John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

Mr. Kleppmann, I will be open with you. You enrage me. No longer a question of just doing my work. Been beyond that for months. I no longer remember what line I’m in, professionally speaking, at least with the part of my mind I hunt with-the other mind will click on again when I’ve caught you, no doubt, will feed in words like cartridges, official, metal against metal, clean. Ping. Whooey! I no longer remember even why you enrage me, or why I’m afraid of you — why I start violently when I’m sitting on the can and a stranger’s legs appear below the door and the stranger tries the handle. Fantastic way to die. Be found sitting upright, leaning back on the wall, head tipped, pants at the ankles, and on the nether beard, the limp prick, martyr’s blood. In every airport, railway platform, crowded room, even in the sanctuary of the church in Albany, or in the flower shop in Syracuse, or on the street — always, on any street, in the gray lath morning or the cheerily lighted graveyard dark two hours after sunset — the blood says Ici! Il est ici! Some hunter. Scared as hell. Turning suddenly, seeing that face — wide, white, benign, expressionless as a planet depopulated by fire and flood and war and plague — eyes like a bubonic rat’s, the hat high, high on the forehead yet perfectly level, like a child’s fedora placed, très amusant, on the head of a fat, new corpse. Crowd closes. The face is gone. I run toward where I think it was. (Votre pardon, madame. Pardon moi, monsieur. Sonny.) But there’s no one, of course. An apparition, terror projected to a point, Très bien. But I continue. Yes. Surely you are impressed by that, Kleppmann. Brother. Perhaps you can say a simple word, be rid of me — but maybe not, too, eh? Perhaps your man will miss the first time, and if he misses once I’ll have the pistol out, aiming it at him with my two hands wobbling, or perhaps even aiming as though I knew what I was doing, the second piece of the brain clicking in, an old memory of military training, whooeee, Pvt Hodge! — and the room will explode a second time with the noise of a pistol, and he will fall, could be. And then you, Mr. Kleppmann, in time. Surely you must be impressed, Mr. Kleppmann. As shitless scared as I am.

Louise said, “You’re never home nights any more.”

“Half-crazy with work,” I said. “Have you any idea?”

“You’ll be crazy all the way. You don’t play with the kids. You have nightmares night after night after night. Sometimes I’m afraid of you.”

“It will be over. Take it easy. Be patient. C’est la vie.”

“And your French is horrible,” she said.

Hawes said, “Take an extra day, Will. Listen. Let me lend you my bunny key.” Bent closer. “Fantastic place, that club in Chicago. Girl named Molly. Watch for her. Tell her Clarence sent you.”

“Ha ha ha.”

“I mean it, ole pal.”

“No thanks. Got things on my mind. I recommend the same. Get your mind back on mergers. What were this last year’s total assets for the Dansville First National? What’s the population complex? New industry coming? Farm loans secure? Got to have it by heart Hawes. Got to make the Feds say ‘hmm!’ Got to wake ’em up with the tragedy of it all. Monumental injustice. They get bored, that’s the secret. You’d be bored too, sitting there reading a thousand pages of crap that’s no interest to anybody. So they come to the hearing and they’re half-asleep. Try cartoons in the margins. Dirty pictures maybe. Wake ’em up.”

“Take the bunny key.”

“No. Got things on my mind.”

Perdu.

Voices:

Circuit court, Division Nine, now in session. Honorable Christ the Lord, Judge.

Good morning, gentlemen. Young fellow, call the docket.

Heaven and Earth versus William Hodge.

Would you care to make an opening statement?

We would, your Honor.

Proceed.

Room very large, excessively bright despite the layers of blue-green smoke, mercurious, stiffening to mare’s tales before the tiered dais. The Judge is bored. Beware of a bored Judge, Counsellor. A bad beginning. This bodes ill, oh ill! for William Hodge, acting in his own defense. A fool. Colossal idiot. It is impossible to act in one’s own defense. Miserable. Well, C’est la mort.

I will not be judged by Him.

Kleppmann is my judge. O lead us not into Milwaukee, deliver us from Pittsburgh.

Sholly hoolibash! Niscera willy-bill bingle-um gimpf!

Don’t mock me, Kleppmann. We’re past that, you and I. Another martini?

Don’t mind if I do. You’re paying, of course?

Naturally. Or my firm is. Naturally.

Smile.

You had me running for a while there Kleppmann, I’ll give it to you. Well, that’s over.

The pistol in his hand (so he imagines) is utterly still and comfortably warm.

A woman with a sweet voice mumbled something, and he smiled, and she mumbled it again. He opened his eyes.

“Fasten your seat-belt, please, Mr. Hodge. We’re landing.”

“Is something wrong?”

She smiled and tipped her head. She had not heard him.

‘Les amis’ my foot. Secretly married, quintuplets in the stroller, at home with her husband who was born in Ely, Iowa. At heart a pig grower; by trade, a bicycle mechanic.

He could see the lights of St. Louis shooting out behind the wing like sparks, stretching out forever, beautiful. And then the plane was diving, as it seemed to him — now leveling again. Before his stomach was ready for it, the landing-gear bumped on the runway.

He caught the train south (with an hour to spare) and sat reading of earthquakes and the walls of Jericho. It made him remember, more vividly than he would have thought possible, his cousin Ben Jr, head tipped nearly to his shoulder, grinning, arguing about whether God, like Merlin, was so powerful he could make a cage so strong He couldn’t get out of it Himself. Or was the Merlin story another of Ben Jr’s lies? And then he was remembering a song Ben would sing — irrelevant, surely.

King David was my dancing man,

And a juggler too as well;

The way he thrown his balls around

I’ll dance with him in hell!

2

In fact, he had no idea what it was he expected. It was as if he had thrown away his compass, in the classical way, and had ventured into the thickness of the woods prepared for whatever he was destined to meet (Phaiakians?), including the man with the gun in the public lavatory. She had said she wanted to talk to him, and it was pleasant to think it was really that — pleasant not so much in any sexual way as metaphysically, if that was not too big a word for it: pleasant to think she might innocently tell him the truth. But he didn’t expect it.

He was pleasantly numb from the martinis on the train, but not so drunk he was entirely indifferent to matters of, as the expression goes, life and death. The pistol was not in his briefcase but in his pocket.

He was almost alone on the concrete platform. A few students had gotten off — it was a college town — and there was a man with a sunken, Southern mouth, an engineer’s cap, a frock, and pantlegs limply cylindrical, walking along beside the train looking under it, as if watching for a rabbit for his hounds. It was a small town, and, after the hurtle of motion he’d endured this past hour, he had a sharp sense of its spatial isolation — the expanse of bare farmland on every side, the profound darkness outside the pale rim of dead white light from the depot lamps. Against the wall there were taxi drivers, but they did not call out to him or even, as far as he could tell, notice his presence on the platform. He put the pipe in his mouth, selfconsciously solemn, and walked toward the waiting-room doors.