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

jewels, like the branches, the rooftops, the winter-darkened grass, all thickly cased in ice—Death would not be fooled, driven from the place by mere music and light—so a stranger with a taste for the gothic might have thought, and Martin Orrick would think before morning. Inside the high door with the fox-head knocker (firewood piled high to the left and right), the ceiling was low, like the roof of a cave, and the dark, crowded furniture sagged and bulged under the weight of slow-talking, slow-gesturing grad students, some of them asleep with their drinks in their hands, some noisily drunk, some asleep but still talking, smoking pot. Useless to try to drive home on that ice. (It had rained all day, then at sunset had suddenly begun to freeze.) It was five miles to town, over Ozark roads. Even the sober might never reach the foot of the driveway.

In the new room, the room that looked out on the pool, Martin Orrick, famous novelist, professor of classical and medieval literature, held forth like a blear-eyed prophet. Joan, his red-headed wife, watched in silence. She’d taken Demerol to kill her pain, such a dose that the world was like a landscape seen through blowing lace, and she suffered, besides, an odd dizziness not usually part of the Demerol high, and a ringing in her ears. She should go to bed, she knew, but she was afraid to. Martin grew, every day, more difficult. If she turned her back, he might suddenly attack some favorite student with cruelty and scorn he would refuse to believe himself guilty of tomorrow, or he might lure some young woman to the storm cellar or the barn or the tower. They would all know, these students who loved him and were always as embarrassed as she was, and helplessly they would watch, pained but not judging, big intelligent grown-ups baffled and hurt and struggling to approve, like children. She had no choice but to prevent it if she could, control him; and sensing her subtle, unspeaking control, he might at any moment turn on her in rage, say terrible things to her, and she, foggy, ringing with that damned, mysterious pain, would be defenseless. They must surely understand that he was mad, simply. Nevertheless it would be she, Joan Orrick, who would be guilty.

Baggy-faced, paunched, standing like a sumo, but icy-eyed, druidic—waving his martini and sometimes ferociously driving home a point with a stab of his pipe or the square index finger of his free, dark-red right hand—he spoke belligerently of the fall of man. “It’s a three-part process,” he said, or rather fumed, so mean of eye that one might well have imagined—or so it seemed to his wife—that the man to whom he spoke, half asleep on his feet, his skin splotchy pink, his beard a mass of tangles, was responsible. The ice-crusted trees on the lawn stood motionless, hungrily listening—if Martin’s weird theory of the universe was right—and the black, silent river hurried on toward New Orleans, huge helpless mother of animals and men, bearer of St. Louis and Chicago poisons, also treasures of silt, generous feeder of bottomlands, smasher of dikes.

“First,” he said, and cocked back like a horseman, “there’s the fall out of Nature, the fall that makes primitive bear cults and corn cults. We kill to eat, and thanks to our consciousness we can’t help but notice that in the act of killing we take a step back from the general connectedness, the harmony of Nature, old Schopenhauer’s universal howl of will: we’ve judged and condemned brother bear to death, or brother stalk of grain—you follow what I’m saying?—and however our intelligence may deal with the event, the chest—the right lobe of the brain, if you like—calls it murder and shudders with guilt.” His eyes bugged, he spoke so earnestly. He stood with his hand drawn dramatically to his chest. “We invent the Corn God, or Artemis-Ursus, and do terrified obeisance, kill virgins to buy our way back in.” He was outraged.

He was talking loudly, but perhaps not as loudly as it sounded in Joan Orrick’s head. The bearded, pink-faced student nodded, sorrowful and logy, keeping his eyes open and smiling politely by a mighty act of will. He stood tipped back, the bottle of beer out in front of him for balance. In the shadows around them—a clutter of bottles and potted plants, a fog of cigarette smoke, a thick stench of gin—other students listened, their heads thrown forward, not so much from interest in Martin Orrick’s theories—they’d heard them all before—as in faint alarm at his drunken intensity. Martin drank quickly from the glass in his hand and, before anyone could speak, widened his eyes again, lifted his eyebrows, and plunged on, still more loudly, shouting down a sudden swell of music from the speakers. “Second, there’s the fall from humanity,” he said. The people around him nodded, and to Joan Orrick’s drugged perception it seemed they nodded in synchronization, like puppets, like a Gilbert and Sullivan chorus. He said, swinging forward dangerously, “ Gilgamesh, for instance! He enslaves his own people—makes them build a great wall for their own protection”—his left arm dramatically cast a wall up through the ceiling—“and thus rightly, necessarily, Gilgamesh sets himself apart from his fellow men, and the people, rightly, cry to heaven for vengeance. Like the hunter, he’s stepped out of the ring of the living. New rituals, some new kind of religion must be found. So we get, for example, Greek tragedy: we watch the hero raise his head above all others and we watch it blasted by the lightning of the gods, and in compassion and fear we at once admire him and reaffirm our common humanity. Ha!” He raised his hand in what looked like sharp warning. “Or consider Achilles and Priam in the tent, or Jesus on brotherly love.” Again his eyes bugged, and his stance was an actor’s pose: utter indignation.

“Or consider Martin Orrick,” someone said