John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

“Shut up,” the Sunlight Man echoed, snatching off his cap and rolling his eyes up. “If only one could! But think of the implications! Staggering! If I close myself in … if every one of us closes himself in … and we can do it, of course, a simple manipulation of the switch called Will, what evils would be banished! what terrifying ghosts would be laid!

“Enough. No bombast.” He leaned toward the Indians, perspiration on his forehead like drops of dew on the corpse of a mushroom.

“Take an instance. I went to a party once in Los Angeles, through a friend of a friend. It was supposed to be for Tarzan. Imagine the scene: a warm Saturday night and all over Southern California the smoke had begun to rise heavenward. The summer moon was hidden, the smog was glorious — blood red and the deep translucent brown of soy sauce. It was a holy time. The people had all wrung out their swimsuits and they stood now, tanned and glistening, drinking martinis in the wide windows of the one-floor huts overlooking the freeways.

“It was in the Bel Air neighborhood, this party. The best neighborhood in the city, so exclusive that for years and years they wouldn’t even let in movie stars. Clark Gable had to live in Brentwood. William Powell’s three-hundred-thousand-dollar house went up just outside the gates in Westwood. But the Depression came along, and Bel Air decided to take even the money of the vulgar and crass. But I digress.

“I was greeted at the door by a lady in a hairdo that must have cost two hundred dollars, and it was almost all she had on. ‘Is this the Tarzan party?’ I said. ‘Who?’ she said. ‘Here, have a glass of champagne and meet the gang.’ So I did. It was wall-to-wall sofas and sliding glass doors and lampshades as big as the world. The party was in full swing, and you could’ve heard it to San Juan Capistrano. They introduced me as the Wolf Man. On the porch they were playing rock ’n roll, colored lights going over the orchestra, and the shriek of it all would have brought down the roof except that the roof was made of colored plastic — it had no shame. There must have been four hundred people there — dozens of ‘starlets,’ if you know what I mean, a lion trainer dressed in black leather, girls in leopard bikinis, press agents, camera people, a huge chimpanzee and something that looked to be a lynx but might’ve been a snow-leopard with its tail cut off, an old woman with glasses on a stick, waiters with name tags, a man dressed as a Canadian Mountie, and a Russian merchant seaman with steel-rimmed glasses. There were others. Who can remember! Somebody said there was a rape out by the swimming pool, but it was crowded there, there was no way to be sure. There were girls with topless swimsuits, though, and who knows what it may have led to? Nobody mentioned Tarzan all night long, and I never saw him. Well — I have never left your question, you see — how do you close in from that? Ah! Or are you already closed in, there? I don’t mean anything complicated. No! That much pure body and maybe you’re back to pure soul, that’s what I mean. Do I make myself clear? Some people might say it was a holy event, beyond sensualism — that the whole age is a holy event. I don’t say it. But the code you suggest, each of us locked in the cell of himself …” He dashed to the bars and seized them as if with pleasure. “In the ancient conflict of the Jews and the Babylonians,” he said — but there he was cut off. The police came for him, to question him, and he went away between two of them, quietly, as if full of remorse for the sins of all mankind.

The older Indian stood rubbing his jaw, watching him led away. “Jesus Christ,” he said.

“Shut up,” the other one said.

After a long time, the older of the Indians said, “That’s quite a trick, you know?”

“Aah?” the younger said.

The older one stood in the center of their cell with his lean arms stretched out and head tipped back, and he tried to lift one leg straight out to the side and hold it steady. But the knee was bent and he wobbled off balance, and it came to them both at the same time that the thing was almost impossible.

The younger one shrugged. “Practice. That’s all it is.”

“Yeah, I know,” the older one said. He was musing.

2

The thief, Walter Boyle, seemed to hear nothing of what the Sunlight Man said. He sat in his cell like a creature neither alive nor dead, an ash pile which might or might not still hold some heat. He was a short man. His neck and arms and legs were sallow and thin. He did exercises every morning, slowly and methodically, combed his few wisps of graying hair with his short, square fingers, polished his thick glasses, revealing naked, for a minute or two, his protrusive, heavy-lidded eyes, then sat waiting like a hopeless and indifferent barber in a run-down shop, reading the day-old paper he’d gotten from the guard the night before. He was memorizing it, you would have thought. He seemed oblivious to the smell of the place and of his bearded neighbor, oblivious too to the man’s talk, the sullen anger of the two young Indians. Boyle looked at no one, at least in the beginning, and never asked or answered questions except for a word now and then to the guards. It was as if he was busy, adding up sums in his head. At night before he went to sleep he would kneel beside his pallet for a minute, cross himself, and mumble something. He seemed to see nothing amusing or out-of-the-way in this. It was his habit. He was a fool, perhaps, as the older of the Indians — the tall one — pronounced him, but he was not a religious crank. He was a small-time professional thief who travelled from one Western New York town to another, knocked inconspicuously on people’s doors and, if he got no answer, tried the door and, if it was unlocked, went in. He took nothing but cash, impossible to identify even if he should be caught with it on him, and he never worked except by daylight. He made enough to get by and, generally speaking, he was not dissatisfied. In twenty-two years he’d been arrested only four times and had never been convicted except on charges of no significance. He wouldn’t be convicted on the felony charge this time either.

He was a man not easily distressed. He had a faculty for thinking nothing, when necessary, merely bathing in sensation — the rumble and clank of the trucks passing in the street outside, the noise of a television somewhere nearby, a gas station bell, voices. (It was the hottest time of year in Western New York, and the people who lived in the large, declining houses across from the jail would sit on their porches talking and drinking beer until well after sundown.) The thief heard the bearded man’s chatter without noticing the words, merely catching here and there a single phrase — some blasphemous outcry — that stayed with him, briefly, as a minor irritant, like a small segment of some flat-voiced fieldbird’s song, teasing him almost but not quite to curiosity. After the first day he began sometimes to glance furtively at the new prisoner, without real prejudice or even particular interest, merely as one might glance at some fat, harmless snake to see what he was doing; and then sometimes — but less often — he would glance at the Indians. He had no strong feeling about the bearded man, except for a queer sense that he’d seen him before somewhere, which in fact he had; but the Indians, especially the older one, he disliked. Why he disliked them he did not know or care, and even if you had told him what the reason was, he might not have recognized the truth. He was a painstaking, meticulous thief, a man who would never harm a soul or steal on mere impulse. They, on the other hand, were hooligans.

On the third day, sitting with his paper as usual, running his eyes along the words, he came awake to the sharp impression that the older Indian was watching him and had been doing so for a long time. He peeked between his shoulder and the pinked edge of the Daily News and saw that his impression had not been wrong. The Indians were in the cell beyond the bearded man’s, and the older one was lying catlike on his pallet, hands under the side of his head, pretending to listen to the bearded man but staring at Boyle with sleepy-looking eyes. Boyle looked back at his paper and then, slowly, as if indifferently, turned his back. He began to listen.