Stillness & Shadows

by John Gardner

“I wasn’t saying it’s trouble. It’s no trouble at all,” Craine snapped. “People are always deciding what’s trouble for other people. It’s an interesting quirk.” He caught himself and smiled, not quite genial, and took a suck at his pipe. “Trouble for you, maybe.” He smiled harder and let out smoke. “That’s what we usually mean when we talk about other people’s trouble.”

  McClaren looked at him oddly, thought of saying something, then thought better of it. The gears were working. Click, spin, click. He raised his whiskey glass. “Cheers,” he said, and drank. Craine set his pipe down, drew the bottle of whiskey from his pocket—spilling more paper scraps—uncapped the bottle, still inside the sack, and, with slightly trembling hands, carefully poured a little Scotch into his coffee. He set down the bottle and picked up the cup. “Bung-o!”

  “Still,” McClaren said, setting down his glass, eyebrows lowering in an irritable but lightly conversational frown, “how do you do your work if you forget things?”

  “Oh, I remember that kind of thing, for the most part.” He capped the bottle, wrung the dirty paper sack closed again, and with a hand not too noticeably wobbling set it to his left, beside the soy sauce. Then once more he closed both hands around the cup, preparing to lift it. Why he continued, getting himself in deeper, he couldn’t have said—the crackling of electrons in the back of his head had grown louder—but he did, and in fact it gave him pleasure. Joy of coming clean, he thought. Beauty is Truth. “I remember pretty much everything, when I’m working on a case. But when it’s over, that’s it.”

  “Odd,” McClaren said.

  “Yes, that’s true,” Craine said, “I’ll admit it. But you know how it is with a private detective—Sam Spade, Lew Archer—” He shrugged, smiling crookedly—a smile he’d practiced at his mirror as a child—and he reminded himself again to be careful. “It’s much more a matter of style, with us. Columbo, for example. You’ve seen Columbo on TV?”

  “I’ve watched it, yes,” McClaren said, watching Craine. He whispered something that Craine didn’t catch. Again he raised his glass to drink. As he set it down again he said, “I don’t believe Columbo’s ‘private,’ actually. And in any case, you know as well as I do, those are fairy tales. Actual police work, when compared to its fictional representation on TV—” He cleared his throat, prepared to launch a lecture.

  “True!” Craine said, “but more true for you than for me, that’s my point. In my line—private as opposed to public—we have to keep in mind what our clients expect. ‘Image,’ that’s the name of the game with us.” He leered. “We have to be characters. You think I like this getup?” He pointed to his ragged cuffs, the large brown stain on his overcoat sleeve. He sat back, cocked his head. “You, Inspector. You’ve got a wife, children from a previous marriage …” How he knew McClaren had children he couldn’t say; instinct maybe; contact with “the bioplasmic universe,” as Dr. Tummelty had said. He must think about that, remember to write himself a note about it; something fake in the way Tummelty had said it, maybe—but for now he must hurry on, step lightly, beware of getting tangled in his shoelaces. “You think I like making these sacrifices?” he asked. He leaned forward and raised the coffee cup with two hands, sipped the Scotch-coffee loudly, then set down the cup again. “But there are forms, you know. We have to accept that. Right ways and wrong ways of doing things, you know. Not true forms, mind you. Not Platonic forms.” Craine’s voice, unbeknownst to him, was sorrowful. “Social prejudices, expectations, that’s what we’re discussing.” He leered again, his sagging eyes morose. “How do I know you’re a professor?” he asked, slightly nasty. “Because you behave like a professor, you dress like a professor, you occasionally throw in a little French.” He let out what he meant for a smile, squinting, and raised his cup again. When he’d sucked in, loudly, intending to offend, he hurried on, lowering the cup, picking up the pipe, relighting it. “So it is with us. Form is function, as the physicists say—and vice-a-versa. What does the American private detective do? Lew Archer, say? J. T. Malone? He drinks Scotch! Every time he turns around, every scene he walks into, more Scotch! It’s hard on the system, but you see how it is, we have no choice. Just like the Avon lady can’t be too fat. And when he’s shadowing people he reads newspapers, magazines, books. Thass less harmful, probly—” He felt the slur coming into his speech and took hold of himself. “Depends on what you read.” He pointed with his pipe stem at the old book on Sanskrit beside his cup.

  McClaren looked at it, shook his head, the glass hovering in his still hand halfway to his mouth. “I believe this is the strangest conversation I ever got into,” he said.

  “Yes, that’s part of it too! I’m glad you noticed! Sam Spade pretended to be dishonest, remember? You’ve seen The Maltese Falcon, I imagine. Yes of course. Everybody has. Yer going over for it, baby. I’m not gonna play the sap fer you. Humphrey Bogart. Me now, I play crazy.” He cackled, the sound so crazy in the great, dark, empty restaurant that for an instant he was frightened.

  “Now wait a minute,” Inspector McClaren said, scowling, prepared to smile if it should prove that Craine was joking.

  “It’s the number one problem of existence,” Craine said, “finding the adequate function for your form, or coming to understanding of the form behind your function, in common parlance value or motive, criminal or otherwise.” He showed his teeth. “Now the determinists maintain—”

  “Listen,” Inspector McClaren broke in. He touched the corner of his horn-rims with his thumb and first finger. “Let me see if I understand this.” He pointed at Craine’s coffee cup, then frowned, raised his eyebrows, and looked over at the curtain where the waiter had disappeared. He forgot his question—one could see the gears shudder and stop like huge old mill-wheel gears when the mill’s foundation breaks, giving way to the flood. A blush of fury rose up in him and he pushed back his chair, got up, went over to the service bell on the bar, and clanged it. When nothing happened, he clanged it again, stared at the curtain for a moment, then came back to the table. “This ‘character’ you put on, this strange manner of behaving—”

  He saw by Craine’s face that the waiter had appeared, and he swung his head around. “Waiter, what happened to that cream?”

  “Ah!” the boy said, throwing both hands up, laughing. He went back out through the curtain. McClaren pursed his lips, still angry, then after a moment checked the chair seat and carefully sat down again.

  “That now,” Craine said, leaping with both feet into the hole in the conversation, meaning to kick it in yet another direction—he pointed toward where the waiter had been, and leaned forward to speak more confidentially—“that’s a typical case!”

  “Case?” McClaren said.

  “Brute substance,” Craine said. “Here we are having an intelligent conversation, a meeting of minds, as one might say, and what happens? A zenseless—” He checked himself. “Senseless accident! We don’t think of events as brute substance, but they are! Of course they are!” He hit the table. “In the war of mind and matter we have to keep these things clear. Nothing’s static, that’s the great lesson we’ve learned. Process, the meaningless spinning of wheels—click, spin, click—that’s materiality! So how do you work?”

  “Pardon?” Inspector McClaren said and blinked.

  “How do you work?” Craine pushed his hat back, thinking of Sam Spade, and waited, showing his rat smile, deeply interested.

  “How do I work?” Inspector McClaren said. He looked at Craine over the tops of his glasses. He had the expression of a man on the verge of becoming airsick.

  “Technique,” Craine said. “M.O.”

  The Chinese boy came through the curtain with the cream, glided to the table, and set it down. “Everything aw-right?” he said.

  “Fine,” Craine said. “Wonderful.” He winked at him.

  McClaren glanced from Craine to the waiter, then back into his glass. The waiter left. Craine poured cream into his coffee and Scotch. He smiled and waited.

 
“Let me ask you this, Gerald,” Inspector McClaren said at last, as if forgetting Craine’s question, or maybe thinking himself clever to have managed to avoid it so easily. “Do you remember nothing whatsoever of your personal past?”

  “Nothing,” Craine said.

  “Your parents? Your schooldays? University?” His head slowly tilted, and his right hand moved up to take his glasses partway off.

  “Nothing.”

  Inspector McClaren pushed the horn-rims back on, then raised his whiskey glass and swirled the yellow liquid. The ice had all melted. He was frowning ferociously. “How about things that happened, say, two weeks ago?

  He was zeroing in now in earnest, Craine saw. Figuring out how much of the decline in the quality of American life they could pin on him.

  “I sometimes remember some of that,” Craine said. “It comes back to me when I need it, more often than not. I have what you might call ‘practical memory.’ I could tell you my father’s name, if you give me time to think.”

  “Incredible,” McClaren said. He worked on it some more. “Perhaps you drink too much?”

  Craine leered and raised his cup.

  “Even so,” McClaren said, blushing, “to have forgotten your parents, your affaires de coeur—if you don’t mind my saying so, it would seem to indicate—” Again he shot Craine a furtive, scrutinizing look. “You’re teasing me,” he said, and abruptly smiled. “It’s part of that act you spoke of.”

  “Well, think what you please,” Craine said. If he was smart, he knew, he’d claim that, yes, it was indeed an act. His chest was full of panic: it was like playing with dynamite, fooling with a creature like McClaren. But some madness was in him, some craziness finally metaphysical, or chemical; same thing. No doubt to McClaren it was Craine who seemed the enemy of mankind, outrage against decency and reason. No doubt to McClaren it was Craine who seemed the alien, the terrible beast from deep space, the spider. Oh yes, yes, one could easily understand these things, take the larger view. Suddenly, Craine felt defensive, annoyed. Though perhaps it was just his drunkenness, it seemed to him now that it was a serious matter, this door he’d closed on his past, closed on all of it, and sealed up tight, so that hardly a shred of light broke through. How many people in the history of the world had ever done such a thing, freely, for no reason, for the pure existential élan of it? or if not that (for no doubt he was exaggerating now, it had not been entirely voluntary), if not that, then how many people, having found themselves forgetting things, had confirmed and approved the unsettling process, voluntarily shaped it as a sculptor confirms and shapes the design in marble? He was a walking proof of the physicist’s proposition that everything that can happen in the universe does happen. Once in the history of the universe, it could be said from now on, a man locked himself outside Time. A petty-minded fool would say, “Why? What caused it?” The man of heroic vision would say, “Behold what has been caused!”

  Craine found himself whining. “It’s the truth, actually. Most people don’t like that kind of thing. If they don’t do it—in this case, forget things—then it shouldn’t be done. That’s the universal law. ‘Herd law,’ I call it, as in cattle, not ears.”

  “Ah yes, Nietzsche,” the inspector said.

  Craine nodded, grimacing. “Perhaps. But I ask you, why should a man remember things? I grant you, there are various opinions about Time. There’s the popular, simpleminded one—no, let me finish, let me explain!” Craine raised his hand.

  McClaren leaned back in his chair, letting him hang himself.

  “There’s the popular notion, Time as an onward rushing stream, a river—a notion that brings with it the corollary assumption of a moving present moment, the little bubble of now. But obviously the meaning of past and future must be determined not merely at the surface, that is, the psychological level—you can see that yourself—but also at a deeper, ontological level. All around and in between the no more and the not yet come lies the eternally present and at the same time eternally absent time zone called now. Correct? Absent in the same sense that if Time is the whole created universe from Big Bang to Fizzle, then we’re not it, we’re a hole in it, or rather we’re the mice in the hole in it.” He laughed. “But neither of these times, psychological or ontological, gets mentioned at all in the mathematician’s or the physicist’s description of Time, or rather Space-time.” Again he raised his hand. “No wait, I’m not finished!” He took a sip from his cup, spilling a little down his chin in his haste. His whine became, even in his own ears, more petulant. “In the physicist’s description of the universe, there’s no provision whatever for a flowing time or, by implication, a moving now.”

  “That may be so,” McClaren began.

  “It’s all a trick, you see,” Craine explained, leaning forward still more, both hands clinging to the cup as if without it he’d be dragged—like Atlantis, like Rome and the British Empire—into the darkness below the table. “These notions of time and space we have, it all comes of thinking too much about objects—including ourselves, you see, the ‘subjects’ embedded in the general clutter of objectivity. Now I, for one, have refused to be deluded! What I cannot endorse, I take no part in.”

  “But you are here, sitting at this table,” McClaren said uncertainly.

  “Only for practical purposes,” Craine said.

  McClaren frowned, slowly shaking his head. He feigned professorial patience, a decent man’s willingness to hear all points of view—leaning back comfortably, glass in hand—but his eyes were smoldering, as if he suspected his intelligence was being trifled with. “You’ve got all this from that book?” he asked, nodding toward Craine’s book.

  “No, a different one,” Craine said. “The Avengers. It’s a comic book. You’d be surprised what a man can learn from comic books.” He cackled and threw McClaren a wink, then raised his cup two-handed and drank.

  “Crazy stupid shit,” Inspector McClaren said; or perhaps Craine only imagined it. “I see,” McClaren said. He considered the matter from all angles. “What I don’t quite follow,” he said, “is why this makes you forget things.” For all his studied dignity—the professorial jacket, the carefully cultivated look of one who has encountered this question a time or two before—he looked vulnerable as a chicken, as if he feared that his question might have given him away, might have revealed that, contrary to the impression he’d so diligently labored to create, that huge pink dome was empty.

  “Ah, that!” Craine said. “Why do I forget things? Yes, that’s the question we must grapple with.”

  Slowly, as if Craine had drained off some of his vital energy, Inspector McClaren leaned forward again and settled his weight, more heavily than before, on his elbows. “You actually have no memory of your past whatsoever?

  Dogged son of a bitch, Craine thought. But he thought it almost fondly. His glimpse of the man’s vulnerability had put him off his guard. He’d be sorry, he suspected, but he nodded soberly, solemnly, and sipped his Scotch-coffee.

  McClaren turned his glass, empty now, between the palms of his hands. “Ordinarily,” he said, like a professor reaching deep into his treasury of information, “when we forget things it’s for one of two reasons, as Sigmund Freud observed.”

  “That’s right! Exactly! Sigmund Freud!” Craine said, but McClaren kept coming, like a bulldozer.

  “Either because we’re repressing them—refusing to look at them—or because we’re looking with all our attention at something else.”

  “That’s it!” Craine said. “That’s Freud all right!” He pointed at McClaren’s glass. “You want more whiskey?”

  “The second explanation might well be the correct one in your case,” McClaren said. “You’re familiar with the theories of Sigmund Freud, I presume?”

  Craine rolled his eyes up, clear out of sight, but McClaren, looking straight at him like a slightly baffled dog—a boxer—seemed not to notice.

  “By reputation, at least, you’re an excellent detective, or were at one time”
—he blushed, quickly smiled—“… no doubt still are. Yet this failure of memory is so extreme, as you describe it.…” Mysteriously, his shoulders and dome began to rise. Craine stared. The odd phenomenon continued. The large man rose from the table as if levitating, unaware of it himself, or so it seemed, all his faculties engrossed, and, still talking, he drifted toward the bar like a somnambulist, stretching his arm out through the murky room, groping. “It’s hard to believe that what blocks out your past is an intense preoccupation with the present, the details of your work, and so on. Surely the cases you encounter in a place like Carbondale … And also, of course, there’s the matter of your drinking. Ordinarily that wouldn’t seem to indicate … ” His hand rose over the service bell, moving as if independent of his will, and came down hard, clanging it. Even though Craine had been waiting for the noise, he jumped. McClaren seemed not to hear it. His hand came down again on the bell, clanging it a second time; then he came drifting back toward Craine, still, it seemed, thinking out loud “You’re a complicated person. I’m told you won a number of medals, up in Chicago. That’s very good, admirable—so it is!—and yet I always distrust such things. ‘Why was he so desperate to prove himself?’ I ask. Pessimistic, I admit, though it’s a fault you share, I suspect.” He smiled, conspiratorial, lowering himself like a descending spider into his chair. “We wouldn’t last a minute in this business if we weren’t a bit distrustful, eh?”

  “Now you’ve got it!” Craine said, cackling, and slapped the table. His voice rang loudly in the hollow, gloomy room.

  But McClaren was onto him. “I admire you, Gerald. The energy it must have taken! You’ve never been to a psychiatrist, I suppose. Never been hospitalized, nothing like that—”

  “No, nothing like that,” Craine said, laughing, “no.”

  “Well if it works, do it, as the philosopher William James would say—brother to the novelist.” He gave Craine a little look. “Most people don’t know they were brothers, I find.”