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

out the bag was tricky: he had to bare his gauzed and bandaged belly, hold the plastic to the faucet to get the rinse water in, worst of all empty small bits of feces in the sink, one eye on the knob of the rest room door, since if someone came in … but never mind, he managed; he was quick and as cunning as a weasel; he was almost never caught. After the takedown it was trickier yet: he had no more idea than a day-old baby when his bowels would move. Very well, he had accidents. But he managed. After one had lived in a hospital for a time, one pretty much lost all sense of shame. Vomiting, elimination, even one’s old-man dangling nakedness came to be as public as politics, less one’s own business than the business of one’s blond young nurse. It was a lesson in philosophy, another proud illusion blown rearward and flushed, as if cleaned from his system by an enema.

So Craine continued, day after day, visiting fellow patients, reading, more or less enjoying himself; and then the time came for his release. Tom Meakins arrived again, pink-cheeked, bulging in his too small checked brown suit. The nurses found boxes, which they loaded to the lids with Craine’s plants and gifts, his huge paper sacks of tape, gauze, pads, medicines, and bottles of saline solution, then stacked in two wheelchairs to carry to the taxi down below. Craine, leaning on Meakins’ arm, started down the corridor, waving his good-byes. He did not say good-bye to the music historian who’d been his neighbor; the old man had died two days ago and had been removed without anyone’s knowing—not a sound, not so much as a whisper, so far as Craine knew—in the middle of the night. “Good-bye,” Craine called to the woman who’d had both feet removed; “good-bye” to the huge, gray freak of a man sprawled like a mountain in his special chair, brought in for an operation meant to save him, whatever his opinions in the matter, from being buried alive in fat. The man stared back, too gloomy to show anger or disgust. Tom Meakins chattered, talking about the weather—it had snowed last night, maybe half an inch, a significant snowfall for Baltimore in March. Meakins’ voice was high and thin, filled with emotion. He placed his small, glossy shoes with care, taking short, timid steps, as if Craine might go crashing to the marble floor at any moment, only Meakins’ sharp watchfulness could save him. “You lost a lot of weight, old man,” Meakins said, and smiled, then turned away his face and wiped his forehead.

It was not until Craine was in the plane for Chicago—from there they’d fly down to Carbondale—that the truth burst over him and he began to weep. He was going to live. The plane groaned and shuddered, then quieted, taking off. Never in his life had Craine experienced such emptiness, such revulsion and despair. Meakins, in the seat beside him, turned to look at him, wide-eyed, then reared forward in acute distress, reaching to touch Craine’s arm with both plump, young-womanish hands. “Jerry!” he cried softly. Never before had Meakins called him “Jerry.” Meakins wet his lips, baffled and embarrassed, blushing, then brought out, “Does something hurt?” Now he too had tears in his eyes, as if he’d guessed what the trouble was.

Craine shook his head. He couldn’t speak a word for fear of bursting into whooping sobs, part sorrow, part childish rage. He covered his face, pouring the tears into his hands.

“What’s the matter?” Meakins said. “Can I get you something?”

There was no way, of course, that Craine could say what was the matter. Time was the matter; the fact that people lived and died for nothing, and horribly at that. Meakins’ daughters, once pretty, now grotesquely fat. Craine’s parents, dead when he was too young to remember; the poor old-maid aunt who’d raised him, Aunt Harriet, her silly existence vanished from the face of the earth like a puff of her Evening in Paris face powder. His friends, all those people who, incredibly, had come to visit him—faster than the airplane was rumbling toward Chicago, they were flying to their graves, all for nothing, all part of the vast, unspeakable foolishness. Women he’d loved, should perhaps have married—he no longer knew even where any of them lived—all, all were shooting like greased lightning toward the grave, or were perhaps there already.

He pulled off his thick-lensed glasses to wipe his eyes, but the tears came pouring more profusely than ever, and a whimpering, uncontrollable, began to push up from his throat. All his defenses had abandoned him at once, even that comic, ironic detachment that had until now gotten him past the worst life could dump. He saw himself as the people now craning their necks must be seeing him, a hawk-nosed old derelict with deep-sunken, red, weeping eyes; an old limp suit grown three sizes too large; long, crooked fingers, stained fingernails. He could conjure up neither amusement or disgust, only sorrow at the waste, one more poor unlovable orphan wailing its heart out to no one in particular, for no good reason.

“Listen, let me get us a drink,” Meakins said. He reached up and pushed the stewardess button. “It’s emotional exhaustion, that’s all,” he said. “It’s a natural reaction.” He loosened his tie. “You’ve been holding it all in, that’s all. It’s natural.”

Now the stewardess was coming. When she reached their row she pushed the button that turned the little light off, then leaned over to look at Craine, then, in haste, at Meakins. She was blinking rapidly, probably wearing new contacts.

“My friend here would like a martini,” Meakins said, “—double; straight up, two olives. I’ll take the same.”

“Brothers and sisters, let us drown our woes in gin,” Craine said, and tried to laugh. At once he was sobbing again. There was a movie he’d seen once, German propaganda—he’d seen it in connection