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

At the Director’s office to hear the good news about my article and invention 11:00 A.M. / MONDAY, JULY 3

THIRTY MINUTES EARLY FOR MY APPOINTMENT. Quite nervous. But why? My article speaks for itself. The evidence is there. My invention works.

There is time to go the roundabout way through Love Clinic in hopes of catching a glimpse of Moira, my love.

No one is in but Father Kev Kevin, who is sitting at the vaginal computer reading a book, Christianity Without God.

“Is it good?”

“What? Oh. Yes, this is where it’s at.”

He jumps up and greets me with suspicious cordiality, flashing his handsome Pat O’Brien grin and shaking my hand with both of his just as he used to when he was chaplain for the Knights of Columbus. He must have bad news. He does.

“Are you looking for Miss Schaffner?”

“Yes.”

“I’m afraid she’s no longer with us,” said Father Kev Kevin, rocking back on his heels in his old clerical style.

“Where is she?”

“She’s working over in Geriatrics with Dr. Brown.”

“Very good,” I say, but my heart gives an ugly leap sideways. But really, why should I be jealous? Buddy Brown is a licentious man, but Moira knows this. Undoubtedly it is the hapless old folk who interest her and whom she wants to help.

“Thank you. Goodbye, Father,” I say absently.

Father Kev Kevin frowns and returns to the vaginal computer. At the same moment Lonesome Lil enters the clinic, lines up her Lucite fittings on the table, and begins taking off her good gray suit.

It does not help matters when I run into Buddy Brown in the hall. He greets me even more effusively.

“See you in The Pit this afternoon,” he says, coming close and pinching my flank in a loving kind of hate.

“The Pit?”

“At two o’clock. Me and you. Let’s give them a real show, what do you say?”

“Yes. But just now I have an appointment with the Director.”

“It’s a good case. You saw him first, then I saw him. We both know him backwards and forwards.”

“Which case? Oh, Mr. Ives.”

“Which case! Ho ho.” Buddy twists my flank a bit too hard for comfort. “Son, this time I got you by the short hairs.”

“Perhaps. What do you think is wrong with him?”

“I know what’s wrong with him.”

“And you’ve got him down for the Happy Isles.”

“What would you do with him?”

“I don’t know.” I am gazing down at Buddy’s tanned bald head and lustrous spaniel eyes. His jaw muscles spread up like a fan under the healthy skin. Could Moira like him? There is to commend him his health, strength, brains, and cleanliness. He is very clean. His fingernails are like watch crystals. His soft white shirt and starched clinical coat sparkle like snow against his clear mahogany skin. Burnished hairs sprout through the heavy gold links of his expansion band.

Buddy is winking at me. “I understand that you diagnosed uh no pathology in Mr. Ives.”

“Yes.”

“You mean you think there’s nothing wrong with him?”

“Yes.”

“Then how come he can’t walk or talk?”

“I don’t know.”

“Me and you going to have it.”

“All right.”

“This time you’re wide open.”

“How do you figure?”

“Because you have allowed nonscientific considerations to affect your judgment.”

“Nonscientific considerations?”

“Religious considerations.”

“I? Religious? How’s that?”

“Tell the truth. You oppose in principle Happy Isles and the Euphoric Switch.”

“Yes.”

“And you don’t want Mr. Ives to be sent there.”

“That’s true.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why do you disapprove?”

I fall silent.

“Tom, you and I don’t disagree,” says Buddy in an earnest friendly voice.

“We don’t?”

“It’s the quality of life that counts.”

“Yes.”

“And the right of the individual to control his own body.”

“Well—”

“And above all a man’s sacred right to choose his own destiny and realize his own potential.”

“Well—”

“Would you let your own mother suffer?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t believe you. I know you too well and know that you place a supreme value on human values.”

“Yes.”

“We believe in the same things, differing only in the best way to achieve them.”

“We do?”

“See you in The Pit!”

One last squeeze — we are good friends now — and off he goes, white skirts sailing.

The Pit is a curious institution, a relic of medieval disputations and of doctors’ hankering for horseplay, satiric verse, heavy-handed clinical jokes, and such. Once a month a clinical-pathological conference is held in the student amphitheater, before four hundred odd students, professors, nurses, and staff members. Local physicians are invited and sometimes come, if only to see what the Leftpapasan psychiatrists and behaviorists are up to. Today’s Pit is the grand finale of the arduous ten-month school year. The seats of The Pit slope steeply to a small sunken arena, a miniature of the bullring at Pamplona. The Pit is popular with students because it is the one occasion when the Herr Professors try publicly to make fools of each other and the students can take sides (perhaps it is an Anglo-Saxon institution: no German Herr Professor would put up with it). They can clap, cheer, boo, point thumbs down, scrape their feet on the concrete. Contending physicians present and defend their diagnoses. Opponents are free to ridicule, even abuse each other. One doctor, none other than Buddy Brown in fact, routed an opponent who had diagnosed the “typical red butterfly rash of Lupus” by demonstrating that he, the opposing doctor, was colorblind.

Buddy exaggerates when he says I have my “following.” My one small success in The Pit might be compared to a single well-executed estocada by an obscure matador. I was able to demonstrate that a lady suffering from frigidity and morning terror and said to have been malconditioned by her overly rigid Methodist parents was in truth terrified by her well-nigh perfect life, really death in life, in Paradise, where all her needs were satisfied and all she had to do was play golf and bridge and sit around the clubhouse watching swim-meets and the Christian baton-twirlers. She woke every morning to a perfect husband, perfect children, a perfect life — and shook like a leaf with morning terror. All efforts to recondition her in a Skinner box failed. I thought they had got it backward, that the frigidity followed from the terror, not vice versa. How can a lady quaking with terror make love to her husband? For the first time I produced my lapsometer in The Pit — yes, the students know about my invention but are not sure whether it is a serious diagnostic tool or a theatrical prop. It registered normal readings in both the erogenous and interpersonal zones. The lady had a loving heart Ah, but what to do about it? How to demonstrate it in The Pit? An idea came to me. Sizing her up, noting her suggestibility — she was one of those quick slim ash-blondes whose gray eyes are onto you and onto what you want before you know it yourself and are willing to follow your lead: a superb dancing partner — I gambled on a quick hypnosis, put her under and implanted the posthypnotic suggestion that she had nothing to worry about, that as soon as possible she should make an excuse and leave in search of her husband. Whereupon she did, waking up, rising with parted lips and a high color, patting the back of her hair and looking at her watch: “Good heavens, I’m late. I’ve got to meet Harry. This is his day off and if I hurry, I’ll be home before he finishes his nap.” Exit, blushing. The students cheered and sang “I’m Just Wild about Harry.”

My little triumph, of course, was more theatrical than medical. As you well know, medical colleagues, and as Freud proved long ago, hypnosis is without lasting benefit.

Five minutes to eleven. Time for a last visit to the men’s room. Why am I so nervous? The Director has to be on my side. Else how would Art Immelmann have found out about my invention?

Speak of the devil. A man takes the urinal next to me though there are six urinals and mine is at the end. I frown. Here is a minor breach of the unspoken rules between men for the use of urinals. If there are six urinals and one uses the first the second man properly takes the sixth or perhaps the fifth, maybe the fourth, tolerably the third, but not the second.

This fellow, however, hawks and spits in the standard fashion, zips and pats himself and moves to the washstand, again the next washstand. In the mirror I notice it is Art Immelmann, the man from the Rockefeller-Ford-Carnegie foundations who looks like a drug salesman.

“Well well, Doc.”

When I turn to speak, I notice another minor oddity. In the mirror, which reverses things, there was nothing amiss. But as Art adjusts his trousers, I notice that he “dresses” on the wrong side. He dresses, as tailors say, on the right, which not one American male in a thousand, ask any tailor, does. In fact, American pants are made for left-dressing. A small oddity, true, but slightly discommoding to the observer, like talking to a cross-eyed man.

“Well, Doc,” says Art, turning on the hot water, “have you thought about our little proposition?”

“It’s out of the question.”

“May I ask why?”

“I wouldn’t want my invention to fall into the wrong hands. It could be quite dangerous.”

“Don’t you trust the National Institute of Mental Health and the Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller foundations?”

“No. Besides, my invention is not perfected yet. I haven’t finished with it.”

“What’s not perfected?” Art bends his knees, mambo style, and combs his hair like a sailor with quick alternating strokes of comb and hand.

“My sensors won’t penetrate melanin pigment in the skin.”

“Hm.” Art wets his comb. “You mean your MOQUOL doesn’t work on darkies?”

“No, it doesn’t.” I look at him with surprise. Darkies?!

“Anything else wrong?”

“Yes. I don’t yet have a therapeutic component. As it stands, my device is a diagnostic tool, no more.”

“I know.” Art goes on riffling his flat-top with a wet comb. Is he trying to make it lie down? Some hairs stick up like a wet airdale’s. “What would you say, Doc, if I told you your invention has the capacities and is incremental for both components?”

“Eh?”

“That the solution to both the melanin problem and the therapeutic problem is under your nose.”

“Where?”

Art laughs. “You know all I’m good for, Doc? I’m a coordinator. You’ve got the big ideas. I’m a tinkerer. In fact, I’ve got a little gadget right here that would fit your device—”

“Excuse me. I’m late. I’ve got to—”

“We’d make a team, Doc! All you got to do is sign the funding application!”

“No.”

But we say goodbye and shake hands agreeably enough. His is curiously inert, as if all he knew about shaking hands he had learned from watching others shake hands. A heavy smell of sweat neutralized by deodorant pushes to my nostrils.

Art holds my hand a second too long. “Doc. Just in case anything should go wrong, I’ll be around.”

“What could go wrong?”

“Just in case!”

As I leave him, he opens his attaché case on the windowsill. He looks like a traveling salesman doing business in the post office.

My hour of triumph is at hand.

In the outer office of the Director the typists do not look up, but the secretary is pleasant. She nods toward a bench. There are no staff members present. A row of patients, dressed in the familiar string robes of the wards, sit on the bench, hands on their knees. They look at me without expression. There is no place to sit but the bench.

Quite correct of the Director not to make a fuss! Yet it is an annoyance when one of the patients is called before me. I do not mind. The encounter with Art Immelmann has left me thoughtful. Was he trying to tell me something?

When my turn does come, the Director greets me warmly, if somewhat vaguely, at the door. The first thing I catch sight of over his shoulder is — yes! — my Brain article and my lapsometer lined up side by side on his desk.

“You are very imaginative!” cries the Director, waving me to a chair opposite him.

“Thank you.” What does he mean?

The Director is a tough old party, a lean leathery emeritus behaviorist with a white thatch and a single caliper crease in his withered brown cheek. Though he is reputed to have a cancer in his lung that is getting the better of him, one can easily believe that the growth is feeding on his nonvital parts, fats and body liquors, leaving the man himself worn fine and dusty and durable as Don Quixote. The only sign of his illness is a fruity cough and his handkerchiefs, which he uses expertly, folding them flat as a napkin over his sputum and popping them up his sleeve or into the slits of his white coat.

Though he is a behaviorist and accordingly not well disposed to such new ideas as an “ontological lapsometer,” I take heart from two circumstances: one, that he is an honorable man of science and as such knows evidence when he sees it; two, that he is dying. A dying king, said Sir Thomas More, is apt to be wiser than a healthy king. A dying behaviorist may be a good behaviorist.

The Director coughs his fruity cough. His eyes bulge. Handkerchiefs pop in and out of his pockets.

“With your permission, Tom, we’re going to do a feature about your project in the Rehab Weekly.”

“The Rehab Weekly?”

“Yes. We think you’ve shown a great deal of imagination.”

“Sir, the Rehab Weekly is the patients’ mimeographed magazine.”

“I know,” says the Director, his eyes bulging amiably.

The unease that has been flickering up and down my spine turns into a pool of heat in the hollow of my neck. Strange, but I feel only a mild embarrassment for him.

“Sir,” I say presently. “Perhaps you have misunderstood me. You say there are plans to do a feature on my work in the Rehab Weekly. Very good. But the reason I submitted my article to you was to obtain your approval and support before submitting it to Brain.”

“Yes, I know,” says the Director, coughing.

“It is also necessary to obtain your sanction of my application to N.I.M.H. for funding.”

“Yes. In the amount of—” The Director is leafing through — not my proposal but my medical chart!

“Twenty-five million,” I say, blushing furiously. Why am I so embarrassed? What is shameful about twenty-five million?

“I see.” The Director lays his head over, eyes bulging thoughtfully. “You are on patient-staff status.”

“Technically, but—”

“Doctor, don’t you think that before launching such a ah major undertaking, it might be well to wait until you are discharged?”

“Discharged?”

He slides the chart across the desk. “According to our records you are still a patient on A-4, which means that though you perform staff duties, you have not yet reached an open ward.”

I find myself nodding respectfully, hands on my knees — like a patient! I blink at my trousers. Where is my string robe?

“Sir, I left the hospital five months ago.”

“Left?” The glossy eyes bulge, the pages flip past He’s lost me somewhere in the chart “Here. You’re still on A-4.”

“No sir.”

“You’re still on patient-staff status.”

“Yes sir, technically.”

“I remember that. It is the first time in my experience that a doctor-patient on A-4 has ever been put on patient-staff. Remarkable. We have great respect for your abilities, Doctor. Let’s see, you’re in encephalography with Dr. Wilkes. How is it going?”

“I was with Colley Wilkes. Five months ago.”

“I noticed today you’re down for The Pit, heh heh heh. I saw you once before, Doctor. Great, heh heh heh. What’ll it be today, high medicine or hijinks or both? You know, Doctor, if you could ever get on top of your mood swings, you have a real contribution to make. Hm”—again poking through the chart—“too bad the Skinner box didn’t do more for the anxiety and elation-depression. I wonder if we hadn’t better get on with implanting electrodes—”

“Sir, excuse me. I believe I understand. Rather, there is a misunderstanding. You are under the impression that I am here as a patient together with the other patients outside, for my monthly visit with you. Right. I’d forgotten, Monday is patient day.”

“That reminds me.” He consults his watch. “I fear we’re running a bit over. But don’t worry about it. Always glad to see you. I predict you’ll soon make A-3 and permanent staff. For the time being, hang in there where you are.”

“With Colley Wilkes.”

“Tremendous fellow! A renaissance man.”

We rise. There lying on the desk between us like a dog turd is my lapsometer. I can’t bear to look at it. Neither can the director.

“But, sir—”

“Dr. More, tell me the truth.”

“Yes sir.”

“Do you think you are well?”

“No sir, I’m not well.”

“Well—?” He spreads his hands.

My God, he’s right. $25,000,000. An ontological lapsometer. I’m mad as a hatter.

But the Director suddenly feels so much better that in an access of goodwill he does look at my machine and even gives it a poke with his pencil.

“Amazing! What workmanship. Say, why don’t you use it in The Pit today, heh heh heh. Where did you get it machined?”

“In Japan,” I say absently. “You remember Dr. Yamaiuchi.”

“The Japanese are amazing, aren’t they?”

We reflect on the recent excellence of Japanese workmanship.

“What do you call this thing, Doctor?” the Director asks, exploring the device with his pencil.

“Lapsometer.” I am unable to tear my eyes from his strong brown farmer’s hands.

“The name interests me.”

“Yes sir?”

“It implies, I take it, a lapse or fall.”

“Yes,” I say tonelessly.

“A fall perhaps from a state of innocence?”

“Perhaps.” My foot begins to wag briskly. I stop it.

“Does this measure the uh depth of the fall?”

I stand up.

“Sir?”

“Yes, Doctor?”

“Am I to understand then that you do not intend either to approve my article for Brain or my application for funding from N.I.M.H.?”

“We’ll cross that bridge at our next month’s meeting. Right now I’m more interested in the hijinks in The Pit, heh heh. And don’t worry about being on A-4 much longer. I believe you’re ready for A-3. Glad to have you aboard. You’ve no idea how hard it is to keep staff these days. Now back to the old hospital in Boston—”

“Sir?”

“Yes?”

“There is one thing I don’t understand.”

“What’s that?” I’ve gone past my ten minutes. His glossy eyes bulge at his watch.

“Why did you tell Art Immelmann you had approved my application?”

“Who?”

“Art Immelmann.”

“I never heard of him.”

“He’s a liaison man between N.I.M.H. and the funds.”

“Oh my, one of those fellows. They’re bad news. They all say the same things: the war in Ecuador has dried up the money.”

“He says Ford, Carnegie, and Rockefeller are willing to fund me.”

“Good!” He doesn’t believe me.

“But you don’t know him?”

“I steer clear of those fellows!” For some reason the Director laughs immoderately, which in turn sets him off into a fit of coughing.

“Then you’ve told no one about my invention or article?”

Handkerchiefs pop in and out. The Director, still red-faced, shakes his head and gazes past me. He has other patients!

The next patient passes me in the doorway, a sorrowful angry man in a string robe who stares at me furiously, tapping his watch with trembling forefinger. His cheek quivers with rage. I’ve encroached upon his time. Rage shakes him like a terrier. I recall being possessed by this demon. Once, after brooding two days over a remark made by a fellow patient, I walked up to him with clenched fists. “I resent that remark you made two days ago. In fact, I can’t stand it any longer. Take it back!” “O.K.,” said the startled man and took it back.

My feet shuffle past the elevators, my hands groping for the pockets of my string robe.

Where am I going? Back to the wards?

The center is not holding.

Where am I going? Back to my narrow bed on A-4 with its hard mattress and seersucker spread stretched tight as a drum, a magic carpet where I can lie and wing it like a martin.

Why is it I feel better, see more clearly, can help more people when I am crazy? Not being crazy, being sane in a sane world, is the craziest business of all.

What I really want to do is practice medicine from my bed in A-4, lie happy and stiff on my bed, like a Hindoo on his bed of nails, and treat sane folk and sane doctors from the sane world, which is the maddest world of all.

Where am I? Going past Love. On the bench in the hall sit volunteers. J.T. Thigpen and Gloria and Ted ’n Tanya. J.T. strokes his acne with his fingernails. Gloria reads a textbook open on her plump thighs. Through the diamond-shaped window I catch a glimpse of Father Kev Kevin reading Commonweal at the vaginal console.

“See you Wednesday!” whispers Ted.

“What’s that? Oh.”

On the lower level Buddy Brown and Moira are standing next to Mr. Ives in a wheelchair. Moira hangs her head. Buddy greets me with the cordiality of a good enemy.

“You’re just in time, Tom!”

“In time for what?”

“To give Mr. Ives the once-over. Be my guest.”

“No thanks.”

“Look at this.” Taking a reflex hammer from his pocket, he taps Mr. Ives’s knee tendon with quick deft taps.

Mr. Ives dances a regular jig in his chair, all the while watching me with his mild blue gaze.

“Isn’t that upper-motor-neurone damage, Doctor?” Buddy asks me.

“I don’t think so.”

“Try it yourself.” He hands me his hammer, a splendid affair with a glittering shaft and a tomahawk head of red rubber.

“No fanks.”

“What? Oh. Then I’ll see you shortly.”

“Fime.”

I do not speak well. I’ve lost. I’m a patient. But Buddy doesn’t notice. Like all enemies, he puts the best construction on his opponent. But Moira knows something is wrong. She hangs her head.

“Is something wrong?” she asks in a low voice.

“I’m fime.” I notice that they are waiting outside the tunnel that leads into The Pit from the lower level.

“Don’t forget Howard,” says Moira.

“Who? Oh.” Howard Johnson. “Nopes.”

“Who is Howard?” Buddy asks.

“We can go now,” whispers Moira. She sees the abyss and is willing to save me.

“When will you come in?” asks Buddy.

“Eins upon a oncy,” I reply.

“O.K. Eins zwei drei,” says Buddy, willing to give me the benefit of the doubt. “He’s going to the men’s room,” he tells Moira, trying to make sense of me.

“Rike,” I say.

“Rotsa ruck.”

So I go back to the men’s room.

At the washstand there is a step behind me. A familiar smell of sebum-sweat overlaid by unguents.

“Hello, Art.” Where did he come from? He must live in a cubicle. Now he’s wearing a tie and jacket as if he were dressed for an occasion. But where did he get the tie and jacket? I take a closer look in the mirror. It is a tight gabardine “bi-swing” jacket, a style popular many years ago, with little plackets under each shoulder.

“How does it go, Doc?”

“Not so good.”

“Win a few, lose a few, eh?”

“What? Yes.”

I am gazing at my face in the mirror intently, like the man in Saint James’s epistle. The image reverses on the retina and a hole opens. Removing the bottle of Early Times from my bag, I take two long pulls.”

“Where to now, Doc?”

“I don’t know. Back to A-4.”

“As a patient.”

“I suppose.”

“Do you give up so easily?”

I shrug.

“What about our little proposition?”

“What proposition?”

“Let me see your MOQUOL.”

“Gladly.” Taking the device from my bag, I loft it toward the used-towel bin.

Art intercepts it, rubs it on his shirt front like a street urchin finding a dime.

“You got to have faith, Doc.”

“Faith?”

“Listen to me for a minute.”

“Why?”

“Sit here.” Taking my arm, he leads me to the shoeshine chair. I sit on the platform. Art hops up to the throne and fits his shoes to the treadles. The whiskey catches hold in my stomach like a gear. I feel better, engaged.

“And to make matters worse,” says Art cheerfully, “somebody’s beating your time with your girl.” Beating my time. I haven’t heard that expression since childhood.

“What do you want?” I ask him, slumping around the pleasant engaged gear in my stomach.

“To show you something.” He hops over me, fumbles in his attaché case, which still lies open on the windowsill. It is a short barrel, like a telephoto lens, fitted with an adapter ring. He screws it onto my lapsometer.

“Life is funny, Doc.”

“It is.”

“There is such a thing as being too close to the woods to see the trees.”

“What is that thing?”

“It’s really your discovery. The principle is yours. This is just a bit of tinkering. If you want to give me credit in a footnote, ha ha—”

“What’s it for?”

“Doc, the trouble with your invention has always been that you could diagnose but not treat, right?”

“That’s right.”

“Now you can treat.” He tosses me the lapsometer.

“How’s that?”

“Don’t you know? You discovered it twenty years ago.”

“What—”

A behaviorist comes in to take a leak. Art begins combing his hair again, wetting his comb and bending his knees mambo-style. The behaviorist washes his hands, nods at me, and leaves. Art hops nimbly up into the shoeshine chair.

“Doc, you recall that you discovered the effects of Heavy Sodium fallout?”

“Yes.” I am wondering: if two drinks of Early Times makes me feel good, wouldn’t three drinks make me feel better?

“You had the answer. Don’t you see?”

“See what?”

“The possibility of treating personality disorders with Heavy Sodium and Chloride.”

“That would be like exploding a cobalt bomb over New Orleans to treat cancer.”

“That’s the point. How do you treat cancer with cobalt radiation?”

“I’ve thought of that. But you know, of course, that sodium radiation is a two-edged sword. In the same moment that you assuage frontal terror you might increase red-nucleus rage.”

“Exactly!” Art’s feet fairly dance on the treadles above my head. “And you of all people should know how to avoid that.”

“How?”

“With this.”

“What is that?”

“A differential stereotactic emission ionizer. Beams in either your Heavy Sodium or Chloride ion. Using your principle.”

“How?”

“Don’t you see? You don’t even move your MOQUOL. Say you take a reading at the red nucleus and find a plus-five millivolt pathology. All you do is swing your dial to a minus-five Chloride charge and ionize.”

“And what will that do?”

“Tranquilize red-nucleus rage.”

“Sure.”

“You don’t believe me? Where are you going?”

“To get a drink.”

“That’s the point, Doc. Drink this drink and you’ll never want a drink. Let me show you something.”

“What?”

“Sit down here.”

As I sit on the lower platform, Art holds the machine to my head. It feels like barber’s clippers.

“Now. Using your diagnostic circuit, I observe that you are registering a plus-three on the anxiety scale. A little high but not unusual considering the pace of modern living. Now suppose I keep the MOQUOL in place and switch over to a plus-two ion emission. You should feel a bit worse.”

The machine hums like a tuning fork against my head.

I begin to shiver. My shoulders are rounded and I am gazing at my hands clenched in my lap. At last I raise my eyes. A horrid white light streams through the frosted window and falls into the glittering porcelain basins of the urinals. It is the Terror, but tolerable. The urinals, which are the wall variety, are shaped like skulls. The dripping water sounds hollow like water at the bottom of a well.

“Now. Well reverse and give you a minus-seven Chloride dose, which should throw you over into minus-two anti-anxiety.”

My head is leaning against the metal support of the treadle. Again the machine hums.

When I open my eyes, I am conscious first of breathing. Something in my diaphragm lets go. I realize I’ve been breathing at the top of my lungs for forty-five years. Now my diaphragm moves like a piston into my viscera, pulling great drafts of air into the base of my lungs.

Next I become aware of the cool metal of the support against my neck.

Then I notice my hand clenched into a fist on my knee. I open it slowly, turning it this way and that, inspecting every pore and crease. What a beautiful strong hand! The tendons! The bones! But the hand of a stranger! I have never seen it before.

How can a man spend forty-five years as a stranger to himself? No other creature would do such a thing. No animal would, for he is pure organism. No angel would, for he is pure spirit.

“Feeling better, Doc?”

“Yes.”

“It’s quite a device, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“And the Director doesn’t appreciate it, does he?”

“No.”

“Now.” Art is at my head again, fiddling about, pressing bony protuberances, measuring salients of my skull with a cold metal centimeter scale. It feels good to be measured. “I’m going to show you something I think will interest you. I’m going to stimulate Brodmann 11 mildly. You know what that is?”

“Yes, but I’d like to hear what you think it is.”

“It lies in the frontal-temporal sulcus of course, betwixt and between the abstractive areas of the frontal and the concrete auditory radiation of the frontal. It is the area of the musical-erotic.”

“Hm, that’s not my terminology.”

“But you know what I mean. Here the abstract is experienced concretely and the concrete abstractly. Take women, for example. Here one neither loves a woman individually, for herself and no other, faithfully; nor does one love a woman organically as a dog loves a bitch. No, one loves a woman both in herself and insofar as she is a woman, a member of the class women. Conversely, one loves women not in the abstract but in a particular example, this woman. Loves her truly, moreover. One loves faithlessly but truly.”

“Truly?”

“Loves her as one loves music. A woman is the concrete experienced abstractly, as women. Music is the abstract experienced as the concrete, namely sound.”

“So?”

“Ha! Old stuff to you, eh, Doc? Well, that’s not the end of it. Don’t you see? Stimulate this area and you stimulate both the scientist and the lover but neither at the expense of the other. You stimulate the scientist-lover.”

“I see.”

But it is Art himself who interests me. How does Art, who looks like the sort of fellow who used to service condom vendors in the old Auto Age, know this?

“So that in the same moment one becomes victorious in science one also becomes victorious in love. And all for the good of mankind! Science to help all men and a happy joyous love to help women. We are speaking here of happiness, joy, music, spontaneity, you understand. Fortunately we have put behind us such unhappy things as pure versus impure love, sin versus virtue, and so forth. This love has its counterpart in scientific knowledge: it is neutral morally, abstractive and godlike—”

“Godlike?”

“In the sense of being like a god in one’s freedom and omniscience.”

“You surprise me, Art.”

“Hold still, Doc.”

Again the cold steel hums like a tuning fork against my skull.

The tone of the tuning fork turns into music: first, a plaintive little piping, the dance of happy spirits in a high meadow; the flute trips along, hesitates, picks up again, and here’s the beauty of it, in the catch, the stutter, and starting up again. Now comes the love music of man in particular for women in general: happy, faithless, seductive music: the race and rip of violins dancing, whipping, tricking, fizzing in a froth of May wine, sunshine sunshine, and cotton dresses in summertime.

Who am I?

I am he who loves. I am in love. I love.

Who do you love?

You.

Who is “you”?

A girl.

What girl?

Any girl you please. You.

How can that be?

Because all girls are lovable and I love them all. I love you. I can make you happy and you me.

Only one thing can make you happy and it is not that

Love makes me happy. Knowing makes me happy.

Love is God, because God is love. Knowing God is knowing all things.

Love is not God. Love is music

“Who are you talking to, Doc?”

“What?”

“Why don’t you sit down?”

“What was I doing?”

“It doesn’t matter, as long as you feel good.”

Art pushes up the frosted window. We gaze out into the gold-green. Fat white clouds are blown by map winds. Swallows dip. Cicadas go zreeeee.

“You look good, Doc. Look at yourself. You’re not a bad-looking guy. You’re still young, you got a good built if you took care of yourself. Here, wash your face in cold water and comb your hair.” He hands me his pocket comb. “Now, no need to look like a hairy elf.” In a flash he produces a pocket klipette, clips the hair in my nose, ears, and eyebrows. “Tch, your fingernails!”—and gives me a manicure on the spot. In two minutes my nails become glossy watchglasses like Buddy Brown’s. Art comes close and sniffs: “Pardon, Doc, but you’re a little high, you know. Here’s a man’s deodorant. Now!”

Art gazes at me. I gaze at the green-gold summer.

“How do you feel, Doc?”

“Fine.”

“Isn’t it better to feel good rather than bad?”

“Yes.”

“Isn’t it better to be happy than unhappy?”

“Yes.”

“How can you take care of unhappy patients if you are unhappier than they are? Physician, heal thyself.”

“Yes.”

“Your terror is gone, you’re breathing well, your large bowel should be slack as a string, clear as a bell. How is it?”

“Slack as a string, clear as a bell.”

“O.K., Doc, now what?”

“I don’t know. What?”

“Well, what is the purpose of life in a democratic society?”

“A democratic society?” I ask him, smiling.

“Sure. Isn’t it for each man to develop his potential to the fullest?”

“I suppose so.”

“What is your potential?”

“I don’t know, what?”

“Doc, you have two great potentials: a first-class mind and a heart full of love.”

“Yes.”

“So what do you do with them?”

“I don’t know, what?”

“Know and love, what else?”

“Yes.”

“And win at both.”

“Win?”

“Is there anything wrong with being victorious and happy? With curing patients, advancing science, loving women and making them happy?”

“No.”

“Use your talents, Doc. What do you know how to do?”

“I know how to use this.” I pick up the lapsometer.

“What can you do with that?”

“Make people happy.”

“Who do you love, Doc?”

“Women, knowing, music, and Early Times.”

“You’re all set, Doc. One last thing—”

“Yes?”

“Where is your crate of MOQUOLs?”

“In a safe place.”

“Let me have them. The situation is critical and I think we ought to get them in the right hands as soon as possible.”

“No. I’d better not. That is not part of our contract.”

“Why not?”

“They are dangerous. I can’t be too careful.”

“What dangers?”

“Physical and political dangers.”

“What do you mean?”

“I think you know what I mean. If one of these falls into the wrong hands, it could produce a chain reaction in the Heavy Sodium deposits hereabouts or a political explosion between the Knotheads and the Lefts. Do you realize that the President and Vice-President will be here tomorrow?”

“Realize it! Why do you think I want your MOQUOLs?”

Coming close, he opens and closes his wallet, giving me a glimpse of a metal shield.

“F.B.I.?”

“A bit more exalted. Let’s just say I make security reports from time to time. That’s why we’re interested in making sure your invention stays in the right hands.”

“This seems a bit far afield from your work with mental health and the foundations.”

“Everything is interdisciplinary now, Doc. As well as being third-generational. You understand.”

“No. But don’t worry about my invention.”

“O.K., Doc. Now. Sign here.” He nods to the contract on the windowsill. A ballpoint pen leaps to his hand, clicks, and backs toward my chest.

“Very well.” Standing at the windowsill, which seems to be his place of business, I sign the blue-jacketed contract.

“You won’t be sorry, Doc.” All in one motion he takes pen and contract clicks pen, stuffs both into his inside breast pocket. As usual, he stands too close and when he buttons his coat it exhales a heavy breath. “Now you can use your talents for the good of mankind and the increase of knowledge. All you have to do is never look back and never be sorry, as per agreement.”

“As per what agreement?” I ask vaguely, frowning. But my colon is at peace and my heart beats in time to Mozart.

“We’re in business, Doc.”

“Yeah. Let’s have a drink.”

“What? Oh. Well—”

The bottle of Early Times passes between us. The whiskey catches hold in my stomach, gear engaging gear. Art chokes, his eyes water.

“That’s good stuff,” says Art, blinking. I could swear it was his first drink.

“Yes,” I say, laughing.

It’s like being back in Charlottesville, in the spring, in the men’s room, at a dance, at old Saint Anthony’s Hall.

The Pit is in an uproar. Students roost like chickens along the steep slopes of the amphitheater, cackling and fluttering their white jackets as they argue about the day’s case. Bets are placed, doctors attacked and defended. The rightwing Knothead Christian students occupy the right benches, the Lefts the left.

The lower reaches are reserved for professors, residents, consultants, and visiting physicians. The Director, for example, sits in the front row, elbows propped on the high retaining wall, next to his fellow Nobel laureate Dr. Kenneth Stryker, who first described the branny cruciform rash of love. Gottlieb is directly behind them, erect as a young prince, light glancing from his forehead. His eyes search mine with a questing puzzled glance, seeking to convey a meaning, but I do not take the meaning. In the same row sit Dr. Helga Heine, the West German interpersonal gynecologist; Colley Wilkes, the super-Negro encephalographer, and his wife, Fran, a light-colored behaviorist and birdwatcher; Ted ’n Tanya and two visiting proctologists from Paradise: my old friend Dr. Dusty Rhoades and Dr. Walter Bung, an extremely conservative albeit skillful proctologist recently removed from Birmingham.

The pit itself, a sunken area half the size of a handball court and enclosed by a high curving wall, is empty save for Dr. Buddy Brown, the patient, Mr. Ives, in a wheelchair, and behind him a strapping blond nurse named Winnie Gunn, whose stockings are rolled beneath her knees. Where is Moira? Ah, I see: sitting almost out of sight in the approach tunnel with no more of her visible than her beautiful gunmetal legs. Is she avoiding me?

I enter not through the tunnel but from the top, walking down the steep aisle like a relief pitcher beginning the long trek from the left-field bullpen. As I come abreast of successive rows of students, there occurs on the left a cutting away of eyes and the ironic expression of the fan confronted by the unfavorite. These are by and large Buddy’s fans and mostly qualitarians (= euthanasists).

From here and there on the right comes a muted cheer, a vigorous nodding and lively corroborative look from some student who remembers my small triumph and imagines that he and I share the same convictions.

I don’t pay much attention to left or right.

Students are, if the truth be known, a bad lot. En masse they’re as fickle as a mob, manipulable by any professor who’ll stoop to it. They have, moreover, an infinite capacity for repeating dull truths and old lies with all the insistence of self-discovery. Nothing is drearier than the ideology of students, left or right. Half the students here revere Dr. Spiro T. Agnew, elder statesman and honorary president of the American Christian Proctological Society; the other half admire Hermann Hesse, Dr. B. F. Skinner, inventor of the Skinner conditioning box, and the late Justice William O. Douglas, a famous qualitarian who improved the quality of life in India by serving as adviser in a successful program of 100,000,000 abortions and an equal number of painless “terminations” of miserable and unproductive old folk.

People talk a lot about how great “the kids” are, compared to kids in the past. The only difference in my opinion is that kids now don’t have sense enough to know what they don’t know.

On the other hand, my generation is an even bigger pain.

It seems today in The Pit I am favored by the Christian Knothead anti-euthanasic faction, but I’m not sure I like them any better than the Hesse-Skinner-Douglas qualitarians.

But I do not, on the whole, feel bad. My large bowel is clear as a bell, my coeliac plexus is full of blood. Anxiety flickers over my sacrum but it is not the Terror, rather a useful and commensurate edginess. What I fear is not nothing, which is the Terror, but something, namely, getting beat by Buddy Brown in front of Moira. Otherwise I feel fine: my heart is full of love, my mind is like a meat grinder ready to receive the raw stuff of experience and turn out neat pattycake principles.

The thing to do, it occurs to me halfway down into the pit, is to concern myself with the patient and what ails him, and forget the rest.

In the pit itself a casual air is cultivated. Mr. Ives’s bright monkey eyes snap at me. Buddy Brown leans against the high wall talking to the Director, who hangs over, cupping an ear. Nurse Winnie Gunn, who stands behind the wheelchair, gives me a big smile and shifts her weight, canting her pelvis six degrees starboard. Moira? Her face swims in the darkness of the tunnel. Are her eyes open or closed?

The uproar resumes. The doctors are free to unhorse each other by any means fair or foul. The students are free to boo or cheer. Last month one poor fellow, a psychiatrist who had diagnosed a case as paranoia, was routed and damned out of his own mouth, like Captain Queeg, by Buddy Brown, who led the man to the point of admitting that yes, he was convinced that all the students and the faculty as well had it in for him and were out to get him. Jeers from the students, right and left, who have no use for weakness in their elders.

The door opens at the top and in strolls Art Immelmann and perches in the back row. In the same row but not close sit two women. The two women are — good Lord! — my two women, Lola Rhoades and Ellen Oglethorpe. What are they doing together?

There is no time to speculate. The uproar subsides and Buddy Brown begins, flipping through the chart held above Mr. Ives, who sits slumped in his string robe, head jogging peacefully, monkey eyes gone blank for once and fixed on the wall in front of him.

Buddy presents the medical history, physical examination, and laboratory findings. He stands at his ease, looking fondly at Mr. Ives.

“My differential diagnosis: advanced atherosclerosis, senile psychosis, psychopathic and antisocial behavior, hemiplegia and aphasia following a cerebrovascular accident.”

Murmurs and nods from the students.

“Doctor.” With a flourish Buddy hands me the chart.

The Early Times is turning like a gear in my stomach. I am looking at my hand again. What a hand.

“Doctor?”

“Yes. Oh. By the way, Dr. Brown. You made no therapeutic recommendations.”

Buddy spreads his fingers wide, shrugs an exaggerated Gallic shrug (he is part Cajun and comes from Thibodeaux).

“You have no recommendations?”

“Do you, Dr. More?”

“Then you plan to transfer him?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“To the Happy Isles Separation Center.”

This is what the students have been waiting for.

“Euphoric Switch! Euphoric Switch!” cry the euthanasists.

“Button! Button!” cry the right-benchers. “Not to Georgia!”

“Where would you send him, Doctor?” asks Buddy sarcastically.

The heavy warm gear is turning in my stomach. My hand is the hand of a stranger. Music is still playing. I must have swayed to the music because Winnie Gunn has seized my forearm with both hands.

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

“Fine.”

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

“I found no significant pathology.”

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

“I said I found no significant pathology.”

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

“Discharge him.”

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

“If indeed there was nothing wrong with him.”

“You think there was nothing wrong with him?”

“No. That is, yes.”

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

Titters.

I shrug.

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

“You mean, assuming he’s had one.”

“Very well. Assuming he’s had one.”

“Very small.”

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

“Very large.”

“Do you recall his former behavior?”

I am silent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

More titters from the student roosts.

Buddy goes on:

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

“If he had a stroke,” I say.

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

“Well what?”

“What would you do with him?”

“Discharge him.”

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

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

“A sporting chance to do what?”

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

“Doctor!” interrupts the Director sternly.

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

Buddy flushes angrily.

The Director is angrier still.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Sir!”

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

“Eh?” The Director cups his ear.

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

“Eh? How’s that?”

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

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

Even the Director looks relieved despite himself.

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

Moira has shrunk even farther into the tunnel.

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

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

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

A beehive murmur. Buddy holds up both hands.

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

Laughter from the left.

“Qualitative-Quantitative,” I correct him.

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

Moira is all but invisible. Have I lost her?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Helga uncrosses her thighs.

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

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

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

“I see Christmas.”

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

Max shrugs.

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

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

“Eh?” says the Director.

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

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

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

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

“It’s all right, Buddy,” I tell him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Speech! Speech!” cry the students.

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

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

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

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

“I know, but tell them.”

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

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

“You know what I was digging for.”

“The fountain of youth?”

“That’s right.”

“Did you find it?”

“I did.”

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

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

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

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

“Linguistics.”

“And what were you especially interested in?”

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

“What is the Ocala frieze?”

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

“Go on.”

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

“How did you happen to find it?”

“Browsing through the Franciscan files in Salamanca.”

“What were you doing there?”

“Looking for the dictionary.”

“Did that decipher the glyphs?”

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

“But that wasn’t enough.”

“No.”

“What else did you need?”

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

“Did you find such a pairing?”

“Yes.”

“In the fountain of youth?”

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

“There is such a fountain?”

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

“So you had a hunch?”

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

“Did you find anything?”

“Enough.”

“Enough for what?”

“To crack the cipher.”

“You deciphered the frieze?”

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

“What did you find?”

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

“Could you bring it here?”

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

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

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

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

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

The Director examines the medal intently.

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

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

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

“Sure.”

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

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

“Is it fair to compare the work of science to the well-deserved recreational activities of retired people?”

“Sir, are you implying that what retired people do must necessarily be something less than the work of scientists? I mean is there any reason why a retired person should not go on his own way and refuse to be importuned by a bunch of chickenshit Ohioans?”

“Excuse me.” It is Stryker, rising slowly behind the Director. “I am not a chauvinistic man. But as a graduate of Western Reserve University and a native of Toledo, I must protest the repeated references to natives of the Buck-Eye state as a ‘bunch of chickenshit Ohioans.’”

“No offense, sir,” says Mr. Ives, waving him off. “I’ve known some splendid Ohioans, But you get a bunch of retired Ohioans together in Florida — you know, they get together on the west coast to get away from the Jews in Miami. But I’ll tell you the damn truth, to me it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other.”

“Just a minute,” says Max, rising to a stoop. “I see no reason for the ethnics—”

“Where are you from?” Stryker asks Mr. Ives.

“Originally? Tennessee.”

Stryker turns to Max. “I mean Jesus Christ, Tennessee.”

“Yeah, but that’s not the point, Ken,” says Max, still aggrieved. “I still see no reason for the ethnic reference.”

“But you have no objection to his referring to us as a bunch of chickenshit Ohioans?”

“You’re missing my point.”

“Let me quote you a figure!” cries Mr. Ives to Stryker, warming to it. “Did you know that there are three thousand and fifty-one TV and radio announcers in the South, of which twenty-two hundred are from Ohio, and that every last one of these twenty-two hundred says ‘the difference between he and I’? In twenty years we’ll all be talking like that.”

But Max and Stryker, still arguing, pay no attention.

The students are both engrossed and discomfited. They chew their lips, pick their noses, fiddle with pencils, glance now at me, now at Mr. Ives. Who can tell them who’s right? Students are a shaky dogmatic lot. And the “freer” they are, the more dogmatic. At heart they’re totalitarians: they want either total dogmatic freedom or total dogmatic unfreedom, and the one thing that makes them unhappy is something in between.

Art Immelmann looks restive too. He fidgets around on the top step, hands in pockets hiking the skirts of his “bi-swing” jacket, and won’t meet my eye. Now what the devil is he doing? He has removed one of the new lapsometers from the carton and is showing it to a student.

The doctors are unhappy too. The behaviorists, I know, don’t like Mr. Ives dabbling in science. The visiting proctologists don’t like anything they see. Colley Wilkes reverts to an old Alabama posture, hunched forward, hands clasped across wide-apart knees, pants hitched up black fuzzy shins. He clucks and shakes his head. “Man, what is all this?” I imagine him saying.

Moira has emerged from the shadows and taken charge of Mr. Ives’s chair from Winnie Gunn, who is out of sight in the tunnel. Moira smiles at met.

Buddy Brown is trying to pick up the pieces of his anger but he’s still out of it He can’t make out what happened to him.

Ellen Oglethorpe is torn between her disapproval of The Pit and what seems to be my triumph. But is it a triumph? She sits disgruntled, fingers shoved up into her cheek, shooting warm mothering glances at me, stern Calvinistic glances at the rowdy students.

Lola Rhoades is not paying strict attention. She moves to her own music, lips parted, hissing Brahms. Brahms, old Brahms! We’ll sing with you yet of a summer night.

Lola fills every inch of her seat with her splendid self, her arms use both arm rests, her noble knees press against the seat in front.

“Mr. Ives, a final question.”

The Director is speaking.

“Why have you neither walked a step nor uttered a word during the past month?”

Mr. Ives scratches his head and squints up the slope. “Well sir, I’ll tell you.” He lays on the cracker style a bit much to suit me. “There is only one kind of response to those who would control your responses by throwing you in a Skinner box.”

“And what would that be?” asks the Director sourly, knowing the answer.

“To refuse to respond at all.”

“I see.” The Director turns wearily to me. “Doctor, be good enough to give us your therapeutic recommendations and we’ll wind this up.”

“Yes sir. May I have a word with the patient?”

“By all means.”

“Mr. Ives, what are your plans? I mean, if you were free to make plans.”

“I intend to go home if I ever get out of this nuthouse.”

“Where is home?”

“Sherwood, Tennessee. It’s a village in a cove of the Cumberland Plateau. My farm is called Lost Cove.”

“What are you going to do there?”

“Write a book, look at the hills, live till I die.”

The students avert their eyes.

The Director looks at his watch. “Dr. More?”

“I recommend that Mr. Ives, instead of being sent to the Separation Center in Georgia, be released immediately and furnished with transportation to Sherwood, Tennessee.”

“To Tennessee!” cries a student.

“To Tennessee! To Tennessee!” chime in both right-benchers and left-benchers.

Applause breaks out I take some comfort in it even though students are a bad lot fickle as whores, and no professor should take pleasure in their approval.

“Hold it!” cries Buddy Brown, who has pulled himself together. He strides back and forth, sailing his white coat “This may be a good show-boating, but it’s sorry damn science. Dr. More has proved he’s a good hypnotist, but as for his metaphysical machine—”

“To Tennessee!” cry the students.

Art is busy as a bee.

Some of the students, I notice, have acquired lapsometers from Art, which they wear about their necks like cameras and aim and focus at each other. Now Art Immelmann bounds up the aisle for a fresh supply. Feverishly he hands them out, squatting beside a student to explain the settings and point out skull topography. A dark circle of sweat spreads under his armpit.

A student near the top turns to the girl next to him, lifts her ponytail and places the MOQUOL muzzle on her occiput.

“Wait! No!” I yell at the top of my lungs and go bounding up the steps and past the startled Director. “No, Art!”

But Art can’t or won’t hear. Lapsometers are stacked up his arm like a black marketeer wearing a dozen wrist-watches.

Dr. Helga Heine aims a lapsometer at Stryker’s mid-frontal region.

“Wait, Helga!” I cry. “That thing is not a toy! It’s not a prop for The Pit! It’s for real! No, Helga!”

“But, liebchen, all we’re doing is what you yourself suggested,” says Helga as Stryker points his lapsometer at the region of her interpersonal sulcus.

“Yes, but my God, what’s the setting? Let me see. Oh Lord, he’s set the ionization at plus ten!”

Everywhere lapsometers are buzzing like a swarm of bees. Students and doctors and nurses either duck their heads or buzz away at their neighbors’ heads with their new hair-dryers.

“STOP I BEG OF YOU!” I yell at the top of my voice.

But nobody pays attention except the Director, who plucks at my sleeve.

“Isn’t this all part of the hijinks, Doctor, heh heh. Just what is it you fear?” he asks and cups his ear to hear me in the uproar.

“Goddamn sir,” I yell into the hairy old ear. “As I told you earlier, this device is not a toy. It could produce the most serious psychic disturbances.”

“Such as?”

“If it were focused over certain frontal areas or the region of the pineal body, which is the seat of selfhood, it could lead to severe angelism, abstraction of the self from itself, and what I call the Lucifer syndrome: that is, envy of the incarnate condition and a resulting caricature of the bodily appetites.”

“Eh? What’s that? Angelism? Pineal body? Seat of the self? Lucifer? Oh, I get it. Heh heh heh. Very good. Good show, Doctor. But really, I’m afraid The Pit is getting away from us.”

“Sir, you don’t understand. What I meant—” But Helga jostles me.

She has unwound her hair and let it down like Brunhilde. Placing her hand on her breast, she tells Stryker: “Everything is spirit. Alles ist Geist.”

“Right.” Stryker nods and puts his hand on her other breast.

“Hold it,” I tell Stryker and turn to the Director. “Sir, this is not what it appears.”

A powerful grip, catching my arm, yanks me erect. I find myself standing between the two proctologists, Dusty Rhoades and Dr. Walter Bung. Have they—? Yes, Dr. Bung carries a lapsometer slung from his shoulder.

Yet they seem in the best of humors. They nod and wink at each other, claim me as an ally, and give every appearance of approval.

“Did you ever in your life,” says Dr. Walter Bung, holding us close, “see this many commonists, atheists, hebes, and fags under one roof?”

“Excuse me, Dr. Bung,” I say, unlimbering my lapsometer, “but the fact is that neither they nor you are quite yourselves.”

“How’s that, son?”

“I’ll warrant you your red nucleus is at this moment abnormally active. May I take a reading?”

“What the hell you talking about boy, my red—”

“The reason you’re both so upset is this,” I tell them both, but at that moment someone, perhaps one of them, pushes me violently and I stumble backward into the pit, nearly cracking my skull.

Moira is standing transfixed behind Mr. Ives’s chair.

“Let’s go to Howard Johnson’s,” she whispers, leaning over me as I struggle to get up.

“Get the patient out of here,” I tell her.

Moira hesitates, opens and closes her mouth. Mr. Ives rises and takes her arm.

“I’ll take care of her, Doctor.”

“Thank you.”

“Where shall I take her?”

“Are we going to Howard Johnson’s?” Moira asks, coming close.

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll go to my room first.”

“I’ll take her to her room,” Mr. Ives assures me.

“Thank you.”

They disappear into the tunnel, Mr. Ives escorting Moira like the Tennessee gentleman that he is.

Colley Wilkes is trying to reach his wife, Fran, by detouring through the pit. But Buddy Brown stands in his way.

“Who you shoving?” asks Buddy.

“Out of my way.”

“If there is anything I can’t stand, it’s a smart-mouth coon.”

Buddy picked the wrong man. For Colley is no ordinary Negro, smart-mouthed or not, but a super-Negro who besides speaking five languages and being an electronic wizard, also holds the Black Belt in karate.

Colley pokes his hand, fingers held stiff as a plank, straight into Buddy’s throat. Buddy sits down in Mr. Ives’s wheelchair and tries to breathe.

I must see to Ellen and Lola.

Halfway up the aisle two students are fighting over a girl. I recognize J.T. Thigpen. The girl is Gloria, by no means a beauty, still dressed in her soiled lab coat, her brass-colored hair sprung out in a circle like a monstrance. The second student is a Knothead named Trasker Gluck. Seeing Trasker and Gloria together, I suddenly realize they are brother and sister.

Trasker and J.T. have each other elbow around neck, grunting and cursing, the way boys fight.

“Hold it, fellows.” I try to stop them.

“You stay away from my sister, you son of a bitch,” says Trasker, who is a clean-living athletic Baptist type like pole-vaulter Bob Richards.

“It’s a meaningless relationship and nothing for you to take exception to,” grunts J.T. “We get fifty bucks for a successful performance. Let me go, I need the money. Let me go! I feel if we can get over to Love right away we can make it for sure. Let me go! There is nothing between us. Ask your sister.”

“Why you son of a bitch, that makes it worse,” says Trasker, slamming J.T. squarely on the nose with his big fist.

“Do something, Dr. More!” pleads Gloria. “I love him!”

“Who?”

“J.T.!”

“Excuse me,” I say, spying Ellen and Art Immelmann in the next aisle.

Ted ’n Tanya are lying under the seats. I almost step on Ted’s back.

“Tom, you were wonderful,” says Tanya over Ted’s shoulder.

“Thank you.”

“Your invention works! We can love. We are loving!”

“Good. Pardon.” I step over them.

“All we feared was fear itself.”

“I know.”

“Stay with us! Share our joy!”

“I can’t just now. Pardon.”

Warm arms encircle my waist I find myself sitting in Lola’s lap. “Hi, Sugah!”

“Hi, Lola.”

“My, you’re a big fine boy!” She gives me a hug.

Reaching back, I give her a hug. She warms my entire back from shoulders to calves.

“Do you love Lola?”

“Yes, I do.” I do.

“Lola’s got you.”

“She sure has.”

“When you coming to see Lola?”

“Tomorrow. No, this evening.”

“Lola will make you some gin fizzes and we’ll go walking out in the moonlight.”

“Absolutely. But you better go home now. I don’t want you to get hurt.”

“O.K., Sugah,” says Lola, giving me a final tremendous squeeze.

Dusty seizes my shoulder in his huge hand, working the bones around like dice.

His face looms close, his breath reeks like a lion’s.

“You listen here, Doctor.”

“Yes, Dusty?”

“You mess with my daughter one more time without wedding bells and you done messed for the last time. You read me?”

“Yes.”

“You all right, boy,” says Dusty and, taking Dr. Walter Bung in one arm and me in the other, draws the three of us close.

Ellen is shouting angrily at Art Immelmann, who surveys the pit, swinging his arms idly and whistling loudly and accurately Nola, the piano theme of Vincent Lopez, a band leader in the Middle Auto Age.

I snatch Ellen away.

“Stay away from him.”

“Chief, he got your lapsometers!” Ellen is sobbing with rage.

“I know.”

“What are we going to do?” asks Ellen, wringing her hands. “Just look.”

Below us the pit writhes like a den of vipers. Now and then an arm is raised, fist clenched, to fall in a blow. Bare legs are upended.

“Listen.” I whisper in Ellen’s ear. “While I am talking to Art, take the rest of the lapsometers in the carton and put them in your car. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“O.K., Chief. But are you leaving?”

“I have to collect all the loose ones.”

“I’m not leaving without you!”

“You son of a bitch,” I tell Art. “What did you pull this stunt for?”

“I am not a son of a bitch,” says Art, looking puzzled. “Take it easy, Doc.” As usual he has no sense of distance, comes too close, and blows Sen-Sen in my face.

“I told you specifically to leave my lapsometers alone.”

“How are we going to run a pilot on your hardware without using your hardware?”

“Pilot! Is this what you call a pilot?”

“Doc, we can’t go national until we test the interactions in a pilot. That’s boilerplate, Doc.”

“Boilerplate my ass. Goddamn it don’t you know the dangers of what you’re doing? We’re sitting on a dome of Heavy Salt, the President is coming tomorrow, and what do you do? Turn loose my lapsometers cranked up to ten plus.”

“Doc, does this look political to you?” He nods at the lovers and fist-fighters. “This is not political. It is a test of your hypotheses about vagal rage and abstract lust as you of all people should know. And as for the dangers of a chain reaction, there’s no Heavy Salt within three miles of here.”

“We’re through, Art. I’m canceling the contract.”

“You’ll be right as rain tomorrow, Doc. Just remember: music, love, and the dream of summer.”

Max Gottlieb and Ellen hold me tight, one at each elbow.

“Let’s go home, fella,” says Max. “You’ve been great.”

“Wait a minute. I’m needed here, Max.”

“He’s right, Chief. You’re worn out.”

“I’m not leaving until I collect all the lapsometers.”

“I’ll get them for you,” says Max. “You go home and get a good night’s sleep. Or better still, go back to A-4.”

“Damn it, Max, don’t you realize what’s happening?”

“I’m afraid I do. Your device has triggered a mass hysteria. Like the St. Vitus’s dance in the Middle Ages. These are strange times.”

“Listen to me, Max. Number one, my lapsometer works. You saw it. Number two, it has fallen into the wrong hands. Number three, the effect here is mainly erotic but it could just as easily have been political. Number four, the President and Vice-President will be in this area tomorrow. Number five, there are plans to kidnap you and hold you prisoner in the Honey Island wilderness. Number six, we’re sitting on the biggest Heavy Salt dome in North America.”

“Oh boy,” says Max to Ellen.

Ellen frowns. She is loyal to me.

“I believe you, Chief. But if what you say is true, you’re going to need all your strength tomorrow.”

“That’s true. But I feel fine right now.” How lovely you are, Ellen. Perspiration glitters like diamonds in the down of her short upper lip.

“What’s that, Chief?” asks Ellen quickly. Did I say it aloud? She blushes and tugs at my arm. “Come on now!” At the same time I feel a pinprick in my other arm. Max has given me a shot through my coat sleeve.

“You’re going to get a good night’s sleep. Ellen will take you home. I’ll drop in on you tomorrow morning.” He holds my hand affectionately. I see him look at the scars on my wrist. “Take care of yourself now.”

“I feel fine, Max.” I do. I can still hear music.

“Let’s go out through the tunnel, Chief. My car is in the back.”

I say goodbye to the Director, but he is engrossed with a young medical student. It is Carruthers Calhoun, scion of an old-line Southern family, a handsome peach-faced lad.

“Wasn’t it Socrates,” the Director is saying, a friendly arm flung across the boy’s shoulders, “who said: A fair woman is a lovely thing, truth lovelier still, but a fair youth is the fairest of all?”

“No sir,” replies Carruthers, who graduated from Sewanee with a classical education. “That was Juvenal and he didn’t quite say that.”