Jack (Gilead #4)(78)
He had long recognized in himself a nagging urge to confess, which he sometimes indulged. To be forthright about his dishonesty, for one thing, could be a relief. To speak about his impulse to harm was much harder. So it should not have surprised him that the darkness had conjured that girl, so strongly that he was afraid to think what he might say to Della if she were there, what confession he might make to her. Della fallen silent in the dark, he unable to see her face, not daring to take her hand. Re ceding from him, while the river slid through its shallows, braiding and pooling.
He had to be gone from that room. He felt a kind of pressure of attention, something watching him closely when he could not see himself. Himself being the wretch that lived in his clothes. Look at him. But he did find his way to the door, found the doorknob. Then he remembered he had brought his blanket, so he had to try to find where he had been when he had it, groping along the benches, increasingly upset that he could be so wrong, that his sense of things could itself be a complication, a snare. He’d have risked turning on the lights just for a second, to orient himself, if he could have found the switch. It wasn’t much of a blanket, but the difference between a blanket, however thin and short, and no blanket is absolute. In the morning the miserable thing would be there, anomalous as anything a windstorm leaves behind. If he left it there and came back early, he could find a place to stash it, surely, and if not, he could disclaim it. If he said it wasn’t his, that would mean someone else had been there while he, Jack, had the keys. So not only would the lie be obvious, but the thing itself would be incriminating—why, after all, would he have a blanket there if not because he meant to bring in a lady friend? Jack might say, My wife, actually. And the boss would smile at the ridiculous transparency of the lie and fire him, anyway.
The scheme was so trivial it made him feel how overwhelming the darkness was. Whenever he did something he thought might be ordinary, marrying for example, it was as if he’d bought a ticket and a box of popcorn for an event everybody was going to, streaming in, the quick and the dead. And then the curtain would go up and it was the Last Judgment. What was he supposed to do with that ticket? He’d try to slip it in his pocket, to conceal an embarrassing misunderstanding no one else shared, and there would be no pocket, only his bare side, his bare leg. It was ridiculous that he still had his hat on. A terrible occasion he hadn’t really remembered to prepare for. His astonishment would damn him all by itself.
He had stood still to think these thoughts, and then he began groping along the benches until he found the blanket, then along the benches in the direction he had come, then along the wall to the door. It couldn’t be hard to find a door he had just left, but the distance from one thing to the next kept seeming wrong.
His entire life was an engrossing confusion, very small change cosmically speaking, and still anything at all could loom up like a great foreshadowing and accuse him. A baffled struggle in a dark place. A veritable Jabbok. Some laming involved. True enough. Point taken. When his pocket had given out the other day and his money had spilled on the floor, coins rolling in various directions—what genius decided that coins should be round?—he kept looking for that last penny because he knew he had five of them. Two quarters, two dimes, and five pennies. Four bought four hard candies, but five bought a chocolate bar. The petty dramas of his earthly pilgrimage. And still these overwhelming, Balthazarian revelations were visited upon him. Reprobate in any case, he tried to make it a point of pride to ignore them, insofar as they seemed only to point to his human vulnerability, of which he was wholly aware, thank you very much. So they became less nuanced, even blunt. The debt collectors began using their fists, for one thing. He hadn’t told Della about that problem. He imagined himself with Della on his arm, showing her the city by night, when they appear, suddenly, anywhere, and he turns out his mended pockets and they punch him, anyway, for laughs, and what about Della? A miserable thought, bright as a dream. He might have a knife in his pocket, a switchblade, and then: Surprise! You didn’t expect that, did you? There would be four of them, at most. If they got the knife away from him, who knows what might happen. They were always meaner. What about Della? She wouldn’t run away. She might be all right if she were a white woman. Ah, Jesus!
He took off his jacket and hung it on the doorknob because his shirt was wet. He tried to wipe the sweat away from his eyes with his damp sleeve. Then he took off his shirt and spread it out on the floor as well as he could. The air was so still in that room, it would never dry, but he would have to put it on again as soon as he could stand to, to be out of there, out on the street.
The point was familiar enough. He was guilty of exposing this wonderful woman to risks—no, call them dangers—that he could not protect her from. It was as if he were being forced to see his whole life under an unbearably bright light. Was. The experience was not at all subjunctive. He had always been drawn to vulnerability, to doing damage where it was possible, because it was possible. Della was an educated woman firmly ensconced in a good life. He was nothing, a mere unshielded nerve, a pang mollified by a drink or two, a shine on his shoes. He had let himself be deceived by whatever it is that does the deceiving. He should have realized. No, he had to have known, somewhere in that dark brain of his that knew the word “uncountenanced” before it knew the state capitals. So he had committed himself to harmlessness, and it was his harmlessness that made a joke of their stealing from him, he even pretending they had some claim on him, some debt to be settled, to keep the transactions simple and brief, so he thought. It was his harmlessness that would make a joke of God knows what humiliation of him with God knows what consequences for his colored gal. He was still sweating, fanning himself with his hat. It was so clear, so obvious. An honorable man would never have let things go this far. But she could still go back to Memphis. Her family might be angry at her, but they would protect her. Her family would see to it that she was safe. He could not. He would tell her he had reached a decision. The thought calmed him, though he would like to ask that preacher how he could enjoy a moment of grace and refuse it at the same time, a fair question, the kind preachers take seriously.