Love in the Ruins

by Walker Percy

“We’re happy here.”

  “Good.”

  “Everyone here lives a life of perfect freedom and peace.”

  “Good.”

  “We help each other. We love.”

  “Very good.”

  “That is, all except Hester. She hasn’t found anyone she likes yet. Eh, Hester?”

  “I’m not quite sure,” says Hester, not blushing.

  Oh those lovely hollowed-out Holyoke vowels. Her voice is a Congregational bell.

  “We’re basically religious here, Doc.”

  “Good.”

  “We have God every minute.”

  “Good.”

  “Don’t you see that I am God, you are God, that prothonotary warbler is God?”

  “No.”

  “We always tell the exact truth. Will you answer me honestly, Doc?”

  “All right.”

  “What is your life like? Are you happy?”

  “No.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s hard to say.” For some reason I blush under Hester’s clear gaze.

  “But you don’t have a good life.”

  “No.”

  “Then why do you live it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We have a good life here.”

  “Good.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with sex, Doc. You shouldn’t put it down.”

  “I don’t.”

  “It’s not even the most important thing.”

  “It’s not?”

  “With us it’s far down the list.”

  “Hm.” I look at my watch. “You can take me back.”

  “O.K. if I pay you later? Or do you want some Choctaw cannab?”

  “No thanks. Don’t worry about it.” Some time ago Chuck lit up a calumet of Choctaw or “rabbit” cannabis and has now begun to jump a bit, feet together, kangaroo style. He passes the calumet around. Hester smokes and passes it to me.

  “No thanks.”

  Ethel, returning from her chickee, also refuses. “Pay the man,” she tells Chuck. “Can’t you tell he wants to be paid?”

  “You’re all right, Doc,” says Chuck, jumping. “I’ve always liked you. I’ve always liked Catholics. We’ve got some liberated Catholics here.”

  “I’m not a liberated Catholic.”

  “What’s this about your invention?”

  “Did your father tell you?” I am surprised. Perhaps Chuck and his father have patched things up.

  “No. My mother. She said you passed a miracle. Have a drag, Doc?”

  “No thanks.”

  I tell them briefly about my lapsometer and about the new breakthrough, my ionizer that corrects electrical malfunctions. High though he’s getting, Chuck, what with his three years at M.I.T. and 800 SAT score, is digging me utterly.

  “Wow, Doc! Great! Wild!” cries Chuck, jumping straight up and down like a Choctaw at the jibiya dance. “You got to stay! We’ll massage everybody on the mainland with your lapsometer and get rid of the old sad things!”

  “Do you mean you can actually treat personality hangups?” asks little Brooklyn-Pocahontas Ethel.

  “Well, yes.”

  “Do you have it with you?”

  “As a matter of fact I do.”

  “Give us a reading, Doc!” says Chuck.

  Even Hester shows a spark of interest.

  “Treat Hester, Doc!” cries Chuck. “She’s still Springfield bourgeois. Look at her! She likes you, Doc.”

  “This is the last place I’d treat anybody.”

  “Why?” asks Ethel, frowning.

  “Too much heavy salt hereabouts.” I pick up a chunk of dirty Confederate salt. “This stuff assays at about point oh-seven percent heavy salt. I wouldn’t dare use my ionizer.”

  Chuck snaps his fingers. “You mean sub-chain reaction? Silent implosion? Whssssk?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wowee! Hot damn!” Now Chuck is jumping like a pogo.

  “But you could do the diagnostic part?’ asks Hester in her lovely hollow-throat voice.

  “Yes.”

  “Do one on me,” says Ethel.

  “Doc, tell me the truth now,” says Chuck, capering and jerking his elbows.

  “All right.”

  “Are you telling me that with that thing you can actually register the knotheadedness of the Knotheads, the nutty objectivity of the scientists, and the mad spasms of the liberals?”

  “That’s an odd way of putting it, but yes.”

  “And you’re also telling me that you can treat ’em, fry ’em with your ray and make ’em human?”

  “With the same qualification, yes.”

  “And you’re also telling me that something is afoot with all those nuts over yonder and that today on the glorious Fourth of July something is going to happen and they’re all going to do each other in?”

  “Well, not quite but—”

  “And finally you’re saying that some of your gadgets have fallen into the wrong hands and there’s a chance the whole swamp might go up in a Heavy-Sodium reaction?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wow! Whee! Hot damn!” Off he goes in his goat dance.

  “Will you sit down, you idiot,” says Ethel crossly. “What’s got into you?”

  “It’s so funny. And Doc here. Doc, man you the wildest of all. Doc, you got to stay here with us. Who’s going to believe all that great wild stuff over there?”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “Believe? Sure. Because you’re putting down on all of them, including the scientists.”

  “I’m a scientist.”

  “You’re better. You’re a shaman. The scientists have blown it.”

  “Still and all, scientists are after the truth.”

  “I believe you,” says Hester suddenly, clear post-Puritan Holyoke eyes full on me.

  “I said, do one on me,” says Ethel, handing my bag to me.

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t believe you.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “I think you’re afraid to.”

  “No, I’m not afraid.”

  “I wish you would,” Hester says, pulling her brown heels across her calves.

  “I can do a diagnosis here but not a treatment.”

  “Do it!”

  I shrug. “Very well.”

  It takes three minutes to run a standard profile. Ethel bows her head so that her Pocahontas braids fall along her cheeks.

  “Hm.”

  “Doc, you kill me,” says Chuck.

  “Hm. She’s got a contradictory reading.”

  “A what?”

  “Look here. She’s got a strong amplitude and high millivoltage over the temporal lobe, Brodmann 28, which correlates in my experience with singular concrete historical awareness, vivid childhood memories, you know, as well as a sense of the uniqueness of one’s tradition. But see here: an even stronger reading over parietal lobe, Brodmann 18. That’s the site of ahistoric perceptions that are both concrete and abstract. You should be an excellent artist, Ethel.”

  “You see there, Ethel! She is, Doc.”

  “Tch,” says Ethel sourly. “I’ve got the same thing from fortune cookies.”

  “Are you Jewish, Ethel?”

  “What? Yes. What do you mean by asking?”

  “You exhibit here what I have termed contradictory Judaism.”

  “What in hell do you mean?” Ethel swings around on her knees and looks at me squarely for the first time.

  “Because you believe at one and the same time that the Jews are unique and that they are not. Thus you would be offended if a Jew told you the Jews were chosen by God, but you would also be offended if a non-Jew told you they were not.”

  “You hear that, Ethel,” yells Chuck, beginning to jump again. “Why only last week—”

  Ethel has picked up my lapsometer. “You better take Dr. More home,” she tells Chuck without taking her eyes from me.

  “O.K., honey, but
I mean, gee—Look, I’m sorry, Doc—”

  “I’m not listening to some bastard tell me I have a Jewish brain.”

  “Well actually,” I tell Ethel, “I show the same reading, believing as I do both that God—” I stop, mouth wide open. “Look out!—don’t throw it!— Jesus!—”

  But she threw it and in doing so must have flipped the adaptor switch because, before I can catch it, the lapsometer swings through a slow arc, adaptor down. The dirty salt on the bank spits and smokes.

  “Good God, what is that?” asks Chuck, instantly sober.

  “That was close.” Turning off the switch, I pack the lapsometer with trembling hands.

  “Yeah, but what was that stuff? Was it what I think it was?”

  “Brimstone, no doubt,” says Ethel drily.

  “As a matter of fact, it was.”

  “What else?” says Ethel.

  “Its the sulfur in the salt. Don’t worry. No harm done. Now I’ve got to go.”

  “Right,” says Chuck soberly. “I want to thank you for—”

  “Never mind. Goodbye, Hester.”

  “Goodbye. Come back.”

  “All right.”

  How stands it with a forty-five-year-old man who can fall in love on the spot with a twenty-year-old stranger, a clear-eyed vacant simple Massachusetts girl, and desire nothing more in this life than to move into her chickee?

  On the interstate

  7 p.m. / July 4

  IT IS GETTING DARK. Lightning flickers like a genie inside the bottle-shaped cloud.

  Why am I so sleepy? It is almost impossible to keep my eyes open! Fireflies of albumen molecules spark in my brain. Yet I don’t feel bad. Then concentrate! The next few minutes are critical.

  At this moment the President is beginning to speak in New Orleans and the Vice-President is mounting the platform at NASA a few miles away. Both are making a plea for unity. The President, who is an integrationist Mormon married to a liberated Catholic, will appeal to Leftists to respect law and order. The Vice-President, a Southern Baptist Knothead married to a conservative Unitarian, is asking Knotheads for tolerance and understanding, etcetera.

  The poor U.S.A.!

  Even now, late as it is, nobody can really believe that it didn’t work after all. The U.S.A. didn’t work! Is it even possible that from the beginning it never did work? That the thing always had a flaw in it, a place where it would shear, and that all this time we were not really different from Ecuador and Bosnia-Herzegovina, just richer. Moon Mullins blames it on the niggers. Hm. Was it the nigger business from the beginning? What a bad joke: God saying, here it is, the new Eden, and it is yours because you’re the apple of my eye; because you the lordly Westerners, the fierce Caucasian-Gentile-Visigoths, believed in me and in the outlandish Jewish Event even though you were nowhere near it and had to hear the news of it from strangers. But you believed and so I gave it all to you, gave you Israel and Greece and science and art and the lordship of the earth, and finally even gave you the new world that I blessed for you. And all you had to do was pass one little test, which was surely child’s play for you because you had already passed the big one. One little test: here’s a helpless man in Africa, all you have to do is not violate him. That’s all.

  One little test: you flunk!

  God, was it always the nigger business, now, just as in 1883, 1783, 1683, and hasn’t it always been that ever since the first tough God-believing Christ-haunted cunning violent rapacious Visigoth-Western-Gentile first set foot here with the first black man, the one willing to risk everything, take all or lose all, the other willing just to wait and outlast because once he was violated all he had to do was wait because sooner or later the first would wake up and know that he had flunked, been proved a liar where he lived, and no man can live with that. And sooner or later the lordly Visigoth-Western-Gentile-Christian-Americans would have to falter, fall out, turn upon themselves like scorpions in a bottle.

  No! No fair! Foul! The test was too much! What do you expect of a man? Yet even so we almost passed. There was a time … You tested us because bad as we were there was no one else, and everybody knew it, even our enemies, and that is why they curse us. Who curses the Chinese? Who ever imagined the Chinese were blessed by God and asked to save the world? Who ever expected anything else from them than what they did? What a laugh. And as for Russia and the Russian Christ who was going to save Europe from itself: ha ha.

  Flunked! Christendom down the drain. The dream over. Back to history and Bosnia-Herzegovina.

  No! No fair!

  But wait. It is still not too late. I can save you, America! I know something! I know what is wrong! I hit on something, made a breakthrough, came on a discovery! I can save the terrible God-blessed Americans from themselves! With my invention! Listen to me. Don’t give up. It is not too late. You are still the last hope. There is no one else. Bad as we are, there is no one else.

  I crack one eye. Through my turret slit, I notice that the sand trap is smoking. The champs, swinging sand wedges, are converging in the fiery bunker.

  It has begun.

  A yellow lens-shaped cloud hangs like a zeppelin over the horizon beyond the swamp. From the direction of NASA to the north comes a rattle of gunfire.

  Then why don’t I get up and go down to the motel and see to the girls?

  Because I am so sleepy. One little catnap …

  JULY FIRST

  At home

  9:00 a.m. / July 1

  SOMEONE TOOK A SHOT AT ME AT THE BREAKFAST TABLE.

  At this moment I am lying in a corner out of the line of fire and thinking to myself: why is it better down here?

  The shots, three of them, came from the direction of the swamp. I was eating breakfast in my “enclosed patio.” First there was the sound of the shot heard through the glass, not close, not alarming, not even noteworthy. Undoubtedly a gunshot, though it is too early for squirrel season. Then, more or less at the same time as the second shot, the glass panel shattered. I say more or less at the same time because I did not infer a connection between the two, the shot and the glass shattering.

  The third shot was lower, closer, louder. It made a hole in the glass, and in my mind the shot bore a relation to the hole. Somebody is shooting at me, I thought as I drank a warm orange drink named Tang. As I am considering this at the top of my head, something at the heart of me knew better and I found myself diving for the corner even as I ruminated. Saved by a reflex learned with the First Air Cav in the fifteen-year war in Ecuador.

  The corner is a good choice, flanked as it is by two low walls of brick that support the glass panels, high enough for protection and low enough to see over if I crane up. But I don’t have to crane up. There is a fenestration in the bricks at eye level.

  Here I used to tell Samantha the story of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, how the cobra got into the house by crawling through a hole in the bricks. Samantha shivered with delight and stopped up the hole with newspapers.

  A description of my wife: the sort of woman who would name our daughter Samantha though there was no one in our families with this name.

  A plan takes shape. Wait a few minutes, get the Smith & Wesson, leave the house by the lower “woods” door, circle the yard under cover of the sumacs, and get behind the sniper.

  Is someone after my invention? By craning my head I can catch a glimpse of the box in the hall, the lovely crafted crate from Osaka Instruments. It is the first shipment of the More Qualitative-Quantitative Ontological Lapsometer, the stethoscope of the spirit, one hundred compact pocket-sized machines of brushed chrome. I’ve come a long way since my Brownie model.

  I am lying on the floor drinking warm Tang to which two duck eggs have been added plus two ounces of vodka plus a dash of Tabasco.

  The reason the Tang is warm is that the refrigerator doesn’t work. Nothing works. All my household motors are silent: air-conditioner, vacuum, dishwasher, dryer, automobile. Appliances and automobiles are more splendid than ever, but when they break down nob
ody will fix them. My car broke down at the A & P three weeks ago and nobody would come fix it so I abandoned it. Paradise is littered with the rusting hulks of splendid Pontiacs, Olds, and Chryslers that developed vapor locks and dead batteries and were abandoned. Nowadays people buy cars, drive them until they break down, abandon them and buy another. Most of my friends have switched to Toyotas, which have one moving part.

  Don’t tell me the U.S.A. went down the drain because of Leftism, Knotheadism, apostasy, pornography, polarization, etcetera etcetera. All these things may have happened, but what finally tore it was that things stopped working and nobody wanted to be a repairman.

  The bricks smell of old wax. After all these years particles of Pledge wax still adhere to the cindery pits that pock the glaze. Doris used to wax the bricks once a week. “Annie Mae,” she’d tell the maid, “Go Pledge the bricks.”

  I polish off the Tang-plus-vodka-plus-duck-eggs-plus-Tabasco. I feel better.

  Another peep through the cobra hole: nothing moves in the swamp, but there is a flash of light. A telescopic sight?

  By moving back a few inches I can see the curving loess slope on which my house stands. The house next door has been abandoned, its slab cracked and reclaimed by the swamp, by creeper and anise with its star-shaped funky-smelling flower. Wild grape festoons the carport.

  Honeysuckle has invaded Doris’s azaleas. A particularly malignant vine with rank racemose leaves has laid hold of her Saint Francis, who appears to be lifting his birdbath above these evil serpents. Titmice and cardinals used to drink here. Saint Francis was Doris’s favorite saint, not because he loved Christ but because he loved titmice.

  The evil vine, I notice, has reached the house. A tendril pokes through the cobra hole and curls up looking for purchase.

  Wait! Something moves.

  But it is only a swamp bird, a gloomy purplish-green heron that flaps down out of a cypress and lights on Saint Francis’s bird-limed head. There he perches, neck drawn into his shoulders, yellow bill pointed straight up. He looks as frowsty and ill-conceived as a bird drawn by a child.

  Now I’ve got my revolver, by crawling to the closet and back. The carbine is downstairs.

  No sign of the sniper. Has he gone?

  Directly above my head on the glass-topped coffee table are Doris’s favorite books just as she left them in the “enclosed patio.” That was before I roofed it, and the books are swollen by old rains to fat wads of pulp, but still stacked so: