John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

Clumly shuddered. They’d been through this many times.

“Entropy!” the Judge squealed. Then he laughed, as soundless as a snake.

“Maybe,” Clumly said.

The Judge asked kindly, “Your wife?”

“Dead,” Clumly said.

The Judge nodded once more, remembering. “There’s some meaning in that.” He took a long, slow drag on his pipe, casting about like an old woman in an attic for the meaning.

“I doubt it,” Clumly said.

“I don’t suppose you ever hear of that magician,” the Judge said then, “—the one you had in jail that time.”

“Dead too,” he said.

“Pity.” He rubbed his hands together clumsily.

You could not see either one of them clearly in the yellow smoke from the Judge’s pipe and Old Man Clumly’s cigar. The bars on the window of the Judge’s room were as vague as lampposts bathed in fog, and the whiskey in his glass was gray. The male nurse who looked after him stood in the doorway cleaning the fingernails of his right hand with the thumbnail of his left. He was not listening. In the dusk outside, four miles away, a traffic light changed, and a police car started up, clean and precise as a young child’s tooth. The policeman, driving, waved to a man he knew on the sidewalk, and the man waved back with a smile. It was like a salute. The tyrannic scent of May was in the air; it was the time when young hearts blossom and burgeon, and boys try to think of heroic deeds. But it was winter in the Judge’s room, for nothing in this world is universal any more; there is neither wisdom nor stability, and faithfulness is dead. Or, at any rate, such was the Judge’s solemn opinion. But Clumly would say, “Well, so—” and would say no more.

“It was good of you to visit,” the Judge said.

“No trouble,” Clumly said. “A man—”

“Well, nevertheless,” the Judge said. He raised the glass of gray whiskey. “Good whiskey,” he whispered with deep satisfaction, without tasting it.

“Mmm,” Clumly said.

The room grew darker. The Judge half-closed his eyes and thought about it. “Well, nevertheless,” the Judge said, “we’ve had some times, we’ve done some tricks.” He chuckled. “We’ve seen some curious things.”

Clumly nodded, mechanical as an old German clockmaker’s doll. His mind was a blank.

Later, after Fred Clumly was gone, the Judge said to his bored attendant, “I made that man. I created him, you might say. I created them all. The Mayor, the Fire Chief, all of them. I ran this town. I made them, and then when the time came I dropped a word in the right place and I broke them.” He smiled and his gold teeth gleamed. The attendant looked at him indifferently, as if from infinitely far away, and the Judge sipped his whiskey again, uneasy. His spotted hand shook. One time in a nightmare he’d dreamed his attendant had shot him in the back. “I like you,” the Judge said suddenly. “You’re like a son to me!”

“As to that,” the attendant said, “I’m what I am.”

The Judge was not certain afterward that this was what he really said, and probably it was not.

1

In late August, 1966, the city jail in Batavia, New York, held four regular prisoners, that is, four prisoners who were being kept on something more than an overnight basis. Three had been bound over for trial; the fourth was being held, by order of the court, until the County could administer a psychiatric examination. The identity of this fourth prisoner was not yet known. He seemed to be about forty. He’d been arrested on August 23rd for painting the word love in large, white, official-looking letters across two lanes of Oak Street, just short of the New York State Thruway. As the police were in the act of arresting him he had managed to burn all the papers in his billfold (dancing up and down, shaking like a leaf), and he refused to say now a halfway sensible word about himself, except that he was “an anarchist, a student.” His face was slightly disfigured by what looked like a phosphor burn — the kind men get in wars. Whether he was actually a student (he was an anarchist, all right) there was no way of telling. He seemed too old for that, and there was no college in Batavia; but the town was not large and they knew he was not from there. There were of course plenty of colleges elsewhere in Western New York, and there was always the possibility that he’d come from someplace far away. The Chief of Police — it was then Fred Clumly — would sit in his office in front of the cellblock and talk about it with whoever happened to be there — one of his men or Judge Sam White or May Bunce from Probation. “I think he’s from California,” Clumly would say. But he wouldn’t say why. “It’s the way he talks,” he would explain, squinting, sitting with his bare white elbows planted on the desk like trees. Clumly’s whole body was creased and white and completely hairless. He’d had a disease when he was in the Navy, years ago. Aside from the whiteness and the hairlessness, his only remarkable features were his large nose, which was like a mole’s, and his teeth, which were strikingly white and without a flaw. The whiteness, the hairlessness, the oversized nose all gave him the look of a philosopher pale from too much reading, or a man who has slept three nights in the belly of a whale.

It was of course not true that the prisoner’s way of talking was noticeably Californian. But Clumly hated California, or anyway felt alarmed by it. He would sit with his Look magazine, at home in his livingroom, squinting irascibly, fascinated, at the blurry color photograph of a waitress with breasts completely bare, smiling, standing in what looked like a kind of cardboard window, holding out a coffeepot to Clumly. Clumly’s wife was a blind woman with bright glass eyes and small, pinched features and a body as white as his own. Her small shoulders sagged and her neck was long, so that her head seemed to sway above her like a hairy sunflower. He minded the way she filled her teacup, one finger over the rim to watch the level, and he minded the way she talked to herself perpetually, going about the house with her lips moving as though she were some kind of old-fashioned priestess forever at her prayers, or insane. Also, she whined. But Clumly was not bitter. “Nobody’s life is perfect,” he sometimes said to himself, which was true.

“Also,” he said to Mickey Salvador, the new man, “what makes me think California is that beard.”

“Like the riots,” Salvador said.

“That’s it,” Clumly said. “You ever see a beard like that around Batavia?”

“Only Old Man Hoyt,” Salvador said.

“Correct.”

“And Walazynski.”

“Correct,” Clumly said. It was all coming clearer in his mind.

“And that Russian guy.” Salvador tugged at his collar and stretched his neck, thinking. “Brotski. The one that sells Watchtower.” He laughed. “With the leather pants.”

Clumly scowled, and Salvador stopped laughing.

“I was out to L.A. once myself,” Salvador said. “I wish to hell I’d got up to San Francisco.”

A little daintily, Clumly picked up the half-smoked cigar from his ashtray, pressed the end firm, and lit it.

Salvador said, “My brother Jimmy had a beard once. It came in red. Jesus to God.”

But Clumly was shaking his head, gloomy. “San Francisco,” he said. “What’s this country coming to?”

“I guess they all got beards in Vietnam there. But I guess that’s different. My old lady’s got a moustache. Shit, my old lady got hair all over her, just like a monkey.” Salvador looked thoughtful.