Jack (Gilead #4)(42)

On the other hand, he had tried from time to time to do something baldly self-interested, and not much came to mind. A few minor thefts, that old habit, nothing acquisitive about it, since the things he took were worthless to him if not to the people he took them from. Moral scrutiny was invited by this habit of his, he knew. He believed it might be an attempt on his part to weave himself into the emotional fabric of another life. That sounded right. It was a speculation of his father’s, once when he had found a shoebox half full of Jack’s pilferings. “I think we should talk about this,” his father had said, and they had had a good conversation, his father weighing his words so carefully. “I know that you are most at ease by yourself. That’s fine. But you may be lonelier than you realize.” He liked the thought that he was weaving himself into the emotional fabric of another life. And then he took the experiment much too far. “There was pure malice in it,” his father had said. “Surely you see that, Jack.” He saw it, he remembered it, the way you remember the mood of a dream. With that impulse, when his thoughts centered on fragility—fixed on it. No doubt also malice, always compounding itself by a logic of its own.

So, harmlessness. This really might be too much to hope for. He actually shuddered at the harm Della might have suffered, perhaps did suffer, from his stupidly hanging around her door. How could she have explained him to a principal, a board of some kind? He shuddered as if the thought had not occurred to him a thousand times before. And still he thought that he might sometime loiter near Sumner when school was letting out, just for a glimpse of her, to be sure that things were all right with her. This would not happen. He could not promise himself no harm would come of it.





* * *





Simplify, simplify. He had made a good beginning when he forbade himself the thought of Della. Once she was banished, he was freed of anticipation and regret, both of which were attended by calculation of a kind—how to have a glimpse of her, which became how to pass her on the street, and then what to say to her, what would make her smile. Or he would fall to thinking how to put something right, how to make something clear, for example that he avoided her for her sake and at some cost to himself, emotionally speaking. For a day or two he would take pleasure in the thought that her good life was unthreatened by his Jackness, Jackitude, Jackicity. How was it possible to be encumbered with slyness, so that his blundering always ended as shrewd harm? It was a shock to his metaphysics to discover that when he had forsworn malicious intent, the effects of his actions, his mere presence, were changed very little and not reliably for the better. What if Della read Paterson and was offended by it? He hadn’t been to the library since he went there to draw that picture, chicken joint with angels. He had been, as the fellow said, ashamed to show his face, though he knew that the most respectable man in Missouri could be mugged if he happened to turn down the wrong alley. It was ridiculous to have believed that the circumstances of his life would not have touched him essentially so long as they left no visible scars. As if he could just walk into the old house and take his place at the dinner table. He usually banished that thought once or twice a day, but now he gave up on it for good. It was gone now, and all the sorrow he would surely have brought with him, like the wind he brought in at night when the house was warm and asleep. It was like a black cloak that swept around him, setting off disturbances among the crystals on the lampshades, leafing books left open, losing places in them. Scattering letters, half-written or half-read. He couldn’t say he hadn’t done any of these things. If they asked him why he had done them, he could not say, “I am at the center of a certain turbulence.” That would sound flippant at best, a little deranged if they took him seriously.

He was inclined to believe that there were (a): energy, and (b): displacement. Any gesture was, whatever else, like freeing something from your hand, some living thing that would touch or settle wherever it happened to be carried on the surge of displacement. Rattle or fracture confirmed this. So as a living creature he was ill suited to the brittle, frangible world of things. It was as though planet Energy and planet Order had collided and merged, leaving displacement as the settling of the ruins. By extension, he thought, though he knew it was only by analogy, the small gesture of, say, recommending a book of poetry to someone became displacement that struck where it would, as it would, converting itself in midair into malice or stupidity. How did people live? His oldest question.



* * *



Nevertheless. But. Still. And. He went to the library, though his face was zombie lavender and zombie green, especially around his right eye, which looked a little reptilian with the swelling half gone. He hoped that kindly woman was not there, but she was, at the front desk, where she would be sure to see him. When he saw her there, he paused, thinking he might try another hour, another day, since there was certainly no urgency about this or anything else, but she glanced up at him just as he was stepping away. “Good morning,” she said, which was kind in the circumstances, and then went back to sorting her cards, which was also kind. So he said, “Good morning,” and smiled, insofar as he could manage a smile, and went off to the stacks, overtaken by that strange awkwardness that comes with feeling watched as you walk away. Shady intentions always make it worse.

He went to the place where he had hidden Paterson, behind The Dream of the Rood and Other Early English Religious Poems, the title he had memorized, and it wasn’t there. It was not behind twenty books in either direction, above or below. He sat down at the table to think about this. Then he took down Robert Frost, so that he had something to look at while he absorbed his disappointment, which was really out of all proportion to the situation. He only meant to read the book over to resolve in his mind whether it would have offended Della or not. He hardly knew her—how could he be sure in any case? He could commit the whole thing to memory and be none the wiser. And she might have forgotten about it the minute he mentioned it.