Stillness & Shadows by John Gardner (accelerated reader books TXT) 📕

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.