John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

“That’s stupid,” she said. Pious little idiot! Did he really imagine he’d made the discovery all by himself, that it hadn’t been one of the grand old clichés for a thousand thousand years?

“Maybe. So then enlighten me, Mama. How come you can walk on whoever you want to, and me, I’m supposed to live by the Guilty Rule?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

Shame on him! Shame! The ghosts said.

But she could have told him, if there were so much as a prayer that he would listen. It was not her fault that Luke was the victim of a dream, a romantic image of a world that never was. It was not she who’d given him the image.

It was the same with us, the Runian sisters whispered. They referred to their murdering nephew. She smiled. It gave her comfort, this fantasy (for she knew it was that) in which she and the dead sisters were in league against him.

The sentimentality of youth, she thought. And more than sentimentality: overweening pride. Born to save the world ruined by their parents, they prated. Where did it come from — that tiresome idea? That was what the Sunlight Man had said yesterday morning, in effect — or the morning before — except that he’d said more than that, too. Standing up to his ankles in the water, pantlegs rolled up, his hands in the pockets of his suitcoat, studying them as though they were mannequins in a store window. “There’s only rule or anarchy,” he said. “Talk about anything between as ‘freedom’ and you engage in insignificant speech. There’s much to be said for anarchy, to tell the truth. Consider, please. For the child’s safety he learns to stay out of the road. A rule. And for his health he learns to eat both foods he does and doesn’t like. A rule. Nevertheless, grown men can walk in the street if they please, and they can go without food for days if they have their reasons. Sooner or later even the rules which keep a man alive — keep his kind alive — come up for nearer inspection, so to speak, and every generation — and every man of it — is alone. Abandoned to life. The wiser a man grows, the fewer his iron bonds. So it seems.” He mused, looking first at her, then at Luke. “It’s strange, isn’t it, the curious counter-movement. How we long to get home again. When I was a child—” He closed his eyes and, after a moment, nodded, deciding on a different tack. “Punctilious old men think back to the easy freedom of their childhood. And long-toothed beatniks in their cups hone for the rituals of right and wrong their bourgeois fathers taught. I was once told that the antidote to the escape through marijuana is brown sugar; another person told me peanut butter. I don’t know which is true, if either. But though very little is more pleasurable than a marijuana buzz, it is a curious fact of experience that the higher one goes, the more ardently one longs for brown sugar or, alternatively, peanut butter.”

A rat swam toward him. He watched it come, its small legs churning with all their might, stirring the heavy black water, and when it came within six inches he lifted one bare foot and shooed it. The rat turned and continued on its way. He too continued. “With respect to life, I can say this: The greater the freedom I personally achieve — the greater the distance I put between myself and the common run of mankind — bus-drivers, judges, policemen, men of science, and the like — the more I find myself admiring them. I could listen all day to the sober good sense of an upholder of the law. I take my hat off to them, I go down on my knees to them and ask their benediction. Like wicked Jacob in Esau’s hair. All are sinners.”

She said nothing. It was impossible to know whether he was reasoning or raving, seriously questioning her or mocking her.

He waded over to Luke and bent his face forward till his nose was two inches from Luke’s forehead. “And which way will you go, my child?” he whispered. No answer came. The Sunlight Man nodded. “Either way, you have my blessing.” He made a cross in the air, then sadly shook his head. “So much revolution in you,” he said, “so much hatred for order, so much hatred for anarchy — and so much love. How terrible! Where can you run to? I tremble for your soul.” Then, slowly, solemnly, he went down on his knees in the water at Luke’s feet and, after long meditation, kissed Luke’s shoes. After that he sighed, like a man who has finished an unpleasant task, and straightened up and tightened the cords around Luke’s wrists. He gave them all a little wave. “Think positive,” he said. He slapped Luke’s cheek to see if he was conscious. His trousers were soaked to the crotch. He turned back to the stairs, whistling under his breath, and went up and turned the light off.

He brought them no breakfast the following morning, and they believed he had abandoned them for good. They could hear no sound of hammering and sawing in the garage, no sound of pacing. “Maybe they caught him,” Nick’s eyes said. Luke snarled inside his gag like a dog, then cried for a long time. She listened to it and hated him. She’d had nightmares last night. The Sunlight Man did not appear with lunch for them. She looked up at the flooring and began angrily to talk to it — or, really, to talk to the demonic spirit which might or might not be beyond the flooring, resting, or possibly hanging dead (she had half-convinced herself by now that he would kill himself), and at last, experimentally at first, she began to shout inside the gag. Hardly a sound. Luke too shouted, but only with his eyes, sometimes at the Sunlight Man, sometimes at her, sometimes at Nick. At last they were all shouting, their eyes resonant in the wet, stonewalled room. They stopped. Millie wept as Luke had. “At a time like this, you learn what the really important things are,” she said in her mind. “That’s stupid,” she said, enraged.

And then at last, just as the light was going out of the casement windows, they began to hear noises upstairs: pacing, the sound of doors and cupboards opening, sounds of cooking. She tried shouting again, but the man would not be hurried. She fell silent again and stood now, head straining forward, eyes rolling upward, listening intently for any sound of hope. At last it came. The cellar door creaked open and light shot down the stairs and then the cellar light clicked on and his feet came in sight. When they could see all of him they saw that he was dressed in a blue suit of terrible dignity, wearing hornrimmed glasses that made him look like a college professor, and smoking an elegant pipe. He dusted off one of the cellar steps, then sat down on it, took off his shoes, rolled up his pantlegs. Then he came and, without a word, untied them and half-carried, half-led them from their posts back to the steps. Upstairs he wiped his feet and lower legs on a kitchen towel, rolled down his pantlegs, and put his socks and shoes back on, then showed them to the dining room. The table was beautifully set, as if for a party: linen tablecloth, china, crystal (where he’d gotten it heaven knew), long slim candles.

“Would you care to freshen up?” the Sunlight Man said. He bowed toward the bathroom. “Meanwhile, I’ll fix us a drink,” he said. “Sainthood cannot be taken on all at once.” He laughed, and the laugh startled her. It was Taggert! Then she remembered that she’d realized that before. And again she could hardly believe it, and, full of alarm, held back from seizing the discovery, waiting to be sure. She glanced at Luke, trying to see if he knew, but his eyes were vague as a madman’s; he was a thousand miles away. She looked then at the Sunlight Man, and she was dead certain. Yet nothing about him, not even the way he stood, was right for the man she knew he was; and even now her mind would not close on it. “Thank you,” she said suddenly, and she went into the bathroom and closed the door, and in the mirror she saw her face. She wept. Monster, she thought, over and over, and she did not know who she meant, the man or herself. She could hear someone moving in the upstairs bathroom, directly over her head. The next thing she knew, she had fallen asleep and someone was knocking on the bathroom door, calling to her.