John Gardner - October Light

“I’m Dr. Berg,” a voice in (it seemed) the fog above and behind him said. It was a gentle voice, deeply concerned, professionally friendly. It was a veritable musical instrument, that voice. Peter Wagner in his drunkenness smiled, almost giggled. He knew by experience how such voices could sweetly groan, like cellos, seduce like double-stopped, mourning violins, suddenly lash out in anger, like a snare-drummer’s rim-shots. He’d had a dozen psychiatrists, as had his wife — all excellent, capable of baffling him with terrible clarity, like a loving parent. (He was well off; a trust fund from his father’s estate.) Peter Wagner was no one to disparage such skills, the virtuoso music of an accomplished brain-bender. It was mortally depressing that such voices, warm and human as an uncle’s, one might have thought, were precision-built, cool scientific devices that could engage and disengage the gears of the will by precise neuro-chemical formulae, laboratory-tested and repeatedly proved “psychological strategies” that no human consciousness, even the most obdurate, could indefinitely resist (the effects of adrenocortical fluids, ureic acid, and ingested alcohol were as predictable and controllable as acid in a battery, dishearteningly dependable as the drool of a witless Russian dog at the tinkle of a bell); and it was no less mortally depressing when they “played it by ear,” as they liked to say, cunningly hiding in the dark, husky center of the language of the masses — trying now this shrewd approach, now that, fishing, in this case, for some last feeble tittle of vulnerable, smashable humanity in the would-be suicide — played it, that is, not by ordinary ear but by finely tuned, educated nuance-perceptor, quicker to respond than young lovers, indifferent as transistors, chilly as dead snakes.

“I’m Dr. Berg,” said the voice a second time, mellow, firm as cable, reaching down to him with calculated universal love, man to man, a voice to lean on, to depend on or from, emblem of unguessed reserves to be called upon, model for his weakness and confusion to reach up to, grasp toward: “I have survived this cesspool,” called the guardian in effect, teeth clenched, eyes mild with experience overwhelmed (he had, clearly, no beautiful sister turned vegetable, no misfiring glands, no ex-Christian rage), “so can you, my son!”

“Hello,” he said.

The voice called down: “I’m your friend. I’m a psychiatrist.”

He listened to the foghorns mournfully groaning to the universe B.O. The sirens were still going, and he couldn’t tell where, in the blackness below his dangling shoes, the ships were. His fingers, though he couldn’t feel them, were like steel. He tipped back his head to look up (he was unable — because of the bunched-up shoulders of his overcoat — to look down or anywhere else except level-and-straight-ahead, like a horse in blinders, sometimes called blinkers, or, laboriously, up). Among the bridge-lights, drifting double images to his eyes’ disfocus, there floated a mushroom-white, bearded face with a hat. “Tell them to turn off the sirens,” he called.

“Turn off the sirens,” Dr. Berg said, softly fulminant, basso profundo.

Despite the rolling, ruminating fog, the night was suddenly still, it seemed to him: majestically peaceful. It was as if, exploding outward to the farthest, filtered star, the invisible edge of the ocean horizon, he had himself become — had mysteriously subsumed — the night, containing it like a bell-jar. Call it enlightenment, subject and object in perfect interpenetration. The colored lights of San Francisco, stretching for miles, bloomed vaguely in the fog like emotions lost, or here and there cut sharply through open air like a few childhood Christmases. Far, far ahead of him and slightly to his right, a huge scrawl of neon that he couldn’t read, though he remembered it faintly, went on and off, and he was aware all at once of the distance he must fall, the distance he had come, the magnitude of things, God’s grandeur. He was alarmed from the tips of his fingers to his toes: miracles on every hand, seagulls and the brilliance of squadcar lights, the stability of steel, the intense physicality of fog-swirled space, space he would penetrate in a moment, probably with a yell. The world was a magnificent, mysterious thing, thrilling as a dance on a volcano rim, charged with unspeakable, unnameable powers that rose up out of earth and came plummeting from the night, invisibly colliding and exploding all around him, rushing, inaudibly roaring, to the ends of the universe. He was the center of it, hanging by six knuckles from his girder, high priest and sacrifice, objective and dispassionate, churning with emotion (ah! air, pride, plume), ultimate perceptor of cosmic nuances, core of “the ambiance.”

Directly underneath him, a foghorn loud as an earthquake exploded from the watery stillness, startling him so badly that he almost lost his grip.

“Listen,” Dr. Berg said. “You can let go any time you want to, but until you do I want you to listen. Will you?”

Oh yes, life’s guardian, light of my darkness, clarity to my miserable soul’s confusion, he was on the point of saying, drunkenly giggling as he thought of it, but he caught himself in time. It would give Berg a clue. (“Ah, you’re an intellectual, a student of books!” the man would say.) It was one of life’s mortally discouraging facts that if a psychiatrist understood you, he could beat you. “Yes sir,” he said.

“Can you hang on?” Berg said.

“Pretty drunk,” he said.

“Let me hang onto your hands.”

He smiled, drunkenly malevolent, at San Francisco. “Yes, good.” He could feel the big ship sliding past underneath him. Another foghorn, higher in pitch, was coming in from his right. Berg’s hands came around his wrists, gentle as a fairy’s, and clamped on. No, he realized then, not Berg’s. Leather-gloved.

“You tricked me,” he said. It came out badly and he tried again. The leather gloves began pulling at him and he clamped his knees under the bridge.

“The shithead’s got hold of something with his legs,” the policeman said. “Lend a hand.”

Some more gloves came. He smiled. “I lift weights,” he said carefully and slowly. To himself, at least, he sounded sober as a judge.

“Also, he’s psychotic,” Dr. Berg said. “They have amazing strength. You can tell he’s psychotic by his eyes. Look.” He pointed down. “He’s got eyes like a couple of vaginas.”

Peter Wagner pursed his lips, deeply offended, his anger rising. It was not so much the slur against his eyes, though that was outrageous, in fact. He had beautiful eyes. He’d been told it a thousand times, in a thousand ports, and it was true: his eyes were otherworldly, they had mysterious glints and depths, odd shadows, the stillness of clear, dark pools in a German forest. To describe them as Dr. Berg had done was tasteless, blasphemous. But what offended him most was the slovenly diagnosis. It was shoddy medicine, such practice as the world had left over for the poor and dispossessed — the weeping mad maiden in her upstairs room, the whiskered drunk in his Fillmore Street gutter, the sixteen-year-old black bow-legged whore. To calm his wrath and stall for time, he yelled, “Purity of heart is to will one thing!”

Sally Abbott stopped a moment, touching her lower lip with one finger, and read the line again. Purity of heart is to will one thing. In her mind’s eye she saw silent, gray-bearded uncle Ira, a small, solid creature with animal eyes, an axe on one shoulder, on the other a gun. He stood for her memory as for a photograph, a picture in what would by this time be some discoloring old album, his snowshoes brown against the yellow, dead snow. He came out of the past like a creature from the woods, his reluctance and strangeness absolute, hostile; and beside him now stood her brother James in a lumberman’s cap, long coat and snowshoes — James who had loved him, in a way even worshipped him, unless perhaps, as her husband had suspected, it was an unwitting trick James had played on himself, twisting fear of the man to intense admiration as little Dickey sometimes did (so it seemed to the old woman) struggling to pacify this older James.