by John Gardner
As he sat at his window, reading the old tome on Sanskrit by the failing light outside, the shadows on the street grew longer and sharper, eerily alive, it seemed to Craine—-jumping up like panthers when a truck cut through them, or fluttering like starlings in a sudden gust of wind—until once, when he looked out, he saw that their blocks and lines had vanished, or rather had spread everywhere, consuming the street. He heard sharply clicking footsteps, a young woman running. Distress stirred in him, but of course it was nothing, just night again. Voices came up to him, children playing football in the empty dirt lot of the railroad depot across from where he sat. The depot was old, once grand as a palace, chimneys all over it like headstones on a hill, black as coal, their corbeling ornate and clean-cut against the gray, still starless sky. He thought for an instant of the view from his window in Johns Hopkins Hospital—Osier dome and the streets of Baltimore—then concentrated, resisting memory, on the depot. The building had been padlocked and boarded up for years, and like everything else faintly tinged with nobility in Little Egypt (nobody could say there was much along that line), the depot was said to be haunted. Craine had no patience for country superstitions, but it was easy to believe that if anything anywhere was haunted, the Carbondale depot was the place. The ghosts would not be of the dangerous kind: weary black men pushing baggage carts, lean old conductors implacably chewing the insides of their cheeks, countrified young men dressed up to travel …striped cardboard suitcases, haircuts shaped by bowls …Craine focused on the book, resisting a minute rise of sadness. “Ghosts,” he muttered. He closed out, just in time, an image of children around a fireplace in a cabin at the edge of a dark mountain lake. “Not likely,” he said aloud. Nothing in the depot but heavy old boards half rotted out, crumbling concrete, rusty iron; pigeonshit and rats.
The children in the shadow of the depot had been playing for hours now, he was dimly aware, or clearly aware with one small part of his brain—playing as if they’d begun just a moment ago, as if time had been suspended—as it was for Craine, at least so long as he could escape into dozing, as he managed to do from time to time, or could engross himself in his Sanskrit book. Their faces were surprised and indignant when the father of one of them called, poking his head out the window of his old black panel truck—the truck just visible in the rising flood of darkness—“Stephen! Stephen!” and then, a moment later, when the boy had walked over to him—the man still shouting, so that the rest of the players would be sure to hear—“It’s getting dark out, boy! You got your mothah worried sick!” Craine gazed out guiltily, as if it were he who’d stayed out too long. Beyond the makeshift playing field, the railroad tracks gleamed dully, more dully every minute, gradually disappearing.
His sense of being watched was not as strong as before, nowhere near so. If he could be sure that someone had actually been watching him, he would have to say now that they’d quit for the day, gone home. Yet something of the weird discomfort was still there, a ghostly residue like the dread a man feels the morning after. That was why he sat by the window to read, the window shade up, the room growing steadily darker around him, his bottle dull amber in the windowsill, his pipe between his teeth, Scotch glass in his gray left hand. He was presenting himself for his enemy’s inspection, if the observer was his enemy (his sense of the whole thing was more and more unsure), stating by the act of sitting there that he had nothing he knew of to be ashamed of, nothing, and was not in the least afraid, not at all, not “worried,” as the restaurant cat had claimed, not even anxious; nothing of the kind. By his presence at the window he made plain to all the world that if the stranger would come up and knock on his door, like a civilized being, Gerald Craine would be happy to talk, make an effort to explain, put forward his defense.
His calm was an illusion, of course. When for a moment it seemed to him that the stranger had really done it, had climbed the narrow, dimly lit stairs and stood quietly knocking at his door even now, Craine started violently, bursting from the depths of his absorption like a rabbit, such terror in his chest that he thought he was having a heart attack. His hand jerked, splashing whiskey from his knee to his chin; then he sat silent and jittering, holding his breath, mouth wide open, waiting for the knock to come again. It didn’t. Slowly, his heart still painfully beating, he put the book down on the floor beside his shoe, put the glass on the windowsill to the right of him, put the pipe in his pocket, rose silently from the armchair, and, carefully avoiding the floorboards that creaked, crossed to stand listening at the door. Except for the scramblings of mice in the wall and the sea roar in his ears, there was nothing. At last, with his right hand on the handle of the gun in his shoulder holster, he reached out with his trembling skinny left hand, turned the knob, and jerked the door open. Across the hall, in front of his neighbor’s door, a shabby person in a suit was bending over, trying to poke a pamphlet through the door crack. At Craine’s feet lay a similar pamphlet. He stooped to pick it up. What Does God Require of Me? he read. When Craine looked up from the pamphlet, the shabby person was smiling at him and nodding. Craine glared, his emotions in a turmoil, feeling at the same time both encroached upon and curious, even eager to find out what the pamphlet said. That too was the whiskey, he understood. If he thought about what he thought, he didn’t give a hoot in hell what God required of him.
Without returning the stranger’s nod, he closed the door, crumpled the pamphlet in his fist and threw it in the direction of the wastepaper basket beside his bed. He thought, with a brief little tingle of alarm, of the incident at Tully’s, the paper airplane. He stood bent forward in the nearly dark room, scratching his bewhiskered Adam’s apple, then moved back toward his chair and book. As he stood at his window, fingertips on his glass, he said aloud, crossly, “Ought to turn the lights on.” But he stared at the street, unconsciously looking for the watcher’s eyes, and, hardly aware that he was doing it, poured whiskey into his glass. His hands were relatively steady again, as they almost always were late in the day. Late in the day, he thought, and smiled grimly. He sipped the warm whiskey and ran his tongue around his lips, lost in thought.
He sat down and picked up the book again.
All languages, the Vedic priests believed, were descended from one original divine language, now corrupted and lost. The concept will be familiar to Western readers through the legend of Babel and the mystic tradition of the kabala. Especially in the 19th century …
The street outside his window was almost deserted. Farther down, in the direction of the university campus, there was a faint roar of talk and music along the strip; the evening was beginning at Zack’s, Bonapart’s, the Zombie’s, Merlin’s. Damn fools, he thought, looking back at his book. He wiped sweat from his forehead. Fever? he wondered. In his mind he saw the crowd of college students, a few of them dressed like elegant savages, the rest of them got up, with careful vanity, to look like junk collectors, sandhogs, farmers, pharmacists time-warped from some other thoroughly insignificant moment—1912, 1932, 1957. (His eyes moved steadily, line after line, four inches from the book, his right hand automatically picking at page corners, turning pages.) As if morosely, they nodded with the music, hands mechanically raising beer mugs to their mouths, or marijuana cigarettes, eyes gazing dully, hungrily at the girl in the wrinkled dark green blouse or at the boy in the tank top, mechanically snapping his fingers. Out on the highway toward Murphysboro, the big, stainless-steel Massage Parlor on Wheels would be rolling toward the Mississippi River, glinting in the darkness like a pistol barrel, a movie on the screen in the room behind the driver, on the bed a young Arab with his hands behind his head, grinning eagerly, sheepishly, at the girl rubbing oil on his chest and belly, then down along his loins, professionally teasing toward his towering, crooked member, softly whispering as her face came nearer, “Tickle?” Mournfully, Craine lowered the book into his lap, thinking he was thinking about the sentence he’d just read, his dim eyes groping along the bookshelves to the old Zenith television set he’d never used, then to th
e dresser, the rickety table and chair near his bed, the apartment fridge, the imperfectly closed bathroom door beyond which he could make out the gleam of what he knew to be the bathroom sink. Pitiful objects—they’d all been living here when Craine moved in—each with its miserable little history, forgotten.
The legend of the grandfather’s clock came back to him, Time Lost … and quickly, refusing to think again of the person in the stacks, he got up to cross the room and turn the light on. When he flicked the switch, everything around him was changed for an instant: the rug showed its faded and threadbare solidity—atoms to be counted on, its immense charge discrete and self-contained, no threat; Craine’s paperback books, hardbacks, and magazines waiting patient and dependable in their sagging shelves or strewn along the baseboard; his suit coat on the chair back fast asleep. But then, the next instant, nothing was changed; his confusion and distress were everywhere, wide awake, rocketing through the room. From somewhere nearby—Ira Katz’s room, perhaps—came a food smell, toast and coffee.
He’d eaten nothing all day, it occurred to him. He’d forgotten lunch, and when he’d finally gotten to his office—both Meakins and Royce were gone by then, and Hannah was putting on her coat to leave—he’d been too busy keeping his condition from Hannah (she waited, taking off her coat again, while he glanced through the mail she’d slit open for him) to think of anything so practical as supper. It was an outrage, having his comings and goings observed and judged, subtly ruled, in fact, by a fat, middle-aged black secretary. If he’d meant to be a slave he’d have gotten married and had children, like Meakins. (In his mind he saw the second of his agents, Emmit Royce, hips slung forward, hands in his pockets, no doubt playing with himself, grinning lopsidedly at some college girl maybe half his age, his steel tooth glinting like his murderous eyes, big dimple flashing, the handle of his gun poking out, suggestive, from the pocket of his old leather jacket. By midnight he’d have her under him. By two a.m. he’d have forgotten her, maybe found another.) When Craine had glanced through the last of them, he stacked his letters more or less neatly at the side of his desk. He wasn’t drinking, though the bottle in its sack was in his overcoat pocket and God knew he was thinking about it. “Deal with them tomorrow, ”he’d said, nodding at the letters.
“You all right, Craine?” Hannah said, eyes screwed up tight.
“Wonderful,” he said. He stood up, carefully, supporting himself with both hands on the edge of the desk.
She put her coat on again. “Wonderful,” she mimicked. She’d raised boys; she knew pretty well where he was coming from; but she decided to smile. “Lan-a-Goshen,” she said, and patted her forehead with a tissue. “You wanna lock up?”
“I’m coming now,” he said. He’d done it to torment himself, or so he would have claimed, not that he’d thought about it; had done it to make himself be with her a little longer without revealing the extent of his condition. Or partly that. It was a complicated business, of course, like everything. The quirks of human motivation, his stock in trade, spiralled down and down. She was a test of his ability to cope, partly; but also, he had a right to do whatever he pleased, and, leaving with her, maybe falling down the stairs—who knew? who cared?—he would show her his lordly indifference to whatever she might think. Also, of course, he was afraid to be alone; she had a beautiful voice, and a heart as immense as her bosom. Possibly she’d ask him some question, and he could spill it all out. I’ve gone crazy, Hannah. He would laugh as he spoke, reserving certain rights. You think I was crazy before, but listen!
As soon as they’d come out on the sidewalk, there was that feeling again. Eyes nailing him like headlight beams. He got an image of Eggers’ meek face, then McClaren’s—nostrils twitching, pale eyes snapping.
The smell of food was stronger now, and it came to him that what he chiefly desired in this world was a talk with his neighbor Ira Katz. Impossible, of course. He would be busy grading papers or writing poetry or whatever it was he did nights. Listening to his clocks. Or he’d have some young woman with him, yes. Embarrassing all round.
A queer tingling came over him and he looked up. His right hand knuckles and wrist ached. Too much smoking, no doubt. Thickening the blood, pushing the pressure up, loading the system with carbon monoxide. Incredible what the old corpse would tolerate! With the tip of his tongue he touched the sandpaper roof of his mouth just behind the front teeth. His gums were painfully sensitive, as always; advanced case of stomatosis, he’d been told. It wouldn’t become cancer—Craine’s opinion, not the dentist’s—he’d be saved by the law of parsimony; his weak spot had already been found. He hadn’t bothered to mention his theory to the dentist, naturally, lest the dentist convince him that the theory was, as Craine knew, nonsense. Craine frowned, glanced crossly at the door. It was a strange business, how a man rushed tail over tin cup toward the grave, kicking and swinging at every guardian angel that stupidly rose up, batting its wings and blocking his path, yelling, “Halt, maniac! Turn aside!”
When they’d diagnosed him—“colon carcinoma”—in the hospital just across the parking lot from the Baptist building where his offices were, he hadn’t felt the slightest trace of fear or shock; he’d simply been interested; perhaps—strange to say—almost pleased. He’d been sick for weeks: diarrhea, cramps; he couldn’t say how long ago it had started. They’d rammed in the old sigmoidoscope, casual and fierce as veterinarians, and that was that. So it’s cancer, he’d thought. He’d assumed from the start it meant curtains. He’d never known anyone who’d been told he had cancer and not died of it. With cancer of the colon it wasn’t necessarily that bad, people told him. Tom Meakins had an uncle who’d lived forty-one years after a cancer-of-the-colon operation. But the doctors at Johns Hopkins, where the doctors at Carbondale had immediately shipped him, had spoken guardedly, neither holding out nor withholding hope, so he’d gone on figuring he was done for. Better than a twenty-minute death by angina pectoris, which was what he’d been expecting, he’d thought—better than bouncing around, slamming against walls, screaming his head off with pain, nothing anyone could do. And of course he was done for. They could take out the growth, get all of it out, as apparently they’d done, but he still had cancer, a shadow inside him for life, the same drab shadow that lay over the world. Well, well! was all he’d thought, so Craine is to go to his reward! His indifference had gone deep. Even here, far from home, in Baltimore, he hadn’t had a hint of a nightmare. When friends, or rather acquaintances, had stopped in to visit him, happening by plane or train toward Washington, even coming on purpose—true foul-weather friends—and had delicately skirted the subject of death, piously mentioning prayer and God, bringing him amulets, miraculous diets, a cut-glass-windowed silver case which contained what appeared to be a very small part of the tooth of a saint, Mother Seton by name (tell him no more about modern enlightenment: someone had sawed that poor woman to bits and laid her aside like money in the bank in the hope that, in spite of the odds, she might one day be canonized), he’d nodded as politely as patience would allow, had hurried them over the difficult parts, and soothed them with Styrofoam cups of the Teachers’ Scotch he kept hidden in his nightstand.
It should have been one of the most significant periods of his life, he would have said. When a man thinks he’s dying, that’s when you’d think he’d take stock in earnest, face up to things. Take stock of what, though? The meaning of life? There he’d take his stand with that fellow Celine, best writer in the world, in Craine’s opinion: “Shut your eyes, that’s all that’s necessary. There you have life seen from the other side.” Dying did not change what he knew to be the case, that one way of life was as good as another. Farmer, priest, murderer …Ah, when you were young, watching the colorful, noisy parade, one set of bandsmen took your fancy above all others—perhaps it was the one with the silver trombones, or the one where the drummers threw their sticks in the air, or perhaps it was the one where the drum majorettes were young gentlemen in drag—no matter, you made your choic
e, threw in your lot with them, chose their company as if all other companies were ludicrous, contemptible; you fell in behind them, hopping to get in step, sucked in your belly, prettily lifted your chest and chin, threw your elbows out left and right like corn knives, and by diligent apprenticeship you became, by God, what you became. Very good; congratulations! And so the world paraded, overwhelmed with itself, until dusk, when the music petered out and the marching stopped, and, standing in a light, smoky rain, all the bandsmen—band on band from horizon to horizon—stood trying to keep their cigarettes lit, grumbling about wages, waiting for the chartered bus. It was all proud, childish foolishness. Third Reich, Mother Russia, China, driving permit, merit badges …shit clouds collapsing into planets, proud boulders in space …That had been Gerald Craine’s opinion before, and it was his opinion now that he was dying. Bankers against bank robbers; indignant, trembling teachers against proud or distressed ignoramuses; priests superstitiously kissing their crosses against bug-eyed, whimpering atheists pissing on altars. Righteousness, patriotism, “good manners” on one side, crouching in fear and brave comradery beside the cannons that cautiously peeked out, small dark O’s of alarm, above the battlements; on the other side, in the woods beyond the moat, Flint’s bedraggled cult, ready to die like heroes—nay, martyrs—for General Fornication; Anarchists United —outrageous idea—willing and eager to die for freedom from the accidental chains of geography and geometry, the rivers, mountain ranges, invisible dotted lines that invest one set of hills with unholy majesty far beyond that of all other green tumescences and can send you to prison if you fail to see the glow; and somewhere, sulking behind the worshippers of flesh and the anarchists, the unwashed and uncivil—tanned, half-naked bums huddled on the heat vents of the sidewalks of Washington, D.C., in the middle of winter, kings of disgust to whom style, even thank you and please, is more loath than Treblinka …
