Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World

by Walker Percy

  Nothing changes in a man, I was thinking. I felt exactly as I felt when I was ten years old. Only accidentals change. Hair begins to sprout from your ears, your toes rotate, showing more skin.

  My nurse first put away the bottle. She is a beautiful though dour Georgia Presbyterian of the strict observance named Ellen Oglethorpe. Her eyes, blue as Lake Geneva, glittered in triumph as she stowed the Early Times and closed the door behind the patient. For she had, to her way of thinking, killed two birds with one stone. She was striking a blow at my drinking and at the same time delivering one of the “better sort” of patients, the sort who have money. She approves of money on religious grounds.

  The patient was P.T. Bledsoe, president of Brown-Betterbag Paper Company. The poor man had his usual blinding sick headache. I gave him a shot of corticaine and sat and looked at him.

  P.T. Bledsoe is a sixty-year-old man, an upright citizen, a generous Knothead, good hunting companion, churchgoer, deacon, devoted husband and father, Lion, Kiwanian, 33rd-degree Mason who, however, is subject to seizures of rage and blinding headaches and is convinced of several conspiracies against him. The Negroes for one, he told me, were giving him a hard time at the plant, wanting to be promoted and all. He was certain that the Negroes and Communists were after him (as a matter of fact, the Negroes were after him, I happened to know) as well as a Jewish organization that he called the “Bildebergers” and that he had reason to believe had taken over the Federal Reserve system. Though he lived on the ninth hole squarely in the middle of Paradise Estates, which is protected by an electrified ten-foot fence, a guard house at every entrance, and a private patrol, he kept two fierce Rhodesian ridgebacks, one outside and one inside the house. His ambition was to move to Australia. He never tired of telling of the year in his youth he spent in the Outback.

  “Look, P.T.,” I said at last. “Why don’t you move to Australia?”

  “Yeah,” said P.T. sourly, disappointed at what he took to be a conversational gambit.

  “No, I mean it.”

  “I’m not ready to retire.”

  “Doesn’t your company have a million acres in Queensland?”

  “I’m not walking away from anything.”

  I sighed. Perhaps he was right. It’s just that in recent months I’ve found it an effective rule of therapy to accept as more self-evident every day a certain state of affairs, namely, that most people nowadays are possessed, harboring as they do all manner of demonic hatred and terrors and lusts and envies, that principalities and powers are nearly everywhere victorious, and that therefore a doctor’s first duty to his patient is to help him find breathing room and so keep him from going crazy. If P.T. can’t stand blacks and Bildebergers, my experience is that there is not enough time to get him over it even if I could. Nor can I cast out his demon nor forgive his sin if that’s what it is. Why not then move to the Outback, if that is what you like and especially if there is not a Jew or a black for a hundred miles around?

  But we’d been over this ground before and P.T. now sat wearily in his chair.

  Catching sight of the first crude model of my invention in an open drawer, I had an idea. Until that moment I had not tried it on anyone but myself—where I confess I had uncovered a regular museum of pathology, something like passing a metal detector over the battlefield of Iwo Jima.

  Why not begin my clinical series with P.T. Bledsoe?

  His blood pressure and other physical signs were normal. So, standing behind P.T., I passed the lapsometer over his skull, taking readings and feeling a bit like a phrenologist.

  His cortical readings were normal, as was his pineal selfhood. Then, having a hunch, I focused upon the red nucleus in the floor of the fourth ventricle and asked him about the Bildebergers.

  To my astonishment and even as I watched, the needle swung from a moderate 2.6 mmv to a great whacking rage level of 9.4 mmv.

  “Your headache’s coming back, isn’t it?”

  P.T. looked up in surprise, his eyes hazed with pain, and spied my machine, which at this stage looked for all the world like a Brownie box camera.

  “Does that thing register headaches?”

  “In a way.”

  “Can you cure them?”

  Now it was his turn to be excited and mine to be depressed.

  “No, not yet.” At the time I had not yet made my second breakthrough.

  I could not cure his headache then. Now I can. But here’s the curious thing. The very act of locating the site, touching the sore spot, so to speak, seemed to make him feel better. He refused a second shot and left quite cheerfully.

  Patient #2

  Later the same afternoon I saw Ted Tennis, a well-educated, somewhat abstracted graduate student who suffered from massive free-floating terror, identity crisis, and sexual impotence.

  It didn’t take my machine to size him up. Every psychiatrist knows the type: the well-spoken slender young man who recites his symptoms with precision and objectivity—so objective that they seem to be somebody else’s symptoms—and above all with that eagerness, don’t you know, as if nothing would please him more than that his symptom, his dream, should turn out to be interesting, a textbook case. Allow me to have a proper disease, Doctor, he all but tells me.

  As we watched the sooty martins through the doorway come skimming up to the hotel—it helps with some patients if we can look at the martins and not at each other—he tells me his troubles with the usual precision, using medical words—he’s read more medical books than I have—like a case history! The usual story: daytime terror and nighttime impotence, even though he feels “considerable warmth and tenderness” toward his wife, Tanya (why doesn’t he just say he loves her?), and so forth. He is wondering again about the “etiology” of the impotence. Dear God, how could he be anything other than impotent? How can a man quaking with terror make love to his wife?

  But today he’s got a new idea. If I’d been as sharp-witted and alert to small clues as a good psychiatrist should be, I should have guessed from the way his eye kept straying to my big bottom drawer. Here I keep my samples. The untreatable maladies of any age, reader, may be ascertained from the free samples a doctor receives. My desk drawer contains hundreds of suppositories, thousands of pills for treating terror, and dozens of rayon “training” organs for relieving male impotence.

  None of these things works very well.

  In short, my patient asked—for the first time and in a halting, scarcely audible voice—to be fitted with a rayon organ.

  If he could not “achieve an adequate response” himself, he said—why doesn’t he say “make love”—he could at least see that his wife did.

  Again we cast an eye toward my bottom drawer, which did in fact contain a regular arsenal of male organs, the best of which are for some reason manufactured in Bayonne, New Jersey.

  “Very well, Ted,” I said, opening the drawer and taking out not a Bayonne-rayon organ but my invention.

  “What’s that?”

  “I’d like to do a personality profile using a new tele-encephalographic technique.” This is the way you talk to Ted.

  “Eh? How’s that?” asked Ted, pricking up his ears. “You mean you can measure electrical activity with that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Without electrodes?”

  “Yes.”

  “And correlate the readings with personality traits?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wow.”

  He was willing enough, of course. He sees something magic in it, scientific magic, like being touched by the king for the king’s evil. But it is more than that. When I touched him—strange, but this happened earlier with P.T. Bledsoe—he already seemed better. Who of us now is not so strangely alone that it is the cool clinical touch of the stranger that serves best to treat his loneliness?

  “Should be interesting,” said Ted, bowing his head.

  It was. He registered a dizzy 7.6 mmv over Brodmann 32, the area of abstractive activity. Since that time I have learne
d that a reading over 6 generally means that a person has so abstracted himself from himself and from the world around him, seeing things as theories and himself as a shadow, that he cannot, so to speak, reenter the lovely ordinary world. Instead he orbits the earth and himself. Such a person, and there are millions, is destined to haunt the human condition like the Flying Dutchman.

  Ellen Oglethorpe peeped in and closed the door again as discreetly as if we were lovers. Her eyes sparkled. She was having a good day. Two rich patients in one day! Ted Tennis’s wife, Tanya, is a Milwaukee beer heiress and their house in Paradise is bigger than mine.

  Over his coeliac plexus, soothed though he was, he still clocked a thunderous anxiety of 8.7 mmv. His hand trembled slightly against mine. And all at once I could see how he lived his life: shuddering in orbit around the great globe, seeking some way to get back. Don’t I know? We are two of a kind, winging it like Jupiter and spying comely maids below and having to take the forms of swans and bulls to approach them. Except that he, good heathen that he is, wished only to reenter his own wife. I, the Christian, am the fornicator.

  “Well?” he asked anxiously when I finished.

  So I told him my findings and he listened with the intensest interest, but I made the mistake of using such words as “angelism,” “spiritual apogee,” etcetera, all of which are just technical words to me but had the wrong connotations to him. He’s a biologist. So he looked disappointed.

  “Look, Tom,” said Ted patiently. “All I want is a Bayonne-rayon training member. Would you—”

  “O.K. You can take your pick—if.” I open the drawer of members.

  “If?”

  “If you follow my prescription first.”

  “Oh, very well.”

  “First, take these… .” I write him a prescription. “Now, tomorrow, here’s what you do.”

  “Yes?”

  “Instead of taking the car pool home tomorrow, walk.”

  “Walk twenty-five miles on the interstate?”

  “No, walk six miles through the swamp.”

  “Through the swamp.” He nodded dolefully, worst fears realized.

  “Yes. Unfortunately, until we make a therapeutic breakthrough comparable to this diagnostic breakthrough”—I wave my invention at him—“the only way to treat a disorder like this is by rough-and-ready empirical methods. Like putting an ice pack on a toothache. We don’t know much about angelism.”

  “Angelism,” repeated Ted sourly. “So to treat angelism, you walk through a swamp.”

  “Is that worse than the indignity of strapping on a Bayonne-rayon member?” I gave him a few technical details about Layer V of Brodmann Area 32. He brightened. If it’s scientific, he’ll do it.

  “Well, it’s worth a try. I’ll do it for Tanya’s sake. I’d do anything to restore our relationship along the entire spectrum.”

  “Very well. Get a compass and after work tomorrow on Monkey Island, strike out due north across the swamp.”

  Ted does his research on Monkey Island in the middle of the swamp. There dwells a colony of killer apes, Gorilla gorilla malignans, thought to be an unevolved descendant of one of man’s ancestors. No other ape kills for pleasure.

  The question is: how to account for man’s wickedness? Biologists, for some reason, find it natural to look for a wicked monkey in the family tree. I find it more reasonable to suppose that monkeys are blameless and that something went wrong with man. Many people hereabouts, by the way, blame the recent wave of atrocities on escaped killer apes. Some Knothead whites, however, blame black guerrillas. Some liberals blame white Knotheads.

  If you measure the pineal activity of a monkey—or any other subhuman animal—with my lapsometer, you will invariably record identical readings at Layers I and II. Its self, that is to say, coincides with itself. Only in man do you find a discrepancy: Layer I, the outer social self, ticking over, say, at a sprightly 5.4 mmv, while Layer II just lies there, barely alive at 0.7 mmv, or even zero!—a nought, a gap, an aching wound. Only in man does the self miss itself, fall from itself (hence lapsometer!) Suppose—! Suppose I could hit on the right dosage and weld the broken self whole! What if man could reenter paradise, so to speak, and live there both as man and spirit, whole and intact man-spirit, as solid flesh as a speckled trout, a dappled thing, yet aware of itself as a self!

  But we were speaking of Ted. Yes, I prescribed for Ted, Ted promised to follow the prescription, and he did. The next afternoon, instead of leaving Monkey Island at five, climbing into a sealed refrigerated bubbletop and gliding home on the interstate, home where in his glass-walled “enclosed patio” he would surely sit quaking with terror, abstracting himself from himself and corrupting the here-and-now—instead he wore jeans and tennis shoes and, taking a compass reading bearing nor’-nor’east, struck out through Honey Island Swamp. The six miles took him five hours. At ten o’clock that night he staggered up his back yard past the barbecue grill, half dead of fatigue, having been devoured by mosquitoes, leeches, vampire bats, tsetse flies, snapped at by alligators, moccasins, copperheads, chased by Bantu guerrillas and once even set upon and cuffed about by a couple of Michigan State dropouts on a bummer who mistook him for a parent. It was every bit the ordeal I had hoped.

  At that time the only treatment of angelism, that is, excessive abstraction of the self from itself, was recovery of the self through ordeal.

  So it came to pass that half-dead and stinking like a catfish, he fell into the arms of his good wife, Tanya, and made lusty love to her the rest of the night.

  The freshening wind smells of rain and trees.

  Behind the motel a tumbleweed blows through the vine-clad posts of the drive-in movie. Its sign has advertised the same film for the past five years:

  HOMO HIJINKS

  ZANY LAFF RIOT

  It took a lot to get people out to movies in the last days of the old Auto Age. A gimmick was needed. In Homo Hijinks it was an act of fellatio performed by two skydivers in a free fall on 3-D Ektachrome on a two-hundred-foot screen.

  Patient #3

  Charley Parker, the Paradise golf pro, came to see me last year for a life insurance examination. In the physical, he checked out well in all categories, being indeed a superb physical specimen as well as a genial outgoing sort of fellow. A fifty-year-old blond stud pony of a man, he once made the winter tour with the champs and even placed at Augusta. But Charley is best known for having been the first pro to introduce night golf to a major course. Paradise Country Club, thanks to Charley Parker, inaugurated the famous Southern “Moonlight” summer tour of the champs, played “under the arcs” in the cool of the evening. It is a “new concept” in tournament golf. Making use of cheap electricity and cheap sodium vapor, Charley concealed hundreds of lamps in cypress trees, behind Spanish moss. To Charley goes the credit for delighting the fans with the romance of golf and repelling insects as well.

  I made routine readings with my lapsometer. Hm, what’s this? Healthy as he was, and with every reason to be happy, Charley’s deep pineal, the site of inner selfhood, was barely ticking over at a miserable 0.1 mmv.

  I asked Charley if he was sure he felt all right, no insomnia? no nervousness? no depression? no feelings of disorientation or strangeness?

  “Are you kidding, Doc?” Charley began, ticking off his assets: his lovely wife, Ramona; one boy at M.I.T.; the other boy at fourteen winner of the J.C. tournament; his success in bringing the champs to Paradise (this very weekend, by the way) for a Pro-Am tournament; boosting the prize money to a cool million; being voted Man of the Year by the Optimists, etcetera etcetera.

  But he paused in his counting. “Nervousness? Strangeness? It’s funny that you should ask.”

  “Why?”

  As I waited, I was thinking: surely my machine is wrong this time. Charley never looked better, tan skin crinkled in healthy crow’s-feet, blond, almost albino, eyelashes thick and sand-sprinkled as so many athletes’ are. He’s a healthy bourbon-cured stud of a man with a charming li
ttle-kid openness about him: it does not occur to him not to say how he feels. Charley’s the sort of fellow, you know, who always turns up in a pinch and does what needs doing. Maybe he’s the best American type, the sergeant-yeoman out of the hills, the good cop. When the hurricane comes, he’s the fellow with the truck: come on, we got to get those folks out of there.

  Charley blinked his sandy lashes and passed a hand across his eyes.

  “I mean like this morning I looked at myself in the mirror and I said, Charley, who in the hell are you? What does it all mean? It was strange, Doc. What does it all mean, is the thing.”

  “What does what all mean?”

  “What about you, Doc?” asked Charley, with a glint in his eye, meaning: look who’s asking about nervousness. But he forgave me as quickly. “Doc, you ought to stay in condition. You got a good build. What you need is eighteen every night under the arcs, like the other docs.”

  I nodded, taking hope. He could be right.

  A note for physicians: if you listen carefully to what patients say, they will often tell you not only what is wrong with them but also what is wrong with you.

  Six months later I was called out to Charley’s house by his wife, Ramona. Charley was in an acute depression. As a matter of fact, I was not feeling well myself. My feet moved in glue. It was March 2, the anniversary of Samantha’s death and the date too of the return of the first martin scouts from the Amazon basin. I had been sitting at the back door of my office waiting for them and putting off going to see Charley.

  It was four o’clock when I got there. Ramona and I sat there in the cathedral living room and watched Charley in his Naugehyde recliner set uncomfortably in the up position. Ramona had just got back from a garden club luncheon and still had her hat on, bright blue and fur-trimmed to match her suit. A thick white droning afternoon light filled the room. Through the open pantry door I could see Lou Ann, the cook, fixing to leave the kitchen with her plastic bag of scraps. The dishwasher had already shifted into the wash cycle chug-chug-chug.