Stillness & Shadows

by John Gardner

  “Morning, Doctor,” Craine said, trembling, mustering all his courage. He raised his right hand toward the brim, of his Stetson, then, because of the violent trembling, reconsidered and, attempting to disguise the gesture, reached into his inside pocket, got his pipe out, carefully not disturbing slips of paper there, and with almost imperceptibly shaking fingers stuck the pipe between his teeth.

  The doctor seemed to notice none of it. “Well, well! Hello there, Detective!” he said. “Any progress on those murders?”

  “Murders?” Craine said, giving a jump. Then, seeing what the man must have in mind, he grinned and bleated, “I’m not in on that.” He let out a bitter laugh. “No doubt the police are doing all they can.” In the flood of relief, he nearly remembered where it was that they’d met, what it was they’d talked about, but then at once the memory slipped back into shadow, out of reach.

  They shook hands, an easy, automatic gesture on the doctor’s part, awkward on Craine’s—partly because he had to shift the pipe to his left hand, partly because the doctor had stumbled onto one of Craine’s oddities: like a raw-skinned old farmer, he disliked shaking hands. He squeezed hard, as if to make up for his reluctance, then quickly drew the long, skinny hand back and wiped it on his coat. The rough cloth grated against the numbness in his fingers.

  “It’s a terrible thing,” the doctor said. “Right here in Carbondale! What is it, five now? Five, I think.”

  “You might be surprised,” Craine said, pedantic. “Murder’s very common in Carbondale. Been that way for years.” The conversation was academic, one of those tedious labors of politeness. There hadn’t been a murder in three, four months. Chances were it was over, like the Hollywood strangler thing.

  The doctor nodded. “Yes, that’s so, so I’ve heard.” He looked at Craine with interest. “One of the highest murder rates in the nation, right here in Little Egypt, as they say. Mine wars, lynchings, slot-machine wars … But five young women in one year—”

  “Everything’s old hat in Little Egypt,” Craine said. He realized at once that he’d sounded impatient. He added, “One of them was up in her sixties—the professor’s wife.”

  The doctor nodded, and, with a look of distress, putting his pipe in his mouth, Craine nodded too. The professor—some man in economics, Craine recalled; computer expert—had come home to his house out on Lipes’ Ridge Road at five o’clock—that was his story—and had found the house strangely quiet, as if empty. He’d gone down cellar and there was his wife, stark naked, tied up in a chair. She’d been beaten, then stabbed in the neck and chest. On the floor there were twelve empty beer cans.

  “You suppose it’s all one man?” the doctor said. His concern was personal, not ghoulish. He had a wife of his own, no doubt. She’d be home alone right now.

  “No telling,” Craine said.

  “No, no telling,” the doctor agreed.

  It was not quite true. Craine could narrow it down, he had a feeling, if he put his mind to it. The twelve beer cans, the woman beaten and stabbed and tied up afterward… But it was none of his business. The police had all the help they wanted; even hired a university specialist, it said in the paper. They’d stumble along as usual, trying this and that, following false leads—maybe even shadowing poor miserable Craine, if what Carnac said was true—and possibly sooner or later, by accident … Craine scowled, trying hard to concentrate, but abruptly, as if shaken loose by the shudder that now rocked through him, the whole thing fell out of his mind.

  He drifted with the doctor toward Tully’s desk. The girl in the cape was gone now. Light shot in through the transom above the door, tinted green by the glass, giving the room a kind of underwater look, the light shaft aswirl with motes. The grandfather’s clock behind the desk read one fifteen. The pendulum wasn’t swinging. On the glass of the pendulum chamber a chipped, ornate golden legend read Time Lost Can Ne’er Be Recaptured.

  “Don’t forget what I tole you!” Two-heads Carnac called from behind him. “They watchin you, brother—gettin ready to jump—so mine your p’s and q’s!

  Craine’s jaw tightened, cracking the pipe bit, and his mind flashed an image of chipped, ornate p’s and q’s. Except for the tightening of his jaw he showed no sign of hearing. One fifteen, he thought, gazing fixedly at the clock, which gazed fixedly back at him. He tried to remember if he’d had lunch.

  “Fascinating mind,” the doctor said, and smiled again, tentative, as if meaning to imply some question. He cocked his large head sideways to see the title of Craine’s book. Craine, misunderstanding at first, held his arm up so the doctor could read his watch, then, seeing his mistake, tilted the spine of the book so the doctor could read it.

  “Sanskrit?” the doctor said, and briefly met Craine’s eyes.

  Craine nodded vaguely, only now registering the doctor’s observation—“fascinating mind”—and scowled, thinking about Carnac’s wrecked brain. Raising his left hand, book and all, he took the pipe from his mouth. “Sometimes you’d swear he’s as sane as you or me,” he said. He shifted the pipe to his right hand.

  The doctor glanced at him to see if the irony was intended, a smile flickering at the edges of his mouth, then nodded. “It’s fascinating to watch him,” he said at last. Again he spoke a little tentatively, watching for Craine’s reaction. He was a handsome old man, broad-shouldered, smooth-gaited, his teeth white as snow. No doubt he’d been an athlete, fifty years ago. All the well built and good-looking were athletes in the doctor’s day. Health nuts. Bernarr MacFadden, if that was the fellow’s name. Sun baths, air baths. The world was innocent; honest work for honest pay. Not that Craine remembered. He remembered nothing—on principle, he liked to say: “Reality is what we say it is, correct? Language is our prison.” “Why not our walled garden,” his neighbor the poet had broken in, but Craine had hurried on, pleased with his opinion and unwilling to be disabused of it: “Only those who remember the past are condemned to repeat it! He he! Ha ha!” His neighbor had grinned, shaking his head. “I’ll say this about you, Craine, your craziness runs deep.” But though Craine refused to remember the past, and for the most part couldn’t anyway, he’d read about it, even read MacFadden. Five leather-bound red books, with anatomy cutouts in various colors. No photographs.

  Still the doctor stood head forward, like the sphinx. If his snow-white teeth were false, there was no way of guessing it. Craine’s teeth, Craine remembered, closing his mouth, were gray.

  “They think like lightning, these people,” the doctor was murmuring confidentially, “but sometimes it’s difficult to translate.” Craine nodded, a quick jerk. (There were words in Choctaw, he’d read somewhere, that had no equivalents in English. Indians did badly on IQ tests, he’d read. Lived in a whole different world.) He nodded again. The doctor’s face was pink—benevolent and serene. Though he’d been handling books, his hands were as clean as if he’d just finished washing them. Craine did remember now where it was that he’d first seen him: they’d met at the AAUW Book Fair and had a long conversation—more like a lecture by the doctor—about Roman baths and lead poisoning. Dimout of the Empire through idiocy; the rich and powerful were all either half-wits or crazy. “Pollution is the Number One threat against humanity,” Craine had read. Especially cigarettes. Only ten percent of the people who get lung cancer were never habitual cigarette smokers, he’d read. On the brighter side, however, there was scientific evidence for life after death. “I saw a white light, and I knew at once it was Jesus,” someone had said, brought back to life. Craine smiled wryly. He remembered the doctor’s name now. Dr. Tummelty.

  “They work by instinct, that’s the thing,” Dr. Tummelty was saying. He swung his chin toward his shoulder, indicating Carnac, behind them. “They say the first thing that comes into their heads, and so—theoretically at least—they’re never wrong.” He slowed his walk a little, his light blue eyes on Craine’s neck. “Fascinating, the way they work.” His nostrils flared and narrowed, and he shifted his gaze to Craine’s forehe
ad. Perhaps he’d only now caught the whiskey smell.

  “Never wrong?” Craine said. He strained to make his mind focus, nailing his gaze to the grandfather’s clock, and stopped, partly to let Tummelty go ahead of him to Tully’s desk, partly to put distance between his breath and the doctor’s nose, but Dr. Tummelty stopped too.

  “I’m not a specialist in these things,” Dr. Tummelty said softly, “it’s just a hair outside my field, but it’s a theory I’ve been, so to speak, toying with.” It was clear that he was ready to abandon the theory if Craine had good arguments against it. He studied Craine earnestly, his head once more thrown forward and slightly tilted, his faint smile encouraging, assuring Craine that an honest opinion would not offend him. His hair was snow-white, perfectly combed, exactly the same white as his manicured cuticles. White with blue shadows, like the shadows in bone. Carnac had dropped out of sight again, vanished utterly into the darkness of the stacks. If there was anyone else there, Craine could see no sign of him; but then, Craine had bad eyesight. Tully glanced up, then returned his attention to the ledger, his jaw working furiously, chewing. Craine looked again at the legend on the clock, Time Lost … The universe, if physicists were right, was fifteen billion years old. So he’d read. He shook his head just perceptibly to clear it. The bulldog lay perfectly still, as if dead, beside his dish. Waiting for one sixteen, Craine thought, and smiled grimly, as if enraged.

  “There’s an idea medieval theologians had,” Dr. Tummelty said, studying him. “They took the view that the angels never stammer—the way humans do—because they never tell lies.” He grinned. Craine’s eyes narrowed and, quickly, apologetically, Dr. Tummelty went on, “It’s not the opinion about angels that interests me, it’s the opinion about stammering. Not that I generalize about stammerers—not at all!” He glanced around, smiling, slightly blushing, then back at Craine. Again, he cocked his head, princely, the gesture of a man about to make a terribly important, though tentative, point. “But it got me to thinking about how quickly these people like Carnac there can make leaps from thought to thought—the swiftness and ease of their, so to speak … so to speak … gibberish. The unconscious is wonderfully intelligent, you know? That’s the great point the Zen Buddhists make. A woman walks down the street, for instance—” He waved the magnifying glass, showing where the hypothetical woman was, suggesting the dignity and indifference of the woman’s walk. Craine nodded, pondering it, his mind darting off to the complexity of the human walk—two legs. Strange process, when you thought about it, two ungainly projections we balance over, hurrying here or there, or teeter on, pausing between backward or forward falls … And the human eye even stranger, heaven knows!—a single cell, he’d read, stretched and ingeniously adapted. All those centuries of experiment, hit-or-miss development, millions of years of Nature’s tinkering with an eye that for most of that time couldn’t see, and then, clink, “Snake eyes!” Who in his right mind would believe it? In fact he didn’t believe it. No, he was with Einstein, not that Craine was a religious man.

  The doctor was rambling on, oblivious, urgently concerned with his own speculations, objective as a philosopher, but quietly insistent—even desperate, a disinterested observer might have said—the doctor’s head tipped and thrown forward still more, as if to see more deeply into the queerness of things. “She doesn’t seem to look at the strangers she meets, but all the time a part of her mind is, you might say, ‘scanning’—watching for signs of, let us say, let us say, danger. Scanning like a computer, I mean. I don’t suppose you work with computers much?” He saw that Craine did not, and nodded, apologetic. He hurried on, “She judges our eyes, our clothes, our walk, all without consciously knowing she’s doing it, and the first little sign that something’s wrong”—he made a quick jab with the magnifying glass—“she’s suddenly all attention.” Craine leaned, startled, in the direction of the jab. He was thinking again of the murdered women. Did they know, right from the first instant, what was coming?

  Dr. Tummelty bent closer and lowered his voice to show that he was serious, dead serious in all this, though of course it was all just a theory, he might be mistaken. His snow-white hair was blow-dried but nevertheless perfect, every hair in place. He wore a wedding ring. “We add and subtract, make up sentences, and so on, with the slowest, most trivial of our faculties—the part of our minds we’re normally most aware of, the part we most value in our … value in our, so to speak …everyday affairs. But all the while, these more ancient faculties, things closer to the brain stem, are scanning the world for us, quicker than instinct, or one with it perhaps, though for the most part we’re scarcely aware of them. We block them, doubt them—that’s partly what makes us civilized, so to speak—but they’re always there, ready to assert themselves, too simple and pure to lie to us—too primitive. By some accident—some severing of a nerve, some altered synapse, conceivably even some conscious choice—a man like Carnac there, a man who occasionally connects with the timeless, or so he believes—the ‘bioplasmic universe …’ whatever … You follow what I’m saying?” He moved the reading glass slowly toward Craine’s arm. The movement struck Craine as obscurely ominous, like a cat’s paw slowly reaching.

  Craine smiled in panic, scanning for faint sounds of life behind him, his eyes narrowed, sharp as needles. His head was drawn back, cheeks twitching, as if prepared to jab out and bite. “Interesting,” he said. Now they drifted again toward Tully’s desk, slowly falling toward it on their flesh and bone stilts, gauging and subtly controlling the fall with the swollen cells in their skull holes.

  “There’s no greater mystery than the human mind,” the doctor said softly, his head tipped, trying to see into Craine’s eyes. “Some fascinating things came out of Viet Nam—severed lobes are the least of it. I wrote a book on the subject.” He blushed. “I don’t mean to bore you. If I’m talking too much—”

  Absentmindedly, Craine nodded. He could feel the unseen stranger’s eyes on him again, drilling into his back. Was it possible, that theory the ancients had, vision as a stream of particles? Physics, he’d read, knows of no one-way events. Then could looking at an object disturb the object?—provoke some infinitely subtle response, a prickling of the thumbs? Could the atoms of his body—that was the point—could his atoms, just perceptibly molested by particles beamed from an observer’s eyes … He must try to remember to think about that, he told himself. He’d write himself a note—he had pockets full of notes, and back at the hotel whole drawers full of them—but it was impossible just now, he had the book in one hand, the unlit pipe in the other, and moreover the doctor had his hand on his forearm, or rather the brass rim of his reading glass, pinning him where he was …

  The doctor was still speaking, a curious scent like mint, maybe catnip, on his breath, one more brute obstacle in the way of concentration. “You’ve read about severed lobes?” the doctor was asking. Then, giving his head a little lift to get the lenses of his bifocals right, he smiled and corrected himself: “Yes of course. I’d forgotten. You read everything. Ha ha!” He tapped Craine good-humoredly—a fellow culprit—with the magnifying glass. “So where was I? Ah yes, Carnac! Fascinating mind. You’re good friends, I take it? I’ve noticed the way he keeps an eye on you.”

  “Carnac?” Craine said, starting awake, indignant.

  “A man can’t have too many friends,” the doctor said, and smiled again, more warmly than ever, as if to comfort him. For all the smile, he was watching Craine shrewdly. Judging his health, perhaps. Yes; he would have heard about Craine’s operation.

  The bell above the door clanged and a fat young man in an oversized red sweater came in, opening the door just enough to slip through it, more timid than furtive, or so it seemed to Craine on reflection. A college student. Small, neat features in the middle of an oversized head. Large hands and feet. He affected a bored look, as if his coming to the bookstore was someone else’s idea, not his. Closet intellectual? Pervert in pursuit of dirty books? Poor devil wouldn’t find them at Tully�
��s—not a chance! Tully was a Baptist. Maniac on the subject of perversion, or such was Craine’s suspicion. He knew the look. The squeezed-shut face, the anger that drove Tully’s everlasting grinding of nothing between filed-down teeth. Tully’s dog opened one eye, then let it fall shut of its own weight. The young man looked at Tully’s sign, a piece of cardboard tacked above the shelf by the door, PLEASE DEPOSIT BOOKS AND PACKAGES HERE—THE MANAGEMENT, glanced down at his canvas bookbag, and then, as if the bookbag were a bomb, or infected with plague germs, slid it, touching it with only his fingertips, onto the warped gray shelf below the sign. He shot a look at Craine and Dr. Tummelty as if the offense were theirs—whatever the offense: the sign, the increasing smell of winter in the air, the tall, stopped clock—then ambled, hands in pockets, rear end rolling, toward the stacks.