October Light by John Gardner
She glanced in annoyance at the light above the bed, soft, over-shaded, then at the ceiling globe, hardly brighter. They’d certainly never been designed for reading. She could do as well lighting up the kerosene lamp on the commode.
She thought, for some reason, of James’ wife Ariah, pretty-faced and witless, dead now for years—a kind of cancer. The whole house, this house in which Sally had grown up, bore yet the stamp of Ariah’s sweet, soft character. She remembered her putting up lace curtains in bright sunlight, singing. “You have a lovely voice,” Horace had said. He’d always been especially polite to ladies. It had to do, partly, with his dentistry work. Ever after that time, whenever Sally and Horace had come up to visit, Ariah had found reason to sing to herself. It was annoying.
The old woman returned, somewhat abruptly, to her book.
2
ALKAHEST’S CONVERSION
John F. Alkahest, sitting in his wheelchair at the polished rail of the Coast Guard cutter, peered down through his opera glasses at the fishingboat below. The whole evening had made his heart race—it was his first ride on a Coast Guard cutter—but this was beyond his wildest dreams. The word suicide had shogged through the night, and now Guardsmen, pumping elegant, animal muscles, chins poking forward with glorious intent, hurried back and forth, prepared for self-sacrifice and wide heroic gesture, though mostly they had nothing to do. John Alkahest was not a Guardsman but a medical doctor—an ex-brain-surgeon, who had had, in his day, an excellent reputation. He was now eighty-three. Several things stood out about him. First, he was paraplegic. He’d been in a wheelchair since the age of nine, when his father, disordered by a tumor and hard to live with in any case, had shot him in the back. Second, he looked like a man dressed as Death for some macabre party. His head was like a skull, as white and devoid of sheen as chalk, and his hands were so ashen you’d have sworn he carried in his vessels not blood but formaldehyde. Along with the paleness went a curious hypersensitivity, a gift for precise sensory definition highly unusual in elderly persons: he was—as he sometimes remarked himself—like one of those characters in gothic tales who could hear a dead woman’s shroud rustle many rooms away. He had a nose more delicate than a hunting dog’s, and his sense of touch was extraordinary. Only his sense of sight was inferior. His glasses were thick, a smoky yellow-brown. And whether because of his myopia or for darker reasons, Dr. Alkahest’s eyes, set deep in his head, had a glitter that even old colleagues who’d known him for years found unnerving. It was to counteract the effect of those eyes that he smiled, whenever he remembered, his death’s-head smile. He was, it goes without saying, vain. He wore dark, natty suits, funeral ties hand-made in Italy, a ruby stickpin, and, tonight, a great Austrian overcoat with a black fur collar. His motorized wheelchair was a luxury model, a Mercedes-Benz among wheelchairs: a black leather seat, silver spokes, and black leather arms. He had a handsome purple lap rug draped over his knees.
The reason for Dr. Alkahest’s presence on the Coast Guard cutter was a remarkably powerful feeling he’d developed, in recent months, that his life was a pitch-black, bottomless pit devoid of all pleasure, all direction. He needed thrills, he thought; quasi-sexual thrills, the kind he’d gotten, for a while at least, after hiring his cleaning woman Pearl, who’d been raped. Though once notorious among the English set and a sometime celebrated frequenter of gay bars, old Dr. Alkahest had been inactive for years. He had lost all sense of …
“Drat,” Sally Abbott said. There was a leaf missing, pages eleven and twelve. She looked through the other loose pages in the book, but it was lost completely. It occurred to her that maybe it was still on the floor, where she’d found the book, or had slipped under the bed. She put the book on the table, open to her place, and got out of bed to look. She bent down—still spry for all her years—and with her left hand raised the dust-ruffle. The page was not there. She straightened up again, scowling out the window toward the road.
“If you had any sense, you’d drop the silly book and get some sleep,” she said, more or less to her reflection.
The trees in the front yard were motionless and dark—rather strangely dark considering that by daylight they were all in their brightest autumn foliage. Over by the fence something moved. She jumped. It was nothing, just a chicken, yet even after she’d identified the movement she was uneasy, as if like her crazy uncle Ira, long years ago, she believed an animal might be more than it seemed. She considered reading on, never mind the two pages, then decided to get into her nightie first. She started for the bathroom to wash her hands and face, and remembered only when she pulled at the knob that her brother had locked her door. She stood motionless, sudden hot anger flushing through her, then breathed deeply and drew back her hand. She needed to use the toilet, but she was a woman of stronger than average will, as her mother had been, and her grandmother; she could last all night, if necessary. And in any case, when her niece came home all this foolishness would end.
She undressed, slightly trembling, holding in her wrath, hung her dress in the closet, put her nightie on, tucked her hankie in her sleeve, put her teeth in the waterglass, and got back into bed with her book. She breathed deeply again. Still no sound downstairs. She read:
… two figures on the deck of the fishingboat, waving, pointing at the water. While they were still shouting, their boat began to move. Soon the searchlight picked out nothing but tumbling fog.
Then something happened. It felt at first, to Dr. Alkahest, like sunstroke, or like one of those attacks one gets sometimes when one is short of vitamins, or unduly keyed up. The canvas hoses and polished brass fittings, the studded bulkhead, the too-clean deck, the rail, the Guardsmen’s uniforms, took on an intensified, unnatural “presence,” in the painter’s special sense—the not quite alarming but startling thereness of normal vision in early childhood. He snatched at his flask, believing he might faint, but even as he did so his refined senses closed on the delicate impression as an ordinary man would take hold of an axe. Then, like a violent eruption in his mind, the whole thing came clear. It was the smell of cannabis! It churned up out of the sea beside the ship as if the whole belly of the world had disgorged it. It lifted him heavenward like a scent of new-mown hay. It brought back his childhood, his first kiss, his Summa Cum Laude. It made him want to sing. He made a tentative peeping noise and, after a moment, crazed by the narcotic, he did, in fact, sing. His head fell back, his mouth gaped wide. Io Pagliacci! Sailors up near the bow turned and looked at him. He wavered. He bit off the note, apologetically leered. He hummed to himself, choked off even that, fumbled with the cap of the flask, and drank. He hummed again. He giggled, then immediately put on a sober face. His whole reason for coming on the cutter had dropped out of his mind. “I’m so happy!” he thought. He shook his head—his hands shook too—in amazement. But now the officer was coming toward him, looking rather odd, and he got hold of himself in earnest. He put away the flask. “Dee dee dee DUM” he sang, then finally, irrevocably, stopped himself. Even so, the scent was everywhere, that beatific smell. He could smell it through his pores. It was incredibly like hay—but hay transmuted, glorified, dubbed Knight. Surely they too must notice! He’d smelled pot before, of course, and had thought it quite pleasant, as the smell of weeds went. But this was something else. They must have had tons of it aboard, those “fishermen.” God bless them, he thought. God bless them every one! To his right and behind him, out toward the sea, foghorns moaned, and, somewhere toward land, a bell clinked four times. Tears filled his eyes. Pot was in the wind! God was in his glory! What sport for the Sons of Liberty! He wept.
The officer with the bullhorn approached him, coming slowly, sliding his hand on the rail as would a child. He seemed not quite sure what to say, if anything, about old Dr. Alkahest’s behavior. The officer was a big, burly man, an Italian or Greek, but in his confusion he looked like a shy, self-conscious boy. Dr. Alkahest dabbed away tears with his hankie. He thought of mentioning the scent, then, suddenly shrewd, thought he’d wait.
Dr. Alkahest nodded, then remembered to look grave.
The man shook his head. “We get hundreds of ’em off that bridge, ye know.” He had a muscular face, small squinting eyes, a dimple. He pressed the bell of the bullhorn against his beer-drinker’s stomach, squinting harder, and cocked his head. “You believe in flying saucers?” he asked.
“I beg your pardon?” Dr. Alkahest said. He smiled. The merest flicker.
“It all ties up,” the man said. He pursed his lips, then nodded.
Dr. Alkahest tapped his fingertips soundlessly on the arms of his wheelchair. His skull eye-holes in their steel-rimmed glasses looked past the man’s head into the drifting fog, and in what sounded in his own ears like a faraway voice, as if he were reciting some poem he’d learned many years ago, he said, “The sea, in its infinite gentleness, carries all things, good and evil, shit or otherwise.”
The officer glanced at him.
Dr. Alkahest smiled, breathed deep. “It submits to all gods.”
The officer glanced down, this time pursing his lips so hard it made his nose move.
But Dr. Alkahest smiled on, frail, fragile fingertips tapping the silver opera glasses that rested on the purple lap rug. He moved his head forward and down slowly, pursuing anfractuous questions of philosophy. He resisted with all his might the temptation to hum a little ditty, though it boomed in his head: Have some Madeira, my dear! It’s really much nicer than beer! “I’ve often reflected,” he said gently, thoughtfully, “that we should all of us try to be more tolerant. Close our noisy mouths and accept divergent lifestyles. After all, that’s America! Truth has many faces, even changes her mind. We organize, you know, we establish splendid laws, but—” He paused, breathed more deeply, nostrils trembling. “New men will come, and not improbably with new ideas; at this very instant the causes productive of such change are strongly at work.”
The officer mulled it over a moment, peering into the fog. At last he said …
More pages were missing. Sally Abbott looked up, listening, eyes narrowed, then sighed irritably and looked back at the book. “We’re our own worst enemies,” Horace had often said. (Now what on earth had brought that to mind?) She discovered that a line from the book was idly repeating itself in her head. Close our noisy mouths and accept divergent lifestyles. Horace would no doubt have agreed with that, though for reasons not quite pure. (She was no child; she could accept impurity of motivation. All of us hold back. We all “hedge our bets,” as her friend Estelle’s husband Ferris used to say.) As he grew into middle age—though he’d once been a talkative man—Horace had fallen more and more into the habit of silence, especially with her. When he came home from the office he’d do nothing but listen to his music and read, though perhaps inside his mind he talked endlessly to himself. Not that he’d been sullen! She’d never known a more contented man. He was quiet, merely. Men frequently grew more quiet and withdrawn as they got older. It had been the opposite with her. She’d started out a quiet one, but now in her old age she liked nothing better than a little conversation when the mailman came, or the insurance man, or when she met old friends at Powers’ Market.
She could remember well how hurt she’d been at first by Horace’s unwillingness to talk. She’d been jealous, in a way, and hadn’t been altogether wrong to be. It had come to a head as they were speaking one night—or rather she was speaking—about her sister-in-law, about Ariah’s cooking, actually, and about cooking in general, though what was in the back of her mind was an image of Horace wiping dishes, up at her brother’s house, some weeks before, joking with Ariah and little Richard. Horace was at work tonight on his map of next year’s flower garden; Sally, here in their own kitchen, did the dishes alone. Horace seemed to listen to her talk of Ariah without interest, speaking not a word. “My,” she’d finally said, “you’re certainly the quiet one tonight!” She’d put her fists on her hips, smiling hard, giving him no choice but to say something.
He went right on working with his map and colored pencils, and after a minute he said, “Are you aware that we have on this planet, or used to have, something like ten thousand languages—maybe more?”
“That’s a great many,” she’d said, studying him, putting up her guard.
He nodded. “Yes sir, it’s the last frontier.” He eyed his map, for a moment holding it away from him. “You’d think we’d all get together and try to speak one language, wouldn’t you? It would improve understanding, advance the cause of peace.” He glanced at her and grinned, pleased with himself, secretly remote.
She’d said nothing, still studying him, smelling a trap.
“Well, we never will,” he’d said, shaking his head, still grinning that private, insufferable grin that wasn’t meant to be understood—putting down the yellow pencil, picking up a blue one. “Children will continue to say ‘I and him,’ scold them all you like, and your brother will continue to say ‘Here I be.’ Peace and understanding—” He looked over her head, thoughtful. “That’s the dilemma of democracy.”
She hadn’t been fooled by his fancy talk, and in a sudden flash of hurt feelings and indignation she’d lashed out, still smiling: “Why don’t you just run away with her?”
He hadn’t pretended not to know who she meant. “I never said that’s what I want, Moogle.” (It was one of the pet names they’d called each other.)
“Everything she makes tastes of onions,” she said.
He shook his head, smiling, saying something in French. He knew she knew no French. After that he would say nothing, and gradually it came to her—it made her scalp prickle—what it was he’d meant: people had all those languages in order not to be understood. They were castle walls. She had cried that night, understanding that there were things about her that he did not want to know, and parts of himself he would hide from her, wall off, even if he spoke of them. She’d learned to accept it, though it was natural to be watchful and suspicious. It was at about that time that he’d begun to read aloud to her. What she thought of it she wasn’t quite sure, though she’d quickly grown used to it.
She pursed her lips, eyes narrowed again, then abruptly looked down at her book. After the gap of missing pages, it continued:
… him that he slid down awkwardly in his chair and couldn’t pull himself up.
“Doctor,” the officer said.
But he waved him away, gasping with laughter, and leaned forward to say more. He had a sense that he was speaking very rapidly, though as a matter of fact an omniscient observer could have told him he was not. “I survive, of course. My cleaning woman makes little remarks—I embarrass her, no doubt. Working for a lunatic crippled pervert soils her reputation. But I survive. I can’t help myself, you know. I tease people in uniforms the way monkeys climb trees, or chickens lay pigs.” (There was something wrong with that, he felt at once; but the more he thought about it the better he liked it.) He’d slid practically out of his chair by now, and realizing this, he felt sudden panic. The pot smell strengthened. Then the lights all went off.
He woke up in a white, white room. A man in a white coat looked over at him and nodded to show that all was white. The officer stood leaning on the studded white doorway, his face fixed in a wince.
“This happened to you before?” the man in white said.
Dr. Alkahest stretched his eyes open wider. Hours might have passed. Days.
“You seem to have fainted,” the man in white said.
“Ah,” he said, growing clearer. He tried to sit up, felt faint—sickish woozy—and lay back again. He seemed to be floating above the table. The officer came over from the door, and Dr. Alkahest suddenly remembered. He asked urgently, craftily, lifting his head, “Why do you suppose those people had their lights off?”
The officer glanced at the man in white, the ship’s doctor.
“The fishingboat,” Dr. Alkahest explained, irritated, his old heart racing, and at last the half-wit officer understood. He sucked in his breath, puffed his cheeks out, patted his belly. “Good question,” he said. He lowered his head, squinting. “I’ll tell you my theory,” he said. “My theory is they must’ve heard him go in. Splat! They shined their lights around, but the fog reflected it, you know, and they saw that the lights was more harm than good, so they switched ’em off. But no luck. Gone.”
“Ah,” Dr. Alkahest said, and closed his eyes. But he was still unsure how much they knew. “Why do you suppose they left so suddenly—while you were still talking to them on that—” he struggled for the word, but it refused to come. He waved his hand. “That horn.”
“You don’t know fishermen,” the officer said. He rolled his eyes heavenward and grinned.
Dr. Alkahest said nothing.
“Well,” the ship’s doctor said, “you get some sleep, that’s my advice, and when you wake up you’ll be as good as new.”
“Yes, good,” Dr. Alkahest said; but he looked up at the officer again. “What are the chances of that fellow’s surviving that drop?”
“The suicide? Zero!” He waved the idea away; his hand was like a soft brick. “Practically zero. The water’s like concrete when you hit it from that far up. And then there’s the current.” He laughed, only partly rueful. “Also, the fall takes the air out of you. You drown just like that.” He snapped his fingers. He sounded quite pleased. “A lot of them die of a heart attack before they even hit.”
Dr. Alkahest moved his head in a subtle nod, then closed his eyes. “What fishingboat was that, by the way?”