Walker Percy - The Second Coming

Yes, now I remember something. It was because she had sat so in the closed ward in the same lookout position, head wedged in an angle of the wingback chair. From here too she could see the two places people come from, the highway which ran past the main gate and the door to the hall.

Using the binoculars her father had given her for birdwatching, she was watching out not for the birds but for the bread truck. A car came over the hill, its top appearing first as a swelling in the hot asphalt. In the binoculars it seemed not to approach but to swell and rise until it was a few inches clear of the highway and riding on thick shimmering air. The car, a yellow Continental, was foreshortened and set off at an angle so that the four women passengers, two in front and two in back, appeared to be seated in a row. They were dressed as if they were going to a party, hair done neatly, but at this hour they could only be visiting antique shops or views of valleys and mountains of red leaves. Yes, they were leafers. The car had a Florida license.

Dr. Duk came in. He knocked on the door after opening it and coming in.

Knock knock, he said, hiding in the little foyer.

Who’s there, she said.

Ivan.

Ivan who?

Ivan to be alone.

This was a bad sign. When Dr. Duk felt obliged to be funny, she was in for it. By enlisting her in his joke, he was trying, one, to be funny, and, two, to give her a “language structure” so that she, who had stopped talking because there was nothing to say, would have a couple of easy lines, straight man to his comic.

When he said Knock knock, it was not hard to say Who’s there? Or Ivan who? Perhaps he was right. She could never lead off with a Knock knock. So she had lost most of her speech except for short questions such as Who’s there? and Ivan who?

Where did he get these knock-knock jokes? Not even her father had told a knock-knock joke for years. Dr. Duk was English. Had knock-knocks just got to England? But Dr. Duk was not quite English. He sounded English and his first name was Alistair, but a faint sootiness underlay his white skin. It reminded her of her mother stirring carbon black into her Williamsburg white paint. Kelso said his real name was Dr. Dukhipoor. Had he got his knock-knock jokes from old Milton Berle reruns in Pakistan? The patients called him Dr. Duck.

Her eyes were asking him something and he knew what it was, but he felt obliged to talk first about his hobbies, birdwatching and gardening. Maybe he was English. There is an advantage to being a small insular people, he said. We make a virtue of our limitations — ah, but you Americans and the Russians with your great continental soul-searching — heavy, man! — all very well indeed I’m sure but it’s not a bad thing to do a bit of gardening and take a good look at a pine warbler. D’you know the first thing I do when I go to a convention to read a scientific paper? Register in the motel, then take a turn around the block with my glasses. Have a look-see. Nobody walks in your suburbs. Children look at me with absolute astonishment. Parents suspect me of being a molester. Dogs try to bite me. Last year in Phoenix I took a turn with my glasses, stopped at a vacant lot filled with the usual rubbish and weeds, spotted a bit of a commotion, put my glasses on it, and what d’you suppose it was? A canyon wren! Can you imagine? A canyon wren in a vacant city lot!

Maybe he’s right, she was thinking at the edge of her mind but really watching his face for a sign, a pudding face framed by black hair combed low across his forehead and straight down the sides like Robert Newton. Maybe the Englishman can keep sane in a mad world by watching wrens and puttering about his garden — ah, she thought in her greenhouse, I can have my garden now, yes, more “grandiose” than his, he would say, because it’s a crystal palace and I’m going to live in it and make a living from it. With greens. A greenhouse is for growing greens. But maybe he’s right, and it’s one way to keep from going nutty, but maybe there’s something nutty too about an Englishman puttering about his mums while the sceptered isle slowly sinks into the sea.

No, he wasn’t quite kosher with his too black hair and his puddingish Robert Newton face, and his sooty white skin. Anyhow, the English don’t go around talking about “the English” and “your suburbs” and saying “heavy, man.”

Her eyes kept asking him the question, so he answered her, coming smoothly off the knock-knocks and the bird-watching and swinging round to her but offhandedly as if the birds were the important tiling and her illness a detail to be polished off on his way out. Yet it was his very off handedness which caused the familiar sweet doomstroke in her throat. What is this sweetness at the horrid core of bad news?

No — ah — I just thought praps you might do with a light massage of your neurones. Not even a major ECT series. A small refresher course. To get you ready for the big world out there.

You’re going to buzz me again. (Her unfamiliar voice sounded loud and crackly like the intercom.)

Only a refresher course. I would imagine it to be your last.

Why?

Why what?

The asking in this case is like the answering, she said. I mean — she stopped.

Yes?

She had trouble talking. It was like walking out on a stage. She could answer questions, play straight man to his knock-knock routine, even ask questions. But to make a statement on your own, surely you had to know what you were talking about.

No buzzin cousin, she said. (A lame statement and she saw what she was doing, trying to slip in a statement in his joking style, by cockney rhyming Southern-style.)

You’ll feel much better.

I feel bad? Which I? It was the lilt at the end of a question that let her say it, freed her up. She did not want to go down just yet the way a statement goes down flat and hard, ends. Isn’t there a difference between the outside-I, the me you see, the meow-I and the inside deep-I-defy? Back to the old meow-I.

I’m talking to the deep-I or the I-defy — only I thought we had agreed it became the I-define. Your I as you want to define it.

Okay, she said, what what what.

Okay, you want my reasons for suggesting a little refresher course.

Yes. Yes, that is, sir.

Don’t be afraid. No, it’s just that you don’t eat. You won’t talk to the others, staff or patient. You’ve stopped participating in group. You have stopped functioning.

I don’t eat?

Only the morsels you smuggle back to your room in a napkin, like a chipmunk.

Morsel. She liked the word. It was folded on itself and had a taste. It was dark and nourishing, better than a snack. She also liked his rubbish. It was cleaner and firmer than our trash.

How about group?

Group? she said, meaning: I still go to group.

He understood.

Yes, you go to group, but you sit under the table.

Knees are easy. Faces are defacing.

Ha. I like that. I quite know what you mean. I’d prefer to look at knees rather than some of the defaced faces in staff conference and seminars. All the same, we’re stuck with these faces and we have to make the best of it.

I’ll take the knees.

There you go.

Now he was trying to sound like Dennis Weaver and didn’t. She was embarrassed for him. How could he stand to speak himself? You’d have to be crazy to make such a fool of yourself. How could he stand to be so out-of-focus? a bogus Englishman doing knock-knocks. I’d rather be crazy. Or maybe the question was, why did she have to know everything before she could say anything?

I — she began and stopped.

Yes?

(Here came her statement because this was the one thing she knew.)