Lancelot

by Walker Percy

  “Yes?”

  “I want—”

  We’ll never know what he wanted because his head was bending back and I was cutting his throat, I think. No, I’m sure. What I remember better than the cutting was the sense I had of casting about for an appropriate feeling to match the deed. Weren’t we raised to believe that “great deeds” were performed with great feelings—anger, joy, revenge, and so on? I remember casting about for the feeling and not finding one. Yet I am sure the deed was committed, because his voice changed. His voice dropped a foot from his mouth to his windpipe and came out in a rush, not a word, against my hand holding the knife. He was still under me and there was no feel of the heat of blood on my hand, only the rush and bubble of air as the knife went through the cartilage. I held him for a while until the warm air stopped blowing the hairs on the back of my hand. Yes, I feel certain that is what happened.

  Standing by the bed, I gazed down at Margot. I do not remember the storm. She was not dead, not even unconscious. She was watching me, I think. The kerosene light made her cheekbones look wide, an Indian’s cheekbones. Her eyes were pools of darkness. They were open, I think. How could I be sure? I sat on the bed and with my arm across her put her cheek to my face. She was breathing. When she blinked, her eyelashes stirred the air against my cheek. In the midst of the hurricane I felt this minuscule wind her eyelashes made against my cheek. She said something. I felt her diaphragm move under my arm.

  “What?”

  “What are we going to do?” She spoke in my ear. “Is he—?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh no,” she said in simple dismay as if Suellen had dropped her best Sèvres vase.

  Margot, unlike me, had a feeling but not a remarkable one. It was dismay that things had gotten out of hand. Perhaps the house had begun to break up under the force of the wind. We had better do something about it.

  “What are we going to do?”

  “We?”

  “You.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Oh oh oh,” she said, taking one hand in the other and actually wringing it. “Is there anything I can do? Oh my God.”

  “You could have.”

  “Me. Just me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because I loved you.” That was true enough I knew even though I couldn’t remember what it was to love her.

  “Loved? Love?” she asked.

  “Because you were the only person who knew how to turn it all into love.”

  “Love?”

  “Sweetness dearness innocence singing laughing. ‘Love.’”

  “Laughing?”

  “That may have been your secret. You had a way of laughing.”

  “Yes, I know. I’ll tell you what.”

  “What?”

  “Take your weight off me a little. I can’t breathe.”

  “Neither can I. I’m not on you. It’s not the weight.”

  “Oh, God. What is wrong? I can’t breathe.”

  “Don’t worry about that. It’s the storm.”

  “I tell you what, Lance.”

  “What?”

  “Let’s go away.”

  “Where?”

  “Anywhere. We can start a new life. I’m the only one who can make you happy.” It is strange but she spoke offhandedly now, as if nothing mattered a great deal. She too knew that there are no longer any “great historical moments.” She even took hold of the fabric of my hunting jacket and in her old way plucked a loose thread from it.

  “That’s true.”

  “I know that I know how to and you know that I know how to.”

  “Yes.”

  It was true.

  We must have been poisoned by the methane because the roaring of the storm was inside my head and I could hardly hear her. She was delirious. She was talking again, but not even to me any longer, about being a child in the Texas countryside and walking to town Saturdays and taking her good shoes along in a paper bag. She would change shoes at the bridge and hide the old shoes in a culvert.

  “I’m nothing—” she began. “What’s the matter with me?”

  “What?”

  “That’s what you never knew. With you I had to be either—or—but never a—uh—woman. It was good for a while. Oooh. Everything’s gone black. I’m dying.”

  “No. The lamp went out.”

  I sat on the bed thinking: How could the lamp go out? To this day I don’t know. Perhaps the wick was too low.

  “Wait,” I told her and crawled on all fours to get it. Why did I say that to her? Wait. Because I wanted her to tell me how we could do it, start all over again? But not in a serious way. Yes. I was delirious too. I had forgotten about the methane and was thinking of planning a trip with her.

  Before I lit the lamp, I sat on the floor, the lamp between me and the bed. my back against the outer wall.

  “Do you really think—” I said, turning up the wick, and struck the match. For a tenth of a second I could see her in the flaring, lying on her side like Anna, knees drawn up, cheek against her hands pressed palms together, dark eyes gazing

  Without a sound the room flowered. All was light and air and color and movement but not a sound. I was moved. That is to say, for the first time in thirty years I was moved off the dead center of my life. Ah then, I was thinking as I moved, there are still great moments. I was wheeling slowly up into the night like Lucifer blown out of hell, great wings spread against the starlight.

  I knew everything. I even knew what had happened. Belle Isle had blown up. Why, I wondered, wheeling, hadn’t Raine’s room blown first? Was it because the duct was much smaller there or because I had left the chimney on the lamp?

  I must have been blown through the wall, with the wall, because I came down on the outer sloping thicket of the great oak where the limb swept to the ground, touched, and came up again. When I came to myself, the fire was hot against my cheek. But there was no great inferno. The roof and upper floors were gone and what flame there was was blown flat and in places separate from the building like the flame of a Bunsen burner. The south wind of the hurricane blew the heat away from me. I felt myself. Nothing was broken. I looked at myself. My hand and shoulder were bloody. I did not feel bad. I stood up, for some reason put my hands in my pockets, and walked up the front steps as I had done ten thousand times before. The heat, carried away by the wind, was not great. Perhaps I had been unconscious a long time. Most of the walls of the ground floor were down. There was no second floor.

  What did you say? How did I get burned?

  I had to go back to find the knife.

  9

  WHAT A BEAUTIFUL DAY! Don’t you think so? The last day of the hurricane season. All danger of hurricanes past. The morning sun bright and high refracted through the clear crystal prism of northern air with that special moderation, the promise of warmth, of fine November days in New Orleans. Everything is mild and unexceptional here, isn’t it? even the weather. By eleven o’clock the winos on Camp Street will be creeping out of their holes and stretching out or curling up like cats in sunny doorways to take a little nap. Not a bad life.

  Stop pacing up and down. I’m the prisoner, not you. Why the long race, the frowning preoccupation? Look at the street. Even the cemetery, especially the cemetery, looks cheerful. The mums are still fresh and yellow. The tombs spick-and-span, the rain trees bright as new copper pennies. Yesterday young people were singing in the old section. Some of them even sleep in the oven crypts, shove the bones aside and unroll their sleeping bags, a perfect fit. An odd thing about New Orleans: the cemeteries here are more cheerful than the hotels and the French Quarter. Tell me why that should be, why two thousand dead Creoles should be more alive than two thousand Buick dealers?

  Ah, I forgot to tell you my good news. I’m leaving today. They’re discharging me. Psychiatrically fit and legally innocent. I can prove I am sane. Can you? Why do you look at me like that? You don’t think they should? Well, in any case, my lawyer g
ot a writ of habeas corpus and my psychiatrist says I’m fit as a fiddle, saner in fact than he—the poor man is overworked, depressed, and lives on Librium.

  Just think of it! At noon I shall walk through the front door of this building for the first time in a year, stroll down that block of Annunciation Street I’ve studied so minutely, turn the corner of Tchoupitoulas, and read that sign there.

  Free &

  Ma

  B

  At last I shall know what it says.

  Then I shall turn around and look back at this window, reversing the direction of a million looks the opposite way.

  It is not a small thing to look back at the place where one has spent a year of one’s life.

  Then I shall cross the street to La Branche’s (formerly Zweig’s) Bar and Grill, enter the cool ammoniac gloom where Zweig, La Branche. is mopping the floor of small hexagonal bathroom tile, sit at the bar, and order a Dixie draught and an oyster po’ boy.

  Then I shall pick up my little suitcase, which contains my worldly possessions, a change of underwear, one suit, socks, sweater. Bowie knife, and boots, walk to St. Charles, catch the streetcar to Canal Street, close out my bank account at the Whitney (about $4,000), walk to the Union Terminal, and catch the Southerner to Richmond. Think of that. Rocking along through the lonesome pine barrens of Mississippi in this two hundredth anniversary year of the first Revolution into the old red clay cuts of Alabama, gliding into Peachtree Station in Atlanta in the evening, order a few drinks in the club car while the train rambles north in the Georgia twilight. Then off at Richmond in the cold dawn hours and catch a Greyhound for the mountains.

  Siobhan? Yes, now that I’m legally sane and competent. I can have her. And I intend to get her from Tex as soon as I’m settled in Virginia. We’ll do fine, if Tex has not bored her to death or driven her out of her mind with his horsh pistols and coinkidinkies. I suppose I should be grateful to him. At least he took care of her. But I wish now I had let her stay with Suellen. Some black people are still sane.

  Anna? Oh, she’s well. But she’s not going with me after all. I’m going alone. She’s been kind enough to lend me her place in the Blue Ridge until I can find my own little half acre.

  What happened to Anna? Really it’s incredible. I shall never understand women. We were going to have a new life together. I thought we were suited to each other—each stripped of the past, each aware that an end had come and that there had to be a new beginning, just like a man and woman striking out for the territory through the Cumberland Gap in the old days. Then, to my astonishment, I mortally offended her. I suggested that she had suffered the ultimate indignity, the worst violation a woman can suffer, rape at the hands of several men, forced fellatio, and so on, that I too had suffered my own catastrophe, and that since we had both suffered the worst that could happen to us and come through, not merely survived but prevailed, we were qualified as the new Adam and Eve of the new world. If we couldn’t invent a new world and a new dignity between man and woman, surely nobody could.

  Do you know that she took offense? In fact she flew into a rage. “Are you suggesting,” she said to me, “that I. myself, me, my person, can be violated by a man? You goddamn men. Don’t you know that there are more important things in this world? Next you’ll be telling me that despite myself I liked it.”

  There is something to what she says. The other day I opened St. Augustine’s The City of God thinking to find what some of your best people had to say about the great questions, God and man and so on. And what do you think I found? The good saint devoting page after page soothing the consciences of nuns, virgins who had been raped by Visigoths and enjoyed it despite themselves. No doubt howled with delight.

  So Anna told me to shove off. Very well. I did. Perhaps it is better that way.

  I expected too much from her. I expected her to have made the same discovery I made, to have found the great secret of life, the old life that is, the ignominious joy of rape and being raped. We, I thought, she and I, were going to discover something better. And in her heart she knows the secret as well as I but she can’t bear to admit it. Can you blame her? But we would have made good pioneers in the new life because neither one of us could tolerate the old. Someday women will admit the truth, will refuse to accept it, and then they will be my best recruits.

  Oh, one last thing she said. She held my hand for a while after shaking hands goodbye. “When you get up there in Virginia,” she told me, “you’ll find a fallen-down house but a small solid-two-hundred-year-old barn. One side is a corn crib and a tack room with a loft. It would make a lovely cozy place to live in the winter and big enough for three.” Christ, do you think this is another woman trying to fix me up in a pigeonnier? Why is it that shelters for animals now seem more habitable than ordinary houses? Hm. A done-over corn crib. But she said big enough for three. I had the feeling that if she could take her revenge, shoot enough men to even the score, not only for herself but for the bad trick played on her and her sisters by God or biology or evolution or whatever, she then might settle down with me in a barn, and we could hold each other as lovers should do, cling to each other like children, while Siobhan frolicked in the loft. Do you think she’ll come?

  You look at me strangely. I don’t think I ever thanked you for listening to me. You know that I could not have told anyone else. Yes, I’m quite all right now. No, no confession forthcoming. Father, as you well know. But there is one thing … There is a coldness … You know the feeling of numbness and coldness, no, not a feeling, but a lack of feeling, that I spoke of during the events at Belle Isle? I told you it might have been the effect of the hurricane, the low pressure, methane, whatever. But I still feel it. That is, today, I don’t feel it. I don’t feel anything—except a slight curiosity about walking down that street out there. What do you think of it, that there is a certain coldness… Do you feel it?

  The truth is that during all the terrible events that night at Belle Isle, I felt nothing at all. Nothing good, nothing bad, not even a sense of discovery. I feel nothing now except a certain coldness.

  I feel so cold. Percival.

  Tell me the truth. Is everyone cold now or is it only I?

  What? You remind me that I said in the beginning that there was something I wanted to ask you. Ah yes. Well, it doesn’t seem important now. Because there is no answer to the question. The question? Very well. The question is: Why did I discover nothing at the heart of evil? There was no “secret” after all, no discovery, no flickering of interest, nothing at all. not even any evil. There was no sense of coming close to the “answer” as there had been when I discovered the stolen money in my father’s sock drawer. As I held that wretched Jacoby by the throat, I felt nothing except the itch of fiberglass particles under my collar. So I have nothing to ask you after all because there is no answer. There is no question. There is no unholy grail just as there was no Holy Grail.

  Not even the knife at his throat seemed to make any difference. All it came down to was steel molecules entering skin molecules, artery molecules, blood cells.

  You gaze at me with such—what? Sadness? Love? What about love? Do I think I can ever love anyone? Explain the question.

  But that is beside the point. The point is, I know what I need to know and what I must do. Shall I tell you? Christ, you of all people should understand. Come here and stand with me at the window. I want to show you something, some insignificant things you may not have noticed. Why so wary? You act as if I were Satan showing you the kingdoms of the world from the pinnacle of the temple.

  Listen. Do you hear them? Young people singing and laughing, enjoying themselves in the city of the dead. Perhaps they know something we don’t know.

  I’m like that old lady at the window across the street. I don’t miss much. For example, I saw you earlier down there. In the cemetery. Surprised? I saw what you did, even though you did it very quickly. You stopped at a tomb and said a prayer. A relative? A friend? A request? So you pray for the dead. You k
now, something has changed in you. I have the feeling that while I was talking and changing, you were listening and changing. Am I wrong or have you reached a decision of sorts? No? You’re waiting for me to finish?

  Just take a look. What do you see? The same friendly little scene I first showed you the other day. The same street, the same junked 1958 Cadillac, the same movie, the same neat little Volkswagen with the MAKE LOVE NOT WAR sticker pulling in this very moment with the same mousy little coed at the wheel, the same two homosexuals holding hands next door, a quiet decent couple actually, much like any other couple, raper and rapee, with needs like yours and mine plus an occasional tube of K-Y jelly.

  Look closely, you’ll see that one or two insignificant items are different out there in the street. Notice the new bumper sticker on the VW: IF IT FEELS GOOD DO IT. Notice the poster near the old colored entrance of the movie. It’s new. Deep Throat where once we saw Henry V and Key Largo.

  Yes, insignificant changes, I’ll admit. In fact, not really a change at all, but only more of the same. You shrug. What of it? Yes, you’re right. What of it?

  You say you wish to know what I’m going to do. Very well. I’ll gladly tell you because when I woke this morning I knew for the first time exactly what I was going to do. Really it’s simple. I can’t imagine why I had to go to such lengths to discover it. There it was under my nose all along.

  Yes, it dawned on me that suddenly, the solution is as clear and simple as an arithmetic problem. As a matter of fact, that is what it is: a matter of logic as simple as two plus two. I saw exactly how things are and what I must do. For your benefit I can even state it as a simple scholastic syllogism.

  We are living in Sodom.

  1.I do not propose to live in Sodom or to raise my son and daughters in Sodom.

  2.Either your God exists or he does not.

  3.If he exists, he will not tolerate Sodom much longer. He will either destroy it or let the Russians or the Chinese destroy it just as he turned the Assyrians loose on the Jews, and Sparta on Athens. How many Spartans would be needed to take these 200 million Athenians? Ten thousand? A thousand? A hundred? Twelve? One?