John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

CLUMLY: You didn’t!

SUNLIGHT: Certainly. Some of them I shot in their beds. Some I shot as they came out their doors, kissing their wives good-bye. One of them I got when he was mailing a letter. A couple of them I shot on the BMT. Caused quite a stir, to tell the truth. It was my last serious encounter with American business. Listen!

CLUMLY ( alarmed) : The train!

SUNLIGHT: Yes.

CLUMLY: But aren’t you going to—

SUNLIGHT: No. I’m staying.

CLUMLY: For the love of God!

SUNLIGHT: But you can go. I excuse you.

(Sound of a train approaching, still a quarter-mile off.)

CLUMLY: I can’t allow this. I must order you, in the name of the law …

SUNLIGHT: There is no law.

(Boom of a diesel engine whistle, not far off.)

CLUMLY (shouting. The train seems almost on top of them): I beg you. Come with me!

SUNLIGHT (loudly, a little pompously) : I care about nothing! Pooh.

CLUMLY: Then I’m going. Maybe I can stop it yet. I can’t be responsible for—

(He breaks off. Crunch of cinders as he jumps, holding the tape recorder. Sound of Clumly shouting wildly. The train lurches and shudders near, the engineer trying to stop it in time. Clumly’s shout comes through clearly now: “Stop the train! Stop the train!” And now there are other voices too, a young man shouting from the distance, a booming, congressional-sounding voice yelling “Stop! Stop!” Sounds of the train stopping. The voices grow wilder, with hope in them now, and with the train’s last shudder a chorus of hysterical cheers, joined by the engineer and fireman. In the foreground, Clumly, howling: “Thank God! Thank God!”)

VOICE: What the devil’s going on here?

CLUMLY: No time to explain right now. There’s a madman inside that tent. Stay back! He may be dangerous.

(Sound of a car pulling up.)

RURAL VOICE (distant) : What seems to be the trouble, folks?

(Several at once, in confusion, tell him what they know.)

ENGINEER: Well, someone do something. I’ve got a schedule.

CLUMLY: You people stay back. I’ll try to reason with him. (Crunch of his footsteps in the gravel.) You in there! (No answer.) Come out! We’ve got to let this train through. (No answer.) All right, Sunlight, I’m coming up. Do you hear me? (No answer.) Will somebody hold this damn machine? (Background noise.)

RURAL VOICE (distant): That’s a brave policeman, men. He’ll get himself a citation for this. I’ll write to the Gov’nor myself.

(Bystanders comment on the policeman’s courage.)

You, up on the bridge, you with the camera! Get a picture!

SECOND VOICE (distant) : Yes sir! I’m getting it.

THIRD VOICE: There, he made it. He’s got his head and chest in the tent now.

FIRST VOICE: He’s looking back at us.

THIRD VOICE: Looks sick.

SECOND VOICE (distant): Is he all right?

(Pause. Puzzled murmurings from the bystanders. Crunch of Clumly’s approaching footsteps.)

CLUMLY (too softly to hear clearly): He’s gone.

FIRST VOICES: What?

CLUMLY: He’s gone.

FOURTH VOICE (a young man) : Impossible!

CLUMLY: Look for yourself.

THIRD VOICE (aggressively): How do we know he was in there at all?

CLUMLY: Think what you like. I’ll take that tape recorder.

FOURTH VOICE: Yessir. Of course.

RURAL VOICE (distant) : I’m sorry, officer. But look here. I got my car. Can I take you somewheres?

CLUMLY: I’ll walk, thanks. I’m parked down this way.

RURAL VOICE (distant) : Well, ever you say. It’s a gol-danged disappointment, man can see.

CLUMLY: Ha. (Crunch of his footsteps. Behind him, silence. The engineer calls his crew and puts them to work getting the tent out of the way.)

RURAL VOICE (distant): Officer!

(Clumly stops. Waits.)

Even if it turned out bad after all, I want you to know folks is going to be impressed by your courage, that’s the truth. They won’t forget it. You know who I am, sir?

(Clumly waits.)

Young man, take this here over to the officer. Good. Fine boy. Well, I better be getting on. God be with you, friends. G’day.

(Sound of car starting up, backing away, pulling out onto the road. Footsteps as the young man draws near.)

YOUNG MAN: Sir, the man said to give you—

CLUMLY (infinitely weary) : Thank you.

YOUNG MAN: What is it, you think?

CLUMLY (absently, sunk in thought) : It looks like a box with a chain around it.

(Switches off the tape.)

1

The morning of the room and the yard beyond the round-arched windows lay to the left of her, stiff as old knees, violated in the night but uncomplaining: it might have been any of a hundred mornings, as though Millie’s life were all played out but not yet over — she might put herself where she pleased in time, like a needle on an endlessly repetitious record; or, at any rate, she had seen before a thousand times this graygreen dawn after autumn rain, a presence in the room, or the memory of a presence, old, blind, despairing, a relative out of a tintype in the attic, Memento mori, Millie my maid, who sat in the room, hands folded on his cane, his wide tie drooping on his scorch-yellow shirt, his lumpy shoes toeing inward wearily, fingers the color of piano keys: and it was a part of his weariness that his substance did not interfere any more than a stranger’s — that Coleridge poem — with her undevout vision of the chair behind him or the threadbare rug beneath his heavy shoes: not a ghost, exactly, or a dream either, but the heaviness of the morning brought down to the not quite invisible figure of a man because once on such a morning he’d been there, as if by way of explanation, sitting opposite the couch where, after she’d left Will Hodge in anger, she had slept. “Well, well,” he had said. “Good morning,” she had said. He had smiled with vast and weary scorn, then had raised himself, slow and ponderous as an elephant waking from a dream of swamps, and had shuffled out of the room. It had come to her that she had wanted him to tell her something, heaven knew what. But the Congressman was gone and would not return, she understood, would lie in his coffin with that same weary scorn, and she would be, as she had always been, on her own. She could endure it. Waking another day and year to look out at another autumn morning after rain, not at the wide lawn of Stony Hill Farm or the scratchy, truck-rutted lawn at her son’s, but at city streets where pieces of newspaper lay and early morning trucks muttered irritably in the alley behind the pizza parlor and the grocery store next door, her lover gone down now, no longer romantic and mighty in an aura of wine but heavy and woppish, a tradesman tending to his business, she would see the Old Man again or would remember him or would remember the day as though all other days were illusion and only this — weariness, violation, despair — were real. She knew well enough, on days like this, where the truth lay. It was the physical pattern in the carpet, where the blueblack lines intersected the brown and where figures of roses showed their threads; in the broken putty on the windowpanes, in the angular shadows inside the glass of a doorknob, in the infinite complexity of lines in the bark of trees, in the dust in the sunbeams: substance calling beyond itself to substance. And coming to life was an act of will, an act of waking up, putting substance to some human use for the moment. Poor Luke! Who knew nothing of all this — a saint, merely. Mad as a hatter. (She remembered the sound of their hammering, high above her, Will and Ben, balanced on the comb of the barn, stripping off shingles black with age and soft as the deadmen embedded in the bottom of the Tonawanda Creek, replacing them with goldenbrown cedar richly scented and light as wings; and for all her weariness she would open her eyes and look up at where they crouched, enormous and light as bumblebees, or walked the comb with a bundle of shingles on one shoulder, solemn as Noahs at work on another antique, preposterous ark.) She lay still, moving only her eyes, her substance one with the pointless substance of the room and the morning outside. What time was it? Early, she was sure. Not eight. Then, wide awake, she remembered that this morning was dangerous. Luke lay exactly as he’d lain last night, dead looking, inert body and soul from his heavy drugs. Nick and the bearded stranger were nowhere in sight.