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

for now he must hurry on, step lightly, beware of getting tangled in his shoelaces. “You think I like making these sacrifices?” he asked. He leaned forward and raised the coffee cup with two hands, sipped the Scotch-coffee loudly, then set down the cup again. “But there are forms, you know. We have to accept that. Right ways and wrong ways of doing things, you know. Not true forms, mind you. Not Platonic forms.” Craine’s voice, unbeknownst to him, was sorrowful. “Social prejudices, expectations, that’s what we’re discussing.” He leered again, his sagging eyes morose. “How do I know you’re a professor?” he asked, slightly nasty. “Because you behave like a professor, you dress like a professor, you occasionally throw in a little French.” He let out what he meant for a smile, squinting, and raised his cup again. When he’d sucked in, loudly, intending to offend, he hurried on, lowering the cup, picking up the pipe, relighting it. “So it is with us. Form is function, as the physicists say—and vice-a-versa. What does the American private detective do? Lew Archer, say? J. T. Malone? He drinks Scotch! Every time he turns around, every scene he walks into, more Scotch! It’s hard on the system, but you see how it is, we have no choice. Just like the Avon lady can’t be too fat. And when he’s shadowing people he reads newspapers, magazines, books. Thass less harmful, probly—” He felt the slur coming into his speech and took hold of himself. “Depends on what you read.” He pointed with his pipe stem at the old book on Sanskrit beside his cup.

McClaren looked at it, shook his head, the glass hovering in his still hand halfway to his mouth. “I believe this is the strangest conversation I ever got into,” he said.

“Yes, that’s part of it too! I’m glad you noticed! Sam Spade pretended to be dishonest, remember? You’ve seen The Maltese Falcon, I imagine. Yes of course. Everybody has. Yer going over for it, baby. I’m not gonna play the sap fer you. Humphrey Bogart. Me now, I play crazy.” He cackled, the sound so crazy in the great, dark, empty restaurant that for an instant he was frightened.

“Now wait a minute,” Inspector McClaren said, scowling, prepared to smile if it should prove that Craine was joking.

“It’s the number one problem of existence,” Craine said, “finding the adequate function for your form, or coming to understanding of the form behind your function, in common parlance value or motive, criminal or otherwise.” He showed his teeth. “Now the determinists maintain—”

“Listen,” Inspector McClaren broke in. He touched the corner of his horn-rims with his thumb and first finger. “Let me see if I understand this.” He pointed at Craine’s coffee cup, then frowned, raised his eyebrows, and looked over at the curtain where the waiter had disappeared. He forgot his question—one could see the gears shudder and stop like huge old mill-wheel gears when the mill’s foundation breaks, giving way to the flood. A blush of fury rose up in him and he pushed back his chair, got up, went over to the service bell on the bar, and clanged it. When nothing happened, he clanged it again, stared at the curtain for a moment, then came back to the table. “This ‘character’ you put on, this strange manner of behaving—”

He saw by Craine’s face that the waiter had appeared, and he swung his head around. “Waiter, what happened to that cream?”

“Ah!” the boy said, throwing both hands up, laughing. He went back out through the curtain. McClaren pursed his lips, still angry, then after a moment checked the chair seat and carefully sat down again.

“That now,” Craine said, leaping with both feet into the hole in the conversation, meaning to kick it in yet another direction—he pointed toward where the waiter had been, and leaned forward to speak more confidentially—“that’s a typical case!”

“Case?” McClaren said.

“Brute substance,” Craine said. “Here we are having an intelligent conversation, a meeting of minds, as one might say, and what happens? A zenseless—” He checked himself. “Senseless accident! We don’t think of events as brute substance, but they are! Of course they are!” He hit the table. “In the war of mind and matter we have to keep these things clear. Nothing’s static, that’s the great lesson we’ve learned. Process, the meaningless spinning of wheels—click, spin, click—that’s materiality! So how do you work?”

“Pardon?” Inspector McClaren said and blinked.

“How do you work?” Craine pushed his hat back, thinking of Sam Spade, and waited, showing his rat smile, deeply interested.

“How do I work?” Inspector McClaren said. He looked at Craine over the tops of his glasses. He had the expression of a man on the verge of becoming airsick.

“Technique,” Craine said. “M.O.”

The Chinese boy came through the curtain with the cream, glided to the table, and set it down. “Everything aw-right?” he said.

“Fine,” Craine said. “Wonderful.” He winked at him.

McClaren glanced from Craine to the waiter, then back into his glass. The waiter left. Craine poured cream into his coffee and Scotch. He smiled and waited.

“Let me ask you this, Gerald,” Inspector McClaren said at last, as if forgetting Craine’s question, or maybe thinking himself clever to have managed to avoid it so easily. “Do you remember nothing whatsoever of your personal past?”

“Nothing,” Craine said.

“Your parents? Your schooldays? University?” His head slowly tilted, and his right hand moved up to take his glasses partway off.

“Nothing.”

Inspector McClaren pushed the horn-rims back on, then raised his whiskey glass and swirled the yellow liquid. The ice had all melted. He was frowning ferociously. “How about things that happened, say, two weeks ago?

He was zeroing in now in earnest, Craine saw. Figuring out how much of the decline in the quality of American life they could pin on him.

“I sometimes remember some of that,” Craine said. “It comes back to me when I need it, more often than not. I have what you might call ‘practical memory.’ I could tell you my