The Road to Wellville

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Her hands. The warm bulb of the apparatus. What was he doing? What was going on? “Eleanor,” he blurted. “My wife. Where’s Eleanor?”

  “Hush,” Irene whispered. “She’s fine. She’s on the second floor, room two-twelve, no doubt undergoing this very same procedure … to flush her system, relax her.”

  Will was stunned. “Then she, she won’t be staying here, with me?”

  The nurse’s voice caressed his ear, soothing, soft, as much a part of him as the secret voice that spoke inside his head. “Oh, no. The Chief keeps couples separate here. For therapeutic reasons, of course. Our patients need quiet, rest—any sort of sexual stimulation could be fatal.”

  Sexual stimulation. Why did those two words suddenly sound so momentous?

  “Relax,” she whispered, and all at once Will felt the hot fluid surprise of it, his insides flooding as if a dam had burst, as if all the tropical rivers of the world were suddenly flowing through him, irrigating him, flushing, cleansing, churning away at his deepest nooks and recesses in a tumultuous cathartic rush. It was the most mortifying and exquisite moment of his life.

  That night he slept like a baby.

  In the morning, after his wake-up enema, a sitz bath and a dry-friction massage administered by a mannish-looking nurse who was as mechanical as Irene Graves had been tender, Will, under his own power, hobbled down the corridor and took the elevator to the dining room for breakfast. When this second nurse—Nurse Bloethal—had produced the colonic apparatus, Will had protested. It had been disturbing enough to have the lovely and delicate Nurse Graves administer the treatment, but this woman—well, he felt it would be impossible. “But I just had one last night,” he said, a hint of nasality creeping into his voice as he took a defensive posture on the bed and self-consciously adjusted his cotton robe. Nurse Bloethal, fortyish, arms like hams, hams like sacks of grain, with a squarish face and a smile full of crooked teeth, burst out with a laugh. “You’ll forgive my saying so, Mr. Lightbody, but you’ve got a lot to learn.”

  She was referring, as Will would discover, to the Chief’s obsession with interior as well as exterior cleanliness. Dr. Kellogg, tidy son of a broom maker, not only believed in a diet rich in bulk and roughage to encourage the bowels to exonerate themselves, but he was a strict adherent to the five-enema-a-day regimen as well. The inspiration for this mode of treatment had struck him some years earlier during a visit to Africa. He’d had the leisure there to study a troop of apes living in a tumble of blanched rock and sere trees at an oasis outside of Oran. The doctor studied them for a week, sometimes up to sixteen hours a day, hoping to gain some insight into the hominoid diet from these gregarious and frugivorous primates. What he discovered, so obvious, really, and yet till this point so easily overlooked, was that the apes moved their bowels almost continuously. Practically every mouthful they took was accompanied by a complementary evacuation.

  Simple. Natural. The way it was meant to be. None of that tribe suffered from constipation, autointoxication, obesity, neurosis, hypo-hydrochloria or hysteria. But man did. Because man had civilized his bowel, house-trained it, as it were. Man could not, in the course of daily life, go about eliminating his wastes at will—society simply wouldn’t be able to function, and the mess … well, the Doctor felt, better not to think about the mess. At any rate, through his observation of the Oran apes, Dr. Kellogg hit upon one of his greatest discoveries: the need, the necessity, the imperative of assisting the bowel mechanically to undo the damage wrought upon it by civilization. Hence, five enemas a day, minimum. Hence, Will on the toilet and Nurse Bloethal with the already familiar apparatus.

  Will was met at the dining-room door by a motherly little woman with an enormous bosom and tiny recessed eyes so blue they looked artificial. She wore a prim white cap perched atop an explosion of hair the color of cornstarch. “Mr …?” she inquired, the Battle Creek Sanitarium smile frozen into her features.

  Tall, self-conscious, smarting from his recent encounter in the bathroom and broiling in the depths of his gut, Will gave her a curt glance. “Lightbody,” he said in his hollow booming tones. A few of the diners in the vast room before him looked up from their plates.

  “Yes, of course,” the woman returned, “I’ve got you right here on my list. ‘Lightbody, William Fitzroy.”’ She paused to squint up at him for reinforcement. Will nodded. “It says here that until your examination is completed, you’re to be put on a low-protein, laxative, nontoxic diet. But, oh, do forgive me”—and here she held out her hand—”I’m Mrs. Stover, the head dietician. I’ll be overseeing your diet during your stay with us, under the direction of your physician, of course. Now, if you’ll look out into the dining room a moment, you’ll see a number of girls in white caps like mine. Do you see them? There, there’s a girl, Marcella Johnson, she’s one of mine. If you need any help or advice in choosing your dishes scientifically, please just flag one of us down, won’t you?”

  Will took her hand, released it, and promised that he would. He made as if to move on, but Mrs. Stover lingered there in the entranceway, blocking Will’s path to the comestibles as other patients sauntered casually by her and were seated in that grand and quietly seething room. Will didn’t care much about eating—he couldn’t remember the last time he’d experienced hunger or when he’d last eaten anything that didn’t set his digestive tract aflame—but he wasn’t particularly keen on standing there all morning like an idiot while several hundred cud-chewing diners studied him surreptitiously. “Yes?” he asked. “Is there anything more?”

  “One thing only.” Mrs. Stover stoked up her smile a degree. So much cheer, Will thought bitterly. And for what? They were all of them hurtling toward their graves, scientific living or no. “Where would you care to sit? We do try to accommodate our guests as to seating arrangements, though not everyone gets an opportunity to sit next to a Horace Fletcher or an Admiral Nieblock, of course.”

  Will shrugged. “With my wife, I guess.”

  Mrs. Stover’s smile contracted till it was just the template of a smile pressed into her dry and faintly reproachful lips. She looked hurt, offended. “Oh, no,” she crooned, “you wouldn’t want to do that, would you? Don’t you think you might prefer to mingle, to meet some of your fellow guests?”

  Will thought not.

  Mrs. Stover looked crestfallen. She began to speak in a rush, barely pausing for breath. “I’ll try my very best, for dinner, that is, but I’m afraid—well, I’m afraid I’ve already seated Eleanor, Mrs. Lightbody—such a charming woman, you’re a very lucky man—and her table, number sixty, is full at the moment. You’re quite certain you wouldn’t prefer to sit with someone else?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  Mrs. Stover studied the floor a moment before answering, and when she answered, her smile fluttered and her voice couldn’t seem to hold its note. “No,” she said, “I’m afraid not.”

  The waitress, a robust young thing who suggested Nurse Graves in the color of her hair and the set of her ears, led him into the huge palmy room with its skylights and twin colonnades. Will tried to hold himself erect, conscious of his fellow patients’ scrutiny, but he felt unstable and weak and his shoulders seemed unnaturally affected by the tug of gravity. He saw a mass of bent heads, a hundred bald spots, mustaches, beards, the rats and fluffs of the women’s monumental coiffures, the flash of silverware and the serene but constant movement of the host of waitresses in their dark dresses and white aprons. A murmur of conversation bubbled up round him: laughter, repartee, a smatter of economics and politics—he distinctly heard Teddy Roosevelt’s name as he passed a table of six mustachioed gentlemen, none of whom seemed in imminent danger of starvation. He saw, in fact, that all the tables were set for six—no doubt the Chief had determined this to be the optimal number for conviviality and physiologic dining, not to mention superior digestion. A phrase popped into Will’s head—“The Peristaltic Optimum”—and he had to smile despite himself.

  He craned his neck to loo
k for Eleanor, but she was nowhere to be seen in that sea of scientifically feeding heads, and when the waitress stopped abruptly at a table in the far corner, he wasn’t quite as alert as he might have been. For a moment he lost control of his feet, which were narrow but overlong, and he suddenly found himself pitching forward in a spastic sprawl just as the waitress pulled back a chair for him. The embarrassment, he was thinking, oh, the embarrassment, when at the last moment he shot out an arm to clutch at the rigid spine of the chair and managed to rake himself around, swivel his hips and collapse heavily across the seat—but not before barking both shins and cracking his kneecap with a sudden sharp sound that echoed through the room like a gunshot.

  “Are you all right, sir?” The waitress looked stricken.

  All right? Was he all right? The immediate and shooting pain of shin and patella was nothing, kindling to the inferno raging in his gut. He wanted to bay at the moon, claw at himself, get down on all fours and tear out his innards like a poisoned dog. All right? He’d never be all right.

  Tears of anguish in his eyes, he looked up into the startled faces ranged round the table before him and found himself staring into the chartreuse eyes and high green cheekbones of the girl he’d noticed in the hallway the previous night. Seeing her there flustered him, and he glanced down at his hands, into which the waitress, with a thousand apologies, inserted a menu.

  “A bit eager today, aren’t we?” a voice spoke in his ear. The voice belonged to an Englishman, sixty or so, with a white tonsure and teeth like a mule’s. He was sitting to Will’s immediate right. “Champing at the bit, eh? I know the feeling. All of this simple living builds an appetite and there’s no arguing that.”

  Will agreed with him, wholeheartedly, his eyes affixed to the menu.

  “Endymion Hart-Jones,” the Englishman’s voice announced after a pause, and Will at first thought he was recommending a dish—but no, he was introducing himself.

  Will had grown up in a proper household and gone to proper schools. He knew how to behave in society. In fact, he was normally gregarious, barely containable—but to say he was out of sorts would be an understatement. He locked eyes with the Englishman. “Will Lightbody,” he said in his rain-barrel tones.

  The Englishman introduced the others, Will nodding at each in turn. The heavyset woman to Will’s immediate left was Mrs. Tindermarsh, of Indianapolis; beside her, a dwarfish man with a tiny pointed beard and bulbous head, a Professor Stepanovich of the Academy of Astronomical Sciences, in Saint Petersburg, Russia; at the far end of the table, Miss Muntz, the greenish girl, from Poughkeepsie, New York; and beside her, Homer Praetz, the industrialist, from Cleveland.

  “The Nut Lisbon Steak with Creamed Gluten Gravy is absolutely divine,” Mrs. Tindermarsh offered without a trace of irony.

  Will could only blink at her. He could feel the presence of the waitress—or was it one of Mrs. Stover’s dieticians?—hovering at his elbow as he tried to make sense of the menu:

  “Do you feel up to an entrée today, Mr. Lightbody?”

  Will gazed up into the broad honest faces of the table waitress and dietician, buxom girls and young, radiating health, wisdom and the secret knowledge of diet and health to which their Chief and idol had made them privy.

  “My name is Evangeline,” said the taller of the two, “and I’ll be your dietary advisor during your stay with us. And this”—indicating the second girl—”is Hortense. She’ll be your waitress. Now, if I might explain the menu to you, sir.” She cleared her throat. “I hope you’ll notice the numbers printed beside each food item….”

  Will clutched the menu as if it were a rope suspended over a pit of crocodiles. His fellow diners had fallen silent, absorbed in his deliberations: this wasn’t merely eating, this was science.

  “Well,” she went on, “these numbers, when summed up, will give you the total calories consumed—simply add the figures in the first, second and third columns and put down the sums at the foot of the respective columns. Mark each item eaten, sign the bill of fare, and hand it to your physician—for each meal, each day. It’s really quite simple.”

  “Yes,” Will agreed, his eyes jumping from the dietician’s to those of Miss Muntz and the others, “yes, I suppose it is.”

  “Well, then,” Evangeline said brightly, “may I repeat my original question: Do you feel up to an entrée this morning? Either the Nuttolene and jelly or the Protose patties would be very therapeutic for a man in your condition.”

  Will ran a hand through his hair. His stomach began to announce itself, an old adversary backed into a comer but not about to give up without a fight. “Uh, well,” Will fumbled, “uh, I think I’ll just have the toast. And water. A glass of water.”

  “Toast?” the girls harmonized, a look of shock and incredulity on their faces. “But surely—” began the taller one, and then she trailed off. “We can get you your toast, of course, if that’s what you like, sir, but I’d recommend a serving of the corn pulp, the brown soup and prune fritters to go with it. At the very least. I can appreciate that you’re not yet up to digesting a large meal, but I do advise you to eat generously and flush your system of its poisons.”

  At this point, the Englishman got into it: “That’s right, old boy, flush the system. You’ll be getting your flora changed, too, I’ll wager”—and here, inexplicably, the whole table burst into laughter—”and it’s never too early to give the little blighters a hand.”

  Will’s face reddened. Flora? What on earth was he talking about? And the menu. That was nonsense, too. Nuttolene, Protose patties, Meltose and gluten and all the rest of it—Eleanor’s concoctions, as unlike food as anything he’d ever had in his mouth. His jaw hardened. He fastened on the eyes of the waitress. “Toast,” Will repeated in a firm tone. “Dry. And that will be all, thank you.”

  Suddenly meek, the girls melted away from him. When he turned back to the table, he found himself staring into Miss Muntz’s startled yellow eyes, until she turned abruptly to the bulbous Russian and began talking of the weather—terribly cold for this time of year, wasn’t it? The Englishman had suddenly become absorbed in studying his shirt cuffs, and Mrs. Tindermarsh gazed out the windows into intermediate space. Homer Praetz, he noticed, was carefully chewing a bit of something that looked vaguely organic. It was then, in that moment of relative calm, that Will again thought of Eleanor. Where was she? Why hadn’t she come to the table to wish him a good morning? Was this the Kellogg method—to drive a wedge between husband and wife? To segregate them? Well, he’d be damned if he’d sit here and eat his toast without her.

  He was just rising from the table when the waitress reappeared with his toast and a glass of kumyss for Mrs. Tindermarsh. Reluctantly, Will sank back into his chair, all the while looking over his shoulder for a glimpse of Eleanor. She was nowhere to be seen. Other women were, though—hundreds of them, ranging in age from fifteen to eighty, every last one of them dressed in the latest styles (as modified by their Chief, of course) and enjoying a healthy, bubbly, convivial meal. Their chatter was electric, all-pervasive, the buzz of a field of insects droning toward the intersection of afternoon and evening. Will bowed his head and morosely lifted the toast to his mouth.

  No sooner had he taken a bite than his stomach began to rumble—or not just rumble, but growl and spit like a caged animal poked with a stick. “Down, boy!” the Englishman exclaimed, playing to the table with a show of his horsey teeth. Miss Muntz put a pretty green hand to her mouth and tittered. Will gave them a sick grin and munched his toast.

  Just as he was transporting a second spear of scorched bread to his mouth, his stomach rumbling like Vesuvius and his coated tongue swelling in his throat, he felt a pressure on his shoulder and turned to find himself gazing up into a great shrewd globe of a face that hung over him like a Chinese lantern. The face belonged to a rubicund, snowy-haired man built on the Chief’s mold—that is, stocky, foreshortened and expansive round the middle. The man had his hand on Will’s shoulder. His look of sa
gacity almost immediately turned to one of consternation, and he began emitting a moist clucking sound. “No, no, no, no, no,” he said, wagging a finger for emphasis, “you’ve got it all wrong.”

  Will was baffled. Did he know this man? He studied the blistering blue eyes, the firm jowls, the hair leached of all color dancing round the great pumpkin of his head … come to think of it, he did look vaguely familiar….

  “Chew,” the man said, and he made a command of it. “Chew!” he cried, his voice corkscrewing upward. “Masticate! Fletcherize!” And he removed his hand from Will’s shoulder to point to the ten-’foot banner draped across the wall just under the entranceway at the far end of the room. The banner, in bold black letters three feet high, echoed the stocky little man’s exhortation:

  FLETCHERIZE!

  Understanding began to dawn on Will. This was none other than Horace B. Fletcher himself, standing there before him in all his mandibular glory. Will knew him—of course he did. Was there a man, woman or child in America who didn’t? Fletcher was the naturopathic genius who’d revealed to the world the single most fundamental principle of good health, diet and digestion: mastication. Thorough mastication. Fletcher maintained (and Dr. Kellogg concurred with all his heart) that the nearest thing to a panacea for gastric ills and nutritional disorders was the total digestion of food in the mouth. And he wasn’t content merely to chew each morsel of food once for each of the thirty-two teeth in the human mouth, though he’d admit that it was a good start; rather, you were to chew a given bit of food fifty, sixty or seventy times even, until it dissolved in the mouth, the “food gate” opened and the mouthful was gone. With a shout of acclamation, the entire alimentary community had heralded this simple but momentous discovery. And now here was this celebrated figure, this hero of the oral cavity, standing before Will in the midst of this dining room crowded with luminaries, this great man coaching him in the intricacies of masticating a scrap of toast. Despite himself, Will was impressed.