by John Gardner
“I’ll be waiting,” he said. “Anything you like, I’m your servant. Craine’s Last Case. One last feeble push for humanity, and then amen, amen.”
She jerked her face around, her eyes very wide behind the magnifying lenses. She’d understood him better than he’d meant her to, he saw. He winked and grinned to throw her off, but her expression did not change. Without a word, she turned the doorknob, opened the door just a little, and slipped in.
Craine watched her out of sight. The professor was saying, working up interest, though she’d said it a hundred times, no doubt, “If you could put all the people in the United States on a postage stamp, that’s how many rods there would be on a single retina. And as for the cells of the brain itself, if people were scaled down to the size of cells, we could hold the whole population of the earth in our two cupped hands, and there wouldn’t be enough to make a brain of.”
There the door clicked shut, and though he could still have heard if he were willing to strain, Craine gave up listening. He turned away from the classroom, folded his hands behind his back, and for a moment stood gazing out the large, gray-tinted window.
The sunlight fallen over the campus seemed now ever warmer, more golden, bronzing the trees, making them like trees in some noble old painting from the eighteenth century.
Fragment Five
There on the dark, quiet lawns and the shaded brick and stone entranceways where students stood waiting, inaudibly talking—they all seemed now features in some classic oil painting, fallen out of time. The Golden Age, Craine thought, and gave a little nod as if someone else had said it. Strange, downright mysterious, how placid university campuses could seem. He knew well enough that it was partly an illusion. It was here, after all, that Ira Katz made his living, full of anger and sorrow at the failure of his marriage. You could pretty well bet that once, at least, he’d loved that wife of his; no doubt believed, when first they’d gotten married, she was the prettiest creature that ever walked this earth, and the cleverest too—Wendel Davies, his chairman, seemed to think so, so to Ira, who’d loved her, it must have been all the more obvious. Emotions like that would be hard to get over: his memory of how it was at the beginning of their marriage (it was always the same, that first stage of marriage, like the first stage of a drunk), all the time love-making, night and morning and under the not-yet-paid-for kitchen table; and his memories of the hospital, when she was having their children, how she’d clung to his hand as if to crush the bones, rolling her widened eyes at him, mouth opening for a scream; and memories of moments when she’d shone and he’d been proud of her—some party where everyone was surprised at her wit or sweet modesty, whatever (more likely wit, Craine decided, studying the photograph in his mind): say she was wearing a dress she’d made herself, very tasteful, stunning, the neck perhaps a slash that showed her cleavage. There’d be no doubt, of course—against all those painfully sweet memories he carried—that their Eden had gone awry; indeed, looking back, he would see that their marriage had been awry from the beginning. Perhaps she had a jealous streak, or a sullen streak, or a mean streak, something he’d noticed—if only he’d paid attention—the first day he’d met her. There’d be no doubt in his mind that it was mainly her fault; at any rate no doubt in the part of his mind where the light was on. For all his poetry, Ira Katz was no wiser than any other poor doltish male. It was a premise with all men, Craine had long since observed, that everyone ought to feel exactly as they did; to feel otherwise was to show oneself emotionally defective—infantile, or hysterical, or cloddishly insensitive. Most men were quick to assert this premise, and proud of it. Women, who worked from the same premise, confused things by hotly denying that that was how they worked. And so they’d fought the age-old fight, tiresomely the same, from the viewpoint of the gods, generation on generation. What each of them had loved, if it had ever been love—the central mystery of the other one’s being—they’d attacked with the cunning and (behind the loud skirmishing) deadly calm of professional murderers. Each convinced, of course, that he did it to save himself, not really to hurt the other—and, ironically, each one right. An old, old story. Ira Katz would have no real doubt that he’d been right to leave, in the end: she’d been killing him, he could tell himself, and very likely it was true. But ah, how terrible it must be for him now to look out at this peaceful scene, this green-golden Eden lost to him forever though he stands in the center of it! “This softness in the air,” he would think, “this is how it was the night I took her to that John Wayne movie.” Or, “The way the shadows are beginning to stretch out, that’s the way it was the night she gave me the surprise party, the night I passed my orals.” Ah, Eden, Craine thought, wincing and shaking his head without knowing it, terrible, terrible place! No man—or almost none—in Ira Katz’s position could keep it entirely secret from himself that in fact it was his fault. Poet. Squeezer, poisoner of emotion, himself the ancient enemy, sly old viper. Craine would bet anything you cared to bet that even now, in his misery, what Ira Katz was writing nights was poems about his former wife, or maybe—yes, more likely—his children. “Nobody learns a damn thing,” Craine muttered aloud, then, hearing himself, shut his mouth and swallowed. Restlessness, ambition, that was the enemy of marriage, always; that was Katz’s sin—perhaps the girl’s as well, he wasn’t sure. Sin or madness. Something Elaine had said darkened the edge of his mind, then broke in—“what I’ve learned in analysis.” Why it felt connected he wasn’t exactly sure: perhaps the way the campus, in the afternoon light, had made him think of Eden, or childhood, same thing … Yes, anality and all that, the child’s possessiveness, playing with his feces, feces symbolically transmuted into money, into time, great monuments, cities walling out Nature, Death … All very vague; he hadn’t thought about Freud in a long time, though he remembered he’d more or less believed it as he read, in fact had seemed to remember, though of course it was impossible, nobody really remembered that far back. He’d believed ever since he’d read those books—he no longer remembered exactly which ones—that everything men did, or men and women, perhaps (he’d have to think about that)— everything they did was a fraud and a delusion, a game played against Death on a rigged roulette wheel, Death playing for the house. Music, mathematics, Egypt’s cities of the dead (the brains of the corpses drained out through the nostrils and discarded as of no use), all the magnificent works of man were mere blind birds’ battering nights against the roof, bluffs against Death’s dull, invincible hand, a flailing of “sublimation.” It was all nothing, Chartres cathedral, UNIVAC, “the shadow of a dream,” as some old-time poet said. No doubt Ira Katz had read those same books. He’d refused to be persuaded, the drive to live forever too strong in him. So he’d sit up all night, intense, eyes glowing, exactly like the “hackers” Professor Weintraub had mentioned, at the computer center, and when his wife said, “Ira, aren’t you coming to bed?” he’d said, “Half an hour more,” lying, praying she’d fall asleep and never know if he stayed up far longer, as he intended to do, hunting for some rhythm that was the perfect music and matched perfectly the words for his sorrow or rage or sense of loss. He’d stayed up till dawn sometimes, or worked straight through, skipping a night, or maybe two nights in a row—at any rate he did that now, sometimes; no reason to doubt that he’d done it when he was married. His heart would tug from his chain-smoking, the veins in his wrists and hands would ache. He’d have to be crazy to think he was driving Death away, when obviously he was beckoning to him, waving both arms, yelling “Here! Over this way!” So all right, he was crazy: variant of the universal madness. Fooled himself by claiming he was capturing life, that is, emotion in its flow, translating time into eternity. And what was he doing? Making things up! Not reliving emotions and capturing them forever in the exact right words—no, making up scenes drawn partly from life and partly not, blending fact and fantasy till afterward he wouldn’t know which was which, murdering the past as it really was, tearing it down like a worthless machine for spare parts. Sur
ely he must feel some guilt over that. He could hardly forget that his feeling for his wife had been real, once, powerful—his feeling for his children no less so, perhaps. Yet he had used those feelings, changed them just slightly, for some aesthetic reason—or even if he got them exactly right (which was unlikely, but never mind) had altered them by the very act of setting them apart from the flow of things, as a beautiful young woman is one thing, darting naked from the bedroom to the bathroom, another caught forever in her flight by stiff, glowing paint. Surely no poet, not even the very finest, could help but feel to some extent a betrayer of life. If he loved his children as profoundly as he claimed, why was he sitting here sucking on his pencil while his children lay asleep in the other room? Not that poets were worse than other men; not at all. But there was no denying that poets, more than most men, were in a bad position for keeping up the helpful lie. Exact description or re-creation of feeling was their special expertise. As the chairman of Ira Katz’s department had pointed out, every device in the tradition they lived by was designed for no other purpose than getting the emotion just right. So now, looking out at the soft golden sunlight, the shaded lawns of the university, Ira Katz must no doubt be pretty well aware how rotten his life had turned. He must know pretty well how his wife felt, too—careful student of emotion that he was—and how his children felt. He who had seemed their hope had proved their destroyer, he must be thinking. And what would he be thinking, given all that, about the death of April Vaught? “Dismal,” Craine said aloud, then bit his mouth shut. No doubt he’d slept with her often. At any rate, it seemed general knowledge that they were having an affair. Yet she was not the first, not the only affair. So Ira Katz’s guilt, in his own eyes—to Craine it hardly mattered—was darkened. That childhood self Katz had talked about was betrayed with a vengeance, then. And with her death—assuming he had nothing to do with it himself, not an easy assumption—the picture darkened still more.
All this while Craine stood motionless, staring out the window like a man in a trance, watching the sky change, dark, silvered cloud patches moving northward through the yellow, reflected in the windows of the buildings across from him, the leaves of the trees moving, inaudible to Craine, and he was thinking, despite his gloomy thoughts about Ira Katz, Strange, how beautiful it is, how peaceful! It was true, no mere illusion, he understood, not quite in words. It was not just that it seemed like some noble old painting, though it did, certainly; on the campus time had in some quite real sense stopped. Everyone noticed it, if only in jest. People distinguished between the campus and “the real world.” It was the last playground; that might be it, perhaps. The last slow, easy breath of childhood. They came here “students” and left “workers.” A grim thought. He remembered now something else he’d run into, in one of those books of Freud’s, that in the unconscious Time does not exist. He felt through his pockets and found a pencil, then a scrap of paper. “In unconscious, no past or future,” he wrote. He studied the writing, making sure he’d be able to read it when he came on it again, a week or a month from now, then folded it and tucked it in his shirt pocket. Almost at once he drew it out again, frowning, and added the words, “also sub-atomic particles, psychic experience.” The last few words were very small, almost off the paper’s ragged edge. He dropped it in his pocket again.
“Complementarity,” he said aloud. Two whole realities in double exposure. Pastoral peace, undeniable as young love, or the childlike old scholar’s endless play, up in his tower; yet in the same immortal garden, neurosis, terror, murder, Elaine Glass dreaming up her death in the colors of the Virgin, while down at the computer center …
He thought of Elaine in there scribbling in her notebook, then of how she’d run to the blind boy to help him and he’d almost knocked her down. What a strange marriage she was of awkwardness and grace! At once, with what felt like a massive blush, he remembered her flying toward him at Denham’s tobacco store, remembered the smell of chocolate malt on her breath, and his surprise that, thin as she was, she had well-developed breasts. Quickly, Craine closed the door on that, and even more quickly he pushed away the thought of Emmit Royce.
He needed a drink. When he looked at his watch—ten to four—he was astonished and once again convinced that it must not be working; impossible that he’d stood here that long, knowing he should go down to the truck and move it, and grab a quick restorative while he was there, handy by. It came to him that he hadn’t had a drink in hours, an incredible feat, he could claim, and anyone who knew him would admit that it was so—though strange to say, it seemed to him, for some reason, like nothing: he could go, if the whim took him, hours more. He wasn’t even shaky, and the sweats had forgotten him. He was feeling quite unusually well, in fact, except gloomy, as he always became when he was sober. Not that he minded. Mortal gloom was the unconfessed ground of being, in southern Illinois. You saw it even in the hogs and chickens, the horses standing in fields, with their heads down, and in the Black Angus browsing in the mustardy, thistle-ridden hills or the cool, heavy shade of woodlots. It was deep in the character of the people of Little Egypt, and it infected the students in no time. Just as well. Let the people all speak the same language.
He looked down at the paperback open in his hand and frowned as if returning his attention to it, though he did not, musing instead on the idea of gloom. It was an odd thought that the dreary, philosophical gloom of Gerald Craine should be the normal gloom of Little Egypt. He was tempted to think otherwise, think something more to his own credit, but it seemed to him that the thought he’d stumbled on was sound. He would not count the young, the people who, by a sad irony, gave Southern Illinois the reputation of a party school—as if there were anything celebratory in that milling in the streets, smoking pot on curbs, drinking, dancing, knocking on the door of the mobile massage-parlor or drifting out at midnight down the county’s dirt roads and weed-choked lanes toward the lakes, woods, caves, or the immense stone cliffs of Giant City. That was just the gloom of indecision and uncertainty, ambition and desire not yet harnessed to some adequate illusion. But the gloom of the crocodiles—the weedlot Baptists and mowed-lawn Methodists, farmers of hardpan, managers of banks of no significant account—that was something else again, worthy of consideration and respect. That was philosophical, not personal gloom: Lazarus’ objective detachment, weighing the husk of life, tossing it in his hand, solemnly judging it: Due cause of woe. It was true, he had never been quite fair to the crocodiles. He’d heard a story once, a meeting of the Klan in some farmer’s back lot. Rain had come, a soaker, and before they could escape all their Ford and Chevy pickups and sedans were stuck. They might have been there for a week, but some blacks came along with a wrecker and helped them, didn’t even specially overcharge them for it. You’d think it might have led to some changes, but no. They’d been fooled all their lives by appearances: land that seemed rich—but then it cracked, or washed out from under them in a sudden roar of yellow—a gospel that seemed to promise happiness but none came … Even the government they’d fought wars for and paid honest taxes to had proved, in the end, one more sinister trick. Heath candy bar and Bell Telephone made a fortune on farming, while they, one by one, moved to town and gave up, to live by welfare. Therefore the crocodiles had no interest in how things seemed. They continued to burn crosses—those who were mean enough—carefully refraining from any other violence than the violence of the heart. They hardly knew what they were doing, not civilized human beings but reversions to the archaic; Craine’s brothers, he thought now: gloom transformed to gesture.
Fragment Six
A door opened, down the corridor, apparently someone letting class out early. A few students came into the hall, then more, among others a blond girl Craine had seen around town before, strikingly beautiful but homosexual, real crime. Watching how she walked, legs unbecomingly solid, like a hod carrier’s, head slightly forward—why would even a man want to walk like that? Craine thought—he almost missed it when Ira Katz came out, dressed in
jeans and work shirt, carrying a bulging, bursting briefcase, black-bearded head cocked far to the right for balance. He was halfway down the corridor, beyond the crowd of students, when Craine got the presence of mind to go after him. Now someone else had let a class out early, and it was all Craine could do to keep sight of Ira’s hurrying head and shoulders. The students around the doors where their classes had been were in no hurry to break up, talking and laughing, gossiping, complaining, making timid or bold advances in the old, old game. “That’s college,” Craine thought, and accidentally said it aloud as he pressed against the wall, crowding past. They should advertise that way. Looking for a pretty girl that likes geography? Still more doors opened, and more slow-moving students, smiling like theater people between acts, came wandering out into the corridor, massive and indefinite of purpose as cattle.
“Excuse me,” Craine said, pushing past, “excuse me!” But when he came to the stairs going down and up, he couldn’t tell, even when he jumped to get a look above the others’ heads, which way Katz had gone. Down, Craine decided, for no good reason—indeed, when he’d gone two steps he knew he’d chosen wrong, but it was too late to go back, the crowd was all around him.
But near the foot of the stairs he saw Ira again. He’d come down after all and was striding past the elevators, fifty feet away, moving, almost running, toward the high glass doors that led outside. “Excuse me,” Craine said, “sorry, emergency!” trying to push through. The students in front of him looked up over their shoulders, not eager to let him pass, and moved only a little, neither so little he had a right to be angry nor so much that he had room to get by. When he reached the main floor, Ira Katz was nowhere to be seen. He made his way to the big glass doors, but it was clearly hopeless. He ought to be right out there, in the wide span of sunlight between Faner and the woods, but if Ira was among those unchaining their bicycles or moving, heads bent, into the shadows of trees, Craine was miraculously missing him.
