by John Gardner
“The world’s neither one thing nor the other, that’s what we believe,” Craine said. “ ‘Complementarity,’ as the physicists say.”
“That’s not exactly—” Ira began, then stopped.
“We’re simply here, that’s the thing,” Craine explained, hurrying, sensing that he’d made some mistake. “We don’t know what happened before we came onto the case, who did what or why, nothing, and we don’t give a damn; not really.” He squinted, playing crafty detective. “We’re not committed one way or the other, that’s our profession. Dispassionate.”
Ira straightened up—the shadow leaped back with him—and looked at his glass. “I suppose that’s true,” he said. He seemed now a little like a detective himself, trying to see around behind the conversation.
Craine laughed, trying to make light of it. “A detective cares no more for the victim than he does for the murderer,” he said. “His heart’s cold as ice. He’s a man without a past, you might say. No past and, for all practical purposes, no future.” He laughed again, then, trembling, put his pipe between his teeth and relit it. Ira Katz watched him, lips pursed, waiting just a touch impatiently, glancing at the bedroom door. “It’s a terrible thing, of course,” Craine said, “a man with no earthly connections, suspicious as a rat; but, you see, that’s how it is.” He gave another little laugh.
“Yes, I suppose,” Ira said.
Craine had a feeling he still wasn’t following, and no wonder; he was half lost himself. “Put it this way,” he said. “It wasn’t us that made the laws—we don’t care about the laws—we just make up a theory about who did what to who, and that’s it, that’s reality, or as much of it as counts, one tiny bubble in the”—he paused, then gestured impatiently—“the foam.”
Ira nodded and smiled, making light blink in his hair. Judging from his face, he was as baffled as ever. “But sometimes the theory’s true and sometimes not—you’d agree with that?” he asked.
“Maybe so, but you can never be sure,” Craine said. “And what’s the difference?”
Ira thought about it, tapping the rim of his glass with one finger. “Interesting,” he said. It was not quite ingenuous, Craine could see. He’d thought it all through before, though he pretended otherwise. He still seemed reluctant to pursue the conversation—no doubt old stuff to him, junk food for freshmen—but after a moment the hint of a smile came back and his eyes met Craine’s. “Tell me this,” he said. “Suppose you should decide to take that gun out of its holster and shoot me, right here and now, and suppose in half an hour you should fall into a river, gun and all”—he gave Craine a quick, apologetic glance, maybe just a touch of hostility in it—“and no one in the world could prove that it was you that killed me. Wouldn’t it be true just the same that it was you who did it?”
Craine narrowed his eyes, thinking hard, on the look-out for traps. “No, not for practical purposes,” he said.
“No, not for practical purposes, I suppose.” Ira tapped the glass, slightly lined up at the checkout computers, or copying down call numbers at the central catalogue, browsing in the seven-day new-acquisitions room, or sprawled in the carpeted lounges, reading, Craine’s soul, ordinarily so indifferent to fortune, stirred toward covetousness and envy. He reminded himself, as he always did here, that maybe ninety percent of the people around him weren’t interested in books, were merely faking their courses, skimming half-heartedly or reading carefully but without real interest or understanding—but he didn’t believe it. Every student who passed with a great, awkward armload clamped under his chin was an affront to Craine, like a fat, smiling czar to a peasant Communist—though of course it was nonsense: he could come here whenever he pleased, if he pleased. Theoretically, at least. It was only in his mind that he was an alien here, a rat darting furtively through a room of sleeping cats.
At the checkout desk he asked a well-dressed black boy in glasses, “Where do I get the number of a person’s library carrel?”
Without looking up from his work the boy pointed at the ceiling and said, “Second floor, main desk.”
“Thank you very much,” Craine said, bowing, and hurried to the elevator.
Two minutes later, with the number of Terrance Rush’s carrel on a pink slip of paper in his hand, Craine got off the elevator at the fifth floor and hurried along the stacks, hunting for where the carrels began. Half unaware that he was doing it, he read titles as he walked. Abruptly, he stopped, staring at a dark blue book almost in front of him, at eye level: Clairvoyance, it said. For the first time since it had happened he remembered that something had come over him when he was standing at Ira Katz’s door, a kind of dream or maybe a vision, very brief, but powerful: he—or someone—was standing in the dark, under trees, and someone was moving very quietly toward him, hands raised. Craine, remembering, put one hand over his mouth. It was that night—somewhere where there were leaves—that Ira’s friend April had been murdered.
“I said something like that,” Ira Katz said, not quite interrupting.
“Whatever,” Craine said, brushing it aside almost angrily. “But you follow what I mean. The writer that wrote the novel may know the story from end to end—he might or he might not, I wouldn’t know about that—but the characters, what do they know? They come in at, say, page a hundred, maybe page two thousand. Before that they didn’t exist. Not a trace of them. What are they to do?”
Ira Katz smiled patiently. His glass was still nearly as full as when he started.
“I’ll tell you what they do if they’re smart, Mr. Katz.” He leaned forward, intense and emotional; he hardly knew why himself. In a minute he’d be crying. “They don’t eat the cake till someone else has tried it and not died of it. They don’t make friends, they don’t make enemies. They don’t go up on rooftops or wander around in the shrubbery or down in cellars. They keep their mouths shut and pay very close attention.”
“It’s a hard way to live,” Ira Katz said, again not quite following, or so it seemed.
“That’s the truth,” Craine said, and shuddered, tears leaping into his eyes, then drank. The thread of his argument had slipped from him. The click of the clocks had a hollow echo. He was drinking much too fast. He stared hard at the cat as if for help. The cat slept on.
Ira Katz said playfully, carefully not making it too clear that he was playing—indeed, there was a chance that he was serious after all, “Some of us have to be the victims, though, and some of us have to be the people left over at the end, the suspects who didn’t do it.”
Craine nodded, petulant, still looking for the thread. Everybody did it, he thought, but that made no sense. He drank again, furiously wishing he’d stayed sober. Then it came to him. He reached out sharply toward Ira Katz, gesturing with his glass, spilling whiskey. “That’s just bad luck, though, that’s the thing—the ones that get killed and the ones that happen not to, the poor dumb bastards that die or have children and never think. It’s the detective we have to watch. He’s the one to think about. The others can be as passionate as they want to—good luck to ’em! But the detective, he’s got to be objective, scientific. No commitments. He’s like a man from outside Time. That’s his secret. Maybe he’s a foreigner, like Hercule Poirot. Maybe he gets stoned on cocaine, like Sherlock Holmes.”
Ira Katz was studying him from deep in his chair, for all the world like Holmes making cunning deductions. “Craine,” he said suddenly, “what are you driving at?” Again he glanced toward the bedroom door.
“Sherlock Holmes,” Craine said, and waved his glass. “Hercule Poirot!”
“I know,” Ira Katz said. “That part I’m hearing.”
Craine sat perfectly still for a moment, his insides overtaken by a curious trembling. Again, for an instant, he’d gotten a flash of the beautiful young woman who was following him. “We’re talking about the man who solves the mystery,” he said. A tear escaped onto his cheek, and quickly, furtively, he wiped it away. “We’re talking about the solitary hunter, cold-blooded as the moon
!”
Ira Katz studied him. “Is that what you want to be?” he asked. He spoke too gently, like a psychiatrist.
“As I told you,” Craine said crossly, with dignity, “I never get murder cases. We’re talking theoretically.”
The young man nodded. For a long moment he stared at something just above and behind Craine’s head. At last he dropped his gaze to meet Craine’s and cleared his throat. “I’ll tell you how it seems to me,” he said, and colored slightly. It seemed for an instant that the clocks ticked more softly. Ira Katz looked above Craine’s head again. “It seems to me that the man who’s a lover is more likely to make a good detective than the man who’s not. That’s my impression, anyway, or my impression at this moment.” His smile was, again, apologetic. “We all know the disadvantages. He gets over involved, he’s not objective, he runs a risk of missing things—those are the arguments. But I don’t know. I’m not sure. The detective who’s involved—not just with the woman, if it’s a woman that’s in danger, as in the usual plot, but with everyone, everything—I think that’s the man I’d put my money on. If I were to make up a new kind of detective—a new and different kind of Ellery Queen or Dr. Fell or Perry Mason—I’d use—I don’t know—maybe an Indian guru, some man like Swami Muktinanda—you’ve heard of him? I’d choose a man half crazy with empathetic love for all the universe. Someone who needs an assistant to keep him from walking into freight trains or falling down in trances—some merry-hearted lunatic who understands the language of goats and trees.” He looked at Craine and grinned. “My novels wouldn’t have much suspense, I admit. The minute the detective meets the killer, that’s that, no more mystery. ‘Ah!’ he’d say, ‘so it’s you!’ Big smile from both parties. And my novels might not have much in the way of emotional catharsis, either. My detective would never turn the murderer in, he’d simply cure him by a beatific look, or maybe confirm his existence for what it was, as he would a cobra’s, and send him on his way. But then—” He gestured vaguely, smiling, letting it go. After a moment his expression clouded and, glancing down at his glass, he said, “Or then again I might choose just the opposite, some rolling-eyed, half-crazy paranoid. They too have their involvement—involvement of a kind, anyway. They can be wonderfully shrewd.” Craine’s mind flashed an image of Dr. Tummelty talking of the woman who walks down the street unconsciously scanning. Craine leaned forward, raising his glass to object, but Ira Katz, looking over his head again, seemed not to notice.
“I’ll tell you the problem with existentialists,” he said seriously. His voice became teacherish, as if he’d said this many times and had a good deal invested in it. “They begin with the assumption that we’re free—‘existence precedes essence’ and all that. The trouble is, it’s not true. You remember Jean-Paul Sartre’s image, the man who stands on a cliff looking down. He feels dizzy, a little nausea. That’s the experience of freedom, Sartre claims—the man’s sense that he could throw himself into the abyss if he chose to. The trouble is, most people don’t—they step back. If we were really free, about fifty percent of us would jump.”
“But surely that’s just fear, Mr. Katz,” Craine broke in. “If they dared to face up to their freedom and act—” His voice came out unexpectedly loud. It wasn’t so much the whiskey outrunning him as the speed with which Ira Katz hurried from thought to thought, dropping names, queer images —the man on the cliff—as if Craine should have heard of them a hundred times, which perhaps he had; he was too foggy to remember. “The mere fact that we don’t jump, even if we’re miserable,” Craine began.
“But we don’t, you see. That’s the point.” He spoke patiently, as to a child. “Being mammals, and sentient, we’re aware that it might hurt, landing on those big jagged rocks down below. We obey the age-old law of mammals, the law that precedes our particular existence: Try not to get hurt. It seems to me that our proper business should be to try to figure out what the secret laws are for sentient mammals—what hurts us and what doesn’t, physically, psychologically, spiritually.” He flashed a smile, too quick and neat, a smile he’d used in lectures. “We should work at discovering what values are built into us. Learn to survive—learn what makes us fit. The existentialists point us in the opposite direction, that’s what’s wrong with them. They encourage us to think we can make up values, like Midas deciding, on insufficient evidence, that what people really need is a world made of gold, or like Nietzsche deciding, on insufficient evidence, that the future belongs to ‘the sons of the Prussian officers.’ ”
“But what if it does?” Craine burst out, flustered. “By your law of mere fitness, what if he was right? Take people’s hatred of the Jews.” He looked away from Ira’s face, then resolutely back, straight into his eyes. “You think it was beaten when Hitler lost the war—if he did lose the war?” He was aware, too late, that it came out like a snarl, as if Craine were the chief and most deadly of anti-Semites.
Ira Katz shrugged as if the matter were of no great importance to him, but his eyes lowered, and his voice became more serious, studiously reasonable and offhand. “If Nietzsche was right, then his position will win. Survival of the fittest. Millions upon millions of gentle, well-meaning creatures have been wiped out by the centuries.”
There was a silence, as if both of them, in their embarrassment, had lost the thread. Craine’s eyes settled on the snapshot of Ira Katz’s children. The photograph beside it was of their mother—not Jewish, it came to him. He quickly looked away and busied himself relighting his pipe, then refilling his glass. It was late, he must be going. An increasing sense of urgency churned in him. Whatever it was that he’d come to find out, they hadn’t gotten near it, or rather, one moment they’d be edging in on it, the next they’d be light-years off. He was like a man who’d stayed late at a tedious party, hoping against hope, and now the others were leaving, the talk of the few who remained was turning insidious, his hopes were growing slimmer by the moment. He raised his glass with a quick jerk and drank. Like a train in the station, starting up before you realize it’s done so, the room began to move.
There was a trace of a quaver in Ira Katz’s voice when he spoke again, as if Craine’s accidental attack had stirred memories. “Whatever is true is true,” he said. “We have to live with that.” He shrugged as if trying to submit to his own rule. His eyes, looking down at the carpet between Craine and himself, were solemn. “We were talking about detective novels. About getting at the truth. There’s something I tell my students … ” He took a deep breath, as if he couldn’t get air enough. Craine noticed only now that the room was hot. Sweat ran down his neck. Ira was saying, “We have only two ways of finding out what’s true, what will work. By history’s blind groping, one damn thing after another, as they say”—he took another deep breath—“or by rigorous imagination, which in the end means by poems and novels.” He flicked his eyes up at Craine. “Get everything exactly right, and maybe you save people the pain of history gone wrong.”
“Ha!” Craine barked, not in scorn but only to stop the talk for a moment, make the room stop moving, give himself time to think—though scorn was what it sounded like, Craine knew.
Ira Katz shrugged and leaned back in his chair, abandoning him. The room now moved steadily to the left. Ira Katz remembered his wineglass on the table and took a sip, then put the glass down gently and glanced at the clock just beside it. Quarter to eleven. Again he took one of those deep, pained breaths, and his glance went briefly to the bedroom door. This time Craine registered it. Was it possible that the man had a girl in there? If so, she was as quiet as a corpse. For an instant he imagined it clearly: a lead-gray dead girl, some college student with long blond hair, naked on Ira Katz’s bed. Craine shuddered and drank. No, not possible, he thought, and briefly understood with perfect clarity what Ira Katz was saying about imagination testing truth. At once Craine lost it. “Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense,” the clocks said everywhere around him, heavily sibilant but clear as day. He was imagining it, of course, he told himself;
but in fact, he saw the next instant, he was not. The word was unmistakable. They’d been saying it all night, it came to him. He sat still as a boulder, stunned by the discovery. The Vedic priests were right: sounds corresponded to natural forces in the universe. Everything was language, the very atoms maniacally whirling in the chair where he sat. Word of God, he thought, half ironic, half crazily gleeful, and for an instant closed his eyes. He fell through space, plummeting, and at once snapped his eyes open and was stabilized.
For all that was happening—Time off its rhythm, as if rushing out past the edge of the universe—Ira Katz was saying calmly, reasonably, “You may be right that it’s impossible for human beings to know the truth, but whatever the real history of the world is, we’re part of it, made of the same material. The minute we step outside it—or allow some son of a bitch to push us outside it—we’re done for. That’s what survival of the fittest means, being made of the same thing the universe is, and able to move when the universe moves. In that sense all novels are detective novels, or ought to be. People hunting for connections.” Incredibly—since usually, drunk or sober, Craine was like lightning at catching such things—Craine realized only now that Ira Katz was in some way talking about himself. He, Ira Katz, was the man not fit to survive, or so he thought—not “connected.” Was that what it was about, then, the poetry writing?—the endless, passionate turning over of trivia—autumn days, the eyes of chickens? Strange that Craine should be surprised by it. He’d known for years that it was hardly for himself alone that the jig was up.
Before he knew he would do it, Craine heard himself saying, “I’ve been having some queer experiences lately.” He glanced past his shoulder, then leaned forward again. “I keep feeling someone watching me. Crazy, eh? Ha ha!” His free hand slapped the chair arm.