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

have today, and a trainer earned his reputation by learning to analyze an animal problem and solve it. Though “behaviorism” was a word that had not yet been perpetrated, all nineteenth-century animal trainers were behaviorists, and those who were religious, as was George Preston’s father, sooner or later confronted the greatest and oldest of philosophical problems.

Men had of course special reasons, at that time, for suspecting that there might be more to the occult than the ordinary skeptic would admit. Mesmerism was still new and shocking, and though the Académie Franchise had denounced Mesmer as a charlatan, anyone who troubled to learn the technique knew that “animal magnetism” was real. George Preston’s father and uncle Bill learned the art and were soberly convinced that the only reason they couldn’t mesmerize people who were miles away was that they were doing something wrong. They had long discussions of these mysteries and attended every experiment they could get to. Also, on the side, less for simple pleasure than as insurance against the chance of bunkum, they learned tricks with cards, goldfish, rabbits, nickel-plated pistols, and mirror boxes. Many of these George Preston learned, some only when his father and uncle were dead and he inherited their books. At his own death he passed them on to Buddy, through whom they reached Evan, who made them the backbone of his wonderfully skillful, ridiculous act. (“Goldfish?” he would say, raising the handkerchief behind which he was supposed to find the ace of hearts. “Oh well,” he would say to the audience, smiling and blushing with pleasure, exactly as his grandfather would do, “it could be worse. Once I got chickens.”)

In their search for something beyond mere illusion, George Preston’s father and uncle Bill gave psychic tests to George and his brothers and sisters. They would deal out, for instance, a pack of ordinary playing cards, face down on the table, from which each member of the family was to select one without looking at it, and was to sit with his fingertips just touching the card until he believed he knew the card’s value. It was a foolish game, George’s mother thought, more tiresome even than guessing thoughts or Ouija, and no one in the family would have played it if George’s father and uncle Bill hadn’t been salesmen as clever as George Preston was to be. They would play this “game,” as they called it, hour after hour, on the brothers’ theory that psychic power was a thing that required developing, like a muscle; and time after time the members of the family would, after much thought, name the cards they thought they had, and the cards would be turned up, and everyone would be wrong.

One night, according to family legend, an odd thing happened. Buddy Orrick’s uncle George, who was six at the time, fell asleep in his chair while the game dragged on. When his father called his name, he looked around, confused, realized what was happening, and named a card at random—the four of clubs. “Turn it over, Georgy,” his father said, a touch impatient, and he was already turning to the next player when George’s small fingers turned over the four of clubs. According to George Preston’s story later, the family whooped with delight and hugged him, overjoyed because in this game for loonies and idiots someone had finally won. His father and uncle were eager to deal the cards and try again, but it was late and George’s mother—she was a pinched-looking woman who wore her hair in a bun and, judging by her photograph, had no good to say of anything—put her foot down: the children must get some sleep.

The brothers agreed at once, but they were unscrupulous mad scientists and had their plans prepared. Half an hour later they crept furtively to little Georgy’s bed, candles in their hands, their flickering shadows towering behind them, looking over their shoulders, half wakened him from sleep to give him a playing card, keeping the face from him, and asked him what it was. “The queen of diamonds,” he said. It was, indeed, the queen of diamonds. He would remember years later how, looking up into the two men’s crazily eager, candlelit faces, his father holding another card to him, he’d felt a wild surge of excitement himself, a sudden conviction that in some way he couldn’t put his finger on, he knew how he’d done it and could do it again. But he knew the next instant that he’d been wrong about that. He had no idea what the card he was touching now might be.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Come, come,” his father said, smiling, the candlelight glinting on his teeth. “Make your mind a blank.”

Their heads were tipped toward each other, and their smiles, their slightly lifted eyebrows, the way the fingertips of their right hands gently touched their beards, were identical. It seemed the intense reality of their image that blocked his vision of what the card might be. The room was becoming more solid by the moment: the wallpaper, stained where the roof had leaked, the commode with its shiny, cracked pitcher and chamber pot and washbasin, the scratchy curtain, every thread more precise than usual—as if the two men and the room were a startling, unreal vision, so that his ordinary knowledge of the value of the card had been driven from his thought by the intensity of the strange dream risen before his eyes. “I don’t know,” he said again. “I’m sleepy.”

“That’s right,” his uncle said, and tilted toward him like a huge automaton. “You’re sleepy…very sleepy.” He raised his hand, moved it slowly from left to right. George slept.

He could never have proved, he would readily admit, that it had been anything more than luck that night. His father and uncle had continued to force the game on the family—also other games of the same kind: for instance, one with painted matchsticks, where one was supposed to guess what color had been