by Walker Percy
THE COSMIC STRANGER (stands stiffly, hands at his sides, and begins speaking briskly, very much in the style of the late Raymond Gram Swing): I will be brief. I have taken this human form through a holographic technique unknown to you in order to make myself understood to you.
Hear this. I have a message. Whether you heed it or not is your affair.
I have nothing to say to you about God or the Confederacy, whatever that is—I assume it is not the G2V Confederacy in this arm of the galaxy—though I could speak about God, but it is too late for you, and I am not here to do that.
We are not interested in the varieties of your sexual behavior, except as a symptom of a more important disorder.
It is this disorder which concerns us and which we do not fully understand.
As a consequence of this disorder, you are a potential threat to all civilizations in the G2V region of the galaxy. Throughout G2V you are known variously and jokingly as the Ds or the DDs or the DLs, that is, the ding-a-lings or the death-dealers or the death-lovers. Of all the species here and in all of G2V, you are the only one which is by nature sentimental, murderous, self-hating, and self-destructive.
You are two superpowers here. The other is hopeless, has already succumbed, and is a death society. It is a living death and an agent for the propagation of death.
You are scarcely better—there is a glimmer of hope for you—but that is of no interest to me.
If the two of you destroy each other, as appears likely, it is of no consequence to us. To tell you the truth, G2V will breathe a sigh of relief.
The danger is that you may not destroy each other and that your present crude technology may constitute a threat to G2V in the future.
I am here to tell you three things: what is going to happen, what I am going to do, and what you can do.
Here’s what will happen. Within the next twenty-four hours, your last war will begin. There will occur a twenty-megaton airburst one mile above the University of Chicago, the very site where your first chain reaction was produced. Every American city and town will be hit. You will lose plus-minus 160 million immediately, plus-minus 50 million later.
Here’s what I am going to do. I have been commissioned to collect a specimen of DD and return with it so that we can study it toward the end of determining the nature of your disorder. Accordingly, I propose to take this young person referred to as Penny—for two reasons. One, she is perhaps still young enough not to have become hopeless. Two, she is pregnant and so we will have a chance to rear a DD in an environment free of your noxious influence. Then perhaps we can determine whether your disorder is a result of some peculiar earth environmental factor or whether you are a malignant sport, a genetic accident, the consequence of what you would have called, quite accurately, in an earlier time an MD—mutatio diabolica, a diabolical mutation.
Finally, here’s what you can do. It is of no consequence to us whether you do it or not, because you will no longer be a threat to anyone. This is only a small gesture of goodwill to a remnant of you who may survive and who may have the chance to start all over—though you will probably repeat the same mistake. We have been students of your climatology for years. I have here a current read-out and prediction of the prevailing wind directions and fallout patterns for the next two weeks. It so happens that the place nearest you which will escape all effects of both blast and fallout is the community of Lost Cove, Tennessee. We do not anticipate a stampede to Tennessee. Our projection is that very few of you here and you out there in radio land will attach credibility to this message. But the few of you who do may wish to use this information. There is a cave there, corn, grits, collard greens, and smoked sausage in abundance.
That is the end of my message. Penny—
DONAHUE: We’re long! We’re long! Heavy! Steve, I’ll get you for this. Oh boy. Don’t forget, folks, tomorrow we got surrogate partners and a Kinsey panel—come back—you can’t win ‘em all—'bye! Grits. I dunno.
AUDIENCE: (Applause)
Cut to station break, Secure Card 65 commercial, Alpo, Carefree Panty Shields, and Mentholatum, then The Price Is Right.
Question: If you heard this Donahue Show, would you head for Lost Cove, Tennessee?
(a) Yes
(b) No
(CHECK ONE)
*Abigail Van Buren, The Best of Dear Abby (New York: Andrews and McMeel, 1981), p. 242.
(9) The Envious Self
(in the root sense of envy: invidere, to look at with malice): Why it is that the Self—though it Professes to be Loving, Caring, to Prefer Peace to War, Concord to Discord, Life to Death; to Wish Other Selves Well, not Ill—in fact Secretly Relishes Wars and Rumors of War, News of Plane Crashes, Assassinations, Mass Murders, Obituaries, to say nothing of Local News about Acquaintances Dropping Dead in the Street, Gossip about Neighbors Getting in Fights or being Detected in Sexual Scandals, Embezzlements, and other Disgraces
EVERYONE REMEMBERS WHERE he was and what he was doing when he heard the news of the Kennedy assassination—or, if he is old enough, Pearl Harbor.
Why?
The self deceives itself by saying that it is natural that such terrible events should be etched in the memory.
It is not so simple.
The fact is that the scene and the circumstances of hearing such news become invested with a certain significance and density which they do not ordinarily possess and with which ordinary events and ordinary occasions contrast unfavorably.
Two such recollections as reported to me:
(1) I was standing outside a grocery store on the corner of St. Charles and Jackson avenues in New Orleans when a stranger came up to me and said that the President had been shot and killed. I can remember noticing that the stranger wore an old-fashioned shirt, the kind with a tab collar and a gold pin which fitted little holes in the tabs and kept the collar snug against the neck. Everything seemed amazingly vivid and discrete. I could even see the threads sewn in the little holes of the man’s tab collar. Then he began to tell me the story of his life. He, too, felt curiously dispensed. I can even remember exactly where I stood on the sidewalk and a sycamore tree growing through a hole in the concrete. I can still see the bark.
Question: Had you noticed the tree before?
No.
Question: Have you noticed it since? No.
(2) I was watching the soap opera As the World Turns on TV. It was a scene between Chris Hughes and Grandpa. A bulletin was flashed on the screen. Bulletin: Shots have been fired into the Presidential motorcade in Dallas. As the bulletin came on, Grandpa was saying to Chris Hughes something like: “Now let’s don’t be too hasty, Chris. I don’t believe Ellen would do such a thing.” I can remember thinking how unimportant the soap opera seemed compared with the events in Dallas.
Question: But before that, the soap opera seemed more interesting than the events in Dallas?
Yes.
Question: And since? Have you resumed watching As the World Turns?
Yes.
Question: During the week following Pearl Harbor, the incidence of suicide declined dramatically across the nation. Was this decline a consequence of
(1) A rise in patriotic fervor and a sense of purpose?
(2) A new sense of interest (e.g., something, even war, is better than nothing. Peace in the 1930s was like nothing)?
A Short Journal Chronicling Certain Events in Our Town
Monday. Everyone is cheerful today. Mr. D—, a well-known judge and gubernatorial candidate, was detected in an act of fellatio with a bellboy in the men’s room of the Roosevelt Hotel during lunch hour. He was arrested by the vice squad. It is on the five o’clock news. Men stop each other in the street, shaking their heads: “Did you hear the awful thing that happened to Judge D—?” “Yes. I don’t believe it. I think it’s political. He was set up.” “Right. Clearly, entrapment.” Telephone lines are buzzing all over town. Housewives stop watching talk shows and soap operas to call each other.
Tuesday. Everyone in town is
moderately depressed. Mr. L—, a highly successful attorney, a cheerful and generous man, wins the biggest lawsuit of his career, a ten-million-dollar judgment against A.T.&T. On the same day, he learns that his wife has been awarded the Times-Picayune cup for outstanding service to the community, his son has won a Rhodes Scholarship, and his daughter has been chosen to be Queen of the Comus Ball. His friends congratulate him. “You really hit the jackpot!” they exclaim and turn away with preoccupied expressions. The telephone wires do not hum. Housewives watch more soap operas than ever.
Wednesday. The ex-Premier of France, General de Gaulle, has died and the President of the United States attends his funeral. He looks very solemn and dignified sitting in Notre Dame cathedral. Later he confides to an aide that he enjoys state funerals more than anything he does in Washington or even Camp David because he can relax and let his mind go blank and yet be admired for paying his respects and taking so much trouble when all he has to do is look solemn. And also because there is de Gaulle dead as a duck and here I am alive and kicking.
Questions: Imagine yourself in a place most familiar to you and therefore most nugatory; e.g., standing on the platform of the commuter station at 8:00 a.m. on a Tuesday morning waiting for the 8:05 to New York. Or walking across your front yard in Montclair for the eight thousandth time to pick up the morning paper.
Now imagine that in these circumstances you receive a piece of news, either by way of a newspaper headline, by word of mouth from a neighbor, or perhaps by overhearing a radio bulletin from a black youth carrying a Sony CF-520.
In each instance of news, check the correct answer. Hint: Use as your guide your altered perception of your surroundings and any change in mood—e.g., whether, as a result of hearing the news, your front yard becomes visible for the first time since you moved in, or whether it becomes more nugatory than usual; whether your usual morning depression deepens or lifts.
There are four possible answers: (a) The news is unrelievedly bad. (b) The news is putatively bad, that is, news which by all criteria should be bad but in which you nevertheless take a certain comfort. (c) The news is unrelievedly good. (d) The news is putatively good, that is, news which by all criteria ought to be good but which you find secretly depressing.
(1) News bulletin: A UFO has landed in Nebraska and vaporized Omaha. This news is for you
(a) Unrelievedly bad: After all, there is nothing good about the loss of several hundred thousand people.
(b) Putatively bad but secretly not so bad: I don’t know anybody in Omaha and there is something extremely interesting about an authenticated UFO visitation—which I had never really credited until now.
(CHECK ONE)
(2) While you stand at the paper-tube reading the morning headlines, a highly localized yet extremely violent tornado descends upon your house, carrying it aloft and away like Judy Garland’s house in The Wizard of Oz. Your wife is in the house. Nothing is ever heard again of the house or your wife.
This event is
(a) Unrelievedly bad news: You love your wife. She is a good woman, your companion and helpmate for these twenty years. Your house, moreover, is underinsured.
(b) Putatively bad news: All the above is true enough, yet if the entire truth be known, your wife is also a shrew; you are sick to death of her, the house, your job, and your life. Since your wife has vanished through no fault of yours, cannot indeed have suffered much, whatever her fate, could indeed have been set down in a new place and a new life of her own like Judy, you are free to begin a new life without guilt.
(CHECK ONE)
(3) You are a woman whose husband has taken early retirement. He is a decent fellow, a combat veteran of Korea, and has been a good provider for thirty years. Money is no problem. Now, even though he is seriously overweight, all he does is sit around your pleasant Lake Wales house polishing off six-packs and watching golf, the NBA and NFL on TV. For months he goes without touching you and hardly speaking. Or he’ll have spells of satyriasis when he’ll want to have beery sex twice a night. What do you want? (What do women want?) You want to take a cathedral tour of Europe, or a leisurely barge voyage through the canals of France, stopping off at quaint French villages, or a cuisine tour through the vineyards and kitchens of the Loire Valley. Or visit the Galapagos Islands with your local Audubon Society. He won’t go. Why do I want to look at a bunch of turtles? What does he want? He wants to go to Vegas to catch Wayne Newton and Liberace, or to Augusta to follow Nicklaus. You won’t go. Yet you don’t feel free to go off without him—you have duties as a housewife.
So one day you pick up a brochure from a travel agency in Orlando about a thatched-roof-cottage tour of England and a hot-air balloon ride down the Loire Valley and get in your car and start home. From the radio comes news of yet another sinkhole in the fragile limestone crust of central Florida. When you arrive in your block, you discover that your entire lot, house, husband Ralph, and the Zenith Chromacolor have dropped out of sight and disappeared forever into the Eocene muck.
This is
(a) Unrelievedly bad news: Ralph, a good man, a good husband, is gone. You, a good Christian woman, have lost your better half. You are alone in the world.
(b) Putatively bad: This is all true, but on the other hand Ralph is gone through no fault of your own and you are free. Frankly, thirty years of Ralph is enough. Moreover, Ralph was well insured.
(CHECK ONE)
(4) You are picking up the morning paper before going to work. It is a big day in your career. You are making a sales presentation to representatives of the biggest prospective corporate customer in the history of your firm. You’ve been suffering some anxiety and sleepless nights, and with good reason. In recent months you’ve been somewhat depressed and you’re drinking more than you should.
A young insane person, totally unknown to you, drives slowly past your house in an ancient VW, takes aim with his Colt Woodsman .22-caliber pistol, and shoots you in the armpit just as you reach to take the newspaper from the paper-tube.
The wound is probably not fatal. The bullet hits a rib, flattens, ricochets into the substance of your lung, but without injuring heart or major vessel. Your neighbor comes to your aid, calls an ambulance. Feeling faint, you sit on the grass of your front yard. You notice a dogwood tree which you planted ten years ago. It is doing well.
In the emergency room of the hospital, you feel a strange euphoria. You joke with the doctors. Even though you’re spitting blood and growing fainter, your mind works wonderfully well. To the amazement of the doctors and nurses, you remember a remark of Churchill’s, which you quote: “Nothing makes a man feel better than to be shot without effect.”
Is this occurrence
(a) Unrelievedly bad news? It is not good to get shot. One could die of it.
(b) Putatively bad news but secretly good? The incident somehow dispenses you. The single irrational act of a madman changes the entire state of your life in an instant—from that of an anxious worried businessman in danger of losing a big account, to that of an innocent victim, not only not guilty but also unfailed, a patient who finds himself not only in the peculiar role of hospital patient with its peculiar prerogatives, that of being the passive and blameless recipient of the expert services of highly trained people, but of a certain honorific status as well, better than a business bonus: that of being a kind of surrogate victim for all of us. After all, it could happen to any of us in this crazy world, and here it has happened to you, a highly respected and successful member of the community. You took a round which any of us could have taken.
What is more, you’ll probably get the account for your firm—which in your anxiety you might have lost—without lifting a finger. What corporation would turn you down?
Why did President Reagan feel better after he was shot than he has felt since?
(CHECK ONE)
(5) You are standing by your paper-tube in Englewood reading the headlines. Your neighbor comes out to get his paper. You look at him sympathetically. You
know he has been having severe chest pains and is facing coronary bypass surgery. But he is not acting like a cardiac patient this morning. Over he jogs in his sweat pants, all smiles. He has triple good news. His chest ailment turned out to be a hiatal hernia, not serious. He’s got a promotion and is moving to Greenwich, where he can keep his boat in the water rather than on a trailer.
“Great, Charlie! I’m really happy for you.”
Are you happy for him?
(a) Yes. Unrelievedly good news. Surely it is good news all around that Charlie is alive and well and not dead or invalided. Surely, too, it is good for him and not bad for you if he also moves up in the world, buys a house in Greenwich where he can keep a 25-foot sloop moored in the Sound rather than a 12-foot Mayflower on a trailer in the garage in Englewood.
(b) Putatively good news but—but what? But the trouble is, it is good news for Charlie, but you don’t feel so good.
(CHECK ONE)
If your answer is (b), could you specify your dissatisfaction, i.e., do the following thought experiment: which of the following news vis-à-vis Charlie and you at the paper-tube would make you feel better:
(1) Charlie is dead.
(2) Charlie has undergone a quadruple coronary bypass and may not make it.
(3) Charlie does not have heart trouble but he did not get his promotion or his house in Greenwich.
(4) Charlie does not have heart trouble and did get his promotion but can’t afford to move to Greenwich.
(5) You, too, have received triple good news, so both of you can celebrate.
(6) You have not received good news, but just after hearing Charlie’s triple good news, you catch sight of a garbage truck out of control and headed straight for Charlie—whose life you save by throwing a body block that knocks him behind a tree. (Why does it make you feel better to save Charlie’s life and thus turn his triple good news into quadruple good fortune?)
