Walker Percy - Love in the Ruins - The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World

“I said, do one on me,” says Ethel, handing my bag to me.

“Why?”

“Because I don’t believe you.”

“That’s all right.”

“I think you’re afraid to.”

“No, I’m not afraid.”

“I wish you would,” Hester says, pulling her brown heels across her calves.

“I can do a diagnosis here but not a treatment.”

“Do it!”

I shrug. “Very well.”

It takes three minutes to run a standard profile. Ethel bows her head so that her Pocahontas braids fall along her cheeks.

“Hm.”

“Doc, you kill me,” says Chuck.

“Hm. She’s got a contradictory reading.”

“A what?”

“Look here. She’s got a strong amplitude and high millivoltage over the temporal lobe, Brodmann 28, which correlates in my experience with singular concrete historical awareness, vivid childhood memories, you know, as well as a sense of the uniqueness of one’s tradition. But see here: an even stronger reading over parietal lobe, Brodmann 18. That’s the site of ahistoric perceptions that are both concrete and abstract. You should be an excellent artist, Ethel.”

“You see there, Ethel! She is, Doc.”

“Tch,” says Ethel sourly. “I’ve got the same thing from fortune cookies.”

“Are you Jewish, Ethel?”

“What? Yes. What do you mean by asking?”

“You exhibit here what I have termed contradictory Judaism.”

“What in hell do you mean?” Ethel swings around on her knees and looks at me squarely for the first time.

“Because you believe at one and the same time that the Jews are unique and that they are not. Thus you would be offended if a Jew told you the Jews were chosen by God, but you would also be offended if a non-Jew told you they were not.”

“You hear that, Ethel,” yells Chuck, beginning to jump again. “Why only last week—”

Ethel has picked up my lapsometer. “You better take Dr. More home,” she tells Chuck without taking her eyes from me.

“O.K., honey, but I mean, gee — Look, I’m sorry, Doc—”

“I’m not listening to some bastard tell me I have a Jewish brain.”

“Well actually,” I tell Ethel, “I show the same reading, believing as I do both that God—” I stop, mouth wide open. “ Look out! — don’t throw it! — Jesus!—”

But she threw it and in doing so must have flipped the adaptor switch because, before I can catch it, the lapsometer swings through a slow arc, adaptor down. The dirty salt on the bank spits and smokes.

“Good God, what is that?” asks Chuck, instantly sober.

“That was close.” Turning off the switch, I pack the lapsometer with trembling hands.

“Yeah, but what was that stuff? Was it what I think it was?”

“Brimstone, no doubt,” says Ethel drily.

“As a matter of fact, it was.”

“What else?” says Ethel.

“Its the sulfur in the salt. Don’t worry. No harm done. Now I’ve got to go.”

“Right,” says Chuck soberly. “I want to thank you for—”

“Never mind. Goodbye, Hester.”

“Goodbye. Come back.”

“All right.”

How stands it with a forty-five-year-old man who can fall in love on the spot with a twenty-year-old stranger, a clear-eyed vacant simple Massachusetts girl, and desire nothing more in this life than to move into her chickee?

IT IS GETTING DARK. Lightning flickers like a genie inside the bottle-shaped cloud.

Why am I so sleepy? It is almost impossible to keep my eyes open! Fireflies of albumen molecules spark in my brain. Yet I don’t feel bad. Then concentrate! The next few minutes are critical.

At this moment the President is beginning to speak in New Orleans and the Vice-President is mounting the platform at NASA a few miles away. Both are making a plea for unity. The President, who is an integrationist Mormon married to a liberated Catholic, will appeal to Leftists to respect law and order. The Vice-President, a Southern Baptist Knothead married to a conservative Unitarian, is asking Knotheads for tolerance and understanding, etcetera.

The poor U.S.A.!

Even now, late as it is, nobody can really believe that it didn’t work after all. The U.S.A. didn’t work! Is it even possible that from the beginning it never did work? That the thing always had a flaw in it, a place where it would shear, and that all this time we were not really different from Ecuador and Bosnia-Herzegovina, just richer. Moon Mullins blames it on the niggers. Hm. Was it the nigger business from the beginning? What a bad joke: God saying, here it is, the new Eden, and it is yours because you’re the apple of my eye; because you the lordly Westerners, the fierce Caucasian-Gentile-Visigoths, believed in me and in the outlandish Jewish Event even though you were nowhere near it and had to hear the news of it from strangers. But you believed and so I gave it all to you, gave you Israel and Greece and science and art and the lordship of the earth, and finally even gave you the new world that I blessed for you. And all you had to do was pass one little test, which was surely child’s play for you because you had already passed the big one. One little test: here’s a helpless man in Africa, all you have to do is not violate him. That’s all.

One little test: you flunk!

God, was it always the nigger business, now, just as in 1883, 1783, 1683, and hasn’t it always been that ever since the first tough God-believing Christ-haunted cunning violent rapacious Visigoth-Western-Gentile first set foot here with the first black man, the one willing to risk everything, take all or lose all, the other willing just to wait and outlast because once he was violated all he had to do was wait because sooner or later the first would wake up and know that he had flunked, been proved a liar where he lived, and no man can live with that. And sooner or later the lordly Visigoth-Western-Gentile-Christian-Americans would have to falter, fall out, turn upon themselves like scorpions in a bottle.

No! No fair! Foul! The test was too much! What do you expect of a man? Yet even so we almost passed. There was a time … You tested us because bad as we were there was no one else, and everybody knew it, even our enemies, and that is why they curse us. Who curses the Chinese? Who ever imagined the Chinese were blessed by God and asked to save the world? Who ever expected anything else from them than what they did? What a laugh. And as for Russia and the Russian Christ who was going to save Europe from itself: ha ha.

Flunked! Christendom down the drain. The dream over. Back to history and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

No! No fair!

But wait. It is still not too late. I can save you, America! I know something! I know what is wrong! I hit on something, made a breakthrough, came on a discovery! I can save the terrible God-blessed Americans from themselves! With my invention! Listen to me. Don’t give up. It is not too late. You are still the last hope. There is no one else. Bad as we are, there is no one else.

I crack one eye. Through my turret slit, I notice that the sand trap is smoking. The champs, swinging sand wedges, are converging in the fiery bunker.

It has begun.

A yellow lens-shaped cloud hangs like a zeppelin over the horizon beyond the swamp. From the direction of NASA to the north comes a rattle of gunfire.

Then why don’t I get up and go down to the motel and see to the girls?

Because I am so sleepy. One little catnap …

SOMEONE TOOK A SHOT AT ME AT THE BREAKFAST TABLE.

At this moment I am lying in a corner out of the line of fire and thinking to myself: why is it better down here?