The Second Coming (41 page)

He turned his head. The sphinx turned. He turned his head the other way. The sphinx turned the other way.

It was his own brain.

Later the same quick hands unstrapped him and led him into a brightly lit examining room. There were Leslie and Jack Curl and Vance Battle and another man, no doubt a doctor, wearing a long white coat with a rubber hammer sticking out of his pocket. Leslie and Jack were smiling at him.

“What are you grinning about?” he asked Leslie crossly. Uh oh, he thought. Something is wrong for sure. Leslie never smiles unless somebody dies or the Holy Spirit descends. What had happened to her inverted-U frown?

“Credit friend Jack here,” she said, giving him a pat. Ah, they had become friends. What was up? “There is nothing like the power of prayer.”

“There you go,” said Jack absently, dancing a little.

“Power of prayer to do what?” asked Will Barrett.

“To find you and get you here at Duke!” said Leslie, giving him a hug. “Oh, Poppy, you're a mess!”

Vance and the other man were holding their arms and talking, their heads down. The other man must be a doctor because he was talking to Vance both seriously and casually. He didn't have to smile. A courtesy was being extended Vance. They did not seem to be exchanging medical information as doctors do, but rather reaching an agreement, as lawyers do. They traced designs on the floor with the toes of their shoes. An agreement was reached. Both men nodded. The other doctor left.

Leslie and Jack Curl were smiling and shaking their heads. Vance winked. With so much cheerfulness—Leslie smiling and soft-eyed!—the news must be bad.

“Son, we had a time catching up with you and throwing you down,” said Vance, talking more country man usual. Bad! He turned to Leslie. “What this old boy needs is some strong-arm tactics, and this little lady is just the one to do it.”

“There you go,” said Jack Curl, doing a turn and bumping into Leslie. There occurred between them some kind of comic Christian jostle.

He was looking down at his short hospital smock. It was tied loosely in the back. A draft blew up under the flap. There was lettering on the front. He tried to read it.

“Where am I?” he asked.

“You're at Duke, Poppy,” said Leslie and sure enough took him by a strong hand. “The Duke hospital.”

“Sit down, Tiger, before you fall down,” said Vance.

“I feel fine,” he said. He did. Except for a lightness in the head and a throbbing above one eye, he felt strong. He was hungry. “How long have I been here?”

“Twelve hours,” said Vance. “And I'm here to tell you one damn thing. Out of your head you're a lot easier to get along with. You're not a bad patient. You actually hold still when I tell you.”

“How did I get here from the bus?”

The three looked at each other and laughed.

Jack Curl did a turn and addressed the others, with Will Barrett as listener-in. “I don't know what friend Will here told that bus driver, but that sucker turned that bus around and delivered him straight to Linwood Hospital.”

He looked at them. Their smiles and winks and jokes bore him along as skillfully as the swift hands on the X-ray table. “What am I doing here?”

Vance's eyes gazed unfocused into his. “I thought there might be a little sumpn wrong with you.”

“Was there?”

“Not what I was afraid of. Actually I was right all along. It looked to me like you were having little petty-mall seizures, but when you took to falling down and acting even meaner than usual, I was afraid it might be something more serious. As it is, they even got a pill for what ails you. You won't even have to stay in a hospital. A convalescent home for a spell is all you need, long enough for me to get you regulated. Let's go back to the mountain, boy. At least I know now what was causing your slice. What a relief. I thought for a while your golf game was shot.”

“Poppy,” said Leslie, coming close and straightening his smock, giving it firm tugs and pats like a mother. “Vance and Dr. Ellis want to have a little powwow with you. Jack and I will be waiting in the hall. When the scientists get through with you, we want a piece of you. Jack, Vance, and I have cooked up something special for the four of us. But that can wait.”

Jack Curl took his hand too and squeezed it with both of his in a special way like a fraternity grip. Jack seemed more English than before. His hair flew off unbrushed to one side. He didn't use deodorant.

They went into another room. Dr. Ellis was standing there, doing nothing, not smiling, not frowning.

When the door closed, Vance turned on the light of a shadow box, another box, then another. There was the galaxy again, not swimming in deep space now but its poor pale image, an X-ray. Next to it a pelvis connected legbones to backbone as simply and comically as a Halloween skeleton. Next, a bigger woman-size pelvis had something new cradled in its womb, a puddle of white. What was hatching here?

The two doctors lined up alongside him as if he were a colleague, a man among men. The women and priests were gone and they could talk.

“Boy, you some lucky,” said Vance. “You want to know what I thought you had until Dr. Ellis here talked me out of it. You know I went to Chapel Hill and we know all about Duke assholes but this is one more smart asshole.”

Dr. Ellis nodded and pressed his lips together in a faint smile. Will Barrett wished Vance would not try to be funny. Dr. Ellis was not the sort of person to be called an asshole. Vance went down the bank of X-rays, snapping his fingernail against the heavy celluloid. “I thought you had a prostatic growth here—”
pow
“—with metastases here—”
pow
“—here in the brain—”
pow
“I'd have given you three months. But you're some lucky. What you got I barely heard of and Dr. Ellis has written a paper about. He even invented a test for it. Frankly I think he invented the disease. And that ain't all. They can't cure it but they got a drug for it and we can control it. Ain't that right, Doctor?”

Dr. Ellis went on with his nodding and faint smile. The two doctors fell back, folded their arms, and examined the X-rays as if they were a wall of Rembrandts. He saw that they were using the X-rays as stage props, something to look at so they could talk to him.

“I'm afraid Dr. Battle is doing himself an injustice,” said Dr. Ellis dryly, his eyes drifting along the X-rays. He saw that Dr. Ellis had a way of feigning inattention which in fact allowed him to pay strict attention. “He suggested all along that you had a petit-mal epilepsy, which in fact you do, a rare form, so rare it bears the name of its discoverer. It's called Hausmann's Syndrome. It is in fact a petit-mal temporal-lobe epilepsy which is characterized by typical symptoms. It is not too well controlled by Dilantin but there's a new drug which works very well. That is to say, it clears up the symptoms. What we have to do is rule out a lesion in the temporal lobe. Dr. Battle favors that. I don't. The odd thing about the treatment is—”

“What are the symptoms?” asked Will Barrett.

Dr. Ellis shrugged. “As I recalled, Dr. Hausmann listed such items as depression, fugues, certain delusions, sexual dysfunction alternating between impotence and satyriasis, hypertension, and what he called
wahnsinnige Sehnsucht
—I rather like that. It means inappropriate longing.”

It ought to be called Housmann not Hausmann, he thought, the disorder suffered by the poet who mourned dead Shropshire lads and rose-lipt maids and his own lost youth.

“As I was saying, the odd thing is that the drug is the simplest of all substances, so simple that no one would think of it—in fact, it was discovered by accident. It is nothing other than the hydrogen ion, a single nucleus of one proton, not even an electron. Isn't that intriguing? that the most complex symptoms,
wahnsinnige Sehnsucht,
inappropriate longings, depression and such, can be cured by a single proton? Apparently it all comes down to pH. I've had a series of six cases, and in each one you have petit-mal seizures plus an unstable pH which fluctuates between a mild alkalosis and acidosis. It is apparently a high sensitivity to pH changes which causes the symptoms. For instance, this morning your pH ran seven point seven. The treatment is simple but pesky. It means checking your pH every couple of hours and calibrating the medication accordingly. Anyone can pass out from alkalosis—I could put Vance out just by having him hyperventilate—but you're much more sensitive and therefore your pH must be monitored all the time. All my patients are doing well but have to be maintained under the most carefully controlled conditions.”

“What does that mean?” asked Will Barrett, taking note of the not unpleasant sensation of being caught up, diagnosed, recognized, planned for, of the prospect of one's life being ordered henceforward, like joining the army.

“I've got this one case of Hausmann's in the math department here at Duke. Instead of showing up for class he'd be found sitting in the stadium alone. Once he went to Kitty Hawk and lived in the dunes and nearly starved.”

The dunes? Yes.

“Now, under treatment, he meets his classes and publishes voluminously. Except for living in our convalescent wing, he has a normal life.”

“Here? He lives here in the hospital?”

“We have to monitor his blood pH every hour. One spoon of vinegar salad dressing and he's in the depths. One Alka-Seltzer and he's off for the dunes with two coeds. Heh heh. We don't know whether it's your internal governor on the blink or whether your limbic system is abnormally sensitive. Or whether you have a temporal-lobe lesion, though”—he snapped an X-ray—“I see no sign of it. Remarkable, don't you think, that a few protons, plus or minus, can cause such complicated moods? Lithium, the simplest metal, controls depression. Hydrogen, the simplest atom, controls
wahnsinnige Sehnsucht
.”

“How about that?” said Vance.

The two doctors could have been enlisting him as a colleague. Will Barrett saw that it was his, Dr. Ellis's, way of telling him good news, and a very good way it was, giving him a new lease on life as offhandedly as making an appointment. What a good fellow Dr. Ellis was!

Leslie came in, all smiles and melts, Jack Curl dancing behind her.

“Let's head for the hills, Poppy.”

He looked at Dr. Ellis.

“Vance can monitor your pH as well as I. If he finds any sign of a lesion he can bring you back.”

“And here's the bottom line,” said Jack Curl, coming too close. “Bertie's got you signed up for the Seniors tournament next month and these two docs say you can make it. If—”

“If?”

“If you put up at my place so Vance can check your blood. You can start out on St. Mark's putting green.”

He looked at Vance.

“You heard the man. Now let's get out of here, old buddy. I got sick people to tend to. I can only add one item to Dr. Ellis's diagnosis—incidentally, I concur with him now. I'll make you a press bet that the hydrogen ion will correct your slice—that may be my contribution to medical literature: the correlation of blood pH and the golf slice. Who knows?” He gave him a wink. “The hydrogen ion may even solve the Jewish question. As a matter of fact, why don't we try it for size—you're on hydrogen now, your blood pH is exactly seven point four, normal. Is Groucho Marx dead or alive?”

“Dead.”

“Right. Now what happened to the Jews in North Carolina?”

“The Jews?” he said, frowning.

“Yes, the Jews.”

“Why, nothing. They're going about their business as usual, I suppose.”

“Right. And what about that Jewish girl in high school you were raving about last night?”

“What Jewish girl?”

“What about the Jewish exodus?”

“What exodus?”

“What about your business in Georgia?”

“What business?”

“You were talking about some unfinished business in a Georgia swamp.”

“What swamp?”

“Let's head for the hills, son.”

“From whence cometh our help,” said Leslie.

“Okay,” he said agreeably, blinking. Yes, he felt exactly as he felt when he was drafted in the army, a dazed content and a mild curiosity. His life was out of his hands.

IV

THANKSGIVING FOUND HIM COMFORTABLY
installed in St. Mark's Convalescent Home taking pills and shots and having blood drawn every hour. Jack had put him in the penthouse suite overlooking the gorge. Leslie moved in his new clothes, cardigans, pipes, stereo, Bible, everything but the Greener and Luger. She had even retrieved the Mercedes from the maple tree, had it repaired and parked outside. With a significant look she handed the keys to him. Perhaps it was an act of faith in him.

For a long time he stood twiddling the keys and looking at the Mercedes. He opened the trunk. There lay the Greener in its case and the Luger in its holster. He stood, foot on bumper, thinking.

Vance came by twice a day to give him his “acid” and to take blood to test his pH. He came close as a lover, breath strong and sweet, sniffed at him, looked into his eyeballs. He told his patient he smelled healthy, his pressure was down, and the arteries in his eyegrounds were as supple as snakes.

Not only did Will Barrett tolerate the drug, he seemed in a queer way to prosper. A smell of pesticide hung in his nostrils. He smelled like a house sprayed for termites. A chemical exuberance took hold of him. The simplest of all atoms gave him a complex sense of well-being. If the treatment was dangerous, he felt as safe as a knife thrower's girl. Friendly knives zipped past his head, between his legs, fanned his ears, went
zoing
straight to their malignant target. A cool Carolina Salk rattling his test tubes at Duke had saved his life. How odd to be rescued, salvaged, converted by the hydrogen ion! a proton as simple as a billiard ball! Did it all come down to chemistry after all? Had he fallen down in a bunker, pounded the sand with his fist in a rage of longing for Ethel Rosenblum because his pH was 7.6? A quirky energy flowed into his muscles. He couldn't sleep but didn't mind. He rose at all hours, dressed carefully, prowled the halls, explored the grounds, even drove the Mercedes. He wanted to see Allie. He forgot about Jews but not Allie. Had his longing for her been a hydrogen-ion deficiency, a
wahnsinnige Sehnsucht?
No, hydrogen or no hydrogen, he wanted to see her face. Would the protons now coursing through his brain and eyegrounds make her look different? Why hadn't she come to see him? He headed for the club, but a twisting in his head caused him to turn the Mercedes to correct the twist. Again the Mercedes took to the woods. Maybe he'd better drive around the block at first.