John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

And in her looks, which from that time infus’d

Sweetness into my heart, unfelt before,

And into all things from her Aire inspir’d …

Now the doctor was speaking to her. It was as if Hodge were no longer in the room. “You think you’re going to get well now, or is it going to be back to the asylum with you?”

She stared at him, and the corner of her mouth trembled. At last she said, “Where’s … where’s my brother?”

“He’s in the kitchen.” He indicated the direction with a jerk of his head.

“He shouldn’t be here.” She glanced at Hodge, then away. “I’ll send him out. He has to obey me, and if I say—”

“You’re wrong,” he said. “You have to obey him. He’s supposed to keep an eye on you. Don’t you know who’s God around here?”

She bristled, then calmed herself. “I’m God,” she said.

The attendants laughed, and Hodge narrowed his eyes. He was beginning to sweat.

“You?” the doctor said. He drew back a little, incredulous.

She nodded.

Instantly, he moved toward her a little. “Kneel down.”

She shook her head. “No. You kneel.”

“All right boys,” the doctor said, “show her who’s God.”

They seized her roughly, as though she were a criminal, and forced her to her knees. Her face worked, full of rage. “Now listen,” she whispered.

“Kneel!” he said.

“You’re not supposed to use force against me.”

“Don’t be silly. I’m the boss.”

The dark-haired attendant said, “She’s on her knees.”

The doctor nodded as if immensely pleased with himself. “Now.” He folded his arms. “What are you doing?”

Her face worked violently. It was the face of an old woman, and Hodge closed his eyes for an instant.

“What are you doing to God?” the doctor said.

“Please!”

“All right, let her up.”

She got up slowly. They gave her freedom enough to raise her hands to her face. “There are conditions under—” she said.

He shook his head. “Who’s boss here?”

“You do what I say,” she whispered, “and there are conditions under which we can make conditions under for dealing—”

“There are no conditions.”

Kathleen drew in a deep breath, eyes blank for a moment. She touched her hair, trying to smooth it. “I am the Creator,” she said patiently. “If you don’t do what I say then what can we—”

“Who kneeled in front of whom?”

“I will have to destroy you,” she said.

Again he shook his head. “You can’t destroy me because I’m God.”

“No, I’m God. Have you no faith?” The hand moving on the hair had lost meaning. It worked like a machine.

“No,” he said, “I’m God.”

She was squinting. “Well, I happen to be a better thinker and more — more of a leader than you of human beings and I think what I am and I realize I’m God, and I see what you are and—” She stopped, and Hodge could feel her panic in his chest. “You are and I under conditions—” She stopped again.

The doctor half-turned away from her. “Show her again, boys. There’s no point trying to argue with a crazy woman.”

The dark-haired attendant said, “Kneel to God.”

Again she looked at Hodge. “Tag,” she said.

But the attendants were forcing her down. She tried to scratch at their wrists, but they held her arms too tightly and her nails closed on air.

“Take it easy on her,” the doctor said. And then, to Kathleen: “Make it easy for yourself.”

“Why does God have to cry for Tag?” the shorter attendant said.

She got her hand free for an instant and struck at him, but again he caught her wrist.

“Why does God have to cry for Tag?” he asked again.

“That’s true,” the doctor said. “I hadn’t thought of it.” He bent over her. “That’s true, what he says.”

“You’re not supposed to use force — you’re not boss.”

“Who’s God?” he said.

“I am God. Nomine matris …”

“Why don’t you get up then?”

“Well, I’ll push them away.” She tried. “Tell them to get away,” she said angrily.

“All right boys, get away.”

The attendants released her and stepped back. Hodge waited, the back of his neck tingling. Suddenly, as though she were perfectly sane, Kathleen laughed. “That was a mistake,” she said. “I should have pushed them away, I should have obliterated them.”

Now, crazily, they were all laughing. “Obliterate, yeah!” the shorter attendant said.

“Obliterate, that’s it,” the doctor said. “But you’re absolutely helpless.”

After it was over the doctor said, “So now you’ve seen it.”

Hodge shook his head, still shaky. “It’s a hell of a thing.” His brother-in-law was leaning on his arm against the doorframe.

“Not too pretty, no,” the doctor admitted. “But you see how it is. Reality’s damned unpretty to Kathleen. You have to drive her to the admissions one by one.”

“You wonder if it’s worth it,” Hodge said.

Her brother glanced at him, thinking the same, it seemed.

“Of course it’s worth it,” the doctor snorted.

Hodge nodded, but the man’s voice made something ring far back in his mind. It was the game again, he realized the next instant. “Tell me something,” Hodge said as if thoughtfully, “do you really believe you’re God?”

The man smiled. “Easy boy,” he said. He closed his hand for a moment around Taggert’s arm.

When the doctor was gone her brother said, “We’ve got to get her out of here, Tag. It doesn’t work.”

“You’re crazy,” Hodge said. “It’s only been six weeks.”

The mild eyes looked at him, swollen behind the thick glasses. “Aren’t we all? — crazy, I mean?”

He stared at the place where he knew his burnt face would be staring back at him out of the darkness of the mirror, and his mind played over and through the past and the present and lived in neither.

Purity, cleanliness, contentment, patience, devotedness, self-denial, above all, silence.

But they had moved her, in spite of him. They had the money, not he. He had pleaded, argued, had even once caught Robert, the oldest, by the lapels of his damned high-yeller suitcoat, prepared to hurl him through the wall. The Professor had sat with his thin legs crossed, as always, tapping the tip of his moustache with one finger, passing no judgment. He agreed with Hodge, but he was the old lady’s slave. “Virtuous love,” Sir Thomas Malory called it. Knight-prisoner, in the ninth year of the reign of Edward Fourth. If the old lady wanted Kathleen burned alive, the Professor would have offered his matches. But so it was with all of them, wasn’t it? Virtuous love. For love of Kathleen the brothers, miserable neurotics themselves, evaded the father whose rule was otherwise in all respects absolute and absolutely corrupt. For love of Kathleen the brothers leaped from cure to cure, as if they were the psychotics, not she. For love of Kathleen the old man hated Hodge like death, her husband, in his mind her destroyer. And as for Hodge,

He stood in the school hallway, leaning on his broom, and he looked at the child who reminded him of the pictures of Kathleen when she was a child, watched her so hungrily, with such brute anguish that if anyone had noticed they’d have locked him up on the spot for dangerous. Perhaps not that bad, quite. He was capable of looking down, capable of smiling with kindly middle-aged-janitor indifference when she passed, walking like music, a drop of sweat beside her nose.

“Possessed,” Helene Burns had said. The mathematics teacher.

He had explained to her lightly how it was with him, and she had seen, for all his light-heartedness, how it was. There were very few of them there that he could talk to; she was the chief one. Recently divorced. That was why he appealed to her, he knew. He had been happy in his marriage, she had been miserable. Into his wounded animal love for a creature beyond either love or hate, translated into a present eternity, she projected what her marriage might have been; and his loss of what had seemed invulnerable was the objectification of her loss of what never was.