Love in the Ruins

by Walker Percy

  Returning to the corner, I discover I can hear by putting an ear to the partition, which acts as a sounding board.

  “And I’ll tell you something else,” says the voice at the center pole, a voice without antecedents, black yes, Midwestern perhaps, but mainly stereo-V, an announcer’s voice, a Detroit disc jockey’s voice. “This is war and don’t you forget it. All this talk about some people being nice, listen. They’re nice all right They’re so nice and polite that you mothers been castrated without knowing it.”

  “What you talking about, my mother being—” begins Victor, outraged.

  “No, what he means, Victor,” says Willard, touching his eye and hooting, “is—”

  “Never mind,” says the third man in disgust “Jesus.”

  “I hear you say Jesus!” cries Victor.

  “I said, never mind.”

  “I say bless Jesus!”

  “O.K., O.K.”

  Guns clink together. Wood, lightened on its load, creaks. The deer carcass slides over the rough wood of the bench. A man grunts as the load is hefted.

  “Well, they going to eat today,” says a voice, Willard’s, going away.

  Wait five minutes to make sure.

  5

  Shortcut into rear of hospital and through the day room of my old ward. The attendant peering through the screened glass lets me in, though he is not clear about my position. Am I professor, patient, doctor, what? But he knows me from somewhere, sees my bag, lets me through. Did I remember to put pistol in bag? Yes.

  Though the building is new, the day room already has the worn look of all day rooms. Its scuffed tile and hard-used blocky wooden furniture is for all the world like a child’s playhouse. The picture on stereo-V rolls slowly. The room smells of idle man-flesh, pajamas stiffened by body dandruff and dried urine. Great sky-high windows let in the out-of-doors through heavy security screens that render the world gauzy green and pointillist.

  Here dwell my old friends and fellow madmen. I recognize them. They gaze at me, knowing me and knowing me not. I am like a dream they have dreamed before. A man standing at the window twitters his fingers, sending out radar beams to the vague, gauzy world, and cocks his ear, listening for returning blips. Who are you out there? Another man carries his head under his arm. A blond youth, a pale handsome exchange student from Holland, remembers that he owes me a debt of some sort and pays me off with feces money, a small dry turd, which I accept in good part, folding it into my handkerchief and pocketing same.

  Here I spent the best months of my life. In a few days my high-lows leveled out, my depression-exaltation melded into a serene skimming watchfulness. My terror-rage—cowardly lionheartedness and lionhearted cowardice—fused into a mild steady resolve. Here in the day room and in the ward we patients came to understand each other as only fellow prisoners and exiles can. Sane outside, I can’t make head or tail of people. Mad inside, we signaled each other like auctioneers, a wink here, a wag of finger there. I listened and watched. Outside there is not time to listen. Sitting here in the day room the day after Christmas next to a mangy pine tree decorated with varicolored Kleenex (no glass!), the stereo-V showing the Blue-Gray game and rolling flip flip flip, my hands on my knees and wrists bandaged, I felt so bad that I groaned aloud an Old Testament lamentation AAAAIEOOOOOW! to which responded a great silent black man sitting next to me on the blocky couch: “Ain’t it the truth though.”

  After that I felt better.

  We love those who know the worst of us and don’t turn their faces away. I loved my fellow patients and hearkened to them and they to me. I loved Max Gottlieb. He sewed up my wrists in his living room without making a fuss about it. How did I get to his house? By walking, I think. The last thing I remember clearly is Perry Como, hale as Saint Nick but orange of face and livid of lip.

  As Max worked, he was holding my wrist pressed with pleasant pressure against his stomach, and I remembered thinking he was like a trainer lacing up his fighter’s gloves.

  He clucked in mild irritation.

  “What’s the matter, Max?”

  “Tch. I can’t fix the tendon here. You’ll have to wait Sorry.”

  “That’s all right, Max.”

  Here’s an oddity. Max the unbeliever, a lapsed Jew, believes in the orderliness of creation, acts on it with energy and charity. I the believer, having swallowed the whole Thing, God Jews Christ Church, find the world a madhouse and a madhouse home. Max the atheist sees things like Saint Thomas Aquinas, ranged, orderly, connected up.

  Here it was in this very day room that I, watchful and prescient, tuned into the palpable radiations of my fellow patients and my colleagues as well, the tired hollow-eyed abstracted doctors, and hatched my great principle, as simple and elegant and obvious as all great principles are. It is easy to understand how men do their best work in prison or exile, men like Dostoevsky, Cervantes, Bonhoeffer, Sir Thomas More, Genet, and I, Dr. Thomas More. Pascal wrote as if he were in prison for life and so he was free. In prison or exile or a mental hospital one has time to watch and listen. My question was: how is it with you, fellow patient? how is it with you, fellow physician? and I saw how it was. Many men have done that, seen visions, dreamed dreams. But it is of no use in science unless you can measure it. My good luck came when I stumbled onto a way of measuring the length and breadth and motions of the very self. My little machine is the first caliper of the soul.

  Then one day in May I had had enough of the ward and wanted out. I had made my breakthrough. I had done my job. Though I was still on the ward, I was working on the staff as well, even presenting cases to students in The Pit. But I still had to get out. What was it like out there in the gauzy pointillist world? Would my great discovery work out there?

  So I went AWOL, walked out and haven’t been back since. I walked to town along the interstate. Wham! there it was, the world, solid as a rock, dense as a doorknob. A beer can glinted malignantly on the shoulder. The grains of concrete were like rocks on the moon. Here came old friend, morning terror, corkscrewing up my spine. Dear God, let me out of here, back to the nuthouse where I can stay sane. Things are too naked out here. People look and talk and smile and are nice and the abyss yawns. The niceness is terrifying.

  But I went on to town, to the Little Napoleon tavern where I greeted Leroy Ledbetter, the owner, and other old friends, sipped a few toddies and soon felt better. From the Little Napoleon I telephoned an acquaintance, Dr. Yamaiuchi of Osaka Instruments, with whom I had been in correspondence and who had my specifications, and placed an order for one hundred lapsometers, certified check to follow upon his estimate. The pay phone in the Little Napoleon cost me $47.65 in quarters and nickels.

  Leroy and my pals did not find the call remarkable and fed me coins: old Doc is making a call to Japan, scientific medical business, etcetera, keep the money coming, fix him a drink.

  Max and Colley, just back from birding, are sitting in the chief resident’s office. Max has donned his white clinical coat but hasn’t changed his boots. Colley, still wearing bush jacket and bermuda shorts, lounges in a tattered aluminum chaise, puffing a briar that sends out wreaths of maple-sugar smoke.

  Max is glad to see me, Colley is not Colley is a super-Negro, a regular black Leonardo. He is chief encephalographer, electronic wizard, ornithologist, holds the Black Belt in karate, does the crossword in the Sunday Times. A native of Dothan, Alabama, he is a graduate of Amherst and N.Y.U. medical school So he lounges around like an Amherst man, cocking a quizzical eyebrow and sending out wreaths of maple-sugar smoke, or else he humps off down the hall like a Brooklyn interne, eyes rolled up in his eyebrows, shoes pigeoning in and going squee-gee on the asphalt tile. Yet if he gets excited enough or angry enough, the old Alabama hambone shows through. His voice will hit up into falsetto and he might even say aksed instead of asked.

  When I was in the open ward and working on staff, he was very good to me. He immediately saw what I was getting at and helped me wire up my first lapsometer, read my articl
e and refused to take credit as coauthor. “Too metaphysical for me,” he said politely, knocking out his briar. “I’ll stick to old-fashioned tumors and hemorrhages”—and off he went humping it down the hall squee-gee.

  But we were always wary of each other. Our eyes never quite met. It was as if there was something between us, a shared secret, an unmentionable common past, an unacknowledged kinship. We were somehow onto each other. He recognized my Southern trick of using manners and even madness guilefully and for one’s own ends. I was onto his trick of covering up Alabama hambone with brave old Amherst and humping it like a Brooklyn interne. What is more, he knew that I knew and I knew that he knew. We were like two Jews who have changed their names.

  Max sits behind his desk in his perfectly fitted white coat, erect as a young prince, light glancing from the planes of his forehead. But when he rises, like Toulouse-Lautrec he doesn’t rise much.

  Colley drums his fingers on his pith helmet in his lap, Jungle Jim after the safari.

  “Well well,” says Max with pure affection, an affection without irony. He loves me because he saved my life. “The prodigal has returned.”

  “Prodigal or prodigy?” asks Colley quizzically-Amherstly.

  We’re all three prodigies. Max is a prodigy. His performance on grand rounds is famous. There he stands at the foot of my bed in the ward, the small erect young prince, flanked by a semicircle of professors, psychiatrists, behaviorists, love counselors, reminding me of the young Jesus confounding his elders.

  He saved me twice. Once the night before by suturing my arteries. The next morning by naming my terror, giving it habitation, standing at the foot of my bed, knowing the worst of me, then naming it with ordinary words, English common nouns, smiling and moving on.

  A bad night it had been, my wrists bandaged and lashed to the rails, crucified, I by turns exalted, depressed, terrified, lustful. Miss Oglethorpe, a handsome strapping nurse (she’s now my nurse) came on at eleven and asked me what I wanted. “I want you, Miss Oglethorpe. You are so beautiful and I need you and love you. Will you lie here with me?” Since she was and I did, was beautiful and I did love and need her, and she being a woman knew the truth when she heard it, she almost did. She almost did! But of course she didn’t and instead made a horrid nurse-joke about how I couldn’t be so bad off what with chasing the nurses etcetera, but what a good nurse!

  Later, lust gave way to sorrow and I prayed, arms stretched out like a Mexican, tears streaming down my face. Dear God, I can see it now, why can’t I see it other times, that it is you I love in the beauty of the world and in all the lovely girls and dear good friends, and it is pilgrims we are, wayfarers on a journey, and not pigs, nor angels. Why can I not be merry and loving like my ancestor, a gentle pure-hearted knight for our Lady and our blessed Lord and Savior? Pray for me, Sir Thomas More.

  Etcetera etcetera. A regular Walpurgis night of witches, devils, pitchforks, thorns in the flesh, unkneed girl-thighs. Followed by contrition and clear sight. Followed, of course, by old friend morning terror.

  There stood Max at the foot of my bed flanked by my former colleagues, the ten o’clock sunlight glancing from the planes of his forehead and striking sparks from the silver of his reflex hammer and tuning fork in his breast pocket, Max smiling and spreading the skirts of his immaculate white coat and saying only, “Dr. More is having some troublesome mood swings—don’t we all—but he’s got excellent insight, so we hope we can enlist his services as soon as he’ll let us, right, Tom?” And all at once it, the terror, had a habitation and name—I was having “mood swings,” right, that’s what they were—and the doctors nodded and smiled and moved to the next bed. And suddenly the morning sunlight became just what it was, the fresh lovely light of morning. The terror was gone.

  That, sirs, is love.

  In a week, I got up cheerfully and went about my business. Another week and, lying in my bed, I became prescient and clairvoyant, orbiting the earth like an angel and inducing instant angelic hypotheses. Another week and I had made my breakthrough.

  “The prodigal returns,” says Max, smiling his candid unironic smile (Max, who is from Pittsburgh, doesn’t know all the dark things Colley and I know, so is not ironic). “This time to stay, I hope.”

  “No,” I say quickly, taking a tiny shaft of fright. For I’ve just remembered that legally I’m still committed and that they could, if they wished, detain me.

  “Yeah, very nice,” says Colley, shaking hands without enthusiasm. He appears to knock out two pipes at the same time. The smoke has leveled out in a layer like leaf smoke in Vermont.

  “What can we do for you, Tom?” asks Max, his princely head shedding light.

  “I’ve a favor to ask.”

  “Ask it.”

  For some reason I frown and fall silent.

  “I thought you’d come by to prepare for The Pit,” says Max.

  “The Pit?”

  “Sure, Tom,” says Colley, cheering up at my confusion. “You’re down for Monday. This is the last go-round of the year for the students, you know, the annual Donnybrook.”

  Max hastens to reassure me. “You’ve got quite a following among the students, Tom. You’re the new matador, Manolete taking on Belmonte.”

  Buddy Brown, my enemy, must be Belmonte. O God, I had forgotten. The Pit is a seriocomic clinic, an end-of-year hijinks put on by the doctors for the students. Doctors, you may know, have a somewhat retarded sense of humor. In medical school we dropped fingers and ears from cadavers on pedestrians. Older doctors write doggerel and satirical verse. When I was a young man, every conservative proctologist in town had a cartoon in his office showing a jackass kicking up his heels and farting a smoke ring: “LBJ has spoken!”

  “God, I had forgotten. No, Max, I came to ask you a favor.”

  “Ask it.”

  “You know what it is. I want you to speak to the Director about my article and my lapsometer before my appointment with him Monday.”

  Colley straddles the chaise and rises.

  “Wait, Colley. I want to tell you something too.”

  He shrugs, settles slowly, unfolds a silver pipe tool.

  “Well, Max?”

  “Sure sure.” Max swivels around to the gold-green gauze. “If—”

  “If what?”

  “If you’ll come back.”

  “You mean as patient?”

  “Patient-staff. As you were.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re not well.”

  “I’m well enough. I can’t come back.”

  “Why not?”

  “Something is afoot.”

  “What?”

  I sit down slowly and close my eyes. “You were both out birding this morning, weren’t you? Down by the Quarters.”

  “Yeah!” says Max, lighting up. Rummaging in his desk for something, he hands it to me, a piece of bark. “Take a look at those cuttings.”

  “O.K.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That’s from an overcup oak and it’s not a pileated.”

  “You mean you think—”

  “Ask Colley. He’s the ornithologist.”

  “No question about it,” says Colley, rubbing his briar on his nose. “It’s the ivorybill. He’s out there. Just think of it, Max.”

  “Yes.”

  “No one’s seen him since nineteen-three and he’s out there. Think of it. I think he’s on Honey Island.”

  “Yes.” Max’s eyes are shining. For him the ivorybill, which the Negroes used to call the Lord-to-God, is the magic bird, the firebird, the sweet bird of youth. For the ivorybill to return after all these years means—

  Colley is different. The search for the bird is for him not a bona fide search. It is something he has got the knack of. How happy he is to have got the knack of searching for the ivorybill!

  (No idle speculation this: once, before Colley and I fell out, I measured his pineal region. He had good readings at laye
r I, little or nothing at layer II. Diagnosis: a self successfully playing at being a self that is not itself. I told him this—he asked me!—and he took offense, rolled his eyes up in his eyebrows, and went humping off down the hall squee-gee.)

  Max is looking at me sharply. “Why do you ask? Did you see us? Why didn’t you join us? It would be good—”

  “I couldn’t. I was trapped.”

  “Trapped?”

  Colley, I see, is wondering whether he should risk an exchange of glances with Max. His eyes stray. He doesn’t

  “Yes,” I say and relate to them the events of the morning, beginning with the sniper and ending with my eavesdropping on the three conspirators in the pagoda. I don’t tell it badly, using, in fact Max’s own low-keyed clinical style of reciting case histories on grand rounds.

  Silence falls. Colley, who has lit up again, screws up an eye against the maple-sugar smoke. Max’s expression does not change. He listens attentively, unironically. Daylight glances interestingly from his forehead.

  “Let me be sure I understand you,” says Max at last, swinging to and fro. “You are saying first that somebody tried to shoot you this morning; second, that there is a conspiracy planned for the Fourth of July, a conspiracy to kidnap the Paradise baton-twirlers as well as staff members here who participate in the Audubon outings?”

  “Not exactly. The shooting is a fact. The other is what I heard.”

  “And they’re planning to run a school on Honey Island for the Bantus and Choctaws,” says Colley, drumming his fingers on his helmet

  “They said it.”

  Silence.

  I rise. “Look. I felt obliged to pass it on to you. Make of it what you will. Perhaps it is foolishness. It is not even necessary that you believe me. I simply—”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t believe you, Tom,” says Max affectionately. “Belief. Truth values. These are relative things. What interests me is—”

  “Yeah, don’t give me that either. Skip it. Look, will you speak to the Director?”