John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

JUDGE: Good-day, then.

FIRE CHIEF: Yes. (He moves toward the door. )

JUDGE (aside, scraping his moustache with two fingers): Righteous old fool! There are fires and fires, Mr. Uphill! And you, sir, can be replaced by a tidal wave.

FERE CHIEF (at the door) : Your Honor. I ought to explain—

JUDGE: No need.

FIRE CHIEF: I don’t mean to offend you. I’ve got my duty to the City, you know.

JUDGE: Of course.

FIRE CHIEF: I’ve always been very grateful for whatever favors—

JUDGE: Certainly.

FIRE CHIEF: Good. That has to be clear. I assume this disagreement—

JUDGE: Don’t mention it! A trifle! Glad you could drop by, Phil.

FIRE CHIEF: Good-bye, then.

JUDGE: Good-day. Don’t forget your hat.

FIRE CHIEF: I have it. I don’t often forget things, as you know. Well, never mind.

[Exit Fire Chief. The Judge draws back with a sigh into his smoke. The desk he has leaned his elbows on is reduced by his withdrawal to an object, or, rather, to an assembly of objects — pencils, an open ink bottle, papers, books, magazines. Among the magazines a stack of five with bright covers: Hodge’s folly. The shadow of a blowing curtain reaches toward them, misses, reaches again. A sound of retreating footsteps on the stairs.]

2

Chief of Police Fred Clumly suffered a sleep full of troublesome dreams, agitations, old memories. When he turned his head on the pillow he felt his thoughts tumbling from the left side of his head to his right, reappearing there as seemingly new, unrelated dreams and agitations. He had stepped through a familiar door and had emerged in a strange place, and now he’d gotten turned around somehow, had lost his bearings. At odd twistings of the maze he encountered his wife — naked, at one point, with an ecstatic smile which repelled him — but in general he encountered only strangers with muffled chins and with hats drawn low, who spoke to each other with voices as muffled and unrecognizable as their faces. Once he caught sight of the waitress in the magazine picture, sitting at her window high above the street, smiling. It was snowing. The buildings — he was in a city of some sort, not Batavia but some large, dark city where there were chemical plants, or tanneries — the buildings were heavily draped in snow, and there was snow like sifted flour on the sidewalks, treacherous stuff to walk in. He was in a great hurry, though he could not remember what his appointment was, and there was something in the way of his getting wherever it was he had to get. Once a tree fell slowly and solemnly in his path (the crowd drew back, unconcerned, as if they’d been forewarned that the tree would fall). Another time a truck plunged slowly and solemnly over the curb directly in front of him and there, without a sound, turned over, like an elephant falling dead with a heart attack. He came to a peculiar, elaborately wrought concrete portal — columns on each side, statuary (armless figures in attitudes of greed, agony, debauched pleasure: a naked leering fat man, at his feet young girls, also naked, looking up with expressions of mingled delight and disgust — in all this nothing shocking, Clumly felt, nothing out of the ordinary), around the bases of the statues bits of broken glass, a hubcap, a bleeding hand. From a window, a naked, emaciated old woman without a face extended a ticket to Clumly. He took it and tipped his hat. The woman was his wife. He started down the steps; cold, wet stone slabs on which rats scampered. “Terrible place,” Clumly said without either delight or distaste. The fat man beside him nodded curtly. “Terrible.” A public official of some kind, here merely to inspect, like Clumly. A bearded man in a high black hat. “Don’t I know you from somewhere?” Clumly said. The official smiled, and Clumly saw that the mouth had no teeth in it. He jerked himself awake.

“Incredible,” Clumly said. “Horrible!”

It was light out now, time he should be getting up, but he closed his eyes and allowed himself to drift back into sleep. The dream seemed to continue, but it was another dream. He seemed to be standing in a public dancehall — in colored lights above the stage the enormous legend THE FAT PEOPLE’S PLEASURE CLUB. All the people were fat and naked, pinkish and bluish in the mysterious light, and all the men were alive, all the women dead. This did not seem strange. Some of the couples were dancing, the men straining and heaving, dragging around their dead partners. Here and there a man stood kicking the body of his partner, or beating the body with a club. “This won’t do,” Clumly said. But someone was clutching at him, dragging him toward the floor, stripping his clothes from his back like skin as she pulled him along. “All right,” he said irritably. He could think of no reason to refuse, though it gave him no pleasure. “It’s time,” she said. She gave him a loaf of bread. “You’re supposed to feed me. It’s time,” she repeated, cross. “What’s the matter with you?” He opened his eyes and, half awake half asleep, saw the staring, scrawny hen’s face of his wife.

“Wake up, Fred,” she said, “it’s almost ten. They want you on the phone.”

The room beyond her gray face was toneless and drab.

“A minute,” he said. He struggled to clear the images out of his brain, but against the undertow of his weariness his effort was paltry. “Later,” he said. He scowled, forcing himself to think. “Tell them—” He let himself relax.

“Well all right, Fred,” she said doubtfully. He heard her drawing away.

“Half an hour,” he said.

She gave no answer. The door closed and he felt himself sinking, a little sickeningly, as though it were the earth itself that was falling toward sleep. If he dreamed, this time, he could not remember it later. He knew only that all at once he was wide awake, though lying with his eyes closed. Were the stories true? Had the man really kept a Negro boy locked in his cellar all that time? Impossible! And yet Clumly had half-believed it — half-believed it yet. The image of the horrified white woman leaning toward the windshield, the image of the purse in the grass — convincing. He would telephone St. Louis. And then San Francisco. Yet clearly both stories couldn’t be true. Was one of them a lie, a joke? Both? It came to him that what was convincing was less the details than the mockery, the godlike indifference of the man. What in the world could make a man so indifferent? Was that the lie, after all? The dreams came back into Clumly’s mind and shocked him. He insists on calling me his friend, Clumly thought. He was suddenly angry, but in the same motion of his mind he felt himself drawing back, spying on himself — it was as if he crouched at the foot of his own rumpled bed peeking at himself, or sat on the red asbestos shingled porch roof outside his window, peering suspiciously in. What makes me so angry, then? he thought. But there was no time, always no time, always the pressure of events: trouble at the station, they wouldn’t have phoned him otherwise, and something else — he struggled to remember, then placed it: some unlikely story Esther had told him when he came up to bed, or when she got up, it wasn’t clear: a visitor last night, some weird message on a paper airplane. Was that, too, just a dream? But the message was there on the dresser, waiting: he must meet the Sunlight Man again this afternoon. He wouldn’t do it, of course. His foolishness was over; he’d send in Miller and Kozlowski to arrest him, and any talk they had from now on would be down at the station. Anything else would be asking for disaster. No question.

But if he did decide to meet the Sunlight Man this afternoon, which he wouldn’t, he had work to do first. He got out of bed and called down to Esther. While she worked on his breakfast, he looked over the mysteriously delivered note — a map and instructions — then stuffed it in his pocket with the other slips of paper and carried the box wrapped in chains out to the garage, where he had a hacksaw. When he’d sawed the chain through and sawed off the lock he opened the box and found another inside it, wrapped in binding twine, old and dirty, wound round and round and repeatedly knotted — it would have taken an ordinary man a good hour to tie up — and when he’d cut the twine and sawed the second lock he found the pistol. It was still loaded. He hurried back into the house.