John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

“Yes, do,” he said. One final shudder went down his back and it was over, he felt all right. “I’ll come with you,” he said. Halfway across the room he remembered that the door was still open and went back to close it. Though both of them had been here in the room all the time, his fear was back. He was convinced that someone had slipped in, invisible, and was somewhere in the house.

“You’re jumpy,” she said. She had turned as if to look at him. She stood, tipped and lean as a beanpole, bony hands folded like a singer’s, prepared to be frightened.

“No, no,” he said. Then, with conviction: “Everything’s fine. Tired as a dog, that’s all.” He gave a laugh.

“Good,” she said. “You had me worried.”

He took a deep breath, then unbuckled his holster belt and hung it in the clothespress, where it belonged. He followed her into the kitchen, rubbing his hands as he walked. The muscles of his face were frozen to a cheerful smile.

3

The Sunlight Man had gone upstairs. To sleep, they imagined; but they were wrong. While Nick Slater sat at the livingroom window, shoulders hunched, brain numb, watching the storm as he would have watched some foreign movie without subtitles, full of dark scenes of ominous import, monstrous faces, branches of trees like scratches on a sky from which all life had sunk away, his two hands lightly closed around the gun, the Sunlight Man was overhead in the front bedroom, sitting in blackness like a Biblecover, thinking.

He could not see the vanity mirror he knew stood solemn and indifferent before him like a messenger with news already known, no longer a matter of sorrow, much less shock. Let it be as it was. He felt like a man come back from the dead to find the world less than he had one time imagined but not for that reason drab; more glowing than before. “Millie,” he said, perhaps aloud. Not fondly, not with horror either, merely as one might try out a word in an unfamiliar language, torturing it toward sense. He had not seen her for a long time and had not known he had any particular feeling for her; his brother’s wife, simply; a sword in his brother’s side but not in his, a matter of sad indifference. “So get rid of her,” he’d said easily when Will Hodge sat suffering in the chair by the bookshelf, wooden-faced as an Indian but boiling within with grief and outrage, some latter-day Hrothgar, mighty and patient and beyond all human counsel. Will said nothing, merely moved his hand a little as if toward his face, then thought better of it. He had said, “It’s up to you, Will. Anybody else would.” But he had not felt quite as callous as that. He knew his brother. What would have been for himself or Ben or Art Jr a matter of snapping the fingers was for Will a case of vast difficulty and subtlety, a labyrinthine question of justice. Was I wrong? Was she wrong? Where is the guilt? And though the question was absurd, the asking was noble, and Taggert Hodge had looked away, understanding his uselessness. He might have laughed, measuring his brother’s troubles against his own; but to each man God gives the test he can endure.

No man who has passed a month in the death cells

believes in capital punishment

No man who has passed a month in the death cells

believes in cages for beasts

And so, confronting her face to face, finding that the leftward veer of her chin, the way she held her glass, stood with one strong foot thrown forward, weight squared and balanced like a fencing master’s — finding that above all the music in her voice, however deadly to a man armed only with a shield of wood — rekindled the past more violently than Batavia’s streets or the stink of its water or the hellish heat that lay on it in August like a dying beast — he had been shocked to a sudden pain of love or anguish or something between, a vacuum of feeling between two fires: an intense upsurge of memory and hopeless desire.

But he was calm now, beyond his first rage and love-hate to reflection and the abstract knowledge of his fear. The feeling he’d experienced long ago in his father’s house was back, yet strangely not inside him: it had gone out to penetrate and shine in things external — in Millie, in the boy he had not known except as a child of three or four, in the Indian boy he had found in jail, of whom he had heard in the letters that Millie had written neither for his sake nor for hers but because he was a source of torment to Will. The feeling had gone out into objects as well, they were alive as if with his memory of them, though he’d never seen them before in his life: the swaybacked couch, the rug, the cheap old andirons and scuttle by the fireplace, in ashtrays, magazines, pieces of paper — a glow as if of brute sensation, shining in one thing more and in another less, he could not tell why. And he felt, as he had felt in his childhood, that there were things he knew, great mysteries, a knowledge too deep for the power of memory to pull down or dredge up, a light moving through subterranean passages, drawing to a focus around God knew what queer images — crosses, circles, his mad wife’s eyes? — something outside the limits of his mind.

He had felt then for a moment that he knew. She was looking at something, her eyes fixed with a stare like an eagle’s, and now he too seemed to see, not so much an image as a center of pain, like an iron just brought blinding white from the forge. And then, drawing back, he had fixed his eyes not on what she was seeing but on her.

“Poor bitch,” he whispered when she fled.

The doctor said nothing. A gentle spring breeze came in off the patio of the therapy cottage, but no sound came with it. Beyond the walls of the hospital grounds there would be traffic moving, business as usual, but not here. Wherever she may be. The grass was smooth and clean as only grass officially kept can be. Like her mind, officially kept in the neat regulations of her madness. The doctor said, “These treatments—” He paused, studied Taggert’s face, decided to continue. “They’re a distressing sight, as you can see.” Taggert Hodge nodded. “You understand the principle, of course. But until you’ve seen one …” He smiled. “Good though, those boys of mine. You saw their reactions. Like lightning!” He snapped his fingers. “They have to be of course, but it’s impressive just the same. The first time I saw it — I was interning; I remember as if it was yesterday — I just plain couldn’t believe it. Well, takes time, of course. What it comes down to, you know, is you have to think like a madman. They’re just as quick thinkers as anybody else, understand. Quicker. You get so you can think like them, and then you’ve got to go beyond that. You’ve got to control them, lead them where you want them to go, block them. Take chess now. A simple game, compared to this. You’ve got hours to think out every move — and just as many conditions as we have to deal with here — and even if you lose, what is it? A game. But every move we screw up—” He glanced at Hodge again, then smiled. “But we don’t.”

Hodge nodded, doubtful. The man was tall and heavy, with slow, shallow eyes, a dark brown suit. He did not look like a chess player. “She recognize me?” Hodge said.

“Hard to say,” the doctor said. He was evading some long explanation. Then: “Ah. I think they’re coming back. Have a seat?”

Hodge sat down again. It was a comfortable room. It didn’t smell lived-in. This time, walking between the two attendants, Kathleen did not even glance at him: neither did she glance at the doctor. It came to him that it was from the doctor she’d tried to run, to Taggert Hodge she was as indifferent as to the walls, the stale smell of flowers. His heart shrank around the recognition. She was haggard; once beautiful. Her eyes, once dazzling with Irish humor and gentleness, were dazed now, the eyes of a sleepwalker. She walked slowly, lightly, as though all substance had drained out of her with her sanity. “And in her looks …” What was the line? He clung to the question as to the arms of his chair.