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

or another. We can’t do what’s decent. Our commitments prevent it, or it’s beyond our means. There are only so many causes you can die for, only so many good women you can love with all your heart, and even the best twist you downward, limit possibilities, limit your potential. So we lose touch with ourselves, turn our backs on the image, believe ourselves to be the ugly thing we’ve by now half-proved we are. The image is still there, the shadow we cast into the future when we were young. It’s still there haunting us, beckoning us toward it; only now there’s that second shadow, the shadow, behind us, of all those acts unworthy of us.” He put his hand on his beard. At last he said, “I heard a story. There was this girl, a student of one of our graduate students. It seems she saw a rape—or a murder, I forget—and she was afraid to report it. It was years ago, I think. Anyway, all this time she’s been brooding on it, trapped in the past. Snagged on it, that unfulfilled moment. Everywhere she goes, everyone she meets, out pours the story. It’s the most important thing in the world to her. People hide behind trees when they see her coming. You see what I’m saying. Maybe in your case—”

Something astonishing was happening in Craine’s mind—a blinding flash of white, as if all matter had exploded, then blackness, then everything as it was. She was there, out in the hallway, her small ear pressed against the door, dark eyes rolled up. He could hear her breathing.

Ira Katz was looking at him, eyebrows lowered. Craine sat forward. “It’s late,” he said, and shuddered—shuddered from head to foot, like a man just come in from icy wind and deep snow. “I lost track of the time,” he said, and laughed. He rose unsteadily to his feet, three fingers on the chair arm for balance. His legs were like wood.

“It is late,” Ira said.

Craine’s eyes fell again on the snow-white sand mounded up in the bottom of the hourglass, absolutely still.

“I’ll just use your bathroom,” he said, and moved very carefully, like an old, old man, toward the bedroom door. When he was seated in the dark—he’d been unable to find the bathroom lightswitch—his sense that she was listening in the hallway outside became a certainty. He heard her purse snap open, saw her hand slip in. He tried to hurry, full of life again, but his bowel track refused to be rushed, shooting miserable dribbles and insisting with pressure like a wail that he wait a minute longer. Pain tugged at the red gouge five inches below his nipple, another pain lower, where the remains of his anus had been sewn to the remains of his tubing. He strained with all his might, then gave up—he’d take his chances—wiped himself, pulled up his trousers, and flushed the toilet. His heart pounded fiercely, the rest of him sodden and heavy as new concrete. Then the knock came, exactly when he’d known it was coming. Quickly, one hand on the bathroom doorknob, he drew the pistol from its holster. When he heard Ira Katz walk over in his stocking feet and open the hallway door, Craine stepped out of the bathroom and crossed to the door to the livingroom, then, after an instant, stepped out suddenly—smiling like a storm trooper—to greet her.

At once he saw that the woman staring at him was not the one. She was tall, middle-aged, all skin and bones, most of her straggly brown hair up in a bun. Her dress was vaguely Indian; over it, she wore a pale purple cardigan sweater and green beads. Her face went white—all except the birthmark like a coin on her cheek—and the hand that held the purse dropped lower. Ira Katz, too, was staring at Craine’s pistol. He drew the woman back toward himself.

“Craine,” he said at last, eyes wide, “this is April. She’s a friend.” He pulled at the side of his collar with two fingers, letting in air, still looking at the pistol—now aimed at the floor. He stood carefully balanced, like a man on a tightrope thousands of feet up. He said, “April, this is my neighbor from down the hall, Detective Craine.”

She just stared.

Craine smiled crazily, bending forward over the gun. “I just came to borrow some sugar,” he said. He glanced at the cup on the bookshelf, then down at his pistol. He put it away hastily, fingers shaking. “I thought you were here to steal my sugar,” he explained, and gave a laugh.

They looked at him.

“It’s late,” he said, soberly nodding, then laughed again. He went to get the cup from the bookshelf. “I lost track of the time,” he said, hurrying toward the door. He made his face so sober that, unbeknownst to himself, he looked furious. Tears ran down his cheeks. “Thank you very much,” he said. “Sorry I had to trouble you. Thank you very much.”

Five

It was not that he felt guilty; he’d drunk too much to be vulnerable to guilt. Nor was it exactly that his mind was churning. He seemed to be thinking nothing, lying there flat on his back like a corpse patiently awaiting resurrection. He lay in his underwear on top of the covers, head cocked forward by the pillows, his arms at his sides, bare feet splayed outward. He was strongly conscious of the room around him, the faded gray wallpaper splotched and cracked, bulging here and there, like an old bum’s forehead; the padless, once wine-red, threadbare carpet lumped up into ropes, like the veins on the backs of his hands. It was, his story, this room, this miraculous decay—the books that spelled out his consciousness wedged into bookshelves of cheap, stained pine, strewn along the baseboards, stacked up in corners; on the bedpost above him his pistol precariously tilted in its shoulder holster; on his dresser, in its dusty old Bible-black case, the