The Sunlight Dialogues (102 page)

He stood in the old woods beside the house, leaning on a tree trunk, hands over his eyes. When he let himself look again, there were no more flames. The woods, like the house behind him, were unnaturally quiet, and the late slant of the sun made the colors mellow.
Jadis,
he remembered,
si je me souviens bien …
They had read it together, he and Kathleen. Was it still there, buried in that brain closed up in stone? A brilliant girl once. Quick-witted as Millie but delicate, as light as the incense-filled garden old Rimbaud lost, like Luke, like Millie: garden of unreality.

The doctor had told him of Nazi experiments, had prattled stupidities while Kathleen sat dying little by little, and Taggert had thought
I could kill him; no one would know, no one would miss him
but had listened on, or pretended to, constructing difficulties: the doctor’s detachment was a professional necessity; he might otherwise go mad himself; and how was one to strangle professional necessity? Nevertheless, it was he who had pumped the shocks through her skull, he who had made her this. But then again it was Paxton who had hired and paid him, against Taggert’s plea. Then he had seen the two graves, and had seen the gentle, forgiving Ben, though they did not speak; and in his sorrow Taggert had fallen out of wrath. He had resolved to visit her father. He would say, he remembered thinking, “Mr. Paxton, I come to make peace between us. God forgive me for all I’ve done to you and you to me. We loved her, both of us, and whatever terrible things we did—” There his memory broke down. He was planning it, walking down Oak Street, tears brimming, heart hammering, and then, paintbrush in hand …

There was an old man sitting on a stump not fifty feet from him, reading a book. He was well dressed, incongruous here in the woods, but Taggert could not stop just now for puzzlement. Something had happened, he was realizing for the first time, his mind finally ready or almost ready to face it. He’d been walking down Oak. It was late afternoon. The next moment he was painting a word on the street, and it was morning. One whole night had dropped out of his mind. He wiped away sweat and went through it more carefully. “It’s coming back,” he whispered. He screwed his eyes up tight. “I reached his house, yes. But I walked by, didn’t have the nerve. I stopped.” There was a tricycle in the yard, he remembered. He’d stood looking at it.

The man in the clearing went on reading. There was another man now, approximately the same age but heavier, enormous in fact, with shocks of white hair streaming out around his ears.
It’s my father,
he thought.
He’s not dead.
But the next instant he knew he was wrong, his father was dead. For the man on the stump was Clive Paxton. He was looking up, greeting the ghost of Taggert’s father. They began to talk, warmly, like old friends. (He could hear their voices.)
It’s not real,
he thought.
I saw my father buried.

Then, at last, he remembered putting his hands around Give Paxton’s throat. It was all he could remember, but he knew it was not an illusion.

Now the clearing was empty. The ghosts had disappeared.

2

Stony Hill. Late afternoon.

A square wooden silo of a sort once common in Western New York. A gabled roof where gray pigeons nest. Fred Clumly parked under the walnut trees on what had once been the Congressman’s lawn—now a place of high weeds, the September air full of insects—and walked toward the silo, ignoring the lighted house to his right, the Negro faces at the windows. The silo was dark, its silhouette distinct and imposing against the luminous gray of twilight. The air smelled of apples, and the smell brought to Clumly’s chest a keen sense of memories just beyond the reach of his conscious mind, a sense of time lost. With his hands in the pockets of the enormous black coat—the skirt of the coat six inches above Clumly’s shoes—he walked toward the silo. As he approached, a faint light began to glow inside, just visible through the vertical cracks in the silo wall, and the closer he moved, the brighter the light seemed to burn. It was a pleasant trick, and he felt comfortable with it. He was no longer afraid. It was not that he expected no danger now, not that he had come to a firm belief that the Sunlight Man was harmless. He was a madman, close to violence, according to the opinion of the psychiatrist, and Clumly could believe it. The poor man’s experiment had failed. But Clumly, in black coat and hat, his hands in his pockets, was no longer afraid. As he stood wondering where the entrance might be, a small door opened directly in front of him, and he found himself looking in at a clean, neatly swept room where an oil lamp burned. He went to the door, hands still in his pockets, stooped a little, and went in. The Sunlight Man stood with his arms folded, waiting. He was wearing the same black suit as before, and in one white-gloved hand he held a cane. “Welcome,” he said. Clumly nodded. The lamp was on an old chair in the exact center of the silo floor. The arrangement was too obviously theatrical to be mere chance. “On time as usual,” the Sunlight Man said. Again he nodded. “As usual.”

Abruptly, the Sunlight Man moved to the chair. “The light’s not good, I realize,” he said. “I do the best I can, but you see the difficulties.” He bent forward slightly, and in the glow of the lamp his eyes were dangerous. “It would be better up higher, you think?”

Clumly smiled, tight-lipped.

The Sunlight Man pointed the cane at the chair and with his left hand motioned it to lift. Nothing happened. “My mind’s fatigued,” the Sunlight Man said. “I’d be glad if you’d help. Concentrate on making the chair lift. Be sure to keep it level.”

“Look, friend,” Clumly said. Almost kindly.

“Concentrate!”

Clumly sighed and looked at the chair, pretending to concentrate. The chair began to move. It gave a little jerk, then began, slowly and steadily, to rise. It all seemed to Clumly a foolish waste of mind, these paltry illusions, magic tricks. But he was impressed, in a way. It was handsomely done, although he could see the wires. He could almost have believed that it was the very perfection of the magician’s pantomime that made the chair rise.

“That’s very good,” Clumly said.

“Sh!” When the chair was level with his waist the Sunlight Man stopped the lift and turned as if for applause. He turned back then, quickly, and ran his cane through the seemingly empty air in a crafty circle around the chair. “Would you like to examine it yourself?”

“I trust you,” Clumly said.

“That’s a little unwise.” He smiled. Then: “But we have nothing to sit in!” He crossed quickly to Chief Clumly and removed from his inside suitcoat pocket, as it seemed, a long, bright red cloth. He stepped back with it, shook it violently, then held it open at shoulder height, so that the bottom touched the floor, and he seemed to offer it for Clumly’s inspection. Then, like a man unveiling a statue, he whipped the cloth away. Clumly blinked. There, quite impossibly, in the center of the room where a moment ago there had been nothing, stood the Indian boy.

“Bring the chairs, Nick,” the Sunlight Man said.

The boy nodded sullenly, walked to the corner of the room, then paused. “They’re gone,” he said.

The Sunlight Man laughed. “How stupid of me. They’re right here under my nose.” Though he had not moved, Clumly would have sworn, it was true: they stood one on each side of him, good parlor chairs with blue plush seats. The Sunlight Man smiled with satisfaction, then reached out and took a pipe from the empty air. With another wave of his hand he had matches. “Sit down,” he said. Clumly obeyed. He sat with his feet planted firmly, hands still in his pockets. The Sunlight Man seated himself opposite and lit the pipe. When he had it going to his satisfaction he said, “One last illusion, and then to business.” He turned to the Indian. “Fold up that cloth for me, would you?”

The boy stooped for the red cloth the Sunlight Man had dropped on the floor and raised it in front of him, holding it by the corners.

“Watch closely,” the Sunlight Man said. “As far as I know there are only two other magicians who know how to do this.” He paused and looked annoyed. “What’s wrong, Nick? Fold it.” He went over to help, then paused, a foot away.

The top of the cloth dropped of its own will, as though invisible hands held the cloth by the middle, one hand on each side. The Indian was gone. Clumly bent farther forward, watching as the cloth folded itself upward from the bottom, forming a rectangle, then halved to the left, forming a square. Then it formed a triangle, then another and another. The Sunlight Man stood up, went over to the cloth, ran his cane around it, then took it from the invisible hands and stuffed it in his pocket.

Clumly nodded.
Surely, only in a book
… , he thought.

“Now to business,” the Sunlight Man said.

He nodded again.

“You brought the tape recorder?”

He reached inside his coat for the machine, set it on the floor, switched it on.

“Tonight I’ll tell you about the towers,” the Sunlight Man said.

Chief Clumly slid his right hand back into the pocket of his coat

3

SUNLIGHT:
The towers of Babylon! The crowning achievement of ancient civilization!

No, start with this. Imagine a Mesopotamian city. It’s on a hill, normally—or on a range of hills—a city not so vast as New York or London or Rome, but you wouldn’t know that to look at it: it stretches as far as you can see, hill after hill, or the breadth of a whole valley. It’s surrounded by gigantic walls—a hundred feet thick at the base, and on top a road so wide you can drive four chariots down it side by side—and the whole city’s white as snow, with magnificent buttresses and arches, and there are buildings six stories high and at every story a hanging garden so that what you see when you first come over the mountains or the endless plain is an incredible explosion of light and color—the white of the walls and houses, the green of the gardens everywhere, the red and yellow and purple and blue of flowers, the blue of the sky. But more magnificent than all the rest together, crowning the city as the city crowns the hill, the towers of the temples.

All the city’s made of mud—bricks of mud stamped to astonishing density—coated over with white and colored plaster and decorated with enormous murals or with mosaics. As for the towers, they’re strange, multistaged buildings wound around with steep outside stairways, and they rise terrifyingly above the whitewashed temples. At times the sanctuary extended into the core of the tower so that the niche with the image was located within the base of the temple tower.

All right. Enough. You get the picture. What were they for? What did the towers mean? Can you make it out?
CLUMLY
: What do
you
think?

SUNLIGHT
: I don’t know. It’s a mystery. To the ancient Jews their height suggested a wish in man to become like to God—Babel, for instance. Mad human pride. But it’s not in the top of the tower that the god has his place. It’s true, Herodotus tells the story that the priestess of Bel passed a night at the top of the temple tower to wait for the deity to alight—but there’s no reference to any such business in the cuneiform texts. Sounds like a tale told by a dragoman. Fact is, the god is in the base, a kind of inner mystery from which the towers ascend. Could it mean this:
(a little wildly)
from man’s own inner mystery, the destructive principle in his blood—his knowledge that he’s born for death—his achievements ascend—his godly will, his desire to become at one with the universe, total reality, either by merging with it or by controlling it?
CLUMLY
(dubiously):
Mmm.

SUNLIGHT
: It might, yes. A reasonable hypothesis, at least.
CLUMLY
: Reasonable.

SUNLIGHT
: Very well, then I say this. It’s a matter of fact that we can never control the secret powers of the universe or even match their force. Sexually, socially, politically—any way you care to name—our civilization is doomed, in the same way all civilizations have been doomed. And so I cannot join you. It’s not that I mind doom, you understand. It’s because I have a vision of what would be possible in a better culture—one I do not expect ever to arise in the world. And yet I’m torn, I confess it. How can I openly turn against the culture I was born to? I have ties. And something else. I was right to set him free, hold out new life. But you see what has resulted.

Let me tell you a vision.

The age that is coming will be the last age of man, the destruction of everything. I see coming an age of sexual catastrophe—a violent increase of bondage, increased violence and guilt, increased disgust and ennui. In society, shame and hatred and boredom. In the political sphere, total chaos. The capitalistic basis of the great values of Western culture will preclude solution of the world’s problems. Vietnam is the beginning. No matter how long it takes, the end is upon us, not only in the East but in Africa too, and South America, Civilizations fall because of the errors inherent in them, and our error will kill us.

CLUMLY:
But what
is
the error? Excuse me.

SUNLIGHT:
It’s man, Clumly! Man!

You want to know the future? I’ll tell it to you! I see towers of magnificent beauty and awesome height—towers of white and gold and blue—towers stretching from hill to hill and valley to valley as far as the eye can see—the towers not of men but of gods, you would swear: but the sky is dark behind them, and the earth at their foundations trembles and cracks. The people of the city are blinded and they speak in a babble of tongues, and around the towers there are luminous clouds full of dazzling colors, and the air stinks of brimstone. There is no Zoar to run to, and if there are five good men living they have no more chance than a Jew’s fat wife. Hell’s jaws will yawn and the cities will sink, and there will not be a trace. I promise you all this. I give you my word as an official wizard to the king.

CLUMLY:
You can’t believe that.

SUNLIGHT:
I’ve seen it.

Abruptly, full of a confused sense of pity and anger, Chief Clumly stood up. He went to the low door and stood there, bent down, looking out, his hands in the pockets of his coat. At last he turned and said, “I saw your wife today.”