Walker Percy - The Moviegoer

“On the other hand, if you sit back here and take a little carcass out of the garbage can, a specimen which has been used and discarded, there remains something left over, a clue?”

“Yes, but let’s go.”

“You’re a cold one, dear.”

“As cold as you?”

“Colder. Cold as the grave.” She walks about tearing shreds of flesh from her thumb. I say nothing. It would take very little to set her off on an attack on me, one of her “frank” appraisals. “It is possible, you know, that you are overlooking something, the most obvious thing of all. And you would not know it if you fell over it.”

“What?”

She will not tell me. Instead, in the streetcar, she becomes gay and affectionate toward me. She locks her arms around my waist and gives me a kiss on the mouth and watches me with brown eyes gone to discs.

IT IS TWO O’CLOCK before I get back to Gentilly. Yet sometime before dawn I awake with a violent start and for the rest of the night lie dozing yet wakeful and watchful. I have not slept soundly for many years. Not since the war when I was knocked out for two days have I really lost consciousness as a child loses consciousness in sleep and wakes to a new world not even remembering when he went to bed. I always know where I am and what time it is. Whenever I feel myself sinking toward a deep sleep, something always recalls me: “Not so fast now. Suppose you should go to sleep and it should happen. What then?” What is this that is going to happen? Clearly nothing. Yet there I lie, wakeful and watchful as a sentry, ears tuned to the slightest noise. I can even hear old Rosebud turning round and round in the azalea bushes before settling down.

At dawn I dress and slip out so quietly that the dogs do not stir. I walk toward the lake. It is almost a summer night. Heavy warm air has pushed up from the Gulf, but the earth has memories of winter and lies cold and sopping wet from dew.

It is good to walk in the suburbs at this hour. No one ever uses the sidewalks anyhow and now there are not even children on tricycles and miniature tractors. The concrete is virginal, as grainy as the day it was poured; weeds sprout in the cracks.

The closer you get to the lake, the more expensive the houses are. Already the bungalows and duplexes and tiny ranch houses are behind me. Here are the fifty and sixty thousand dollar homes, fairly big moderns with dagger plants and Australian pines planted in brick boxes, and reproductions of French provincial and Louisiana colonials. The swimming pools steam like sleeping geysers. These houses look handsome in the sunlight; they please me with their pretty colors, their perfect lawns and their clean airy garages. But I have noticed that at this hour of dawn they are forlorn. A sadness settles over them like a fog from the lake.

My father used to suffer from insomnia. One of my few recollections of him is his nighttime prowling. In those days it was thought that sleeping porches were healthful, so my father stuck one onto the house, a screen box with canvas blinds that pulled up from below. Here Scott and I slept on even the coldest nights. My father had trouble sleeping and moved out with us. He tossed like a wounded animal, or slept fitfully, his breath whistling musically through the stiff hairs of his nose — and went back inside before morning, leaving his bed tortured and sour, a smell which I believed to be caused by a nasal ailment known then as “catarrh.” The porch did not work for him and he bought a Saskatchewan sleeping bag from Abercrombie and Fitch and moved out into the rose garden. Just at this hour of dawn I would be awakened by a terrible sound: my father crashing through the screen door, sleeping bag under his arm, his eyes crisscrossed by fatigue and by the sadness of these glimmering dawns. My mother, without meaning to, put a quietus on his hopes of sleep even more effectively than this forlorn hour. She had a way of summing up his doings in a phrase that took the heart out of him. He dreamed, I know, of a place of quiet breathing and a deep sleep under the stars and next to the sweet earth. She agreed. “Honey, I’m all for it. I think we all ought to get back to nature and I’d be right with you, Honey, if it wasn’t for the chiggers. I’m chigger bait.” She made him out to be another Edgar Kennedy (who was making shorts then) thrashing around in the bushes with his newfangled camping equipment. To her it was better to make a joke of it than be defeated by these chilly dawns. But after that nothing more was said about getting back to nature.

He made a mistake. He was trying to sleep. He thought he had to sleep a certain number of hours every night, breathe fresh air, eat a certain number of calories, evacuate his bowels regularly and have a stimulating hobby (it was the nineteen thirties and everybody believed in science and talked about “ductless glands”). I do not try to sleep. And I could not tell you the last time my bowels moved; sometimes they do not move for a week but I have no interest in such matters. As for hobbies, people with stimulating hobbies suffer from the most noxious of despairs since they are tranquillized in their despair. I muse along as quietly as a ghost. Instead of trying to sleep I try to fathom the mystery of this suburb at dawn. Why do these splendid houses look so defeated at this hour of the day? Other houses, say a ’dobe house in New Mexico or an old frame house in Feliciana, look much the same day or night. But these new houses look haunted. Even the churches out here look haunted. What spirit takes possession of them? My poor father. I can see him, blundering through the patio furniture, the Junior Jets and the Lone Ranger pup tents, dragging his Saskatchewan sleeping bag like the corpse of his dead hope.

When I return, the sun is warm on my back. I stretch out in a snug little cul de sac between the garage and the house, under the insolent eye of Rosebud, and doze till nine o’clock when the market opens.

AWAKENED BY ROSEBUD’S growling. It is the postman. Rosebud feels my eye on him, cocks an eyebrow around to see me and is discomfited to meet my eye; he looks away, pretends to settle his mouth, but his lip is dry and snags high on a tooth. Now he is actively embarrassed.

School children across the street line up in ragged platoons before the storklike nuns, the girls in little blue bell-shaped skirts and suspenders, the boys a bit dreary in their khaki. In they march, under the schematic dove. The morning sunlight winks on the polished metal of ocean wave and the jungle gym. How shiny and strong and well-set are the steel pipes, polished to silver by thousands of little blue-skirted and khaki-clad butts.

The postman has a letter from Harold Graebner in Chicago. It is a note and a birth announcement. Harold asks me to be godfather to his new baby. The enclosed card announces the birth in the following way:

1 C.O.D. PACKAGE

SHIPPING WEIGHT: 7 LB. 4 oz.

HANDLE WITH TENDER LOVING CARE, ETC.

Harold Graebner probably saved my life in the Orient and for this reason he loves me. When I get a letter, it is almost certain to be from Harold Graebner. I no longer write or receive letters, except Harold’s. When I was in the army I wrote long, sensitive and articulate letters to my aunt, giving my impressions of countries and peoples. I wrote such things as

Japan is lovely this time of year. How strange to think of going into combat! Not so much fear — since my chances are very good — as wonder, wonder that everything should be so full of expectancy, every tick of the watch, every rhododendron blossom. Tolstoy and St Exupery were right about war, etc.

A regular young Rupert Brooke was I, “—full of expectancy.” Oh the crap that lies lurking in the English soul. Somewhere it, the English soul, received an injection of romanticism which nearly killed it. That’s what killed my father, English romanticism, that and 1930 science. A line for my notebook: