The Last Gentleman (45 page)
“Don't you want me to read to you?” the engineer asked him.
“No, that's all right!”
Jamie was polite but the engineer could tell he wanted to be alone.
“I'll be back after supper.”
“Fine.” The patient smiled his best smile because he wanted the visitor to leave. The book was the safest sunniest most inviolate circle of all.
9
.
The next morning Jamie was even better. His fever was gone, but he was tired and wanted to sleep. For the first time he spoke seriously of going home, no, not home but to the Gulf Coast, where they could lie in the sand dunes and get in shape for the next semester. “I have the strongest hunch that the combination of cold salt water and the warm sunny dunes would be great!”
The engineer nodded. Sure enough it might.
Would the engineer take him?
“Let's go,” said the latter rising.
Jamie laughed and nodded to signify that he knew the other meant it “But I'll leave tomorrow, no kidding,” he said as the engineer cranked him flat for his nap.
“We can make it in three days,” the engineer told him. “Your monk's pad is still on the upper berth.”
Jamie said no more about calling Val.
But for the present it was the engineer who lay in the upper berth and read:
Christ should leave us. He is too much with us and I don't like his friends. We have no hope of recovering Christ until Christ leaves us. There is after all something worse than being God-forsaken. It is when God overstays his welcome and takes up with the wrong people.
You say don't worry about that, first stop fornicating. But I am depressed and transcendent. In such a condition, fornication is the sole channel to the real. Do you think I am making excuses?
You are wrong too about the sinfulness of suicide in this age, at least the nurtured possibility of suicide, for the certain availability of death is the very condition of recovering oneself. But death is as outlawed now as sin used to be. Only one's own suicide remains to one. My “suicide” followed the breakdown of the sexual as a mode of reentry from the posture of transcendence.
Here is what happened. I became depressed last summer when I first saw Jamie's blood smear, depressed not because he was going to die but because I knew he would not die well, would be eased out in an oxygen tent, tranquilized and with no sweat to anyone and not even know what he was doing. Don't misunderstand me: I wasn't thinking about baptism.
The depression made me concupiscent. On a house call to the Mesa Motel to examine a patient in diabetic coma (but really only to collect blood for chemistryâI was little more than a technician that summer). Afterwards spied a chunky blonde by the pool, appraised her eye, which was both lewd and merry. She 41, aviatrix, winner of Powder Puff Derby in 1940's, raced an old Lockheed P-38 from San Diego to Cleveland. We drank two glasses of straight whiskey. I spoke in her ear and invited her to her room. Afterwards very low. Went to ranch, shot myself, missed brain, carried away cheek.
Recovery in hospital. The purity of ordeal. The purity of death. The sweet purity of the little Mexican nurse. Did Americans become lewd when they banished death?
I saw something clearly while I had no cheek and grinned like a skeleton. But I got well and forgot what it was. I won't miss next time.
It was the last entry in Sutter's casebook. When he finished reading, the engineer left the Trav-L-Aire and threw the pad into the trashburner of Alamogordo Motor Park. As he watched it burn, glowering, his head sinking lower and lower, mouth slack and drying, he became aware that someone was speaking to him. It was a fellow Trav-L-Aire owner, a retired fire inspector from Muncie. He and his wife, the man had told him, were in the midst on their yearly swing from Victoria, B.C., to Key West. They kept just ahead of winter on the way down and just behind spring going north. It was a courtesy of the road that camper owners show their rigs to each other. The engineer invited him in. The hoosier was polite enoughâthe engineer's was the most standard of all Trav-L-Airesâbut it was obvious that the former had a surprise in store. After showing off his cabin, which had a tinted sun-liner roof, he pressed a button. A panel above the rear door flew open and a contraption of aluminum spars and green netting unhinged in six directions. With a final grunt of its hidden motor the thing snapped into a taut cube of a porch big enough for a bridge game. “You take off your screen door and put it here,” the Hoosier told him. “It's the only thing for west Florida, where you're going to get your sand flies.”
“Very good,” said the engineer, nodding and thrusting his hand through his pocket, for his knee had begun to leap.
Returning to his own modest camper, he became at once agitated and lustful. His heart beat powerfully at the root of his neck. The coarsest possible images formed themselves before his eyes. But this time, instead of throwing a fit or lapsing into a fugue as he had done so often in the past, he became acutely conscious of the most insignificant sensations, the slight frying sound of the Servel refrigerator, the watery reflection on the Formica table, which seemed to float up the motes of dust. His memory, instead of failing, became perfect. He recalled everything, even a single perception years ago, one of a thousand billion, so trivial that it was not even remembered then, five minutes later: on a college field trip through the mangy Jersey woods looking for spirogyra, he had crossed a utility right-of-way. When he reached the farther woods, he had paused and looked over his shoulder. There was nothing to see: the terrain dipped, making a little swale which was overgrown by the special forlorn plants of rights-of-way, not small trees or bushes or even weeds exactly but just the unclassified plants which grow up in electric-light-and-power-places. That was all. He turned and went on.
Desolate places like Appomattox and cut-over woods were ever the occasion of storms of sexual passion. Yet now when he rushed out into the abstract afternoon to find a maid (but who?) he forgot again and instead found himself picking through the ashes of the trashburner. What was that last sentence? It had a bearing. But the notebook was destroyed.
Jumping into the cab of the G.M.C., he tore out of the poplar grove, forgetting his umbilical connections until he heard the snappings of cords and the shout of the Hoosier.
“What theâ” yelled the latter like an astounded comic-strip character, Uncle Walt (so that's where the expression “What theâ” comes fromâIndiana).
“I'm going over to Albuquerque,” shouted the engineer as if this were an explanation and as quickly changed his mind, stopped, and strode past the still-astounded Hoosier. “Pardon,” he said, “I think I'll call Kittyâ” and nodded by way of further explanation to a telephone hooked contingently to a telephone pole. Could he call Kitty from such a contingent telephone?
Perhaps if he could talk to a certain someone he would stop hankering for anyone and everyone, and tender feelings of love would take the place of this great butting billygoat surge which was coming over him again. He clung to the pole, buffeted by an abstract, lustful molecular wind, and might even have uttered a sound, brayed into the phone, for the Hoosier looked astounded again and rushed into his deluxe Sun-Liner.
10
.
“I remember everything now, Dr. Vaught,” he said calmly, no longer agitated. “You said I was to come and find you. Very well, here I am. What was it you wished to tell me?”
So
distracted had been the engineer in his headlong race across the desert that he had noticed not a single thing on the way and could not have said how he found his way here. Only now as Sutter sighed and sank into himself could he spare time to take a breath and see where he was.
Sutter was sitting in a sheriff's chair on the front porch of Doc's cottage. Doc's was one of a hundred or more such cottages fronting on a vast quadrangle of rich blue-green winter grass bordered by palm trees, a rectangular oasis in a scrabbly desert of mesquite. The evening rides were over and it was almost suppertime. Doors slammed as the dudes, mostly women, began the slow promenade to the chuck wagon. The sun was already down behind Sandia Mountain but the sky was bright and pure and empty as map space. The dudes smiled and nodded at Doc as they passed but the latter sat slumped and unresponsive, his dried-up Thom McAn shoes propped on the rail and Curlee pants hitched halfway up his skinny legs.
Sutter didn't seem to hear him. He slumped further and gazed at the bare mountain. The material of his trousers bunched up between his legs like curtain drapes.
“Then you have nothing to tell me,” the engineer asked him again.
“That is correct. Nothing.”
“But, sir, you wrote many things inâ”
“In the first place I didn't write them to you. In the second place I no longer believe a word of it. Did you ever read the great philosopher Wittgenstein?”
“No sir,” said the other gloomily.
“After his last work he announced the dictum which summarized his philosophy. He said: Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one should keep silent. And he did. He stopped teaching and went to live in a hut and said no more.”
“And you believe that?”
“No, I don't even believe that.”
They watched the women for a while. Presently the engineer said, “But you told me to come out and find you.”
“I did?”
“Therefore you at least owe me the explanation of what happened to make you change your mind.”
“What has happened?” Sutter looked puzzled.
“What has happened to you?”
“Nothing has happened.”
From the chair beside him, where he must have held it all along and out of the other's sight, Sutter raised the Colt Woodsman and sighted it at an airliner which sparkled like a diamond in the last of the sunlight.
“But Val told me that youâ”
“Val.” Sutter smiled as he tracked the airliner.
“Oh, I know you don't agree with Val.”
“Oh, but I do agree with her.”
“You do?”
“Oh yes, in every respect. About what has happened to the world, about what God should be and what man is, and even what the Church should be.”
The engineer sighed. “Yes sir. That is very interesting, but I think you know why I am here.”
“You see, Barrett, Val had a dream of what the Church should come to. (And I agree! Absolutely!) For example, she did not mind at all if Christendom should be done for, stove in, kaput, screwed up once and all. She did not mind that the Christers were like everybody else, if not worse. She did not even mind that God shall be gone, absent, not present, A.W.O.L., and that no one noticed or cared, not even the believers. Because she wanted us to go the route and be like Sweden, which is not necessarily bad, but to go the route, to leave God out of it and be happy or miserable, as the case might be. She believes that then, if we go the route and run out of Christendom, that the air would be cleared and even that God might give us a sign. That's how her own place makes sense, you see, her little foundation in the pines. She conceived herself as being there with her Delco and her butane tanks to start all over again. Did you notice how much it looked like one of those surviving enclaves after the Final War, and she's probably right: I mean, who in the hell would want to bomb South Alabama? But yes, I agree with her. Absolutely! It's just that nothing ever came of it.”
“Dr. Vaught. Excuse me, butâ”
“Don't you see? Nothing happened. She got all dressed up for the bridegroom and the bridegroom didn't come. There she sits in the woods as if the world had ended and she was one of the Elected Ones Left to keep the Thing going, but the world has not ended, in fact is more the same than usual. We are in the same fix, she and I, only I know it and she doesn't. Here I sit in Swedenâmost of those women are Swedes, spiritual Swedes, if you will noticeâbut I do not wait for a sign because there is no sign. I will even agree with her that when I first came to the desert I was waiting for a sign, but there was no sign and I am not waiting for one now.”
“Yes sir. That is very interesting. But the reason I came, if you will recall, is that you told meâ”
“But she changed, you see, and that was when we parted company. I could make some sense of her notion of being the surviving remnant of her Catholic Thing (which has to prevail, you see, in spite of all, yes, I don't mind that) set down back there in that God-forsaken place. That was fitting. But she changed, you see.
She became hopeful.
She goes to confraternity meetings in Mobile. She has dealings with the Methodist preacher, even the Baptists. She corresponds with scientists. She begs from the Seven-Up man and slips him a K.C. pamphlet (âHow many churches did Christ found?'). She talks the Klonsul into giving her a gym. In short, she sold out. Hell, what she is is a Rotarian.”
“Yes sir, very true, but what I want toâ”
“Barrett.”
“Sir?”
“Which is the best course for a man: to live like a Swede, vote for the candidate of your choice, be a good fellow, healthy and generous, do a bit of science as if the world made sense, enjoy a beer and a good piece (not a bad life!). Or: to live as a Christian among Christians in Alabama? Or to die like an honest man?”
“I couldn't say,” said the engineer. He was bitterly disappointed by Sutter's refusal to take him seriously.
“How is Jamie?” asked Sutter.
“Better,” said the other absently. “I am on my way there now. If you will answer my question, I'll leave.”
“What question?”
“The last time I saw you you said you had something to tell me. What was it?”
“I don't remember.”
The engineer, who had been pacing the tiny porch, which abutted Wells Fargo on one side and the O.K. Corral on the other, paused and fixed Sutter with a lively clairvoyant expression. Now at last he remembered everything, knew what he knew and what he didn't know and what he wished to know. He even remembered every sentence in Sutter's notebook.