John Gardner - October Light

“You’re really young? — disguising your voice?”

He imagined her crotch. “I’ve already told you twice.”

The fool was convinced. “You’re very good, you know that? I mean, are you an actor?” Her excitement was increasing. He was discovering, for no clear reason, the will to live.

“I am an actor, actually. I’m amazed that you got it so quickly!”

“But you’re out of work,” she said with deep sympathy.

“That’s it! Right on!”

“But surely, with a talent like yours—” She let it trail off, perhaps hoping he’d speak. When he said nothing, she continued, “Are you an actor I might have heard of? TV?”

“Movies, actually. You’ve heard of me all right.”

“Not Brando,” she whispered.

“My God,” he said, “how do you do it?” Noisily, he hung up. Yet even as he laughed with rackety glee, he was not amused — felt increasingly depressed. He’d forgotten how inadequate women were to a person’s needs — like the world. That was why, in the Middle Ages, they’d been the Church Fathers’ great symbol of “the World.” No wonder preachers railed against them, and conquering armies raped and slaughtered them! He indulged himself with a brief, dead serious fantasy of seeking her out, this Judy of SUICIDE — lying in wait for her, a pipewrench in his hands. He felt, simultaneously, exhilarated and despairing. In secret he couldn’t deny to himself that her girlish voice had touched and distressed him with a hunger for the perfect, for heaven’s glory and absolute justice, for the girl-faced, golden-winged angels of his childhood, things he’d known for years he was never to have in this world — in this or any other — so that, hungering for the possible, he could think only of filth and death: the deflowering and smashing of beautiful young women, or suicide, which was the same. There was no third choice, metaphysically, except perhaps waking sleep — sweet mystic Mary Jane! He saw himself floating, as in a sportscar ad, or an ad for toothpaste or shampoo, his wheelchair surrounded by flowers and beautiful young women and effeminate young men, Judy of suicide leaping toward him through tall yellow grass in slow-motion, CONCEPTROL printed in the blue sky behind her.

Thai’s my dream, thought Alkahest, bitterly weeping, wringing his fingers, not making a sound. That’s everybody’s dream, the whole length and breadth of America. And not to be had!

As old Dr. Alkahest sat weeping, something came to him from nowhere. Perhaps it was illusion — he was tired enough, certainly — but then again, perhaps it was a memory, buried in his consciousness and peeking out only now, timidly, like a lizard from behind a rock. It seemed to him that — faintly, so faintly he hadn’t noticed at the time (if it was not in fact a dream) — a voice had said, down in the darkness below the cutter, “He’s a human being. We couldn’t just let him down.” It was all Dr. Alkahest could recall from the exchange, but now, going over it in his mind, he was so excited his brain began to tingle and he thought he might faint. The fellow who’d jumped from the bridge had been picked up by the fishingboat! Perhaps he was still alive, then! Perhaps he could still be found!

It was a slim lead, but reason enough to go on living. He’d start at once, not a moment to lose!

But he was faint with exhaustion. The white of the morning was like steady lightning, hammering at his eyes, and the vacuum cleaner, in the tower now, was like thunder or the roar of a surf. Incredibly — considering how much was to be done — he found himself slipping physically and mentally, sinking toward nothingness, heavy of brain and body as a stone. By desperate effort, he drove himself into the elevator, away from the monstrous suggestion of the bed, rode up to the tower and out into the white, octagonal room, meaning to ask Pearl to get him coffee, pep pills, tobacco — bring him back to life.

“Pearl!” he tried to call, but his voice was inaudible. “Oh no!” he wailed inwardly. It was unspeakably unjust — intolerable! But the dimming continued, as when the electricity falters and fails in an old hotel, and at last Dr. Alkahest gave in to it — helplessly endured the obscene violation, abandoning his rights.

~ ~ ~

It was the end of the chapter, but Sally Abbott was enjoying herself now, and she had nothing but time. She went on without a moment’s hesitation.

5

MR. NIT

Peter Wagner awakened to a foul, green darkness that seemed an intensification of troubles in his stomach. Things moved, ugly shadows as in a William Burroughs novel; he couldn’t focus them. Black things began to impinge on the green, now weed, now seaweed, so that he couldn’t tell whether he was drowning or merely in hell. Mouth open, eyes squinting, he thought of his wife, source of all misery and cruel disenchantment; never mind that he was, for her, the same. Once — maybe half of that first year of marriage — when he’d looked at her he’d seen her, as he’d seen all the world, integral and transcendent, like a lemon in sunlight, and he’d been indivisibly, unthinkingly one with her as a child and a day in July are unthinkingly one (or a lemon and sunlight). That was long past, now; might have been a dream. He saw now, discrete as numbers, her tics and oddities. When she turned her hand palm up, holding her dark brown, pencil-thin cigar, he saw the gesture in perfect isolation, raised from the life-giving mulch of its surroundings and logically finite, as if the hand were severed at the wrist.

So it was in everything these days. He had reached — and it seemed to him everyone had reached — the decadent age of analysis. Eden’s bright apple had turned in his mouth to dust and blowing ashes. Like his wife, like what he’d once thought of fondly as his country, life had turned trivial-minded and bitchy, filled with unreasonable complaints. He closed his eyes, felt sicker — his head was pounding — and slept again.

The next time he awakened he was in a large cabin, mysterious as Ben Franklin’s tinkering room, thick with alchemistical smells. He felt at once the familiar hovering of a docked ship — a gentle, more-than-physical restlessness, speculum of Peter Wagner’s world: an eagle trying forever to land on the limb of a forever falling tree, a sentence snaking ominously downward in Spengler’s Decline of the West. Through his blood and bones came, from time to time, the thud of the boat’s outer wall against a wharf. He could feel the heaviness of the water beyond the iron hull, silt and sewage, old condiments and condoms, pages from popular psychology books, and he could feel, or imagined he could feel, the slippery bump of, hopefully, dead fish. He was lying on a wooden bunk suspended from the bulkhead by chains. He moved his arm. It was stiff. He lay still, oppressed by a sense of déjà vu, then remembered: all that was happening had happened in some novel he’d read about a hoax.

Then the smells came over him more heavily. Like a zoo. He tensed himself to identify the smell, and suddenly remembered, with strange joy, the Reptile House in St. Louis. The alligator pit and, somewhere nearby — was it pea-vines?

At last he saw well. A second officer’s cabin, once well fitted out, black now, decayed. There was a wooden table, once a mess table, he guessed. It was so close to his bunk he could have reached out and touched it. There were things on it, vaguely alive. Five feet or so beyond the table there was a desk and, beyond the desk, a wall of books. At the desk there was a man. The light was dim, only a Coleman lantern above the man at the desk. Once more, Peter Wagner closed his eyes, this time to think.

He was not dead. Nor was he ruptured, so far as he could tell. He remembered all at once the woman who had revived him, and immediately thought again of the man behind the desk. Small, with the wide mouth and red, button eyes of a monkey. Black cap, black sweater. Peter Wagner opened one eye experimentally. The monkey eyes came at him like a pair of nails.