The Last Gentleman and The Second Coming

by Walker Percy

Were they, the scientists, serious? How could one not solve any problem, once you put your mind to it, had forty years, and people didn’t bother you? Problems were for solving. Perhaps they the scientists were not serious. For if people solved the problems of cancer and war, what would they do then? Who could she ask about this? She made a note to look it up in the library.

She lit a candle and the soft yellow light made a room in the dark and time went singing along with cicada music and not even the screech owl was sad except that just at dusk there rose in her throat not quite panic but something rising nevertheless. She swallowed it, all but the aftertaste of wondering: tomorrow will it be worse, even a curse?

She went to the library to look up love as she had looked up the mechanical advantages of pulleys. Surely great writers and great lovers of the past had written things worth reading.

His scruffy yellow beard looked odd against his smooth platinum-and-brown hair. Was he nodding because he knew what he was going to do?

She wished he would notice her concrete, the best-cured concrete in North Carolina.

What pleasure, obeying instructions! Then is this what people in the world do? This is called “joining the work force.” It is not a bad way to live. One gets a job. There is a task and a task teller (a person who tells you a task), a set of directions, instructions, perhaps a map, a carrying out of the task, a finishing of the task, a return to the task teller to report success, a thanking. A getting paid. An assignment of another task.

Victory! She had made it in the world! Not only could she make herself understood. People even understood what she said when she didn’t.

“What’s the matter with him? Is that rascal sick?” Rascal. The word had peculiar radiations but mainly fondness.

Some of the drops on the glass beyond his head didn’t run. In the big drops the open firebox was reflected in a bright curved stripe like a cat’s eye.

“Then why is it that I live this life as if it were a dream and as if any minute I might wake up and find myself in my real life?”

When he began to talk she found that she could not hear his words for listening to the way he said them. She cast about for his drift.

“I do that,” she said, “I go round and down to get down to myself.” “I went down and around to get out of myself.” “Did you?” “I don’t know. I can’t remember. Curious. Now that your memory is better, mine is . . . Anyhow, that’s over and done with. The future is what concerns us.”

Something occurred to him. Excitedly he jumped out of the car and, paying no attention to the cold drizzle which had started up again, paced back and forth beside the silver Mercedes, smacking his arms around his body and now and then kicking the Michelin radials.

Though it was she who had been the mental patient and he the solidest citizen of the community, early retiree, philanthropist, president of United Way, six-handicap golfer, surely it was he not she who was deranged now, who, after holing up in a cave for two weeks, now paced up and down the parking lot of the Linwood Country Club in the predawn darkness, kicking a German car, while sane folk snored in their beds.

Now he snapped his fingers and nodded to himself, for all the world like a man who has hit upon the solution to a problem which had vexed him for years.

War is what makes peace desirable. But peace without war is intolerable.

Why do men walk like sheep straight into the slaughterhouse? Why are people content to stand helpless while their lifeblood is drained away?

You only kissed me once and it was the kiss of death. True, death is a way out of a life-which-is-a-living-death. War and shooting is better than such a peace. But what if there is life?

Death in the guise of God and America and the happy life of home and family and friends is not going to prevail over me. America is in fact almost as dead as Europe. It might still be possible to live in America, said the nutty American dancing in place in old Carolina.

“What happens when she tries?” “At first she’s bright as can be. Too bright. Everything is Christmas morning. And that’s the trouble. She can only live if every day is Christmas morning. But she doesn’t know how to live from one Christmas to the next.” “What happens when she tries?” “She can’t cope.” “What does that mean?” “I mean that she literally does not know how to live. She can’t talk, she can’t sleep, she can’t work. So she crawls into a hole and pulls it in after her. Twice I’ve saved her from starvation. I can’t take that responsibility any more.”

Then she was too much of this world, she knew too many men, talked too much, lied too much, and abused her body. So now she is not of this world, knows nobody, can’t talk enough to lie, doesn’t use her body at all. Or as she would put it: my body doesn’t work—implying that, before, her body worked.”

Her belief in such matters was both absolute and perfunctory. There was a plausibility to it. Things fell into place. Mysteries were revealed. Why could he not be a believer?

Even now Kitty was inattentive, eyes drifting as she talked. In the very act of uttering her ultimate truths, she was too bored to listen. “Ah, I’ve got to go,” he said suddenly, getting out of the car stiffly and setting one foot toward the woods.

Why not play golf with hale and ruddy Seniors for the next thirty years? He’d be the youngest on the tour, the Golden Bear among the old grizzlies.

He felt fine but somewhat abstracted, like a man who is looking at something without seeing it yet cannot bring himself to tear his eyes away.

His rimless glasses flashed. His cheeks were pale and withered but his lips curved richly as if they belonged to a hearty man.

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.

Things increased in density and stood apart. He could see around trees. But time ran together. Was it Wednesday or Sunday?

“What?” he asked, noticing that he felt scared, and wondered if this natural emotion were not another sign of his return to health.

He had spied Mr. Arnold in the hall hopping along on his crutch. There was no mistaking that peeled-onion head and the one bright eye in his shutdown face.

He explained, watching Will Barrett closely, that it was better to chop off a good piece the first time than nibble away as they had done with the other leg. I could have told them from the beginning, he said, that it’s exactly like pruning back boxwood with the blight.

Learned what? That he didn’t miss me after all, that I thought I survived and I did but I’ve been dead of something ever since and didn’t know it until now. What a surprise. They were right after all. He was right. D’Lo was right. What a surprise. But is it not also a surprise that discovering you’ve been dead all these years, you should now feel somewhat alive?

“Both. Atlantan businesswise with your suit, as I once saw Sarge come down the bullet in the Hyatt with attaché case and suit like that. But Atlantean also because of the way you came through the woods like you were coming from elsewhere not there.”

“There is something I need,” he told her. “Moi aussi,” she said. “Entirely apart from the needs of society and the family as a unit, or the group.” “Yes, apart from that.”

“It is possible that though marriage in these times seems for some reason to be a troubled, often fatal, arrangement, we might not only survive it but revive it.” “Yes, we could survive and revive it.”