Read Online Lancelot by Walker Percy - Free Book Online Page A

to require a tremendous effort to focus on. What I remember is that miserable Janos Jacoby looking up at me, the firelight in the trees … The headlines come back.
    SCION CRAZED BY GRIEF. RESTRAINED FROM ENTERING HOUSE. HANDS BURNED .
    That night. I can’t get hold of it. Oh, I try to, but my mind slides back to the past or forward to the future.
    I can remember perfectly what happened years ago, like the time we, you and I, were riding down the river on a fraternity-sorority party and were passing Jefferson Island, which lies between Mississippi and Louisiana, was claimed by both states, and in a sense belonged to neither, a kind of desert island in the middle of the U.S., so you, drinking and solitary as usual, said to no one in particular: “I think it would be nice to spend a few days in such a place,” pulled off your coat, and dove off the Tennessee Belle (that was an “act” too, wasn’t it?); I, of course, having to go after you as usual, taking just time enough to wrap some matches in a tobacco pouch, and even so it took me three hours to find you huddled shivering under a log, looking bluer than Nigger Jim and more emaciated than usual; you, ever the one to do the ultimate uncalled-for thing—I never really knew whether it was a real thing or a show-off thing. And do you know, I’ve often wondered whether your going off to the seminary out of a clear sky was not more of the same—the ultimate reckless lifetime thing. Hell, you were not Christian let alone Catholic as far as anyone could notice. So wasn’t it just like your diving off the Tennessee Belle to go from unbeliever to priest, leapfrogging on the way some eight hundred million ordinary Catholics? Was that too an act, the ultimate show-off thing or the ultimate splendid thing? You shrug and smile. And as if that weren’t enough, you weren’t content to be an ordinary priest. Father John from New Orleans; no, you had to take off for Uganda or was it Biafra? You had to go to medical school and outdo Albert Schweitzer, because of course that was outdoing even him, wasn’t it, because you had the True Faith and he didn’t, being only a Protestant.
    And it didn’t turn out too well, did it? Else why are you here?
    Something is wrong, isn’t it? Have you lost your faith? or is it a woman?
    Is that all you can do, look at me with that same old hooded look? You smile and shrug. Christ, you don’t even know the answer yourself.
    But you left, you see. And you might have stayed. Maybe you were needed here. Maybe I needed you worse than the Biafrans. If you’d been around all those years … Christ, why is it that I could never talk to anybody but you? Well, you’re here now and I can use you. I’ve discovered that I can talk to you and get closer to it, the secret I know yet don’t know. So I’ll start behind it and work up to it, or I’ll start ahead of it and work back.
    My mind slides forward, to the future, to the person next door. I have an idea even crazier than one of yours. It is that somehow the future, my future, is tied up with her, that we, she and I, must start all over. Did I tell you that I saw her yesterday? Just a glimpse as I ventured out on one of my infrequent forays, this time for my monthly physical and mental examination. Her door was open. She was thin and black-haired but I couldn’t see her face; it was turned to the wall, that wall, her knees drawn up. Her calves were slim but well-developed and still surprisingly suntanned. Had she been a dancer? a tennis player? She reminded me of Lucy.
    Here’s my crazy plan for the future. When I leave here, having served my time or been “cured,” I don’t want to go back to Belle Isle. I don’t want to go back to any place. The only thing I’m sure of is that the past is absolutely dead. The future must be absolutely new. This is true not only of me but of you and of everyone. A