Jack (Gilead #4)(76)
His actual plan was simply to bring Della there, to the studio, to spend a few hours with her. They could play the Victrola and talk about whatever they wanted to and let the night take its course. Just stealing a few hours together could expose them to much more indignation than would any actual theft. There was a terrible vision that sometimes crossed his mind, of Della led away by police, not speaking, not crying, not looking back, proud as a martyr. And he, back in jail, having no way to find out what had become of her. Dear Jesus, what was he doing? This was not what he had promised himself. This was not harmlessness. He was sure he had no right to involve her in so much potential misery. How often had he thought this? But she had the right to involve herself, or had claimed the right, holding his hand the way she had. She was young, the daughter of a protective family. She might have no idea yet that embarrassment, relentless, punitive scorn, can wear away at a soul until it recedes into wordless loneliness. Maybe apophatic loneliness. God in the silence. In the deep darkness. The highest privilege, his father said. He was usually speaking of death, of course. The congregant’s soul had entered the Holy of Holies. Jack sometimes called this life he had lived prevenient death. He had learned that for all its comforts and discomforts, its stark silence first of all, there was clearly no reprieve from doing harm.
Because there was a logic in the tendency of his thinking that made the idea seem reasonable, he decided to spend a night by himself in that building, that room, to make sure there was nothing about it to especially alarm Della. Then he would send his note. Please come by yourself through the unlighted, hos tile, judgmental streets to an empty building where the Prince of Darkness will be watching for you, ready to die of shame if it all goes wrong. As if his shame were worth anything to her or anyone else. What would he say to her father? To his own father, for that matter, since he was now amplifying dread by imagining conversations that would never happen.
But staying there by himself was a mistake. The very first night he had the keys, as soon as it was late enough that the streets were empty, he rolled up his blanket, walked out past the bemused glance of the desk clerk, through the streets, pausing only to buy a hot dog from a malodorous cart still open for business in the hope of selling that last sausage. Jack had never learned to share the local love of sauerkraut, but it was free, as were mustard and ketchup. He was relieved to have stepped into the deeper darkness of the entry and to have turned the key in the lock without attracting any attention, so far as he knew.
Buildings dream at night, and their dreams have a particular character. Or perhaps at night they awaken. There is nothing cordial or accommodating about buildings, whatever they might let people believe. The stresses of simply standing there, preposterous constructions, Euclidian like nothing in nature, the ground heaving under them, rain seeping in while their joints go slack with rot. They speak disgruntlement, creaks and groans, and less nameable sounds that suggest presence of the kind that is conjured only by emptiness. Grudges, plaints, and threats, an interior conversation, not meant to be heard, that would startle anyone. Jack had never realized before that the city, the parts he knew of it, might despise its human infestation. He went up the stairs nevertheless and into the studio, as they called it, as it was listed in the yellow pages. It was vast in the absolute darkness. It smelled like Chicago.
The memory of that wretched pilgrimage, that frustrating, humiliating experience of drunkenness, of course made him crave a drink. He was suddenly sure that one small whiskey would give fluency to his thoughts and clarity, as well. How he could find himself persuaded of this again and again, despite all evidence to the contrary, he could not imagine, but so it was. Considered choice seemed suspect by comparison. He could wander the streets till he came upon some dive furtively alight and astir, where he could squander his pocket money, the whole of his worldly wealth, on a few watered drinks. Then those debt collectors would probably find him and pound him a few times for having nothing to give them, and he would congratulate himself inwardly on having spent it all before they found him, which would make sense to him because he was drunk. He had thought this through, and still he craved, still he was tempted.
He did find his way to a bench. It was actually his shin that found it. He sat down, then lay down, with the blanket roll under his head. He closed his eyes, then he put his hat over his face to make the darkness smaller. Then he took it off his face to feel less defenseless against sounds that were for all the world like stealthy approach. This was becoming a test of his conscience, to give him a sense of how much he had to dread. It wasn’t theology that told him this, it was experience. Theology simply rationalized those nights he spent walking the streets, exhausted and glassily alert, a dull weight in his chest, thinking, Macbeth does murder sleep, or I have been one acquainted with the night, which was better suited to his situation. Why should a man with no other expectation of an afterlife than adding his bit of clay to verdant Iowa experience dread? His father told him once that the more scrupulous a conscience is, the heavier the burden it carries. He had decided at the time that Jack had a low estimation of himself because his conscience was so delicate it seemed to truly condemn him in his own eyes. Its stores were not so remarkable, after all, and if he could realize this, he could stop, so to speak, touching the wound. He worked this into a sermon, apologizing for the mixed metaphor and generalizing the thought to describe the whole of humankind. No one was deceived. And not so long afterward, Jack had mooted this comforting argument by adding a burden to his conscience that his gentleman father could never call unremarkable. Common is somehow indeed the opposite of unremarkable. Hamlet.