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

My little triumph, of course, was more theatrical than medical. As you well know, medical colleagues, and as Freud proved long ago, hypnosis is without lasting benefit.

Five minutes to eleven. Time for a last visit to the men’s room. Why am I so nervous? The Director has to be on my side. Else how would Art Immelmann have found out about my invention?

Speak of the devil. A man takes the urinal next to me though there are six urinals and mine is at the end. I frown. Here is a minor breach of the unspoken rules between men for the use of urinals. If there are six urinals and one uses the first the second man properly takes the sixth or perhaps the fifth, maybe the fourth, tolerably the third, but not the second.

This fellow, however, hawks and spits in the standard fashion, zips and pats himself and moves to the washstand, again the next washstand. In the mirror I notice it is Art Immelmann, the man from the Rockefeller-Ford-Carnegie foundations who looks like a drug salesman.

“Well well, Doc.”

When I turn to speak, I notice another minor oddity. In the mirror, which reverses things, there was nothing amiss. But as Art adjusts his trousers, I notice that he “dresses” on the wrong side. He dresses, as tailors say, on the right, which not one American male in a thousand, ask any tailor, does. In fact, American pants are made for left-dressing. A small oddity, true, but slightly discommoding to the observer, like talking to a cross-eyed man.

“Well, Doc,” says Art, turning on the hot water, “have you thought about our little proposition?”

“It’s out of the question.”

“May I ask why?”

“I wouldn’t want my invention to fall into the wrong hands. It could be quite dangerous.”

“Don’t you trust the National Institute of Mental Health and the Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller foundations?”

“No. Besides, my invention is not perfected yet. I haven’t finished with it.”

“What’s not perfected?” Art bends his knees, mambo style, and combs his hair like a sailor with quick alternating strokes of comb and hand.

“My sensors won’t penetrate melanin pigment in the skin.”

“Hm.” Art wets his comb. “You mean your MOQUOL doesn’t work on darkies?”

“No, it doesn’t.” I look at him with surprise. Darkies?!

“Anything else wrong?”

“Yes. I don’t yet have a therapeutic component. As it stands, my device is a diagnostic tool, no more.”

“I know.” Art goes on riffling his flat-top with a wet comb. Is he trying to make it lie down? Some hairs stick up like a wet airdale’s. “What would you say, Doc, if I told you your invention has the capacities and is incremental for both components?”

“Eh?”

“That the solution to both the melanin problem and the therapeutic problem is under your nose.”

“Where?”

Art laughs. “You know all I’m good for, Doc? I’m a coordinator. You’ve got the big ideas. I’m a tinkerer. In fact, I’ve got a little gadget right here that would fit your device—”

“Excuse me. I’m late. I’ve got to—”

“We’d make a team, Doc! All you got to do is sign the funding application!”

“No.”

But we say goodbye and shake hands agreeably enough. His is curiously inert, as if all he knew about shaking hands he had learned from watching others shake hands. A heavy smell of sweat neutralized by deodorant pushes to my nostrils.

Art holds my hand a second too long. “Doc. Just in case anything should go wrong, I’ll be around.”

“What could go wrong?”

“Just in case!”

As I leave him, he opens his attaché case on the windowsill. He looks like a traveling salesman doing business in the post office.

My hour of triumph is at hand.

In the outer office of the Director the typists do not look up, but the secretary is pleasant. She nods toward a bench. There are no staff members present. A row of patients, dressed in the familiar string robes of the wards, sit on the bench, hands on their knees. They look at me without expression. There is no place to sit but the bench.

Quite correct of the Director not to make a fuss! Yet it is an annoyance when one of the patients is called before me. I do not mind. The encounter with Art Immelmann has left me thoughtful. Was he trying to tell me something?

When my turn does come, the Director greets me warmly, if somewhat vaguely, at the door. The first thing I catch sight of over his shoulder is — yes! — my Brain article and my lapsometer lined up side by side on his desk.

“You are very imaginative!” cries the Director, waving me to a chair opposite him.

“Thank you.” What does he mean?

The Director is a tough old party, a lean leathery emeritus behaviorist with a white thatch and a single caliper crease in his withered brown cheek. Though he is reputed to have a cancer in his lung that is getting the better of him, one can easily believe that the growth is feeding on his nonvital parts, fats and body liquors, leaving the man himself worn fine and dusty and durable as Don Quixote. The only sign of his illness is a fruity cough and his handkerchiefs, which he uses expertly, folding them flat as a napkin over his sputum and popping them up his sleeve or into the slits of his white coat.

Though he is a behaviorist and accordingly not well disposed to such new ideas as an “ontological lapsometer,” I take heart from two circumstances: one, that he is an honorable man of science and as such knows evidence when he sees it; two, that he is dying. A dying king, said Sir Thomas More, is apt to be wiser than a healthy king. A dying behaviorist may be a good behaviorist.

The Director coughs his fruity cough. His eyes bulge. Handkerchiefs pop in and out of his pockets.

“With your permission, Tom, we’re going to do a feature about your project in the Rehab Weekly .”

“The Rehab Weekly ?”

“Yes. We think you’ve shown a great deal of imagination.”

“Sir, the Rehab Weekly is the patients’ mimeographed magazine.”

“I know,” says the Director, his eyes bulging amiably.

The unease that has been flickering up and down my spine turns into a pool of heat in the hollow of my neck. Strange, but I feel only a mild embarrassment for him.

“Sir,” I say presently. “Perhaps you have misunderstood me. You say there are plans to do a feature on my work in the Rehab Weekly . Very good. But the reason I submitted my article to you was to obtain your approval and support before submitting it to Brain .”

“Yes, I know,” says the Director, coughing.

“It is also necessary to obtain your sanction of my application to N.I.M.H. for funding.”

“Yes. In the amount of—” The Director is leafing through — not my proposal but my medical chart!

“Twenty-five million,” I say, blushing furiously. Why am I so embarrassed? What is shameful about twenty-five million?

“I see.” The Director lays his head over, eyes bulging thoughtfully. “You are on patient-staff status.”

“Technically, but—”

“Doctor, don’t you think that before launching such a ah major undertaking, it might be well to wait until you are discharged?”

“Discharged?”

He slides the chart across the desk. “According to our records you are still a patient on A-4, which means that though you perform staff duties, you have not yet reached an open ward.”

I find myself nodding respectfully, hands on my knees — like a patient! I blink at my trousers. Where is my string robe?

“Sir, I left the hospital five months ago.”

“Left?” The glossy eyes bulge, the pages flip past He’s lost me somewhere in the chart “Here. You’re still on A-4.”