The Sunlight Dialogues (54 page)
Thus we continued for many years. We became the closest of friends, though also we were enemies. And then one day—horrible! horrible!—I forgot to lock his door. He didn’t leave. In fact he may not even have noticed, I’ve no idea. But I was excited—almost feverish. And that night I left his door unlocked again, but this time on purpose. I left it unlocked for months and months, and still he stayed, a creature of habit. Only natural. It was as if I had him chained to the wall. Spring came, and it got warmer. I told him the Government had discovered a way of making heat by some atomic process. But I knew I was finished. Sooner or later he would venture out of the cellar and into the street. I waited for it. We went on talking, night after night, and I went on leaving the door unlocked. I didn’t know whether I wanted him to stay or wanted him to leave. I merely waited, tortured by anxiety, sweating, terrorized by nightmares. And so, inevitably, it happened. He came out of the cellar. He must have known for weeks that he could do it if he wanted. What agony he must have undergone! Nevertheless, at last he came out. Picture it. A creature crawling on hands and knees, unspeakably grotesque! His beard hung down like an emperor’s—he must have been eighteen or nineteen by now—and his eyes had grown enormous, like the eyes of a fish who’s spent all his life in some cavern, looking at darkness. Slowly, tentatively, he crawled from his prison to the cellar stairs, all his body awake to the memory of the whippings I’d given him long ago. Up he went, step by step, an agony of guilt. At the top of the stairs he found the entryway, the door leading out to the garden, and in the door’s glass pane he saw—God forgive him!—sunlight! Fantastic! He couldn’t believe it! His wits reeled! He was nauseous! Perhaps he fainted, fell away into madness. But there was no turning back! Perhaps hours passed, or perhaps he went back to his cellar, shaking like a leaf, and did not come out until two days later. In any case, out he came, at last, and he saw that beyond any shadow of a doubt, the sun was still burning. He crawled onto the sidewalk and called out to passersby for explanation. They ignored him, fled from him. Nevertheless, the sun was burning. Eventually he attracted the attention of a child and asked his questions and learned the truth. I had lied. All his life had been a lie, for years and years! The pity of it! Christ! So then tell me. What would
you
have done, Clumly? What?
CLUMLY:
You’re mad!
SUNLIGHT:
No, sane. What would you have done?
CLUMLY:
I would have killed you.
SUNLIGHT:
Yes!
(Long pause.)
CLUMLY:
What are you up to? What does all this mean?
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.
This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come.
—II Timothy 3:1
1
Will Hodge Jr sat with the seat pushed back as far as it would go, fists squared on the steering wheel, shoulders and belly monumental, trousers drawn up a trifle to preserve the press, revealing lean bare shins as white as milk. He drove with authority and grace, head back, jaw thrown forward: an Assyrian king. He surveyed the city as though it belonged to him and he to it. The tall buildings threw angular shadows over the pavement, dignified and impersonal, as was fitting. He was home. During the absurd session at the police station, he’d been tormented by confused emotions, among them a momentary sense, unusual with him, that there was deep meaning in all of this. There was no specific cause behind this feeling he had, as far as he could tell—not his father’s storming past him without a word as he and Luke stood waiting for their turn with the Police Chief, not Clumly’s ridiculous accusations (not even Clumly took them seriously: a stall, an evasion, an explosion of senseless energy in what seemed for the moment a senseless universe), not the feeling of accomplishment Will Jr had had as he exploded Clumly’s ludicrous theories one by one, not Luke’s shame and indignation, not even the smell of the dead policeman’s blood. Perhaps simply this: sitting in Clumly’s office, soberly reasoning with a half-senile country cop on a case that would never have come up in a city like Buffalo, he had felt a burst of pleasure in his having escaped all that, having fled that cave of miscalculation and inevitable embarrassment that had once been his prison—the discomfiture summed up for him in his partnership with a small-town, old-fashioned attorney, Will Hodge Sr. It was almost frightening, when you thought about it. His father had been dealing with tax cases all his life and yet, compared to a first-rate tax man, knew nothing: his client was a helpless victim, and neither the client nor the lawyer was so much as aware of it. Will Jr knew it for a fact. He himself, as attorney for a small corporation—Flemming Construction, of North Tonawanda—had automatically been made an official of the company, a position in fact no more meaningful than, say, Head Custodian, but an “official,” nevertheless. So that when the Government had slapped a twenty-thousand-dollar fine on all responsible officials for the company’s failure to pay its taxes, Will Jr, though he had known nothing about the evasion of payment, had been held to be liable, like the others. Some of them, too, had known nothing about the thing. “There’s nothing you can do,” his father had said; “buy them off. Pay them ten thousand.” And he would have done it except that at lunch with Lou Solomon he had gotten, between two puffs from Solomon’s leather-covered pipe, a specialist’s opinion. “Show cause why you shouldn’t be considered a ‘responsible official.’ Stop by after lunch and I’ll show you what to do.” Obvious, and yet even he himself had missed it. It was a grand old ideal, the Jack-of-all-trades attorney, but like all grand old ideals, it didn’t work. He’d been amazed when his father had told him, long ago, that he couldn’t afford to run his office in Batavia if he didn’t get seven dollars an hour for every case. Here in Buffalo, with Hawley, Hawley Poacher, it was forty-five an hour. But the difference was important. Here they didn’t make mistakes, or anyway not obvious mistakes. Tax specialists, litigation specialists, labor specialists, merger specialists, the works. A murderous overhead—ten dollars a foot for office space, someone had said—and murderous hours, if you were the type who cared about the client’s pocketbook, but it was worth it, you could hold up your head.
