PRISONER: Certainly not.
CLUMLY: Maybe we’re getting somewhere, finally.
PRISONER: Nonsense.
CLUMLY: Do you come from California?
PRISONER: I come from the Lord of Hosts.
CLUMLY: Don’t do that. Answer my question.
PRISONER: I’ve forgotten what it was.
CLUMLY (patiently): Do you come from California?
PRISONER: Why do you keep pacing? Sit down. You make me nervous.
CLUMLY: I’ll decide when it’s time to sit down.
PRISONER: No you won’t. You’ll put it off till the last minute and then you’ll fall on your ass. I had an uncle did that. It was terrible.
CLUMLY: Just answer the questions. Cigar?
PRISONER: Thank you. With pleasure. Why do you shake so?
CLUMLY: You’ll shake the same way when you’re sixty-four.
PRISONER: Bad for the system, no question about it. Does it worry you much? Worries the little woman, I’ll bet! Good cigar, though. There are always compensations!
CLUMLY: Where do you live?
PRISONER: Big old house on LaCrosse, with a blind woman. (Pause.)
CLUMLY: What in hell are you up to? How did you find that out?
PRISONER: Startling, isn’t it.
CLUMLY: Shut up.
PRISONER: Take it easy! I used to be a fortune teller. Learned lots of tricks. Are you sick of her—the blind woman?
CLUMLY: Of course not. Stop that!
PRISONER: Sorry.
CLUMLY: What do you do? Is it true that you’re a college man, a student?
PRISONER: I run a business. Big desk, time cards, things like that. I worry a lot, worry myself sick. Makes me do weird things, if I may speak in confidence. Strictest confidence. Or whatever the expression is. There are certain people who know secrets about me, but I’m not yet sure who they are. I find it difficult to trust people. Sometimes I think—I can trust you, I hope?—sometimes I think of doing downright deranged things. Shall I tell you?
CLUMLY: What is this?
PRISONER (intensely): I have thoughts of spying on my boss, listening outside his window. It’s insane, I know. I resist it, naturally. Nevertheless, sometimes the desire comes over me and—Christ! What’s this world coming to, I wonder? Do bosses talk to their wives, do you think? Do they get phonecalls, perhaps? (Pause.) A man could crouch there in the dark outside the window, in the shrubbery, say …
CLUMLY: What do you want? Look, I don’t want any trouble from you. I want straight answers to straight questions.
PRISONER: Negative.
CLUMLY (wildly): You sit listening, don’t you! You sit in there and strain your ears to hear every word I say!
PRISONER: It’s because you’re my friend.
(Pause.)
Psst! (A whisper): Are you interested in metaphysics?
CLUMLY: See here—
PRISONER: I’ve known men would give their souls for metaphysics. (Laughs.) I know a man in Philadelphia killed by lightning in pursuit of metaphysics. I admire him for it. I’d have done the same myself, and the country be damned. (Laughs more softly.)
CLUMLY: Metaphysics! Lord!
Chief Clumly shuddered, reversed the tape, found the beginning of the examination, and carefully erased it twice. Very well. So people were talking about him, even in front of the prisoners. Well, no surprise. When he left the station (it was now almost ten) he noticed that the light was on in the Mayor’s office in the City Hall down the street. He paused, scowling, his hand around his mouth, then turned back and went up the police station steps.
“Figlow, you seen Miller tonight?”
“He’s been off since six, Chief.”
Clumly nodded, studied the stump of his cigar, then went out again. “Funny business,” he said. The darkness around him was warm as a blanket.
Metaphysics.
He hunted a long time before he located the paper—on the porch, right in front of the door. He let himself in and locked the door behind him, as usual, then waited in the darkness of the livingroom. She didn’t call to him, and a light pain of fear began to build up in his chest. The house was absolutely still, and in the yard outside not a leaf was stirring. “Hello!” Clumly called.
He groped toward the kitchen, his nerves jangling, and said again, more loudly, “Hello?” He could smell her wine. His heart shook violently as he snapped on the light, but there was no one. He opened the pantry door and pulled the lightstring there, half-expecting to find she’d hanged herself. But again there was nothing. He leaned on the doorframe, gathering his wits.
He found her, three minutes later, asleep in the bed; or possibly, he thought for some reason, she was only pretending to be asleep. Her sewing was in her hands. He stood for a long time looking at her in the dim light thrown from the wall lamp in the hallway behind him, his shadow falling over her waist and hips. He was amazed at how worried he’d been at the thought that something had happened to her. And he was amazed at the joy—it was more than relief-flooding through him now as he looked down at the sly old woman lying almost motionless, only the bony chest stirring as she breathed very slowly in and out, fallen like a scrawny chicken on its back.
We’re going to get through this thing, you and I, Chief Clumly thought. Whatever the bearded man was plotting—or Miller and Kozlowski and Figlow and the Mayor—Chief of Police Fred Clumly was not afraid.
He squared his jaw in the darkness. Metaphysics. Mad as a hatter—no doubt of it. And yet it was odd how the question had affected him. He could not recall off-hand what Metaphysics was—it was one of those things he’d probably understood once, long ago, had come across, say, in the days when he used to read whatever people offered him to pass the time with on the ship; or it was one of those words you heard and dismissed, knowing your limits, or knowing the thing was probably just air, an occupation for idle minds—like the words the Mayor’s man Wittaker used at times, “interaction target,” or something like that, and “socio-economic construct.” He used them constantly, as naturally as he breathed, a little like a lunatic using words with all normal sense drained out of them. Except, when he thought about it, when Wittaker used those words of his, Clumly would turn off his mind for a moment, annoyed. The prisoner’s word had a different effect: it had given a queer sort of jolt to his heart. Yes! Clumly had thought. There it was. Whatever it meant, spiritualistic trash for old ladies or the roaring secret of life and death, for a minute there Clumly had believed he wanted to know. Better watch that man, he thought. He came wide awake. What the devil had he meant by that? Psst! Interested in—
But all was still. All was well. The room silent and comfortable, haunted by no turbulence but the breath of his nostrils and the nostrils of his wife. The house silent. The street. Nevertheless, he had a terrible sense of things in motion, secret powers at work in the ancient plaster walls, devouring and building, and forces growing and restive in the trees, the very earth itself succinct with spirit. He had an image, culled from some old book, perhaps, or a sermon he’d heard—an image of his house taken over by owls and ravens and cormorants and bitterns, and strange shapes dancing in his cellar. And in his livingroom, thorns and brambles. He listened to his heartbeat going choof, kuh-choof, and he could not get to sleep. “Dear Lord,” he said, and fell silent.
Unbeknownst to Clumly or anyone else, three boys in the alley by the post office were letting the air out of people’s tires with an ice pick. Elsewhere—beside the Tonawanda—a woman was digging a grave for her illegitimate child three hours old. Jim Hume was chasing his cows back through the fence some hunter had cut. There was no moon.
II
When the Exorcist
Shall Go
to the House
of
the Patient …
His diademe of dyamans droppede adoun;
His weyes were a-wayward wroliche wrout;
Tynt was his tresor, tente, tour, & toun.
—Anon., Early 14th Centur
y
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.”