Stillness & Shadows

by John Gardner

  Ira Katz nodded, eyebrows lifted, and tentatively smiled, alerted.

  “I’ve got a friend who maintains it’s the Lord watching me. I laugh. I don’t believe in such things, naturally. But I’ll tell you, it gives me the jeebies!” He had an odd sensation—not quite frightening, but curious—of sinking chair and all into the floor.

  “I should think so,” Ira said and again just perceptibly nodded. He raised his wineglass and sipped. His eyes had gone vague.

  Craine desperately focused his attention on Ira, keeping the chair from sinking further. “I don’t believe in connections—especially metaphysical connections,” Craine said. He laughed, alarmed, as if his words tempted devils, then hurried on, focusing still harder on Ira Katz. In his drunkenness he believed he was zeroing in on the heart of the matter—he would not think so tomorrow, perhaps, but his feeling that he was getting at the truth at last was intense. In a burst, struggling with his thickening tongue, he told Ira Katz how Carnac kept pursuing him, hounding him, and how even as he fled he felt mysteriously bound to the man, doomed to some terrible brotherhood with him. He spoke of the bookstore and how Tummelty had strangely latched onto him, hooked in like a burr, pretending it was Carnac’s mind, not his own, that interested him. Craine laughed, three sharp yelps, as he spoke of how Tummelty had tried to fool him. The feeling that he was onto something grew by leaps and bounds. As he was about to speak of the woman who stood watching from the stacks, unseen—a woman with cat’s eyes, black as coal—there came a terrible whirring and, out of sync, the clocks all struck eleven. Craine stopped short, mouth wide open, listening.

  To Craine’s drunken ears, the whirring, pinging, and bonging of the clocks was monstrously mechanical, at the same time mocking and despairing. He strained to hear the words, but if any were there they eluded him. It seemed to him that he knew where the wild noise came from, the pitch-dark hole at the center of the universe, aclutter with dead things—old planets, prima materia, a cosmic Sargasso sea from which came now only the sound he’d heard as he came back to consciousness after his operations. His eyes leaped toward Ira Katz. Ira, he saw to his amazement, had heard something totally different, innocent. Craine felt himself quietly slipping under again, drowning toward the whisper.

  Ira Katz had set his wineglass on the table beside his chair, the glass still almost full. He sat—or blurrily hovered—with his fingertips together, like a priest. He looked up and ran one hand through his hair.

  “Yes, it’s interesting,” he said, “the work Dr. Tummelty’s been doing.” Craine had to concentrate, tensing so hard his cheeks twitched, to make the words make sense. Ira was saying, “I got a copy of his book—The Shattered Mind, I think it’s called. I only read a little of it. You know him well?”

  By Ira’s tone Craine understood for the first time—dimly, as he understood everything just now—that Dr. Tummelty was in some way famous. Perhaps he’d heard that before, in fact. No use hunting; his mind was like a dead man’s. With his right hand he was gripping the chair arm, with his left the glass of whiskey, still struggling against the horror of that chiming from the depths. “I’ve talked with him once or twice, that’s all,” Craine managed to bring out. His speech was badly slurred, beyond all control now. He could feel the long tumble of the room through space. Struggling for sobriety, he tried to think what Dr. Tummelty had said, but his mind had quit as if forever.

  “He works with people who’ve had head injuries,” Ira said. His voice came out hollow, the words dirge-slow; a dream voice. “People who’ve severed certain nerves or something. They can write, for instance, but they can’t read—not even what they’ve written. Neurophysiology. It’s a scary business. You introduced him to Carnac?”

  “No,” Craine said, “something …” He could call back none of it, or nothing but one phrase, the bioplasmic universe. Then that too slid away from him. He felt his eyelids sinking and struggled to stay awake.

  Ira Katz was increasingly impatient to see him gone; he could barely hide it, Craine saw. But the door was far across the room. If he stood up and tried he couldn’t make it, not a chance. As if he’d actually gotten up, he saw himself staggering, falling against bookshelves, knocking down clocks. Again, he jerked his eyes open. “Psychics,” he said.

  Ira Katz looked at him. “Pardon?” he said.

  “Tummelty’s in’rested in psychics,” Craine said. It took all his energy to keep his eyelids partway open. He saw himself as Ira Katz must be seeing him, a newly dead corpse, two narrow chinks through which his icy blue, unfocussed eyes peered out with hushed malevolence.

  Then, like a collision of clocks thrown together, maybe sliding from a dump truck, there came from behind him the deafening jangle of Ira Katz’s phone in the bedroom. Ira started as if in fear, then, controlling himself, rose to his feet. “So that’s it,” Craine thought, and would have cackled if he could have—one last feeble burst of demonic intelligence—he’s been expecting a phone call from his wife! Craine’s eyes narrowed more, murderous as the cat’s, and he strained all his powers toward the difficult business of eavesdropping, but before the phone could ring twice, he was fast asleep.

  He slept for forty minutes, or forty-five, perhaps fifty—the clocks were in rough agreement on ten to twelve. It took him a long time to remember where he was and even longer to realize that it was his neighbor in there, still on the phone, speaking angrily and loudly, confident that Craine was asleep, or else indifferent to his hearing. “I didn’t say that,” he was shouting. “Listen, we need to talk—”

  Craine’s arms and legs were leaden, his head strangely clear and indifferent, remote. The room around him was like a sharply focused old photograph, blurry at the edges. He listened, unsurprised, to the crackle of rage in his neighbor’s voice in the bedroom. It was nothing unusual, in Craine’s profession, this murderous enmity of separated husbands and wives. Chances were they’d be together again in six months, or amicably parted, sending birthday cards. He smiled, cold as ice, then slowly turned his head. The red light on the stereo was off now. The cat stood by the door to the bedroom, watching him.

  “Kill them!” his neighbor shouted. “That’s a wonderful idea! Jesus Christ, that’s terrific! Listen, I got a better idea. Kill them and pin the thing on me!”

  Craine thought, for no reason, of drawing out his pistol and shooting himself. He smiled again. His arms lay flat on the chair arm, heavy as dead-men at the bottom of a pond. He saw himself sitting here in Ira Katz’s chair with his head half blown away, blood and hair on the wall behind him. His arms remained perfectly still, as if he’d done it already.

  “Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense,” the clocks said.

  It was curiously interesting, the thought of being dead. Like a midnight swim in one’s childhood, or a journey by train.

  Craine’s eyes again fell shut and, like a stone, he slept.

  When he awakened the second time, Ira Katz was at the window, staring down into the street, one hand flat on his beard. There was an afghan over Craine’s chest and legs. According to the clocks, it was quarter after twelve. The cat, in the chair where Ira had been sitting, had his eyes fixed on Craine. Craine looked away, as he would from the stare of some stoned young bore at a bus station. It no longer mattered that someone was following him, spying on him. It was all the same, the connected universe he’d dropped out on. Maggots. After a minute Craine’s hand rose unbidden to his forehead, as if seeing if it was there.

  “Headache?” Ira Katz said, turning slowly. His mind, for all his solicitude, was far away.

  “Not yet,” Craine said.

  Ira Katz studied him, eyelids puffy, as if he’d been crying, then turned his face back to the window. “I know what it’s like,” he said. He stroked his beard. It seemed that he would say no more, but then, surprisingly, as if speaking to the darkness outside the room, he said, “I used to do it all the time—knock myself unconscious with martinis. It’s a very inefficient way to kill yourself. You want some aspirin?”<
br />
  “If you’ve got some handy,” Craine said.

  Ira nodded, thought about it, then crossed to the door to the bedroom and bathroom, hardly glancing at Craine as he passed. He switched the bathroom light on—a ribbon of white shot up the wall across from Craine— then ran water. When he’d turned the tap off, he said—still in the bathroom, standing there looking into the mirror, perhaps—“I knew a woman once managed to kill herself on whiskey. Hemorrhage of the esophagus. Managed to rear up, spouting blood like a geyser, and make a few last interesting remarks.” He switched off the bathroom light, blew his nose, and after a moment emerged with a glass of water and three aspirin.

  “You were there, I take it,” Craine said, not looking at him, leaving him free to ignore it if he pleased. To Craine it hardly mattered. He was not floating now. He’d sunk to the center of things, the ultimate idea of stone.

  “Intimate part of the conversation,” Ira said. He held out the aspirin and glass of water.

  Craine took them from him, clumsily, put the pills in his mouth, and drank. “Thank you,” he said, and rolled his eyes up. “Thank you very much.” He handed back the glass.

  Ira turned away, looked at the cat in the chair, the photographs, then set down the glass on the bookshelf behind Craine. With a part of his mind, Craine registered a noise, perhaps the door opening at the foot of the stairs. He listened more carefully, listless, not even interested—alert in spite of himself, he would have said, like some criminal who’d lost all taste for life yet finds himself paying attention to every strange footfall. There was nothing now, only the ticking of the clocks, the absolute stillness of mounded white sand in the hourglass on the table beside him. Ira went over to the window to stand with his hands in his suspenders, looking down again.

  “Personally,” Craine said, “I put such things out of my mind. Gone like smoke.” He leaned his head back and looked at the ceiling.

  “I know,” Ira said.

  There was another sound, someone on the stairs. He strained to separate out the sound of the clocks. Even now he felt no interest, only a morbid curiosity. The miraculous does not come to those out looking for it. Beauty, high adventure … He closed his eyes.

  The man was muttering something, standing there angrily muttering at the window. Stupid bastard, stupid fucking bastard …

  Indignation leaped up in him, but he forgot the next instant. He saw the doorknob turning, the door slowly opening, a leather-gloved hand reaching in, groping toward the lightswitch.

  “What?” Craine said, snapping his eyes open.

  Ira Katz looked at him, far away. “Maybe that’s your trouble, Craine,” he said.

  “What?” Craine said again, heart racing.

  “This feeling you have of someone following you, spying on you. Maybe it’s Time’s revenge.” He studied Craine a moment, then shifted his gaze away, out the window, down into the street. “I have a theory,” he said. “We have an idea of ourselves, when we’re kids: noble-hearted, honorable, unselfish. It’s a beautiful image, and in fact it’s true—it’s the truth about us—but we betray it, or the nature of the world betrays it. We betray it again and again, one way or another. We can’t do what’s decent. Our commitments prevent it, or it’s beyond our means. There are only so many causes you can die for, only so many good women you can love with all your heart, and even the best twist you downward, limit possibilities, limit your potential. So we lose touch with ourselves, turn our backs on the image, believe ourselves to be the ugly thing we’ve by now half-proved we are. The image is still there, the shadow we cast into the future when we were young. It’s still there haunting us, beckoning us toward it; only now there’s that second shadow, the shadow, behind us, of all those acts unworthy of us.” He put his hand on his beard. At last he said, “I heard a story. There was this girl, a student of one of our graduate students. It seems she saw a rape—or a murder, I forget—and she was afraid to report it. It was years ago, I think. Anyway, all this time she’s been brooding on it, trapped in the past. Snagged on it, that unfulfilled moment. Everywhere she goes, everyone she meets, out pours the story. It’s the most important thing in the world to her. People hide behind trees when they see her coming. You see what I’m saying. Maybe in your case—”

  Something astonishing was happening in Craine’s mind—a blinding flash of white, as if all matter had exploded, then blackness, then everything as it was. She was there, out in the hallway, her small ear pressed against the door, dark eyes rolled up. He could hear her breathing.

  Ira Katz was looking at him, eyebrows lowered. Craine sat forward. “It’s late,” he said, and shuddered—shuddered from head to foot, like a man just come in from icy wind and deep snow. “I lost track of the time,” he said, and laughed. He rose unsteadily to his feet, three fingers on the chair arm for balance. His legs were like wood.

  “It is late,” Ira said.

  Craine’s eyes fell again on the snow-white sand mounded up in the bottom of the hourglass, absolutely still.

  “I’ll just use your bathroom,” he said, and moved very carefully, like an old, old man, toward the bedroom door. When he was seated in the dark—he’d been unable to find the bathroom lightswitch—his sense that she was listening in the hallway outside became a certainty. He heard her purse snap open, saw her hand slip in. He tried to hurry, full of life again, but his bowel track refused to be rushed, shooting miserable dribbles and insisting with pressure like a wail that he wait a minute longer. Pain tugged at the red gouge five inches below his nipple, another pain lower, where the remains of his anus had been sewn to the remains of his tubing. He strained with all his might, then gave up—he’d take his chances—wiped himself, pulled up his trousers, and flushed the toilet. His heart pounded fiercely, the rest of him sodden and heavy as new concrete. Then the knock came, exactly when he’d known it was coming. Quickly, one hand on the bathroom doorknob, he drew the pistol from its holster. When he heard Ira Katz walk over in his stocking feet and open the hallway door, Craine stepped out of the bathroom and crossed to the door to the livingroom, then, after an instant, stepped out suddenly—smiling like a storm trooper—to greet her.

  At once he saw that the woman staring at him was not the one. She was tall, middle-aged, all skin and bones, most of her straggly brown hair up in a bun. Her dress was vaguely Indian; over it, she wore a pale purple cardigan sweater and green beads. Her face went white—all except the birthmark like a coin on her cheek—and the hand that held the purse dropped lower. Ira Katz, too, was staring at Craine’s pistol. He drew the woman back toward himself.

  “Craine,” he said at last, eyes wide, “this is April. She’s a friend.” He pulled at the side of his collar with two fingers, letting in air, still looking at the pistol—now aimed at the floor. He stood carefully balanced, like a man on a tightrope thousands of feet up. He said, “April, this is my neighbor from down the hall, Detective Craine.”

  She just stared.

  Craine smiled crazily, bending forward over the gun. “I just came to borrow some sugar,” he said. He glanced at the cup on the bookshelf, then down at his pistol. He put it away hastily, fingers shaking. “I thought you were here to steal my sugar,” he explained, and gave a laugh.

  They looked at him.

  “It’s late,” he said, soberly nodding, then laughed again. He went to get the cup from the bookshelf. “I lost track of the time,” he said, hurrying toward the door. He made his face so sober that, unbeknownst to himself, he looked furious. Tears ran down his cheeks. “Thank you very much,” he said. “Sorry I had to trouble you. Thank you very much.”

  Five

  It was not that he felt guilty; he’d drunk too much to be vulnerable to guilt. Nor was it exactly that his mind was churning. He seemed to be thinking nothing, lying there flat on his back like a corpse patiently awaiting resurrection. He lay in his underwear on top of the covers, head cocked forward by the pillows, his arms at his sides, bare feet splayed outward. He was strongly consciou
s of the room around him, the faded gray wallpaper splotched and cracked, bulging here and there, like an old bum’s forehead; the padless, once wine-red, threadbare carpet lumped up into ropes, like the veins on the backs of his hands. It was, his story, this room, this miraculous decay—the books that spelled out his consciousness wedged into bookshelves of cheap, stained pine, strewn along the baseboards, stacked up in corners; on the bedpost above him his pistol precariously tilted in its shoulder holster; on his dresser, in its dusty old Bible-black case, the pitted, once-silver cornet that he hadn’t touched in years. A streetlight made the night smoke-gray outside his window, lighting up telephone and electric lines and throwing a negative shadow along the floor toward his closet. The closet door hung open, too warped to close; it had a broken spool for a doorknob. The interior of the closet, just visible from Craine’s bed, was crowded with dark forms. He thought, without emotion, how some murderer might crouch there, waiting for him to sleep. At once he found himself thinking of the women who’d been killed. He imagined their terror as the dark shape detached itself from the other dark shapes and came forward, signalling for silence, reaching out to snatch them. Abruptly, Craine sat upright, threw his feet over the side of the bed, and got up.

  For fifteen minutes he stood at his dresser, wearing only his underwear—he had the lights on now, the shades not pulled—sorting through paper scraps from his pockets and the dresser drawers, laying them out like puzzle pieces, lifting them one after another and squinting, trying to read them, but to no avail; his eyes refused to focus. He worked in increasing desperation, growing angry or frightened, he could hardly say which. All at once he found himself listening to something. Perhaps he’d been listening for a long time. It was a creaking sound, rhythmical and urgent—some machine, he thought at first, something to do with torture. Then the truth broke through: Ira Katz’s bedsprings. He reached out, automatically, and turned out the lights. In the darkness that leaped up around him the sound seemed much louder. He groped his way back to the bed and lay down as before. The sound went on and on. They were still at it, banging away like demons, when Craine’s stiff muscles relaxed and he sank into sleep.