Walker Percy - Lancelot

Siobhan then was conceived on or about July 15, 1968, give or take a few days. How many days? a week? ten days? two weeks? As Royal said, biology is not an exact science but a matter of averages and probabilities. So put July 15 at the summit of a probability curve and add or subtract two weeks in either direction along the x axis and, as I discovered later, the curve is so flat and close to the axis that breathing under it is difficult and conception damn near impossible.

A fact then: Siobhan was fathered in Texas in July 1968 and not by me.

The thunder machine started and stopped again. Someone was tinkering with it. A door slammed, the heavy front door of Belle Isle. I looked down through a pigeonhole. Margot and Jacoby and Merlin got in the station wagon and drove away. I’d have known it was Margot by the way she drove. Her hand made an arc through the green windshield. She turned the car like a man, or a Texas girl, not push-pulling with two hands but palming the wheel around with one hand. Looking down into the car from the pigeon roost, I could see her bare knees. When she got into a car she hiked up her dress like a man does his pants. They were headed, I knew, for the Holiday Inn on I-10 where the film company stayed and the manager let them have a conference room so Merlin could view the rushes.

The three of them sat on the front seat. Merlin in the middle next to Margot. Merlin was one of the few men I ever knew who couldn’t drive. There used to be more such people when I was a child, often quite gifted, intelligent men. Especially creative people. Picasso and Einstein never learned to drive, did they?

The girl in the next room and I communicated yesterday! She has not said a word for months, not since her terrible experience, but we communicated!

At six o’clock, when they brought us coffee, I knocked once as usual: good morning! To my astonishment, after a minute or two there came a timid little knock back: good morning.

I could not believe my ears. Perhaps it was not a reply at all. Perhaps she had turned over her chair.

So I knocked again. It was a tentative knock, a knock with a question mark. In thirty seconds, it came back. Knock. No mistake.

Yet was it a communication? If so, what kind? Two chimpanzees could do as well.

Still the question: Is that communication or imitation? Monkey see, monkey do. Perhaps the girl is lying there, a hopeless idiot, her eyes vacant, her knuckles straying against the wall, like a two-year-old child lying in bed.

So I tried the simplest code of all: One knock = A, two = B, and so on.

But how to propose it to her as a code? Not as easy as you might think. I spent the morning thinking it over. It became clear that the only way to avoid imitation is to ask a question and the only way to establish a code is repetition. After all, we have all the time in the world.

It is very awkward, of course. For example, my question began with a W , which requires twenty-three knocks. But no matter. Once the idea of a code is established, once she catches on, we can simplify.

I sent this message: 23 knocks pause 8 pause 15 double pause 1 pause 18 pause 5 double pause 25 pause 15 pause 21.

Who are you?

I knocked at about a one-second rhythm knowing she wouldn’t get it at first but thinking she might catch on and get a pencil and start counting.

No reply.

Repeat.

No reply.

Repeat.

No reply.

I tried ten times and quit.

Ah well. Tomorrow I will try again.

I must communicate with her. According to my theory, she may be a prototype of the New Woman. It is no longer possible to “fall in love.” But in the future and with the New Woman it will be.

You’re curious, I see. I haven’t told you my sexual theory of history? You smile. No, I’m serious. It applies to both the individual and mankind.

First there was a Romantic Period when one “fell in love.”

Next follows a sexual period such as we live in now where men and women cohabit as indiscriminately as in a baboon colony — or in a soap opera.

Next follows catastrophe of some sort. I can feel it in my bones. Perhaps it has already happened. Has it? Have you noticed anything unusual on the “outside”? I’ve noticed that the doctors and guards and attendants here who are supposed to be healthy — we’re the sick ones — seem depressed, anxious, gloomy, as if something awful had already happened. Has it?

Catastrophe then — yes, I am sure of it — whether it has happened or not; whether by war, bomb, fire, or just decline and fall. Most people will die or exist as the living dead. Everything will go back to the desert.

Do you believe that dreams can foretell the future? After all, your Bible speaks of it. I used not to, but I had a dream the other night and I cannot forget it. It was not about Belle Isle or my past life at all but about my future life. I’m sure of it. I was living in an abandoned house in a desert place, a ghost town which looked like one of those outlying Los Angeles neighborhoods Raymond Chandler describes.

I was in a room and strangely immobilized. I don’t know why but I could not move. Outside there were trees and other houses and cars but nothing moved. There was perfect quiet. Yet I was not alone in the house. There was someone else in the next room. A woman. There was the unmistakable sense of her presence. How did I know it was a woman? I cannot tell you except that I knew. Perhaps it was the way she moved around the room. Do you know the way a woman moves around a room whether she is cleaning it or just passing time? It is different from the way a man moves. She is at home in a room. The room is an extension of her.

She came out of the house. We were having a picnic, sitting on the tailgate of a truck. It was not the desert now. The land plunged almost straight down into the blue ocean. A breeze had sprung up and there was a tinkle of wind chimes. We had been working hard and were very hungry. We ate in silence, looking at each other. There was much to be done. We were making a new life. It was not the Old West and there was no frontier but we were making a new life, starting from scratch. There was no thought of “romance” or “sex” but only of making a new life. We knew what we were doing.

The New Woman is the survivor of the catastrophe and the death of old worlds — like the woman in the next room. The worst thing that can happen to her has happened. The worst thing that can happen to me has happened. We are both survivors.

What do survivors do?

Knock.

But she does not reply. Perhaps she did not survive. I’m surer of the catastrophe than I am of her survival.

YOU WERE ASKING me how I felt when I discovered Margot had been unfaithful to me. Yes, that is very important if you are to understand what happened later.

First, you must understand that the usual emotions which one might consider appropriate — shock, anger, shame — do not apply. True, there is a kind of dread at the discovery but there is also a curious sense of expectancy, a secret sweetness at the core of the dread.

I can only compare it to the time I discovered my father was a crook. It was a long time ago. I was a child. My mother was going shopping and had sent me up to swipe some of his pocket money from his sock drawer. For a couple of years he had had a political appointment with the insurance commission with a “reform” administration. He had been accused of being in charge of parceling out the state’s insurance business and taking kickbacks from local agencies. Of course we knew that could not be true. We were an honorable family. We had nothing to do with the Longs. We may have lost our money, Belle Isle was half in ruins, but we were an honorable family with an honorable name. Much talk of dirty politics. The honor of the family won out and even the opposition gave up. So I opened the sock drawer and found not ten dollars but ten thousand dollars stuck carelessly under some argyle socks.