The Last Gentleman by Walker Percy

patent as to be funny and tender. Everyone acted as if he knew exactly what he was doing and this was the funniest business of all. It reminded him of a nurse he had in the South. Once his father took some movies of him and his nurse in a little park. Ten years later, when on Christmas Eve the film was shown and D’lo, passing in the hall behind the projector, stood for a moment to see herself with the others, the black nurses whose faces were underexposed and therefore all the more inscrutable but who nevertheless talked and moved and cocked a head with the patent funniness of lapsed time—D’lo let out a shriek and, unable to bear the sight of herself, threw her apron over her head. It was, he reckoned, the drollness of the past which struck her, the perky purpose of the people who acted for all the world as if they knew what they were doing, had not a single doubt.
    Still no sign of the women in the park, and he cut short his vigil, watching only during the noon hour. There was more time now to attend to his physical health. He took pains to eat and sleep regularly and to work out in the Y.M.C.A. gym. He punched a sandbag an hour a day, swam forty laps in the pool, or, on cool days, jogged three times around the reservoir in the park. After a cold shower and a supper of steak, milk, vegetables, and wheat germ, he allowed himself a half hour of television and spent the remaining three hours before work seated bolt upright at his desk trying to set his thoughts in order.
    He began the day by reading a few lines from Living, a little volume of maxims for businessmen which he had come across in Macy’s book department. It made him feel good to read its crisp and optimistic suggestions.
    On your way to work, put aside your usual worries. Instead keep your mind both relaxed and receptive—and playful. The most successful businessmen report that their greatest ideas often come to them in such intervals.
    Yes. And it was in fact very pleasant walking up Broadway instead of riding the subway every morning, one’s mind wiped clean as a blackboard (not that it was necessary for him to try to “put aside your usual worries,” since he forgot everything anyhow, worries included, unless he wrote them down).
    Cheerful and sensible though his little book of maxims was, it was no match for the melancholy that overtook him later in the day. Once again he began to feel bad in the best of environments. And he noticed that other people did too. So bad did they feel, in fact, that it took the worst of news to cheer them up. On the finest mornings he noticed that people in the subway looked awful until they opened their newspapers and read of some airliner crashing and killing all hundred and seven passengers. Where they had been miserable in their happiness, now as they shook their heads dolefully at the tragedy they became happy in their misery. Color returned to their cheeks and they left the train with a spring in their step.
    Every day the sky grew more paltry and every day the ravening particles grew bolder. Museums became uninhabitable. Concerts were self-canceling. Sitting in the park one day, he heard a high-pitched keening sound directly over his head. He looked up through his eyebrows but the white sky was empty.
    That very night as he sat at his console under Macy’s, his eye happened to fall upon the Sunday Times, which lay in a corner. There on the front page of an inner section was a map of Greater New York which was overlaid by a series of concentric circles rippling out to Mamaroneck in the north, to Plainfield in the South. He picked it up. It was one of those maps illustrating the effects of the latest weapon, in this case some kind of nerve gas. The innermost circle, he noted idly, called the area of irreversible axon degeneration, took in Manhattan Island and Brooklyn as far as Flatbush, Queens as far as Flushing, and the lower Bronx. The next circle was marked the zone of “fatty