October Light

by John Gardner

  “God damn you, Dusky, where are you?” Fist was calling.

  Peter Wagner puffed as he would do when lifting weights, then went back to the cabin for Jane. When he reached the bridge with her he realized that the Indomitable was moving. He stood baffled, straining to understand. Then Captain Fist came hobbling onto the Militant’s deck. He was shouting “Eureka! Eureka!” Mr. Nit came out behind him, popping his knuckles. “Fantastic discovery,” Mr. Nit yelled up. “Fantastic!” Captain Fist, in his joy, threw his hat in the air. The breeze took it, and Mr. Nit went after it, two-thirds the length of the boat.

  The discovery was an accident. They’d forgotten to unlash the Militant from the Indomitable, and they’d found that the Militant, small as she was, could haul the Indomitable like an oceangoing tug. They need not abandon the Indomitable’s cargo capacity after all.

  “Help me up!” Captain Fist called. Why he insisted on riding in the larger boat, since they’d both be going pretty much the same place, was not clear. His dignity maybe; sense of theater, reality transcended. Peter Wagner ignored his appeal for help—hardly heard it, in fact. Mr. Nit bent over, Captain Fist scrambled up onto his back, grunting, and climbed back aboard the Indomitable. “What luck!” he said, smiling like a shark, “what luck!” Peter Wagner stood as before, with Jane in a fireman’s carry on his shoulder. Captain Fist limped past him, shaking his head at his good fortune. Inside his cabin he called back, “Somebody throw these people overboard.”

  Down on the deck of the Militant, Mr. Goodman sat up, rubbing his head.

  “Full Speed to Lost Souls’ Rock,” howled Captain Fist.

  Mindlessly, robbed of will, Peter Wagner set the course. He was a man in a dream, his brain going over and over, as many times before in his life, the same unimportant facts. Tears streamed from his eyes, though he was aware of no emotion. He heard Santisillia’s elegant, theatrical voice; saw Dancer’s apocalyptic joy. He had lifted Dancer’s body from the floor to put it on the Captain’s bunk, and when the Captain said, “What are you doing? Get it out of here!” he had heard, had registered, and had immediately forgotten. It had seemed to him for an instant that Dancer was not dead after all, and the feeling was so strong that he’d leaned over to listen for a heartbeat. But then the Captain had shouted, and he’d forgotten what he was doing, moving from instant to instant like a drunk. The memory of his wife was smiling at him, her lip bleeding, her eyes rich with scorn. He felt, in brief panic, a need—like the desperate need for a cigarette—for some book, some tale of high adventure.

  Now, in the wheelhouse, he concentrated on the tremor of the compass needle as if the place they were going were important. But even the compass was more than he could fix on. It came to him at last that Mr. Goodman was beside him.

  “You should sleep,” Mr. Goodman said. He put his hand on Peter Wagner’s shoulder.

  It was a difficult concept. He concentrated on the ring of brass, brooding on Ahead and Stop and Reverse. His chest filled with panic. “Is Jane all right?” But he was thinking: What of motion in all directions simultaneously?

  “She’s coming around,” Mr. Goodman said. “Go on in and talk to her. And get something to eat. Here, I’ll take the wheel.” Though his chest was wide, his face was undeveloped, ministerial.

  The pink dawn was brightening, false as stagelight. Captain Fist had gone back onto the Militant, too persnickety to sleep with the dead.

  “Someone should move the Indian,” Peter Wagner said.

  Mr. Goodman pushed his lower lip out and stared at the horizon. Then he nodded, turned with a shrug, and was gone. It would be dark and foul as a pit down there. There were still no lights on the Indomitable, and the leaks were still leaking. She was riding a foot and a half low. If he could remember he would have Mr. Nit rig a pump from the Militant’s engines, come daylight. (He could see Mr. Nit in the Militant’s wheelhouse, riding the course of the Indomitable’s steerage like the rear-end driver of a ladder truck.) The east was almost red. Red sky at morning . . . He thought of Jane, who had a claim on him. She’d saved his life, and even though he hadn’t wanted it, it was a claim as powerful and burdensome as a parent’s, or a hangman’s. And also he had, of course, saved her life. So molecules are built, and ultimately the anguish of the stars.

  Then, though no time whatever had seemed to pass, Mr. Goodman was once again beside him. “Go on in, let me take over.”

  He nodded and stepped back from the wheel. The east was blood red. They were now heading south, far off the southern California coast. The breeze smelled of land. On the deck beyond the Indomitable’s radio cubicle he could see the form of the Indian, wrapped in a tarpaulin. Peter Wagner stood still, thinking, looking. He turned to say over his shoulder to Mr. Goodman, “I’ve been born again, you realize that?”

  Mr. Goodman turned slightly, studying the deck.

  “I’ve been given a new life, by pure chance—thanks to you and Jane.” His voice was level.

  “Thank Jane, not me,” Mr. Goodman said. “I just happened to be near when you came flying down out of—” He pointed upward and laughed, then grew serious again, pulling his chin back, making it, once again, double.

  “Just the same, here I am,” Peter Wagner said. He stretched out one arm as if giving a blessing, playing the part to the hilt, papal—and it was an accident that he happened to gesture toward the form of the dead Indian. “Here I am, an innocent newborn babe, with all the frontiers of the Indomitable before me.”

  Mr. Goodman squinted.

  He said no more. It was not, of course, Mr. Goodman’s fault, this coffin of frontiers, empty options, Time stopped dead. Through the open cabin door, as deep red with the light of sunrise as it had been last night with the light of the Militant, he glimpsed some movement, some shift that his tired mind identified as the head-toss of a seal. He pressed his eyelids with his fingertips and leaned through the door to look again. In the red light Jane was sitting on Dancer’s belly. He was lying on the floor. She was giving him, it seemed, artificial respiration, sometimes pausing and slapping his arms with her left hand, his face—knocking it from side to side—with her right. Not with his mind, it seemed, but with some older, quicker faculty—something from that relic of the First Age, the brainstem—Peter Wagner understood that disintegrating wires had dissipated the jolt: the eels had merely stunned, not killed. He’d been granted, incredibly, a reprieve. It was like a telegram from heaven: Rules all changed. Time clicked in, taking hold like a gear. Then he saw that the body of Santisillia was gone. The same instant, violent pain shot through his head, and sound like a hurricane: Jane’s scream. He must have been unconscious, and yet—one eye blinded by his own blood, his mind lit up as if by dynamite—he ran down the bridge, then staggered and fell and crawled on hands and knees to the tarpaulin and tore away the top to see the face.

  The lifeless eyes stared through him like stones; nevertheless, he began slapping the Indian, trying to bring him to.

  Luther Santisillia, with the pipewrench raised to hit him again, saw what he was doing and hesitated. He dropped, threw away the wrench, and began to help. Then Jane was there, pressing her ear to the Indian’s chest, Dancer, looking dazed, just behind her. Her eyes widened, then widened more. “It’s beating!” she said. Santisillia jerked forward and began hitting the Indian harder.

  Thank heavens, Sally thought; but the thought had, strangely, no life in it. The truth was, she didn’t believe the happy turn of events for one minute. It was only a novel of course. Nevertheless …

  She glanced at the page she’d just finished, and read:

  He’d been granted, incredibly, a reprieve. It was like a telegram from heaven: Rules all changed.

  Curiously, the idea depressed her, and she wondered why. One of James’ complaints about television was that it wasn’t true to life, and—blinking the fact that what he really meant was that it didn’t tell stories about life in Vermont, only stories about Utah, California, and Texas, the dullest states in the Union
, surely, except for the scenery—or stories about the grubbier parts of New York City—the dullest place of all, if she admitted the truth—blinking all that, she had to agree with him that mostly it wasn’t true to life. But that never bothered her, on television. Why should it in a book?

  Running through, in her mind, the programs she knew best—Maude, Mary Tyler Moore, and Upstairs, Downstairs—it struck her that none of those programs ever touched real life at all. They were all about interesting characters, stage people, glittering and amusing exactly as characters were glittering and amusing in a Broadway play. That didn’t seem to be true, somehow, of characters in novels, even bad novels. If characters in novels were entertaining, it wasn’t in quite the same way. They might be a little like characters in movies—a good deal in her paperback reminded her more of movies than of life, and perhaps that was why, as she’d known from the beginning, it was trash, really, or at least not the kind of book Horace would read—but there was something, even in a novel like this one, that was more like life than any movie could be. You saw things from inside. You understood exactly why everyone did everything—or imagined you did—so that when something went false it seemed not merely silly but—what? A kind of cheat, a broken confidence.

  Well …

  Her mind drifted. It was only a novel, and though it was true that, meaning to entertain her it had instead depressed her, that was no matter—though it would be different, of course, if the writer had intended it. She caught herself up, abruptly scowling, paying attention again. Suppose there were a writer so cynical and dishonest, so tyrannical, in effect … She stared at the locked door, thinking of the gun. Suppose, from pure meanness—or for her good, say—the writer had constructed the whole novel as a trap, intending in the end to embarrass her or mock her, jump her as James would jump Richard, those times when he’d skimped on his chores, or that vile Cotton Mather had jumped old women at witch-trials—for some high moral purpose, he supposed in his satanic pride.

  She sighed and looked down at the paperback again. No, this was not that kind of writer; merely foolish and inept, like most people. What annoyed her in the chapter was merely that by accident it came close enough to life to remind her of it, and life was, Lord knew, a sad business.

  Gazing at the print, sleepy now and thinking of putting the book away, she had, without noticing it, a kind of dream or fantasy, something that might have been a memory except that it was nothing she’d seen, merely a construction built of love like a mother’s and the little she knew—those and the novel, which had triggered her gloomy mood.

  She imagined Richard meeting the Flynn girl, some time shortly before his death. It was a hamburg place, Paddy’s (it hadn’t existed at the time), and the Flynn girl was eating at a table with her family, one child in a highchair, another in her womb, well along, bloating her body out of shape, draining the sheen from her red hair. The old woman imagined her nephew smiling shyly, looking quickly away, the Flynn girl’s husband merely glancing at him, sullen, then growling at the child in the highchair to prove his mastery, and only on second thought nodding a greeting, final proof of his power, his absolute right, though now Richard wasn’t watching. Richard walked on to the counter to order, a pink blush rising from his broad, stooped shoulders toward his straw-yellow hair. So this is all it comes to in the end, he was thinking. And, reading the menu on the blackboard above the shelves, he was aware of her fussing, covering her confusion, and smiled secretly, as they’d all seen him smile so often, panic in his eyes, as if James stood behind him with his arms crossed, wide lips clamped.

  She saw Richard studying the girl behind the counter, noticing her youth, the childish lip, the high, too narrow forehead, unfocused eyes; saw him glance at her bosom, noticing the hint of womanliness there, thinking of the Flynn girl asleep in his arms, the room bathed in music, violins, trombones—thinking as he ordered his hamburg and fries, So this is all it comes to. And that night, again, alone in his house, sitting with a drink, tinny music in the background: So it’s all just this.

  Her hands began to shake, and she steadied the book on the covers in order to read.

  10

  ALKAHEST AGONISTES

  For John F. Alkahest, M.D., it was a time of anguish. He sat in his tower overlooking San Francisco, not moving a finger, his wheelchair planted in the precise center of the octagonal room, on a real Persian rug that was mostly scarlet—and though he was now once more conscious, he could not rise. His cleaning girl, Pearl, appeared at the entryway door and looked in at him.

  She disliked Dr. Alkahest, profoundly disapproved of him, but never before had she realized that she no more understood him than she understood spiders.

  “You want somethin?” she said, though getting things for the old man was not one of her duties.

  He said nothing, neither snarled nor simpered, and after a moment she came nearer with her feather-duster, and, slowly, thoughtfully, dusted around him, showing no sign that she was watching him. He sat like stone. She dusted around the room: the antique clock on its flowerstand, the roll-top desk, the gin cupboard, the three stiff chairs. Still nothing happened. She looked cautiously down at the sunlit street. Hardly anyone out. A shudder came over her, which she did not stop to understand. One of the long-haired college students lay sprawled on the steps of the big gray house where a herd of them lived. Their Volkswagen was parked on the sidewalk, an American flag on the window. Down at the corner, by Llewellen’s Market, a boy was leaning a bright purple bicycle against yellow crates of oranges, bananas, and yams on the sidewalk. Still no movement from Alkahest. She thought of touching him, then decided against it. If he was dead she would know soon enough by the smell.

  As she stepped back into the entryway, she thought he said something. He still had not moved, but she became increasingly certain that he had spoken. The elevator door closed, the elevator started down. To her surprise, she was faintly disappointed that the man wasn’t dead. What was wrong with her? If he was dead, who’d pay her? The familiar, brief panic came over her, and she made herself numb. Slaves no more! Slaves no more!, they’d yelled in Union Square as she walked timidly past them, primly dressed, carrying her shopping bag. She’d been a teenager then. It was what she’d heard them yelling on television, and at San Francisco State when she’d gone there as a student. Slaves no more!, the elevator hummed. She was no longer fooled by slogans. Since the night she’d been sexually assaulted, she’d known she was a slave.

  The elevator stopped, landing on nothing, and the door clunked open. She thought of Miss Pinky, in the ghetto of her childhood, whose daughter had buried her newborn baby in a coalpile. The girl’s father, who did not live with them, killed a policeman, for no known reason, then sat staring at his linoleum until the police came in and found him. Had the policeman been the one, and had the father known? Pearl had followed for a year the trial of Joan Little, who’d been raped in jail. Every column she read of the story made her furious and afraid, sometimes violently sick.

  It was not just the cold of the pistol as she remembered it against her temple. It was something huge, unnameable: the absolute violation of the center of her life. Once, earlier, her apartment had been robbed. She’d sat in the high wooden kitchen chair shaking, too weak-kneed to stand, and when the police spoke of the “intruder” the word took on suddenly, in her spinning wits, a terrible, half-supernatural sense: something not herself, not remotely of her world, had watched her movements, an invisible enemy, and had suddenly struck out of darkness and vanished, leaving her revealed, obscene. The rape had been the same, except a thousand times more terrifying, more final. He’d been white, in a dark purple jacket with orange sleeves, and calling her Nigger, nigger, nigger, he’d torn away her name, her very self, made her monstrous even in her own eyes, as she was in his. Even Mrs. Waggoner, who counseled her later, had hardly the faintest idea what rape meant. She wanted, like the police, a description. “Practical action, a step back to reality,” she said. Pearl had seen only the jack
et—dark purple, orange sleeves—and knew the cold of the gun. “I didn’t look at him,” she’d said. “I was afraid.” Her counsellor had said, another time, “You must promise me you’ll never feel ashamed, Pearl.” Everyone assumes, the woman had told her, that nice girls don’t get raped. It wasn’t true. “Tell yourself that, Pearl. ‘Nice girls do get raped.’” Pearl had nodded, in the end had dutifully repeated it. But Mrs. Waggoner knew nothing. The shame went far deeper than anything she’d ever understand. Pearl wished she could explain, but they were talking different languages. He had made her not human, not anything. Worse. He’d made her know that she’d never been human, it was all imagination, mere illusion. After that—she had no explanation for it, it was true, simply—when people talked, even jokingly, of stealing, or of breathing obscenities to some stranger on the phone, terror struck the pit of her stomach. She had learned—her whole life had taught her, in fact, though at first she’d ignored it—that the world is unspeakably dangerous.

  Even among children born poor, she’d been unlucky, had witnessed from a safe psychological distance terrors to which, now that she’d escaped them, she would never return alive. “We just don’t want no trouble,” her father had said, poking his bald, back-slanting head through the living-room door. Or someone had told her that that was what he said. She remembered distinctly that there were men in the kitchen, opening drawers, but she no longer remembered if they were black or white. She was too young to understand. She had never understood it, and never wished to. It was odd that she should think of it, should from time to time be surprised by the memory, startled as she’d be by an animal at the window. She had other things to think of now. She had her own life. On free days she walked in the park or sat on the beach with her radio. (She had naturally wavy, not kinky, hair, and long, coal-black lashes. On Fillmore once, in the middle of the day, a middle-aged man had said to her, “Hey girl, you wanna fuck?” She’d looked at him in terror, and he’d laughed and had not pursued her. Men were forever touching her, patting her shoulder, even at church. She’d been having, lately, a recurring dream about Switzerland.) Dr. Alkahest, it came to her, was insane. Her eyes widened. She would never get paid.