The Last Gentleman

disagreeable blonde. Her malevolent expression startled him. Her bulging eye was glossy with dislike. She hated his guts! Amazing.
    Thoughtfully he stacked money on the metal shelf of the phone booth. As the wires went clicking away to the East, he gazed through the open door and out into the disjunct afternoon with its simple spectrum-yellow and its flattened distances. Was it possible to call Alabama from here?
    No. The line was busy.
    He tried for half an hour and gave up.
    When he returned to the room the pleasant student was giving Jamie an alcohol rub. Afterward the patient sat up in his right mind and began to read Treasure Island and eat soda crackers.
    â€œDon’t you want me to read to you?” the engineer asked him.
    â€œNo, that’s all right!”
    Jamie was polite but the engineer could tell he wanted to be alone.
    â€œI’ll be back after supper.”
    â€œFine.” The patient smiled his best smile because he wanted the visitor to leave. The book was the safest sunniest most inviolate circle of all.
    9 .
    The next morning Jamie was even better. His fever was gone, but he was tired and wanted to sleep. For the first time he spoke seriously of going home, no, not home but to the Gulf Coast, where they could lie in the sand dunes and get in shape for the next semester. “I have the strongest hunch that the combination of cold salt water and the warm sunny dunes would be great!”
    The engineer nodded. Sure enough it might.
    Would the engineer take him?
    â€œLet’s go,” said the latter rising.
    Jamie laughed and nodded to signify that he knew the other meant it “But I’ll leave tomorrow, no kidding,” he said as the engineer cranked him flat for his nap.
    â€œWe can make it in three days,” the engineer told him. “Your monk’s pad is still on the upper berth.”
    Jamie said no more about calling Val.
    But for the present it was the engineer who lay in the upper berth and read:
    Christ should leave us. He is too much with us and I don’t like his friends. We have no hope of recovering Christ until Christ leaves us. There is after all something worse than being God-forsaken. It is when God overstays his welcome and takes up with the wrong people.
    You say don’t worry about that, first stop fornicating. But I am depressed and transcendent. In such a condition, fornication is the sole channel to the real. Do you think I am making excuses?
    You are wrong too about the sinfulness of suicide in this age, at least the nurtured possibility of suicide, for the certain availability of death is the very condition of recovering oneself. But death is as outlawed now as sin used to be. Only one’s own suicide remains to one. My “suicide” followed the breakdown of the sexual as a mode of reentry from the posture of transcendence.
    Here is what happened. I became depressed last summer when I first saw Jamie’s blood smear, depressed not because he was going to die but because I knew he would not die well, would be eased out in an oxygen tent, tranquilized and with no sweat to anyone and not even know what he was doing. Don’t misunderstand me: I wasn’t thinking about baptism.
    The depression made me concupiscent. On a house call to the Mesa Motel to examine a patient in diabetic coma (but really only to collect blood for chemistry—I was little more than a technician that summer). Afterwards spied a chunky blonde by the pool, appraised her eye, which was both lewd and merry. She 41, aviatrix, winner of Powder Puff Derby in 1940’s, raced an old Lockheed P-38 from San Diego to Cleveland. We drank two glasses of straight whiskey. I spoke in her ear and invited her to her room. Afterwards very low. Went to ranch, shot myself, missed brain, carried away cheek.
    Recovery in hospital. The purity of ordeal. The purity of death. The sweet purity of the little Mexican nurse. Did Americans become lewd when they banished death?
    I saw something clearly while I had no cheek and grinned like a skeleton. But I got well and forgot what it was. I won’t miss next time.
    It was the last entry in Sutter’s casebook. When he finished reading, the engineer left the Trav-L-Aire and threw the pad into the trashburner of Alamogordo Motor Park. As he watched it burn, glowering, his head sinking lower and lower, mouth slack and drying, he became aware that someone was speaking to him. It was a fellow Trav-L-Aire owner, a