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

“Well, it’s worth a try. I’ll do it for Tanya’s sake. I’d do anything to restore our relationship along the entire spectrum.”

“Very well. Get a compass and after work tomorrow on Monkey Island, strike out due north across the swamp.”

Ted does his research on Monkey Island in the middle of the swamp. There dwells a colony of killer apes, Gorilla gorilla malignans , thought to be an unevolved descendant of one of man’s ancestors. No other ape kills for pleasure.

The question is: how to account for man’s wickedness? Biologists, for some reason, find it natural to look for a wicked monkey in the family tree. I find it more reasonable to suppose that monkeys are blameless and that something went wrong with man. Many people hereabouts, by the way, blame the recent wave of atrocities on escaped killer apes. Some Knothead whites, however, blame black guerrillas. Some liberals blame white Knotheads.

If you measure the pineal activity of a monkey — or any other subhuman animal — with my lapsometer, you will invariably record identical readings at Layers I and II. Its self, that is to say, coincides with itself. Only in man do you find a discrepancy: Layer I, the outer social self, ticking over, say, at a sprightly 5.4 mmv, while Layer II just lies there, barely alive at 0.7 mmv, or even zero! — a nought, a gap, an aching wound. Only in man does the self miss itself, fall from itself (hence lapsometer !) Suppose—! Suppose I could hit on the right dosage and weld the broken self whole! What if man could reenter paradise, so to speak, and live there both as man and spirit, whole and intact man-spirit, as solid flesh as a speckled trout, a dappled thing, yet aware of itself as a self!

But we were speaking of Ted. Yes, I prescribed for Ted, Ted promised to follow the prescription, and he did. The next afternoon, instead of leaving Monkey Island at five, climbing into a sealed refrigerated bubbletop and gliding home on the interstate, home where in his glass-walled “enclosed patio” he would surely sit quaking with terror, abstracting himself from himself and corrupting the here-and-now — instead he wore jeans and tennis shoes and, taking a compass reading bearing nor’-nor’east, struck out through Honey Island Swamp. The six miles took him five hours. At ten o’clock that night he staggered up his back yard past the barbecue grill, half dead of fatigue, having been devoured by mosquitoes, leeches, vampire bats, tsetse flies, snapped at by alligators, moccasins, copperheads, chased by Bantu guerrillas and once even set upon and cuffed about by a couple of Michigan State dropouts on a bummer who mistook him for a parent. It was every bit the ordeal I had hoped.

At that time the only treatment of angelism, that is, excessive abstraction of the self from itself, was recovery of the self through ordeal.

So it came to pass that half-dead and stinking like a catfish, he fell into the arms of his good wife, Tanya, and made lusty love to her the rest of the night.

The freshening wind smells of rain and trees.

Behind the motel a tumbleweed blows through the vine-clad posts of the drive-in movie. Its sign has advertised the same film for the past five years:

HOMO HIJINKS

ZANY LAFF RIOT

It took a lot to get people out to movies in the last days of the old Auto Age. A gimmick was needed. In Homo Hijinks it was an act of fellatio performed by two skydivers in a free fall on 3-D Ektachrome on a two-hundred-foot screen.

Charley Parker, the Paradise golf pro, came to see me last year for a life insurance examination. In the physical, he checked out well in all categories, being indeed a superb physical specimen as well as a genial outgoing sort of fellow. A fifty-year-old blond stud pony of a man, he once made the winter tour with the champs and even placed at Augusta. But Charley is best known for having been the first pro to introduce night golf to a major course. Paradise Country Club, thanks to Charley Parker, inaugurated the famous Southern “Moonlight” summer tour of the champs, played “under the arcs” in the cool of the evening. It is a “new concept” in tournament golf. Making use of cheap electricity and cheap sodium vapor, Charley concealed hundreds of lamps in cypress trees, behind Spanish moss. To Charley goes the credit for delighting the fans with the romance of golf and repelling insects as well.

I made routine readings with my lapsometer. Hm, what’s this? Healthy as he was, and with every reason to be happy, Charley’s deep pineal, the site of inner selfhood, was barely ticking over at a miserable 0.1 mmv.

I asked Charley if he was sure he felt all right, no insomnia? no nervousness? no depression? no feelings of disorientation or strangeness?

“Are you kidding, Doc?” Charley began, ticking off his assets: his lovely wife, Ramona; one boy at M.I.T.; the other boy at fourteen winner of the J.C. tournament; his success in bringing the champs to Paradise (this very weekend, by the way) for a Pro-Am tournament; boosting the prize money to a cool million; being voted Man of the Year by the Optimists, etcetera etcetera.

But he paused in his counting. “Nervousness? Strangeness? It’s funny that you should ask.”

“Why?”

As I waited, I was thinking: surely my machine is wrong this time. Charley never looked better, tan skin crinkled in healthy crow’s-feet, blond, almost albino, eyelashes thick and sand-sprinkled as so many athletes’ are. He’s a healthy bourbon-cured stud of a man with a charming little-kid openness about him: it does not occur to him not to say how he feels. Charley’s the sort of fellow, you know, who always turns up in a pinch and does what needs doing. Maybe he’s the best American type, the sergeant-yeoman out of the hills, the good cop. When the hurricane comes, he’s the fellow with the truck: come on, we got to get those folks out of there.

Charley blinked his sandy lashes and passed a hand across his eyes.

“I mean like this morning I looked at myself in the mirror and I said, Charley, who in the hell are you? What does it all mean? It was strange, Doc. What does it all mean, is the thing.”

“What does what all mean?”

“What about you, Doc?” asked Charley, with a glint in his eye, meaning: look who’s asking about nervousness. But he forgave me as quickly. “Doc, you ought to stay in condition. You got a good build. What you need is eighteen every night under the arcs, like the other docs.”

I nodded, taking hope. He could be right.

A note for physicians: if you listen carefully to what patients say, they will often tell you not only what is wrong with them but also what is wrong with you.

Six months later I was called out to Charley’s house by his wife, Ramona. Charley was in an acute depression. As a matter of fact, I was not feeling well myself. My feet moved in glue. It was March 2, the anniversary of Samantha’s death and the date too of the return of the first martin scouts from the Amazon basin. I had been sitting at the back door of my office waiting for them and putting off going to see Charley.

It was four o’clock when I got there. Ramona and I sat there in the cathedral living room and watched Charley in his Naugehyde recliner set uncomfortably in the up position. Ramona had just got back from a garden club luncheon and still had her hat on, bright blue and fur-trimmed to match her suit. A thick white droning afternoon light filled the room. Through the open pantry door I could see Lou Ann, the cook, fixing to leave the kitchen with her plastic bag of scraps. The dishwasher had already shifted into the wash cycle chug-chug-chug .

Charley’s appearance was shocking. He was dressed in sport clothes but wore them like an old man, aloha shirt, high-stomached shorts, but business shoes and socks. His elbows had grown tabs. His tan had an undertone of jaundice. The crow’s-feet around his eyes were ironed out, showing white troughs.