The End of the Road (11 page)

“Weren’t you sitting here like this last night?” he asked me sharply. I did not reply. He came close, bent his face down toward mine, and moved an upthrust finger back and forth about two inches from my eyes. But my eyes did not follow his finger. He stepped back and regarded me critically, then suddenly snapped his fingers almost on the point of my nose. I blinked involuntarily, although my head did not jerk back.

“Ah,” he said, satisfied, and regarded me again. “Does this happen to you often, young man?”

Perhaps because of the brisk assuredness of his voice, the
no
welled up in me like a belch. And I realized as soon as I deliberately held my tongue (there being in the last analysis no reason to answer his question at all) that as of that moment I was artificially prolonging what had been a genuine physical immobility. Not to choose at all is unthinkable: what I had done before was simply choose not to act, since I had been at rest when the situation arose. Now, however, it was harder—“more of a choice,” so to speak—to hold my tongue than to croak out something that filled my mouth, and so after a moment I said, “No.”

Then, of course, the trance was broken. I was embarrassed, and rose quickly and stiffly from the bench to leave.

“Where will you go?” my examiner asked with a smile.

“What?” I frowned at him. “Oh—get a bus home, I guess. See you around.”

“Wait.” His voice was mild, but entirely commanding. I stopped. “Won’t you have coffee with me? I’m a physician, and I’d be interested in discussing your case with you.”

“I don’t have any case,” I said awkwardly. “I was just—sitting there for a minute or so.”

“No. I saw you there last night at ten o’clock when I came in from New York,” the doctor said. “You were sitting in the same position. You
were
paralyzed, weren’t you?”

I laughed shortly. “Well, if you want to call it that, but there’s nothing wrong with me. I don’t know what came over me.”

“Of course you don’t, but I do. My specialty is various sorts of physical immobility. You’re lucky I came by this morning.”

“Oh, you don’t understand—”

“I brought you out of it, didn’t I?” he said cheerfully. “Here.” He took a fifty-cent piece from his pocket and handed it to me—I accepted it before I realized what he’d done. “I can’t go into that lounge over there. Go get two cups of coffee for us and we’ll sit here a minute and decide what to do.”

“No, listen, I—”

“Why not?” he laughed. “Go on, now. I’ll wait here.”

Why not, indeed?

“I have my own money,” I protested lamely, offering him his fifty-cent piece back, but he waved me away and lit a cigar.

“Now hurry up,” he ordered calmly, around the cigar. “Move fast, or you might get stuck again. Don’t think of anything but the coffee I’ve asked you to get.”

“All right.” I turned and walked with dignity toward the lounge, just off the concourse.

“Fast!” the doctor laughed behind me. I flushed, and impulsively quickened my step.

While I waited for the coffee I tried to feel the curiosity about my invalidity and my rescuer that it seemed appropriate I should feel, but I was too weary in mind and body to wonder at anything. I do not mean to suggest that my condition had been unpleasant—it was entirely anesthetic in its advanced stage, and even a little bit pleasant in its inception—but it was fatiguing, as an overlong sleep is fatiguing, and one had the same reluctance to throw it off that one has to finally get out of bed when one has slept around the clock. Indeed, as the Doctor had warned (it was at this time, not knowing my benefactor’s name, that I began to think of him with a capital
D
), to slip back into immobility at the coffee counter would have been extremely easy: I felt my mind begin to settle into rigidity, and only the clerk’s peremptory “Thirty cents, please,” brought me back to action—luckily, because the Doctor could not have entered the white lounge to help me. I paid the clerk and took the paper cups of coffee back to the bench.

“Good,” the Doctor said. “Sit down.” I hesitated. I was standing directly in front of him. “Here!” he laughed. “On this side! You’re like the donkey between two piles of straw!”

I sat where ordered and we sipped our coffee. I rather expected to be asked questions about myself, but the Doctor ignored me.

“Thanks for the coffee,” I said uncertainly. He glanced at me impassively for a moment, as though I were a hitherto silent parrot who had suddenly blurted a brief piece of nonsense, and then he returned his attention to the crowd in the station.

“I have one or two calls to make yet before we catch the bus,” he announced without looking at me. “Won’t take long. I wanted to see if you were still here before I left town.”

“What do you mean, catch the bus?”

“You’ll have to come over to the farm—my Remobilization Farm over near Wicomico—for a day or so, for observation,” he explained coldly. “You don’t have anything else to do, do you?”

“Well, I should get back to the university, I guess. I’m a student.”

“Oh,” he chuckled. “Might as well forget about that for a while. You can come back in a few days if you want to.”

“Say, you know, really, I think you must have a misconception about what was wrong with me a while ago. I’m not a paralytic. It’s all just silly, really. I’ll explain it to you if you want to hear it.”

“No, you needn’t bother. No offense intended, but the things you think are important probably aren’t even relevant at all. I’m never very curious about my patients’ histories. Rather not hear them, in fact—just clutters things up. It doesn’t much matter what caused it anyhow, does it?” He grinned. “My farm’s like a nunnery in that respect—I never bother about why my patients come there. Forget about causes; I’m no psychoanalyst.”

“But that’s what I mean, sir,” I explained, laughing uncomfortably. “There’s nothing physically wrong with me.”

“Except that you couldn’t move,” the Doctor said. “What’s your name?”

“Jacob Horner. I’m a graduate student up at Johns Hopkins—”

“Ah, ah,” he warned. “No biography, Jacob Horner.” He finished his coffee and stood up. “Come on, now, we’ll get a cab. Bring your suitcase along.”

“Oh, wait now!”

“Yes?”

I fumbled for protests: the thing was absurd.

“Well—this is absurd.”

“Yes. So?”

I hesitated, blinking, wetting my lips nervously.

“Think, think!” the Doctor said brusquely.

My mind raced like a car engine when the clutch is disengaged. There was no answer.

“Well, I—are you sure it’s all right?” I asked weakly, not knowing what my question signified.

The Doctor made a short, derisive sound (a sort of “Huf!”) and turned away. I shook my head—at the same moment aware that I was watching myself act bewildered—and then fetched up my suitcase and followed after him, out to the line of taxicabs at the curb.

Thus began my
alliance
with the Doctor. He stopped first at an establishment on North Howard Street, where he ordered two wheel chairs, three pairs of crutches, and certain other apparatus for the farm, and then at a pharmaceutical supply house on South Paca Street, where he also made some sort of order. Then we went to the W.B. & A. bus terminal on Howard and Redwood streets and took the Red Star bus to the Eastern Shore. The Doctor’s Mercury station wagon was parked at the Wicomico bus depot; he drove to the little settlement of Vineland, about three miles south of Wicomico, turned off onto a secondary road, and finally drove up a long, winding dirt lane to the Remobilization Farm, an aged but clean-painted white clapboard house in a clump of oaks on a knoll overlooking some creek or other. The patients on the porch, senile men and women, welcomed the Doctor with querulous enthusiasm, and he returned their greeting. Me they regarded with open suspicion, if not hostility, but the Doctor made no explanation of my presence—for that matter, I should have been hard put to explain it myself.

Inside I was introduced to the muscular Mrs. Dockey and taken to the Progress and Advice Room for my first interview. I waited alone in that clean room, bare, but not really clinical-looking—just an empty white room in a farmhouse—for some ten minutes, and then the Doctor entered and took his seat very much in front of me. He had donned a white medical-looking jacket and appeared entirely official and competent.

“I’ll make a few things clear very quickly, Jacob,” he said, leaning forward with his hands on his knees and rolling his cigar around in his mouth between sentences. “The farm, as you can see, is designed for the treatment of paralytics. Most of my patients are old people, but you mustn’t infer from that that this is a nursing home for the aged. It’s not. Perhaps you noticed when we drove up that my patients like me. They do. It has happened several times in the past that for one reason or another I have seen fit to change the location of the farm. Once it was outside of Troy, New York; another time near Fond du Lac, Wisconsin; another time near Biloxi, Mississippi. And we’ve been other places, too. Nearly all the patients I have on the farm have been with me at least since Fond du Lac, and if I should have to move tomorrow to Helena, Montana, or Far Rockaway, most of them would go with me, and not because they haven’t anywhere else to go. But don’t think I have an equal love for them. They’re just more or less interesting problems in immobility, for which I find it satisfying to work out therapies. I tell this to you, but not to them, because your problem is such that this information is harmless. And for that matter, you’ve no way of knowing whether anything I’ve said or will say is the truth, or just a part of my general therapy for you. You can’t even tell whether your doubt in this matter is an honestly founded doubt or just a part of your treatment: access to the truth, Jacob, even belief that there is such a thing, is itself therapeutic or antitherapeutic, depending on the problem. The reality of your problem itself is all that you can be sure of.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why do you say that?” the Doctor asked.

“Say what?”

“ ‘Yes, sir.’ Why do you say ‘Yes, sir’?”

“Oh—I was just acknowledging what you said before.”

“Acknowledging the truth of what I said or merely the fact that I said it?”

“Well,” I hesitated, flustered. “I don’t know, sir.”

“You don’t know whether to say you were acknowledging the truth of my statements, when actually you weren’t, or to say you were simply acknowledging that I said something, at the risk of offending me by the implication that you don’t agree with any of it. Eh?”

“Oh, I agree with
some
of it,” I assured him.

“What parts of it do you agree with? Which statements?”

“I don’t know: I guess—” I searched my mind hastily to remember even one thing that he’d said. He regarded my floundering coldly for a minute and then went on as if the interruption hadn’t occurred.

“Agapotherapy—devotion therapy—is often useful with older patients,” he said. “One of the things that work toward restoring their mobility is devotion to some figure, a doctor or other kind of administrator. It keeps their allegiances from becoming divided. For that reason I’d move the farm occasionally even if other circumstances didn’t make it desirable. It does them good to decide to follow me. Agapotherapy is one small therapy in a great number, some consecutive, some simultaneous, which are exercised on the patients. No two patients have the same schedule of therapies, because no two people are ever paralyzed in the same way. The authors of medical textbooks,” he added with some contempt, “like everyone else, can reach generality only by ignoring enough particularity. They speak of paralysis, and the treatment of paralytics, as though one read the textbook and then followed the rules for getting paralyzed properly. There is no such thing as
paralysis,
Jacob. There is only paralyzed Jacob Horner. And I don’t
treat
paralysis: I schedule therapies to mobilize John Doe or Jacob Horner, as the case may be. That’s why I ignore you when you say you aren’t paralyzed like the people out on the porch are paralyzed. I don’t treat your paralysis; I treat paralyzed you. Please don’t say, ‘Yes, sir.’ “

The urge to acknowledge is almost irresistible, but I managed to sit silent and not even nod.

“There are several things wrong with you, I think. I daresay you don’t know the seating capacity of the Cleveland Municipal Stadium, do you?”

“What?”

The Doctor did not smile. “You suggest that my question is absurd, when you have no grounds for knowing whether it is or not—you obviously heard me and understood me. Probably you want to delay my learning that you
don’t
know the seating capacity of Cleveland Municipal Stadium, since your vanity would be ruffled if the question
weren’t
absurd, and even if it were. It makes no difference whether it is or not, Jacob Horner: it’s a question asked you by your doctor. Now, is there any ultimate reason why the Cleveland Stadium shouldn’t seat fifty-seven thousand, four hundred eighty-eight people?”

“None that I can think of,” I grinned.

“Don’t pretend to be amused. Of course there’s not. Is there any reason why it shouldn’t seat eighty-eight thousand, four hundred seventy-five people?”

“No, sir.”

“Indeed not. Then as far as Reason is concerned its seating capacity could be almost anything. Logic will never give you the answer to my question. Only Knowledge of the World will answer it. There’s no ultimate reason at all why the Cleveland Stadium should seat exactly seventy-seven thousand, seven hundred people, but it happens that it does. There’s no reason in the long run why Italy shouldn’t be shaped like a sausage instead of a boot, but that doesn’t happen to be the case.
The world is everything that is the case,
and what the case is is not a matter of logic. If you don’t simply
know
how many people can sit in the Cleveland Municipal Stadium, you have no real reason for choosing one number over another, assuming you can make a choice at all—do you understand? But if you have some Knowledge of the World you may be able to say, ‘Seventy-seven thousand, seven hundred,’ just like that. No choice is involved.”