John Gardner - October Light

The elevator stopped, landing on nothing, and the door clunked open. She thought of Miss Pinky, in the ghetto of her childhood, whose daughter had buried her newborn baby in a coalpile. The girl’s father, who did not live with them, killed a policeman, for no known reason, then sat staring at his linoleum until the police came in and found him. Had the policeman been the one, and had the father known? Pearl had followed for a year the trial of Joan Little, who’d been raped in jail. Every column she read of the story made her furious and afraid, sometimes violently sick.

It was not just the cold of the pistol as she remembered it against her temple. It was something huge, unnameable: the absolute violation of the center of her life. Once, earlier, her apartment had been robbed. She’d sat in the high wooden kitchen chair shaking, too weak-kneed to stand, and when the police spoke of the “intruder” the word took on suddenly, in her spinning wits, a terrible, half-supernatural sense: something not herself, not remotely of her world, had watched her movements, an invisible enemy, and had suddenly struck out of darkness and vanished, leaving her revealed, obscene. The rape had been the same, except a thousand times more terrifying, more final. He’d been white, in a dark purple jacket with orange sleeves, and calling her Nigger, nigger, nigger, he’d torn away her name, her very self, made her monstrous even in her own eyes, as she was in his. Even Mrs. Waggoner, who counseled her later, had hardly the faintest idea what rape meant. She wanted, like the police, a description. “Practical action, a step back to reality,” she said. Pearl had seen only the jacket — dark purple, orange sleeves — and knew the cold of the gun. “I didn’t look at him,” she’d said. “I was afraid.” Her counsellor had said, another time, “You must promise me you’ll never feel ashamed, Pearl.” Everyone assumes, the woman had told her, that nice girls don’t get raped. It wasn’t true. “Tell yourself that, Pearl. ‘Nice girls do get raped.’” Pearl had nodded, in the end had dutifully repeated it. But Mrs. Waggoner knew nothing. The shame went far deeper than anything she’d ever understand. Pearl wished she could explain, but they were talking different languages. He had made her not human, not anything. Worse. He’d made her know that she’d never been human, it was all imagination, mere illusion. After that — she had no explanation for it, it was true, simply — when people talked, even jokingly, of stealing, or of breathing obscenities to some stranger on the phone, terror struck the pit of her stomach. She had learned — her whole life had taught her, in fact, though at first she’d ignored it — that the world is unspeakably dangerous.

Even among children born poor, she’d been unlucky, had witnessed from a safe psychological distance terrors to which, now that she’d escaped them, she would never return alive. “We just don’t want no trouble,” her father had said, poking his bald, back-slanting head through the living-room door. Or someone had told her that that was what he said. She remembered distinctly that there were men in the kitchen, opening drawers, but she no longer remembered if they were black or white. She was too young to understand. She had never understood it, and never wished to. It was odd that she should think of it, should from time to time be surprised by the memory, startled as she’d be by an animal at the window. She had other things to think of now. She had her own life. On free days she walked in the park or sat on the beach with her radio. (She had naturally wavy, not kinky, hair, and long, coal-black lashes. On Fillmore once, in the middle of the day, a middle-aged man had said to her, “Hey girl, you wanna fuck?” She’d looked at him in terror, and he’d laughed and had not pursued her. Men were forever touching her, patting her shoulder, even at church. She’d been having, lately, a recurring dream about Switzerland.) Dr. Alkahest, it came to her, was insane. Her eyes widened. She would never get paid.

The downstairs part of Dr. Alkahest’s apartment was as neat as ever; nothing to do but dust, polish glasses, perhaps scrub the already glittering black-and-white tile of the small kitchen floor. She raised the duster toward the mantel, then hesitated. “No,” she said aloud. She looked at herself in the oval mirror. She was like an old portrait, in the oakleaf frame. The light was gray-yellow as vermouth behind her. She looked like the long-dead mistress of some noble old house in a country where highborn ladies were born black.

When she was sure he could pay her, she would work. Not otherwise. A minute shock like a fever went through her. She went to the window and stood looking down with her arms folded, watching the street through her long lashes as if expecting it might, at any moment, open up and …

On the third day, John Alkahest was able to move again. He went first to the Bureau of Missing Persons. No luck. The man who had jumped from the bridge had left no trace but the car — no plates, no registration, no engine number, nothing but a paperback book in the front seat, something about an Indian. If the mysterious perfumed ship had saved him, it had sent no message back.

He spoke with the chief official, Mr. Fiorenzi. Fiorenzi sat like a huge, unhappy Maltese cat in a high-backed ox-blood leather chair with golden studs and walnut arms, on a square of scratched Lucite, behind a walnut desk with a Lucite top, an American flag to the right of him. Behind the flag, up against the door to some further room, he had a suitcase. On the walls there were pictures — Fiorenzi receiving a plaque, a medal, shaking hands with the Lieutenant Governor, shaking hands with …

There was a four-page gap.

… official began moving around the room, pulling hard at the bottom of his vest. “I can’t even keep track of my own missing persons.” He laughed, lamb-like. “I’ve got a daughter Teresa — she’s the oldest, lives in Long Beach, married to a CPA. She’s a lovely thing, that girl of mine. Graduate from college. But you think she writes? Three kids she’s got, and I’ve hardly even seen ’em.” Swinging near the desk, he picked up a photograph, a man and a woman and three black-eyed girls. That’s them,” he said. “Beautiful? — Look at this!” He held up another of his pictures, a sullen young man in a uniform. “That’s Joseph, my second. State Police up in Red Bluff. Hasn’t been home since four years ago.” He held up another of his photographs, boy of about ten. “This is Kenny, my youngest. It’s an old picture, he must be twenty now. Hasn’t been home since he was sixteen years old. We get postcards — Hong Kong, West Berlin …” He laughed again. “You didn’t think I was that old, did you? Fifty-five. No joke! It’s a funny world, I can tell you that. If my people came back from the grave, God forbid, they’d never believe it. House in Daly City, big white Caprice and a Gremlin for the wife—” He was looking at the suitcase between the door and the flag.

“Well, thank you very much,” Dr. Alkahest said. He pivoted his wheelchair, more official than Fiorenzi, and shot away toward the door. There he paused, his hypersensitive nostrils filled with the chemical scent of the gray-brown carpet, the years-old government forms in the cabinets, Fiorenzi’s Old Spice stick-deodorant. “Shame,” he whispered. His weak eyes glinted.

Fiorenzi, some distance behind him, asked, “Do you believe in flying saucers?” A phone rang just then, and by the time Dr. Alkahest could turn around to look, the Bureau official had vanished.

The Police Commissioner was a busy man, putting off phone-calls, sorting through papers on his desk while he talked, writing notes to himself, poking his cigar at the ashtray beside him then back into his mouth then back at the ashtray. He was enormous: so bloated that the wire things that held on his glasses sank deep into his head. On his desk he had pill bottles, a dozen or more, all prescription. Brazenly Alkahest swigged from his flask, then slipped it back into his coat, but the Commissioner didn’t notice. “Best damn Narcs in the country,” he said, and hurriedly turned over a paper and wrote. “People don’t realize. We make five, six, seven raids a week. Major raids, I mean. Not just Penny Annie. We burn it by the ton.” He wiped his huge forehead.