They were talking about politics and the Negro, who was now rumored to be headed for the campus this weekend. “Do yall know the difference between a nigger and an ape?” said Lamar Thigpen, embracing all three Deltans. They’re good chaps, though, thought the engineer distractedly, and, spying Mr. Vaught circling the walls, thought of something he wanted to ask him and took out after him, pushing his kneecap in with each step like a polio victim. They’re good chaps and so very much at one with themselves and with the dear world around them as bright and sure as paradise. The game was tomorrow and they were happy about that; they knew what they wanted and who they hated. Oh, why ain’t I like them, thought the poor engineer, who was by no means a liberal — never in fact giving such matters a single thought — but who rather was so mystified by white and black alike that he could not allow himself the luxury of hatred. Oh, but they were lordly in theirs, he noticed, as he hobbled along. Then forgetting what he wanted to ask Mr. Vaught, he fetched up abruptly and took his pulse. “I’m not at all well,” he said to himself.
“What’s the matter,” asked Sutter, who had been watching him from his kitchen chair at the blue bar. Jamie, the engineer noticed, had left.
“I don’t feel well. Where’s Jamie?”
“He went to bed.”
“I wanted to ask him what his plans were.”
“Don’t worry about him. He’s all right. What about you?”
“I think my nervous condition is worse. I feel my memory slipping.”
“What was that book you were reading earlier?”
“Freeman’s R. E. Lee.”
“Are you still strongly affected by the Civil War?”
“Not as strongly as I used to be.”
“How strongly was that?”
“When I was at Princeton, I blew up a Union monument. It was only a plaque hidden in the weeds behind the chemistry building, presented by the class of 1885 in memory of those who made the supreme sacrifice to suppress the infamous rebellion, or something like that. It offended me. I synthesized a liter of trinitrotoluene in the chemistry lab and blew it up one Saturday afternoon. But no one ever knew what had been blown up. It seemed I was the only one who knew the monument was there. It was thought to be a Harvard prank. Later, in New York, whenever there was a plane crash, I would scan the passenger list to see how many Southerners had been killed.”
“And yet you are not one of them.” Sutter nodded toward the Thigpens.
“No.”
“Are your nationalistic feelings strongest before the onset of your amnesia?”
“Perhaps they are,” said the engineer, gazing at himself in the buzzing blue light of the mirror. “But that’s not what I’m interested in.”
Sutter gazed at him. “What are you interested in?”
“I—” the engineer shrugged and fell silent.
“What is it?”
“Why do they feel so good,” he nodded toward the Deltans, “and I feel so bad?”
Sutter eyed him. “The question is whether they feel as good as you think, and if they do, then the question is whether it is necessarily worse to feel bad than good under the circumstances.”
“That doesn’t mean anything to me,” said the engineer irritably.
“One morning,” said Sutter, “I got a call from a lady who said that her husband was having a nervous breakdown. I knew the fellow. As a matter of fact, they lived two doors down. He was a Deke from Vanderbilt, president of Fairfield Coke and a very good fellow, cheerful and healthy and open-handed. It was nine o’clock in the morning, so I walked over from here. His wife let me in. There he stands in the living room dressed for work in his Haspel suit, shaved, showered, and in the pink, in fact still holding his attaché case beside him. All in order except that he was screaming, his mouth forming a perfect O. His corgi was howling and his children were peeping out from behind the stereo. His wife asked me for an opinion. After quieting him down and having a word with him, I told her that his screaming was not necessarily a bad thing in itself, that in some cases a person is better off screaming than not screaming — except that he was frightening the children. I prescribed the terminal ward for him and in two weeks he was right as rain.”
The engineer leaned a degree closer. “I understand that. Now what I want to know is this: do you mean that in the terminal ward he discovered only that he was not so bad off, or is there more to it than that?”
Sutter looked at him curiously but did not reply.
“Did you get in trouble with him too?”
Sutter shrugged. “It was a near thing. His wife, who was a psychiatrically oriented type, put him into analysis with an old-timey hard-assed Freudian — they’re only to be found down here in the South now — and he went crazy. Of course I got the blame for not putting, him into treatment earlier. But she didn’t sue me.”
The engineer nodded toward the Deltans. “What about them?”
“What about them?”
“Would you put them in the terminal ward?”
“They’re not screaming.”
“Should they be screaming?”
“I should not presume to say. I only say that if they were screaming, I could have helped them once. I cannot do even that now. I am a pathologist.”
The engineer frowned. He felt a stirring of anger. There was something unpleasantly ironic about Sutter’s wry rapid way of talking. It was easy to imagine him ten years from now haunting a barroom somewhere and pattering on like this to any stranger. He began to understand why others made a detour around him, so to speak, and let him alone.
He couldn’t sleep. As he lay at attention listening to the frolic in John Houghton’s room below, he began to skid a little and not recollect exactly where he was, like a boy who wakes in a strange bed. In the next bed Jamie breathed regularly. By three o’clock in the morning he was worse off than at any time since Eisenhower was President when he had worked three months for a florist in Cincinnati, assaulted by the tremendous déjà vus of hot green growing things.
At last he went out to the landing and, seeing a light under Sutter’s door, knocked. Sutter answered immediately. He was sitting in the wagonwheel chair, dressed in the same clothes, feet flat on the floor, arms lying symmetrically on the rests. There was no drink or book beside him.