by Walker Percy
But my invention has changed all this. Now I know how to be happy and make others happy. With my little machine I can diagnose and treat with equal success the morning terror of liberals and the apoplexy of conservatives. In fact it could save the U.S.A. if we can get through the next hour or so.
What’s wrong with my eyes? My field of vision is narrowing from top to bottom. The world looks as it if were seen through the slit of a gun turret. But of course! My eyes are swelling with hives! It could only come from the delicious gin fizzes prepared for me by Lola, my lovely cellist.
Still I feel very well. My brain, lubricated by egg white from the gin fizzes, hums like a top; pangs of love for the three girls—two anyhow—pierce my heart (how beautiful did God make woman!). Yet I am able to observe every detail of the terrain through my turret slit. A single rank weed, I notice, has sprouted overnight in the sand trap of number 12 fairway next to the interstate right-of-way—this despite the fact that the champs are to play here tonight “under the arcs.”
Far away church steeples puncture the globy oaks. Ordinary fat grayish clouds sail over the town blown by map winds with pencil lines.
The sand trap and the clouds put me in mind of being ten years old and in love and full of longing. The first thing a man remembers is longing and the last thing he is conscious of before death is exactly the same longing. I have never seen a man die who did not die in longing. When I was ten years old I woke one summer morning to a sensation of longing. Besides the longing I was in love with a girl named Louise, and so the same morning I went out to this same sand trap where I hoped chance would bring us together. At the breakfast table, I took a look at my father with his round head, his iron-colored hair, his chipper red cheeks, and I wondered to myself: at what age does a man get over this longing?
The answer is, he doesn’t. My father was so overwhelmed with longing that it unfitted him for anything but building martin houses.
My father, also a physician, had his office in town and I kept it, poor place though it was, even after I became a professor at the medical center.
We are not exactly a distinguished family. My father was a failed physician who also drank. In early middle age he got himself elected coroner and more or less retired, sat alone in his office between the infrequent autopsies and made spectacular bird houses, martin hotels, and wren houses of cypress with brass fittings.
My mother, a “realtor” and a whiz at getting buyer and seller together, really supported us.
Our family’s only claim to singularity, if not distinction, is that we are one of that rare breed, Anglo-Saxon Catholics who were Catholic from the beginning and stayed Catholic. My forebears remained steadfast in the old faith both in Hertfordshire, where Elizabeth got after them, and in Maryland, where the Episcopalians finally kicked them out. Sir Thomas More, in fact, is a collateral ancestor. Our name anyhow is More. But if such antecedents seem illustrious, recent reality is less so. It is as if the effort of clinging to the faith took such a toll that we were not fit for much else. Evicted from Maryland, my ancestor removed to Bardstown, Kentucky, where he and his sons founded a whiskey distillery—and failed at that.
My grandfather took dentistry at Loyola of the South and upon graduation married a Creole heiress with timberlands and never drilled a tooth.
All Mores, until I came along, were good Catholics and went to mass—I too until a few years ago. Wanderers we became, like the Jews in the wilderness. For we were Catholic English-Americans and most other English-Americans were Protestant and most Catholics were either Mediterranean or Irish. In the end we settled for Louisiana, where religious and ethnic confusion is sufficiently widespread and good-natured that no one keeps track of such matters—except the Baptists, who don’t like Catholics no matter what. My forefathers donned Knights of Columbus robes, wore swords and plumed hats, attended French shrimp boils and Irish wakes, made retreats with Germans, were pallbearers at Italian funerals. Like the French and Germans here, we became easygoing Louisianians and didn’t think twice about our origins. We fought with Beauregard next to old blue-light Presbyterian Stonewall Jackson and it seemed natural enough. My father was only a third-degree Knight of Columbus, but he too went regularly to Holy Name shrimp boils and Lady of the Lake barbecues and was right content. For twenty-five years he sat out the long afternoons in his dim little coroner’s office, sipping Early Times between autopsies and watching purple martins come skimming up to his splendid cypress-and-brass hotel.
The asphalt of the empty plaza still bubbles under the hot July sun. Through the shimmer of heat one can see the broken store fronts beyond the plaza. A green line wavers in midair above the pavement, like the hanging gardens of Babylon. It is not a mirage, however. I know what it is. A green growth has taken root on the flat roofs of the stores.
As for me, I was a smart boy and at the age of twenty-six bade fair to add luster to the family name for the first time since Sir Thomas More himself, that great soul, the dearest best noblest merriest of Englishmen. My contribution, I hasten to add, was in the realm of science not sanctity. Why can’t I follow More’s example, love myself less, God and my fellowman more, and leave whiskey and women alone? Sir Thomas More was merry in life and death and he loved and was loved by everyone, even his executioner, with whom he cracked jokes. By contrast, I am possessed by terror and desire and live a solitary life. My life is a longing, longings for women, for the Nobel Prize, for the hot bosky bite of bourbon whiskey, and other great heart-wrenching longings that have no name. Sir Thomas was right, of course, and I am wrong. But on the other hand these are peculiar times… .
When I was a young man, the question at the time was: where are the Catholic Einsteins, Salks, Oppenheimers? And the answer came, at least from my family: well, here comes one, namely me. The local Catholic paper and the K.C. magazine wrote me up, along with some well-known baseball players, bandleaders, and TV personalities. It was the end of the era of Lawrence Welk, Perry Como, Bing Crosby, Stan Musial, Ed McMahon, all good Catholics, good fellows, decent family men, etcetera etcetera, though not exactly the luminaries of the age—John Kennedy was the exception—and the question was, who was going to take their place, let alone measure up to Einstein.
One proof of the divine origin of the Catholic Church: that I found myself in the same Church as Lawrence Welk and Danny Thomas and all those Irishmen and did not feel in the least peculiar.
What happened was that as a young physician in New Orleans I stumbled onto an extraordinary medical discovery, wrote an article for the Journal of the American Medical Association that was picked up by Time, Newsweek, and the papers. Caption under Time photo: “Psychic Fallout?” In Newsweek: “Doctor Treats Doctors in Switch.” Headline in New York Daily News: “Beautiful Girl Interne Disrobes—Fallout Cause Says Doc.”
I was the doc and a very promising doc at that. How many doctors achieve fame in their twenties?
Alas, the promise didn’t pan out. On the contrary. There followed twenty years of silence and decline. My daughter, Samantha, died; my wife ran off with a heathen Englishman—come to think of it, I haven’t seen a Christian Englishman for years—and I left off research, left off eating Christ in Communion, and took to sipping Early Times instead and seeking the company of the fair sex, as they used to say.
My wife and I lived a good life. We used to get up in the morning in a beautiful house, sit down to breakfast in our “enclosed patio,” watch Barbara Walters talk about sexual intercourse on the Today show. Nevertheless, I fell prey to morning terror, shook like a leaf at the breakfast table, and began to drink vodka with my grits. At the same time that I developed liberal anxiety, I also contracted conservative rage and large-bowel complaints.
But—and here is the point—the period of my decline was also a period of lying fallow and of the germination of some strange quirky ideas. Toynbee, I believe, speaks of the Return, of the man who fails and goes away, is exiled, takes counsel with himself, hits on something, sees daylight —and
returns to triumph.
First, reader and especially my fellow physicians, let me set forth my credentials, recall to your mind my modest discovery twenty years ago, as well as give you an inkling of my recent breakthrough.
Do you recall the Heavy Sodium experiments that were conducted years ago in New Orleans under the stands of the Sugar Bowl stadium? and the mysterious accident that put an end to the same? There occurred an almost soundless explosion, a whssssk like tearing silk, a few people were killed, and a curious yellow lens-shaped cloud hung over the French Quarter for a day or two.
Here’s what happened. At the time I was encephalographer-in-residence at Tulane University. Part of my job was to do encephalograms on students with the hope of eliminating those who were subject to the sundry fits and seizures that were plaguing universities at the time, conservative fits and radical seizures. Another duty was to assist the team of physicists assigned to the secret Vieux Carré project under the Sugar Bowl. I doubled as medical officer and radiation monitor. The physicists were tinkering with a Heavy Sodium pile by means of which they hoped to hit on a better source of anticancer radiation than the old cobalt treatment. The Heavy Sodium was obtained from the massive salt domes of southern Louisiana where it occurs (along with the Heavy Chloride ion) as a trace element. The experiment was promising for two reasons. One was that Heavy Sodium radiation was thought not to injure normal tissues—hence no X-ray burns. The other was evidence that it destroyed cancer cells in mice.
The long and short of it is that the reactor got loose, killed a brace of physicists, sent up an odd yellow cloud, and accordingly rated a headline on the second page of the New York Daily News, as might a similar accident at Oak Ridge or Los Alamos.
In the weeks that followed, however, I noticed something curious and so made my, to date, sole contribution to medical annals. You may still find it in the textbooks, where it usually rates a footnote as “More’s Paradoxical Sodium Radiation Syndrome.” Something peculiar happened in the Tulane Psychiatric Hospital, where I was based. Nobody thought to make a connection between these peculiar events and the yellow cloud. Was it not John Locke who said that the mark of genius is the ability to discern not this thing or that thing but rather the connection between the two?
At any rate I noticed a remarkable change in the hospital people. Some of the patients got better and some of the psychiatrists got worse. Indeed, many of our most disturbed patients, the suicidal, the manic, the naked, the catatonic, in short the mad, were found one morning sitting fully clothed and in their right minds. A number of residents and staff physicians, on the other hand, developed acute symptoms out of the blue. One doctor, for example, a noted authority on schizophrenia, uttered a hoarse cry on rounds, hurled himself through a window, ran over the levee, and disappeared into the waters of the mighty Mississippi. Another, a lady psychologist and by the way a very attractive person and something of a radio-TV personality, stripped off her clothing in staff conference and made gross sexual overtures to several male colleagues—hence the somewhat inaccurate headline in the New York Daily News.
A third case, a fellow resident and good friend of mine, a merry outgoing person both at work and play, underwent a marked personality change. In the hospital he became extremely cold in mien, abstracted and so absorbed with laboratory data that he treated his patients like guinea pigs in a cage, while in his off-duty hours he began to exhibit the lewdest sort of behavior, laying hands on strange women like a drunken sailor.
Shortly thereafter I awoke one morning and it occurred to me that there might be a connection between these peculiar events and the lens-shaped cloud. For though I attached no weight to the superstitions flying around—one good soul, a chambermaid in the hospital, said that the yellow cloud had driven the demons out of the mad patients and into the doctors—nevertheless, it did occur to me that the cloud might have contained, and turned loose, something besides demons. I ordered esoteric blood chemistry on both sane patients and mad doctors. Sure enough, both groups had sufficient levels of Heavy Sodium and Chloride in their blood.
What I didn’t know at the time and what took me twenty years to figure out was why some got better and others got worse. I know now that the heavy ions have different effects on different brain centers. For example, Heavy Sodium radiation stimulates Brodmann Area 32, the center of abstractive activity or tendencies toward angelism, while Heavy Chloride stimulates the thalamus, which promotes adjustment to the environment, or, as I call it without prejudice, bestialism. The two conditions are not mutually exclusive. It is not uncommon nowadays to see patients suffering from angelism-bestialism. A man, for example, can feel at one and the same time extremely abstracted and inordinately lustful toward lovely young women who may be perfect strangers.
So ran my report in the J.A.M.A., a bald observation of a connection, without theory. The explanation, now that I look back on it, seems so simple now. Then I was like Benjamin Franklin getting a jolt from his kite and having no notion what hit him. Now I know.
A second thunderhead, larger and more globular, is approaching from the north. A breeze springs up. There is no thunder but lightning flickers around inside the cloud like a defective light bulb.
While there is still time, let me tell you what my invention does, just in case worst comes to worst and my article in Brain can’t be published. Since catastrophe may overtake us within the hour, I am dictating these words into a pocket recorder so that survivors poking around the ruins of Howard Johnson’s a hundred years from now will have a chance of avoiding a repetition.
My discovery, like all great scientific breakthroughs, is simplicity itself. The notion came to me during my work with the encephalograph, with which instrument, as you know, one tapes electrodes to the skull and records brain waves, which in turn may reveal such abnormalities as tumors, strokes, fits, and so on.
It happened while I was ill.
One stormy night I lay in a hospital bed recovering from seizures of alternating terror and delight with intervening periods of immense longing. These attacks are followed in my case by periods of extraordinary tranquillity of mind, of heightened perception, clairvoyance, and increased inductive powers. The storm roared and crashed outside the acute ward; I lay on my back in bed, hands at my side, surrounded by thirty-nine other madmen moaning and whimpering like souls in the inner circle of hell. Yet I felt extraordinarily happy. Thoughts flew into my head like little birds. Then it was that my great idea came to me. So confident was I of its value that I leapt out of bed at the height of the storm and yelled at my fellow patients:
“Don’t be afraid, brothers! Don’t cry! Don’t tremble! I have made a discovery that will cure you! Believe me, brothers!”
“We believe you, Doc!” the madmen cried in the crashing thunder, and they did. Madmen, like possessed souls in the Gospels, know when you are telling the truth.
It was my fellow physicians who gave me trouble.
My idea was simply that: if the encephalograph works, why not devise a gadget without wires that will measure the electrical activity of the separate centers of the brain? Hardly a radical idea. But here was the problem: given such a machine, given such readings, could the readings then be correlated with the manifold woes of the Western world, its terrors and rages and murderous impulses? And if so, could the latter be treated by treating the former?
A large order, but so was Edward Jenner’s dream of eradicating the great pox.
A bit of luck came my way. Once I got out of the acute wing, they put me to work as assistant to the resident encephalographer, one of those super-Negroes who speak five languages, quote the sutras, and are wizards in electronics as well. He, Colley Wilkes, got interested in my ideas and helped me rig up my first working model. Another break came my way from Kino Yamaiuchi, a classmate, presently with Osaka Instruments, who cut every piece of red tape and got the first five hundred production models turned out in record time—a little order that cost me $150,000 worth of my wife’s R. J. Reynold�
�s stock.
My invention unites two principles familiar to any sophomore in high school physics. One is the principle of electrical induction. Any electrical activity creates a magnetic field, which in turn will induce a current in a wire passed through the field. The other is the principle of location by triangulation. Using microcircuitry techniques, Colley and I rigged up two tiny electronic “listeners,” something like the parabolic reflectors with which one can hear a whisper at two hundred feet. Using our double receiver, we could “hear” the electrical activity of a pinhead-sized area anywhere in the brain: in the cortex, the pineal body, the midbrain—anywhere.
So we “listened.” Colley was interested in locating brain tumors and such, but I was after bigger game. We listened and sure enough Colley found his brain tumors. What I found was a horse of a different color.
Colley, I will admit, has not gone along with my idea of measuring and treating the deep perturbations of the soul. Unfortunately, there still persists in the medical profession the quaint superstition that only that which is visible is real. Thus the soul is not real. Uncaused terror cannot exist. Then, friend, how come you are shaking?
No matter, though. Later I was made a professor and didn’t need Colley’s help.
I have called my machine More’s Qualitative Quantitative Ontological Lapsometer.
A curtain moves in a window of the front wing of the motel, opposite the girls’ rooms. Could it be that some Bantu S.O.B. is still trying to shoot me?
Allow me to cite, in simplified terms, a couple of my early case histories.
Patient #1
One hot summer afternoon as I sat at my father’s old coroner’s desk by the open back door sipping Early Times, watching the flight patterns of the martins, and pondering the singularity of being forty-four years old, my nurse, whom I mainly employ to keep patients away, brought in a patient.