John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

“I can’t say I blame you,” the bearded man said. He wasn’t whispering or making any show of speaking quietly, but the infuriating voice was almost more faint than the rain. When he closed his eyes it seemed not to come from any single point but from everywhere. “It’s disquieting, the thought of one’s own death. And you’re young, of course.” He sighed, but Nick could imagine the leer. “Well, be philosophical. As a great man once said, ‘The world’s a hospital.’” He sighed again.

Nick said between his teeth, “Shut up, I’m warning you. I’m gonna call the friggin guard.”

“No harm. But I’d help you if I could.”

“Fuckhead,” he whispered to himself.

“When you think about it,” the voice said, infinitely weary, “the world is more like a jailhouse than like a hospital. No matter how cynical we try to be, the food is never what we secretly expected; the beds rob us of our sleep and health; the company lacks zest, not to mention how it smells; the toilets are a cruel, cold shock; and at the end of it all, instead of the justice we have a right to expect, as feeling creatures— fzzzt! the electric chair. If we had any sense we’d hang ourselves and be done with it.”

“Do it,” he thought ferociously, but still he said nothing, as though there were some faint hope of stopping the man by ignoring him. The voice stirred up in him a churning of strong, confused emotion — anger and fear, but worst of all a powerful but vague longing that had no name, a feeling something like what he’d gone through at night in his childhood when he heard the train, a mile away, going through the oak-woods over at the edge of the Reservation. There was a dirt floor in Mrs. Steeprock’s house, cold and smooth as the worn, worthless brown coins in her snakegrass box. He would cross to the foot-wide window in the dark and there he would see the long bloom of white light moving quickly south, up over the trees, riding the undersides of clouds. She said once, “What is it?” looking in from the kitchen where she sewed, and when he shrugged sullenly, turning away from the window again, she came to him and bent down, as if she were grieved, to study his face. He hadn’t remembered that particular night for a long time. It was strange that it was still in his mind, clear as ever.

“Be that as it may,” the voice said, “I have just one piece of advice for you. Break out. If you don’t, I swear to heaven you’re dead. And this: once you’re out of this hole, don’t you ever let them drag you back.”

“Shut up,” he whispered. “I don’t need to break out. I got a lawyer.”

Suddenly, unbelievably, the bearded man laughed, softly; then his laughter grew louder, though still a whisper, like the laughter of wind. The noise was frightening in the darkness. His brother lumbered awake, swearing in his half-sleep like a man grumbling something under water. When he was fully awake, Nick’s brother moaned, “You again! Jesus god damn hell!”

The door opened at the end of the hallway, and the nearer light came on.

“Why are you doing this?” Nick hissed at the bearded man. “You got to be crazier than shit.”

In the far cell he could make out the thief sitting up, fumbling for something with both hands. He found what he was after — his glasses — and put them on to look.

4

“Clumly,” Mayor Mullen said, “have a cigar.” He was expansive. A small man, noisy and quick as a blue jay — a flaming, apoplectic face — but he seemed much larger than he was, because of the size of the desk, perhaps, or because he had power over Clumly, or because he had a stubbornness about him, the same as a jay, an unshakable conviction of his own lightness that went beyond mere confidence born of his having looked through a fine-toothed comb, as he sometimes said, at the ins and outs of things. It was true, certainly, that he knew a great deal — a working mayor, the posters said — and had friends in high places. The glass-topped desk was completely bare, as though he never did anything, but that was because he was not a man who worked with paper: paper was for his underlings. He talked, listened, scrutinized men’s tics. Famous for phonecalls, sudden trips. If he worked with books, records, letters, he did it alone, late at night, unseen by mortal eyes unless perhaps the eyes of the man called Wittaker, his amanuensis, as he said, bald hawklike man in drab brown suits, nails too perfectly manicured, on one hand a discreet bronze ring like a Czechoslovakian coin. The Mayor, thoroughly public man, had no private identity unless one counted the farm equipment store he owned but had nothing to do with any more, and had no secrets public or private except that his hair, as white as virgin snow, was dyed.

He had risen from his desk as Wittaker, wearing his hat and coat, about to leave, showed Clumly into the room, and now he came out around the desk, awkwardly past the wastebasket, holding out the cigars in one hand, reaching for Clumly’s hand with the other. They were White Owls, cheaper than Clumly’s own cigars, but Clumly took one. It was a bad sign when the Mayor opened with cigars. One of many bad omens. It was bad to be called in in the first place — to talk about “a mutual problem,” the note from Wittaker had said.

Mullen tipped his head. “How you been, Fred?” Still holding Clumly’s hand.

“Fine, Walt,” Clumly said.

The afternoon sunlight, breaking through the Venetian blinds to Clumly’s right, made bands across the Mayor’s face.

“Good,” Mullen said. “That’s all that matters, isn’t it.” He released Clumly’s hand, veered away toward the center of the room, head still cocked, and rubbed his hands together. Clumly rolled the cigar between his fingers. Wittaker closed the door softly behind them, shutting out the clutter of his own, much smaller office and the closed door to the council chamber.

“Sit down,” the Mayor said.

Two captain’s chairs, old and nicked, faced the Mayor’s desk, another stood to the right of it. It was an absurd arrangement, calculated to shatter a man’s calm, because the Mayor never sat at his desk when he talked. He roamed about like a restless creature in a narrow cage, fussing with things, adjusting the blinds, studying the photographs beside the window (photographs in which he himself almost invariably appeared, inconspicuous in a second row, while men of more importance opened the racetrack, cut the tape at the western end of the New York State Thruway, or shook hands with one another, holding some solemn trophy on display). He went now to the hotplate on the waist-high cabinet where he made his coffee — a scummy glass Silex into which he spooned out Instant Nescafé.

“I’m not supposed to have to do this,” he said. “Make my own coffee. That man—” He pecked with his nose toward the door Wittaker had closed as he left. “He remembers as much as he wants to remember. You know the problem. Well, good worker. Dependable. Trained sociologist, you know. Don’t know what I’d do without him.”

“Mmm,” Clumly said.

“Cup of coffee, Fred?”

He wanted one badly, and therefore took hold of himself. “Just had one. Thanks all the same.”

“Fine, fine.” He screwed the lid on and put the coffee jar back in the cabinet. Except for a pair of galoshes, there was nothing else in the cabinet, as far as Chief Clumly could see. “Be right back,” Mullen said. He carried the Silex out past Wittaker’s office and into the hall and to the men’s room to get water. He took several minutes to get back. When he had the coffee heating, he came to stand by the bookshelf under the photographs and lounged on his feet, looking at them, bent forward, hands in pockets, his back to Clumly. “Damned hot,” he said. “We’re supposed to get an air-conditioner in here, they passed it more than a year ago. Well, it’s the old story. Corruption.” He turned to wink.