John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

She stopped, looking at him. “That’s quite a get-up,” she said.

“It is, yes.” He had a mincing way of talking, a thin, reedy voice that sounded like an affectation. Something about him made her think at once of Will, her ex-husband, and the next instant she knew what it was. The suit he was wearing was Will’s. It even smelled of him, or so she imagined.

“How did you get here?” she said. And still she felt unnaturally calm, turned to ice.

“The question, my dear,” the bearded man said, “is how we are going to get out.”

“I’m afraid that’s your problem,” Millie said, and smiled fiercely again.

“You’re mistaken,” he said. “Sit down.”

She pretended not to hear. “Where did you get that suit?”

“You may sit down,” he said.

Suddenly Nick Slater covered his face with his hands. “Sit down,” he said. “I’m telling you.”

And now, finally, the multitude of her sorceries and enchantments failed her, and without knowing why, she was afraid. She moved back numbly toward the couch and sat on the edge of it. After a moment she lowered the bottle and the glass to the rug. “Why are you doing this?” she brought out. The stocking over his eyes made it impossible for her to know where he was looking.

“I’m not sure,” he said. “It’s an interesting question.”

They sat very still for a long time, listening to the storm.

At last the bearded man said, “Get some clothes. You’ll catch pneumonia.”

Nick got up and went over to the doorway, toward the stairs.

“Did you kill him?” she asked. “My husband?”

“Are you hoping I did?”

“I’m asking.”

“He wasn’t there to kill,” he said in that same high effeminate voice. “Just empty clothes. Curious, isn’t it? He’d been eaten up from the inside out, as far as we could tell. Left only his clothes.”

The smell that came from him was overwhelming.

“Do you mind if I smoke?” she said.

“Very much.” He nodded as he spoke. “I want you to suffer. No smoking, no nothing.”

“And Luke?” She tipped her head toward where he lay.

“I don’t know him yet. Perhaps he’ll be human.”

She reached for her drink.

“Put it down,” he said.

She ignored him, and suddenly — out of empty air, it seemed to her — the man had conjured a gun. Her heart stopped cold.

“Put it down, Madam. We’re going to make you a saint.”

“You’re insane,” she whispered.

“Not yet.” The pale lips smiled. “These things take time.”

1

Chief Clumly ate in his office that night, and as he ate, alone for the first time in hours, he looked over the article Judge White had made him take. It was not the kind of thing he’d have read past a sentence or two, normally, and it wasn’t an easy thing to get through with the radio on in the outer office. But he read attentively, straining to catch any possible hint of why the Judge had made him take it. It was conceivable that the Judge had merely thought he’d be interested, but Clumly did not read as though he believed it could be that. He had the shade pulled and the office door locked, and he sat hunched forward, spectacles low on his nose, left hand reaching blindly to the white bag of hamburgers and Sanka from Critic’s, and when the writer made allusions he couldn’t catch he felt panicky. He’d have worse news the next time he came, the Judge had said. Was the article a clue? Flies buzzed, up by the lightglobe. The fan on the cabinet moved back and forth slowly, hardly stirring the muggy air.

“Policework and Alienation.

“Insofar as we view the whole matter abstractly, nothing in the world, not even abject poverty, is more degrading and, ultimately, dehumanizing — at least in potential — than police work. Against the poor unlucky policeman all the physical and spiritual forces of the universe seem to conspire. It has always been so — though it was less so in simpler societies, including our own fifty years ago, than it is in America today. And no doubt it will always remain so, for all the labors of psychologists, sociologists, criminologists, and so on, and for all the honest effort of those most directly involved in the problem — law-enforcement agencies themselves. The subject is a difficult one to treat frankly without appearing to sink into petty fault-finding or name-calling or, worse, melodrama, and, worse yet, cheap exposé. But the subject is worthy of attention. Police work has so often been sentimentalized, both by those who make policemen old-fashioned heroes and by those who would soften and domesticate them into weary, hard-working custodians and clerks — and the qualities of the police mind have so often been polished and ornamented, much as coffins are, and made to seem not only tolerable but downright commodious — that it behooves us to take stock of what police work does to the human body and soul.

“We could speak, if we were seeking dramatic effect, of that paradox so frequently pointed out by psychologists and sociologists who have interested themselves in the policeman: ‘The defender of peace is a trained killer.’ The phrase is not altogether unjust, for all its mercantile ring. One cannot watch the training of a police rookie without realizing, perhaps with some horror, the extent to which his profession removes him from the ordinary run of humanity. The targets on a police firing range are not innocent circles or x’s but silhouettes of men, and the familiar saw of police training, ‘Never draw your gun unless you’re prepared to use it,’ is not mere air. More than one man has died needlessly in demonstration of the truth in that saw, both criminals who should not have been drawn on, and policemen who drew and were not ready to shoot or, stymied by their partisanship with the human race, failed to shoot in time. Among psychologists there is no debate as to whether or not the loaded gun the policeman carries with him constantly has any effect on the structure of his personality. It does, and the effect tends to be bad. The plain truth seems to be that the men who go into police work are society’s needful sacrifice for order.

“But to focus on the gun the policeman wears is to miss the complexity of the problem. A gun is, after all, a tool, and can be used, like a shovel or a frying pan, in more ways than one. It need not kill, and it need not give the man who wears it nightmares or result in his estrangement from his wife. All that goes into the selection and training of a modern policeman is designed to minimize the likelihood of the tool’s destruction of the man. The forced-choice questionnaires he fills out when he first applies are designed to rule out any man not a good deal more stable and mature than the common human run, and the training he goes through — unlike the training of, say, a soldier — emphasizes not the efficient use of the power society has given him, but the responsibility involved. There is no denying the powerful symbolic significance of the gun at his hip, but it is not just in the policeman’s mind that the symbol burns: in the darkness at the bottom of consciousness, the man who passes the policeman on the street knows as well as the policeman himself that the gun is there. And it is in the relationship, or rather the gap, between the policeman and the rest of mankind that the trouble has its genesis.

“Though every man wants law and order, at least up to a point, most men want it mainly to keep other people in line, not themselves. Nobody wants his child run over; nevertheless, nothing is more infuriating for a man with serious business in the world than hearing behind him, as he hurries his car through congested traffic toward his office (late through no fault of his own) the yawl, like the yawl of a big angry cat, of a siren. That is, indeed, the least of it. One doesn’t last a day in police work if one wears one’s feeling on one’s sleeve; and the man who takes very little personally, who with mild eyes and a stern jaw accepts all abuse, threats, mockeries with the indifference of a man born deaf and blind — who puts insult away as quickly and lightly as he drops his ball-point pen back into his pocket — that man grows tougher yet with experience. Often the lamb turns tiger when he comes before the judge; and often those who howl loudest at the time of arrest, on the other hand — who call down on the poor policeman’s head the most terrible curses, and take the lowest view of his generation and lineage — are the same men who, when the trial comes up or the fine has been paid, are most generous with their forgiveness of what seems to them, even now, the policeman’s small-mindedness. Remembering this, the policeman learns such patience as would shame old Job. He learns to stand lightly in the present moment, at once committed and detached, like a true philosopher or like an old-time Christian who knows this world no home, but a wilderness. So much the better, some opine. Only young lovers and elderly fools mistake the moment’s passions for equal in value to the ups and downs, the larger illuminations, of a total action. What is police work, some may inquire, but a new approach to old-fashioned caritas— the heart’s concern with, not simply some part of the cosmic bog, but the whole? Ah, true! The ability to rise out of one’s narrow cell of time and place — to behold and admire not simply some particular woman or campaign or golden vase but the total order into which all particulars must necessarily fit — is not only the beginning but the true end, both the purpose and the method, of wisdom. But alas, caritas has never in this world had much charity in it. The man who loves with a pure heart, who loves his friend for the virtues he embodies, does not love his friend very much — as women understand. Thus saints love mankind but do not much care for men. The man deeply mired in cupidity, who so greatly enjoys, say, lemon drops that he walks in front of trains without seeing them, all his wits curled up around the sour-sweet sensation in his mouth, is no doubt a poor miserable unfortunate who deserves our pity here and, hereafter, hell. But the man who leaps past the mere lemon drop to the glory of God there figured forth — that is to say, the man whose eye is on the larger order of the universe, both the lemon drop and the freight train he stops to watch rush past — is more pitiable yet, from a certain point of view, and richly deserves the eternal tedium of Heaven.