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

Here’s the hottest political issue of the day: euthanasia. Say the euthanasists not unreasonably: let’s be honest, why should people suffer and cause suffering to other people? It is the quality of life that counts, not longevity, etcetera. Every man is entitled to live his life with freedom and to end it with dignity, etcetera etcetera. It came down to one curious squabble (like the biggest theology fight coming down to whether to add the que to the filio ): the button vs. the switch. Should a man have the right merely to self-stimulation, pressing the button that delivers bliss precisely until the blissful thumb relaxes and lets go the button? Or does he not also have the right to throw a switch that stays on, inducing a permanent joy — no meals, no sleep, and a happy death in a week or so? The button vs . the switch.

And if he has such a right and is judged legally incompetent to throw the switch, cannot a relative throw it for him?

The debate rages. The qualitarians, as the euthanasists call themselves, have won in Maryland and New York and Hawaii where legislatures have passed laws that allow sane oldsters to choose a “joyful exitus” as it is called in Maryland, or a kawaneeolaua as it is called in Hawaii, and throw the on-switch on. In the case of the insane, the consent of both physician and spouse is necessary.

Whup. Up ahead I spy my enemy, Dr. Buddy Brown, sailing his coattails, and duck into Love Clinic just in time.

I don’t want to talk to him about our coming shoot-out in The Pit. Am I afraid of him?

The small observation room in Love is not crowded. Moira is perched on a stool at the viewing mirror, steno pad open on her knees. My heart melts with love. Does not a faint color spread along her throat? She blushes! I nod merely — or do I blush? — and go on talking to Stryker. But her presence is like sunlight. No matter which way I turn I feel a ray of warmth, now on my cheek, now between my shoulder blades. There is a sextant in me that keeps her position.

Father Kev Kevin sits reading Commonweal at his console of vaginal indicators. Only the regular staff is present today — though there may be students in the amphitheater above — Dr. Kenneth Stryker, chief of staff of Love; Dr. Helga Heine, his assistant, a West German interpersonal gynecologist; Father Kev Kevin, an ex-priest now a Love counselor; and Moira Schaffner, my own true love.

Stryker and Moira are glad to see me. Father Kev Kevin and Helga are not, though they are civil enough. Helga thinks I don’t like Germans. I suspect, too, she believes I am Jewish because I was always with Gottlieb and I look somewhat Jewish, like my illustrious ancestor, Sir Thomas More.

Father Kev Kevin was a curate at Saint Michael’s, my old parish church. So he is skittish toward me, behaving now too brightly, now too sullenly. I think he fears I might call him Father. A handsome Irishman, he is not merely chaplain of the clinic but jack of all trades: counsels persons in Love who cannot love — love or die! he tells them — takes clinical notes, operates the vaginal console. Imagine a young genial anticlerical Pat O’Brien who reads Commonweal .

The behavior room beyond the viewing mirror is presently unoccupied. It has an examining table with stirrups, a hospital bed, a tray of instruments, a tube of K-Y jelly, and a rack for the sensor wires with leads to the recording devices in the observation room.

A subject comes in, a solitary lover. I gaze at her, feeling somewhat big-nosed.

I recognize her. She is Lillian, Stryker’s first subject. No doubt she will go down in history like Freud’s first patient, Anna O. For it is she, Lonesome Lil as the students called her, who exhibited in classic form the “cruciform rash” of love that won for Stryker the Nobel Prize.

Lillian wears a sensible gray suit and sturdy brown low-heeled shoes. Her outfit, with shoulder bag and matching hat, a kind of beret with up-arching hoop inside, puts me in mind of Lois Lane of the old Superman comics of my childhood. Lillian is a good deal sturdier, however. As she opens her shoulder bag and begins to remove small fitted devices of clear Lucite, lining them up neatly on the surgical tray, she is for all the world like a visiting nurse come to minister to a complex ailment.

But, unlike a visiting nurse, she undresses. As briskly as a housewife getting ready for her evening bath and paying no more attention to the viewing mirror than if it were her vanity, she sheds jacket, skirt, underwear — the lower article a kind of stretch step-in garment, the upper a brassiere with a bodice-like extension — and finally her up-arched beret, holding a bobby pin in her teeth and giving her short dark hair a shake as any woman would. Not fat, she is heavy-legged and heavy-breasted, her olive skin running to pigment. Though there is glass between us, there is the sense, almost palpable, of the broad, low, barefooted heft of her, of a clothed-in cottoned-off body heat and of the keratin-rasp of her bare feet on the cork floor.

Now, clipping Lucite fittings to sensor wires — and again with the impression of holding a bobby pin in her teeth — she inserts one after another into the body orifices, as handily and thriftily as a teen-ager popping in a contact lens.

Cameras whir, tapes jerk around, needles quiver, computers wink, and Lillian begins her autostimulation.

My eyes meet Moira’s. She blushes and glances down. Here we meet, at Lillian’s recording session, as shyly as two office workers at the water cooler, touch fingers and—! Yes, my hand strays along the vaginal computer, our fingers touch. A thrill pierces my heart like an arrow, as they say in old novels. I am in love.

Stryker tells me his problem, I listen attentively, and sure enough he offers me a job. It disconcerts me that he speaks in a loud voice, in the hearing of the others, and pays no attention to Lillian, who is doing her usual yeoman-like job. Isn’t it impolite not to watch her? Stryker is a tall, willowy doctor who feels obliged by the nature of his work to emphasize the propriety, even the solemnity of his own person. So he dresses somewhat like a funeral director in a dark suit, perfectly laundered shirt, and sober tie. Yet there persists about him the faint air of the dude: his collar has a tricky pin that lofts the knot of his tie. Overly long cuffs show their jeweled links and cover part of his hand, whose fingers are still withered from his years as a chemist before he went into behavior. He is a wonderful dancer, hopping nimbly through the complicated figures of the Center’s square dances. Even now, in the observation room, there is about him a lightness of foot, a discreet bounciness, as if he were keeping time to an inner hoedown. His foot swings out. Yet there pervades the observation room a strong tone, at once solemn and brisk. Embarrassment is not to be thought of. Nor, on the other hand, would it be thinkable to crack vulgar jokes as surgeons do in the scrub room.

Dr. Helga Heine has caught the same note of brisk solemnity. She is a jolly matronly Bavarian gynecologist, neither young nor old, a regular hausfrau, hair done up in a bun, breast conformed to a single motherly outcurve. Moira tells me that Helga takes pains to remember the birthdays of staff members and veteran performers, brings a cake and plays Zwei Herzen on her little Bavarian guitar. I gaze big-nosed at her plump pink fingertips.

“Thanks to you,” says Stryker solemnly, balancing lightly on the balls of his feet, “we’ve made a breakthrough in the whole area of sexual behavior.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say—” I begin, sweeping out a foot like Stryker. So he’s read my paper! In the corner of my eye Moira listens and registers pride. To Moira, who believes in Science without knowing much about it, my triumph has all the grace and warrant of a matador’s.