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

go, but a showman, and learned; he could read both Greek and Hebrew. In the dream Craine saw himself exploding golden curls; he was looking across the room into a mirror, perhaps. His heart skipped, delighted and baffled at receiving such attention. Why the harmless dream had the effect of a nightmare was not yet clear—the images had nothing to do with the emotion, or so it seemed—but Craine whimpered in his sleep, snatching out frantically at the sheets. In the dream his parents and the rest of the passengers were laughing like children and raising their glasses. A drunkard appeared in the doorway, holding out a very old letter with earth and stains on it, but no one noticed. A woman stood half in shadow behind him. Now the orchestra began to play, some noble old hymn or patriotic piece, and a few of the passengers began singing. More and more joined in, music sweeping around as the lights from the slowly turning mirror-globe swept across the walls of the ballroom—image of the universe from the still, dead center (so he reflected, studying the dream as he dreamed it). His mother wore black. Hastily, by some woman with a face that appeared to be a skull, blue-white as mist, he was whisked away to bed.

Craine awoke early, as usual, his eyelids heavy, his body lead-gray—only his hands, neck, and face were red—as tired as he’d been when he went to bed last night. He was filled with a sense that something of the greatest importance had happened, as if he’d made some terrible discovery and then forgotten. He rose irritably, full of inexplicable dread, and reached out, shaking, to the bedpost, the chair back, the wall, then the door frame as he moved into the bathroom, where he poured a little Scotch into his glass and checked the mirror to see if his skin had a yellow tinge—if it was there, he couldn’t see it—then sat for half an hour on his cracked wooden toilet seat. On his bony knees he held his thick, discolored book, The Mystery of Sanskrit. “Tomes,” he muttered, “—tombs,” and grimaced as if someone else had said it. He sucked at his teeth. All around him in the bathroom lay stacks of old hardbacks, paperbacks, magazines. He had no girly magazines. Fifty-some years of existence had taught him, so he often claimed, that on inspection no woman holds up. Show him Cleopatra, show him Helen of Troy, he’d see through her. He’d discern around her mouth a faint hint of crabbyness or weakness, stubbornness, sullenness, or vanity; a certain tenseness around the eyes that showed a slight inclination to take notice of pain and make intolerable small demands; he’d make out that her hands, too quick and strong, suggested a habit of impatience. He understood that his complaint was against humanness itself, even life itself. He knew the antique identification of womanhood and the World, Mother Eve and the Apple, symbol of our bruised, thin-skinned planet. Though he watched fearfully for that tinge of yellow, Craine had lost his taste for the planet.

He read on, sucking at the dryness of his mouth, wincing at the book, muttering as if the page had not only the gift of language but also ears. He remembered his grandfather, for no reason, he believed—for no better reason than that the book spoke of Hebrew. He saw the man standing in his natty robe, arms outstretched behind the pulpit—moustached, slightly plump, his spectacles blanked out by light. He was Presbyterian, Craine remembered; pastor to a well-off congregation in St. Louis. “So that’s it,” Craine muttered, and winced again. It had come to him why at times, when drunk, he flew into complicated, passionate lectures and quoted Scripture, his mind on automatic pilot. He was, at such times, like a man possessed. Facts fell to hand like fruit in Eden; logic revealed itself like a goddess undressing. Afterward, everything he’d said, every wham of his fist, would be gone like smoke.

Suppose glossolalia were a real thing, he’d thought. Suppose Carnac was, in some sense, sane. Suppose glossolalia was what Craine had heard, anesthetized on the table, and the man in the dark, the girl he imagined to be following him, somehow crying out to him, friend or foe …

He got up from the toilet, flushed it, put down the book and picked up a paperback, easier to carry, and prepared to confront another day. In the underwear he’d slept in he brushed his teeth, then shaved and touched up his hair dye, black. Outside his window it was another clear autumn morning, almost no one out yet, two or three cars, a Bunny Bread truck, Ned Bugrum’s mule-drawn junk wagon coming across the tracks, not making a sound.

Craine squinted and sucked again at his loose, dry mouth, thinking about his grandfather as he put on the socks he’d left hanging to air out on the doorknob, then his shirt, trousers, shoes, and shoulder holster, then his sagging brown jacket or rather suit coat, once part of a suit. Some taint of the nightmare emotion remained with him, coloring the miserable gray room around him, decayed and alive as the duff on the floor of a forest—he couldn’t say why; perhaps the discovery that he was haunted. Though his past had been dead for a long time, buried as if under grass and huge stones, it was now clear to him that, somewhere down there, some part of it still wriggled, alive. For an instant, incredibly, he remembered his father, then forgot. He glanced past his shoulder at the window. He couldn’t explain the crotchety feeling, subtle as the look of death in the sheen of a cancer victim’s skin. Scowling, slightly squinting, he poured more Scotch into his glass, drank it, then cracked his revolver, making sure it was loaded, though it always was. He stared at the bullets in their chambers for a moment, vaguely reminded of the brasswork