by John Gardner
Sally Abbott read without commitment at first, just a hint of curiosity and a tentative willingness to perhaps be amused. But quite imperceptibly the real world lost weight and the print on the page gave way to images, an alternative reality more charged than mere life, more ghostly yet nearer, suffused with a curious importance and manageability. She began to fall in with the book’s snappy rhythms, becoming herself more wry, more wearily disgusted with the world—not only with her own but with the whole “universe,” as the book kept saying—a word that hadn’t entered Sally’s thoughts in years. Life became larger, in vibration to such words, and she, the observer and container of this universe, became necessarily more vast than its space, became indeed (though she would not have said so) godlike. By degrees, without knowing she was doing it, she gave in to the illusion, the comforting security of her vantage point, until whenever she looked up from the page to rest her eyes, it seemed that the door, the walls, the dresser, the heavy onyx clock had no more substance than a plate-glass reflection; what was real and enduring was the adventure flickering on the wall of her brain, a phantom world filled with its own queer laws and character. She read—at first doubtfully, but with increasing abandon:
He could see all San Francisco now. It was beautiful, rising, slightly bleary, out of fog. Interestingly enough, his whole body felt limp, muscleless, yet he was hanging by, essentially, only three fingers of each hand, only two knuckles involved on each finger, or six knuckles in all, approximately. It was incredible. Also, it was incredible that they’d found his car so quickly. Civilization was a marvelous thing. He thought of the Babylonians, the Romans. “Hang on!” someone yelled. He hung on, for reasons of his own. There was great commotion now on the bridge above him.
“I’m Dr. Berg,” a voice in (it seemed) the fog above and behind him said. It was a gentle voice, deeply concerned, professionally friendly. It was a veritable musical instrument, that voice. Peter Wagner in his drunkenness smiled, almost giggled. He knew by experience how such voices could sweetly groan, like cellos, seduce like double-stopped, mourning violins, suddenly lash out in anger, like a snare-drummer’s rim-shots. He’d had a dozen psychiatrists, as had his wife—all excellent, capable of baffling him with terrible clarity, like a loving parent. (He was well off; a trust fund from his father’s estate.) Peter Wagner was no one to disparage such skills, the virtuoso music of an accomplished brain-bender. It was mortally depressing that such voices, warm and human as an uncle’s, one might have thought, were precision-built, cool scientific devices that could engage and disengage the gears of the will by precise neuro-chemical formulae, laboratory-tested and repeatedly proved “psychological strategies” that no human consciousness, even the most obdurate, could indefinitely resist (the effects of adrenocortical fluids, ureic acid, and ingested alcohol were as predictable and controllable as acid in a battery, dishearteningly dependable as the drool of a witless Russian dog at the tinkle of a bell) ; and it was no less mortally depressing when they “played it by ear,” as they liked to say, cunningly hiding in the dark, husky center of the language of the masses—trying now this shrewd approach, now that, fishing, in this case, for some last feeble tittle of vulnerable, smashable humanity in the would-be suicide—played it, that is, not by ordinary ear but by finely tuned, educated nuance-perceptor, quicker to respond than young lovers, indifferent as transistors, chilly as dead snakes.
“I’m Dr. Berg,” said the voice a second time, mellow, firm as cable, reaching down to him with calculated universal love, man to man, a voice to lean on, to depend on or from, emblem of unguessed reserves to be called upon, model for his weakness and confusion to reach up to, grasp toward: “I have survived this cesspool,” called the guardian in effect, teeth clenched, eyes mild with experience overwhelmed (he had, clearly, no beautiful sister turned vegetable, no misfiring glands, no ex-Christian rage), “so can you, my son!”
“Hello,” he said.
The voice called down: “I’m your friend. I’m a psychiatrist.”
He listened to the foghorns mournfully groaning to the universe B.O. The sirens were still going, and he couldn’t tell where, in the blackness below his dangling shoes, the ships were. His fingers, though he couldn’t feel them, were like steel. He tipped back his head to look up (he was unable—because of the bunched-up shoulders of his overcoat—to look down or anywhere else except level-and-straight-ahead, like a horse in blinders, sometimes called blinkers, or, laboriously, up). Among the bridge-lights, drifting double images to his eyes’ disfocus, there floated a mushroom-white, bearded face with a hat. “Tell them to turn off the sirens,” he called.
“Turn off the sirens,” Dr. Berg said, softly fulminant, basso profundo.
Despite the rolling, ruminating fog, the night was suddenly still, it seemed to him: majestically peaceful. It was as if, exploding outward to the farthest, filtered star, the invisible edge of the ocean horizon, he had himself become—had mysteriously subsumed—the night, containing it like a bell-jar. Call it enlightenment, subject and object in perfect interpenetration. The colored lights of San Francisco, stretching for miles, bloomed vaguely in the fog like emotions lost, or here and there cut sharply through open air like a few childhood Christmases. Far, far ahead of him and slightly to his right, a huge scrawl of neon that he couldn’t read, though he remembered it faintly, went on and off, and he was aware all at once of the distance he must fall, the distance he had come, the magnitude of things, God’s grandeur. He was alarmed from the tips of his fingers to his toes: miracles on every hand, seagulls and the brilliance of squadcar lights, the stability of steel, the intense physicality of fog-swirled space, space he would penetrate in a moment, probably with a yell. The world was a magnificent, mysterious thing, thrilling as a dance on a volcano rim, charged with unspeakable, unnameable powers that rose up out of earth and came plummeting from the night, invisibly colliding and exploding all around him, rushing, inaudibly roaring, to the ends of the universe. He was the center of it, hanging by six knuckles from his girder, high priest and sacrifice, objective and dispassionate, churning with emotion (ah!, air, pride, plume), ultimate perceptor of cosmic nuances, core of “the ambiance.”
Directly underneath him, a foghorn loud as an earthquake exploded from the watery stillness, startling him so badly that he almost lost his grip.
“Listen,” Dr. Berg said. “You can let go any time you want to, but until you do I want you to listen. Will you?”
Oh yes, life’s guardian, light of my darkness, clarity to my miserable soul’s confusion, he was on the point of saying, drunkenly giggling as he thought of it, but he caught himself in time. It would give Berg a clue. (“Ah, you’re an intellectual, a student of books!” the man would say.) It was one of life’s mortally discouraging facts that if a psychiatrist understood you, he could beat you. “Yes sir,” he said.
“Can you hang on?” Berg said.
“Pretty drunk,” he said.
“Let me hang onto your hands.”
He smiled, drunkenly malevolent, at San Francisco. “Yes, good.” He could feel the big ship sliding past underneath him. Another foghorn, higher in pitch, was coming in from his right. Berg’s hands came around his wrists, gentle as a fairy’s, and clamped on. No, he realized then, not Berg’s. Leather-gloved.
“You tricked me,” he said. It came out badly and he tried again. The leather gloves began pulling at him and he clamped his knees under the bridge.
“The shithead’s got hold of something with his legs,” the policeman said. “Lend a hand.”
Some more gloves came. He smiled. “I lift weights,” he said carefully and slowly. To himself, at least, he sounded sober as a judge.
“Also, he’s psychotic,” Dr. Berg said. “They have amazing strength. You can tell he’s psychotic by his eyes. Look.” He pointed down. “He’s got eyes like a couple of vaginas.”
Peter Wagner pursed his lips, deeply offended, his anger rising. It was not so much the slur against his eyes, though that wa
s outrageous, in fact. He had beautiful eyes. He’d been told it a thousand times, in a thousand ports, and it was true: his eyes were otherworldly, they had mysterious glints and depths, odd shadows, the stillness of clear, dark pools in a German forest. To describe them as Dr. Berg had done was tasteless, blasphemous. But what offended him most was the slovenly diagnosis. It was shoddy medicine, such practice as the world had left over for the poor and dispossessed—the weeping mad maiden in her upstairs room, the whiskered drunk in his Fillmore Street gutter, the sixteen-year-old black bow-legged whore. To calm his wrath and stall for time, he yelled, “Purity of heart is to will one thing!”
Sally Abbott stopped a moment, touching her lower lip with one finger, and read the line again. Purity of heart is to will one thing. In her mind’s eye she saw silent, gray-bearded uncle Ira, a small, solid creature with animal eyes, an axe on one shoulder, on the other a gun. He stood for her memory as for a photograph, a picture in what would by this time be some discoloring old album, his snowshoes brown against the yellow, dead snow. He came out of the past like a creature from the woods, his reluctance and strangeness absolute, hostile; and beside him now stood her brother James in a lumberman’s cap, long coat and snowshoes—James who had loved him, in a way even worshipped him, unless perhaps, as her husband had suspected, it was an unwitting trick James had played on himself, twisting fear of the man to intense admiration as little Dickey sometimes did (so it seemed to the old woman) struggling to pacify this older James.
“Grampa,” little Dickey had whined to him once, his breath steaming in the deep-winter cold. (She had watched it all from the back-room window.) The old man ignored him, and the boy touched his sleeve, cautious as a city man reaching toward a horse. “Grampa, what does it mean when you say ‘cold as a cane’?”
“Kind of hail,” her brother answered, pushing him back out of the way of his axe, “sticks instead of stones. Coldest thing there be.” He would say no more, miserly with words as with everything else. James, chopping wood, had only thin wool gloves on.
Dickey said, after a reasonable wait, “What’s pussley broth?”
“Nubbidy knows.” He gauged his stroke, squinting, and brought the axe down hard. He was splitting blocks of elm. Only two weeks in a year was it cold enough for elm-splitting. Most people said you couldn’t split elm at all. “Trick to ’t,” he’d say, and would say no more.
Dickey said, “Grampa, what’s tunkit’ mean?” He danced to warm his feet.
The axe came down again, clean as the sound of a stone against a stone—it was twenty below zero—and the block fell apart as if opened by a spell. He brought the axe away, looking with self-satisfaction and casual ferocity at the boy. “Why do pigs sleep in trees?” he said.
Her brother was more like their mad uncle Ira than he knew, she’d mused. It was not a thing she planned to mention to him. He’d be flattered and maybe turn still meaner.
“Boy, go inside where it’s wahm,” James said, pointing with the axe.
“I ain’t cold,” Dickey said. He continued dancing, steam all around him, his mittened hands tucked inside his armpits.
“The hell you ain’t, boy,” the old man snapped, chaining him there by the pride in his voice. She had turned from the window, disgusted.
To will one thing.
She looked back at her novel—or rather, began to pay attention again, since while her mind had wandered her eyes had gone on reading, dutifully moving from word to word like well-trained horses through a haylot. She drew them back to where the sense had stopped registering and realized with satisfaction that Peter Wagner spoke not, as she’d thought at first, in earnest, but in anger and scorn, taunting the psychiatrist, taunting all the stiff, self-righteous world. Again she saw him dangling in his overcoat, below him churning fog and San Francisco’s colored lights. She imagined the psychiatrist, at the rail above, with baggy-lidded eyes, the policemen like storm-troopers in a World War II movie.
“Get the rope,” someone said.
Looking down at the fog, insofar as he could, was like looking at clouds from above.
“That’s from Kierkegaard,” Dr. Berg said with sugary interest.
“You’re an intellectual,” he said.
A rope came down, with a grapnel on the end, and they fumbled it toward him. He broke free with his left hand, hanging only with his right, and Dr. Berg said, “Lay off,” then whispered, “Let me talk to him.” Dr. Berg said, “You think I don’t know about suffering? You’re suffering.”
“It’s true. Christ.” It was not true, except that his fingers had lost their numbness and his knuckles were in pain.
“You feel as if all life’s a waste. You’ve read the philosophers—hungry, hungry—and nobody’s got a real answer. You’re practically an authority on existentialism, absurdism!” He carefully spoke French.
“Christ, yes.”
“Love is an illusion. Hope is the opiate of the people. Faith is pure stupidity. That’s how you feel.”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes.”
“Let him drop,” Dr. Berg said coldly.
The gloved hands let loose but he hung on.
“Is there a ship underneath me?” he asked.
Berg laughed. “You’re testing me, friend. You’re a very complex person.”
“Is there?” he said.
“No. Not right now.”
“You’re a very complex person too. If you can’t win, you want me smashed on some fucking ship.” He looked up and the mushroom face smiled.
“That may be true,” Dr. Berg said. “It puts you in kind of a bind, doesn’t it? You’re too drunk to tell if there’s a ship underneath you, and since I’m a professional psychiatrist, with a certain inevitable ego-involvement in the work I do, maybe I’d rather see you smashed on a ship than gently sucked out by the ocean if I’ve got to lose.”
“That’s true,” he said. He began to cry, carefully listening to the foghorns. “The whole modern world is a catastrophe for the individual psyche. I’ve tried everything—love, drugs, whiskey, withdrawal to the Old Symbolic Sea, but everywhere I turn falsehood, illusion. I want to die.” He glanced quickly at Dr. Berg, then down again. “Waaa!” he bawled.
“I know how you feel,” Dr. Berg said, vastly gentle. “You think I haven’t felt it? Listen. I’m married. A sweet, good wife, three sweet, good children. You think I’m ignorant of despair?”
“Where have we gone wrong?”
“That’s what Tolstoy asked himself.”
They had cars going over the bridge again now. It seemed a little unfeeling. How could they know Peter Wagner was not that poor mad weeping maiden, or the bow-legged prostitute, hardly more than a child? Yet all life is compromise, of course. The mail must get through, and the groceries; almonds to San Diego, squash to Pasadena. God bless, God bless. His father had made his fortune in sugar beets. A splendid man; frail and coughing, those last few years, but optimistic to the end. His rural background. “Europeans,” he said, “know how to live. We’re mites by comparison to the wise old Europeans.” Everything he said was true, always, for the moment at least. Peter Wagner’s respect for his father was boundless, his admiration downright religious, though he agreed with him in nothing. “Between them, big government and the unions are ruining this country,” his father said, “and a few unscrupulous big businesses.” It was not that what his father said was untrue; it was merely tiresome, like great art forever staring ga-ga at the black abyss. “Drink up, Andrew,” his mother would say. That too was a tiresome philosophy. His uncle Morton had a book, which he was unable to get published, about “the great Negro-Jewish conspiracy.” The rest of his childhood, so far as he could remember, had been bird-baths and elm trees and lawns. Sometimes at parties, to his horror, his stepmother spoke French.
“Doesn’t it?” Dr. Berg asked sharply.
He realized his mind had been wandering. He wondered if arthritis was the feeling in his knuckles now. He called up, “If despair is the meaning of l
ife, a man should seize it, clutch it like a god!” He felt his overcoat ripping at the armpits.
“That’s true,” Dr. Berg said. “Or anyway, it’s as true as anything else. So drop.”
“You’re a very complex person,” he said. “You make it extremely difficult for a man to drop.” He felt openness below him. Another ship was moving in. A small one. Half a mile away there was a blurry searchlight, a Coast Guard cutter. Ah, civilization! Swift, swift! The cutter came on with incredible speed. It was too late already. He hung on. He said: “Death is as meaningless as life. You agree, Dr. Berg?”
“Of course. So what else? Listen. Come talk with me in my office. If you convince me that suicide is the only way, I won’t prevent you. You believe me?”
“I do, I do!”
“Then let us pull you up.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Then drop.” He saw his mistake instantly. The ship had passed and the water below was clear. “Grab him!”
He dropped. The beautiful lights of San Francisco hung level for a time then sank upward, slowly, slowly. The rush of wind sucked his breath out. He fell and fell.
Aboard the Indomitable, Mr. Goodman turned with a jerk. “Man overboard!” he yelled, though it was not quite fitting. Whatever it was that fell, six inches from the larboard bow, went down like a boulder, throwing almost no splash. Choong, it went, and he yelled, “Full speed backwards!” A strange command. “You’re crazy,” Mr. Nit hissed. “If the Captain hears—” “It was a man,” Mr. Goodman said. “I saw it.” It wasn’t quite true. He knew it was a man; he saw nothing, merely heard it come screaming like a bomb. The boat jerked and shuddered, then backed up as Jane reversed the engine. “There!” Mr. Goodman yelled. Jane cut the engine and the Indomitable was silent except for the trickle of a few small leaks.
