John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

He was in, perhaps, the Paxton Dairy. (Paxton had never owned a dairy.) All around him lay white perfection: clean walls, clean floors, huge snow-white trucks, a sound and smell of ice-cold water churning. There were stainless steel tubs and milkcans on clean concrete ramps, and corrugated stainless steel doors that rolled open and shut with a sound like far-away thunder. Kathleen, perhaps — perhaps someone else — was at the desk in the office, writing. He noticed with only a part of his mind, for someone was explaining, pointing into a vat which had no water in it, no visible bottom, that the enemy came from down there. Taggert knew who the enemy was, but he could not bring it to mind for a moment. Then, momentarily, everything was clear. The girl at the desk (her red hair falling forward softly, hiding her face and most of the summer-sky blue of her blouse) was named Prosperinga. She’d been captured by a man called Plato, a business rival of Paxton’s, who’d risen up out of the underworld when the girl was working there alone. He’d kept her prisoner all winter but had for some reason released her in the spring. The problem was to board up the hole, because fall was near. Taggert Hodge, called in to help, made a careful sketch of his plan while the man at his elbow admired the sketch and whispered of the awful difficulty.

When he looked up from the paper it was winter and all the windows were broken. Snow was blowing in, and the milkcans were cracked down the side like frozen eggs. He was alarmed at first, then remembered he was not the man they thought, but a secret agent. He smiled, crumpled the paper, and dropped it on the floor. Hurrying away, he took the wrong door and found himself in what appeared to be an old country kitchen converted into some kind of hospital room. On the kitchen table, under an operating light, the attendants had stretched her out naked and had given her ether. She was beautiful, skin as white as marble, and they could not resist passing their hands lightly over her breasts and belly and legs. “See here,” he said. They stopped at once and dropped their hands to their sides, looking sullen. “Have I got to be everywhere at once?” he said. But from under a small table on wheels, with bottles on it, and scissors and tubing, someone whispered to him and reached up his hand in dreadful supplication. Crossly, he turned to do what he could for the poor hopeless devil — there were wormholes in the arm — and he heard his attendants climbing up onto the operating table behind him. His younger son’s hand reached out to him from a basket of clothes by an aluminum ironing board. Suddenly he smelled smoke. He glanced around in alarm and saw cracks appearing in the walls, and small, quick tongues of flame. He shouted in rage at the attendants crawling over her body like spidermonkeys, and with the shout he awakened himself. The Indian boy stood over him, holding the pistol, and he could not tell — perhaps Nick Slater could not tell either — whether Nick was there to defend him or to kill him. Wide awake but confused and sick, Hodge met the boy’s eyes. At last Nick lowered the gun.

“You were shouting,” Nick said dully.

Taggert nodded and swallowed.

“Dream, I guess,” Nick said. He turned away and limped back to his watching without a sound. Hodge, after a moment, returned to his nightmares. He was thinking as he drifted off, I must try to explain to him. Nick had said nothing, had not even showed surprise, when Hodge had tied him up in the basement with the others. Perhaps he’d assumed it was simply more madness, and then again perhaps he’d understood. There was no sign whatever of what he thought, if anything, in his flat, dark face. The likelihood, perhaps, was that he showed nothing because he was still watching and waiting. One of these days — one of these hours — he would stop that watching and act. Then Taggert Hodge, too, must watch and wait. But he put it off now and slept. “Let me tell you why I had to tie you up,” he said reasonably and kindly in his dream. The explanation he gave was involved, incredibly subtle, and though it was thrillingly lucid at the time, he could not remember it later.

At eight-thirty, when Nick Slater touched his shoulder to wake him, he sat up on one elbow, blinking, licking the dryness from his mouth. The room around him was still sick with the atmosphere of his dreams. “All right, I’m up,” he said. “You can turn in.” The boy nodded, but he didn’t withdraw. Taggert brought him into focus. “Well?”

“We should get out,” Nick said accusingly. “We can’t stay here like this.”

“Soon,” Taggert said. “We’ll go when it’s right.”

The boy shook his head. His face was drawn with fear and lack of sleep. “It’s too dangerous. There was somebody here last night. Knocked for a long time. Scared me to shit.”

“You kill him?”

The eyes narrowed — Nick had been tied in the cellar at the time — but he said nothing.

Taggert sat up and swung his feet over the side. His head ached and the inside of his mouth was dry, as if he’d been drinking all night. There were bubbles of panic — only partly the aftertaste of his nightmares — stirring in his chest. He observed that Nick had cleaned and polished his shoes. Even in the deathhouse his shoes would be clean and polished.

“A curious pair, aren’t we,” Taggert said. “Rise up and follow me, and I will make you harpooners of men.” He leered.

The boy went on watching him, looking at the scar tissue, not his eyes.

Hodge said, “What will you do when I get you out of this?”

“I don’t know.”

“Turn on me, I suppose.” Hodge nodded, indifferent. “That would be natural.” He tried to think about it, knowing it was impossible; his mind was not yet willing. “Or turn on yourself. Yes. That’s more like it. Destroy your freedom by burning it up. I knew a young fellow that did that once. Name of Ike or something. He was locked on this island with his father, people say, and no escape. But the father was crafty, and he figured out a way to make eagle’s wings that a person could fly with.” He closed his eyes, faking a smile, raising his arms like wings. “Well, never mind. A story.”

Nick said, totally ignoring the act, “What you going to do?”

He shook his head. After a long time he said, “Watch you, I suppose. See where it leads.”

The boy took it in and, after a second, to Hodge’s surprise, nodded. Hodge was shocked, filled with pity. It had never occurred to him that sooner or later the boy might understand that they were caught in an experiment, and no one was in control.

Nick said, “I’d like to be out of here. Someplace else.”

“Not yet, love,” Hodge said. He thought again of Clumly, bent squinting over the tape, and then he was remembering Old Man Paxton, bent over the letter Kathleen had sent to the newspaper. It was a mad letter — she said she’d been captured by Communists — and Paxton could not make out how to deal with it. When his children went wrong it was his habit to slap them, bark out some brilliant cruelty, and return them to his image of what they were; but he had now no slap fierce enough, no cruelty that could reach her. In the wide, sunlit room with the enormous fieldstone fireplace that had never been lit for fear it would confound the heating system, he sat like a coiled snake uncertain where to strike. “I’ll get you for this,” he said. Hodge smiled, thrilled with hate, and said, “You’re as crazy as she is, then?” But afterward Clive Paxton walked in his garden, scrutinizing his lilacs and althea for minute flaws, giving orders, critically turning loose earth with his foot. And the precision in his madness filled Hodge with awe. Paxton did not say later, “I lost control when we talked this morning.” He was no more able to apologize than to complain or compliment. He stood — but this was long before — stood at the gate of his huge truckbarn as the diesels came out in a chalk-white fire of headlights, and would not stir from their path but forced them to swerve and creep like monstrous lions cowering past the whip. He ruled from terror, Hodge thought. Any psychiatrist would say so: the tyranny of the insecure. At the age of fifty-one he’d established a boys’ camp, had risked bankruptcy for it, stamping his troubled image into the Catskill Mountains: a huge stone lodge, a chapel, cabins, a long white dock and boathouses. And there he dealt out contests and awards, branding boys as successes or failures, stamping out hearts and souls in his own tigerish image. And now, meeting Nick Slater’s noncommittal, unblinking gaze, he thought: I’ve loosed another Paxton on the world.