The Sunset Limited: A Novel in Dramatic Form
Page 7
White I’m sure that’s true.
Black Well jubilation. Listen at the professor.
White But I’m at a loss as to how to bring myself to believe in some most excellent world when I already know that it doesnt exist.
Black Most excellent.
White Yes.
Black I sure do like that. Most excellent.
White Do you actually believe in such a world?
Black Yes I do, Professor. Yes I do. I think it’s there for the askin. You got to get in the right line. Buy the right ticket. Take that regular commuter train and stay off the express. Stay on the platform with your fellow commuter. You might even want to nod at him. Maybe even say hello. All of them is travelers too. And they’s some of em been places that most people dont want to go to. They didnt neither. They might even tell you how they got there and maybe save you a trip you’ll be thankful you didnt take.
White Yes. Well, that’s not going to happen.
Black Why not?
White Because I dont believe in that world. I just want to take the train. Look, why dont I just go?
Black How about some more coffee?
White No thank you.
Black What can I do?
White Maybe you just need to accept that you’re in over your head.
Black I do accept it. It dont let me off the hook though.
White You think I dont understand. But I’m not sure you’d want to listen to the things I do understand.
Black Try me.
White It would just upset you.
Black I been upset before.
White It’s worse than you think.
Black That’s all right.
White You dont want to hear this.
Black Yes I do. I got no choice.
The professor leans back and studies the black.
White Okay. Maybe you’re right. Well, here’s my news, Reverend. I yearn for the darkness. I pray for death. Real death. If I thought that in death I would meet the people I’ve known in life I dont know what I’d do. That would be the ultimate horror. The ultimate despair. If I had to meet my mother again and start all of that all over, only this time without the prospect of death to look forward to? Well. That would be the final nightmare. Kafka on wheels.
Black Damn, Professor. You dont want to see you own mama?
White No. I dont. I told you this would upset you. I want the dead to be dead. Forever. And I want to be one of them. Except that of course you cant be one of them. You cant be one of the dead because what has no existence can have no community. No community. My heart warms just thinking about it. Silence. Blackness. Aloneness. Peace. And all of it only a heartbeat away.
Black Damn, Professor.
White Let me finish. I dont regard my state of mind as some pessimistic view of the world. I regard it as the world itself. Evolution cannot avoid bringing intelligent life ultimately to an awareness of one thing above all else and that one thing is futility.
Black Mm. If I’m understandin you right you sayin that everbody that aint just eat up with the dumb-ass ought to be suicidal.
White Yes.
Black You aint shittin me?
White No. I’m not shitting you. If people saw the world for what it truly is. Saw their lives for what they truly are. Without dreams or illusions. I dont believe they could offer the first reason why they should not elect to die as soon as possible.
Black Damn, Professor.
White (Coldly) I dont believe in God. Can you understand that? Look around you man. Cant you see? The clamor and din of those in torment has to be the sound most pleasing to his ear. And I loathe these discussions. The argument of the village atheist whose single passion is to revile endlessly that which he denies the existence of in the first place. Your fellowship is a fellowship of pain and nothing more. And if that pain were actually collective instead of simply reiterative then the sheer weight of it would drag the world from the walls of the universe and send it crashing and burning through whatever night it might yet be capable of engendering until it was not even ash. And justice? Brotherhood? Eternal life? Good god, man. Show me a religion that prepares one for death. For nothingness. There’s a church I might enter. Yours prepares one only for more life. For dreams and illusions and lies. If you could banish the fear of death from men’s hearts they wouldnt live a day. Who would want this nightmare if not for fear of the next? The shadow of the axe hangs over every joy. Every road ends in death. Or worse. Every friendship. Every love. Torment, betrayal, loss, suffering, pain, age, indignity, and hideous lingering illness. All with a single conclusion. For you and for every one and every thing that you have chosen to care for. There’s the true brotherhood. The true fellowship. And everyone is a member for life. You tell me that my brother is my salvation? My salvation? Well then damn him. Damn him in every shape and form and guise. Do I see myself in him? Yes. I do. And what I see sickens me. Do you understand me? Can you understand me?
The black sits with his head lowered.
White I’m sorry.
Black That’s all right.
White No. I’m sorry.
The black looks up at him.
Black How long you felt like this?
White All my life.
Black And that’s the truth.
White It’s worse than that.
Black I dont see what could be worse than that.
White Rage is really only for the good days. The truth is there’s little of that left. The truth is that the forms I see have been slowly emptied out. They no longer have any content. They are shapes only. A train, a wall, a world. Or a man. A thing dangling in senseless articulation in a howling void. No meaning to its life. Its words. Why would I seek the company of such a thing? Why?
Black Damn.
White You see what it is you’ve saved.
Black Tried to save. Am tryin. Tryin hard.
White Yes.
Black Who is my brother.
White Your brother.
Black Yes.
White Is that why I’m here? In your apartment?
Black No. But it’s why I am.
White You asked what I was a professor of. I’m a professor of darkness. The night in day’s clothing. And now I wish you all the very best but I must go.
He pushes back his chair and rises.
Black Just stay a few more minutes.
White No. No more time. Goodbye.
He turns toward the door and the black rises.
Black Come on, Professor. We can talk about somethin else. I promise.
White I dont want to talk about something else.
Black Dont go out there. You know what’s out there.
White Oh yes. Indeed I do. I know what is out there and I know who is out there. I rush to nuzzle his bony cheek. No doubt he’ll be surprised to find himself so cherished. And as I cling to his neck I will whisper in that dry and ancient ear: Here I am. Here I am. Now open the door.
Black Dont do it, Professor.
White I’m sorry. You’re a kind man, but I have to go. I’ve heard you out and you’ve heard me and there’s no more to say. Your God must have once stood in a dawn of infinite possibility and this is what he’s made of it. And now it is drawing to a close. You say that I want God’s love. I dont. Perhaps I want forgiveness, but there is no one to ask it of. And there is no going back. No setting things right. Perhaps once. Not now. Now there is only the hope of nothingness. I cling to that hope. Now open the door. Please.
Black Dont do it.
White Open the door.
The black undoes the chains. They rattle to the floor. He opens the door and the professor exits. The black stands in the doorway looking down the hall.
Black Professor? I know you dont mean them words. Professor? I’m goin to be there in the mornin. I’ll be there. You hear? I’ll be there in the mornin.
He collapses to his knees in the doorway, all but weeping.
Black I’ll be there.
He looks up.
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Black He didnt mean them words. You know he didnt. You know he didnt. I dont understand what you sent me down there for. I dont understand it. If you wanted me to help him how come you didnt give me the words? You give em to him. What about me?
He kneels weeping rocking back and forth.
Black That’s all right. That’s all right. If you never speak again you know I’ll keep your word. You know I will. You know I’m good for it.
He lifts his head.
Black Is that okay? Is that okay?
THE END
Cormac McCarthy is the author of eleven novels. Among his honors are the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Books by Cormac McCarthy
The Road
The Sunset Limited (a novel in dramatic form)
No Country for Old Men
Cities of the Plain
The Crossing
All the Pretty Horses
The Stonemason (a play)
The Gardener’s Son (a screenplay)
Blood Meridian
Suttree
Child of God
Outer Dark
The Orchard Keeper
BOOKS BY CORMAC MCCARTHY
“McCarthy puts most other American writers to shame.”
—The New York Times Book Review
THE ORCHARD KEEPER
Set in a small, remote community in rural Tennessee between the two world wars, this novel tells of John Wesley Rattner, a young boy, and Marion Sylder, an outlaw and bootlegger who, unbeknownst to either of them, has killed the boy’s father. Together with Rattner’s Uncle Ather, they enact a drama that seems born of the land itself.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72872-6 (trade)
978-0-307-76250-4 (eBook)
OUTER DARK
Outer Dark is a novel at once fabular and starkly evocative, set in an unspecified place in Appalachia around the turn of the century. A woman bears her brother’s child, a boy, whom he leaves in the woods and tells her the baby died of natural causes. Discovering her brother’s lie, she sets forth alone to find her son.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72873-3 (trade)
978-0-307-76249-8 (eBook)
CHILD OF GOD
Child of God is a taut, chilling novel that plumbs the depths of human degradation. Falsely accused of rape, Lester Ballard—a violent, dispossessed man who haunts the hill country of East Tennessee—is released from jail and allowed to roam at will, preying on the population with his strange lusts.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72874-0 (trade)
978-0-307-76248-1 (eBook)
SUTTREE
This is the story of Cornelius Suttree, who has forsaken a life of privilege to live in a houseboat on the Tennessee River. Remaining on the margins of the outcast community—a brilliantly imagined collection of eccentrics, criminals, and squatters—he rises above the physical and human squalor with detachment, humor, and dignity.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-73632-5 (trade)
978-0-307-76247-4 (eBook)
THE STONEMASON
The setting is Louisville, Kentucky, in the 1970s. The Telfairs are stonemasons and have been for generations. Ben Telfair has given up his education to apprentice himself to his grandfather, Papaw. Out of the love that binds these two men and the gulf that separates them from the Telfairs who have forsaken—or dishonored—the family trade, McCarthy has crafted a drama that bears all the hallmarks of his great fiction.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-76280-5
BLOOD MERIDIAN
This is an epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America’s westward expansion. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into a nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-72875-7 (trade)
978-0-307-76252-8 (eBook)
ALL THE PRETTY HORSES
All the Pretty Horses tells of young John Grady Cole, the last of a long line of Texas ranchers. Across the border, Mexico beckons—beautiful and desolate, rugged and cruelly civilized. With two companions, he sets off on an idyllic, sometimes comic adventure, to a place where dreams are paid for in blood.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-74439-9 (trade)
978-0-307-48130-6 (eBook)
THE CROSSING
In the late 1930s, sixteen-year-old Billy Parham captures a she-wolf that has been marauding his family’s ranch. Instead of killing it, he takes it back to the mountains of Mexico. With that crossing, he begins an arduous and dreamlike journey into a country where men meet like ghosts and violence strikes as suddenly as heat-lightning.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-76084-9 (trade)
978-0-307-76246-7 (eBook)
CITIES OF THE PLAIN
It is 1952 and John Grady Cole and Billy Parham are working as ranch hands in New Mexico. Their life is made up of trail drives and horse auctions and stories told by campfire light, a life they value because they know it is about to change forever.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-74719-2 (trade)
978-0-307-77752-2 (eBook)
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
McCarthy returns to the Texas-Mexico border, the setting of his famed Border Trilogy. A good old boy named Llewellyn Moss finds a pickup truck surrounded by dead man. A load of heroin and two million dollars in cash are still in the back. When Moss takes the money, he sets off a chain reaction of catastrophic violence that not even the law can contain.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-375-70667-7 (trade)
978-0-307-39053-0 (eBook)
THE SUNSET LIMITED
A startling encounter on a New York subway platform leads two strangers to a run-down tenement where a life or death decision must be made. In that small apartment, “Black” and “White,” as the two men are known, begin a conversation that leads each back through his own history, mining the origins of two fundamentally opposing world-views. White is a professor whose seemingly enviable existence of relative ease has left him nonetheless in despair. Black, an ex-con and ex-addict, is the more hopeful of the men—though he is just as desperate to convince White of the power of faith as White is desperate to deny it. Their aim is no less than this: to discover the meaning of life.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-307-27836-4 (trade)
978-0-307-49812-0 (eBook)
THE ROAD
A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.
Fiction/Literature/978-0-307-38789-9 (trade)
978-0-307-26745-0 (eBook)
VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL
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FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, OCTOBER 2006
Copyright (c) 2006 by M-71, Ltd.
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, business organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author’s use of names of actual persons (living or dead), places, and characters is incidental to the purposes of the plot, and is not intended to change the entirely fictional character of the work or to disparage any company or its products or services. The book has not be
en prepared, approved, or licensed by any persons or characters named in the text, their successors, or related corporate entities.
The Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.
eISBN: 978-0-307-49812-0
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Chapter 1
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Books by Cormac Mccarthy
Copyright