The Road to Wellville

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

The sweat glistened on Dab’s bald, swollen-looking head. He was writing furiously, not daring to look up. Will felt himself redden. “Is this why you stuck us on separate floors? Is this why I can’t so much as even sit down to a meal with my own wife?”

  “Once again, in all candor,” the Doctor went on, ignoring him, his voice leaping out in the way of the orator catching hold of his subject, “I must ask how often you’ve engaged in intimate physical relations with your wife during this period of your illness—and hers.”

  Will’s right foot began to tap, rattling away under the desk as if it had suddenly come loose from his body. He looked away from the Doctor’s cold unblinking gaze and found himself contemplating the craggy sexless visage of Thomas “Old Parr” Parr, dead of longevity at a hundred and fifty-two. “Well,” he began, fumbling for composure, feeling like a criminal, a wife abuser, a veritable sop of venality, “we used to … come together, maybe once every, oh, week”—he glanced up furtively to see the good Doctor wince—”or less, sometimes less, a lot less, but then she, she became—”

  “Enceinte,” the Doctor supplied.

  “Yes. And we, we …” Suddenly an image of his daughter rose up before him, the daughter he never saw or held or took to the soda fountain for an ice cream, an idealized vision of a little girl in pigtails, the flash of a bonnet and basket, a field of flowers nodding in the sun, and he broke down. “But she died,” he choked, “died before I could even see her, just see her once—”

  Silently, on catlike feet, the Doctor glided round the desk to stand rigid over Will, mechanically offering the crisp pressed linen of his handkerchief. “It’s all right,” he said, his voice a pitcher of sympathy, “I understand. The sad fact of human existence is that we must engage in these dangerous practices—dangerous for wife and husband alike, what with the excitation of the nervous system, the loss of life-giving fluids, the shock to the constitutions of both partners—we must engage in them, I say, to replenish the species. It’s our lot in life. But don’t blame yourself, Mr. Lightbody—I’ve seen worse, far worse. Men who indulged their appetites nightly—in one case every night without fail for over twenty years. That man was a beast of the jungle. He buried three wives.”

  There was a long moment of silence. Dab was still writing furiously—Will could hear the scratch of his pen against the faint ticking of the steam in the pipes and the odd muted sound from the corridor—but he’d turned away, as if the subject were too painful to bear. After a while, the Doctor moved quietly back to his own side of the desk, and for the first time during their interview, he took a seat. “The world is a busy place, Mr. Lightbody,” he began, and he made a little pyramid of his fingers; the apple, casually gnawed, lolled at his elbow. “The streets are full of orphans. My wife and I have adopted all our children, and we’re proud of it. I preach abstinence, sir, strict abstinence. Certainly while you’re under our care and in your very tentative condition, but for the future, too … we can control our appetites, we can. God gave us that.”

  Thoughtfully massaging the back of his neck, the Doctor shuffled through the file. Without looking up, and in his clinically insinuating way, he dug a little deeper in the dirt. “Cravings for spirits? Opiates? You’ve conquered those problems?”

  Will could barely speak. He was mortified, deeply ashamed of his body, with its furtive wants and secretions, ashamed of the terrible lewd thoughts that had crowded his mind throughout the day, ashamed ever to look Nurse Graves in the eye again. “Yes,” he gulped, almost choking on the single simple little syllable.

  “Good.” The Doctor glanced up from beneath the eyeshade. “Now, we’re going to change your intestinal flora, that’s the first thing. You are aware, aren’t you, that over one hundred-sixty different types of bacteria inhabit the human digestive tract?”

  Will nodded feebly. Yes. Or, no. No, he wasn’t.

  “Each of these separate species forms its own peculiar products and byproducts, many of which are highly toxic. The two main classes of these bacteria, the aerobes and anaerobes, as described by Tissier and others—you are aware of Tissier’s work? No matter. At any rate, the aerobes are generally beneficial—vital to us, in fact, and they produce harmless acids for the most part—but the anaerobes, those bacteria we find in flesh foods, are pathologic and putrefactive. They are pernicious, Mr. Lightbody, and they are your scourge.”

  The Doctor was on his feet again. He took a bite of the apple, which by now had gone brown round the indentations left by his teeth. Chewing, pacing, stroking the white wisps of his hair, he suddenly pulled up short and whirled round on Will. “Have you ever studied the life habits of the Bulgarians, Mr. Lightbody? Not the city folk, but the shepherds and wood gatherers of the Balkans and the Rhodope range?”

  Will hadn’t.

  “Well, as Metchnikoff has discovered, they are surprisingly long-lived. Not so long-lived as Old Parr, perhaps, but, then, he’s the happy exception, isn’t he? Still, as a whole, and Massal and Metchnikoff have subjected the proposition to rigorous statistical analysis, these rugged mountaineering Bulgarians outlive everyone on our grand and various little planet. And do you know why?”

  The diminutive Doctor wasn’t asking for an answer; Will, recovering from his shame, understood as much. He pushed himself up in the chair so that he could feel the stab of its orthopedic ribs in his kidneys and managed to produce a deep interrogatory grunt.

  “Yogurt.”

  “Yogurt?”

  “Yogurt.” The Doctor was beaming, his stingy lips pressed into a thin, triumphant smile. “This is the key. Because yogurt, Mr. Lightbody, which comprises the bulk of the Bulgarian diet, contains the amicable bacterium Lactobacillus bulgaricus, which will drive out the wild bacteria, the pathogenic, poison-forming B. welchii and Proteus vulgaris implanted in the exhausted system—in your exhausted system, sir—by the putrefactive action of flesh foods. As Sir Arbuthnot Lane says, ‘The colon is a common sink.’ We must change that flora.”

  Will’s critical faculties seemed to have been eroded by the torrent of information and odd sensation he’d experienced over the course of the past twenty-four bewildering hours. He was defeated, insensate, a mass of protoplasm occupying the iron seat of a physiologic chair in a high-vaulted little room in a great big brick building in Battle Creek, Michigan. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  The Doctor turned abruptly to his secretary. “Dab: the regimen and dietary for Mr. Lightbody, please.”

  Sweating and puffing, banana protruding from his pocket, collar pinching at his throat, Dab heaved himself across the room and handed two closely typed sheets to the Doctor, avoiding eye contact with Will. “Ah, yes. Yes, yes,” Dr. Kellogg murmured, swinging back around. “We’re going to start you out, for the first three days, on psyllium seeds and hijiki. The psyllium, which you will take as if it were a medication—this is a prescription, sir, and I’m afraid I will brook no deviation from it and no nonsense with the dieticians in the dining hall—the psyllium, as I say, is hygroscopic; that is, it absorbs water and will expand in your stomach, scouring you out as it passes through you just as surely as if a tiny army of janitors were down there equipped with tiny scrub brushes. The same with the hijiki, a Japanese seaweed introduced to me by Dr. Tomoda, of the Imperial School of Medicine in Kyoto. Perfectly indigestible. Like eating a broom—but that broom will sweep you clean, Mr. Lightbody, sweep you clean. Then we put you on the milk diet.”

  Will was confused. Yogurt, milk, seaweed: what about food? “The milk diet?”

  “Oh, yes: I’m sorry. The yogurt, for the most part, will be entering you from the posterior end, in a sort of two-pronged assault, as it were.” The Doctor paused to acknowledge his joke with a soft, reflective chuckle. Dutifully, Dab joined him, but in the secretary’s throat the chuckle turned to a snicker and then a sort of throttled wheeze that had no trace of humor in it at all. “That’s where Nurse Bloethal comes in,” the Doctor continued. “Twice a day, in addition to your postprandial enemas, you�
��ll be getting a colonic injection of whey and Lactobacillus bulgaricus—that is, the yogurt bacterium, collected in Bulgaria expressly for the Sanitarium and available only here. In time, we will eradicate the harmful bacteria from your colon and repopulate it with a bloom of health-giving flora, so that you can properly digest your food. Stick to the dietary, stick to the exercise regimen, and your stomach problems will be a thing of the past. Three months, Mr. Lightbody. In three months’ time, sir, you’ll be a new man.”

  The interview was ending. The fact alone perked Will up. Added to that was this glimmer of hope, this shining vision of the sanitized colon and the quiescent stomach. He rose from the chair and ventured a joke of his own. “Three months and I’ll be on the Road to Wellville, eh?”

  The words were barely out of his mouth when Will realized he’d made a mistake. A pall fell over the room. The Doctor went rigid; Dab dropped his eyes and edged off into the corner. “What?” Will said, straining against his grin of embarrassment. “Did I say something wrong?”

  A terrible, crippled moment limped by. “We don’t speak cant here, sir,” the Doctor finally said, his mouth drawn up tight. “Not in this institution. Cheap slogan-mongering, that’s all it is. An attempt by an individual who, who—”

  For the first time in their brief acquaintance, the Doctor seemed at a loss for words. And his color—the pink glow of blessed flesh, of carefree, daisy-tripping health, had been supplanted by an ugly reddening, the angry bruised shade of a sausage about to burst in the pan. All at once it came to Will: The Road to Wellville. This wasn’t one of the Doctor’s slogans, not at all—it was C. W. Post’s. Each twenty-five-cent package of that burnt-weed powder he sold as a coffee substitute contained a tub-thumping, positive-thinking, self-congratulatory pamphlet reprising the uplifting story of how “The Captain” had got himself well and made his fortune. And what was the title of that pamphlet? What was the catchword it had put on the lips of every man, woman and child in America?

  Will had made a faux pas. But how could you blame him? Until Eleanor had come under the spell of the good Doctor, the whole lot of raw-fooders, oat-bran nuts, antivivisectionists, Indian fakirs, nudists and the like had seemed indistinguishable to him, fish out of the same barrel. “C. W. Post,” Will offered.

  The Doctor was aflame, all his burners lit. He tore the eyeshade from his head and flung it down on the table like a gauntlet. “We do not mention that name in this institution,” he thundered, hammering at each word as if he were driving nails. “Ever.”

  Will felt he should apologize—he was innocent, he didn’t mean any harm, he was confused, that was all—but he never got the chance. In the next instant the Doctor jerked his neck angrily round and shouted for Nurse Bloethal.

  A door at the rear of the office opened, and the nurse lumbered into the room, graceless, big-armed, her hair pressed to her head like wire strands beneath the nurse’s cap. She was smiling, but there was no hint of Nurse Graves’s ingenuousness or even Mrs. Stover’s artificiality in that smile; no, Nurse Bloethal’s smile was hard and self-satisfied, with the smallest suggestion of something harder still. “Yes, Doctor?”

  Dr. Kellogg had reined in his anger as quickly as it had come up on him. His voice was steady, matter-of-fact. “Mr. Lightbody is ready for the treatment. He’ll be taking the full gallonage, followed by the whey-Lactobacillus culture. You’re to escort him to the dining room afterward—and emphasize to Mrs. Stover, though she’ll have the dietary program by now, that he’s on the laxative diet through Friday.”

  The moment of release had come, though it wasn’t quite what Will had been prepared for. He’d been expecting Nurse Graves, the gentle ministrations, the warm flesh, and here was her antithesis. “Uh, Dr. Kellogg, thank you, thank you very much for your help,” Will fumbled.

  Again the white palm. “It’s nothing. We just want you to be well again.”

  “Doctor?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m not sure—that is, I don’t understand your instructions to the nurse … uh, I’m to go where?”

  The Doctor looked up sharply, and Will sensed a tension in him that had nothing to do with the unfortunate Post reference—perhaps he resented looking up at anyone. His eyes were clear, cold, the unwavering eyes of the scientist. “Nurse Bloethal will be taking you to the baths. The manual colonic, in your case, hasn’t really been as effective as we’d like. We have two mechanized systems, very efficient, able to force up to fifteen gallons into the colon in a matter of seconds—to ensure proper evacuation.”

  Proper evacuation?

  Two beats. The steam ticked in the pipes, Dab wiped his forehead. “Don’t worry, Nurse Bloethal will show you the ropes.”

  Chapter 9

  Per-Fo

  Charlie Ossining’s first meal in Battle Creek, his first meal as the in-situ President-in-Chief of the Per-Fo Company, Inc., consisted of a bowl of tepid fish broth and a handful of stale soda crackers. He ate standing up, hunched over the bowl like a beggar on a street corner, his buttocks pressed to Mrs. Eyvindsdottir’s kitchen stove in the vain hope of deriving some faint degree of warmth from its anemic embers. It was past two in the afternoon, and the other boarders, the bronchial Bagwell presumably among them, had already breakfasted and dined. Mrs. Eyvindsdottir stood at the drainboard, cleaning fish with a worn, fiercely honed blade. “Yust this once,” she warned in her patient but barely intelligible gargle of a dialect, “I feed you late. But no more. Is this correct?”

  Charlie nodded, barely able to stomach the broth, strewn as it was with pike bones and bits of scale, fin and other unidentifiable debris. He’d always been a good eater and he was ravenous after the night he’d gone through, but the broth had an unfortunate aftertaste of muddy bottoms and pondweed, and the sight and smell of the fish on the drainboard didn’t improve matters any. Mrs. Eyvindsdottir’s knife flashed as she deftly worked the blade up under the gill slits of two huge slack yellow-green pike, removed their heads and dropped them into a gleaming pot. Charlie caught a glimpse of blood-rich gill and the flat cold gaze of an extinguished eye and had to look away. He set the bowl down on the stove.

  “Nice fish,” the landlady observed, nodding proudly to the basket in the corner where some eight or ten of them, each as long as a man’s leg and rigid with ice, bristled against the wall. Charlie didn’t yet realize it, but he would see those pike, in various guises, every day for the next week, breakfast, lunch and dinner. Mrs. Eyvindsdottir was a widow, plump and economical, and a trapper who lived on Gull Lake and was particularly enamored of her charms—one Bjork Bjorksson by name—kept her supplied with mountains of fish and game. One week it would be pike; the next, muskrat, beaver, lynx or groundhog. No, Charlie didn’t know it, but he would come to rue the day Bjork Bjorksson had entered the landlady’s life, and his entire gastrointestinal system would seize up at the adjective “nice,” as applied to any furred, finned or feathered creature. At this juncture, though, he was naive enough to agree. “Yes, nice,” he grunted.

  He spent the remainder of the afternoon trying to track down Bender. The presiding genius and pro-tem treasurer of the Per-Fo Company had left a rather cryptic message for Charlie at the desk of the Post Tavern Hotel: Gone Goguac Boat Clb. Luncheon w/Stellrecht in matter of paper Per-Fo boxes. Meet 11:00 A. M. tomorrow for examine factory site, cnr Verona Wattles. Yrs., W/Bst Wshs & Sincest Regds, Good. For a long moment Charlie stood there at the gleaming marble counter, reading the message over. He was mortified to think that he’d overslept and missed this luncheon, but then it was unclear whether he’d been invited or not—had Bender said anything about it the previous night? He couldn’t remember. Too tired. And drunk. But if he wasn’t invited, he damn well should have been—and he could feel the irritation rising in him. He was President-in-Chief of the blessed company, after all, and wherever and whatever the Goguac Boat Club was, he had a pretty strong suspicion that lunch there was bound to be an improvement over Mrs. Eyvindsdottir’s room-chilled fish broth
.

  Well. And what to do? Perhaps it was a late luncheon and he could still make it, or maybe they were lingering over sherry and cigars in the smoking room. He pictured a rustic lodge with a high beamed ceiling and a great roaring blaze in the fieldstone fireplace, waiters in white jackets ducking respectfully in and out of the room, Bender and Stellrecht talking of paper in low fraternal tones. They wanted it stiff, didn’t they? Paperboard. And how did it come—reams, rolls? They’re shipping six carloads a day out of here, Charlie, six carloads a day. Charlie didn’t know the first thing about the breakfast-food business, and he’d be the first to admit it—but how was he ever going to learn if Bender excluded him from even the most routine of business meetings? Or, worse: if he overslept and excluded himself?

  Inquiring at the desk, Charlie discovered that a streetcar line ran out to Goguac Lake, a resort area south of the city, but to his chagrin he learned that it ran only in summer. Having footed it all the way from Mrs. Eyvindsdottir’s in a subarctic gale over sidewalks that were like a bobsled run, he decided to invest in a hack and spare himself any further risk of pneumonia or a broken leg. And he didn’t have to feel guilty about it, either—he was an executive, wasn’t he? Chief Executive, at that. If Bender felt obligated to put on a show with Mrs. Hookstratten’s money, then why shouldn’t he? “Goguac Boat Club,” he pronounced grandly to the driver, sinking into the seat like a bored prince.

  The cabbie was a tired-looking gnome of a man, wizened and white-haired, hunched over a tireder-looking nag from which a nimbus of steam rose steadily in the cold of the street. He turned round in his seat. “You don’t want to go there,” he said, reflectively dredging his throat and hawking a glistening ball of mucus into the street. They were sitting beneath the elaborate sheltered bridge that connected the second floor of the Post Tavern Hotel to the Post Building across the street. The hotel doorman, rigid as a cigar-store Indian, was watching them intently.