October Light

by John Gardner

  The downstairs part of Dr. Alkahest’s apartment was as neat as ever; nothing to do but dust, polish glasses, perhaps scrub the already glittering black-and-white tile of the small kitchen floor. She raised the duster toward the mantel, then hesitated. “No,” she said aloud. She looked at herself in the oval mirror. She was like an old portrait, in the oakleaf frame. The light was gray-yellow as vermouth behind her. She looked like the long-dead mistress of some noble old house in a country where highborn ladies were born black.

  When she was sure he could pay her, she would work. Not otherwise. A minute shock like a fever went through her. She went to the window and stood looking down with her arms folded, watching the street through her long lashes as if expecting it might, at any moment, open up and …

  On the third day, John Alkahest was able to move again. He went first to the Bureau of Missing Persons. No luck. The man who had jumped from the bridge had left no trace but the car—no plates, no registration, no engine number, nothing but a paperback book in the front seat, something about an Indian. If the mysterious perfumed ship had saved him, it had sent no message back.

  He spoke with the chief official, Mr. Fiorenzi. Fiorenzi sat like a huge, unhappy Maltese cat in a high-backed ox-blood leather chair with golden studs and walnut arms, on a square of scratched Lucite, behind a walnut desk with a Lucite top, an American flag to the right of him. Behind the flag, up against the door to some further room, he had a suitcase. On the walls there were pictures—Fiorenzi receiving a plaque, a medal, shaking hands with the Lieutenant Governor, shaking hands with …

  There was a four-page gap.

  … official began moving around the room, pulling hard at the bottom of his vest. “I can’t even keep track of my own missing persons.” He laughed, lamb-like. “I’ve got a daughter Teresa—she’s the oldest, lives in Long Beach, married to a CPA. She’s a lovely thing, that girl of mine. Graduate from college. But you think she writes? Three kids she’s got, and I’ve hardly even seen ’em.” Swinging near the desk, he picked up a photograph, a man and a woman and three black-eyed girls. That’s them,” he said. “Beautiful?—Look at this!” He held up another of his pictures, a sullen young man in a uniform. “That’s Joseph, my second. State Police up in Red Bluff. Hasn’t been home since four years ago.” He held up another of his photographs, boy of about ten. “This is Kenny, my youngest. It’s an old picture, he must be twenty now. Hasn’t been home since he was sixteen years old. We get postcards—Hong Kong, West Berlin …” He laughed again. “You didn’t think I was that old, did you? Fifty-five. No joke! It’s a funny world, I can tell you that. If my people came back from the grave, God forbid, they’d never believe it. House in Daly City, big white Caprice and a Gremlin for the wife—” He was looking at the suitcase between the door and the flag.

  “Well, thank you very much,” Dr. Alkahest said. He pivoted his wheelchair, more official than Fiorenzi, and shot away toward the door. There he paused, his hypersensitive nostrils filled with the chemical scent of the gray-brown carpet, the years-old government forms in the cabinets, Fiorenzi’s Old Spice stick-deodorant. “Shame,” he whispered. His weak eyes glinted.

  Fiorenzi, some distance behind him, asked, “Do you believe in flying saucers?” A phone rang just then, and by the time Dr. Alkahest could turn around to look, the Bureau official had vanished.

  The Police Commissioner was a busy man, putting off phone-calls, sorting through papers on his desk while he talked, writing notes to himself, poking his cigar at the ashtray beside him then back into his mouth then back at the ashtray. He was enormous: so bloated that the wire things that held on his glasses sank deep into his head. On his desk he had pill bottles, a dozen or more, all prescription. Brazenly Alkahest swigged from his flask, then slipped it back into his coat, but the Commissioner didn’t notice. “Best damn Narcs in the country,” he said, and hurriedly turned over a paper and wrote. “People don’t realize. We make five, six, seven raids a week. Major raids, I mean. Not just Penny Annie. We burn it by the ton.” He wiped his huge forehead.

  “Where, if I may ask?” Dr. Alkahest asked. But the Police Commissioner failed to hear him, coughing, then sucking at his cigar again. Dr. Alkahest tipped up the flask, hand shaking, and swigged. His fingers tingled and he began to feel dangerously impish. He put the flask in his inside overcoat pocket.

  “People think it’s just crazies and kids,” the Commissioner said. “I could tell you different.” He paused to pant. “Doctors and lawyers. Ministers. Whole country’s gone to shit. Communist inspired. College professors.” He snatched another paper from his pile and ran his eyes down it. “You wouldn’t believe what goes on at those parties. Six, seven in a bed.”

  Dr. Alkahest remembered the smell for an instant, and his soul took wings; but then the smell was gone, fled to the depths of his being, and he couldn’t get it back.

  “As to what you ask,” the Commissioner said, “can’t sanction it. Sorry. Appreciate your interest. Clad to be reminded there’s Americans left.” He jerked out the cigar and looked at it, then quick as a cat popped it back between his teeth and reached for a pill bottle. “We get directives on these things. Don’t know if you’d make a good agent or not, but we got directives.” He took two pills. “Our undercovers are mostly young. Like college. Kind that can mingle and get in with that type. Kind that can grow big Looney-Tunes beards and look weird as the can in a whorehouse.” He laughed. Yaaa! “You, now—” He shot a split-second glance at Alkahest, then looked back at his papers. “No chance,” he said.

  “I could mingle with the doctors and lawyers,” Dr. Alkahest said. A miserable whine. He clutched his flask, his palm pressed to his heart. The cigar stench filling the room dizzied him, knotted his stomach.

  “Sorry,” the Commissioner said, blowing smoke. He slapped away the paper and started immediately on another. “They’re not our prime target. Hard to get convictions. It’s like flies,” he said, “you don’t swat the one on the edge of a cup, you swat the one on the wall where he’s easy to hit.” He blew smoke, gulped air. “So you see our situation. Appreciate yer offer.” Suddenly, without warning, the Commissioner put down his cigar and stood up, like a whale breaching, and shot out his hand toward Alkahest. “Appreciate yer offer.” Dr. Alkahest jerked his wheelchair forward and around to the side of the Commissioner’s desk to shake. The impish malevolence was bubbling up more fiercely. Any moment now he’d do something intemperate and be thrown in the bucket where he couldn’t do a thing about that boat. He held his breath. The Commissioner’s fat hand squeezed his bones. “The way I see it,” the Commissioner said, “not many Americans care about the law.” He gasped in air. “I’d say nine-tenths of the people in this country is against the whole process. I tell my operatives: the few of us that’s left—nothing but a handful—we got no choice but put our shoulders to the grindstone and preserve our American way of life—democracy and freedom for all—and put the rest behind bars.” The Commissioner laughed, gasp gasp, crushing Dr. Alkahest’s hand. Suddenly a coughing fit took Dr. Alkahest, and then a great spasm that threw him from his wheelchair and out onto the Police Commissioner’s floor. The Commissioner, in his astonishment, did not notice that the cigar had fallen, or perhaps had been somehow pushed, from his ashtray into the wastebasket. “You all right?” he squealed, face red.

  “I’m fine,” Dr. Alkahest called up, coughing. “Happens all the time.” A wild giggling took him, twisting his bone-white face.

  The Commissioner quickly tipped the wheelchair right and lifted Dr. Alkahest, as if he were a small bag of feathers, into it. “Terrible,” he said. “Call you a doctor.”

  “No, no!” Alkahest said. “I’m fine. I’m a doctor myself! No need! Don’t bother!” He was already wheeling toward the door. The Commissioner hurried around him, almost at a run, to open the door and help him through. “Thank you! God bless you!” Dr. Alkahest said. He peeked back timidly, then quickly away. Flames shot up beside the Commissioner’s desk.
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br />   It did not occur to the cleaning girl, Pearl, to pity Dr. Alkahest—not yet, that is—no more than it occurred to her to pity the lady who begged in front of I. Magnin’s, placing her hand over her hat and piously saying “God bless you!” whenever a coin dropped in. She followed him merely because if he was crazy, as it seemed, she owed it to herself to find it out and start looking for new work. It was not the kind of employment a person threw away just like that. He paid well, it was a safe neighborhood, and the work was easy yet not dishonest. If the odds were that he would continue to pay her, she owed it to herself—and to him as well—to remain with him. Also, although his bathroom smelled, and though it turned her stomach to watch him eat (he sometimes had an oyster and a glass of white wine while she was dusting nearby)—and though she was practically certain that he watched her through keyholes—he made no effort to pat her on the fanny or snatch at her breast, for which she was, in her cool and sullen way, grateful. She knew about old white men.

  But gradually, as she cautiously followed him from place to place—peeking around corners, hiding behind newspapers, exactly as in the movies—she began to doubt that the trouble was just insanity. The Bureau of Missing Persons, the Police Commissioner’s, the FBI. She was frightened. She thought for some reason of female dope addicts, female bankrobbers, girls who made bombs. Though a law-abiding Christian to the soles of her shoes, she felt threatened. The world of Pearl’s mind, now that what had happened was six months behind her, was a conditionally serene, brightly lighted tunnel where dark, jagged jungle things crouched, full of murderous intent, at the shadowy edges. She walked down the lighted path staring straight ahead. They called to her, Pearl, what’s happenin? She pretended not to hear. Things mostly imaginary reached out to her, patted her buttocks, passed over her breasts like spiderwebs. She walked on, outwardly calm. But stories and memories once of no importance were important now: four boys shot by the Oakland police while playing cards. Black Panthers coming through high weeds with guns. She’d left Marin City at the age of twelve. She had taken piano lessons, sung in the choir. Sometimes, alone in Dr. Alkahest’s tower, she stood, hands folded—drawn up before her belly like an anthem singer’s—and looked across the city to where the sunlight struck the breastlike towers of the Russian Church, and had prayed for escape, total manumission, though she knew it was impossible. She knew where Dr. Alkahest’s money was—in a black metal box in the gin cupboard—and one day stealing it had crossed her mind. The thought had merely come; she had not invited it, nor had she even for an instant entertained it. But it had come, and she’d felt queer, almost dizzy for a second, like a person looking down from a cliff. “Pearl, chile, you out of you mind,” she’d whispered. Her grandmother’s voice. Closing the cupboard, she had not even felt virtuous. There had never been a question of her stealing it. Her very bowels were against it, tightening in revulsion. But even so it was as if for an instant the jungle had darted nearer.

  She sat on the wooden bench in the corridor, pretending to read a Fortune magazine. Pictures of United Nations buildings. On the doorway across from her and a little down the hall, a door with a frosted glass window and the words Society for the Hindrance of International Trafficking. Above the writing there were two large flags, a medical one and an American one, crossed like swords. She had no idea what kind of place it was. She had reached the corridor just in time—racing up the stairs while he came on the elevator—and had seen Dr. Alkahest’s wheelchair darting in. It was a high, old fashioned corridor with a metal ceiling stamped in a design, squares and curlicues. The globes that hung down to give light were half filled with dead flies.

  A man said, “Hey, what’s happenin?”

  She started, then instantly recognized him and, still frightened, smiled. “What’s happenin?” she said. She sounded sullen, and tried to fix it. “You work here, Leroi?” It was Leonard, she remembered, not Leroi. She blushed, then shrank further, afraid he was about to do that hand-slapping thing, a thing she’d never learned.

  “How’s your mother?” he said. He leaned on his broom, wrapped himself around it like a python in a tree. His family had lived two floors up in Marin City. Six boys, all bad. Her mother would never let her speak with them.

  “She’s fine,” Pearl said, and smiled. “How’s yours?” Pearl’s mother had been dead three years.

  “She gets by,” he said. He shrugged and made a so-so waggle with both hands. His smile was like a boy’s, as if he’d never done anything shameful in his life. He was delighted—that much was true—to see her. She felt herself blushing again, and pouting like a fool. “Well, shoo,” he said, and gave his head a shake.

  Before she knew she’d do it, she pointed at the door with the lettering on it. “Leonard, what is that place? You know?”

  He turned to look, then smiled. He had a nose like an ocean liner and teeth like parked white trucks. “Ma’am,” he said, “that’s the American Medical Society’s Special Organization to Prevent the Corruption of Our Youth into Horrible Addiction.”

  “Go on!” she said. A sudden white light flashed through her.

  He nodded like a judge, then smiled again. “No foolin, baby, that’s what it is. Whole lot of dudes with pipes and whiskers tryin to keep this country beautiful.”

  But he was talking too fast, and her mind was awash. Terrifying stories of drugs, murders; images of doors with five, six night-latches, heavy iron chains, dull black pistols in deal-dresser drawers. She remembered hearing shots, somewhere in her childhood. She said, “What’s ‘international trafficking’?”

  He tipped his head, soberly, as if the question were natural. “International trafficking is The Mexico Connection—things like that. These dudes find out where some smuggler’s at and they ride down on ’im wif their big black hosses and they bugles sounding like Jericho all over, and they yells, ‘Burn ’em! Destroy ’em! Ride ’em cowboy!’” He laughed, momentarily closing his eyes, hands splayed out like a tapdancer’s. She felt a strange urge to touch him and drew back.

  The door opened and she raised the magazine to hide her face. Leonard watched her. Dr. Alkahest came out and rolled right by without seeing her. She shot a look past the magazine. He pushed the elevator button. When he’d rolled the chair in, and the elevator had closed with a whoosh behind him, Leonard said softly, “You in trouble, Pearl?”

  She shook her head, but no words came. The magazine fell from her hands and struck the floor. She looked down, surprised. When Leonard bent over, starting to pick up the magazine, she had a sudden intuition that he was about to touch her knee. She froze, her back turning to ice, but the hand continued down, picked up the magazine, brought it up again. “You ok?” he said.

  She had no idea. She was filled with panic. She didn’t even like Dr. Alkahest, so what difference did it make if he was up to some terrible mischief? But her mind was unclear, full of guns and syringes, her mother turning toward the door, listening. On Twentieth Street, the place they’d moved next, there was a boy named Chico, about sixteen years old, two years older than she was. One day he was there and the next he was gone, and people said he’d OD’d on heroin. He was simply gone. She looked at the street, at the place where he’d stood the day before, grass coming up through a crack in the sidewalk, and he was gone and the place where he’d been was like a burn in film.

  “Where you comin from, Pearl?” Leonard said.

  The Jungle, she thought crazily, and the same instant her stomach jerked in as if to vomit the idea, the same revulsion she’d felt as a child at the movies. Barenaked Africans with drums and spears, bones in their noses, running around with crazy yells, killing people, shrinking people’s heads. The corridor leaped toward infinity, floorless, and she seized the nearest thing to her, his arm, and held on for dear life. He looked at her from nowhere, no-time, with frightened eyes, the left one larger than the right. Slowly, he raised the fingertips of his free hand to touch her hands, cautiously, lightly, and she knew it had never so much as crossed his mind th
at all flesh is imprisonment and filth.

  “You pregnant?” he said.

  She saw light bursting down the long corridor, and she was momentarily better. She drew away a little, even managed a foolish, apologetic laugh. “Not me!” she said. She looked at his face with sudden interest. It was the face of a coal-black mule, but intelligent and concerned. She said, feeling suddenly free, “Me, Lennie? You crazy?”

  Dr. Alkahest, carefully unsmiling, entered Wong Chop’s. He took a booth near the back, on the first floor, and a waiter, absolutely soundless, brought him a menu. The second time the waiter came, Dr. Alkahest said, an irascible whine, “There’s nothing I like here. Let me talk to Mr. Chop.” His heart raced, and he dared not look at the waiter. The waiter considered, face like a mask—he looked about eleven but was probably middle-aged—then bowed, exactly like a puppet, and flowed away. Two minutes later a large Oriental in a crimson robe came beaming in, his palms pressed together like a Buddha. “Good evening,” he said. “I Wong Chop.” He bowed as if humbly but spread out his hands, palms up, as if nothing on earth could be more faultlessly joyful than being Wong Chop.

  “How do you do,” Dr. Alkahest said. “I’m John F. Alkahest, M.D.”

  “I deeply honored,” Wong Chop said, his little eyes merry behind the thick green glasses. He bowed again, ignoring the hand Dr. Alkahest extended. “We glatified you come to our humble estabrishment, Doctor.” Another bow. It was mere parody, of course, an act for tourists. Nevertheless, Dr. Alkahest was pleased.