John Gardner - October Light

“Where, if I may ask?” Dr. Alkahest asked. But the Police Commissioner failed to hear him, coughing, then sucking at his cigar again. Dr. Alkahest tipped up the flask, hand shaking, and swigged. His fingers tingled and he began to feel dangerously impish. He put the flask in his inside overcoat pocket.

“People think it’s just crazies and kids,” the Commissioner said. “I could tell you different.” He paused to pant. “Doctors and lawyers. Ministers. Whole country’s gone to shit. Communist inspired. College professors.” He snatched another paper from his pile and ran his eyes down it. “You wouldn’t believe what goes on at those parties. Six, seven in a bed.”

Dr. Alkahest remembered the smell for an instant, and his soul took wings; but then the smell was gone, fled to the depths of his being, and he couldn’t get it back.

“As to what you ask,” the Commissioner said, “can’t sanction it. Sorry. Appreciate your interest. Clad to be reminded there’s Americans left.” He jerked out the cigar and looked at it, then quick as a cat popped it back between his teeth and reached for a pill bottle. “We get directives on these things. Don’t know if you’d make a good agent or not, but we got directives.” He took two pills. “Our undercovers are mostly young. Like college. Kind that can mingle and get in with that type. Kind that can grow big Looney-Tunes beards and look weird as the can in a whorehouse.” He laughed. Yaaa! “You, now—” He shot a split-second glance at Alkahest, then looked back at his papers. “No chance,” he said.

“I could mingle with the doctors and lawyers,” Dr. Alkahest said. A miserable whine. He clutched his flask, his palm pressed to his heart. The cigar stench filling the room dizzied him, knotted his stomach.

“Sorry,” the Commissioner said, blowing smoke. He slapped away the paper and started immediately on another. “They’re not our prime target. Hard to get convictions. It’s like flies,” he said, “you don’t swat the one on the edge of a cup, you swat the one on the wall where he’s easy to hit.” He blew smoke, gulped air. “So you see our situation. Appreciate yer offer.” Suddenly, without warning, the Commissioner put down his cigar and stood up, like a whale breaching, and shot out his hand toward Alkahest. “Appreciate yer offer.” Dr. Alkahest jerked his wheelchair forward and around to the side of the Commissioner’s desk to shake. The impish malevolence was bubbling up more fiercely. Any moment now he’d do something intemperate and be thrown in the bucket where he couldn’t do a thing about that boat. He held his breath. The Commissioner’s fat hand squeezed his bones. “The way I see it,” the Commissioner said, “not many Americans care about the law.” He gasped in air. “I’d say nine-tenths of the people in this country is against the whole process. I tell my operatives: the few of us that’s left — nothing but a handful — we got no choice but put our shoulders to the grindstone and preserve our American way of life — democracy and freedom for all — and put the rest behind bars.” The Commissioner laughed, gasp gasp, crushing Dr. Alkahest’s hand. Suddenly a coughing fit took Dr. Alkahest, and then a great spasm that threw him from his wheelchair and out onto the Police Commissioner’s floor. The Commissioner, in his astonishment, did not notice that the cigar had fallen, or perhaps had been somehow pushed, from his ashtray into the wastebasket. “You all right?” he squealed, face red.

“I’m fine,” Dr. Alkahest called up, coughing. “Happens all the time.” A wild giggling took him, twisting his bone-white face.

The Commissioner quickly tipped the wheelchair right and lifted Dr. Alkahest, as if he were a small bag of feathers, into it. “Terrible,” he said. “Call you a doctor.”

“No, no!” Alkahest said. “I’m fine. I’m a doctor myself! No need! Don’t bother!” He was already wheeling toward the door. The Commissioner hurried around him, almost at a run, to open the door and help him through. “Thank you! God bless you!” Dr. Alkahest said. He peeked back timidly, then quickly away. Flames shot up beside the Commissioner’s desk.

It did not occur to the cleaning girl, Pearl, to pity Dr. Alkahest — not yet, that is — no more than it occurred to her to pity the lady who begged in front of I. Magnin’s, placing her hand over her hat and piously saying “God bless you!” whenever a coin dropped in. She followed him merely because if he was crazy, as it seemed, she owed it to herself to find it out and start looking for new work. It was not the kind of employment a person threw away just like that. He paid well, it was a safe neighborhood, and the work was easy yet not dishonest. If the odds were that he would continue to pay her, she owed it to herself — and to him as well — to remain with him. Also, although his bathroom smelled, and though it turned her stomach to watch him eat (he sometimes had an oyster and a glass of white wine while she was dusting nearby) — and though she was practically certain that he watched her through keyholes — he made no effort to pat her on the fanny or snatch at her breast, for which she was, in her cool and sullen way, grateful. She knew about old white men.

But gradually, as she cautiously followed him from place to place — peeking around corners, hiding behind newspapers, exactly as in the movies — she began to doubt that the trouble was just insanity. The Bureau of Missing Persons, the Police Commissioner’s, the FBI. She was frightened. She thought for some reason of female dope addicts, female bankrobbers, girls who made bombs. Though a law-abiding Christian to the soles of her shoes, she felt threatened. The world of Pearl’s mind, now that what had happened was six months behind her, was a conditionally serene, brightly lighted tunnel where dark, jagged jungle things crouched, full of murderous intent, at the shadowy edges. She walked down the lighted path staring straight ahead. They called to her, Pearl, what’s happenin? She pretended not to hear. Things mostly imaginary reached out to her, patted her buttocks, passed over her breasts like spiderwebs. She walked on, outwardly calm. But stories and memories once of no importance were important now: four boys shot by the Oakland police while playing cards. Black Panthers coming through high weeds with guns. She’d left Marin City at the age of twelve. She had taken piano lessons, sung in the choir. Sometimes, alone in Dr. Alkahest’s tower, she stood, hands folded — drawn up before her belly like an anthem singer’s — and looked across the city to where the sunlight struck the breastlike towers of the Russian Church, and had prayed for escape, total manumission, though she knew it was impossible. She knew where Dr. Alkahest’s money was — in a black metal box in the gin cupboard — and one day stealing it had crossed her mind. The thought had merely come; she had not invited it, nor had she even for an instant entertained it. But it had come, and she’d felt queer, almost dizzy for a second, like a person looking down from a cliff. “Pearl, chile, you out of you mind,” she’d whispered. Her grandmother’s voice. Closing the cupboard, she had not even felt virtuous. There had never been a question of her stealing it. Her very bowels were against it, tightening in revulsion. But even so it was as if for an instant the jungle had darted nearer.

She sat on the wooden bench in the corridor, pretending to read a Fortune magazine. Pictures of United Nations buildings. On the doorway across from her and a little down the hall, a door with a frosted glass window and the words Society for the Hindrance of International Trafficking. Above the writing there were two large flags, a medical one and an American one, crossed like swords. She had no idea what kind of place it was. She had reached the corridor just in time — racing up the stairs while he came on the elevator — and had seen Dr. Alkahest’s wheelchair darting in. It was a high, old fashioned corridor with a metal ceiling stamped in a design, squares and curlicues. The globes that hung down to give light were half filled with dead flies.