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

working for NPR or building nuclear power plants, storage tanks for nerve gas (leaky, like all the rest), making car payments, house payments, worried about The Schools …”

At night the nurses left the door open, and the light that came in made him feel as he’d felt in his forgotten childhood, alone in the dark but safe. He lay on his back, the only position available to him, listening to the comfortable clicks and hums of the sleeping building breathing and dreaming like an animal around him, the occasional swish of a door, the suggestion of footsteps, now and then a distant voice—perhaps some guard, or doctor or nurse, or for all he knew, some patient’s TV. He slept, then wakened again as (as if in a dream) the heavy, Virginia-hills night nurse named Audrey came and changed his dressing, emptied his urine can, freshened up the water and ice in his blue plastic pitcher. “Forty years,” she said, and winked at him. “Would you believe it?” He had no idea what she meant at first, but he liked her country face and pretended to be astonished. “Forty years!” she said again, and shook her head as if even she could make no sense of it. She patted his hand as she would a child’s. “Get some sleep now, Mr. Craine.” She snapped the light off. Before her square shape was out the door, he was asleep. Then it was day again—blood samples, breakfast, bustling activity, as if everyone who came here to Nelson had come for pure pleasure.

Visiting his neighbors up and down the hall, he walked in a bubble of time exactly like childhood time: in the morning it never occurred to him that it would soon be noon, then afternoon, then evening. His neighbor to the left was an elderly Jew, formerly of New York, who’d once been America’s chief manufacturer of Panama hats, or so he said, and it was probably the truth. During World War II, the old man explained, hats went out of fashion. He had theories as to why. He’d become America’s chief historian of the Popular Song. He’d published several books. He had them there with him in the hospital room, in case anyone should care to look. Craine did. Bicycle-song period, baseball-song period, circus-song period. Changing styles in the political song, the nostalgia song, the love song. There were numerous illustrations—engravings of musicians and public figures, covers of sheet music. The scholarly comment was learned and tirelessly wry. The old wife sat smiling, proud beyond words of the brilliant, crotchety old man in the bed. The books had been published, she mentioned from time to time, by the Ohio University Press. “He never even started this history business till he was sixty-two years old,” she said. “Everybody said he was crazy. Some crazy!” “Mama,” the old man said, “you already told him.” The old man had two sons, one an engineer for Bell Telephone, the other a professor at Hofstra. Both of them came to visit, day after day, the engineer small and hearty, elegantly dressed, the professor large and sullen, nearsighted, shabby, both argumentative, impatient, and inconvenienced, but there at his bedside nevertheless, having flown in at once as if nothing were more natural in the world. Sometimes young women came, perhaps the old man’s daughters; also children. When no one else was there, the old woman sat long-nosed and hunchbacked, sleeping in the vinyl chair beside the bed, or worrying and fussing, complaining to the nurses, between times reading the old man jokes from magazines. Once, when something went wrong with the old man, so that he had to be placed in an oxygen tent and no one could be with him but his special nurse, the old woman went striding up and down the corridor, mile after mile, staring straight ahead, eyes like the eagle eyes of Moses. Craine, moving carefully with his aluminum tree, had been afraid to say a word to her. He saw, that day or another day just like it, a picture in a magazine, Jews in a concentration camp, behind barbed wire so messy and tangled it looked as if crows had built it. All the Jews in the picture were now dead. One of them was a girl of about twenty, beautiful. He was sexually aroused, and he looked up from the picture in distress, repelled by all existence, though when he thought about it he understood, of course, why he was aroused, why there was no more reason to be disgusted by that than by bedpans, say, or projectile vomiting, or the woman with her feet cut off. Nature’s way.

Everything he saw, in short, had confirmed him in his opinion that life was interesting, if one chose to see it that way, but not important, by no means a matter for joyful celebration. He was an excellent patient, uncomplaining, steadily healing. The only real unpleasantness in his hospital life, aside from the occasional shaking that came over him, was the food. Each time he lifted the cover off the tray—a yellow plastic cover dripping with condensation—the smell that wafted up was like ensilage, or mulch, old hay in a barn. Sometimes for days in a row he ate nothing but the Jell-O. Then the simple expedient occurred to him of putting on his clothes and walking out (he was unhooked from the tree by now). He knew the hospital routine like the back of his hand, and it was an easy matter to slip down the hall to the stainless steel back elevator, descend to the first floor, and walk past the guards there—no one looked up—cross to the front-door public telephone and call himself a taxi. He began going out to restaurants while he was still on the colostomy bag; an awkward business. Emptying the bag in the toilet was easy (every time he ate he had to empty the bag almost immediately, especially if he drank wine), but rinsing