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

he might be, the man was no charlatan. He demonstrated the breathing, ten thousand years old, he mildly claimed, that would suck down the powers of the universe, and spoke of how first one must revive the brain.

“Blain die first, you understand?” If a man had been dead for as much as fifteen minutes, his mind, when you brought him back to life, would be like a child’s. But between fifteen minutes and fourteen hours—the maximum—there would be very little difference. “Next we must levive the pancleas.” Next the heart. In his black suit, black hair, thick plastic-rimmed glasses he looked like a Japanese monk. After every important pronouncement he bowed. He spoke of yin and yang, the earth’s rotation, the cycles of the moon, spoke of sodium and potassium, the powerful electrical charge in the earth—the reason people sometimes come back to life in the grave. He spoke at length, thoughtfully and carefully, of the moral considerations involved in the raising of the dead—how it was a sin against nature to raise a man who had not died by mistake, to raise a man who must die again tomorrow or next week. He demonstrated the orthodox modern method of starting up the heart by pounding violently on the victim’s chest, spoke of the orthodox revival of the heart by electric shock, and showed— strange—a badly taken photograph of an old Chinese painting of a corpse being struck in the chest by a physician. As Martin listened, expressionless—not tempted to laugh: crank or not, Kushi was a holyman—he was aware all the time that she was watching him out of the corner of her eye, from the ambush of her long, dark lashes. At the end of the session—it closed with a prayer—she whispered in his ear, “But he’s a good man, mmm?”

Immediately afterward, there was a session advertised as “The Cure of Cancer.” She wanted him to hurry back to the fine old dark house and make love to her, but he wanted to attend. “You goon,” she said lovingly, “I’m not signed up for that. It costs twenty-five dollars for six weeks, and the way this place works, one session costs the same as the whole lot.”

“I’ve got twenty-five dollars,” he said.

“OK,” she said, and smiled and shrugged. “I’ll wait for you.”

“No,” he said, coming out of his trance, “I’ve got fifty dollars. You stay too. I’m a rich and famous novelist.”

“You’re crazy,” she said, and raised his hand to her lips, then lowered it, and with the fingertips stroked her own breast. He remembered with a shock how it had been with Joan, when they were kids. He remembered the next instant that fifty dollars was more than she spent, living in her macrobiotic commune, in a month.

Kushi had left the room. Though the class was supposed to begin at once, he was gone for half an hour. Outside the high, bare, round-arched windows, the sky was red. It would soon be dark. Martin’s seat was numb. He hadn’t sat cross-legged since God knew when, and the class in the raising of the dead had taken two full hours. It was surprising, in fact, that he felt as well as he did. The leg he’d broken, that time he fell in London, was throbbing slightly, but it wasn’t really painful. Nevertheless, he decided to give up his dignity and sprawl. If fat, teenaged girls could do it, and bearded freaks, why not the great Martin Orrick? What would Joan think, he wondered, if she could see him here? But his mind flinched away from it in something like fright. She would say, standing in the eight-foot-high doorway, her face alive, as theirs were not, her attire immaculate, her eyes as bright as jewels, whereas theirs were dusty—except Sarah’s, he thought: Joan would have liked Sarah, in some other world, some other time—a world and time that would never come, now—Joan would say, standing in the eight-foot-high doorway, “Have we time to exterminate these people, Paul? What time’s the concert?”

He sprawled on his side, and gently, shamelessly, Sarah snuggled up beside him. How simple and reasonable it seemed. I love you, Sarah, he thought with all his heart. —But at dinner, in the big, dark-beamed house, when someone had asked Sarah to pass the God-knows-what, he’d nudged her out of her trance saying, “Joan, would you pass the …” She hadn’t seemed to notice that he’d called her Joan, though surely it was impossible to miss a thing like that. If she did notice, she instantly forgave him, as she forgave everything. But it preyed on him a little, that slip of the tongue. He and Joan had been married more than half their lives, their habits were like rock; yet even that wasn’t what struck him, troubled him. Calling Sarah Joan, he’d said it with affection, and the feeling that had slipped out for an instant from the darkness of his mind or, maybe, heart—the absolute identity of his feelings for Joan and Sarah, and the reminder of Joan’s priority—shook him. The more he thought of it, the more suspicious it looked that Sarah had not blinked an eye—had expected it and didn’t mind. He had dimly planned, ever since the Spanish trip—without quite daring to think about it—that one day, like some character in an Updike novel, he would muster up his courage and break with his family, sometime when Joan was strong enough to take it, and would settle for the rest of his life with Sarah. It dawned on him now that it might never happen, and not, as he’d imagined, because he was afraid.

Kushi arrived, bowing and apologetic, blushing like Joan’s father, though his skin was dark. He had with him a man who claimed to be a Harvard medical professor, and a woman with, he said, metastasized cancer. It was no doubt true: she was wasted and gray. With a little start, Martin came awake: it was all not as innocent as