The Sunlight Dialogues (100 page)

When they’d taken a bite or two he said, “Pick a card, any card! Superb! Beautiful! The seven of farts! Tear a corner off! Marvellous! You’ll recognize the card? You’ll know, when I’ve put it through fire and water, that the corner you hold in your hand fits the mutilated card?” He snatched it from her, matched the two pieces, thrust the card back. “Beautiful!” He spun away, cape whirling out, and when he turned back to them he was holding the gun. “Now!” he said. “Allah, the incinerator!” Dully, full of hate, Nick handed him a small stone dish, and the Sunlight Man tore the card to bits, dropped the pieces in, sprinkled something like lighter fluid on them, and lit them. They burned to ashes. (Luke went on eating the omelette, stubbornly not watching. He breathed in awful gasps. The Sunlight Man glared.) “Very good,” he said. “Would you kindly hold the pistol, madam? Upright. That’s it. We’ll pour the ashes down the barrel, you see. Hah!” He conjured a funnel and poured in the ashes. “Nicodemus,” he said, “you may dispose of the incinerator now.” He went away to the kitchen with it, then on out into the woodshed. “Now behold,” said the Sunlight Man. She heard him moan. “You see before you a common nail, except of course that it’s solid gold, or a reasonable facsimile. (For all is illusion, ladies and gentlemen. Nothing is as it seems. All tricks out of hell!) Will you mark it, kind sir. With a cross, if you don’t mind. A powerful symbol, and we need, in this dark pass, the most powerful of symbols! Excellent! Sublime! You are an artist, young man! A very Giotto of crosses! I kneel to you! Good. Now madam, your kind cooperation. Would you drop the nail in the pistol? Fine!” Then turning, aiming the pistol at the wall: “Nicodemus, you fool, the fishbowl!” He came with it, drew the coffee table over by the wall, set the fishbowl on the coffee table a foot from the edge of the drape, then stood back and bowed. The water in the bowl moved from side to side, and the Sunlight Man waited for it to settle, not saying a word now, dangerously silent, aiming straight at the bowl. Then, deafeningly, the gun went off. The same torn card was nailed through the drape to the wall. “Bring it here,” the Sunlight Man said, and Nick brought it. The two pieces matched. Outside, there was a sound of running. The Sunlight Man smiled, bending toward her, and his dark ringed eyes showed mysterious satisfaction. “Praise the Lord of hosts,” he said, but he was listening, “in whose name these miracles are performed. And applause for Nicodemus, who is His prophet.” He turned suddenly to the door, holding the gun, and snatched it open. There was no one there, or so he said. She could no longer trust her wits.

After that he did tricks with handkerchiefs, tricks with rings, more tricks with cards—“Take a card, any card!” He dealt her a living mouse. He worked more swiftly, as if in frenzy. He made a chair stand unsupported in empty air, put a spell on a rooster so that even the blowing of a trumpet would not awaken it though with a snap of his fingers he could bring it back. And then when her mind was swimming he said, “For my next trick, I will do the resurrection. Dear lady, let me borrow your bird.”

“My bird?” she said.

He took from just inside her collar, as it seemed to her, a living bird, a sparrow. “You have heard it said that not a sparrow shall fall?” he said. “Behold!” He put the sparrow on the coffee table, produced the pistol and, with the barrel not a foot away from the bird’s breast, shot it dead. “A trick, you think?” he said with a wild look. “Touch it, dear lady! Do not pick it up with your coarse earthly hands, but touch it. Your fingertips know the feel of death. Touch!” She obeyed. The bird was unquestionably dead. He went nowhere near it. “Bird,” he whispered. “My beloved, my leman, O symbol of the soul’s eternity, rise!
Rise!”
After a long moment, the bird seemed to move. There was blood on the coffee table. “Stop it,” she whispered. Nick was bending close, wringing his hands, but he too went nowhere near it. “Rise!” the Sunlight Man whispered, and now there was violence in his eyes, all the violence of thunder and rage. There was no mistake. The bird was coming to life. “Stop!” she said. A shout, this time. The bird twitched violently and struggled to stand up and at last succeeded. It stood trembling, bleeding and twitching and completely alive. The Sunlight Man bowed his head. “Resurrexit,” he said.
¹

Sometimes it was in the middle of the afternoon that he would leave. Once, perhaps twice, he took Nick with him. “Where do you go?” she said. “About my father’s business,” he said. “My
real
father.” He winked.

Down in the darkness of the cellar, where there was never a sound except the occasional stirring of a rat, an almost unheard plosh as one of them slipped from the edge of some moldy shelf into the black, still water, she sometimes believed she was losing her mind, that that was in fact his purpose. For she did not believe, as Luke did, that he had no purpose. She stood hour after hour, or hung limp from the binding ropes she could no longer feel, trying to think, remembering trifles of no sense or significance. She remembered Will’s snoring, Will Jr’s preaching to the others in the orchard—poor, pitiful Will Jr!—remembered darning socks for her mother, children’s socks so worn there was hardly a place sturdy enough to hold the thread. (She remembered the smooth, heavy darning ball, lovely to the touch.)

Sometimes, with their eyes, she and Luke fought, or so she imagined.

Luke’s eyes said, “So make love to him. That’s the trick. Love conquers all,
et cetera, et cetera.
All
you
want, anyway.”

“Stop it,” she hissed in her mind.

He stood relaxed against the post, no longer resisting the ropes that bound his hands and feet and chest, the gag biting into his cheeks. Nick Slater stood tied to the post beyond, with his back to them. To look at them he had to twist his head over his shoulder, and that was too hard. He simply stood hour after hour with his head dropping, still and silent as the moldy stone wall. For Nick it had not been so long as for them, because sometimes when he came back the Sunlight Man would untie him and take him upstairs with him, whisper and laugh and teach him tricks, sometimes striking him when he turned sullen. At times the Sunlight Man would talk to him as though nothing had happened.

“Me,” Luke’s eyes said, “I like it as much here as anyplace—though I wouldn’t mind getting some dinner now and then.” They couldn’t tell how long it had been since they’d eaten. Maybe as much as a day. The casement windows were so dirty you couldn’t tell morning from afternoon. “That’s the advantage of being a poor crippled bastard, you know.” He laughed shrilly with his eyes. “You learn to ask for nothing. No delusion. You, now. You’ve had the illusion of being free as a bird; but me, I’m used to where I am—I almost like it.”

“You whine too much,” she said. She’d have struck him if she could.

“Yes, yes! Say it cheerfully then. What does she want?
Power
she wants. Vroom vroom! Be her own boss! She goes to college and gets her a paper. Self-supporting now. Vroom! She wants ice-cream, she goes out and buys herself ice-cream. She wants sex, she goes out and buys herself—”

“Luke!”

“Yes, yes! Quite right. Talking that way to his own shitass mother! But that’s the price, you know. Price of liberty! You collects the merchandise, you gotta pay the fee. I was quiet a long, long time, after all. But the lesson finally got through to me. Yes. Think of Number One. From you I learned it. Now I think of Number One, which from my point of view is me, and I guess Number Two will just have to smart a little. Which is you. C’est la vie.”

“That’s stupid,” she said. Pious little idiot! Did he really imagine he’d made the discovery all by himself, that it hadn’t been one of the grand old clichés for a thousand thousand years?

“Maybe. So then enlighten me, Mama. How come you can walk on whoever you want to, and me, I’m supposed to live by the Guilty Rule?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

Shame on him! Shame!
The ghosts said.

But she could have told him, if there were so much as a prayer that he would listen. It was not her fault that Luke was the victim of a dream, a romantic image of a world that never was. It was not she who’d given him the image.

It was the same with us,
the Runian sisters whispered. They referred to their murdering nephew. She smiled. It gave her comfort, this fantasy (for she knew it was that) in which she and the dead sisters were in league against him.

The sentimentality of youth, she thought. And more than sentimentality: overweening pride. Born to save the world ruined by their parents, they prated. Where did it come from—that tiresome idea? That was what the Sunlight Man had said yesterday morning, in effect—or the morning before—except that he’d said more than that, too. Standing up to his ankles in the water, pantlegs rolled up, his hands in the pockets of his suitcoat, studying them as though they were mannequins in a store window. “There’s only rule or anarchy,” he said. “Talk about anything between as ‘freedom’ and you engage in insignificant speech. There’s much to be said for anarchy, to tell the truth. Consider, please. For the child’s safety he learns to stay out of the road. A rule. And for his health he learns to eat both foods he does and doesn’t like. A rule. Nevertheless, grown men can walk in the street if they please, and they can go without food for days if they have their reasons. Sooner or later even the rules which keep a man alive—keep his kind alive—come up for nearer inspection, so to speak, and every generation—and every man of it—is alone. Abandoned to life. The wiser a man grows, the fewer his iron bonds. So it seems.” He mused, looking first at her, then at Luke. “It’s strange, isn’t it, the curious counter-movement. How we long to get home again. When I was a child—” He closed his eyes and, after a moment, nodded, deciding on a different tack. “Punctilious old men think back to the easy freedom of their childhood. And long-toothed beatniks in their cups hone for the rituals of right and wrong their bourgeois fathers taught. I was once told that the antidote to the escape through marijuana is brown sugar; another person told me peanut butter. I don’t know which is true, if either. But though very little is more pleasurable than a marijuana buzz, it is a curious fact of experience that the higher one goes, the more ardently one longs for brown sugar or, alternatively, peanut butter.”

A rat swam toward him. He watched it come, its small legs churning with all their might, stirring the heavy black water, and when it came within six inches he lifted one bare foot and shooed it. The rat turned and continued on its way. He too continued. “With respect to life, I can say this: The greater the freedom I personally achieve—the greater the distance I put between myself and the common run of mankind—bus-drivers, judges, policemen, men of science, and the like—the more I find myself admiring them. I could listen all day to the sober good sense of an upholder of the law. I take my hat off to them, I go down on my knees to them and ask their benediction. Like wicked Jacob in Esau’s hair. All are sinners.”

She said nothing. It was impossible to know whether he was reasoning or raving, seriously questioning her or mocking her.

He waded over to Luke and bent his face forward till his nose was two inches from Luke’s forehead. “And which way will you go, my child?” he whispered. No answer came. The Sunlight Man nodded. “Either way, you have my blessing.” He made a cross in the air, then sadly shook his head. “So much revolution in you,” he said, “so much hatred for order, so much hatred for anarchy—and so much love. How terrible! Where can you run to? I tremble for your soul.” Then, slowly, solemnly, he went down on his knees in the water at Luke’s feet and, after long meditation, kissed Luke’s shoes. After that he sighed, like a man who has finished an unpleasant task, and straightened up and tightened the cords around Luke’s wrists. He gave them all a little wave. “Think positive,” he said. He slapped Luke’s cheek to see if he was conscious. His trousers were soaked to the crotch. He turned back to the stairs, whistling under his breath, and went up and turned the light off.

He brought them no breakfast the following morning, and they believed he had abandoned them for good. They could hear no sound of hammering and sawing in the garage, no sound of pacing. “Maybe they caught him,” Nick’s eyes said. Luke snarled inside his gag like a dog, then cried for a long time. She listened to it and hated him. She’d had nightmares last night. The Sunlight Man did not appear with lunch for them. She looked up at the flooring and began angrily to talk to it—or, really, to talk to the demonic spirit which might or might not be beyond the flooring, resting, or possibly hanging dead (she had half-convinced herself by now that he would kill himself), and at last, experimentally at first, she began to shout inside the gag. Hardly a sound. Luke too shouted, but only with his eyes, sometimes at the Sunlight Man, sometimes at her, sometimes at Nick. At last they were all shouting, their eyes resonant in the wet, stonewalled room. They stopped. Millie wept as Luke had. “At a time like this, you learn what the really important things are,” she said in her mind. “That’s stupid,” she said, enraged.

And then at last, just as the light was going out of the casement windows, they began to hear noises upstairs: pacing, the sound of doors and cupboards opening, sounds of cooking. She tried shouting again, but the man would not be hurried. She fell silent again and stood now, head straining forward, eyes rolling upward, listening intently for any sound of hope. At last it came. The cellar door creaked open and light shot down the stairs and then the cellar light clicked on and his feet came in sight. When they could see all of him they saw that he was dressed in a blue suit of terrible dignity, wearing hornrimmed glasses that made him look like a college professor, and smoking an elegant pipe. He dusted off one of the cellar steps, then sat down on it, took off his shoes, rolled up his pantlegs. Then he came and, without a word, untied them and half-carried, half-led them from their posts back to the steps. Upstairs he wiped his feet and lower legs on a kitchen towel, rolled down his pantlegs, and put his socks and shoes back on, then showed them to the dining room. The table was beautifully set, as if for a party: linen tablecloth, china, crystal (where he’d gotten it heaven knew), long slim candles.