John Gardner - Stillness & Shadows

“Don’t fool yourself, Meakins,” Craine had said that morning, looking at him over his spectacles, severe, or mock-severe. (Craine himself could hardly have said which — in fact he no longer remembered exactly what he’d said, if anything; he had a tendency, in these reveries, to make things up — but his voice had been, or would have been, intense, as if someone had done him a disservice.) “Society needs us. We redress grievances.”

Though it might have been sarcasm and then again might not, Meakins took it simply. He lifted his eyebrows, feeble and inoffensive. “Not often,” he said. “At least that’s my opinion. Mostly, seems to me, we just snoop into other people’s business.” He turned away, pivoted toward his office like an elderly, fat dancer or a slow-brustling whale, ready to dismiss it. But not Craine, not today.

“That’s true too ,” Craine barked, and his voice went taut as harpoon line, holding him. “But we’re professional snoops. Imagine what the world would be like out there if all those crazies did their own snooping.” Boredom and irritation lured him further, toward rhetoric. High-falutin language was one of his talents, a gift he’d inherited from his grandfather, perhaps. “We’re objective, dispassionate. Bring me your suspicions, your free-floating guilt, your grudges, your fears, your dark secret hungers and unmentionable willies; I’ll defuse ’em, lay yer ghosts in triplicate, guaranteed! It’s a fact, Meakins. To them—” He pointed out angrily at the street. “—to them it’s a matter of life or death: revenge, safety after dark, reputation. To us it’s statistics. So many credit skips, so many divorces, so many cases of dogs fed glass. We’re the pressure valve, Meakins! We dry up their fury to courtroom talk!”

Hannah Johnson was bent forward at her desk, looking in through the door at him, eyes yellow-white against her midnight skin, her halo of steel-wool hair.

“All I meant,” Meakins said, staring at Craine’s glass.

Craine glanced down suddenly to the writing in reverse, like Arabic or Hebrew, on his desk blotter. “I wonder,” he said, “what happens to all that emotion we defuse?”

“Beg your pardon?” said Meakins.

“Nothing,” Craine said, and with eyes gone suddenly petulant he shot out a look at the man, more annoyed at the stupidity of his own muttered question than at Meakins’ having half overheard it. “Talking to myself.”

“Sorry,” said Meakins, and tentatively bowed. He moved away toward his own, smaller office, at the far end of the suite.

“Damn right,” Craine said, his hand slowly coiling around the whiskey. Something stirred behind him, and he turned his head slowly, glancing — heart racing — past his shoulder.

“Meakins!” he said, and carefully raised his glass.

“Sir?”

It seemed to Craine that there was something odd about the way Meakins stood, as if it were not really Meakins but someone else, an ingenious impostor, master of disguise. He thought, God knew why, of the article he’d read over breakfast that morning, or some other morning, black holes spiralling out through space, grinding up all that came near them, even light, even dreams, Tom Meakins’ fourth and middle fingers, and — the opposite of black holes — white holes in space, energy fountains inexplicably spewing out brand-new creation — soybean hamburgers, pyramids for sharpening old razor blades — and between those murderous black holes and strangely fecund white holes, million-mile chasms crazed with time warps, gloomy with intelligence, aclutter with vast, unearthly bodies drifting phlegmatically through patches of antimatter, leavings of some older universe, perhaps, like dark, archaic ships sailing mine-filled seas. He felt a queer trembling coming over him and saw an image of a towering ship, ablaze with lights, all around it blackness.

Meakins stood waiting with his hand on the doorknob, his mouth slightly open, eye bags sagging down his dull, freckled face. If he were not Tom Meakins, father of prostitutes, he would be, perhaps, some god of the rain forests gazing morosely through the veil of illusion, weighty with ruinous knowledge and unlikely to speak.

“Never mind,” Craine said at last, and waved him away. Again Meakins bowed, distant, perhaps wounded, and something flashed through Craine’s mind — a faintness. When that too passed, Craine’s world, though normal, felt odd, endangered, as he felt when alone after dark in some faraway place like Moline, where there were whores on prowl, laughing, circling outward from the darkest streets, dimmed-out rubies, practically invisible; yet he felt, at the same time, back in command: he’d found the thread of conversation again. Detectives were objective, dispassionate. Yes. (He thought of Inspector McClaren and suppressed quick alarm.) Did their work without personal involvement: bored professionals.

“Hired killers do the same,” some observer might have told him, gaze moving off toward the corner of the room.

Good point,” Craine muttered, loud enough to hear, then slyly glanced around to see if anyone, anything, was listening.

So Craine’s mind ran, half remembering, half dreaming, making up his life out of bits and pieces, some real, some not, as if Gerald Craine were indeed fictitious — Craine almost wholly unaware that he was doing it, sipping his whiskey from time to time, some of the time half asleep. The mail came, Royce just behind it, chewing gum. Hannah slit open the envelopes and skimmed their contents, fat, pink Tom Meakins at her elbow. “What the devil!” she said suddenly. Royce looked over at them, red-eyed and grouchy; he’d been up all night — so he told them all — in pursuit of a young woman who in the end had cried and vomited. Tom Meakins leaned closer to read.

“What you got?” Craine called.

Hannah came over with the letter.

The minute Craine’s hand touched the paper the letter was written on, he was filled with a sharp sensation like anguish. He was not yet ready to admit it to himself, and later, when he was ready, he would have forgotten the event. Nevertheless, the letter came up through his fingers like a shock of electricity. If you’d asked him, he could not have told you that he knew who the letter was from; nevertheless, he knew. The first time he’d seen her — a passing glance — he’d registered her face more deeply than he’d registered anything in years. Who knows why? Perhaps Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften , some powerful chemical affinity only a poet would risk belief in. Or perhaps, “scanning,” as Dr. Tummelty would say, he’d unconsciously locked on to something his consciousness could never have guessed. He’d thought her quite beautiful, as he would again think her, by the time he remembered (an objective observer would have said she was not) — though also he’d thought her dangerous, alien. From that moment on, each time she watched him he’d been dimly aware of it, though his drunkenness confused him. He’d been walking down a corridor, the second time, and, glancing past his shoulder, he’d seen her behind him. She’d been wearing a poncho, gray and black, and her hair was as black as coal, he’d thought— mistakenly. She had about her an alarming intensity, as if she were a creature from a collapsing planet, every pound of her body like a thousand pounds on earth, though she walked without a sound, light as air. He’d nodded, embarrassed. She’d nodded back, eyes widening. It had of course not yet occurred to Craine that she was following him, watching his every move.

In any event, he could now see that his sense of being watched, shadowed as if by spirits, was perhaps no more than this, an eerie combination of his whiskey-blur and the fact that he was, indeed, being shadowed, if the letter told the truth. (Why it made him furious he couldn’t make out. He was shaky with rage.) Hannah loomed silent and large beside his desk — one hand on her hip, the other on his desk top, small-fingered and elegant as the blue jade hand of some Oriental figure in the National Geographic —watching him read through the letter and waiting for his comment. He was aware of her as he read — faintly, neither pleasantly nor unpleasantly distracted; fractionally drawn from the immediate to the timeless, from the mortal nuisance of the daily mail to the age-old comfort of beings with whom one feels at home, more or less unjudged. Hannah had no doubt been beautiful in her time. Tall, high-domed, queenly, full of confidence in herself. She had even now a sanguine, handsome face, eyes just noticeably slanted, nose like an Indian’s. She had beautiful daughters, handsome sons, all the color of her husband, coffee with cream, none of much account. T.J. was locked up in Menard Prison. He’d been there six years and on numerous occasions. If he ever got out, he’d be back within a month. Prison had become his philosophy of life. It was what he was best at, “a man’s world,” as Hannah had once said cheerfully. He knew how to duck the risks, draw maximum benefit.