John Gardner - The Sunlight Dialogues

SUNLIGHT: Yes! What meaning?

(Long pause.)

CLUMLY: I don’t believe you. The whole thing’s a lie.

SUNLIGHT: Yes. No.

(Long pause.)

CLUMLY: I’m old. I’m tired. What are you talking about?

SUNLIGHT: He returned to the cellar.

(Long pause.)

CLUMLY: Incredible!

SUNLIGHT: Yes. He was a philosopher.

CLUMLY: You’re mad.

SUNLIGHT: He died three weeks later.

(Long pause.)

CLUMLY: I don’t know what to say.

SUNLIGHT: No. Nor I.

(Long pause.)

CLUMLY: Does all this have to do with civil rights? Or with … Babylonia?

SUNLIGHT: Babylon.

CLUMLY: Yes of course. I meant to say Babylon.

(A pause of two full minutes. )

SUNLIGHT: He’d misunderstood reality, and so he died. And so I say this. Suppose you’re wrong. You ask me what my answer is to America’s problems — psychological, social, political. I have none. I do not deny that we ought, theoretically, to continue fighting, labor on, struggle for improvement. But I doubt that anything in all our system is in tune with, keyed to, reality. How can one fight for what he doesn’t believe in for a moment?

CLUMLY: You make things too complicated. Law and Order …

SUNLIGHT: Bullshit! That boy I freed from your jailhouse was an Indian. Do you know what it’s like to grow up on a Reservation? I don’t mean pity him. I don’t mean sob. I mean your laws are irrelevant, stupid, inhuman. I mean you support civilization by a kind of averaging. All crimes are equal, because you define the crime, not the criminal. It’s effective, I admit it. But it has nothing to do with reality. There is good and evil in the world, but they have nothing to do with your courts. I know better than anyone, believe me! I have been the victim. But that’s in the past. Assault and battery is always the same, no matter who does the assaulting and battering. That’s your Jewish law. Well I reject your law!

CLUMLY: Nevertheless, we have two murders …

SUNLIGHT: By panic, yes.

CLUMLY: What has this to do—

SUNLIGHT: Very good! I judged you right.

CLUMLY: This is a democracy. Bunch of people get together and they decide how they want things, and they pass a law and they have ’em that way till they’re sick of it, and then they pass some other law—

SUNLIGHT: But that’s insane.

CLUMLY: Well—

SUNLIGHT: Have you really missed the point? Listen! How can you act for what you don’t believe in? And don’t tell me “That’s democracy.” Don’t take me for a fool. It I accepted democracy I’d put up with the majority opinion until I could muster the voting power to change it. But I don’t! Who in his right mind does? Take a look at the world! Are the demonstrators accepting majority opinion? Are they setting up an alternative? A demonstrator is a Hell’s Angel without brains. Or put it this way. You say accept majority opinion, work lawfully to change it. Suppose the majority favors anarchism, or suppose the majority goes Nazi. Will you quietly pass pamphlets soberly arguing for a change of opinion? It comes to this: I say the world you support is foul, and, personally, I opt out. I don’t say I can beat you. I’m not interested in beating you. I say only that the will of the gods is with me. Your side will win, eventually. You’ve got the votes. But meanwhile I will kill you. The gods will rumble on, indifferent to your theories, and your house will in due time fall around your ears.

CLUMLY: You’ve got no feeling. You don’t care about people.

SUNLIGHT: Ha! Madness! I care about every single case. You care about nothing but the average. I love justice, you love law. I’m Babylonian, and you, you’re one of the Jews. I can’t cover every single case, I have no concern about covering cases, so I cover by whim whatever cases fall into my lap — the Indian boy, the Negro thief, for instance — and I leave the rest to process. But you, you cover all the cases — by blanketing them, by blurring all human distinctions.

CLUMLY: That’s unfair. We’re closer than you think! (Reconsidering:) That is—

SUNLIGHT: Yes, true. I’ve said so all along. You are my friend. Yet my enemy. “The greatest good for the greatest number.” In Germany ten people out of a hundred were Jews. Suppose it were forty, or forty-nine! Still they’d be the smaller number. I say your rule’s insane. Can you really think number has anything whatever to do with truth?

CLUMLY: I can’t understand you. You seem such a moral person, and yet—

SUNLIGHT: I make murder possible. Yes! I watch a man I have talked with shot down, and afterward I don’t show a sign of remorse. Not a sign! Am I twitching? wringing my hands? I watch an old woman shot dead for merely entering a room, and I don’t even say to you “excuse me.” It baffles you.

CLUMLY (stubbornly): You’re insane.

SUNLIGHT: Say it with conviction.

CLUMLY: You’re insane!

SUNLIGHT: Exactly. Just the same, they’re puzzling, aren’t they, those man-sized gods of wood and stone. Who eat and drink and sleep and hunt, who show no visible sign that they are gods and who are, for all that, certainly gods.

CLUMLY: That may be. I don’t know about such things. It seems all muddled. But I’ll tell you this. Give yourself up, bring the Indian back—

SUNLIGHT: Impossible. The request is absurd!

CLUMLY: You’re a lunatic.

SUNLIGHT: You are a bore.

(Sound of an explosion.)

4

The pulpit seemed to blow up in the Sunlight Man’s hands. When the smoke cleared, he was gone. There seemed no question of his having ducked to right or left, or having sunk through the floor. The oldest trick in the world, and one of the simplest, you may say if you know. Nevertheless, Fred Clumly blinked, wide awake now, sick with futility. He got up at last, reaching into his coat absently to turn off the tape recorder, and stepped out into the aisle like a man publicly chastised. He stood squinting for a long time, rubbing his jaw, and then at last he went up the carpeted steps onto the dais. His skin still crawled. The smoke had left a scent that mingled now with the Sunlight Man’s stench, a faint pungency like that left where a cherry bomb has gone off. Aside from that, nothing. Not a trace. Beyond the stained-glass windows the sky was gathering the first gray of dawn. His ears were still ringing with the sound of the explosion. He touched the pulpit. Black dust came off on his fingers. The man was still here, it came to him — crouched somewhere close by — and he wanted to speak to him, to show he was not fooled. “Next time, then,” he thought. He would see that he was not sleepy next time. He would not be so easy to fool. On the pulpit, where the Bible should be, he found a box elaborately wrapped in a small iron chain. He listened. It did not seem a bomb.

He walked down the aisle toward the vestibule, then over to the door and out onto the street, the queer, chained box under his arm. It was cold out, but still summery. It would be hot again tomorrow. There was no one on the street, not a car in sight except one, parked halfway down the block, beyond the Lutheran church. He walked to his own car, got in, started it. It was almost five in the morning when he got home. He lay down on the couch, instead of going up to his bed, and fell asleep at once. He dreamed of being buried alive and woke up freezing cold and furious. It was seven now. Esther was fixing his breakfast in the kitchen. He gritted his teeth and went slowly, painfully upstairs and went to bed. Half-asleep he realized what it was that the box contained. It would be — he clenched his fists — his stolen pistol.