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

“Incredible,” McClaren said. He worked on it some more. “Perhaps you drink too much?”

Craine leered and raised his cup.

“Even so,” McClaren said, blushing, “to have forgotten your parents, your affaires de coeur—if you don’t mind my saying so, it would seem to indicate—” Again he shot Craine a furtive, scrutinizing look. “You’re teasing me,” he said, and abruptly smiled. “It’s part of that act you spoke of.”

“Well, think what you please,” Craine said. If he was smart, he knew, he’d claim that, yes, it was indeed an act. His chest was full of panic: it was like playing with dynamite, fooling with a creature like McClaren. But some madness was in him, some craziness finally metaphysical, or chemical; same thing. No doubt to McClaren it was Craine who seemed the enemy of mankind, outrage against decency and reason. No doubt to McClaren it was Craine who seemed the alien, the terrible beast from deep space, the spider. Oh yes, yes, one could easily understand these things, take the larger view. Suddenly, Craine felt defensive, annoyed. Though perhaps it was just his drunkenness, it seemed to him now that it was a serious matter, this door he’d closed on his past, closed on all of it, and sealed up tight, so that hardly a shred of light broke through. How many people in the history of the world had ever done such a thing, freely, for no reason, for the pure existential élan of it? or if not that (for no doubt he was exaggerating now, it had not been entirely voluntary), if not that, then how many people, having found themselves forgetting things, had confirmed and approved the unsettling process, voluntarily shaped it as a sculptor confirms and shapes the design in marble? He was a walking proof of the physicist’s proposition that everything that can happen in the universe does happen. Once in the history of the universe, it could be said from now on, a man locked himself outside Time. A petty-minded fool would say, “Why? What caused it?” The man of heroic vision would say, “Behold what has been caused!”

Craine found himself whining. “It’s the truth, actually. Most people don’t like that kind of thing. If they don’t do it—in this case, forget things—then it shouldn’t be done. That’s the universal law. ‘Herd law,’ I call it, as in cattle, not ears.”

“Ah yes, Nietzsche,” the inspector said.

Craine nodded, grimacing. “Perhaps. But I ask you, why should a man remember things? I grant you, there are various opinions about Time. There’s the popular, simpleminded one—no, let me finish, let me explain!” Craine raised his hand.

McClaren leaned back in his chair, letting him hang himself.

“There’s the popular notion, Time as an onward rushing stream, a river—a notion that brings with it the corollary assumption of a moving present moment, the little bubble of now. But obviously the meaning of past and future must be determined not merely at the surface, that is, the psychological level—you can see that yourself—but also at a deeper, ontological level. All around and in between the no more and the not yet come lies the eternally present and at the same time eternally absent time zone called now. Correct? Absent in the same sense that if Time is the whole created universe from Big Bang to Fizzle, then we’re not it, we’re a hole in it, or rather we’re the mice in the hole in it.” He laughed. “But neither of these times, psychological or ontological, gets mentioned at all in the mathematician’s or the physicist’s description of Time, or rather Space-time.” Again he raised his hand. “No wait, I’m not finished!” He took a sip from his cup, spilling a little down his chin in his haste. His whine became, even in his own ears, more petulant. “In the physicist’s description of the universe, there’s no provision whatever for a flowing time or, by implication, a moving now.”

“That may be so,” McClaren began.

“It’s all a trick, you see,” Craine explained, leaning forward still more, both hands clinging to the cup as if without it he’d be dragged—like Atlantis, like Rome and the British Empire—into the darkness below the table. “These notions of time and space we have, it all comes of thinking too much about objects—including ourselves, you see, the ‘subjects’ embedded in the general clutter of objectivity. Now I, for one, have refused to be deluded! What I cannot endorse, I take no part in.”

“But you are here, sitting at this table,” McClaren said uncertainly.

“Only for practical purposes,” Craine said.

McClaren frowned, slowly shaking his head. He feigned professorial patience, a decent man’s willingness to hear all points of view—leaning back comfortably, glass in hand—but his eyes were smoldering, as if he suspected his intelligence was being trifled with. “You’ve got all this from that book?” he asked, nodding toward Craine’s book.

“No, a different one,” Craine said. “The Avengers. It’s a comic book. You’d be surprised what a man can learn from comic books.” He cackled and threw McClaren a wink, then raised his cup two-handed and drank.

“Crazy stupid shit,” Inspector McClaren said; or perhaps Craine only imagined it. “I see,” McClaren said. He considered the matter from all angles. “What I don’t quite follow,” he said, “is why this makes you forget things.” For all his studied dignity—the professorial jacket, the carefully cultivated look of one who has encountered this question a time or two before—he looked vulnerable as a chicken, as if he feared that his question might have given him away, might have revealed that, contrary to the impression he’d so diligently labored to create, that huge pink dome was empty.

“Ah, that!” Craine said. “Why do I forget things? Yes, that’s the question we must grapple with.”

Slowly, as if Craine had drained off some of his vital energy, Inspector McClaren leaned forward again and settled his weight, more heavily than before, on his elbows. “You actually have no memory of your past