John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

The man in the clearing went on reading. There was another man now, approximately the same age but heavier, enormous in fact, with shocks of white hair streaming out around his ears. It’s my father, he thought. He’s not dead. But the next instant he knew he was wrong, his father was dead. For the man on the stump was Clive Paxton. He was looking up, greeting the ghost of Taggert’s father. They began to talk, warmly, like old friends. (He could hear their voices.) It’s not real, he thought. I saw my father buried.

Then, at last, he remembered putting his hands around Give Paxton’s throat. It was all he could remember, but he knew it was not an illusion.

Now the clearing was empty. The ghosts had disappeared.

2

Stony Hill. Late afternoon.

A square wooden silo of a sort once common in Western New York. A gabled roof where gray pigeons nest. Fred Clumly parked under the walnut trees on what had once been the Congressman’s lawn — now a place of high weeds, the September air full of insects — and walked toward the silo, ignoring the lighted house to his right, the Negro faces at the windows. The silo was dark, its silhouette distinct and imposing against the luminous gray of twilight. The air smelled of apples, and the smell brought to Clumly’s chest a keen sense of memories just beyond the reach of his conscious mind, a sense of time lost. With his hands in the pockets of the enormous black coat — the skirt of the coat six inches above Clumly’s shoes — he walked toward the silo. As he approached, a faint light began to glow inside, just visible through the vertical cracks in the silo wall, and the closer he moved, the brighter the light seemed to burn. It was a pleasant trick, and he felt comfortable with it. He was no longer afraid. It was not that he expected no danger now, not that he had come to a firm belief that the Sunlight Man was harmless. He was a madman, close to violence, according to the opinion of the psychiatrist, and Clumly could believe it. The poor man’s experiment had failed. But Clumly, in black coat and hat, his hands in his pockets, was no longer afraid. As he stood wondering where the entrance might be, a small door opened directly in front of him, and he found himself looking in at a clean, neatly swept room where an oil lamp burned. He went to the door, hands still in his pockets, stooped a little, and went in. The Sunlight Man stood with his arms folded, waiting. He was wearing the same black suit as before, and in one white-gloved hand he held a cane. “Welcome,” he said. Clumly nodded. The lamp was on an old chair in the exact center of the silo floor. The arrangement was too obviously theatrical to be mere chance. “On time as usual,” the Sunlight Man said. Again he nodded. “As usual.”

Abruptly, the Sunlight Man moved to the chair. “The light’s not good, I realize,” he said. “I do the best I can, but you see the difficulties.” He bent forward slightly, and in the glow of the lamp his eyes were dangerous. “It would be better up higher, you think?”

Clumly smiled, tight-lipped.

The Sunlight Man pointed the cane at the chair and with his left hand motioned it to lift. Nothing happened. “My mind’s fatigued,” the Sunlight Man said. “I’d be glad if you’d help. Concentrate on making the chair lift. Be sure to keep it level.”

“Look, friend,” Clumly said. Almost kindly.

“Concentrate!”

Clumly sighed and looked at the chair, pretending to concentrate. The chair began to move. It gave a little jerk, then began, slowly and steadily, to rise. It all seemed to Clumly a foolish waste of mind, these paltry illusions, magic tricks. But he was impressed, in a way. It was handsomely done, although he could see the wires. He could almost have believed that it was the very perfection of the magician’s pantomime that made the chair rise.

“That’s very good,” Clumly said.

“Sh!” When the chair was level with his waist the Sunlight Man stopped the lift and turned as if for applause. He turned back then, quickly, and ran his cane through the seemingly empty air in a crafty circle around the chair. “Would you like to examine it yourself?”

“I trust you,” Clumly said.

“That’s a little unwise.” He smiled. Then: “But we have nothing to sit in!” He crossed quickly to Chief Clumly and removed from his inside suitcoat pocket, as it seemed, a long, bright red cloth. He stepped back with it, shook it violently, then held it open at shoulder height, so that the bottom touched the floor, and he seemed to offer it for Clumly’s inspection. Then, like a man unveiling a statue, he whipped the cloth away. Clumly blinked. There, quite impossibly, in the center of the room where a moment ago there had been nothing, stood the Indian boy.

“Bring the chairs, Nick,” the Sunlight Man said.

The boy nodded sullenly, walked to the corner of the room, then paused. “They’re gone,” he said.

The Sunlight Man laughed. “How stupid of me. They’re right here under my nose.” Though he had not moved, Clumly would have sworn, it was true: they stood one on each side of him, good parlor chairs with blue plush seats. The Sunlight Man smiled with satisfaction, then reached out and took a pipe from the empty air. With another wave of his hand he had matches. “Sit down,” he said. Clumly obeyed. He sat with his feet planted firmly, hands still in his pockets. The Sunlight Man seated himself opposite and lit the pipe. When he had it going to his satisfaction he said, “One last illusion, and then to business.” He turned to the Indian. “Fold up that cloth for me, would you?”

The boy stooped for the red cloth the Sunlight Man had dropped on the floor and raised it in front of him, holding it by the corners.

“Watch closely,” the Sunlight Man said. “As far as I know there are only two other magicians who know how to do this.” He paused and looked annoyed. “What’s wrong, Nick? Fold it.” He went over to help, then paused, a foot away.

The top of the cloth dropped of its own will, as though invisible hands held the cloth by the middle, one hand on each side. The Indian was gone. Clumly bent farther forward, watching as the cloth folded itself upward from the bottom, forming a rectangle, then halved to the left, forming a square. Then it formed a triangle, then another and another. The Sunlight Man stood up, went over to the cloth, ran his cane around it, then took it from the invisible hands and stuffed it in his pocket.

Clumly nodded. Surely, only in a book …, he thought.

“Now to business,” the Sunlight Man said.

He nodded again.

“You brought the tape recorder?”

He reached inside his coat for the machine, set it on the floor, switched it on.

“Tonight I’ll tell you about the towers,” the Sunlight Man said.

Chief Clumly slid his right hand back into the pocket of his coat

3

SUNLIGHT: The towers of Babylon! The crowning achievement of ancient civilization!

No, start with this. Imagine a Mesopotamian city. It’s on a hill, normally — or on a range of hills — a city not so vast as New York or London or Rome, but you wouldn’t know that to look at it: it stretches as far as you can see, hill after hill, or the breadth of a whole valley. It’s surrounded by gigantic walls — a hundred feet thick at the base, and on top a road so wide you can drive four chariots down it side by side — and the whole city’s white as snow, with magnificent buttresses and arches, and there are buildings six stories high and at every story a hanging garden so that what you see when you first come over the mountains or the endless plain is an incredible explosion of light and color — the white of the walls and houses, the green of the gardens everywhere, the red and yellow and purple and blue of flowers, the blue of the sky. But more magnificent than all the rest together, crowning the city as the city crowns the hill, the towers of the temples.