John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

CLUMLY: What do you want? Look, I don’t want any trouble from you. I want straight answers to straight questions.

PRISONER: Negative.

CLUMLY (wildly): You sit listening, don’t you! You sit in there and strain your ears to hear every word I say!

PRISONER: It’s because you’re my friend.

(Pause.)

Psst! (A whisper): Are you interested in metaphysics?

CLUMLY: See here—

PRISONER: I’ve known men would give their souls for metaphysics. (Laughs.) I know a man in Philadelphia killed by lightning in pursuit of metaphysics. I admire him for it. I’d have done the same myself, and the country be damned. (Laughs more softly.)

CLUMLY: Metaphysics! Lord!

Chief Clumly shuddered, reversed the tape, found the beginning of the examination, and carefully erased it twice. Very well. So people were talking about him, even in front of the prisoners. Well, no surprise. When he left the station (it was now almost ten) he noticed that the light was on in the Mayor’s office in the City Hall down the street. He paused, scowling, his hand around his mouth, then turned back and went up the police station steps.

“Figlow, you seen Miller tonight?”

“He’s been off since six, Chief.”

Clumly nodded, studied the stump of his cigar, then went out again. “Funny business,” he said. The darkness around him was warm as a blanket.

Metaphysics.

He hunted a long time before he located the paper — on the porch, right in front of the door. He let himself in and locked the door behind him, as usual, then waited in the darkness of the livingroom. She didn’t call to him, and a light pain of fear began to build up in his chest. The house was absolutely still, and in the yard outside not a leaf was stirring. “Hello!” Clumly called.

He groped toward the kitchen, his nerves jangling, and said again, more loudly, “Hello?” He could smell her wine. His heart shook violently as he snapped on the light, but there was no one. He opened the pantry door and pulled the lightstring there, half-expecting to find she’d hanged herself. But again there was nothing. He leaned on the doorframe, gathering his wits.

He found her, three minutes later, asleep in the bed; or possibly, he thought for some reason, she was only pretending to be asleep. Her sewing was in her hands. He stood for a long time looking at her in the dim light thrown from the wall lamp in the hallway behind him, his shadow falling over her waist and hips. He was amazed at how worried he’d been at the thought that something had happened to her. And he was amazed at the joy — it was more than relief-flooding through him now as he looked down at the sly old woman lying almost motionless, only the bony chest stirring as she breathed very slowly in and out, fallen like a scrawny chicken on its back.

We’re going to get through this thing, you and I, Chief Clumly thought. Whatever the bearded man was plotting — or Miller and Kozlowski and Figlow and the Mayor — Chief of Police Fred Clumly was not afraid.

He squared his jaw in the darkness. Metaphysics. Mad as a hatter — no doubt of it. And yet it was odd how the question had affected him. He could not recall off-hand what Metaphysics was — it was one of those things he’d probably understood once, long ago, had come across, say, in the days when he used to read whatever people offered him to pass the time with on the ship; or it was one of those words you heard and dismissed, knowing your limits, or knowing the thing was probably just air, an occupation for idle minds — like the words the Mayor’s man Wittaker used at times, “interaction target,” or something like that, and “socio-economic construct.” He used them constantly, as naturally as he breathed, a little like a lunatic using words with all normal sense drained out of them. Except, when he thought about it, when Wittaker used those words of his, Clumly would turn off his mind for a moment, annoyed. The prisoner’s word had a different effect: it had given a queer sort of jolt to his heart. Yes! Clumly had thought. There it was. Whatever it meant, spiritualistic trash for old ladies or the roaring secret of life and death, for a minute there Clumly had believed he wanted to know. Better watch that man, he thought. He came wide awake. What the devil had he meant by that? Psst! Interested in—

But all was still. All was well. The room silent and comfortable, haunted by no turbulence but the breath of his nostrils and the nostrils of his wife. The house silent. The street. Nevertheless, he had a terrible sense of things in motion, secret powers at work in the ancient plaster walls, devouring and building, and forces growing and restive in the trees, the very earth itself succinct with spirit. He had an image, culled from some old book, perhaps, or a sermon he’d heard — an image of his house taken over by owls and ravens and cormorants and bitterns, and strange shapes dancing in his cellar. And in his livingroom, thorns and brambles. He listened to his heartbeat going choof, kuh-choof, and he could not get to sleep. “Dear Lord,” he said, and fell silent.

Unbeknownst to Clumly or anyone else, three boys in the alley by the post office were letting the air out of people’s tires with an ice pick. Elsewhere — beside the Tonawanda — a woman was digging a grave for her illegitimate child three hours old. Jim Hume was chasing his cows back through the fence some hunter had cut. There was no moon.

1

He came to be known as the Sunlight Man. The public was never to learn what his name really was. As for his age, he was somewhere between his late thirties and middle forties, it seemed. His forehead was high and domelike, scarred, wrinkled, drawn, right up into the hairline, and above the arc of his balding, his hair exploded like chaotic sunbeams around an Eastern tomb. At times he had (one mask among many, for stiff as the fire-blasted face was, he could wrench it into an infinite number of shapes) an elfish, impenetrable grin which suggested madness, and indeed, from all evidence, the man was certainly insane. But to speak of him as mad was like sinking to empty rhetoric. In the depths where his turbulent broodings moved, the solemn judgments of psychiatry, sociology, and the like, however sound, were frail sticks beating a subterranean sea. His skin, where not scarred, was like a baby’s, though dirty, as were his clothes, and his straw-yellow beard, tangled and untrimmed, covered most of his face like a bush. He reeked as if he’d been feeding on the dead when he first came, and all the while he stayed he stank like a sewer. For all his elaborate show of indifference, for all his clowning, his play-acting, his sometimes arrogant, sometimes mysteriously gentle defiance and mocking of both prisoners and guards, he sweated prodigiously, throughout his stay, from what must have been nervousness. He talked a great deal, in a way that at times made you think of a childlike rabbi or sweet, mysteriously innocent old Russian priest and at other times reminded you of an elderly archeologist in his comfortable classroom, musing and harkening back. He would roll his eyes slowly, pressing the tips of his fingers together, or he would fix his listener with a gentle, transmogrifying eye and open his arms like a man in a heavy robe. He pretended to enjoy the official opinion of the court, that he might be mad. “I am the Rock,” he said thoughtfully, nodding. “I am Captain Marvel.”

None of the other prisoners listened to him much when he first came, and except for young Mickey Salvador, neither did the guards. No one could help seeing that there was a kind of cleverness, even genius, in some of what he said and did. He could quote things at great length (there was no way for them to know whether he was really quoting or inventing) and he had an uncanny ability to turn any trifling remark into an abstruse speculation wherein things that were plain as day to common sense became ominous, uncertain, and formidable, like buttresses of ruined cities discovered in deep shadow at the bottom of a blue inland sea. You could not tell whether he was speaking to you or scoffing at you for your immersion in the false; whether he was wrestling with a problem of immense significance to him or indifferently displaying his hodge-podge of maniac learning. Only this much was sure (it was Miller’s observation, long afterward): whatever he was up to now, in the beginning he must have gone to those books of his hungrily, hunting for something. One could see that he had bent desperately over his books late at night, night after night and day after day, prayerfully even, keeping like a hermit to his no doubt cluttered, filthy room, poring over the print as though his soul’s salvation depended on it. It is unusual, to say the least, to encounter such men in a small-town jail. No wonder Chief Clumly was troubled.