times, when drunk, he flew into complicated, passionate lectures and quoted Scripture, his mind on automatic pilot. He was, at such times, like a man possessed. Facts fell to hand like fruit in Eden; logic revealed itself like a goddess undressing. Afterward, everything he’d said, every wham of his fist, would be gone like smoke.

Suppose glossolalia were a real thing, he’d thought. Suppose Carnac was, in some sense, sane. Suppose glossolalia was what Craine had heard, anesthetized on the table, and the man in the dark, the girl he imagined to be following him, somehow crying out to him, friend or foe …

He got up from the toilet, flushed it, put down the book and picked up a paperback, easier to carry, and prepared to confront another day. In the underwear he’d slept in he brushed his teeth, then shaved and touched up his hair dye, black. Outside his window it was another clear autumn morning, almost no one out yet, two or three cars, a Bunny Bread truck, Ned Bugrum’s mule-drawn junk wagon coming across the tracks, not making a sound.

Craine squinted and sucked again at his loose, dry mouth, thinking about his grandfather as he put on the socks he’d left hanging to air out on the doorknob, then his shirt, trousers, shoes, and shoulder holster, then his sagging brown jacket or rather suit coat, once part of a suit. Some taint of the nightmare emotion remained with him, coloring the miserable gray room around him, decayed and alive as the duff on the floor of a forest — he couldn’t say why; perhaps the discovery that he was haunted. Though his past had been dead for a long time, buried as if under grass and huge stones, it was now clear to him that, somewhere down there, some part of it still wriggled, alive. For an instant, incredibly, he remembered his father, then forgot. He glanced past his shoulder at the window. He couldn’t explain the crotchety feeling, subtle as the look of death in the sheen of a cancer victim’s skin. Scowling, slightly squinting, he poured more Scotch into his glass, drank it, then cracked his revolver, making sure it was loaded, though it always was. He stared at the bullets in their chambers for a moment, vaguely reminded of the brasswork on a ship; then he closed the pistol, slipped it into its holster and, taking the whiskey with him, left his room. At the head of the stairwell his neighbor’s cat sat warming itself in a trapezoid of sunlight, its one open eye on Craine. He moved toward it, then, with a startled look, turned back to his door. He bent over the lock, managed to get the key in, locked it, carefully tried the doorknob twice, and glanced around furtively at the cat. The hallway was full of some strange, strong smell. At last, stepping cautiously, groping like a blind man, making hardly a sound, he descended the long stairway, his right hand on the bannister, in his left the bottle of Scotch in its brown paper sack. The thought of memory rising from the dead had made him think of grave robbers, mysterious incantations, King Tut’s curse. Someone with a beard and a wide-brimmed hat was at the window in the door at the foot of the stairs, looking up at him. Craine paused, gripping the bannister more tightly. The person stepped away. The same instant it seemed to Craine that some animal stirred among the garbage bags. His heart gave a jump and he leaned down to look. His mind went blinding white, then blank.

Two-heads Carnac sat motionless among the brown plastic bags as if someone had hastily and indifferently dumped him there, one more piece of trash for the garbage truck. Craine ground his fists into his eyes, then looked again. It was no mistake. Craine stood staring, his hands out for balance, then hastily dropped to his knees to see if Carnac was alive. He reached toward Carnac’s one good eye, the right one, with the intention of opening it and peering in, but three inches away his hand stopped as if of its own accord and jerked back. Caked blood lay on Carnac’s cheek and forehead, blood from a scalp wound, Craine thought at first, but then he found that that was wrong: though Carnac was sitting upright, the blood was from his nose. He’d lain somewhere head upside down at least long enough for the blood to dry, then someone had picked him up and moved him. There was more caked blood on the chest and right shoulder of his robe. It wasn’t likely, then, that he’d been hit by a car, knocked into a ditch, and then later picked up and brought here. He’d been upright when the bleeding started, then later he’d lain upside down, then still later he’d been moved. All this Craine took in in an instant, by second nature, no longer than it took for his hand to jerk back then move forward again without a pause, and open the eyelid. It was too dim in the hallway for Craine to be sure of anything; he pressed his ear to Carnac’s chest. He got the heartbeat at once, steady as the rumble of train wheels.

Only now did emotion leap up in him — panic, rage, whatever — so that he jerked back, twisting his head around, yelling, “Help! A man has been injured!” And then: “Ira! Help me!” No sound came from above, though he’d shouted with all his might, and he scrambled as if drunkenly to his feet and leaped to the door onto the street, pushed it open, and yelled, “Help! A man has been injured!” On the sidewalk people jerked and looked at him, hesitated an instant, then moved toward him. Now there was a thundering on the stairway behind him as Ira Katz came rushing down crazy-haired, wearing just a bathrobe, crying, “What’s the matter? Jesus, Craine!” Then he stopped, seeing Carnac, and his eyes went comically wide.

“Call the police,” Craine yelled, “call an ambulance!”

Bug-eyed, as if in slow motion, Ira Katz turned and began to climb two steps at a time back toward his room. Now three of the people from the sidewalk were with Craine in the entryway, standing like rabbits, their hands in front of them, looking at Carnac and waiting to be told what to do.

“Don’t touch him,” Craine said, “a call has been put in for an ambulance and the police.”

One of them, a man Craine knew from somewhere, said, “What’s happened? What’s going on?” The door had closed behind the three who’d come in. Outside, others stood peering through the window, crowding to get a look. None of them made a motion to open the door. The three inside had a trapped look, as if suddenly they’d realized they should have moved more slowly.

“He’s been injured,” Craine said. “I was coming down the stairs to go to work …” He explained how he’d found him, just sitting there like that; apparently someone had beaten him up again. Craine had a queer, familiar sense of floating above himself, watching himself chatter. He thought of the curious expression he’d used: Help! A man has been injured! — and felt the faintest flicker of an impulse to laugh; but all the while he mused on the absurdity, he was talking, chattering away like a citizen, telling his audience how he’d seen Carnac sitting there and couldn’t believe it, would have thought he was a drunken bum just sleeping it off except the blood — the smell of it — had stopped him right away. He couldn’t believe it. One of the three, an apartment-house owner by the name of Ayers — Craine had had dealings with him, off and on — stepped partway out, holding the door open, to tell the crocodiles on the street what had happened. The crocodiles began to argue, God knew why. Ira Katz was coming down the stairs again, gray-faced; he’d pulled on black pants and slippers. “The police will be right over,” he said.