John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

And one of these days, Mr. Kleppmann would put a bullet through his head. Why did he go on with it? He could teach. He’d talked with Louise about it. He could get a credential, shuck the salary — a piddling salary anyhow, all things considered — and shuck the house in Kenmore — yes, no alternative to that — but eventually teachers could afford to buy houses too. He could drop the rat race, break free. As simple as that! And yet he was not going to drop it. He’d go on and on until he managed to destroy himself. From ego, must be. From a vague sense of his own image, not clear to him yet, but there, final, however unrealized inside his head: a shadowy higher ground toward which, instinctively, he must go on witlessly fleeing. An image of himself as — was it that? — a blind old man enthroned in his livingroom, speaking with neighbors of balanced trade and income taxes and the troubles in Asia? The Congressman through the looking-glass, then, turned inside out, gone dark.

But if it was ego that drove him, why was he not a professional skip, like Kleppmann — a man who moved from city to city setting up paper businesses, borrowing on them, vanishing as if in smoke. What could be more satisfying if it was ego, nothing more?

But that, too, he had an answer for. The Congressman’s ideas were no longer viable, his faith was as empty and dead as his estate, yet they’d left their mark on Will Hodge Jr as on all of them. The American dream turned nightmare. They were not such fools — or anyway Will Jr was no longer such a fool — as to pursue the dream, but at least, with the impossible ideal in mind, he could hate the forces that denied it. Nothing short of hate could explain his continuing pursuit of a man he knew had the power — and the indifference — to kill him. It was no fantasy. His evidence wouldn’t stand up in court, but he had evidence that R. V. Kleppmann had arranged the murder of a private detective in Madison, Wisconsin. The man had been found shot through the head, sitting on a public toilet.

It gave Will Jr nightmares, and when first he’d learned he had seemed to see Kleppmann on every dark street corner, in every alley, in every airport crowd. Once, pulling up at an intersection, he’d looked over at the man in the car beside him and had imagined in stark terror that the ghostly white face in the car next to his own — as white as a tangle of potato sprouts in a dark cellar — was Kleppmann’s, the pipe in the man’s hand a revolver. And once, getting into the M&T elevator, finding another man ahead of him, with his face hidden in his newspaper, Will had thought — heart pounding in his chest — that when the door closed the newspaper would be lowered and he would be meeting Kleppmann’s eyes. Wrong, of course. Kleppmann was not a man to do his own exterminating. Nevertheless, Will had gotten out his almost forgotten Army.38 and now carried it with him wherever he went, tucked into his briefcase. The nightmares continued, but little by little his daylight fears had withdrawn. Almost casually he seized the few trifling Kleppmann stocks or accounts he could locate — here fifty dollars, there seventy — stocks and accounts left, as if with malicious scorn, to mock him. He had, all told, ninety thousand to collect for Mercantile — God knew how many more debts the man had for some other poor collector to chase. But as for Kleppmann’s large accounts, Will Hodge was always a few hours or a few minutes too late. To Will’s certain knowledge, the man had pulled in a hundred and sixty thousand dollars since March, but always, as soon as Will could trace the stuff, it was gone, had vanished to thin air. It was as if the man had someone right here in the office keeping tabs. It was not beyond the realm of possibility. It had come to this, to tell the truth: whenever June, Will’s secretary, came into the room behind him, the hair on the back of his neck began to tingle with alarm. Louise said, “You’re going to have a breakdown, Will. I mean it!”

“This is stupid,” Will said aloud. “I should go home.” He leaned toward his desk, about to rise. That same instant, a door slammed, maybe the front door of the office. Will Jr jerked so violently that he almost fell off his swivel chair. He caught himself, splashing out with both hands toward the glossy desk on one side, the rolling typewriter table on the other, and got to his feet as quickly as he could manage.

“Who’s there?” he called.

His voice resounded in the dark hallway. No one answered.

Hurriedly, breathing in huge gulps, heart hammering, he went back in to his desk, moving his arms at his sides like a man swimming. He bent to his briefcase for the gun. When he had it in his hand he went back to the door and called again. After his shout, the silence seemed deeper than before. He went cautiously down the hallway, panting, and snapped on the light. All the office doors were closed. Through the high window at the end of the hallway he could see the dark windows of the office building opposite the M&T and he could feel in his blood the abyss falling away toward the street.

Behind him, in his own office, the phone rang. He started violently again and almost fired the gun. The phone rang a second time; he went to it.

Louise said, “Will?”

“It’s me,” he said. He struggled for breath.

“Will,” she said, “do you know what time it is?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I got involved and—”

“Are you alone?” she asked.

“Who in hell would be here with me?”

She said nothing.

At last he said, speaking carefully, to hide his fright from her, “I’m just packing up to leave. I’ll be home in twenty minutes.”

The phone clicked; she’d hung up.

Then, crazily, he wondered: “Was it Louise?” He closed his eyes tight for a moment, then opened them. If it wasn’t Louise, then whoever had been inside one of those closed offices would be gone. What kind of people was he dealing with?

When he reached home she was still angry.

He said casually, “Did you phone me, at the office?”

She stared at him. “What’s the matter with you? Of course I did.” Her squint came.

“It’s all right,” he said. “All I meant was—” He could think of nothing to say. “Kids asleep?” he asked.

“Well what do you think? It’s almost midnight.”

Hours later, just as he was going to sleep, he thought again of the small white stones which the Chief of Police had held out to him. He remembered now. He had seen them twenty-five years ago. They’d been kept, in those days, in the locked drawer of his Grandfather Hodge’s desk. The effect of the memory was shattering, and he heaved himself up onto one elbow. With the sharp recollection of the stones there came, in terrible soul-crushing clarity, the desk itself — polished walnut that had seemed to burn with an inner light — the walnut captain’s chair where the Old Man always sat, the notebooks, the Bible, the legal books, the wide, clean window looking out on a world now utterly vanished — expanses where trees grew taller than any trees grow now, where fences stood out in precise detail and flowers were sharp particulars — a world where, for all the offices of the banjo clock and for all the gloomy intimations of the boggy, squitchy painting hanging on the study wall, a sailing vessel sinking in an eerie light, there was Space stretching out endlessly from the center of his child’s brain, but no hint yet of the antique serpent, the old destroyer, Time.

The stones had gone to his Uncle Taggert, it came to him. He was the only one who’d followed the Old Man’s interest in the occult. In horror, he realized that he knew the bearded creature in Clumly’s photograph. There was no possibility of mistake, much as he was changed. “Has it brought him to this?” he thought. “But what are we to do?” He saw again the malevolence in Clumly’s eyes.