Stillness & Shadows

by John Gardner

  “All right. I don’t mean to be criticizing Ira. I just meant to explain that there’s a natural social-psychological component. Ira doesn’t ‘work well,’ as they say, with his colleagues, and what he does—aside from his teaching, of course—is a hard thing for his colleagues to evaluate. No doubt I sound as if I’d like to see him fired. It’s not true. But believe me, he’s difficult. You’re a realist. Think about my position. The job of a chairman is to some extent political. If I come out swinging for a fellow, he’d better be standing there behind me, trying to look polite! —But all right, that’s my problem; not to the point.

  “All right. So where were we?”

  “You were saying he’s self-destructive.”

  “Yes, good. Yes, that’s the point. Did you hear about the death of his mother?”

  “I don’t think he mentioned it.”

  Davies nodded, lips pursed. After a moment he said, “Ira’s mother was alcoholic; a very difficult woman. She lived with them—no doubt part of the reason for the divorce. When she died he was there at the hospital with her, sitting at her bedside. She seemed to be asleep when her esophagus burst. I suppose it must have waked her. She reared up in bed, blood pouring out of her mouth—Ira jumped up and grabbed her—and she said, ‘Ira, why’d you let me do this to myself?’ You can imagine how it is for a man like Ira to have to live with a thing like that!”

  “Maybe,” Craine said.

  Davies shot him a look. “Maybe?”

  Craine waved. “The ole lady wasn’t exactly being fair, you’ll admit.”

  “Of course she wasn’t! Real ‘Jewish mamma,’ as Ira’s wife put it.”

  “Ex-wife.”

  “Well yes, technically.” He smiled, as if feeling a little trapped. “She was—is—a wonderful woman. We’re all very fond of her. He had a wonderful family. Smart, good-looking kids, beautiful little house on Chautauqua—”

  “The wife got the house?”

  He studied the pencil, which he held now by the point and the eraser, between his two index fingers. “Jane’s very social, stunningly beautiful, an excellent cook. Maybe beautiful’s too strong; she’s just a little puffy— cortisone treatments. And of course when a man walks out on her, a woman shows the wear and tear.”

  “Of course.

  Abruptly, Professor Davies put the pencil in his pocket and turned back toward the desk. “Well, that’s about it,” he said. “There’s not much more I can tell you. As you can see, we’re pretty worried.”

  “Yes I can,” Craine said. He leaned forward as if to get up. “One thing,” he said. “Where did he run into this other woman, this April?”

  “Ah yes, April.” The professor shook his head. “She was a programmer over at the center. So in a way, you see, I’m responsible.”

  “Yes, that’s too bad,” Craine said. “You know anything about her?”

  “I’m not sure I ever laid eyes on her. No doubt a nice enough person. Ira’s always had good taste.”

  “Mmm,” Craine said, and now he did rise. He said, “There were others, then?”

  “I can’t definitely say,” Professor Davies said. A coolness came over him, quite suddenly, as if with a click.

  Craine looked down at his pipe and grinned a little wickedly. “Occupational hazard, I imagine,” he said. “They’re like rock stars, these poets. They go off and do readings, talk behind closed doors with their female students about whatever little intimacies show up in their poems … I imagine there must be rumors, at the very least. I imagine you’d have to be a saint to be the wife of a poet and never suffer jealousy.”

  “That may be so,” Davies said. “But I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

  “On the contrary,” Craine said, and looked up, his smile wide open, downright friendly, “you’ve helped me very much!”

  At the silver-wigged secretary’s desk he got directions to the computer center and borrowed the phone again. As he dialed, Chairman Davies watched, on the chance that he might still be of use, then nodded, smiled, and stepped back into his office. This time he did not close the door.

  “Craine,” Hannah said, “where the devil are you?”

  “Out in the field,” he said, and grinned.

  “Out in the field,” she mimicked. But she knew she’d get nothing more from him and gave it up. “McClaren’s still trying to reach you,” she said.

  “I thought he might be. I imagine I’ll eventually run into him.”

  “I wish you luck,” she said. “He’s in a very bad mood. I went over and tried to talk with Carnac.”

  “Go on.”

  “Nothin. Zero.”

  Craine frowned. “He wouldn’t talk?”

  “Talked a blue streak, but not English. Funny thing was, I’d swear he was trine with all his might to get through to me.”

  “Scared, you think?”

  “God knows. I think just plain crazy.”

  “OK,” Craine said. “Hold the fort, I’ll check in.” He handed the receiver to the girl. When she’d hung it on the cradle, he asked, “You know this person, Terrance Rush? I noticed when I was writing down the name, you seemed—”

  “He’s one of our graduate students,” she said. “I can give you his office number—it’s up on the fourth floor—but he probably won’t be there, he’ll be over in the library, in his carrel. You’d have to get that over at the library.”

  He waited while she added the office number to the name and address on the slip of paper, then folded it again and tucked it into his shirt pocket, where he thought with luck he might find it. Rush, he thought. Elaine Glass’s teacher. Was it possible that the thing could be that easy?

  “Thank you for all your time and trouble,” he said. “Thank you very much!”

  “Our pleasure,” she said. As he was about to turn away she gave him an earnest look, a little panicky and furtive, as if she wished the others couldn’t hear what she was saying. “If there’s anything I can do for, you know, the case … don’t hesitate to call me. I’m Janet.”

  “Yes, I know.” He smiled. “Thank you, Janet. Thank you very much.” As he approached the door to the hallway he turned to nod good-bye one last time and caught, out of the corner of his eye, Chairman Davies’ door closing, without a sound. He shot a look at Janet and saw that she too had noticed. Their eyes met firmly for an instant. Craine winked.

  With magnificent self-control he passed the truck without stopping for a drink and walked on to the library. The clock over the door said 12:05. He walked faster. It was a beautiful building, or such was Gerald Craine’s opinion—grand rooms, black marble columns, marble floors smooth as glass, everywhere the smell—the presence, as people in stereo say—of books. It seemed to him, as it always did when he came here, simply incredible that he didn’t spend his life here. At the sight of students and professors lined up at the checkout computers, or copying down call numbers at the central catalogue, browsing in the seven-day new-acquisitions room, or sprawled in the carpeted lounges, reading, Craine’s soul, ordinarily so indifferent to fortune, stirred toward covetousness and envy. He reminded himself, as he always did here, that maybe ninety percent of the people around him weren’t interested in books, were merely faking their courses, skimming half-heartedly or reading carefully but without real interest or understanding—but he didn’t believe it. Every student who passed with a great, awkward armload clamped under his chin was an affront to Craine, like a fat, smiling czar to a peasant Communist—though of course it was nonsense: he could come here whenever he pleased, if he pleased. Theoretically, at least. It was only in his mind that he was an alien here, a rat darting furtively through a room of sleeping cats.

  At the checkout desk he asked a well-dressed black boy in glasses, “Where do I get the number of a person’s library carrel?”

  Without looking up from his work the boy pointed at the ceiling and said, “Second floor, main desk.”

  “Thank you very much,” Craine said, bowing, and hurried to the elevator. />
  Two minutes later, with the number of Terrance Rush’s carrel on a pink slip of paper in his hand, Craine got off the elevator at the fifth floor and hurried along the stacks, hunting for where the carrels began. Half unaware that he was doing it, he read titles as he walked. Abruptly, he stopped, staring at a dark blue book almost in front of him, at eye level: Clairvoyance, it said. For the first time since it had happened he remembered that something had come over him when he was standing at Ira Katz’s door, a kind of dream or maybe a vision, very brief, but powerful: he—or someone—was standing in the dark, under trees, and someone was moving very quietly toward him, hands raised. Craine, remembering, put one hand over his mouth. It was that night—somewhere where there were leaves—that Ira’s friend April had been murdered.

  FRAGMENTS

  Editor’s Note

  The fragments that follow have sufficient internal coherence to justify inclusion—but no attempt has been made to render them sequential. Fragments number two and three are versions of the same scene but distinct enough as presentations to demonstrate the way Gardner worked with what he acknowledges as “borrowed material.” Fragment number seven would appear to pertain to a different story-line—and time, it’s winter—entirely. Craine has had cancer of the colon, not—as in this closing fragment—a mental collapse.

  Royce visits Craine’s room well before Hannah’s warning that he’s planning such a visit; Elaine Glass acquires a suntan in inverse proportion to her time spent in the sun. It’s as difficult for the reader as for the book’s protagonist to know the actual hour and the date.

  Craine and his creator might have proposed a solution; we cannot. To paraphrase Professor Weintraub’s lecture on computers, there are routines and sub-routines and sub-sub-sub-routines. “How does one man, in a single lifetime, program them all in, you ask me? The answer is, he doesn’t—and therein lies a tale.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This novel is a “construction” of sorts: The characters and plot are for the most part imaginary, but passages from numerous books have been ripped from their original contexts and inserted, slightly altered, into this story. I cannot explain in detail here—perhaps I could not explain fully, down to the last iota, even to myself—why I have not totally recast borrowed material, so that no acknowledgment is legally or morally necessary; but I can say this much: my ideal novel is a universe of voices, not a work of triumphant individual will but a human chorus, sometimes in harmony, sometimes not—an edifice modified by all who have used it, generation on generation, the way very old churches and schools have been modified, a window plugged here, a chimney added there, here and there old beams replaced by steel—a concatenation in which I, the novelist, serve mainly as moderator, keeping the various contributions more or less relevant both in the sense that they apply and in the sense that they tend to move the whole kaboodle in some direction that satisfies my intuition of where things ought to go. I don’t mean to suggest that I’m indifferent to design (though it’s true that I have no objection to “loose, baggy monsters” if they hold my attention); I mean only that, writing a novel, one is always on familiar philosophical ground. No one, not even the most ingenious writer of sci-fi, can find a wholly new domain for dramas of human personality in conflict, which is our business, mostly, or so it seems to me. And the philosophical ground of this novel, being as old, at least, as human consciousness, has been much trampled over the years and even millions of years, so that to limit one’s dramatizing voice would be like stubbornly refusing to use any mathematics one has not thought up from scratch by oneself.

  I have borrowed so widely that no complete list of original sources is possible. A few books I’ve made heavy use of are Joseph Weizenbaum’s Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, Howard Gardner’s The Shattered Mind, Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death, Robert E. Ornstein’s The Psychology of Consciousness, and M. B. Dykshoorn’s My Passport Reads Clairvoyant. From all of these books I take individual lines (which I make some character speak), images and symbols which may sink of their own weight to the novel’s bedrock or may, on the other hand, serve as mere surface decorations, and ideas—even ideas for characters—which grope out toward everything else in the construction, helping to hold the thing together. Various other writers have influenced this work almost equally, but for them I can mention no single book. I’ve ranged freely, for instance, through the writings of Darwin, Freud, Jung, and Rank, and through the outpourings of both scientific and popular writers on the so-called paranormal, writers for example like Joseph Chilton Pearce (The Crack in the Cosmic Egg and Exploring the Crack in the Cosmic Egg)—writers who seem to me to range, both collectively and individually, from the profound to the unspeakably silly.

  Fragment One

  Nothing is stable; all systems fail. Imponderables, improbabilities … Not even the weary man’s willing decline toward the grave is entirely to be trusted. Consider the case of Gerald Craine, detective.

  Consider Craine sweating and tossing on his bed, asleep in his miserable, stinking hotel room, his mind numbed by whiskey, weighted like the deadmen in the long-forgotten swamps of his childhood—oak limbs, cotton-woods, once-towering sycamores brought down, back then, not by insects or disease or the voracious mills or by land speculation but by tornadoes and the heaviness of age. The faded gray wallpaper in Craine’s one room is splotched and cracked, bulging here and there, like the old man’s forehead; the padless, once-wine-red threadbare carpet lumps up into ropes, like the veins on the backs of his hands. His history lies around him, miraculously decayed. He has books everywhere, wedged into the bookshelves of cheap, stained pine, strewn along the baseboards, stacked up, dusty, in the corners of the room. On the bedpost above him his pistol hangs, precariously tilted in its shoulder holster; on his dresser, in its dusty old Bible-black case, lies the pitted, once-silver cornet he hasn’t touched in years. A streetlight burns 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 hangs open, too warped to close. It has a broken spool for a doorknob. The interior of the closet, just visible from Craine’s bed, is crowded with dark, restive forms. Old Craine cries out, as if aware of them, and his hands claw and clench. His knees jerk.

  Fragment Two

  He was standing now beside a long row of carrels that stretched behind and ahead of him. He looked down at the paper: number 34. He was standing almost exactly in front of it. Craine shuddered at the coincidence and moved closer. Through the narrow glass window beside the door he made out that the carrel was unoccupied, but there was clear evidence that it hadn’t been and wouldn’t be unoccupied long. The little room, tight and awkward as an upended coffin, was so crammed with books there was no room to stand, one would have to slip sideways through the door into the chair at the desk, hunched before an old Smith-Corona typewriter, an overflowing bright green plastic ashtray, a ragged stack of paper, more books. On the floor, half hidden by books, there was a hot plate, a coffeepot, several fat paper bags. For all practical purposes, Craine decided, this was home for Terrance Rush.

  He looked around for a place to wait. Not far off there were brightly colored, plastic-covered chairs, on the wall behind them a thank you for NOT SMOKING sign. He crossed to the nearest chair and sat down facing carrel 34, got his pipe lit, and opened the book on clairvoyance at random. There was a long passage in small print, a quotation. (It sounded vaguely familiar; perhaps he’d read the book it came from.)

  By relating various incidents and circumstances in which my gift brought me specific information, I may have given the impression that it made itself evident only sporadically, whenever I concentrated on a particular person or object, or that it worked in reaction to events in my own life. But this was not the case. In fact, the crucial problem of my youth was that the psychic part of my mind was operating almost constantly, and I could not control it.

  Craine skipped down a ways
.

  But at school I could not withdraw, and my emotional troubles began in earnest. For the first time in my life I found myself obliged to sit for hours on end in the same room with twenty or more other people.

  Picture the scene: The teacher is reading a story and the class is attentive, waiting to hear the outcome. One boy, however, sits staring fixedly at the teacher’s face. He already knows the outcome of the story and cannot realize the others do not. Why is the teacher reading the story when everyone knows what will happen and there is no truth in it anyway? None of it ever happened.

  The boy sits in silence because he has to—but his mind is buzzing. Today as every day it whirls in confusion, filled with incomprehensible and often frightening images, sounds, smells, tastes, impressions, and sensations. He sees his classmates not only as they are now, but as they have been and as they will be in the future. And he sees their parents, friends, relatives—people he has never met—and he knows them, too.