The Sunlight Dialogues (51 page)

He would think about the weather.

The night was pleasant.

that time of night when the troublesome cares of humanity drift from our hearts and on seas of luxury streaming in gold we swim together, and make for a shore that is nowhere

(To the white-mantled maidens
of Tanagra I sing my sweet lays,
I am the pride of my city
for my conversational singing)

Greater love hath no man than this: that he give up his head for his beloved.

“That’s enough,” he said. He thought of striking his hand with the hammer.

“I need a drink,” he said. That, at least, was true, but he did not stop working.

The inability to act, except absurdly. Familiar plague of his existence. He’d been doing it, walking the same circle, round and round, since before the time …

It was not true that he himself was blameless. Had the Old Man sensed that, for all the sharp-steel brutality of his mind?

In the beginning, before he knew that the sickness was serious, he had been unfaithful to her in his thought. She’d made demands, was forever interrupting his work, insisted on knowing everywhere he went, constantly spoke of his scuffed shoes, his untrimmed hair. She complained that he was getting fat.

“You’re
sick,”
he said, lashing out viciously, and she answered that he was the sick one, and made him believe it. They would have terrible fights, frequently about her father. Then it would all be as it had been before, for a while. He would notice the beauty of her walk, would sit on the bed watching her fix her face for a party, and he would reach out to touch her when she passed. Then it would happen again, and he would endure it for a time, withdrawing to his thoughts. Sometimes she would go rigid with anger, would talk gibberish; and he, though he held her, soothed her, assured her of his love, would be full of secret hate. The Old Man had started it perhaps, but he himself had pushed it along. He had drawn back into his mind, and when she beat him with her fists, ludicrously futile, he had endured her violence with scorn. What she said of him was cruel and false, and because it was painful he had developed defenses. There were plenty of people who did not find him fat, ugly, stupid, malicious, whatever it was she accused him of at the moment. They became his battlements against her. He began to long with all his heart to be rid of her, not to be with some other woman—her cruelty made him hate all her kind—but merely to be free, to prove himself in some battle worth the trouble. And at the same time, precisely because he was no longer able to believe in any of them, he wanted to couple with every woman he saw. It was true, he would see later, that he was sick. He would realize with a shock of horror why it was that he’d been able to win her so easily from her father: it was no victory, the same regime.

But he had not known that yet and would not make it out until too late, after he had won by destroying her, had snapped her mind because he would not learn what his father’s life taught:
stop, listen, wait.

It takes strength to listen and wait, and neither one of us was strong. To desire too much, to think oneself unfit—

Not a circle, a spiral inward
(introversion)
to a madness of cool objectivity.

Nothing passes belief when a god’s intention

We weren’t ready yet, either of us; we loved each other and were at war for fear that we didn’t deserve what we took. Withdrew by separate paths. You forward to madness, and as for me—

Deadly Opinions.
He had meant it to be ironic, but the title told the truth. Thoughts of a mind half god, half goat.
It was like that, yes.
He had written once.

Burning nights and days in his sullen grove,

Funereal as onyx, hind legs splayed,

Sick and omnivorous, the ruptured goat

Participates in the antics of the brain.

His monstrous groin cries out to mount the wind

As the mind cries out for subtleties worth thought

And the heart for a sacrifice as thick as time:

Hunger and surfeit gathered in one red heat.

His eyes are blank as stones. He has no name,

No physics for his rage. Collects his force,

Attacks and painfully couples; then, alone,

Broods once more on anger; finally dies.

I am unhinged by that fierce unholy image:

Fed up with gentleness, and sick with thought,

I will tear down my kingdom hedge by hedge,

Make war on the scree-gashed mountains, lord the night!

I turn to life! In every glittering maid

I’ll plant my burning wrath till the last flame

That cracks my chest is spent away to head

And the parched ribcage cools to easy dying.

I’ll learn to mock responsibilities,

These cold whereases capping the living well

That churns, beneath the ground, by fiercer laws.

I’ll have no truck with words. Discretion. Guilt.

I’ll put on joy, or something brother to joy;

Butt down the delicate gates I’ve helped to firm.

I’ll turn blind eyes on tears, stone ears on sighs,

No more the pale good friend. A mindless storm.

For I have cause! I’ve proved what reason is—

Paid with contempt, indifference. Honored laws

I do not need; made peace with foolishness

That steals my hurtling-downhill time and laughs.

I too have blood to burn. I know the case

Of those I am of use to. A human voice

Making the time pass, keeping the night outdoors.

No more! Go hire pale virgins in my place!

Virgins. Who smile, who weep, who ask to be loved.

I am no raging goat (nor meant to be):

A kindly ass in glasses, lightly moved,

Sniffing back tears at the movies tenderly.

Or worse. A ruptured goat with a thinking head,

Aware that maidens fall betrayed not by

My pagan code but out of their own dumb need

As I fall headwords, raging thoughtfully.

Where is the man, while body and head make war?

Holy Abstraction, catch us up as we fall!

Turn us to saints. Distract us out of earth

To love of things celestial and unreal!

Make me the singer of lovers’ agonies,

No victim now, pale comforter to victims,

Some kindly grandmother with inward eyes

Forgiving harmless fools for slight destructions.

Make me the mindless brute in Plato’s cell,

Walled from sense, bereft of the flesh’s curse:

Teach me the trick of granite, burning yet still,

A seeming rest in a tumbling universe.

Such was his betrayal. Infinitely subtle compared to her father’s, and for that reason more deadly. There was no atonement for it, no court to hear his confession or defense.

He stood, hands on hips, surveying his work, and saw that it would do. He began to load it into Luke Hodge’s car. When he was finished he rubbed his hands and nodded. “Poor old bastard,” he said.

When God made Clumly

He was old and sick,

Where he should’ve put ’is head

He put his prick.

He made a quick trip to the cellar to check his prisoners, then started for his meeting. “Poor lunatics,” he said, sinking toward grief.

3

The front door of the church was unlocked. Clumly had had a hunch it might be. He looked all around with the greatest possible care and saw no one. The corner of Liberty and Main was gray and deserted, full of dead, pale light from the streetlamps, the fluorescent nightlights of the appliance store across the street, the floodlights reaching up like hopeless prayers toward the steeple of St. Joseph’s, across Main. Farther along toward the center of town the gray took on a pinkish cast, only faintly satanic, from the neons burning like flares above commercial doorways as dark as coal bins. A long, glittering car passed, heading west on Main, and after a moment a semi heading in the opposite direction pulled up at the light, which had turned red now, and waited. The light changed; the truck made a hissing noise like a sigh and started up. Quickly, Chief Clumly opened the arched door just enough to let himself in, glanced over his shoulder one last time, threw down his cigar, suppressed an annoying yawn, and ducked into the cool, funereal darkness of the vestibule. He pulled the door shut behind him and stood bent over, hands clasped, small eyes peering into the blackness, listening. There was not a sound, but he could feel the maniac’s presence and, what was more, could smell it. The church reeked. He moved the tips of his fingers to the handle of his pistol and started toward the sanctuary door, only a pale gleam of wood in the almost perfect darkness. He was sick with weariness; he hadn’t been up so late in years. The floor creaked with every step he made. Twice he turned abruptly, believing there was a man behind him on the stairway that led up to the balcony and, beyond that, the steeple. At the sanctuary door he paused to listen again. His head ached. Still nothing. It was lighter here, the smell even stronger. The sanctuary walls were gray—they would be white by daylight—and held a faint glow of uncertain color that came filtered through the stained-glass windows along the side. As his eyes got used to the semidarkness he found he could make out the pulpit and font, the crenellations of the wall behind, the carved symbols on the panels of the elevated choir loft. On the minister’s tiered dais stood three high-backed chairs, old and dignified, and hanging above the chairs an elaborately ornamented lamp, not burning tonight although it was a symbol, Clumly had somewhere heard, of some kind of everlasting fire. Suddenly something burst into motion right under his nose—a bat, he thought as his alarm subsided—or perhaps some kind of bird. Before he knew what that fierce whirring was he had lifted his hand to his face, ducking back, and had let out a whispered cry; but immediately he saw the thing flying along the right wall and knew it was nothing supernatural. He reached down once more to touch the pistol. The pistol was gone.

“You’re right on time,” someone said the same instant. A deep voice full of anger like a glow of red light inside the skin. The high arched ceiling, the walls of wood and rock like plaster, the sea of gleaming pews falling away toward the altar made the voice seem even deeper, perhaps—and nearer—than it was. Clumly reached inside his coat and clicked on the small, flat tape recorder he’d tucked there, then smiled craftily, though his heart pounded, and took two more steps, his head cocked to listen for any hint of a footstep, the rustle of a curtain, some sign of where the man stood hidden. The skin of his arms prickled and all his body felt hot. At last he saw what he was looking for. In the central altar chair something moved, a darkness more intense than the darkness of the chair itself. It was only a slight movement, at the start, no more than a heart’s intuition of movement, like a stirring of some creature millennia old in a mountain of Siberian ice. But the intuition grew, and now he was moving forward toward the altar, raising his arms with grim and macabre dignity, half Miltonic dream of Lucifer, half whitefaced mechanical man in drab, once-black, moth-eaten clothes, responding with tin emotions to the demand of a drive in a museum of horrors. Incredibly, he must have been sitting there all the time. Yet here, a hundred feet away from where he sat, the pistol was gone.

Clumly clenched his fists and made himself calm. “So you came,” he said. He continued slowly down the aisle to the front pew, center, stood musing a moment with his right hand clinging to his left, then slipped into the pew and lowered himself cautiously onto the polished wood of the seat. It came to him all at once that for all his panic, he was really terribly tired, hardly able to keep his eyes open. It had been a long time since he’d stayed up all night. He clenched his jaw and squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again, trying to bring himself wide awake. Should he mention the pistol at once? Suppose the madman had brought him here for the purpose of murdering him. It was foolhardy, coming here without telling a soul at the police station what he was doing. But necessary. How else could he get what he had to get on the Sunlight Man? Correct. How slowly his mind worked! It seemed to creak as it moved, like his bones. Now that he thought of it, he wasn’t sure the Sunlight Man had answered him. “So you came,” Clumly said again. He ventured a crafty smile. After a moment he forced his eyes open and saw that the man was at the pulpit now, hands closed on the corners, gazing down on him with, it seemed, compassion. He was well dressed, almost elegant, the beard neatly trimmed, the grayish blond hair curling around his ears like the locks of an angel of ambiguous allegiance. Clumly let his eyes fall shut again. It was not so much that he was sleepy as that his eyes were tired. Yes. Still, thank God he’d had the presence of mind to bring the tape recorder. He was in no shape to catch any subtleties, that was for sure.

“You look tired, Fred.”

Thus began the remarkable dialogue Batavia Chief of Police Fred Clumly would play over and over later, with confused feelings of bafflement and rage and sorrow. The Sunlight Man leaned on the pulpit. Clumly pressed his knees together and sat back in the pew and closed his eyes. It was not that he was going to sleep. He sat tense as a tiger poised to spring, every nerve alert—though he was tired, yes, that was true. It was inhuman, having to stay wide awake at such an hour. If nothing but his personal safety depended on his keeping his guard up, then strange to say he would have slept: when you were sixty-four years old and dead with weariness it didn’t matter any more. But there was no telling what dangers he had been chosen (so to speak) to protect the people from. And so there could be no question of his drifting off to sleep. The Sunlight Man’s voice receded.