The Sunlight Dialogues (39 page)

But he was calm now, beyond his first rage and love-hate to reflection and the abstract knowledge of his fear. The feeling he’d experienced long ago in his father’s house was back, yet strangely not inside him: it had gone out to penetrate and shine in things external—in Millie, in the boy he had not known except as a child of three or four, in the Indian boy he had found in jail, of whom he had heard in the letters that Millie had written neither for his sake nor for hers but because he was a source of torment to Will. The feeling had gone out into objects as well, they were alive as if with his memory of them, though he’d never seen them before in his life: the swaybacked couch, the rug, the cheap old andirons and scuttle by the fireplace, in ashtrays, magazines, pieces of paper—a glow as if of brute sensation, shining in one thing more and in another less, he could not tell why. And he felt, as he had felt in his childhood, that there were things he knew, great mysteries, a knowledge too deep for the power of memory to pull down or dredge up, a light moving through subterranean passages, drawing to a focus around God knew what queer images—crosses, circles, his mad wife’s eyes?—something outside the limits of his mind.

He had felt then for a moment that he knew. She was looking at something, her eyes fixed with a stare like an eagle’s, and now he too seemed to see, not so much an image as a center of pain, like an iron just brought blinding white from the forge. And then, drawing back, he had fixed his eyes not on what she was seeing but on her.

“Poor bitch,” he whispered when she fled.

The doctor said nothing. A gentle spring breeze came in off the patio of the therapy cottage, but no sound came with it. Beyond the walls of the hospital grounds there would be traffic moving, business as usual, but not here.
Wherever she may be .
The grass was smooth and clean as only grass officially kept can be. Like her mind, officially kept in the neat regulations of her madness. The doctor said, “These treatments—” He paused, studied Taggert’s face, decided to continue. “They’re a distressing sight, as you can see.” Taggert Hodge nodded. “You understand the principle, of course. But until you’ve seen one …” He smiled. “Good though, those boys of mine. You saw their reactions. Like lightning!” He snapped his fingers. “They have to be of course, but it’s impressive just the same. The first time I saw it—I was interning; I remember as if it was yesterday—I just plain couldn’t believe it. Well, takes time, of course. What it comes down to, you know, is you have to think like a madman. They’re just as quick thinkers as anybody else, understand. Quicker. You get so you can think like them, and then you’ve got to go
beyond
that. You’ve got to control them, lead them where you want them to go, block them. Take chess now. A simple game, compared to this. You’ve got hours to think out every move—and just as many conditions as we have to deal with here—and even if you lose, what is it? A game. But every move
we
screw up—” He glanced at Hodge again, then smiled. “But we don’t.”

Hodge nodded, doubtful. The man was tall and heavy, with slow, shallow eyes, a dark brown suit. He did not look like a chess player. “She recognize me?” Hodge said.

“Hard to say,” the doctor said. He was evading some long explanation. Then: “Ah. I think they’re coming back. Have a seat?”

Hodge sat down again. It was a comfortable room. It didn’t smell lived-in. This time, walking between the two attendants, Kathleen did not even glance at him: neither did she glance at the doctor. It came to him that it was from the doctor she’d tried to run, to Taggert Hodge she was as indifferent as to the walls, the stale smell of flowers. His heart shrank around the recognition. She was haggard; once beautiful. Her eyes, once dazzling with Irish humor and gentleness, were dazed now, the eyes of a sleepwalker. She walked slowly, lightly, as though all substance had drained out of her with her sanity. “And in her looks …” What was the line? He clung to the question as to the arms of his chair.

And in her looks, which from that time infus’d

Sweetness into my heart, unfelt before,

And into all things from her Aire inspir’d …

Now the doctor was speaking to her. It was as if Hodge were no longer in the room. “You think you’re going to get well now, or is it going to be back to the asylum with you?”

She stared at him, and the corner of her mouth trembled. At last she said, “Where’s … where’s my brother?”

“He’s in the kitchen.” He indicated the direction with a jerk of his head.

“He shouldn’t be here.” She glanced at Hodge, then away. “I’ll send him out. He has to obey me, and if I say—”

“You’re wrong,” he said. “You have to obey him. He’s supposed to keep an eye on you. Don’t you know who’s God around here?”

She bristled, then calmed herself. “I’m God,” she said.

The attendants laughed, and Hodge narrowed his eyes. He was beginning to sweat.

“You?” the doctor said. He drew back a little, incredulous.

She nodded.

Instantly, he moved toward her a little. “Kneel down.”

She shook her head. “No.
You
kneel.”

“All right boys,” the doctor said, “show her who’s God.”

They seized her roughly, as though she were a criminal, and forced her to her knees. Her face worked, full of rage. “Now listen,” she whispered.

“Kneel!” he said.

“You’re not supposed to use force against me.”

“Don’t be silly. I’m the boss.”

The dark-haired attendant said, “She’s on her knees.”

The doctor nodded as if immensely pleased with himself. “Now.” He folded his arms. “What are you doing?”

Her face worked violently. It was the face of an old woman, and Hodge closed his eyes for an instant.

“What are you doing to God?” the doctor said.

“Please!”

“All right, let her up.”

She got up slowly. They gave her freedom enough to raise her hands to her face. “There are conditions under—” she said.

He shook his head. “Who’s boss here?”

“You do what I say,” she whispered, “and there are conditions under which we can make conditions under for dealing—”

“There are no conditions.”

Kathleen drew in a deep breath, eyes blank for a moment. She touched her hair, trying to smooth it. “I am the Creator,” she said patiently. “If you don’t do what I say then what can we—”

“Who kneeled in front of whom?”

“I will have to destroy you,” she said.

Again he shook his head. “You can’t destroy me because I’m God.”

“No, I’m God. Have you no faith?” The hand moving on the hair had lost meaning. It worked like a machine.

“No,” he said, “I’m God.”

She was squinting. “Well, I happen to be a better thinker and more—more of a leader than you of human beings and I think what I am and I realize I’m God, and I see what you are and—” She stopped, and Hodge could feel her panic in his chest. “You are and I under conditions—” She stopped again.

The doctor half-turned away from her. “Show her again, boys. There’s no point trying to argue with a crazy woman.”

The dark-haired attendant said, “Kneel to God.”

Again she looked at Hodge. “Tag,” she said.

But the attendants were forcing her down. She tried to scratch at their wrists, but they held her arms too tightly and her nails closed on air.

“Take it easy on her,” the doctor said. And then, to Kathleen: “Make it easy for yourself.”

“Why does God have to cry for Tag?” the shorter attendant said.

She got her hand free for an instant and struck at him, but again he caught her wrist.

“Why does God have to cry for Tag?” he asked again.

“That’s true,” the doctor said. “I hadn’t thought of it.” He bent over her. “That’s true, what he says.”

“You’re not supposed to use force—you’re not boss.”

“Who’s God?” he said.

“I am God.
Nomine matris …”

“Why don’t you get up then?”

“Well, I’ll push them away.” She tried. “Tell them to get away,” she said angrily.

“All right boys, get away.”

The attendants released her and stepped back. Hodge waited, the back of his neck tingling. Suddenly, as though she were perfectly sane, Kathleen laughed. “That was a mistake,” she said. “I should have pushed them away, I should have obliterated them.”

Now, crazily, they were all laughing. “Obliterate, yeah!” the shorter attendant said.

“Obliterate, that’s it,” the doctor said. “But you’re absolutely helpless.”

After it was over the doctor said, “So now you’ve seen it.”

Hodge shook his head, still shaky. “It’s a hell of a thing.” His brother-in-law was leaning on his arm against the doorframe.

“Not too pretty, no,” the doctor admitted. “But you see how it is. Reality’s damned unpretty to Kathleen. You have to drive her to the admissions one by one.”

“You wonder if it’s worth it,” Hodge said.

Her brother glanced at him, thinking the same, it seemed.

“Of course it’s worth it,” the doctor snorted.

Hodge nodded, but the man’s voice made something ring far back in his mind. It was the game again, he realized the next instant. “Tell me something,” Hodge said as if thoughtfully, “do you really believe you’re God?”

The man smiled. “Easy boy,” he said. He closed his hand for a moment around Taggert’s arm.

When the doctor was gone her brother said, “We’ve got to get her out of here, Tag. It doesn’t work.”

“You’re crazy,” Hodge said. “It’s only been six weeks.”

The mild eyes looked at him, swollen behind the thick glasses. “Aren’t we all?—crazy, I mean?”

He stared at the place where he knew his burnt face would be staring back at him out of the darkness of the mirror, and his mind played over and through the past and the present and lived in neither.

Purity, cleanliness, contentment, patience, devotedness, self-denial, above all, silence.

But they had moved her, in spite of him. They had the money, not he. He had pleaded, argued, had even once caught Robert, the oldest, by the lapels of his damned high-yeller suitcoat, prepared to hurl him through the wall. The Professor had sat with his thin legs crossed, as always, tapping the tip of his moustache with one finger, passing no judgment. He agreed with Hodge, but he was the old lady’s slave. “Virtuous love,” Sir Thomas Malory called it.
Knight-prisoner, in the ninth year of the reign of Edward Fourth.
If the old lady wanted Kathleen burned alive, the Professor would have offered his matches. But so it was with all of them, wasn’t it? Virtuous love. For love of Kathleen the brothers, miserable neurotics themselves, evaded the father whose rule was otherwise in all respects absolute and absolutely corrupt. For love of Kathleen the brothers leaped from cure to cure, as if they were the psychotics, not she. For love of Kathleen the old man hated Hodge like death, her husband, in his mind her destroyer. And as for Hodge,

He stood in the school hallway, leaning on his broom, and he looked at the child who reminded him of the pictures of Kathleen when she was a child, watched her so hungrily, with such brute anguish that if anyone had noticed they’d have locked him up on the spot for dangerous. Perhaps not that bad, quite. He was capable of looking down, capable of smiling with kindly middle-aged-janitor indifference when she passed, walking like music, a drop of sweat beside her nose.

“Possessed,” Helene Burns had said. The mathematics teacher.

He had explained to her lightly how it was with him, and she had seen, for all his light-heartedness, how it was. There were very few of them there that he could talk to; she was the chief one. Recently divorced. That was why he appealed to her, he knew. He had been happy in his marriage, she had been miserable. Into his wounded animal love for a creature beyond either love or hate, translated into a present eternity, she projected what her marriage might have been; and his loss of what had seemed invulnerable was the objectification of her loss of what never was.

She understood, too, his restless arrogance, the disgust he felt for teachers, principals, Education professors at the university, parents who were riding high in the world, who spoke kindly, condescendingly to him as though his fallen condition were of course a punishment for sins. (And yet he was lying to himself, he knew; they did not scorn him but merely passed by, oblivious even to the fact that he scorned them. Insiders.)

“It’s temporary, Tag,” she said. “You’ll be on your feet soon, you watch.” He slept with her sometimes—that was before the accident—and often he would lie with his hands behind his head and listen with egoistic pleasure to her analyses of his condition. She had a throaty, New York Jewish voice, eyes like a piece of sculpture out of Syria. “You were the one with the smarts,” she said, smiling, nodding, toying with how it must have been. “Also the schmertz. And the baby of the family, that’s what did it.”

He was not fooled by his pleasure. As indifferent to that as he was to almost everything, in those days. Everything but his sons. As if saying to himself, “Very well, you too like flattery.” He could have been bored by his vulgar humanness, but he was beyond it. She said once: “The magic tricks are interesting, though. They’re the key, if you want my opinion.” At her apartment, the light on in the kitchen, visible from the bedroom where they lay. On the record player a Broadway musical.

“I don’t,” he said, “—want your opinion—” and grinned in the half-light falling from the doorway.

“Yes you do,” she said casually. He did not protest “The way I figure, you were always quick, and people made a big fuss about it, and pretty soon it was a game. The quickness I mean. You learned all this stuff, but you didn’t really understand it. Like a quiz-kid or something. You just skittered on it, hike a waterbug. A thin film of sense. And they all said
Ooh! Aah!’
That’s how it was.”

He frowned.

She said, “Too bad.”

For a long time they were both silent, and then she said again, as if to herself, “Too bad.” She put her arms behind her head, making her breasts rise.

“I need a cigarette,” he said.

After a minute she sat up as if to get them, but looked at him. “Hurt your feelings, Tag?”