All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [192]
There he was, and he hadn’t changed a bit.
“Hello, Jack,” he said, and swiped the forelock out of his eyes and swung his feet off the desk and came toward me, putting out his hand, “where the hell you been, boy?”
“Out West,” I said, with elaborate casualness, taking the proffered hand. “Just drove out West. I got sort of fed up round here, so I took me a little vacation.”
“Have a good time?”
“I had a wonderful time,” I said.
“Fine,” he said.
“How you been making out?” I asked.
“Fine,” he said, “everything is fine.”
And so I had come home to the place where everything was fine. Everything was fine just the way it had been before I left, except that now I knew the secret. And my secret knowledge cut me off. If you have the secret, you cannot really communicate any more with somebody who has not got it, any more that you can really communicate with a bustling vitamin-crammed brat who is busy with his building blocks or a tin drum. And you can’t take somebody off to one side and tell him the secret. If you do that, then the fellow, or female, you are trying to tell the truth to thinks you are feeling sorry for yourself and asking for sympathy, when the real case is that you are not asking for sympathy but for congratulations. So I did my daily tasks and ate my daily bread and saw the old familiar faces, and smiled benignly like a priest.
It was June, and hot. Every night, except those nights when I went to sit in an air-conditioned movie, I went to my room after dinner and stripped buck-naked and lay on the bed, with an electric fan burring and burrowing away into my brain, and read a book until the time when I would become aware that the sound of the city had sunk off to almost nothing but the single hoot of a taxis far off or the single lost clang and grind of a streetcar, an owl car heading out. Then I would reach up and switch off the light and roll over and go to sleep with the fan still burring and burrowing.
I did see Adam a few times in June. He was more deeply involved than before in the work of the medical center, more grimly and icily driving himself. There was, of course, some letup in the work at the University with the end of term, but whatever relief was there, was more than made up for by an increase in his private practice and work at the clinic. He said he was glad to see me when I went to his apartment, and maybe he was, but he didn’t have much to say, and as I sat there he would seem to be drawing deeper and deeper into himself until I had the feeling that I was trying to talk to somebody down a well and had better holler if I wanted to be understood. The only time he perked up was one night when, after he had remarked on the fact that he was to perform an operation the next morning, I asked about the case.
It was a case of catatonic schizophrenia, he said.
“You mean he is a nut?” I asked
Adam grinned and allowed that that wasn’t too far wrong.
“I didn’t know you cut on folks for being nutty,” I said. “I thought you just humored and gave them cold baths and let them make raffia baskets and got them to tell you their dreams.”
“No,” he said, “you can cut on them.” Then he added, almost apologetically, “A prefrontal lobectomy.”
“What’s that?”
“You remove a piece of the frontal lobe of the brain on each side,” he said.
I asked would the fellow live. He said you never could tell for sure, but if he did live he would be different.
I asked how did he mean, different.
“Oh, a different personality,” he replied.
“Like after you get converted and baptized?”
“That doesn’t give you a different personality,” he said. “When you get converted you still have the same personality. You merely exercise it in terms of a different set of values.”
“But this fellow will have a different personality?”
“Yes,” Adam said. “The way he is now he simply sits on a chair or lies in his back on a bed and stares into space. His brow is creased and furrowed. Occasionally he utters a low moan or an exclamation. In some such cases we discover the presence of delusions of persecution. But always the patient seems to experience a numbing, grinding misery. But after we are through with him he will be different. He will be relaxed and cheerful and friendly. He will smooth his brow. He will sleep well and eat well and will love to hang over the back fence and compliment the neighbors on their nasturtiums and cabbages. He will be perfectly happy.