All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [193]
“If you can guarantee results like that,” I said, “you ought to do a land-office business. As soon as the news gets around.”
“You can’t ever guarantee anything,” Adam said.
“What happens if it doesn’t come out according to Hoyle?”
“Well,” he said, “there have been cases–not mine, thank God–where the patient didn’t come cheerfully extroverted but became completely and cheerfully amoral.”
“You mean he would throw the nurses down right on the floor in broad daylight?”
“About that,” Adam said. “If you’d let him. All the ordinary inhibitions disappeared.”
“Well, if your guy tomorrow comes out like that he will certainly be an asset to society.”
Adam grinned sourly, and said, “He won’t be any worse than a lot of other people who haven’t been cut on.”
“Can I see the cutting” I asked. I felt all of a sudden that I had to see it. I had never seen an operation. As a newspaperman, I had seen three hangings and one electrocution, but they are different. In a hanging you do not change a man’s personality. You just change the length of his neck and give him a quizzical expression, and in an electrocution you just cook some bouncing meat in a wholesale lot. But this operation was going to be more radical even than what happened to Saul on the road to Damascus. So I asked could I see the operation.
“Why?” Adam asked, studying my face.
I told him it was plain curiosity.
He said, all right, but it wouldn’t be pretty.
“It will be as pretty as a hanging, I guess,” I replied.
Then He started to tell me about the case. He drew me pictures and he got down books. He perked up considerably and almost talked my ear off. He was so interesting that I forgot to ask him a question which had flitted though my mind earlier in our conversation. He had said that in the case of a religious conversion the personality does not change, that it is merely exercised in terms of a different set of values. Well, I had meant to ask him how, if there was no change in personality, how did the person get a different set of values to exercise his personality in terms of? But it slipped my mind at the time.
Anyway, I saw the operation.
Adam got me rigged up so I could go right down in the pit with him. They brought in the patient and put him on the table. He was a hook-nosed, sour-faced, gaunt individual who reminded me vaguely of Andrew Jackson or a back-country evangelist despite the white turban on his head made out of sterile towels. But that turban was pushed pretty far back at a jaunty angle, for the front part of his head was exposed. It had been shaved. They put the mask on him and knocked him out. Then Adam took a scalpel and cut a neat little cut across the top of the head and down at each temple, and then just peeled the skin off the bone in a neat flap forward. He did a job that would have made a Comanche brave look like a tyro with a scalping knife. Meanwhile, they were sopping up the blood, which was considerable.
Then Adam settled down to the real business. He had a contraption like a brace and bit. With that he drilled five or six holes–burr holes they call them in the trade–on each side of the skull. Then he started to work with what he had told me earlier was a Gigli saw, a thing which looked like a coarse wire. With that he sawed on the bone till he had a flap loose on each side of the front of the head and could bend the flap down and get at the real mechanism inside. Or could as soon as he had cut the pale little membrane which they call the meninges.
By that time it had been more than an hour, or so it seemed to me, and my feet hurt. It was hot in there, too, but I didn’t get upset, even with the blood. For one thing, the man there on the table didn’t seem real. I forgot that he was a man at all, and kept watching the high-grade carpenter work which was going on. I didn’t pay much attention to the features of the process which did indicate that the thing on the table was a man. For instance, the nurse kept on taking blood-pressure readings and now and then she would mess with the transfusion apparatus–for they were given the patient a transfusion all the time out of a bottle rigged up on a stand with a tube coming down.