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

was asleep, or else indifferent to his hearing. “I didn’t say that,” he was shouting. “Listen, we need to talk—”

Craine’s arms and legs were leaden, his head strangely clear and indifferent, remote. The room around him was like a sharply focused old photograph, blurry at the edges. He listened, unsurprised, to the crackle of rage in his neighbor’s voice in the bedroom. It was nothing unusual, in Craine’s profession, this murderous enmity of separated husbands and wives. Chances were they’d be together again in six months, or amicably parted, sending birthday cards. He smiled, cold as ice, then slowly turned his head. The red light on the stereo was off now. The cat stood by the door to the bedroom, watching him.

“Kill them!” his neighbor shouted. “That’s a wonderful idea! Jesus Christ, that’s terrific! Listen, I got a better idea. Kill them and pin the thing on me!”

Craine thought, for no reason, of drawing out his pistol and shooting himself. He smiled again. His arms lay flat on the chair arm, heavy as dead-men at the bottom of a pond. He saw himself sitting here in Ira Katz’s chair with his head half blown away, blood and hair on the wall behind him. His arms remained perfectly still, as if he’d done it already.

“Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense,” the clocks said.

It was curiously interesting, the thought of being dead. Like a midnight swim in one’s childhood, or a journey by train.

Craine’s eyes again fell shut and, like a stone, he slept.

When he awakened the second time, Ira Katz was at the window, staring down into the street, one hand flat on his beard. There was an afghan over Craine’s chest and legs. According to the clocks, it was quarter after twelve. The cat, in the chair where Ira had been sitting, had his eyes fixed on Craine. Craine looked away, as he would from the stare of some stoned young bore at a bus station. It no longer mattered that someone was following him, spying on him. It was all the same, the connected universe he’d dropped out on. Maggots. After a minute Craine’s hand rose unbidden to his forehead, as if seeing if it was there.

“Headache?” Ira Katz said, turning slowly. His mind, for all his solicitude, was far away.

“Not yet,” Craine said.

Ira Katz studied him, eyelids puffy, as if he’d been crying, then turned his face back to the window. “I know what it’s like,” he said. He stroked his beard. It seemed that he would say no more, but then, surprisingly, as if speaking to the darkness outside the room, he said, “I used to do it all the time—knock myself unconscious with martinis. It’s a very inefficient way to kill yourself. You want some aspirin?”

“If you’ve got some handy,” Craine said.

Ira nodded, thought about it, then crossed to the door to the bedroom and bathroom, hardly glancing at Craine as he passed. He switched the bathroom light on—a ribbon of white shot up the wall across from Craine— then ran water. When he’d turned the tap off, he said—still in the bathroom, standing there looking into the mirror, perhaps—“I knew a woman once managed to kill herself on whiskey. Hemorrhage of the esophagus. Managed to rear up, spouting blood like a geyser, and make a few last interesting remarks.” He switched off the bathroom light, blew his nose, and after a moment emerged with a glass of water and three aspirin.

“You were there, I take it,” Craine said, not looking at him, leaving him free to ignore it if he pleased. To Craine it hardly mattered. He was not floating now. He’d sunk to the center of things, the ultimate idea of stone.

“Intimate part of the conversation,” Ira said. He held out the aspirin and glass of water.

Craine took them from him, clumsily, put the pills in his mouth, and drank. “Thank you,” he said, and rolled his eyes up. “Thank you very much.” He handed back the glass.

Ira turned away, looked at the cat in the chair, the photographs, then set down the glass on the bookshelf behind Craine. With a part of his mind, Craine registered a noise, perhaps the door opening at the foot of the stairs. He listened more carefully, listless, not even interested—alert in spite of himself, he would have said, like some criminal who’d lost all taste for life yet finds himself paying attention to every strange footfall. There was nothing now, only the ticking of the clocks, the absolute stillness of mounded white sand in the hourglass on the table beside him. Ira went over to the window to stand with his hands in his suspenders, looking down again.

“Personally,” Craine said, “I put such things out of my mind. Gone like smoke.” He leaned his head back and looked at the ceiling.

“I know,” Ira said.

There was another sound, someone on the stairs. He strained to separate out the sound of the clocks. Even now he felt no interest, only a morbid curiosity. The miraculous does not come to those out looking for it. Beauty, high adventure … He closed his eyes.

The man was muttering something, standing there angrily muttering at the window. Stupid bastard, stupid fucking bastard …

Indignation leaped up in him, but he forgot the next instant. He saw the doorknob turning, the door slowly opening, a leather-gloved hand reaching in, groping toward the lightswitch.

“What?” Craine said, snapping his eyes open.

Ira Katz looked at him, far away. “Maybe that’s your trouble, Craine,” he said.

“What?” Craine said again, heart racing.

“This feeling you have of someone following you, spying on you. Maybe it’s Time’s revenge.” He studied Craine a moment, then shifted his gaze away, out the window, down into the street. “I have a theory,” he said. “We have an idea of ourselves, when we’re kids: noble-hearted, honorable, unselfish. It’s a beautiful image, and in fact it’s true—it’s the truth about us—but we betray it, or the nature of the world betrays it. We betray it again and again, one way