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

The lower reaches are reserved for professors, residents, consultants, and visiting physicians. The Director, for example, sits in the front row, elbows propped on the high retaining wall, next to his fellow Nobel laureate Dr. Kenneth Stryker, who first described the branny cruciform rash of love. Gottlieb is directly behind them, erect as a young prince, light glancing from his forehead. His eyes search mine with a questing puzzled glance, seeking to convey a meaning, but I do not take the meaning. In the same row sit Dr. Helga Heine, the West German interpersonal gynecologist; Colley Wilkes, the super-Negro encephalographer, and his wife, Fran, a light-colored behaviorist and birdwatcher; Ted ’n Tanya and two visiting proctologists from Paradise: my old friend Dr. Dusty Rhoades and Dr. Walter Bung, an extremely conservative albeit skillful proctologist recently removed from Birmingham.

The pit itself, a sunken area half the size of a handball court and enclosed by a high curving wall, is empty save for Dr. Buddy Brown, the patient, Mr. Ives, in a wheelchair, and behind him a strapping blond nurse named Winnie Gunn, whose stockings are rolled beneath her knees. Where is Moira? Ah, I see: sitting almost out of sight in the approach tunnel with no more of her visible than her beautiful gunmetal legs. Is she avoiding me?

I enter not through the tunnel but from the top, walking down the steep aisle like a relief pitcher beginning the long trek from the left-field bullpen. As I come abreast of successive rows of students, there occurs on the left a cutting away of eyes and the ironic expression of the fan confronted by the unfavorite. These are by and large Buddy’s fans and mostly qualitarians (= euthanasists).

From here and there on the right comes a muted cheer, a vigorous nodding and lively corroborative look from some student who remembers my small triumph and imagines that he and I share the same convictions.

I don’t pay much attention to left or right.

Students are, if the truth be known, a bad lot. En masse they’re as fickle as a mob, manipulable by any professor who’ll stoop to it. They have, moreover, an infinite capacity for repeating dull truths and old lies with all the insistence of self-discovery. Nothing is drearier than the ideology of students, left or right. Half the students here revere Dr. Spiro T. Agnew, elder statesman and honorary president of the American Christian Proctological Society; the other half admire Hermann Hesse, Dr. B. F. Skinner, inventor of the Skinner conditioning box, and the late Justice William O. Douglas, a famous qualitarian who improved the quality of life in India by serving as adviser in a successful program of 100,000,000 abortions and an equal number of painless “terminations” of miserable and unproductive old folk.

People talk a lot about how great “the kids” are, compared to kids in the past. The only difference in my opinion is that kids now don’t have sense enough to know what they don’t know.

On the other hand, my generation is an even bigger pain.

It seems today in The Pit I am favored by the Christian Knothead anti-euthanasic faction, but I’m not sure I like them any better than the Hesse-Skinner-Douglas qualitarians.

But I do not, on the whole, feel bad. My large bowel is clear as a bell, my coeliac plexus is full of blood. Anxiety flickers over my sacrum but it is not the Terror, rather a useful and commensurate edginess. What I fear is not nothing, which is the Terror, but something, namely, getting beat by Buddy Brown in front of Moira. Otherwise I feel fine: my heart is full of love, my mind is like a meat grinder ready to receive the raw stuff of experience and turn out neat pattycake principles.

The thing to do, it occurs to me halfway down into the pit, is to concern myself with the patient and what ails him, and forget the rest.

In the pit itself a casual air is cultivated. Mr. Ives’s bright monkey eyes snap at me. Buddy Brown leans against the high wall talking to the Director, who hangs over, cupping an ear. Nurse Winnie Gunn, who stands behind the wheelchair, gives me a big smile and shifts her weight, canting her pelvis six degrees starboard. Moira? Her face swims in the darkness of the tunnel. Are her eyes open or closed?

The uproar resumes. The doctors are free to unhorse each other by any means fair or foul. The students are free to boo or cheer. Last month one poor fellow, a psychiatrist who had diagnosed a case as paranoia, was routed and damned out of his own mouth, like Captain Queeg, by Buddy Brown, who led the man to the point of admitting that yes, he was convinced that all the students and the faculty as well had it in for him and were out to get him. Jeers from the students, right and left, who have no use for weakness in their elders.

The door opens at the top and in strolls Art Immelmann and perches in the back row. In the same row but not close sit two women. The two women are — good Lord! — my two women, Lola Rhoades and Ellen Oglethorpe. What are they doing together?

There is no time to speculate. The uproar subsides and Buddy Brown begins, flipping through the chart held above Mr. Ives, who sits slumped in his string robe, head jogging peacefully, monkey eyes gone blank for once and fixed on the wall in front of him.

Buddy presents the medical history, physical examination, and laboratory findings. He stands at his ease, looking fondly at Mr. Ives.

“My differential diagnosis: advanced atherosclerosis, senile psychosis, psychopathic and antisocial behavior, hemiplegia and aphasia following a cerebrovascular accident.”

Murmurs and nods from the students.

“Doctor.” With a flourish Buddy hands me the chart.

The Early Times is turning like a gear in my stomach. I am looking at my hand again. What a hand.

“Doctor?”

“Yes. Oh. By the way, Dr. Brown. You made no therapeutic recommendations.”

Buddy spreads his fingers wide, shrugs an exaggerated Gallic shrug (he is part Cajun and comes from Thibodeaux).

“You have no recommendations?”

“Do you, Dr. More?”

“Then you plan to transfer him?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“To the Happy Isles Separation Center.”

This is what the students have been waiting for.

“Euphoric Switch! Euphoric Switch!” cry the euthanasists.

“Button! Button!” cry the right-benchers. “Not to Georgia!”

“Where would you send him, Doctor?” asks Buddy sarcastically.

The heavy warm gear is turning in my stomach. My hand is the hand of a stranger. Music is still playing. I must have swayed to the music because Winnie Gunn has seized my forearm with both hands.

“Are you all right, Doctor?” she whispers.

“Fine.”

“We are still waiting for your diagnosis, Dr. More,” says Buddy with the gentleness of victory.

“I found no significant pathology.”

“Louder!” from the back benches. The Director cups his ear.

“I said I found no significant pathology.”

“No significant pathology,” says Buddy as gently as Perry Mason beating Hamilton Burger for the thousandth time. “And what is your recommendation, Doctor?”

“Discharge him.”

“Discharge him,” repeats Buddy. “He can’t walk or talk, and if he could, he would presumably return to his former atrocious behavior. And yet you want to discharge him. As cured, Doctor?”

“If indeed there was nothing wrong with him.”

“You think there was nothing wrong with him?”

“No. That is, yes.”

“Then what’s he doing here in a wheelchair?”

Titters.

I shrug.

“Dr. More, what do you think his chances are of recovering from his stroke?”

“You mean, assuming he’s had one.”

“Very well. Assuming he’s had one.”