Stillness & Shadows John Gardner (nice books to read .txt) 📖

he touched Craine’s arm to draw his attention back. Craine squinted, waiting. If it weren’t for the slight alcoholic haze, he’d have noticed long ago that there was something peculiar in the way Dr. Tummelty had latched onto him, clinging like a burr. Someone else, of course, would have dismissed it at once as an old man’s loneliness. (That, as Craine often remarked, was why Craine was the detective, not someone else.) “It’s not a concept I fully understand,” Dr. Tummelty said, “but I gather it suggests that the physical universe may be constructed in completely different ways, so that it shows itself to us in one way or another depending on how we look at it. Ask questions that assume light travels in waves, and the universe obliges us by answering in waves. Ask questions that assume light flows in particles, and the universe answers you in particles. There’s no resolving the conflict—no ‘wavicles,’ as some scientific wag once expressed it. The universe is this, but also that—that’s complementarity, if I haven’t got it wrong. It’s a fascinating business. Look at it one way in isospin space … isospin space … and an object’s a proton; look at it another, and it’s a neutron. Science, religion … rationality, intuition …”

Craine glanced at him, then down again, half eager to move on, half arrested, his scalp prickling; the sensation that someone was observing him was increasing by leaps and bounds. (Without his knowing it, his hand drew his pipe toward his mouth. His teeth caught the bit and his hand reached into his coat to look for matches among the paper scraps.) The only time he’d heard the bell above the door, he was almost certain, was when the boy in the oversized red sweater came in. Was the girl still there, then? the young woman in the long black cloak? Was she police?—was that it? But if so, why him? He squinted, chilled. Why not, after all? It was the oldest trick in the handbook: pin it on some drunk. His head gave a little involuntary jerk and his mouth fell open. Never! They knew him! Never in a million years! But the flushing in his chest told him otherwise. He strained to clear his wits, get cold sober for an instant—just one clear-headed instant was all he’d need—but all he could get, strain as he might, was a surge of witless fear that made him jerk his right hand toward the bottle. He stopped himself by such ferocious force of will that his hand hung there shaking like a machine.

“Suppose the two lobes see whole different universes, both of which are there,” Dr. Tummelty said, still touching Craine’s arm, searching his eyes as if with feigned innocence—as if someone had hired him to check Craine out, or maybe delay him while a trap was set—“one universe superimposed on the other, so to speak. Or interdigitated. On the one hand, the universe Carnac sees; on the other hand …” He studied Craine as if to make out what he thought. Waving his left hand, dismissing innumerable objections, he hurried on: “Suppose in addition to physical particles—quarks and anti-quarks, neutrinos, muons—there are spiritual particles—prayerons, say.” He smiled, looking over Craine’s head, not quite joking. “Suppose that in that accident Two-heads had, some curious rewiring of his brain resulted, something analogous to the operation formerly done in Tibet, we’re told—the opening of the mystic … so to speak … third eye. I don’t say I believe all that, mind you, but one of the things we’ve been learning lately—”

“Mmm,” Craine said. “Here, let me get that door for you.” Like a man stepping over a crevasse, Craine threw one foot forward.

As his stretched hand went for the doorknob an explosion of barking went off behind him. Craine jumped, violently and awkwardly, throwing one arm out but nearly falling even so, and swung his long sharp nose around in the same motion, just in time to see a gray paper airplane come to rest in the shadowy space between his feet and Tully’s desk. Tully stared at him, his caved-in mouth wide open, black as a pit. The airplane had been made from the page of some old book. The dog, half up on his feet, barked once, twice more, then stopped, embarrassed, looking around over his shoulder at Wilbur Tully.

“Hyah!” Tully yelled, throwing all the force of his fury, all his rage at the universe, at the dog. Craine shrank, cringed as the dog did, averting his gaze. His eye landed on the airplane. On one wing, in pencil, Carnac—or someone—had drawn a picture of a large, staring eye with enormous lashes.

“Goddamn you!” Tully was bellowing. “Goddamn you sons of bitches!” The yell came out distinctly, nothing ever clearer, but his mouth was, all the while, tight shut.

“You all right, Detective?” Dr. Tummelty asked, catching Craine’s arm.

“Fine,” Craine said, and jerked his arm back, harder than he meant to. His weak eyes searched wildly, trying to make sure it was Carnac who’d done this, but he couldn’t make out even the back of the store. “Never better!” he said, and gave a quick, fierce cackle. He lunged forward, snatched the door open, and stepped out into the light.

Two

The day was blindingly bright and clear, the sky and the sunlit walls of buildings charged with that yellow-white, tropical brilliance of sunlight unexpectedly encountered after hours in a movie theater, except worse, more like the darkness of Mammoth Cave or the center of the earth. Pain shot in through his eye sockets. Coming out into the daylight had been a mistake, he saw; but after all that business he could hardly go back. He shaded his eyes with the book on Sanskrit, then, gradually adjusting to the dazzle in every atom on the sunstruck street, groped forward, lowering the book, reaching out vaguely, like a swimmer, his shoes stumbling close to obstructions in his path, then away again, his right elbow now clamped