Last Gentleman and The Second Coming

by Walker Percy

  I may be a member of the second class, the unbelievers, and no doubt an even greater asshole than they since they generally perform good works, help niggers, pore whites, etc., but at least I’m not crazy.

  Unlike them I demand an explanation and at last have contrived a way of determining either what it is or that there is none.

  For some time I had believed that the Jews were a sign, a clue to the mystery, a telltale bent twig, a blazed sapling in an otherwise riotous senseless jungle.

  But now it appears the Jews may have not left North Carolina after all, and in fact are making porno flicks and building condos and villas in Highlands, enjoying the leaves, and in general behaving like everyone else. There goes the last sign.

  Granted then that the situation is unacceptable, that both parties, the believers and unbelievers, are not only equally repulsive but also equally unpersuasive, what is one to do?

  To the best of my knowledge, only one man in history ever made a practical proposal, that is, a proposal of which the rare sane unbeliever could at least make a modicum of sense. That was the famous wager of Pascal, who was the last French intellectual who was not insane. Though it has never been taken seriously, it does after all make sense. One makes the bet that God exists, though one doesn’t know for sure. One could just as well bet that he does not exist. But it is better to bet that he does because if he does, the bettor wins and picks up all the marbles. If God does not exist, the bettor has lost nothing. He has everything to win and nothing to lose. If he bets against God, he has everything to lose and nothing to win.

  But it is after all ludicrous to reduce the question to a crapshoot at Vegas.

  My father knew all about this, about believers and unbelievers and Pascal’s bettor. What he said was I’m having no part of any of you. Excuse me but I won’t have it. Good day, gentlemen.

  That’s one way. The trouble with Pascal’s wager is its frivolity.

  The trouble with my father’s exit is that it yields no answers. It doesn’t even ask a question.

  I’ve discovered a better way, a more scientific method, in fact an experiment. If I’m going to spatter my brains around the Great Smokies, it will happen because my question was not answered, not because it wasn’t asked. And I will not pull the trigger. And my beneficiary will be assured of receiving his million from Prudential.

  There is an extra pleasure in killing two birds with one stone: solving the so-called mystery of life and beating the Rock at the same time.

  My project is the first scientific experiment in history to settle once and for all the question of God’s existence. As things presently stand, there may be signs of his existence but they point both ways and are therefore ambiguous and so prove nothing. For example, the wonders of the universe do not convince those most conversant with the wonders, the scientists themselves. Whether or not this testifies to the stupidity of scientists or to God’s success at concealing himself doesn’t matter.

  The peculiar history of the Jews may be a sign but no one sees it as such except possibly the Jews themselves. But if the Jews have stayed in North Carolina (I must verify this) and not returned to Israel, their staying is no more a sign than the blacks leaving for the North or the blacks returning to the South.

  But what if one should devise a situation in which one’s death would occur if and only if God did not manifest himself, did not give a sign clearly and unambiguously, once and for all?

  Would not the outcome of such an experiment be a clear yes or a clear no, with no maybes?

  Unless I am mistaken, I’ve hit on the perfect, the definitive experiment—as definitive as the famous Michelson-Morley experiment which asked a question about the nature of space which could only be answered by a yes or a no, no maybes allowed.

  We have had five thousand years of maybes and that is enough.

  Can you discover a single flaw in this logic?

  I’ve got him!

  No more tricks!

  No more deus absconditus!

  Come out, come out, wherever you are, the game’s over.

  No, I do not mean to joke. What I am doing is asking God with the utmost respect to break his silence.

  No, not asking. Requiring.

  Didn’t Jacob, a Jew, require an answer of God by hanging on to him, rassling him until God got fed up with this Jew (what have I done to have picked out such a nagging stiff-necked people?) and gave him what he wanted. How odd of God to choose the Jews.

  God no longer makes appearances as a rassler, but I have my own way of getting at him.

  I shall do this by waiting him out.

  My experiment is simply this: I shall go to a desert place and wait for God to give a sign. If no sign is forthcoming I shall die. But people will know why I died: because there is no sign. The cause of my death will be either his nonexistence or his refusal to manifest himself, which comes to the same thing as far as we are concerned. Only you know the nature of the experiment. I give you permission to publish the results in a scientific journal of your choice.

  Will it not be a relief to all of mankind to have this dreary question settled once and for all, proved or disproved? Imagine! We shall no longer have to listen to preachers haranguing unbelievers about God’s existence, and professors haranguing people about God’s nonexistence and mythic structures?

  For obvious reasons I cannot tell you where I am going to conduct this experiment. For if I did and the result was negative, you might spill the beans, mount a search, which would of course jeopardize the beneficiary’s claim to the insurance.

  Who is the beneficiary?

  You are the beneficiary.

  Does that surprise you?

  Then it shall happen so: either you shall hear from me within three weeks or you shall not. If you do not hear, then I ask that you carry out the mission, make the trip to North Carolina, mail the soiled envelope at the Linwood post office.

  If you do hear from me, I will at that time tell you the nature of the affirmative result of my experiment, that is, the nature of the sign I have received.

  The reason I make you beneficiary is twofold. One, as you may have surmised, is to increase the incentive for your visit to North Carolina, whether you think I am crazy or not. For if the enclosed letter does not reach Lewis Peckham, my body will never be found and your insurance payment will be delayed seven years.

  The other reason is that even if the answer to my little experiment is no, I wish you to continue the experiment and confirm it. Though I cannot enforce my request, I nevertheless make it and hope that you will continue the investigation, particularly since you will have the financial means of doing so and I expect you will also be interested.

  To be specific: I wish you to monitor the demographic movement of Jews not only from North Carolina but from other states and other countries as well, to take note of any extraordinary changes which go contrary to established demographic patterns—such as the emigration of blacks from the South (and their present return). If, for example, there has occurred or should occur a massive exodus of Jews from the U.S. to Israel, I request that you establish an observation post in the village of Megiddo in the narrow waist of Israel (the site, as you may know, of ancient Armageddon), where a foe from the east would logically attempt to cut Israel in two. From this point you can monitor any unusual events in the Arab countries to the east, particularly the emergence of a leader of extraordinary abilities—another putative sign of the last days.

  I can’t see any reason why you can’t just as easily live in the Israeli desert as the New Mexican.

  Instead of watching TV docudramas, why not a ringside seat for the real thing?

  I shall leave it to your best judgment how to evaluate such events and what action, if any, to take, e.g., whether to inform the media what is afoot. Though I am no great lover of mankind, I believe that people have the right to whatever information may help them to reach the right decision. If you had proof that Southern California would slide into the ocean next Tu
esday, would you not at least put a notice in the L.A. Times?

  Finally, I trust that none of these unusual requests will be necessary, not the delivery of the letter to North Carolina, not your removal to Megiddo, that instead you will receive a telephone call from me. A few days will tell the story.

  Again: please destroy this letter after reading and digesting it.

  Sincerely yours,

  Will B. Barrett

  Having finished this outlandish document, Will Barrett rose from his desk and paced up and down, hands deep in pockets, frowning, lips pursed, for all the world as if he were back in his Wall Street office rehearsing an argument before a probate judge. But what a difference! What would Dr. Sutter Vaught make of this letter? Imagine Sutter in Albuquerque, picking up his mail, turning on Cronkite, flopping down in his recliner after a day’s work with paraplegics in the V.A. hospital, opening his beer, then opening a letter which proposed first a trip by plane and bus to North Carolina (he had not owned a car since his Edsel gave out), then a permanent removal to a flea-bitten village in Israel—to say nothing of the references to God’s existence or nonexistence, Armageddon, and the appearance of the Antichrist during the Last Days!

  Leaving aside what any psychiatrist—or any sensible person—would think of Barrett’s preoccupation with God, Jews, Armageddon, and suchlike, one might nevertheless wonder how in fact Sutter would respond to this strange request: to journey to North Carolina and mail a soiled letter in the Linwood post office. The fact is that Will Barrett, crazy or not, might well have made a shrewd choice of a confidant. Even if Dr. Sutter Vaught thought he was as mad as a hatter, he would nevertheless very likely carry out the assignment, whether as a matter of curiosity and the simple oddness of it, or from a kind of quirky sense of obligation, or as an investment in the interesting role of beneficiary of a million-dollar life-insurance policy. Can a madman change his beneficiary? Who can say?

  At any rate, Will Barrett suddenly bethought himself and, seating himself again at the desk, took up pen and added a postscript.

  P.S. I wish there was a way to tell my daughter Leslie goodbye but there is not. Perhaps you will do it for me if it is necessary. If the result of the experiment is positive, then she and I will have found common ground. I will acknowledge her Lord. If not, and you do not hear from me, I ask you to choose a time at your convenience and convey this message to her: that even though she never seemed to need me, I am sorry I was such a rotten father. No doubt the fact that she never needed me sprang from her perception of my unavailability, coldness, shutoffness. These awful distances within a family—was it always so? But I’ve always been suspicious of the word “love,” what with its gross abuse and overuse. There is no cheaper word. I can’t say tell her I “love” her, because I don’t really know what “love” means except as it applies to one’s feeling for children—and then it may only mean one’s sense of responsibility for their terrible vulnerability, which they never asked for. One loves children, especially one’s own, because there they are, through no doing of their own, born into the same low farce you and I are living but not knowing it yet, being in fact as happy as doodlebugs and you and I would do anything to keep them so. Wouldn’t we? Is that love? Perhaps my experiment will shed some light that will be helpful to them later. But there is nothing I can say to her now. She is a Christian and the angriest person I know. When she was five years old and we were living in New York, she got hit by a car in Central Park. I thought she was going to die. She was in great pain. When she lay in her hospital bed she looked up at me and asked me, “Why?” “Why what?” I said, but I knew what she meant. I opened my mouth to say something, but there was nothing to say except that I didn’t know why and that I would gladly have given my life to stop her from hurting, but she didn’t want to hear that. I gnawed my arm at the prospect of her suffering. Is that love? Now when she finishes a Pentecostal service, she loves everybody with a swooning melting tearful smiling love which scares hell out of me. Is that love? Count me out.

  Leslie will inherit a great deal of money. She hasn’t needed me since she went to the Brearley School in New York. (Or is it that I imagined that I didn’t need her?) But if my little experiment works out, I hope to find common ground with her, perhaps enough to share with her in her “love-and-faith community”—Jesus, why does this expression give me the creeps?

  If not, tell her in your own words, that I love—tell her.

  Moving quickly now, he folded the pages and inserted them with the letter to Lewis Peckham into the larger envelope, which he carefully sealed.

  Opening a wall safe, he removed an insurance policy, read it, took down his old Harvard hornbook on Wills & Testaments, and wrote a letter to the Prudential Insurance Company requesting a change in beneficiary. He directed them to send the new policy to Dr. Sutter Vaught of Albuquerque, New Mexico.

  So it was that Will Barrett went mad. His peculiar delusion and the strange pass it brought him to would be comical if it were not so perilous. This unfortunate man, long subject to “spells,” “petty-mall” trances, and such minor disorders, had now gone properly crazy. This is how crazy he was. He had become convinced that the Last Days were at hand, that the world had fallen into the hands of the only species which knew how to destroy itself along with all other living creatures on earth, that whenever in history this species had invented a weapon, it had forthwith used it; that it was characteristic of this species that, through a perversity or an upsidedownness peculiar to it, while professing a love of peace and freedom and life, secretly it loved war and thralldom and death and loved them to a degree that it, the species, in these last days behaved like creatures possessed by demons; that the end would come by fire, a fire such as had not been seen in all of history until this century of demons, a fire which would consume the earth. The very persons who spoke most about “people’s democracy” or “the freedom and sacredness of the individual” were most likely, he was convinced, to be possessed by demons.

  Madness! Madness! Madness! Yet such was the nature of Will Barrett’s peculiar delusion when he left his comfortable home atop a pleasant Carolina mountain and set forth on the strangest adventure of his life, descended into Lost Cove cave looking for proof of the existence of God and a sign of the apocalypse like some crackpot preacher in California.

  VI

  ALLISON SQUATTED IN the sunlight on the creeper, A coil of rope slung over each shoulder, a double metal block in one hand, single in the other, which she hefted absently as she gazed up at the stove.

  It was getting cold. A cirrus feather of ice crystals stood in six miles high from Canada. During the day she and the dog followed the sun to keep warm. At night she curled up in the NATO sleeping bag. How to heat the greenhouse? It was either move the stove or buy a new Peerless kerosene heater. But it offended her sense of thrift and propriety to waste the stove. And she didn’t want to stink up the greenhouse. There was plenty of wood. Pine cones and dead chestnut from the forest and all manner of charred timber from the ruin. So the stove was the thing. Anyhow, she was a hoister, a mistress of mechanical advantage. And here was something to hoist. If she could hoist this monster of a Grand Crown stove, she could do anything in life.

  But first count your money. Make your list, assemble your words, then visit the hardware store for blocks and tackle, wrenches, WD-40, plastic pipe and sleeves. Next, Washau Motors for creepers (she would need four, she figured, one for each foot of the Grand Crown).

  It was only after she left the hardware store, coils of rope slung over each shoulder, plastic pipe tied in a surprisingly light bundle, backpack heavy with blocks, pulleys, hooks, and wrenches—she had all the words and got the things without pointing—and walked in the service entrance of Washau Motors, that she realized she had forgotten the most important word of all—no, not forgotten his name, had never had his name, never even thought of him as having a name. She had two names though, creeper and Jerry the parts man.

  A mechanic was moving on a c
reeper under a car. It was only when he winked at her that she realized she had been watching him or rather watching the action of the creeper with its queer swiveling wheels.

  She frowned and turned away, fell back to reconnoiter. How to get four creepers without the name of the creeper owner? It took a plan. She had one. She had a name, but she needed another. Next to a field of used cars she spied a husky young black man washing a Ford Galaxy on a rack. He wore a Go Wolves sweatshirt. She knew about the Wolves. She came up alongside him. He seemed pleasant and even deferred to her with a small courtesy, turning ever so slightly toward her as if he meant to share with her his hosing down the Galaxy.

  “Do you play with the Wolves?”

  “Yeah,” he said, frowning. She perceived that he had second thoughts about his courtesy and decided to make up for it.

  “Offense?”

  He looked at the sky. “Cornerback.”

  “Are you going to win State?”

  “You better believe it.”

  “I had better?”

  “What?” he said heavily.

  “Are you acting like somebody else?” she asked, eyeing him.

  “What?” he asked quickly.

  “Nothing. I hope you win.”

  “Why, thank you.”

  “What’s the man’s name here? I’m supposed to see him but I can’t remember his name.”

  “The man?” He almost looked at her and almost smiled, trying, she saw, to figure out whether she was talking as she might imagine he talked. “You mean the boss or the owner?”

  “The owner.”

  “Oh. Mister Barrett.” Did she imagine it or was there a certain affection in his voice? Or was it a smiling indulgence?

  “Right. John Barrett.”

  “No no. Will. Mister Will Barrett.”

  “Will Barrett.”