Walker Percy - Lancelot

“How are you going to get the binoculars out there?”

“Wrapped in my towel.”

“Okay. Then the location of the room doesn’t matter. Go on out there now and register. Keep your log tonight. When you get back, get some sleep and meet me here about this time tomorrow. I’ll put Fluker on guide duty.”

“Fluker.” Again we laughed. “No telling what Fluker gon say.”

“He’ll do fine. Anyhow, what difference does it make?”

“Yeah.” Elgin was casting ahead again. “How to see to write in the dark is the thing. White pencil on black? Pencil light? No, what I’m going to use”—clearly he was talking to himself—“is a Kiefer blacklight stylus.”

“You do that.”

JACOBY? I HAVEN’T TOLD you about him? The headlines? BELLE ISLE BURNS! DIRECTOR MURDERED AND MUTILATED! EX-GRID STAR HELD FOR QUESTIONING! Yes, I remember all that. Belle Isle burned to the ground except for twenty snaggle-toothed Doric columns. My hands burned trying to save Margot.

It is difficult to think about all that.

You must believe me when I tell you that it is the banality of the past which puts me off. There is only one reason I am telling you about these old sad things, or rather trying to remember them, and it has nothing to do with not being able to remember. I can remember. I can remember every word Elgin said to me in the pigeonnier. It is because the past, any past, is intolerable, not because it is violent or terrible or doomstruck or any such thing, but just because it is so goddamn banal and feckless and useless. And violence is the most banal and boring of all. It is horrible not because it is bloody but because it is meaningless. It does not signify.

Then why bother to tell you? Because something is bothering me and I won’t know what it is until I say it. Presently I’m going to ask you a question. Not that you will be able to answer it. But it is important that I ask it. That was always the best thing about you, that you were the only person I could ever talk to.

Why did you leave twenty years ago? Wasn’t Louisiana good enough for you? Do you think the U.S.A. needs you less than Biafra? I sometimes think that if you’d been around to talk to…

You are silent. Christ, you don’t know yourself.

I have to tell you what happened in my own way — so I can know what happened. I won’t know for sure until I say it. And there is only one way I can endure the horrible banality of it: and that is that I sense there is a clue I’ve missed and that you might pick it up.

It is as if I knew that the clue was buried somewhere in the rubble of Belle Isle and that I have to spend days kicking through the ashes to find it. I couldn’t do that alone. But we could do it.

A clue to what? To the “mystery” of Belle Isle? No. To hell with that. Belle Isle is gone and I couldn’t care less. If it were intact it would be the last place on earth I’d choose to live. I’d rather live in Brooklyn. As gone with the wind as Tara and as good riddance.

No, that’s not the mystery. The mystery lies in the here and now. The mystery is: What is one to do with oneself? As you get older you begin to realize the trick time is playing, and that unless you do something about it, the passage of time is nothing but the encroachment of the horrible banality of the past on the pure future. The past devours the future like a tape recorder, converting pure possibility into banality. The present is the tape head, the mouth of time.

Then where is the mystery and why bother kicking through the ashes?

Because there is a clue in the past.

Start with the present moment. Look out there. A fall afternoon in New Orleans with the peculiar gold light that fills the sky when the first wedge of Canadian cold air slides like a crystal prism under the Gulf steambath. Look at the gold light. It radiates in the crystal and filters down into the same shabby streets with the same neighborhood sounds of housewives switching on their Hoovers, TV, voices through kitchen doorways, the same smell of the Tchoupitoulas docks.

Consider the past. Imagine a man sitting in Feliciana Parish for twenty years practicing law (yes! “practicing”), playing at being a “moderate” or “liberal” whatever that is, all under the illusion that he was living his life and was not even aware that he was not.

But something happens. There is a difference. The difference between then and now is that now I’ve been alerted. I am aware of being the tape head. I am aware of this room being a tape head. That is why it is so simple and empty: so I can be aware. As you can see, it consists of nothing but a small empty space with time running through it and a single tiny opening on the world. I’m staying here until I can decide what the tape head is doing and whether I have anything to say about it. It is simply a devourer of time and does it necessarily turn the pure empty future into the shabby past?

A year ago (was it a year?) I made my two great discoveries: one, Margot’s infidelity; two, my freedom. I can’t tell you why, but the second followed directly upon the first. The moment I knew for a fact that Margot had been fucked by another man, it was as if I had been waked from a twenty-year dream. I was Rip van Winkle rubbing his eyes. In an instant I became sober, alert, watchful. I could act.

Yet something went wrong. I am glad you are simply listening, looking at me and saying nothing. Because I was afraid you might suggest either that I had done nothing wrong — like the psychologist here: no matter what I tell him, even if I break wind, he gives me the same quick congratulatory look — either that I had done nothing wrong or that I had “sinned”—and I don’t know which is worse. Because it isn’t that. I don’t know what that means. Yet obviously something went wrong, because here I am, in a nuthouse — or is it a prison? — recovering from shock, psychosis, disorientation.

From a state of freedom and the ability to act (that night I told you about, the world was open! I was free! I could do anything, devise any plan), I now find myself closeted in a single small cell and glad to be here.

A fox doesn’t crawl into a hole for a year unless he is wounded. But after a while he begins to feel good, pokes his nose out, takes a look around.

I still have the resolve to make a new life, an absolutely new beginning. But I know that one must start from scratch.

Begin with a burrow, a small clean well-swept place such as this, with one tiny window on the world and another creature in the next room. That is all you need. In fact, that is all you can stand. Add more creatures, more world, books, talk, TV, news — and we’ll all be as crazy as we were before. There is too much feeding into the tape head — the new tape is too empty — too many possibilities — but the recorded tape is too full.

But what went wrong with the other new life last year? I must find out so I won’t make the same mistake twice. Therefore I must go back and kick through the ashes of Belle Isle. There is something I don’t understand. And you are both my leverage point and my companion. Because you knew Belle Isle and you know me and I can’t tell anyone else.

In a month or so I shall be leaving here. At least that is my opinion, even though the doctors have not committed themselves. Perhaps Anna will be well enough to leave too.

Who is Anna? The woman next door. I didn’t tell you I had paid her a visit and she told me her name? She also ate something for the first time. Soon they won’t have to force feed her. How did that happen? Very simple. I just got tired of all that wall tapping. Yesterday I simply got up, went to my door, opened it, and went out in the hall — the first time I had ever done so voluntarily — and walked ten feet and there was her door. I knocked on it and went in. (Sometimes life is simple!) She was lying on her cot as usual, curled up, face to the wall, a tangle of hair on her cheek, thin hip upthrust in her hospital gown. Her brown boylike arms made a perfect V, hands pressed palms together between her thighs.