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

At home 9:00 A.M. / JULY 1

SOMEONE TOOK A SHOT AT ME AT THE BREAKFAST TABLE.

At this moment I am lying in a corner out of the line of fire and thinking to myself: why is it better down here?

The shots, three of them, came from the direction of the swamp. I was eating breakfast in my “enclosed patio.” First there was the sound of the shot heard through the glass, not close, not alarming, not even noteworthy. Undoubtedly a gunshot, though it is too early for squirrel season. Then, more or less at the same time as the second shot, the glass panel shattered. I say more or less at the same time because I did not infer a connection between the two, the shot and the glass shattering.

The third shot was lower, closer, louder. It made a hole in the glass, and in my mind the shot bore a relation to the hole. Somebody is shooting at me, I thought as I drank a warm orange drink named Tang. As I am considering this at the top of my head, something at the heart of me knew better and I found myself diving for the corner even as I ruminated. Saved by a reflex learned with the First Air Cav in the fifteen-year war in Ecuador.

The corner is a good choice, flanked as it is by two low walls of brick that support the glass panels, high enough for protection and low enough to see over if I crane up. But I don’t have to crane up. There is a fenestration in the bricks at eye level.

Here I used to tell Samantha the story of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, how the cobra got into the house by crawling through a hole in the bricks. Samantha shivered with delight and stopped up the hole with newspapers.

A description of my wife: the sort of woman who would name our daughter Samantha though there was no one in our families with this name.

A plan takes shape. Wait a few minutes, get the Smith & Wesson, leave the house by the lower “woods” door, circle the yard under cover of the sumacs, and get behind the sniper.

Is someone after my invention? By craning my head I can catch a glimpse of the box in the hall, the lovely crafted crate from Osaka Instruments. It is the first shipment of the More Qualitative-Quantitative Ontological Lapsometer, the stethoscope of the spirit, one hundred compact pocket-sized machines of brushed chrome. I’ve come a long way since my Brownie model.

I am lying on the floor drinking warm Tang to which two duck eggs have been added plus two ounces of vodka plus a dash of Tabasco.

The reason the Tang is warm is that the refrigerator doesn’t work. Nothing works. All my household motors are silent: air-conditioner, vacuum, dishwasher, dryer, automobile. Appliances and automobiles are more splendid than ever, but when they break down nobody will fix them. My car broke down at the A & P three weeks ago and nobody would come fix it so I abandoned it. Paradise is littered with the rusting hulks of splendid Pontiacs, Olds, and Chryslers that developed vapor locks and dead batteries and were abandoned. Nowadays people buy cars, drive them until they break down, abandon them and buy another. Most of my friends have switched to Toyotas, which have one moving part.

Don’t tell me the U.S.A. went down the drain because of Leftism, Knotheadism, apostasy, pornography, polarization, etcetera etcetera. All these things may have happened, but what finally tore it was that things stopped working and nobody wanted to be a repairman.

The bricks smell of old wax. After all these years particles of Pledge wax still adhere to the cindery pits that pock the glaze. Doris used to wax the bricks once a week. “Annie Mae,” she’d tell the maid, “Go Pledge the bricks.”

I polish off the Tang-plus-vodka-plus-duck-eggs-plus-Tabasco. I feel better.

Another peep through the cobra hole: nothing moves in the swamp, but there is a flash of light. A telescopic sight?

By moving back a few inches I can see the curving loess slope on which my house stands. The house next door has been abandoned, its slab cracked and reclaimed by the swamp, by creeper and anise with its star-shaped funky-smelling flower. Wild grape festoons the carport.

Honeysuckle has invaded Doris’s azaleas. A particularly malignant vine with rank racemose leaves has laid hold of her Saint Francis, who appears to be lifting his birdbath above these evil serpents. Titmice and cardinals used to drink here. Saint Francis was Doris’s favorite saint, not because he loved Christ but because he loved titmice.

The evil vine, I notice, has reached the house. A tendril pokes through the cobra hole and curls up looking for purchase.

Wait! Something moves.

But it is only a swamp bird, a gloomy purplish-green heron that flaps down out of a cypress and lights on Saint Francis’s bird-limed head. There he perches, neck drawn into his shoulders, yellow bill pointed straight up. He looks as frowsty and ill-conceived as a bird drawn by a child.

Now I’ve got my revolver, by crawling to the closet and back. The carbine is downstairs.

No sign of the sniper. Has he gone?

Directly above my head on the glass-topped coffee table are Doris’s favorite books just as she left them in the “enclosed patio.” That was before I roofed it, and the books are swollen by old rains to fat wads of pulp, but still stacked so:

Siddhartha

Atlas Shrugged

ESP and the New Spirituality

Books matter. My poor wife, Doris, was ruined by books, by books and a heathen Englishman, not by dirty books but by clean books, not by depraved books but by spiritual books. God, if you recall, did not warn his people against dirty books. He warned them against high places. My wife, who began life as a cheerful Episcopalian from Virginia, became a priestess of the high places. I loved her dearly and loved to lie with her and would and did whene’er she would allow it, but most especially in the morning, at breakfast, in the nine o’clock sunlight out here on the “enclosed patio.” But books ruined her. Beware of Episcopal women who take up with Ayn Rand and the Buddha and Dr. Rhine formerly of Duke University. A certain type of Episcopal girl has a weakness that comes on them just past youth, just as sure as Italian girls get fat. They fall prey to Gnostic pride, commence buying antiques, and develop a yearning for esoteric doctrine.

Doris stood on these black pebbles, which we brought from Mexico, and told me she was leaving me.

Samantha had been dead some months. Doris began talking of going to the Isle of Jersey or New Zealand where she hoped to recover herself, learn quiet breathing in a simple place, etcetera etcetera, perhaps in the bright shadow of a ’dobe wall or perhaps in a stone cottage under a great green fell. She wanted to leave the bad thing here and go away and make a fresh start. That was all right with me. I was ready to go. I wanted out from the bad thing too. What I didn’t know at the time was that I was for her part of the bad thing.

“I’m leaving, Tom.”

“Where are you going?”

She did not reply.

The morning sun, just beginning to slant down into the “enclosed patio,” struck the top of her yellow hair, sending off fiery aureoles like sunflares. I never got over the splendor of her person in the morning, her royal green-linen-clad self, fragrant and golden-fleshed. Her flesh was gold amorphous stuff. Though it was possible to believe that her arm had the usual layers of fat, muscle, artery, bone, these gross tissues were in her somehow transformed by her girl-chemistry, bejeweled by her double-X chromosome. Those were the days of short skirts, and she looked like long-thighed Mercury, god of morning. Her heels had wings. Her legs were long and deep-fleshed, bound laterally in the thigh by a strap of fascia that flattened the triceps. Was it her slight maleness, long-leggedness — perhaps 10 percent tunic-clad Mercury was she — that set my heart pounding over breakfast?

No, that’s foolishness. I loved her, that’s all.

“Where are you going?” I asked again, buttering the grits and watching her hair flame like the sun’s corolla.

“I’m going in search of myself.”

My heart sank. This was not really her way of talking. It was the one tactic against which I was defenseless, the portentous gravity of her new beliefs. When she was an ordinary ex-Episcopalian, a good-humored Virginia girl with nothing left of her religion but a fondness for old brick chapels, St John o’ the Woods, and the superb English of the King James Version, we had common ground.

“Don’t leave, Doris,” I said, feeling my head grow heavy and sink toward the grits.

“I have to leave. It is the one thing I must do.”

“Why do you have to leave?”

“We’re so dead, Tom. Dead inside. I must go somewhere and recover myself. To the lake isle of Innisfree.”

“Jesus, let’s go to the lake isle together.”

“We don’t relate any more, Tom.”

“I’d like to relate now.”

“I know, I know. That’s how you see it.”

“How?”

“As physical.”

“What’s wrong with physical?”

Doris sighed, her eyes full of sunlight “Who was it who said the physical is the lowest common denominator of love?”

“I don’t know. Probably a Hindoo. Would you sit here?”

“What a travesty of love, the assertion of one’s conjugal rights.”

“I wasn’t thinking of my conjugal rights. I was thinking of you.”

“Love should be a joyous encounter.”

“I’m joyous.”

She was right. Lately her mournful spirituality had provoked in me the most primitive impulses. In ten seconds’ time my spirits had revived. My heart’s desire was that she sit on my lap in the yellow muscadine sunlight.

I took her about the hips. No Mercury she, here.

She neither came nor left.

“But we don’t relate,” said Doris absently, still not leaving though, eyes fixed on Saint Francis who was swarming with titmice. “There are no overtones in our relationship, no nuances, no upper mansions. Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul.”

“All right.”

“It’s not your fault or my fault. People grow away from each other. Spiritual growth is the law of life. Our obligation is to be true to ourselves and to relate to this law of life.”

“Isn’t marriage a relation?”

“Our marriage is a collapsed morality, like a burnt-out star which collapses into itself, gives no light and is heavy heavy heavy.”

Collapsed morality. Law of life. More stately mansions. Here are unmistakable echoes of her friend Alistair Fuchs-Forbes. A few years ago Doris, who joined the Unity church, got in the habit of putting up English lecturers of various Oriental persuasions, Brahmin, Buddhist, Sikh, Zoroastrian. Two things Doris loved, the English people and Eastern religion. Put the two together, Alistair Fuchs-Forbes reciting I Ching in a B.B.C. accent, and poor Episcopal Doris, Apple Queen, from Winchester, Virginia, was a goner.

Alistair Fuchs-Forbes, who came once to lecture at Doris’s Unity church, took to coming back and staying longer. He and his boy friend Raymond. Here they would sit, in my “enclosed patio,” on their broad potato-fed English asses, and speak of the higher things, of the law of life — and of the financial needs of their handicraft retreat in Mexico. There in Cozumel, it seemed, was the last hope of the Western world. Transcendental religion could rescue Western materialism. How? by making-and-meditation, meditating and making things with one’s hands, simple good earthbound things like clay pots. Not a bad idea really — I’d have gone with her to Cozumel and made pots — but here they sat on my patio, these two fake English gurus, speaking of the law of spiritual growth, all the while swilling my scotch and eating three-dollar rib-eye steaks that I barbecued on my patio grill. They spoke of Hindoo reverence for life, including cattle, and fell upon my steaks like jackals.

It didn’t take Alistair long to discover that it was Doris, not I, who was rich.

“A collapsed morality?”

“I am truly sorry, Tom.”

“I’m not sure I know what a collapsed morality means.”

“That’s it. It’s meaning we’ve lost. What is meaningful between us? We simply follow rules and habit like poor beasts on a treadmill.”

“There is something in that. Especially since Samantha died. But why don’t we work at it together. I love you.”

“I love you too, Tom. I’m extremely devoted to you and I always will be. But don’t you see that people grow away from each other. A part of one dies, but the rest grows and encysts the old part. Like the chambered nautilus. We’re dead.”

“I love you dead. At this moment.”

My arms are calipers measuring the noble breadth of her hips. She doesn’t yield, but she doesn’t leave.

“Dead, dead,” she whispered above me in the sunlight

“Love,” I whispered.

We were speaking in calm matutinal voices like a pair of wood thrushes fluting in the swamp.

“My God, how can you speak of love?”

“Come here, I’ll show you.”

“Here?” she said crossly. “I’m here.”

“Here.”

We had not made love since Samantha’s death. I had wanted to, but Doris had a way of ducking her head and sighing and looking elegiac that put me off and made me feel guilty besides. There is this damnable female talent for making a man ashamed, not merely turning him down but putting the guilt of it on him. She made me feel like a high school boy with impure thoughts. Worse than that: a husband with “conjugal rights,” and that’s enough to chill the warmest heart.

But not mine this morning. I pick up the napkin from my lap.

“Come here.”

“What for?” A tiny spark of old Virginny, the Shenandoah Valley, rekindling in her: her saying “what for” and not “why.”

“Come and see.”

What she did was the nicest compromise between her faraway stare, her sun worship, and lovemaking. She came closer, yet kept her eye on the titmice.

“But you don’t love me,” she said to Saint Francis.

“Yes I do.”

She gave me a friendly jostle, the first, and looked down.

“Tch. For pity’s sake!” Again, a revival of her old Shenandoah good humor. “Annie Mae is coming, you idiot.”

“Close the curtains then.”

“I’m leaving,” she said but stood closer, again a nicely calculated ambiguity: is she standing close to be close or to get between me and the window so Annie Mae can’t see?

“Don’t leave,” I say with soaring hopes.

“I have to leave.”

Then I made a mistake and asked her where she was going.

Again her eyes went away.

“East of the sun and west of the moon.”

“What crap.”

She shrugged. “I’m packed.”

Knowing I was wrong, I argued.

“Are you going to meet Alistair and that gang of fags?”

Doris was rich and there was much talk of her financing the Cozumel retreat and even of her coming down and making herself whole.

“Don’t call him that. He’s searching like me. And he’s almost found peace. Underneath all that charm he’s—”

“What charm?”

“A very tragic person. But he’s a searcher like me, a pilgrim.”

“Pilgrim my ass.”

“Did you know that for two years he took up a begging bowl and wandered the byways with a disciple of Ramakrishna, the greatest fakir of our time?”

“He’s a fakir all right. What he is is a fake Hindoo English fag son of a bitch.” Why did I say the very thing that would send her away?

Here was where I had set a record: that of all cuckolds in history, I am the first American to be cuckolded by two English fruits.

“Is that what he is?” said Doris gravely.

“Yes.”

“What are you, Tom?”

“I couldn’t say.”

She nodded absently, but now (!) her hand is on my head, ruffling my hair and strumming just as she used to strum her fingers on the Formica in the kitchen.

“Who was it who said: if I were offered the choice between having the truth and searching for it, I’d take the search?”

“I don’t know. Probably Hermann Hesse.”

“Hadn’t we better close the curtains?”

“Yes. You do it. I can’t get up.”

She laughed for the first time in six months. “Boy, you are a mess.”

We’re back in Virginia, at school, under the apple blossoms.

She looked down at me. “Annie Mae’s going to see you.”

“She’d be proud of me.”

“Don’t be vulgar.”

Annie Mae is a big hefty black girl whom Doris dressed up like a French maid with a tiny white cap and a big butterfly bow on her tail.

“Sit in my lap.”

“How?”

“This way.”

“O.K.”

“Easy!”

“Oh boy,” she said, nodding and tucking her lip in her old style. Her hand rested as lightly on my shoulder as it did at the Washington and Lee Black-and-White formal. What a lovely funny Valley girl she was before the goddamn heathen Oriental English got her.

“You know the trouble with you, Tom?” She was always telling me the trouble with me.

“What?”

“You’re not a seeker after the truth. You think you have the truth, and what good does it do you?”

“Here’s the truth.” Nobody can blaspheme like a bad Catholic.

“Say what you like about Alistair,” she said — and settled herself! “He’s a seeker and so am I.”

“I know what he seeks.”

“What?”

“Your money.”

“That’s how you would see it.”

“That’s how I see it.”

“Even if it were true, would it be worse than wanting just my body?”

“Yes. But I don’t want just your body.”

“What do you want?”

“You.”

“But not the real me.”

“Jesus.”

But she was jostling me, bumping me carelessly like a fraternity brother in a stagline.

“You know the trouble with you, Tom?”

“What?”

“You don’t understand a purely spiritual relationship.”

“That’s true.”

Somewhere Doris had got the idea that love is spiritual. So lately she’d had no use for my carrying on, as she called it, or messing about, putting her down in the zoysia grass, etcetera, with friendly whacks on the thick parts and shouts of joy for the beauty of the morning, hola! I do truly believe that she came to look upon her solemn spiritual adultery with that fag Alistair as somehow more elevating than ordinary morning love with her husband.

“You never grasped that,” said Doris, but leaning closer and giving me a hug.

“Then grasp this.”

We sat in the chair, the chair not being an ordinary chair, which would have been fine, but a Danish sling, since in those days ordinary chairs had canceled out and could not be sat on. Married as we were and what with marriage tending to cancel itself and beds having come not to be places for making love in or chairs for sitting on, we had no place to lie or sit. We were like forlorn lovers in the street with no place to go.

But love conquers all, even a Danish sling.

“Darling,” said Doris, forgetting for once all the foolishness.

“Let’s lie down,” I said.

“Fine, but how?”

“Just hold still. I’ll pick you up.”

Have you ever tried to get up out of a Danish sling with a hundred-and-forty-pound Apple Queen in your lap?

But I got up.

We lay on the bricks, here in this spot Perhaps this is why I feel better lying here now. Here, at any rate, we lay and made love for the last time. We thought no more of Hermann Hesse that day.

In two weeks she was gone. Why? I think it was because she never forgave me or God for Samantha’s death.

“That’s a loving God you have there,” she told me toward the end, when the neuroblastoma had pushed one eye out and around the nosebridge so that Samantha looked like a two-eyed Picasso profile. After that, Doris went spiritual and I became coarse and disorderly. She took the high road and I took the low. She said I was like a Polack miner coming up out of the earth every night with no thought but to fill his belly and hump his wife. The expression “hump” shocked me and was unlike her. She may have lost her faith but she’d always kept her Virginia-Episcopal decorum. But she’d been reading current novels, which at the time spoke of “humping” a great deal, though to tell the truth I had not heard the expression. Was this a word invented by New York novelists?

At last, getting up and keeping clear of the windows, I fetch my medical bag, which is packed this morning not merely with medicines but with other articles that I shall presently describe, and stick the revolver in my belt and slip out the lower “woods” door at the back of the house where it is impossible to be seen by an assailant lurking in the swamp.

The door, unused since Doris left, is jammed by vines. I squeeze through into the hot muscadine sunlight. Here the undergrowth has almost reached the house. Wistaria has taken the stereo-V antenna.

Two strides and I’m swallowed up in a plantation of sumac. It is easy to keep cover and circle around to the swamp edge and have a long look. Nothing stirring. Egrets sail peacefully over the prairie. A wisp of smoke rises from a hummock. There some drughead from Michigan State lies around smoking Choctaw cannab while his girl fries catfish.

I rub my eyes. Did I imagine the sniper’s shots? Was it part and parcel of the long night’s dream of Verdun, of the terrible assault of the French infantry on Fort Douaumont? No. There is the shattered window of the “enclosed patio.”

What to do? The best course: walk to town by a route known only to me in order to avoid ambush. Call the police at the first telephone.

But in the thick chablis sunlight humming with bees, it is hard to credit assassination. A stray guerrilla perhaps, using my plate glass for target practice.

Anyhow, I have other fish to fry. First to the Center, where I hope to have a word with Max Gottlieb, ask a favor of him; then perhaps catch a glimpse of Moira in Love Clinic; thence to Howard Johnson’s to arrange a trysting place, a lover’s rendezvous with Moira, my love from Love.

Afterwards there should be time for a long Saturday afternoon in my office — no patients, no nurse today — where I shall sip Early Times and listen to my father’s old tape of Don Giovanni with commentary by Milton Cross.

Using my bag to fend off blackberries, I angle off to a curve of Paradise Drive where the woods notch in close.

Standing in the schoolbus shelter, now a cave of creeper and muscadine, I get my bearings. Across the road and fifty feet of open space, a forest of longleaf begins. A hundred yards into it and I should pick up the old caddy path that leads from town to country club.

Wait five minutes to be sure. No sound but the droning of bees in honeysuckle.

Step out and — bad luck! In the split second of starting across, a car rounds the curve. There’s no not seeing him or he me. It’s like turning the corner of a building and walking into someone’s arms.

He stops. It is no stranger. But do I want to see friends now? I get along with everybody except people. Psychiatrist, heal—

It is Dr. George “Dusty” Rhoades in his new electric Toyota bubbletop, a great black saucer of a car and silent as a hearse.

He’s waving me in. Hm, not exactly my choice for a companion. Why? Because he’s Lola’s father and he may believe I have injured him, though I have not. Shall I accept the lift? The question does not arise. The fierce usages of friendship take command. Dusty leans out waving and grinning. Before I know what I’m doing I’m grinning too and hopping around to the door with every appearance of delight.

“There you go!” cries Dusty in an eccentric greeting that has evolved between us over the years. Renewed friendship sweeps all before it. We are like lovers after a quarrel.

Dusty is a big surgeon with heavy freckled hands that like to feel your bones and a red rooster shock of hair gone straw-colored in middle age. It is his manner to pay terrific attention to the controls of his car, the dials of the dashboard, while shouting eccentric offhand remarks. So does he also shout, I know, at his operating nurse, not to be answered or even to be heard but to make an occupational sound, so to speak.

“Fine, fine,” I say, settling myself. He nods and keeps on nodding.

Dusty Rhoades is a conservative proctologist, though he does other surgery as well, from Tyler, Texas. He played tackle for Texas A & M, is a reserve Air Force colonel. An excellent surgeon, he works fourteen hours a day, caring nought for his own comfort, and owns a chain of Chicken Delight stands. The money rolls in faster than he can spend it even though he bought Tara, the showplace of Paradise, and an $80,000 Guarnerius cello for his daughter Lola.

Like saints of old, Dusty spends himself tirelessly for other men, not for love, he would surely say, or even for money, for he has no use for it, but because people need him and call him and what else would he do with himself? His waking hours are spent in a dream of work, nodding, smiling, groping for you, not really listening. Instead, his big freckled hands feel your bones like a blind man’s. He’s conservative and patriotic too, but in the same buzzing, tune-humming way. His office is stacked with pamphlets of the Liberty Lobby. In you come with a large-bowel complaint, over you go upside down on the rack, in goes the scope, ech! and Dusty humming away somewhere above. “Hm, a diverticulum opening here. The real enemy is within, don’t you think?” Within me or the U.S.A., you are wondering, gazing at the floor three inches from your nose, and in goes the long scope. “You know as well as I do who’s really causing the trouble, don’t you?” “Do you mean—?” “I mean the Lefts and Commonists, right?” “Yes, but on the other hand—” In goes the scope the full twenty-six inches up to your spleen. “Oof, yessir!”

“Am I glad to see you, you rascal!” cries Dusty, coming out of his trance and looking over at me. His hand, going its own way, explores the crevices of my knee.

I blink back the beginning of a tear. He’s forgiven me! Why do I forget there is such a thing as friends?

He’s forgiven what he could only have understood as my misconduct with his daughter Lola, and misconduct it was, though in another sense it was not. Lola and I were discovered by him lying in one another’s arms in the deep canyon-size bunker of the eighteenth hole. Though Lola is twenty-six, single, and presumably had the right to embrace whomever she chose, I fancied nevertheless that Dusty took offense. Though he was careful not to let me know it and I was careful not to find out. Certainly no offense was intended. Lola is a big, beautiful, talented girl who teaches cello at Texas A & M. We fell in love for a few hours last Christmas Eve, literally fell, came upon each other like strangers in a forest and fell to the ground in one another’s arms, and the next day went our separate ways, she back to Texas and I to the nuthouse broken out with giant hives and quaking with morning terror and night exaltations.

The consequences of this misbehavior in Paradise, where everyone else behaves very well, were muted by my self-commitment to the mental hospital. Thus, it is possible that I have been expelled from the local medical society: no notices have come in the mail — but on the other hand, perhaps notices were suspended because of my illness. I dare not inquire. One consequence was certain: an anonymous communication did come in the mail, a copy of the Hippocratic oath with that passage underlined which admonishes physicians about their relations with female patients. But Lola was not, at the time, my patient

“You making house calls, Doctor!’ Dusty shouts.

I jump. “No no. I was … I felt like walking to town.” For some reason I do not wish to speak of the sniper.

Dusty nods vigorously, as if my stepping out of the woods with my medical bag was no more or less than he expected. But even as he speaks, his eyes caress the mahogany dashboard and brass knobs and dials. These days it is the fashion to do car interiors in wood and brass like Jules Verne vehicles.

When we shake hands, he opens his meaty hand to me in his old tentative way like a porter taking a tip.

“I wish I could work like you!” he shouts at the rushing pines. “It must take discipline to cut down hack work and make time for research and writing.”

How graceful and kind of him. Though Dusty knows all there is to know about me, my family troubles, my cuckoldry, my irregular life, my alcoholism — he connives at the best available myth about me, that I am “smart” but unlucky. People are kind. They find it easy to forgive you in the name of tragedy or insanity and most of all if you are smart. Certain mythic sayings come easily to the lips of my doctor friends when they wish to speak well of me, and lately they do since they know I’ve had a bad time of it. They’ll speak of a mythic, storied diagnosis I made ten years ago….

“No, I’m not working today,” I tell Dusty. “I have a few errands to run, then I’m going down to my office and fix myself a little drink and listen to the opera.”

“Yes! Right! Absolutely!” cries Dusty joyfully and strikes himself eccentrically in several places.

He fiddles with the controls. All of a sudden a hundred-piece orchestra is blasting away on the back seat, playing Viennese Waltz Favorites. The hot glistening pines fall away as the road climbs along the ridge. The dry refrigerated air evaporates my sweat. Strains of Wienerblut lilt us over the pines. We might be drifting along in a Jules Verne gondola over happy old Austria.

I feel better. There are no ruins here. We are beginning to pass sparkling new houses with well-kept lawns. What a lovely silent car. What lovely things money can buy. I have money. Why not spend it? Until this moment it has never occurred to me to spend a penny of Doris’s two million on myself. I look down at my frayed cuffs, grubby fingernails. Why not dress well, groom myself, buy a good car, meet friends for lunch, good fellows like Dusty, chaff with them, take up golf? Money is splendid!

But today I have other fish to fry.

“Would you mind dropping me off at the plaza?”

“What in hell for?” asks Dusty, frowning. But his freckled hand continues to browse among the knobs and dials.

“I have a date.”

When I left the hospital, I resolved not to lie. Lying cuts one off. Lying to someone is like blindfolding him: you cannot see the other’s eyes to see how he sees you and so you do not know how it stands with yourself.

“Like the fellow says, that’s a hell of a place to take a woman. All those tramps, outlaws …”

“Yes, well … I think it’s safe.”

“Is that why you’re wearing your handgun?”

“What?” I had forgotten my pistol and didn’t see Dusty look at it. The gun had worked its way around to my belt buckle where it sticks out like Billy the Kid’s six-shooter. “The fact is somebody took a shot at me this morning.”

“That a fact?” says Dusty with routine astonishment expressing both incredulity and affection. “I tell you the truth, nothing would surprise me nowadays.”

“It was probably a wild shot from some nut in the swamp,” I say, shoving the pistol out of sight. Indeed, is anything less likely than a sniper on this lovely old-fashioned Viennese morning?

“I happened to notice it is all. You’re not going to the club?”

“The club?”

“For the Pro-Am.”

“Oh, of course!” I laugh heartily. How could I have forgotten the most important event of the year, the Paradise Moonlight Pro-Am tournament played every Fourth of July weekend under the arcs? “But the champs don’t tee off till tonight, do they?”

“Right I thought you might be going to the Bible Brunch.”

“No. No, I have to go to the Center.”

“O.K. I’ll take you over to the plaza.”

“No no! Go on to the club. I’ll walk from there. I need to walk.”

“O.K.,” says Dusty, frowning thoughtfully. The freckled hand browses like a small animal patrolling its burrow. “You know, it’s something my running into you like this. It’s really something.”

“It is?”

“I’ve been looking for you.”

“You have?” I look at him with interest “Did you read my paper?”

“Paper? Well, I haven’t finished it.”

I sent Dusty a copy of my breakthrough article. He is president-elect of the American Christian Proctological Society and could be useful when I apply for N.I.M.H. funds. Dusty is highly regarded, both in Knothead and Left circles.

“As a matter of fact, I have one of the new models here,” I say, taking out a lapsometer and putting it on the seat between us.

Dusty moves away an inch.

“Tom,” says Dusty as we go lilting along to Wine, Women, and Song. “I want you to take my clinic for me.”

Dusty holds a fat clinic on Tuesdays and Thursdays, dispensing thousands of pills to women and encouraging them in their dieting.

We’ve stopped at a gate and sentry box where a red-faced colonel of Security gives us the once-over before admitting us to the inner circle of Paradise. He’s dressed like General Patton, in helmet, jacket, and pearl-handle revolvers.

“O.K., Doc,” says Colonel Ringo, stooping down to the window. “Two docs! Ha ha.” He waves us on.

Now we’ve stopped again, this time in front of Tara, Dusty’s house. Thinking he’s dropping me off, I open the door to go my way. But Dusty’s browsing hand finds my knee and holds me fast.

“You know, life is funny, Tom.”

“Yes, it is.”

“You a brilliant professor and you losing your wife and all.”

“Yes.”

“And Lola coming home.”

“Coming home?”

“Coming here, that is.”

“I see.”

“She’s come to stay.”

Tara is on the right, and to see it, Dusty leans over me. He makes himself surprisingly free of my person, coming much closer than men, American men, usually do. His strong breath, smelling of breakfast, breathes on me. An artery socks away at his huge lion-head causing it to make tiny rhythmic nods as if he were affirming this view of his beautiful house, Tara.

“Tom,” says Dusty, taking his hand off my knee and fingering the tape deck. A Victor Herbert medley comes on.

“Yes?”

“I’m going home.”

“O.K., I’ll get out.”

But the knuckle of his hand turns hard into my knee, detaining me.

“No, I mean I’m going back to Texas.”

“I see.”

“No, my old daddy died and I’m going back to the ranch outside of Tyler.”

“You mean you’re retiring?”

“Oh I reckon I’ll work some—”

“I reckon you’ll have to.”

“Right!” Dusty laughs. “But I’m slacking off before I kill myself.”

“I’m glad to hear it.” But I’m also concerned about the knuckle turning hard into my knee.

“Lola is not leaving. She’s staying here. This is what she wants. So I’m giving her Tara,” muses Dusty, gazing past me. The huge head is in my lap, so to speak, nodding as the artery socks away.

“Is that right? You mean she’s going to live here by herself?”

“Yep. She’s home for good.”

“Is that so?”

“You know, this is home to her. And she’s got her Eastern gaited horses here, why I don’t know.”

“Yes.”

“And to tell you the damn truth,” Dusty goes on in exactly the same voice, lidded eyes peering past me at the white columns of Tara, breathing his breakfast breath on me, “that girl is ever more crazy about you, Tom.”

“She is? Well, she is a wonderful girl and I am extremely—”

“In fact, your mother was only saying yesterday,” Dusty breaks in, and his head swivels a few degrees, nodding now at the hipped roof of my mother’s cozy saltbox next door. “She said: you know Tom and Lola are a match if ever I saw one. You know your mother.”

“Yes.” I know my mother and I can hear her say it in her trite exclamatory style: they’re a match if ever I saw one!

For some reason I am nodding too, in time with Dusty. From the point where Dusty’s knuckle is turning into my knee, waves of prickling spread out in all directions.

Now the hand lets go my knee and settles in a soft fist on my shoulder.

“I’m giving Tara to Lola, Tom.”

“You are?”

“You want to know the reason she’s staying?”

“No. That is, yes.”

“You.”

“Me?”

“She thinks the world of you.”

“And I of her.”

“She can’t live here by herself.”

“No?”

“No way. Tom, you see this place?”

“Yes?”

“I’m putting it and my little girl in your hands.”

“You are?”

“Ha ha, that will give you something to think about, won’t it?”

“Yes.”

“You knew, neither one a y’all got good sense.”

“No?”

“You laying up in the bed with a bottle, shooting rats, out in the woods by yourself, talking about snipers and all. Lola taking long rides by herself in the backcountry where some crazy nigger’s going to knock her in the head. I’m counting on you to take care of her.” Dusty gazes attentively at the kingbird sitting on the white Kentucky fence.

“All right.”

“Both a y’all can damn well straighten up and fly right! That’s what I told your mama I was going to tell you and now I done told you.” For some reason Dusty begins to talk in a broad Texas accent. He gives a final jokey-serious nod with his big head. “You reading me, Doctor?”

“Yes.”

“That’s settled then.” Dusty settles back with a sigh. “I told your mama you would.”

“Would what?”

“Do the right thing.”

I sigh, relieved at least to have Dusty’s great lion-head off my chest. Again the car drifts along, a silent gondola. With a sudden inspiration, Dusty presses a button and a thousand violins play Hills of Home, the Tara theme.

“That’s my favorite music,” muses Dusty.

“Very nice.”

“I’ll tell Lola.”

“Tell her what?”

“About our understanding.”

“What understanding?”

“Ha ha, you’re a card, Tom. I always thought you had the most wonderful sense of humor.”

As we approach the clubhouse, more people are abroad. The Christian Kaydettes are practicing in the schoolyard. Suntanned golfers ply the fairways in quaint surrey-like carts, householders bestride tiny tractors, children splash in pools, their brown bodies flashing like minnows.

“Will you also take my Tuesday clinic?”

Also? Does that mean that I’ve agreed to take Tara and Lola?

“Thanks, Dusty. But I’m using all my spare time developing my lapsometer. I’m applying for an N.I.M.H. grant. You could help.”

“Use it in the clinic!” cries Dusty, socking himself eccentrically in several places. He’s in the best of humors. “Read their frontal lobes with your gadget and they’ll believe you! They’ll believe you anyhow! You know, Tom, you’re the best diagnostician around here. If you wanted to, you could be—” Dusty shrugs and falls silent.

Then he did read my paper! Dusty’s nobody’s fool. Though he pretends to be a country boy, his mind can devour a scientific article with one snap of its jaws.

“Since you’ve read my paper, you know that my lapsometer has more important uses than treating fat women.”

“Sho now. But is there anything wrong with treating fat women?”

“In fact,” I tell Dusty earnestly, “with this device in hand any physician can make early diagnoses of potential suicides, paranoiacs, impotence, stroke, anxiety, and angelism-bestialism. Think of the significance of it!”

“Chk.” Dusty winks and clucks tongue against teeth, signifying both a marveling and an unseriousness.

“This country is in deep trouble, Dusty.”

“You don’t have to tell me that.”

“This device could be decisive.”

“Well, I’m just a country doctor.”

“Did you read about the atrocity last night?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you think?”

“The work of a madman.”

“Yeah, but there’s a reason.”

“Reason? You mean you’re going to cure all the crazy niggers?”

“And crazy whites, crazy Lefts, and crazy Knotheads.”

“I don’t know about you, but me I see very few Lefts and no niggers at all.”

We’ve reached the clubhouse. Pennants stream from the twin copper peaks of the roof, like a castle at tournament time. Gaily colored pavilions are scattered through the pines. A few pros and ams, early arrivals, enter the clubhouse for the Bible Brunch. A banner strung the length of the eaves announces: Jesus Christ, the Greatest Pro of Them All.

“Come on in with me,” says Dusty impulsively.

“Thank you, but I’ve got to be going.”

“Many devout Catholics are coming.”

“I’m not a devout Catholic.”

“Cliff Barrow Junior is preaching.”

“Good.”

“Lola and I will be looking for you at the fish fry tonight.”

As he talks, Dusty picks up the new lapsometer on the seat between us. He hefts it.

“Very compact.”

“Yes.”

It is a lovely device, all brushed chrome, pointer and dial, and a jade oscilloscope screen the size of a half-dollar, the whole as solid as a good camera. Just the thing, I see now, to take Dusty’s fancy.

“You take readings?” says Dusty, turning it every which way. He’s all business now, buzzing away while his big fleshy hand hefts, balances, knows.

“That’s right.”

“What do you take readings of?”

I shrug. “You know. Local electrical activity in cortical and subcortical centers. It’s nothing but an EEG without wires, with a stereotactic device for triangulating.”

“Yeah, I see. Here you measure your micromillivolts.” The lizard scales have fallen from his blue eyes, which bear down like gimlets. His thumb rubs the jade screen as if it were a lucky piece. “And this here—”

“That’s your oscilloscope to display your wave patterns, with this, see? — a hold-and-stack device. You can stack ten patterns and flip back at will.”

“You take your readings, then what?”

“Like the article says, you correlate the readings with various personality traits, attitudes.”

“You mean, like emotions?” asks Dusty, frowning.

“Well, yes, among other things.”

“Isn’t that all rather … subjective?”

“Is a pointer reading subjective?”

“But there’s a lot of room for interpretation.”

“Isn’t there also in an electroencephalogram?” I turn it over. “Here on the back you’ve got your normal readings at key centers.”

“Yeah. Like a light meter.” He takes it back. The freckled hand can’t leave it alone. Again the thumb tests the grain of the brushed chrome, strokes the jade screen.

“How long does it take to do a, uh what? An examination?”

“A reading. I can do a standard profile in less than three minutes.” I look at my watch and open the door. “Thanks for the ride.”

“Do one on me.”

“What?”

“Couldn’t you do a reading right here and now?”

“Sure, but—”

“But what?”

“It’s not a play toy.”

“Well, damn it, does it work or doesn’t it?”

“It works.”

“Show me.”

“I’ve learned that it’s not to be used lightly.”

Dusty nods ironically. We’re both thinking of the same thing. It was using my first Brownie model on Lola that got me into trouble. That Christmas Eve six months ago I’d made my breakthrough and had the first inkling what I’d got hold of. I was abstracted, victorious, lonely, drunk, and full of love, and lo, there was Lola, also victorious (she’d had a triumphant concert in Tyler, Texas) and also lonely and full of love. My lapsometer revealed these things. But it was not the cause of our falling in love. Rather the occasion.

“You need controls for your series, don’t you?” Dusty asks shrewdly.

“Yes.”

“Then use me as a control.”

“You wouldn’t stick a proctoscope up me here in the car, would you?”

Dusty laughs, but his knuckle turns into my knee. “If you want my endorsement, I’d like to see how it works.”

“I see.” Why do I feel uneasy? “Oh very well. Take off your coat and lean over the steering wheel, like a sleepy truck driver.”

“O.K., Doctor.” Dusty says “Doctor” with exactly the same irony priests use in calling each other “Father.”

It takes two and a half minutes to clock seven readings.

There is one surprise. He registers good pineal selfhood, which I expected; an all but absent coeliac anxiety — he is, after all, an ex-fullback and hardworking surgeon, a man at home with himself and too busy to worry about it. That is to say: he may fear one thing or another but he’s not afraid of no-thing, which is the worst of fears. His abstractive index is not excessive — he lets his hands do the knowing and working. His red nucleus shows no vagal rage.

But—

His love-sex ratio is reversed.

That is to say: the reading from Brodmann Area 24, the locus of “higher” or interpersonal relations, is a tiny 0.5 mmv while the hypothalamus, seat of organic sexual activity, registers a whacking stud-level 7.9 mmv. The display wave of the latter is well developed. It is the wave of a powerful, frequently satisfied, but indiscriminate sexual appetite. Dusty is divorced.

“Well?” asks Dusty, buttoning his collar.

“No real pathology,” I say, pocketing the lapsometer and adjusting my six-gun. I seize the door handle.

“Hold it, son!” cries Dusty, laughing. “Don’t pull that!”

“What?”

“Tell me, you rascal!” Joyfully he socks me with a few eccentric blows.

“Very well,” I say doubtfully, remembering my vow to tell the truth.

I show him, clicking back over the wave-displays stacked in the oscilloscope circuit, and tell him, glossing over as best I can the love-sex reversal. But I have not reckoned with Dusty’s acuteness.

“I see,” he says at last, looking straight ahead, lizard scales lowering over his eyes. “What you’re saying is I’m messing around with my nurses.”

“I said no such thing. You asked for the readings. I gave them to you. Make your own interpretation.”

“Is that thing nonpartisan?” he asks in the same voice, yet somehow more ominously.

“How do you mean?”

“Does it also measure alcoholism, treachery, laziness, and white-trash morals?”

“If you like,” I reply in a low voice, but relieved to have him strike at me so hard.

The freckled hand browses. A switch clicks, locking the doors. It clicks again, unlocking, locking. Is Dusty thinking of beating me up?

“There’s the door, Doctor.” Click, unlock.

“Very well. Thanks for the ride.”

“Don’t mention it. One piece of advice.”

“Yes?”

Dusty begins his rhythmic nodding again as the artery pounds away.

“Lola has a lot more use for you than I do, though I used to. I know you been through a bad time. But let us understand each other.” He still looks straight ahead.

“All right.”

“You going to do right by Lola or, Doctor, I’m going to have your ass. Is that clear?”

“Yes.”

“Goodbye, Doctor.”

“Goodbye.”

Leaving Dusty’s car, I skirt the festive booths of the Bible Brunch.

The heat of the concrete pool apron strikes up like the Sahara sands. The sun strikes down into the top of my head. Chunks of Styrofoam water-toys are scattered in the weeds like dirty wedding cake. The pool is empty and drifted with leaves.

Why has the pool been abandoned?

A breath of cool air stirs in the doorway of the old pro shop bearing the smell of leather and of splintered pine flooring. The shop too is empty save for a life-size cutout of Gene Sarazen dipping toward the floor. Gene is dressed in knickerbockers and a British cap. A trumpet vine sprouts through the floor and twines around a rusty mashie.

Why is the pro shop empty? Is there a new pro shop in another part of the building?

It was not empty when I stood here and kissed Lola.

I went to the catfish fry and fell in love with Lola and performed with her the act of love in the grassy kidney-shaped bunker of number 18 green (par 4, 275 yards).

I was standing in the Paradise Country Club bar shaking the worn leather cup of poker dice and gazing at the rows of bottles lined up against the brand-new antiqued wormholed cypress, when I noticed something. The vines had begun to sprout It was the first time I had noticed it. A whitish tendril of vine, perhaps ivy, had sprouted through a wormhole and twined about a bottle of Southern Comfort.

“Give me a drink of Southern Comfort,” I told Ruby, the bartender, and watched to see if he would notice anything amiss.

Ruby, a thin sly Chinese-type Negro, took the bottle without noticing the tendril, which broke off in his hand.

“How long has that vine been here?”

“What vine?”

“In your hand.”

He shrugged.

“How long has it been since anybody asked for Southern Comfort?”

“It been a while,” said Ruby with a sly smile. “Christmas gif, Doc.”

Absently I gave him a bill, a dollar.

Ruby’s face went inscrutable like an Oriental’s. He expected, rightly, a higher tip at Christmas. The dollar was received as an insult. We dislike each other. He sucked his teeth. Leaving him and my drink, I went out among the catfish crowd and found myself hemmed up with Lola Rhoades against a stretch of artificially wormholed cypress.

The pro shop seems to darken in the morning light. Gene Sarazen straightens. I sit on a pedestal holding a display of irons arranged in a fan. There is a chill in the room. The summer spins back to chilly azalea crucifixion spring, back further to Christmas with its month of cheerful commercial jingling shopping nights and drinking parties.

I see Lola clearly, holding her gin fizz.

“I am glad to see you,” says Lola, who is five feet nine and in her high heels looks me straight in the eye and says what she thinks.

“So am I,” I say, feeling a wonder that there should be such a thing as a beautiful six-foot woman who is glad to see me. Women are mythical creatures. They have no more connection with the ordinary run of things than do centaurs. I see her clearly, gin fizz in one hand, the other held against her sacrum, palm out, pushing herself rhythmically off the wall. Women! Music! Love! Life! Joy! Gin fizzes!

She is home for Christmas from Texas A & M. She looks like her father but the resemblance is a lovely joke, a droll commentary on him. His colorlessness, straw hair, straw skin, becomes in her a healthy pallor, milkiness over rose, lymph over blood. Her hair is a black-auburn with not enough red to ruin her skin, which has none of the green chloral undertones of some redheads. Her glance is mild and unguarded. It is the same to her whether she drinks or does not drink, talks or does not talk, looks one in the eye or does not look.

She drinks and hisses a cello tune in her teeth and pushes herself off the wall.

The gin fizzes come and go. We find we can look into each other’s eyes without the usual fearfulness and shamefulness of eye meeting eye. I am in love.

A Negro band, dressed in impressed Santa suits, is blasting out Christmas carols. Bridge-playing ladies surround us, not playing bridge but honking their Wednesday bridge-playing honks and uttering Jewish-guttural yuchs which are fashionable this season.

Lola asks me something. I cannot hear and, stooping, put my ear to her mouth, registering as I go past a jeweled reflection of red and green Christmas lights in a web of saliva spinning between parted rows of perfect teeth.

“Don’t you want to ask about your patient?”

“You look well. How are you?” I had treated her last summer for a mild depression and a sensation of strangeness, quite common these days, upon waking in the morning.

“Well enough,” she says, nodding in order to lever her sacrum off the wall. “But you seem — odd.”

“Odd?” I speak into her ear, which crimsons in the canal like a white orchid.

“You look both happy and — sad.”

It is true. Women are so smart. In truth I am suffering from simultaneous depression and exaltation. So I tell her about it: that this very day I perfected my invention and finished my article, which will undoubtedly be recognized as one of the three great scientific breakthroughs of the Christian era, the others being Newton hitting on his principles and Einstein on his field theory, perhaps even the greatest of all because my discovery alone gives promise of bridging the dread chasm between body and mind that has sundered the soul of Western man for five hundred years.

She believes me. “Then why do you feel bad?”

I explain my symptoms in terms of my discovery: that when one records the thalamic radiation, a good index of one’s emotional state, it can register either as a soaring up, a sine curve, or a dipping down, a cosine curve. “Mine registers both at the same time, sine and cosine, mountain on a valley.”

She laughs, thinking I am joking.

“Why should that be?”

Since I am in love, I can feel with her, feel my sacrum tingle when hers hits the wall.

“Well, I’ve won, you see. Won the big one. But it’s Christmas Eve and I’m alone. My family is dead. There’s nobody to tell.”

“Tell me:”

“Do you know what I planned to do tonight?”

“No.”

“Go home and watch Perry Como’s Christmas show on stereo-V.” Perry Como is seventy and still going strong.

Lola nods sympathetically, ducks her head, drinks, and hisses a tune in her teeth. I bend to listen. It is the Dvořák cello concerto.

Trays pass. I begin to drink Ramos gin fizzes with one swallow. At one time I was allergic to egg white but that was long ago. These drinks feel silky and benign. The waiters too are dressed as Santa. They grin sideways from their skewed Santa hoods and shout “Christmas gif!” I give them money, a dollar, ten dollars, whatever.

“Listen to this,” I tell Lola and hum the Don Quixote theme in her ear.

“Very good. You have absolute pitch. And you look better! Your face is fuller.”

I feel my face. It is fuller.

“I feel fine. I am never happier than when I am in love.”

“Are you in love?”

“Yes.”

“Who with?”

“You.”

“Ah huh,” says Lola, nodding, but I can’t tell whether the nodding is just to get her sacrum off the wall.

“Christmas gif!”

Another black Santa passes and I take three gin fizzes. The tingling sacrum should have been a warning, but love made me happy, love and the sight of tiny jewels strung along the glittering web of saliva. Her membranes are clear as light, the body fluids like jeweler’s oil under a watch crystal. A lovely inorganic girl.

Her company stabilizes me. Abstracted still, my orbit becomes lower. Bending close to her, close to the upper reaches of her breast, is like skimming in silence, power off, over the snowy slopes of Kilimanjaro. I close my eyes.

“When I close my eyes, I can see you teaching cello in the Texas A & M cello class, a drafty gym-like room, the cello between your knees. It is during a break and you’re wearing a sweatshirt and resting your arm on the cello.”

“Ah huh.” She nods. “It gets cold in there.” She believes everything I say, knowing it is true.

Handing Lola her gin fizz, I touch her. A hive, a tiny red wheal, leaps out at the point of touch, as if to keep touch. The touch of her is, as they say, a thrill.

“Why did you bring your physician’s bag here?” Lola asks me.

“I haven’t been home yet. The first working model of my lapsometer is inside, can’t afford to lose it.”

“Can you really measure a person’s innermost self?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“Can you measure mine?”

“Sure.”

“Do it.”

“Where? Right here?”

“Yes.”

“Well — over here.” Taking her by the hand, I lead her through the bridge women to the pro shop. We stand behind Gene Sarazen while I take a few snapshots of her with my Brownie.

She registers zero anxiety — music saves her! she goes dreaming through the world as safe and sure as Schubert’s trout — but her interpersonal wave is notable in two respects: it is both powerful and truncated, lopped off at the peak like Popocatepetl.

“Well?”

“You see?” I show her the snail tracks on jade, a faint cratered Fuji in a green dawn.

“What does that mean?”

“It means you have a heart full of love and no one to give it to, but that is not so bad because you have your music, which means a great deal to you.”

“Yes. I don’t. It does. Yes!”

Now it is she who does the hemming up and I who am backed up against the cypress, sacrum fiery and quilted. My head is turning against the wormholes. Hairs catch and pop.

“Why is that?” she asks, brown eyes level with mine.

“Why is what?”

“Why is there — no one?”

“Well you’re a bit much, you know. You scare most men. Also, your music is hard to compete with. You always hear singing.” I show her the lilting curve of her aesthetic radiation.

“Yes! I understand! It is true! Can love be like that?”

She takes my hand urgently, her cello calluses whispering in my palm.

“Yes, it can, if the love is like that, singing.”

“Do you love me like that?”

“Yes.”

“How do I know?”

I kiss her hand. My lip leaps out to keep touch, ridges with a wheal.

She feels it. “Good heavens!”

We are laughing and touching.

“Christmas gif!”

A waiter comes up. We take four gin fizzes. Under the monk-like Santa hood, I recognize a Negro named Willard Amadie. Long ago he used to be a caddy, before the electric surreys came along. A very strong short black man, he would stand down the fairway for the drive and with the heavy bag still on his shoulder take a full swing at the clover with an iron. It is a surprise to see him. Years ago he went off to the Ecuadorian wars and became, I heard, a career soldier. Somber even as a youth, he’d stand waiting at the lie, club selected and proffered handle first, face bitter-black, bee-stung, welted laterally like an Indian’s.

Now he’s dressed like Santa and grinning a ghastly grin.

“Christmas gif, Doc!”

I look at him.

“What’s wrong, Willard?”

“Nothing, Doc! Christmas gif to you and missee.”

“Missee?” The outer corners of my eyes are filling up with hives, forming a prism. Willard and Lola are edged in rainbows. “What in hell are you talking about?”

Willard doesn’t leave but stands watching. His sclerae are yellow as egg yolk. At last I give Willard ten dollars, blushing, as I do so, with rage or shame, I’m not sure which.

“Thankee, Doc!” says Willard in the same goofy Gullah accent. “May you and missee have many a more!”

I refuse to look at Willard, watching instead sections of a road map, pieces of highway, dots of towns, drifting across my retina.

But Lola is pleased. She sees Willard’s courtliness (what is wrong with him?) as a sanction. Christmas is sanctioned. Our love is sanctioned. Willard’s nutty good manners (something is up, I know that, like the vines sprouting, but what?) are part of the singing, life made to lilt.

“Let’s go outside,” I say, to go outside but mainly to get away from Willard, and take her again by the hand, her left hand, her fingering hand, calluses whispering in my palm.

Out into the gloaming we go.

It was a warm Christmas Eve. A south wind blows fat little calypso clouds over a new moon.

We kiss in the grassy bunker. She kisses oddly, stooping to it, developing a torque and twisting down and away, seeming to grow shorter. Her breath catches. What she puts me in mind of is not a Texas girl at all but a smart Northern girl, a prodigy who has always played the cello ten hours a day, then one day finds herself at a summer festival and twenty-one and decides it is time to be kissed. So she stoops to it with an odd, shy yet practiced movement, what I fancy to be the Juilliard summer-festival style of kissing.

Now her hands are clasped in the small of my back. My hands are clasped in the small of her back. She hisses Dvorak. My hot chicken blood sings with albumen molecules. Her hand is warm and whispery as a horn.

We lie in the grassy bunker, she gazing at the winter constellations wheeling in their courses, I singing like a cello between her knees. Fiery Betelgeuse hangs like a topaz in the south. We kiss hungrily, I going around after her.

“Doris,” I whisper, forgetting she is Lola. Fortunately my breath whistles in my throat and she doesn’t hear me.

She is like Doris, except for her Juilliard torque and her odd going-away persimmon-tasting kisses. A big lovely girl, big and white and cool-warm, a marble Venus with a warm horned hand.

Her callused fingertips strew stars along my flanks. Hot wheats of love leap forth at her touch.

“What’s the matter with you?” Lola asks, leaning out of the moon’s shadow to inspect my bumps.

“I’ve got hives.”

“You’ve got bobos on your shoulder,” she says, minding my bobos attentively and curiously like a child.

When I look sideways, the wedge of sky is narrower.

“Hold still, hon,” she whispers, from Tyler Texas now, Juilliard forgotten. “You’ll be all right. Lola’ll hold you tight.”

“I have to go.”

“Where you going?”

“For a walk. Stay here, I’ll be right back.”

I can’t hold still. Why? The longing is back. Longing for what? I don’t know. For Doris? For the Valley of Virginia and sycamore trees and cicadas unwinding in October? I don’t know. God knows.

Now running down 18 fairway, knowing it in the black dark (for the “old” 18 is the terrain of my youth), to the tee and back, eyes squeezed shut like a Chinaman’s. Back to the bunker to lie at Lola’s breast a blind babe. My scalp quilts and pops. Lymph engorges me. Love returns. Again I sing between Lola’s knees, blind as a bat.

Go now, I try to tell her, you better leave, but my larynx squeaked shut.

So it was that Lola, noble cellist, saved my life at the cost of her reputation. She could have gone, left me to die in the bunker, swell up and die and be found stiff as a poker in the foggy dew. But she fetched her brother, who fetched Willard Amadie, and they both fetched me home, finding me in some disarray, I think, for Lola, putting first things first, had thought only to save my life.

Did I dream it or do I have a recollection of Willard Amadie bending over me, his Santa hood pushed back on his shoulders like a Carmelite’s, his face no longer farcical but serious and tender but also risible in his old style. “—If you ain’t something now,” did he not say, bending over to pick me up and seeming in the same motion to adjust my clothes before Dusty came up.

So it was not even a great scandal but just enough to allow the possibility that Dusty could have been offended, though perhaps not, and the possibility that my name was dropped by the medical society, though perhaps it wasn’t. I did receive the anonymous Hippocratic oath, however. But I was in love and Lola was not my patient at the time.

Dusty saved my life, finding me without breath, shot me full of epinephrine, helped Willard carry me home, where he, Dusty, put a tube in my nose and stayed with me until I came to myself.

All this, if you can believe it, in less than an hour’s time from the moment I hoisted the first gin fizz until I opened my Chinaman’s eyes in my own bed.

Christmas Eve fell out thereafter as planned. With the last of my strength I pressed the button on the headboard and saw Perry Como’s Christmas show after all.

There came Perry, seventy years young and snowy-thatched but hale as old Saint Nick himself, still wearing his open cardigan, color off a bit, face orange, lips violet, but all in good 3-D.

He sang Silent Night sitting on his stool.

It was during the following week, between Christmas and New Year, that I became ill, suffering simultaneous depressions and exaltations, assaulted at night by longings, succubi, and the hideous shellfire of Verdun, and in the morning by terror of unknown origin. One morning — was it Christmas morning after listening to Perry Como? — my wrists were cut and bleeding. Seeing the blood, I came to myself, saw myself as itself and the world for what it is, and began to love life. Hm, better stop the bleeding in that case. After all, why not live? Bad as things are still when all is said and done, one can sit on a doorstep in the winter sunlight and watch sparrows kick leaves. So, hugging myself, I stuck a wrist in each armpit like a hobo, squeezed the arteries shut, and walked to Max’s house. Max mostly sewed me up without making much over it, fetched a surgeon to suture a tendon, and at my request allowed me to commit myself to the federal hospital.

Going to see Max. Is the sniper following?

As I walk across the pool apron, powdered by chlorine dust and littered by dirty cakes of Styrofoam, I try to collect my wits, badly scattered by memories of Lola and by Dusty Rhoades’s plans for me. Lola did not come to see me in the hospital. But perhaps she returned to Texas A & M without knowing I was ill.

Two things to do today — no, three things: (1) see Max Gottlieb, who knows the value of my discovery, and ask him to speak to the Director about sponsoring my article in Brain and my application for funding from N.I.M.H.; (2) complete arrangements for a trysting place at the ruined Howard Johnson motel for my date with Moira on the Fourth; (3) go to my office where, undisturbed by patients or my shrewish nurse (it is Saturday), I can put the finishing touches on my article, sip a toddy or two, listen to music, and watch the martins fly home in the evening.

Shortest and safest route is by foot. Across the fairways of the old 18 waist-high in Johnson grass, past the old Bledsoe house, a streaked Spanish stucco from the thirties, in the dogleg of number 5. Here for fifty years lived the Bledsoes, locked in, while golf balls caromed around the patio, richocheted off Spanish balconies and window grills.

Clink clink. Clink clink.

A great thunderhead hides the sun, but it is dry on the fairways. The anthills are abandoned, worn away to a comb of cells.

Clink clink. Clink clink.

Stop and listen.

Someone is following me. But there is no sound but the whir and snap of grasshoppers.

Clink clink.

There it is again: a sound very much like — yes, the very sound my caddy Willard Amadie used to make when he’d hump it for the angle of the dogleg to watch the drive, running level and flat out and holding the clubheads in the crook of his arm so they wouldn’t rattle and disturb the drivers already poised over their balls, but even so the faces of the irons would slap clink clink.

There is no one. I stop on a high bald green dotted with palmetto. The flagpole flies a pennant of wistaria.

Now into a dry wash out of bounds and among the flared bladed trunks of tupelo gums. Clink clink, it’s ahead of me.

Stop and calculate: really it seems unlikely that anyone is trying to shoot you here or even following you or, if he is, that he would be carrying a golf bag.

Nevertheless, suppose that he is. Suppose he has seen me and, knowing me, knows where I am going and is going ahead to wait Where would he go?

One place: the “island” of number 11, a sporty hole where the drive has to carry a neck of the swamp, which the golfers cross by two Chinese footbridges connecting a little loess lump in the swamp. Here I’d cross if I were going to the Center and here on the island stands a pagoda shelter that commands both bridges.

Instead of using the bridge, drop down the soft cliff, using a boy’s trick of walking along the face dropping two steps for every step forward.

Now behind the “Quarters,” a long rowhouse, a ruin of soft warm brick which housed sugar-plantation slaves and which, set just above water level on the bayou, was thought of by the Paradise developers as a kind of Natchez-under-the-Hill and so restored and reroofed for domestic servants, even a chapel added so that strains of good old spirituals would come floating up to our patios in the evening, but the domestic preferred their Hollow, dank and fetid though it was. So back to the jungle went the Quarters, new tin roof and all.

A crashing in the vines ahead of me. My heart stops: if it is a sniper, there’s an army of them. Wait. Yes, whew. I spot Colley’s pith helmet and Gottlieb’s fishing cap. It is the Audubon Society, on the trail of the lordly ivorybill.

Moving swiftly in deep shade and without sound on the moss bank of the bayou, I reach the hogback of the island, high and dry now, and climb its gentlest slope, angling for the path and keeping an eye peeled for the roof of the pagoda.

There it is, directly above, but the loess loam, soft as meal, has eroded badly under the near quadrant of the pagoda so that one may no longer walk into it but has to climb up through the vines. Thunder rumbles. A big sour drop spatters on my hand. The wind smells of trees. It is a simple matter to climb into the quadrant, put bag on seat, hold pistol, stand on seat to see over the partition.

Is anyone there?

The two adjacent quadrants are empty. The opposite quadrant? It is difficult to see because the angle between partitions is choked with potato vine and dirt-dauber nests. The space between the eaves and the intersecting rafters allows a view of a stretch of the coast with a church steeple and parade ground. There the Kaydettes are drilling, the sun is shining. By a trick of light and distance, the field seems to be tilted like an Andes farm. Tiny figures march up and down. The twirling batons make silver coins in the sunlight.

Safe in the thunder and wrapped in potato vine, I wait The wind is sour with raindrops but the storm is veering off.

In a brief quiet between thunder rolls, close as close, a man clears his throat So close that I feel my head incline politely as if he were addressing me. In a panic I grip the center post and hollow my throat to keep breathing quiet

“That’s a pretty sight now.” The voice is so close that the dry wood of the partition vibrates like a sounding board.

“They fixing to parade.” A second voice, the sentence uttered civilly, an observation.

“They’ll parade all right.” A third voice, even closer, grim, rich in ironies.

Thunder rolls, covering the voices. Dropping slowly, I sit in the angle, feeling behind me the press and creak of wood as bodies shift weight

“What do we need with him?” asks the third voice.

“Victor’s all right now. He know how to get along with people. Victor what you call our contract man.” First voice: a familiar two-layered voice, one layer speaking to meaning, the other risible, soliciting routine funniness: we might as well be funny as not.

“Contract? Do you mean contact?”

“Contract, contact.”

I recognize two voices but not the third.

The rolling thunder becomes more discrete, coming after lightning cracks. I count the intervals. Two seconds, three. The storm is going away. At the next crack I count four and stand up in the thunder.

Use the potato vine as screen, crane up and over into it, far enough to see through the leaves but not be seen.

The man sitting at the end of the seat, facing the path toward the club, is, I know already, Willard Amadie. Bent forward, forearms on knees, he can look up and see the others, see the path, only by wrinkling his low wide welted forehead. He wears a Marine camouflage coverall. Beside him, propped against the bench, butts grounded, are a rifle and shotgun fitted with straps. Then it was they, not golf irons, that clinked.

Stretched out on the bench, only its forequarters visible, head lolling to the ground, tongue smeared with dust, is a young buck deer.

“No reason why people can’t get along,” says the first voice in the style of uttering platitudes agreeably.

“People?” Voice number three. “What people? I’ll tell the truth, I never know what he’s talking about.”

I know what he’s talking about. People uttered so, in a slight flatting of tone, means white people. Uttered another way, it means black. A third way means people in general.

“I’ll tell you this!” exclaims the first voice, shouting a platitude. “I’m not going have anything to do with people”—second meaning—“who looking to hurt other people.” First meaning. “That’s not what the good Lord intend.”

“The good Lord,” says the third voice. “What is it with this dude? Jesus.”

“Victor is all right. He’s with us. In fact, we couldn’t do without him,” says Willard, looking up from his black welted brow. “He’s for the plan, he’s for the school, don’t worry. Aren’t you, Brother?” The brother too I recognize, though I doubt if number three does. This is Baptist brother: Victor is a deacon in Starlight Baptist Church.

“Sure I’m for it! Education is good for everybody and everybody is entitled to it!”

“I’ll tell you this, Uru,” says Willard. “We need Victor more than he needs us. Where do you think we get our medicine? People respect him.” All kind of people.

“I don’t understand anybody down here. This dude sounds like some old uncle from Memphis.”

“Those old uncles in Memphis are tougher than you think,” says Willard, grinning.

Victor Charles sits opposite Willard, feet planted flat on the ground, hands prone on his knees. A strong, grave, heavy-thighed man, he is purple-black and of an uncertain age. He could be forty and looking older for his dignity. Or he could be sixty and flat-bellied from his life as a laborer. Dressed like a hospital attendant in white duck trousers, white shirt, white interne shoes, he does in fact work in the animal shelter as caretaker. A black belt circles his wide, flat hips, buckle worn to the side and I recall why: so the buckle won’t scrape against the high metal table when he holds the big dogs.

“Look like he not coming,” says Willard after a pause, squeezing his fist in his hand.

Who’s not coming? Me? A corkscrew tightens in my sacrum.

“Where are they going now?” asks the third man.

The other two look toward the coast.

“They marching over to the club for a show this evening,” says Willard. Willard has a slight stammer. Once in a while the words hang in his throat, he touches his eye and out they come, hooting.

“All right Now you know the route Tuesday.”

“Sure I know the route,” hoots Willard.

“How about the brother here?”

Willard and Victor look at each other and laugh.

“I know,” says Victor gravely. “Here,” says Willard, bending over. Something scrapes in the dirt. He’s drawing a map. “Intercept the bus here. Brother, we counting on you to watch them.”

“I’m going to be watching more than them,” says Victor, spreading his fingers over his knees.

“What does he mean?” asks the third man.

“He means you, Brother Uru,” says Willard, laughing.

“Ain’t nobody going to hurt anybody long as I got anything to do with it!” cries Victor. “I mean nobody!”

“I don’t know. I just don’t know,” mutters number three to himself. “What kind of damn country is this?”

“Victor’s going to lead them to Honey Island.”

“That’s right and I’m staying there.”

“What you worrying about, old man?”

“You.”

“Me?”

“Ain’t nobody bothering those little ladies.”

“What in the hell—”

Willard opens his mouth, touches his eye: “Listen!”

There is a crackling in the swamp, a sound that becomes louder and more measured. It is the little safari of birdwatchers.

“See. I told you,” says Willard softly. “They pass here every Saturday this time of day, and on Tuesday the Fourth they’ll do the same.”

“Well well well,” says the third man, pleased for the first time. “Here come our teachers.”

“Teachers?” says Victor Charles. “What you talking about. They the doctors from the Center out for a walk. With their spyglasses.”

“They going too,” says Willard quietly. “We need teachers at the school.”

“You mean they going out to Honey Island too!” cries Victor.

“That’s right, Brother. Some of them, anyhow.”

“Lord to God. Now I done heard it all.”

“Why not, Uncle,” says the third man. “I think it proper and fitting that our children be taught by Ph.D.’s.”

“I think ever’body entitled to an education!” exclaims Victor in his singsong.

The crashing grows louder as the safari works around the hogback. Presently, by standing at the end of the bench, I can see them: Colley and Gottlieb still in the lead, Colley in pith helmet, bermuda shorts, and bush jacket; Gottlieb in his long-billed meshtop hat, the sort retirees wear in Fort Lauderdale. There follow a dozen or so behaviorists, physicians, Love counselors, plus a NASA engineer or two.

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

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

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

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

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

“I hear you say Jesus!” cries Victor.

“I said, never mind.”

“I say bless Jesus!”

“O.K., O.K.”

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

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

Wait five minutes to make sure.

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

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

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

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

After that I felt better.

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

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

He clucked in mild irritation.

“What’s the matter, Max?”

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

“That’s all right, Max.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That, sirs, is love.

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

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

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

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

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

“I’ve a favor to ask.”

“Ask it.”

For some reason I frown and fall silent.

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

“The Pit?”

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

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

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

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

“Ask it.”

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

Colley straddles the chaise and rises.

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

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

“Well, Max?”

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

“If what?”

“If you’ll come back.”

“You mean as patient?”

“Patient-staff. As you were.”

“Why?”

“You’re not well.”

“I’m well enough. I can’t come back.”

“Why not?”

“Something is afoot.”

“What?”

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

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

“O.K.”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

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

“You mean you think—”

“Ask Colley. He’s the ornithologist.”

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

“Yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

“I couldn’t. I was trapped.”

“Trapped?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“They said it.”

Silence.

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

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

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

“Of course. Will you come back?”

Colley beats me to the door. “I’m off. Max. Tom. You know your job is still open?”

“Thanks,” I say sourly.

Colley gone, Max nods toward the lounge. “You look tired, Tom. Did you have a bad night?”

“Yes.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Fine fine.”

“No depression?”

“Not much.”

“No highs?”

“They come together, sine-cosine.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Max, you read my paper and you’ve seen my lapsometer.”

“Yes.”

“Do you think they’re of value?”

“Yes. I think you’ve hit on something extremely intriguing. You’ve got a gift for correlation, but there’s too much subjectivity here and your series is too short. You need to come back in the hospital and spend about a year at it.”

“At what?” I ask him suspiciously.

“At this.” He picks up my paper. “And at treatment.”

“Whose treatment?”

“Your treatment of other patients and our treatment of you.”

“I know my mental health is bad, but there’s not much time.”

“Let’s talk about this sense of impending disaster.”

“Bullshit, Max. Are you going to help me with the Director or aren’t you?”

“I am. And you take the job back.”

“What job?”

“Your same job. As a matter of fact, Kenneth Stryker over in Love just read your earlier paper and I told him something about this. He’s quite excited and thinks you can help him out over there.”

“Max, I don’t seem to be getting across. You’re talking about doing business at the same stand here. I’m talking about a crash program involving N.I.M.H. and twenty-five million dollars.”

“A crash program? You mean on a national scale? You think there is a national emergency?”

“More even than that, Max! It’s not even the U.S.A., it’s the soul of Western man that is in the very act of flying apart HERE and NOW. Christ, Max, you read the paper. I can measure it, Max! Number one, I’ve got to get this thing mass-produced and in the hands of G.P.’s; number two, I’ve got to hit on a therapeutic equivalent of my diagnostic breakthrough. Don’t you agree?”

“Well now. The soul of Western man, that’s a large order, Tom. Besides being rather uh metaphysical—”

“Metaphysical is a word, Max. There is nothing metaphysical about the tenfold increase in atrocities in this area. There’s nothing metaphysical about the vines sprouting. There’s nothing metaphysical about the Bantu guerrillas and this country falling apart between the Knotheads and the Leftpapas. Did you know the President and Vice-President will both be in this area on the Fourth—”

“What was that about the vines?” asks Max, cocking an ear.

“Never mind,” I say, blushing. I shouldn’t have mentioned the vines.

Max is shifting about in his chair.

“I get uh uncomfortable when politics gets mixed with medicine, to say nothing of angels.”

“Very well.”

“Wait. What are your immediate plans?”

“For today? I’m headed for my office in town, stopping off on the way at old Howard Johnson’s. I want to make sure it’s safe. Moira and I have a date there on the Fourth.”

“Moira? Isn’t she the little popsy over in Love?”

“Yes. She’s a secretary at the Love Clinic.”

“Yes indeed. I saw her at the square dance with Buddy.”

“Buddy?” I frown.

“She’s a charmer.”

Max calls all attractive women “popsies.” Though he is a neobehaviorist, he is old-fashioned, even courtly in sexual matters. Like Freud himself, he is both Victorian and anatomical, speaking one moment delicately of “paying court to the ladies” or “having an affair of the heart,” and the next of genitalia and ejaculations and such. Whenever he mentions women, I picture heavy black feather-boa’d dresses clothing naked bodies and secret parts.

“Then will you come back, Tom?”

“Come back?”

“To the hospital. I’ll work like a dog with you.”

“I know you will.”

“We were just getting the cards on the table when you left.”

“What cards?”

“We found out what the hangup was and we were getting ready to condition you out of it.”

“What hangup?”

“Your guilt feelings.”

“I never did see that.”

“You did see that your depression and suicide attempt were related to sexual guilt?”

“What sexual guilt?”

“Didn’t you tell me that your depression followed une affaire of the heart with a popsy at the country club?”

“Lola is no popsy. She’s a concert cellist.”

“Oh.” Max has a great respect for stringed instruments. “Nevertheless your guilt did follow une affaire of the heart.”

“Are you speaking of my fornication with Lola in number 18 bunker?”

“Fornication,” repeats Max, nodding. “You see?”

“See what?”

“That you are saying that lovemaking is not a natural activity, like eating and drinking.”

“No, I didn’t say it wasn’t natural.”

“But sinful and guilt-laden.”

“Not guilt-laden.”

“Then sinful?”

“Only between persons not married to each other.”

“I am trying to see it as you see it.”

“I know you are.”

“If it is sinful, why do you do it?”

“It is a great pleasure.”

“I understand. Then, since it is ‘sinful,’ guilt feelings follow, even though it is a pleasure.”

“No, they don’t follow.”

“Then what worries you, if you don’t feel guilty?”

“That’s what worries me: not feeling guilty.”

“Why does that worry you?”

“Because if I felt guilty, I could get rid of it.”

“How?”

“By the sacrament of penance.”

“I’m trying to see it as you see it.”

“I know you are.”

“What I don’t see is that if there is no guilt after une affaire, what is the problem?”

“The problem is that if there is no guilt contrition, and a purpose of amendment the sin cannot be forgiven.”

“What does that mean, operationally speaking?”

“It means that you don’t have life in you.”

“Lifer?”

“Yes.”

“But you didn’t seem much interested in life that night On the contrary.”

“I know.”

“In any case, your depression and suicide attempt did follow your uh ‘sin.’”

“That wasn’t why I was depressed.”

“Why were you depressed?”

“It was Christmas Eve and there I was watching Perry Como.”

“You’re blocking me.”

“Yes.”

“What does ‘purpose of amendment’ mean?”

“Promising to try not to do it again and meaning it.”

“And you don’t intend to do that?”

“No.”

“Why not, if you believe it is sinful?”

“Because it is a great pleasure.”

“I don’t follow.”

“I know.”

“At least, in the matter of belief and action, you are half right.”

“That’s right.”

“But there remains the tug of war between the two.”

“There does.”

“If you would come back and get in the Skinner box, we could straighten it out.”

“The Skinner Box wouldn’t help.”

“We could condition away the contradiction. You’d never feel guilt.”

“Then I’d really be up the creek.”

“I’m trying to see it.”

“I know you are.”

“I notice that in speaking of your date with the little popsy from Love, you choose a setting that emphasizes the anonymous, transient, and sordid character of the relationship as you see it.”

“How’s that?”

“Not merely a motel, but an abandoned motel, a ruin, a secret hole-in-the-corner place, an assignation.”

“Yes, that the beauty of it, isn’t it?” I say, cheering up.

“No. No no. You misunderstand me. It’s a question of maturity—”

“You’re right, Max,” I say, wringing his hand affectionately and rushing off. “You’re a good friend!” I call back from the hall.

Poor Max did his best for me. Once he devised a psychological test, tailored to my peculiar complaint.

“You see those two doors,” he said to me one day, sitting behind the same desk.

“Yes.” I could tell from the sparkle in his eye and from the way light glanced interestingly from his forehead that he had cooked up something for me.

“Behind those two doors are not the lady and the tiger but two ladies.”

“O.K.,” I say, perking up. Max, I saw, had gone to some trouble devising a test that would reveal to me the nature of my problem.

“Behind that door,” said Max, wheeling in his chair, “is a lovely person, a mature, well-educated person who is quite fond of you.”

“Yes?”

“You have much in common. She can converse on a variety of topics, is psychiatrically-oriented, empathetic toward you, and is quite creative in the arts. She is equally at home discussing the World Bank or a novel by Mazo de la Roche.”

“Mazo de la Roche? Jesus, Max. Look, do you have someone in mind?”

“And she is dressed in the most seductive garb”—Max would say garb—“and you find her reclining on a couch in a room furnished with the costliest, most tasteful fabrics. Exotic perfumes are wafted toward you”—Max says wäfted—“You talk. She responds warmly at all levels of the interpersonal spectrum. The most seductive music is playing—”

“What music in particular, Max?”

“What difference does it make? Scheherazade.”

“God, Max, it all sounds so Oriental.” What makes Max’s attempt to find me a girl both odd and endearing is that he is so old-fashioned. He and his wife, Sylvia, are like Darwin and Mrs. Darwin at their fireside in Kent. “Who’s behind the other door, Max?”

“Oh, a popsy in a motel room.”

“What is she like?”

“Oh, ordinary. Say a stewardess. You’ve spoken to her once on a flight from Houston.”

“She fancies me?”

“Yes.”

“You want to know which I prefer?”

“Yes.”

“The stewardess.”

“Exactly!” cried Max triumphantly. “You prefer ‘fornication,’ as you call it, to a meaningful relation with another person qua person.”

“Right, and you’re saying the other case is not fornication.”

“Yes.”

Thus Max devised a specific test to reveal me to myself, I flunked the test, was in fact revealed to myself. But nothing came of it.

After saving my life, he tried to make it a good life. He invited me along on Audubon bird walks and to Center square dances and even introduced me to an attractive lady behaviorist named Grace Gould. Was this the lady behind the first door, I wondered. He even invited me to his home. Grace and I would sit in Max’s living room while Max barbecued kebabs outside and his wife, Sylvia, a tall stooped one-shoulder-hitched-up ruddy-faced girl from Pittsburgh, passed around a dip. We spoke of politics, deplored Knotheads, listened to Rimski-Korsakov, played Scrabble, watched educational stereo-V. Max himself had many interests besides medicine and looking for the ivorybill: tropical fish, square dancing, gem-polishing, tree-dwarfing — which he tried to interest me in, without success. Grace Gould was his last and best effort Grace, who came from Pasadena, was indeed attractive, was nimble as a cat at square dancing, could spot a Louisiana waterthrush at one hundred feet, and could converse on a variety of topics. Max and Sylvia would retire early, leaving us to our devices downstairs. Upstairs the Gottliebs lay, quiet as mice, hoping something was cooking downstairs (for Max loved me and wanted for me what he had). Nothing was cooking, however, though Grace and I liked each other. But there seemed to be nothing to do but drink and look at the walls which, though the house was a new one in Paradise, nevertheless gave the effect of being dark and varnished inside like an old duplex in Queens. The bookshelves contained medical, psychiatric, and psychological texts, a whole shelf of Reader’s Digest four-in-one novels, and the complete works of Mazo de la Roche. The night Max sewed up my wrists at his house, found a cut tendon, went out to beat the bushes for a surgeon, I read Whiteoaks of Jalna at one sitting. There we sat, Grace and I, agreeing on everything, until I developed a tic, commenced to wink, and so took her home, keeping one side of my face averted.

Passing through the geriatric cottages on the way to Love. Here in cold glassed porches sit despondent oldsters, exiled from Tampa and Tucson for crankiness, misanthropy, malcontent, solitariness, destructiveness, misery— in short, the St. Petersburg Blues.

Each has two electrodes in his head, like a Martian with antennae. They’re being reconditioned, put in Skinner boxes, which are pleasant enough chambers furnished with that “recreational or avocational environment” which the patient shows highest aptitude for — pottery wheel, putting green, ceramic oven, square-dance therapist — and conditioned. Positively conditioned when he responds positively: spins wheel, hops to music — by a mild electric current flowing through electrode A inducing a pleasant sensation, an unlocated euphoria, hypothalamic joy. Negatively conditioned when he responds negatively: breaks wheel, kicks therapist, sits in corner — by a nasty shock through electrode B inducing a distinct but not overpowering malaise.

Those who respond? Back home to Senior Citizen compounds in Tampa and Tucson with other happy seniors.

Those who don’t respond? Off they’re packed to the Happy Isles of Georgia, the federal Good Time Garden where reconditioning is no longer attempted but rather the opposite: whenever they behave antisocially they’re shocked into bliss, soon learning to press the button themselves, off and dreaming so blissful that they pass up meals—

Here’s the hottest political issue of the day: euthanasia. Say the euthanasists not unreasonably: let’s be honest, why should people suffer and cause suffering to other people? It is the quality of life that counts, not longevity, etcetera. Every man is entitled to live his life with freedom and to end it with dignity, etcetera etcetera. It came down to one curious squabble (like the biggest theology fight coming down to whether to add the que to the filio): the button vs. the switch. Should a man have the right merely to self-stimulation, pressing the button that delivers bliss precisely until the blissful thumb relaxes and lets go the button? Or does he not also have the right to throw a switch that stays on, inducing a permanent joy — no meals, no sleep, and a happy death in a week or so? The button vs. the switch.

And if he has such a right and is judged legally incompetent to throw the switch, cannot a relative throw it for him?

The debate rages. The qualitarians, as the euthanasists call themselves, have won in Maryland and New York and Hawaii where legislatures have passed laws that allow sane oldsters to choose a “joyful exitus” as it is called in Maryland, or a kawaneeolaua as it is called in Hawaii, and throw the on-switch on. In the case of the insane, the consent of both physician and spouse is necessary.

Whup. Up ahead I spy my enemy, Dr. Buddy Brown, sailing his coattails, and duck into Love Clinic just in time.

I don’t want to talk to him about our coming shoot-out in The Pit. Am I afraid of him?

The small observation room in Love is not crowded. Moira is perched on a stool at the viewing mirror, steno pad open on her knees. My heart melts with love. Does not a faint color spread along her throat? She blushes! I nod merely — or do I blush? — and go on talking to Stryker. But her presence is like sunlight. No matter which way I turn I feel a ray of warmth, now on my cheek, now between my shoulder blades. There is a sextant in me that keeps her position.

Father Kev Kevin sits reading Commonweal at his console of vaginal indicators. Only the regular staff is present today — though there may be students in the amphitheater above — Dr. Kenneth Stryker, chief of staff of Love; Dr. Helga Heine, his assistant, a West German interpersonal gynecologist; Father Kev Kevin, an ex-priest now a Love counselor; and Moira Schaffner, my own true love.

Stryker and Moira are glad to see me. Father Kev Kevin and Helga are not, though they are civil enough. Helga thinks I don’t like Germans. I suspect, too, she believes I am Jewish because I was always with Gottlieb and I look somewhat Jewish, like my illustrious ancestor, Sir Thomas More.

Father Kev Kevin was a curate at Saint Michael’s, my old parish church. So he is skittish toward me, behaving now too brightly, now too sullenly. I think he fears I might call him Father. A handsome Irishman, he is not merely chaplain of the clinic but jack of all trades: counsels persons in Love who cannot love — love or die! he tells them — takes clinical notes, operates the vaginal console. Imagine a young genial anticlerical Pat O’Brien who reads Commonweal.

The behavior room beyond the viewing mirror is presently unoccupied. It has an examining table with stirrups, a hospital bed, a tray of instruments, a tube of K-Y jelly, and a rack for the sensor wires with leads to the recording devices in the observation room.

A subject comes in, a solitary lover. I gaze at her, feeling somewhat big-nosed.

I recognize her. She is Lillian, Stryker’s first subject. No doubt she will go down in history like Freud’s first patient, Anna O. For it is she, Lonesome Lil as the students called her, who exhibited in classic form the “cruciform rash” of love that won for Stryker the Nobel Prize.

Lillian wears a sensible gray suit and sturdy brown low-heeled shoes. Her outfit, with shoulder bag and matching hat, a kind of beret with up-arching hoop inside, puts me in mind of Lois Lane of the old Superman comics of my childhood. Lillian is a good deal sturdier, however. As she opens her shoulder bag and begins to remove small fitted devices of clear Lucite, lining them up neatly on the surgical tray, she is for all the world like a visiting nurse come to minister to a complex ailment.

But, unlike a visiting nurse, she undresses. As briskly as a housewife getting ready for her evening bath and paying no more attention to the viewing mirror than if it were her vanity, she sheds jacket, skirt, underwear — the lower article a kind of stretch step-in garment, the upper a brassiere with a bodice-like extension — and finally her up-arched beret, holding a bobby pin in her teeth and giving her short dark hair a shake as any woman would. Not fat, she is heavy-legged and heavy-breasted, her olive skin running to pigment. Though there is glass between us, there is the sense, almost palpable, of the broad, low, barefooted heft of her, of a clothed-in cottoned-off body heat and of the keratin-rasp of her bare feet on the cork floor.

Now, clipping Lucite fittings to sensor wires — and again with the impression of holding a bobby pin in her teeth — she inserts one after another into the body orifices, as handily and thriftily as a teen-ager popping in a contact lens.

Cameras whir, tapes jerk around, needles quiver, computers wink, and Lillian begins her autostimulation.

My eyes meet Moira’s. She blushes and glances down. Here we meet, at Lillian’s recording session, as shyly as two office workers at the water cooler, touch fingers and—! Yes, my hand strays along the vaginal computer, our fingers touch. A thrill pierces my heart like an arrow, as they say in old novels. I am in love.

Stryker tells me his problem, I listen attentively, and sure enough he offers me a job. It disconcerts me that he speaks in a loud voice, in the hearing of the others, and pays no attention to Lillian, who is doing her usual yeoman-like job. Isn’t it impolite not to watch her? Stryker is a tall, willowy doctor who feels obliged by the nature of his work to emphasize the propriety, even the solemnity of his own person. So he dresses somewhat like a funeral director in a dark suit, perfectly laundered shirt, and sober tie. Yet there persists about him the faint air of the dude: his collar has a tricky pin that lofts the knot of his tie. Overly long cuffs show their jeweled links and cover part of his hand, whose fingers are still withered from his years as a chemist before he went into behavior. He is a wonderful dancer, hopping nimbly through the complicated figures of the Center’s square dances. Even now, in the observation room, there is about him a lightness of foot, a discreet bounciness, as if he were keeping time to an inner hoedown. His foot swings out. Yet there pervades the observation room a strong tone, at once solemn and brisk. Embarrassment is not to be thought of. Nor, on the other hand, would it be thinkable to crack vulgar jokes as surgeons do in the scrub room.

Dr. Helga Heine has caught the same note of brisk solemnity. She is a jolly matronly Bavarian gynecologist, neither young nor old, a regular hausfrau, hair done up in a bun, breast conformed to a single motherly outcurve. Moira tells me that Helga takes pains to remember the birthdays of staff members and veteran performers, brings a cake and plays Zwei Herzen on her little Bavarian guitar. I gaze big-nosed at her plump pink fingertips.

“Thanks to you,” says Stryker solemnly, balancing lightly on the balls of his feet, “we’ve made a breakthrough in the whole area of sexual behavior.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say—” I begin, sweeping out a foot like Stryker. So he’s read my paper! In the corner of my eye Moira listens and registers pride. To Moira, who believes in Science without knowing much about it, my triumph has all the grace and warrant of a matador’s.

“Your article in the J.A.M.A. delineated a new concept.”

“Oh. I wouldn’t say that.”

And I wouldn’t. The “article” he speaks of is not the epochal paper I just finished, but a minor clinical note, small potatoes indeed. It noted nothing more than a certain anomaly in the alpha wave of solitary lovers (as Colley’s assistant, I read the EEG’s of all the lovemakers in Love). Stryker’s praise is something like congratulating Einstein for patenting a Swiss watch. I accept it for Moira’s sake.

Moira’s eyes are shining.

Lillian is going about her task at a fair clip. Drums revolve, heartbeats spike on a monitor, her skin conductivity ascends a gentle slope. Stryker keeps a casual eye on the dials, now and then dictates a clinical note to Moira. Helga and Father Kev Kevin, hearing my praises, look glum.

Moira perches on her stool, heels cocked on a rung, and manages both to take notes and keep her short skirt tucked under her knees. What lovely legs. Her kneecaps are smooth and tan as a beaten biscuit. To plant kisses on those perfect little biscuits, I’m thinking, as Stryker dances a step. Moira and I do not quite look at each other but my cheek is aware of hers.

She never told her love

But let concealment, like a worm i’ the bud

Feed on her damask cheek.

Lillian is going at a good clip now.

“There’s the old methodology,” says Stryker, waving a hand at Lillian without bothering to look. “Thanks to you, we’re onto something new.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” I murmur out of Moira’s hearing.

“Not that the old wasn’t useful in its way—”

“Useful!” chime in Helga and Father Kev Kevin. “Useful enough to take the Nobel!”

But Stryker waves them off. “Useful, yes, to a point But without your note on the alpha wave, we’d never have struck out on a new path.”

“A new path?” I ask, puzzled. But my Moira-wards cheek glows.

Her cheek like the rose is, but fresher, I ween,

She’s the loveliest lassie that trips on the green.

I ween she is.

Stryker sways closer, balancing lightly on his toes. “I think you might be interested to learn, Tom, that since June we’ve been using not one subject at a time”—he touches my arm with a withered finger—“but two.”

“Two?”

“Yes. A man and a woman. Here’s the breakthrough.”

“Breakthrough?”

“Yes. And guess what?”

“What?”

“We’ve got rid of your alpha wave anomaly. You were right.”

“Very good. But actually I was only reading EEG’s and not making recommendations about future techniques, you understand—”

“Moral scruples, Doctor?” asks Father Kev Kevin, eyes alight. He clears the orgasm circuit

“Perhaps.”

“Oh, that’s neither here nor there!” cries Stryker cheerfully. “All I’m saying is that using couples instead of singles we’ve got rid of your alpha wave anomaly and kept the cruciform rash. I thought you’d want to know.”

“Yes,” I say gloomily, watching Lillian. My nose is getting bigger. I try to think. “Then if that’s the case, what’s your problem?”

“Yeah, here’s the thing.” Stryker glances at Lillian like a good cook watches a pot of beans. I notice that as Lillian progresses, Stryker becomes ever more light-footed. His black pumps swing out. His watching Lillian is like a poet reading his best poem. “Our problem is that our couples do not perform regularly.”

“Ted ’n Tanya do!” Helga objects.

“Not lately. Only one out of four couples interact successfully,” says Stryker drily. “Hardly an adequate base for observation.”

“Ted ’n Tanya?” I ask, scratching my head. There could only be one Ted ’n Tanya. It must mean that my prescription for Ted didn’t, in the end, work, and that they’ve come here. “But what do you think I can do about it?”

Lillian seems to be looking at me. But I know she can only see mirror. It is herself she is watching. Her eyes are unfocused and faraway. Her eyebrows are unplucked, the heavy black sort one used to see in daguerreotypes of frontier women.

“Do some studies on our noninteracting couples!” cries Stryker. “I hear you’ve developed a special sort of EEG.”

“Not exactly.”

“Join our team! We’re even funded for a full-time consultant.”

“Well, thank you, Ken, but …” On the other hand, I could see Moira all day if I did.

“Twenty thousand a year, full professorship, and do as you please.”

“Well …”

“We’ve hit a snag in the interpersonal area and both Max and I feel you could iron it out.”

“The fact is …” What does Moira’s cheek say, my cheek wonders.

“Here-we-are,” says Stryker in a routine rush, glancing at Lillian. All the quiet pride of a scientist demonstrating his best trick.

The Love team springs into action, each to his station.

Lillian turns to show her famous cruciform rash. She embraces herself. Her pale loins bloom. Stryker presses buttons with a routine skill, a practiced climactic.

“Beautiful!” murmurs Helga.

“Pathognomonic!” cries Father Kev Kevin.

Moira bends to her note-taking, scribbles furiously as Stryker dictates.

Helga speaks by microphone to Lillian.

“Turn around slowly, dear.”

She addresses the unseen students, perched in their roost above us.

“You will notice please the cruciform morbilliform eruption extending bilaterally from the sacral area—”

Moira breaks her pencil and goes to sharpen it. The others are busy with Lillian and I see my chance. I follow her into a small closet-sized room, which houses a computer and a cot littered with dusty scientific journals. A metal label on the door reads Observer Stimulation Overflow Area. Standard equipment in all Love clinics. Known more familiarly to the students as the “chicken room,” it is provided to accommodate those observers who are stimulated despite themselves by the behavior they observe. For although, as Stryker explained, the observer hopes to retain his scientific objectivity, it must be remembered that after all the observers belong to the same species as the observed and are subject to the same “environmental stimuli.” Hither to the closet, alone or in pairs or severally, observers may discreetly repair, each to relieve himself or herself according to his needs. “It iss the same as a doctor having hiss own toilet, nicht?” Helga told me somewhat vulgarly. “Nicht,” I said but did not argue. I have other fish to fry.

While moral considerations are not supposed to enter into scientific investigation, “observer stimulation overflow” is nevertheless discouraged. It is Stryker’s quiet boast, moreover, that whatever may happen in Palo Alto or Berkeley or Copenhagen, scientific objectivity has been scrupulously preserved in the Paradise Love Clinic. No observer has ever used the chicken room. The closet houses not lovers but dusty journals and a computer.

Moira, in fact, tells me she feels safer in Love than when she worked as secretary to the chief psychologist.

“Can I see you after work today?” I whisper and take her hand. It is cold. Che gelida manina. Thy tiny hand is frozen.

“Can’t today!” she whispers back. “But I can’t wait till the Fourth! Where are we going?” Her lovely gold eyes look at me over her steno pad like a Moslem woman’s.

I frown. An ugly pang pierces my heart. Why can’t she see me today? Does she have a date with Buddy? Here’s the misery of love: I don’t really want to see her today, was not prepared to, have other plans, yet despite myself hear myself insist on it.

“But—”

She shushes me, seals my lips with her finger, and, glancing through the open door at Lillian who is unwiring herself, brushes her lips with her fingers, brushes mine.

“You better go.”

“Yes.” Ah.

Returning to the observation room, I sink into a chair and dreamily watch Lillian dress. Here’s my trouble with Moira. She’s a romanticist and I’m not. She lives for what she considers rare perfect moments. What I long to share with her are ordinary summer evenings, cicadas in the sycamores.

She whispers behind me. “Where are we going this time? To Dry Tortugas again? Chicken Itza? Tombstone?”

I shrug and smile. She likes to visit ghost towns and jungle ruins, so I’ll show her the one in our back yard, the ruined Howard Johnson motel. She’ll savor the closeness of it. One weekend we flew to Silver City, Arizona, and stood in the deserted saloon and watched tumbleweeds blow past the door. “Can’t you just hear the old rinky-dink piano?” she cried and hugged me tight “Yeah,” I said, taking delight in the very commonplaceness of her romanticism. “How about a glass of red-eye, Moira?” “Oh yes! Yes indeed!”

Lillian dresses quickly, pins on her Lois Lane hat, using the viewing mirror as her vanity, shoulders her bag, trudges out

In comes the next subject. No, subjects. A couple. I recognize one, a medical student who is doubtlessly making money as a volunteer. He is J.T. Thigpen, a slightly built, acned youth who wears a blue shirt with cuffs turned up one turn. He carries a stack of inky books in the crook of his wrist. His partner, whom the chart identifies only as Gloria, is a largish blonde, a lab worker, to judge from her stained smock, with wiry bronze hair that springs out from her head. Volunteers in Love get paid fifty dollars a crack, which beats giving blood.

“These kids are our pioneers,” Stryker tells me, speaking softly now for some reason. “And a case in point. Something has gone wrong. Yet they were our first and best interaction subjects. Our problem, of course, with using two subjects was one of visualization. Colley, who is a wizard, solved that for us with his Lucite devices. We can see around curves, you see, between bodies. So we figured if Colley could help us out in mechanics, you could help us out with interpersonal breakdowns. How about it?”

“Well …”

Gloria and J.T. are undressing. J.T. takes off his shirt, revealing an old-fashioned undershirt with shoulder straps. He’s a country boy from hereabouts. The spots of acne strewn across his shoulders turn livid in the fluorescent light. Removing his wristwatch with expansion band, he hesitates for a moment, then hangs it on the crank handle of the hospital bed.

Gloria wears a half-slip, which comes just short of her plump white knees, and a half-brassiere whose upper cusps are missing.

“Okay, keeds!” cries Helga, clapping her hands into the microphone. “Mach schnell! Let’s get the show on the road!”

“We have found,” Stryker explains to me, “that you can inspire false modesty and that by the same token a brisk no-nonsense approach works wonders. Helga is great at it!”

I clear my throat and stretch up my heavy-lidded eyes. My nose is a snout.

“I’ve got to be going.”

J.T. and Gloria, half-undressed, are standing around like strangers at a bus stop. J.T. sends his fingers browsing over his acned shoulder. Gloria stands foursquare, arms angled out past her hips as if she were carrying milkpails.

Father Kev Kevin clears the orgasm circuit. He won’t look at me.

“I’ve got to be going, Stryker.”

“Wait. How can you spot the hangup if you don’t watch them?”

“Yeah. Well, later. Thank you very much, all of you. Hm. I’m already late—” I look at my watch and start for the door.

“Wait! Ted ’n Tanya are next. They’re our best. Or were. Don’t you want to—”

“No.”

“What about the job?”

“I’ll let you know.”

“We’re funded, man! The money is here!”

“Very good.”

Leaving, I catch a final glimpse of J.T. Thigpen, bare-chested and goose-pimpled, gazing around the porcelain walls with the ruminant rapt expression of a naked draftee.

“Mach schnell! Keeds—” cries Helga, clapping her hands.

Whew! Escape! Escape, but just in time to run squarely into Buddy Brown, my enemy, in the corridor.

He smiles and nods and grips my arms as if we shared a lover’s secret. What secret? Who is he waiting for?

I brush past and do not wait to find out. Am I afraid to find out?

To the motel to fix a room for a tryst with Moira on the Fourth. No sign of sniper or anyone else for that matter. But I take no chances, slip into Howard Johnson’s through the banquet room where the rent Rotary banner still flies from Tuesday’s meeting five years ago:

Is it the truth?

Is it fair to all concerned?

Will it build goodwill and better friendships?

and straight up the inside stairs without exposing myself to the patio.

Room 203, the most nearly intact, was nevertheless a mess when we first saw it: graffiti, illuminations of hairy pudendae, suspicious scraps of newspaper littering the floor. The beds moldy, the toilet fouled. I’ve been working on the room for a month, installed a generator for air-conditioner and TV and coffee-maker and lights and bed vibrators; brought in hose water from Esso station next door; laid in supplies for a day or so.

And I haven’t finished. This weekend, knowing what I know, I’ll lay in supplies for six months, plus clothes for Moira, books, games. All hell will break loose on the Fourth and Moira and I may need a place to stay. What safer place than a motel in no man’s land, between the lines so to speak?

This is the place. Moira, in fact, picked it. She and I came here for a few minutes last month. She likes the byways. That weekend we hadn’t time to fly to Merida or Tombstone. So we took a walk. A proper ruin this, and what is more, it has a bad reputation and people don’t come here. But I think it is safe. The whites think the black guerrillas have it. The blacks think the white drug-heads have it. Neither wants any part of the other, so both stay away. I think.

Moira was delighted with the motel. There was a soupçon of danger, just enough. She clutched my arm and shrank against me. We stood by the scummy pool. Spanish moss trailed from the balcony. Alligator grass choked the wading pool. A scarlet watersnake coiled under the lifeguard’s perch. Moira found a pair of old 1960 harlequin glasses and an ancient vial of Coppertone.

“It’s like Pompey!” she cried.

“Like what? Yes, right.”

We kissed. Ruins make her passionate. Ghosts make her want to be touched. She is lovely, her quick upturned heart-shaped face and gold-brown eyes bright with a not quite genuine delight, a willingness rather to be delighted. Are you going to delight me? isn’t this the time? aren’t things falling out just right? Pleasing her is fathoming and fulfilling this expectation. Her face. Her cropped wheat-colored hair with a strong nap that aches my hand to brush against, her rather short tanned perfect legs drawn with strong simple strokes like the Draw Me girl in magazine contests. She’s poor, having left her West Virginia parents early and supported herself in civil service, worked in Bethesda for N.I.M.H. before transferring here. I can see her in Washington in the evening washing out her things in the washstand, keeping her budget, minding herself…. But she has her own views and likes. She opposes the war in Ecuador, subscribes to Playgirl, a mildly liberated, mildly Left magazine, and carries in her purse a pocket edition of Rod McKuen, a minor poet of the old Auto Age, which she likes to read aloud to me: “Don’t you just love that?” “Yes.” But what I love is her loving it, her faintly spurious love of loving things that seem lovable.

A turtle plopped into the pool.

“Can’t you just see them!” she whispered, swaying against me.

“Who?”

“All the salesmen and flappers.”

“Yes.”

“Aah!” said Moira, stretching out on a convex lounge which pushed her up in the middle. I perched somewhat precariously beside her.

Moira, who is twenty-two and not strong on history, thinks that the great motels of the Auto Age were the haunt of salesmen and flappers of the Roaring Twenties. Whereas, of course, it was far more likely that it was the salesman and his wife and kids and station wagon who put up here in the sixties and seventies.

A green lizard did push-ups on Moira’s lounge, blew out a red bladder. Moira screamed and hopped into my lap. We kissed. I kissed her smooth biscuit-shaped kneecaps. Her eyes were fond and faraway. “Just think,” she said.

“What?”

“It’s all gone. Gone with the wind.”

“Yes.”

“The lion and the lizard keep The courts where Samson gloried and drank deep.”

“Right.” I held her close, melting with love, and whispered in her ear: “The wild ass stamps o’er his head, but cannot break his sleep.”

“Don’t be nasty!” cried Moira, laughing and tossing her head like Miss Clairol of olden time.

“Sorry.”

Taking my hand like a child, she led me exploring. In a rusted-out Coke machine in the arcade we found warm, five-year-old Cokes. I opened two, poured out half and filled the bottles with Early Times.

“This is how the salesmen and flappers used to drink.”

“Wonderful!” She took a big swig.

The hot sun blazed in the patio. We could not swim in the foul pool. So we sweated and drank Coke and bourbon like a salesman and a flapper. The Spanish moss stirred on the balcony. We went up to get the breeze. Then we explored the rooms, sat on the moldering bed in 203 and drank some more.

“A penny for your thoughts,” said Moira thoughtfully.

“I fancy you. Do you fancy me?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s lie down.”

“On this? Ugh.”

“Then let’s sit in the chair.”

“Not today, Josephine.”

“Why not?”

“I didn’t bring my Cupid’s Quiver.”

“Your what?”

“My sachet, silly.”

“I’m not sure I understand. In any case, I don’t mind.”

“I do.”

“Then let’s have a drink.”

Again she took a mighty pull. Again we kissed. Her gold eyes gleamed.

“Ugh,” she said again, noticing the graffiti and pudendae on the walls. Damn, why didn’t I clean the walls? But she refused to be shocked by dirty pictures. To prove it, we had to make a museum tour. Love, where is love now? We gazed at the poor penciled organs, same and different, same and different, like a figure in the wallpaper, and outside the swifts twittered down the sky and up sang the old skyey sounds of June and where was love?

So we walked hand in hand and read the graffiti. Moira had taken a course in semantics and knew there was nothing in dirty words.

Above the Gideon Bible: For a free suck call room 208.

Moira shook her head sadly. “What an unhappy person must have written that.”

“Yea. That is, yes.” Desire for her had blown my speech center. “Love, I, you,” I said.

“Love I you too,” she said, kissing me, mouth open, gold eyes open.

Holding hands, we read the graffito under The Laughing Cavalier: Room 204 has a cutout on her pussy.

“The poor man.”

“Yes.”

“What is a cutout?”

“It is a device salesmen used to attach to their auto mufflers.”

“But how—? Never mind. Ummm, what a good place for a picnic!”

“Yes.”

“Far from the maddening crowd.”

“That’s true.”

It was then that the notion occurred to me to fix the room up properly and spend a weekend here.

“Tom, do you remember that quaint little hotel in Merida?”

“Yes, I do.”

“There’s a small hotel. With a wishing well.”

“Right.”

“Remember the coins we threw in the fountain after our love and the wish we made?”

“Yes.”

She is right. I must remember that women like to think of the act of love as a thing, “our love.” There are three of us, like a family, Moira and I and our love.

“I wish you’d worn your Mexican pleated shirt.”

“Why?”

“You look just like Rod McKuen, if you had more hair.”

“He’s an old man.”

“No, he’s not. Look.” She showed me his picture on the back of her book, Rod hoofing it along a California beach, arms open to the sea gulls.

“That was twenty years ago.”

“Let’s have a picnic here.”

“We will.”

“A jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and thou.”

“Yes, thou.”

That was last month. I’ve been working on this room ever since. Today I finish the job. No bowerbird ever prepared a bower for his love more carefully.

The hard work was done last week, Delco generator installed downstairs, hose run two hundred feet from the Esso station faucet up through the bathroom window.

Room 203 still has suspicious smells. Pull back curtains, open front panels and bathroom window to get a breeze. Unpack from doctor’s bag and line up on dresser: one saniflush, one wick deodorizer, one tube of cold solder, one roll of toilet paper, one boxed gift copy of Stanyan Street, one brass shower head, one jar of instant coffee.

Half an hour and my work is done, floors mopped, fungoid mattresses and horrid foam-rubber pillows slung over balcony rail to sun, coffee-maker restocked, graffiti wiped from wall revealing original hunt-and-hound design, Laughing Cavalier straightened, ancient color TV and bed vibrator plugged into Delco lead, shower head screwed onto hose from Esso station and tested (hot bitter hose water), Stanyan Street lined up with the Gideon.

Test vibrator: sit on bed and drop in quarter. Z-Z-Z-Z-Z goes the vibrator and suddenly I am thinking not of Moira but of Samantha, my dead daughter, and the times she and I and Doris used to travel in the Auto Age all over the U.S.A. and Samantha would explore the motel and drop coins in every slot. First off she’d have found the Slepe-Eze and fed it a quarter.

Tears spurt from my eyes. Removing a pint of Early Times from my bag, I sit on the humming bed and sip a few drinks.

Why does desire turn to grief and memory strike at the heart?

Off to town. Past empty Saint Michael’s Church and school, a yellow brick dairy-barn-with-silo.

Here I went to mass with Samantha, happy as a man could be, ate Christ and held him to his word, if you eat me you’ll have life in you, so I had life in me. After mass we’d walk home to Paradise through the violet evening, the evening star hard by the red light of the TV tower like a ruby and diamond in the plush velvet sky, and I’d skip with happiness, cut the fool like David while Samantha told elephant jokes, go home, light the briquets, drink six toddies, sing Tantum Ergo, and “Deh vieni alla finestra” from Don Giovanni and, while Samantha watched Gentle Ben, invite Doris out under the Mobile pinks, Doris as lusty and merry a wife then as a man could have, a fine ex-Episcopal ex-Apple Queen from the Shenandoah Valley. Oh Shenandoah, I long to see you.

Cliff swallows are nesting in the fenestrated concrete screen in front of Saint Michael’s.

In this Catholic church, the center did not hold. It split in three, Monsignor Schleifkopf cutting out to the right, Father Kev Kevin to the left, leaving Father Smith. There is little to be said about Father Smith since he is in no way remarkable, having been a good and faithful if undistinguished priest for twenty-five years, having baptized the newborn into a new life, married lovers, shriven sinners, comforted the sick, visited the poor and imprisoned, anointed the dying, buried the dead. He had his faults. He was a gray stiff man. Like me, he was thought to drink and on occasion was packed off, looking only a bit grayer and stiffer than usual, to a Gulf Coast home for addled priests. Now he and his little flock are looking for a new home, I hear, having used for a while a Pentecostal church and later Paradise Lanes, my bowling alley here in the plaza, until it became too dangerous.

The plaza is empty now save for the rusting hulks of cars abandoned or burned in the time of troubles.

Five and a half years ago, on Christmas Eve, Paradise Plaza was sacked by Bantu guerrillas, foraying up out of the swamp. Store windows were smashed, the new Sears looted, some stores burned, cops shot up by Bantus, Bantus shot up by cops. Noncombatants fled, Christmas shoppers, storekeepers, motel occupants, drive-in movie patrons watching Homo Hijinks. Monsignor Schleifkopf left by the front door of the church, abandoning his burning Buick and golf clubs in the garage, where they are to this day. Nobody came back these five and a half years save lovers and bums and drugheads and in the end only the original denizens of the swamp, owls, alligators, and moccasins.

I should have known trouble was brewing. The night before, Leroy Ledbetter had kicked out a black couple from Tougaloo who wanted to bowl at Paradise Lanes. That very morning, walking to town, I met Nellie Bledsoe, who told me her cook had quit and she was ready “to shoot some niggers.”

“Eh? What? What’s that? My God,” I said, “you don’t mean you want to shoot some niggers because your cook quit.”

“Oh yes I do!” she cried, laughing and winking and kneading her arm. “Don’t you know what they do?”

“What?”

“They go on welfare and have their illegitimate nigger babies and get paid for it, paid more than they make working.”

“Yes, but you’re not saying that you’re going out and—”

“Oh yes I am!” says Nellie, winking and laughing. “Ho Ho Ho!”

Earlier the same morning, at six, a young jaundiced Bantu came up out of the swamp and appeared at my “enclosed patio” to be treated for liver flukes.

After I gave him his shot, he too winked at me with his yellow eye.

“I can’t pay you now, Doc, but since you’re so nice, we won’t shoot you when the shooting starts.”

“Who are you planning to shoot?”

“Anybody who gets in our way.”

“In the way of what?”

“In the way of our taking this goddamn parish, Doc,” he said, pulling out a copy of Fanon with one hand and patting a bulge under his coat with the other.

“My God, you’re not really going to shoot anybody, are you?”

“We’re taking over, Doc.”

“Why don’t you take over by the vote? You got the vote and there are more of you than of us.”

“Shit on voting, Doc.”

There was something in the air all right

On McArthur Boulevard now, a defunct parkway that deadends in a weedy lot and an ancient putt-putt course. Follow it as far as the L & N overpass and take the shortcut to town through Happy Hollow.

A bit shaky now, faintified but not hungry. The Early Times is not sitting well.

The thunderhead fills the whole eastern sky. A hot wind blows me toward it over the asphalt playground of the school. A chain rings against a flagpole.

The short cut turns out to be a mistake. Happy Hollow is a hot airless hole. The sun slants down like a laser. My stomach churns acid. When did I eat last?

The bare ground between the shacks and under the chinaberry trees never dries out. Where the sun does strike, the earth steams and gives off a smell of dishwater and chicken fat. Duck eggs rise in my throat.

But people seem happy here. Happy pot-bellied picaninnies play in the alley. Old folk rock on the porches. The unhappy young men are gone. The kindly old folk doff their caps politely. Yellow yarddogs lie chained to the chinaberry trees. They lift an eyebrow and snarl as I pass.

It is collection day. Up one side of the alley goes Moon Mullins collecting rent for his shacks. Down the other side goes old Mr. Jack Bourgeois collecting burial-insurance premiums. Both are cheerful and good-humored with their clients, exchanging jokes and pleasantries at each shack before moving on. Both collect in exactly the same way. If the householder is sitting on his porch, he will pass the time of day and hand down the money to the collector, who stands on the ground. If the porch is vacant, the collector will put his foot on the second step, rest an elbow on his knee and rap the porch floor with his knuckles, all the while looking down at the ground with a musing expression. Old Mr. Jack bangs the porch with his fat premium book.

The collectors greet me cordially.

“Hot enough for you, Doc!” cries Moon.

“How you doing, Doc!” cries old Mr. Jack.

“Yes, it is. All right,” I reply, weaving a bit

The Negroes greet me uneasily. Why do the yarddogs snarl at me and not at Moon and old Mr. Jack? I am unwell.

How will I get up the hill to town? The sun laser bores into the top of my head, but my feet are blocks of ice. If only I could make it to the Little Napoleon, where I could sit in a dark nook and drink a little toddy to settle my stomach.

Halfway up the hill it becomes clear I won’t make it Flowers of darkness are blooming in the weeds. Rank vines sprout in the path. In times of ordeal one’s prayers become simple. I pray only that I will faint in a private place where no one will disturb me and where especially Moon and old Mr. Jack won’t see me.

I have drawn abreast of the new animal shelter, a glass-and-concrete air-conditioned block of a building cantilevered from the hillside like a Swiss sanitorium.

My knees knock.

But here’s a good spot

I sit down in a dry ditch under a chinaberry whose dense branches come down and make a private place. It is next to the dog-runs that slope down the hill under the pines. Where are the dogs?

Something in the ditch catches my eye. It is a Garrett snuff can. I lean forward to pick it up and faint. Not keel over but settle down comfortably propping my head on my bag. The weeds smell like iron.

Where are the dogs?

Here are the dogs. Inside where it is cool.

When I come to, I am lying on the large-dog table in the treatment room of the animal shelter. I feel well but so weak I cannot lift my head. Delicious cool air bathes my forehead. A great blue surgical lamp shines straight down. When my eyes get used to the glare, I notice the dogs, several dozen glossy-coated curs, seated behind grills and watching with interested expressions. This is why the outside runs are empty: the dogs have come inside to enjoy the cool breezes.

Gazing down at me, hands shoved deep in his pockets and fingering coins, stands Victor Charles. I know him without seeing his face. His fat abdomen engages the edge of the table. His belt buckle is to the side. The white duck is soiled by a horizontal streak I’ve seen before. Now I know where the streak comes from. It coincides with the metal edge of the table.

I try to get up.

“Hold it, Doc.” Victor places skilled large-dog hands on my shoulders.

I close my eyes. There is a pleasant sense of being attended, of skills being practiced, strong hands laid on, of another’s clothes rustling nearby.

I open my eyes. The lamp is reflected in one coppery highlight from Victor’s forehead. The rest of his face is blue-black. I notice that his sclerae are lumpy and brown.

“How long have I been here?”

“No more than fifteen minutes, Doc.”

“How did you find me?”

“I saw you sit down out yonder.”

“Were you watching me?”

“Watching you?”

“And you carried me in?”

Victor nods.

I am thinking: it is true. All day I have had the sense of being watched.

“Where’s my bag?”

“Right here, Doc.”

“O.K., Victor. Thank you. I think I’ll sit up.”

He helps me. I am well but weak.

“Eat this, Doc.”

Victor gives me a piece of corn bread and a cold glass of buttermilk. Though the bread is hard and unbuttered, it is very good. I don’t remember anything ever tasting better. The buttermilk slides under the acid.

“Thank you again.”

“You’re welcome.” Victor presses against the table and fingers his coins.

“I’ve got to go.”

“You ought to take better care yourself, Doc. And be more careful where you takes a nap.”

“Why?”

“Crazy folks everywhere now, Doc.”

“Folks? What folks?”

“Folks. You know.”

“You ought to be more careful too, Victor.”

“How’s that, Doc?” Victor, who has been pushing himself off the table with his stomach, stays off.

“I mean who you meet and where you meet, though it’s none of my business.”

“What you talking ‘bout, Doc?”

For some reason all three tiers of dogs start barking.

Presently Victor shouts, “You’ll be all right, Doc. Just rest here a while. You know what you need? Somebody to take care you. Why don’t you move in with your mama, Miss Marva? She be glad to do for you.”

I wait for the dogs to subside.

“You were there at number 11 on the old 18. This morning.”

“What you talking ’bout, Doc?”

“I was there, Victor. On the island. In the pagoda.”

“Oh, you talking about—” Victor begins to shake a loose hand toward the east as if he just remembered.

“What the hell is going on, Victor?”

“Like I told you, Doc—”

“Like you told me! You haven’t told me anything. I saw you, I saw Willard Amadie. Who was the third man?”

“Willard bringing meat for the swamp. Folks going hungry out there, Doc.”

“I saw the deer. Was that all?”

“All? How you say, all?”

“Victor, I heard you. I was sitting in the pagoda.”

“Oh, you talking about—” Again Victor salutes the east.

“Yes. Who was the third man?”

“Him? Doc, they say he mean,” says Victor, laughing.

“They?”

“Everybody. You talk about mean and lowdown!”

“Then what are you laughing about?”

“You, Doc. You something else.”

“Victor, is Willard trying to shoot me?”

“Shoot you! Willard!” Victor falls back.

“You mean somebody else is trying to shoot me?”

“Doc, why in the world anybody want to shoot you? You help folks. Like I tell people, you set up with my auntee when other doctors wouldn’t even come out.”

“You mean somebody is trying to shoot me and you tried to talk them out of it?”

“Doc, look. How long me and you known each other?”

“All our lives.”

“How long did I work for y’all, first for Big Doc, then for Miss Marva clearing land?”

“I don’t know. Twenty years.”

“And didn’t you set up with my auntee many a night before she died?”

“Yes.”

“You think I wouldn’t do the same for you?”

“I think you would. But—”

“Wasn’t I working as a orderly in the hospital last year when they brought you in and didn’t I take care you?”

“Yes, you did.”

“When you said to me, Victor, there’s something crawling on the wall, get it out of here, didn’t I make out like I was throwing it out?”

“Yes.”

Victor is laughing in such a way that I have to smile.

“I couldn’t see but I threw it out anyhow.”

“Yes, you did.”

“You think I wouldn’t tell you right?”

“I think you would.”

“Then, Doc, listen.” Victor comes close again, presses stomach against metal table. “Move in with Miss Marva. She’ll do for you. Miss Marva, she’d love nothing better. I help you move over there, Doc.”

“How come you want me out of my house?”

“I’m worried about you, Doc Look at you. Fainting and falling out in a ditch.”

“Victor, who were you waiting for in the pagoda?”

“Waiting?”

“I heard Willard say: Looks like he’s not coming.”

“Oh yeah. Willard.”

“Was he waiting for me?”

Victor is silent

“Did he or the third man intend to shoot me?”

“Shoot you! Lord, Doc. We just want to talk to you.”

“Well, here I am.”

“That’s what I’m telling you. Move in with your mama.”

“What’s she got to do with it?”

Silence.

“What about that other stuff?”

“What other stuff?”

“All that stuff about the Kaydettes, the doctors, and the school.”

“Doc, all in the world I want to do is help you. You say to me, do this, that, or the other, and I’ll do it.”

Victor’s his old self, good-natured, reserved, with just the faintest risibility agleam in his muddy eyes.

“How you feeling, Doc?”

“I think I can make it.”

But when I stand up, one knee jumps out

“Whoa, look out now. Why don’t you stay here till you are stronger? Ain’t nobody going to bother you here.”

“I got to get on up the hill.”

“I was going up there too. I’ll carry your bag — no wonder, Lord, what you got in here? Just hang on to Victor.”

We are near the top. Victor wants me to hang on to him, but I don’t feel like it.

“You never did like anybody to help you, did you, Doc?”

I stop, irritated with Victor and because the faintness is coming back. Flowers of darkness begin to bloom on the sidewalk.

We sit on the wooden steps of an abandoned Chinese grocery angled into the hill. Again I invite Victor to go back — I know he’s along just to help me. He refuses.

“You’ve been away, haven’t you, Victor?” I say to hide my irritation.

“I been back for two years, Doc.”

“Where did you go?”

“I lived in Boston and worked in the shipyard. I made seven fifty an hour.”

“Why did you come back?”

“You know something, Doc? You don’t trust anybody, do you?”

I look at Victor with astonishment.

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing, Doc. I know that when you ask me a question like that you really want to know.”

I blink. “You’re humbugging me, aren’t you, Victor?”

“No, Doc. You know what I remember? You asked me why I came back. I don’t know. But I remember something. I remembered in Boston and when I did, you were in it. You remember the shrimp jubilees?”

“Yes.”

“The word would come that the shrimp were running and everybody would go to the coast at night and as far as you could see up and down the coast there were gas lamps of people catching shrimp, setting up all night with their chirren running around and their picnics, you remember? And long before that me and you learned to throw a cast-net holding it in your teeth.”

“Yes. Those were the days.”

“Not for you, Doc.”

I, who am seldom astonished, am astonished twice in a minute. “What do you mean?”

“You never did like — you didn’t even like the jubilees. You were always … to yourself.”

I shrug. “Are you telling me you came back because of the jubilees?”

“I don’t know. I just wanted to come back. You know, I been a deacon at Starlight Baptist for twenty years.”

“I know.”

“Mr. Leroy, though, he used to love the jubilees.”

“So you and Leroy Ledbetter like the jubilees and that’s why you came back?”

“Not exactly. But I remember when everybody used to come to the jubilees. I mean everybody. You and Mr. Leroy came one night, you and your family on one side of me and he on the other.”

“In the first place the shrimp don’t run any more. In the second place, even if they did, Leroy Ledbetter wouldn’t be next to you now.”

“That’s right, but you know something, Doc?”

“What?”

“You ought to trust people more. You ought to trust in the good Lord, pick yourself out a nice lady like Miss Doris, have chirren and a fireside bright and take up with your old friends and enjoy yourself in the summertime.”

“For Christ’s sake.”

“What say, Doc?” Victor, who is slightly deaf, cups an ear.

“You kill me.”

“How’s that?”

“Here’re you complaining about me and acting like you and Leroy Ledbetter are sharing the good life. Hell, Leroy Ledbetter, your fellow Baptist, wants no part of you. And one reason you’re living in this pigpen is that Leroy is on the council and has turned down housing five times.”

“That’s the truth!” says Victor, laughing. “And it’s pitiful.”

“You think it’s funny?”

My only firm conclusion after twenty years of psychiatry: nothing is crazier than life. Here is a Baptist deacon telling me, a Catholic, to relax and enjoy festivals. Here’s a black Southerner making common cause — against me! — with a white Southerner who wouldn’t give him the time of day.

That’s nothing. Once I was commiserating with a patient, an old man, a Jewish refugee from the Nazis — he’d got out with his skin but lost his family to Auschwitz — so I said something conventional against the Germans. The old fellow bristled like a Prussian and put me down hard and spoke of the superiority of German universities, German science, German music, German philosophy. My God, do you suppose the German Jews would have gone along with Hitler if he had let them? Nothing is quite like it’s cracked up to be. And nobody is crazier than people.

“It would be funny if it wasn’t so pitiful,” says Victor. He looks at me from the corner of his eye. Something has occurred to him. “Do you think you could speak to Mr. Leroy?”

“About what?”

“About — Never mind. It’s too late.”

“Victor, what in the hell is going on?”

He is shaking his head. “It’s so pitiful. You would think people with that much in common would want to save what they have.”

“Are you talking about you and Leroy?”

“Now everything’s got to go and everybody loses.”

I rise unsteadily. “Everybody?”

Victor jumps up, takes my arm. “Not you, Doc. All you got to do is move in with your mama. She’ll do for you.”

Victor takes me as far as the Little Napoleon. There I make a mistake, a small one with small consequences but a mistake nevertheless, which I’d ordinarily not have made. But it has been a strange day. Hanging on to Victor, I did not let him go until we were inside. I should have either dismissed him outside or held on to him longer. As it was, letting go Victor when the bar was within reach, I let go a second too early, so that Leroy Ledbetter, turning toward me in the same second, did not see me let go but saw Victor just beside me and so registered a violation. Not even that: a borderline violation because Victor was not even at the bar but still a step away. What with his white attendant’s clothes and if he had been a step closer to me, it would have been clear that he was attending me in some capacity or other. A step or two in the other direction and he’d have been past the end of the bar and in the loading traffic where Negroes often pass carrying sacks of oysters, Cokes, and such. As it was, he seemed to be standing, if not at the bar, then one step too close and Leroy, turning, saw him in the split second before Victor started to leave, Victor in the act of backing up when Leroy said as his eyes went past him, said not even quite to Victor, “The window’s there,” nodding toward the service window opening into the alley; even then giving Victor the benefit of the doubt and not even allowing the possibility that Victor was coming to the bar for a drink, but the possibility only that he had come to buy his flat pint of muscatel and for some reason had not known or had forgotten about the service window. In the same second that he speaks, Leroy knows better, for in that second Victor steps back and turns toward me and I can see that Leroy sees that Victor is with me, sees it even before I can say, too late, “Thank you, Victor, for helping me up the hill,” and signifies his error by a pass of his rag across the bar, a ritual glance past Victor at the storm cloud above the saloon door, a swinging back of his eyes past Victor and a saying in Victor’s direction, “Looks like we going to get it yet,” said almost to Victor but not quite because it had not been quite a violation so did not quite warrant a correction thereof. Victor nods, not quite acknowledging because total acknowledgment is not called for, withholding perhaps 20 percent acknowledgment (2 percent too much?). He leaves by the side door.

A near breach, an insignificant incident. A stranger observing the incident would not have been aware that anything had happened at all, much less that in the space of two seconds there had occurred a three-cornered transaction entailing an assignment of zones, a near infraction of zoning, a calling attention to the infraction, a triple simultaneous perception of the mistake, a correction thereof, and an acknowledgment of that — a minor breach with no consequences other than these: an artery beats for a second in Leroy’s temple, there is a stiffness about Victor’s back as he leaves, and there comes in my throat a metallic taste.

It is not even worth mentioning even though Victor withholds perhaps 2 percent of the acknowledgment that was due and his back is 2 percent stiffer than it might be.

“What’s wrong with you, Tom?”

“I’m all right now. It was hot in the Hollow. I got dizzy.”

He gives me my toddy. I peel an egg.

“Is that your lunch? No wonder you fainted. And you a doctor.”

I look at the mirror. Behind the bar towers a mahogany piece, a miniature cathedral, an altarpiece, an intricate business of shelves for bottles, cupboards, stained-glass windows, and a huge mirror whose silvering is blighted with an advancing pox, clusters of vacuoles, expanding naughts. Most of the customers of the Little Napoleon have long since removed to the lounges of the suburbs, the nifty refrigerated windowless sealed-up Muzaked hideaways, leaving stranded here a small band of regulars and old-timers, some of whom have sat here in the same peaceable gloom open to the same twilight over the same swinging doors that swung their way straight through Prohibition and saw Kingfish Huey P. Long promise to make every man a king on the courthouse lawn across the street. Next door Gone with the Wind had its final run at the old Majestic Theater.

The vines are sprouting here in earnest. A huge wisteria with a tree-size trunk holds the Little Napoleon like a rock in a root. The building strains and creaks in its grip.

The storm is closer, the sun gone, and it is darker than dusk. The martins are skimming in from the swamp, sliding down the dark glassy sky like flecks of soot. Soon the bullbats will be thrumming.

Leroy Ledbetter stands by companionably. Like me he is seventh-generation Anglo-Saxon American, but unlike me he is Protestant, countrified, sweet-natured. He’s the sort of fellow, don’t you know, who if you run in a ditch or have a flat tire shows up to help you.

We were partners and owners of the old Paradise Bowling Lanes until the riot five years ago. In fact, the riot started when Leroy wouldn’t let a bushy-haired Bantu couple from Tougaloo College have an alley. I wasn’t there at the time. When Leroy told me about it later, an artery beat at his temple and the same metallic taste came in my throat. If I had been there…. But on the other hand, was I glad that I had not been there?

“Lucky I had my learner ready,” Leroy told me.

“Your learner?” Then I saw his forearm flex and his big fist clench. “You mean you—”

“The only way to learn them is upside the head.”

“You mean you—?” The taste in my mouth was like brass.

Where did the terror come from? Not from the violence; violence gives release from terror. Not from Leroy’s wrongness, for if he were altogether wrong, an evil man, the matter would be simple and no cause for terror. No, it came from Leroy’s goodness, that he is a decent, sweet-natured man who would help you if you needed help, go out of his way and bind up a stranger’s wounds. No, the terror comes from the goodness and what lies beneath, some fault in the soul’s terrain so deep that all is well on top, evil grins like good, but something shears and tears deep down and the very ground stirs beneath one’s feet.

“Ellen was looking for you,” Leroy is saying, leaning close but not too close, a good drinking friend. He’s fixed himself a toddy. “She’s got some patients.”

“That’s impossible. I don’t see patients Saturday afternoon.”

“You’re a doctor, aren’t you?”

Leroy, like Ellen, believes that right is right and in doing right. You’re a doctor, so you do what a doctor is supposed to do. Doctors cure sick people.

The terror comes from piteousness, from good gone wrong and not knowing it, from Southern sweetness and cruelty, God why do I stay here? In Louisiana people still stop and help strangers. Better to live in New York where life is simple, every man’s your enemy, and you walk with your eyes straight ahead.

Leroy believes that doctors do wonders, transplant hearts, that’s the way of it, right? Isn’t that what doctors are supposed to do? He knows about my lapsometer, believes it will do what I say it will do — fathom the deep abscess in the soul of Western man — yes, that’s what doctors do, so what? Then do it. Doctors see patients. Then see patients.

“Looks like it’s going to freshen up,” says Leroy. We drink toddies, eat eggs, and watch the martins come skimming home, sliding down the glassy sky.

In the dark mirror there is a dim hollow-eyed Spanish Christ. The pox is spreading on his face. Vacuoles are opening in his chest. It is the new Christ, the spotted Christ, the maculate Christ, the sinful Christ. The old Christ died for our sins and it didn’t work, we were not reconciled. The new Christ shall reconcile man with his sins. The new Christ lies drunk in a ditch. Victor Charles and Leroy Ledbetter pass by and see him. “Victor, do you love me?” “Sho, Doc.” “Leroy, do you love me?” “Cut it out, Tom, you know better than to ask that.” “Then y’all help me.” “O.K., Doc.” They laugh and pick up the new Christ, making a fireman’s carry, joining four hands. They love the new Christ and so they love each other.

“You all right now?” Leroy asks, watching me eat eggs and drink my toddy.

“I’m fine.”

“You better get on over there.”

“Yes.”

I leave cheerfully, knowing full well that Ellen must be gone, that I shall be free to sit in my doorway, listen to Don Giovanni, sip Early Times, and watch the martins come home.

The back doors of the Little Napoleon and my father’s old office let on to the ox-lot in the center of the block. It is getting dark. The thunderhead is upon us. A sour rain-drop splashes on my nose. It smells of trees. The piles of brickbats scattered in the weeds are still warm. A dusty trumpet vine has taken the loading ramp of Sears and the fire escape of the old Majestic Theater. In the center of the ox-lot atop a fifteen-foot pole sits my father’s only enduring creation: a brass-and-cedar martin hotel with rooms for a hundred couples. Overhead the martins wheel and utter their musical burr and rattle. They are summer residents. Already they are flocking with their young, preparing for their flight to the Amazon basin.

I sit at my desk and listen to Don Giovanni and watch the martins through the open door. From the lower desk drawer, where I also keep the free samples of Bayonne-rayon Skintone organs, I fetch a fresh bottle of Early Times.

My office is exactly as my father left it twenty years ago: three rooms, one behind the other like a shotgun cottage, but with a hall alongside, my office at the rear, treatment room in the middle, and at the front the waiting room furnished with the same sprung green wicker and even the same magazines: the Ford Times, National Geographic, the Knights of Columbus magazine, and the S A E Record (my father was an S A E).

The offices are dark. No sign of Ellen, my nurse, and no patient in the waiting room. A sigh of relief and a long happy evening.

No such luck.

A half hour of happiness, the fresh sour evening, the gathering storm, a warm toddy, and the singing god-like devilish music of Don Giovanni and—bang.

Bang up front, the door slams, and here comes Ellen clop-clopping down the hall.

It seems I’ve got not one but three patients. They went away all right, but they’ve come back. Ellen told them: don’t worry, she’d find me.

I sigh and console myself: I should be able to polish them off in thirty minutes — and do right by them, Ellen! Leroy! Hippocrates! — and get back to my researches. I’ve the strongest feeling that the second breakthrough is imminent, that if I wait and be still and listen, it will come to me, the final refinement of my invention that will make it the perfect medicine. I’ve the strongest feeling that the solution is under my nose, one of those huge simple ideas that are so big you can’t see them for being too close.

“Good heavens, Chief, where’ve you been? I’ve been looking for you all day.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why have you been looking for me? Today is Saturday.”

I lean back in my chair and watch Ellen sadly as she picks up the fifth of Early Times and puts it back in the drawer of organs. Then she rinses out my toddy glass, closes the back door, turns off Mozart, pops a chlorophyll tablet in my mouth, wets her thumb with her tongue and smooths my eyebrows with firm smoothings like a mother. My eyebrows feel wet and cool.

Ellen Oglethorpe is a beautiful but tyrannical Georgia Presbyterian. A ripe Georgia persimmon not a peach, she fairly pops the buttons of her nurse’s uniform with her tart ripeness. She burgeons with marriageable Presbyterianism. It somehow happens that the strict observance of her religion gives her leave to be free with her own person. Her principles allow her a kind of chaste wantonness. She touches me, leans against me, puts spit on me. I shudder with horrible pleasure and pleasurable horror. Caught up by her strong female urgings, one to mother, one to marry, one to be a girl-child and lean against you, she muses and watches and is prodigal with herself — like an eleven-year-old who stands between your legs, eyes watching your eyes, elbows and knees engaging you in the lap, anywhere, each touch setting off in you horrid girl-child tingles. She doesn’t know how close is close.

Now she stands in front of me even closer than usual, hands behind her. I have to look up. Her face is tilted back, the bones under her cheeks winged and wide as if the sculptor had spread out the alar ridges with two sure thumb thrusts. The short downy upper lip is lifted clear of the lower by its tendon. Her face, foreshortened, is simple and clear and scrubbed and peach-mottled, its beauty fortuitous like that of a Puritan woman leaning over her washtub and the blood going despite her to her face.

“Look, Ellen, it’s Saturday. What are you doing here?”

“Not an ordinary Saturday.”

“No?”

“It’s your birthday.”

And what she’s hiding behind her is a present. She hands it to me. I feel a prickle of irritation. My birthday is but one more occasion for her tending to me, soliciting me, enlisting me. Yes, it is my birthday. I am forty-five. As I unwrap it, she comes round and leans on my chair arm and breathes on me.

It is the sort of present only a woman would buy. A gift set of Hell-for-Leather pre-shave and after-shave lotion. Through the chair arm comes the push of her heedless body weight. Her sweet breath comes through her parted lips. There is nothing to do but open a bottle. It smells like cloves.

“We’ve got customers, Chief.”

Though she is an excellent nurse, I wish she would not call me Chief and herself my girl Friday.

Forty-five. It is strange how little one changes. The psychologists are all wrong about puberty. Puberty changes nothing. This morning I woke with exactly the same cosmic sexual-religious longing I woke with when I was ten years old. Nothing changes but accidentals: your toes rotate, showing more skin. Every molecule in your body has been replaced but you are exactly the same.

The scientists are wrong: man is not his own juices but a vortex, a traveling suck in his juices.

Ellen pats some Hell-for-Leather on me.

“How do you like it, Chief?”

“Very much,” I say, eyes watering with cloves.

Ellen, though she is a strict churchgoer and a moral girl, does not believe in God. Rather does she believe in the Golden Rule and in doing right. On the whole she is embarrassed by the God business. But she does right. She doesn’t need God. What does God have to do with being honest, hard-working, chaste, upright, unselfish, etcetera. I on the other hand believe in God, the Jews, Christ, the whole business. Yet I don’t do right. I am a Renaissance pope, an immoral believer. Between the two of us we might have saved Christianity. Instead we lost it.

“Are you ready now, Chief?”

“Ready for what?”

“You’ve got two patients. Or rather three. But two are together.”

“Who?”

“There’s Mr. Ives and Mr. and Mrs. Tennis.”

“Good God. Who is Mr. Ives?”

“You know. He’s an old patient of yours.”

“Wait a minute. Isn’t he from Gerry Rehab over in Fedville?”

“Yes.”

“Then what’s he doing here?”

“He wanted to see you.”

“He’s the patient who’s up for The Pit Monday, isn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“I still don’t understand how he got here.”

“He wanted to see you. I brought him.”

“You?”

“Don’t forget, Chief, I used to work over there.”

She did. She even took care of me in the acute ward when I was strung out, bound by the wrists, yet in the end free and happy as a bird, by turns lustful and exalted, winging it like a martin, inducing scientific theories, remembering everything, quoting whole pages of Gerard Manley Hopkins:

Glory be to God for dappled things—

For skies of couple-color as a brinded cow;

For rose moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls;

and inviting her into my bed, her of all people.

Nevertheless, when I left the hospital, she came with me and set up as my nurse. Toward me she feels strong Presbyterian mother-smoothings.

“Did Mr. Ives want to come or was it your idea?”

“My idea?”

“Did you think I needed a little briefing before appearing in The Pit?”

“Tch. What do you mean?”

“Are you afraid Dr. Brown is going to beat me?”

“He can’t hold a candle to you as a doctor.”

“But you were afraid?”

“Afraid? Oh yes, I’m afraid for Mr. Ives. Oh, Chief, do you think he’ll be sent to the Happy Isles?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do they really throw the Switch there?”

“Yes.”

“No!”

“You don’t think they ought to?”

“Oh no, Chief!”

“Why not?” I ask her curiously.

“It’s not right.”

“I see.”

“I think Mr. Ives is putting on.”

“But if he were not?”

“Oh, Chief, why do you have anything to do with those people?”

“What people?”

“Those foul-mouthed students and that nasty Dr. Brown.”

“It’s all in good fun. End-of-year thing.”

“You’re much too fine to associate with them.”

“Hm. Well, don’t worry. I have other fish to fry.”

“You mean you’re not going to The Pit?”

I shrug. “What difference does it make? By the way, what’s Brown’s diagnosis of Mr. Ives?”

She reads: “Senile psychopathy and mutism.”

“And his recommendation?”

“The Permanent Separation Center at Jekyll, Georgia. Doesn’t that mean the Happy Isles?”

I nod.

“And the Euphoric On-Switch?”

“Yes. But you think the diagnosis is wrong?”

“Because you did.”

“I did? Well, let’s see him.”

She wheels him in. Mr. Ives sits slumped in a folding chair, a little bald-headed monkey of a man, bright monkey eyes snapping at me. His scalp is a smooth cap of skin, heavily freckled, fitted over his low wrinkled brow. The backs of his hands are covered with liver spots and sun scabs. His eyes fairly hop with — what? rage or risibility? Is he angry or amused or just plain crazy? I leaf through his chart. He was born in Sherwood, Tennessee, worked for forty years as controller in a Hartford insurance company, lost his wife, retired to Louisiana, lived in the woods in a camper, dug up potsherds in a Choctaw burial mound, got sick, was transferred to a Tampa Senior Citizens’ compound, where he misbehaved and was referred to Gerry Rehab here. I remember him from the old days. He used to call me for one complaint and another and we’d sit in his camper and play checkers and through the open door watch the wild turkeys come up and feed. He was lonely and liked to talk. Now he’s mute.

I get up and open the back door. Ellen frowns.

“What’s the trouble, Mr. Ives?”

He doesn’t reply but he’s already looking past me at the martins scudding past and turning upwind for a landing. Gusts of warm air sour with rain blow in the open doorway.

“Ecccc,” says Mr. Ives.

The old man can’t or won’t speak but he lets me examine him. Physically he’s in good order, chest clear, abdomen soft, blood pressure normal, eyegrounds nominal. His prostate is as round and elastic as a handball. Neurological signs normal.

I look at his chart “… Did on August 5 last, expose himself and defecate on Flirtation Walk.” Hm. He could still suffer from senile dementia.

I look at him. The little monkey eyes snap.

“Do you remember playing checkers out at the mound?”

The eyes snap.

“You never beat me, Mr. Ives.” I never beat him.

No rise out of him. His eyes slide past me to the martins rolling and rattling around the hotel.

“He doesn’t look senile to me,” I tell Ellen. I take out my lapsometer and do a complete profile from cortex to coeliac plexus. Ellen jots down the readings as I call them out.

“No wonder he won’t talk,” I say, flipping back through his stack of wave patterns.

“Won’t or can’t?” Ellen asks me.

“Oh, he can. No organic lesion at all. Look at his cortical activity: humming away like a house afire. He’s as sharp as you or I.”

“Then why—?”

“And he’s reading me right now, aren’t you, Mr. Ives?”

“Ecccc,” says Mr. Ives.

“You asked me why he won’t talk,” I tell her loudly. “He’s too damn mad to talk. His red nucleus is red indeed. Look at that.”

“You mean—”

“I mean he doesn’t trust you or me or anybody.”

“Who’s he mad at?”

“Who are you mad at?” I ask Mr. Ives.

His eyes snap. I focus the lapsometer at his red nucleus.

“At me?” No change.

“At Communists?” No change.

“At Negroes?” No change.

“At Jews?” No change.

“At students?” No change.

“Hm. It’s not ordinary Knothead anger,” I tell Ellen.

“How do you know he understands you at all?” asks Ellen.

“Watch this.” I aim in at the medio-temporal region, near Brodmann 28, the locus of concrete memory. “Do you remember our playing checkers in your camper ten years ago on summer evenings like this?”

The needle swings. The eyes snap, but merrily now.

“Chief!” cries Ellen. “You’ve done it!”

“Done what?”

“You’ve proved your point!”

“I haven’t proved anything. He still won’t talk or can’t, won’t walk or can’t. All I’ve done is make a needle move.”

“But, Chief—! You’re a hundred years ahead of EEG.”

“I can’t prove it. I can’t treat him. This thing is purely diagnostic and I can’t even prove that.” Mr. Ives and I watch the last of the martins come home. “I feel like a one-eyed man in the valley of the blind.”

“You’ll prove it, Chief,” says Ellen confidently. She tells me a story about a famous Presbyterian (she said) named Robert the Bruce who sat discouraged in a cave and watched a spider try seven times to span the cave with its web before it succeeded. “Remember Robert the Bruce!”

“O.K. Who’s the next patient?”

“Mr. and Mrs. Ted Tennis.”

“Are you going to take Mr. Ives back to the hospital?”

“No. They’ll send for him.”

“Very well. Goodbye, Mr. Ives. Don’t worry. You’re going to be all right.”

He takes my hand with his old wiry grip. I can’t understand why he won’t talk. His prefrontal gyrus is as normal as mine.

Ted ’n Tanya are next. They must have come directly from Love. It is a bit of a surprise that they’ve come here, since his former complaint of impotence had been pretty well cleared up by my prescription of an occasional tramp through the swamp, so successfully in fact that only today I’ve learned that Ted ’n Tanya have become star performers in Love.

They come in together and sit opposite me across the desk. Ellen closes the door and turns on the lights and leaves discreetly. Hm. Have they come to gloat, to tell me of the superiority of Love Clinic to the swamp? But no. They look glum.

But Ted is more than ever the alert young crop-headed narrow-necked Oppenheimer. Tanya is an angular brunette who has smoldering violet eyes, one of which is cocked, and wears a ringlet of hair at each temple like a gypsy. They love each other, do Ted ’n Tanya, and, though heathen, are irrevocably monogamous and faithful.

That much I know. Ted brings me up to date. The swamp treatment of impotence did indeed work for a while but wore off after a few months, as I had told Ted it might. Whereupon they applied for treatment at Love, where they were put in a Skinner box and conditioned so successfully that they became one of the first volunteer couples in the new program of “multiple-subject interaction.” A breakthrough. Here too, encouraged by Stryker, Dr. Helga Heine, and Father Kev Kevin, they succeeded admirably.

“I understand that. The only thing that puzzles me is why you’re here at all.” Making sure Ellen is up front, I open the drawer of organs and recover my Early Times. Ted ’n Tanya don’t mind my drinking.

“I know,” says Ted glumly.

“Weren’t you over at Love today?” I ask them, pouring a little toddy.

“Yes,” whispers Tanya, one lovely violet eye fixed on me, the other drifting out a bit as if it were keeping track of my second self, my pneuma.

“Well?” They’re sitting side by side on a bench, like children in the principal’s office. “How did it go today in Love?”

Ted ’n Tanya look at each other. “It didn’t,” says Ted.

“It hasn’t for weeks,” whispers Tanya.

“Hm. I expect the effect of the conditioning is wearing off too, though to tell you the truth I’ve always suspected that the good results came more from the sympathetic third party, the observer, rather than—”

“Exactly!” cries Ted.

Puzzled, I wait.

Again Ted ’n Tanya exchange glances. “Shall we tell him, Tanya?” She nods.

“Tell me what?”

Ted leans forward, big Oppenheimer head bobbing on its slender neck. “That we never did succeed at home.”

“You mean—”

“I mean even at the peak of our performances at Love, we were never able to achieve orgasm at home, except after floundering around the swamp, but even that wore off.”

“Pity. Would you care for a drink?”

“No thanks, Tom.”

We fall silent. The storm is closer. Thunder rumbles.

I sigh and open the drawer. “Well, I suppose you’re here for a Bayonne-rayon member.”

But Ted is shaking his head. “That’s not the idea, Tom.”

“You don’t want a member?”

“No.”

“Then what can I do for you?” I am genuinely puzzled.

Ted leans forward. “Tom, you were right in thinking that it was the presence of the sympathetic observer that was crucial.”

“Yes?”

“The trouble with the observers in Love Clinic is precisely that, that they are too clinical.”

“Yes?”

“We thought perhaps if we could enlist the services of an observer-therapist team who were more sympathetic and in surroundings less clinical.”

“Hm.”

“When we put the two ingredients together, friend plus professional, naturally our thoughts turned in this direction.”

“What direction?”

“To you and Miss Oglethorpe.”

“You want me and Miss Oglethorpe …”

“We thought we could use your waiting room with that wonderful campy old couch, and you and Miss Oglethorpe could stay in the examining room with the door cracked and spy a bit, to add piquancy to the observer factor.”

“Miss Oglethorpe is a Presbyterian.”

“So what? Don’t Presbyterian nurses treat patients?”

“I expect she’s gone home.”

“No, she said she’d wait.”

I spill my drink. “You mean you asked her?”

“She said anything you wanted to do was all right with her.” Ted turns to Tanya. “Do you know what that couch reminds me of?”

“I know, I know.”

“The porch at the old dorm in Lansing.”

“I know, I know,” says Tanya, looking at Ted, but her out eye strays toward me.

“I’m feeling like a kid, wow,” says Ted, rising. “I’ll go get Miss Oglethorpe.”

“Wait,” I say.

“Yes?”

“Why Miss Oglethorpe? Why the two of us? Why not me?”

Ted frowns impatiently. “Studies in Palo Alto have shown that when observers are of both sexes, successful reconditioning increases by sixty-two percent.”

“Yes. Hm. But I fear today is out of the question. I’m tied up.” The prospect of watching Ted ’n Tanya make love is lugubrious enough, but it is the enlisting of Ellen Oglethorpe that makes me nervous. In fact, I’ve broken out in a cold sweat.

“You couldn’t give us half an hour, Tom?” asks Tanya, patting a gypsy ringlet.

“I’m afraid not.”

“What about Wednesday?” asks Ted.

“Yes!” I say, seizing at the straw. By Wednesday anything could happen. The world could end. “Check with Ellen for a new appointment.”

“Dear?” Ted stretches out both hands to Tanya, lifts her up. Ted is smiling. Two spots of color grow in Tanya’s cheeks. They exit, arms about each other like Rudolfo and Mimi.

I sit in the dark wondering where Ellen is. The storm breaks at last. My lapsometer gleams in the lightning flashes. If only … If only my lapsometer could treat as well as diagnose, I wouldn’t be caught up in these farces.

The back door is open. The tape rolls. Don Giovanni begins his descent into hell. A bolt of lightning strikes a transformer with a great crack. Sparks fly. The ox-lot is filled with a rinsing blue-white light Trees jump backward. The lights go out.

Ellen comes in to tell me she is leaving and that someone else wants to see me.

“I’m not seeing any more patients.”

“I think he’s a detail man. He said he wouldn’t keep you long.”

“But—”

“Don’t forget, Chief, your mother expects you tomorrow.”

“What? Wait—”

But she’s gone. In the lightning flashes a man seems to come forward by jumps. He carries an outsize attaché case like a drug salesman.

“Look, I see detail men on weekdays.”

But he’s not a detail man.

“Art Immelmann is the name,” he says, sticking his hand across the desk. “Funding is my game.”

“Very good, Art, but—” I notice gloomily that he’s sat down. Did he say Immerman, or Immelmann like the German ace and inventor of the Immelmann turn?

“It’s a new concept in funding, Doctor.” Art is shouting over the storm as he takes papers out of his attaché case. He frowns at the open door but I don’t feel tike closing it,

I try to turn on the tights to see him better, but the current is off. The lightning flashes, however, are almost continuous. He’s an odd-looking fellow, curiously old-fashioned. Indeed, with his old-style flat-top haircut, white shirt with short sleeves, which even have vestigial cuff buttons, and neat dark trousers, he looks like a small-town businessman in the old Auto Age, one of those wiry old-young fifty-year-olds, perhaps a Southern Bell manager, who used to go to Howard Johnson’s every Tuesday for Rotary luncheon. His face is both youthful and lined. The flat-top makes a tangent with the crown of his skull, giving the effect of a tonsure. Is it an early bald spot or a too-close flat-top?

When he leans across the desk to shake hands, air pushes ahead of him bearing to my nostrils a heavy complex odor, the intricate canceled smell of sweat neutralized by a strong deodorant.

“A lovely little lady, Doc,” says the stranger, nodding at the closed door.

“Who? What’s that?” I say sharply, frowning with irritation. Did he wink at me or is it the effect of the lightning?

“Very high-principled and efficient, yet most attractive. Most I’d like to beat you out of her.”

“How—! What in hell do you mean?” At a loss for words — I almost said, How dare you? — I jump up from the chair.

“No offense! Take it easy, Doc! Ha ha, made you come up for air, didn’t I?”

“What do you want?”

“I only meant that I admire your nurse and wish I had someone as good to assist me in my own researches. What is the saying: All is fair in love and war and hiring cooks?”

“Are you selling something?” My hair prickles with an odd, almost pleasurable dislike.

“Not selling today, Doc. We’re giving it away.” With that, Art hands over what appear to be application forms. “Don’t worry!” He laughs heartily. “They’re already filled in.”

I haven’t been listening carefully. The papers seem to jump back and forth in the lightning. “What are these for?” (Why don’t I throw him out?)

“For the money you need.”

“Money? Who are you representing, Art?”

“I’m one of those liaison fellows from Washington.”

“Liaison? Between whom?”

“Between the public and private sectors.”

“What does that mean?”

“Ha ha, you might well ask.” His young-old face, I notice, goes instantly serious between laughs. “In this case it is between the National Institute of Mental Health in the public sector and the Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller foundations in the private sector.”

“Good.”

“It does sound impressive, doesn’t it?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Actually, I’m a glorified errand boy.”

“Is that so?” I say gloomily, trying to read my watch.

“We of N.I.M.H. and”—for a moment his words are lost in a clap of thunder—“you may have come up with the most important integrative technique of our time.”

“What’s that?” I say. The wind shifts and a fine mist blows in the doorway. There is a smell of wet warm brick.

“You’ve done it, Dr. More!”

“Done what?”

“You’ve come up with a technique that maximizes and unites hardware and software capabilities.”

“How’s that?” I ask inattentively. What to make of this fellow who talks like a bureaucrat but looks — and smells — like a hard-working detail man? “What technique are you talking about?”

“The More Qualitative-Quantitative Ontological Lapsometer,” says Art Immelmann, laughing. “What a mouthful. Everybody at the office calls it the MOQUOL. Sounds like a hole in the ground, doesn’t it?”

I set down my toddy. My hand, feeling light and tremulous, levitates. I put it in my pocket.

“Surprised, eh, Doc?”

After a moment I decide to fix a drink. Though my hand feels normal, I decide to hold the glass in both hands.

“What I don’t understand is how you knew about it.”

“Think about it a moment Doc, and you’ll see.”

I see in the next lightning flash. Either the Director has approved my article, or Brain has accepted it or both, and either or both have leaked the news to N.I.M.H.

“You’ve won, Doctor,” says Art gravely. Again the hand comes across the desk. We shake hands. Again comes the intricate canceled sweat-and-deodorant smell.

I’ve won.

Now I know how Einstein felt when the English astronomers flashed the news from Venezuela that sure enough, Arcturus’s light had taken a little bend as it swept past the sun.

Victory.

I sit back and listen to the steady rain and the peepers turning up in the ox-lot What to do now? I recall my uncle’s advice: guard against the sadness of hubris. How to do that? By going to the Little Napoleon and having a drink with Leroy Ledbetter.

“We’re interested in funding truly innovative techniques. Yours is truly innovative.”

“Yes.”

“You’ve got your own built-in logistical factor. The results, moreover, are incremental.”

“Yes.” What in hell is he talking about? It doesn’t matter. I’ve won.

“You are aware of the national implications?”

“Yes, I am.”

“For the first time the behavioral sciences have a tool for dealing with the heretofore immeasurable and intangible stresses that are rending the national fabric.”

“Yes.”

“Dr. More.” Again Art stands up, not to shake hands again I hope, no, but again there is the heavy mollified protein smell.

“Yes?”

“We’re prepared to fund an interdisciplinary task force and implement a crash program that will put a MOQUOL in the hands of every physician and social scientist in the U.S. within one year’s time.”

“You are?” Why don’t I feel excited? My eyes don’t blink.

“As you know better than I, your MOQUOL has a multilevel capacity. It is operative at behavioral, political, and philosophical levels. I would even go so far as to say this, Doc—” Art pauses to hawk phlegm and adjust his crotch with an expert complicated pat.

“What’s that, Art?”

“If the old U. S. of A. doesn’t go down the drain in the next year, it will be thanks to your MOQUOL.”

“Well, I wouldn’t say that, but—”

In the last flash of lightning, a legal-size blue-jacketed document appears under my nose and a pen is pointed at my breastbone.

“What’s this, Art?”

“A detail. A bureaucratic first step, ha ha.” Art laughs his instant laugh and goes as sober as a mortician.

“Hey, this is a transfer of patent rights!”

“Boilerplate, Doc. Standard procedure for any contract with the private sector. And look at your return!” Expertly he flips pages. “Seventy-five percent!”

“Yeah, but I mean, goddamn, Art—!” I begin, but Art Immelmann turns white and falls back a step.

“Pardon. I only meant to say that the money doesn’t interest me.” Art must be a Holy Name man or a hard-shell Baptist.

“I told them you’d say that. But let’s don’t worry about it. The important thing is to get the MOQUOL distributed in time.”

“Well, I’ve already got a hundred production models.”

“Where?” Art nearly comes across the desk.

I sit back in surprise. “In a safe place. Don’t worry.”

“You don’t want to leave something like MOQUOL lying around. Doc.”

“I know.” I tell him of my plans, my appointment with the Director Monday, the submission of my article to Brain. “I just don’t see the necessity of signing over my patent rights.”

“You know, you could be disappointed, Doc,” says Art thoughtfully but beginning, I see with relief, to put the application forms back in his case.

“Well, I’m hopeful.”

“You know how people resist a really radical innovation.”

“Yes, but this thing works, Art.”

“I know. Tell you what, Doc,” says Art cheerfully, snapping up his attaché case. “I’ll drop in next week.”

“Cant the funding be arranged without signing over control of the MOQUOL?”

“No doubt. But I’ll be seeing you in a day or two. Just in case.”

“In case of what?”

“In case you hit a snag. You never know about people, Doc,” says Art mysteriously.

“Very true,” I say, anxious only to get rid of him and get over to the Little Napoleon, a snug and friendly haven in any storm.

Some seconds pass before I realize that Art left by the back door, striking out across the dark ox-lot. I shrug. Perhaps he’s taking the short cut to the old Southern Hotel, where a few drummers and detail men still put up.

But how would he know about the short cut?