A Confederacy of Dunces (51 page)

Mr. Levy returned? His valve sent out a distress signal that established communication with his hands. He scratched the bumps on his paws and peered through the shutters, expecting to see several hirsute brutes from the hospital.

There on the porch stood Myrna in a shapeless olive drab corduroy car coat. Her black hair was braided into a pigtail that twisted under one ear and fell on her breast. A guitar was slung over her shoulders.

Ignatius was about to burst through the shutters, splintering slats and latches, and wrap that one hemp-like pigtail around her throat until she turned blue. But reason won. He was not looking at Myrna; he was looking at an escape route. Fortuna had relented. She was not depraved enough to end this vicious cycle by throttling him in a straitjacket, by sealing him up in a cement block tomb lighted by fluorescent tubes. Fortuna wished to make amends. Somehow she had summoned and flushed Myrna minx from a subway tube, from some picket line, from the pungent bed of some Eurasian existentialist, from the hands of some epileptic Negro Buddhist, from the verbose midst of a group therapy session.

"Ignatius, are you in that dump?" Myrna demanded in her flat, direct, slightly hostile voice. She beat on the shutters again, squinting through her black-rimmed glasses. Myrna was not astigmatic; the lenses were clear glass; she wore the glasses to prove her dedication and intensity of purpose. Her dangling earring reflected the rays of the streetlight like tinkling glass Chinese ornaments. "Listen, I can tell there's somebody in there. I heard you stomping around in that hall. Open up these crummy shutters."

"Yes, yes, I'm here," Ignatius cried. He tore at the shutters and pushed them open. "Thank Fortuna you've come."

"Jesus. You look terrible. Like you're having a nervous breakdown or something. Why the bandage? Ignatius, what's the matter? Look how much weight you've gained. I've just been reading these pitiful signs out here on the porch. Boy, have you had it."

"I've gone through hell," Ignatius slobbered, pulling Myrna into the hall by the sleeve of her coat. "Why did you step out of my life, you minx? Your new hairdo is fascinating and cosmopolitan." He snatched at her pigtail and pressed it to his wet moustache, kissing it vigorously. "The scent of soot and carbon in your hair excites me with suggestions of glamorous Gotham. We must leave immediately. I must go flower in Manhattan."

"I knew something was wrong. But this. You are feally in bad shape, Ig."

"Quickly. To a motel. My natural impulses are screaming for release. Do you have any money on you?"

"Don't put me on," Myrna said angrily. She grabbed the soggy pigtail from Ignatius's paws and threw it over her shoulder onto the guitar where it landed with a twang. "Look. Ignatius.

I'm beat. I've been on the road since nine o'clock yesterday morning. As soon as I mailed you that letter about the Peace Party routine, I said to myself, 'Myrna. Listen. This guy needs more than just a letter. He needs your help. He's sinking fast.

Are you dedicated enough to save a mind rotting right before your eyes? Are you committed enough to salvage the wreckage of that mentality?' I came out of the post office and got in my car and just started driving. All night. Straight. I mean, the more I thought about that wild Peace Party telegram, the more upset I got."

Apparently Myrna was very hard up for causes in Manhattan.

"I don't blame you," Ignatius cried. "Wasn't that telegram horrible? A deranged fantasy. I've been in the depths of depression for weeks. After all these years that I've stuck by my mother's side, she has decided to get married and wants me out of the way. We must leave. I can't stand this house another moment."

"What? Who'd marry her?"

"Thank God you understand. You can see how ludicrous and impossible everything has become."

"Where is she? I'd like to outline for that woman what she's done to you."

"She's out somewhere failing her blood test at the moment. I don't want to see her again."

"I guess not. You poor kid. What have you been doing, Ignatius? Just lying around in your room doping off?"

"Yes. For weeks. I've been immobilized by the neurotic apathy. Do you remember the fantasy letter about the arrest and the accident? I wrote that when my mother first met this debauched old man. It was then that my equilibrium started to fail. Since then, it's been a continuously downward movement culminating in the schizophrenia of the Peace Party. Those signs outside were just one physical manifestation of my inward torment. My psychotic desire for peace was no doubt a wishful attempt to end the hostilities which have been existing in this little house. I can only be grateful that you were perceptive enough to analyze my fantasy life as embodied in my letters. Thank goodness they were distress signals written in a code which you could understand."

"I can tell hov Inactive you've been from your weight."

"I've gained pounds lying continuously in bed, seeking surcease and sublimation in food. Now we must run. I must leave this house. It has terrible associations."

"I told you to get out of this place a long time ago. Come on, let's get you packed," Myrna's monotonous voice was growing enthusiastic. "This is fantastic. I knew you'd have to break away sooner or later to preserve your mental health."

"If only I had listened to you earlier, I wouldn't have had to go through this horror." Ignatius embraced Myrna and pressed her and her guitar flatly against the wall. He could see that she was beside herself with joy over finding a legitimate cause, a bona fide case history, a new movement. "There will be a place for you in heaven, my minx. Now we must dash."

He tried to drag her out the front door, but she said, "Don't you want to pack anything?"

"Oh, of course. There are all of my notes and jottings. We must never let them fall into the hands of my mother. She may make a fortune from them. It would be too ironic." They went into his room. "By the way, you should know that my mother is enjoying the questionable attentions of a fascist."

"Oh, no!"

"Yes. Look at this. You can imagine how they've been torturing me."

He handed Myrna one of the pamphlets that his mother had slipped under the door of his room, Is your Neighbor Really an American? Myrna read a note written in the margin of the cover: "Read this, Irene. It is good. There is some questions at the end you can ask your boy."

"Oh, Ignatius!" Myrna moaned. "What has it been like?"

"Traumatic and dreadful. At the moment I think they're out somewhere lashing some moderate whom my mother overheard speaking in favor of the United Nations in the grocery this morning. She's been mumbling about the incident all day." Ignatius belched. "I've been through weeks of terror."

"It's so strange to find your mother gone. She used to be around here all the time." Myrna hung her guitar on a bedpost and stretched across the bed. "This room. We used to have a ball in here, exposing our minds and souls, composing anti-Talc manifestos. I guess that fraud is still hanging around that school."

"I would imagine so," Ignatius said absently. He wished that Myrna would get off the bed. Soon her mind would turn to exposing other things. Anyway, they had to get out of the house. He was in the closet, where he was looking for the overnight bag that his mother had bought for him for a disastrous one-day stay at a boys' camp when he was eleven.

He pawed through a pile of yellowed drawers like a dog digging for a bone, throwing the drawers up behind him in an arc. "Perhaps you'd better rouse yourself, my little lily. There are tablets to be collected, notes to be gathered. You might look under the bed."

Myrna swung herself off the damp sheets, saying, "I've tried to describe you to my friends in the group therapy group, working away in this room, sealed off from society. This strange medieval mind in its cloister."

"No doubt they were intrigued," Ignatius murmured. Having found the bag, he was filling it with some socks he found lying on the floor. "Soon they'll be able to see me in the flesh."

"Just wait till they hear all that originality pouring out of your head."

"Ho hum," Ignatius yawned. "Perhaps my mother has done me a great favor by planning to remarry. Those Oedipal bonds were beginning to overwhelm me." He threw his yo-yo into the bag. "Apparently you had safe passage through the South."

"I didn't have a moment to really stop along the way. Almost thirty-six hours of drive, drive, drive." Myrna was making piles of the Big Chief tablets. "I did stop at a Negro diner last night, but they wouldn't serve me. I think the guitar threw them off."

"That must have been it. They took you for some red-neck hillbilly singer. I've had some experience with those people.

They're rather limited."

"I can't believe that I am actually taking you out of this dungeon, this hole."

"It is unbelievable, isn't it? To think that I fought your wisdom for years."

"We are going to have the most fantastic time in New York.

Honestly."

"I can't wait," Ignatius said, packing his scarf and cutlass. "The Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, the thrill of opening night on Broadway with my favorite musicomedy stars. Gab sessions in the Village over espresso with challenging, contemporary minds."

"You're coming to grips with yourself at last. Really. I can hardly believe what I've heard in this shack tonight. We'll work on your problems. You're going into a whole new and vital phase. Your inactivity is over. I can tell. I can hear it. Just think of the great thought that is going to come streaming out of that head when we've finally cleared away all the cobwebs and taboos and crippling attachments."

"Goodness knows what will happen," Ignatius said disinterestedly. "We must leave. Now. I should warn you that my mother may return momentarily. If I see her again, I'll regress horribly. We must dash."

"Ignatius, you're jumping all over the place. Relax. The worst is over."

"No, it isn't," Ignatius said quickly. "My mother may return with her mob. You should see them. White supremacists, Protestants, or worse. Let me get my lute and trumpet. Are the tablets gathered together?"

"This stuff in here is fascinating," Myrna said, indicating the tablet through which she was flipping. "Gems of nihilism."

"That is merely a fragment of the whole."

"Aren't you even going to leave your mother some very bitter note, some articulate protest or something?"

"It would hardly be worthwhile. She'd be weeks in comprehending it." Ignatius cradled the lute and trumpet in one arm and the overnight bag in the other. "Please don't drop that looseleaf folder. It contains the Journal, a sociological fantasy on which I've been working. It is my most commercial effort. Wonderful film possibilities at the hands of a Walt Disney or a George Pal."

"Ignatius." Myrna stopped in the doorway, her arms laden with tablets, and moved her colorless lips for a moment before she spoke, as if she were formulating an address. Her tired, highway-drugged eyes searched Ignatius's face through the sparkling lenses. "This is a very meaningful moment. I feel as if I'm soring someone."

"You are, you are. Now we must flee. Please. We'll chat later."

Ignatius pushed past her and lumbered down to the car, opening the rear door of the little Renault and climbing in among the placards and piles of pamphlets that covered the seat. The car smelled like a newsstand. "Hurry up! We don't have time to stage a tableau-vivant here before the house."

"I mean, are you really going to sit back there?" Myrna asked as she dropped her load of tablets through the rear door.

"Of course I am," Ignatius bellowed. "I am certainly not going to sit up in that deathtrap of a front seat for highway travel.

Now get in this go-cart and get us out of here."

"Hold on. I left a lot of tablets behind," Myrna said and ran into the house, her guitar thumping against her side. She came down the steps with another load and stopped on the brick sidewalk, turning to look at the house. Ignatius could tell that she was attempting to record the scene: Eliza crossing the ice with a particularly large genius in her arms. Unlike Harriet Beecher Stowe, Myrna was still around to offend. At last, in response to Ignatius's cries, she came down to the car and threw the second load of tablets onto Ignatius's lap. "There are still some left under the bed, I think."

"Never mind about those!" Ignatius screamed. "Get in and start this thing. Oh, my God. Don't stick that guitar in my face like that. Why can't you just carry a purse like a decent young lady?"

"Go fall in a hole," Myrna said angrily. She slid into the front seat and started the car. "Where do you want to spend the night?"

"Spend the night?" Ignatius thundered. "We're not spending the night anywhere. We must drive straight."

"Ignatius, I'm about to drop dead. I've been in this car since yesterday morning."

"Well, get across Lake Pontchartrain at least."

"Okay. We can take the causeway and stop in Mandeville."

"No!" Myrna would drive him right into the alerted arms of some psychiatrist. "We can't stop there. The water's polluted.

They're having an epidemic."

"Yeah? Then I'll take the old bridge to Slidell."

"Yes. It's far safer anyway. Barges are always hurtling into that causeway. We'll plunge into the lake and drown." The Renault was dragging very low in the rear and accelerated slowly. "This car is rather small for my frame. Are you sure that you know how to get to New York? I seriously doubt whether I can survive more than a day or two in this fetal position."

"Hey, where are you two beatniks going?" Miss Annie's voice called faintly from behind her shutters. The Renault moved into the center of the street.

"Does that old bitch still live there?" Myrna asked.

"Shut up and get us out of here!"

"Are you going to bug me like this?" Myrna glared at the green cap in the rearview mirror. "I mean, I'd like to know."

"Oh, my valve!" Ignatius gasped. "Please don't make a scene.

My psyche will crumble entirely after the assaults it has recently received."

"I'm sorry. For a while it sounded like old times with me playing chauffeur and you bugging me from the back seat."