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

As soon as they’d come out on the sidewalk, there was that feeling again. Eyes nailing him like headlight beams. He got an image of Eggers’ meek face, then McClaren’s—nostrils twitching, pale eyes snapping.

The smell of food was stronger now, and it came to him that what he chiefly desired in this world was a talk with his neighbor Ira Katz. Impossible, of course. He would be busy grading papers or writing poetry or whatever it was he did nights. Listening to his clocks. Or he’d have some young woman with him, yes. Embarrassing all round.

A queer tingling came over him and he looked up. His right hand knuckles and wrist ached. Too much smoking, no doubt. Thickening the blood, pushing the pressure up, loading the system with carbon monoxide. Incredible what the old corpse would tolerate! With the tip of his tongue he touched the sandpaper roof of his mouth just behind the front teeth. His gums were painfully sensitive, as always; advanced case of stomatosis, he’d been told. It wouldn’t become cancer—Craine’s opinion, not the dentist’s—he’d be saved by the law of parsimony; his weak spot had already been found. He hadn’t bothered to mention his theory to the dentist, naturally, lest the dentist convince him that the theory was, as Craine knew, nonsense. Craine frowned, glanced crossly at the door. It was a strange business, how a man rushed tail over tin cup toward the grave, kicking and swinging at every guardian angel that stupidly rose up, batting its wings and blocking his path, yelling, “Halt, maniac! Turn aside!”

When they’d diagnosed him—“colon carcinoma”—in the hospital just across the parking lot from the Baptist building where his offices were, he hadn’t felt the slightest trace of fear or shock; he’d simply been interested; perhaps—strange to say—almost pleased. He’d been sick for weeks: diarrhea, cramps; he couldn’t say how long ago it had started. They’d rammed in the old sigmoidoscope, casual and fierce as veterinarians, and that was that. So it’s cancer, he’d thought. He’d assumed from the start it meant curtains. He’d never known anyone who’d been told he had cancer and not died of it. With cancer of the colon it wasn’t necessarily that bad, people told him. Tom Meakins had an uncle who’d lived forty-one years after a cancer-of-the-colon operation. But the doctors at Johns Hopkins, where the doctors at Carbondale had immediately shipped him, had spoken guardedly, neither holding out nor withholding hope, so he’d gone on figuring he was done for. Better than a twenty-minute death by angina pectoris, which was what he’d been expecting, he’d thought—better than bouncing around, slamming against walls, screaming his head off with pain, nothing anyone could do. And of course he was done for. They could take out the growth, get all of it out, as apparently they’d done, but he still had cancer, a shadow inside him for life, the same drab shadow that lay over the world. Well, well! was all he’d thought, so Craine is to go to his reward! His indifference had gone deep. Even here, far from home, in Baltimore, he hadn’t had a hint of a nightmare. When friends, or rather acquaintances, had stopped in to visit him, happening by plane or train toward Washington, even coming on purpose—true foul-weather friends—and had delicately skirted the subject of death, piously mentioning prayer and God, bringing him amulets, miraculous diets, a cut-glass-windowed silver case which contained what appeared to be a very small part of the tooth of a saint, Mother Seton by name (tell him no more about modern enlightenment: someone had sawed that poor woman to bits and laid her aside like money in the bank in the hope that, in spite of the odds, she might one day be canonized), he’d nodded as politely as patience would allow, had hurried them over the difficult parts, and soothed them with Styrofoam cups of the Teachers’ Scotch he kept hidden in his nightstand.

It should have been one of the most significant periods of his life, he would have said. When a man thinks he’s dying, that’s when you’d think he’d take stock in earnest, face up to things. Take stock of what, though? The meaning of life? There he’d take his stand with that fellow Celine, best writer in the world, in Craine’s opinion: “Shut your eyes, that’s all that’s necessary. There you have life seen from the other side.” Dying did not change what he knew to be the case, that one way of life was as good as another. Farmer, priest, murderer …Ah, when you were young, watching the colorful, noisy parade, one set of bandsmen took your fancy above all others—perhaps it was the one with the silver trombones, or the one where the drummers threw their sticks in the air, or perhaps it was the one where the drum majorettes were young gentlemen in drag—no matter, you made your choice, threw in your lot with them, chose their company as if all other companies were ludicrous, contemptible; you fell in behind them, hopping to get in step, sucked in your belly, prettily lifted your chest and chin, threw your elbows out left and right like corn knives, and by diligent apprenticeship you became, by God, what you became. Very good; congratulations! And so the world paraded, overwhelmed with itself, until dusk, when the music petered out and the marching stopped, and, standing in a light, smoky rain, all the bandsmen—band on band from horizon to horizon—stood trying to keep their cigarettes lit, grumbling about wages, waiting for the chartered bus. It was all proud, childish foolishness. Third Reich, Mother Russia, China, driving permit, merit badges …shit clouds collapsing into planets, proud boulders in space …That had been Gerald Craine’s opinion before, and it was his opinion now that he was dying. Bankers against bank robbers; indignant, trembling teachers against proud or distressed ignoramuses; priests superstitiously kissing their crosses against bug-eyed, whimpering