Lancelot

The heat, carried away by the wind, was not great. Perhaps I had been unconscious a long time. Most of the walls of the ground floor were down. There was no second floor.
    What did you say? How did I get burned?
    I had to go back to find the knife.

9
    WHAT A BEAUTIFUL DAY! Don’t you think so? The last day of the hurricane season. All danger of hurricanes past. The morning sun bright and high refracted through the clear crystal prism of northern air with that special moderation, the promise of warmth, of fine November days in New Orleans. Everything is mild and unexceptional here, isn’t it? even the weather. By eleven o’clock the winos on Camp Street will be creeping out of their holes and stretching out or curling up like cats in sunny doorways to take a little nap. Not a bad life.
    Stop pacing up and down. I’m the prisoner, not you. Why the long race, the frowning preoccupation? Look at the street. Even the cemetery, especially the cemetery, looks cheerful. The mums are still fresh and yellow. The tombs spick-and-span, the rain trees bright as new copper pennies. Yesterday young people were singing in the old section. Some of them even sleep in the oven crypts, shove the bones aside and unroll their sleeping bags, a perfect fit. An odd thing about New Orleans: the cemeteries here are more cheerful than the hotels and the French Quarter. Tell me why that should be, why two thousand dead Creoles should be more alive than two thousand Buick dealers?
    Ah, I forgot to tell you my good news. I’m leaving today. They’re discharging me. Psychiatrically fit and legally innocent. I can prove I am sane. Can you? Why do you look at me like that? You don’t think they should? Well, in any case, my lawyer got a writ of habeas corpus and my psychiatrist says I’m fit as a fiddle, saner in fact than he—the poor man is overworked, depressed, and lives on Librium.
    Just think of it! At noon I shall walk through the front door of this building for the first time in a year, stroll down that block of Annunciation Street I’ve studied so minutely, turn the corner of Tchoupitoulas, and read that sign there.
    Free &
Ma
B
    At last I shall know what it says.
    Then I shall turn around and look back at this window, reversing the direction of a million looks the opposite way.
    It is not a small thing to look back at the place where one has spent a year of one’s life.
    Then I shall cross the street to La Branche’s (formerly Zweig’s) Bar and Grill, enter the cool ammoniac gloom where Zweig, La Branche. is mopping the floor of small hexagonal bathroom tile, sit at the bar, and order a Dixie draught and an oyster po’ boy.
    Then I shall pick up my little suitcase, which contains my worldly possessions, a change of underwear, one suit, socks, sweater. Bowie knife, and boots, walk to St. Charles, catch the streetcar to Canal Street, close out my bank account at the Whitney (about $4,000), walk to the Union Terminal, and catch the Southerner to Richmond. Think of that. Rocking along through the lonesome pine barrens of Mississippi in this two hundredth anniversary year of the first Revolution into the old red clay cuts of Alabama, gliding into Peachtree Station in Atlanta in the evening, order a few drinks in the club car while the train rambles north in the Georgia twilight. Then off at Richmond in the cold dawn hours and catch a Greyhound for the mountains.
    Siobhan? Yes, now that I’m legally sane and competent. I can have her. And I intend to get her from Tex as soon as I’m settled in Virginia. We’ll do fine, if Tex has not bored her to death or driven her out of her mind with his horsh pistols and coinkidinkies. I suppose I should be grateful to him. At least he took care of her. But I wish now I had let her stay with Suellen. Some black people are still sane.
    Anna? Oh, she’s well. But she’s not going with me after all. I’m going alone. She’s been kind enough to lend me her place in the Blue Ridge until I can find my own little half acre.
    What happened to Anna? Really it’s incredible. I shall never understand women. We were going to have a new life together. I thought we were suited to each other—each stripped of the past, each aware that an end had come and that there had to be a new beginning, just like a man and woman striking out for the territory through the Cumberland Gap in the old days. Then, to my astonishment, I mortally