Lancelot

by Walker Percy

  “Mm.” Now Elgin was interested, transported from the inelegant mysteries of white folks’ doings to the elegant simplicities of geometry. Using his thumb, he began to push his lip over his eyetooth, a new mannerism. My guess is he got it from one of his M.I.T. professors.

  “Take these binoculars, Elgin. They are excellent night glasses. Don’t forget your log. In your log make a note of everything you see: not only the exact time anyone enters or leaves a room, but anything else you happen to notice, what a person may carry with him, what they do, the smallest item of behavior.”

  Elgin was busy drawing lines across the court, angles and declinations. He frowned happily. I repeated my instructions.

  “You mean all night?”

  “Yes. That is, from eleven to dawn. Or rather, just before dawn. I don’t want you to be seen.”

  “For three nights?”

  “Maybe. At the outside. We’ll see how it goes. You’re relieved as of now from guide duty. Go home and get some sleep. I’ll tell Ellis that I’m sending you to New Orleans to take a deposition.”

  “I wonder what this room is. Probably the alcove for Coke machine and ice maker.”

  “Probably. No window.”

  Elgin took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “You see, here’s what it comes to.” I could see him twenty years later, for his expression, his mannerisms had already begun to set; see him behind his desk, give himself to a problem, quickly take off his glasses and rub his eyes. “The problem as you pose it is insoluble—unless you want to rig up a system of mirrors, bore holes in floors, which I gather you don’t.”

  “I don’t.”

  “You see, if I were in 214, an upper room near the inner corner of the ell, I could see every room but Raine’s on the first floor. On the other hand, if I were across the court near the outer corner of the ell, I couldn’t see Merlin’s room.” More lines, lines crossing lines like electrons colliding.

  “To see all rooms, posing the problem as you do, you’d need two observers. Me here and, say, Fluker here.”

  “Fluker! He’d go to sleep!”

  We both laughed. The very name was funny for us, a secret joke.

  Elgin smiled his old smile, his sweet white-flashing un-mannered smile. “He sho would. Hm. Let’s see. Let’s-us-see.” He gazed at the plan and tapped his pencil. Why did I feel like the student visiting the professor? “We-ull!” (How happy scientists are! Why didn’t we become scientists, Percival? They confront problems which can be solved. We don’t know what we confront. Does it have a name?)

  Elgin put on his glasses. “The pool is here?”

  “Right.”

  “Is it lit?”

  “By underwater lights after ten. The floodlights are fixed to the balconies but the area around the pool is fairly dark.”

  “Lounges and chairs around here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Scrubs—that is, shrubbery around here?”

  “Yes.” Ellis, his father, used to say scrubs for shrubs: “You want me to cut them scrubs?” Not even Ellis says that any more.

  “Then there’s only one place.” Elgin dropped his pencil with a clatter, picked it up. made a big X, dropped it again, sat back. He smiled. His eyelids lowered. He’d made a breakthrough!

  “The middle of the court?”

  “Sure. Where else?”

  “But—”

  “What kind of lounge chairs they got?”

  “What kind?”

  “I mean light aluminum or those heavy wooden ones?”

  “Redwood, heavy, black webbing. Too heavy to steal, I remember. Lock is proud of them.”

  Again Elgin smiled his old brilliant sweet smile. In his triumph he permitted himself to be what he was: a twenty-two-year-old Southern youth who smiled and laughed a great deal. “It’s dark here you say. The lounges are dark, the webbing is black. I’ll wear black swim trunks and man can’t nobody see nothing.”

  I smiled. He wasn’t even burlesquing himself as black or Southern black but as TV-Hollywood-Sammy-Davis-Junior black and he knew that I knew it.

  He snapped his fingers. “No. It’s even better than that.”

  “How?”

  “Don’t you see? It wouldn’t matter if anyone saw me at that distance. A man in trunks by the pool. Nobody would pay the slightest attention. Like Poe’s Purloined Letter.”

  Poe’s Purloined Letter. I thought about J. B. Jenkins, bad man, good man, bad good man, Kluxer, Christian, tackle, and comrade at arms against Alabama’s mighty Crimson Tide. The only Poe he knew was Alcide “Coonass” Poe, tailback from De Ridder. J. B. and I, sunk in life, soaked in old Louisiana blood and tears and three hundred years of Christian sin and broadsword Bowie-knife Sharps-rifle bloodshed and victory-defeat. And Elgin leapfrogging us all, transformed overnight into snotty-cool Yankee professor.

  Poe’s Purloined Letter indeed. Poe. He too had got onto Elgin’s secret: Find happiness in problems and puzzles and mathematical gold bugs. But he let go of it. Went nutty like me. Elgin wouldn’t.

  “How are you going to get the binoculars out there?”

  “Wrapped in my towel.”

  “Okay. Then the location of the room doesn’t matter. Go on out there now and register. Keep your log tonight. When you get back, get some sleep and meet me here about this time tomorrow. I’ll put Fluker on guide duty.”

  “Fluker.” Again we laughed. “No telling what Fluker gon say.”

  “He’ll do fine. Anyhow, what difference does it make?”

  “Yeah.” Elgin was casting ahead again. “How to see to write in the dark is the thing. White pencil on black? Pencil light? No, what I’m going to use”—clearly he was talking to himself—“is a Kiefer blacklight stylus.”

  “You do that.”

  5

  JACOBY? I HAVEN’T TOLD you about him? The headlines? BELLE ISLE BURNS! DIRECTOR MURDERED AND MUTILATED! EX-GRID STAR HELD FOR QUESTIONING! Yes, I remember all that. Belle Isle burned to the ground except for twenty snaggle-toothed Doric columns. My hands burned trying to save Margot.

  It is difficult to think about all that.

  You must believe me when I tell you that it is the banality of the past which puts me off. There is only one reason I am telling you about these old sad things, or rather trying to remember them, and it has nothing to do with not being able to remember. I can remember. I can remember every word Elgin said to me in the pigeonnier. It is because the past, any past, is intolerable, not because it is violent or terrible or doomstruck or any such thing, but just because it is so goddamn banal and feckless and useless. And violence is the most banal and boring of all. It is horrible not because it is bloody but because it is meaningless. It does not signify.

  Then why bother to tell you? Because something is bothering me and I won’t know what it is until I say it. Presently I’m going to ask you a question. Not that you will be able to answer it. But it is important that I ask it. That was always the best thing about you, that you were the only person I could ever talk to.

  Why did you leave twenty years ago? Wasn’t Louisiana good enough for you? Do you think the U.S.A. needs you less than Biafra? I sometimes think that if you’d been around to talk to…

  You are silent. Christ, you don’t know yourself.

  I have to tell you what happened in my own way—so I can know what happened. I won’t know for sure until I say it. And there is only one way I can endure the horrible banality of it: and that is that I sense there is a clue I’ve missed and that you might pick it up.

  It is as if I knew that the clue was buried somewhere in the rubble of Belle Isle and that I have to spend days kicking through the ashes to find it. I couldn’t do that alone. But we could do it.

  A clue to what? To the “mystery” of Belle Isle? No. To hell with that. Belle Isle is gone and I couldn’t care less. If it were intact it would be the last place on earth I’d choose to live. I’d rather live in Brooklyn. As gone with the wind as Tara and as good riddance.

 
No, that’s not the mystery. The mystery lies in the here and now. The mystery is: What is one to do with oneself? As you get older you begin to realize the trick time is playing, and that unless you do something about it, the passage of time is nothing but the encroachment of the horrible banality of the past on the pure future. The past devours the future like a tape recorder, converting pure possibility into banality. The present is the tape head, the mouth of time.

  Then where is the mystery and why bother kicking through the ashes?

  Because there is a clue in the past.

  Start with the present moment. Look out there. A fall afternoon in New Orleans with the peculiar gold light that fills the sky when the first wedge of Canadian cold air slides like a crystal prism under the Gulf steambath. Look at the gold light. It radiates in the crystal and filters down into the same shabby streets with the same neighborhood sounds of housewives switching on their Hoovers, TV, voices through kitchen doorways, the same smell of the Tchoupitoulas docks.

  Consider the past. Imagine a man sitting in Feliciana Parish for twenty years practicing law (yes! “practicing”), playing at being a “moderate” or “liberal” whatever that is, all under the illusion that he was living his life and was not even aware that he was not.

  But something happens. There is a difference. The difference between then and now is that now I’ve been alerted. I am aware of being the tape head. I am aware of this room being a tape head. That is why it is so simple and empty: so I can be aware. As you can see, it consists of nothing but a small empty space with time running through it and a single tiny opening on the world. I’m staying here until I can decide what the tape head is doing and whether I have anything to say about it. It is simply a devourer of time and does it necessarily turn the pure empty future into the shabby past?

  A year ago (was it a year?) I made my two great discoveries: one, Margot’s infidelity; two, my freedom. I can’t tell you why, but the second followed directly upon the first. The moment I knew for a fact that Margot had been fucked by another man, it was as if I had been waked from a twenty-year dream. I was Rip van Winkle rubbing his eyes. In an instant I became sober, alert, watchful. I could act.

  Yet something went wrong. I am glad you are simply listening, looking at me and saying nothing. Because I was afraid you might suggest either that I had done nothing wrong—like the psychologist here: no matter what I tell him, even if I break wind, he gives me the same quick congratulatory look—either that I had done nothing wrong or that I had “sinned”—and I don’t know which is worse. Because it isn’t that. I don’t know what that means. Yet obviously something went wrong, because here I am, in a nuthouse—or is it a prison?—recovering from shock, psychosis, disorientation.

  From a state of freedom and the ability to act (that night I told you about, the world was open! I was free! I could do anything, devise any plan), I now find myself closeted in a single small cell and glad to be here.

  A fox doesn’t crawl into a hole for a year unless he is wounded. But after a while he begins to feel good, pokes his nose out, takes a look around.

  I still have the resolve to make a new life, an absolutely new beginning. But I know that one must start from scratch.

  Begin with a burrow, a small clean well-swept place such as this, with one tiny window on the world and another creature in the next room. That is all you need. In fact, that is all you can stand. Add more creatures, more world, books, talk, TV, news—and we’ll all be as crazy as we were before. There is too much feeding into the tape head—the new tape is too empty—too many possibilities—but the recorded tape is too full.

  But what went wrong with the other new life last year? I must find out so I won’t make the same mistake twice. Therefore I must go back and kick through the ashes of Belle Isle. There is something I don’t understand. And you are both my leverage point and my companion. Because you knew Belle Isle and you know me and I can’t tell anyone else.

  In a month or so I shall be leaving here. At least that is my opinion, even though the doctors have not committed themselves. Perhaps Anna will be well enough to leave too.

  Who is Anna? The woman next door. I didn’t tell you I had paid her a visit and she told me her name? She also ate something for the first time. Soon they won’t have to force feed her. How did that happen? Very simple. I just got tired of all that wall tapping. Yesterday I simply got up, went to my door, opened it, and went out in the hall—the first time I had ever done so voluntarily—and walked ten feet and there was her door. I knocked on it and went in. (Sometimes life is simple!) She was lying on her cot as usual, curled up, face to the wall, a tangle of hair on her cheek, thin hip upthrust in her hospital gown. Her brown boylike arms made a perfect V, hands pressed palms together between her thighs.

  I stood looking down at her. She stirred.

  “What’s your name?” I asked her.

  “Anna,” she said. That was all she said.

  I decided to sit beside her. She stirred again, tucking her chin in her throat so she could see me past her cheekbone. I could see the gleam between her eyelids.

  Her thin brown face reminded me of Lucy, except she didn’t have Lucy’s funny quirky expression and the tiny scar on her lip. Her face was blank, lips slightly parted and dry, like a woman asleep. She had a scar all right, not like Lucy’s, but a big white raised scar curving from forehead to cheek where she had been cut in the rape and beating. Her scar was like a whore’s. Do you remember our both making the observation that all whores have scars, belly scars from hysterectomies and abortions, face scars from beatings, leg scars from car wrecks?

  “Here,” I told her. “Eat this.” In my pocket I had half a dozen Hershey kisses Malcolm (the guard—or is he a nurse?) had given me. I unwrapped the silver foil of one and offered it to her. She made no response. I put it into her mouth.

  Do you know what she did?

  She raised one hand from between her thighs, took the candy out, tucked her chin again, frowned, and looked at it exactly the way a child would, then closed her eyes, put it back in her mouth, and began sucking it.

  Yes. Jacoby. He was there, I think, the night of the day I talked to Elgin. At any rate, there was one night I remember.

  Janos Jacoby was full of himself. Youngish, short, black forelock which he kept whipping off his eyes with a toss of his head. He was either volatile fiery French-Polish or he knew how to act volatile fiery French-Polish or maybe both. Maybe he was from the Bronx. His accent varied—he had been an actor too and so didn’t know what he was. Sitting next to Margot, he gave all his attention to her, turning so far around in his chair that, his back to me, he was almost facing her. He had also gotten onto the foreigner’s knack of using his accent and even his mistakes to his advantage. Searching for a word, lips tensed European style, he would hold both hands under Margot’s face as if the word were there for both to examine. Though he ignored Raine and Dana—I wondered if all directors ignored all actors—he used his head, face, hands, lips like an actor, for an effect. An effect on Margot. She was charmed. Her eyes sparkled. Color rose in her cheeks. Her freckles darkened. His eyes swept past me, through me, as if I weren’t there. When she spoke, her shoulder swayed jokingly toward him. touching him.

  Merlin, on the other side of Margot, seemed inattentive and bored. Using his spoon handle, he made long straight marks in the tablecloth. Once in a while Margot would sway the other way and touch him as if to draw him into the conversation, but he only nodded.

  Earlier Merlin and Jacoby had been in an argument, Merlin talking about the indispensability of action and story in a film. Jacoby talking in a much fancier way about “cinematographic language,” “the semiotics of film,” “Griffith as master of denotative language.” “Metz as the only critic who understands the connotative film,” and so forth. What junk. I refused to pay attention.

  Merlin finally shrugged and fell silent. I couldn’t tell whether Jacoby was trying to (1) upstage Merlin, (2) impress Margot, (3) do both,
or (4) was speaking honestly.

  Nor could I be sure whether Merlin was withdrawn because (1) Jacoby was paying too much attention to Margot, (2) he was bored by Jacoby’s fancy “cinematographic semiotics.”

  Raine and Dana listened glumly. My daughter Lucy had managed to get herself between them and was in a transport of happiness, happy to be next to Troy Dana, whom she said she was in love with, but maybe even happier to be next to Raine, whom she worshipped as the casual possessor of those qualities most prized by Lucy and therefore, it seemed to her, most unattainable: beauty, fame, and that special “niceness” which Lucy could scarcely believe, Raine’s way of remembering the film crews’ names, the film crews’ wives’ names, servants’ names, and even the servants’ children’s names, taking time with her, Lucy’s friends. Raine’s ability to “act like anybody else, a real person” seemed to Lucy to surpass the most miraculous deeds of the saints. “She is the most wonderful person I have ever known,” Lucy told me.

  I didn’t think Raine was wonderful. She was amazingly pretty, with a pure heart-shaped face and violet-cobalt eyes which seemed to look from her depths into yours, a trick I came to learn, that steady violet gaze, chin resting on the back of her bent hand. Her depths were vacant. But she flirted with me and that was pleasant. Her single enthusiasm, beside her niceness, was her absorption with a California cult called I.P.D., or something like that—Ideo-Personal-Dynamics maybe. She told me of it at length. I remember very little except that she said it was more scientific than astrology, being based not merely on the influence of the stars but on evidence of magnetic fields surrounding people. The existence of these fields or auras had been proved, she said, by special photography.

  Cobalt eyes gazing straight into mine one foot away: “Did you know your magnetic field is as unique as your fingerprints?”