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

“Rike,” I say.

“Rotsa ruck.”

So I go back to the men’s room.

At the washstand there is a step behind me. A familiar smell of sebum-sweat overlaid by unguents.

“Hello, Art.” Where did he come from? He must live in a cubicle. Now he’s wearing a tie and jacket as if he were dressed for an occasion. But where did he get the tie and jacket? I take a closer look in the mirror. It is a tight gabardine “bi-swing” jacket, a style popular many years ago, with little plackets under each shoulder.

“How does it go, Doc?”

“Not so good.”

“Win a few, lose a few, eh?”

“What? Yes.”

I am gazing at my face in the mirror intently, like the man in Saint James’s epistle. The image reverses on the retina and a hole opens. Removing the bottle of Early Times from my bag, I take two long pulls.”

“Where to now, Doc?”

“I don’t know. Back to A-4.”

“As a patient.”

“I suppose.”

“Do you give up so easily?”

I shrug.

“What about our little proposition?”

“What proposition?”

“Let me see your MOQUOL.”

“Gladly.” Taking the device from my bag, I loft it toward the used-towel bin.

Art intercepts it, rubs it on his shirt front like a street urchin finding a dime.

“You got to have faith, Doc.”

“Faith?”

“Listen to me for a minute.”

“Why?”

“Sit here.” Taking my arm, he leads me to the shoeshine chair. I sit on the platform. Art hops up to the throne and fits his shoes to the treadles. The whiskey catches hold in my stomach like a gear. I feel better, engaged.

“And to make matters worse,” says Art cheerfully, “somebody’s beating your time with your girl.” Beating my time. I haven’t heard that expression since childhood.

“What do you want?” I ask him, slumping around the pleasant engaged gear in my stomach.

“To show you something.” He hops over me, fumbles in his attaché case, which still lies open on the windowsill. It is a short barrel, like a telephoto lens, fitted with an adapter ring. He screws it onto my lapsometer.

“Life is funny, Doc.”

“It is.”

“There is such a thing as being too close to the woods to see the trees.”

“What is that thing?”

“It’s really your discovery. The principle is yours. This is just a bit of tinkering. If you want to give me credit in a footnote, ha ha—”

“What’s it for?”

“Doc, the trouble with your invention has always been that you could diagnose but not treat, right?”

“That’s right.”

“Now you can treat.” He tosses me the lapsometer.

“How’s that?”

“Don’t you know? You discovered it twenty years ago.”

“What—”

A behaviorist comes in to take a leak. Art begins combing his hair again, wetting his comb and bending his knees mambo-style. The behaviorist washes his hands, nods at me, and leaves. Art hops nimbly up into the shoeshine chair.

“Doc, you recall that you discovered the effects of Heavy Sodium fallout?”

“Yes.” I am wondering: if two drinks of Early Times makes me feel good, wouldn’t three drinks make me feel better?

“You had the answer. Don’t you see?”

“See what?”

“The possibility of treating personality disorders with Heavy Sodium and Chloride.”

“That would be like exploding a cobalt bomb over New Orleans to treat cancer.”

“That’s the point. How do you treat cancer with cobalt radiation?”

“I’ve thought of that. But you know, of course, that sodium radiation is a two-edged sword. In the same moment that you assuage frontal terror you might increase red-nucleus rage.”

“Exactly!” Art’s feet fairly dance on the treadles above my head. “And you of all people should know how to avoid that.”

“How?”

“With this.”

“What is that?”

“A differential stereotactic emission ionizer. Beams in either your Heavy Sodium or Chloride ion. Using your principle.”

“How?”

“Don’t you see? You don’t even move your MOQUOL. Say you take a reading at the red nucleus and find a plus-five millivolt pathology. All you do is swing your dial to a minus-five Chloride charge and ionize.”

“And what will that do?”

“Tranquilize red-nucleus rage.”

“Sure.”

“You don’t believe me? Where are you going?”

“To get a drink.”

“That’s the point, Doc. Drink this drink and you’ll never want a drink. Let me show you something.”

“What?”

“Sit down here.”

As I sit on the lower platform, Art holds the machine to my head. It feels like barber’s clippers.

“Now. Using your diagnostic circuit, I observe that you are registering a plus-three on the anxiety scale. A little high but not unusual considering the pace of modern living. Now suppose I keep the MOQUOL in place and switch over to a plus-two ion emission. You should feel a bit worse.”

The machine hums like a tuning fork against my head.

I begin to shiver. My shoulders are rounded and I am gazing at my hands clenched in my lap. At last I raise my eyes. A horrid white light streams through the frosted window and falls into the glittering porcelain basins of the urinals. It is the Terror, but tolerable. The urinals, which are the wall variety, are shaped like skulls. The dripping water sounds hollow like water at the bottom of a well.

“Now. Well reverse and give you a minus-seven Chloride dose, which should throw you over into minus-two anti-anxiety.”

My head is leaning against the metal support of the treadle. Again the machine hums.

When I open my eyes, I am conscious first of breathing. Something in my diaphragm lets go. I realize I’ve been breathing at the top of my lungs for forty-five years. Now my diaphragm moves like a piston into my viscera, pulling great drafts of air into the base of my lungs.

Next I become aware of the cool metal of the support against my neck.

Then I notice my hand clenched into a fist on my knee. I open it slowly, turning it this way and that, inspecting every pore and crease. What a beautiful strong hand! The tendons! The bones! But the hand of a stranger! I have never seen it before.

How can a man spend forty-five years as a stranger to himself? No other creature would do such a thing. No animal would, for he is pure organism. No angel would, for he is pure spirit.

“Feeling better, Doc?”

“Yes.”

“It’s quite a device, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“And the Director doesn’t appreciate it, does he?”

“No.”

“Now.” Art is at my head again, fiddling about, pressing bony protuberances, measuring salients of my skull with a cold metal centimeter scale. It feels good to be measured. “I’m going to show you something I think will interest you. I’m going to stimulate Brodmann 11 mildly. You know what that is?”

“Yes, but I’d like to hear what you think it is.”

“It lies in the frontal-temporal sulcus of course, betwixt and between the abstractive areas of the frontal and the concrete auditory radiation of the frontal. It is the area of the musical-erotic.”

“Hm, that’s not my terminology.”

“But you know what I mean. Here the abstract is experienced concretely and the concrete abstractly. Take women, for example. Here one neither loves a woman individually, for herself and no other, faithfully; nor does one love a woman organically as a dog loves a bitch. No, one loves a woman both in herself and insofar as she is a woman, a member of the class women. Conversely, one loves women not in the abstract but in a particular example, this woman. Loves her truly, moreover. One loves faithlessly but truly.”