John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

He paused again.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “we all live in the hope and faith that, although there may still be some faults in our society, and sometimes things aren’t all we wish they might be, we’re trying to get better, doing our level best in that direction. It’s a little like the Einstein universe, as I understand it, which is reaching outwards and outwards at terrific speed, and the danger is — if I’ve got this right — the danger is, it can get cold. Turn ice. Ladies and gentlemen, we mustn’t let that happen, I feel. I feel we must all be vigilant against growing indifferent to people less fortunate …”

He bit his lip, pausing a moment, and hungered for a cigar. Would they mind? he wondered. Would they even really notice if he took out a cigar and lit it? When he looked at them this time they seemed to him farther away, as if the whole room were receding — not swiftly, but slowly, definitely, determinedly receding. He got out the cigar and, after a moment, lit it.

“Well things are getting better, some ways, we know. There are supermarkets in India now, or so I read—‘super bazaars,’ they call them. You can buy such things as pressure cookers, egg slicers, meat grinders, and packaged varieties of food — all made right in India. Everything’s got a price tag, which is very important as nobody knows better than the farmer (There! he’d got that in!), and it’s all self-service which, as we all know, is the best way to do it, and the truly American way. But then on the other hand there are signs that things are getting worse. A thousand people a day dying of famine right there in India for instance. Or for instance take the problem of advertising. It’s getting so advertising’s so plain outright obscene you wonder if it’s bad for children’s minds, such as, ‘Does she or doesn’t she?’ and ‘Had any lately?’ and that shaving ad for Noxema where the lady is saying ‘Take it off, take it all off.’ And there’s the problem all over the world of juvenile delinquency, for instance, even in Russia. I forget the statistics on it, but they’re something staggering, believe me. And yet it seems like the worse things get the harder it is for us to arrest a criminal. In San Francisco, California, according to what I read, every time they arrest a person they have to hand him a card that tells him what his rights are. If that makes you nervous, well I can’t say I’m surprised. It does me too.”

He paused again. It was none of it exactly what he’d meant to say. It had nothing to do with his feeling about the man who’d been killed, and nothing to do with his own feelings either, for that matter, his own feelings about being here, talking with friends — He felt his mind fumbling, lost.

“There’s been a lot of talk,” he said. “About me, about the Mayor, about the people over there in the fire department …” He felt himself getting angry, and he wasn’t sure why. “We do the best we can. You know that. And I want to say I know you do the best you can too, or anyway some of you do, and I have the utmost confidence that the people of Batavia will not go off half-cocked about a lot of false rumors.” He wished they would turn the lights up more. He could hardly make out the people at the table beside him. “There may be those—” he said. He squinted. Someone was whispering. “There may be those who condemn what happened tonight with the Sunlight Man. I won’t hide it from you. I’ll tell you right out. He came barging in there to give himself up and the man at the desk got panicky and shot him, that’s all there was to it. A terrible mistake, plain murder, you may say. And it was. But let me tell you this: It ain’t easy, sitting in there listening to the radio crackle and knowing there’s crimes going on in this city and you can’t be everywhere at once. It ain’t easy to know they’re gunning for you — following you around, dogging your footsteps, ready to topple you the first time you go and put your foot down wrong. Think of it! You’re sitting at the desk, nothing happening, mind full of stories of the Sunlight Man-murdering, robbing, scaring people in their beds, so the rumors have it anyhow — and all of a sudden WHOP!!”—he banged the table—”he’s right there in front of you like magic! You know what you’d do. Don’t you fool yourself, mister. It’s the same all around us. The Negro problem! Or the China problem! Face the truth! Juvenile delinquents setting fire to your store, or dogs hunting children in the streets of the city, or somebody poisoning your calves with paint, or lightning striking, or the end of the world!” whop!! It filled him with exhilaration and he banged the table again and then again, whop!! WHOP!!!

Then he put his hands down, shaking all over, collecting his thoughts.

“We may be wrong about the whole thing,” he said. “The whole kaboodle. If we could look at ourselves from the eyes of history—” His voice trembled. He squinted, panicky, momentarily believing they had all disappeared and the hall was empty. But they were there, leaning on their knees, listening, eyes as bright as the eyes of birds of prey, far in the distance. He wiped the sweat from his forehead.

“We may be dead wrong about the whole kaboodle,” he said wearily. He thought of the Sunlight Man shot through the heart, how he’d said when the Universe told him to jump he would jump; and now — because Luke was his nephew, it came to him: Luke was his brother’s son, and he would be alive today if it weren’t for the anarchist Taggert Hodge — now, because Luke was his nephew and had died on account of him — he had jumped. “We may be wrong,” he said. “We have to stay awake, as best we can, and be ready to obey the laws as best as we’re able to see them. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.” His face strained, struggling to get it all clearer, if only to himself. He thought of Esther. “Now there’s a fine model for us all,” he said emphatically, pointing at the ceiling. They all looked up, and he was flustered. He should go home. Then they were watching him again, as wide-eyed and still as fish. “Blessed are the meek, by which I mean all of us, including the Sunlight Man,” he said. “God be kind to all Good Samaritans and also bad ones. For of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.”

Then, abruptly, Clumly sat down and scowled.

No one clapped, at first.

The silence grew and struggled with itself and then, finally, strained into sound, first a spatter and then a great rumbling of the room, and he could feel the floor shivering like the walls of a hive and it seemed as if the place was coming down rattling around his ears but then he knew he was wrong, it was bearing him up like music or like a storm of pigeons, lifting him up like some powerful, terrible wave of sound and things in their motions hurtling him up to where the light was brighter than sun-filled clouds, disanimated and holy. The Mayor was there at his side, surging upward, it seemed to Fred Clumly, and crying happily, “Bravo, Clumly!” and the Fire Chief said happily, “Powerful sermon! God forgive us!” And Clumly, in a last pitch of seasickness, caught him in his arms and said, “Correct!” and then, more wildly, shocked to wisdom, he cried, “Correct!”

All this, though some may consider it strange, mere fiction, is the truth.