The Sunlight Dialogues (11 page)

—Anon., Early 14th Century

1

He came to be known as the Sunlight Man. The public was never to learn what his name really was. As for his age, he was somewhere between his late thirties and middle forties, it seemed. His forehead was high and domelike, scarred, wrinkled, drawn, right up into the hairline, and above the arc of his balding, his hair exploded like chaotic sunbeams around an Eastern tomb. At times he had (one mask among many, for stiff as the fire-blasted face was, he could wrench it into an infinite number of shapes) an elfish, impenetrable grin which suggested madness, and indeed, from all evidence, the man was certainly insane. But to speak of him as mad was like sinking to empty rhetoric. In the depths where his turbulent broodings moved, the solemn judgments of psychiatry, sociology, and the like, however sound, were frail sticks beating a subterranean sea. His skin, where not scarred, was like a baby’s, though dirty, as were his clothes, and his straw-yellow beard, tangled and untrimmed, covered most of his face like a bush. He reeked as if he’d been feeding on the dead when he first came, and all the while he stayed he stank like a sewer. For all his elaborate show of indifference, for all his clowning, his play-acting, his sometimes arrogant, sometimes mysteriously gentle defiance and mocking of both prisoners and guards, he sweated prodigiously, throughout his stay, from what must have been nervousness. He talked a great deal, in a way that at times made you think of a childlike rabbi or sweet, mysteriously innocent old Russian priest and at other times reminded you of an elderly archeologist in his comfortable classroom, musing and harkening back. He would roll his eyes slowly, pressing the tips of his fingers together, or he would fix his listener with a gentle, transmogrifying eye and open his arms like a man in a heavy robe. He pretended to enjoy the official opinion of the court, that he might be mad. “I am the Rock,” he said thoughtfully, nodding. “I am Captain Marvel.”

None of the other prisoners listened to him much when he first came, and except for young Mickey Salvador, neither did the guards. No one could help seeing that there was a kind of cleverness, even genius, in some of what he said and did. He could quote things at great length (there was no way for them to know whether he was really quoting or inventing) and he had an uncanny ability to turn any trifling remark into an abstruse speculation wherein things that were plain as day to common sense became ominous, uncertain, and formidable, like buttresses of ruined cities discovered in deep shadow at the bottom of a blue inland sea. You could not tell whether he was speaking to you or scoffing at you for your immersion in the false; whether he was wrestling with a problem of immense significance to him or indifferently displaying his hodge-podge of maniac learning. Only this much was sure (it was Miller’s observation, long afterward): whatever he was up to now, in the beginning he must have gone to those books of his hungrily, hunting for something. One could see that he had bent desperately over his books late at night, night after night and day after day, prayerfully even, keeping like a hermit to his no doubt cluttered, filthy room, poring over the print as though his soul’s salvation depended on it. It is unusual, to say the least, to encounter such men in a small-town jail. No wonder Chief Clumly was troubled.

There were those in Batavia who would gladly have listened to him later, would eagerly have searched out, if it weren’t too late, as much as could be known of the Sunlight Man’s thought, hunting down the secrets of his interwoven innocence and violence. But in the jail, at least in the beginning, he had no real audience but Clumly, as he knew. The truth was simple, at that time. First, he smelled. Second, he was an outrageously self-centered, tiresome man, however talented in his odd, unsettling way. No doubt deep down he had two or three of the usual human virtues, but it was not the business of the police to notice either virtues or defects, now that he was jailed. Their business was to keep him in his cell, feed him, and, with professional indifference, see that he stayed alive. As for his fellow prisoners, they had no time for either genius or madness. All three of his fellow prisoners had been in jail before and might have been expected to endure their confinement with some resignation; but two, the Indians, were in serious trouble, and the third, though he knew he would be found not guilty (although he was guilty), had reasons of his own for gloom.

The Sunlight Man seemed to have no sense of how the others felt. He’d never been in jail before, he said, and he apparently believed himself set apart by nature from the others—as if by that perhaps unjust and unwarranted, meaningless brand, like the mark of Cain—so that his punishment was more cruel than theirs, downright absurd, in fact. When the guard shoved him in and closed the door the Sunlight Man leaped back at the bars and clung to them, mouth gaping. Bearded, peering out with those small, close-set, wounded eyes burning deep in the ashes of his face, he looked like some pirate’s minor crewman marooned for half a century, still outraged but deeply befuddled now, near despair. The Indians to his left sat unmoving on their pallets merely looking at him. The middle-aged man to his right had his back turned.

“Guard!” the Sunlight Man howled. The echo boomed at him from all around and he cringed, gorillalike, looking over his shoulder. The Indians said nothing. He gripped the bars tightly and his plump fists went white. He stood silent a moment, like a timid child, returning the calm stare of the Indians, then he began once more to howl for the guard.

At last one of the Indians said, “You get him, you’ll wish you didn’t, mister.”

The Sunlight Man considered it, still watching for the guard, then turned his head once more to look at the Indians. They were young, teen-agers, the older one lean and muscular, with a short, flat forehead and a thin mouth. The younger one was fat, as apelike as the Sunlight Man himself, but cleaner, with downward slanting, unfocused eyes that seemed never fully opened. The two Indians were like Mutt and Jeff, like a pine tree and a mound of earth, like contrasted endocrinological types in a high-school biology book. When the new prisoner was finished looking at them, grimly and suspiciously, or so it seemed at the moment, he smiled suddenly, like a wicked child, and opened his hands like a Jewish tailor.

“But you see,” he said, “I have his billfold.” It hung, incontrovertible as a flat-iron, between the thumb and first finger of the man’s left hand.

The Indians stared and even the humpbacked thief turned to look, and, after a silence, they all began to laugh.

When the guard came, the new prisoner handed him the billfold humbly, as if sheepishly, and explained, showing his large, perfect teeth, “Practice.”

The guard said nothing. He pocketed the billfold without even checking to see that whatever money he’d had was still inside (he regretted that later, though nothing was missing), and he held out his hand again. His face was dark red, whether with rage or embarrassment you could not have guessed. Chief of Police Clumly and Captain Sangirgonio—Miller—stood watching from the hallway, with their arms folded, Clumly looking panicky and mildly outraged, pale eyes bulging, Miller grinning broadly, one eyebrow cocked. The bearded prisoner put his fingers to his lips studying the guard’s outstretched, patient hand, then nodded thoughtfully and produced from the empty air, as it seemed, a wristwatch, a pack of Kools, a pencil, and a fifty-cent piece. The guard stuffed them all in his pocket without glancing at them, bit his lips together, and turned to stalk between Clumly and Miller and away down the hall.

“He’s good, you know that?” Miller said.

Clumly said, “There’ll be a file on that man. You mark my words.”

Miller grinned. “Fifty bucks says you’re wrong, Chief. That’s no pick-pocket there.” He rubbed his hands. “We caught us a magician.”

“Negative,” Clumly said. “What’s a magician doing defacing a public thoroughfare?”

Miller turned mock-solemn. “You’re right, Chief. That’s the work of a pick-pocket.”

Clumly scowled his disgust and went back to his office. Miller nodded admiration and farewell, and the bearded prisoner bowed from the waist, like a Chinaman, fingertips together, his fire-blasted face like a large baked apple wrinkled and dry with age. When Miller was gone, the new prisoner went to the back of his cell, demonically pleased with himself, and sat down.

He’d won them all, that moment—both the police and his fellow prisoners—and so, by some inevitable logic of his character, he had to destroy the effect. He said to both Indians, as though they weren’t worth addressing singly, “What did they arrest
you
for?” He managed to make it sound thoroughly unfriendly, as though he wanted to know for his own safety. When the older one answered, the bearded prisoner closed his eyes and seemed to pay no attention—though he heard, all right, they would find out later.

The younger one said, “Why they got
you
here?”

He leered. “Because I’m mad, friend.” He stood up, threw out his arms, tipped back his head, and lifted his thick right leg straight out to the side so that the toe of his shoe hung, perfectly motionless, four inches beyond the fingers of his right hand. The baggy suitcoat opened, revealing a dirty white shirt and no tie. It was then that he began his infuriating prattle.

“Jesus God,” the older of the Indians said.

Even after the light went off, a little before midnight, the Sunlight Man went on jabbering, playing madman. As far as the other prisoners knew, he did not sleep a wink all night, though for a while he was quiet. In the morning they saw him squatting on the floor, wringing his hands, his head drawn in between his fat, hunched shoulders, small lips pursed. He was studying some tiny white stones on the floor. How he had smuggled them in no one knew. He was tricky all right. After a long time he gathered them up and shook them in one hand like dice and sprinkled them out again, and again sat studying them. The thief, Walter Boyle, pretended not to notice, but the Indians bent close to the bars.

“What you doing?” the fat younger one said.

The Sunlight Man raised one finger to his lips, commanding silence, and went on studying the stones. At last, shaking his head sadly, he gathered up the stones a last time and closed them in his fist. When the fist opened again, the stones were gone. He stood up and buttoned his suitcoat. “Casting the spots,” he said. “A mysterious business.”

“What?” the older Indian said.

Once more the Sunlight Man raised one finger to his lips, and this time he winked. “Sh!” he said. “They’re listening!”

After breakfast he began to talk again, and now it was worse than before. He was like a spoiled child insisting on attention—winking, leering, ranting, pretending to weep.

The younger Indian said suddenly, “Hey, shut up, will you?”

“Shut up,” the Sunlight Man echoed, snatching off his cap and rolling his eyes up. “If only one could! But think of the implications! Staggering! If I close myself in … if every one of us closes himself in … and we can do it, of course, a simple manipulation of the switch called
Will,
what evils would be banished! what terrifying ghosts would be laid!

“Enough. No bombast.” He leaned toward the Indians, perspiration on his forehead like drops of dew on the corpse of a mushroom.

“Take an instance. I went to a party once in Los Angeles, through a friend of a friend. It was supposed to be for Tarzan. Imagine the scene: a warm Saturday night and all over Southern California the smoke had begun to rise heavenward. The summer moon was hidden, the smog was glorious—blood red and the deep translucent brown of soy sauce. It was a holy time. The people had all wrung out their swimsuits and they stood now, tanned and glistening, drinking martinis in the wide windows of the one-floor huts overlooking the freeways.

“It was in the Bel Air neighborhood, this party. The best neighborhood in the city, so exclusive that for years and years they wouldn’t even let in movie stars. Clark Gable had to live in Brentwood. William Powell’s three-hundred-thousand-dollar house went up just outside the gates in Westwood. But the Depression came along, and Bel Air decided to take even the money of the vulgar and crass. But I digress.

“I was greeted at the door by a lady in a hairdo that must have cost two hundred dollars, and it was almost all she had on. ‘Is this the Tarzan party?’ I said. ‘Who?’ she said. ‘Here, have a glass of champagne and meet the gang.’ So I did. It was wall-to-wall sofas and sliding glass doors and lampshades as big as the world. The party was in full swing, and you could’ve heard it to San Juan Capistrano. They introduced me as the Wolf Man. On the porch they were playing rock ’n roll, colored lights going over the orchestra, and the shriek of it all would have brought down the roof except that the roof was made of colored plastic—it had no shame. There must have been four hundred people there—dozens of ‘starlets,’ if you know what I mean, a lion trainer dressed in black leather, girls in leopard bikinis, press agents, camera people, a huge chimpanzee and something that looked to be a lynx but might’ve been a snow-leopard with its tail cut off, an old woman with glasses on a stick, waiters with name tags, a man dressed as a Canadian Mountie, and a Russian merchant seaman with steel-rimmed glasses. There were others. Who can remember! Somebody said there was a rape out by the swimming pool, but it was crowded there, there was no way to be sure. There were girls with topless swimsuits, though, and who knows what it may have led to? Nobody mentioned Tarzan all night long, and I never saw him. Well—I have never left your question, you see—how do you close in from
that?
Ah! Or are you already closed in, there? I don’t mean anything complicated. No! That much pure body and maybe you’re back to pure soul,
that’s
what I mean. Do I make myself clear? Some people might say it was a holy event, beyond sensualism—that the whole age is a holy event.
I
don’t say it. But the code you suggest, each of us locked in the cell of himself …” He dashed to the bars and seized them as if with pleasure. “In the ancient conflict of the Jews and the Babylonians,” he said—but there he was cut off. The police came for him, to question him, and he went away between two of them, quietly, as if full of remorse for the sins of all mankind.