Lancelot (28 page)

Siobhan? Yes, now that I'm legally sane and competent. I can have her. And I intend to get her from Tex as soon as I'm settled in Virginia. We'll do fine, if Tex has not bored her to death or driven her out of her mind with his horsh pistols and coinkidinkies. I suppose I should be grateful to him. At least he took care of her. But I wish now I had let her stay with Suellen. Some black people are still sane.

Anna? Oh, she's well. But she's not going with me after all. I'm going alone. She's been kind enough to lend me her place in the Blue Ridge until I can find my own little half acre.

What happened to Anna? Really it's incredible. I shall never understand women. We were going to have a new life together. I thought we were suited to each other—each stripped of the past, each aware that an end had come and that there had to be a new beginning, just like a man and woman striking out for the territory through the Cumberland Gap in the old days. Then, to my astonishment, I mortally offended her. I suggested that she had suffered the ultimate indignity, the worst violation a woman can suffer, rape at the hands of several men, forced fellatio, and so on, that I too had suffered my own catastrophe, and that since we had both suffered the worst that could happen to us and come through, not merely survived but prevailed, we were qualified as the new Adam and Eve of the new world. If we couldn't invent a new world and a new dignity between man and woman, surely nobody could.

Do you know that she took offense? In fact she flew into a rage. “Are you suggesting,” she said to me, “that I. myself, me, my person, can be violated by a
man
? You goddamn men. Don't you know that there are more important things in this world? Next you'll be telling me that despite myself I liked it.”

There is something to what she says. The other day I opened St. Augustine's
The City of God
thinking to find what some of your best people had to say about the great questions, God and man and so on. And what do you think I found? The good saint devoting page after page soothing the consciences of nuns, virgins who had been raped by Visigoths and enjoyed it despite themselves. No doubt howled with delight.

So Anna told me to shove off. Very well. I did. Perhaps it is better that way.

I expected too much from her. I expected her to have made the same discovery I made, to have found the great secret of life, the old life that is, the ignominious joy of rape and being raped. We, I thought, she and I, were going to discover something better. And in her heart she knows the secret as well as I but she can't bear to admit it. Can you blame her? But we would have made good pioneers in the new life because neither one of us could tolerate the old. Someday women will admit the truth, will refuse to accept it, and then they will be my best recruits.

Oh, one last thing she said. She held my hand for a while after shaking hands goodbye. “When you get up there in Virginia,” she told me, “you'll find a fallen-down house but a small solid-two-hundred-year-old barn. One side is a corn crib and a tack room with a loft. It would make a lovely cozy place to live in the winter and big enough for three.” Christ, do you think this is another woman trying to fix me up in a pigeonnier? Why is it that shelters for animals now seem more habitable than ordinary houses? Hm. A done-over corn crib. But she said
big enough for three.
I had the feeling that if she could take her revenge, shoot enough men to even the score, not only for herself but for the bad trick played on her and her sisters by God or biology or evolution or whatever, she then might settle down with me in a barn, and we could hold each other as lovers should do, cling to each other like children, while Siobhan frolicked in the loft. Do you think she'll come?

You look at me strangely. I don't think I ever thanked you for listening to me. You know that I could not have told anyone else. Yes, I'm quite all right now. No, no confession forthcoming. Father, as you well know. But there is one thing … There is a coldness … You know the feeling of numbness and coldness, no, not a feeling, but a lack of feeling, that I spoke of during the events at Belle Isle? I told you it might have been the effect of the hurricane, the low pressure, methane, whatever. But I still feel it. That is, today, I don't feel it. I don't feel anything—except a slight curiosity about walking down that street out there. What do you think of it, that there is a certain coldness… Do you feel it?

The truth is that during all the terrible events that night at Belle Isle, I felt nothing at all. Nothing good, nothing bad, not even a sense of discovery. I feel nothing now except a certain coldness.

I feel so cold. Percival.

Tell me the truth. Is everyone cold now or is it only I?

What? You remind me that I said in the beginning that there was something I wanted to ask you. Ah yes. Well, it doesn't seem important now. Because there is no answer to the question. The question? Very well. The question is: Why did I discover nothing at the heart of evil? There was no “secret” after all, no discovery, no flickering of interest, nothing at all. not even any evil. There was no sense of coming close to the “answer” as there had been when I discovered the stolen money in my father's sock drawer. As I held that wretched Jacoby by the throat, I felt nothing except the itch of fiberglass particles under my collar. So I have nothing to ask you after all because there is no answer. There is no question. There is no unholy grail just as there was no Holy Grail.

Not even the knife at his throat seemed to make any difference. All it came down to was steel molecules entering skin molecules, artery molecules, blood cells.

You gaze at me with such—what? Sadness? Love? What about love? Do I think I can ever love anyone? Explain the question.

But that is beside the point. The point is, I know what I need to know and what I must do. Shall I tell you? Christ, you of all people should understand. Come here and stand with me at the window. I want to show you something, some insignificant things you may not have noticed. Why so wary? You act as if I were Satan showing you the kingdoms of the world from the pinnacle of the temple.

Listen. Do you hear them? Young people singing and laughing, enjoying themselves in the city of the dead. Perhaps they know something we don't know.

I'm like that old lady at the window across the street. I don't miss much. For example, I saw you earlier down there. In the cemetery. Surprised? I saw what you did, even though you did it very quickly. You stopped at a tomb and said a prayer. A relative? A friend? A request? So you pray for the dead. You know, something has changed in you. I have the feeling that while I was talking and changing, you were listening and changing. Am I wrong or have you reached a decision of sorts? No? You're waiting for me to finish?

Just take a look. What do you see? The same friendly little scene I first showed you the other day. The same street, the same junked 1958 Cadillac, the same movie, the same neat little Volkswagen with the
MAKE LOVE NOT WAR
sticker pulling in this very moment with the same mousy little coed at the wheel, the same two homosexuals holding hands next door, a quiet decent couple actually, much like any other couple, raper and rapee, with needs like yours and mine plus an occasional tube of K-Y jelly.

Look closely, you'll see that one or two insignificant items are different out there in the street. Notice the new bumper sticker on the VW:
IF IT FEELS GOOD DO IT
. Notice the poster near the old colored entrance of the movie. It's new.
Deep Throat
where once we saw
Henry V
and
Key Largo.

Yes, insignificant changes, I'll admit. In fact, not really a change at all, but only more of the same. You shrug. What of it? Yes, you're right. What of it?

You say you wish to know what I'm going to do. Very well. I'll gladly tell you because when I woke this morning I knew for the first time exactly what I was going to do. Really it's simple. I can't imagine why I had to go to such lengths to discover it. There it was under my nose all along.

Yes, it dawned on me that suddenly, the solution is as clear and simple as an arithmetic problem. As a matter of fact, that is what it is: a matter of logic as simple as two plus two. I saw exactly how things are and what I must do. For your benefit I can even state it as a simple scholastic syllogism.

We are living in Sodom.

1. I do not propose to live in Sodom or to raise my son and daughters in Sodom.

2. Either your God exists or he does not.

3. If he exists, he will not tolerate Sodom much longer. He will either destroy it or let the Russians or the Chinese destroy it just as he turned the Assyrians loose on the Jews, and Sparta on Athens. How many Spartans would be needed to take these 200 million Athenians? Ten thousand? A thousand? A hundred? Twelve? One?

4. If God does not exist, then it will be I not God who will not tolerate it. I, one person. I will start a new world single-handedly or with those like me who will not tolerate it. But the difference between me and God is that I won't tolerate the Russians or the Chinese either. God uses instruments. I am my own instrument. No Russkies or Chinks in the Shenandoah Valley. We won't tolerate either. We won't tolerate that out there and we won't tolerate the Russians. We know what we want. And we'll have it. If it takes the sword, we'll use the sword.

5. I'll wait and give your God time.

You are silent. Your eyes are vacant.

So you plan to take a little church in Alabama, Father, preach the gospel, turn bread into flesh, forgive the sins of Buick dealers, administer communion to suburban housewives?

At last you're looking straight at me, but how strangely! Ah, all at once I understand you. I read you as instantly as I used to when we were so close. All of a sudden we understand each other perfectly, don't we?

Tell me if I'm right or wrong.

You know something you think I don't know, and you want to tell me but you hesitate.

Yes
.

You speak! Loud and clear! And looking straight at me!

But I can see in your eyes it doesn't make any difference any more, as far as what is going to happen next is concerned, that what is going to happen is going to happen whether you or I believe or not and whether your belief is true or not. Right?

Yes.

We are not going to make it this way, are we?

No.

It's all over, isn't it? I can see it in your eyes. We agree after all.

Yes.

Yes, but? But what? There must be a new beginning, right?

Yes—

But? You don't like the new beginning I propose?

You are silent. So you are going to go to your little church in Alabama and that's it?

Yes.

So what's the new beginning in that? Isn't that just more of the same?

You are silent.

Very well. But you know this! One of us is wrong. It will be your way or it will be my way.

Yes.

All we can agree on is that it will not be their way. Out there.

Yes.

There is no other way than yours or mine, true?

Yes.

One last question—and somehow I know you know the answer. Do you know Anna?

Yes.

Do you know her well?

Yes.

Will she join me in Virginia and will she and I and Siobhan begin a new life there?

Yes.

Very well. I've finished. Is there anything you wish to tell me before I leave?

Yes.

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copyright © 1977 by Walker Percy

cover design by Jason Gabbert

ISBN: 978-1-4532-1617-0

This edition published in 2011 by Open Road Integrated Media
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