Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World

by Walker Percy

  “Doctor,” says Mr. Ives, hunkering down in his chair, monkey eyes glittering, “how would you like it if during the most critical time of your experiments with the Skinner box that won you the Nobel Prize, you had been pestered without letup by a bunch of chickenshit Ohioans? Let’s play shuffleboard, let’s play granddaddy golf, Guys and Gals à go-go. Let’s jump in our Airstream trailers and drive two hundred miles to Key West to meet more Ohioans and once we get there talk about—our Airstream trailers? Those fellows wouldn’t let me alone.”

  “Is it fair to compare the work of science to the well-deserved recreational activities of retired people?”

  “Sir, are you implying that what retired people do must necessarily be something less than the work of scientists? I mean is there any reason why a retired person should not go on his own way and refuse to be importuned by a bunch of chickenshit Ohioans?”

  “Excuse me.” It is Stryker, rising slowly behind the Director. “I am not a chauvinistic man. But as a graduate of Western Reserve University and a native of Toledo, I must protest the repeated references to natives of the Buck-Eye state as a ‘bunch of chickenshit Ohioans.’”

  “No offense, sir,” says Mr. Ives, waving him off. “I’ve known some splendid Ohioans, But you get a bunch of retired Ohioans together in Florida—you know, they get together on the west coast to get away from the Jews in Miami. But I’ll tell you the damn truth, to me it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other.”

  “Just a minute,” says Max, rising to a stoop. “I see no reason for the ethnics—”

  “Where are you from?” Stryker asks Mr. Ives.

  “Originally? Tennessee.”

  Stryker turns to Max. “I mean Jesus Christ, Tennessee.”

  “Yeah, but that’s not the point, Ken,” says Max, still aggrieved. “I still see no reason for the ethnic reference.”

  “But you have no objection to his referring to us as a bunch of chickenshit Ohioans?”

  “You’re missing my point.”

  “Let me quote you a figure!” cries Mr. Ives to Stryker, warming to it. “Did you know that there are three thousand and fifty-one TV and radio announcers in the South, of which twenty-two hundred are from Ohio, and that every last one of these twenty-two hundred says ‘the difference between he and I’? In twenty years we’ll all be talking like that.”

  But Max and Stryker, still arguing, pay no attention.

  The students are both engrossed and discomfited. They chew their lips, pick their noses, fiddle with pencils, glance now at me, now at Mr. Ives. Who can tell them who’s right? Students are a shaky dogmatic lot. And the “freer” they are, the more dogmatic. At heart they’re totalitarians: they want either total dogmatic freedom or total dogmatic unfreedom, and the one thing that makes them unhappy is something in between.

  Art Immelmann looks restive too. He fidgets around on the top step, hands in pockets hiking the skirts of his “bi-swing” jacket, and won’t meet my eye. Now what the devil is he doing? He has removed one of the new lapsometers from the carton and is showing it to a student.

  The doctors are unhappy too. The behaviorists, I know, don’t like Mr. Ives dabbling in science. The visiting proctologists don’t like anything they see. Colley Wilkes reverts to an old Alabama posture, hunched forward, hands clasped across wide-apart knees, pants hitched up black fuzzy shins. He clucks and shakes his head. “Man, what is all this?” I imagine him saying.

  Moira has emerged from the shadows and taken charge of Mr. Ives’s chair from Winnie Gunn, who is out of sight in the tunnel. Moira smiles at met.

  Buddy Brown is trying to pick up the pieces of his anger but he’s still out of it He can’t make out what happened to him.

  Ellen Oglethorpe is torn between her disapproval of The Pit and what seems to be my triumph. But is it a triumph? She sits disgruntled, fingers shoved up into her cheek, shooting warm mothering glances at me, stern Calvinistic glances at the rowdy students.

  Lola Rhoades is not paying strict attention. She moves to her own music, lips parted, hissing Brahms. Brahms, old Brahms! We’ll sing with you yet of a summer night.

  Lola fills every inch of her seat with her splendid self, her arms use both arm rests, her noble knees press against the seat in front.

  “Mr. Ives, a final question.”

  The Director is speaking.

  “Why have you neither walked a step nor uttered a word during the past month?”

  Mr. Ives scratches his head and squints up the slope. “Well sir, I’ll tell you.” He lays on the cracker style a bit much to suit me. “There is only one kind of response to those who would control your responses by throwing you in a Skinner box.”

  “And what would that be?” asks the Director sourly, knowing the answer.

  “To refuse to respond at all.”

  “I see.” The Director turns wearily to me. “Doctor, be good enough to give us your therapeutic recommendations and we’ll wind this up.”

  “Yes sir. May I have a word with the patient?”

  “By all means.”

  “Mr. Ives, what are your plans? I mean, if you were free to make plans.”

  “I intend to go home if I ever get out of this nuthouse.”

  “Where is home?”

  “Sherwood, Tennessee. It’s a village in a cove of the Cumberland Plateau. My farm is called Lost Cove.”

  “What are you going to do there?”

  “Write a book, look at the hills, live till I die.”

  The students avert their eyes.

  The Director looks at his watch. “Dr. More?”

  “I recommend that Mr. Ives, instead of being sent to the Separation Center in Georgia, be released immediately and furnished with transportation to Sherwood, Tennessee.”

  “To Tennessee!” cries a student.

  “To Tennessee! To Tennessee!” chime in both right-benchers and left-benchers.

  Applause breaks out I take some comfort in it even though students are a bad lot fickle as whores, and no professor should take pleasure in their approval.

  “Hold it!” cries Buddy Brown, who has pulled himself together. He strides back and forth, sailing his white coat “This may be a good show-boating, but it’s sorry damn science. Dr. More has proved he’s a good hypnotist, but as for his metaphysical machine—”

  “To Tennessee!” cry the students.

  Art is busy as a bee.

  Some of the students, I notice, have acquired lapsometers from Art, which they wear about their necks like cameras and aim and focus at each other. Now Art Immelmann bounds up the aisle for a fresh supply. Feverishly he hands them out, squatting beside a student to explain the settings and point out skull topography. A dark circle of sweat spreads under his armpit.

  A student near the top turns to the girl next to him, lifts her ponytail and places the MOQUOL muzzle on her occiput.

  “Wait! No!” I yell at the top of my lungs and go bounding up the steps and past the startled Director. “No, Art!”

  But Art can’t or won’t hear. Lapsometers are stacked up his arm like a black marketeer wearing a dozen wrist-watches.

  Dr. Helga Heine aims a lapsometer at Stryker’s mid-frontal region.

  “Wait, Helga!” I cry. “That thing is not a toy! It’s not a prop for The Pit! It’s for real! No, Helga!”

  “But, liebchen, all we’re doing is what you yourself suggested,” says Helga as Stryker points his lapsometer at the region of her interpersonal sulcus.

  “Yes, but my God, what’s the setting? Let me see. Oh Lord, he’s set the ionization at plus ten!”

  Everywhere lapsometers are buzzing like a swarm of bees. Students and doctors and nurses either duck their heads or buzz away at their neighbors’ heads with their new hair-dryers.

  “STOP I BEG OF YOU!” I yell at the top of my voice.

  But nobody pays attention except the Director, who plucks at my sleeve.

  “Isn’t this all part of the hijinks, Doctor, heh heh. Just what is it you fea
r?” he asks and cups his ear to hear me in the uproar.

  “Goddamn sir,” I yell into the hairy old ear. “As I told you earlier, this device is not a toy. It could produce the most serious psychic disturbances.”

  “Such as?”

  “If it were focused over certain frontal areas or the region of the pineal body, which is the seat of selfhood, it could lead to severe angelism, abstraction of the self from itself, and what I call the Lucifer syndrome: that is, envy of the incarnate condition and a resulting caricature of the bodily appetites.”

  “Eh? What’s that? Angelism? Pineal body? Seat of the self? Lucifer? Oh, I get it. Heh heh heh. Very good. Good show, Doctor. But really, I’m afraid The Pit is getting away from us.”

  “Sir, you don’t understand. What I meant—” But Helga jostles me.

  She has unwound her hair and let it down like Brunhilde. Placing her hand on her breast, she tells Stryker: “Everything is spirit. Alles ist Geist.”

  “Right.” Stryker nods and puts his hand on her other breast.

  “Hold it,” I tell Stryker and turn to the Director. “Sir, this is not what it appears.”

  A powerful grip, catching my arm, yanks me erect. I find myself standing between the two proctologists, Dusty Rhoades and Dr. Walter Bung. Have they—? Yes, Dr. Bung carries a lapsometer slung from his shoulder.

  Yet they seem in the best of humors. They nod and wink at each other, claim me as an ally, and give every appearance of approval.

  “Did you ever in your life,” says Dr. Walter Bung, holding us close, “see this many commonists, atheists, hebes, and fags under one roof?”

  “Excuse me, Dr. Bung,” I say, unlimbering my lapsometer, “but the fact is that neither they nor you are quite yourselves.”

  “How’s that, son?”

  “I’ll warrant you your red nucleus is at this moment abnormally active. May I take a reading?”

  “What the hell you talking about boy, my red—”

  “The reason you’re both so upset is this,” I tell them both, but at that moment someone, perhaps one of them, pushes me violently and I stumble backward into the pit, nearly cracking my skull.

  Moira is standing transfixed behind Mr. Ives’s chair.

  “Let’s go to Howard Johnson’s,” she whispers, leaning over me as I struggle to get up.

  “Get the patient out of here,” I tell her.

  Moira hesitates, opens and closes her mouth. Mr. Ives rises and takes her arm.

  “I’ll take care of her, Doctor.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Where shall I take her?”

  “Are we going to Howard Johnson’s?” Moira asks, coming close.

  “Yes.”

  “Then I’ll go to my room first.”

  “I’ll take her to her room,” Mr. Ives assures me.

  “Thank you.”

  They disappear into the tunnel, Mr. Ives escorting Moira like the Tennessee gentleman that he is.

  Colley Wilkes is trying to reach his wife, Fran, by detouring through the pit. But Buddy Brown stands in his way.

  “Who you shoving?” asks Buddy.

  “Out of my way.”

  “If there is anything I can’t stand, it’s a smart-mouth coon.”

  Buddy picked the wrong man. For Colley is no ordinary Negro, smart-mouthed or not, but a super-Negro who besides speaking five languages and being an electronic wizard, also holds the Black Belt in karate.

  Colley pokes his hand, fingers held stiff as a plank, straight into Buddy’s throat. Buddy sits down in Mr. Ives’s wheelchair and tries to breathe.

  I must see to Ellen and Lola.

  Halfway up the aisle two students are fighting over a girl. I recognize J.T. Thigpen. The girl is Gloria, by no means a beauty, still dressed in her soiled lab coat, her brass-colored hair sprung out in a circle like a monstrance. The second student is a Knothead named Trasker Gluck. Seeing Trasker and Gloria together, I suddenly realize they are brother and sister.

  Trasker and J.T. have each other elbow around neck, grunting and cursing, the way boys fight.

  “Hold it, fellows.” I try to stop them.

  “You stay away from my sister, you son of a bitch,” says Trasker, who is a clean-living athletic Baptist type like pole-vaulter Bob Richards.

  “It’s a meaningless relationship and nothing for you to take exception to,” grunts J.T. “We get fifty bucks for a successful performance. Let me go, I need the money. Let me go! I feel if we can get over to Love right away we can make it for sure. Let me go! There is nothing between us. Ask your sister.”

  “Why you son of a bitch, that makes it worse,” says Trasker, slamming J.T. squarely on the nose with his big fist.

  “Do something, Dr. More!” pleads Gloria. “I love him!”

  “Who?”

  “J.T.!”

  “Excuse me,” I say, spying Ellen and Art Immelmann in the next aisle.

  Ted ’n Tanya are lying under the seats. I almost step on Ted’s back.

  “Tom, you were wonderful,” says Tanya over Ted’s shoulder.

  “Thank you.”

  “Your invention works! We can love. We are loving!”

  “Good. Pardon.” I step over them.

  “All we feared was fear itself.”

  “I know.”

  “Stay with us! Share our joy!”

  “I can’t just now. Pardon.”

  Warm arms encircle my waist I find myself sitting in Lola’s lap. “Hi, Sugah!”

  “Hi, Lola.”

  “My, you’re a big fine boy!” She gives me a hug.

  Reaching back, I give her a hug. She warms my entire back from shoulders to calves.

  “Do you love Lola?”

  “Yes, I do.” I do.

  “Lola’s got you.”

  “She sure has.”

  “When you coming to see Lola?”

  “Tomorrow. No, this evening.”

  “Lola will make you some gin fizzes and we’ll go walking out in the moonlight.”

  “Absolutely. But you better go home now. I don’t want you to get hurt.”

  “O.K., Sugah,” says Lola, giving me a final tremendous squeeze.

  Dusty seizes my shoulder in his huge hand, working the bones around like dice.

  His face looms close, his breath reeks like a lion’s.

  “You listen here, Doctor.”

  “Yes, Dusty?”

  “You mess with my daughter one more time without wedding bells and you done messed for the last time. You read me?”

  “Yes.”

  “You all right, boy,” says Dusty and, taking Dr. Walter Bung in one arm and me in the other, draws the three of us close.

  Ellen is shouting angrily at Art Immelmann, who surveys the pit, swinging his arms idly and whistling loudly and accurately Nola, the piano theme of Vincent Lopez, a band leader in the Middle Auto Age.

  I snatch Ellen away.

  “Stay away from him.”

  “Chief, he got your lapsometers!” Ellen is sobbing with rage.

  “I know.”

  “What are we going to do?” asks Ellen, wringing her hands. “Just look.”

  Below us the pit writhes like a den of vipers. Now and then an arm is raised, fist clenched, to fall in a blow. Bare legs are upended.

  “Listen.” I whisper in Ellen’s ear. “While I am talking to Art, take the rest of the lapsometers in the carton and put them in your car. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “O.K., Chief. But are you leaving?”

  “I have to collect all the loose ones.”

  “I’m not leaving without you!”

  “You son of a bitch,” I tell Art. “What did you pull this stunt for?”

  “I am not a son of a bitch,” says Art, looking puzzled. “Take it easy, Doc.” As usual he has no sense of distance, comes too close, and blows Sen-Sen in my face.

  “I told you specifically to leave my lapsometers alone.”

  “How are we going to run a pilot on your ha
rdware without using your hardware?”

  “Pilot! Is this what you call a pilot?”

  “Doc, we can’t go national until we test the interactions in a pilot. That’s boilerplate, Doc.”

  “Boilerplate my ass. Goddamn it don’t you know the dangers of what you’re doing? We’re sitting on a dome of Heavy Salt, the President is coming tomorrow, and what do you do? Turn loose my lapsometers cranked up to ten plus.”

  “Doc, does this look political to you?” He nods at the lovers and fist-fighters. “This is not political. It is a test of your hypotheses about vagal rage and abstract lust as you of all people should know. And as for the dangers of a chain reaction, there’s no Heavy Salt within three miles of here.”

  “We’re through, Art. I’m canceling the contract.”

  “You’ll be right as rain tomorrow, Doc. Just remember: music, love, and the dream of summer.”

  Max Gottlieb and Ellen hold me tight, one at each elbow.

  “Let’s go home, fella,” says Max. “You’ve been great.”

  “Wait a minute. I’m needed here, Max.”

  “He’s right, Chief. You’re worn out.”

  “I’m not leaving until I collect all the lapsometers.”

  “I’ll get them for you,” says Max. “You go home and get a good night’s sleep. Or better still, go back to A-4.”

  “Damn it, Max, don’t you realize what’s happening?”

  “I’m afraid I do. Your device has triggered a mass hysteria. Like the St. Vitus’s dance in the Middle Ages. These are strange times.”

  “Listen to me, Max. Number one, my lapsometer works. You saw it. Number two, it has fallen into the wrong hands. Number three, the effect here is mainly erotic but it could just as easily have been political. Number four, the President and Vice-President will be in this area tomorrow. Number five, there are plans to kidnap you and hold you prisoner in the Honey Island wilderness. Number six, we’re sitting on the biggest Heavy Salt dome in North America.”

  “Oh boy,” says Max to Ellen.

  Ellen frowns. She is loyal to me.

  “I believe you, Chief. But if what you say is true, you’re going to need all your strength tomorrow.”

  “That’s true. But I feel fine right now.” How lovely you are, Ellen. Perspiration glitters like diamonds in the down of her short upper lip.