Walker Percy - The Second Coming

The driver slowed. Well, he’s going to let me out, he thought. But no, it was in order to reach for a rack on the dash in front of him, and take out cards and pass them to the passengers behind him. “Please pass these along and fill them out. You are witnesses to a crime. This is a hijacking.”

He looked at the four passengers on the front row of seats. They gazed straight ahead, faces like stone. Something is happening, their stricken expressions said, but it is happening too close. We do not know what to do. It was better not to look. But they took the cards dutifully and gazed at the scenery, not daring even to look at the cards.

The bus was still going slow.

“Let the man out. The man wants out.” It was the Associate, standing tall and reared, glasses flashing. He was not smiling. “You heard the man. He wants out.”

“I’ll let him out all right,” said the driver, who in his rage had gone stupid and sought now only the ultimate gesture, the last one-up face-saver, to prove himself to himself and to the passengers, who watched stone-faced holding their legal cards as dutifully as TV game players. The door opened while the bus was still moving and in the moment of his stepping down the driver slammed on the brakes, slamming him forward into metal jamb, then started up rhhhooom, slamming him back into the other jamb not squarely but glancingly so that he was bounced out, which would not have been serious except that the door, itself now part of the driver’s stupidity and rage, was already closing and caught his foot, levering him down hard enough so that the next thing he knew, the pebbles of tar and craters of pavement were coming up at him like a moon landing fast and silent yet slow enough for him to say to himself: right, it’s not going to end like this or in a Georgia swamp either because I won’t stand for it and don’t have to. Then the Eagle landed and the moon went dark.

4

The room was dark.

The table he was strapped to began to move. It slanted up at the foot, then slanted down, rolled over on one side, stood on end. Quick sure woman’s hands moved his body, straightening it. Someone measured his head with a ruler and marked it. There was the sense of conforming his body, its warm wayward flesh and bone, to the simple cold geometry of straight metal edges. A motor went on and off. There was a hum.

When he and the table were stood on end like a mummy case, he saw stars. A window directly in front of him seemed to open into deep space. There twinkling in a thousand, a million points of light was a distant galaxy. But it was not a window, not deep space, not a galaxy, but a brain. The fore part of the brain crouched between two lobes like a sphinx.

He turned his head. The sphinx turned. He turned his head the other way. The sphinx turned the other way.

It was his own brain.

Later the same quick hands unstrapped him and led him into a brightly lit examining room. There were Leslie and Jack Curl and Vance Battle and another man, no doubt a doctor, wearing a long white coat with a rubber hammer sticking out of his pocket. Leslie and Jack were smiling at him.

“What are you grinning about?” he asked Leslie crossly. Uh oh, he thought. Something is wrong for sure. Leslie never smiles unless somebody dies or the Holy Spirit descends. What had happened to her inverted-U frown?

“Credit friend Jack here,” she said, giving him a pat. Ah, they had become friends. What was up? “There is nothing like the power of prayer.”

“There you go,” said Jack absently, dancing a little.

“Power of prayer to do what?” asked Will Barrett.

“To find you and get you here at Duke!” said Leslie, giving him a hug. “Oh, Poppy, you’re a mess!”

Vance and the other man were holding their arms and talking, their heads down. The other man must be a doctor because he was talking to Vance both seriously and casually. He didn’t have to smile. A courtesy was being extended Vance. They did not seem to be exchanging medical information as doctors do, but rather reaching an agreement, as lawyers do. They traced designs on the floor with the toes of their shoes. An agreement was reached. Both men nodded. The other doctor left.

Leslie and Jack Curl were smiling and shaking their heads. Vance winked. With so much cheerfulness — Leslie smiling and soft-eyed! — the news must be bad.

“Son, we had a time catching up with you and throwing you down,” said Vance, talking more country man usual. Bad! He turned to Leslie. “What this old boy needs is some strong-arm tactics, and this little lady is just the one to do it.”

“There you go,” said Jack Curl, doing a turn and bumping into Leslie. There occurred between them some kind of comic Christian jostle.

He was looking down at his short hospital smock. It was tied loosely in the back. A draft blew up under the flap. There was lettering on the front. He tried to read it.

“Where am I?” he asked.

“You’re at Duke, Poppy,” said Leslie and sure enough took him by a strong hand. “The Duke hospital.”

“Sit down, Tiger, before you fall down,” said Vance.

“I feel fine,” he said. He did. Except for a lightness in the head and a throbbing above one eye, he felt strong. He was hungry. “How long have I been here?”

“Twelve hours,” said Vance. “And I’m here to tell you one damn thing. Out of your head you’re a lot easier to get along with. You’re not a bad patient. You actually hold still when I tell you.”

“How did I get here from the bus?”

The three looked at each other and laughed.

Jack Curl did a turn and addressed the others, with Will Barrett as listener-in. “I don’t know what friend Will here told that bus driver, but that sucker turned that bus around and delivered him straight to Linwood Hospital.”

He looked at them. Their smiles and winks and jokes bore him along as skillfully as the swift hands on the X-ray table. “What am I doing here?”

Vance’s eyes gazed unfocused into his. “I thought there might be a little sumpn wrong with you.”

“Was there?”

“Not what I was afraid of. Actually I was right all along. It looked to me like you were having little petty-mall seizures, but when you took to falling down and acting even meaner than usual, I was afraid it might be something more serious. As it is, they even got a pill for what ails you. You won’t even have to stay in a hospital. A convalescent home for a spell is all you need, long enough for me to get you regulated. Let’s go back to the mountain, boy. At least I know now what was causing your slice. What a relief. I thought for a while your golf game was shot.”

“Poppy,” said Leslie, coming close and straightening his smock, giving it firm tugs and pats like a mother. “Vance and Dr. Ellis want to have a little powwow with you. Jack and I will be waiting in the hall. When the scientists get through with you, we want a piece of you. Jack, Vance, and I have cooked up something special for the four of us. But that can wait.”

Jack Curl took his hand too and squeezed it with both of his in a special way like a fraternity grip. Jack seemed more English than before. His hair flew off unbrushed to one side. He didn’t use deodorant.

They went into another room. Dr. Ellis was standing there, doing nothing, not smiling, not frowning.

When the door closed, Vance turned on the light of a shadow box, another box, then another. There was the galaxy again, not swimming in deep space now but its poor pale image, an X-ray. Next to it a pelvis connected legbones to backbone as simply and comically as a Halloween skeleton. Next, a bigger woman-size pelvis had something new cradled in its womb, a puddle of white. What was hatching here?

The two doctors lined up alongside him as if he were a colleague, a man among men. The women and priests were gone and they could talk.