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

“I said, never mind.”

“I say bless Jesus!”

“O.K., O.K.”

Guns clink together. Wood, lightened on its load, creaks. The deer carcass slides over the rough wood of the bench. A man grunts as the load is hefted.

“Well, they going to eat today,” says a voice, Willard’s, going away.

Wait five minutes to make sure.

Shortcut into rear of hospital and through the day room of my old ward. The attendant peering through the screened glass lets me in, though he is not clear about my position. Am I professor, patient, doctor, what? But he knows me from somewhere, sees my bag, lets me through. Did I remember to put pistol in bag? Yes.

Though the building is new, the day room already has the worn look of all day rooms. Its scuffed tile and hard-used blocky wooden furniture is for all the world like a child’s playhouse. The picture on stereo-V rolls slowly. The room smells of idle man-flesh, pajamas stiffened by body dandruff and dried urine. Great sky-high windows let in the out-of-doors through heavy security screens that render the world gauzy green and pointillist.

Here dwell my old friends and fellow madmen. I recognize them. They gaze at me, knowing me and knowing me not. I am like a dream they have dreamed before. A man standing at the window twitters his fingers, sending out radar beams to the vague, gauzy world, and cocks his ear, listening for returning blips. Who are you out there? Another man carries his head under his arm. A blond youth, a pale handsome exchange student from Holland, remembers that he owes me a debt of some sort and pays me off with feces money, a small dry turd, which I accept in good part, folding it into my handkerchief and pocketing same.

Here I spent the best months of my life. In a few days my high-lows leveled out, my depression-exaltation melded into a serene skimming watchfulness. My terror-rage — cowardly lionheartedness and lionhearted cowardice — fused into a mild steady resolve. Here in the day room and in the ward we patients came to understand each other as only fellow prisoners and exiles can. Sane outside, I can’t make head or tail of people. Mad inside, we signaled each other like auctioneers, a wink here, a wag of finger there. I listened and watched. Outside there is not time to listen. Sitting here in the day room the day after Christmas next to a mangy pine tree decorated with varicolored Kleenex (no glass!), the stereo-V showing the Blue-Gray game and rolling flip flip flip, my hands on my knees and wrists bandaged, I felt so bad that I groaned aloud an Old Testament lamentation AAAAIEOOOOOW! to which responded a great silent black man sitting next to me on the blocky couch: “Ain’t it the truth though.”

After that I felt better.

We love those who know the worst of us and don’t turn their faces away. I loved my fellow patients and hearkened to them and they to me. I loved Max Gottlieb. He sewed up my wrists in his living room without making a fuss about it. How did I get to his house? By walking, I think. The last thing I remember clearly is Perry Como, hale as Saint Nick but orange of face and livid of lip.

As Max worked, he was holding my wrist pressed with pleasant pressure against his stomach, and I remembered thinking he was like a trainer lacing up his fighter’s gloves.

He clucked in mild irritation.

“What’s the matter, Max?”

“Tch. I can’t fix the tendon here. You’ll have to wait Sorry.”

“That’s all right, Max.”

Here’s an oddity. Max the unbeliever, a lapsed Jew, believes in the orderliness of creation, acts on it with energy and charity. I the believer, having swallowed the whole Thing, God Jews Christ Church, find the world a madhouse and a madhouse home. Max the atheist sees things like Saint Thomas Aquinas, ranged, orderly, connected up.

Here it was in this very day room that I, watchful and prescient, tuned into the palpable radiations of my fellow patients and my colleagues as well, the tired hollow-eyed abstracted doctors, and hatched my great principle, as simple and elegant and obvious as all great principles are. It is easy to understand how men do their best work in prison or exile, men like Dostoevsky, Cervantes, Bonhoeffer, Sir Thomas More, Genet, and I, Dr. Thomas More. Pascal wrote as if he were in prison for life and so he was free. In prison or exile or a mental hospital one has time to watch and listen. My question was: how is it with you, fellow patient? how is it with you, fellow physician? and I saw how it was. Many men have done that, seen visions, dreamed dreams. But it is of no use in science unless you can measure it. My good luck came when I stumbled onto a way of measuring the length and breadth and motions of the very self. My little machine is the first caliper of the soul.

Then one day in May I had had enough of the ward and wanted out. I had made my breakthrough. I had done my job. Though I was still on the ward, I was working on the staff as well, even presenting cases to students in The Pit. But I still had to get out. What was it like out there in the gauzy pointillist world? Would my great discovery work out there?

So I went AWOL, walked out and haven’t been back since. I walked to town along the interstate. Wham! there it was, the world, solid as a rock, dense as a doorknob. A beer can glinted malignantly on the shoulder. The grains of concrete were like rocks on the moon. Here came old friend, morning terror, corkscrewing up my spine. Dear God, let me out of here, back to the nuthouse where I can stay sane. Things are too naked out here. People look and talk and smile and are nice and the abyss yawns. The niceness is terrifying.

But I went on to town, to the Little Napoleon tavern where I greeted Leroy Ledbetter, the owner, and other old friends, sipped a few toddies and soon felt better. From the Little Napoleon I telephoned an acquaintance, Dr. Yamaiuchi of Osaka Instruments, with whom I had been in correspondence and who had my specifications, and placed an order for one hundred lapsometers, certified check to follow upon his estimate. The pay phone in the Little Napoleon cost me $47.65 in quarters and nickels.

Leroy and my pals did not find the call remarkable and fed me coins: old Doc is making a call to Japan, scientific medical business, etcetera, keep the money coming, fix him a drink.

Max and Colley, just back from birding, are sitting in the chief resident’s office. Max has donned his white clinical coat but hasn’t changed his boots. Colley, still wearing bush jacket and bermuda shorts, lounges in a tattered aluminum chaise, puffing a briar that sends out wreaths of maple-sugar smoke.

Max is glad to see me, Colley is not Colley is a super-Negro, a regular black Leonardo. He is chief encephalographer, electronic wizard, ornithologist, holds the Black Belt in karate, does the crossword in the Sunday Times . A native of Dothan, Alabama, he is a graduate of Amherst and N.Y.U. medical school So he lounges around like an Amherst man, cocking a quizzical eyebrow and sending out wreaths of maple-sugar smoke, or else he humps off down the hall like a Brooklyn interne, eyes rolled up in his eyebrows, shoes pigeoning in and going squee-gee on the asphalt tile. Yet if he gets excited enough or angry enough, the old Alabama hambone shows through. His voice will hit up into falsetto and he might even say aksed instead of asked .

When I was in the open ward and working on staff, he was very good to me. He immediately saw what I was getting at and helped me wire up my first lapsometer, read my article and refused to take credit as coauthor. “Too metaphysical for me,” he said politely, knocking out his briar. “I’ll stick to old-fashioned tumors and hemorrhages”—and off he went humping it down the hall squee-gee .