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.
Black: Just stay a few more minutes.
White: No. No more time. Goodbye.
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.
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.
Black: I’ll be there.
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?
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.
Black: Is that okay? Is that okay?
About the Author
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.
Praise for CORMAC McCARTHY
Winner of the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award
“McCarthy’s prose [is] the most laudable, his characters the most fully inhabited, his sense of place the most bloodworthy and thoroughly felt of any living writer’s.”
“McCarthy has a voice that is unmistakably his…. Its elegiac rhythm captures the badlands of Texas and northern Mexico with a passion most writers either couldn’t muster or wouldn’t dare.”
“The deity that presides over Mr. McCarthy’s world has not modeled itself on humanity: its voice most resembles the one that addressed Job out of the whirlwind.”
“McCarthy meditates on creation, stares at it. He does not look past appearances, he looks through them… The world is set before us with fever-dream clarity … and then, with simile and metaphor, he sweeps everything into profound animation… McCarthy is writing entirely against the grain of our times, against the haste and the distraction and the moral diffusion… As an old, more spacious world rises up, we experience a more vivid and consequential feeling about human destiny, about good and evil and matters of the spirit.”
“Like the novelists he admires—Melville, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner—CORMAC McCARTHY has created an imaginative oeuvre greater and deeper than any single book. Such writers wrestle with the gods themselves.”
