“I can assure you that you don’t have a fever. Your temperature’s perfectly normal.”
“I didn’t say I had a fever. I only said I feel as if I had.”
“Oh. I see. Well, is there anything else you would like to tell me about? Is your wrist painful?”
“No. My wrist doesn’t bother me at all. That’s a very small thing. What bothers me most is the feeling I have that I have come to the end of things.”
“To the end of things? What do you mean, to the end of things?”
“Oh, I don’t know how I can make it any clearer than that. It’s just a premonition or something. As far as I’m concerned, everything is finished.”
“I’d be very much interested to know why you feel this way. Would you care to tell me?”
“I don’t know. It’s hard to say. I’ve always had this feeling that I’d come to a bad end. It’s not something you can just simply explain.”
“Do you think you deserve to come to a bad end?”
“I suppose I do. I’m not much good, I guess. I’ve never been able to do anything of any consequence, and I’m a coward besides. Terrible things have happened to lots of people who were much better than I am.”
“I dare say that’s true. Terrible things have happened to lots of people who were better than I am, too, but that’s not our fault, is it?”
“I don’t know about that. I don’t know.”
“You said you’re a coward. I don’t believe you are, or at least no more than we all are, but I would like to know what makes you think so. Are you afraid of anything in particular?”
“Right now, you mean?”
“Now or any other time.”
“Well, I’ve thought about it and tried to understand it. Mostly it’s only a kind of general feeling, not about anything in particular, but sometimes it attaches itself to something, and then I’ll be afraid for a while of whatever it attaches itself to. Later on the feeling will get general again, and then become specific about something different, or maybe the same thing again, and it keeps going on that way.”
“What are some of the particular things you have been afraid of?”
“I don’t believe I want to talk about them.”
“That’s too bad. Sometimes if you talk about such things, it helps.”
“Well, I don’t think it will do any good, but I guess it won’t do any harm, either. I was afraid of God once for quite a while, because I thought He was going to do something terrible to me, and I was afraid of people all together, society I mean, and I was afraid of contamination and diseases like epilepsy and such things.”
“Are you afraid of God now?”
“No.”
“How did you get over being afraid of Him?”
“I quit believing in Him.”
“Are you afraid of society or disease?”
“No.”
“Are you afraid of anything in particular now?”
“No. Nothing in particular. I just feel that something is wrong with me, with my life, and I don’t know what it is except that it is something terrible that I won’t ever be able to get rid of. It’s something I was born with, I guess.”
“Is that why you did what you did to your wrist?”
“Yes, that’s why.”
“It’s really unnecessary and unreasonable to let yourself become so depressed over the things you mentioned, God and society and things like that. Don’t you understand that?”
“I understand that it’s unreasonable, but I can’t help it.”
“Of course you can’t. I see that, all right. But perhaps we can help you to help it. As you said, these are merely things or ideas to which your depression attaches. Since you understand that, we are already a long way on the road to understanding the rest of it. Well, now, you see? We have made some progress in just this little while, and I believe we have talked enough for the present, don’t you?”
The doctor stood up and looked around the room. His eyes discovered and rested upon a book.
“I see you are reading the Grand Testament,” he said. “It isn’t often you see someone reading Villon. Do you like him?”
“Yes, I like him. He is a fine poet.”
“Is that the only reason you like him? Because he is a fine poet?”
“No. I like him because he was an evil man who created a kind of beauty that few good men have been able to create.”
“Why does this idea appeal to you? Because you find it reassuring in respect to yourself?”
“I guess so. I’m evil, too. It’s something I’ve felt to be true for as long as I can remember, and I wouldn’t have felt it was true for so long if it weren’t.”
“And it makes you feel a little better to believe that evil people are capable of great good?”
“Great beauty, I said.”
“Beauty is good, isn’t it?”
“That’s right. I guess you’re right about that.”
“Can’t you see that if you were truly evil you would not be concerned about your potential for good?”
“I don’t know. It’s all part of the same thing. Just twisting words around won’t change it.”
“Have you ever done an evil thing?”
“That doesn’t matter. Doing evil and being evil are different things. God knows the difference.”
“I thought you had quit believing in God.”
“Oh, well, that’s just a manner of speaking. I can see that you are only trying to catch me up, and that’s no help to anyone.”
The doctor smiled again and placed a hand lightly for a second on Enos Simon’s shoulder.
“I said we had talked enough for the present, and here I have started all over again. It’s a weakness of mine. Whenever you’ve had enough of me, you mustn’t hesitate to say so. Goodby, now. Perhaps we can talk again soon.”
He went away quietly, and Enos Simon looked down at the slope and the pines.
As he now looked up at them. In this different place, at this different time, quite a long while later. His depression was increasing, the deep dark swing of the cycle, inexplicable and inexorable, that never swerved to the antithetical elation, the mania, but hovered only between depression and release from depression. He knew quite well that he should not be standing here in idle submission looking up the slope among the trees, that it was in fact the worst thing he could possibly do. But it was a part of the dark process to want most to do nothing when it was most imperative to do simply anything. It was a mistake also to remember the past, the effects of depressions that had become confused with causes, and he knew quite clearly what a mistake it was. It was one he had made before, and often, but he continued to make it, in spite of his knowledge.
There was, for instance, the time he had gone with a group to a home for incurables; it had been a day depressing in itself, a gray day of cold rain in which the sun had never shone. He had seen these patients, these men and women in all stages of degeneration, some in that terrible corruption of body and mind, and looking at them, he had wondered where their souls had gone. It was easy to believe that a normal person possessed a soul, but where was the soul of an idiot? And what happened to the soul of a person who had once not been an idiot but had become one slowly through degeneration over a period of time? And how could one seriously believe in something that was supposed to be the very essence and immortal part of life and yet was subject to physical corruption, or at least had no discernible existence apart from it in the way that the mind might survive cleanly and discernibly in a body otherwise mutilated? And most terrifying of all, if the soul survived, did it survive an idiot as an idiot soul?