by John Gardner
The prisoner sat perfectly still, as before, but it did not seem to me now that he was struggling to make sense of Heller’s words. He seemed to consider with his weakened wits whether to respond or relax his attention, drift deeper into death. Then, little by little, I saw him laboring back toward thought. He began to speak, if you could call it speaking, and Heller interpreted word for word until, by my touching his arm, he perceived that I no longer needed his assistance.
I can suggest only faintly and obscurely what I felt, listening in darkness to the tortuous syllables of that spiritless old man. The lamp threw the shadows of bars across his body, and I had a sense—a conviction related to his words—that insubstantial shadows alone were sufficient to pin him in his place.
“There is no immateriality,” he said. “Mere word. Mere sound.” He ran his thick, dry tongue around his lips. His eyebrows lifted, part of an attempt to get his jaw muscles working. For all his difficulty in expressing himself, it was plain that he had his words by heart. He’d delivered the lecture a hundred—more like a thousand—times. Not merely to students; to himself more often; to the rats, the spiders, the bats, the darkness and emptiness around him, perhaps to neighboring felons, while they lasted. The lecture was doubtless the anchor of his sanity, or had been once. Such tricks are common among prisoners. As long as he could still put the words in order, still grasp some part of their significance, he was himself, a man, not yet reduced to the level of beasts, whose suffering, if not unconscious, is soon forgotten. I could see by his pauses and the accompanying expression of bafflement and panic that the power of the magic was draining away. A ghostly pallor lay over his features, his voice trembled, and his blind eyes stared fixedly, as if he were listening intently to every word.
I no longer recall the exact phrasing, but I remember very well the general argument—that and the terrible struggle in his voice, like the labor of the prematurely buried. As Heller and I have reconstructed it, the lecture went as follows:
“There are gradations of matter of which man knows nothing, the grosser impelling the finer, the finer pervading the grosser. The atmosphere, for example, impels the electric principle, while the electric principle permeates the atmosphere. These gradations increase in rarity until we arrive at matter unparticled; and here the law of impulsion and permeation is modified. The ultimate, unparticled matter not only permeates all things but impels all things, and thus is all things within itself. This matter is God. What men attempt to embody in the word ‘thought’ is this matter in motion.
“There are two bodies, the rudimental and the complete, corresponding with the two conditions of the worm and the butterfly. What we call ‘death’ is the painful metamorphosis. Our present incarnation is progressive, preparatory, temporary. Our future is perfected, ultimate, immortal. The ultimate life is the full design.
“But of the worm’s metamorphosis, you may object, we are palpably cognizant. I answer: We, certainly—but not the worm. Our rudimental organs are adapted to the matter of which is formed the rudimental body, but not to that of which the ultimate is composed. We thus perceive only the shell which falls from the inner form, not the inner form itself. Yet consider. In certain states—in states of entrancement, as, for instance, when we have been Mesmerized—we perceive independent of rudimental organs: We employ the medium we shall fully employ in the ultimate, unorganized life.
“Only in the rudimental life is there any experience of pain, for pain is the product of impediments afforded by number, complexity, and substantiality. That is not to say that the rudimental life is bad, however painful in a given case. All things, after all, are good or bad only by comparison. To be happy at any one point we must have suffered at the same. Never to suffer would be never to have been blessed. But in the inorganic life, pain cannot be; thus the necessity for the organic.”
I have no idea how long it took him to get all this out, nor what I thought of his opinions at the time—though I’ve had fearful occasion to think back to them since. I stood motionless, clinging to the square iron bars as if the slightest movement might shatter his delicate hold on sense. Heller, too, stood motionless, staring at the floor, his hand closed on one end of his mustache, his bearded chin pressed firmly to his chest. When the lecture broke off, the guard shot a glance at me, then moved the lamp closer to the bars and peered in at the prisoner. The sudden alteration of the shadows was alarming, as if something alive had slipped closer to us. Then, without a word, the guard stepped back from the door of the cell, gave me a nod, and started toward the stairway we’d come down.
When we reached the relatively less dismal passage above—a corridor six feet wide and eight «feet high, lighted, every twenty feet or so, by flickering, smoke-dulled hanging lamps and etched, like all our prison walls, with the initials of a thousand miserable souls long since departed—Heller dropped back to walk beside me, his head bowed and his long hands folded in front of him.
“So now you’ve seen,” he said.
I nodded, not certain what it was that he meant I’d seen. My mind turned over the Professor’s ideas—those and the irony of his present condition, his whole life of pain grown remote, unreal, a cold refutation of his optimistic theory.
“The man’s innocent,” Heller said. “A keen, metaphysical mind; and yet through all these years—”
“On the contrary,” I said, “we’ve no notion whatever of his innocence or guilt. He was no doubt legally sentenced to this dungeon.”
The guard stopped and looked at me, holding the lamp up to see me more clearly—exactly, I noticed with a shudder, as he’d held up the lamp to inspect the old man. “Why would he deny his guilt at this stage? Surely he’s aware—”
“Habit, perhaps.” I said it too sharply, as if for the benefit of the darkness behind us. I could hardly blame the guard for his quick little shrug of exasperation. I looked away, toward the steps that would lead me to higher, wider corridors and at last to my chamber, remote from this graveyard of the living. The guard waited, not even bothering to scoff at my suggestion. Again I could hardly blame him.
“I must speak to the Warden about this,” I said, clipped and official, and looked over his head. The guard leaned toward me with a jerk and a bewildering smile, and caught my arm. “Do!” he whispered. His fingers dug into me. (I have seen it before, the guilt the men feel about the horrors they help to perpetuate.) Though I know the importance of keeping the forms in a place like this, I did not shake Heller’s hand from my arm. “I’ll see to the matter at once,” I said. My voice was accidentally stern.
And so I left him, my step as metallic as an officer’s, my walking stick a weapon. As I passed the guards in the passageways above I gave to each of them a crisp salute. Some responded, looking up from their half-sleep, their dice games, their lunch baskets; some did not. I let it pass, secretly listening already for the sound of pacing that would prove that the Warden had been all the while in his chamber and knew nothing of our breach of regulations.
And so I came to the Warden’s door and stood listening. My knock brought no change to the rhythm of his step. I knocked again, and then again. It was unthinkable that the Warden couldn’t hear the banging of that great brass knocker—the figure of a lion with eyes worn blank by a century of hands. But the Warden continued pacing.
2
The sky ahead of me, as I walked home that evening, was a thing of sublime and fearsome beauty. The sun was still high—it was the middle of summer—and the weather had for weeks been alternating between hot, dense, muggy days and twilight cloudbursts. Mountainous thunder-heads towered all around me, some miraculously white, where the sunlight struck them, some—the lower clouds—glowering, oppressive. The sky in the glodes between masses of cloud was irenic blue, and down through some of them came shafts of light that transmuted the ripening wheatfields, the pastures, the plane trees, hedges, and haycocks to images from a dream. Here and there on the horizon, sheet lightning flickered.
I hurried. The rain w
as not far off. I might easily have gotten transportation if I’d wished—with one of the guards relieved of duty; with the lumbering, creaking supply wagon that went back each night from the prison to the village; with some kindly stranger in his touring carriage; or even with one of the farmers bringing in hay. But I preferred to risk a soaking; I valued, almost superstitiously, the long walk home, transition from the world of officials to the world of men. Tonight especially. I hadn’t yet shaken the image of the wasted, enfeebled “professor” or that ominous burden on my soul, the Warden’s self-confinement.
The land was becalmed. Shadows lengthened almost visibly, and the light grew fiery green. Moment by moment, the landscape around me darkened more. The river vanished, then the hedges, soon all but the hills. I would hear now and then the low warble of a bird, a sound that seemed to come from all directions, like sounds heard under water. Gradually, even the hills sank away. All the more impressive, even awesome, then, that directly above me stood a window of somber sky, its frame edged by moonlight, and in the infinite depths of that sky, three stars. Despite the warning of thunder in the distance, I stopped in my tracks—as stirred to wonder as my father would have been, a foolish old man, but one with all his sensibilities refined by landscape painting. Something of what the old prisoner had said came back to me. Not words, exactly. A sense; an impression. I had a feeling of standing outside myself, as if time and space had stopped and in one more second would be extinguished. As quickly as the queer impression came it passed, faded back into shadow like a fish. And for some reason impossible to name, I was left with a feeling of indescribable, senseless horror, a terrible emptiness, as if I’d penetrated something, broken past the walls of my consciousness and discovered … what? But perhaps the cause was above me, not within. The walls of the open, moonlit glode were collapsing violently toward one another, blotting the stars out, tumbling downward like a falling roof. I seemed to hear a step, and I turned to look back. In all that darkness there was nothing to be seen—neither on the hills nor on the road behind me—nothing but the smoldering torches on the prison walls.
3
I do not ordinarily mind the burden of my father’s senility. It provides distraction from those other problems I have no power or authority to solve. In any case, I’m the dutiful, respectful sort. If I’d meant to question or judge the old man, I’d have done so long since. He has his opinions, and I have mine. I let it go at that. On this particular evening, however, his whimsy took an extraordinary turn.
We had finished supper and were seated in the parlor, except for my wife, who was washing dishes. I’ve told her time and time again that the children are old enough for that, if only she’d give them some discipline. But she prefers to do all the work herself. She enjoys work, no doubt. It frees her from the rest of us. So tonight, as usual, they lay scribbling, gouging great holes in the paper, on the floor, beside my father’s shoes. Every now and then they would glance through the window, keeping watch on the storm like creatures in secret league with it. My father was sorting through old canvases—paintings of craggy precipices; huge-boled hickories, walnuts, oaks; sunlight bursting through chasms, orange and purple. Whatever the quality of the paintings—I’m no judge—the old man certainly had the look of an artist, erumpent white hair ferociously shaggy, eyes deep-set as two caves in an overhung cliff. When he clamps his mouth shut, the tips of his nose and chin come together. You’d think, from the looks of him—the heavy-veined temples, the glittering eyes—that the old man misses nothing; but not so. One can have no notion, from moment to moment, where his mind will surface next.
He jerked his head up, cracked lips pursed, staring at me as if angry in his attempt to remember what it was that, a moment earlier, had occurred to him. I lowered my treatise—the Discourse of Descartes, I think it was—and at last, with another little jerk, abandoning the paintings stacked beside his chair, he said, “Ah! So you’re executing Josef Mallin!”
I was so startled I nearly dropped my book. There are times when his senility seems purposeful, malicious. Worse than that, there are times when, for all his confusion, he seems to see with perfect clarity what troublesome thoughts are astir at the edge of your consciousness. “Mallin’s been dead for months,” I said sharply. The tic came over me, flickering like lightning. I covered it with my hand.
“Impossible!” he snorted, but the next instant he looked unsure of himself, then cunning. “An interesting man,” he said quickly and firmly, like a good liar shifting his ground. He leaned toward me, bent-backed, slightly drooling, and in the lamplight it seemed his head grew larger. His eyes were like a tiger’s. “A man could learn a good deal from that Josef Mallin,” he said. “Tried to burn down my studio once.”
It happened to be true, though how it fit with the subject at hand was impossible to determine unless, like my father, you were addled. He suddenly jerked still nearer to me, as if he’d hit on something. “He’s an atheist!” he said.
I sighed, still covering the tic, then sadly nodded to prevent his continuing. I did not appreciate (to say the least) his insistence on bringing Josef Mallin back to life. The period of Mallin’s imprisonment, first while he awaited trial, then while he awaited execution, was a terrible strain on all of us. He was a brilliant devil, black-haired and handsome and deadly as a snake, so cunning at bribing or persuading his guards that at last the Warden himself took charge of holding him. It was shortly after his death that the Warden began that interminable pacing in his chamber. Mallin’s execution, I might add, was unpleasant. His crimes were the worst of the three main kinds of which the laws speak, so that, after the decapitation, his head was thrown to the sawdust in the village square, to be eaten by dogs, as the law requires.
But my nod did nothing to check my father’s babblings. “He claims the Bible is a pack of lies,” he said, squinting, tightening his fists to get the thought exact. “The man’s not merely indifferent to religion, he hates it, heart and soul!” He struck his knee with his fist, as if some great point were scored.
I could not help but glance at my children, sprawled on the floor with their coloring papers and candies. One of these days I must force them back to their Bible lessons. My wife, unfortunately, can see no reason for reading the Bible if one does not like it. She enjoys it, herself, and she merely laughs—as she laughs at everything I stand for— when I insist that religion is no natural impulse but a tiling to be acquired. (I know only too well. It’s a thing I myself never properly acquired, despite my father’s love of Scripture and his labor, when I was a boy, to make me study it. I could profit by religion’s consolations, I think, if only I’d reached them at the proper age, the age when trust is as reasonable as reason. If I’d known what troubles this world affords …)
“I admit,” my father said abruptly, “that I’ve never seen a ghost myself, that I know of.” I blinked, grasping in vain for the connection, and I felt my heartbeat speeding up. Needless to say, I’d said nothing to my father of my foolish idea, in the dungeon this morning, that something was watching us. My father continued soberly, “But I know a little something of states of entrancement. Sometimes when you’re painting, a kind of spell comes over you, and you know—you positively know—that there’s no chance of erring with the picture at hand. You’re nailed directly to the universe, and the same force that moves in the elm tree is moving your brush.” He nodded.
Again I nodded back; I hardly knew what else to do. I’m always uncomfortable when he speaks of himself as a master craftsman. His paintings in recent years have been clumsy and confused as a child’s. Not even kind old ladies buy them. I listened with the back of my mind to my wife in the kitchen, rhythmically washing and rinsing plates. She works, always, in a pleasant daze, humming to herself, her mind as empty as a moonbeam.
My father said, “He hates Swedenborg, too, and the politics of Spinoza. ‘The essence of life is suffering,’ says he.”
Once again I gave a start, thinking of Heller’s pathetic “professor�
��; but my father didn’t notice, engrossed in the pleasure of pontificating. “Says Mallin, ‘I can say at least this for myself. I have steadily resisted illusion.’ ” My father smiled wickedly, as if he’d just made some vicious joke at my expense. I pursed my lips, watching him closely, but, of course, the whole thing was lunatic. I took off my spectacles and sighed.
Now both of us listened to the kitchen sounds, and the sound of the children’s chewing. After a time, he began nodding his head. “It will be a great blow to the Warden, no doubt. The minute the axe comes down on Joe Mallin, the Warden’s life will go fssst!” He grinned.
I was positive, for an instant, that the old man knew perfectly well that Josef Mallin, “Laureate of Hell,” as he called himself, was dead. I suspected that he brought the matter up just to torture me, remind me of my worrisome troubles at the prison. But then, as before, I was unsure. I saw—so vividly that I winced away—the image of Mallin’s head rolling from the block into sawdust, spraying blood. The mustached lips were curled back, furious, raging their pain and indignation even now, and the black eyes—small flecks of sawdust hung on them—stared, now, full of hatred as ever, at the clouded sky.
My father looked down, disconcerted for some reason. “The prophets leap backward and forward in time,” he said loudly, and slammed the arm of the chair with his fist. “There is no past or future in the grammar of God.”
The children looked up at him and laughed. There was candy between their teeth. I felt giddy, pulled crazily in diverse directions. I was suddenly reminded, looking at my children, of those bestial creatures at the prison—your usual criminal, I mean; not “the Professor,” as Heller calls him, and not some outraged philosopher-poet like Mallin. They live, the more usual criminal lot, for nothing but pleasure, like animals. They wallow in their food; when you let them together, they attack one another sexually; when you let them out into the exercise yard they snap at the sunlight, roll in the mud, and provoke horrible fights, even killings. I must have been fond of my children once, but, if so, I had now forgotten it. They were completely out of hand. I had tried to correct them—I’d tried many times—but my wife and father undid all my labors, she because she saw no point in correcting them—“Let them be, let them be!” she’d say lightly, with that foolish, carved-wood smile. As for my father, he disapproved of my mode of correcting them. He preferred tiresome argument to switchings. What time have I for argument, a man overworked, in an impossible situation? Between my wife and my father, I was hopelessly walled-in.
