John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

He poured. It ran down over the sides.

“And so, dear Millie, it comes to this. I’ve pursued the whole question as far as I care to, and I’m ready to leave. I pray you may come to understand yourself and may continue joyfully on the road I have started you up — or down, depending on your point of view. Just one thing more. Your son must drive us, preferably in the tractor-trailer. That might require your maternal influence. Convince him, dissuade him from jokes and tricks, and we’ll call the whole thing even.”

“Even?” She turned away.

Luke had turned partway toward them. He was listening, pretending not to.

“Nothing personal,” the Sunlight Man said. “You won’t believe that. Most people wouldn’t. Nevertheless, I have watched objectively, partly because of the accident of my having been cut off from intervening, and partly, I suppose, because of my nature. I’ve observed every move of your chess game with the Old Man, and maybe I’ve sympathized with both sides, at times. In any case, he was right, as you see, and you were wrong. You brought down his house, made fools of his sons and even grandsons, your own sons. But law was on his side.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Religion.”

She searched his eyes. He really did seem to imagine he was talking sense, and she wanted to grasp it. But it was useless. She watched the moving lips, the undeniably insane smile. She remembered the razorblade tucked inside her bra.

“All the walls mankind makes can be broken down,” he said, “but after the last wall there’s still one more wall, the final secret, Time. You can’t get out of it. The man in the back room, as who’s-it says — sitting with head bent, silent, waiting, listening to the commotion in the streets: the Keeper of the Kinds. You and I, Millie, we were going to run naked in our separate woods and play guitars and prove miraculous. But outside our running the bluish galaxies are preparing to collapse, and inside our running is the space between the pieces of our atoms. And so I won’t kill you for your destructions, or kill the police for theirs. We’ll have dinner, like civilized people, and then your son will drive us away to where we can hide for eternity, like Cain.”

She looked at Luke. Before she knew she would say it, she asked, “Luke, can you?”

“Did I ever have a choice?” he said.

She tried to think. “Do you know who this is?”

After a long moment, Luke nodded. She believed him.

“Then you understand?”

He smiled ironically. “At least as well as you do.”

The Sunlight Man was smiling too.

“What do you mean?” she said. “Both of you. Luke, what are you talking about?”

“Dinner’s ready,” the Sunlight Man said. “Will you join us, beloved sister?”

“It’s terrible,” she said softly. “What your loving people has done to you, I mean. That’s it, isn’t it.”

He laughed. “Ridiculous!” Luke, too, suddenly and horribly, laughed.

But Millie was above error. She was ugly as a witch, and could not be beautiful again. She was ugly, and the father-in-law she had too much admired was dead, his house in ruins. The war was over.

She had underestimated love.

1Because this illusion may seem improbable, the editors have thought fit to append this explanation of how it is managed:

TO SHOOT A SMALL BIRD AND BRING IT TO LIFE AGAIN

In this experiment take an ordinary fowling-piece, and put the usual charge of powder into it; but instead of the common charge of shot, introduce a half-charge of quicksilver. When a small bird approaches, fire. Although it is not necessary to hit the bird — if the bird is struck by the minimal charge, blood will be produced — it will be found so stunned and stifled as to fall upon the ground in a state of suspended animation. As its consciousness will return at the expiration of a few minutes, avail yourself of the interval in declaring your intention of bringing it to life again, and your declaration will come true.

1

Even now that he had fled them, Luke’s scornful laughter rang in his ears. Luke’s was the worst crime: youth, innocence. But demanded as he knew he was, or anyway twisted out of the sane but not to the comfort of the not-sane, he knew the crime was not merely Luke’s but one they must all live down. “It’s terrible, what loving people has done to you,” she’d said; and so at last they were face to face. He’d made her a foul old witch for her crimes, and now he was chief victim of her witchcraft. Or she’d been a witch before and he had exorcised her demon, had brought her gaze down from grand visions of sex and subtle wit to the bare earth where he stood. Either way, she had seen him clear, “as if scales had fallen from her eyes”—the brittle scales of her theory on how to “be”—and she knew him, and knew herself, so that he too suddenly knew. He’d backed away in terror. “Ridiculous.” And laughed, faking scorn. She understood. But Luke’s scorn was real, and hurt her, and the callouses he’d carefully grown to wall off his nerves from other people’s pain were torn away to the roots by her words; the image he thought he had sealed off — an image now familiar and tiresome, infuriating as a tubercular’s cough, yet no less dreadful for his having endured it a thousand times, awake and asleep — the image of fire, leapt up again in his mind or, as it seemed, in the corners of the room: turning quickly, with a sudden bow to prove to himself as much as to them that he was still in command, he had fled.

He stood in the old woods beside the house, leaning on a tree trunk, hands over his eyes. When he let himself look again, there were no more flames. The woods, like the house behind him, were unnaturally quiet, and the late slant of the sun made the colors mellow. Jadis, he remembered, si je me souviens bien … They had read it together, he and Kathleen. Was it still there, buried in that brain closed up in stone? A brilliant girl once. Quick-witted as Millie but delicate, as light as the incense-filled garden old Rimbaud lost, like Luke, like Millie: garden of unreality.

The doctor had told him of Nazi experiments, had prattled stupidities while Kathleen sat dying little by little, and Taggert had thought I could kill him; no one would know, no one would miss him but had listened on, or pretended to, constructing difficulties: the doctor’s detachment was a professional necessity; he might otherwise go mad himself; and how was one to strangle professional necessity? Nevertheless, it was he who had pumped the shocks through her skull, he who had made her this. But then again it was Paxton who had hired and paid him, against Taggert’s plea. Then he had seen the two graves, and had seen the gentle, forgiving Ben, though they did not speak; and in his sorrow Taggert had fallen out of wrath. He had resolved to visit her father. He would say, he remembered thinking, “Mr. Paxton, I come to make peace between us. God forgive me for all I’ve done to you and you to me. We loved her, both of us, and whatever terrible things we did—” There his memory broke down. He was planning it, walking down Oak Street, tears brimming, heart hammering, and then, paintbrush in hand …

There was an old man sitting on a stump not fifty feet from him, reading a book. He was well dressed, incongruous here in the woods, but Taggert could not stop just now for puzzlement. Something had happened, he was realizing for the first time, his mind finally ready or almost ready to face it. He’d been walking down Oak. It was late afternoon. The next moment he was painting a word on the street, and it was morning. One whole night had dropped out of his mind. He wiped away sweat and went through it more carefully. “It’s coming back,” he whispered. He screwed his eyes up tight. “I reached his house, yes. But I walked by, didn’t have the nerve. I stopped.” There was a tricycle in the yard, he remembered. He’d stood looking at it.