The Sunlight Dialogues (70 page)
CLUMLY:
Completely free.
SUNLIGHT:
Yes, free!
(Abruptly, rapidly, as if shocked by what he is saying)
: I’ll tell you the truth. I wasn’t always free, as I am now. I’ve given myself to many causes. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, I used to put out a newsletter for Krebiozen. I believed in it implicitly, and as an ophthalmologist—hah! you see, my profession’s slipped out!—I knew for certain that the AMA was rotten to the core. I attacked them brutally, brilliantly, in issue after issue. I told about their shocking tactics against Medicare—the banquets for doctors’ wives, for instance, where the wives were given a speech that was an absolute tissue of lies, a speech that ended with outrageous rhetoric, more moving than any account of a lynching, and the final line:
DO YOU WANT THAT KIND OF WORLD FOR YOUR DAUGHTERS AND SONS?
I showed them why the doctors and their wives were hit in separate meetings which took place at the same time and where each was asked for a family pledge; I specified times and places, named names. And lest any man make the foolish mistake of thinking the ??? was a merely systematic evil in which the participating doctors had no part, I set down in cold print, with facts and figures, the inhuman collusion of doctors and hospital administrations—the kind of collusion which results in thousands of deaths per week throughout this country: Negroes left to die in hospital waitingrooms, indigents not admitted or inadequately treated, outpatient cases not followed up because of bills unpaid at discharge. Every word I said was true. I’d seen things myself that would make your hair turn white. In Filer, Idaho, there was an Indian family that drove two hundred miles to the nearest hospital with a child who had peanuts down her windpipe. The hospital refused to admit them, and the child died. I was there on a fishing trip. I could do nothing! Enough. You’ve heard such stories. You refuse to believe them, or you think them exceptional. Insanity! You refuse to see what’s right there in front of your eyes! Read the magazines! You think they exaggerate? I give you my word as a professional doctor, they hear
nothing,
they print a mere tenth of the horror. One story in a hundred! I tell you, read the magazines and tremble! So all I said was true, my attack on the profession was wholly just, my facts and figures unassailable. However, I was wrong about Krebiozen, and I became a laughingstock.
I had another cause, later. A student of mine who opposed the war in Vietnam and marched against it was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Being young and foolish, and knowing he was right, he rejected the possibility of taking the Fifth Amendment, or the First, or the First and Ninth and Fourteenth, or any other of the usual options, and instead he made a speech. They crucified him, needless to say, and I attacked them masterfully in a series of articles for the
Oregonian.
I became a target for the Rightists—they burned my house and drove my wife from me, poor child. It turned out in the end that, though I was certainly right, my student was, as it happened, a Communist.
Another time I fought the professional Educationists, the most dangerous, wasteful, and thoroughly ignorant single group in America. They creamed me, of course. I got twenty-seven of them fired, before I was through, but in the end they creamed me. If I’d had time I’d have gotten them all, every one. But one never has time, finally, and in any case they weren’t really the heart of the matter, I realized later. If the public wants cheap and worthless education—not schooling but a sop for the public conscience—someone will come to provide it. And so I became, at last, an anarchist. In Houston, Texas, I dynamited the F.B.I. building. This was in October, 1964. I did it at night, killed only an elderly burglar who was there. I had not yet entered my violent period, you see.
But the most spectacular cause in my whole career—I’m telling you the truth—was Muntz TV. I was out of work, owing to various financial reversals, and I was living in the basement of a fraternity house at Harvard—unknown to the fraternity, of course. One of the boys in the fraternity had an old red car, in terrible condition. One day he came home and the car had been repainted—quite handsomely: green and yellow and blue, I think. Across the side it said
MUNTZ TV
. I was impressed. It seemed a beautiful thing, a kind of symbol of the American way: a poor, battered car in need of paint, a great corporation in need of advertising. I resolved to work for them, support what was best in our heritage. I went to their main office—the only office they had in Cambridge, Mass., as it turned out. A first-floor office on a scruffy street—I forget the name. An office that had clearly been many things in its time, one fly-by-night outfit after another. Muntz would be different, of course. TV was new, at this time, and the Muntz TV, with its miraculous single knob, was destined to make that scruffy street a place of prosperity. I was sure of it. I went in. Everything in the office was on wheels—desks, chairs, filing cabinets, everything—but of course it didn’t occur to me that it was all designed for get-away. I was broken in, taught the virtues of the set and, in short, made a salesman. Then came meetings. Daily. Sales meetings. Selling Muntz TV’s was a religion. First we sang the Muntz TV hymns—“The Muntz riders in the sky”—things like that. Then came confession and inspiration. A salesman would stand up, wringing his hands and trembling. He’d lost a sale. He had both the man and the woman convinced, the lady even had her pen out to sign the check. But then the man said, “Lovey, maybe we ought to think this over. Why don’t we talk about it and—” The salesman telling the story bowed his head. “I lost the sale.” We were silent. Shocked and grieved. Then up stood Ace. The bold and swift-tongued Ace. He was our leader, the Ace of Aces. A little Italian with a smile like a spider’s. “Ridiculous mistake,” he hissed. “Don’t make it again. Now look, the minute the man starts talkin, you just say, ‘I’m sarry, I don’t think I can take a check.’ Zap. You got ’em. ‘You can’t take my check? Why of course you can take my check!’” Smiles. Leers. “Now lissen,” says Ace. He ducks his head half into his collar and out again and rolls his eyes. “The customuh,” he says—he squeezes his fist together—”the customuh is … a fly. He’s a
mosquito.
You push him into the corner little by little and then you—
squash
“im!” Cheers! Applause! Blessed be God. Those TV’s had a half-life of maybe two months. And when your set went
pow
and you took it to the store, no store. As soon as I found out, I was furious, of course. Betrayed again! I thought about it for three days and I made up my mind, and the next meeting I went to I took a Browning automatic. I was going to kill every one of them, clean them out. But I was too late, when I got to the meeting the store was empty, they’d all lit out. Well, needless to say, I didn’t give up. It took me three years, but one by one I tracked them down and shot them.
CLUMLY:
You didn’t!
SUNLIGHT:
Certainly. Some of them I shot in their beds. Some I shot as they came out their doors, kissing their wives good-bye. One of them I got when he was mailing a letter. A couple of them I shot on the BMT. Caused quite a stir, to tell the truth. It was my last serious encounter with American business. Listen!
CLUMLY
(
alarmed)
: The train!
SUNLIGHT:
Yes.
CLUMLY:
But aren’t you going to—
SUNLIGHT:
No. I’m staying.
CLUMLY:
For the love of God!
SUNLIGHT:
But you can go. I excuse you.
(Sound of a train approaching, still a quarter-mile off.)
CLUMLY:
I can’t allow this. I must order you, in the name of the law …
SUNLIGHT:
There is no law.
(Boom of a diesel engine whistle, not far off.)
CLUMLY
(shouting. The train seems almost on top of them):
I beg you. Come with me!
SUNLIGHT
(loudly, a little pompously)
: I care about nothing! Pooh.
CLUMLY:
Then I’m going. Maybe I can stop it yet. I can’t be responsible for—
(He breaks off. Crunch of cinders as he jumps, holding the tape recorder. Sound of Clumly shouting wildly. The train lurches and shudders near, the engineer trying to stop it in time. Clumly’s shout comes through clearly now: “Stop the train! Stop the train!” And now there are other voices too, a young man shouting from the distance, a booming, congressional-sounding voice yelling “Stop! Stop!” Sounds of the train stopping. The voices grow wilder, with hope in them now, and with the train’s last shudder a chorus of hysterical cheers, joined by the engineer and fireman. In the foreground, Clumly, howling: “Thank God! Thank God!”)
VOICE:
What the devil’s going on here?
CLUMLY:
No time to explain right now. There’s a madman inside that tent. Stay back! He may be dangerous.
(Sound of a car pulling up.)
RURAL VOICE
(distant)
: What seems to be the trouble, folks?
(Several at once, in confusion, tell him what they know.)
ENGINEER:
Well, someone do something. I’ve got a schedule.
CLUMLY:
You people stay back. I’ll try to reason with him.
(Crunch of his footsteps in the gravel.)
You in there!
(No answer.)
Come out! We’ve got to let this train through.
(No answer.)
All right, Sunlight, I’m coming up. Do you hear me?
(No answer.)
Will somebody hold this damn machine?
(Background noise.)
RURAL VOICE
(distant):
That’s a brave policeman, men. He’ll get himself a citation for this. I’ll write to the Gov’nor myself.
(Bystanders comment on the policeman’s courage.)
You, up on the bridge, you with the camera! Get a picture!
SECOND VOICE
(distant)
: Yes sir! I’m getting it.
THIRD VOICE:
There, he made it. He’s got his head and chest in the tent now.
FIRST VOICE
: He’s looking back at us.
THIRD VOICE:
Looks sick.
SECOND VOICE
(distant):
Is he all right?
(Pause. Puzzled murmurings from the bystanders. Crunch of Clumly’s approaching footsteps.)
CLUMLY
(too softly to hear clearly):
He’s gone.
FIRST VOICES:
What?
CLUMLY:
He’s gone.
FOURTH VOICE
(a young man)
: Impossible!
CLUMLY:
Look for yourself.
THIRD VOICE
(aggressively):
How do we know he was in there at all?
CLUMLY:
Think what you like. I’ll take that tape recorder.
FOURTH VOICE:
Yessir. Of course.
RURAL VOICE
(distant)
: I’m sorry, officer. But look here. I got my car. Can I take you somewheres?
CLUMLY:
I’ll walk, thanks. I’m parked down this way.
RURAL VOICE
(distant)
: Well, ever you say. It’s a gol-danged disappointment, man can see.
CLUMLY:
Ha.
(Crunch of his footsteps. Behind him, silence. The engineer calls his crew and puts them to work getting the tent out of the way.)
RURAL VOICE
(distant):
Officer!
(Clumly stops. Waits.)
Even if it turned out bad after all, I want you to know folks is going to be impressed by your courage, that’s the truth. They won’t forget it. You know who I am, sir?
(Clumly waits.)
Young man, take this here over to the officer. Good. Fine boy. Well, I better be getting on. God be with you, friends. G’day.
(Sound of car starting up, backing away, pulling out onto the road. Footsteps as the young man draws near.)
YOUNG MAN:
Sir, the man said to give you—
CLUMLY
(infinitely weary)
: Thank you.
YOUNG MAN:
What is it, you think?
CLUMLY
(absently, sunk in thought)
: It looks like a box with a chain around it.
(Switches off the tape.)
But if ye bite and devour one another, take heed that ye be not
consumed one of another.
—Galattans 5:15
1
The morning of the room and the yard beyond the round-arched windows lay to the left of her, stiff as old knees, violated in the night but uncomplaining: it might have been any of a hundred mornings, as though Millie’s life were all played out but not yet over—she might put herself where she pleased in time, like a needle on an endlessly repetitious record; or, at any rate, she had seen before a thousand times this graygreen dawn after autumn rain, a presence in the room, or the memory of a presence, old, blind, despairing, a relative out of a tintype in the attic,
Memento mori, Millie my maid,
who sat in the room, hands folded on his cane, his wide tie drooping on his scorch-yellow shirt, his lumpy shoes toeing inward wearily, fingers the color of piano keys: and it was a part of his weariness that his substance did not interfere any more than a stranger’s—that Coleridge poem—with her undevout vision of the chair behind him or the threadbare rug beneath his heavy shoes: not a ghost, exactly, or a dream either, but the heaviness of the morning brought down to the not quite invisible figure of a man because once on such a morning he’d been there, as if by way of explanation, sitting opposite the couch where, after she’d left Will Hodge in anger, she had slept. “Well, well,” he had said. “Good morning,” she had said. He had smiled with vast and weary scorn, then had raised himself, slow and ponderous as an elephant waking from a dream of swamps, and had shuffled out of the room. It had come to her that she had wanted him to tell her something, heaven knew what. But the Congressman was gone and would not return, she understood, would lie in his coffin with that same weary scorn, and she would be, as she had always been, on her own. She could endure it. Waking another day and year to look out at another autumn morning after rain, not at the wide lawn of Stony Hill Farm or the scratchy, truck-rutted lawn at her son’s, but at city streets where pieces of newspaper lay and early morning trucks muttered irritably in the alley behind the pizza parlor and the grocery store next door, her lover gone down now, no longer romantic and mighty in an aura of wine but heavy and woppish, a tradesman tending to his business, she would see the Old Man again or would remember him or would remember the day as though all other days were illusion and only this—weariness, violation, despair—were real. She knew well enough, on days like this, where the truth lay. It was the physical pattern in the carpet, where the blueblack lines intersected the brown and where figures of roses showed their threads; in the broken putty on the windowpanes, in the angular shadows inside the glass of a doorknob, in the infinite complexity of lines in the bark of trees, in the dust in the sunbeams: substance calling beyond itself to substance. And coming to life was an act of will, an act of waking up, putting substance to some human use for the moment. Poor Luke! Who knew nothing of all this—a saint, merely. Mad as a hatter. (She remembered the sound of their hammering, high above her, Will and Ben, balanced on the comb of the barn, stripping off shingles black with age and soft as the deadmen embedded in the bottom of the Tonawanda Creek, replacing them with goldenbrown cedar richly scented and light as wings; and for all her weariness she would open her eyes and look up at where they crouched, enormous and light as bumblebees, or walked the comb with a bundle of shingles on one shoulder, solemn as Noahs at work on another antique, preposterous ark.) She lay still, moving only her eyes, her substance one with the pointless substance of the room and the morning outside. What time was it? Early, she was sure. Not eight. Then, wide awake, she remembered that this morning was dangerous. Luke lay exactly as he’d lain last night, dead looking, inert body and soul from his heavy drugs. Nick and the bearded stranger were nowhere in sight.
