“—found him in New York,” Val was saying. “He’s Ed Barrett’s son. Have you met him?”
“I saw him in the garden.” Sutter aimed the pistol at something over the engineer’s head.
“What did you think of him?”
Sutter shrugged. “You know. He is—” His free hand, held forth like a blade, moved back and forth across the vertical.
“Yes,” said Val.
“—nice,” ended Sutter with six overtones in his voice, “you know.”
“Yes.”
My God, thought the closeted Englishman, they already knew what he was, agreed on it, and communicated their complex agreement with hardly a word!
“Put that thing up,” said Val.
“Why?”
“Some day you’re going to blow your fool head off — by accident.”
“That would offend you more than if I did it deliberately, wouldn’t it?”
“And it would please you, wouldn’t it, to die absurdly?”
The engineer heard no more. He had become extremely agitated, whether by their reference to him or by the sight of the pistol, he could not have said, but he left the closet and paced up and down the bedroom. He took his pulse: 110. A door closed and the stairs creaked under a heavy step. For some minutes he stood listening. A car started below. He went to the window. It was a Volkswagen microbus painted a schoolbus yellow and stained with red dust.
He had already started for the door, blood pounding in his ears, when the shot rang out. It was less a noise than a heavy concussion. Lint flew off the wall like a rug whipped by a broom. His ears rang. Now, hardly knowing how he came here, he found himself standing, heart pounding in his throat, outside Sutter’s door on the tiny landing. Even now, half out of his mind, his first thought was of the proprieties. It had seemed better to go to Sutter’s outside door than directly through the kitchenette, which with the closet separated the apartments. And now, standing at the door, knuckles upraised, he hesitated. Does one knock after a shot. With a sob of dismay, dismay less for Sutter than himself, he burst into the room.
The wagonwheel chair was empty. He went lunging about.
“You must be Barrett.”
Sutter stood at a card table, almost behind the door, cleaning the pistol with a flannel disk soaked in gun oil.
“Excuse me,” said the reeling engineer. “I thought I heard a noise.”
“Yes.”
“It sounded like a shot.”
“Yes.”
He waited but Sutter said no more.
“Did the pistol go off accidentally?”
“No. I shot him.”
“Him?” The engineer suddenly feared to turn around.
Sutter was nodding to the wall. There hung yet another medical picture, this of The Old Arab Physician. The engineer had not seen it because his peephole was some four inches below the frame. Moving closer, he noticed that the Arab, who was ministering to some urchins with phials and flasks, was badly shot up. Only then did it come over him that his peephole was an outlying miss in the pattern of bullet holes.
“Why him?” asked the engineer, who characteristically, having narrowly escaped being shot, dispatched like Polonius behind the arras, had become quite calm.
“Don’t you know who that is?”
“No.”
‘That’s Abou Ben Adhem.”
The engineer shook his head impatiently. “Now that I’m here I’d like to ask you—”
“See the poem? There in a few short, badly written lines is compressed the sum and total of all the meretricious bullshit of the Western world. And lo! Ben Adhem’s name led all the rest Why did it lead all the rest?”
“I don’t know,” said the engineer. His eyes were fixed vacantly on the dismantled gun barrel. The fruity steel smell of Hoppe’s gun oil put him in mind of something, but he couldn’t think what.
“There it is,” said Sutter, loading the clip, “the entire melancholy procession of disasters. First God; then a man who is extremely pleased with himself for serving man for man’s sake and leaving God out of it; then in the end God himself turned into a capricious sentimental Jean Hersholt or perhaps Judge Lee Cobb who is at first outraged by Abou’s effrontery and then thinks better of it: by heaven, says he, here is a stout fellow when you come to think of it to serve his fellow man with no thanks to me, and so God swallows his pride and packs off the angel to give Abou the good news — the new gospel. Do you know who did the West in?”
“No.”
“It wasn’t Marx or immorality or the Communists or the atheists or any of those fellows. It was Leigh Hunt.”
“Who?” repeated the engineer absently, eyes glued forever to the Colt Woodsman.
“If I were a Christian, I shouldn’t hesitate to identify the Anti-Christ. Leigh Hunt.”
“Leigh Hunt,” said the engineer, rubbing his eyes.
“I’m glad you came down with Jimmy,” said Sutter. “Come sit over here.”
“Yes sir.” Still not quite able to rouse himself, he allowed Sutter to lead him to the wagonwheel chair. But before he could sit down, Sutter turned him into the light from the window.
“What’s the matter with you?”
“I feel all right now. I was quite nervous a few minutes ago. I’ve had a nervous condition for some time.” He told Sutter about his amnesia.
“I know. Jimmy told me. Are you going into a fugue now?”
“I don’t know. I thought perhaps that you—”
“Me? Oh no. I haven’t practiced medicine for years. I’m a pathologist I study the lesions of the dead.”
“I know that,” said the engineer, sitting down wearily. “But I have reason to believe you can help me.”
“What reason?”
“I can tell when somebody knows something I don’t know.”
“You think I know something?”
“Yes.”
“How can you tell?”
“I don’t know how but I can. I had an analyst for five years and he was very good, but he didn’t know anything I didn’t know.”
Sutter laughed. “Did you tell him that?”
“No.”
“You should have. He could have done a better job.”
“I’m asking you.”
“I can’t practice. I’m not insured.”
“Insured?”
‘The insurance company cancelled my liability. You can’t practice without it.”
“I’m not asking you to practice. I only want to know what you know.”
But Sutter only shrugged and turned back to the Colt.
“Why did they cancel your insurance?” the engineer asked desperately. There was something he wanted to ask but he couldn’t hit on the right question.
“I got the idea of putting well people in the hospital and sending the truly sick home.”
“Why did you do that?” asked the engineer, smiling slightly. He was not yet certain when the other was joking.
Again Sutter shrugged.
The engineer was silent.
Sutter rammed a wad through the barrel. “I had a patient once who lived under the necessity of being happy. He almost succeeded but did not quite. Since he did not, he became depressed. He became very unhappy that he was not happy. I put him in the terminal ward of the hospital, where he was surrounded by the dying. There he soon recovered his wits and became quite cheerful. Unfortunately — and by the purest bad luck — he happened to suffer a serious coronary before I sent him home. As soon as it became apparent that he was going to die, I took it upon myself to remove him from his oxygen tent and send him home to his family and garden. There he died. The hospital didn’t like it much. His wife sued me for a half a million dollars. The insurance company had to pay.”
The engineer, still smiling faintly, was watching the other like a hawk. “Dr. Vaught, do you know what causes amnesia?”