John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

When they’d taken a bite or two he said, “Pick a card, any card! Superb! Beautiful! The seven of farts! Tear a corner off! Marvellous! You’ll recognize the card? You’ll know, when I’ve put it through fire and water, that the corner you hold in your hand fits the mutilated card?” He snatched it from her, matched the two pieces, thrust the card back. “Beautiful!” He spun away, cape whirling out, and when he turned back to them he was holding the gun. “Now!” he said. “Allah, the incinerator!” Dully, full of hate, Nick handed him a small stone dish, and the Sunlight Man tore the card to bits, dropped the pieces in, sprinkled something like lighter fluid on them, and lit them. They burned to ashes. (Luke went on eating the omelette, stubbornly not watching. He breathed in awful gasps. The Sunlight Man glared.) “Very good,” he said. “Would you kindly hold the pistol, madam? Upright. That’s it. We’ll pour the ashes down the barrel, you see. Hah!” He conjured a funnel and poured in the ashes. “Nicodemus,” he said, “you may dispose of the incinerator now.” He went away to the kitchen with it, then on out into the woodshed. “Now behold,” said the Sunlight Man. She heard him moan. “You see before you a common nail, except of course that it’s solid gold, or a reasonable facsimile. (For all is illusion, ladies and gentlemen. Nothing is as it seems. All tricks out of hell!) Will you mark it, kind sir. With a cross, if you don’t mind. A powerful symbol, and we need, in this dark pass, the most powerful of symbols! Excellent! Sublime! You are an artist, young man! A very Giotto of crosses! I kneel to you! Good. Now madam, your kind cooperation. Would you drop the nail in the pistol? Fine!” Then turning, aiming the pistol at the wall: “Nicodemus, you fool, the fishbowl!” He came with it, drew the coffee table over by the wall, set the fishbowl on the coffee table a foot from the edge of the drape, then stood back and bowed. The water in the bowl moved from side to side, and the Sunlight Man waited for it to settle, not saying a word now, dangerously silent, aiming straight at the bowl. Then, deafeningly, the gun went off. The same torn card was nailed through the drape to the wall. “Bring it here,” the Sunlight Man said, and Nick brought it. The two pieces matched. Outside, there was a sound of running. The Sunlight Man smiled, bending toward her, and his dark ringed eyes showed mysterious satisfaction. “Praise the Lord of hosts,” he said, but he was listening, “in whose name these miracles are performed. And applause for Nicodemus, who is His prophet.” He turned suddenly to the door, holding the gun, and snatched it open. There was no one there, or so he said. She could no longer trust her wits.

After that he did tricks with handkerchiefs, tricks with rings, more tricks with cards—“Take a card, any card!” He dealt her a living mouse. He worked more swiftly, as if in frenzy. He made a chair stand unsupported in empty air, put a spell on a rooster so that even the blowing of a trumpet would not awaken it though with a snap of his fingers he could bring it back. And then when her mind was swimming he said, “For my next trick, I will do the resurrection. Dear lady, let me borrow your bird.”

“My bird?” she said.

He took from just inside her collar, as it seemed to her, a living bird, a sparrow. “You have heard it said that not a sparrow shall fall?” he said. “Behold!” He put the sparrow on the coffee table, produced the pistol and, with the barrel not a foot away from the bird’s breast, shot it dead. “A trick, you think?” he said with a wild look. “Touch it, dear lady! Do not pick it up with your coarse earthly hands, but touch it. Your fingertips know the feel of death. Touch!” She obeyed. The bird was unquestionably dead. He went nowhere near it. “Bird,” he whispered. “My beloved, my leman, O symbol of the soul’s eternity, rise! Rise!” After a long moment, the bird seemed to move. There was blood on the coffee table. “Stop it,” she whispered. Nick was bending close, wringing his hands, but he too went nowhere near it. “Rise!” the Sunlight Man whispered, and now there was violence in his eyes, all the violence of thunder and rage. There was no mistake. The bird was coming to life. “Stop!” she said. A shout, this time. The bird twitched violently and struggled to stand up and at last succeeded. It stood trembling, bleeding and twitching and completely alive. The Sunlight Man bowed his head. “Resurrexit,” he said. 1

Sometimes it was in the middle of the afternoon that he would leave. Once, perhaps twice, he took Nick with him. “Where do you go?” she said. “About my father’s business,” he said. “My real father.” He winked.

Down in the darkness of the cellar, where there was never a sound except the occasional stirring of a rat, an almost unheard plosh as one of them slipped from the edge of some moldy shelf into the black, still water, she sometimes believed she was losing her mind, that that was in fact his purpose. For she did not believe, as Luke did, that he had no purpose. She stood hour after hour, or hung limp from the binding ropes she could no longer feel, trying to think, remembering trifles of no sense or significance. She remembered Will’s snoring, Will Jr’s preaching to the others in the orchard — poor, pitiful Will Jr! — remembered darning socks for her mother, children’s socks so worn there was hardly a place sturdy enough to hold the thread. (She remembered the smooth, heavy darning ball, lovely to the touch.)

Sometimes, with their eyes, she and Luke fought, or so she imagined.

Luke’s eyes said, “So make love to him. That’s the trick. Love conquers all, et cetera, et cetera. All you want, anyway.”

“Stop it,” she hissed in her mind.

He stood relaxed against the post, no longer resisting the ropes that bound his hands and feet and chest, the gag biting into his cheeks. Nick Slater stood tied to the post beyond, with his back to them. To look at them he had to twist his head over his shoulder, and that was too hard. He simply stood hour after hour with his head dropping, still and silent as the moldy stone wall. For Nick it had not been so long as for them, because sometimes when he came back the Sunlight Man would untie him and take him upstairs with him, whisper and laugh and teach him tricks, sometimes striking him when he turned sullen. At times the Sunlight Man would talk to him as though nothing had happened.

“Me,” Luke’s eyes said, “I like it as much here as anyplace — though I wouldn’t mind getting some dinner now and then.” They couldn’t tell how long it had been since they’d eaten. Maybe as much as a day. The casement windows were so dirty you couldn’t tell morning from afternoon. “That’s the advantage of being a poor crippled bastard, you know.” He laughed shrilly with his eyes. “You learn to ask for nothing. No delusion. You, now. You’ve had the illusion of being free as a bird; but me, I’m used to where I am — I almost like it.”

“You whine too much,” she said. She’d have struck him if she could.

“Yes, yes! Say it cheerfully then. What does she want? Power she wants. Vroom vroom! Be her own boss! She goes to college and gets her a paper. Self-supporting now. Vroom! She wants ice-cream, she goes out and buys herself ice-cream. She wants sex, she goes out and buys herself—”

“Luke!”

“Yes, yes! Quite right. Talking that way to his own shitass mother! But that’s the price, you know. Price of liberty! You collects the merchandise, you gotta pay the fee. I was quiet a long, long time, after all. But the lesson finally got through to me. Yes. Think of Number One. From you I learned it. Now I think of Number One, which from my point of view is me, and I guess Number Two will just have to smart a little. Which is you. C’est la vie.”