Read The End of the Road Page 9


  “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.”

  “Well,” I said, “you’d still have to choose whether to answer the question or not, or whether to answer it correctly, even if you knew the right answer, wouldn’t you?”

  The Doctor’s tranquil stare told me my question was somehow silly, though it seemed reasonable enough to me.

  “One of the things you’ll have to do,” he said dryly, “is buy a copy of the World Almanac for 1951 and begin to study it scrupulously. This is intended as a discipline, and you’ll have to pursue it diligently, perhaps for a number of years. Informational Therapy is one of a number of therapies we’ll have to initiate at once.

  I shook my head and chuckled genially. “Do all your patients memorize the World Almanac, Doctor?”

  I might as well not have spoken.

  “Mrs. Dockey will show you to your bed,” the Doctor said, rising to go. “I’ll speak to you again presently.” At the door he stopped and added, “One, perhaps two, of the older men may attempt familiarities with you at night up in the dormitory. They’re on Sexual Therapy, and I find it useful and convenient in their cases to suggest homosexual affairs rather than heterosexual ones. But unless you’re accustomed to that sort of thing I don’t think you should accept their advances. You should keep your life as uncomplicated as possible, at least for a while. Reject them gently, and they’ll go back to each other.”

  There was little I could say. After a while Mrs. Dockey showed me my bed in the men’s dormitory. I was not introduced to my roommates, nor did I introduce myself. In fact (though since then I’ve come to know them better), during the three days that I remained at the farm not a dozen words were exchanged between us, much less homosexual advances. When I left they were uniformly glad to see me go.

  The Doctor spent two or three one-hour sessions with me each day. He asked me virtually nothing about myself; the conversations consisted mostly of harangues against the medical profession for its stupidity in matters of paralysis, and imputations that my condition was the result of defective character and intelligence.

  “You claim to be unable to choose in many situations,” he said once. “Well, I claim that that inability is only theoretically inherent in situations, when there’s no chooser. Given a particular chooser, it’s unthinkable. So, since the inability was displayed in your case, the fault lies not in the situation but in the fact that there was no chooser. Choosing is existence: to the extent that you don’t choose, you don’t exist. Now, everything we do must be oriented toward choice and action. It doesn’t matter whether this action is more or less reasonable than inaction; the point is that it is its opposite.”

  “But why should anyone prefer it?” I asked.

  “There’s no reason why you should prefer it,” he said, “and no reason why you shouldn’t. One is a patient simply because one chooses a condition that only therapy can bring one to, not because any one condition is inherently better than another. All my therapies for a while will be directed toward making you conscious of your existence. It doesn’t matter whether you act constructively or even consistently, so long as you act. It doesn’t matter to the case whether your character is admirable or not, so long as you think you have one.”

  “I don’t understand why you should choose to treat anyone, Doctor,” I said.

  “That’s my business, not yours.”

  And so it went. I was charged, directly or indirectly, with everything from intellectual dishonesty and vanity to nonexistence. If I protested, the Doctor observed that my protests indicated my belief in the truth of his statements. If I only listened glumly, he observed that my glumness indicated my belief in the truth of his statements.

  “All right, then,” I said at last, giving up. “Everything you say is true. All of it is the truth.”

  The Doctor listened calmly. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “There’s no such thing as truth as you conceive it.”

  These apparently pointless interviews did not constitute my only activity at the farm. Before every meal the other patients and I were made to perform various calisthenics under the direction of Mrs. Dockey. For the older patients these were usually very simple—perhaps a mere nodding of the head or flexing of the arms—although some of the old folks could execute really surprising feats: one gentleman in his seventies was an excellent rope climber, and two old ladies turned agile somersaults. For each Mrs. Dockey prescribed different activities; my own special prescription was to keep some sort of visible motion going all the time. If nothing else, I was constrained to keep a finger wiggling or a foot tapping, say, during mealtimes, when more involved movements would have made eating difficult. And I was told to rock from side to side in my bed all night long: not an unreasonable request, as it happened, for I did this habitually anyhow, even in my sleep—a habit carried over from childhood.

  “Motion! Motion!” the Doctor would say, almost exalted. “You must be always conscious of motion!”

  There were special diets and, for many patients, special drugs. I learned of Nutritional Therapy, Medicinal Therapy, Surgical Therapy, Dynamic Therapy, Informational Therapy, Conversational Therapy, Sexual Therapy, Devotional Therapy, Occupational and Preoccupational Therapy, Virtue and Vice Therapy, Theotherapy and Atheotherapy—and, later, Mythotherapy, Philosophical Therapy, Scriptotherapy, and many, many other therapies practiced in various combinations and sequences by the patients. Everything, to the Doctor, is either therapeutic, anti-therapeutic, or irrelevant. He is a kind of super-pragmatist.

  At the end of my last session—it had been decided that I was to return to Baltimore experimentally, to see whether and how soon my immobility might recur—the Doctor gave me some parting instructions.

  “It would not be well in your particular case to believe in God,” he said, “Religion will only make you despondent. But until we work out something for you it will be u
seful to subscribe to some philosophy. Why don’t you read Sartre and become an existentialist? It will keep you moving until we find something more suitable for you. Study the World Almanac: it is to be your breviary for a while. Take a day job, preferably factory work, but not so simple that you are able to think coherently while working. Something involving sequential operations would be nice. Go out in the evenings; play cards with people. I don’t recommend buying a television set just yet. If you read anything outside the Almanac, read nothing but plays—no novels or non-fiction. Exercise frequently. Take long walks, but always to a previously determined destination, and when you get there, walk right home again, briskly. And move out of your present quarters; the association is unhealthy for you. Don’t get married or have love affairs yet: if you aren’t courageous enough to hire prostitutes, then take up masturbation temporarily. Above all, act impulsively: don’t let yourself get stuck between alternatives, or you’re lost. You’re not that strong. If the alternatives are side by side, choose the one on the left; if they’re consecutive in time, choose the earlier. If neither of these applies, choose the alternative whose name begins with the earlier letter of the alphabet. These are the principles of Sinistrality, Antecedence, and Alphabetical Priority—there are others, and they’re arbitrary, but useful. Good-by.”

  “Good-by, Doctor,” I said, a little breathless, and prepared to leave.