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

In a pine grove on the southwest cusp of the interstate cloverleaf 5 P.M. / JULY 4

NOW IN THESE DREAD LATTER DAYS of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world I came to myself in a grove of young pines and the question came to me: has it happened at last?

Two more hours should tell the story. One way or the other. Either I am right and a catastrophe will occur, or it won’t and I’m crazy. In either case the outlook is not so good.

Here I sit, in any case, against a young pine, broken out in hives and waiting for the end of the world. Safe here for the moment though, flanks protected by a rise of ground on the left and an approach ramp on the right. The carbine lies across my lap.

Just below the cloverleaf, in the ruined motel, the three girls are waiting for me.

Undoubtedly something is about to happen.

Or is it that something has stopped happening?

Is it that God has at last removed his blessing from the U.S.A. and what we feel now is just the clank of the old historical machinery, the sudden jerking ahead of the roller-coaster cars as the chain catches hold and carries us back into history with its ordinary catastrophes, carries us out and up toward the brink from that felicitous and privileged siding where even unbelievers admitted that if it was not God who blessed the U.S.A., then at least some great good luck had befallen us, and that now the blessing or the luck is over, the machinery clanks, the chain catches hold, and the cars jerk forward?

It is still hot as midafternoon. The sky is a clear rinsed cobalt after the rain. Wet pine growth reflects the sunlight like steel knitting needles. The grove steams and smells of turpentine. Far away the thunderhead, traveling fast, humps over on the horizon like a troll. Directly above, a hawk balances on a column of air rising from the concrete geometry of the cloverleaf. Not a breath stirs.

The young pine I am sitting against has a tumor and is bowed to fit my back. I am sweating and broken out in hives from drinking gin fizzes but otherwise quite comfortable. This spot, on the lower reaches of the southwest cusp, was chosen carefully. From it I command three directions of the interstates and by leaning over the lip of the culvert can look through to the fourth, eastern approach.

Traffic is light, an occasional milk tanker and produce trailer.

The hawk slants off in a long flat glide toward the swamp. From the angle of its wings one can tell it is a marsh hawk.

One of the roof tiles of the motel falls and breaks on the concrete.

The orange roof of the Howard Johnson motel reminds me of the three girls in rooms 202, 204, and 205. Thoughts of the girls and the coming catastrophe cause my scalp to tingle with a peculiar emotion. If the catastrophe occurs, I stand a good chance, knowing what I know about it, of surviving it. So do the girls. Surviving with one girl who likes you is not such a bad prospect. But surviving with three girls, all of whom like you and each of whom detests the other two, is both horrible and pleasant, certainly enough to make one’s scalp tingle with a peculiar emotion.

Another reason for the prickling sensation is that the hives are worse. Fiery wheals bloom on my neck. My scalp feels airy and quilted and now and then pops a hair root like a dirigible popping its hawsers one by one.

These are bad times.

Principalities and powers are everywhere victorious. Wickedness flourishes in high places.

There is a clearer and more present danger, however. For I have reason to believe that within the next two hours an unprecedented fallout of noxious particles will settle hereabouts and perhaps in other places as well. It is a catastrophe whose cause and effects — and prevention — are known only to me. The effects of the evil particles are psychic rather than physical. They do not burn the skin and rot the marrow; rather do they inflame and worsen the secret ills of the spirit and rive the very self from itself. If a man is already prone to anger, he’ll go mad with rage. If he lives affrighted, he will quake with terror. If he’s already abstracted from himself, he’ll be sundered from himself and roam the world like Ishmael.

Here in my pocket is the very means of inoculating persons against such an eventuality or of curing them should it overtake them.

Yet so far only four persons have been inoculated: myself and the three girls yonder in the motel.

Just below me, abutting the deserted shopping plaza, rises the yellow brick barn-and-silo of Saint Michael’s. A surprisingly large parish it was, big enough to rate a monsignor. But the church is empty now, abandoned five years ago. The stained glass is broken out. Cliff swallows nest in the fenestrae of its concrete screen.

Our Catholic church here split into three pieces: (1) the American Catholic Church whose new Rome is Cicero, Illinois; (2) the Dutch schismatics who believe in relevance but not God; (3) the Roman Catholic remnant, a tiny scattered flock with no place to go.

The American Catholic Church, which emphasizes property rights and the integrity of neighborhoods, retained the Latin mass and plays The Star-Spangled Banner at the elevation.

The Dutch schismatics in this area comprise several priests and nuns who left Rome to get married. They threw in with the Dutch schismatic Catholics. Now several divorced priests and nuns are importuning the Dutch cardinal to allow them to remarry.

The Roman Catholics hereabouts are scattered and demoralized. The one priest, an obscure curate, who remained faithful to Rome, could not support himself and had to hire out as a fire-watcher. It is his job to climb the fire tower by night and watch for brushfires below and for signs and portents in the skies.

I, for example, am a Roman Catholic, albeit a bad one. I believe in the Holy Catholic Apostolic and Roman Church, in God the Father, in the election of the Jews, in Jesus Christ His Son our Lord, who founded the Church on Peter his first vicar, which will last until the end of the world. Some years ago, however, I stopped eating Christ in Communion, stopped going to mass, and have since fallen into a disorderly life. I believe in God and the whole business but I love women best, music and science next, whiskey next, God fourth, and my fellowman hardly at all. Generally I do as I please. A man, wrote John, who says he believes in God and does not keep his commandments is a liar. If John is right, then I am a liar. Nevertheless, I still believe.

A couple of buzzards circle the interchange a mile high. Do I imagine it, or does one cock his head and eye me for meat? Don’t count on it, old fellow!

Thoughts about the coming catastrophe and the three girls cause my scalp to tingle with a peculiar emotion. Or perhaps it is the hives from drinking gin fizzes. A catastrophe, however, has both pleasant and unpleasant aspects familiar to everyone — though no one likes to admit the pleasantness. Just now the prospect is unpleasant, but not for the reasons you might imagine.

Let me confess that what worries me most is that the catastrophe will overtake us before my scientific article is published and so before my discovery can create a sensation in the scientific world.

The vanity of scientists! My article, it is true, is an extremely important one, perhaps even epochal in its significance. With it, my little invention, in hand, any doctor can probe the very secrets of the soul, diagnose the maladies that poison the wellsprings of man’s hope. It could save the world or destroy it — and in the next two hours will very likely do one or the other — for as any doctor knows, the more effective a treatment is, the more dangerous it is in the wrong hands.

But the question remains: which prospect is more unpleasant, the destruction of the world, or that the destruction may come before my achievement is made known? The latter I must confess, because I keep imagining the scene in the Director’s office the day the Nobel Prize is awarded. I enter. The secretaries blush. My colleagues horse around. The Director breaks out the champagne and paper cups (like Houston Control after the moon landing). “Hats off, gentlemen!” cries the Director in his best derisive style (from him the highest accolade). “A toast to our local Pasteur! No, rather the new Copernicus! The latter-day Archimedes who found the place to insert his lever and turn the world not upside down but right side up!”

If the truth be known, scientists are neither more nor less vain that other people. It is rather that their vanity is the more striking as it appears side by side with their well-known objectivity. The layman is scandalized, but the scandal is not so much the fault of the scientist as it is the layman’s canonization of scientists, which the latter never asked for.

The prayer of the scientist if he prayed, which is not likely: Lord, grant that my discovery may increase knowledge and help other men. Failing that, Lord, grant that it will not lead to man’s destruction. Failing that, Lord, grant that my article in Brain be published before the destruction takes place.

Room 202 in the motel is my room. Room 206 is stacked to the roof with canned food, mostly Vienna sausage and Campbell’s soup, fifteen cases of Early Times bourbon whiskey, and the World’s Great Books. In the rooms intervening, 203, 204, and 205, are to be found Ellen, Moira, and Lola respectively.

My spirits rise. My quilted scalp pops another hair root. The silky albumen from the gin fizzes coats my brain membranes. Even if worst comes to worst, is there any reason why the four of us cannot live happily together, sip toddies, eat Campbell’s chicken-and-rice, and spend the long summer evenings listening to Lola play the cello and reading aloud from the World’s Great Books stacked right alongside the cases of Early Times, beginning with Homer’s first words: “Sing, O Goddess, the anger of Achilles,” and ending with Freud’s last words: “—but we cannot help them and cannot change our own way of thinking on their account”? Then we can read the Great Ideas, beginning with the first volume, Angel to Love. Then we can start over — until the Campbell’s soup and Early Times run out.

The sun makes bursts and halos through the screen of pine needles. The marsh hawk ends his long glide into the line of cypresses, which are green as paint against the purple thunderhead.

At first glance all seems normal hereabouts. But a sharp eye might notice one or two things amiss. For one thing, the inner lanes of the interstate, the ones ordinarily used for passing, are in disrepair. The tar strips are broken. A lichen grows in the oil stain. Young mimosas sprout on the shoulders.

For another thing, there is something wrong with the motel. The roof tiles are broken. The swimming pool is an opaque jade green, a bad color for pools. A large turtle suns himself on the diving board, which is broken and slanted into the water. Two cars are parked in the near lot, a rusty Cadillac and an Impala convertible with vines sprouting through its rotting top.

The cars and the shopping center were burnt out during the Christmas riot five years ago. The motel, though not burned, was abandoned and its room inhabited first by lovers, then by bums, and finally by the native denizens of the swamp, dirt daubers, moccasins, screech owls, and raccoons.

In recent months the vines have begun to sprout in earnest. Possum grape festoons Rexall Drugs yonder in the plaza. Scuppernong all but conceals the A & P supermarket. Poison ivy has captured the speaker posts in the drive-in movie, making a perfect geometrical forest of short cylindrical trees.

Beyond the glass wall of the motel dining room still hangs the Rotary banner:

Is it the truth?

Is it fair to all concerned?

Will it build goodwill and better friendships?

But the banner is rent, top to bottom, like the temple veil.

The vines began to sprout in earnest a couple of months ago. People do not like to talk about it. For some reason they’d much rather talk about the atrocities that have been occurring ever more often: entire families murdered in their beds for no good reason. “The work of a madman!” people exclaim.

Last Sunday as I was walking past the house of a neighbor, Barry Bocock, a Boeing engineer transplanted from Seattle, I spied him riding his tiny tractor-mower like a big gringo astride a burro. The next moment my eye was caught by many tiny vines sprouting through the cracks in the concrete slab and beginning to cover the antique bricks that Barry had salvaged from an old sugar mill.

Barry got off his tractor simply by standing up and walking.

“It looks as though your slab is cracked, Barry,” I told him.

Barry frowned and, seeming not to hear, began to show me how the tractor could cut grass right up to the bark of a tree without injuring the tree.

Barry Bocock is the sort of fellow who gives the most careful attention to details, especially to those smaller problems caused by germs. A very clean man, he walks around his yard in his shorts and if he should find a pustule or hickey on his clean hairy muscular legs, he takes infinite pains examining it, squeezing it, noting the character of the pus. One has the feeling that to Barry there is nothing wrong with the world that couldn’t be set right by controlling germs and human wastes. One Sunday he invited me into his back yard and showed me the effluence from his new septic tank, letting it run into a drinking glass, where in fact it did look as clear as water.

But when I called his attention to the vines cracking his slab, he seemed not to hear and instead showed me his new mower.

“But, Barry, the vines are cracking your slab.”

“That’ll be the day,” said Barry, flushing angrily. Then, drawing me close to his clean perfect West-Coast body, he asked me if I’d heard of the latest atrocity.

“Yes. What do you think?”

“The work of a madman!” he exclaimed and mounted his burro-size tractor.

Barry is a widower, his wife having died of alcoholism before he left Seattle. “Firing the sunset gun” he called her drinking. “Every day she’d be at it as early as one o’clock.” “At what?” “Firing the sunset gun.”

The buzzards are lower and more hopeful, rocking their wings this way and that and craning down for a look.

When I think of Barry, I can’t help but wonder whether he, not I, should be the doctor, what with his keen interest in germs, boils, hickeys, bobos, pustules, scabs, and such. Moreover, I could tell from Barry’s veiled expression when I mentioned the vines sprouting that he knew of my troubles and that he was accordingly discounting my alarm. Physician, heal thyself….

The truth is that, though I am a physician, my health, especially my mental health, has been very poor lately. I am subject to attacks of elation and depression, as well as occasional seizures of morning terror. A few years ago my wife left me, running off with an Englishman, and I’ve led an irregular life ever since.

But to admit my infirmities is not necessarily to discredit my discoveries, which stand or fall on scientific evidence. After all, van Gogh was depressed and Beethoven had a poor time of it. The prophet Hosea, if you will recall, had a bad home life.

Some of the best psychiatrists, it is hardly necessary to add, have a few problems of their own, little rancors and terrors and such.

Who am I? you well might wonder. Let me give a little dossier.

I am a physician, a not very successful psychiatrist; an alcoholic, a shaky middle-aged man subject to depressions and elations and morning terrors, but a genius nevertheless who sees into the hidden causes of things and erects simple hypotheses to account for the glut of everyday events; a bad Catholic; a widower and cuckold whose wife ran off with a heathen Englishman and died on the island of Cozumel, where she hoped to begin a new life and see things afresh.

My afflictions attract some patients, repel others. People are generally tolerant. Some patients, knowing my frailties, calculate I’ll understand theirs. I am something like old Doc in Western movies: if you catch old Doc sober, he’s all right, etcetera. In fact, he’s some kind of genius, I heard he went to Harvard, etcetera etcetera.

Not that I make much money. Sensible folk, after all, don’t have much use for a doctor who sips toddies during office hours. So I’m obliged to take all kinds of patients, not merely terrified and depressed people, but people suffering with bowel complaints, drugheads with beriberi and hepatitis, Bantus shot up by the cops, cops shot up by Bantus.

Lately, however, I’ve discouraged patients in order to work on my invention. I don’t need the money. Fortunately for me, my wife, who left me and later died, either didn’t or wouldn’t change her will and so bequeathed me forty thousand shares of R. J. Reynolds stock she inherited from her father.

Loose bark from the pine is beginning to work through my shirt. My scalp is still quilted, my throat is whistling with hives — albumen molecules from the gin fizzes hum like bees in the ventricles of my brain — yet I feel quite well.

Where is the sniper? Shading my eyes, I examine every inch of the terrain.

A flag stirs fitfully on its pole beside the green rectangle dug into the slope of the near ridge like a step. It is the football field of the Valley Forge Academy, our private school, which was founded on religious and patriotic principles and to keep Negroes out. Earlier today — could it have been today? — the Christian Kaydettes, our champion baton-twirlers, practiced their twirling, little suspecting what dread misadventure would befall them.

Beyond the empty shopping plaza at my foot rise the low green hills of Paradise Estates. The fairways of the golf links make notches in the tree line. Pretty cubes and loaves of new houses are strewn among the pines like sugar lumps. It is even possible to pick out my own house, a spot of hot pink and a wink of glass under the old TV transmitter. By a trick of perspective the transmitter tower seems to rise from the dumpy silo of old Saint Michael’s Church in the plaza.

Here in the old days I used to go to mass with my daughter, Samantha. My wife, an ex-Episcopal girl from Virginia, named our daughter Samantha in the expectation that this dark gracile pagan name would somehow inform the child, but alas for Doris, Samantha turned out to be chubby, fair, acned, and pious, the sort who likes to hang around after school and beat Sister’s erasers.

The best of times were after mass on summer evenings when Samantha and I would walk home in the violet dusk, we having received Communion and I rejoicing afterwards, caring nought for my fellow Catholics but only for myself and Samantha and Christ swallowed, remembering what he promised me for eating him, that I would have life in me, and I did, feeling so good that I’d sing and cut the fool all the way home like King David before the Ark. Once home, light up the charcoal briquets out under the TV transmitter, which lofted its red light next to Venus like a ruby and a diamond in the plum velvet sky. Snug down Samantha with the Wonderful World of Color in the den (the picture better than life, having traveled only one hundred feet straight down), back to the briquets, take four, five, six long pulls from the quart of Early Times, shout with joy for the beauty of the world, sing “Finch ’han dal vino” from Don Giovanni and “Holy God We Praise Thy Name,” conceive a great heart-leaping desire for Doris, whose lip would curl at my proposal but who was nonetheless willing, who in fact now that she thought of it was as lusty as could be, her old self once again, a lusty Shenandoah Valley girl, Apple Queen of the Apple Blossom Festival in Winchester. Lead her by the hand beyond the azaleas where we’d fling ourselves upon each other and fall down on the zoysia grass, thick-napped here as a Kerman rug.

A flutter of white in the motel window. The sniper? I tighten my elbow against the carbine belt No, it is one of the girls’ rooms. Moira’s. Moira washing her things out and hanging them out to dry as if it were any other Tuesday. A good omen, Moira washing her underwear. Her I always think of so, standing barefoot in her slip at the washstand, legs planted far apart and straight, even a bit past straight, so that the pad at the back of her knees stands out as firm as rubber; yellow eyes musing and unfocused as she puts her things to soak in Lux.

Lola, on the other hand, I always see playing the Dvořák concerto, hissing the melody with her tongue against her teeth, straddling the cello with her splendid knees.

Ellen Oglethorpe appears in my mind as in fact she is, a stern but voluptuous Presbyterian nurse, color high in her cheeks, eyes bright with disapproval. I think of her as having her fists planted on her hips, as they used to say, akimbo.

All quiet in front. Could he, the sniper, have gotten behind me? I turn around slowly, keeping under the low spreading limbs of the longleaf.

Beyond the hump of the interchange rise the monoliths of “Fedville,” the federal complex including the hospital (where I’ve spent almost as much time as a patient as doctoring), the medical school, the NASA facility, the Behavioral Institute, the Geriatrics Center, and the Love Clinic.

In “Love,” as it is called, volunteers perform sexual acts singly, in couples, and in groups, beyond viewing mirrors in order that man might learn more about the human sexual response.

Next door is Geriatrics Rehabilitation or “Gerry Rehab,” a far-flung complex of pleasant low-lying white-roofed Daytona-type buildings. Here old folk from Tampa to Tucson are treated for the blues and boredoms of old age. These good folk, whose physical ailments are mostly cured nowadays, who at eighty-five, ninety, even a hundred, are as spry as can be, limber-jointed, smooth-faced, supple of artery, nevertheless often grow inexplicably sad. Though they may live in the pleasantest Senior Settlements where their every need is filled, every recreation provided, every sort of hobby encouraged, nevertheless many grow despondent in their happiness, sit slack and empty-eyed at shuffleboard and ceramic oven. Fishing poles fall from tanned and healthy hands. Golf clubs rust. Reader’s Digests go unread. Many old folks pine away and even die from unknown causes like victims of a voodoo curse. Here in Gerry Rehab, these sad oldsters are encouraged to develop their “creative and altruistic potential.” Yet mysterious deaths, and suicides too, continue to mount. The last Surgeon General’s report named the nation’s number-one killer as “Senior Citizens’ anomie,” known locally as the St. Petersburg Blues.

To my left, white among the cypresses, are the old frame buildings of the Little Sisters of the Poor. During the week the Little Sisters run a school for poor children, black and white, feed and clothe them, and on weekends conduct religious retreats for Christian folk. The scientists help the sisters with the children during the week. On weekends Christians come to make retreats and pray for the conversion of Communists.

The scientists, who are mostly liberals and unbelievers, and the businessmen, who are mostly conservative and Christian, live side by side in Paradise Estates. Though the two make much of their differences — one speaking of “outworn dogmas and creeds,” the other of “atheism and immorality,” etcetera etcetera — to tell the truth, I do not notice a great deal of difference between the two. Both sorts are generally good fellows, good fathers and husbands who work hard all day, come home at five-thirty to their pretty homes, kiss their wives, toss their rosy babes in the air, light up their charcoal briquets, or perhaps mount their tiny tractor mowers. There are minor differences. When conservative Christian housewives drive to town to pick up their maids in the Hollow, the latter ride on the back seat in the old style. Liberal housewives make their maids ride on the front seat. On Sundays Christian businessmen dress up and take their families to church, whereas unbelieving scientists are apt to put on their worst clothes and go bird-watching. As one of my behaviorist friends put it, “my cathedral is the blue sky and my pilgrimage is for the ivory-billed woodpecker,” the fabulous and lordly bird that some say still inhabits the fastness of the swamp.

Beyond the cypresses, stretching away to the horizon, as misty as a southern sea, lies the vast Honey Island Swamp. Smudges of hummocks dot its savanna-like islands. The north-south interstate, crossing it on a causeway, flies due south straight as two lines drawn with a ruler to converge at a point on the horizon.

From the hummocks arise one or two wisps of smoke. Yonder in the fastness of the swamp dwell the dropouts from land castoffs of and rebels against our society: ferocious black Bantus who use the wilderness both as a refuge and as a guerrilla base from which to mount forays against outlying subdivisions and shopping plazas; all manner of young white derelicts who live drowsy sloth-like lives, sustaining themselves on wild melons and catfish and green turtles and smoking Choctaw cannabis the livelong day. The lonely hummocks, once the haunt of raccoon and alligator, are now rubbed bare as monkey islands at the zoo by all manner of disaffected folk: Bantu guerrillas, dropouts from Tulane and Vanderbilt, M.I.T. and Loyola; draft dodgers, deserters from the Swedish army, psychopaths and pederasts from Memphis and New Orleans whose practices were not even to be tolerated in New Orleans; antipapal Catholics, malcontented Methodists, ESPers, UFOers, Aquarians, ex-Ayn Randers, Choctaw Zionists who have returned to their ancestral hunting grounds, and even a few old graybeard Kerouac beats, wiry old sourdoughs of the spirit who carry pilgrim staffs, recite sutras, and leap from hummock to hummock as agile as mountain goats.

The town where I keep an office is north and to my right. By contrast with the swamp, the town has become a refuge for all manner of conservative folk, graduates of Bob Jones University, retired Air Force colonels, passed-over Navy commanders, ex-Washington, D.C., policemen, patriotic chiropractors, two officials of the National Rifle Association, and six conservative proctologists.

Paradise Estates, where I live now, is another matter. Directly opposite me, between swamp and town, its houses sparkle like jewelry in the sunlight. Emerald fairways run alongside sleepy bayous. Here everyone gets along well, heathen and Christian, Jew and Gentile, Northerner and Southerner, liberal and conservative. The Northerners, mostly businessmen and engineers from places like Kenosha and Sheboygan and Grosse Pointe, actually outnumber the Southerners. But they, the Northerners, have taken to Southern ways like ducks to water. They drink toddies and mint juleps and hold fish fries with hush puppies. Little black jockeys fish from mirrors in their front yards. Life-sized mammy-dolls preside over their patios. Nearly everyone treats his servants well, picking them up in Happy Hollow and taking them home, allowing “totin’ privileges” and giving them “Christmas gifs.”

The Negroes around here are generally held to be a bad lot. The older Negroes are mostly trifling and no-account, while the young Negroes have turned mean as yard dogs. Nearly all the latter have left town, many to join the Bantus in the swamp. Here the conservatives and liberals of Paradise agree. The conservatives say that Negroes always have been trifling and no-account or else mean as yard dogs. The liberals, arguing with the conservatives at the country club, say yes, Negroes are trifling and no-account or else mean as yard dogs, but why shouldn’t they be, etcetera etcetera. So it goes.

Our servants in Paradise are the exceptions, however: faithful black mammies who take care of our children as if they were their own, dignified gardeners who work and doff their caps in the old style.

Paradise Estates, where I live, is a paradise indeed, an oasis of concord in a troubled land. For our beloved old U.S.A. is in a bad way. Americans have turned against each other; race against race, right against left, believer against heathen, San Francisco against Los Angeles, Chicago against Cicero. Vines sprout in sections of New York where not even Negroes will live. Wolves have been seen in downtown Cleveland, like Rome during the Black Plague. Some Southern states have established diplomatic ties with Rhodesia. Minnesota and Oregon have their own consulates in Sweden (where so many deserters from these states dwell).

The old Republican Party has become the Knothead Party, so named during the last Republican convention in Montgomery when a change of name was proposed, the first suggestion being the Christian Conservative Constitutional Party, and campaign buttons were even printed with the letters CCCP before an Eastern-liberal commentator noted the similarity to the initials printed on the backs of the Soviet cosmonauts and called it the most knotheaded political bungle of the century — which the conservatives, in the best tradition, turned to their own advantage, printing a million more buttons reading “Knotheads for America” and banners proclaiming “No Man Can Be Too Knotheaded in the Service of His Country.”

The old Democrats gave way to the new Left Party. They too were stuck with a nickname not of their own devising and the nickname stuck: in this case a derisive acronym that the Right made up and the Left accepted, accepted in that same curious American tradition by which we allow our enemies to name us, give currency to their curses, perhaps from the need to concede the headstart they want and still beat them, perhaps also from the secret inkling that our enemies know the worst of us best and it’s best for them to say it. LEFT usually it is, often LEFTPAPA, sometimes LEFTPAPASAN (with a little Jap bow), hardly ever the original LEFTPAPASANE, which stood far what, according to the Right, the Left believed in: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, The Pill, Atheism, Pot, Anti-Pollution, Sex, Abortion Now, Euthanasia.

The center did not hold.

However, the Gross National Product continues to rise.

There are Left states and Knothead states, Left towns and Knothead towns but no center towns (for example, my old hometown over yonder is Knothead, Fedville behind me is Left, and Paradise Estates where I live now does not belong to the center — there is no center — but is that rare thing, a pleasant place where Knothead and Left — but not black — dwell side by side in peace), Left networks and Knothead networks, Left movies and Knothead movies. The most popular Left films are dirty movies from Sweden. All-time Knothead favorites, on the other hand, include The Sound of Music, Flubber, and Ice Capades of 1981, clean movies all.

I’ve stopped going to movies. It is hard to say which is more unendurable, the sentimental blasphemy of Knothead movies like The Sound of Music or sitting in a theater with strangers watching other strangers engage in sexual intercourse and sodomy on the giant 3-D Pan-a-Vision screen.

American literature is not having its finest hour. The Southern gothic novel yielded to the Jewish masturbatory novel, which in turn gave way to the WASP homosexual novel, which has nearly run its course. The Catholic literary renascence, long awaited, failed to materialize. But old favorites endure, like venerable Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Susann, who continue to write the dirty clean books so beloved by the American housewife. Gore Vidal is the grand old man of American letters.

Both political parties have had their triumphs.

The Lefts succeeded in removing “In God We Trust” from pennies.

The Knotheads enacted a law requiring compulsory prayers in the black public schools and made funds available for birth control in Africa, Asia, and Alabama.

But here in Paradise, Knothead lives next to Leftist in peace. On Wednesday nights one goes to a meeting of Birchers, the other to the ACLU. Sunday one goes to church, the other in search of the lordly ivory-billed woodpecker, but both play golf, ski in the same bayou, and give “Christmas gifs” to the same waiters at the club.

The war in Ecuador has been going on for fifteen years and has divided the country further. Not exactly our best war. The U.S.A. sided with South Ecuador, which is largely Christian, believing in God and the sacredness of the individual, etcetera etcetera. The only trouble is that South Ecuador is owned by ninety-eight Catholic families with Swiss bank accounts, is governed by a general, and so is not what you would call an ideal democracy. North Ecuador, on the other hand, which many U.S. liberals support, is Maoist-Communist and has so far murdered two hundred thousand civilians, including liberals, who did not welcome Communism with open arms. Not exactly our best war, and now in its sixteenth year.

Even so, most Americans do well enough. In fact, until lately, nearly everyone tried and succeeded in being happy but me. My unhappiness is not the fault of Paradise. I was unlucky. My daughter died, my wife ran off with a heathen Englishman, and I fell prey to bouts of depression and morning terror, to say nothing of abstract furies and desultory lusts for strangers.

Here’s the puzzle: what is an unhappy psychiatrist to do in a place where everyone else is happier than he is? Physician, heal thy …

Fortunately for me, many other people have become unhappy of late. Certain psychiatric disorders have cropped up in both Lefts and Knotheads.

Conservatives have begun to fall victim to unseasonable rages, delusions of conspiracies, high blood pressure, and large-bowel complaints.

Liberals are more apt to contract sexual impotence, morning terror, and a feeling of abstraction of the self from itself.

So it is that a small Knothead city like my hometown yonder can support half a dozen proctologists, while places like Berkeley or Beverly Hills have a psychiatrist in every block.

It is my misfortune — and blessing — that I suffer from both liberal and conservative complaints, e.g., both morning terror and large-bowel disorders, excessive abstraction and unseasonable rages, alternating impotence and satyriasis. So that at one and the same time I have great sympathy for my patients and lead a fairly miserable life.

But my invention has changed all this. Now I know how to be happy and make others happy. With my little machine I can diagnose and treat with equal success the morning terror of liberals and the apoplexy of conservatives. In fact it could save the U.S.A. if we can get through the next hour or so.

What’s wrong with my eyes? My field of vision is narrowing from top to bottom. The world looks as it if were seen through the slit of a gun turret. But of course! My eyes are swelling with hives! It could only come from the delicious gin fizzes prepared for me by Lola, my lovely cellist.

Still I feel very well. My brain, lubricated by egg white from the gin fizzes, hums like a top; pangs of love for the three girls — two anyhow — pierce my heart (how beautiful did God make woman!). Yet I am able to observe every detail of the terrain through my turret slit. A single rank weed, I notice, has sprouted overnight in the sand trap of number 12 fairway next to the interstate right-of-way — this despite the fact that the champs are to play here tonight “under the arcs.”

Far away church steeples puncture the globy oaks. Ordinary fat grayish clouds sail over the town blown by map winds with pencil lines.

The sand trap and the clouds put me in mind of being ten years old and in love and full of longing. The first thing a man remembers is longing and the last thing he is conscious of before death is exactly the same longing. I have never seen a man die who did not die in longing. When I was ten years old I woke one summer morning to a sensation of longing. Besides the longing I was in love with a girl named Louise, and so the same morning I went out to this same sand trap where I hoped chance would bring us together. At the breakfast table, I took a look at my father with his round head, his iron-colored hair, his chipper red cheeks, and I wondered to myself: at what age does a man get over this longing?

The answer is, he doesn’t. My father was so overwhelmed with longing that it unfitted him for anything but building martin houses.

My father, also a physician, had his office in town and I kept it, poor place though it was, even after I became a professor at the medical center.

We are not exactly a distinguished family. My father was a failed physician who also drank. In early middle age he got himself elected coroner and more or less retired, sat alone in his office between the infrequent autopsies and made spectacular bird houses, martin hotels, and wren houses of cypress with brass fittings.

My mother, a “realtor” and a whiz at getting buyer and seller together, really supported us.

Our family’s only claim to singularity, if not distinction, is that we are one of that rare breed, Anglo-Saxon Catholics who were Catholic from the beginning and stayed Catholic. My forebears remained steadfast in the old faith both in Hertfordshire, where Elizabeth got after them, and in Maryland, where the Episcopalians finally kicked them out. Sir Thomas More, in fact, is a collateral ancestor. Our name anyhow is More. But if such antecedents seem illustrious, recent reality is less so. It is as if the effort of clinging to the faith took such a toll that we were not fit for much else. Evicted from Maryland, my ancestor removed to Bardstown, Kentucky, where he and his sons founded a whiskey distillery — and failed at that.

My grandfather took dentistry at Loyola of the South and upon graduation married a Creole heiress with timberlands and never drilled a tooth.

All Mores, until I came along, were good Catholics and went to mass — I too until a few years ago. Wanderers we became, like the Jews in the wilderness. For we were Catholic English-Americans and most other English-Americans were Protestant and most Catholics were either Mediterranean or Irish. In the end we settled for Louisiana, where religious and ethnic confusion is sufficiently widespread and good-natured that no one keeps track of such matters — except the Baptists, who don’t like Catholics no matter what. My forefathers donned Knights of Columbus robes, wore swords and plumed hats, attended French shrimp boils and Irish wakes, made retreats with Germans, were pallbearers at Italian funerals. Like the French and Germans here, we became easygoing Louisianians and didn’t think twice about our origins. We fought with Beauregard next to old blue-light Presbyterian Stonewall Jackson and it seemed natural enough. My father was only a third-degree Knight of Columbus, but he too went regularly to Holy Name shrimp boils and Lady of the Lake barbecues and was right content. For twenty-five years he sat out the long afternoons in his dim little coroner’s office, sipping Early Times between autopsies and watching purple martins come skimming up to his splendid cypress-and-brass hotel.

The asphalt of the empty plaza still bubbles under the hot July sun. Through the shimmer of heat one can see the broken store fronts beyond the plaza. A green line wavers in midair above the pavement, like the hanging gardens of Babylon. It is not a mirage, however. I know what it is. A green growth has taken root on the flat roofs of the stores.

As for me, I was a smart boy and at the age of twenty-six bade fair to add luster to the family name for the first time since Sir Thomas More himself, that great soul, the dearest best noblest merriest of Englishmen. My contribution, I hasten to add, was in the realm of science not sanctity. Why can’t I follow More’s example, love myself less, God and my fellowman more, and leave whiskey and women alone? Sir Thomas More was merry in life and death and he loved and was loved by everyone, even his executioner, with whom he cracked jokes. By contrast, I am possessed by terror and desire and live a solitary life. My life is a longing, longings for women, for the Nobel Prize, for the hot bosky bite of bourbon whiskey, and other great heart-wrenching longings that have no name. Sir Thomas was right, of course, and I am wrong. But on the other hand these are peculiar times….

When I was a young man, the question at the time was: where are the Catholic Einsteins, Salks, Oppenheimers? And the answer came, at least from my family: well, here comes one, namely me. The local Catholic paper and the K.C. magazine wrote me up, along with some well-known baseball players, bandleaders, and TV personalities. It was the end of the era of Lawrence Welk, Perry Como, Bing Crosby, Stan Musial, Ed McMahon, all good Catholics, good fellows, decent family men, etcetera etcetera, though not exactly the luminaries of the age — John Kennedy was the exception — and the question was, who was going to take their place, let alone measure up to Einstein.

One proof of the divine origin of the Catholic Church: that I found myself in the same Church as Lawrence Welk and Danny Thomas and all those Irishmen and did not feel in the least peculiar.

What happened was that as a young physician in New Orleans I stumbled onto an extraordinary medical discovery, wrote an article for the Journal of the American Medical Association that was picked up by Time, Newsweek, and the papers. Caption under Time photo: “Psychic Fallout?” In Newsweek: “Doctor Treats Doctors in Switch.” Headline in New York Daily News: “Beautiful Girl Interne Disrobes — Fallout Cause Says Doc.”

I was the doc and a very promising doc at that. How many doctors achieve fame in their twenties?

Alas, the promise didn’t pan out. On the contrary. There followed twenty years of silence and decline. My daughter, Samantha, died; my wife ran off with a heathen Englishman — come to think of it, I haven’t seen a Christian Englishman for years — and I left off research, left off eating Christ in Communion, and took to sipping Early Times instead and seeking the company of the fair sex, as they used to say.

My wife and I lived a good life. We used to get up in the morning in a beautiful house, sit down to breakfast in our “enclosed patio,” watch Barbara Walters talk about sexual intercourse on the Today show. Nevertheless, I fell prey to morning terror, shook like a leaf at the breakfast table, and began to drink vodka with my grits. At the same time that I developed liberal anxiety, I also contracted conservative rage and large-bowel complaints.

But — and here is the point — the period of my decline was also a period of lying fallow and of the germination of some strange quirky ideas. Toynbee, I believe, speaks of the Return, of the man who fails and goes away, is exiled, takes counsel with himself, hits on something, sees daylight — and returns to triumph.

First, reader and especially my fellow physicians, let me set forth my credentials, recall to your mind my modest discovery twenty years ago, as well as give you an inkling of my recent breakthrough.

Do you recall the Heavy Sodium experiments that were conducted years ago in New Orleans under the stands of the Sugar Bowl stadium? and the mysterious accident that put an end to the same? There occurred an almost soundless explosion, a whssssk like tearing silk, a few people were killed, and a curious yellow lens-shaped cloud hung over the French Quarter for a day or two.

Here’s what happened. At the time I was encephalographer-in-residence at Tulane University. Part of my job was to do encephalograms on students with the hope of eliminating those who were subject to the sundry fits and seizures that were plaguing universities at the time, conservative fits and radical seizures. Another duty was to assist the team of physicists assigned to the secret Vieux Carré project under the Sugar Bowl. I doubled as medical officer and radiation monitor. The physicists were tinkering with a Heavy Sodium pile by means of which they hoped to hit on a better source of anticancer radiation than the old cobalt treatment. The Heavy Sodium was obtained from the massive salt domes of southern Louisiana where it occurs (along with the Heavy Chloride ion) as a trace element. The experiment was promising for two reasons. One was that Heavy Sodium radiation was thought not to injure normal tissues — hence no X-ray burns. The other was evidence that it destroyed cancer cells in mice.

The long and short of it is that the reactor got loose, killed a brace of physicists, sent up an odd yellow cloud, and accordingly rated a headline on the second page of the New York Daily News, as might a similar accident at Oak Ridge or Los Alamos.

In the weeks that followed, however, I noticed something curious and so made my, to date, sole contribution to medical annals. You may still find it in the textbooks, where it usually rates a footnote as “More’s Paradoxical Sodium Radiation Syndrome.” Something peculiar happened in the Tulane Psychiatric Hospital, where I was based. Nobody thought to make a connection between these peculiar events and the yellow cloud. Was it not John Locke who said that the mark of genius is the ability to discern not this thing or that thing but rather the connection between the two?

At any rate I noticed a remarkable change in the hospital people. Some of the patients got better and some of the psychiatrists got worse. Indeed, many of our most disturbed patients, the suicidal, the manic, the naked, the catatonic, in short the mad, were found one morning sitting fully clothed and in their right minds. A number of residents and staff physicians, on the other hand, developed acute symptoms out of the blue. One doctor, for example, a noted authority on schizophrenia, uttered a hoarse cry on rounds, hurled himself through a window, ran over the levee, and disappeared into the waters of the mighty Mississippi. Another, a lady psychologist and by the way a very attractive person and something of a radio-TV personality, stripped off her clothing in staff conference and made gross sexual overtures to several male colleagues — hence the somewhat inaccurate headline in the New York Daily News.

A third case, a fellow resident and good friend of mine, a merry outgoing person both at work and play, underwent a marked personality change. In the hospital he became extremely cold in mien, abstracted and so absorbed with laboratory data that he treated his patients like guinea pigs in a cage, while in his off-duty hours he began to exhibit the lewdest sort of behavior, laying hands on strange women like a drunken sailor.

Shortly thereafter I awoke one morning and it occurred to me that there might be a connection between these peculiar events and the lens-shaped cloud. For though I attached no weight to the superstitions flying around — one good soul, a chambermaid in the hospital, said that the yellow cloud had driven the demons out of the mad patients and into the doctors — nevertheless, it did occur to me that the cloud might have contained, and turned loose, something besides demons. I ordered esoteric blood chemistry on both sane patients and mad doctors. Sure enough, both groups had sufficient levels of Heavy Sodium and Chloride in their blood.

What I didn’t know at the time and what took me twenty years to figure out was why some got better and others got worse. I know now that the heavy ions have different effects on different brain centers. For example, Heavy Sodium radiation stimulates Brodmann Area 32, the center of abstractive activity or tendencies toward angelism, while Heavy Chloride stimulates the thalamus, which promotes adjustment to the environment, or, as I call it without prejudice, bestialism. The two conditions are not mutually exclusive. It is not uncommon nowadays to see patients suffering from angelism-bestialism. A man, for example, can feel at one and the same time extremely abstracted and inordinately lustful toward lovely young women who may be perfect strangers.

So ran my report in the J.A.M.A., a bald observation of a connection, without theory. The explanation, now that I look back on it, seems so simple now. Then I was like Benjamin Franklin getting a jolt from his kite and having no notion what hit him. Now I know.

A second thunderhead, larger and more globular, is approaching from the north. A breeze springs up. There is no thunder but lightning flickers around inside the cloud like a defective light bulb.

While there is still time, let me tell you what my invention does, just in case worst comes to worst and my article in Brain can’t be published. Since catastrophe may overtake us within the hour, I am dictating these words into a pocket recorder so that survivors poking around the ruins of Howard Johnson’s a hundred years from now will have a chance of avoiding a repetition.

My discovery, like all great scientific breakthroughs, is simplicity itself. The notion came to me during my work with the encephalograph, with which instrument, as you know, one tapes electrodes to the skull and records brain waves, which in turn may reveal such abnormalities as tumors, strokes, fits, and so on.

It happened while I was ill.

One stormy night I lay in a hospital bed recovering from seizures of alternating terror and delight with intervening periods of immense longing. These attacks are followed in my case by periods of extraordinary tranquillity of mind, of heightened perception, clairvoyance, and increased inductive powers. The storm roared and crashed outside the acute ward; I lay on my back in bed, hands at my side, surrounded by thirty-nine other madmen moaning and whimpering like souls in the inner circle of hell. Yet I felt extraordinarily happy. Thoughts flew into my head like little birds. Then it was that my great idea came to me. So confident was I of its value that I leapt out of bed at the height of the storm and yelled at my fellow patients:

“Don’t be afraid, brothers! Don’t cry! Don’t tremble! I have made a discovery that will cure you! Believe me, brothers!”

“We believe you, Doc!” the madmen cried in the crashing thunder, and they did. Madmen, like possessed souls in the Gospels, know when you are telling the truth.

It was my fellow physicians who gave me trouble.

My idea was simply that: if the encephalograph works, why not devise a gadget without wires that will measure the electrical activity of the separate centers of the brain? Hardly a radical idea. But here was the problem: given such a machine, given such readings, could the readings then be correlated with the manifold woes of the Western world, its terrors and rages and murderous impulses? And if so, could the latter be treated by treating the former?

A large order, but so was Edward Jenner’s dream of eradicating the great pox.

A bit of luck came my way. Once I got out of the acute wing, they put me to work as assistant to the resident encephalographer, one of those super-Negroes who speak five languages, quote the sutras, and are wizards in electronics as well. He, Colley Wilkes, got interested in my ideas and helped me rig up my first working model. Another break came my way from Kino Yamaiuchi, a classmate, presently with Osaka Instruments, who cut every piece of red tape and got the first five hundred production models turned out in record time — a little order that cost me $150,000 worth of my wife’s R. J. Reynold’s stock.

My invention unites two principles familiar to any sophomore in high school physics. One is the principle of electrical induction. Any electrical activity creates a magnetic field, which in turn will induce a current in a wire passed through the field. The other is the principle of location by triangulation. Using microcircuitry techniques, Colley and I rigged up two tiny electronic “listeners,” something like the parabolic reflectors with which one can hear a whisper at two hundred feet. Using our double receiver, we could “hear” the electrical activity of a pinhead-sized area anywhere in the brain: in the cortex, the pineal body, the midbrain — anywhere.

So we “listened.” Colley was interested in locating brain tumors and such, but I was after bigger game. We listened and sure enough Colley found his brain tumors. What I found was a horse of a different color.

Colley, I will admit, has not gone along with my idea of measuring and treating the deep perturbations of the soul. Unfortunately, there still persists in the medical profession the quaint superstition that only that which is visible is real. Thus the soul is not real. Uncaused terror cannot exist. Then, friend, how come you are shaking?

No matter, though. Later I was made a professor and didn’t need Colley’s help.

I have called my machine More’s Qualitative Quantitative Ontological Lapsometer.

A curtain moves in a window of the front wing of the motel, opposite the girls’ rooms. Could it be that some Bantu S.O.B. is still trying to shoot me?

Allow me to cite, in simplified terms, a couple of my early case histories.

One hot summer afternoon as I sat at my father’s old coroner’s desk by the open back door sipping Early Times, watching the flight patterns of the martins, and pondering the singularity of being forty-four years old, my nurse, whom I mainly employ to keep patients away, brought in a patient.

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.

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 learned 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.

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 little-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.

Charley’s appearance was shocking. He was dressed in sport clothes but wore them like an old man, aloha shirt, high-stomached shorts, but business shoes and socks. His elbows had grown tabs. His tan had an undertone of jaundice. The crow’s-feet around his eyes were ironed out, showing white troughs.

“Did you want to see me, Charley?”

He cupped his hand to hear. Not that he was deaf, but it was hard to hear in that room. Voices sounded reedy. The vaulted ceiling crossed by simulated hand-hewn beams roared like a conch.

Charley looked at me.

“You look like hell, Doc.”

“I know.”

“You got a good build. You ought to stay in shape.”

“You’re right.” I was feeling bad. Samantha was dead and the martins had not come back. It was a bad white winter day.

“What did you mean when you asked me if I felt strange?” Charley asked me, resuming our conversation of six months earlier.

“What? Oh. As I recall, it was a routine question.”

“Why in hell should I feel strange?” Charley’s reedy voice buzzed up into the vaulted ceiling like a cicada. He felt very low, but my own low spirits revived him sufficiently so that he pulled a lever and lay back in the recliner.

“He loves to talk to you,” said Ramona in a loud drone as if Charley were not talking, were not even present. Discovering that she still had her hat on, she clucked and, feeling for hatpins, stood up and went into the pantry. Her inner calves still had the tender straight undeveloped lines of pretty girls in the Lower Piedmont, the sort who sit drinking Cokes for twenty years. She is from Spartanburg, South Carolina.

It seemed permissible to slump as low as Charley. Charley and I could talk along the floor while Ramona went sailing through the roaring upper air as if it were her medium.

Charley was depressed but he didn’t know why. Nothing much had changed in his life, except that his son had dropped out of M.I.T. and taken to the swamp, hardly an uncommon occurrence these days. But he and his son had never been close.

“So what?” said Charley. “My old man ran me off when I was fourteen.”

So there seemed to be no external cause for Charley’s distress. On the contrary. Just the week before, the champs had signed up again to play under the arcs on the Moonlight Summer Tour. The new Paradise 36 was finished. A new concept in golf courses, its initial cost of forty million was also its final cost. What with its fleet of carts, elimination of caddies, its automatic sprinkler system with each outlet regulated by a moisture sensor, its new Tifton 451 Bermuda, which required neither mowing nor fertilizing, labor costs were eliminated.

Then what was the trouble?

Charley shrugged. “I don’t know, Doc. I mean, what’s the use? You know what I mean?”

“Yes.” Something occurred to me. “When did you see your son last?”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“When?”

“Last month. On his way to Honey Island Swamp.”

“Did you quarrel with him?”

“Do you know what that sapsucker wanted to do?”

“No.”

“Move the three of them into his old room while he looks for a new cave.”

“The three of them?”

“Him and his little yehudi and their cute little bastard. Up they go to bed without a by-your-leave.”

“Yehudi?”

“Introduces her as Ethel Ginsberg or Finklestein.”

“Yes?”

“What do you mean, yes? I mean, don’t you think he could at least have had enough consideration for his mother to pretend they were married?”

“What happened then?”

“What do you mean, what happened? I threw his ass out. Wouldn’t you have?”

“I don’t know.”

I was thinking of my daughter, dead these seven years. Would I have thrown her ass out if she had gone up to bed with a Ginsberg? Yes. No. I don’t know.

Rising unsteadily, I blew my nose and reached for my lapsometer. What I was curious about was whether his deep pineal reading stayed low during his excitement Charley was so wound up that he didn’t even notice that I was going over his head like a barber. He kept swinging around to tell me something. It was like giving a haircut to a three-year-old.

(The reading was up: getting mad helped him. Or was it the talking?)

“Be still, Charley.”

Charley shut up. But he had to do something, so he started pressing buttons on his recliner. The stereo-V came booming on and stayed on.

In a minute Ramona came in and turned it down. Her hat was off and her hair was piled up in tiers like a garden-club arrangement.

“It’s a goddamn lie,” said Charley.

“What’s a lie?” Was he talking about the news or his son?

“That’s what he does all day,” Ramona told me, as if Charley were absent. “Fusses about the news and can’t wait till the next. He listens to the news every hour.”

“Fusses” seemed to be the wrong word for Charley’s anger.

Then it was that the idea first occurred to me: what would happen if one were able to apply electrical stimulation to the pineal region?

But the best I could do in those days was a kind of “historical therapy,” as I called it then: a recapture of the past and one’s self.

Only one thing worked with Charley. After his anger had subsided (something in the news — the Negroes, the Lefts, the love people, I didn’t notice — made him mad), I picked up the glass paperweight and I gave it a shake to set the snow whirling. The scene was the Battle above the Clouds atop Lookout Mountain. “Remember when we got this, honey,” Charley would usually say. “Yes. At Ruby Falls on our honeymoon.”

But that day Charley was either too angry still or too low to notice the paperweight.

“Ain’t nobody starving in no swamp,” he muttered.

I nodded, thinking he meant his son.

Ramona, who is quick and intuitive, saw my mistake and corrected me (women are smarter than psychiatrists).

“He”—still the absent he—“was talking about the news. You know, niggers supposed to be starving around here like in Beauford.”

“I see.”

Ramona gave me another hint. “He thinks they’re accusing him.”

“They?”

“That’s humbug,” said Charley.

“Guess what he told him,” said Ramona. “He told him it was his fault.”

He? Him? His? Which he is Charley and which his son and whose fault is it?

“Well of course,” I said somewhat vaguely, “everyone knows that Charley is a generous—”

“No! No!” They both turned on me. I hadn’t got the straight of it yet. I felt stupid, but on the other hand some married people, you know, carry on these mysterious six-layered conversations with all manner of secret signs.

Ramona set me straight. “Why should anyone blame Charley when all he did was build a golf course and invent the arcs? It wasn’t his forty million dollars that filled in the swamp. He was just doing his job. Is it Charley’s fault that Tifton 451 eliminates labor?”

“Yes. Hm,” I said in the best psychiatric style, pretending I knew all along. “You mean he and Chuck quarreled?”

“Quarreled, hell,” said Charley. “I kicked his ass out.”

“You should have heard them,” said Ramona. “Both of them acted ugly.” Ramona tried to put it down to menfolk’s ordinary foolishness. They had a fuss. But it was more than that. So serious was the quarrel that Charley was still worried about not winning it.

“I told him exactly like I’m telling you now: get your little yehudi and your little bastard and get your ass out.”

“They used to go hunting together,” said Ramona in her Spartanburg drone. But she was crying. “They never missed a dove season.”

“You know what he accused me of?” Charley asked me.

“No.”

“Starving niggers. You know what he called me?”

“No.”

“A hypocritical son of a bitch.”

“He didn’t actually say—” began Ramona. “That was ugly, though.”

“You too, Doc,” said Charley.

“Me?”

“You were included. All of us here are hypocritical sons of bitches.”

“I see.”

“He told me he knew for a fact that niggers come up from the swamp at night and eat soybean meal off the greens. Now you know that’s a lie.”

“Well, I’ve never heard—”

“In the first place, we haven’t used soybean meal since last summer. Tifton 451 doesn’t need it. As a matter of fact, I’ve got a whole barnful left over I’ve got to get rid of.”

“I see.”

I shook the paperweight again and in the end succeeded in getting Charley to tell me about his first tour when he had to borrow a hundred dollars to qualify at Fort Worth because Ramona had spent their last money on Sears sport clothes for him so he wouldn’t look like a caddy. But he was a caddy and wore sneakers instead of spiked shoes.

He told me about placing at Augusta. His deep pineal reading got up to 6 mmv.

“Doc, have you ever played thirty-six holes on three Baby Ruths?”

“No.”

“Do you think I’m a hypocritical son of a bitch?”

“No.”

“What do you think I am?”

What do I think? The mystery of evil is the mystery of limited goodness. Charley is a good man. Then how did things turn out so badly? What went wrong? I gave the paperweight a shake and sent snow swirling around Lookout Mountain.

Charley wanted to talk about whether the niggers were starving or not, etcetera, but what interested me and where my duty lay was with Charley. I saw how his life was and what he needed. Charley was a tinkerer, like GM’s famous Charley Kettering, a fellow who has to have one idea to worry with twenty-four hours a day. Without it he’s blown up. Charley’s the sort of fellow who retires to Florida hale and hearty and perishes in six months.

Here’s what happened.

Some months later I made my second breakthrough and added the ionizer to my lapsometer. I was able to treat an area as well as “listen” to it. It worked. Accordingly, a few days ago — when was it? a day? two days? dear Lord, how much has happened — I gave him a pineal massage and he came to himself, his old self, and began to have one idea after another. One idea: an electronic unlosable golf ball that sends signals from the deepest rough. Another: a “golfarama,” a mystical idea of combining a week of golf on a Caribbean island with the Greatest Pro of Them All — a week of revivals conducted by a member of the old Billy Graham team, the same revivalist, incidentally, who is in Paradise this weekend.

The interstate swelters in the sun.

My eyes are almost swelled shut, breath whistles in my throat, but my heart is full of love. Love of what? Women. Which women? All women. The first night I ever spent on the acute ward, a madman looked at me and said, not knowing me from Adam: “You want to know your trouble? You don’t love God, you love pussy.”

It might be true. Madmen like possessed men usually tell the truth. At any rate, through a crack of daylight I catch sight of a face, a blurred oval in the window of room 203. Lola.

The question is: if worst comes to worst, what is the prospect of a new life in a new dead world with Lola Rhoades, to say nothing of Moira Schaffner and Ellen Oglethorpe? Late summer and fall lie ahead, but will they be full of ghosts? That was the trouble with long summer evenings and the sparkling days of fall, they were haunted. What broke the heart was the cicadas starting up in the sycamores in October. Everyone was happy but our hearts broke with happiness. The golf links canceled themselves. Happy children grew up with haunted expressions and ran away. No more of that. Vines sprout in the plaza now. Fletcher Christian began a new life with three wives on faraway Pitcairn, green as green and unhaunted by old Western ghosts. I shall be happy with my three girls. Only Ellen, a Presbyterian, may make trouble.

Late last night a love couple crept up out of the swamp and appeared in my “enclosed patio.” This often happens. Even though I am a psychiatrist, denizens of the swamp appear at all hours suffering from malaria, dengue, flukes, bummers, hepatitis, and simple starvation. Nobody else will treat them.

I saw them from my bedroom window. It was three o’clock. I had been reading my usual late-night fare, Stedmann’s History of World War I. For weeks now I’ve been on the Battle of Verdun, which killed half a million men, lasted a year, and left the battle lines unchanged. Here began the hemorrhage and death by suicide of the old Western world: white Christian Caucasian Europeans, sentimental music-loving Germans and rational clear-minded Frenchmen, slaughtering each other without passion. “The men in the trenches did not hate each other,” wrote Stedmann. “As for the generals, they respected or contemned each other precisely as colleagues in the same profession.”

Comes a tap at the door. Is it guerrilla, drughead, Ku Kluxer, Choctaw, or love couple?

Love couple.

What seems to be the trouble? It seems their child, a love child, is very sick. I know you’re not a pediatrician but the other doctors won’t come, etcetera. Will I come? O.K.

Grab my bag, and down through the azaleas and into a pirogue, I squatting amidships, boy and girl paddling as expertly as Cajuns. A sinking yellow moon shatters in the ripples.

They speak freely of themselves. He’s a tousled blond lad with a splendid fan-shaped beard like Jeb Stuart (I can tell he’s from these parts by the way he says fo’teen for fourteen, Bugaloosa for Bogalusa), gold-haired, gray-jeaned, bare-chested and — footed. She’s a dark little Pocahontas from Brooklyn (I judge, for she speaks of hang-gups). They’ve given up city, home, family, career, religion, to live a perfect life of love and peace with a dozen others on a hummock with nothing else for a shelter in the beginning than an abandoned Confederate salt mine. There they’ve revived a few of the pleasanter Choctaw customs such as building chickees and smoking rabbit cannab, a variety of Cannabis indica that grows wild in the swamp.

“You don’t remember me, Dr. More.” The boy speaks behind me.

“No.”

“I’m Chuck.”

“Chuck?”

“Chuck Parker.”

“Yes of course. I know your father very well.”

“My poor father.”

How is it that children can be more beautiful than the sum of their parents’ beauty? Ramona is a stork-legged, high-hipped, lacquer-headed garden-clubber from Spartanburg. Charley is a pocked-nosed, beat-up, mashed-down Gene Sarazen. And here is golden-haired golden-limbed Chuck looking like Phoebus Apollo or Sir Lancelot in hip-huggers.

When we reach the hummock, the sky in the east has turned sickly and tentative with dawn.

They’re camping near the mouth of old Empire Number Two, the salt mine that supplied Dick Taylor during the Red River campaign. Except for an ember or two there is no sign of the others. In a swale spring with cypress needles Chuck has built a chickee of loblolly chinked with blue bayou clay.

As we enter the chickee, fragrant with bayberry smoke, a tall brown-haired girl rises and closes a book on her finger, for all the world like a baby-sitter in Paradise when the folks come home — except that her reading light is a candle made from wax myrtle and bayberries. Chuck stops her and introduces us. Her name is Hester. Instead of leaving, she squats cross-legged on the cypress needles.

Afterwards Chuck tells me in her hearing, “Hester has her own chickee.”

“Is that so,” I answer, scratching my head.

I take a look at Hester’s book, still closed on her finger. A good way to size up people. It is not what you might think, Oriental or revolutionary. It is, of all things under the sun, Erle Stanley Gardner’s first novel, The Case of the Velvet Claws.

The baby, as I had reason from experience to expect and had in fact prepared my bag for, suffers from dehydration. He’s dried up like a prune. The treatment is simple and the results spectacular. Slip a needle in his scalp vein and hang a bottle of glucose from a loblolly twig.

Mama watched her baby get well before her eyes, reviving like a wilted hydrangea stuck in a bucket of water. I watched Mama. Ethel is a dark, quick little Pocahontas with hairbraids, blue Keds, jean shorts, and sharp soiled knees. She’s not my type, being a certain kind of Smith girl, a thin moody Smithie who props cheek on knee, doesn’t speak to freshmen, doesn’t focus her eyes, and is prone to quick sullen decisions, leaping onto her little basketed bike and riding off without explanation.

(Hester is my type: post-Protestant, post-rebellion, post-ideology — reading Perry Mason here on a little ideological island! — reverted all the way she is, clear back to pagan innocence like a shepherd girl piping a tune on a Greek vase.)

When the sun clears the hummock, we sit on the bayou bank feeling the warmth on our backs, Ethel holding the baby, Chuck holding the infusion bottle. Hester sits cross-legged and stare-eyed, looking at nothing, smoothing her calves with her hands.

“How about that?” murmurs Chuck, as the baby’s wrinkles disappear. What a lordly youth, with a smooth simple chest, simple large golden arms and legs, the large wrists and boxy knees of a tennis player.

Now the sun, breaking through the morning fog and live oaks, strikes shafts into the tea-colored water. Mullet jump. Two orange-colored warblers fly at each other in the sunlight, claws upraised like cockerels. A swarm of gnats hangs over the water motionless and furious, like a molecule. I eat a scuppernong. It is fat and tart.

“It wouldn’t be bad to live here,” I tell Chuck.

“Why don’t you? Come and live with us.” He turns to Ethel but she gives him her hooded Smithie look.

“Where would I live?”

“Here,” says Hester. “There’s my chickee.”

Does she mean live with her or build my own chickee close by? She’s from Massachusetts or Rhode Island. For car she says c?.

“What have you got to lose, Doc?” asks Chuck.

“Well—”

The glucose bottle is empty. Ethel frowns and takes baby and bottle inside.

“Are you happy over there?”

“Happy?”

“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 …