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

But we’d been over this ground before and P.T. now sat wearily in his chair.

Catching sight of the first crude model of my invention in an open drawer, I had an idea. Until that moment I had not tried it on anyone but myself — where I confess I had uncovered a regular museum of pathology, something like passing a metal detector over the battlefield of Iwo Jima.

Why not begin my clinical series with P.T. Bledsoe?

His blood pressure and other physical signs were normal. So, standing behind P.T., I passed the lapsometer over his skull, taking readings and feeling a bit like a phrenologist.

His cortical readings were normal, as was his pineal selfhood. Then, having a hunch, I focused upon the red nucleus in the floor of the fourth ventricle and asked him about the Bildebergers.

To my astonishment and even as I watched, the needle swung from a moderate 2.6 mmv to a great whacking rage level of 9.4 mmv.

“Your headache’s coming back, isn’t it?”

P.T. looked up in surprise, his eyes hazed with pain, and spied my machine, which at this stage looked for all the world like a Brownie box camera.

“Does that thing register headaches?”

“In a way.”

“Can you cure them?”

Now it was his turn to be excited and mine to be depressed.

“No, not yet.” At the time I had not yet made my second breakthrough.

I could not cure his headache then. Now I can. But here’s the curious thing. The very act of locating the site, touching the sore spot, so to speak, seemed to make him feel better. He refused a second shot and left quite cheerfully.

Later the same afternoon I saw Ted Tennis, a well-educated, somewhat abstracted graduate student who suffered from massive free-floating terror, identity crisis, and sexual impotence.

It didn’t take my machine to size him up. Every psychiatrist knows the type: the well-spoken slender young man who recites his symptoms with precision and objectivity — so objective that they seem to be somebody else’s symptoms — and above all with that eagerness, don’t you know, as if nothing would please him more than that his symptom, his dream, should turn out to be interesting, a textbook case. Allow me to have a proper disease, Doctor , he all but tells me.

As we watched the sooty martins through the doorway come skimming up to the hotel — it helps with some patients if we can look at the martins and not at each other — he tells me his troubles with the usual precision, using medical words — he’s read more medical books than I have — like a case history! The usual story: daytime terror and nighttime impotence, even though he feels “considerable warmth and tenderness” toward his wife, Tanya (why doesn’t he just say he loves her?), and so forth. He is wondering again about the “etiology” of the impotence. Dear God, how could he be anything other than impotent? How can a man quaking with terror make love to his wife?

But today he’s got a new idea. If I’d been as sharp-witted and alert to small clues as a good psychiatrist should be, I should have guessed from the way his eye kept straying to my big bottom drawer. Here I keep my samples. The untreatable maladies of any age, reader, may be ascertained from the free samples a doctor receives. My desk drawer contains hundreds of suppositories, thousands of pills for treating terror, and dozens of rayon “training” organs for relieving male impotence.

None of these things works very well.

In short, my patient asked — for the first time and in a halting, scarcely audible voice — to be fitted with a rayon organ.

If he could not “achieve an adequate response” himself, he said — why doesn’t he say “make love”—he could at least see that his wife did.

Again we cast an eye toward my bottom drawer, which did in fact contain a regular arsenal of male organs, the best of which are for some reason manufactured in Bayonne, New Jersey.

“Very well, Ted,” I said, opening the drawer and taking out not a Bayonne-rayon organ but my invention.

“What’s that?”

“I’d like to do a personality profile using a new tele-encephalographic technique.” This is the way you talk to Ted.

“Eh? How’s that?” asked Ted, pricking up his ears. “You mean you can measure electrical activity with that?”

“Yes.”

“Without electrodes?”

“Yes.”

“And correlate the readings with personality traits?”

“Yes.”

“Wow.”

He was willing enough, of course. He sees something magic in it, scientific magic, like being touched by the king for the king’s evil. But it is more than that. When I touched him — strange, but this happened earlier with P.T. Bledsoe — he already seemed better. Who of us now is not so strangely alone that it is the cool clinical touch of the stranger that serves best to treat his loneliness?

“Should be interesting,” said Ted, bowing his head.

It was. He registered a dizzy 7.6 mmv over Brodmann 32, the area of abstractive activity. Since that time I have learned that a reading over 6 generally means that a person has so abstracted himself from himself and from the world around him, seeing things as theories and himself as a shadow, that he cannot, so to speak, reenter the lovely ordinary world. Instead he orbits the earth and himself. Such a person, and there are millions, is destined to haunt the human condition like the Flying Dutchman.

Ellen Oglethorpe peeped in and closed the door again as discreetly as if we were lovers. Her eyes sparkled. She was having a good day. Two rich patients in one day! Ted Tennis’s wife, Tanya, is a Milwaukee beer heiress and their house in Paradise is bigger than mine.

Over his coeliac plexus, soothed though he was, he still clocked a thunderous anxiety of 8.7 mmv. His hand trembled slightly against mine. And all at once I could see how he lived his life: shuddering in orbit around the great globe, seeking some way to get back. Don’t I know? We are two of a kind, winging it like Jupiter and spying comely maids below and having to take the forms of swans and bulls to approach them. Except that he, good heathen that he is, wished only to reenter his own wife. I, the Christian, am the fornicator.

“Well?” he asked anxiously when I finished.

So I told him my findings and he listened with the intensest interest, but I made the mistake of using such words as “angelism,” “spiritual apogee,” etcetera, all of which are just technical words to me but had the wrong connotations to him. He’s a biologist. So he looked disappointed.

“Look, Tom,” said Ted patiently. “All I want is a Bayonne-rayon training member. Would you—”

“O.K. You can take your pick — if.” I open the drawer of members.

“If?”

“If you follow my prescription first.”

“Oh, very well.”

“First, take these….” I write him a prescription. “Now, tomorrow, here’s what you do.”

“Yes?”

“Instead of taking the car pool home tomorrow, walk.”

“Walk twenty-five miles on the interstate?”

“No, walk six miles through the swamp.”

“Through the swamp.” He nodded dolefully, worst fears realized.

“Yes. Unfortunately, until we make a therapeutic breakthrough comparable to this diagnostic breakthrough”—I wave my invention at him—“the only way to treat a disorder like this is by rough-and-ready empirical methods. Like putting an ice pack on a toothache. We don’t know much about angelism.”

“Angelism,” repeated Ted sourly. “So to treat angelism, you walk through a swamp.”

“Is that worse than the indignity of strapping on a Bayonne-rayon member?” I gave him a few technical details about Layer V of Brodmann Area 32. He brightened. If it’s scientific, he’ll do it.