Love in the Ruins

by Walker Percy

  “Are you all right, Doctor?” she whispers.

  “Fine.”

  “We are still waiting for your diagnosis, Dr. More,” says Buddy with the gentleness of victory.

  “I found no significant pathology.”

  “Louder!” from the back benches. The Director cups his ear.

  “I said I found no significant pathology.”

  “No significant pathology,” says Buddy as gently as Perry Mason beating Hamilton Burger for the thousandth time. “And what is your recommendation, Doctor?”

  “Discharge him.”

  “Discharge him,” repeats Buddy. “He can’t walk or talk, and if he could, he would presumably return to his former atrocious behavior. And yet you want to discharge him. As cured, Doctor?”

  “If indeed there was nothing wrong with him.”

  “You think there was nothing wrong with him?”

  “No. That is, yes.”

  “Then what’s he doing here in a wheelchair?”

  Titters.

  I shrug.

  “Dr. More, what do you think his chances are of recovering from his stroke?”

  “You mean, assuming he’s had one.”

  “Very well. Assuming he’s had one.”

  “Very small.”

  “And if he did recover, what are the chances he’d return to his former mode of behavior?”

  “Very large.”

  “Do you recall his former behavior?”

  I am silent.

  “Allow me to refresh your memory, Doctor.” Again Buddy flips through the chart. “These,” he explains to the amphitheater, “are progress reports during the last year of the patient’s residence at the Golden Years Senior Citizen Settlement in Tampa. I quote:

  “‘The subject has not only refused to participate in the various recreational, educational, creative, and group activities but has on occasion engaged in antisocial and disruptive behavior. He refused shuffleboard tournament, senior softball, Golden Years gymkhana, papa putt-putt, donkey baseball, Guys and Gals à go-go, the redfish rodeo, and granddaddy golf. He refused: free trip to Los Angeles to participate in Art Linkletter III’s “the young olds,” even though chosen for this trip by his own community.

  “‘Did on two occasions defecate on Flirtation Walk during the Merry Widow’s promenade.

  “‘Did on the occasion of the Ohio Day breakfast during the period of well-wishing and when the microphone was passed to him utter gross insults and obscenities to Ohioans, among the mildest of which was the expression, repeated many times: piss on all Ohioans!

  “‘Did in fact urinate on Ohio in the Garden of the Fifty States.

  “‘Was observed by his neighbors on Bide-a-wee Bayou to be digging furiously with a spade on the patio putt-putt, defacing same. When asked what he was digging for, he replied: the fountain of youth.’”

  More titters from the student roosts.

  Buddy goes on:

  “‘Despite extensive reconditioning in the Skinner box, the patient continued to exhibit antisocial behavior. This behavior,’” Buddy hastens to add, “‘Occurred before his stroke last month.’”

  “If he had a stroke,” I say.

  “If he had a stroke,” Buddy allows gravely. “Well, Doctor?”

  “Well what?”

  “What would you do with him?”

  “Discharge him.”

  “To suffer another thirty years?” asks Buddy, smiling. “To cause other people suffering?”

  “At least he’d have a sporting chance.”

  “A sporting chance to do what?”

  “To avoid your packing him off to Georgia, where they’d sink electrodes in his head, plant him like a carrot in that hothouse which is nothing more than an anteroom to the funeral parlor. Then throw the Euphoric Switch—”

  “Doctor!” interrupts the Director sternly.

  “Aaah!” The students blush at the word funeral. Girls try to pull their dresses down over their knees.

  Buddy flushes angrily.

  The Director is angrier still.

  “Doctor!” He levels a quivering finger at me, then crooks it, summoning me. Craning down, he croaks into my ear. “You know very well that the patient is present and that there is no guarantee that he cannot understand you.”

  “Excuse me, sir, but I hope—indeed I have reason to believe—that he does understand me.”

  The Director goes off into a fit of coughing. His eyes bulge glassily. Handkerchiefs fly in and out of plackets in his coat. The students are in an uproar. Cheers from the Knotheads, boos from the Lefts.

  “This is too much!” The Director throws up both hands. Now he’s grabbed me, hooked me with his claws like the ancient mariner. “It’s my mistake, Doctor,” he croaks. “My putting you on patient-staff status. I beg your pardon. It is only too clear that your illness does not yet permit you to function.”

  “I can function, sir,” I tell him, speaking into his great hairy convoluted ear. “You’ll see.”

  “Be careful, Doctor!” The powerful old hands squeeze my arm by way of warning. “Proceed!”

  Mr. Ives’s bright monkey eyes have begun to snap again.

  “I repeat,” I say to the back rows. “If Mr. Ives is going to be referred to Happy Isles of Georgia, which is nothing but a euthanasia facility, he has the right to know it and to prepare himself accordingly. And he has the right to know who his executioner is.”

  “I warned you, Doctor!” The Director is on his feet and shouting. “Perhaps you’d better go back to the ward, to A-4.”

  “Yes sir,” I say. Perhaps he is right.

  The students, struck dumb, gaze at me, gaze at each other.

  “Sir!”

  It is Buddy, advancing toward me, hands clasped behind his back. He holds one hand up to quiet the uproar. The other hand is still behind him. “Sir!”—to the Director, in a loud voice. “I submit to you, sir, that you are mistaken!”

  “Eh?” The Director cups his ear.

  “Sir, you do an injustice both to Dr. More as well as to your own clinical judgment!”

  “Eh? How’s that?”

  “Your first decision about Dr. More was quite correct. Your confidence in him is not misplaced. His illness does not in the least interfere with his functioning. In short, sir, I submit to you that his odd behavior today cannot be laid to his illness at all. The truth is—” Buddy, quick as a cat, steps behind me, embraces me with one arm, with the other hidden hand claps a mask over my face. His grip is like iron. There is nothing to do but squirm and, at length, gasp for breath. Three, four, five seconds and Buddy flings one arm up like a cowboy bulldogging a steer. He holds the dial aloft for all to see, presents it to the Director like the bull’s ears. “Point three percent ethyl alcohol. The truth is Dr. More is drunk as a lord!”

  Relieved laughter from the students—along with the gasps. At least they recognize a familiar note of buffoonery.

  Even the Director looks relieved despite himself.

  “Fun is fun,” he announces to no one in particular. “But The Pit may be getting out of hand.”

  Moira has shrunk even farther into the tunnel.

  Unbuckling my physician’s bag, I take out my modified lapsometer. Buddy makes way for me, giving my arm a friendly squeeze, handing me on to the patient with a reassuring smile. You see, his smile tells the students, it’s all in the spirit of The Pit. More and I are not mad at each other.

  “Your patient, Doctor.” Your witness, Mr. Burger. Twenty years and Ham Burger never won a case.

  “Thank you, Doctor, but I don’t want the patient. I want you.”

  A beehive murmur. Buddy holds up both hands.

  “It’s all right!” he cries, smiling. “Turnabout is fair play. Dr. More is going to diagnose me. Why not? He is going to measure, not my blood alcohol, but my metaphysical status. The device he holds there—correct me if I’m wrong, Doctor—is the More Quantitative-Qualitative Ontological Lapsometer.”

  Laughter fro
m the left.

  “Qualitative-Quantitative,” I correct him.

  More laughter from the left. Consternation from the right benches. Stony stares from my colleagues. But the Director’s glossy eyes bulge amiably—at least he is relieved to see the tone change to the acceptable medical-farcical.

  Moira is all but invisible. Have I lost her?

  “Be my guest, Doctor,” says Buddy, presenting his bald brown crown to me.

  With Buddy standing at ironic attention, arms folded, I do a quick diagnostic pass from cortex to brain stem. Over the top of his head I catch a glimpse of Dr. Helga Heine’s bare thighs crossed on the aisle, and far above in the shadows, Art Immelmann, who is standing like a bailiff in front of the swinging doors. Working up Buddy’s brain stem now, I focus moderate inhibitory dosages over the frontal cerebrum and, letting it go at that, step back. It is enough, I calculate, to inhibit the inhibitory centers and let Buddy be what he is.

  Buddy does not move. “Is that all, Doctor?” he asks in his broad stage voice. “How is my metaphysical ontology? Or is it my ontological metaphysics?”

  Giggles. I wait. Silence. Throats are cleared. Could I be mistaken?

  Again the Director stirs restlessly. Our crude theatrics don’t bother him as much as my silence.

  “Doctor,” he begins patiently and coughs his fruity cough. “Please get on with it.”

  Helga uncrosses her thighs.

  “Doctor, I really think that unless—” says the Director, eyes bulging with alarm.

  “I see Christmas,” says Buddy, peering up Helga’s dress.

  “What’s that?” asks the Director, leaning forward.

  “I see Christmas.”

  “What did he say?” the Director asks Max, cupping an ear.

  Max shrugs.

  “Nurse!” cries the Director sternly. “This is too much. Remove the patient. What’s wrong with that woman?” he asks Max, for now Winnie Gunn is standing transfixed at the tunnel entrance. Try as she might, she can’t tear her eyes from Buddy Brown, who has swung around to face her.

  “Nothing wrong with Winnie,” Buddy tells me, winking and giving me an elbow in the ribs. “You know what they say about the great white whale: thar she blows, but not the first night out.”

  “Eh?” says the Director.

  “Not so loud,” I tell Buddy uneasily. It is not clear how much the students, who are gaping and shushing each other, can hear.

  But Buddy pays no attention. He flexes his elbow in a vulgar Cajun gesture, forearm straight up. “Voilà! Eh, Winnie?”

  Uproar among the students. The doctors blink at each other. Only Art Immelmann sees nothing amiss. Somehow, even though I don’t watch him, his every movement makes itself known to me. He hawks and swallows and adjusts his uncomfortable right-dressed pants leg. Now he steps through the swinging doors and drags in a carton. My lapsometers! How did he get hold of them?

  “Look at the leg on that woman,” says Buddy and makes another crude Cajun gesture, common on the bayous. “Ça va! What say, old coonass?”

  “It’s all right, Buddy,” I tell him.

  “I think,” says the Director, rising and looking at his watch, “that we will call it a day—”

  “Sir—” I say, either so loudly or so urgently that everyone falls silent. “May I proceed with the case?”

  “If only you would, Doctor!” cries the Director fervently, snatching handkerchiefs from several pockets.

  The students laugh and settle back. They are telling themselves they must have heard wrong.

  “Let ’em have it, little brother!” Buddy nods encouragement to me and takes a stool. “Go!”

  Winnie Gunn stands stolidly behind the wheelchair, eyes rolled up.

  Mr. Ives sits still as still, yet somehow twittering in his stillness. His monkey eyes snap. There is something boyish and quick about his narrow face. He is like one of those young-old engineers at Boeing who at seventy wear bow ties and tinker in their workshops.

  “It is quite true that Mr. Ives has not walked or talked for a month,” I say loudly enough to be heard by Art Immelmann in the back row. “It is also true that he is afflicted by some of the pathologies listed by Dr. Brown. Dr. Brown is quite right about the atherosclerosis.”

  “You old fucker,” says Buddy affectionately, giving me the Cajun arm. “Give ’em hell.”

  “I deny, however, that he is paralyzed or aphasic. His pineal selfhood, as well as other cerebral centers, is intact.”

  “Spare us the metaphysics, Doctor,” says the Director bluntly. “The best proof that a man can talk is hearing him talk. And walk.”

  “Yes sir,” I say, nodding in admiration of the Director’s toughness. A tough old party he is, wasted by disease to his essential fiber, a coat upon a stick. “Sir, I can assure you that speech and locomotion are no problem here. What is interesting is the structure of his selfhood as it relates both to his fellow seniors in the Tampa settlement and to the scientists here.”

  “No metaphysics!” says the Director, coughing. “I’m a simple man. Show me.”

  “Speech! Speech!” cry the students.

  I shrug. Mr. Ives could, if he wanted, have spoken without further ado. But, to make sure, I administer a light Chloride dampening to his red nucleus (whence his rage) and a moderate Sodium massage to his speech area in the prefrontal gyrus.

  Mr. Ives blinks, takes out a toothpick, and begins to suck it.

  “Mr. Ives, what was your occupation before you retired?”

  “You know that as well as, I do, Dr. More,” says Mr. Ives, cocking his lively monkey’s head. He’s got a deep drawling voice!

  “I know, but tell them.”

  “I was controller at Hartford Travelers Insurance. We lived in Connecticut forty years until my wife, Myrtle, God rest her soul, died. I got restless.”

  “Mr. Ives, what were you digging for down there at the Golden Years Center in Tampa?”

  “You know what I was digging for.”

  “The fountain of youth?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Did you find it?”

  “I did.”

  “You see!” cries Buddy, whose ionization is wearing off. He blinks and shakes himself like a spaniel.

  “The fountain of youth,” says the Director in his old sour-civil style. “Why didn’t you drink some? Or, better still, bring some back with you?”

  The students, spiritual pimps that they are, reassured that things are back on the track and that laughter is in order, laugh.

  “Mr. Ives,” I say when the laughing subsides, “what was your avocation while you lived in Hartford?”

  “Linguistics.”

  “And what were you especially interested in?”

  Mr. Ives blows out his cheeks. “I’ve had the hunch for the last twenty years that I could decipher the Ocala frieze.”

  “What is the Ocala frieze?”

  “A ceramic, an artifact discovered in the Yale dig and belonging to the proto-Creek culture. It has a row of glyphs so far undecipherable.”

  “Go on.”

  “I found a proto-Creek dictionary compiled by a Fray Bartolomeo who was with the original Narvaez expedition.”

  “How did you happen to find it?”

  “Browsing through the Franciscan files in Salamanca.”

  “What were you doing there?”

  “Looking for the dictionary.”

  “Did that decipher the glyphs?”

  “No, but it gave me the Spanish for certain key proto-Creek words.”

  “But that wasn’t enough.”

  “No.”

  “What else did you need?”

  “One or two direct pairings of glyphs and Spanish words might break the cipher.”

  “Did you find such a pairing?”

  “Yes.”

  “In the fountain of youth?”

  Mr. Ives cackles and stomps his feet on the treadles of the wheelchair. “Sure!”

  “There is such a fount
ain?”

  “Oh sure. Not the fountain of youth and not de Leon, but there was a fountain, or at least a big spring, where Narvaez parleyed with Osceononta. It was known to be in the general area of the Oneco limestone springs near Tampa. Why else would I hang around that nuthouse?”

  “So you had a hunch?”

  “I knew there had been a spring there, and a mound that had been bulldozed. I was poking around. It wasn’t the first time. I’ve been digging around there off and on for years.”

  “Did you find anything?”

  “Enough.”

  “Enough for what?”

  “To crack the cipher.”

  “You deciphered the frieze?”

  “Oh sure. Look in next month’s Annals.”

  “What did you find?”

  “This.” Mr. Ives hunches over and sticks his hand in his pocket.

  “Could you bring it here?”

  Lurching out of his chair, he comes weaving across The Pit like a jake-legged sailor and drops it in my hand, a crude coin that looks like a ten-dollar gold piece melted past its circumference.

  “What is it?” I offer to help him back to his chair but he waves me off and goes weaving back. The students cheer.

  “It’s a do-it-yourself medal the Spaniards struck on the spot for the occasion of the Narvaez-Osceononta parley. What they did was take one of their own medals showing a salamander on one side and scratch a proto-Creek glyph on the reverse. My hypothesis was that the glyph meant fish. It worked.”

  I hand it to the Director, who holds it up. The students cheer again.

  Mr. Ives watches nervously. “Be careful. There ain’t but one of them.”

  The Director examines the medal intently.

  “I’d just as soon have it back,” says Mr. Ives, who is afraid the Director is going to pass it around.

  The latter hands it back to me. I give it to Mr. Ives.

  “Mr. Ives,” says the Director. “Would you answer one question?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why did you behave so badly toward the other retirees, hurling imprecations at folk who surely meant you no harm and”—coughing, snatching handkerchiefs—“defecating on, what was it? Flirtation Walk?”

  “Doctor,” says Mr. Ives, hunkering down in his chair, monkey eyes glittering, “how would you like it if during the most critical time of your experiments with the Skinner box that won you the Nobel Prize, you had been pestered without letup by a bunch of chickenshit Ohioans? Let’s play shuffleboard, let’s play granddaddy golf, Guys and Gals à go-go. Let’s jump in our Airstream trailers and drive two hundred miles to Key West to meet more Ohioans and once we get there talk about—our Airstream trailers? Those fellows wouldn’t let me alone.”